From observing consciousness contents to awe: a working overview

Notes, prepared alongside our book Het Innerlijke Laboratorium/The Inner Laboratory (in preparation) Jan M. Keppel Hesselink

https://www.youtube.com/@HetInnerlijkeLaboratorium

1. Starting point: the book’s own trajectory

The book’s method begins from a simple, almost clinical act: learning to observe the contents of consciousness (thoughts, emotions, body signals, imagery) without immediately collapsing into them. This is the Witness (Getuige), trained against the Operator, the capacity to act deliberately from the space that observation opens up. Nothing in this starting point is mystical. It is closer to Deikman’s distinction between the object self, everything that can be observed, and the observing self, the awareness that does the observing and resists becoming an object itself.

What is distinctive about the book’s trajectory is that it does not stop there. It follows the same observing capacity as it is pushed toward its edge: through breath, imagination, symbol, and finally toward phenomena that resist ordinary categorisation altogether, phosphene-like light, felt presence, awe, threshold states near death. The working hypothesis is that this edge is not chaotic but has some kind of internal order, a “grammar”, even before any metaphysical reading is applied to it. That hypothesis is the real subject of this memo.

2. The central question

Put directly: what exactly characterises the grammar of the transpersonal? Is there a structural, content-independent pattern running through altered and transpersonal states, something separable in principle from the metaphysical or religious interpretation laid over it afterwards? Or is that separation itself an illusion, with every such experience already constituted by the concepts the observer brought to it?

This question turns out to be the organising fault line of an entire field. The rest of this memo maps the main positions, starting with Deikman’s own partial answer, then the wider landscape, then where the book’s own method sits within it.

3. Deikman’s partial architecture

Deikman did not attempt a full grammar. His contribution is best read as a functional, clinically motivated sketch rather than a systematic taxonomy.

Deautomatization. Mystical phenomena arise, in his account, from a loosening of the habitual perceptual and cognitive structures that normally organise, filter and interpret stimuli. Meditation works by manipulating attention away from abstract cognition toward raw percept.

Five formal features. Deautomatized experience tends to show intense realness, unusual sensation, unity, ineffability, and trans-sensate quality (perception without the ordinary sensory categories). These are offered as structural, not doctrinal, markers.

Bimodal consciousness. An active mode (object-based logic, sharp boundaries, oriented to manipulating the environment) stands against a receptive mode (diffuse attention, blurred boundaries, oriented to intake). Mystical and creative states favour the receptive mode.

The clinical stakes. His sharpest practical use of this scaffolding was diagnostic: distinguishing genuine mystical states from psychosis not by the content of what appears, but by whether an observing self survives intact and whether the person can return to active-mode functioning. In The Wrong Way Home (1990) he extended the same concern to groups: the human urge to seal an ungrounded, deautomatized experience inside an authoritative system (a guru, a doctrine, a cult) rather than tolerate its openness.

4. The wider field

4.1 Perennialism: a content-free common core

Walter Stace (Mysticism and Philosophy, 1960) argued that beneath doctrinal difference lies a common core: unity, loss of the sense of time and space, a sense of objective reality, blessedness, sacredness, paradoxicality, ineffability. Ralph Hood later operationalised this as the empirically testable Mysticism Scale. Robert Forman sharpened the claim further with the pure consciousness event: a wakeful, entirely contentless (non-intentional) consciousness, reached not by adding anything but by a near-total forgetting of concepts. For this lineage, a content-independent grammar is not only possible, it is the whole point.

4.2 Constructivism: no experience without prior concept

Steven Katz (Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, 1978) denies that any unmediated mystical experience is even possible in principle. The contemplative training of a tradition, in his account, constitutes the experience it produces; a Christian’s sense of union with God and a Buddhist’s experience of śūnyatā are not the same experience differently labelled, they are different experiences. On this view, a tradition-neutral grammar is a category error: there is no pre-interpretive layer left to describe.

4.3 Psychophysiology: grammar without any semantic content at all

Roland Fischer’s “A Cartography of Ecstatic and Meditative States” (Science, 1971) sidesteps the whole debate by refusing phenomenological vocabulary. States are placed on a single arousal continuum, from hyperarousal/ergotropic (ecstasy, panic, catatonia) to hypoarousal/trophotropic (meditative absorption, samadhi), described in purely physiological terms. Charles Tart’s systems model of discrete states of consciousness (States of Consciousness, 1975) pursues a similar tradition-neutral formalism: baseline state, destabilisation, restabilisation, described as a general systems process rather than a spiritual one.

4.4 Clinical cartography

Stanislav Grof, working from LSD and holotropic breathwork research, built a richer but less strictly content-free map: COEX systems, perinatal matrices, and a transpersonal domain proper. It is closer to a real cartography than a grammar, more descriptive of territory than of underlying syntax.

4.5 Comparative developmental structuralism

Daniel Brown and Jack Engler, working alongside Ken Wilber (Transformations of Consciousness, 1986), placed meditative stage-maps from Theravada, Mahamudra/Dzogchen, and Christian contemplative practice side by side, and used developmental-psychological language (Loevinger, Piaget) to argue for shared structural stages beneath the traditions’ own vocabularies. This is the closest existing precedent to a staged “grammar” such as a light phenomenology, though critics note that Wilber’s broader spectrum model, and later the Wilber-Combs lattice, is itself already a totalising interpretive framework, not a neutral scaffold.

5. Where the book’s own method sits

Our book’s stance is, in effect, an implicit position in the Stace-Katz debate, and a fairly unusual one. Methodologically it is closest to Fischer and Tart: it resists committing to any semantic or metaphysical content, holding open, for instance, whether the sixth phase of inner light is reducible to brain activity or points beyond it. Ambition-wise it is closest to Stace, Forman, and Brown and Engler: it assumes there is a real structural pattern to be found (a staged phenomenology of light, a recognisable arc from identification through witnessing to threshold), not merely private, incommensurable content.

That combination, structural regularity claimed without metaphysical closure, is not the default position in the field. Most existing attempts collapse toward one pole: strong perennialism (there is a content-free core, and it points to something real) or strong constructivism (there is no content-free core at all). The book’s rule, that what appears does not automatically carry authority, is functionally a refusal to let the structural claim slide into the metaphysical one. That is worth stating explicitly as the book’s actual epistemological position in this literature, rather than leaving it implicit.

6. Open questions for further work

A few questions this overview leaves genuinely open, useful as a working list:

Can a grammar of this kind be specified with criteria precise enough to be falsifiable, for instance a defined sequence of phosphene phases, rather than a loose family resemblance of features?

What would count as evidence against the grammar, as opposed to evidence that is merely reinterpreted to fit it?

Where does our book’s own six-phase light sequence map onto Brown and Engler’s cross-tradition stages, and onto Fischer’s single arousal axis, agreement across independently derived models would be the strongest evidence for a real structural layer.

Is the refusal of metaphysical closure itself a stable third position, or does it quietly presuppose a mild constructivism (since it treats interpretation as always added, never given) while claiming perennialist structure? This tension is worth resolving explicitly rather than leaving as a background assumption.