EDITORIAL: Transformation and the unity of consciousness   

By Dana Gaynor

I was up at the Metanexus Institute for a conference on the nature of spiritual transformation in April.  A noble cause to be sure yet they will require a functional models of reality and psychospiritual transformation.  This we have done in the preceding issues and will address again in this one.  Remember first that spiritual transformation is essentially a nonverbal experience of the ultimate nature of existence expressed through the subjective description of the experiencer.   When you look across the various traditions, such descriptions, formulated with personal vocabulary, are landlocked in or framed by cultural bias.   

For this reason, reliance on particular cultural frames or individual subjective descriptions of the phenomena misses the mark by cubby-holing researchers into ever more exclusive modeling.  What is needed and what we are doing through this journal and at the PsychoSpiritual Research Institute is providing a mechanism to ferret out common factors and characteristics across traditions and thereby enable modeling of both phenomena sans cultural bias.   

At PSRI, our orientation is to model reality and psychospiritual transformation as a single complex process.  At the same time, we identify and track the changes to awareness, behavior, feelings and cognition in individual's having had spiritually transformative experiences.  This work has identified a number of characteristics found across cultures and the modeling I use is, in this way, cross cultural in nature. 

In this journal, I have created a forum for understanding both the nature of this experience and the implicit nature of a reality that frames this experience so completely.  Over the past issues many of the best minds in the field have graced our pages.  This issue is no exception.   About five months ago physicist Pamela. Knight wrote me that Physicist Tom Campbell had independently corroborated my findings with the publication of his three book theory of everything "My Big Toe."  I contacted Tom, who was quite gracious in his response and very funny indeed.   We shared our findings by trading books.   I was so impressed by Tom's work that I invited him to provide the journal with an article on his work.  Thankfully, he consented.  Along with Tom's article is the third and last part of Paul Bernstein's interview with Transpersonal pundit Michael Washburn.  It has been an honor have Michael represented here over the last three issues.  Following Paul's piece with Michael is my article called "Physics, Inertia and Chaos Theory: the Nature of Reality."  We are also including a review of the works of Amarakavi by Hindu scholar Sankar Sukumar.  Finally we'll loosen up a bit with a light hearted editorial considering some tough political issues from a transpersonal perspective by Swami Beyondananda aka Steve Bhaerman.  

It's a great issue so have a ball.