The Cosmic Game

SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology

Richard D. Mann, editor

The Cosmic Game

Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness

Stanislav Grof

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Cover Illustration : Plate 48 from Rawson, Philip, Tantra: The Indian Cult
of Ecstasy, (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd, 1973). Copyright © Thames
& Hudson. Used by permission. From the Collection of Ajit Mookerjee,
New Delhi.

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© 1998 State University of New York

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grof, Stanislav, 1931–

The cosmic game : explorations of the frontiers of human
consciousness / Stanislav Grof.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in transpersonal and humanistic psychology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-3875-9 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-3876-7
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Spiritual life. 2. Altered states of consciousness.
I. Title. II. Series.
BL625.G697 1998
200’.1’9—dc21 97-41502
CIP

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents
List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Cosmos, Consciousness, and Spirit

3. The Cosmic Creative Principle

4. The Process of Creation

5. The Ways to Reunion with the Cosmic Source

6. The Problem of Good and Evil

7. Birth, Sex, and Death: The Cosmic Connection

8. The Mystery of Karma and Reincarnation

9. The Taboo against Knowing Who You Are

10. Playing the Cosmic Game

11. The Sacred and the Profane

Bibliography

Index

Experiential Holotropic Breathwork Workshops and Training for

Facilitators

Those readers who are interested in a personal experience of the Holotropic

Breathwork or would like to participate in a training program for Holotropic
Breathwork facilitators can obtain the necessary information from:

Cary Sparks
Director
Grof Transpersonal Training
20 Sunnyside Ave, #A 314
Mill Valley, California 94941
tel.: (415) 383-8779
fax.: (415) 383-0965
e-mail: [email protected]
website: www.holotropic.com
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca

Figure 2. Purushakara Yantra

Figure 3. The Hermetic Cosmic Man

Figure 4. Adam Kadmon

Figure 5. The Tibetan Wheel of Life

Figure 6. The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères

Figure 7. Beast Master from Les Trois Frères

Figure 8. Hunting Scene from Lascaux

Figure 9. The Dancer from La Gabillou

Acknowledgments
This book is an attempt to summarize the philosophical and spiritual
insights from forty years of my personal and professional journey that
involved exploration of uncharted frontiers of the human psyche. It has
been a complex, difficult, and at times challenging pilgrimage that I could
not have undertaken alone. Over the years, I have received invaluable help,
inspiration, and encouragement from many people. Some of them have
been my close friends, others important teachers, and most of them have
played an important part in my life in both roles. I cannot acknowledge all
of them individually, but some of them deserve special notice.

Angeles Arrien, an anthropologist and daughter of a “vision maker”—a

spiritual teacher from the Basque mystical tradition—has been for many
years a true friend and an important teacher. Drawing on forty years of her
spiritual training, she has been a living example of how to integrate the
feminine and masculine aspects of one’s psyche and how to “walk the
mystical path with practical feet.”

Gregory Bateson, an original and seminal thinker, with whom I had the
privilege of spending hundreds of hours in personal and professional
discussions during the two and half years when we were both scholars-in-
residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, was for me an
important teacher and a special friend. In our talks, he never wholeheartedly
embraced the mystical realm. However, the relentless logic of his
inquisititive mind produced an incisive critique of mechanistic thinking in
science that provided a large opening for the transpersonal vision.

David Bohm’s work has been one of the most important contributions to my
efforts to establish connections between my own findings concerning the
nature and dimensions of human consciousness, on the one hand, and the
scientific worldview, on the other. I found his holographic model of the
universe invaluable for my own theoretical formulations. The fact that Karl
Pribram’s model of the brain is also based on holographic principles has
been particularly important for this bridging work.

Joseph Campbell, brilliant thinker, story teller, and master teacher, and for
many years my dear friend, has taught me to understand the meaning of
mythology and its function as a bridge to the realms of the sacred. He had a
strong influence on my own thinking and his contributions to my personal
life were equally profound. Today I consider mythology as understood by
C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell to be of critical importance for
psychology, as well as for spirituality and religion.

Fritjof Capra’s ground-breaking book The Tao of Physics was extremely

influential in my own intellectual quest. By showing the convergence
between quantum-relativistic physics and the Eastern spiritual philosophies,
it gave me hope that spirituality and transpersonal psychology will one day
become an integral part of a comprehensive scientific paradigm of the
future. It helped me enormously to free myself from the straitjacket of my
own academic training. Our friendship over the years has been a source of
inspiration.
Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk and philosopher, has
helped me to understand the difference between spirituality and religion.
More specifically, he taught me to appreciate the mystical core of
Christianity and the nature of Jesus’ original message that in my early life
was for me obscured by the complex and confusing history of the Christian
Church.

Michael Harner, who has been able to integrate in a unique way his
academic training as an anthropologist and his shamanic initiation in the
Amazon, is one of my closest friends, as well as an important teacher. I
have been able to learn from him, both theoretically and experientially, to
deeply appreciate shamanism, humanity’s oldest religion and healing art.
This has been an important complement to my direct experiences with
North American, Mexican, South American, and African shamans.

Albert Hofmann has had indirectly a more profound influence on my

personal and professional life than any other single individual. His
“serendipitous” discovery of the powerful psychedelic effects of LSD led to
my first experience with this substance in 1956 when I was a beginning
psychiatrist. This experiment has changed my personal and professional life
and generated a profound interest in nonordinary states of consciousness.

Jack Kornfield, is a dear friend, colleague, spiritual teacher, and a true

master of “skillful means” in the meditation hall, as well as in everyday life.
He has been able to bring together and integrate in a remarkable way years
of training as a Buddhist monk with his Western academic training in
psychology. All of us who know him, friends and disciples alike, admire his
compassion, wisdom, and extraordinary humor. In the two decades we have
known each other, we have co-led many workshops and retreats. I have
probably learned from him more about Buddhism and spirituality than from
all the books I have read on these subjects.

Ervin Laszlo, the world’s foremost representative of systems philosophy

and the theory of general evolution, has been a very important influence in
my professional life. His books—in which he succeeded in formulating the
outlines of a unified science of matter, life, and mind—as well as personal
discussions with him, provided for me the most satisfying conceptual
framework for understanding my own experiences and observations. They
made it possible to integrate my findings into a comprehensive worldview
that unites spirituality and science.

Ralph Metzner, a psychologist and psychotherapist, who represents a rare

combination of rigorous scholarship, concern for nature and the future of
humanity, and an adventurous spirit, has been since our first meeting thirty
years ago an important friend and fellow seeker. He has been for me an
important model for maintaining emotional balance and intellectual rigor in
view of challenging and unsettling experiences and observations.

Ram Dass, another member of a close circle of special friends, has been one
of my most important spiritual teachers. Representing a unique combination
of jñana, bhakti, karma, and raja yoga, he has played in our culture the role
of an archetypal spiritual seeker reporting with brutal honesty all the
triumphs and failures of his spiritual quest. I do not remember a single time
among our many meetings where he would not have enriched me with some
unique insights and ideas.

Rupert Sheldrake has brought to my attention with unusual incisiveness and

clarity the shortcomings of mainstream science. This helped me to be more
open to new observations and trust my own judgment, even if my findings
contradicted basic metaphysical assumptions of the conceptual frameworks
I had been brought up with. I found his emphasis on the need to find
adequate explanations for form, pattern, order, and meaning to be
particularly important for my work.

Rick Tarnas, a psychologist, philosopher, and astrologer, has been one of

my closest friends and a constant source of inspiration and new ideas.
During the years we lived at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and
more recently in the classes we have been jointly teaching at the California
Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), we have been exploring the
extraordinary correlations between holotropic states of consciousness,
archetypal psychology, and transit astrology. Through his meticulous
research, Rick has helped me to deeply appreciate the grand design
underlying creation.

Charles Tart has been for me an example of a brilliant and accomplished

academician who has the courage, honesty, and integrity to stand
uncompromisingly behind what he believes is true and to pursue
unorthodox avenues in research, even if they are as controversial and
misunderstood as parapsychology and spirituality. I admire him and have
learned much from him.

Frances Vaughan and Roger Walsh are important pioneers and leaders in the
field of transpersonal psychology. They are partners in life and work and I
will thank them as a couple. They have been for me a source of continuing
inspiration, support, and encouragement. In their lectures, seminars, and
writings, as well as in their personal life, they have been modeling the
possibility of integrating science, spirituality, and sane living. It has been
wonderful to have them as friends and colleagues.

Ken Wilber has done more than any other single individual in terms of
laying solid philosophical foundations for future reconciliation of science
and spirituality. The series of his ground-breaking books has been a tour de
force, offering an extraordinary synthesis of data drawn from a vast variety
of areas and disciplines, Eastern and Western. Although we have
occasionally disagreed about details, his work has been for me a rich source
of information, stimulation, and conceptual challenge. I also greatly
appreciate his critical comments on the present book.

I also feel deep gratitude to John Buchanan—for the inspiration, the humor
he brought into our lives, and the generous support he has given my work
over the years. Last but not least, I would like to express my high regard for
Robert McDermott, president of the California Institute of Integral Studies
(CIIS) for the extraordinary generosity and open-mindedness with which he
supports and encourages free exchange of ideas in the controversial area of
transpersonal psychology. I am also very grateful for the thoughtful and
valuable comments he offered me after reading the manuscript of this book.

My special thanks go to the immediate members of my family, who have

shared with me the excitement and the vicissitudes of my stormy personal
and professional journey and have been a constant source of support and
encouragement—my wife Christina, my brother Paul, and my late parents.
Christina and I have jointly developed the holotropic breathwork that has
been an important source of data for this book and have used it in our
workshops and training all over the world. I feel deep gratitude for all she
has contributed to the spiritual journey we have shared over the years. I
would also like to express my appreciation to Cary and Tav Sparks, who
have played an important role in my life by being close friends, as well as
highly competent, dependable, and dedicated co-workers.

Many people whose contributions to this book were absolutely essential and
critical will have to remain anonymous. I am referring here to thousands of
individuals with whom I have worked over the years and who have
discussed with me their experiences and insights from nonordinary states of
consciousness. I feel great respect for their courage in exploring hidden
dimensions of reality and gratitude for the openness and honesty with which
they have shared with me their remarkable adventures. Without them this
book could not have been written.

1
Introduction
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. … He to
whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and
stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
—Albert Einstein

Use the light that dwells within you to regain your natural clarity of sight.
—Lao-tzu

This book addresses some of the most fundamental questions of existence

that human beings have been asking since time immemorial. How did our
universe come into being? Is the world we live in merely a product of
mechanical processes involving inanimate, inert, and reactive matter? Do
we have to assume the existence of superior cosmic intelligence responsible
for the creation and evolution of the cosmos? Can material reality be
explained solely in terms of natural laws or does it involve forces and
principles that elude such descriptions?

How can we come to terms with such dilemmas as finiteness of time and
space versus eternity and infinity? What is the source of order, form, and
meaning in the universe? What is the relationship between life and matter,
and between consciousness and the brain? Many of the issues that we will
explore in this book have great relevance for everyday existence. How
should we understand the apparent conflict between good and evil, the
mystery of karma and reincarnation, and the problem of the meaning of
human life?

These are not questions that are usually asked in the context of psychiatric
practice or psychological research. And yet, in my work as a psychiatrist,
these issues emerged quite spontaneously and with extraordinary urgency in
the minds of many of the people with whom I have worked. The reason for
this is the unusual field of study that has been the main focus of my interest
during the forty years of my professional life—research of non-ordinary
states of consciousness.

This interest began quite unexpectedly and in a very dramatic way in 1956,
only a few months after my graduation from medical school, when I
volunteered for an experiment with LSD in the Psychiatric Department of
the School of Medicine in Prague, Czechoslovakia. This experience
profoundly influenced my personal and professional life and provided the
inspiration for my lifelong commitment to consciousness research.

Although I have been interested in the entire spectrum of nonordinary states

of consciousness, I have had most personal experience with psychedelic
research, with therapeutic work involving individuals undergoing
spontaneous psychospiritual crises (spiritual emergencies), and with
holotropic breathwork, a method that I have developed jointly with my wife
Christina. In psychedelic therapy the nonordinary states of consciousness
are induced by chemical means; in spiritual emergencies they develop
spontaneously for unknown reasons in the middle of everyday life; and in
holotropic breathwork they are facilitated by a combination of faster
breathing, evocative music, and a specific form of focused body work. In
this book, I will be drawing on all these three areas, since the insights from
all of them are very similar, if not identical.

Consciousness Research and Perennial Philosophy

In my previous publications, I have described the important implications of
systematic study of nonordinary states of consciousness for the
understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders and for
psychotherapy (Grof 1985, 1992). This book has a much larger and general
focus: it explores the extraordinary philosophical, metaphysical, and
spiritual insights that have emerged in the course of this work. The
experiences and observations from this research have revealed important
aspects and dimensions of reality that are usually hidden from our everyday
awareness.

Throughout centuries, these experiences and the realms of existence they

disclose have been described in the context of spiritual philosophies and
mystical traditions, such as Vedanta, Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism,
Taoism, Sufism, Gnosticism, Christian mysticism, Cabala, and many other
sophisticated spiritual systems. The findings of my research and
contemporary consciousness research in general essentially confirm and
support the position of these ancient teachings. They are thus in radical
conflict with the most fundamental assumptions of materialistic science
concerning consciousness, human nature, and the nature of reality. They
clearly indicate that consciousness is not a product of the brain, but a
primary principle of existence, and that it plays a critical role in the creation
of the phenomenal world.

This research also radically changes our conception of the human psyche. It
shows that, in its farthest reaches, the psyche of each of us is essentially
commensurate with all of existence and ultimately identical with the cosmic
creative principle itself. This conclusion, while seriously challenging the
worldview of modern technological societies, is in far-reaching agreement
with the image of reality found in the great spiritual and mystical traditions
of the world, which the Anglo-American writer and philosopher Aldous
Huxley referred to as the “perennial philosophy” (Huxley 1945).

Modern consciousness research has generated important data that support

the basic tenets of the perennial philosophy. It has revealed a grand
purposeful design underlying all of creation and has shown that all of
existence is permeated by superior intelligence. In the light of these new
discoveries, spirituality is affirmed as an important and legitimate endeavor
in human life, since it reflects a critical dimension of the human psyche and
of the universal scheme of things. The mystical traditions and spiritual
philosophies of the past have often been dismissed and even ridiculed for
being “irrational” and “unscientific”. This is an uninformed judgment that is
unwarranted and unjustified. Many of the great spiritual systems are
products of centuries of in-depth exploration of the human psyche and
consciousness that in many ways resembles scientific research.

These systems offer detailed instructions concerning the methods of

inducing spiritual experiences on which they base their philosophical
speculations. They have systematically collected data drawn from these
experiences and subjected them to collective consensus validation, usually
over a period of many centuries. These are exactly the stages necessary for
achieving valid and reliable knowledge in any area of scientific endeavor
(Smith 1976; Wilber 1997). It is very exciting that the claims of various
schools of perennial philosophy can now be supported by data from modern
consciousness research.

The approaches to self-exploration that make this modern validation

possible, as they are described in this book, do not require the same degree
of commitment and personal sacrifice as the ancient spiritual practices.
They are more accessible and practical for Westerners who are trapped in
the complexity of modern life. The use of psychedelics has been
compromised by widespread unsupervised experimentation and is at present
seriously barred by a host of administrative and legal restrictions. However,
holotropic breathwork is a method that is available for all those interested in
exploring the validity of the insights described in this book. The
experiences from our workshops conducted all over the world and the
feedback from several hundred people who have completed our training and
facilitate holotropic breathwork sessions themselves have convinced me
that the observations I have described in this book are fully replicable.

Holotropic States of Consciousness

Before we begin to explore the spiritual and philosophical insights from my
work, I would like to clarify in which sense I will be using in this book the
term nonordinary states of consciousness. My primary interest is to focus
on experiences that represent a useful source of data about the human
psyche and the nature of reality, particularly those that reveal various
aspects of the spiritual dimension of existence. I would also like to examine
the healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential of these experiences.
For this purpose, the term nonordinary states of consciousness is too
general, since it includes a wide range of conditions that are not interesting
or relevant from this point of view.

Consciousness can be profoundly changed by a variety of pathological

processes—by cerebral traumas, by intoxications with poisons, by
infections, or by degenerative and circulatory processes in the brain. Such
conditions can certainly result in profound mental changes that would be
included in the category of nonordinary states of consciousness. However,
they cause “trivial deliria” or “organic psychoses,” states that are very
important clinically, but are not relevant for our discussion. People suffering
from delirious states are typically disoriented. They might be confused to
such a degree that they do not know who and where they are and what
month or year it is. They typically show a disturbance of intellectual
functions and have subsequent amnesia for the experiences they have had.

I will, therefore, narrow our discussion to a large and important subgroup of

nonordinary states of consciousnes for which contemporary psychiatry does
not have a specific term. Because I am convinced that they deserve to be
distinguished from the rest and placed into a special category, I have coined
for them the name holotropic (Grof 1992). This composite word literally
means “oriented toward wholeness” or “moving in the direction of
wholeness” (from the Greek holos = whole, and trepein = moving toward or
in the direction of something). The full meaning of this term and the
justification for its use will become clear later in this book. It suggests that
in our everyday state of consciousness we are not really whole; we are
fragmented and identify with only a small fraction of who we really are.

Holotropic states are characterized by a specific transformation of

consciousness associated with perceptual changes in all sensory areas,
intense and often unusual emotions, and profound alterations in the thought
processes. They are also usually accompanied by a variety of intense
psychosomatic manifestations and unconventional forms of behavior.
Consciousness is changed qualitatively in a very profound and fundamental
way but, unlike in the delirant conditions, it is not grossly impaired. In
holotropic states, we experience intrusion of other dimensions of existence
that can be very intense and even overwhelming. However, at the same
time, we typically remain fully oriented and do not completely lose touch
with everyday reality. We experience simultaneously two very different
realities.

Extraordinary changes in sensory perception represent a very important and

characteristic aspect of holotropic states. With the eyes open, we typically
experience profound changes in the shapes and colors of the environment.
When we close our eyes, we can be flooded with images drawn from our
personal history and from the collective unconscious. We can also have
visions portraying various aspects of nature, of the cosmos, or of the
mythological realms. This can be accompanied by a wide range of
experiences engaging other senses—various sounds, physical sensations,
smells, and tastes.

The emotions associated with holotropic states cover a very broad spectrum
that extends far beyond the limits of our everyday experience. They range
from feelings of ecstatic rapture, heavenly bliss, and “peace that passeth all
understanding” to episodes of abysmal terror, overpowering anger, utter
despair, consuming guilt, and other forms of extreme emotional suffering.
The intensity of these agonizing experiences can match the descriptions of
the tortures of hell in some of the great religions of the world. The physical
sensations that accompany these states are similarly polarized. Depending
on the content of the experience, it can be a sense of extraordinary health
and well-being, optimal physiological functioning, and orgastic sexual
sensations of enormous intensity, but also extreme discomfort, such as
excruciating pains, pressures, nausea, or feelings of suffocation.

A particularly interesting aspect of holotropic states is their effect on the

thought processes. The intellect is not impaired, but it operates in a way that
is significantly different from its everyday functioning. While we might not
be able to rely in these states on our judgment in ordinary practical matters,
we can be literally flooded with remarkable new information on a variety of
subjects. We can reach profound psychological insights concerning our
personal history, unconscious dynamics, emotional difficulties, and
interpersonal problems. We can also experience extraordinary revelations
concerning various aspects of nature and the cosmos that transcend our
educational and intellectual background. By far the most interesting insights
that become available in holotropic states revolve around philosophical,
metaphysical, and spiritual issues. Exploration of these insights is the main
focus of this book.

Philosophical and Spiritual Insights from

Holotropic States
The content of holotropic states of consciousness is often philosophical and
mystical. In these episodes, we can experience sequences of psychospiritual
death and rebirth or feelings of oneness with other people, nature, the
universe, and God. We might uncover what seem to be memories from
other incarnations, encounter powerful archetypal beings, communicate
with discarnate entities, and visit numerous mythological domains. The rich
spectrum of these states also includes out-of-body experiences during which
the disembodied consciousness maintains the capacity of optical perception
and can accurately observe from unusual angles and distances the events in
the immediate environment of the body, as well as in various remote
locations.

Holotropic experiences can be induced by a variety of ancient and

aboriginal techniques, “technologies of the sacred.” These procedures
combine in various ways drumming, rattling, sounds of bells or gongs,
chanting, rhythmic dancing, changes of breathing, and cultivation of special
forms of awareness. They might include extended social and sensory
isolation, fasting, sleep deprivation, dehydration, and even drastic physical
interventions, such as bloodletting, powerful laxatives and purgatives, and
infliction of severe pain. A particularly effective technology of the sacred
has been ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances.

These mind-altering techniques have played a critical role in the ritual and
spiritual history of humanity. Induction of holotropic states has been
absolutely essential for shamanism, rites of passage, and other ceremonies
of native cultures. It also represented the key element of the ancient
mysteries of death and rebirth that were conducted in different parts of the
world and particularly flourished in the Mediterranean area. Holotropic
experiences have been equally important for various mystical branches of
the great religions of the world. These esoteric traditions have developed a
variety of technologies of the sacred—specific methods of inducing such
experiences. Here belong various forms of yoga, meditation and
concentration techniques, multivocal chanting, whirling of the dervishes,
ascetic practices, the Christian hesychasm or “Jesus prayer,” and many
others.

In modern times, the spectrum of mind-altering techniques has been

considerably enriched. The clinical approaches include the use of pure
alkaloids from psychedelic plants or synthetic psychedelic substances, as
well as powerful forms of experiential psychotherapy, such as hypnosis,
primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork. The most popular of
the laboratory methods for inducing holotropic states has been sensory
deprivation, an approach based on various degrees of reduction of sensory
stimuli. Another well-known method is biofeedback, which makes it
possible to use the information about the changes in one’s brain waves as a
guideline to specific states of consciousness. Many special electronic
devices use the principle of “entrainment” or “driving” of the brainwaves
by various acoustic and optical stimuli.

It is important to emphasize that episodes of holotropic states of varying

depth and duration can also occur spontaneously, without any specific
identifiable cause, and often against the will of the people involved. Since
modern psychiatry does not differentiate between mystical or spiritual states
and psychotic episodes, people experiencing these states are often
diagnosed as mentally ill, hospitalized, and subjected to routine suppressive
pharmacological treatment. My wife Christina and I have suggested that
many of these states are actually psychospiritual crises or spiritual
emergencies. If they are properly understood and individuals undergoing
them are supported by experienced facilitators, episodes of this kind can
result in psychosomatic healing, spiritual opening, positive personality
transformation, and consciousness evolution (Grof and Grof 1990).

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science

As we have seen from the above description, holotropic experiences are the
common denominator in many procedures that have throughout centuries
shaped the ritual, spiritual, and cultural life of many human groups. They
have been the main source of cosmologies, mythologies, philosophies, and
religious systems describing the spiritual nature of the cosmos and of
existence. They are the key for understanding the spiritual life of humanity
from shamanism and sacred ceremonies of aboriginal tribes to the great
religions of the world. But, most important, they provide invaluable
practical guidelines for a rich and satisfying life strategy that makes it
possible to realize to the fullest our creative potential. For all these reasons,
it is important that Western scientists free themselves from their
materialistic prejudices and subject holotropic states to unbiased systematic
research.

I have been deeply interested in all the categories of holotropic states of

consciousness mentioned above and have had important personal
experiences in many of them. However, as I have mentioned earlier, most of
my professional work has been in the areas of psychedelic therapy,
holotropic breathwork, and “spiritual emergency.” Although the
experiences observed in these three situations differ in terms of the triggers
that initiate them, they seem to be remarkably similar in terms of their
experiential content and of the spiritual and philosophical insights that they
convey.

During my professional career, I have personally conducted over four

thousand psychedelic sessions with such substances as LSD, psilocybine,
mescaline, dipropyl-tryptamine (DPT), and methylene-dioxy-amphetamine
(MDA), and had access to over two thousand sessions conducted by my
colleagues. A significant proportion of these sessions involved psychiatric
patients suffering from various forms of emotional and psychosomatic
disorders, such as depression, psychoneurosis, psychosomatic disorders,
alcoholism, and narcotic drug addiction.

Another large group consisted of patients suffering from various forms of

cancer, most of them terminal. In this study, the objective was not only to
relieve the emotional distress and severe physical pain associated with this
illness, but also to offer these patients an opportunity to achieve mystical
states in order to alleviate their fear of death, change their attitude toward it,
and transform their experience of dying. The remaining subjects were
“normal volunteers,” such as psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers,
clergy, artists, and scientists from various disciplines, who volunteered for
psychedelic sessions because they sought understanding and insight.

The breathing sessions were conducted in the context of a long-term

training program of professionals and of experiential workshops with a
broad cross-section of the general population. Over the years, my wife
Christina and I have supervised over thirty thousand holotropic sessions,
mostly carried out in groups, only exceptionally on an individual basis.
Besides the experimentation with psychedelics and with the holotropic
breathwork, I have also worked with many individuals undergoing
spontaneous psychospiritual crises. This occurred occasionally as part of
my personal and professional life and was not carried out systematically as
a specific project.

In writing this book, I used the records that I had amassed during more than
forty years of work in the field of consciousness studies. I have focused
specifically on those parts of the records that described experiences and
observations related to basic ontological and cosmological questions. To my
surprise, what emerged from these accounts of holotropic states was a
comprehensive and logically consistent alternative to the understanding of
human nature and of existence that has been formulated by materialistic
science and that represents the official ideology of the Western industrial
civilization.

People who experience holotropic states and integrate them effectively do

not develop idiosyncratic delusional worldviews representing disjointed
distortions of “objective reality.” They discover various partial aspects of a
grand vision of a universe that is created and permeated by superior cosmic
intelligence. In the last analysis, this ensouled cosmos is commensurate
with their own psyche and consciousness. These insights show a remarkable
similarity to the understanding of reality that has repeatedly emerged, often
quite independently, throughout history in different parts of the world. In
many variations, this vision of reality has been shared by all the people who
have had the opportunity to complement their everyday experience of
material reality with insights from holotropic states of consciousness.

This finding brings good news to the millions of Westerners and people in
technologized societies who have had various forms of holotropic
experiences and were unable to integrate them with the belief system of
their mainstream cultures. Because of this discrepancy, many of them
questioned their own sanity or had their sanity questioned by others,
including the mental health professionals from whom they sought advice or
to whom they were brought against their will. The study of holotropic states
vindicates these people and reveals the shortcomings of contemporary
psychiatry. It shows an urgent need for a radical revision and revisioning of
our understanding of human nature and of the nature of reality.

As the revolutionary advances of various disciplines of modern science

continue to lift the spell of the outdated materialistic worldview, we begin
to see the outlines of a new comprehensive understanding of ourselves,
nature, and the universe. It is increasingly clear that this emerging
alternative approach to existence will integrate science and spirituality and
introduce important elements of the ancient wisdom into our technological
world. Even at present, we have much more than just a disjointed mosaic of
revolutionary theories and a vague outline of such a vision. Ervin Laszlo
has already provided a brilliant synthesis of the most important theoretical
breakthroughs in various fields of modern science (Laszlo 1993). Ken
Wilber has formulated an extraordinary interdisciplinary framework that
provides the necessary philosophical foundations for such integral
understanding of reality (Wilber 1995, 1996, 1997).

Clearly, when this new vision of the cosmos is completed, it will not be a
simple return to prescientific understanding of reality, but an overarching
creative synthesis of the best of the past and the present. A worldview
preserving all the achievments of modern science and, at the same time,
reintroducing into the Western civilization the spiritual values that it has
lost, could have profound influence on our individual, as well as collective
life. I firmly believe that the experiences and observations from holotropic
states explored in this book will be an integral part of this exciting new
image of reality and of human nature that is now painfully being born.
2
Cosmos, Consciousness, and Spirit
As we progress and awaken to the soul in us and things, we shall realize
that there is consciousness also in the plant, in the metal, in the atom, in
electricity, in every thing that belongs to physical nature.
—Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga

The difference between most people and myself is that for me the ‘dividing
walls’ are transparent.
—C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

The Worldview of Materialistic Science

According to Western science, the universe is an immensely complex
assembly of material particles that has essentially created itself. Life,
consciousness, and intelligence are insignificant and more or less accidental
latecomers on the cosmic scene. These three aspects of existence allegedly
appeared in a negligible portion of an immense cosmos after billions of
years of evolution of matter. Life owes its origin to random chemical
processes in the primeval ocean that gathered atoms and inorganic
molecules into organic compounds. The organic material then acquired
during further evolution the capacity for self-preservation, reproduction,
and cellular organization. The unicellular organisms assembled into larger
and larger multicellular life forms and eventually developed into the rich
panoply of species inhabiting this earth, including Homo sapiens.

We are told that consciousness emerged in late stages of this evolution out
of the complexity of the physiological processes in the central nervous
system. It is a product of the brain and, as such, it is confined to the inside
of our skull. From this perspective, consciousness and intelligence are
functions that are limited to human beings and higher animals. They
certainly do not and cannot exist independently of biological systems.
According to this way of understanding reality, the content of our psyche is
more or less limited to the information we have received through our
sensory organs from the external world since the time we were born.
Here Western scientists basically agree with the old saying of the British
empiricist school of philosophy: “There is nothing in the intellect that was
not previously in a sense organ.” This position, first articulated by John
Locke in the eighteenth century, naturally excludes the possibility of
extrasensory perception (ESP)—access to information of any kind that is
not mediated by the senses, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, or out-of-body
experiences with accurate perception of remote locations.

In addition, the nature and extent of our sensory input is determined by the
physical characteristics of the environment and by the physiological
properties and constraints of our senses. For example, we cannot see objects
if we are separated from them by a solid wall. We lose from our view a ship
that passes beyond the horizon, and we are unable to observe the other side
of the moon. Similarly, we cannot hear the sounds if the acoustic waves
created by an external event do not reach our ears with sufficient intensity.
When we are in San Francisco, we cannot see and hear what our friends are
doing in New York City, unless, of course, this perception is mediated by
some modern technological inventions, such as television or telephone.

Conceptual Challenges from Modern

Consciousness Research
The experiences in nonordinary states of consciousness seriously challenge
such narrow understanding of the potential of the human psyche and of the
limits of our perception. What we can experience in these states is not
limited to memories from our life after we were born and to the Freudian
individual unconscious, as materialistic scientists have taught us to believe.
Holotropic experiences reach far beyond the boundaries of what the Anglo-
American writer and philosopher Alan Watts facetiously called “the skin-
encapsulated ego.” They can take us into vast territories of the psyche as yet
uncharted by Western psychologists and psychiatrists. In an effort to
describe and classify all the phenomena that become available in holotropic
states, I have sketched a new map of human experience that expands the
conventional understanding of the psyche. In this context, I will only briefly
outline the basic features of this new cartography. A more detailed
description can be found in my earlier books (Grof 1975, 1988).
To account for all the experiences that can occur in holotropic states, I had
to radically expand the current Western understanding of the psyche by
adding two large domains. The first of these is a repository of intense
physical sensations and emotions linked to the trauma of birth, such as
extreme physical pains in various parts of the body, feelings of suffocation,
experience of vital anxiety, hopelessness, and intense rage. In addition, this
domain also contains a rich spectrum of corresponding symbolic images
revolving around the issues of birth, death, sex, and violence. I refer to this
level of the psyche as perinatal because of its association with biological
birth (from the Greek peri = around or near, and the Latin natalis =
pertaining to chilbirth). I will return to this topic later in the chapter
exploring the spiritual dimensions of birth, sex, and death.

The second additional domain of the psyche included in my cartography

can be referred to as transpersonal, since its basic characteristic is the
experience of transcending the usual personal limitations of the body and
the ego. Transpersonal experiences vastly expand the sense of personal
identity by including elements of the external world and other dimensions
of reality. One important category of transpersonal experiences involves, for
example, authentic experiential identification with other people, animals,
plants, and various other aspects of nature and the cosmos.

Another large group of transpersonal phenomena can be described in terms

of what the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1959) called the collective
unconscious. This vast repository of ancestral, racial, and collective
memories contains the entire historical and cultural heritage of humanity. It
also harbors primordial organizing principles that Jung called archetypes.
According to him, the archetypes govern the processes in our psyche, as
well as the events in the world at large. They also are the creative force
behind the infinitely rich imaginal world of the psyche with its pantheons of
mythological realms and beings. In holotropic states, the contents of the
collective unconscious become available for conscious experience.

Careful study of the perinatal and transpersonal experiences shows that the
boundaries between the individual human psyche and the rest of the cosmos
are ultimately arbitrary and can be transcended. This work brings strong
evidence suggesting that, in the last analysis, each of us is commensurate
with the totality of existence. What it means practically is that anything that
we would, in our everyday state of consciousness, perceive as an object, can
be also encountered as a corresponding subjective experience when we are
in a holotropic state. In addition to all the elements of the material world
throughout the entire range of space-time, we can also experience various
aspects of other dimensions of reality, such as archetypal beings and
mythological domains of the collective unconscious.

In holotropic states, we can experience in remarkable detail all the stages of

our biological birth, memories of prenatal existence, and even a cellular
record of our conception. Transpersonal experiences can bring forth
episodes from the lives of our immediate or remote ancestors or take us into
the realm of the racial and collective unconscious. They can provide access
to episodes that appear to be memories from previous incarnations, or even
vestiges from the lives of our animal ancestors. We might experience full
conscious identification with other people, groups of people, animals,
plants, and even inorganic objects and processes. During such experiences,
we can gain entirely new accurate information about various aspects of the
universe, including the data that we could not have possibly acquired in our
present lifetime through the ordinary channels.

When we have experienced to sufficient depth these dimensions that are

hidden to our everyday perception, we typically undergo profound changes
in our understanding of existence and of the nature of reality. The most
fundamental metaphysical insight we obtain is the realization that the
universe is not an autonomous system that has evolved as a result of
mechanical interplay of material particles. We find it impossible to take
seriously the basic assumption of materialistic science, which asserts that
the history of the universe is merely the history of evolving matter. We have
directly experienced the divine, sacred, or numinous dimensions of
existence in a very profound and compelling way.

The Ensouled Universe

Following powerful transpersonal experiences, our worldview typically
expands to include some elements of the cosmologies of various native
peoples and ancient cultures. This development is completely independent
of our intelligence, educational background, or profession. Authentic and
convincing experiences of conscious identification with animals, plants, and
even inorganic materials and processes make it easy to understand the
beliefs of animistic cultures that see the entire universe as being ensouled.
From their perspective, not only all the animals, but also the trees, the
rivers, the mountains, the sun, the moon, and the stars appear to be sentient
beings.

The following experience shows how it is possible in holotropic states of

consciousness to experience inorganic objects as divine entities. It involves
John, an intelligent and educated American, who had a powerful experience
of loss of his everyday identity and conscious identification with a granite
mountain while camping with his friends at a high altitude in Sierra
Nevada.

I was resting on a large flat slab of granite with my feet immersed in a

pristine creek cascading down the mountain. I was basking in the sun,
absorbing its rays with my whole being. As I was getting more and
more relaxed, I felt deep peace, deeper than I could ever imagine. Time
was progressively slowing down until it finally seemed to stop. I felt
the touch of eternity.

Gradually, I lost the sense of boundaries and merged with the granite
mountain. All my inner turmoil and chatter quieted down and was
replaced with absolute stillness. I felt that I had arrived. I was in a state
of ultimate rest where all my desires and needs were satisfied and all
questions answered. Suddenly I realized that this profound
unfathomable peace had something to do with the nature of granite. As
incredible as it might seem, I felt that I became the consciousness of
granite.

