Social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, Professor at Sofia Univ, and curious explorer of culture, science, and the wonder of it all.

Marilyn Schlitz, Ph.D., M.A.

Dr. Schlitz is an acclaimed social scientist, award-winning author, and charismatic public speaker. She has conducted clinical, laboratory and field-based research into consciousness, human transformation, and healing. Her books include Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life; Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine; and Death Makes Life Possible (and companion film by same title). Having taught at Stanford, Harvard, and Trinity University, she is currently Chair of the doctoral program in Transpersonal Psychology at Sofia University, CEO/President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Schlitz has published hundreds of articles in scholarly journals and popular publications, and has lectured extensively in diverse venues, including the United Nations, Smithsonian Institution, Commonwealth Club, and community groups across the world.

Author: Marilyn Schlitz

14 Feb

Posted at 07:21h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

The Quest for a New Paradigm This leads me back to where I started: questing for a fundamental paradigm, cosmology, or story of the world that’s inclusive enough to embrace the Akashic, noetic dimensions while not losing sight of what is real and true in the objective and intersubjective realms of lived experience. We are alive in a time of enormous complexity—how do we make sense of the fact that a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, secular humanist, and Pagan are all using the same grocery stores, public schools, and health care centers? How is it that a materialist scientist can sit with...

07 Feb

Posted at 20:13h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Exceptional and Transformative Experiences Over time, I have sought to understand the nature of psi and other Akashic experiences outside the laboratory. Obtaining a Ph.D. in anthropology, I felt that qualitative methods may reveal details that are left on the cutting room floor in our lab-based studies. I have been interested in how exceptional experiences impact people’s lives in ways that are transformative. This has led me to engage in a decade of research on what stimulates transformation, what sustains it, and what results from experiences that open us to a larger set of possibilities. In a recent book, Living Deeply: The...

03 Feb

Posted at 13:14h in Featured, News and Press

We are embarking on many exciting events and opportunities that will seed positive transformation in the world. The Death Makes Life Possible Film is moving out into the world with gusto, helping redefine death and transform fear into an inspiration for living and dying well. Marilyn is involved in many conferences and will be speaking in many venues in the next few months. Here’s a calendar for where we will be in 2015. October 15-16,2015 - Death Make Life Possible Film Viewing and Discussion (Kansas City, MO) September 11-13, 2015 - The Final Transition Conference (Tuscon, AZ) July 22-26, 2015 - Living the Noetic...

31 Jan

Posted at 19:31h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

 The Effect of Distant Mental Intention on Living Systems A third study that I will mention involves my work on distant intention and healing. For more than a decade, I collaborated with William Braud at the Mind Science Foundation to develop a research protocol that allows us to study the correlation between one person’s intention and another person’s physiology. This is a procedure we eventually came to call distant mental interactions between living systems (DMILS). The idea behind the work was to simulate an experience in the laboratory that would allow us to study psychic healing, only working with healthy people who...

24 Jan

Posted at 19:09h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

 Exploring Psi in the Lab Since this early phase of my career, more than three decades ago, I have had many compelling encounters with the Akashic experience. Unlike most people, however, many of my personal encounters have occurred in the context of well-controlled laboratory experiments. Let me consider three specific examples from my formal research. Remote Viewing In 1980 I conducted a remote viewing experiment with Elmar Gruber in which we were both the subjects and the experimenters. We designed a formal study of ten trials over thousands of kilometers between Detroit, Michigan and Rome, Italy. Gruber selected a pool of geographical target sites...

17 Jan

Posted at 06:45h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Psychic Exploration When I was an undergraduate, I had several meaningful events that helped shape my life. The first was reading Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. This book, and the idea that our paradigms of reality are socially constructed and not absolute, was nothing short of a conceptual liberation. It gave me hope that the failing vision of society that was around me need not be final or binding. Indeed, even in the context of science, we have experienced different models of reality—one replacing another. What was needed for our society, I felt sure, was a fundamental, whole systems...

10 Jan

Posted at 22:08h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Where does one’s story start? I begin mine with what I don’t remember. At eighteen months old, as I am told by my family, I found a can of lighter fluid on the table. Being a curious child, I did what curious children do: I put it into my mouth. For months after, my small body rested and wrestled in a hospital, floating in and out of life as my lungs sought the affirmation of breath. Perhaps it was here, in the entrusted hands of a dedicated group of health professionals, in the prayers and intentions of my devoted family, in...

