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ABSTRACT: Transpersonal psychology's relationship with esoteric traditions has suffered from the severe limitation that esoteric knowledge is ultimately incommunicable and unverifiable. However, the means for obtaining such knowledge might not be. If descriptions by esoteric traditions of a circuit running through the center of the spine, which purportedly connects consciousness with the Absolute or the Divine, are based on veridical interoceptions, then they may be descriptions of Reissner's fiber, a little-known, threadlike structure which originates from the center of the brain and travels through the central canal of the spinal cord. Because the fiber projects filaments to cerebrospinal fluid-contacting neurons subserving oxytocinergic, and endogenous cannabinoid, opioid and psychedelic systems, it could induce feelings of love, bliss, ego dissolution and noesis associated with "cosmic consciousness." Although physicists have decreed that quantum mechanics is a "mystery without a mysticism," direct consciousness of the fiber's quanta could fulfill mysticism's claim of suprasensory perception of the Absolute.
Keywords: transpersonal psychology, quantum biology, Kabbalah, Yoga
What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and matter? ... So that our ordinary human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world? - James (1987), William James: Writings 1902 - 1910, p. 1264
Transpersonal psychology's search for knowledge from ancient esoteric traditions has alienated the field from modern science. Freud's biased admonition to Jung (Jung, 1961, p. 181) in 1910 that psychology must avoid the "black mud tide of occultism" still reverberates. There is a fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between esoteric traditions and science that has limited its potential: Scientists generally perceive esoteric traditions only as protoscience or as discarded superstitions and myths that have progressed to real science. Only fringe scientists, they believe, try to synthesize esoteric knowledge with science (Asprem, 2015).
However, while science and technology have made undeniable progress, this whiggish perspective might exclude an empirical basis for a fruitful transdisciplinary collaboration between neuroscience and transpersonal psychology. It is possible that descriptions of the central axis of the "subtle body" from various esoteric texts are based on veridical interoceptions of an enigmatic, latent, unique, strategically located structure, which ensheathes the central axis of the central nervous system, called Reissner's fiber (RF), discussed...