Noetic Sciences

From the Greek noēsis / noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding, Noetic Sciences is a multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experiences.

The essential hypothesis underlying the Noetic Sciences is simply that consciousness matters. The question is when, how, and why does it matter?

There are several ways we can know the world around us. Science focuses on external observation and is grounded in objective evaluation, measurement, and experimentation. This is useful in increasing objectivity and reducing bias and inaccuracy as we interpret what we observe. But another way of knowing is subjective or internal, including gut feelings, intuition, and hunches - the way you know you love your children, for example, or experiences you have that cannot be explained or proven “rationally” but feel absolutely real. This way of knowing is what we call noetic.

From a purely materialist, mechanistic perspective, all subjective – noetic - experience arises from physical matter, and consciousness is simply a byproduct of brain and body processes. But there is another perspective, suggesting a far more complex relationship between the physical and the nonphysical. The Noetic Sciences apply a scientific lens to the study of subjective experience and to ways that consciousness may influence the physical world, and the data to date have raised plenty of provocative new questions.

Noetic Sciences is a growing field of valid inquiry. Every new discovery leads to more questions as the mystery of human consciousness slowly unfolds. In the areas of consciousness and healing, extended human capacities, and worldview transformation, it keeps pushing the boundaries of what we know, advancing our shared understanding of consciousness.