I suddenly understood why the Egyptians made granite sculptures of

deities and why the Hindus saw the Himalayas as the reclining figure
of Shiva. It was the imperturbable state of consciousness that they
worshipped. It takes tens of millions of years before even the surface
of granite is broken by the assaults of weather. During that time the
mercurial organic world undergoes countless changes: species
originate, exist, and get extinct; dynasties are founded, rule, and are
 replaced by others; and thousands of generations play out their silly
dramas. The granite mountain stands there like a majestic witness, like
a deity, immovable and untouched by anything that happens.

The World of Deities and Demons

Holotropic states of consciousness, can also provide deep insights into the
worldview of the cultures that believe that the cosmos is populated by
mythological beings and that it is governed by various blissful and wrathful
deities. In these states, we can gain direct experiential access to the world of
gods, demons, legendary heroes, suprahuman entities, and spirit guides. We
can visit the domain of mythological realities, fantastic landscapes, and
abodes of the Beyond. The imagery of such experiences can be drawn from
the collective unconscious and can feature mythological figures and themes
from any culture in the entire history of humanity. Deep personal
experiences of this realm help us realize that the images of the cosmos
found in pre-industrial societies are not based on superstition or primitive
“magical thinking,” but on direct experiences of alternative realities.

A particularly convincing proof of the authenticity of these experiences is

the fact that, like other transpersonal phenomena, they can bring us new and
accurate information about various archetypal beings and realms. The
nature, scope, and quality of this information often by far surpasses our
previous intellectual knowledge concerning the respective mythologies.
Observations of this kind led C. G. Jung to the assumption that, besides the
individual unconscious as described by Sigmund Freud, we also have a
collective unconscious that connects us with the entire cultural heritage of
all humanity.

I will describe here as an illustration one of the most interesting experiences

of this kind I have observed during the years of my work with holotropic
states of consciousness. It involved Otto, one of my clients in Prague,
whom I treated for depression and pathological fear of death
(thanatophobia). In one of his psychedelic sessions, he experienced a
powerful sequence of psychospiritual death and rebirth. As the experience
was culminating, he had a vision of an ominous entrance into the
underworld guarded by a terrifying pig-goddess. At this point, he suddenly
felt an urgent need to draw a specific geometrical design.

Although I generally asked my clients to stay during their sessions in a

reclining position with the eyes closed and keep the experiences
internalized, at this point Otto opened his eyes, sat up, and urgently asked
me to bring him some sheets of paper and drawing utensils. He drew an
entire series of complex abstract patterns and, with great dissatisfaction and
despair, he kept impulsively tearing and crumpling these intricate designs as
soon as he finished them. He was very dissatisfied with his drawings and
was getting increasingly frustrated, because he was not able to “get it right.”
When I asked him what he was trying to do, he was not able to explain it to
me. He said that he simply felt an irresistible compulsion to draw these
geometrical patterns and was convinced that drawing the right kind of
design was somehow a necessary condition for a successful completion of
his session.

The theme clearly had a strong emotional charge for Otto and it seemed
important to understand it. At that time, I was still under a strong influence
of my Freudian training and I tried my best to identify the unconscious
motives for this strange behavior by using the method of free associations.
We spent much time on this task, but without much success. The entire
sequence simply did not make any sense. Eventually, the process moved to
other areas and I stopped thinking about this situation. The entire episode
had remained for me completely mysterious until many years later, when I
moved to the United States.

During my stay in Baltimore, a friend of mine suggested that Joseph

Campbell might be interested in the implications of my research for
mythology and offered to arrange a meeting with him. After a few initial
encounters, we became good friends and he played a very important role in
my personal and professional life. Joseph has been considered by many to
be the greatest mythologist of the twentieth century and possibly of all
times. His intellect was remarkable and his knowledge of world mythology
truly encyclopedic. He had a keen interest in the research of nonordinary
states of consciousness, which he considered to be very relevant for the
study of mythology (Campbell 1972). We had many fascinating discussions
over the years, during which I shared with him various observations of
obscure archetypal experiences from my work that I was not able to
understand. In most instances, Joseph had no difficulties identifying the
cultural sources of the symbolism involved.

During one of these discussions, I remembered the above episode and

shared it with him. “How fascinating,” said Joseph without any hesitation,
“it was clearly the Cosmic Mother Night of Death, the Devouring Mother
Goddess of the Malekulans in New Guinea.” He then continued to tell me
that the Malekulans believed they would encounter this deity during the
Journey of the Dead. She had the form of a frightening female figure with
distinct pig features. According to the Malekulan tradition, she sat at the
entrance into the underworld and guarded an intricate sacred labyrinthine
design.

The Malekulans had an elaborate system of rituals that involved breeding

and sacrificing pigs. This complex ritual activity was aimed at overcoming
the dependency on their human mothers and eventually on the Devouring
Mother Goddess. The Malekulans spent an enormous amount of time
practicing the art of the labyrinth drawing, since its mastery was considered
essential for a successful journey to the Beyond. Joseph, with his lexical
knowledge, was able to solve an important part of this puzzle that I had
come across during my research. The remaining question, that even he was
not able to answer, was why my client had to encounter specifically this
Malekulan deity at that particular time of his therapy. However, the task of
mastering the posthumous journey certainly made good sense for somebody
whose main symptom was pathological fear of death.

C. G. Jung and the Universal Archetypes

In holotropic states we discover that our psyche has access to entire
pantheons of mythological figures, as well as domains that they inhabit.
According to C. G. Jung, these are manifestations of primordial universal
patterns that represent intrinsic constituents of the collective unconscious.
The archetypal figures fall into two distinct categories. The first one
includes blissful and wrathful beings embodying various specific universal
roles and functions. The most famous of them are the Great Mother
Goddess, the Terrible Mother Goddess, the Wise Old Man, the Eternal
Youth (Puer Eternus and Puella Eterna), the Lovers, the Grim Reaper, and
the Trickster. Jung also discovered that men harbor in their unconscious a
generalized representation of the feminine principle that he called Anima.
Her counterpart, the generalized representation of the masculine principle in
the unconscious of women, is the Animus. The unconscious representation
of the dark, destructive aspect of human personality is in Jungian
psychology called the Shadow.

In holotropic states, all these principles can come to life as complex protean
appearances condensing in a holographic fashion countless specific
instances of what they represent. I will use here as an example my own
experience of an encounter with the world of the archetypes.

In the final sequence of the session, I had a vision of a large brilliantly

lit stage that was located somewhere beyond time and space. It had a
beautiful ornate curtain decorated with intricate patterns that seemed to
contain the entire history of the world. I intuitively understood that I
was visiting the Theater of the Cosmic Drama, featuring the forces that
shape human history. I began to witness a magnificent parade of
mysterious figures who entered the stage, presented themselves, and
slowly departed.

I realized that what I was seeing were personified universal principles,

archetypes, that through a complex interplay create the illusion of the
phenomenal world, the divine play that the Hindus call lila. They were
protean personages condensing many identities, many functions, and
even many scenes. As I was watching them, they kept changing their
forms in extremely intricate holographic interpenetration, being one
and many at the same time. I was aware that they had many different
facets, levels, and dimensions of meaning, but was not able to focus on
anything in particular. Each of these figures seemed to represent
simultaneously the essence of his or her function, as well as all the
concrete manifestations of the principle they represented.

There was Maya, the magical ethereal figure symbolizing the world
illusion, Anima, embodying the eternal Female, the Warrior, a Mars-
like personification of war and aggression, the Lovers, representing all
 the sexual dramas and romances throughout ages, the royal figure of
the Ruler or Emperor, the withdrawn Hermit, the facetious and elusive
Trickster, and many others. As they were passing across the stage, they
bowed in my direction, as if expecting appreciation for their stellar
performance in the divine play of the universe.

The archetypal figures of the second category represent various deities and
demons related to specific cultures, geographical areas, and historical
periods. For example, instead of a generalized universal image of the Great
Mother Goddess, we can experience one of her concrete culture-bound
forms, such as the Virgin Mary, the Hindu goddesses Lakshmi and Parvati,
the Egyptian Isis, the Greek Hera, and many others. Similarly, specific
examples of the Terrible Mother Goddess could be, besides the Malekulan
pig-goddess described in the above example, the Indian Kali, the Pre-
Columbian serpent-headed Coatlicue, or the Egyptian lion-headed Sekhmet.
It is important to emphasize that these images do not have to be limited to
our own racial and cultural heritage. They can be drawn from the
mythology of any human group, even those we have never heard about.

Particularly frequent in my work have been encounters or even

identification with various deities from different cultures who were killed
by others or sacrificed themselves and later came back to life. These figures
representing death and resurrection tend to emerge spontaneously when the
process of inner self-exploration reaches the perinatal level and takes the
form of psychospiritual rebirth. At this point, many people have, for
example, visions of crucifixion or experience an agonizing identification
with Jesus Christ on the Cross. The emergence of this motif in individuals
with a Euro-American background seems to make sense, because of the
important role Christianity has over the centuries played in Western culture.

However, we have also seen many powerful experiences of identification

with Jesus during our holotropic breathwork seminars in Japan and India.
They occurred in individuals whose background was Buddhist, Shinto, or
Hindu. Conversely, many Anglo-Saxons, Slavs, and Jews identified during
their psychedelic or holotropic breathwork sessions with Shiva or Buddha,
the Egyptian resurrected god Osiris, the Sumerian goddess Inanna, or the
Greek deities Persephone, Dionysus, Attis, and Adonis. Occasional
identifications with the Aztec deity of death and rebirth, Quetzalcoatl or the
Plumed Serpent, or one of the Hero Twins from the Mayan Popol Vuh, were
even more surprising, since these deities appear in mythologies not
generally known in the West.

The encounters with these archetypal figures were very impressive and
often brought new and detailed information that was independent of the
subjects’ racial, cultural, and educational background and previous
intellectual knowledge of the respective mythologies. Depending on the
nature of the deities involved, these experiences were accompanied by
extremely intense emotions ranging from ecstatic rapture to paralyzing
metaphysical terror. People who experienced these encounters usually
viewed these archetypal figures with great awe and respect, as beings that
belonged to a superior order, were endowed with extraordinary energies and
power, and had the capacity to shape events in our material world. These
subjects thus shared the attitude of many pre-industrial cultures that have
believed in the existence of deities and demons.

However, none of these individuals perceived their experiences of

archetypal figures to be encounters with the supreme principle in the
universe, nor did they claim to have gained an ultimate understanding of
existence. They experienced these deities to be creations of a higher power
that transcended them. This insight echoes Joseph Campbell’s idea that the
deities should be “transparent to the transcendent.” They should function as
a bridge to the divine source, but not be confused with it. When we are
involved in systematic self-exploration or spiritual practice, it is important
to avoid the pitfall of making a particular deity opaque and seeing it as the
ultimate cosmic force rather than a window into the Absolute.

Mistaking a specific archetypal image for the ultimate source of creation

leads to idolatry, a divisive and dangerous mistake widespread in the
histories of religions and cultures. It might unite the people who share the
same belief, but sets this group against others who have chosen a different
representation of the divine. They might then try to convert others or
conquer and eliminate them. By contrast, genuine religion is universal, all-
inclusive, and all-encompassing. It has to transcend specific culture-bound
archetypal images and focus on the ultimate source of all forms. The most
important question in the world of religion is thus the nature of the supreme
principle in the universe. In the next chapter, we will explore the insights
from holotropic states of consciousness regarding this subject.

3
The Cosmic Creative Principle
O landless void, O skyless void,
O nebulous, purposeless space,
Eternal and timeless,
Become the world, extend!
—Tahitian creation tale

What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable,

Likewise tasteless, constant, odorless,
Without beginning, without end, higher than the great,
stable—
By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of
Death.
—Katha Upanishad

Absolute Consciousness
After we have had direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions of reality,
the idea that the universe, life, and consciousness could have developed
without the participation of superior creative intelligence appears to us
absurd, naïve, and untenable. However, as we have seen, the experiences of
nature as ensouled and the encounters with archetypal figures are not in and
of themselves sufficient to satisfy fully our spiritual craving. I therefore
searched in the reports of the people with whom I had worked for states of
consciousness that were perceived as reaching the ultimate frontiers of the
human spirit. I was trying to find out what experiences would convey the
sense of encountering the supreme principle in the universe.
People who had an experience of the Absolute that fully satisfied their
spiritual longing typically did not see any specific figurative images. When
they felt that they attained the goal of their mystical and philosophical
quest, their descriptions of the supreme principle were highly abstract and
strikingly similar. Those who reported such an ultimate revelation showed
quite remarkable agreement in describing the experiential characteristics of
this state. They reported that the experience of the Supreme involved
transcendence of all the limitations of the analytical mind, all rational
categories, and all the constraints of ordinary logic.

This experience was not bound by the usual categories of three-dimensional

space and linear time as we know them from everyday life. It also contained
all conceivable polarities in an inseparable amalgam and thus transcended
dualities of any kind. Time after time, people compared the Absolute to a
radiant source of light of unimaginable intensity, though they emphasized
that it also differed in some significant aspects from any forms of light that
we know in the material world. To describe the Absolute as light entirely
misses some of its essential characteristics, particularly the fact that it also
is an immense and unfathomable field of consciousness endowed with
infinite intelligence and creative power.

The supreme cosmic principle can be experienced in tow different ways.

Sometimes, all personal boundaries dissolve or are drastically obliterated
and we completely merge with the divine source, becoming one with it and
indistinguishable from it. Other times, we maintain the sense of separate
identity, assuming the role of an astonished observer who is witnessing as if
from the outside the mysterium tremendum of existence. Or, like some
mystics, we might feel the ecstasy of an enraptured lover experiencing the
encounter with the Beloved. Spiritual literature of all ages abounds in
descriptions of both types of experiences of the Divine.

“Just as a moth flies into the flame and becomes one with it,” say the Sufis,
“so do we merge with the Divine.” Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Indian saint
and visionary, describes in one of his spiritual poems “a sugar doll who
went to the ocean for a swim and completely dissolved.” By contrast, the
Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila and Rumi, the great Persian
transcendental poet, refer to God as the Beloved. Similarly, the bhaktas,
Indian representatives of the yoga of devotion, prefer to maintain a sense of
separateness from and a relationship with the Divine. They do not want to
become Sri Ramana’s sugar doll who completely loses her identity in the
cosmic ocean. The great Indian saint and mystic Sri Ramakrishna once
exclaimed emphatically: “I want to taste sugar, not to become sugar.”

People who have had the experience of the supreme principle described
above know that they have encountered God. However, most of them feel
that the term God does not adequately capture the depth of their experience,
since it has been distorted, trivialized, and discredited by mainstream
religions and cultures. Even the names like Absolute Consciousness or
Universal Mind that are often used to describe this experience seem to be
hopelessly inadequate to convey the immensity and shattering impact of
such an encounter. Some people consider silence to be the most appropriate
reaction to the experience of the Absolute. For them, it is obvious that
“those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.”

The supreme principle can be directly experienced in holotropic states of

consciousness, but it eludes any attempts at adequate description or
explanation. The language that we use to communicate about matters of
daily life simply is not adequate for this task. Individuals who have had this
experience seem to agree that it is ineffable. Words and the structure of our
language are painfully inappropriate tools to describe its nature and
dimensions, particularly to those who have not had it.

With all these reservations, I include the following report written by Robert,
a thirty-seven-year-old psychiatrist, who in his session had the experience
of what he considered to be the ultimate reality:

The beginning of the experience was very sudden and dramatic. I was
hit by a cosmic thunderbolt of immense power that instantly shattered
and dissolved my everyday reality. I completely lost contact with the
surrounding world; it disappeared as if by magic. The awareness of my
everyday existence, my life, and my name faintly echoed like
dreamlike images on the far periphery of my consciousness. Robert …
California … United States … planet Earth … I tried hard to remind
myself of the existence of these realities, but they suddenly did not
make any sense. Equally absent were any archetypal visions of deities,
 demons, and mythological domains that were so predominant in my
previous experiences.

At that time, my only reality was a mass of swirling energy of

immense proportions that seemed to contain all of Existence in an
entirely abstract form. It had the brightness of myriads of suns, yet it
was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday
life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative
energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and
demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive … all of that
and much more. I had no concept, no categories for what I was
witnessing. I could not maintain a sense of separate existence in the
face of such a force. My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved;
I became one with the Source. Time lost any meaning whatsoever.

In retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the

Primary Clear Light, that according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the Bardo Thödol, appears at the moment of death.

Robert’s encounter with the Supreme lasted approximately twenty minutes

of clocktime, although during the entire duration of his experience time did
not exist for him as a meaningful dimension. While this was happening, he
had no contact with the environment and was not able to communicate
verbally. Then he slowly began experiencing a gradual return to ordinary
reality, concerning which he wrote:

After what seemed like eternity, concrete dreamlike images and

concepts began to form in my experiential field. I started to feel that
something like the earth with large continents and specific countries
might actually exist somewhere, but it all seemed very distant and
unreal. Gradually, this crystallized further into the images of United
States and California. Later, I connected with my everyday identity
and started to experience fleeting images of my present life. At first,
the contact with this reality was extremely faint. For some time, I
thought that I was dying and that I was experiencing the bardo, the
intermediate state between the present life and the next incarnation, as
it is described in the Tibetan texts.
 As I was regaining contact with ordinary reality, I reached a point
where I knew that I would survive this experience. I was lying on the
couch feeling ecstatic and awed by what had been revealed to me.
Against this background, I was experiencing various dramatic
situations happening in different parts of the world throughout
centuries. They seemed to be scenes from my previous incarnations,
many of them dangerous and painful. Various groups of muscles in my
body were twitching and shaking, as my body was hurting and dying
in these different contexts. However, as my karmic history was being
played out in my body, I was in a state of profound bliss, completely
detached from these dramas.

For many days afterwards, it was very easy for me to reach in my

meditations a state of peace and serenity. I am sure that this experience
will have a lasting influence on my life. It seems impossible to
experience something like this and not be profoundly touched and
transformed by it.

The Pregnant Void

The encounter with Absolute Consciousness or identification with it is not
the only way to experience the supreme principle in the cosmos or the
ultimate reality. The second type of experience that seems to satisfy those
who search for ultimate answers is particularly surprising, since it has no
specific content. It is the identification with Cosmic Emptiness and
Nothingness described in the mystical literature as the Void. It is important
to emphasize that not every experience of emptiness that we can encounter
in nonordinary states qualifies as the Void. People very often use this term
to describe an unpleasant sense of lack of feeling, initiative, or meaning. To
deserve the name Void, this state has to meet very specific criteria.

When we encounter the Void, we feel that it is primordial emptiness of

cosmic proportions and relevance. We become pure consciousness aware of
this absolute nothingness; however, at the same time, we have a strange
paradoxical sense of its essential fullness. This cosmic vacuum is also a
plenum, since nothing seems to be missing in it. While it does not contain
anything in a concrete manifest form, it seems to comprise all of existence
in a potential form. In this paradoxical way, we can transcend the usual
dichotomy between emptiness and form, or existence and nonexistence.
However, the possibility of such a resolution cannot be adequately
conveyed in words; it has to be experienced to be understood.

The Void transcends the usual categories of time and space. It is

unchangeable, and lies beyond all dichotomies and polarities, such as light
and darkness, good and evil, stability and motion, microcosm and
macrocosm, agony and ecstasy, singularity and plurality, form and
emptiness, and even existence and nonexistence. Some people call it
Supracosmic and Metacosmic, indicating that this primordial emptiness and
nothingness appears to be the principle that underlies the phenomenal world
as we know it and, at the same time, is supraordinated to it. This
metaphysical vacuum, pregnant with potential for everything there is,
appears to be the cradle of all being, the ultimate source of existence. The
creation of all phenomenal worlds is then the realization and concretization
of its pre-existing potentialities.

When we experience the Void, we have a sense that while it is the source of
all existence, it also contains all creation within itself. Another way of
expressing it is to say that it is all of existence, since nothing exists outside
of its realm. In terms of our usual concepts and logical norms, this seems to
involve some basic contradictions. It would certainly seem absurd to think
about emptiness as containing the world of phenomena, the essential
characteristic of which seems to be that they have specific forms. Similarly,
common sense is telling us that the creative principle and its creation cannot
be the same, that they have to be different from each other. The
extraordinary nature of the Void transcends these paradoxes.

The following example is the description of an experience of the Cosmic

Void of Christopher Bache, a philosopher of religion, who has been
involved for many years in a systematic spiritual quest:

Suddenly an enormous Void opened up inside this world. Visually, It

took the form of a warping of my visual field, as if a giant, invisible
bowl had been inserted into my seeing and was bending all the lines
out to the outer edges of the picture. Nothing was torn or disrupted, but
everything was being stretched and stopped to reveal this underlying
 reality. It was as if God suddenly paused between inhaling and
exhaling, and the entire universe was suddenly suspended, not
dissolved but held in its place for an eternity. It was a gaping, yawning
opening in existence.

At first this sensation took my breath away, both literally and

figuratively, and I waited in suspension for movement to be restored.
But movement was not restored. I was fully conscious, but absolutely
suspended. And this suspension went on and on and on. I could not
believe how long it lasted. As I soaked in this experience I realized
that this was the Void out of which all form springs. This was the
living Stillness out of which all movement flows. This contentless
experience of concentrated consciousness that was pre-form and
outside-form had to be what Eastern philosophers called sunyata.
When slowly movement resumed and the forms congealed, in the
wake of the Void came an exquisite sense of “suchness.” Fresh from
the Void, I touched the edges of experiencing existence “just as it is.”

On several occasions, people who experienced both the Absolute

Consciousness and the Void had the insight that these two states are
essentially identical and interchangeable, in spite of the fact that they can be
experientially distinguished from each other and that they might appear
conceptually and logically incompatible. These individuals claimed to have
witnessed the emergence of creative Cosmic Consciousness from the Void
or, conversely, its return into the Void and disappearance. Others
experienced these two aspects of the Absolute simultaneously, identifying
with the Cosmic Consciousness and, at the same time, recognizing its
essential voidness.

The experience of the Void as the source of creation can also be associated
with the recognition of the fundamental emptiness of the material world.
The realization of the voidness of everyday reality is the core message of
one of the most important spiritual texts of Mahayana Buddhism, the
Prajñaparamita Hridaya Sutra or Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra. In the text
Avalokiteshvara addresses Buddha’s disciple Shariputra: “The nature of
form is emptiness, the nature of emptiness is form. Form is not different
from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form. … Feelings,
perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are also like this.”

It is interesting that the concept of the vacuum that is a plenum and of the
“pregnant void” also exists in modern physics. A statement by Paul Dirac,
one of the founders of quantum physics and the “father” of antimatter,
describes it in these words: “All matter is created out of some imperceptible
substratum and … the creation of matter leaves behind it a ‘hole’ in this
substratum which appears as antimatter. Now, this substratum itself is not
accurately decribed as material, since it uniformly fills all space and is
undetectable by any observation. But it is a peculiarly material form of
nothingness, out of which matter is created.” The late American physicist
Heinz Pagels is even more explicit: “The view of the new physics suggests:
‘The vacuum is all of physics.’ Everything that ever existed or can exist is
already there in the nothingness of space … that nothingness contains all
being” (Pagels 1990).

In their experiments, involving acceleration of elementary particles to high

velocities and their collisions, physicists have observed creation of new
subatomic particles emerging from what they call the “dynamic vacuum”
and their disappearance back into this matrix. Of course, the similarity is
only partial and does not go very far. The problem of cosmic creation is not
limited to the origin of the fundamental building blocks of matter. It has
important aspects that are outside of the reach of physicists, such as the
problem of the origin of forms, order, laws, and meaning. The Void that we
can experience in holotropic states seems to be responsible for all the
aspects of creation, not just the raw material for the phenomenal world.

In our daily life, everything that happens involves complex chains of causes
and effects. The assumption of strict linear causality is a necessary
prerequisite for traditional Western science. Another fundamental
characteristic of material reality is that all processes in our world follow the
law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can
only be transformed into other forms of energy. This way of thinking
appears to be adequate for most of the events in the macroworld. However,
it breaks down when we trace the chains of causes and effects back to the
beginnings of the universe. When we apply it to the process of cosmic
creation, we are confronted with formidable problems: If everything is
causally determined, what is the original cause, the cause of causes, the
Prime Mover? If energy has to be conserved, where did it come from in the
first place? And what about the origin of matter, space, and time?

The current cosmogenetic theory of the Big Bang, suggesting that matter,
time, and space were simultaneously created out of a dimensionless
“singularity” some 15 billion years ago, can hardly be accepted as an
adequate rational explanation of the deepest mystery of existence. And we
generally cannot imagine that a satisfactory answer could be anything else
but rational. The solution to these problems provided by transcendental
experiences is of an entirely different nature and order. Experiencing
Absolute Consciousness, the Void, and their mutual relationship makes it
possible to transcend the baffling paradoxes that plague scientists theorizing
about a material universe governed by causality and mechanical laws.
Holotropic states can provide satisfactory answers to these questions and
paradoxes; however, these answers are not logical, but experiential and
transrational in nature.

When we experience the transition from the Void to Absolute

Consciousness or vice versa, we do not have the feeling of absurdity that
we would have in the usual state of consciousness, while considering the
possibility of something originating out of nothing or, conversely,
disappearing into nothingness without traces. On the contrary, there is a
sense of self-evidence, simplicity, and naturalness about this process. The
experiential insights in this regard are accompanied with the feeling of
sudden clarification or an “aha” reaction. Since on this level the material
world is seen as an expression of Absolute Consciousness and the latter, in
turn, appears to be interchangeable with the Void, transcendental
experiences of this kind provide an unexpected solution for some of the
most difficult and taxing problems that beset the rational mind.

The insights of people who have experienced holotropic states of

consciousness concerning the source of existence are strikingly similar to
those found in perennial philosophy. I have already mentioned the
description of cosmic emptiness from the Prajñaparamita Sutra. Here is a
passage from the ancient Tao Te Ching by the Chinese sage Lao-tzu (1988):
 There was something formless and perfect
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
It flows through all things,
inside and outside, and returns
to the origin of things.

Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian visionary and mystical poet, describes

the source of creation in these words: “Nonexistence is eagerly bubbling in
the expectation of being given existence. … For the mine and treasure-
house of God’s making is naught but nonexistence coming into
manifestation.” And here, for comparison, are two passages from the Jewish
mystical tradition. The thirteenth-century Cabalist Azriel of Gerona says the
following: “You may be asked: ‘How did God bring forth being from
nothingness? Is there not an immense difference between being and
nothingness?’ Answer as follows: ‘Being is in nothingness in the mode of
nothingness, and nothingness is in being in the form of being.’ Nothingness
is being and being is nothingness.” And the fourteenth-century Cabalist
David Ben Abraham he-Lavan writes: “Ayin, Nothingness, is more existent
than all the being of the world. But since it is simple, and every simple
thing is complex compared with its simplicity, it is called Ayin.” And,
according to the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “God’s nothingness fills
the entire world; his something is nowhere.”

Words for the Ineffable

Illuminating insights into ultimate realities experienced in mystical states
cannot be adequately described in our everyday language. Lao-tzu was well
aware of it and put it very succinctly: “The tao that can be told is not the
eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” Any
descriptions and definitions have to rely on words that have been developed
to denote objects and activities in the material world as it is experienced in
daily life. For this reason, ordinary language proves to be inappropriate and
inadequate when we want to communicate about the experiences and
insights encountered in various holotropic states of consciousness. This is
particularly true when our experiences focus on the ultimate problems of
existence, such as the Void, Absolute Consciousness, and creation.

Those who are familiar with the Eastern spiritual philosophies, often resort
to words from various Asian languages when describing their spiritual
experiences and insights. They use Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, or Japanese
terms like samadhi (union with God), sunyata (Void), kundalini (Serpent
Power), bardo (intermediate state after death), anatta (no-self), satori
(enlightenment experience), nirvana, ch’i or ki energy, and the Tao for high
transcendental states or, conversely, samsara (the world of birth and death),
Maya (world illusion), avidya (ignorance), and the like when referring to
everyday reality. These languages were developed in cultures with high
sophistication in regard to holotropic states and spiritual realities. Unlike
the Western languages, they contain many technical terms specifically
describing nuances of the mystical experiences and related issues.
Ultimately even these words can be fully understood only by those who
have had the corresponding experiences.

Poetry, although still a highly imperfect tool, seems to be a more adequate

and appropriate means for conveying the essence of spiritual experiences
and for communicating about transcendental realities. For this reason, many
of the great visionaries and religious teachers resorted to poetry while
sharing their metaphysical insights. Many people with whom I have worked
recalled and quoted passages from various transcendental poets. I have
often heard them say that, after their own mystical experience, visionary
poems that they previously had not comprehended or related to, suddenly
became clear and illumined with new meaning.

Particularly popular among the people involved in spiritual quest seem to be

transcendental poets from the Middle East, such as the mystics Omar
Khayyam, Rumi, and Kahlil Jibran, and the Indian visionaries Kabir,
Princess Mira Bai, and Sri Aurobindo. I have chosen here as an example a
poem by Kabir, a fifteenth-century Indian sage, son of a Moslem weaver in
Benares. In his long life that lasted 120 years, Kabir drew on the best of the
Hindu and of the Sufi tradition and expressed his spiritual wisdom in
ecstatic verses. The following poem echoes the parallels between the
natural cycle of water and the creative process described in the following
section of this book.

I have been thinking of the difference

between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up the word

“wave,” do I have to distinguish it
from water?

There is a Secret One inside us;

the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with

luminous eyes.

We have also our own rich Western tradition of visionary poetry,

represented by William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt
Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and others. People who have experienced
mystical states often refer to these poets and recite passages from their
work. Here is as an example William Blake’s often quoted poem capturing
the mystery of the immanent divine:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

The Beyond Within

In systematic spiritual practice involving holotropic states of consciousness,
we can repeatedly transcend the ordinary boundaries of the body-ego and
identify with other people, animals, plants, or inorganic aspects of nature
and also with various archetypal beings. We discover in this process that
any boundaries in the material universe and in other realities are ultimately
arbitrary and negotiable. By shedding the limitations of the rational mind
and the straitjacket of commonsense and everyday logic, we can break
through the many separating barriers, expand our consciousness to
unimaginable proportions, and eventually experience union and identity
with the transcendental source of all being.

When we reach experiential identification with Absolute Consciousness, we

realize that our own being is ultimately commensurate with the entire
cosmic network, with all of existence. The recognition of our own divine
nature, our identity with the cosmic source, is the most important discovery
we can make during the process of deep self-exploration. This is the
essence of the famous statement found in the ancient Indian scriptures, the
Upanishads: “Tat tvam asi.” The literal translation of this sentence is “Thou
are That,” meaning “You are of divine nature,” or “you are Godhead.” It
reveals that our everyday identification with the “skin-encapsulated ego,”
embodied individual consciousness, or “name and form” (namarupa) is an
illusion and that our true nature is that of cosmic creative energy (Atman-
Brahman).

This revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is
the ultimate secret that lies at the core of all great spiritual traditions,
although it might be expressed in somewhat different ways. I have already
mentioned that in Hinduism Atman, the individual consciousness, and
Brahman, the universal consciousness, are one. The followers of Siddha
Yoga hear in many variations the basic tenet of their school: “God dwells
within you as you.” In Buddhist scriptures, we can read: “Look within, you
are the Buddha.” In the Confucian tradition, we are told that “Heaven,
earth, and human are one body.”

The same message can be found in the words of Jesus Christ: “Father, you
and I are one.” And St. Gregory Palamas, one the greatest theologians of
the Christian Orthodox Church, declared: “For the kingdom of heaven, nay
rather, the King of Heaven … is within us.” Similarly, the great Jewish sage
and Cabalist Avraham ben Shemu’el Abulafia taught that “he and we are
one.” According to Mohammed, “whoso knoweth himself knoweth his
Lord.” Mansur al-Hallaj, the Sufi ecstatic and poet known as “the martyr of
mystical love,” described it in this way: “I saw my Lord with the Eye of the
Heart. I said: ‘Who art thou?’ He answered: ‘Thou.’” Al-Hallaj was
imprisoned and sentenced to death for his statement: “Ana’l Haqq—I am
God, the Absolute Truth, the True Reality.”

The Divine and Its Creation

We can now summarize the insights from holotropic states of consciousness
concerning the creative principle, the nature of reality, and our own nature.
As we have seen, these insights echo the message of the great spiritual
traditions of the world. They suggest that the world of solid matter—
featuring three-dimensional space, linear time, and unrelenting causality, as
we experience it in our ordinary states of consciousness—does not have an
independent existence of its own. Rather than being the only true reality, as
it is portrayed by materialistic science, it is a creation of Absolute
Consciousness.

In the light of these insights, the material world of our everyday life,
including our own body, is an intricate tissue of misperceptions and
misreadings. It is a playful and somewhat arbitrary product of the cosmic
creative principle, an infinitely sophisticated “virtual reality,” a divine play
created by Absolute Consciousness and the Cosmic Void. Our universe that
appears to contain countless myriads of separate entities and elements, is in
its deepest nature just one being of immense proportions and unimaginable
complexity.

The same is true about all the other dimensions and domains of existence
that we can discover in holotropic states of consciousness. Since there are
no absolute boundaries between the individual psyche, any part of creation,
and the cosmic creative principle itself, each of us is ultimately identical
with the divine source of creation. We thus are, collectively and
individually, both the playwrights and actors in this cosmic drama. Since in
our true nature we are identical with the cosmic creative principle, we
cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter
what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical
unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.

4
The Process of Creation
As, from a well-blazing fire, sparks
By the thousand issue forth of like form,
So from the Imperishable, my friend, beings manifold
Are produced, and thither also go.
—Mundaka Upanishad

Even though you tie a hundred knots

The string remains one.
—Rumi

The Mystery of the Creative Impulse

The realization that all the phenomenal worlds, including our material
plane, are virtual realities created by Absolute Consciousness leads to some
very interesting questions. The merging and union with the cosmic creative
principle, as it was described in the previous chapter, is certainly an
extraordinary and very desirable experience from the point of view of an
individual human being. Many spiritual traditions consider reaching this
state to be the ultimate goal of the spiritual quest. Those who actually attain
the union with the Universal Mind realize that the situation is much more
complicated.

They discover that what they once considered to be the goal of the spiritual
journey is also the source of creation. It becomes clear to them that, in order
to create the phenomenal worlds, the Divine has to abandon its original
state of pristine undifferentiated unity. Considering how fantastic the
experience of identification with Absolute Consciousness is from the
human perspective, it seems strange that the creative principle should seek
an alternative, or at least a complement, to a simple experience of itself.
This naturally leads to the question about the nature of the forces that
compel Absolute Consciousness to relinquish its primordial state and to
engage in the process of creating experiential realities like the world we live
in. What could possibly motivate the Divine to seek separation, pain,
struggle, incompleteness, and impermanence, in short, precisely the states
from which we are trying to escape when we embark on the spiritual
journey?

People who achieve in their inner exploration the identification with

Absolute Consciousness often experience fascinating insights into the
dynamics of creation. Before we start examining these revelations, it is
important to remember that holotropic states in general, and those that
involve transcendental levels of awareness in particular, do not lend
themselves well to verbal descriptions. As we review these reports, we
might find them interesting and intellectually stimulating or feel inspired by
them, but we should not expect logical explanations that would fully satisfy
our rational mind. Because of the inherent limitations of our intellectual
faculties, the human attempts to understand the “reasons” or “motives” for
creation will never be completely satisfactory. Reason is an inadequate
instrument for the analysis of transcendental dimensions of existence and of
principles that operate on a very high metaphysical level. Ultimately, true
understanding in these matters is possible only through direct personal
experience.

