Nonlocal Consciousness and the Artistic Creation of Soul: Transpersonal Experiences, Psi, and the Shaping of Cultural Expressions

NLC and Layer 1

Max Planck, whose work helped establish quantum physics, “suggested a conscious and intelligent mind can be the matrix of all matter” (Samarawickrama, 2023, p. 110001-1). His insight aligns with the idea that mind and matter are fundamentally interconnected, as both emerge from Layer 1, which parallels Jung’s collective unconscious. It follows that the artist’s mind participates in this nonlocal domain of archetypes, symbols, and cultural narratives, a realm of information that may constitute the knowledge domains of the soul. Therefore, the artist’s creative insights do not originate solely from personal experience because consciousness is inherently relational, arising through a reciprocal exchange between the individual psyche and the collective field.

NLC Research: Beyond Space and Time

In recent decades, scientists have increasingly investigated the nature of consciousness, a topic once considered purely philosophical and outside the scope of scientific inquiry (Daw & Roe, 2024). Despite this growing interest, most research funding still supports materialistic approaches that assume consciousness emerges solely from the brain, a material substance. However, this assumption faces a fundamental challenge because, as Fodor noted, “nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious” (as cited in Kuhn, 2024, p. 156). 

The limitations of materialism have sparked a growing interest in exploring NLC theories, which propose that consciousness is not confined to the brain but extends beyond its physical boundaries. These theories offer a broader explanatory framework for understanding psi phenomena that materialist consciousness theories cannot adequately explain (Daw & Roe, 2024). 

According to NLC theories, consciousness exists independently of the brain, and as Dossey (2014) describes, it is “not confined to specific points in space, such as brains and bodies, or specific moments in time, such as the present” (p. 1). In this view, the brain does not produce consciousness; rather, it functions as a receiver or conduit for a source of consciousness that arises from within a nonlocal informational field, described in this essay as Layer 1, the same substrate that Jung approached through his theory of the collective unconscious.

When a transpersonal experience opens awareness to this nonlocal dimension of consciousness, it can enable psi-related phenomena, including the transmission of information between minds across vast distances or even across time. Individuals may report sharing information with ancient ancestors, perceiving distant or future events, or even exchanging information with non-human entities, including plants, animals, or seemingly inanimate objects (Grof, 2013). Charles Tart (2009) observed that it is “the sort of mind that would be basically ‘spiritual’” (p. 322).

NLC as a Portal to the Numinous Informational Architecture

Mystics, philosophers, and poets have long expressed a persistent spiritual vision of a unifying force connecting all humans, the environment, and the cosmos. Medieval thought depicted this ultimate unity through the concept of the unus mundus, the one world underlying all existence. Centuries later, Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung revisited this idea and proposed a modern interpretation “of unus mundus [that] suggested a universal symbolic or archetypical reality, with mind and matter being complementary aspects of that same underlying reality” (Stillfried, 2025, p. 401). Further, “Jung’s later work… intimated the ancient understanding of an ensouled world, of an Anima Mundi in which the human psyche participates and with which it shares the same ordering principles of meaning” (Tarnas, 2006, p. 57). 

We can view the Anima Mundi as the living expression of this underlying unity, suggesting that everything in the cosmos is interconnected through an ensouled unity. Contemporary post-materialist science aligns with this view of an underlying unity, especially through Jungian concepts such as synchronicity, archetypes, and the collective unconscious. Each of these concepts points toward a nonlocal underlying realm of unity and interconnectedness that transcends space and time (Le Grice, 2009). Such a realm may correspond to the Anima Mundi, as spiritual and numinous experiences often convey a sense of contact with a deeper layer of reality, an encounter with a dimension of meaning qualitatively different from ordinary awareness (Dossey, 2014).   

During numinous experiences, individuals report feeling as if they have encountered the sacred, an unknowable presence vastly grander than themselves. Jung described numinosity in the following terms: “We should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space-time. This quality is numinous” (as cited in Schwartz, 2018, p. 403). From a post-materialist science perspective, numinous experiences can be viewed as expressions of NLC, since they involve receiving and exchanging information from a realm that transcends ordinary boundaries of space and time. 

Schwartz (2018) argues that numina “should be thought of as information. Numinosity is a kind of nonlocal informational architecture that can be detected by consciousness and to some degree manipulated through intentioned focused awareness” (p. 403). This insight is especially relevant to the creative process. When an artist enters into a deep state of creative absorption, their focused awareness can trigger a transpersonal experience that opens a channel to this numinous nonlocal informational architecture—the knowledge domains of the soul.