Mystics Lab: Creativity and Other Ways of Knowing (SNF Paideia Program Course)

Catalog description

This class is an experiential adventure into accessing and using non-ordinary states as allies in the creative process and gnosis. At a time when critical thinking, intuition, and cognitive liberty are often compromised by AI, cultural expectations, and habit, we take seriously the idea that the human experience is more spacious and unpredictable than we can imagine. The crisis of meaning and societal fragmentation make these concerns especially timely. Some cutting-edge scientists and philosophers think that Consciousness is the ground of being, a continuum that we receive with the mind/brain. If consciousness is being broadcast, how can we learn to expand our receptivity to a wider field of knowledge, and alchemize this into ideas? Metaphysics, depth psychology, occult wisdom, flow states and experimental processes will all be explored as paths to new ways of knowing. Through embodied practices such as breathwork, shamanic journeying, , sound sessions, meditation, ritual practices, and creative exercises, we will explore accessing other ways of knowing and being, and investigate how these can be translated into a creative practice. Modules will include experiential sessions,, reading, dialogue, and process/working time. Ongoing assignments will integrate creative prompts, journaling, and experience questionnaires over the course of the semester. There will be a final creative project. The course design embodies what might be called "radical dialogue"—expanding the definition beyond human-to-human conversation to include dialogue with consciousness itself, with creative inspiration, with the body's wisdom, and with what various traditions call the numinous or transpersonal dimensions of experience. The course inherently teaches students how to dialogue across epistemological boundaries by engaging metaphysics, depth psychology, occult wisdom, and embodied practices…