Individuals describing their experiences of identification with the Divine

are not able to avoid anthropocentric perspectives and to overcome the
limitations of language. Thus the creative impulse of Absolute
Consciousness is often described in terms of certain psychological states
that we know from our everyday life, such as love, longing, or loneliness.
Their authors usually capitalize the first letters of such words to indicate
that they mean transcendental analogs, or “higher octaves,” of such feelings
rather than states that are directly comparable to those that we know from
our everyday life. This is a practice well known from the writings of
psychiatric patients who have experienced unusual revelations concerning
transcendental issues and struggle to describe what happened to them.
The reports of people who in their holotropic states of consciousness have
had insights into the “motivation” of the divine creative principle to
generate experiential worlds contain some interesting contradictions. One
important category of these insights emphasizes the fantastic resources and
inconceivable capacities of Absolute Consciousness. Another group of
revelations suggests that, in the process of creation, Absolute
Consciousness seeks something that it lacks and misses in its original
pristine state. From an ordinary perspective, these two categories of insights
appear to contradict each other. In holotropic states, this conflict disappears
and they can easily coexist.

Divine Cornucopia
The impulse to create is often described as an elemental force that reflects
the unimaginable inner richness and abundance of the Divine. The creative
cosmic source is so immense and overflowing with limitless possibilities
that it cannot contain itself and has to express its full hidden potential. The
experience of this quality of Absolute Consciousness is sometimes likened
to a close-up view of the thermonuclear processes in the sun, the life-giving
principle and source of energy for our planet. People who have this
experience realize that the sun is the most immediate expression of the
divine that we can experience in the material world and they understand
why some cultures worshipped the sun as God.

However, they usually emphasize that this similarity should not be taken
too literally, since there are also important differences between the sun as an
astronomical body and the Cosmic Sun, the creative principle responsible
for creation. The physical sun only contributes the energy necessary for the
life processes, while the divine source also provides the Logos for creation
—its order, forms, and meaning. Yet, in our everyday life, observing the sun
seems to be the closest approximation to the experience of the divine source
of creation as it reveals itself to us in holotropic states.

Other descriptions stress the immense desire of the Universal Mind to get to
know itself and to explore and experience its full potential. This can only be
done by exteriorization and manifestation of all its latent possibilities in the
form of a concrete creative act. It requires polarization into subject and
object, the dichotomy of the observer and the observed. These insights are
reminiscent of the way creation is explained in certain Cabalistic texts,
according to which there once was a state of previous nonexistence, in
which “Face did not gaze upon Face.” The reason for creation was that
“God wished to behold God.” Similarly, the great Persian mystic Jalaluddin
Rumi wrote: “I was a Hidden Treasure, so I wanted to be known. … I
created the whole of the universe, and the goal in all of it is to make Myself
manifest” (Hines 1996).

Additional important dimensions of the creative process that are often

emphasized are the playfulness, self-delectation, and cosmic humor of the
Creator. These are elements that have best been described in ancient Hindu
texts that talk about the universe and existence as lila, or Divine Play.
According to this view, creation is an intricate, infinitely complex cosmic
game that the Godhead, Brahman, creates from himself and within himself.
He is the playwright who conceived the game, as well as its producer,
director, and also all the actors who play the countless myriads of the roles
involved. This cosmic game of games is played in many dimensions, on
many levels, and on unimaginable scales.

Creation can also be viewed as a colossal experiment that expresses the

immense curiosity of Absolute Consciousness, a passion that is analogous
to the infatuation of a scientist who dedicates his or her life to exploration
and research. However, the cosmic experiment is naturally infinitely more
complex than anything that collective effort of all of the scientists of the
world could possibly conceive of. All the fascinating discoveries of science
that extend far into the microworld and into the remote regions of the
universe just barely scratch the surface of the unfathomable enigma of
existence. Science, as we know it, only explores in increasingly refined
ways the nature and content of the final products of creation, but does not
reveal anything about the mysterious process that underlies it and brings it
forth.

The question that repeatedly emerges in nonordinary states is the degree of

control that the Divine has in the process of creation. It is a problem that
Albert Einstein often struggled with. Here it is stated in his own words:
“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of
the world.” The answers of the people who have reached this level of
insight are not unanimous. Sometimes it appears that Absolute
Consciousness is fully in charge of creation in its totality and in all its
details. In this case, any surprises in the cosmic game occur only to
individual protagonists. They are due to sudden lifting of their veil of
ignorance that reveals significant aspects of divine knowledge that were
previously hidden from them.

Occasionally, people experiencing holotropic states become aware of a

significant alternative to this scenario. They see that it might be possible
that only the basic parameters of creation are clearly defined, but the final
outcome in detail remains unpredictable even for the Divine. This latter
model of the cosmic game can be compared to a kaleidoscope or a chess
game. The inventor of the kaleidoscope obviously realized that rotating a
tube containing specially arranged mirrors and colorful pieces of glass
would produce arrays of beautiful dynamic images. However, he or she
could not possibly have foreseen all the specific constellations and
combinations that would arise in the process of the use of this device.

Similarly, the inventor of chess could see the general potential of a game
played on a board of sixty-four black and white squares with figures of
specifically defined roles and movements. Yet it would have been
absolutely out of question to anticipate all the infinite possibilities of
specific situations that playing chess would eventually lead to. Naturally,
the complexity of creation is infinitely greater than that of the kaleidoscope
or the chess game. Although the intelligence of Absolute Consciousness is
immense, it is conceivable that the unfolding of the cosmic drama can be
beyond its control and can provide genuine surprises.

This is closely related to the question of our own role in the cosmic drama.
If the universal script is written by the Divine in all the details, this does not
leave us as individual players any possibility of active creative
participation. The best we can do is to awaken to the fact that in the past our
life has been inauthentic because we were misinformed about critical
aspects of existence and about our own nature. However, if certain
developments are unpredictable even for the Divine, various undesirable
trends, such as the current global crisis, might require our assistance. In that
case, we could actually become truly active players and valuable partners of
Absolute Consciousness in the divine play.

Some people who have experienced insights into the “motives” for creation
also emphasize its esthetic side. In our everyday life, we are often struck by
the inherent beauty of the universe and nature, as well as those aspects of
creation that are mediated by human activity, such as exquisite art and
architecture. In holotropic states the ability to appreciate the esthetic side of
all the different aspects of life and existence is greatly enhanced. When the
“doors of perception are cleansed,” to use William Blake’s expression, it is
difficult to miss the astonishing beauty of creation. From this perspective,
the universe we live in and all the experiential realities in other dimensions
also appear to be ultimate works of art and the impulse to create them can
be likened to the inspiration and creative passion of a supreme artist.

Divine Longing
As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the insights concerning the forces
underlying creation reveal “motives” that are of a different kind and even
seem to be in conflict with the ones described above. They do not reflect
overflowing abundance, richness, ultimate self-sufficiency, and mastery of
the cosmic creative principle, but a certain sense of deficiency, need, or
want. For example, it is possible to discover that, in spite of the immensity
and perfection of its state of being, Absolute Consciousness realizes that it
is alone. This Loneliness finds its expression in an abysmal yearning for
partnership, communication, and sharing—a kind of Divine Longing. The
most powerful force behind creation is then described as the need of the
creative principle to give and receive Love.

Another critical dimension of the creative process that has occasionally

been reported in this category seems to be the primordial craving of the
divine source for the experience of the tangible material world. According
to these insights, Spirit has a profound desire to experience what is opposite
and contrary to its own nature. It wants to explore all the qualities that in its
pristine nature it does not have and to become everything that it is not.
Being eternal, infinite, unlimited, and ethereal, it longs for the ephemeral,
impermanent, limited by time and space, solid, and corporeal. This dynamic
relation between spirit and matter was portrayed in the Aztec mythology as
the tension between two deities—Tezcatlipoca (Smoking Mirror)
symbolizing matter and Quetzalcoatl (Plumed Serpent) representing spirit.
A beautiful illustration of this cosmic dance between Quetzalcoatl and
Tezcatlipoca can be found in the Aztec screenfold known as Codex
Borbonicus.

The understanding of the active role of consciousness in creation is not

necessarily limited to religion, philosophy, and mythology. According to
modern physicists, the act of conscious observation changes probability of
certain events into actuality and thus participates in the creation of material
reality. In one of his lectures exploring the philosophical and spiritual
implications of quantum-relativistic physics, physicist Fred Alan Wolf
referred to the active role that consciousness plays in the creation of the
material world. He speculated about the mechanisms underlying this
process and suggested that the ultimate reason for creation of the material
world might be the addiction of consciousness and spirit to the experience
of matter. In everyday life, this craving of spirit for matter might be the
deepest root of all our human attachments and addictions.

Another important “motive” for creation that is occasionally mentioned is

the element of monotony. However immense and glorious the experience of
the Divine might appear from the human perspective, for the Divine it is
always the same and, in that sense, monotonous. Creation can then be seen
as a titanic effort expressing a transcendental longing for change, action,
movement, drama, and surprise. The countless experiential realities in many
different dimensions and on many different levels offer infinite number of
opportunities for adventures in consciousness and divine self-entertainment.
The extreme forms of descriptions portraying creation as an act aimed at
overcoming the monotony of undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness even
refer to Cosmic Boredom. This again echoes passages from medieval
Cabalistic texts that describe that one of the reasons God created the
universe was to overcome boredom.
 Figure 1.
Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca. The legends of ancient Mexico assert that
the worlds of matter and spirit are coexistent and each has something that
the other needs. In this painting from the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, the
dynamic tension between Spirit and Matter is represented as the
complementary cosmic dance of Quetzalcoatl (in his form of Ehecatl, god
of wind and breath) and Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror.

Source: Stanislav Grof, Books of the Dead. Thames & Hudson, London,
1996, p. 93. Reprinted with permission of the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée
Nationale, 126 Rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris.

The creation of various phenomenal worlds also makes it possible for

Absolute Consciousness to escape from the intolerable Eternal Here and
Now into the comforting and predictable experience of linear time, limited
space, and impermanence. This would then be the polar opposite and
negative mirror image of the human fear of death and impermanence that
underlies our deep craving for immortality and transcendence. For people
who have had this experience, the threat of extinction of consciousness can
be permanently replaced by the awareness that ultimately there is no way
out of consciousness.

All those who have been fortunate to experience such profound insights into
the cosmic laboratory of creation seem to agree that anything that can be
said about this level of reality cannot possibly do justice to what they have
witnessed. The monumental impulse of unimaginable proportions that is
reponsible for creating the worlds of phenomena seems to contain all the
above elements, however contradictory and paradoxical they might appear
to our everyday sensibility and commonsense, and many more. It is clear
that, in spite of all our efforts to comprehend and describe creation, the
nature of the creative principle and of the process of creation remains
shrouded in unfathomable mystery.

Dynamics of the Creative Process

Besides the revelations concerning the “reasons” for creation (the “why” of
creation), the experiences in holotropic states often bring illuminating
insights into the specific dynamics and mechanisms of the creative process
(the “how” of creation). These are related to the “technology of
consciousness” that generates experiences with different sensory
characteristics and by orchestrating them in a systematic and coherent way
creates virtual realities. Although the descriptions of these insights vary in
terms of details, language, and metaphors used to illustrate them, they
typically distinguish two interrelated and mutually complementary
processes that are involved in creating the worlds of phenomena.

The first of these is the activity that splits the original undifferentiated unity
of Absolute Consciousness into an increasing number of derived units of
consciousness. The Universal Mind engages in a creative play that involves
complicated sequences of divisions, fragmentations, and differentiations.
This finally results in experiential worlds that contain countless separate
entities that are endowed with specific forms of consciousness and possess
selective self-awareness. There seems to be general agreement that these
come into being by multiple divisions and subdivisions of the originally
undivided field of cosmic consciousness. The Divine thus does not create
something outside of itself, but by transformations within the field of its
own being.

The second important element in the process of creation is a unique form of

“partitioning,” or of isolating “cosmic screenwork,” through which the filial
conscious entities progressively and increasingly lose contact with their
original source and the awareness of their pristine nature. They also develop
a sense of individual identity and absolute separateness from each other. In
the final stages of this process, intangible but relatively impermeable
screens exist between these split-off units and also between each of them
and the original undifferentiated pool of Absolute Consciousness. It is
important to emphasize that this sense of separation is purely subjective and
ultimately illusory. On a deeper level, the undivided and undifferentiated
unity continues to underlie all of creation.

The terms “partitioning” and “cosmic screenwork” are not quite appropriate
in this context, since they suggest mechanical separation of elements and
breaking of the whole into its parts. Such concrete images are much more
suitable for crafts dealing with various materials, such as masonry or
carpentry, than for the dynamics I am referring to. This is why many people
borrow the terminology from psychology and compare this process with
such mechanisms as forgetting, repression, or dissociation. We are talking
here about the phenomenon that the writer and philosopher Alan Watts
called “the taboo against knowing who you are.” According to the insights
from various holotropic states, the split-off units of consciousness are not
necessarily only humans and animals, but also plants and elements of the
inorganic world, discarnate entities, and archetypal beings.

The relationship between Absolute Consciousness and its parts is unique

and complex and cannot be understood in terms of conventional thinking
and ordinary logic. Our common sense is telling us that a part cannot
simultaneously be the whole and that the whole, being an assembly of its
parts, has to be larger than any of its components. And because the whole is
an assembly of its constituents, we should be able to understand it by
studying its parts. Until recently, this has been one of the fundamental
assumptions of Western science. In addition, the parts should have a
specific location in the context of the whole and occupy a certain portion of
its overall size. While all that has just been said about the relationship of the
whole to its parts seems to be true and self-evident in our everyday life,
none of these characteristics and limitations apply in an absolute sense to
the cosmic game.

In the universal fabric, separate units of consciousness, in spite of their

individuality and specific differences, remain on another level essentially
identical with their source and with each other. They have a paradoxical
nature, being wholes and parts at the same time. Essential information about
each of them is distributed in the entire cosmic field and they, in turn, have
potential access to the information about all of creation. This is most
obvious in regard to human beings where we have direct evidence of these
relationships in the form of an entire spectrum of transpersonal experiences.

In transpersonal states, we have the potential to experience ourselves as

anything that is part of creation, as well as the creative principle itself. The
same is true for other people who can experience themselves as anything
and anybody else, including ourselves. In this sense, each human being is
not only a small constituent part of the universe, but also the entire field of
creation. Similar interconnectedness seems to exist in the animal and
botanical kingdom and even in the inorganic world. Observations
concerning the evolution of species and the paradoxes in quantum physics
certainly point in that direction.

This situation is reminiscent of the descriptions found in the ancient Indian

spiritual systems, particularly in Jainism and in Avatamsaka Buddhism.
According to Jain cosmology, the world of creation is an infinitely complex
system of deluded units of consciousness, or jivas, trapped in different
aspects and stages of the cosmic process. Their pristine nature is
contaminated by their entanglement in material reality and, particularly, in
biological processes. The Jains associate these jivas not only with organic
life forms, but also with inorganic objects and processes. Each jiva, in spite
of its seeming separateness, remains connected with all the other jivas and
contains the knowledge about all of them.

The Avatamsaka Sutra uses a poetic image to illustrate the

interconnectedness of all things. It is the famous necklace of the Vedic god
Indra: “In the heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, so
arranged that if you look at one, you see all the others reflected in it. In the
same way, each object in the world is not merely itself, but involves every
other object and, in fact, is everything else.” Similar concepts can be found
in the Hwa Yen school of Buddhist thought, the Chinese version of the
same teaching. Hwa Yen is a holistic view of the universe that embodies
one of the most profound insights the human mind has ever attained. The
essence of this philosophy can be succinctly expressed in a few words:
“One in One, One in Many, Many in One, Many in Many.” The concept of
mutual cosmic interpenetration characteristic for this school is beautifully
exemplified in the following story:

The Empress Wu, who had difficulties understanding the complexity

of Hwa Yen philosophy, asked Fa Tsang, one of the founders of the
school, to give her a simple practical demonstration of cosmic inter-
relatedness. Fa Tsang took her to a large hall, the entire interior of
which—the walls, ceiling, and floor—was covered with mirrors. He
first lit a candle in the center of this hall and suspended it from the
ceiling. In the next moment, they were surrounded by myriads of
glowing candles of different sizes reaching to infinity. This was Fa
Tsang’s way of illustrating the relationship of the One to the many.

He then placed in the center of the hall a small crystal with many
facets. Everything around the crystal, including all the countless
images of candles, was now collected and reflected in the small
interior of the brilliant stone. In this way, Fa Tsang was able to
demonstrate how in Ultimate Reality the infinitely small contains the
infinitely large and the infinitely large the infinitely small, without
obstruction. Having done this, he pointed out that this static model was
actually very limited and imperfect. It was unable to capture the
perpetual, multidimensional motion in the universe and the unimpeded
mutual interpenetration of Time and Eternity, as well as past, present,
and future.

Metaphors for Creation

People who have envisioned in holotropic states the dynamics of the cosmic
creative process and try to describe their insights often lack means of
adequate verbal expression. They tend to resort to various symbolic images,
metaphors, and parallels from everyday life, hoping that this will help to
illustrate some of the experiences and ideas that they are trying to
communicate. I will use the same approach in the following description of
the creative process, using as illustration images drawn from the circulation
of water in nature. References to such natural phenomena are particularly
frequent in the accounts from sessions that contain cosmological visions.

Before the onset of creation, Cosmic Consciousness is a boundless

undifferentiated field with immense creative potential.

Within it, creation begins as a ripple, as a disturbance of the original unity,

that manifests as playful imagining and imaging of various forms. At first,
the created entities maintain their contact with the source and the separation
is only tentative, relative, and incomplete. Using the water metaphor, the
original undivided unity of Absolute Consciousness would have the form of
a deep and calm ocean of unimaginable magnitude. The image that can best
illustrate the initial stage of the process of creation is the formation of
waves on the surface of the ocean.

From one point of view, the waves can be seen and referred to as individual
and separate entities. For example, it is possible to talk about a large, fast,
and green wave, or one that is good or dangerous for surfers. At the same
time, it is quite clear that, in spite of its relative individuality, the wave is
also an integral part of the ocean. The differentiation of the waves from the
ocean is playful, illusory, and incomplete. A sudden breeze can form waves
on the surface of the ocean and when the wind calms down, these waves
resume their original full identity with the ocean.

In the stage I have described so far, the creative source generates images
different from itself, but these retain the connection with the source and
awareness of their essential identity with it. Genuine creation requires that
its products become separate and clearly distinguishable from the creative
matrix. It begins in a true sense only when the connection with the source is
severed and separate identity established. This may at first occur only for a
fleeting moment. The corresponding metaphorical image would be that of a
wave breaking in the wind or at the shore. As the solid body of water
explodes into thousands of little droplets, these assume for an instant
separate identity and independent existence, as they are flying through the
air. This situation lasts only a very short time, until they all fall back and
reunite with the ocean.

In the next phase, the separation is much more definite and the split-off
units of consciousness assume their individual identity and independence
for a considerable amount of time. This is the beginning of the partitioning,
the “cosmic screenwork” or cosmic dissociation and forgetting. The original
unity with the source is temporarily lost and the divine identity forgotten. A
metaphorical parallel of this situation would be tidal water that got trapped
in a pool on a rocky shore when the ocean receded during the low tide. This
development involves long-term separation between the maternal waters in
the ocean and the water in the pool. Yet during the next high tide the union
will be reestablished and the separated mass of water will return to the
source.

The continuation of the process of individuation results in a situation in

which the separation is complete, convincing, and may appear permanent.
A radical metamorphosis occurs and the split-off units of consciousness
assume a new identity, quite different from the previous one. The original
unity is obscured and concealed, but it is not completely lost. This stage of
creation can be illustrated by a body of water that has evaporated from the
ocean and has formed a cloud. Before becoming a cloud, the water
underwent a profound transformation. The new entity now has a specific
and characteristic shape and a life of its own. Yet the little droplets of water
that can form in it betray the source and origin of this new phenomenon.
They can easily condense, precipitate, and start their way to reunion with
the ocean in the form of rain.

In the final phase, the separation is complete and the liaison with the source
appears to be all but lost. The transformation is radical and total and the
original identity is forgotten. The form of this new unit is distinct, very
complex, and solidified. At the same time, the process of multiple divisions
has advanced and the consciousness of the created entity appears to
represent only an infinitesimal part of the original whole. A good example
of this stage is the snowflake that crystallized in the cloud from the water
that originally evaporated from the ocean. The snowflake represents only an
infinitesimal fragment of the mass of water in the ocean and has a very
specific individual shape and structure. The amazing array of forms that the
snowflakes assume is a good illustration of the richness of creation
characterizing the phenomenal world. The snowflake bears very little
similarity to the source and in order to be able to reunite, it has to undergo
fundamental changes of its structure and lose its identity.

We could go a step further and think about a block of ice. Here the water is
so radically transmuted and so different from its original form that we
would not be able to recognize its identity with water if we did not have the
intellectual knowledge of the process of freezing and its effects. In sharp
contrast to water, ice is dense, solid, hard, and rigid. Like the snowflake, to
return to its original aquatic condition, it has to undergo a complete
annihilation and lose what appear to be its essential characteristics.

Similar images likening various aspects of creation to water can be found in

mystical literature of all ages. Here is how Rumi describes the Divine and
its works: “That is the Ocean of Oneness, wherein is no mate or consort. Its
pearls and its fish are none other than its waves. … Spirit is truly and
always one; but its manifestations on different planes of creation are
different. Just as ice, water, and vapor are not three things but only three
forms of the same thing, similarly Spirit is one, but its forms are many. In
the very highest transcendent realms, it abides as an extremely fine and
subtle entity; but as we descend toward less subtle regions, this Spirit also
takes less subtle forms.”

In the extreme situation, the source is not only lost and forgotten, but its
existence is being denied. It would be difficult to find a fitting image for
this stage of creation that would be related to the circulation of water in
nature. The best example here is the atheist. This is how one of the people
with whom I have worked saw the atheist’s dilemma in a holotropic state of
consciousness:

An atheist represents the ultimate expression of cosmic humor. It is a

split unit of divine consciousness that dedicated its temporary
existence to a tragicomic battle for a clearly impossible task. It insists
and is determined to prove that the universe and itself represent just
accidental assemblies of matter and that the creator does not exist. An
 atheist has completely forgotten that he or she is of divine origin, does
not believe in the existence of God, and can even passionately and
violently attack all the believers. Sri Aurobindo described an atheist as
“God who is playing hide and seek with himself.”

In addition to the images used above, the entire cycle of circulation of water
in nature is often used in its totality to illustrate the character of the cosmic
process. Depending on the weather, the ocean shows a beautiful and
intricate play of waves that represents an entire world in its own right. The
ocean water evaporates and forms clouds, which, in turn, have their own
rich inner and external dynamics. The water in the clouds precipitates and
returns to the earth in the form of rain, hail, or snow. This is the beginning
of the way to reunion. The snow or hail melts, the drops of water merge into
trickles and these form creeks, streams, and large rivers. After multiple
confluences, this body of water reaches the ocean and reunites with its
original source.

The Macrocosm and the Microcosm: As Above,

So Below
Another area of everyday life that provides useful images illustrating the
creative process is biology, particularly the relationship that exists between
cells, tissues, organs, and the organism as a whole, on the one hand, and
organisms, species, and ecosystems, on the other. This situation can be used
to demonstrate how in the creative process the various units of
consciousness are autonomous individuals in their own right, as well as
parts of larger wholes and ultimately of the entire cosmic fabric.

The cells are structurally separate entities, but functionally they are integral
constituents of tissues and organs. In turn, the tissues and organs are
individual forms of increasingly higher orders, but they also have
meaningful roles as parts of the entire organism. The fertilized egg in a
certain sense contains the entire organism and the embryological
development is unfolding of its inner potential. Similarly, the oak can be
seen as an unfolded acorn.
We could also pursue this process in the opposite direction, farther into the
microworld. The cells contain organelles that are made of molecules and the
latter are composed of atoms. The atoms break down into subatomic
particles and these, in turn, into quarks, considered currently the smallest
constituents of matter. In none of the above examples can the parts be
understood as separate entities independent from the system of which they
are constituents. They make sense only in the context of larger wholes and
ultimately as parts of the totality of creation.

The human body develops from a single undifferentiated source, the

fertilized egg, by a complex sequence of divisions resulting in a large
number and variety of highly specialized and diversified cells. In its final
form, it has a hierarchical arrangement, where each part is also an
integrated whole. A complex system of neural and biochemical regulations
that transcends the anatomical boundaries on all levels ensures the
functional unity of the constituent parts. In addition, each cell harbors a set
of chromosomes containing genetic information about the entire organism.
Genetic engineering, a science that is in its early stage, has already been
able to create from the nucleus of a single cell a clone, an exact replica of
the parental organism. The information about the entire body is thus
contained in each of its parts in a way that makes the comparison with the
cosmic creative process, as we described it earlier, very appropriate.

In the worldview of Tantric science, the relationship between the cosmos

and the human organism is not seen as a mere metaphor or a conceptual aid.
Ancient Tantric texts suggest that the human body literally is a microcosm
that reflects and contains the entire macrocosm. If one could thoroughly
explore one’s own body and psyche, this would bring the knowledge of all
the phenomenal worlds (Mookerjee and Khanna 1977). This is graphically
represented in the Purushakara Yantra, the image of the Cosmic Person. In
this figure, the material world in which we live is situated in the area of the
belly, the upper part of the body and the head contain the different heavenly
realms, and the belly and legs harbor the underworlds.

The Buddha described the relationship between the body and the world in
these words: “In truth I say to you that within this fathom-high body lies the
world and the rising of the world and the ceasing of the world.” In the
Cabala, the ten Sefirot, archetypal principles representing various stages of
the divine emanation, are seen as the divine body of Adam Kadmon with
the head, arms, legs, and sexual organs. The human body is a miniature
replica of this primordial form. Similar concepts can also be found in
Gnosticism, in the Hermetic tradition, and in other esoteric systems.

Figure 2.
Purushakara Yantra, or the Cosmic Man Yantra, a grand micro-macro
vision of the universe. This eighteenth-century Tantric painting from
Rajasthan, India, depicts the human being who has fulfilled his/her
immense potentiality and become the entire universe. The seven ascending
planes (lokas) represent experiences of celestial realms, the central plane
those of the earthly plane (bhurloka), and the descending ones subnormal
states of consciousness.
 Source: Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy (Art and
Imagination Series), plate 20, published by Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Reprinted with permission of the Ajit Mookerjee Collection. Photograph by
Jeff Teasdale.

Figure 3.
The Hermetic Cosmic Man . Illustration from a seventeenth-century
hermetic text by Robert Flud, Utriusque cosmi historia, as reproduced in A.
Roob’s book Alchemie und Mystik, Köln, 1996, p. 543, depicting the human
being as a microcosm reflecting the macrocosmos. The concentric circles
representing the planetary spheres are related to the physical structure of the
body. The nine angelic spheres point to the capacity of the individual
human to use reason, intellect, and pure mind to achieve the status of the
Cosmic Man and even God.
 Source: Reprinted with permission of the Old Print Department of the
Central Library of the Mannheim University.

Figure 4.
Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Universal Man of the Cabalists is depicted
here as holding the zodiac and supporting the entire solar system. The
image of Adam Kadmon, embodying the ten Divine Emanations, the
Sephiroth, was seen by the Jewish mystics as the most perfect reflection and
representation of Divinity.

Source: Reprinted from Manly Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages
copyright and with permission of the Philosophical Research Society in Los
Angeles, CA.
This deep connection between the individual human organism and the
cosmos suggested by various esoteric traditions has been expressed in the
famous statements “As above, so below” or “As without, so within.” The
observations from modern consciousness research have shed new light on
this ancient mystical concept that appears quite absurd from the point of
view of materialistic science. Transpersonal psychology has discovered that
in holotropic states it is possible to identify experientially with just about
any aspect of physical reality, past and present, as well as various aspects of
other dimensions of existence. It has confirmed that the entire cosmos is in
a mysterious way encoded in the psyche of each of us and becomes
accessible in deep systematic self-exploration.

The discussion of the hierarchical arrangements in the universe could also

be extended beyond the boundaries of individual organisms, since each life
form constitutes a part in larger groups and systems. Animals form
colonies, schools, flocks, and herds, and belong to families and species.
Individual humans are parts of a family, clan, tribe, culture, nation, gender,
race, and so on. Living organisms—plants, animals, and humans—belong
to various ecosystems that have developed within the biosphere of our
planet. In the complex dynamic structure of the universe, each constituent
part is a separate entity, as well as a member of a larger whole. Individuality
and participation in a broader context are dialectically combined and
integrated.

The Part and the Whole

The new relationship that modern science has discovered between the
whole and its parts was explored and systematically described by the British
writer and philosopher Arthur Koestler. In his book Janus, named after the
two-faced Roman god, Koestler coined the term holon, reflecting the fact
that everything in the universe is simultaneously a whole and a part. The
root of this word, hol-, suggests wholeness and integrity (from the Greek
holos = whole) and the suffix -on, used customarily in the names of
elementary particles, denotes a part or constituent. Holons are Janus-faced
entities on the intermediate levels of any hierarchy, which can be described
either as wholes or as parts, depending on the way we look at them, whether
from “below” or from “above” (Koestler 1978). The concept of holons has
been recently further developed in a highly sophisticated and creative way
by Ken Wilber (1995).

Holons can accumulate into larger agglomerates. Bacteria, for example, can
form a culture or stars can be assembled into a galaxy. These are social
holons comprised of elements of the same order. Holons can also create
emergent holons of a higher order. Atoms of hydrogen and oxygen can
combine into molecules of water, macromolecules can form cells, and cells
can get organized into multicellular organisms. These are examples of
holons of increasingly higher order. What is important from the point of
view of our discussion is that in holotropic states all the different individual,
as well as social, holons have corresponding subjective states. These states
make it possible for us to experientially identify in a very authentic and
convincing way with any aspects of existence that in our ordinary everyday
consciousness we experience as objects separate from us.

We are thus able to experience conscious identification with atoms,

molecules, or specific cells of the body, either as individuals or as
ensembles. Besides experiencing ourselves as other individual human
beings, we can also undergo experiential identification with entire human
groups, for example, all mothers, soldiers, or Christians of the world. We
can envision a single wolf or a pack of wolves and observe them as objects.
In addition, we can also identify experientially with a single wolf, as well as
experience the consciousness of an entire pack of wolves or even of the
entire wolf species.

Some of the people who have experienced holotropic states reported that
they experienced consciousness of an ecosystem, of the totality of Life as a
cosmic phenomenon, or of our entire planet. In transpersonal states, all
aspects of existence as they manifest on different levels and domains of
reality, can under certain circumstances become potentially available for
conscious experience. This is a very important observation that brings a
strong support for understanding the universe and existence as a divine play
of Absolute Consciousness.

The following account is an excerpt from the session of Kathleen, who

participated in our psychedelic training program of professionals at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. It is an example of a transpersonal
experience that encompassed all life and reflected its struggle for survival.
It resulted in a deep sense of compassion with all living things and a
dramatic increase of ecological awareness.

I seemed to have connected in a very profound way with life on earth.

At first, I went through a whole series of identifications with
individual animals from various species, but later the experience
became more and more encompassing. My identity spread not only
horizontally in space to include all living forms, but also vertically in
time. I became the Darwinian evolutionary tree in all its ramifications.
However incredible this might sound, I experienced myself as the
totality of life!

I sensed the cosmic quality of the energies and experiences involved in

the world of living forms, the endless curiosity and experimentation
characterizing life, and the drive for self-expression and self-
preservation operating on many different levels. I realized what we
have been doing to life and to the earth since we developed
technology. Since technology is also an outgrowth of life, the crucial
question I had to deal with was whether life on this planet would
survive.

Is life a viable and constructive phenomenon, or a malignant growth

on the face of the Earth that contains some fatal flaw in its blueprint
condemning it to self-destruction? Is it possible that some basic error
occurred when the design for the evolution of organic forms was
originally laid down? Can creators of universes make mistakes as
humans do? It seemed at the moment a plausible, but very frightening
idea, something I had never considered before.

Kathleen struggled for some time with the question whether it is possible
that the creative principle might have made a fundamental error in bringing
forth creation and that it might not be fully in control of the process. She
concluded that this is probably the case and that the Divine might need
assistance from humans to preserve its creation. Having opted for what I
have described earlier as the “kaleidoscope” or “chess-game” theory of
creation, Kathleen decided to become an active partner of the Divine in the
battle for preservation of life. Here is the rest of her session:
 Identifying with life, I experienced and explored an entire spectrum of
destructive forces operating in nature and in human beings and saw
their dangerous extensions and projections in modern technology
threatening to make the earth inhabitable. In this context, I became all
the countless victims of the military machinery of modern warfare,
prisoners in concentration camps dying in gas chambers, fish poisoned
in polluted streams, plants killed by herbicides, and insects sprayed
with chemicals.

This alternated with moving experiences of smiling infants, charming

children playing in the sand, newly born animals and newly hatched
birds in carefully built nests, wise dolphins and whales cruising the
crystal-clear waters of the ocean, and images of beautiful pastures and
forests. I felt profound empathy with life, strong ecological awareness,
and a real determination to join the life-affirming forces on this planet.

Ideas similar to Koestler’s concept of the holon were expressed in the

seventeenth century in the work of the philosopher and mathematician
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. In his Monadology, Leibniz (1951)
described the universe as composed of elementary units called monads.
These monads have many characteristics of the Jain jivas. As in the Jain
worldview, in Leibniz’s philosophy all the knowledge about the entire
universe can be deduced from the information contained in each single
monad.

It is interesting that Leibniz was also the originator of the mathematical

technique that was instrumental in the development of optical holography, a
new field that provided for the first time a solid scientific basis for the
concept of mutual interpenetration. Optical holograms demonstrate very
clearly the paradoxical relations that can exist between the parts and the
whole, including the possibility of retrieving the information about the
whole from each of its parts. It is possible that in creating phenomenal
worlds Absolute Consciousness is using the same principles that find their
material expression in optical holography. In any case, the holographic
model is the best conceptual framework we have to date for the world of
transpersonal phenomena.
Creation and the World of Art
In holotropic states, we can realize that existence, human life, and the world
around us constitute a fantastic adventure in consciousness, an amazingly
complex and intricate cosmic drama. This parallels the concepts found in
ancient Indian literature. The Hindu scriptures refer to the divine play of the
universe as lila and suggest that the material reality as we perceive it in our
everyday life is a product of a fundamental cosmic illusion called maya.
Theater, film, and television are artificially created illusory representations
of reality. For this reason, these media and various aspects of related artistic
activities represent another frequent source of metaphorical images that
people who have experienced holotropic states use in describing the process
of creation.

The situation of an actor very closely parallels the role each of us plays in
the cosmic drama. While on stage and performing a role, good actors can to
a great extent lose contact with their real identities and become the
characters they represent. For the evening of the performance, they can
almost believe they are Othello, Joan of Arc, Ophelia, or Cyrano de
Bergerac. Yet the awareness of their real identity remains available and is
resumed after the curtain has fallen and the applause of the audience
subsides. To a lesser degree, a similar process of identification with the
dramatis personae and temporary loss of one’s own identity can occur in
spectators watching a good movie or a well-performed theater play. The
actor or actress have their basic everyday personalities to which they return
when the play ends. People who have experienced holotropic states often
suggest that something similar happens in the cycles of reincarnation. At
the beginning of each lifetime, we assume a different personality and role
and, at the time of death, we return to a more basic identity before taking on
another incarnation.

Particularly interesting from this point of view is the situation of a

playwright, because it can be used to illustrate the complexity of our nature
and the problem of determinism versus free will. Since all the boundaries in
the universe are ultimately arbitrary, we do not possess a fixed identity;
each of us is the creator as well as the creation. The degree of freedom that
we have changes dramatically depending on the aspect of creation and the
level of the creative process with which we identify. This is similar to the
situation of the author of a theater play or a screenplay for a movie. All the
characters of a play have their origin in the imagination of the playwright
and are thus initially different aspects of a single creative mind. For the
purpose of a realistic and effective enactment of the drama the protagonists
have to be represented as separate individuals.