20 Dec

Posted at 12:13h in Featured, Research

UPDATE: This article will appear in the soon-to-be-released latest edition of The Write Stuff: Thinking Through Essays by Pearson Canada. Looking forward to it! As philosopher John Locke observed: “New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.” So, what limits our desire and capacity to take in new ideas, even when we hold an intention to transform and to grow? What are the barriers to changing our minds and behaviors? How can we develop habits that allow us to explore our own biases? How can we learn to recognize our own...

09 Dec

Posted at 09:00h in Death and Afterlife, Death Makes Life Possible, Research

How can we understand our own and other’s worldviews about death? To answer this compelling question, I have conducted extensive interviews over the past decade with cultural experts and scientists, focusing on diverse worldviews concerning death and the afterlife. A content analysis was conducted on these interviews to identify thematic trends across individuals representing different cultural, spiritual and religious worldviews. From this analysis, a telecourse and web-based learning program was developed. This was organized into a six-part telecourse that was offered as a benefit to Institute of Noetic Sciences members and to others who learned of the course through diverse networks. The...

05 Dec

Posted at 15:57h in Death and Afterlife, Death Makes Life Possible, Featured

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a wonderful online interview series as one of six other featured speakers in End-of-Life University 2013. This collection of interviews explored the multi-varied aspects of aging and the end-of-life. The host of the series, Karen Wyatt, MD, kicked off the event discussing why we need an "End-of-Life University." With her extensive experience in this field, including many years as a hospice medical director, Dr. Wyatt brings both her own wisdom and the wisdom of those she has cared for to her work. In her marvelous book, What Really Matters: 7 Lessons for Living from the...

29 Nov

Posted at 10:00h in Featured, Transformation

 Heeding the Call to Transformation  There are many catalysts for conscious transformation. For many individuals and for organizations, the call to transformation can be related to a particular moment or event. For others, transformation may be a process of small steps leading to some moment when the way of conducting business is no longer viable. It can involve positive, life-affirming openings, often thought of as epiphanies or breakthroughs. More likely, the greatest portal for transformation is a painful or disruptive experience; something that upsets the steady state of everyday experience. “Business as usual” no longer fills the needs of the company...

22 Nov

Posted at 10:00h in Featured, Transformation

Examine Your Core Assumptions Examining our core assumptions and worldviews is vital to the creation of business as a transformative practice. This includes the analysis of our core images for work and business. As noted in a report called "Changing Images of Man," written several decades ago by Willis Harman and his colleagues at SRI International: Images of humankind that are dominant in a culture are of fundamental importance because they underlie the ways in which the society shapes its institutions, educates its young, and goes about whatever it perceives its business to be. Changes in these images are of particular concern...

18 Nov

Posted at 10:00h in Death Makes Life Possible, Featured

The post-production process of the Death Makes Life Possible documentary is oh-so-close to being complete. I recently had the wonderful opportunity to pay a visit to Skywalker Sound located in the hills of Marin County. My colleagues and I spent the day in awe of the beauty and professionalism of the studio, and of the resulting sound quality for our movie. It was a dream working with Erik Foreman, sound engineer at Skywalker and the man at the controls as we reviewed each scene in the film. I hope you enjoy these photos from inside the studio! [caption id="attachment_1083" align="alignleft" width="1200"]...

15 Nov

Posted at 10:00h in Featured, Transformation

Developing New Habits Transformative practices are central to moving from the call to personal and professional change to the development of new and sustainable habits and patterns of behavior. In this way, business can become a transformative practice with the right conditions. As we have learned from neuroscience, our brains lay down neural pathways based on repetitive experiences. If these pathways are associated with dysfunctional behaviors, we may find ourselves facing a crisis of meaning and purpose. Historically it was thought that brains are not capable of change as we move into adulthood. But outdated behaviors that limit personal growth and development need...

08 Nov

Posted at 10:00h in Featured, Transformation

Expanding Worldviews For nearly two decades, I have engaged in research on worldview transformations. Working with a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, we have systematically explored the dynamics of transformation. These include the identification of catalysts for worldview shifts, the elements of transformational practices shared across diverse spiritual and psychological traditions, and the outcomes and consequences of conscious worldview transformations for individuals and social institutions, including science, education and healthcare. Worldview transformation practices have been seen to increase self-reflection, personal and social awareness, cultural competence, innovation, resilience, collaborative inquiry, collective problem solving, and prosocial behaviors such as compassion and empathy (Schlitz et al.,...