What Conflict Is Teaching Me About Consciousness

Let me come clean: I recently spent three days in Houston at a UFO conference.

Yup. That happened.

Freeze frame. Let’s rewind to 2008.

I had just moved from India to Vancouver. In a job interview, I recounted my career story: religion, international conflict resolution, organizational development. The interviewer looked at me, sharply. “Your story doesn’t connect,” he said, as if he were pointing out a piece of food lodged between my teeth — a truth so self-evident, everyone but me had seen it.

Or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fumbled together a tenuous thread—more impression than plot. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. From then on, I learned to arrange my story in straight lines. Resumé logic. Chronos over Kairos, what felt like a stilted fabrication of the disparate and untethered.

Thankfully, 2025 feels different. These threads feel like they are coming together, expressions of a shared arc, though I can’t quite see where it’s all going.

As I entered this PhD program and began exploring theories of consciousness, I started hearing echoes of something that had always been true for me. I’ve always carried the deep sense that everyone has a story. And that anyone’s story could have been mine—or yours—had we taken a different turn. If I’d gone right instead of left. If I’d been born with more flexible arches, maybe I’d have become a dancer. If I hadn’t met that person. If I had.

I knew this from a very young age. I saw it in the way people entered rooms, in the quiet entanglements of body language, breath, and habit. Not in a self-erasing, draining kind of empathy, but in the flicker of something shared. A momentary softening of boundaries. A glimpse into the space where judgment dissolves, and separateness begins to blur.

In the final moments of a recent trip, I sat at brunch with two of my closest long-time friends. One of them turned to me and asked, “What’s the deal with love? Why is it at the center of so many religions?” For me, this is the essence of it all. Love is a kind of gravitational wink—a pull woven through the spectrum of ego and identity. At its deepest, it becomes a kind of merging, where the boundaries between you and me begin to blur, finding resonance, if not full dissolution. Often, that merging requires surrender—letting go of what we think we can or should control, a death of sorts.

So here I am, studying what they call “high strangeness,” coloring far outside of the lines of Western materialism. Telepathy, subtle energies, precognition, unitive mystical states. Even contact experiences with non-human intelligences. But what does this have to do with my roots in international conflict resolution?

It turns out, everything. As I dove further into this PhD, I started to see connections and shared insights between my “old” world of conflict resolution and my “new” world of consciousness. Gradually I began to map those principles, captured here in some initial reflections.

I used to think of my career in stages—first conflict, then consciousness. Now I see that what began as a commitment to helping people hear one another has evolved into a commitment to expanding our capacity to embody relationship—across realities, dimensions, and even forms of life. The tools have changed, but the ethic remains: to show up in relationship, to extend into a larger body than we once imagined, and to meet the unknown with reverence, discernment, and a loosening of the ego. At its heart, the work invites us to unlearn the boundaries we’ve taken as real—those that appear to separate us from ourselves, from one another, and from the wider field of consciousness.

So what WAS I doing at that UFO conference?

I was spending time with people who’ve had experiences that fall outside the bounds of what society typically considers real, explainable, or acceptable. The people sharing these experiences include scientists, academics, military personnel, and everyday individuals from all kinds of backgrounds. People who’ve encountered something that unsettled everything they thought they knew, and who are now trying to make sense of it without a roadmap.

This kind of honesty is surfacing in all kinds of expected and unexpected places. I hear it in my work with the WISER Super Experiencer Project, where we’re studying people who’ve had multiple types of extraordinary experiences across their lives. But beyond the more obvious venues—a UFO conference, a study on super experiencers—I’m having these conversations everywhere. What’s striking is how often, once the door opens, people share something they’ve kept silent for years. Experiences that don’t quite fit within the frameworks we’ve been handed, yet still feel deeply, undeniably real.

The choice is ours: to dismiss what doesn’t fit—labeling it pathological, unscientific, or fringe—or to stay open, curious, and willing to listen to what these experiences might reveal. As in conflict, the things we push away as “other” often reflect something essential we’ve yet to face.