This offers the author an opportunity for ambiguous identity in relation to

the play and its characters. In the process of writing, he or she has far-
reaching freedom to create and shape the characters and determine the
course of events. However, the same author can also decide to become one
of the players in his or her drama. William Shakespeare, for example, could
decide to play the role of Hamlet or Richard Wagner to sing the part of
Tannhäuser. In such cases, they would be to a great extent confined and
determined by the same scripts that, in another context and on another level,
they more or less freely created. In a similar way, each of us appears in the
divine play in a dual role of creator and actor. A full and realistic enactment
of our role in the cosmic drama requires the suspension of our true identity.
We have to forget our authorship and follow the script.

The problem of ambiguity of our identity and of our role in the cosmic
drama requires a word of caution. In the last few decades this issue has
often been misunderstood and misrepresented in the New Age movement
and in popular spirituality. In holotropic states, it is possible to connect with
a level of consciousness where it seems very plausible that we have actually
chosen our parents and the circumstances of our birth. We can also
experience a state of consciousness in which it seems obvious that we are in
essence spiritual beings and that as such we have made a free decision to
incarnate and engage in the cosmic drama. We can also have a very
powerful experience of identification with the creative principle or God. All
these experiences can seem very real and convincing.

However, it would be a serious mistake to draw from such insights any

conclusions concerning our ordinary identity or our embodied self. In this
form we certainly did not make any of the above decisions. If applied to the
body-ego, such statements as “You are God and you have created your
universe” are confusing and misleading. I remember a workshop at the
Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in which the leader authoritatively
imposed the above statement on the participants. One of the women in the
group got seriously upset, since she was the mother of a retarded child. The
workshop leader’s statement implied that she had chosen this predicament
and deliberately created this problem. This would have meant that she, as
she experienced herself in her everyday life, was fully responsible for her
child’s misfortune. Situations of this kind involve a serious confusion of
levels and an incorrect use of logic that is technically called “error in logical
typing.”

The Archetypal Beings and Domains

We can now return to the dynamics of the cosmic creative process as it is
revealed in holotropic states of consciousness. I have already described and
discussed the frequent insights suggesting that the Universal Mind creates
virtual realities through a complex combination of multiple divisions and
cosmic dissociation and forgetting. Absolute Consciousness projects itself
into countless individual beings that experience themselves as separate from
each other and also alienated from their source. In constant dynamic
interaction with each other, they generate immensely rich experiential
worlds. The material realm which we inhabit and with which we are
intimately familiar seems to be just one of these worlds, the farthest outpost
of this creative activity.

Of special interest is a domain that lies between our everyday reality and
the undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness. It is a mythological realm that
has been extensively studied and described by C. G. Jung and his followers.
Unlike the material reality, it is not available to ordinary sensory
perception; it can be directly experienced only in holotropic states. Jung
referred to it as the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. The
beings inhabiting these realms seem to be endowed with extraordinary
energy and have an aura of sacredness or numinosity. For this reason, they
are usually perceived and described as deities.

The events occurring in this mythic realm unfold in a kind of space and
time, but a space and time that are not identical with our experience of these
dimensions on the material level. Archetypal sequences lack the
geographical and historical integrity that is characteristic for events in
material reality. Unlike the happenings in our world, which can be assigned
specific spatial and temporal coordinates, the mythical sequences cannot be
placed into a coherent fabric of space or time. While it is easy to
geographically locate London or assign a specific historical date to the
French Revolution, it is impossible to do the same with Shiva’s heaven or
the battle between the Greek Olympian gods and the Titans. The stories
inspired by the mythical realm usually begin: “Once upon a time, in a
faraway land,” in order to discourage the listener from an attempt to place
them geographically or historically into the familiar world of everyday
reality.

However, the lack of fixed spatial and temporal coordinates does not make
the archetypal world ontologically less real. The encounters with
mythological beings and visits to mythic landscapes, as experienced in
holotropic states, can be in every respect as real as events in our everyday
life, or more so. The archetypal realm is not a figment of human fantasy and
imagination; it has an independent existence of its own and a high degree of
autonomy. At the same time, its dynamics seem to be intimately connected
with material reality and with human life.

The archetypes are clearly supraordinated to the events in the material

world and govern, form, and inform what is happening in our everyday
reality. The insights from holotropic states of consciousness concerning
these connections are similar to the ideas that have been expressed in
various books written by the authors inspired by Jungian psychology. These
writers showed that our personalities, behaviors, and destinies can be
understood in terms of the archetypal divine principles operating in or
through our unconscious (Bolen 1984, 1989) and that in our everyday
human dramas we act out various mythological themes (Campbell 1972).

The following experience of Helen, a 42-year-old anthropologist, illustrates

the way the archetypal world is experienced in holotropic states of
consciousness and the insights this can provide.

The sequence that followed was of such grandeur and magnificence

that I still feel a deep sense of awe just thinking about it. It was a
vision of a world that had some characteristics in common with our
 everyday reality, yet the amount of energy it was endowed with and
the scale on which it existed was beyond anything I could previously
have imagined. I saw illustrious anthropomorphic figures, male and
female, clad in splendid garments and radiating immense power. It
resembled the ancient Greek descriptions of Mount Olympus where
the gods feasted on nectar and ambrosia. However, this experience by
far surpassed anything I had previously associated with this image.

These suprahuman beings were involved in what resembled social

interaction, but their exchange seemed to be of enormous relevance. I felt
that what was happening there was intimately connected with our everyday
reality and was determining the events in the material world. I remember a
particularly impressive detail that can be used as an illustration of this
connection and the dimensions involved. At one point, I saw a splendid ring
on the finger of one of these divine beings with a stone that seemed to be a
cosmic version of a diamond. The reflection from one of its facets struck
me as a blinding flash of light and I realized that it projected into our world
as explosion of an atomic bomb.

Later I thought in connection with this experience of a movie that I had

seen some time ago. I think it was called the Golden Fleece and it featured
the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. The events in this movie
unfolded on two levels. One of them portrayed the realm of the Olympian
gods, their interactions, affairs, conflicts, clashes, and alliances. Each of
these deities had his or her sphere of influence in the cosmos. The
protagonists of the story were favorites of some gods and targets of wrath of
others. The emotions of the gods manifested on the earthly plane as
dynamics of the elements of nature, sudden turns of fortune, or meaningful
human encounters.

In view of this experience and the insights associated with it, I feel
apologetic about the scientistic hubris with which I used to dismiss the
cosmologies of “primitive cultures” as superstition and magical thinking. I
realized that this reflected the naiveté of our society in regard to
nonordinary states of consciousness. It was very clear to me that once we
subject the observations from these states to serious study, our materialistic
worldview will have to be drastically revised. We might not use the terms
“deities” and “demons” like the “primitive” cultures and might replace
them with more respectable terms, such as “archetypal figures.” However,
once we become familiar with the archetypal dimension, we will not be able
to ignore or deny its existence and its importance in the universal scheme of
things.

While the above account describes a vision of celestial archetypal regions,

other people experienced visits to domains inhabited by various creatures of
darkness, as we know them from mythological descriptions of hells or
underworlds of different cultures. The following excerpt from a narrative
written by Arnold, a forty-year-old teacher, is an example of such an
experience.

The next sequence took me into the world of underground tunnels and
to what appeared to be sewage systems of all the great metropolis of
the world—New York, Paris, London, Tokyo. … It seemed that I was
getting intimately acquainted with the infrastructure of these cities,
with parts and aspects that are indispensable for their existence. I
realized to my surprise that there was an entire world there, hidden
from the sight of most people and generally unappreciated. I was
sinking deeper and deeper into a system of dark mazes until I realized
that the domain I was entering did not any more belong to the world of
our everyday reality.

Although it certainly felt like the deepest bowels of the earth, it was
actually a mythological realm inhabited by strange archetypal
creatures. It seemed to me that I was seeing the infrastructure of the
cosmos, essential for its existence and proper functioning. Like the
underground world of the cities, it was hidden and unappreciated. It
was inhabited by gigantic and monstrous chthonic beings of fantastic
shapes. They were endowed with titanic energies that made one think
of tectonic shifts, earthquakes, and volcanic explosions.

I could not help feeling great appreciation for these homely creatures
living their life in darkness and doing patiently the ungrateful labor of
running the engine of the universe. They clearly welcomed my visit
and responded with great joy to my unspoken compliments. It seemed
 that they were used to being feared and rejected and showed almost
childlike craving for love and acceptance.

As these experiences indicate, there exist various dimensions of reality that

are not part of the phenomenal world of our everyday life. They seem to
represent different types and levels of experiential realities, different
“cosmic channels,” to use an analogy with the world of modern electronics.
We usually take the material world with all its wonders and complexities for
granted and reject the possibility that there might be other domains of
reality. However, if we think about it, the sheer mystery of existence—the
fact that anything exists at all and that it is possible to experience worlds of
any kind—is so stupendous and overwhelming that it makes the question
about the specifics of their nature and content a trivial one.

From a larger perspective, the experience of a beautiful sunset over the

Pacific Ocean, the vision of the Grand Canyon, or the panorama of
downtown Manhattan is not less miraculous than that of Shiva’s heaven or
the Egyptian underworld. If we accept the existence of a supreme principle
that has at its disposal the technology of consciousness and is able to
generate experiences, the fact that it can create realities with many different
characteristics does not present any serious problems. It would be
comparable to the task of a film or TV crew to use the existing technology
and produce movies or programs with mythological themes rather than
stories from everyday life.

The Mystery Play of the Universe

Since the Hindu philosophers refer to the cosmic process as lila, or divine
play, it seems appropriate to illustrate the holotropic insights into the nature
of reality by using the analogy with a movie, which is a modern
technological version of a magic show. The intention of the moviemakers is
to create a reasonable facsimile, a “make-believe” version, of material
reality. They use all the available means necessary to achieve this goal. It is
usually very easy for the spectators to imagine that the scenes unfolding on
the screen represent real events in the material world. In some instances, the
impact of a movie on some spectators can be so strong that they respond to
it emotionally as if it were real. This happens in spite of the fact that they
know intellectually that what they are watching is nothing but a play of
electromagnetic waves of different frequencies within a single undivided
field of light.

In holotropic states of consciousness we can discover to our surprise that

the same applies to our experience of everyday reality. What appears to us
as a world of solid objects is a play of vibrations that is essentially empty.
Naturally, our experience of the world is fuller and richer than that of a
movie, since it includes some dimensions that today’s filmmaking
technology is incapable of conveying, such as tactile, olfactory, and
gustatory qualities. In his famous science fiction novel The Brave New
World, Aldous Huxley described a future form of entertainment, the
“feelies,” in which this shortcoming was overcome, since the experiences of
the spectators were not limited to the optical and acoustic realms, but
included these other sensory qualities. And contemporary researchers in the
field of virtual reality are already experimenting with specially designed
gloves that would enrich the experience of electronically created visual and
acoustic worlds by contributing the tactile dimension.

I described earlier the experience of the “immanent divine,” in which the

material world is perceived as a dynamic play of cosmic creative energy.
This experience also reveals the undivided unity underlying the world of
separation. It shows that what we encounter in everyday life are not discrete
individuals and solid objects, but integral aspects of a unified energetic
field. However absurd this might appear to a naïve realist, this conclusion is
in full agreement with the findings of modern physicists. They indicate that
what we ordinarily perceive as solid matter is essentially empty. Twentieth-
century science has thus provided support for the startling claim of Hindu
sages that our perception of the world as made of dense material objects is
an illusion (maya).

Let us now develop the analogy between filmmaking and the creation of
material reality a step further. By simply watching the movie, we cannot
fully understand the process we are involved in, since some important
answers about what is happening to us cannot be found on the screen. What
we see in the movies does not have independent existence and meaning of
its own. The movie is a product of a very complex process and its essential
stages are not included in our immediate experience of watching it. To
really understand the events we are witnessing, we would have to replace
the naïve experience of watching the movie with a systematic in-depth
analysis of the process that creates it.

First, we would have to shift our attention away from the screen, turn
around, and discover the device responsible for the illusions that we are
perceiving. We would detect that its essential component is a powerful
source of light that projects the images on the screen. On closer inspection,
we would also find the moving celluloid strip that determines the forms and
colors we are seeing. This situation is strikingly similar to Plato’s famous
simile of the cave that he used in his dialogue The Republic to describe the
illusionary nature of the material world.

In this dialogue Plato (1961b) likens the human condition to a situation in

which a group of individuals is confined to the inside of a subterranean
grotto. They are firmly fettered to the ground in such a way that they can
stare only straight ahead. Behind these prisoners is a bright fire and a low
wall above which pupeteers exhibit human and animal effigies and various
implements. The prisoners are immersed in watching the shadows on the
wall, the only aspect of the whole situation they can actually perceive.
Fascinated by the show, they are completely unaware of the true nature of
this situation.

In Plato’s simile, the objects of our familiar material world are likened to
shadows that are cast by a fire on the wall of the cave, while the true nature
of reality remains hidden to us. Plato also suggests that the prisoners in the
cave believe that the echos of the sounds that originate behind them are
actually produced by the shadows. In our movie example, we could
similarly identify not only the source of the images, but also discover the
origin of the sounds by tracing them to the magnetic tape that generates
them.

When we continue our exploration, a closer scrutiny of the projection

process will reveal that what we perceive as smooth and continuous
movements actually consists of rapid sequences of discontinuous flickering
images. This again parallels the insights from nonordinary states of
consciousness concerning the nature of reality. I have repeatedly heard
reports in this regard from people who had various forms of holotropic
experiences. The same insights can be found in traditional spiritual sources.
For example, according to Tibetan Buddhism, reality is radically
discontinuous. The world is constantly flashing in and out of existence,
being dissolved and recreated from one moment to another. Similarly, we
ourselves do not have continuous existence from birth to death, but die and
are reborn all the time. A modern, scientifically based version of the same
concept appears in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1929).

The next step of our in-depth probing of the movie experience would take
us outside of the movie theater altogether. We would discover that the film
started as an idea in somebody’s mind and that all the processes necessary
to make a movie were motivated by the intention to concretize the story in
the screenplay and transform it into a convincing vivid experience. The
reality portrayed in the movie does not have an independent existence of its
own. It cannot be fully understood if we take it out of this larger context.
The ultimate reason for the existence of the movie is the intention to
provide a specific kind of experience. According to the insights from
holotropic states, the same is true about our experience of the material
world.

A naïve person, such as a child or a native from a preindustrial culture who

has not had exposure to modern technology, could mistake a well-done
movie for reality. In the future, holographic movies with holophonic sound,
holographic television, and particularly advanced technology of “virtual
reality” will make that distinction even more difficult. However, even at
present, the idea that our cosmos might be a “virtual reality” produced by
superior intelligence does not seem as far-fetched as it would have a
hundred or even fifty years ago.

5
The Ways to Reunion with the Cosmic
Source
Now I am moving back …. back to the Whole, where I belong … what joy to
return. … Yes, now I know what I am, what I have been from the beginning,
what I always will be …. a part of the Whole, the restless part that desires
to return, yet lives to seek expression in doing, creating, building, giving,
growing, leaving more than it takes, and above all desires to bring back
gifts of love to the Whole … the paradox of total unity and the continuity of
the part. I know the Whole. … I am the Whole … even as a part I am the
totality.
—Robert Monroe, The Ultimate Journey

Whoever has parted from his source

Longs to return to that state of union.
—Rumi

Involution and Evolution of Consciousness

The process of creation as it was described in the preceding chapter results
in an immensely rich spectrum of entities on many different levels of
reality, ranging from the undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness through
rich pantheons of archetypal beings to countless individual units
constituting the world of matter. This process of successive divisions
combined with increasing separation and alienation represents only one half
of the cosmic cycle. The insights from holotropic states repeatedly reveal
another part of this process consisting of events in consciousness that reflect
a movement in the opposite direction—from the worlds of plurality and
separation toward increasing dissolution of boundaries and merging into
ever larger wholes.

For the sake of brevity, I refer to the descending part of the cosmic process,
representing creation (involution of consciousness), as hylotropic, or
oriented toward the world of matter (from the Greek hyle = matter, and
trepein = moving in the direction of something). In a similar way, I call the
ascending aspect of the cosmic process that mediates return to the original
undifferentiated unity (evolution of consciousness) holotropic, or moving
toward wholeness. As I have already mentioned earlier, this latter term is
derived from the Greek holos, meaning whole, and trepein, as above,
aiming for something.
These insights parallel the descriptions and discussions of these two cosmic
movements described in various spiritual and philosophical systems. In the
West, the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (1991), referred to the
hylotropic process as Efflux and to the holotropic movement as Reflux.
According to the Neoplatonists, the cosmos in all its variety of hierarchical
gradations is created by a divine emanation from the supreme One. Humans
have a potential access to the highest intellectual and spiritual realms and
can rise to the consciousness of the World Soul. Plotinus’ ideas became a
dominant theme of all Neoplatonic schools, as well as the writings of
Christian mystics and German idealistic philosophers. A very
comprehensive contemporary synthesis of the ideas concerning Descent and
Ascent appears in the work of Ken Wilber (1995).

In the East, similar concepts found its most articulate expression in the
writings of the Indian mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1965).
Aurobindo argued that Brahman manifests as the world of matter in a
process that he called involution and then progressively brings about an
unfolding of his latent power in the course of evolution. Involution is a
process of self-limitation and increasing density, by which the universal
Consciousness-Force veils itself by stages and creates planes of existence.
In its farthest reaches, it assumes the appearance of the inconscient material
world. In each plane all the powers of consciousness belonging to the
planes above it are involved, so that the full potential of the original and
universal Consciousness-Force is enfolded and hidden even in the
Inconscient.

Evolution is the opposite process, by which the Consciousness-Force

emerges again from the apparent cosmic Inconscience and manifests its
hidden powers. However, it is important to emphasize that for Aurobindo
evolution is not an exact reverse of involution. It is not a gradual
subtilization and rarefaction plane by plane that would eventually lead to
reabsorption of all creation into the One Unmanifest. It is a gradual
emergence of higher powers of consciousness in the material universe
leading to an ever greater manifestation of the divine Consciousness-Force
within its creation.
According to the insights from holotropic states, the universal process
offers not only an infinite number of possibilities for becoming a separate
individual, but also an equally rich and ingenious range of opportunities for
dissolution of boundaries and fusion that mediate experiential return to the
source. The unitive experiences make it possible for the individual units of
consciousness to overcome their alienation and free themselves from the
delusion of their separateness. This transcendence of what earlier appeared
to be absolute boundaries and the resulting progressive merging creates
larger and larger experiential units. In its farthest reaches, this process
dissolves all the boundaries and brings about a reunion with Absolute
Consciousness. The sequences of fusions occurring in many forms and on
many different levels complete the overall cyclical pattern of the cosmic
dance.

Varieties of Unitive Experiences

Although the unitive processes can be observed throughout all domains of
existence, they are particularly rich and complex in human beings. Here
they can also be studied most directly and systematically in the form of
transpersonal experiences. Unfortunately, Western psychiatry does not
differentiate between mysticism and psychosis and tends to treat mystical
experiences of any kind as manifestations of mental disease. I have met
during my professional career many people who received pathological
labels, tranquilizing medication, and even shock therapy because they have
experienced unity with other other people, nature, cosmos, and God.

Abraham Maslow (1964), the late American psychologist who played an

important role in the founding of both humanistic and transpersonal
psychology, interviewed hundreds of people who had had spontaneous
unitive states, or “peak experiences” as he called them. He was able to show
that mystical experiences are not indications of pathology and do not belong
into the handbooks of psychiatry. They often occur in people who do not
have any serious emotional problems and would otherwise be considered
“normal” by standard psychological criteria. Moreover, if these experiences
occur in a supportive setting and are well integrated, they can have very
beneficial consequences and result in better functioning, higher creativity,
and “self-actualization.”
The most frequent triggers of unitive experiences are natural and human-
made creations of extraordinary aesthetic beauty. For some people, it can be
the immensity of the star-filled sky, for others the majesty of giant mountain
ranges, or the awesome stillness of the deserts. People visiting such natural
wonders as the Grand Canyon, giant waterfalls, or some of the famous
stalagmite caverns of the world can feel overwhelmed by their grandeur and
experience a mystical rapture. The ocean, with the elemental power
manifesting on its surface and the noble silence of its depth, is another
frequent source of peak experiences. Similarly, such situations as watching
a beautiful sunset, the magic of the aurora borealis, or a total solar eclipse
can trigger profound unitive states of consciousness. However, it does not
necessarily take events on such a grand scale to inspire mystical awareness.
Under the right circumstances, it can be something as “ordinary” as a spider
spinning its web or a hummingbird hovering over a flower and sucking
nectar.

Exposure to exquisite artistic creations can have a very similar effect.

Composers deeply engaged in creative work, performing musicians, as well
as people in musical audiences, can occasionally lose their boundaries and
literally merge with the music. They can have a sense of actually becoming
music, rather than just listening to it. Great dancers, while on stage, often
reach states where there is no more difference between the dancer and the
dance. European Gothic cathedrals, Moslem mosques, the Taj Mahal, or
Hindu and Buddhist temples, by their monumental beauty, have been
instrumental in inducing mystical states in many thousands of people. Great
sculptures, paintings, and other art objects of all ages and cultures can have
a similar effect on sensitive individuals.

Another area of everyday life that is a frequent source of unitive

experiences deserves special notice, since most of us probably would not
associate it with mystical awareness. Many prominent athletes report that,
at the time of their peak performances, they were in states that resembled
mystical raptures. We tend to attribute stellar performances in various
athletic activities to a combination of special physical endowment,
psychological perseverance, unrelenting discipline, and rigorous training.
The inside story from some of the world’s greatest athletes reveals that the
players themselves often see it very differently. They attribute their
extraordinary achievments to special states of consciousness that mediate
for them capacities that border on the miraculous and supernatural (Murphy
and White 1978). An important aspect of these states is typically a sense of
losing individual boundaries and merging with various aspects of the
environment.

It seems that the mystical raptures triggered by sport activities make it

possible to transcend the boundaries of what we usually consider to be
humanly possible. I have personally witnessed an astonishing example of
such an extraordinary performance associated with a unitive state. It
occurred during a monthlong seminar on Buddhism and Western
Psychology that we conducted at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
A Korean swordmaster whom we invited as guest faculty offered as part of
our program a special demonstration. He asked one of his disciples to lie
down on the grass and placed a napkin and a large watermelon on his naked
belly. He then retreated about fifteen feet and stood for a few minutes in
quiet meditation, his head covered with a tightly fitting bag made of thick
black velvet, and holding in his hand a giant, extremely sharp sword.

Suddenly all the dogs in the area started to howl and the swordsman joined
in with a wild warrior scream. In a cartwheel fashion, he propelled himself
in the direction of his disciple, who was quietly lying on the grass, and with
a strong swing of his sword cut the watermelon on his belly in two pieces.
There was a slight indention from the sword on the napkin, but the disciple
was unscathed. Astounded, the spectators asked how he was able to
accomplish such a spectacular feat. Everybody assumed that he was
somehow able to remember and visualize the environment as he had seen it
before he was blindfolded. He smiled and answered: “No, you meditate and
wait until all is one—the swordmaster, the sword, the grass, the melon, the
disciple—and then there is no problem!”

Experiences of mystical union have been beautifully captured in the world

literature. For example, in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,
Edmund talks about his mystical raptures he experienced in connection with
the ocean:

I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume
under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering
 high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of
it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free!
I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became
beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-
starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity
and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life
of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.

And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or
lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the
sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the
tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they
seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and
seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!

Unitive Potential of Death, Sex, and Birth

While unitive experiences happen most likely in emotionally positively
charged situations, they can also occur under circumstances that are highly
unfavorable, threatening, and critical for the individual. In this case, the ego
consciousness is shattered and overwhelmed rather than dissolved and
transcended. This happens during severe acute or chronic stress, at the time
of intense emotional and physical suffering, or when the integrity or
survival of the body are seriously threatened. Deeply depressed people
brought by a serious life crisis to the verge of suicide can suddenly
experience a profound spiritual opening and transcend their suffering. Many
others discover the mystical realms during near-death experiences at the
time of accidents, injuries, dangerous diseases, and operations.

Death, an event that ends our individual existence as embodied selves, is a

very logical interface with the transpersonal domain. The events leading to
death, associated with it, and following it are a frequent source of spiritual
opening. Suffering from a terminal illness or being in intimate interaction
with people who are dying, particularly close friends or relatives, can
activate one’s own issues around death and impermanence and be
instrumental in a mystical awakening. The training of monks in Tibetan
Vajrayana Buddhism requires spending considerable amount of time with
dying people. Certain Hindu Tantric traditions involve meditations in
cemeteries, in the burning grounds, and in close contact with corpses.

In Middle Ages, Christian monks were asked to imagine in their

meditations their own death and to visualize all the stages of decomposition
of their bodies until the final disintegration into ashes. “Remember death!”,
“Dust to dust!”, “Death is certain, the hour uncertain!”, “Thus passes the
glory of the world!” were the mottoes guiding such practice. This was much
more than morbid indulgence in death as some modern Westerners would
see it. Experiences of deep encounter with death can trigger mystical states.
By accepting impermanence and our own mortality on a deep experiential
level, we also discover the part of us that is transcendent and immortal.

Various ancient books of the dead offer detailed descriptions of powerful

spiritual experiences occurring at the time of biological death (Grof 1994).
Modern research in the field of thanatology, a science studying death and
dying, has confirmed many important aspects of these accounts (Ring 1982,
1985). It has shown that approximately one-third of the people who come
close to death experience powerful visionary states including, among
others, a condensed life review, passage through a tunnel, encounter with
archetypal beings, contact with transcendental realities, and visions of
divine light. In many instances, this can involve “veridical” out-of-body
experiences, during which the individual’s disembodied consciousness
accurately perceives what is happening in various close or remote locations.
Survivors of such situations typically undergo a profound spiritual opening,
personality transformation, and radical changes in their life values. In a
fascinating research project that is currently underway, Kenneth Ring
(1995) is studying near-death experiences in congenitally blind people,
trying to confirm that in disembodied states they are able to observe their
environment.

Talking about triggers of unitive experiences, we should not forget a

particularly important category—situations that are associated with human
reproductive functions. Many people, both men and women, report that they
have experienced profound mystical states during love-making. In some
instances, an intense sexual experience can actually be instrumental in what
is described in ancient Indian yogic texts as awakening of Kundalini, or
Serpent Power. The yogis see Kundalini as the creative energy of the
universe that is feminine in nature. It lies dormant in the sacral area of the
human subtle body until it is activated by a guru, by meditation practice, or
by some other influences. The close connection that exists between this
spiritual energy and the sexual drive plays an essential role in Kundalini
yoga and in Tantric practices.

For women, situations associated with motherhood can become another

significant source of unitive experiences. By conceiving, carrying, and
delivering a child, women directly participate in the proces of cosmic
creation. Under favorable circumstances, the sacred nature of these
situations becomes apparent and is consciously experienced. During
pregnancy, birth, and nursing, it is not uncommon to sense a mystical
connection with the fetus or the infant and even with the world at large. We
will return to the relationship between mysticism and the triad
birth/sex/death later in this book.

Additional important triggers of unitive states are powerful mind-altering

technologies that can facilitate and catalyze their occurrence. Holotropic
experiences have played a critical role in the spiritual and ritual life of
humanity and much effort has been exerted throughout centuries to develop
ways of inducing them. I have briefly reviewed in the introduction to this
book the ancient, aboriginal, and modern “technologies of the sacred” and
the different contexts in which they have been used, from shamanism
through the rites of passage, mysteries of death and rebirth, and various
forms of spiritual practice to modern experiential therapies and laboratory
consciousness research.

The Immanent and the Transcendent Divine

In holotropic states of consciousness, whether they occur spontaneously or
are induced by the ancient and modern mind-altering techniques, it is
possible to transcend in various ways the individual boundaries of the
embodied self. These experiences offer us the opportunity to become other
people, groups of people, animals, plants, or even inorganic elements of
nature and of the cosmos. In this process, time does not seem to be an
obstacle and past and future events can become as easily available as
anything happening at present.

Experiences of this kind convey a very convincing insight that all

boundaries in the material world are illusory and that the entire universe as
we know it, in both its spatial and temporal aspects, is a unified web of
events in consciousness. It becomes very clear that the cosmos is not an
ordinary material reality, but a creation of intelligent cosmic energy or the
Universal Mind. These experiences thus unveil the “immanent Divine,”
deus sive natura, or God manifested in and as the phenomenal world. They
also disclose that each of us is essentially commensurate with the entire
web of creation and with all its parts.

While such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our

understanding of the nature of everyday material reality, there are others
that reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to
our perception. This category includes discarnate entities, various deities
and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings, and the divine
creative principle itself. In contrast to the “immanent Divine,” we can talk
here about the “transcendent Divine,” since the realms and beings that we
encounter under these circumstances are not part of our everyday reality;
they belong to a different domain and order of existence.

Experiences of this kind demonstrate that cosmic creation is not limited to

our material world, but manifests on many different levels and in many
dimensions. Similarly, the possibility of unitive experiences is not confined
to the material realm, but extends into other domains. We thus can not only
see and encounter the inhabitants of the archetypal regions, we can actually
merge with them and become them. And in the farthest reaches of our
experiential self-exploration, we can encounter the creative principle itself
and recognize our fundamental identity with it.

The experiences of the immanent Divine reveal the sacred nature of

everyday reality and the unity underlying the world of matter, which for a
naïve observer appears to be made of separate objects. By disclosing that all
boundaries within the material world are arbitrary, these experiences make
it clear that each of us is essentially identical with the entire field of space-
time and ultimately with the cosmic creative energy itself. By comparison,
the experiences of the transcendent Divine do not just show us new ways of
understanding and perceiving the familiar world of our everyday life. They
reveal the existence of dimensions of reality that are ordinarily invisible, or
“transphenomenal,” particularly those abounding in primordial cosmic
forms and patterns that C. G. Jung (1956) called archetypes.

As we have seen earlier, the world of archetypes, although normally

imperceptible, is not entirely separate from our everyday material reality. It
is intimately interwoven with it and plays a critical role in creating it. In this
way, it represents a supraordinated dimension that forms and informs the
experience of our everyday life. The archetypal domain thus represents a
bridge between the world of matter and the undifferentiated field of Cosmic
Consciousness. For this reason, the experience of the transcendent divine is
more than just the experience of another “cosmic channel.” It also provides
insights into the process by which material reality is created; it gives us a
“glimpse into the cosmic kitchen,” as one of my clients in Prague called it.

The cosmic play offers many opportunities for experiences that make it
possible for us to temporarily step out of the role we are playing in the
universal script, recognize the illusory nature of everyday reality, and
discover the possibility of reunion with the source. Holotropic states
provide an understanding of such unitive experiences that is diametrically
opposite to the position of mainstream psychiatrists. Rather than being
distortions of the correct perception of the material world caused by a
pathological process in the brain, these experiences offer profound insights
into the true nature of reality. They reveal the existence of phenomena that
represent intermediate stages in the process of creation between the
undifferentiated consciousness of the Universal Mind and the specifically
human experience of the material world. Because they involve
transcendence of individual boundaries and expand the sense of one’s
identity in the holotropic direction, they serve as important landmarks on
the journey to spiritual awakening.

The Enigma of Space and Time

Before closing our discussion of the cosmic process as an intricate fabric of
hylotropic and holotropic experiences, we have to discuss another important
aspect of cosmic creation, namely its relation to space and time. When we
describe the creative process as a movement from undifferentiated unity to
plurality, our conditioning will very likely lead us to imagine that this
process had to begin in a specific location and to unfold in linear time.
However, the critical stages of this process occur in regions that lie beyond
time and space as we know them. As we have seen, the cosmic creative
principle transcends all the distinctions and polarities whatsoever and that
includes space and time.

In our everyday life, everything that we encounter has distinct and definite
space and time coordinates. Our experience of time as linear and space as
three-dimensional is very compelling and convincing. As a result of it, we
tend to believe that these characteristics of time and space are mandatory
and absolute. In holotropic experiences, we can discover to our surprise that
there exist many important alternatives to our usual perception and
understanding of these two dimensions. In visionary states, we can
experience not only the present, but also the past and, occasionally, even the
future. The sequences of events can appear to be circular, they can unfold
along spiral trajectories, or actually run backwards. Time can also stop or be
altogether transcended. On the levels on which cosmic creation occurs, the
past, the present, and the future coexist rather than follow one another and,
consequently, all the stages of the process are happening simultaneously.

The concept and experience of space appear to be equally arbitrary when

we are in a holotropic state. Any number of different spaces in various
hierarchical arrangements can be created in a playful fashion and none of
them seems to be more objective, real, and mandatory than others. The
transition from the microcosm to the macrocosm does not have to occur in a
linear fashion. The small and the large can be freely interchanged in a
random and capricious way. Experiential identification with a single cell
can effortlessly become one that involves an entire galaxy and vice versa.
These two dimensions can also coexist in the experiential space of the same
person. Consequently, the baffling paradox of finiteness versus infinity that
we experience in our everyday state of consciousness is transcended and
ceases to exist.
To illustrate the complexities of experiencing time and space in holotropic
states, I will describe one of the most extraordinary adventures in
consciousness that I have experienced during the forty years of my inner
explorations. It occurred in a high-dose psychedelic session that I had at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center shortly after my arrival in the United
States in 1967. Here is an excerpt from my account of that session:

Somewhere in the second half of my session, I found myself in a very

unusual state of mind. It was a feeling of serenity, bliss, and simplicity
mixed with awe in regard to the mystery of existence. I sensed that
what I was experiencing was similar to what the early Christians must
have experienced. It was a world where miracles were possible,
acceptable, and even plausible. I was pondering about the problems of
time and space and had great difficulty understanding how I could
have ever believed that linear time and three-dimensional space are
absolute and mandatory dimensions of reality.

It appeared to me rather obvious that there are no limits whatsoever in

the realm of spirit and that time and space are arbitrary constructs of
the psyche. I suddenly realized that I do not have to be bound by the
limitations of time and space and can travel in the time-space
continuum quite freely and without any restrictions. This feeling was
so convincing and overwhelming that I wanted to test it by an
experiment. I decided to try if I could travel to my parents’ apartment
in Prague, which was many thousand miles away.

After determining the direction and considering the distance, I

imagined myself flying through space to the place of my destination. I
had the experience of moving through space at an enormous speed but,
to my disappointment, I was not getting anywhere. I could not
understand why the experiment did not work, since my feeling that
such space travel should be possible was very convincing. All of a
sudden, I realized that I was still under the influence of my old
concepts of time and space. I continued to think in terms of directions
and distances and approached the task accordingly. It occurred to me
that the proper approach would be to make myself believe that the
place of my session was actually identical with the place of my
destination. I said to myself: “This is not Baltimore, this is Prague.

Right here and now, I am in my parents’ appartment in Prague.”

When I approached the task in this way, I experienced peculiar and

bizarre sensations. I found myself in a strange, rather congested place
full of electric circuits, tubes, wires, resistors, and condensers. After a
short period of confusion, I realized that my consciousness was
trapped in a TV set located in the corner of the room in my parents’
apartment. I was trying, somehow, to use the speakers for hearing and
the tube for seeing. After a while, I had to laugh since I realized that
this experience was a symbolic spoof ridiculing the fact that I was still
imprisoned by my previous beliefs concerning space, time, and matter.

The only way of experiencing distant locations that I could conceive of

and accept was one that was mediated by television. Such a
transmission, of course, is restricted by the velocity of the
electromagnetic waves involved. At the moment when I realized and
firmly believed that my consciousness could transcend any limitations
whatsoever, including the speed of light, the experience changed
rapidly. The television set turned inside out and I found myself
walking in the apartment of my parents in Prague.

