What is Vijñapti?

vijnapti.org is an online community dedicated to showcasing content concerning the nature of consciousness. Through the content on our website and YouTube channel, it is our goal to reveal a fuller understanding of the human mind and its vast potential. This aspiration to understand the mind must be taken with an equal understanding of the limitations of human knowledge in any serious investigation of consciousness, and thus demands a multi-dimensional framework to understanding the nature of mind.

In the words of the late Terence McKenna, “As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.” The inherent limitations of our own human knowledge not only restrict our ability to solve important questions concerning the nature of the mind, but also restrict our ability to know which questions to ask in the first place.

As individual humans our perception is highly limited. We see the world only in the ways that we have seen ourselves, either through direct experience or through second-hand media such as oral stories, written language, art and music, and various forms of digital media. We can only see the world in ways that we are aware of, or that we have otherwise absorbed from the environments that move throughout in life. We see only a tiny sliver of the world based on our own interactions with others, the media we consume, and our perceptions which shape and are shaped by our experiences.

Who alone can claim to understand the sheer complexity of human consciousness in its totality? Which disciplines and systems of knowledge should we look to for answers? How does one even begin to pose the proper questions to the explore the nature of human consciousness, let alone know which questions to ask? Whatever the case may be, one thing is clear; the investigation of consciousness is a collective effort that requires community as an necessary component of its ethos.

vijnapti.org is a community of individuals who seek to undertake the exploration of consciousness from a wide variety of perspectives; including perspectives from scientific, philosophical, and spiritual systems of knowledge.

Vijñapti’s goal is to provide community members with resources that may provide insight the understanding of mind on an individual and social level. Although the primary focus of the website content is centered on altered-states of consciousness – particularly one category referred to as mystical experience – altered-states of mind are but one of many dimensions of human consciousness explored throughout Vijñapti.

Vijñapti Mission

Vijñapti’s mission is to provide viewers and readers with content related to the nature of mind that stems from modern science, philosophy, and religious tradition in order to understand the nature of consciousness more fully. vijñapti’s philosophy is based on the understanding that no individual or group can claim to possess a completely full understanding of consciousness through any single philosophy, tradition, or discipline.

For this reason, Vijñapti’s mission statement can be summarized as follows:

Our mission is to provide viewers with a variety of perspectives on the nature of consciousness stemming from a multitude of personal, intellectual, and philosophical backgrounds.

It is also our goal to provide readers with a wide array of ‘tools’ and resources for their own personal explorations into the nature of their own consciousness their endeavors to understand their own individual human experiences and minds—as well as the world around them—more deeply and fully.

Any discipline or philosophy can be useful in the proper context. Even so, what is useful in one context may not be suitable for another, just as a worldview that resonates with one person may be meaningless to another based on their professional, personal, and spiritual background (or lack thereof).

For this reason, being able to understand consciousness from a wealth of perspectives is a very useful skill to have; especially in our modern, global day and age. Vijñapti’s mission is to create a community that empowers individuals to cultivate this understanding of mind for themselves through engagement with new ideas, individuals, and experiences.