98. Bringing Science to Spiritual Awakenings – Jessica Corneille
On February 19th, 2016, Jessica Corneille went to sleep and had a lucid dream. The next morning, she woke up and opened her eyes … ”… and I was flooded with this immense sense of well-being and connection with everything and everyone in the universe, a deep sense of oneness. It was a deeply lived experience, it was almost cellular and vibrational.” It was not something acquired, Jessica explains. ”It was rather as though a veil had been lifted and I could see what had been there all the time.” ”I was returning to a child-like state. Everything was amplified. Even just from a five senses standpoint it was as if everything was new, and paradoxically, it felt as if I was remembering old knowledge.” This transformational state stayed intense for several months. Eventually it waned, but it is still with her today. ”Six years down the line, I am still thinking about it all the time”, she says. The spontaneous spiritual awakening made Jessica feel compelled to leave a promising career in the art world and instead follow an urge to understand more of what these experiences are and convey that knowledge to people. ”I knew I needed to do something with this experience, some kind of selfless service to humanity.” Her new path led her to become a research psychologist. Her mission is to challenge the default pathologization of awakening experiences. ”If we could understand these experiences better scientifically, we could make a case for them not to always be considered psychopathology or mental health disorder within the mainstream psychological systems, which they are presently, unfortunately”, she says. Before her profound experience, Jessica was an atheist and had no connection to anything spiritual or religious. But the awakening brought with it a strong sense ”that everything will be well after my death”. ”There was a loss of fear. I will return to Source.” Many spiritual awakenings occur when the person is in some kind of trauma or crisis, like temporary clinical death, but Jessica experienced an ego death in a situation where she was happy. She had just moved to a city she loved and begun a job she loved. According to Jessica Corneille’s research, 91 percent of those who have had a spontaneous spiritual awakening experience positive effects already in the short term, and 98 percent experience that they are positive in the long term. The experience is transformative. There is a loss of fear and anxiety. ”These experiences are powerful. Overall, they are described as stronger than all other measured altered states of consciousness, like those induced by drugs or by other means”, Jessica says. She thinks there is hope for a better scientific understanding of spiritual experiences, which entails a possible bridging of science and spirituality. ”Look at the new research on psychedelics and on contemplative practices. And there is quite a lot of funding put into trying to understand the nature of consciousness.” ”I think we are going through a paradigm shift.” Jessica’s email address Bio on the Galileo Commission’s website Jessica’s scientific study on spontaneous spiritual awakenings Lecture by Jessica about her study on spiritual awakenings