At this point, I did not feel any drug effect and the experience was as
real as any other situation in my life. The door of my parents’ bedroom
was half open. I looked in, saw their bodies on the bed, and heard them
breathing. I walked to the window and looked at the clock on the street
corner. It showed a six-hour difference from the time in Baltimore
where the experiment took place. In spite of the fact that this number
of hours reflected the actual time difference between the two zones, I
did not find it to be a convincing evidence. Since I intellectually knew
the time difference, my mind could have easily fabricated this
experience.

I lay down on the couch in the corner of one of the rooms to reflect on
my experience. It was the same couch on which I had spent my last
psychedelic session before my departure to the USA. My request for
 permission to travel to the USA on a fellowship had been initially
turned down by the Czech authorities. My last session in Prague
happened at a time when I was waiting for the response to my appeal.

Suddenly, I felt a wave of overwhelming anxiety. A strange and

uncanny idea emerged in my mind with unusual force and
persuasiveness: Maybe I had never left Czechoslovakia and was now
coming back from the psychedelic session in Prague. Maybe the
positive response to my appeal, the journey to the USA, joining the
team in Baltimore, and having a session there was just a visionary
journey motivated by strong wishful thinking. I was trapped in an
insidious loop, a vicious spatio-temporal circle, unable to determine
my real historical and geographic coordinates.

For a long time, I felt suspended between two realities, both of which
were equally convincing. I could not tell whether I was experiencing
an astral projection to Prague from my session in Baltimore or coming
down from a session in Prague in which I had experienced a trip to the
United States. I had to think about the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu
who awoke from a dream in which he was a butterfly and for some
time could not decide whether he was not actually a butterfly dreaming
of being human.

Meaningful Coincidences and Synchronicities

I would like to discuss in this context another important aspect of holotropic
states that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of time and
space. Transpersonal experiences are often associated with strange
meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained in terms of linear
causality. In a universe, as it is described by materialistic science, all events
should obey the law of cause and effect. Any coincidences that defy
explanation in causal terms are then attributed to the fact that the
phenomena involved are too complex and that we lack the knowledge of all
the contributing factors. Because of all these unknown “hidden variables,”
the final outcome can be predicted only statistically, not in specific detail.
However, on occasion, the statistical improbability of certain coincidences
in our everyday life is so staggering that it makes us question the adequacy
of such an interpretation.

A friend of mine recently shared with me a remarkable coincidence that had

occurred in his family. His wife and her sister, who lives in another city,
were both woken up in the course of the same night by the presence of a bat
in their bedrooms. They both responded to this one-time occurrence in their
lives in exactly the same way. Although it happened in the middle of the
night, they immediately called their father, woke him up and related to him
this unusual event. As most of us know, situations violating statistical
probabilities are much more frequent than one would expect. I have
personally experienced over the years many extraordinary coincidences in
my own life. One of them was particularly relevant because of its important
consequences and is worth describing.

In 1968 when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia, I was in the United
States on a scholarship at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. After
the invasion, I was asked by the Czech authorities to return immediately,
but decided to disobey and stay in the United States. As a result, I was not
able to visit my native country for almost twenty years. During this time, I
could not maintain open contact with my friends and colleagues in
Czechoslovakia. It would have been politically dangerous for them, because
my stay in the United States was considered illegal. After the liberation of
Eastern Europe, the board of the International Transpersonal Association
(ITA), of which I was president, decided to hold its next meeting in
Czechoslovakia and I traveled to Prague to find some potential sites for this
meeting.

After my arrival at the Prague airport, I took a taxi to my mother’s

apartment. After my mother and I had spent some time together and caught
up with each other, she went to see a neighbor to make some arrangements
and I was in the apartment alone. I sat down in an armchair, had a cup of
tea, and reflected about my mission. Because of my long absence, I lost all
my contacts, was not familiar with the situation, and did not have an idea
where to start. I contemplated the situation for about ten minutes, but was
not getting very far. Suddenly my train of thoughts was interrupted by a
loud ringing of the doorbell. I answered the door and recognized Thomas, a
younger psychiatrist colleague of mine who in the old days used to be my
close friend. Before my departure to the United States, we shared some
explorations of nonordinary states by sitting for each other in our
psychedelic sessions. He had heard from an aquaintance of his about my
visit to Prague and came to welcome me.

I found out to my astonishment that just as Thomas was leaving his

apartment, his home telephone rang. It was Ivan Havel, a prominent
researcher in artificial intelligence and the brother of the Czech president
Václav Havel. He and Thomas went to the same school and remained close
friends ever since. It turned out that Ivan Havel was also the head of a
group of progressive scientists who during the Communist era had secret
underground meetings exploring the new paradigm and transpersonal
psychology.

This group had heard about my work in the lecture of a friend of mine, a
Soviet dissident scientist, Vasily Nalimov. Ivan Havel knew that Thomas
and I were friends and called him to mediate contact between me and the
group. Because of this peculiar set of coincidences, it took me only ten
minutes to get access to the ideal support for the ITA conference—a group
of highly competent professionals vitally interested in the subject and the
head of the state, who happened to be a deeply spiritually oriented
statesman. The conference that was held in 1993 under the aegis of Václav
Havel and was very successful.

Probably the most famous case of coincidence is an amusing story about a

certain Monsieur Deschamps and a special kind of plum pudding told by
the French astronomer Flammarion and quoted by Jung. As a boy,
Deschamps was given a piece of this rare pudding by a Monsieur de
Fontgibu. For ten years that followed, he had no opportunity to taste this
delicacy until he took a trip to Paris. There he saw the same pudding on the
menu of a Paris restaurant and asked the waiter for a serving. However, it
turned out that the last piece of the pudding was already ordered—by
Monsieur de Fontgibu, who just happened to be in the same restaurant at
that moment. Many years later, Monsieur Deschamps was invited to a party
where this pudding was served as a special rarity. While he was eating it, he
remarked that the only thing lacking was Monsieur de Fontgibu. At that
moment the door opened and an old man walked in looking very confused.
It was Monsieur de Fontgibu, who burst in on the party by mistake because
he had been given a wrong address for the place he was supposed to go.

The existence of such extraordinary coincidences is difficult to reconcile

with the understanding of the universe developed by materialistic science. It
is easier to imagine that these occurrences have some deeper meaning and
that they are playful creations of cosmic intelligence. This explanation is
particularly plausible when they contain an element of humor, which is
often the case. I will use here as an illustration a true story from the life of
the American astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon.
The astronomical improbability of something like this happening by chance
combined with the exquisite humor of the story makes this certainly one of
the most unique “coincidences” of all time.

Descending from the lunar module, just before his foot touched the surface
of the moon, Neil Armstrong said his famous words: “One small step for
man; one giant step for mankind.” It is much less known that, as he was
climbing back from the moon surface into the lunar module, he muttered
another sentence, “Good luck Mr. Gorski.” After his return to earth, curious
reporters inquired what this sentence meant, but Armstrong refused to
reveal it. Some thought it might have been addressed to a Soviet
cosmonaut, but there was no one of that name. After frustrating efforts of
the journalists, the entire affair was forgotten.

Last year, at a party in Florida, someone brought it up again. This time, Neil
Armstrong felt free to disclose the meaning of the sentence since, in the
meantime, Mr. Gorski and his wife had died. When Neil was a boy, the
Gorskis were their next-door neighbors. One day, Neil was playing ball in
his backyard with his friends. At one point, the ball landed in the Gorskis’
garden under the open window of their bedroom and Neil was appointed to
retrieve it. The Gorskis were in the middle of a heated argument. As Neil
was picking up the ball, he heard Mrs. Gorski screaming: “Oral sex? You
want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex the day the kid next door walks on the
moon!”

Although coincidences of this kind are extremely interesting in and of

themselves, the work of C. G. Jung added another fascinating dimension to
this challenging phenomenon. The situations discussed above involved
highly implausible concatenations of events in the world of matter. Jung
observed and described numerous instances of astonishing coincidences in
which various events in consensus reality were meaningfully linked to
intrapsychic experiences, such as dreams or visions. He coined for this type
of coincidence the term synchronicity.

In his famous work, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung

(1960) defined synchronicity as “a simultaneous occurrence of a psychic
state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels
to the momentary subjective state.” Situations of this kind show that our
psyche can enter into playful interaction with what appears to be the world
of matter. The fact that this can happen blurs the boundaries between
subjective and objective reality.

Among the many instances of synchronicity in Jung’s own life, one is

particularly famous; it occurred during a therapy session with one of his
clients. This patient was very resistant to treatment and to the notion of
transpersonal realities. Up to the time of this particular event, little or no
progress had been made. She had a dream in which she was given a golden
scarab. During the analysis of this dream Jung heard a sound of something
hitting the window. He went to check what happened and found a shiny
rose-chafer beetle on the windowsill trying to get inside. It was a very rare
specimen, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that can be found in that
latitude. Nothing like that had ever happened to Jung before. He opened the
window, brought the beetle inside, and showed it to the client. This amazing
synchronicity had a profound impact on this patient and became an
important turning point in her therapy.

Synchronicities and Inner Exploration

Synchronistic events are particularly frequent in the lives of people who
experience holotropic states of consciousness in their meditation,
psychedelic sessions, experiential psychotherapy, or spontaneous
psychospiritual crises. Transpersonal and perinatal experiences are often
associated with extraordinary coincidences. For example, when in our inner
exploration we are approaching the experience of the ego death, dangerous
situations and accidents can suddenly accumulate in our life. I am not
talking here only about events in which we ourselves are in some way
instrumental, but about those that are caused by other people or by
independent external factors. When we face the ego death and experience
rebirth in our inner process, such situations tend to clear up as magically as
they developed. It seems that we are given the alternative of inner
psychological death versus literal physical damage or destruction.

Similarly, when we have a powerful experience of a shamanic type that

involves an animal spirit guide, this animal can suddenly keep appearing in
in our life in various forms with a frequency that is beyond any reasonable
probability. In one of our six-day training modules, a participating
psychologist experienced in her holotropic breathwork session a powerful
shamanic sequence in which an owl played an important role as her power
animal and spirit guide. That same day, she returned from a walk in the
forest with remnants of an owl. When she was driving home after the
module had ended, she noticed by the side of the road a large wounded bird.
She stopped the car and came closer; it was a large owl with a broken wing.
The owl allowed her to pick him up and take him to the car without
showing any signs of resistance. She took care of the bird until he was able
to fly and return to his natural environment.

At the time of inner confrontation with the archetypal images of the

Animus, Anima, Wise Old Man, or Terrible Mother, ideal examples of these
figures tend to emerge in physical form in our everyday life. It also has
been the experience of many people that when they become involved in a
project inspired from the transpersonal realms of the psyche, remarkable
synchronicities tend to occur and make their work surprisingly easy. My
experience with the ITA conference in Prague described earlier would
certainly fit into this category.

When we are involved in a systematic inner quest that includes work with
holotropic states, we can expect with reasonable certainty that, sooner or
later, we will encounter extraordinary meaningful synchronicities.
Sometimes, we will notice only occasional individual coincidences, other
times, we might be flooded by entire chains of them. According to their
content, they can be very uplifting or oppressive and terrifying. In either
case, they can lead to serious problems in everyday life if they are
convincing and cumulative.

Traditional psychiatry does not distinguish between true synchronicities and

psychotic misinterpretation of the world. Since the materialistic worldview
is strictly deterministic and does not accept the possibility of “meaningful
coincidences,” any intimation of extraordinary synchronicities in the
client’s narrative will be automatically interpreted as delusions of reference,
a symptom of serious mental disease. However, there cannot be any doubt
about the existence of genuine synchronicities, where any person who has
access to the facts has to admit that the coincidences involved are beyond
any reasonable statistical probabilities.

Consciousness Research and Modern Physics

Jung was well aware of the fact that the phenomenon of synchronicity was
incompatible with traditional thinking in science. Because of the deeply
ingrained belief in causality as a central law of nature, he hesitated for
many years before he published his observations of events that refused to fit
into this mold. He postponed publication of his work on this subject until he
and others had collected literally hundreds of convincing examples of
synchronicity, making him absolutely sure that he had something valid to
report.

Struggling with this phenomenon, Jung became very interested in the

developments in quantum-relativistic physics and in the alternative
worldview that it was bringing. He had many intellectual exchanges with
Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, and became
familiar with the revolutionary concepts in this field. Jung was aware of the
fact that his own observations appeared much more plausible and
acceptable in the context of the new emerging image of reality. Additional
support for Jung’s ideas came from no less than Albert Einstein, who,
during a personal visit, encouraged Jung to pursue his idea of synchronicity
because it was fully compatible with the new thinking in physics (Jung
1973).
Since the above discussion about the arbitrary and ambiguous nature of
time and space might seem implausible or even impossible to somebody
who has not had transpersonal experiences, it seems appropriate to mention
some astonishing alternatives to our usual understanding of reality that have
emerged in the course of this century in modern physics. The fantastic and
seemingly absurd insights from holotropic states pale considerably when we
compare them with the daring speculations about the microworld and
macroworld entertained by many prominent representatives of modern
physics. The most outrageous theories concerning the nature of reality that
have been formulated by quantum physicists, astrophysicists, and
cosmologists are taken seriously when they can be backed by mathematical
equations, while similar concepts are met with criticism and even ridicule if
their source is consciousness research or transpersonal psychology.

According to a leading cosmogenetic theory, there was a situation about 15

billion years ago when time and space did not exist. They were created
together with matter during the Big Bang, when the universe was born in a
cataclysmic explosion of unimaginable proportions from a dimensionless
point, or singularity. And, conversely, billions of years from now time and
space might again cease to exist when the universe collapses into itself. A
similar process is already underway in our cosmos in those places where
dying giant stars rapidly contract, knock themselves out of existence, and
create what the physicists call “black holes.” Inside the black holes, beyond
a certain boundary that the physicists refer to as the “event horizon,” time,
space, and physical laws as we know them do not any more exist.

At the beginning of this century, in a conceptual breakthrough of

unprecedented proportions, Albert Einstein replaced Newton’s three-
dimensional space and linear time by a four-dimensional space-time
continuum. In Einstein’s universe, it is possible to travel in space-time in a
way we ordinarily travel in space. Einstein’s famous equation suggests that
time slows down proportionately to the velocity of a moving system and
stops when the velocity reaches the speed of light. In a system moving
faster than light, time would actually run backwards. Californian physicist
Richard Feynman received a Nobel Prize for his discovery that a particle
moving forward in time is identical with its antiparticle moving backward
in time.
Theoretical physicists John Wheeler, Hugh Everett, and Neil Graham
became known for their “many worlds hypothesis,” according to which the
universe splits every instant into an infinite number of universes. In his
bestselling book, Kip S. Thorne (1994), professor of theoretical physics at
the California Institute of Technology, seriously discussed the possibility of
using in the future “wormholes” for instant transport to various locations in
the universe that lie many light years away and even for travel back in time.
According to David Bohm (1980), a longtime co-worker of Albert Einstein,
the world as we know it represents only one aspect of reality, its “explicate”
or “unfolded order.” Its generating matrix is the “implicate order,” an
ordinarily hidden region in which both space and time are enfolded.

I have included this brief excursion into the world of modern physics
because the imaginative and creative thinking in this discipline forms such a
striking contrast to the narrow-minded approach of academic psychiatrists
and psychologists to the human psyche and consciousness. It is certainly
encouraging to see to what extent physicists have been able to overcome
many deeply ingrained preconceptions in their search for the understanding
of the world of matter. Perhaps the startling speculations of contemporary
physics will help us approach with an open mind the extraordinary and
challenging findings of modern consciousness research.

The Cosmic Dance

We can now try to summarize the insights from holotropic states describing
existence as a fantastic experiential adventure of Absolute Consciousness—
an endless cosmic dance, exquisite play, or divine drama. In producing it,
the creative principle generates from itself and within itself a countless
number of individual images, split units of consciousness, that assume
various degrees of relative autonomy and independence. Each of them
represents an opportunity for a unique experience, an experiment in
consciousness. With the passion of an explorer, scientist, and artist, the
creative principle experiments with all the conceivable experiences in their
endless variations and combinations.

In this divine play, Absolute Consciousness finds the possibility to express

its inner richness, abundance, and immense creativity. Through its creations
it experiences myriads of individual roles, encounters, intricate dramas, and
adventures on all imaginable levels. This divine play of plays ranges from
galaxies, suns, orbiting planets, and moons through plants, animals, and
humans to nuclear particles, atoms, and molecules. Additional dramas
unfold in the archetypal realms and other dimensions of existence that are
not available to our perception in our everyday state of consciousness.

In endless cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction Absolute

Consciousness overcomes the feelings of monotony and transcendental
boredom. The temporary negation and loss of its pristine state alternates
with episodes of its rediscovery and reclaiming. The periods that are full of
agony, anguish, and despair are followed by episodes of bliss and ecstatic
rapture. When the original undifferentiated consciousness is regained after
it was temporarily lost, it is experienced as exciting, surprising, fresh, and
new. The existence of agony gives a new dimension to the experience of
ecstasy, the knowledge of darkness enhances the appreciation of light, and
the extent of enlightenment is directly proportionate to the depth of
previous ignorance. In addition, with each excursion into phenomenal
worlds followed by return, the Universal Mind is enriched by the
experiences of the different roles involved. By having concretized more of
its inner potential, it has augmented and deepened its self-knowledge.

For this understanding of the cosmic process it is necessary to assume that

the Universal Mind consciously experiences all aspects of creation, both as
objects of observation and as subjective states. It can thus explore not only
the entire spectrum of specifically human perceptions, emotions, thoughts,
and sensations, but also the states of consciousness of all the other life
forms of the Darwinian evolutionary tree. On the level of cellular
consciousness, it can experience the excitement of the sperm race and the
fusion of the sperm with the egg during conception, as well as the activity
of the liver cells or neurons in the brain.

Transcending the limits of the animal kingdom and expanding into the
botanical world, Absolute Consciousness can become a giant sequoia tree,
experience itself as a carnivorous plant catching and digesting a fly, or
participate in the photosynthesis in the leaves and germination of seeds.
Similarly, the phenomena in the inorganic world, from interatomic bonds
through earthquakes and explosions of atomic bombs to quasars and pulsars
provide interesting experiential possibilities. And since in its deepest nature
our psyche is identical with Absolute Consciousness, these experiential
possibilities are, under certain circumstances, open to all of us.

When we view reality from the perspective of the Universal Mind, all the
usually experienced polarities are transcended. This applies to such
categories as spirit-matter, stability-motion, good-evil, male-female, beauty-
ugliness, or agony-ecstasy. In the last analysis, there is no absolute
difference between subject and object, observer and the observed,
experiencer and the experienced, creator and creation. All the roles in the
cosmic drama have ultimately only one protagonist, Absolute
Consciousness. This is the single most important truth about existence
revealed in the ancient Indian Upanishads. In modern times, it found a
beautiful artistic expression in the poem entitled “Please Call Me by My
True Names” by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn:

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply; I arrive in every second

to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on

the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when the springs comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake, who, approaching
in silence, feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the Politburo

with plenty of power in my hands,
And I am the the man
who has to pay his debt of blood
to my people dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes

flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full
it fills all four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

So I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
So I can see that my pain and my joy are one.

Please call me by my true names

So I can wake up and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.
6
The Problem of Good and Evil
Consequently: he who wants to have
Right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
Does not understand the principles
Of heaven and earth.
He does not know how
Things hang together.
—Chuang-tzu, Great and Small

Ethical Issues in Self-Exploration

One of the most important issues that keeps emerging in holotropic states of
consciousness in many different forms and on various levels is the problem
of ethics. At the time when our inner experiences focus on biographical
issues, the ethical questions usually take the form of a strong need to
scrutinize our life from childhood up to the present time and evaluate it
from the moral point of view. This tends to be intimately linked with
questions concerning self-image and self-esteem. As we review our life
history, we might feel an urgent need to examine whether our personality
and behavior measure up to moral standards—our own, our family’s, or our
society’s. The criteria here are usually quite relative and idiosyncratic since
they necessarily involve a strong personal, familial, and cultural bias. We
essentially judge our behavior in terms of the values that have been
imposed on us from the outside.

There exists another form of self-judgment in which we evaluate our

character and behavior not by the ordinary everyday criteria, but against the
background of the universal law and the cosmic order. Experiences of this
kind occur in holotropic states of various kinds, but are particularly frequent
as part of the life review in near-death situations. Many people who have
come close to death talk about their encounters with a Being of Light and
describe that in its presence they subjected their lives to merciless
reckoning. This strong propensity of the human psyche for moral self-
evaluation is reflected in scenes of divine judgment in eschatological
mythologies of many different cultures.

As our process of self-exploration deepens, we can discover within

ourselves highly problematic emotions and impulses that we were
previously completely unaware of—dark and destructive aspects of our
unconscious psyche that C. G. Jung referred to as the Shadow. This
discovery can be very frightening and disturbing. Some of these dark
elements represent our reactions to painful aspects of our history,
particularly traumas in infancy and childhood. In addition, powerful
destructive potential seems to be associated with the perinatal level of our
psyche, the domain of the unconscious that is related to the trauma of birth.
The hours of painful and life-threatening experiences associated with the
passage through the birth canal naturally provoke a corresponding violent
response in the fetus. This results in a repository of aggressive tendencies
that we harbor in our unconscious for the rest of our life, unless we make
special effort to confront them and transform them in some variety of
experiential self-exploration.

In view of these disclosures, it becomes clear that the menacing doubles in

such works of art as R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Edgar Allan Poe’s
“William Wilson” do not represent fictitious literary characters, but the
shadow aspects of an average human personality. Individuals who have
been able to look deep into their psyches often describe that they discovered
within themselves destructive potential that matches that of evil individuals
in the category of Genghis Khan, Hitler, or Stalin. In view of such
shattering insights, it is common to experience agonizing misgivings about
our own nature and encounter great difficulties in accepting it.

When the experiential self-exploration moves to the transpersonal level,

serious ethical questions are typically raised about humanity as a whole,
about the entire species of Homo sapiens. Transpersonal experiences often
portray dramatic historical scenes or even offer a comprehensive panoramic
review of history. Such sequences bring powerful evidence that unbridled
violence and insatiable greed have always been extremely powerful driving
forces in human life. This brings the question about the nature of human
beings and the proportion of good and evil in the human species.

Are humans at the core of their being just “naked apes” and is violence
wired into the hardware of the human brain? And how do we explain the
aspect of human behavior that psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1973) called
“malignant aggression”—viciousness and destructivity that surpasses
anything known in the animal kingdom? How do we account for the
senseless slaughter in countless wars, for the mass murders of the
Inquisition, for the Holocaust, for Stalin’s Gulag archipelago, for the
massacres in Yugoslavia or Rwanda? It would certainly be difficult to find
parallels for these behaviors in any of the animal species!

The present global crisis certainly does not offer a very uplifting and
encouraging picture of contemporary humanity. Violence in the form of
wars, riots, terrorism, torture, and crime seems to be escalating and the
modern weapons have reached apocalyptic efficacy. Billions of dollars are
wasted in the insanity of arms race worldwide, while millions of people live
in poverty and starvation, or die of diseases for which there are known and
inexpensive cures. Several doomsday scenarios, all of them human-made,
threaten to destroy our species and with it all life on the planet. To the
extent to which Homo sapiens is the crown of natural evolution, as we like
to believe, is not only humanity, but also the very phenomenon of life,
flawed in some fundamental way? In holotropic states, these questions can
emerge with agonizing urgency and intensity.

Relativity of the Criteria for Good and Evil

The insights into ethical matters and answers to various moral problems are
usually affected considerably as the process of deep self-exploration moves
from one level of consciousness to another and we gain access to
information that was not available to us before. To some extent, our ethical
judgment about everyday matters can change quite drastically even without
insights from higher levels of consciousness, simply by acquiring new
information. With the benefit of hindsight, seeming blessings can later
appear to be major disasters. What at one time was seen as a beneficial
action can often take on a very ominous form as we reach deeper and more
complete understanding of what is involved.

We can use here as an example the discovery of the insecticide DDT shortly
after World War II. Initially, DDT was highly praised as an effective
weapon against diseases transmitted by insects. Thousands of tons of this
material were dumped into the swamps in various parts of the world in an
effort to eradicate yellow fever and malaria, as well as used on a large scale
to combat other diseases transmitted by insects. From a limited perspective,
this seemed to be a very worthy and commendable project. DDT was
considered such a positive contribution to humanity that in 1948 it brought
its inventor Paul Müller a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine.
However, what was once considered the epidemiologists’ dream turned out
to be an ecological nightmare.

It was discovered that DDT was not biodegradable and the entire amount of
it that had ever been produced was here to stay. In addition, because of its
special affinity to fats, it showed increasing concentration as it moved up
the food chain through plankton, small fish, large fish, birds, and mammals.
In birds it often reached a concentration that interfered with the capacity to
create viable eggshells. Now we know that DDT is responsible for the
extinction of pelicans, cormorants, peregrines, eagles, and falcons in some
locations. In its geographical spread, it has reached the Arctic and was
detected in the fat of the penguins. It even found its way to human
mammary glands and into mothers’ milk. Although it was taken from the
market many years ago, it was recently implicated as a contributing factor
in human breast cancer.

The problem of relativity of good and evil was addressed in an artistic way
in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Devil and the Good Lord (Sartre 1960). The
chief protagonist, Goetz, is a vicious and merciless military leader who in
his unbridled ambition commits many crimes and evil deeds. When he sees
the horrors of the pestilence that erupts in the besieged town occupied by
his army, he is overwhelmed by fear of death and promises God to change
his behavior if He saves his life.

At that moment, a monk miraculously appears and helps him to escape from
the town through a secret underground passage. Goetz keeps his promise
and begins to lead a life committed to unswerving pursuit of good.
However, in its consequences, his new way of life causes more evil than his
previous merciless, evil conquests. This play was clearly Sartre’s comment
on the history of Christianity that is a prime example as to how merciless
enforcement of the message of love can result in evil actions and cause
suffering of unimaginable proportions.

The issue of ethics is further confounded by the differences in the moral

codes from culture to culture. While certain human groups appreciate and
cultivate the human body or even see it as sacred, others believe that
anything related to flesh and physiological functions is a priori corrupt and
evil. Some feel casual and natural about nudity, others require that women
cover their entire body including parts of their face. In some cultural
contexts, adultery was punishable by death, while, according to an old
Eskimo custom, the host was expected to offer his wife in the spirit of
hospitality to all male visitors of their home. Both polygamy and polyandry
have been practiced in human cultural history as acceptable social
alternatives. A tribe in New Caledonia used to kill fraternal twins, if one of
them was male and the other female, because they committed incest in the
womb. By comparison, in ancient Egypt and Peru, the law required that in
the royal families the brother married his sister.

In Japan, suicide used to be not only recommended, but practically required

in certain situations that were seen as dishonoring. In China and other
places, when the ruler died, his wives and servants were killed and buried
along with him. According to the Indian custom of sati, the widow was
expected to follow her dead husband into the flames of the funeral pyre.
Together with female infanticide, sati was practiced in India long after it
had been outlawed by the British in the nineteenth century. Ritual human
sacrifice was performed in many human groups and cannibalism was seen
as an acceptable practice by some highly cultured groups, such as the
Aztecs and the Maori. From a cross-cultural and transpersonal perspective,
the rigid observance of customs and rules governing various
psychobiological and social practices thus can be seen as a deliberate
experiment of cosmic consciousness in which all possible experiential
variations have been systematically explored.
Evil as an Intrinsic Part of Creation
One of the most difficult ethical challenges that emerges in holotropic states
is to accept the fact that aggression is inextricably woven into the natural
order and that it is not possible to be alive without this being at the expense
of another life form. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch microbiologist
and the inventor of the microscope, summed it up in one sentence: “Life
lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will.” The English poet, Alfred Lord
Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw.” Writing about the
Darwinian worldview, biologist George Williams (1966) put it even
stronger: “Mother Nature is a wicked old witch.” And Marquis de Sade,
who gave sadism its name, used references to this cruelty of nature as a
justification for his own behavior.

Even the most conscientious way of conducting our lives cannot help us to
escape this dilemma. Alan Watts (1969) in his article “Murder in the
Kitchen” discussed from this point of view the problem of meat-eating
versus vegetarianism. The fact that “rabbits scream louder than carrots” did
not seem to him a good enough reason to choose the latter. Joseph
Campbell expressed the same idea in his tongue-in-cheek definition of a
vegetarian as “a person who is not sensitive enough to hear a tomato
scream.” Since life has to feed on life, whether it is of animal or vegetable
nature, Watts recommended as a solution an approach found in many native
cultures, both in communities of hunters/gatherers and agricultural
societies. These groups use rituals that express gratitude for the eaten one
and humble acceptance of their own participation in the food chain in both
roles.

Ethical issues and decisions become particularly complex when the relevant
insights and information come from levels of consciousness that are not
ordinarily easily available, particularly those that include the spiritual
dimension. Introducing spiritual criteria into situations of everyday life can
become paralyzing if it occurs in an extreme form and is not tempered by
practical considerations.

We can mention here as an example an episode from the life of the famous
German physician, musician, philanthropist, and philosopher Albert
Schweitzer. One day, he was treating in his jungle hospital in Lambarene an
African native suffering from a serious septic condition. While he was
standing by his body with a syringe filled with an antibiotic, he suddenly
had to ask himself what gave him the right to destroy millions of lives of
micro-organisms to save one human life. He was questioning by what
criteria we assume the right to see human life as superior to that of all the
other species.

Joseph Campbell was once asked how we can reconcile our spiritual
worldview with the need to make practical decisions in everyday life,
including killing to save life. He described as an example the situation of a
small child who is in imminent danger of being bitten by a snake. When we
intervene under these circumstances, killing the snake does not mean saying
“No” to the snake as an integral part of the universal scheme, as a
meaningful element of the cosmic order. It is not denying the right of the
snake to exist as part of creation and does not necessarily mean that we do
not appreciate its existence. This intervention is our reaction to a specific
local situation, not a gesture of ultimate cosmic relevance.

Divine Roots of Evil

As we discover the existence of the world of archetypes and realize that its
dynamics is instrumental in shaping the events in the material world, the
focus of ethical considerations shifts from the personal and cultural levels to
the transpersonal domain. The critical issue here is the fundamental
dichotomy in the archetypal realm. We become aware of the fact that the
pantheon of archetypal beings includes both benefic and malefic principles
and forces or, using the terminology of pre-industrial cultures, blissful and
wrathful deities. From this perspective, it is they who are responsible for the
events in the material world. However, sooner or later it becomes clear that
these entities themselves are not autonomous. They are creations or
manifestations of a yet higher principle that transcends them and governs
them. At this point, the moral inquiry finds a new focus; it is directed to the
creative principle itself.

This naturally gives rise to an entirely new series of questions. Is there one
creative source that transcends polarities and is responsible for both good
and evil? Or is the universe a battlefield where two cosmic forces, one
essentially good and the other evil, engage in a universal combat, in the way
it has been portrayed in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, and Christianity?
If so, which of these two principles is more powerful and will ultimately
prevail? If God is good and just, omniscient and omnipotent, as we are told
by mainstream Christianity, how do we explain the amount of evil in the
world? How is it possible that millions of children are killed in a bestial
way or die of starvation, cancer, and infectious diseases long before they
could possibly commit any sins? The usual explanation offered by Christian
theology, suggesting that God punishes these individuals in advance
because He foresees that they would grow up into sinners, certainly is not
very convincing.

In many religions, the concept of karma and reincarnation helps to explain

how and why something like this can happen. It also accounts for the
horrendous inequities among adults and the differences in their destinies.
As we will explore later in this book, similar concepts existed also in early
Christianity, particularly in its Gnostic form. Gnostic Christianity was
condemned as a heresy by the ecclesiastical Church in the second century
and, in the fourth century, was severely persecuted with the assistance of
Emperor Constantine. Ideas concerning reincarnation of the same soul were
banned from Christianity in A.D. 553 at a special congress in
Constantinople. This left Christianity with the formidable problem of an
omnipotent, just, and benevolent Creator of a world that is full of inequity
and evil. The belief in reincarnation can provide answers to some most
immediate questions concerning the dark side of existence, but does not
address the problem of the origin of the karmic chain of causes and effects.

In holotropic states of consciousness, fundamental ethical questions

concerning the nature and origin of evil, the reason for its existence, and its
role in the fabric of creation emerge spontaneously and with great urgency.
The problem of the morality of the creative principle that is directly
responsible for all the suffering and horrors of existence, or that permits and
tolerates evil, is truly a formidable one. The ability to accept creation as it
is, including its shadow side and one’s own role in it, is one of the most
challenging tasks we can encounter during an in-depth philosophical and
spiritual quest. It is, therefore, interesting to review how these problems
appear to those individuals who encounter them on their inner journey.

The experiences of identification with Absolute Consciousness or with the

Void involve transcendence of all polarities, including the opposites of good
and evil. They contain the entire spectrum of creation from the most beatific
to the most diabolical aspects, but in an unmanifested form, as a pure
potential. Since ethical considerations are applicable only to the world of
manifest phenomena, which involves polarities, the problem of good and
evil is intimately connected with the process of cosmic creation. For the
purpose of our discussion, it is important to realize that ethical values and
norms are themselves parts of creation and thus do not have an absolute
independent existence of their own. In the ancient Indian sacred text, the
Katha Upanishad, we can read:

As the sun, the eye of the whole world,

Is not sullied by the external faults of the eyes,
So the one Inner Soul of all things
Is not sullied by the evil in the world, being
external to it.

The Role of Evil in the Universal Scheme

Final understanding and philosophical acceptance of evil always seems to
involve the recognition that it has an important or even necessary role in the
cosmic process. For example, deep experiential insights into ultimate
realities that become available in holotropic states might reveal that evil is
an essential element in the universal drama. Since cosmic creation is creatio
ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, it has to be symmetrical. Everything that
emerges into existence has to be counterbalanced by its opposite. From this
perspective, the existence of polarities of all kinds is an absolutely
indispensable prerequisite for the creation of the phenomenal worlds. This
fact had its parallel in the speculations of some modern physicists about
matter and antimatter, suggesting that in the very first moments of the
universe, particles and antiparticles were present in equal numbers.
We have seen earlier that one of the “motives” for creation seems to be the
“need” of the creative principle to get to know itself, so that “God can see
God” or “Face can behold Face.” To the extent to which the divine creates
to explore its own inner potential, not expressing the full range of this
potential would mean incomplete self-knowledge. And if Absolute
Consciousness is also the ultimate Artist, Experimenter, and Explorer, it
would compromise the richness of the creation to leave out some significant
options. Artists do not limit their topics to those that are beautiful, ethical,
and uplifting. They portray any aspects of life that can render interesting
images or promise intriguing stories.

The existence of the shadow side of creation enhances its light aspects by
providing contrast and gives extraordinary richness and depth to the
universal drama. The conflict between good and evil in all the domains and
on all the levels of existence is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for
fascinating stories. A disciple once asked Sri Ramakrishna, the great Indian
visionary, saint, and spiritual teacher: “Swamiji, why is evil in the world?”
After a short deliberation, Ramakrishna replied succinctly: “To thicken the
plot.” This answer might appear cynical in view of the nature and scope of
suffering in the world, seen in a concrete form of millions of children dying
of starvation or various diseases, the insanity of wars throughout history,
countless sacrificed and tortured victims, and the desolation of natural
disasters. However, a mental experiment can help us to get a different
perspective.

