Shelli Renée Joye - Developing Supersensible Perception: Knowledge of the Higher Worlds through Entheogens, Prayer, and Nondual Awareness

Dedicated to Professor Robert McDermott, with whom I studied the work of Rudolf Steiner; to my spiritual mentors: Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Alan Watts, Ramamurti S. Mishra, and John Cunningham Lilly; to my doctoral mentors at the California Institute of Integral Studies: Dean Radin, Brian Swimme, and Allan Combs; and especially to my amazing editors: Laura Neil, Kayla Toher, and Cannon Labrie.

There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds.... There remains only one questionhow to set to work to develop such faculties.

RUDOLF STEINER, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS

Developing Supersensible Perception

... a tour through the realms of consciousness that few could present. This book shows both detailed science and a refined humanities examination in service of painting the most precise and detailed picture of the deeper realms of reality.

JAMES D. RYAN, PH.D., PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHIES AND CULTURES AT THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES

What do you get when you mix degrees in electronics and mathematical engineering and a Ph.D. focused on philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness with Rudolf Steiner's theosophy, Patajali's yoga, and psychedelic drugs? Hold on to your holographic hats, psychonauts, Shelli Joye will be your captain to the bubbling multiverse at the Planck length of space-time. Just be sure to bring your Fourier transform along so you can rematerialize in the explicate order when the trip is done.

TIMOTHY DESMOND, PH.D., AUTHOR OF
PSYCHE AND SINGULARITY

This is not a book for the closed-minded! Shelli Joye's creative weaving of Steiner's insightswith threads drawn from yoga philosophy, quantum physics, electrical engineering, psychedelics, and alien encountersis an invitation to walk, or dance, on the wild side of psychospiritual speculation.

SEAN KELLY, PH.D., AUTHOR OF COMING HOME: THE BIRTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE PLANETARY ERA AND INDIVIDUATION AND THE ABSOLUTE

Shelli Joye takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of consciousness as described by Steiner, right to the frontier of sense-free thinking. She guides us with love, insight, and consummate intelligence into the heart of the mystery. An extraordinary book that achieves the seemingly impossible by articulating that which lies beyond the thinking mind.

STEPHEN JULICH, PH.D., PROGRAM MANAGER OF THE EAST-WEST PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT AT THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES

... a wonderful synthesis of science and spirituality. The ideas in this book are challenging and elusive. The math is daunting. But it's burgeoning with understanding and insight. If you want to grapple with the hard problem, here's a great place to start. And it might even help you develop a bit of perception beyond the ordinary. It's inspired me to pursue Rudolf Steiner's recommendations.

TOBY JOHNSON, PH.D., AUTHOR OF FINDING YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH

Shelli Joye has done something important in bringing the early twentieth-century theosophy of Rudolf Steiner together with early twenty-first-century science. The reader will find in the first half of the book an insightful review of the theosophy of the past century illuminated both by the author's careful research and by her personal experience with the supersensible. In the second half, the author explains the challenging new neurophysics, which offers the scientific grounding that theosophy has up to now lacked. For readers not only in circles that are attuned to theosophy but also with those who sense a disassociation of doctrine and reality in their traditions.

REV. MICHAEL J. TAN CRETI, AUTHOR OF THE GREAT CROWD

Joye's vivid, storied prose jaunts through the hinterlands of consciousness, offering a lucid interweaving of Steiner and Patajali's technologies for navigating states of consciousness, traversing the subtle and manifest realms and their associated temporalities. Joye pays particular attention to physical and mathematical correlates of consciousness, including the role of the Fourier transform in translating between the temporal and atemporalBohm's explicate and implicate orders. Her keen intuition for seeing and explaining how things fit together reveals exactly the type of mind we need to lead us into the now burgeoning integral era.

KERRI WELCH, PH.D., PHILOSOPHER OF TIME, MIND, AND PHYSICS

FOREWORD

The Scientific Basis of Extraordinary Experience

By Robert McDermott

T his book is filled with philosophical reflections, scientific analyses, and spiritual practices; it is also an example of karma, the sometimes curvy line with a telos, an end in view. Shelli Joye's end, at least in this book, is a thoughtfully documented attempt to incorporate the works of Rudolf Steiner, Patajali, Karl Pribram, and David Bohm in addressing what David Chalmers famously referred to in 1995 as the hard problem of consciousness.

Let us first trace the lines of karma leading to this book. Were you to pass by a twelve-year-old in a library who is intently reading a book on hypnotism, you might not anticipate that, more than a half century later, this inquisitive preadolescent would publish a book that firmly links science, consciousness, and Rudolf Steiner's teachings on how to acquire supersensible perception.

Similarly, were you to follow the arc of this young student's academic career into her senior year of an engineering program, you might never predict that, after she had experienced an LSD-fueled night on a California beach and a mysterious encounter with what seemed to be a living ball of light by an ancient pool in the Texas hill country, this same student would be so deeply moved by these experiences that her professional interests would be shifted from engineering toward an intense lifelong study of Sanskrit, Patajali's yoga, and Tantric meditation techniques.

What are the chances that this same young engineer, seeking to understand her experiences through books at the New York Public Library, would just happen to notice, lying open on a table, a book called In Search of the Miraculous by the mathematician P. D. Ouspensky, and that this book would lead directly to the many works of Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and eventually to Rudolf Steiner?

And what are the chances that this same young engineer, attending a workshop in New York, given by the mellifluent Taoist-Buddhist lecturer Alan Watts, would, upon hearing that he and other accomplished faculty had begun teaching Asian philosophies and religions at a new graduate school in San Francisco, leave her professional engineering job in the World Trade Center and move to San Francisco to study Sanskrit, esoteric philosophy, and meditation?

In her seventy years, Shelli Joye has sought to understand the miraculous, the transcendent, and the inner nature of things. She has practiced spiritual disciplines and sought deep insights. As is elaborated in this stunning book, she has gone even further, presenting a scientific basis for her extraordinary experiences.

When twenty-first-century individuals read a book by or about Steiner, or attend a lecture elaborating his ideas, they often seek more evidence to support his claims. This book offers such evidence. That she has titled her book