Kindling Mystery
On studying consciousness without extinguishing wonder
I work in a field that studies mystery—and we’re trying very hard to make it behave.
The other day, I met up with a couple of new friends from my field in Vancouver. This is rare for me; I have almost no one locally who really understands what I think and write about every day. Giddy with physical proximity, we ate our eggs bennies and talked about this utterly weird and consequential field we find ourselves in: consciousness studies, anomalous experiences, philosophy crossed with psychology crossed with neuroscience crossed with religious studies crossed with… you get the idea.
At some point, the conversation turned to a shared wariness about its nascent professionalization.
This field—rooted in mystery, wonder, and experiences we don’t yet understand—is becoming more formalized. That, hopefully, brings real benefits: funding, institutional support, teaching positions, broader visibility, and new organizations. At the same time, professionalization rewards stability, control, and predictability, foregrounding clean frameworks, confident explanations, and gatekeepers.
But the extraordinary doesn’t cooperate. It blurs boundaries. It destabilizes categories.
As George Hansen writes in The Trickster and the Paranormal,
…psi, the paranormal, and the supernatural are fundamentally linked to destructuring, change, transition, disorder, marginality, the ephemeral, fluidity, ambiguity, and blurring of boundaries.
In other words, these experiences resist being tidied up.
The challenge, then, isn’t only how to study these phenomena responsibly, but how to live with the uncertainty they introduce.
I feel this acutely in my dissertation work. I’m developing a way to measure how exceptional experiences change people’s lives — how near-death and out-of-body experiences, encounters with beings, mystical states, or psychic revelations change not just how people see the world but how they live. That work demands rigor, discrimination, and structure. And I believe in that work. But I also know that no framework captures the full reality of a world where consciousness may be primary and meaning is relational. In such a world, mystery isn’t a problem to be solved but a but a way of living.
So how do we hold both?
What I’m pointing to is a way of studying and living that doesn’t rush toward certainty and doesn’t pretend we’re outside what we’re trying to understand. It recognizes that researchers, institutions, and those drawn to these questions are already entangled in the same field as the experiences being explored. This work isn’t about observing from a safe distance; it involves responsibility, exposure, and the possibility of being changed.
What might this look like in practice?
For an individual, that posture is cultivated through humility, a willingness to sit with unknowing, a capacity for wonder, and the openness to listen deeply. For a field, it raises even harder questions:
What if the field learned to recognize credibility in people whose ways of speaking, knowing, or making sense don’t align with academic norms or institutional status?
What if experiencers were engaged not only as sources of data, but as partners in interpreting and giving meaning to what they’ve lived?
What if conferences were designed not to converge on conclusions, but to support shared inquiry and the thoughtful development of better questions?
What if training and credentialing cultivated discernment, reflexivity, and humility alongside technical competence?
What if uncertainty were understood not as a problem to be eliminated, but as a condition the field learns to live with—and learn within—together?
None of this is an argument against rigor. It’s an argument against mistaking rigor for finality.
For me, living this tension has meant intentionally exploring other ways of knowing and being—not as a rejection of analytic work, but as a necessary counterbalance to it. Practices that cultivate both presence and expansion help me stay in contact with what exceeds my tools. They remind me that understanding is not something we arrive at, but something we participate in.
The nascent field of anomalous studies (or whatever we decide to name it) doesn’t need to choose between credibility and mystery. The real challenge is whether we can professionalize without losing our relationship to what first drew many of us here: the strange, the unresolved, the wonder, the edge where understanding cannot settle. Perhaps what’s needed is a way forward that allows us not only to study extraordinary experience and phenomena more intentionally, but to remain open to being changed by their paradoxical, evolving, and multidimensional nature.