Let us for a moment imagine that we can eliminate from the universal
scheme anything that is generally considered bad or evil, all the elements
that we feel should not be part of life. Initially, it might seem that this would
create an ideal world, a true paradise on earth. However, as we proceed, we
see that the situation is much more complex. Suppose we start with the
elimination of diseases, something that certainly belongs to the dark side of
existence, and imagine that they have never existed. We soon discover that
this is not an isolated intervention that selectively eradicates an evil aspect
of the world. This interference has a profound effect on many positive
aspects of life and creation that we hold in great esteem.
Together with the diseases we eliminate the entire history of medicine—
medical research and the knowledge it imparts, the discovery of the causes
of dangerous illnesses, as well as miraculous cures for them, such as
vitamins, antibiotics, and hormones. There are no more miracles of modern
medicine—life-saving operations, organ transplants, and genetic
engineering. We lose all the great pioneers of science, like Virchow,
Semmelweiss, and Pasteur, the heroes who dedicated their entire lives to a
passionate search for answers to medical problems. There is also no need
for the love and compassion of all those who take care of ailing people,
from physicians and nurses to a variety of good Samaritans. We lose
Mother Teresa together with the reason to award her a Nobel Prize. Here go
the shamans and indigenous healers with their colorful rituals and
knowledge of medicinal herbs, the miracles in Lourdes, and the Filipino
psychic surgeons!

Another obviously dark and evil aspect of creation is the existence of

oppressive regimes, totalitarian systems, genocide, and wars. When we
focus our cosmic sanitation efforts on this area, we eliminate a significant
part of human history. In this process, we lose all the heroic acts of freedom
fighters of all times who sacrificed their lives for just causes and for the
liberty of their countries and compatriots. There are no more triumphs of
victory over evil empires and the intoxication of newly achieved freedom.
We have to remove from the world the fortified castles of all historical
periods and countries, as well as museums documenting the ingenuity of
weapon-making, the mastery of defense, and the richness of military attires.
Naturally, the elimination of violence from the cosmic drama will have
profound reverberations in the world of art. The libraries, art museums,
music collections, and movie archives would shrink considerably when we
remove from them all the pieces of art inspired by violence and the fight
against it.

The absence of metaphysical evil would drastically reduce the need for
religion, since God without a powerful adversary would become a
guaranteed commodity that would be taken for granted. Everything related
to ritual and the spiritual life of humanity would now be missing from the
universal scheme and none of the historical events inspired by religion have
ever happened. Needless to say, we would also lose some of the best works
of art—literature, music, paintings, sculptures, and movies—inspired by the
conflict between the divine and the demonic. The world would be without
its glorious Gothic cathedrals, Moslem mosques, synagogues, and Hindu
and Buddhist temples, as well as other architectural gems inspired by
religion.

If we continued further with this process of purging the universal shadow,

creation would lose its immense depth and richness and we would
eventually end up with a very colorless and uninteresting world. If this kind
of reality were portrayed in a Hollywood movie, we probably would not
find it worth seeing and the movie theaters would be empty. A widely used
manual for successful screenplay writing stresses the importance of tension,
conflict, and drama as necessary prerequisites for a successful movie. It
actually specifically warns that portraying “life in a happy village” would
guarantee a certain flop and box office disaster.

The filmmakers, who have a free choice to select any themes for their
movies, do not usually choose sweet uneventful stories with a happy
ending. They typically include suspense, danger, difficulties, serious
emotional conflicts, sex, violence, and evil. And, of course, the creators of
movies themselves are significantly influenced by the taste and demands of
the audiences. To the extent to which God created humans according to
his/her image, as we are told, it should not be surprising that cosmic
creation follows the same principles that govern creative activity and
entertainment in our world.

In the process of deep experiential self-exploration, we discover that

creation is dichotomized on all the levels where we encounter forms and
separate phenomena. Absolute Consciousness and the Void exist beyond the
world of phenomena and thus transcend all polarities. Good and Evil as
separate entities come into existence and manifest in the initial stages of
creation when the dark and the light aspect of the Divine emerge from the
undifferentiated matrix of the Void and Absolute Consciousness. While
these two aspects of existence represent polar opposites and are antagonistic
toward each other, they are both necessary elements in creation. In a
complex and intricate interplay, they generate the countless characters and
events on many different levels and in many dimensions of reality that
constitute the cosmic drama.

Two Faces of God

In holotropic states, we can directly experience not only the unified creative
principle, as I described earlier, but also separately either its benevolent or
its malevolent form as two discrete entities. When we encounter the
benevolent form of God, we selectively tune into the positive aspects of
creation. At this point, we are not aware of the shadow side of existence and
we see the cosmic play in its entirety as being essentially radiant and
ecstatic. Evil appears to be ephemeral or entirely absent from the universal
scheme of things.

The best approximation to the understanding of the nature of this

experience is to describe it in terms of the ancient Indian concept of
Sacchidananda. This composite Sanskrit word consists of three separate
roots: sat meaning existence or being; chit, which translates as awareness;
and ananda, which signifies bliss. All we can say about this experience is
that we are identified with a radiant, boundless, and dimensionless
principle, or state of being, that seems to be endowed with infinite
existence, has infinite awareness or wisdom, and experiences infinite bliss.
It also possesses an infinite capacity to create forms and experiential worlds
out of itself.

This experience of Sacchidananda, or Existence-Awareness-Bliss, has its

counterpart—a cosmic principle that epitomizes all the negative potential of
the Divine. It represents a negative mirror image or an exact polar opposite
of the basic attributes of Sacchidananda. We can think here of the
introductory scene from Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles
introduces himself to Faust: “I am the spirit that negates” (“Ich bin der
Geist der stets verneint”). When we look at the phenomena that we consider
bad or evil, we will see that they fall into three distinct categories, each of
which represents the negation of one of the basic characteristics or
attributes of Sacchidananda.
The first of the three basic qualities of the positive Divine is sat, or infinite
existence. The corresponding category of evil is related to the concepts and
experiences related to limited existence, termination of existence, and
nonexistence. Here belongs the impermanence that rules the phenomenal
world and the inevitable prospect of final annihilation of everything. This
includes our own demise, the death of all living organisms, and the ultimate
destruction of the earth, the solar system, and the universe. We can think
here of the dismay of Gautama Buddha, when during his rides outside of his
father’s palace he discovered the facts of disease, old age, and death. In our
own tradition, medieval Christian clergy coined many laconic phrases
reminding the population of this aspect of existence: “Dust to dust, and to
dust thou will return,” “Remember death,” “This is how passeth the glory of
the world,” or “Death is certain, its hour uncertain.”

The second important aspect of Sacchidananda is chit, or infinite

awareness, wisdom, and intelligence. The corresponding category of evil is
related to various forms and levels of limited awareness and ignorance. It
covers a wide range of phenomena from harmful consequences of lack of
knowledge, inadequate information, and misunderstanding in matters of
everyday life to self-deception and basic ignorance about the nature of
existence on a high metaphysical level (avidya). This type of ignorance was
described by the Buddha and some other spiritual teachers as one of the
important roots of suffering. The form of knowledge that can penetrate the
veil of this ignorance and lead to liberation from suffering is called in the
East prajñaparamita, or transcendental wisdom.

The third category of phenomena experienced as bad or evil includes

elements that represent negation of another major characteristic of
Sacchidananda, the element of unlimited bliss, or ananda. The experiences
belonging here and their causes reflect the dark side in the most direct,
obvious, and explicit way, because they interfere with an ecstatic experience
of existence. They involve an entire range of difficult emotions and
unpleasant physical sensations that are direct opposites of divine pleasure,
such as physical pain, anxiety, shame, sense of inadequacy, depression, and
guilt.
The evil demiurgic principle, the negative mirror image of Sacchidananda
mentioned earlier, can be experienced in a purely abstract form or as a more
or less concrete manifestation. Some people describe it as Cosmic Shadow,
an immense field of ominous energy, endowed with consciousness,
intelligence, destructive potential, and monstrous determination to cause
chaos, suffering, and disaster. Others experience it as an anthropomorphic
figure of immense proportions representing the all-pervading universal evil,
or the Dark God. The encounter with the shadow side of existence can also
take a more culture-bound form of specific deities, as exemplified by Satan,
Lucifer, Ahriman, Hades, Lilith, Moloch, Kali, or Coatlicue.

I will use here as an illustration an excerpt from the report of Jane, a thirty-
five-year-old psychologist, who experienced in her training session a
shattering confrontation with the dark side of existence that culminated in
an encounter with a horrifying personification of universal evil.

It seemed to me that I had lived my life up to this point with rosy

glasses on my eyes that prevented me from seeing the monstrosity of
existence. I saw countless images of various forms of life in nature
being attacked and devoured by others. The entire chain of life, from
the lowest organisms to the most highly developed ones, suddenly
appeared as a brutal drama in which the small and weak get eaten by
the large and strong. This dimension of nature was so striking and
overbearing that I could hardly see any other aspects, such as the
beauty of animals or ingenuity and creative intelligence of the life
force. It was a shattering illustration of the fact that the very basis of
life is violence; life cannot survive without feeding on itself. A
herbivore is just a more hidden and mitigated example of predatory
existence in this biological holocaust. The sentence “nature is
criminal” that the Marquis de Sade used to justify his own behavior
suddenly made new sense.

Other images took me on a tour of human history and provided clear

evidence that it has been dominated by violence and greed. I saw the
vicious combats of the cavemen using primitive clubs, as well as the
mass slaughter caused by increasingly sophisticated weapons. Visions
of the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan, sweeping through Asia
 senselessly killing and burning villages, were followed by the horrors
of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and the African Apartheid. And yet
other images portrayed the insatiable acquisitiveness and insanity of
our technological society that threatens to destroy all life on this
planet!

The ultimate irony and cruel joke in this dismal portrait of humanity
appeared to be the role of the world’s great religions. It was clear that
these institutions promising to mediate contact with the divine have
often actually been a channel for evil. From the history of Islam spread
by sword and spear through the Christian crusades and atrocities of the
Inquisition to more recent religiously motivated cruelties, religion has
been part of the problem rather than its solution.

Up to this point in the session, Jane had to witness a selective display of the
shadow aspects of life, both in nature and in human society, without getting
any insights concerning the causes of greed and violence. In a later phase,
the experience took her directly to what seemed to be the metaphysical
source of all evil in the world.

Suddenly the experience changed and I came face to face with the
entity responsible for all I had seen. It was the image embodying the
quintessence of timeless Evil, an incredibly ominous towering figure,
radiating unimaginable power. Although I had no concrete measure, it
seemed immense, possibly the size of entire galaxies. Although it was
generally anthropomorphic and I could roughly recognize specific part
of its body, it had no concrete form.

It was composed of rapidly changing dynamic images that flowed in

holographic interpenetration. They portrayed various forms of evil and
appeared in appropriate parts of the anatomy of this God of Evil. Thus
the belly contained hundreds of images of greed, gluttony, and disgust,
the genital area scenes of erotic perversion, rape, and sexual murder,
the arms and hands violence committed by swords, daggers, and
firearms. I felt awe and indescribable terror. The names Satan, Lucifer,
and Ahriman emerged in my mind. But these were ridiculously meek
labels for what I was experiencing.
The Separating Power of Evil
Some of the people who had experienced personal encounter with the
Cosmic Evil had some interesting insights about its nature and function in
the universal scheme of things. They saw that this principle is intricately
woven into the fabric of existence and that it permeates in increasingly
concrete forms all the levels of creation. Its various manifestations are
expressions of the energy that makes the split-off units of consciousness
feel separate from each other. It also alienates them from their cosmic
source, the undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness. It thus prevents them
from the realization of their essential identity with this source and also of
their basic unity with each other.

From this point of view, evil is intimately linked with the dynamism to
which I referred earlier as “partitioning,” “screen-work,” or “forgetting.”
Since the divine play, the cosmic drama, is unimaginable without individual
protagonists, without dictinct separate entities, the existence of evil is
absolutely essential for the creation of the world as we know it. This
understanding is in basic agreement with the notion found in some Christian
mystical scriptures according to which the fallen angel Lucifer (literally,
“Light-Bearer”), as a representative of polarities, is seen as a demiurgic
figure. He takes humanity on a fantastic journey into the world of matter.
Approaching this problem from another perspective we can say that, in the
last analysis, evil and suffering are based on a false perception of reality,
particularly the belief of sentient beings in their separate individual self.
This insight forms an essential part of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta or
Anatman (no-self).

The insight that evil is a separating force in the universe also helps to
understand certain typical experiential patterns and sequences in holotropic
states. Thus, ecstatic experiences of unification and consciousness
expansion are often preceded by shattering encounters with the forces of
darkness, in the form of evil archetypal figures, or passing through demonic
screens. This is regularly associated with extreme emotional and physical
suffering. The most salient example illustrating this connection is the
process of psychospiritual death and rebirth, in which experiences of agony,
terror, and annihilation by wrathful deities are followed by a sense of
reunion with the spiritual source. This connection seems to have found a
concrete expression in the Japanese Buddhist temples, such as the splendid
Todaiji in Nara, where one has to pass by terrifying figures of wrathful
guardians before entering the inside of the temple and facing the radiant
image of the Buddha.

One in Many, Many in One

Any attempt to apply ethical values to the process of cosmic creation has to
take into consideration an important fact. According to the insights
presented in this book, all boundaries that we ordinarily perceive in the
universe are arbitrary and ultimately illusory. The entire cosmos is in its
deepest nature a single entity of unimaginable dimensions, Absolute
Consciousness. As we saw earlier, in the beautiful poem by Thich Nhat
Hahn, all the roles in the cosmic drama have, in the last analysis, only one
protagonist. In all the situations that involve the element of evil, such as
hatred, cruelty, violence, misery, and suffering, the creative principle is
playing a complicated game with itself. The aggressor is identical with the
attacked, the dictator with the oppressed, the rapist with the raped, and the
murderer with his victim. The infected patient is not different from the
bacterial agents that invaded her and caused the disease, or from the doctor
who applies the antibiotic to stop the infection.

The following excerpt from a session of Christopher Bache, the professor of

philosophy and religion whose description of the experience of the Void I
cited earlier, is a very vivid illustration of the shattering realization of our
essential identity with the creative principle:

At the center came forward the theme of sex. At first sex emerged in
its pleasant form as mutual delight and erotic satisfaction, but soon it
changed into in its violent form, as attack, assault, injury, and hurt. The
forces of sexual assault were building in the crisscrossing fields of
humanity as well. I was facing these brutal forces, and behind my back
was a child. I was trying to protect this child from them, to hold them
back and prevent them from reaching it. The horror intensified as the
child became my precious three year old daughter. It was she and it
was all children of the world simultaneously.
 I kept trying to protect her, to hold back the attack that was pushing
through me, and yet I knew that eventually I would fail. The longer I
held the forces in check, the more powerful they became. The “I” here
was not just a personal “I” but thousands and thousands of people. The
horror was beyond anything I can describe. Glancing over my shoulder
I could feel the field of frightened innocence, but now there was
another element added to it—a strain of mystical embrace.
Superimposed upon the child was the Primal Female, the Mother
Goddess herself. She beckoned me to embrace her, and I knew
instinctively that there could be no greater sweetness than the one
found in her arms.

In holding myself back from violent sexual assault, I was also holding
myself back from the mystical embrace of the Goddess, yet I could not
bring myself to rape and kill my child no matter how sweet the
promise of redemption. The frenzy continued to build until eventually
I began to turn. Still holding back the terrible onslaught of killing, I
was now facing my victim and being torn apart by the forces of
passion on one side and protection on the other. My victim was at once
my helpless, innocent, fragile daughter and the Primal Woman inviting
me to a sexual embrace of cosmic proportions.

After a long period of agonizing battle against the horifying onslaught of

violent impulses, Chris was gradually able to surrender to them and let them
play themselves out. The resolution of this excruciating situation came
when he was able to discover that behind the separate protagonists of these
violent scenes was only one entity—himself as the creative principle.

No matter how hard I fought what was happening, I was being drawn
to unleash the fury. In horror and blind thirst I was turning to attack, to
rape, to kill, and yet I continued to fight what was happening with
every ounce of my strength. The struggle drove me to deeper and
deeper levels of intensity until suddenly something broke open, and I
came to the shattering realization that I was turning to kill and rape
myself. This breakthrough was very multidimensional and confusing.
The intensity of my struggle drove me beyond a breaking point where
I suddenly confronted the reality that I was both the raping killer and
 the victim. Experientially I knew that we were the same. In looking
into my victim’s eyes, I discovered that I was looking into my own
face. I sobbed and sobbed. “I’m doing it to myself.”

This was not a karmic inversion, a flip into a former life where victim
and victimizer changed places. Rather, it was a quantum jump to an
experiential level that dissolved all dualities into a single,
encompassing flow. The “I” I now became was not in any way
personal, but an underlying oneness that subsumed all persons. It was
collective in the sense of including all human experience, but utterly
simple and undivided. I was one. I was aggressor and victim. I was
rapist and raped. I was killer and killed. I was doing it to myself.
Through all of history, I have been doing it to myself.

The pain of human history was my pain. There were no victims.

Nothing was outside of me doing this to me. I was responsible for
everything that I was experiencing, for everything that had ever
happened. I was looking into the face of my creation. I did this. I am
doing this. I chose for all this to happen. I chose to create all these
horrible, horrible worlds.

The Forms of Emptiness and the Emptiness of

Forms
In any metaphysical discussion concerning the existence of evil, we have to
take into consideration another important factor. Careful analysis of the
nature of reality, whether experiential, scientific, or philosophical, will
reveal that the material world and all the events in it are essentially void.
The texts of various Buddhist schools offer meditational practices through
which we can discover the emptiness of all material objects and the absence
of a separate self in our own being. By following the instructions for
spiritual practice, we can reach experiential confirmation of the basic tenet
of Buddhism—that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.

This statement, which appears paradoxical or even absurd to our everyday

state of consciousness, reveals a profound truth about reality that has been
confirmed by modern science. In the first decades of this century, physicists
conducted systematic research exploring the composition of matter all the
way to a subatomic level. They discovered in this process that what they
had earlier considered to be solid matter turned out to be increasingly
empty. Eventually, anything even remotely resembling solid “stuff”
completely disappeared from the picture and was replaced by abstract
probabilistic equations.

What the Buddhists discovered experientially and modern physicists

experimentally is in essential agreement with the metaphysical speculations
of Alfred North Whitehead (1967), one of the greatest philosophers of this
century. Whitehead calls the belief in enduring existence of separate
material objects the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” According to him,
the universe is composed of countless discontinuous bursts of experiential
activity. The basic element of which the universe is made is not enduring
substance, but moment of experience, called in his terminology actual
occasion. This term applies to phenomena on all the levels of reality, from
subatomic particles to human souls.

As the above discussion suggests, none of the events from our everyday
life, and, for that matter, none of the situations that involve suffering and
evil, are ultimately real in the sense we usually think about them and
experience them. To illustrate this, I will return to the movie analogy that I
used earlier. When we are watching a movie or a television show, what we
see as separate protagonists are actually various aspects of one and the same
undivided field of light. We have the choice to interpret our perceptions as a
complex real-life drama or realize that we are witnessing a dance of
electromagnetic and acoustic waves of various frequencies that are carefully
orchestrated and synchronized for a specific effect. While an
unsophisticated person or a child might mistake the movie for reality, a
typical moviegoer is well aware of the fact that he or she is participating in
a virtual, make-believe reality.

The reason we decide to interpret the play of light and sound as a real story
and the progonists as separate entities is that we are interested in the
experience that results from such a strategy. We actually make a voluntary
choice to go to the movie theater and agree to pay the entrance fee, because
we actively seek the experiences involved. And while we decide to react to
the situation as if it were real, we are, on another level, aware that the
characters in the movie are fictional and that the protagonists are actors who
volunteered to participate. Particularly important from the point of view of
our discussion is the knowledge of the moviegoers that the persons killed in
the movie did not really die.

According to the insights decribed in this book, the human predicament

closely parallels that of the moviegoer. We made, on another level of reality,
the decision to incarnate, because we were attracted by the experiences that
material existence provides. The separate identity of the protagonists in the
cosmic drama, including our own, is an illusion and the matter of which the
universe seems to be made is essentially empty. The world in which we live
does not really exist in the form in which we perceive it. The spiritual
scriptures of the East compare our everyday experience of the world to a
dream from which we can awaken. Frithjof Schuon (1969) put it very
succinctly: “The universe is a dream woven of dreams: the self alone is
awake.”

In the cosmic drama, as in a movie or a theater play, nobody is killed or

dies, since a larger and deeper identity is assumed or resumed after a
particular role ends. In a certain sense, the protagonists and the drama do
not exist at all, or they exist and do not exist at the same time. From this
point of view, to blame the Universal Mind for the existence of evil in the
world would be equally absurd as to sentence a movie director for the
crimes or murders committed on the screen. Naturally, there is one
important difference between sentient beings and the protagonists in the
movies. Even if the beings in the material world are not what they appear to
be, the experiences of physical pain and emotional suffering associated with
their role are real. This, of course, is not the case as far as the movie actors
are concerned.

This way of looking at creation can be very disturbing, in spite of the fact
that it is based on very convincing personal experiences in holotropic states
and is also generally compatible with scientific findings about the nature of
reality. The problems become obvious as we start thinking about the
practical consequences that such a perspective has for our life and our
everyday conduct. At first sight, seeing the material world as “virtual
reality” and comparing human existence to a movie seems to trivialize life
and make light of the depth of human misery. It might appear that such a
perspective denies the seriousness of human suffering and fosters an
attitude of cynical indifference, where nothing really matters. Similarly,
accepting evil as an integral part of creation and seeing its relativity could
easily be seen as a justification for suspending any ethical constraints and
for unlimited pursuit of egotistical goals. It might also seem to sabotage any
effort to actively combat evil in the world.

However, the situation in this regard is much more complex than it might
appear at a superficial glance. First of all, practical experience shows that
the awareness of the emptiness behind all forms is not at all incompatible
with genuine appreciation and love for all creation. Transcendental
experiences leading to profound metaphysical insights into the nature of
reality actually engender reverence toward all sentient beings and
responsible engagement in the process of life. Our compassion does not
require objects that have material substance. It can just as easily be
addressed to sentient beings who are units of consciousness.

The awareness of the emptiness underlying the world of forms can help us
significantly in coping with difficult life situations. At the same time, it
does not in any way make existence less meaningful or interfere with our
ability to enjoy the beautiful and pleasant aspects of life. Deep compassion
and admiration for creation is in no way incompatible with the realization
that the material world does not exist in the form in which we experience it.
After all, we can have an intense emotional reaction to powerful works of
art and profoundly empathize with their characters! And, unlike in the
works of art, in life all the experiences of the protagonists are real!

Impact of the Holotropic Process on Ethical

Values and Behavior
Before we can fully appreciate the ethical implications that deep
transcendental insights can have for our behavior, we have to take into
consideration some additional factors. Experiential exploration that makes
such profound insights available typically reveals important biographical,
perinatal, and transpersonal sources of violence and greed in our
unconscious. Psychological work on this material leads to a significant
reduction of aggression and to an increase of tolerance. We also encounter a
large spectrum of transpersonal experiences in which we identify with
various aspects of creation. This results in deep reverence for life and
empathy with all sentient beings. The same process through which we are
discovering the emptiness of forms and the relativity of ethical values thus
also significantly reduces our proclivity to immoral and antisocial behavior
and teaches us love and compassion.

We develop a new system of values that is not based on conventional

norms, precepts, commandments, and fear of punishment, but on our
knowledge and understanding of the universal order. We realize that we are
an integral part of creation and that by hurting others we would be hurting
ourselves. In addition, deep self-exploration leads to the experiential
discovery of reincarnation and of the law of karma. This brings us
awareness of the possibility of serious experiential repercussions of harmful
behaviors, even those that escape societal retributions.

Plato was clearly aware of the profound moral implications of our beliefs
concerning the possibility of life continuing beyond the biological demise.
In Laws (Plato 1961a) he has Socrates say that disconcern for the
postmortem consequences of our deeds would be “a boon to the wicked.” In
advanced stages of spiritual development, a combination of the decrease of
aggression, decline of egocentric orientation, sense of oneness with sentient
beings, and the awareness of karma become important factors governing
our everyday conduct.

It is interesting to mention in this context C. G. Jung and the crisis he

experienced when he became aware of the relativity of all ethical norms and
values. At that point, he seriously questioned whether, from a higher
perspective, it really matters at all what behavior we choose and whether we
follow ethical precepts. After some deliberation, he finally found a
satisfying personal answer to this problem. He concluded that, since there
are no absolute criteria for morality, every ethical decision is a creative act
that reflects our present stage of consciousness development and the
information that is available to us. When these factors change, we may
retrospectively see the situation differently. However, that does not mean
that our original decision was wrong. What is important is that we did the
best we could do under the circumstances.

Although in advanced transpersonal experiences we can transcend evil, its

existence appears to be very real in our everyday life and in various other
experiential realms, particularly in the archetypal domain. In the world of
religion, we often encounter tendencies to portray evil as something that is
separate from the Divine and alien to it. Holotropic experiences lead to an
understanding that one of my clients called “transcendental realism.” It is
an attitude that accepts the fact that evil is an intrinsic part of creation and
that all realms that contain separate individuals will always have both a
light and a shadow side. Since evil is inextricably woven into the cosmic
fabric and indispensable for the existence of experiential worlds, it cannot
be defeated and eradicated. However, while we cannot eliminate evil from
the universal scheme of things, we can certainly transform ourselves and
develop radically different ways of coping with the dark side of existence.

In deep experiential work we realize that we have to experience in our life a

certain amount of physical and emotional pain and discomfort that is
intrinsic to incarnate existence in general. The First Noble Truth of the
Buddha reminds us that life means suffering (duhkha) and it specifically
refers to situations and circumstances that are responsible for our misery—
birth, old age, disease, dying, association with what we do not like,
separation from what is dear to us, and not getting that which we wish for.
In addition, each of us experiences suffering that is specific for us and
reflects our destiny and karmic past.

While we cannot avoid suffering, we can have a certain influence on its

timing and the form it takes. My observations from the work with
holotropic states indicate that when we confront the dark side of existence
in a focused and condensed form in deliberately planned sessions, we can
significantly reduce its various manifestations in our everyday life. There
are some other ways in which systematic self-exploration can help us to
cope with suffering and with the experience of the difficult aspects of
existence. After we have learned to endure the extreme intensity of the
experiences in holotropic states, our baseline and threshold for suffering
undergo profound changes and the trials and tribulations of everyday life
are much easier to bear.

We also discover that we are not body egos or what the Hindus call name
and form (namarupa). In the course of our self-exploration, we experience
radical shifts in our sense of identity. In holotropic states, we can identify
with anything from an insignificant speck of protoplasm in a vast material
universe to the totality of existence and Absolute Consciousness itself.
Whether we see ourselves as helpless victims of overwhelming cosmic
forces or the co-authors of our life scripts will naturally have a far-reaching
impact on the degree of suffering we experience in life or, conversely, on
the amount of delight and freedom we enjoy.

Evil Archetypes and the Future of Humanity

Before closing this chapter, I would like to mention some interesting
insights from holotropic states concerning the relationship between evil, the
future of humanity, and survival of life on our planet. We are all painfully
aware of the severe and dangerous global crisis that we are facing as we are
about to enter into the next millennium. We clearly cannot continue acting
as we have in the past throughout most of human history and hope to
survive. It has become imperative to find ways to curb human violence, to
dismantle weapons of mass destruction, and to secure peace in the world.
Equally important is to stop industrial pollution of the air, water, and soil
and to reorient our economy to renewable sources of energy. Another
important task is to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world and to
provide treatment for all the people suffering from curable diseases.

Many of us are deeply concerned about this situation and have a sincere
desire to avert it and to create a better world. It is obvious that the situation
in the world is critical and it is hard to imagine any easy remedial actions
that would correct it. The difficulty in finding solutions is usually attributed
to the fact that the current global crisis is extremely complex and involves
an intricate web of problems that have economic, political, ethnic, military,
psychological, and other dimensions. The solutions, if they were possible,
are seen as corrections of the deviant trends in these different areas.
In holotropic states, we discover that this problem has also a disturbing
metaphysical dimension. We become aware of the fact that what is
happening in our world is not determined solely by material causes. In the
last analysis, it is a direct reflection of the dynamics in the archetypal
domain. The forces and entities operating in this domain are strongly
polarized; the pantheon of archetypal figures includes both benevolent and
malefic deities. The archetypal principles—good, neutral, and evil—
represent an integral part of creation and indispensable elements in the
cosmic game. For this reason, it is not possible to eliminate evil from the
universal scheme of things. Half of the archetypal pantheon cannot be
simply “put out of business.”

In view of these insights, it becomes obvious that if we want to improve the

situation in the world and reduce the influence of evil elements on our
everyday affairs, we have to find less destructive and less dangerous forms
of expression for the archetypal forces responsible for them. It is imperative
to create appropriate contexts that would make it possible to honor these
archetypal forces and to offer them alternative outlets that would enhance
instead of destroy life. Occasionally, holotropic states bring interesting
ideas suggesting what these activities and institutions would look like.

The primary strategy for reducing the impact of the potentially destructive
archetypal forces in our world would be to find for them safe channels of
expression in holotropic states of consciousness. This could include
programs of systematic spiritual practice of different orientations, various
experiential forms of psychotherapy mediating access to perinatal and
transpersonal experiences, and centers offering supervised psychedelic
sessions. Of great importance would also be a return to socially sanctioned
ritual activities comparable to those that existed in all ancient and aboriginal
cultures. Modern versions of rites of passage would make it possible to
consciously experience and integrate various difficult destructive and self-
destructive energies that would otherwise have a disturbing effect on
society. Additional interesting alternatives would be dynamic new art forms
and entertainment modalities using the technology of virtual reality.

These transformative technologies could be complemented by various

outward-oriented activities serving the same purpose. Thus the powerful
and potentially destructive explosive energies that are currently expressed
in internecine wars could be partially channeled through a large scale
globally integrated space program or other similar technical projects.
Another possibility would be competitive events of various kinds, from
sports tournaments to racing events involving modern technology. Some of
the energy could also be channeled through sophisticated amusement parks,
elaborate carnivals, and pageants similar to the festivities of the ancient and
medieval royalty, aristocracy, gentry, and general population. If there is any
validity in the above insights, the task of developing these new forms
certainly represents an interesting challenge.

7
Birth, Sex, and Death: The Cosmic
Connection
Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.
—Joseph Hall

Man puts himself at once on the level of the beast if he seeks to gratify lust
alone, but he elevates his superior position when, by curbing the animal
desire, he combines with the sexual functions ideas of mortality, of the
sublime, and of the beautiful.
—Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Intimate Links between Birth, Sex, and Death

In the chapter exploring the ways to reunion with the cosmic source, I
briefly mentioned three aspects of human life that have a particularly close
connection with the transpersonal domain: birth, sex, and death. As we saw,
all three of them represent important gateways to transcendence and unique
opportunities for cosmic reunion. This is true whether our encounter with
one of these areas occurs in a symbolic way in the process of deep
experiential self-exploration or in situations of our everyday life.
Delivering women and people participating in the delivery as assistants or
observers can experience a powerful spiritual opening. This is particularly
true if birth does not occur in the dehumanized context of a hospital, but
under circumstances where it is possible to experience its full psychological
and spiritual impact. Similarly, having a close personal brush with death or
spending intimate time with dying people can be a powerful catalyst for
mystical experiences. And love-making with a highly compatible partner
can be a profoundly spiritual event and, on occasion, even initiate an
ongoing process of consciousness evolution. The close connection between
sexuality and spirituality is the basis of Eastern Tantric practices.

Besides their intimate link with spirituality, birth, sex, and death also show
a significant experiential overlap with each other. For many women, an
uncomplicated delivery under favorable conditions can be the strongest
sexual experience of their life. Conversely, a powerful sexual orgasm in
women, as well as men, can occasionally take the form of psychospiritual
rebirth. The orgasm can also be so overpowering that it can be subjectively
experienced as dying. The connection between sexual orgasm and death is
reflected in the French language that refers to it as “small death” (“la petite
mort”). And dying, particularly if it is associated with choking, can have a
strong sexual component.

Equally close is the relationship between birth and death. In advanced

stages of pregnancy, many women have dreams that contain the motifs of
death and destruction. Childbirth is a potentially life-threatening event for
the mother, as well as the child. And delivery can be associated with strong
fears of dying, even if it is not particularly difficult and does not endanger
life. The reverse is also true; the near-death experiences share certain
elements with birth, particularly the frequent sense of passing through a
tunnel or funnel and emerging into light.

In the work with holotropic states, we can get deep insights into the nature
of these experiential connections between birth, sex, and death. In the
unconscious psyche, these three crucial areas of our life are so intimately
linked and interwoven that it is impossible to experience one of them
without touching upon the other two. This comes as a surprise, because in
our everyday life we usually think about these three areas as separate and
discuss them in different contexts. Birth is something that marks the
beginning of our life and involves an infant. Death, unless it is a result of a
serious disease or accident, is associated with old age and thus with the
final stage of our life. Sexuality, in the full sense of the word, belongs to an
intermediate period of our life characterized by physical maturity.

Birth, Sex, and Death in the Perinatal Process

This conventional view of the relationship between birth, sex, and death
undergoes profound changes when our process of deep experiential self-
exploration moves beyond the level of memories from childhood and
infancy and reaches back to birth, to the perinatal domain of the psyche. We
start encountering emotions and physical sensations of extreme intensity,
often surpassing anything we previously considered humanly possible. At
this point, the experiences become a strange mixture of the themes of birth
and death. They involve a sense of a severe, life-threatening confinement
and a desperate and determined struggle to free ourselves and survive. This
intimate relationship between birth and death on the perinatal level reflects
the fact that birth is a potentially life-threatening event. The child and the
mother can actually lose their lives during this process and children might
be born severely blue from asphyxiation, or even dead and in need of
resuscitation.

The reliving of various aspects of biological birth can be very authentic and
convincing and often replays this process in photographic detail. This can
occur even in people who have no intellectual knowledge about their birth
and lack elementary obstetric information. We can, for example, discover
through direct experience that we had a breech birth, that a forceps was
used during our delivery, or that we were born with the umbilical cord
twisted around the neck. We can feel the anxiety, biological fury, physical
pain, and suffocation associated with this terrifying event and even
accurately recognize the type of anesthesia used when we were born. This is
often accompanied by various postures and movements of the head and
body that accurately recreate the mechanics of a particular type of delivery.
All these details can be confirmed if good birth records or reliable personal
witnesses are available.
The strong representation of birth and death in our psyche and the close
association between them might surprise traditional psychologists and
psychiatrists, but is actually logical and easily understandable. The delivery
brutally terminates the intrauterine existence of the fetus. He or she “dies”
as an aquatic organism and is born as an air-breathing, physiologically and
even anatomically different, form of life. And the passage through the birth
canal is itself a difficult and potentially life-threatening situation.

It is not so easy to understand, why the perinatal dynamics also regularly

includes a sexual component. And yet, when we are reliving the final stages
of birth in the role of the fetus, this is typically associated with an unusually
strong sexual arousal. The same is true for delivering women, who can
experience a mixture of fear of death and intense sexual excitement. This
connection seems strange and puzzling, particularly as far as the fetus is
concerned, and certainly deserves a few words of explanation.

There seems to be a mechanism in the human organism that transforms

extreme suffering, especially when it is associated with suffocation, into a
particular form of sexual arousal. This experiential connection can be
observed in a variety of situations other than birth. People who had tried to
hang themselves and were rescued in the last moment typically describe
that, at the height of suffocation, they felt an almost unbearable sexual
arousal. It is known that males executed by hanging typically have an
erection and even ejaculate. The literature on torture and brainwashing
describes that inhuman physical suffering often triggers states of sexual
ecstasy. In a less extreme form, this mechanism operates in various
sadomasochistic practices that include strangulation and choking. In the
sects of flagellants, who regularly engage in self-inflicted torture, and in
religious martyrs, subjected to unimaginable torments, extreme physical
pain at a certain point changes into sexual arousal and eventually results in
ecstatic rapture and transcendental experiences.

