Conscienciology and Projectiology

Conscientiology

At the intersection of Spiritism, science, and New Age individualism in Brazil, Conscientiology emerged in the 1990s self-fashioned as “the study of consciousness by means of a holistic, holosomatic, multidimensional, bioenergetic, projective, self-conscious and cosmoethic approach” (Vieira 1994). Along with Projectiology, the older sister from which Conscientiology directly derives, both disciplines carry out an update of Brazilian Spiritism, but one that displaces traditional mediumship for an individualized focus on out-of-body experience (OBE, also known as conscious or astral projection). Within broader transformations in Brazilian religion and culture, they embraced therapy discourses sustaining an instrumental culture of self-empowerment prevalent among segments of the urban New Age in Latin America. Along with Projectiology, Conscientiology can be thus characterized as an emerging form of New Age Spiritism (D’Andrea 2000).

Likewise, in available scholarship,...