Research Program / Claims / intuition-9

It is suggested to practice "first inner sense," for example expanding consciousness to include the experience of "becoming a tree," while not losing ego awareness.

建议练习“第一内感”,例如扩展意识去包含“成为一棵树”的经验,同时不失去自我意识。

Concept intuition · Domain Intuitive–Rational Cognitive Integration · methodological suggestion · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
  • dreams-projections §2
Adjudicating experiment
Approximately 240 participants are randomly assigned to four groups: first-person "becoming a tree" guided imagery, third-person observing a tree, general relaxation, and virtual tree embodiment, 20 minutes daily for 4 weeks. Primary endpoints are tree embodiment with simultaneously maintained self-localization, sense of agency, and reality discrimination; blinded interview coding, attention probes, body boundary tasks, and nature connectedness scales are used, with 1-month retest. To claim access to unknown information about the tree, an additional pre-registered guessing task of objective physiological indicators of an isolated target plant is required; subjective embodiment success alone cannot verify such expansion.
Suggested paper title
Tree-Embodiment Imagery and Preservation of Self-Awareness: A Randomized Controlled Study
What it would overturn
Merely producing a tree embodiment experience would not overturn mainstream assumptions, because existing body representation models already allow altered subjective embodiment while retaining reality discrimination.
Candidate labs / funders
Pia Spangenberger:自然具身与沉浸式虚拟现实研究; Sonja Maria Geiger:环境心理学研究; Joel Pearson,新南威尔士大学 Future Minds Lab:心理意象研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
It specifies the experiential object and the constraint of "not losing ego awareness," making it operational; but it does not clearly distinguish predictions from guided imagery and perspective taking.
Note
No direct test of this equipment-free practice was found in this search; studies must allow weak or failed experiences, avoiding mistaking instructed reports of experience for independent verification.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim intuition-9, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/intuition-9