Dynamics and Symbolism of the Basic Perinatal

Matrices (BPMs)
So far, we have focused primarily on the emotional and physical aspects of
the birth experiences. However, the experiential spectrum of the perinatal
domain of the unconscious is not limited to elements that can be derived
from the biological processes involved in childbirth. It also involves rich
symbolic imagery that is drawn from the transpersonal realms. The
perinatal domain is an important interface between the biographical and the
transpersonal levels of the psyche. It represents a gateway to the historical
and archetypal aspects of the collective unconscious in the Jungian sense.
Since the specific symbolism of these experiences has its origin in the
collective unconscious, and not in the individual memory banks, it can
come from any geographical and historical context, as well as any spiritual
tradition of the world, quite independently from our racial, cultural,
educational, or religious background.

Identification with the infant facing the ordeal of the passage through the
birth canal seems to provide access to experiences of people from other
times and cultures, of various animals, and even mythological figures. It is
as if by connecting with the experience of the fetus struggling to be born,
one reaches an intimate, almost mystical, connection with the consciousness
of the human species and with other sentient beings who are or have been in
a similar difficult predicament.

Experiential confrontation with birth and death seems to result

automatically in a spiritual opening and discovery of the mystical
dimensions of the psyche and of existence. As I mentioned before, it does
not seem to make a difference whether this encounter with birth and death
occurs in actual life situations, such as in delivering women and in the
context of near-death experiences, or is purely symbolic. Powerful perinatal
sequences in psychedelic and holotropic sessions or in the course of
spontaneous psychospiritual crises (spiritual emergencies) seem to have the
same effect.

Biological birth has three distinct stages. In the first one, the fetus is
periodically constricted by uterine contractions without having any chance
of escaping this situation, since the cervix is firmly closed. Continued
contractions pull the cervix over the fetus’ head until it is sufficiently
dilated to allow the passage through the birth canal. Full dilation of the
cervix marks the transition from the first to the second stage of delivery,
which is characterized by the descent of the head into the pelvis and its
gradual, difficult propulsion through the birth pathways. And finally, in the
third stage, the newborn emerges from the birth canal and, after the
umbilical cord is cut, he or she becomes an anatomically independent
organism.

At each of these stages, the baby experiences a specific and typical set of
intense emotions and physical sensations. These experiences leave deep
unconscious imprints in the psyche that later in life play an important role
in the life of the individual. Reinforced by emotionally important
experiences from infancy and childhood, the birth memories can shape the
perception of the world, profoundly influence everyday behavior, and
contribute to the development of various emotional and psychosomatic
disorders. In holotropic states, this unconscious material can surface and be
fully experienced. When our process of deep self-exploration takes us back
to birth, we discover that reliving each stage of delivery is associated with a
distinct experiential pattern, characterized by a specific combination of
emotions, physical feelings, and symbolic images. I refer to these patterns
of experience as basic perinatal matrices (BPMs).

First Basic Perinatal Matrix (BPM I)

The first perinatal matrix (BPM I) is related to the intrauterine experience
immediately preceding birth and the remaining three matrices (BPM II–
BPM IV) to the three clinical stages of delivery described above. Besides
containing elements that represent a replay of the original situation of the
fetus at a particular stage of birth, the basic perinatal matrices also include
various natural, historical, and mythological scenes with similar
experiential qualities drawn from the transpersonal realms. In what follows,
I will briefly outline the specific connections between the perinatal
dynamics and the transpersonal domain.

I would like to emphasize that the connections between the experiences of

the consecutive stages of biological birth and various symbolic images
associated with them are very specific and consistent. The reason they
emerge together is not understandable in terms of conventional logic.
However, that does not mean that these associations are arbitrary and
random. They have their own deep order that can best be described as
“experiential logic.” What this means is that the connection between the
experiences characteristic for various stages of birth and the concomitant
symbolic themes are not based on some formal external similarity, but on
the fact that they share the same emotional feelings and physical sensations.

While experiencing the episodes of undisturbed embryonal existence (BPM

I), we often encounter images of vast regions with no boundaries or limits.
Sometimes we identify with galaxies, interstellar space, or the entire
cosmos other times we have the experience of floating in the ocean or of
becoming various aquatic animals, such as fish, dolphins, or whales. The
undisturbed intrauterine experience can also open into visions of nature—
safe, beautiful, and unconditionally nourishing, like a good womb (Mother
Nature). We can see luscious orchards, fields of ripe corn, agricultural
terraces in the Andes, or unspoiled Polynesian islands. The experience of
the good womb can also provide selective access to the archetypal domain
of the collective unconscious and open into images of paradises or heavens
as they are described in the mythologies of different cultures.

When we are reliving episodes of intrauterine disturbances, or “bad womb”

experiences, we have a sense of dark and ominous threat and we often feel
that we are being poisoned. We might see images that portray polluted
waters and toxic dumps. This reflects the fact that many prenatal
disturbances are caused by toxic changes in the body of the pregnant
mother. The experience of the toxic womb can be associated with visions of
frightening demonic figures from the archetypal realms of the collective
unconscious. Reliving of more violent interferences during prenatal
existence, such as an imminent miscarriage or attempted abortion, is usually
connected with a sense of universal threat or with bloody apocalyptic
visions of the end of the world.

Second Basic Perinatal Matrix (BPM II)

When the experiential regression reaches the onset of biological birth, we
typically feel that we are being sucked into a gigantic whirlpool or
swallowed by some mythical beast. We might also experience that the entire
world or even cosmos is being engulfed. This can be associated with images
of devouring or entangling archetypal monsters, such as leviathans,
dragons, giant snakes, tarantulas, and octopuses. The sense of
overwhelming vital threat can lead to intense anxiety and general mistrust
bordering on paranoia. We can also experience a descent into the depths of
the underworld, the realm of death, or hell. As mythologist Joseph
Campbell so eloquently described, this is a universal motif in the
mythologies of the hero’s journey (Campbell 1968).

Reliving the fully developed first stage of biological birth when the uterus
is contracting, but the cervix is not yet open (BPM II), is one of the worst
experiences a human being can have. We feel caught in a monstrous
claustrophobic nightmare, are suffering agonizing emotional and physical
pain, and have a sense of utter helplessness and hopelessness. Our feelings
of loneliness, guilt, absurdity of life, and existential despair can reach
metaphysical proportions. We lose connection with linear time and become
convinced that this situation will never end and that there is absolutely no
way out. There is no doubt in our mind that what is happening to us is what
the religions refer to as Hell—unbearable emotional and physical torment
without any hope for redemption. This can actually be accompanied by
archetypal images of devils and infernal landscapes from different cultures.

When we are facing the dismal situation of no exit in the clutches of uterine
contractions, we can experientially connect with sequences from the
collective unconscious that involve people, animals, and even mythological
beings who are in a similar painful and hopeless predicament. We identify
with prisoners in dungeons, inmates of concentration camps or insane
asylums, and with animals caught in traps. We might experience the
intolerable tortures of sinners in hell or of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up
the mountain in the deepest pit of Hades. Our pain can become the agony of
Christ asking God why He has abandoned him. It seems to us that we are
facing the prospect of eternal damnation. This state of darkness and
abysmal despair is known from the spiritual literature as the Dark Night of
the Soul. From a broader perspective, in spite of the feelings of utter
hopelessness that it entails, this state is an important stage of spiritual
opening. If it is experienced to its full depth, it can have an immensely
purging and liberating effect on those who experience it.

Third Basic Perinatal Matrix (BPM III)

The experience of the second stage of birth, the propulsion through the birth
canal after the cervix opens and the head descends (BPM III), is unusually
rich and dynamic. Facing the clashing energies and hydraulic pressures
involved in the delivery, we are flooded with images from the collective
unconscious portraying sequences of titanic battles and scenes of bloody
violence and torture. It is also during this phase that we are confronted with
sexual impulses and energies of a problematic nature and unusual intensity.

I have already described earlier that sexual arousal is an important part of

the experience of birth. This places our first encounter with sexuality into a
very precarious context, into a situation where our life is threatened, where
we are suffering pain as well as inflicting pain, and where we are unable to
breathe. At the same time, we are experiencing a mixture of vital anxiety
and primitive biological fury, the latter being an understandable reaction of
the fetus to this painful and life-threatening experience. In the final stages
of birth, we can also encounter various forms of biological material—blood,
mucus, urine, and even feces.

Because of these problematic connections, the experiences and images that

we encounter in this phase typically present sex in a grossly distorted form.
The strange mixture of sexual arousal with physical pain, aggression, vital
anxiety, and biological material leads to sequences that are pornographic,
aberrant, sadomasochistic, scatological, or even satanic. We can be
overwhelmed by dramatic scenes of sexual abuse, perversions, rapes, and
erotically-motivated murders.

On occasion, these experiences can take the form of participation in rituals

featuring witches and satanists. This seems to be related to the fact that
reliving this stage of birth involves the same strange combination of
emotions, sensations, and elements that characterizes the archetypal scenes
of the Black Mass and of the Witches’ Sabbath (Walpurgi’s Night). It is a
mixture of sexual arousal, panic anxiety, aggression, vital threat, pain,
sacrifice, and encounter with ordinarily repulsive biological materials. This
peculiar experiential amalgam is associated with a sense of sacredness or
numinosity that reflects the fact that all this is unfolding in close proximity
to a spiritual opening.
This stage of the birth process can also be associated with countless images
from the collective unconscious portraying scenes of murderous aggression,
such as vicious battles, bloody revolutions, gory massacres, and genocide.
In all the violent and sexual scenes that we encounter at this stage, we
alternate between the role of the perpetrator and that of the victim. This is
the time of a major encounter with the dark side of our personality, Jung’s
Shadow, which we discussed in the chapter on good and evil. As this
perinatal phase is culminating and approaching resolution, many people
envision Jesus, the Way of the Cross, and crucifixion, or even actually
experience full identification with Jesus’ suffering. The archetypal domain
of the collective unconscious contributes to this phase heroic mythological
figures and deities representing death and rebirth, such as the Egyptian god
Osiris, the Greek deities Dionysus and Persephone, or the Sumerian
goddess Inanna.

Fourth Perinatal Matrix (BPM IV)

The reliving of the third stage of the birth process, of the actual emergence
into the world (BPM IV), is typically initiated by the motif of fire. We can
have the feeling that our body is consumed by searing heat, have visions of
burning cities and forests, or identify with victims of immolation. The
archetypal versions of this fire can take the form of the cleansing flames of
Purgatory or of the legendary bird Phoenix, dying in the heat of his burning
nest and emerging from the ashes reborn and rejuvenated. The purifying fire
seems to destroy in us whatever is corrupted and prepare us for spiritual
rebirth. When we are reliving the actual moment of birth, we experience it
as complete annihilation and subsequent rebirth and resurrection.

To understand why we experience the reliving of biological birth as death

and rebirth, one has to realize that what happens to us is much more than
just a replay of the original event of childbirth. During the delivery, we are
completely confined in the birth canal and have no way of expressing the
extreme emotions and sensations involved. Our memory of this event thus
remains psychologically undigested and unassimilated. Much of our later
self-definition and our attitudes toward the world are heavily contaminated
by this constant deep reminder of the vulnerability, inadequacy, and
weakness that we experienced at birth. In a sense, we were born
anatomically but have not really caught up emotionally with the fact that
the emergency and danger are over. The “dying” and the agony during the
struggle for rebirth reflect the actual pain and vital threat of the biological
birth process. However, the ego death that immediately precedes rebirth is
the death of our old concepts of who we are and what the world is like,
which were forged by the traumatic imprint of birth.

As we are purging these old programs from our psyche and body by letting
them emerge into consciousness, we are reducing their energetic charge and
curtailing their destructive influence on our life. From a larger perspective,
this process is actually very healing and transforming. And yet, as we are
nearing its final resolution, we might paradoxically feel that, as the old
imprints are leaving our system, we are dying with them. Sometimes, we
not only experience the sense of personal annihilation, but also the
destruction of the world as we know it.

While only a small step separates us from the experience of radical

liberation, we have a sense of all-pervading anxiety and impending
catastrophy of enormous proportions. The impression of imminent doom
can be very convincing and overwhelming. The predominant feeling is that
we are losing all that we know and that we are. At the same time, we have
no idea what is on the other side, or even if there is anything there at all.
This fear is the reason that at this stage many people desperately resist the
process if they can. As a result, they can remain psychologically stuck in
this problematic territory for an indefinite period of time.

The encounter with the ego death is a stage of the spiritual journey when we
might need much encouragement and psychological support. When we
succeed in overcoming the metaphysical fear associated with this important
juncture and decide to let things happen, we experience total annihilation on
all imaginable levels. It involves physical destruction, emotional disaster,
intellectual and philosophical defeat, ultimate moral failure, and even
spiritual damnation. During this experience, all reference points, everything
that is important and meaningful in our life, seems to be mercilessly
destroyed.

Immediately following the experience of total annihilation—“hitting cosmic

bottom”—we are overwhelmed by visions of light that has a supernatural
radiance and beauty and is usually perceived as sacred. This divine
epiphany can be associated with displays of beautiful rainbows, diaphanous
peacock designs, and visions of celestial realms with angelic beings or
deities appearing in light. This is also the time when we can experience a
profound encounter with the archetypal figure of the Great Mother Goddess
or one of her many culture-bound forms.

The experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth is a major step in the

direction of the weakening of our identification with the “skin-encapsulated
ego” and reconnecting with the transcendental domain. We feel redeemed,
liberated, and blessed and have a new awareness of our divine nature and
cosmic status. We also typically experience a strong surge of positive
emotions toward ourselves, other people, nature, God, and existence in
general. We are filled with optimism and have a sense of emotional and
physical well-being.

It is important to emphasize that this kind of healing and life-changing

experience occurs when the final stages of biological birth had a more or
less natural course. If the delivery was very debilitating or confounded by
heavy anesthesia, the experience of rebirth does not have the quality of
triumphant emergence into light. It is more like awakening and recovering
from a hangover with dizziness, nausea, and clouded consciousness. Much
additional psychological work might be needed to work through these
additional issues and the positive results are much less striking.

Perinatal Process and the Collective Unconscious

From what I have described, we can see that the perinatal domain of the
psyche represents an experiential crossroad of critical importance. It is not
only the meeting point of three absolutely crucial aspects of human
biological existence—birth, sex, and death—but also the dividing line
between life and death, the individual and the species, and the psyche and
the spirit. Full conscious experience of the contents of this domain of the
psyche with good subsequent integration can have far-reaching
consequences and lead to spiritual opening and deep personal
transformation.
People usually begin the process of intensive experiential self-exploration
for very personal reasons—either for therapeutic purposes or for their own
emotional and spiritual growth. However, certain aspects of perinatal
experiences strongly suggest that what is happening here is an event that in
its significance transcends by far the narrow interests of the individual. The
intensity of the emotions and physical sensations involved and the frequent
identification with countless other people throughout history give these
experiences a distinctly transpersonal quality.

The following excerpt from an account of a powerful session involving a

holotropic state of consciousness, beautifully captures the nature of
perinatal experiences, their intensity, and the degree to which they engage
the collective unconscious of humanity. (Bache 1997)

I was surprised and caught off guard by how terribly painful this
session was. It was not personal and had little to do with my biological
birth. The pain I was suffering was clearly related to the birthing of the
species first, and my birthing second. My experiential boundaries
stretched to include the entire human race and all of human history,
and this “I” was caught up in a horror that I am incapable of describing
with any accuracy. It was a raging insanity, a surging kaleidoscopic
field of chaos, pain, and destruction. It was as if the entire human race
had gathered from all corners of the globe and gone absolutely stark
raving mad.

People were attacking each other with a rabid savagery augmented by

science fiction technology. There were many currents crossing and
crisscrossing in front of me, each composed of thousands of people—
some killing in multiple ways, some being killed, some fleeing in
panic, others being rounded up, others witnessing and screaming in
terror, others witnessing and having their hearts broken by a species
gone mad—and “I” was all their experiences. The magnitude of the
deaths and the insanity is impossible to describe. The problem is
finding a frame of reference. The only categories I have available to
me are simplistic approximations that can give only a vague sense of
it.
 This kind of suffering comprises all of human history. It is at once
species-specific and archetypal. It comprises the wildest science fiction
worlds of horror beyond our imagination. It involves not only human
beings but billions and billions of pieces of matter in agonizing
galactic explosions. Horror beyond any scope. It is a convulsing of the
human species, a convulsing of the universe. Floating through it were
scenes of tragic suffering caused by nature and human indifference.
Thousands of starving children from around the globe, their bodies
bloated in death, their eyes staring out blankly at a humanity that was
killing them through systemic ecological abuse and human neglect.
Lots of violence between men and women—rape, beating,
intimidation, retaliation—cycles and cycles of destruction.

The extraordinary nature of perinatal experiences raises some interesting

and important questions. Why is it that in the process of deep self-
exploration we reach a phase when we transcend our individual boundaries
and connect with the collective unconscious and the history of our species?
Why does this involve such intimate connection with death and with the
reliving of birth? How and why is this process so closely associated with
sexuality? What role does the frequent participation of the archetypal
elements play in these experiences? And finally, what is the function and
meaning of this process and how is it related to spirituality and
consciousness evolution?

I would like to refer here to the work of Christopher Bache (1996), who has
made an interesting attempt to clarify the problem of the presence of
collective suffering at the perinatal level and the role of the individual in the
spiritual awakening of the species. Bache pointed out that the key to the
understanding of the perinatal process is the fact that its function is to
liberate us from the confines of separate unenlightened existence and
awaken in us the realization of our true nature, our essential identity with
the creative principle. Like the Roman god Janus, the perinatal domain has
a dual nature. It will show us a very different face, depending on the
direction from which we look at it, whether from the point of view of the
body-ego or our transpersonal Self.
Seen from the personal perspective, the perinatal domain appears to be the
basement of our individual unconscious, a repository of undigested
fragments of those experiences that most seriously challenged our survival
and body integrity. From this angle, we perceive the perinatal process, and
the violence that it entails, above all as a threat to our individual existence.
From the transpersonal perspective, the identification with the body-ego
appears to be the product of fundamental ignorance, a dangerous illusion
that is responsible for the fact that we live our lives in an unfulfilling,
destructive, and self-destructive way. Once we understand this fundamental
truth of existence, we see the perinatal experiences, in spite of their violent
and painful nature, as radical and drastic, but loving, attempts to liberate us
spiritually by demolishing the prison of our false identity. We are not being
annihilated, but birthed to a higher reality where we reconnect with our true
nature.

Individual Transformation and Healing of Species

Consciousness
We know from the practice of experiential therapy that it is possible to
purge from our unconscious undigested memories of emotional and
physical pain from our infancy, childhood, and later life by fully
experiencing them. This, together with ensuing positive experiences that
become available in this process, frees us from the distorting influence of
past traumas that make our daily life inauthentic and unsatisfactory.
Christopher Bache suggests that, in a similar way, perinatal experiences
might play an important role in the healing of the traumatic past of the
human species.

Is it not possible, he asks, that the memory of the violence and insatiable
greed that is woven into the fabric of human history, causes disturbances in
the collective unconscious that contaminate humanity’s present? Why could
not the healing impact reach beyond the individual person, as our
consciousness expands beyond the body-ego? Is it not conceivable that by
experiencing the pain that countless generations of people inflicted on each
other in the course of human history, we are actually clearing the collective
unconscious and contributing to a better planetary future?
Spiritual literature offers great examples of individual suffering that has
redeeming influence on the world. In the Christian tradition, it is Jesus
Christ, who died on the cross for the sins of humanity. This is vividly
reflected in the mythological theme of the Harrowing of Hell depicting
Jesus, at the time between death on the Cross and his resurrection,
descending into Hell and liberating sinners from its jaws by the power of
his suffering and sacrifice. The Hindu tradition accepts the possibility that
very advanced yogis can significantly positively influence the situation in
the world and the collective problems of humanity by confronting them
internally in deep meditation, without actually physically leaving their
caves.

Mahayana Buddhism has the beautiful archetypal image of the Bodhisattva

who reaches enlightenment, but refuses to enter nirvana and makes a sacred
commitment to continue reincarnating until all sentient beings are liberated.
The Bodhisattva’s determination to take on the suffering of incarnate
existence in order to help others is expressed in his powerful vow:

Sentient beings are numberless;

I vow to save them all.
Delusions are inexhaustible;
I vow to end them all.
The gates of Dharma are manifold;
I vow to enter them all.
The Buddha way is supreme.
I vow to complete it.

Dying Before Dying

Many people who have experienced holotropic states describe the perinatal
level of the psyche as a gate between the transcendental realm and material
reality, a passageway that functions in both directions. At the time of our
biological birth, when we emerge into the material world, we “die” to the
transcendental dimension and, conversely, our physical demise can be seen
as birth into the world of spirit.
However, the spiritual birth does not have to be associated with the death of
the body. It can occur at any time in the course of deep self-exploration or
even during a spontaneous psychospiritual crisis (spiritual emergency). It is
then a purely symbolic event, an “ego death,” or “dying before dying,”
which does not involve any biological damage. Abraham à Sancta Clara, a
seventeenth-century German Augustinian monk, summed it up in one
sentence when he wrote: “The man who dies before he dies, does not die
when he dies.”

This “dying before dying” has played an important role in all shamanic
traditions. By undergoing death and rebirth in their initiatory crises,
shamans lose the fear of death and become familiar and comfortable with
its experiential territory. As a result, they can later visit this realm on their
own terms and mediate similar experiences for others. In the mysteries of
death and rebirth, which were widespread in the Mediterranean area and
other parts of the ancient world, initiates experienced a profound symbolic
confrontation with death. In this process, they lost the fear of death and
developed an entirely new set of values and strategy of life.

The experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth (“second birth,” “birth

from water and spirit,” becoming a dvija) has played an important role in
many religious traditions. All pre-industrial cultures attributed great
significance to these experiences from a personal as well as collective
perspective and developed safe and effective ways to induce them in
various ritual contexts. Modern psychiatry sees the same experiences as
pathological phenomena and indiscriminately suppresses them when they
occur spontaneously in contemporary individuals. This unfortunate strategy
has been a significant contributing factor in Western civilization’s loss of
spirituality.

Sexuality: Way to Liberation or Pitfall on the

Spiritual Path?
Sex shows a similar inherent ambiguity as birth and death. Depending on
circumstances, it can mediate deep unitive states or deepen separation and
alienation. Which of these two modes will manifest in a particular case will
depend on the circumstances and on the attitude of the individuals involved.
If the partners who are interacting sexually do not feel love and respect for
each other and are driven only by instinctual impulses or by the need for
power and domination, having intercourse will very likely intensify their
feelings of separation and alienation. If the sexual union occurs between
two partners who are personally mature and have not only good biological
compatibility, but also deep emotional resonance and mutual understanding,
love-making can result in a profound spiritual experience. Under these
circumstances, they can transcend their individual boundaries and
experience feelings of oneness with each other and, at the same time, have a
sense of reunion with the cosmic source.

This spiritual potential of sex is the basis of the ancient Indian Tantric
practices. Pañchamakara is a complex Tantric ceremony that involves
ingestion of powerful Ayurvedic herbal mixtures combining aphrodisiac
and psychedelic properties. An intricate, highly stylized ritual procedure
helps the partners identify with the archetypal principles of the feminine
and masculine. It culminates in a ritualized sexual union maintained for a
long period of time (maithuna).

With special training, participants are able to suppress the biological orgasm
and the extended sexual arousal then triggers a mystical experience. In the
course of this ritual event, the partners transcend their everyday identities.
In full identification with archetypal beings, Shiva and Shakti, they
experience a sacred marriage, a divine union with each other and with the
cosmic source. In Tantric symbolism, various aspects of sexuality and
reproductive functions, such as genital union, menstrual flux, pregnancy,
and delivery, not only have literal biological meaning, but also refer to
various higher levels of the cosmic creative process.

Practical Implications of the Insights from

Consciousness Research Concerning Birth, Sex,
and Death
The observations described in this chapter have important practical
implications. They strongly indicate that changes of our attitudes to the
triad birth/sex/death and of our practices related to them could have a
profound influence not only on the quality of our personal life, but also on
the future of the human species and our planet. We have seen that the
memories of prenatal existence, birth, and early postnatal events leave deep
imprints in our unconscious and exert a profound influence on our life. It is,
therefore, imperative that in the future we do whatever is possible to
improve the conditions under which children are conceived, develop as
embryos, are born, and are treated after delivery.

This should begin with education of the young generation providing the
necessary sexual information without irrational moral and religious
distortions and unrealistic injunctions, prohibitions, and expectations.
However, it would not be sufficient to offer unbiased technical data about
reproductive functions. It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which
is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its
worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity. Another
important task is to bring awareness to the fact that the fetus is a conscious
being. This would increase the responsibility in regard to conceiving a child
and bring attention to the importance of the emotional and physical
condition of the pregnant mother. It would also make a big difference, if the
education in postadolescence could include elements increasing
psychospiritual maturity for future parenthood.

The delivery typically activates the mother’s own perinatal unconscious,

which can interfere with the birth process, both emotionally and
physiologically. It would, therefore, be ideal if women could do their own
deep experiential work before becoming pregnant to eliminate these
potentially disturbing elements from their unconscious. Special attention
should then be given to the delivery itself. This would include good
psychological and technical preparation for delivery, natural conditions for
childbirth, and loving postnatal care with adequate physical contact
between the infant and the mother. There are good reasons to believe that
the circumstances of birth play an important role in creating a disposition
for future violence and self-destructive tendencies or, conversely, for loving
behavior and healthy interpersonal relationships.

The French obstetrician Michel Odent (1995) has shown how this perinatal
imprinting, which has the potential to sway our emotional life in the
direction of love or hatred, can be understood from the history of our
species. The birth process has two different aspects and each of them
involves specific hormones. The stressful activity of the mother during the
delivery itself is primarily associated with the adrenaline system. The
adrenaline mechanisms also played an important role in the evolution of the
species as mediators of the aggressive and protective instincts of the mother
at times when birth was typically occurring in open natural environments.
They made it possible for females to rapidly shift from delivering to fight or
flight when an attack by a predator made it necessary.

The other task associated with birth, which is equally important from the
evolutionary point of view, is the creation of the bond between the mother
and the newborn. This process involves the hormone oxytocine, which
induces maternal behavior in animals and humans, and endorphins that
foster dependency and attachment. Prolactine, the hormone that is
instrumental in nursing, has similar effects. The busy, noisy, and chaotic
milieu of many hospitals induces anxiety and unnecessarily engages the
adrenaline mechanisms. It conveys and imprints the picture of a world that
is potentially dangerous. Like the jungle setting in the primordial times,
such a situation calls for aggressive responses. Conversely, a quiet, safe,
and private environment creates an atmosphere of safety that engenders
affectionate patterns of relating. Radical improvement of birth practices
could have a far-reaching positive influence on the emotional and physical
well-being of the human species and assuage the insanity of its behavior
that is currently threatening to destroy the very basis of life on this planet.

The prenatal and perinatal history also has important implications for our
spiritual life. As we have seen earlier, incarnation and birth represent
separation and alienation from our true nature, which is Absolute
Consciousness. Positive experiences in the womb and after birth are the
closest contacts with the Divine that we can experience during our
embryonal life or in infancy. The “good womb” and “good breast” thus
represent experiential bridges to the transcendental level. Conversely,
negative and painful experiences that we encounter in the intrauterine
period, during birth, and in the early postnatal period send us deeper into
the state of alienation from the divine source.
When our prenatal and early postnatal experiences are predominantly
positive, we tend to maintain throughout our life a natural connection with
the cosmic source. We can sense the divine dimension in nature and in the
cosmos and are able to enjoy to a great degree the incarnate existence.
Conversely, when our early development was just a series of continuing
traumas, the loss of connection with the spiritual source can be so complete
that our existence in the material world is a painful ordeal full of emotional
torment.

I should also mention that sometimes an extremely severe trauma can result
in a situation where consciousness splits from the body and is catapulted
into the transpersonal realm. This can establish an escape route that is
regularly used as a defense mechanism in later difficult life situations. This
form of spiritual connection can help to protect us from excessive pain, but
it does not enhance the quality of life, since this mechanism is not well
integrated with the rest of the personality.

Substantial changes are also necessary in our attitude toward death. We

have seen that death has a powerful and important representation in our
unconscious. Its deepest manifestations are transpersonal in nature and have
the form of wrathful archetypal figures and karmic records of life-
threatening situations from other incarnations. The memories of vital threats
in the womb, during delivery, and after birth represent additional important
sources of fear of death. For many of us, this is complemented by memories
of serious traumas that we experienced later in life. The menacing specter
of death that we harbor in our unconscious interferes with our everyday
existence and makes our life in many ways inauthentic. In technological
societies, the predominant reactions to this situation are massive denial and
avoidance that are in their consequences destructive and self-destructive on
an individual as well as a collective level.

It is essential for the future of humanity that we break through this denial
and come to terms with the problem of impermanence and of our mortality.
There exist ancient and modern methods of deep self-exploration that can
help us to confront the fear of death, bring it fully into consciousness, and
overcome it. We have already seen how “dying before dying” can open for
us the channels to the transcendental dimension of existence and initiate a
journey that can eventually lead to the discovery of our true identity. In this
process, we can experience emotional and psychosomatic healing and our
life becomes more satisfying and authentic. This profound psychospiritual
transformation can raise our consciousness to an entirely different level and
make our life less taxing and more rewarding.

It is important to be aware of the existence and nature of this process and to

provide guidance and support for people who experience it unintentionally
in near-death situations or spontaneous psychospiritual crises (spiritual
emergencies). Another important step is to make available, on a large scale,
various ancient and modern methods of deep self-exploration that make it
possible to undergo this process deliberately. Preindustrial and ancient
societies had certain procedures in the form of rites of passage and
mysteries of death and rebirth that were designed specifically for this
purpose. Thanks to the ancient knowledge that, in the last several decades,
has been rediscovered by consciousness research, transpersonal psychology,
and thanatology, we have now the possibility of substantially improving the
emotional quality of our life, as well as our death.

People, who have during their lifetime experientially confronted birth and
death and connected with the transpersonal dimension, have good reasons
to believe that their physical demise will not mean the end of their
existence. They have personally experienced in a very convincing way that
their consciousness transcends the boundaries of their physical body and is
capable of functioning independently of it. As a result, they tend to see
death as a transition into a different state of existence and an awe-inspiring
adventure in consciousness rather than final defeat and annihilation.
Naturally, this attitude can in itself substantially change the approach to
death and the experience of dying. In addition, people who are involved in
deep self-exploration have the opportunity to gradually come to terms with
many difficult aspects of their unconscious that we otherwise have to deal
with in the final period of our life.

The insights from the work with holotropic states also have important
implications for the way we practically approach the final stages of life, our
own as well as those of other people. When we believe that the critical
dimension of our existence is consciousness and not matter, we will be
concerned about the nature and quality of our experience of dying and death
rather than a mechanical prolongation of life at all costs. In the work with
other people who are dying, we will put emphasis on the quality of
communication and will offer meaningful psychospiritual support. We will
complement, and in some instances replace, the technological wizardry of
modern medicine with genuine human care. If the information conveyed by
the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is correct, the way we
approach death and experience it is of critical importance. If we are
adequately prepared, this time is a unique opportunity to achieve instant
spiritual liberation. According to the Tibetan teachings, even if we do not
succeed, the quality of our preparation for death or the lack thereof will
determine the nature of our next incarnation.

8
The Mystery of Karma and Reincarnation
For I have already at times been a boy and a girl, and a bush and a bird
and a mute fish in the salty waves.
—Empedocles

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to

answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible
delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is
his first entrance into life.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena

Crosscultural Perspective on Reincarnation

According to Western materialistic science, our lifespan is limited to the
period between our conception and our biological death. This assumption is
a logical consequence of the conviction that we are essentially our bodies.
Since the body perishes and decomposes at the time of biological death, it
seems obvious that at this point we cease to exist. This perspective is in
conflict with the beliefs of all the great religions and spiritual systems of the
ancient and pre-industrial cultures who have seen death as an important
transition, rather than the final end of any form of existence. Most Western
scientists dismiss or even ridicule the belief that our existence can continue
beyond death. They attribute this idea to lack of education, to superstition,
or to primitive wishful thinking of people who are unable to face and accept
the grim reality of impermanence and death.

In pre-industrial societies, the belief in life after death is not limited to a

vague notion that there might be a Beyond.

Mythologies of many cultures offer very specific descriptions of what

happens after we die. They provide intricate maps of the posthumous
journey of the soul and depict various abodes—heavens, paradises, and
hells—that harbor discarnate beings. Of particular interest is the belief in
reincarnation, according to which the individual units of consciousness
keep returning to earth and experience entire chains of embodied
existences. Some spiritual systems combine the belief in reincarnation with
the law of karma, suggesting that the merits and debits from previous
lifetimes determine the quality of subsequent incarnations. Various forms of
the belief in reincarnation show a wide distribution over geographical space
and historical time. They have developed, often independently, in cultures
separated by many thousands of miles and by many centuries.

The concept of reincarnation and karma is the cornerstone of many Asian

religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, the
Tibetan Vajrayana, Japanese Shintoism, and Chinese Taoism. Similar ideas
can be found in such historically, geographically, and culturally diverse
groups as various African tribes, American Indians, Pre-Columbian
cultures, Polynesian kahunas, practitioners of the Brazilian umbanda, the
Gauls, and the Druids. In ancient Greece, several important schools of
thought subscribed to this doctrine, among them the Pythagoreans, the
Orphics, and the Platonists. The concept of reincarnation was adopted by
the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Karaites, and other Jewish and semi-Jewish
groups. It also formed an important part of the cabalistic theology of
medieval Jewry. This list would not be complete without mentioning the
Neoplatonists and Gnostics and in modern times the Theosophists,
Anthroposophists, and certain spiritualists.
Although the belief in reincarnation is not a part of modern Christianity,
similar concepts existed also among the early Christians. According to St.
Jerome (A.D. 340–420), reincarnation was given an esoteric interpretation
that was communicated to a select elite. It appears that the belief in
reincarnation was an integral part of Gnostic Christianity, best known from
the scrolls discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In the Gnostic text called
Faith Wisdom or Pistis Sophia (1921) Jesus teaches his disciples how
failures in one life are transferred to another. Thus, for example, people who
use curses against others will in their new life be “continually troubled in
their hearts,” while arrogant and immoderate persons might be reborn in a
deformed body and be looked down upon by others.

The most famous Christian thinker speculating about the pre-existence of

souls and world cycles was Origen (A.D. 186–253), one of the greatest
Church Fathers of all times. In his writings, particularly in the book De
Principiis, or On First Principles (Origenes Adamantius 1973), he
expressed his opinion that certain scriptural passages could only be
explained in the light of reincarnation. His teachings were condemned by
the Second Council of Constantinople convened by Emperor Justinian in
A.D. 553 and became a heretical doctrine. The verdict read: “If anyone assert
the fabulous pre-existence of souls and shall submit to the monstrous
doctrine that follows from it, let him be anathema!” However, some
scholars believe that they can detect traces of the teachings in the writings
of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and even St. Francis of Assisi.

How can we explain that so many cultural groups in the course of history
have held this extraordinary belief and that they formulated complex and
intricate theoretical systems describing it? How is it possible that they were
all in agreement about an issue that is alien to the Western industrial
civilization and that is considered utterly absurd by Western materialistic
science? The usual explanation is that these differences reflect our
superiority in the scientific understanding of the universe and of human
nature. However, closer examination reveals that the real reason for this
difference is the tendency of Western scientists to adhere to their belief
system and to ignore, censor, or distort all observations that are in conflict
with it. More specifically, this attitude reflects the reluctance of Western
psychologists and psychiatrists to pay attention to the experiences and
observations from holotropic states of consciousness.

