“Spontaneous Spiritual Awakenings: Phenomenology, Altered States, Individual Differences, and Well-Being”.

We are excited to be hosting The Psychedelic Society for this upcoming event with Jessica Corneille and David Luke.

Time Location: UCL, JZ Young Theatre

Note: Tickets can be purchased directly from The Psychedlic Society. The event will be free for our UCL SAP members, who have purchased the £3 annual membership (UCL Staff/Students only). Please email alexandre.piot.20@ucl.ac.uk to secure your free place, if you are already a standard UCL SAP member. Click here to become a member of SAP. 

Details: Spontaneous spiritual awakenings (SSAs) are characterised by a sudden sense of direct contact, union or communion with the universe, ‘God’ or the divine. 

In this ‘enlightened’ or 'nondual’ state, the experiencer transcends their ordinary sense of self, ‘knowing’ or ‘re-membering’ their true essence as part of a greater truth or reality, in perceived oneness and self-realisation. The scientific community is only just beginning to acknowledge the healing potential of mystical experiences mediated by psychedelic drugs and spiritual contemplative practices, yet awakening experiences of a sudden, spontaneous nature have scarcely been explored within the scientific framework, despite a vast amount of anecdotal evidence pointing to their long-term impacts on perception, cognition, behaviour, and well-being. 

To date, mainstream psychology has tended to pathologise these experiences by default, and the topic is still largely misunderstood and misinterpreted in the West. In this talk, we will discuss these experiences in more depth, and present our research on the phenomenological variances, individual differences, and well-being implications of spontaneous awakening experiences, as well as how these compare with other altered states, such as those produced by strong doses of psilocybin and DMT. 

We will then discuss the importance of ‘de-mystifying’ mystical experiences within mainstream psychology, and conclude by sharing our thoughts on how these experiences (and their research) might help facilitate humanity’s progress towards a more compassionate, understanding and united world