We owe our base knowledge about higher levels of consciousness primarily to religions and spiritual systems that took an interest in it. As empires rose and fell, they lasted through the ages – and along with them their knowledge of higher levels of consciousness.

higher levels of consciousness is one of the few things about human psychology that hasn’t been comprehensively explored by science. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow was hard at work on it when he passed away in June, 1970. In fact, he’d established yet another new branch of psychology to study it just prior to his death. Unfortunately, the rigorous study of it died with him, and wasn’t resumed until the last 20 years or so.

Before things are explored by science, they are largely in the realm of magic and myth. Few of us today would ask for an exorcism when we are sick with a bacterial infection. We simply reach for our antibiotics. Likewise, it’s not likely that you’ll go get some leeches or take a knife and start cutting into yourself when you have a fever. Though bleeding people with a fever was once common practice, modern science has given us ways of handling this that are actually effective.

Until very recently, this had not been done with higher levels of consciousness. It had been left to the realm of the magical and mystical. The very myths covered here are a testament to this. For example, higher levels of consciousness is nearly impossible to reach, they tell us. No, it isn’t. Our scientifically derived research protocols routinely transition a majority of people who use them. And on, and on, it goes.

In the last 20 years or so, this has changed and higher levels of consciousness has been examined from the ground up with the tools of modern science, literally dispelling one myth after another as it went. And, discovering how secular it truly can be.

The reality is that we don’t actually need science to tell us that higher levels of consciousness is perfectly happy existing in secular form. There are no shortage of atheists and agnostics who are publicly known to have transitioned to it. The way they speak about it is fundamentally the same as religious and spiritual Finders. Once under the hood with modern scientific tools and methods, it doesn’t seem to matter what someone’s belief systems or perspectives are, except when it came to preferring one type of higher levels of consciousness over another, or accepting one or more as the “correct” type or types.

This is what allowed us for the creation of the first truly cross-cultural, pan-tradition map of the psychological territory of higher levels of consciousness, as you can read about elsewhere. It’s given us all a set of modern methods that allow a majority of people to transition in short periods of time, instead of years, decades, or not at all. And, it’s taught us that a whole lot of the dogma that it has been wrapped in over the years simply does not matter at all, as we’ll see in the Myth #4.