A few days ago I had a Zoom meeting with my PhD advisory board. The three professors, who are also dear friends, started the meeting by asking me where I stood with my personal "research question," which was about the shift from transient "peak experiences" to a persistent "spiritual high plateau."
As I answered this question, I also expressed why I wanted to do a follow-up research, and make a film about what I'm finding out.
Below is the recording of our exchange, and here is the transcript of my answer:
"I think it's connected to something that was not so much in my internal vocabulary two-three years ago and now is very much in it, which is the experience of love.
I'm not very articulate around this topic, but that's all the more the reason why I want to keep exploring it. Maybe what I mean by that is an experience that connects everything – all levels of oneself and all levels of oneself with the world and with others. That's more specifically what I mean by "love." That's what I felt from quite a few of the exemplars, and because it resonated also in me, that's what enabled the experience of intersubjective space to form between us.
So I think maybe it is answering the initial question… You could say that some of the exemplars discovered or landed upon or fell into something which connects and unites all levels of experience – embodied, emotional, relational, cognitive, cosmic – and are giving themselves or trusting or surrendering to that. And that's the answer to the phenomenon of "peak experiences," where one still distinguishes between the sacred and the mundane, or the peak of the mountain and the valleys. So there is something that connects all that together into one thing, which has a much deeper intelligence – also emotional and relational intelligence – and love is a good code word for that.
Maybe because I don't really have the language for it, I'm hoping that in the follow-up research I will have a cinematographer with me. Because I think it can be conveyed to an extent through film, but I don't know that it can be conveyed through text."