The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium

Bringing together clinical, scientific and
spiritual paradigms to improve clinical outcomes

Driving Scientific Excellence: Pioneering research and advocacy for the responsible integration of meditation, psychedelics, and emergent practices among clinicians, academia and practitioners worldwide.

Who we are

Our team of experts comprises scientists from world’s top universities in Harvard, Cambridge, London, Zurich, Melbourne and other leading institutions.

By means of your generous financial support, you play a vital role in advancing the ambitious mission of the EPRC and the 501(c)(3) charity Emergence Benefactors which supports the EPRC and its Allies.

Make a gift

In addition to cash through card, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay and bank draft, Emergence Benefactors accepts non-cash gift vehicles such as appreciated securities, life insurance policies, retirement accounts, select cryptocurrencies, and some real assets.

For more information, including regarding legacy giving opportunities, please refer to our Gift Acceptance Policy, or contact us at [email protected].

Gifts to Emergence Benefactors are tax-deductible in the US to the full extent of applicable law.

The Mission

What many might call “spiritual”, “mystical”, “energetic”, etc. experiences and effects, we refer to as emergent phenomena. We refer to practices designed to lead to emergent phenomena, such as meditation, psychedelics, yoga, prayer, etc., as emergent practices.

As emergent practices continue to scale up in society, our aim is to give health care systems, mental health providers, and those who are helping to teach and promote various practices the information they need in order to make better decisions about how to both promote the benefits of these practices and manage the various effects that they can produce.

The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium’s mission is to use ontologically-agnostic, multidisciplinary, first-person, psychometric,  neurophenomenological, biochemical, and clinical scientific methods to conduct studies on emergent practices and phenomena to generate clinically-relevant information that can add value to practitioners, patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems.

By finding the skilfull overlap of the perspectives of science, spirituality, religion, clinical medicine, and mental health, we can generate outcomes that are as beneficial as possible for all concerned.

Science

Carrying out and communicating research projects whose findings will support the creation of good clinical outcomes

Spirituality

A deep understanding of the landscape and appropriate respect for people’s beliefs and experiences

Healthcare

Working with providers who want to provide the best outcomes for their patients

Read more

Philosophy

We believe that healthcare systems and the scientific community should understand emergent experiences better in order to add value to people’s lives, health, and wellbeing, as well as support the principles of medical ethics and informed consent.

By remaining agnostic to questions of ontology (statements of underlying reality) and lending a clinical, pragmatic lens to questions of epistemology (how we know what we know), we hope to respectfully navigate the territory of emergent experiences to design studies, generate data, and integrate it into global systems that have broad clinical, societal, and global benefits.

This clinical lens allows us to focus on finding the value in emergent experiences and their capacity to enhance the paradigms, understandings, and capacities of the people involved, and focus on the specific conceptual frameworks and functional global systems that can support this.

Read more

What Does Success Look Like?

This project takes a long-term view. We will generate sufficient scientific information to create a data-driven approach to understanding emergent phenomena and their benefits and risks. 

We want to take this project right through to the practicalities of making the changes to medical and therapeutic educational curricula, textbooks, specialty boards, mainstream clinical protocols, and healthcare systems that will benefit patients, practitioners, therapists, clinicians, and other care providers.

Read more

The Team

This project brings together a team of experts with a huge range of specialist subjects.

We take a multi-disciplinary approach recognising that the challenges we want to solve involve hard scientific questions as well as questions of anthropology, culture, language, messaging, politics, neuroscience, biochemistry, physiology and more.

We want the project to be cross-cultural and we have people working on it from countries around the world with different religious and spiritual backgrounds.

Meet the Team

White Paper

Given the large, complex, multidimensional and evolving nature of the EPRC, we decided to host the details of the studies on ZenKit Hypernotes, so it is really a white wiki.

The format allows the whole scope of our work and vision to be viewed in many different ways, depending on your interests and needs.

Go to the White Paper

Contact Us

We are a consortium of passionate experts. We are always open to collaborations; please get in touch if you would like more information or to discuss being involved in the project.

  • Researchers

    Our diverse and remarkable team of researchers makes this project possible. We work with scientists, clinicians, therapists, and other caregivers, as well as people from a variety of academic disciplines such as anthropologists, religious scholars, philosophers, data scientists, linguists, and more. Please get in touch if you are interested in contributing to the project.

  • Healthcare Professionals

    If you are a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, clinical physician or any healthcare professional with experience or interest in dealing with people who are having emergent experiences, we would love to hear from you.

  • Practitioners

    We are studying emergent experiences using both qualitative and quantitative methods. If you have had mystical or spiritual experiences, which we refer to as emergent phenomena, and would be willing to be involved in these studies, please get in touch.

  • Media

    If you are a media organisation that would like further details or if you would like to interview someone about our projects, we would be very happy to talk with you. 

Contact Details

[email protected]

Keep Up to Date

If you would like to receive occasional updates from us on projects and opportunities, please sign up to our mailing list. We will never sell or give away your data.