John E. Mack
Psychiatrist · Explorer of Consciousness
Can we approach human experience with a sense of mystery, openness, and uncertainty?
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John Mack in conversation with Great Mystery
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Toward a Science of Human Experience
For many years I’ve had the sense that our understanding of people, the world we live in, our relationships, our relationship to the cosmos, is hugely incomplete. I never knew in what way exactly. Maybe it had something to do with what I felt was missing in our knowledge — namely that which goes beyond our immediate material world.
What I would like to see is the development of a “science of human experience.” Surely we need to expand the ways of knowing we use to learn about the world, whether or not we call these spiritual, holistic, sacred, or experiential.
The experiencers open to a new whole-Earth consciousness; they become sensitive to what’s occurring on the planet, the environmental crisis and the interconnectedness of all life. The deeper anguish is no longer about the encounter itself, but becomes an awareness of the divine and the sensation of connection.
What change in us would have to happen for us to begin to credit this kind of a source for information? How did we shut down our intuitive capabilities, our hearts’ knowledge of a larger, more complex reality — and what would it take to open that up again?
ABOUT
John E. Mack (1929–2004) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School whose work increasingly challenged conventional understandings of consciousness and human experience. After a distinguished career studying human connection, conflict, and the nature of identity, he turned his attention to extraordinary experiences that lay beyond established scientific explanations. Through his Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER), he explored the experiences of hundreds of people who reported encounters with unknown intelligences.
Rather than dismissing these experiences, Mack asked what they might reveal about the nature of reality, consciousness, and our relationship with the living world. He saw in them the possibility of an expanded consciousness—one that recognizes the interconnectedness of all life and invites us beyond fear, separation, competition, and certainty.