What constrains this.
Two documents: what the Project currently is, and what is permitted to overturn it.
What this is becoming
We do not yet know what this is.
The Metanoia Project is not a finished institution and does not present itself as one. Its subject is a phenomenon whose ontology is unresolved, and an institution built on unresolved ground has no business claiming a settled identity. What we are will be determined by what we find.
We state this at the outset because the alternative is worse. An institute that declares its nature in advance is committed to defending that declaration against its own evidence. We would rather publish the shape we currently hold, in the open, and be seen to change it.
What is fixed: the phenomenon is real as experience, occurring at scale, and under-examined. Interventions are being performed on the afflicted now, across every culture, without standard or oversight. That much requires no metaphysics, and it is enough to justify the work.
What is not fixed: what the phenomenon is. We hold a view. We have written it down. It is not the same thing as the programme, and it is not protected from it.
The observation arm
Bound to method, and permitted to destroy us.
The Metanoia Project maintains a research and observation arm, structurally insulated from the convictions of its founder.
The threat to this work is not the sceptic. It is us. We believe the phenomenon is real, we believe it is widespread, and the founder is himself the primary subject of the interventions this project documents. A programme built on those three facts, left unguarded, would find what it went looking for. The arm exists so that it cannot.
Its architecture is fixed before any finding is possible.
- I A Principal Investigator who is not the founder owns the protocol and observes from outside the room.
- II A clinician holds unilateral authority to stop any session, at any point, without appeal — and reports to no one within the Project.
- III An adversarial methodological critic is contracted from outside to attack the findings before publication, and is paid whether the attack succeeds or fails.
- IV Nothing is released without the sign-off of both the Principal Investigator and the clinician.
- V Nothing recorded of the founder in an altered state is released until he has reviewed it while clear.
Findings from the arm bind what the Project holds. What the Project holds does not bind the findings.
We have written down what we believe. The arm exists to determine whether it is true, and it is under instruction to tell us if it is not.