Empirical Evidence for Reincarnation

The concept of reincarnation and karma is not a “belief” in the usual sense
of the word, meaning an ungrounded and arbitrary theoretical and
emotional position that is not supported by facts.

For the Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and other groups for whom it
constitutes an important part of their religion, reincarnation is not a matter
of belief. It is an eminently empirical issue, based on very specific
experiences and observations. This is also true for open-minded and
knowledgeable Western consciousness researchers. They are not naïve,
ignorant, and unfamiliar with the philosophical position and worldview of
materialistic science, as their critics like to portray them.

Many of these researchers have good academic training and impressive

credentials. The reason for their position is that they have made some
important observations concerning reincarnation for which their academic
training failed to provide adequate explanations. In many instances, they
also had extraordinary personal experiences that they could not easily
dismiss. According to Christopher Bache, a researcher who has thoroughly
reviewed the literature on reincarnation and encountered past life
experiences in his own inner search, the evidence in this area is so rich and
remarkable that scientists who do not think the problem of reincarnation
deserves serious study are either uninformed or “boneheaded” (Bache
1990).

Let us take a brief look at the existing evidence that one should be familiar
with before making any judgments concerning reincarnation. The nature of
this evidence is described in a mythological language in a passage written
by Sholem Ash (1967), a twentieth-century Hassidic scholar: “Not the
power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a
necessary condition of our existence. If the lore of the transmigration of
souls is a true one, then these souls, between their exchange of bodies, must
pass through the sea of forgetfulness. According to the Jewish view, we
make the transition under the overlordship of the Angel of Forgetfulness.
But it sometimes happens that the Angel of Forgetfulness himself forgets to
remove from our memories the records of the former world; and then our
senses are haunted by fragmentary recollections of another life. They drift
like torn clouds above the hills and valleys of the mind, and weave
themselves into the incidents of our current existence.”

Modern researchers have amassed a large amount of observations

suggesting partial lifting of the veil of forgetfulness that Sholem Ash talks
about. Many of them studied and described vivid past life experiences that
occur spontaneously in everyday life or in the course of various therapeutic
sessions involving holotropic states of consciousness. Others collected
additional information about reincarnation by guiding people to specific
areas of their psyche with the use of hypnosis or some other approaches.
There have also been interesting attempts at experimental verification of the
authenticity of such guided past life experiences (Wambach 1979). And
finally, there are certain intriguing data from the Tibetan spiritual tradition
that provide valuable insights into this area from yet another angle.

Children Remember Past Lives

Among the most interesting phenomena related to the problem of
reincarnation are spontaneous past life experiences in children. Reports
from many different countries of the world indicate that, occasionally, small
children remember and describe their previous life in another body, another
time and place, and with other people. These memories can present many
problems in the lives of these children and their parents. They are often
associated with various “carry-over pathologies,” such as phobias, unusual
idiosyncrasies, and strange reactions to certain people, places, and
situations. There exist reports of child psychiatrists who treated and
described cases of this kind. Access to these memories usually appears
around the age of three and gradually disappears between the ages of five
and eight.

Ian Stevenson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia in

Charlottesville, has conducted meticulous studies of over three thousand of
such cases and reported about them in his books (Stevenson 1966, 1984,
1987). Stevenson’s cases were not only from “primitive,” “exotic” cultures
with an a priori belief in reincarnation, but also from Western countries,
including Great Britain and the United States. Being a cautious and
conservative researcher, Stevenson reported only several hundred of them,
because many have not met the high standards he had set for his research.
Only the cases with the best scientific evidence were included. Stevenson
eliminated many of the observations, because the family benefited from the
behavior of their children financially, in terms of social prestige, or public
attention. Additional reasons for not including certain cases were
inconsistent testimony, false memory (cryptomnesia), witnesses of
questionable character, or indication of fraud.

The findings of Stevenson’s research are remarkable. Although he had

eliminated in all the reported cases the possibility that these children could
have obtained the information through the conventional channels, he was
able to confirm their stories, often with incredible details. In some cases, he
actually took the children into the village or town that they had remembered
from their previous life. Although they had never been there in their current
lifetime, they were familiar with the topography of the village and were
able to find the home they had allegedly lived in. They even recognized the
members of their “family” and the villagers and knew their names. Possibly
the strongest evidence in support of the reincarnation hypothesis was the
incidence of striking birthmarks that specifically reflected injuries and other
events from the remembered life; this could be confirmed by independent
research (Stevenson, 1997).

Past Life Memories in Adults

Spontaneous, vivid reliving of past life memories in adults occurs most
frequently during episodes of psychospiritual crises (spiritual emergencies).
However, various degrees of remembering can also happen in more or less
ordinary states of consciousness in the circumstances of everyday life.
Mainstream psychiatrists are aware of the existence of past life experiences,
but they treat them routinely as indications of serious psychopathology,
usually by suppressive pharmacological medication. The leading theories of
personality in contemporary psychology are firmly anchored in the
materialistic paradigm and thus naturally subscribe to the “one-timer view.”
Past life experiences can be facilitated by a wide variety of techniques that
mediate access to deep levels of the psyche, such as meditation, hypnosis,
use of psychedelic substances, and stays in a sensory isolation tank. They
can emerge during body work and in sessions of experiential
psychotherapy, for example, in the course of rebirthing, holotropic
breathwork, or primal therapy. I have heard of many instances where past
life episodes appeared unsolicited in sessions with therapists who had a
very conventional theoretical framework and did not believe in
reincarnation, or even those who were violently opposed to the concept.
The emergence of karmic material is also completely independent of the
experiencer’s previous philosophical and religious belief system.

In a fully developed past life experience, we find ourselves involved in an

emotionally highly charged situation that is happening in another historical
period and in another location. Our sense of personal identity is preserved,
but it is experienced in relation to another person and another time and
place. These experiences often involve other people with whom we have an
intense relationship in this lifetime. The emotional quality of these episodes
is usually very negative. Sometimes, they are associated with physical pain,
panic anxiety, deep sadness, or guilt feelings. Other times, it is consuming
hatred, murderous anger, or insane jealousy. However, in some instances,
these sequences can reflect great emotional fulfillment and happiness. They
portray passionate love affairs, devoted friendships, or spiritual
partnerships.

The most characteristic aspect of past life experiences is a convinced

feeling that the situation we are facing is not new. We clearly remember that
it happened to us before, that we once actually were this other person in one
of our previous lives. This sense of reliving something that one has seen
before (déjà vu) or experienced before (déjà vécu) in a previous incarnation
is very basic and cannot be analyzed any further. It is comparable to the
ability to distinguish in everyday life our memories of events that actually
happened from our dreams, daydreams, and fantasies. It would be difficult
to convince a person, who is relating to us a memory of something that
happened last week, that the event did not really occur and that he or she is
just imagining it. Past incarnation memories have a similar subjective
quality of authenticity and reality.
Unique Features of Past Life Phenomena
Past life experiences have some extraordinary characteristics for which they
deserve serious attention of researchers studying consciousness and the
human psyche. Considered in their totality, these features leave no doubt
that karmic sequences represent unique phenomena sui generis and not
simply fantasies or figments of pathological imagination. Past life
experiences occur on the same continuum with accurate memories from
adolescence, childhood, infancy, birth, and intrauterine existence,
phenomena that can often be reliably verified. Sometimes they appear
simultaneously or alternate with biographical material from our current life
(Grof 1988, 1992).

Another interesting feature of past life experiences is that they are often
intimately connected with important issues and circumstances in our present
life. When karmic sequences emerge fully into consciousness, either
spontaneously or in the context of deep experiential psychotherapy, they
can provide illuminating insights into various previously incomprehensible
and puzzling aspects of our everyday existence. This includes a wide
variety of emotional, psychosomatic, and interpersonal problems for which
conventional forms of psychotherapy failed to provide explanation.

Experiences of past life memories typically provide more than just new
understanding of these problems. This process can also often result in
alleviation or complete disappearance of various difficult symptoms, such
as various phobias, psychosomatic pains, or asthma. It can also be
instrumental in healing of troublesome relationships with other people. Past
life experiences can thus contribute significantly to the understanding of
psychopathology and play an essential role in successful therapy. Therapists
who refuse to work with these experiences because they reject the concept
of reincarnation are depriving their patients of a very effective therapeutic
mechanism.

The persons who experience karmic phenomena often gain accurate insights
into the time and culture involved, concerning social structure, beliefs,
rituals, customs, architecture, costumes, weapons, and other aspects of life.
In many instances the nature and quality of this information makes it
unlikely that these people could have acquired it through the conventional
channels. Occasionally, past life experiences render information about
specific historical events.

Verification of Past Life Memories

The criteria for verification of past life memories are the same as those that
we use when we relive events from infancy and childhood of the present
lifetime. We try to get as many details of the retrieved memory as possible
and then search for independent evidence corroborating or disproving its
content. Unfortunately, in many past life experiences, this information is not
specific enough to allow independent verification. Other times, the quality
of the information is adequate, but it is impossible to find sufficiently
specific and detailed historical sources that would make the verification
procedure possible.

Most past life memories in adults do not permit the same degree of
verification as Stevenson’s spontaneous memories in children, which are
typically more recent. To appreciate the challenge associated with such an
endeavor, it is important to consider that even our memories from this
lifetime do not always lend themselves easily to objective verification.
Psychotherapists are well aware of the problems associated with the
attempts to evaluate the veracity of memories from childhood and infancy
retrieved in verbal or regressive therapy. Naturally, the task to verify past
life experiences is incomparably more difficult than similar efforts
concerning material from the present lifetime. Even if such experiences
contain very specific details, which is not always the case, objective
evidence is incomparably harder to come by, since the material is much
older and often involves other countries and cultures.

In spite of all these difficulties, there are some rare instances in which all
the necessary criteria are met. The result of such independent research can
be truly extraordinary. Over the years, I have been able to make in my work
several observations, in which the content of past life experiences could be
corroborated in remarkable detail. In all these cases, I have not been able to
find a natural explanation for the phenomena involved. There is no doubt in
my mind that the information conveyed by these experiences came through
extrasensory channels. I have also heard similar stories from other
researchers.

In my previous publications (Grof 1975, 1988), I have described two such

case histories. The first one involved a neurotic patient undergoing
psychedelic therapy. She experienced in four consecutive sessions many
episodes from a life of a seventeenth-century Czech nobleman. This man
had been publicly executed in the Old Town Square in Prague together with
twenty-six other prominent aristocrats. This public execution was an effort
of the Hapsburgs to break the moral of the Czechs after they had defeated
the Czech king in the battle of the White Mountain. In this case, the
patient’s father conducted, unbeknownst to her, independent genealogical
research of the family’s pedigree, which confirmed that they were
descendents of one of these unfortunate men.

The second example was a man who relived in his primal work and later in
his holotropic breathwork sessions during our monthlong seminar at the
Esalen Institute a number of episodes from the war between England and
Spain in the sixteenth century. They revolved around the mass slaughter of
Spanish soldiers by the British in the besieged fortress of Dunanoir on the
western coast of Ireland. During these sessions, he experienced himself as a
priest who accompanied these soldiers and was killed with them. At one
point, he saw on his hand a seal ring with engraved initials and drew a
picture of it.

In his later historical research, he was able to confirm the veracity of this
entire episode that he previously had not known anything about. One of the
documents he found in historical archives gave the name of the priest who
had accompanied the Spanish soldiers on their military expedition. To his
and our surprise, the initials of this name were identical with those that
were carved on the seal ring he had seen in his session and captured in a
detailed drawing.

A striking aspect of past life experiences is their frequent association with

remarkable synchronicities involving other people and situations. The
protagonists in our past life memories often are important persons from our
present life, such as parents, children, spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, or
superiors. It seems to make sense that an intense past life experience could
result in dramatic changes in our own feelings and behavior toward the
person who was an important part of our karmic scenario. However, these
experiences also often show unexplainable mysterious synchronistic links
with specific changes in the lives of other persons whom we identified as
protagonists in our past life memory. These persons could be hundreds or
thousands of miles away from the place where our experience happens and
have absolutely no knowledge that it takes place. Yet they can
independently undergo, at exactly the same time, a dramatic complementary
change in their feelings and attitude toward us.

The Karmic Triangle

I will use here an example from my own life to illustrate this remarkable
phenomenon. Over the years, I have observed many similar occurrences
involving other people. The episode I am about to describe happened
shortly after my arrival in the United States. My emigration to the United
States in 1967 brought about radical changes in my personal, professional,
political, and cultural environment. I arrived in Baltimore with some fifty
pounds of luggage. Over half of the total content of my luggage was the
documentation of my psychedelic research in Prague and the rest were my
personal belongings. This was all that was left of my old life in Europe. It
was a new beginning for me on all imaginable levels. While I thoroughly
enjoyed the inspiring team of my professional colleagues at Spring Grove,
the undreamed of freedom of expression, and all the novel things I was
discovering in the world around me, I did not have much success in creating
a satisfactory personal life.

All the women in my social sphere who were of appropriate age for me and
shared my interests seemed to be married or otherwise committed. It was a
frustrating situation since I was at a stage of life when I felt a deep need for
partnership. My friends and colleagues at Spring Grove seemed to be even
more concerned about this situation than I was myself and exerted great
effort to remedy it. They searched for potential partners for me and kept
inviting them for various social occasions. This resulted in a few frustrating
and somewhat awkward situations, but did not bear any fruit. And then this
situation suddenly changed in the most unexpected and very radical way.
A difficult relationship of a fellow therapist, Seymour, had abruptly ended
and my friends invited his ex-girlfriend Monica for dinner. When Monica
and I first met, I immediately felt a strong attraction to her and had a sense
of instant deep connection. It was not difficult for me to fall in love with
her. She was of European origin like myself, single, beautiful, and bright.
Her unusual charm, wit, and facility with words quickly made her the center
of attention of every party she attended. I felt rapidly drawn into the
relationship and was unable to be objective and realistic about it.

I did not see any problem in the fact that Monica was considerably younger
than myself. I also chose to ignore her stories about her extremely traumatic
childhood and tumultuous interpersonal history that I would have normally
seen as serious warning signs. I was able to reassure myself that all these
were details, nothing that we would not be able to work out. Had I been
able to be analytic under the circumstances, I would have recognized that I
had met what C. G. Jung called an anima figure. Monica and I started
dating and had a passionate and unusually stormy relationship.

Monica’s moods and behavior seemed to change from one day to another,
or even from hour to hour. Waves of intense affection toward me alternated
with episodes of aloofness, evasiveness, and withdrawal. The situation
seemed to be further complicated by two unusual circumstances. Since my
arrival in Baltimore, I lived in a studio that had been at one time rented by
Monica’s ex-boyfriend Seymour and she used to visit him there. She was
now coming to the same apartment to see a different man. In addition,
Monica’s brother Wolfgang hated me since the very first time we had met.
He and Monica had an unusually strong relationship that seemed to have
distinct incestuous features. Wolfgang was violently opposed to my
relationship with Monica and treated me like a rival.

I was very committed to make the relationship work, but nothing I was able
to do had any influence on the crazy rollercoster ride we seemed to be
taking together. I felt like I was alternately exposed to hot and cold showers.
I found it very frustrating but, at the same time, my attraction to Monica
had a strange magnetic quality and I was unable to terminate this confusing
and unfulfilling relationship.
I desperately needed some insight into the baffling dynamic I was caught in.
Our institute had a program offering mental health professionals the
opportunity to have up to three psychedelic sessions. The members of our
therapeutic team were eligible for this program. In an effort to reach some
clarity in my relationship with Monica, I applied for an LSD session just as
our difficulties were reaching their peak. The following is an excerpt from
that session, describing my first introduction to the world of past life
experiences and to the law of karma:

In the middle of this session I suddenly had a vision of a dark rock of

irregular shape that looked like a giant meteorite and seemed
extremely ancient. The sky opened up and a lightning bolt of immense
intensity hit its surface and started to burn into it some mysterious
arcane symbols. Once these strange hieroglyphs were carved into the
surface of the rock, they continued to burn and emit blinding
incandescent light. Although I was unable to decipher the hieroglyphs
and read them, I sensed they were sacred and I could somehow
understand the message they were conveying. They revealed to me that
I had had a long series of lives preceding this one and that, according
to the law of karma, I was responsible for my actions in these lives,
although I could not remember them.

I tried to refuse responsibility for things of which I did not have any
memory, but was not able to resist the enormous psychological
pressure forcing me to surrender. Finally, I had to accept what clearly
was an ancient universal law against which there was no recourse.
Once I yielded, I found myself holding in my arms Monica, just as I
remembered holding her on the previous weekend. We were floating in
air in an archetypal pit of immense size, slowly descending in an
extended spiral. I felt instinctively that this was the Abyss of Ages and
that we were traveling back in time.

The descent took forever; it seemed it would never end. Finally we

reached the bottom of the pit. Monica disappeared from my arms and I
found myself walking in a hall of an ancient Egyptian palace, dressed
in ornate clothes. All around me on the walls were beautiful reliefs
accompanied by carved hieroglyphs. I could understand their meaning
in the same way I would understand the message of the posters pasted
on a Baltimore billboard. On the other side of the large hall, I saw a
figure that was slowly approaching me. I knew that I was the son of an
aristocratic Egyptian family and that the man approaching me was my
brother in that lifetime.

As the figure came closer, I recognized it was Wolfgang. He stopped

about ten feet from me and looked at me with immense hatred. I
realized that in this incarnation Wolfgang, Monica, and I were siblings.
I was the first born and as such I had married Monica and received
many other privileges that came with that status. Wolfgang felt
deprived and experienced agonizing jealousy and strong hatred toward
me. I saw clearly that this was the basis of a destructive karmic pattern
that then repeated itself in many variations throughout ages.

I stood in the hall facing Wolgang and feeling his deep hatred toward
me. In an attempt to resolve this painful situation, I tried to send him a
telepathic message: “I do not know which form I am in and how I got
here. I am a time traveler from the twentieth century, where I took a
powerful mind-altering drug. I am very unhappy about the tension that
exists between us and want to do anything to resolve it.” I stretched
my arms into a very open position and sent him the following
message: “Here I am, this is all I have! Please, do anything you need to
do to liberate us from this bondage, to set both of us free!”

Wolfgang seemed very excited about my offer and accepted it. His
hatred seemed to take the form of two intense rays of energy
resembling powerful laser beams that burned my body and caused me
extreme pain. After what seemed an extremely long time of
excruciating torture, the beams gradually lost their power and
eventually completely faded. Wolfgang and the hall disappeared and I
found myself holding Monica again in my arms.

This time we ascended through the same Abyss of Ages, moving

forward in time. The walls of this archetypal pit were opening into
scenes from different historical periods showing Monica, Wolfgang,
and myself in many previous lifetimes. All of them depicted difficult
and destructive triangular situations, in which we seriously hurt each
 other. It seemed that a strong wind, a “karmic hurricane,” was blowing
through centuries, dissipating the pain of these situations and releasing
the three of us from a fatal painful bondage.

When this sequence ended and I returned fully into the present, I was
in a state of indescribable bliss and ecstatic rapture. I felt that even if I
would not achieve anything else during the rest of my days, my life
had been productive and successful. Resolution and release from one
powerful karmic pattern seemed a sufficient accomplishment for one
lifetime!

Monica’s presence in my experience was so intense that I was convinced

she had to feel the impact of what was happening with me. When we saw
each other the next week, I decided to find out what was her experience in
the afternoon when I had the session. At first, I deliberately did not tell her
anything about my session, trying to avoid any possibility of suggestion. I
simply asked her what she did between 4 and 4.30 p.m. when I was
experiencing the Egyptian karmic sequence in my session. “Strange that
you should ask me,” she answered, “it was probably the worst time of my
entire life!”

She then proceeded to describe a dramatic showdown she had had with her
superior that ended by her storming out of the office. She was sure she had
lost her job, felt desperate, and ended up in a nearby bar drinking heavily.
At one point, the door of the bar opened up and a man walked in. Monica
recognized Robert, a man with whom she had had a sexual relationship at
the time she met me. Robert was very rich and gave her many expensive
gifts, including a new car and a horse.

Unbeknownst to me, Monica continued the relationship with him after we

started dating, not being able to make a choice between the two of us. When
she now saw Robert entering the bar, she walked to him and wanted to give
him a hug and a kiss. Robert made an evasive maneuver and shook her hand
instead. Monica noticed that he was accompanied by an elegant woman.
Clearly perplexed, Robert introduced her to Monica; it happened to be his
wife. For Monica this was a shock, since during their entire relationship
Robert had pretended that he was single.
At this point, Monica felt that the ground disappeared from under her feet.
She left the bar and ran to her car, the one that Robert had given her.
Severely drunk and in heavy rain, she raced down the beltway reaching the
speed of over 90 miles per hour, determined to end it all. Too much had
happened that day and she did not care any more! It turned out that exactly
at the time when I reached the resolution of the karmic pattern in my
session, my image emerged in Monica’s mind. She started thinking about
me and about our relationship. Realizing that she still had somebody in her
life she could rely on, she calmed down. She slowed down the car, drove it
off the beltway, and parked it at the curbside. When she sobered up to the
point that she could drive safely, she returned home and went to bed.

The day after this discussion with Monica, I received a phone call from
Wolfgang, who asked for an appointment with me. This was an absolutely
unexpected and surprising development, since Wolfgang had never called
me before, let alone asked for a meeting. When he arrived, he told me that
he came to see me about a very intimate and embarassing matter. It was a
problem that is called in psychoanalysis the prostitute-Madonna complex.
He had had a number of causal and superficial sexual relationships in his
life, including many one-night stands, and never had had any problems
developing and maintaining erection. Now he felt that he had found the
woman of his dreams and, for the first time in his life, was deeply in love.
However, he was unable to have sex with her and experienced repeated
painful failures.

Wolfgang was desperate and afraid that he would lose this relationship
unless he did something about his impotence. He told me that he was too
embarassed to talk about his problem with a stranger. He thought about
discussing the issue with me, but rejected the idea, because he had strong
negative feelings toward me. At one point, his attitude toward me suddenly
changed radically. His hatred dissolved as if by magic and he decided to call
me and seek help. When I asked him when this had happened, I found out
that it exactly coincided with the time when I had completed the reliving of
the Egyptian sequence.

A few weeks later, I retrieved the missing piece of the Egyptian story. I did
a hypnotic session with Pauline McCririck, a psychoanalyst from London.
The following is an excerpt from my account of this experience.

I lay in the sand of a hot sun-scorched desert. I felt agonizing pain in

my belly and my entire body was in spasms. I knew I had been
poisoned and was going to die. I realized from the context that the only
people who could have poisoned me had to be Monica and her lover.
By the Egyptian law, she had to marry me as her oldest brother, but her
affection belonged to another man. I had found out about their affair
and had attempted to interfere with their relationship. The realization
that I had been betrayed and poisoned filled me with blind anger. I
died alone in the desert with my entire being filled with hatred.

The reliving of this situation brought another interesting insight. I

seemed to remember that in this Egyptian lifetime, I was actively
involved in the mysteries of Isis and Osiris and knew their secrets. I
felt that the poison and the hatred intoxicated my mind and obscured
everything else, including this knowledge. This made it impossible for
me to take advantage of the secret teachings at the time of my death.
For the same reason, my connection with this arcane knowledge was
brutally severed.

I suddenly saw that much of my present life had been dedicated to an

unrelenting search for these lost teachings. I remembered how excited
I had been every time I had come across some information that was
directly or indirectly related to this area. In the light of this insight, my
work with psychedelics revolving around psychospiritual death and
rebirth seemed to be a rediscovery and modern reformulation of the
processes involved in the ancient mysteries.

In a subsequent meditation, I was unexpectedly flooded with a fugue of

images representing highlights of my experiences with Monica and
Wolfgang, some of them from real life, others from my sessions. The
intensity and speed of this review rapidly increased until it reached an
explosive climax. In an instant, I felt a deep sense of resolution and peace. I
knew that the karmic pattern was now fully resolved. Monica and I
remained friends for the rest of my stay in Baltimore. The tension and chaos
disappeared from our interactions and neither of us felt any compulsion to
continue an intimate relationship. We both understood that we were not
meant to be partners in our present lifetime.

Reincarnation and Karma in Tibetan Buddhism

There exists another interesting piece of the puzzle of reincarnation. It is the
information we have about certain Tibetan teachings and practices
concerning the degree to which it is possible to actually influence the
process of death and reincarnation. Tibetan literature describes that certain
highly developed spiritual masters are able to choose the time of their death
and predict or select the time and place of their next incarnation. Others
have developed the capacity to maintain continuity of consciousness during
their passage through the bardos, intermediate states between death and the
next incarnation.

Conversely, according to these reports, accomplished Tibetan monks can

use certain specific clues, received in dreams and meditations, as well as
various external omens, to locate and identify the child who is the
reincarnation of a tulku or a Dalai Lama. Eventually, the child is found,
brought to the monastery, and exposed to a series of tests during which it
has to correctly identify from several sets of similar objects those that
belonged to the deceased. Some aspects of this practice could, at least
theoretically, be subjected to a rather rigorous testing following Western
standards.

Reincarnation: Fact or Fiction?

We can now summarize the objective evidence that forms the basis of the
widespread “belief” in reincarnation and karma. The term belief is actually
inappropriate when applied to this area. Properly understood, it is a
theoretical system of thought, a conceptual framework that is trying to
provide explanation for a large number of unusual experiences and
observations. In holotropic states, spontaneous or induced, it is not only
possible but very common to experience episodes from the lives of people
in various historical periods and different countries of the world. When we
experience these sequences, we feel completely identified with these
individuals. In addition, we have a convinced feeling that we actually once
were these persons and lived their lives. These experiences are typically
very vivid and can engage all our senses.

In terms of their content, past life experiences transcend racial and cultural
boundaries and can take place in any country of the world and at any time
of human history or prehistory. They often provide detailed information
about the countries, cultures, and times involved. In many instances, this
information by far surpasses our previous knowledge of these matters and
our general educational background. On occasion, the sequences from past
lives can feature animal protagonists. For example, we can experience a
situation in which we were killed by a tiger or trampled to death by an
elephant. Over the years, I have also witnessed some past life experiences
with only one protagonist, such as episodes where the experiencer died in
an avalanche or was crushed by a falling tree. The therapeutic potential of
past life experiences and the synchronicities associated with them are
additional remarkable features of these phenomena. These are the facts that
we have to know before we attempt to pass a judgment concerning the
“belief” in reincarnation and karma.

These extraordinary characteristics of past life experiences have been

repeatedly confirmed by independent observers. However, all these
impressive facts do not necessarily constitute a definitive “proof” that we
survive death and reincarnate as the same separate unit of consciousness, or
the same individual soul. This conclusion is just one possible interpretation
of the existing evidence. This is essentially the same situation that we
encounter in science, where we have certain facts of observation and look
for a theory that would explain them and put them into a coherent
conceptual framework.

One of the basic rules in modern philosophy of science is that a theory

should never be confused with the reality that it describes. The history of
science clearly shows that there always exists more than one way to
interpret the available data. In the study of past life phenomena, as in any
other area of exploration, we have to separate facts of observation from the
theories that try to make sense of them. For example, the falling of objects
is a fact of observation, whereas the theories trying to explain why it
happens have changed several times in the course of history and
undoubtedly will change again.

The existence of past life experiences with all their remarkable

characteristics is an unquestionable fact that can be verified by any serious
researcher who is sufficiently open-minded and interested to check the
evidence. It is also clear that there is no plausible explanation for these
phenomena within the conceptual framework of mainstream psychiatry and
psychology. On the other hand, the interpretation of the existing data is a
much more complex and difficult matter. The popular understanding of
reincarnation as a repeated cycle of life, death, and rebirth of the same
individual is a reasonable conclusion from the available evidence. It
certainly is far superior to the attitude of traditional psychologists and
psychiatrists, who ignore all the available evidence and rigidly adhere to the
established ways of thinking. However, it is not difficult to imagine some
alternative interpretations of the same data. Naturally, none of these
explanations is congruent with the materialistic paradigm.

At least two such alternatives can already be found in the spiritual literature.
In the Hindu tradition, the belief in reincarnation of separate individuals is
seen as a popular and unsophisticated understanding of reincarnation. In the
last analysis, there is only one being that has true existence and that is
Brahman, or the creative principle itself. All separate individuals in all the
dimensions of existence are just products of infinite metamorphoses of this
one immense entity. Since all the divisions and boundaries in the universe
are illusory and arbitrary, only Brahman really incarnates. All the
protagonists in the divine play of existence are different aspects of this One.
When we attain this ultimate knowledge, we are able to see that our past
incarnation experiences represent just another level of illusion or maya. To
see these lives as “our lives” requires perception of the karmic players as
separate individuals and reflects ignorance concerning the fundamental
unity of everything.

In his book Lifecycles, Christopher Bache (1990) discusses another

interesting concept of reincarnation found in the books by Jane Roberts
(1973) and in the works of other authors. Here the emphasis is neither on
the individual unit of consciousness nor on God, but on the Oversoul, an
entity that lies in between the two. If the term soul refers to the
consciousness that collects and integrates the experiences of an individual
incarnation, the Oversoul or Soul is the name given to the larger
consciousness that collects and integrates the experiences of many
incarnations.

According to this view, it is the Oversoul that incarnates, not the individual
unit of consciousness.

Bache points out that if we are extensions of our former lives, we clearly
are not the summation of all the experiences that they have contained. The
purpose that the Oversoul has for incarnating is to collect specific
experiences. A full involvement in a particular life requires severing the
connection with the Oversoul and assuming discrete personal identity. At
the time of death, the separate individual dissolves in the Oversoul, leaving
only a mosaic of unassimilated difficult experiences. These then become
assigned to the life of other incarnated beings in a process that can be
compared to dealing a hand of cards in a card game.

In this model, there is no true continuity between the lives of the individuals
that incarnate at diffferent times. By experiencing undigested parts of other
lives, we are not dealing with our personal karma, but actually clearing the
field of the Oversoul. The image that Bache uses to illustrate the
relationship between the individual soul and the Oversoul is that of a
nautilus shell. Here each chamber represents a separate unit and reflects a
certain period in the life of the mollusk, but it is also integrated into a larger
whole.

We have so far discussed three different ways of interpreting the

observations related to past life phenomena. The incarnating units were,
respectively, the individual unit of consciousness, Absolute Consciousness,
and the Oversoul. However, we have not exhausted all the possibilities of
alternative explanations that could account for the observed facts. Because
of the arbitrary nature of all boundaries in the universe, we could just as
easily define as the incarnating principle a unit larger than the Oversoul, for
example, the field of consciousness of the entire human species or that of
all life forms.
We could also take our analysis a step further and explore the factors that
determine the specific choice of the karmic experiences that are assigned to
the incarnating unit of consciousness. For example, some people with
whom I have worked had convincing insights that an important factor in the
selection process might be the relationship between karmic patterns and the
time and place of a particular incarnation with its specific astrological
correlates. This notion is in general agreement with the observations from
psychedelic sessions, holotropic breathwork, and spontaneous episodes of
psychospiritual crises. They show that in all these situations the content and
timing of nonordinary states are closely correlated with planetary transits
(Tarnas, in press).

Holotropic Experiences and Their Influence on

Our Belief System
To get a more comprehensive perspective on the subject of reincarnation, let
us explore the changes in our beliefs that occur during systematic inner
work involving holotropic states. Our belief or disbelief in reincarnation, as
well as our understanding of what might survive death, reflect the nature
and level of the experiences we have had. A typical member of the Western
industrial civilization believes that he or she is a physical body. This clearly
limits individual existence to a lifespan that reaches from conception to the
moment of death. As we saw, this “one-timer” approach is in conflict with
the perspective of many other human groups throughout history. In our
culture, it is strongly endorsed by an unlikely alliance of materialistic
science and the Christian Church. The problem of reincarnation is one of
the rare areas where both of these institutions reach complete agreement.

Personal experiences of past life memories that we encounter in meditation,

experiential psychotherapy, psychedelic sessions, or “spiritual emergency”
can be extremely authentic and convincing. They can bring about a drastic
change in our worldview and open us up to the concept of reincarnation, not
as a belief, but as an experiential reality. Consequently, the emphasis in our
self-exploration tends to change considerably. Previously, we might have
felt that it was all-important to work through our traumas from childhood,
infancy, and birth, because we realized that they were a source of
difficulties in our present life. After the discovery of the karmic realm, we
become more concerned about attaining release from traumatic karmic
patterns, because they have the potential to contaminate not one lifetime,
but many consecutive ones.

At this stage, we often continue having additional past life experiences that
can be very rich in accurate detail and be associated with remarkable
synchronicities. We thus keep obtaining convincing evidence about the
reality and authenticity of this way of understanding existence. We do not
think about ourselves any more as Alan Watts’ “skin-encapsulated egos.”
Instead of identifying with one specific individual who lives from
conception to death, we now have a much larger concept of who we are.

Our new identity is that of a being whose existence spans many lifetimes;
some of them have already passed, others still await us in the future. To see
ourselves in this way, we have to transcend our previous belief that our
lifespan is temporally limited to the period between conception and death.
At the same time, we have to continue believing in the absolute nature of
spatial boundaries that separate us from other people and from the rest of
the world. We think about ourselves as open-ended chains of lifetimes and
see our karmic partners in the same way.

If we continue our inner journey, additional holotropic experiences can

show us that even spatial boundaries are ultimately illusory and can be
dissolved. This creates an entirely new perspective on the problem of
reincarnation. We have now transcended the concept of karma, as it is
usually understood, because we have reached a level where there are no
more separate individuals. And the existence of discrete characters is a
necessary prerequisite for any karmic interaction. At this point, we identify
with the unified field of cosmic creative energy and with Absolute
Consciousness. From this perspective, the past life dramas represent just
another level of illusion, the play of maya. It becomes clear that all lives
have ultimately only one protagonist and that, in the last analysis, they are
all empty of substance.

We now do not believe in karma any more, certainly not in the same sense
as we did before. This form of disbelief is of an entirely different kind and
order than the attitude of a materialistic skeptic and atheist. We still
remember the time when we lived in a completely constricted state of
consciousness and rejected the idea of reincarnation as utterly ridiculous
and absurd. We are also aware of the fact that powerful and compelling
experiences can move us to a level of consciousness where reincarnation is
not a concept, but lived reality. And we know that even this stage can be
transcended when our process of inner self-exploration confronts us with
experiences that make us understand the relativity of all boundaries and the
fundamental emptiness of all forms.

Neither a categorical denial of the possibility of reincarnation, nor the belief

in its objective existence are true in an absolute sense. All the three
approaches to this problem mentioned above are experientially very real
and each of them reflects a certain level of insight into the universal scheme
of things. In the last analysis, only the existence of the creative principle
itself is real. Both the world in which reincarnation seems impossible and
the one where it seems to be an undeniable fact are virtual realities created
by orchestration of experiences. For this reason, the cosmic game can
include scripts that from our limited everyday perspective might appear to
be incompatible and in conflict with each other. In the Universal Mind and
its divine play they can coexist without any problem.

9
The Taboo against Knowing Who You Are
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
—Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
—William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”

The Perfect Illusion

In holotropic states, we can transcend the boundaries of the embodied ego
with which we usually identify and have convincing experiences of
becoming other people, animals, plants, and even inorganic parts of nature
or various mythological beings. We discover that the separation and
discontinuity that we usually perceive within creation are arbitrary and
illusory. And when all the boundaries dissolve and we transcend them, we
can experience identification with the creative source itself, either in the
form of Absolute Consciousness or the Cosmic Void. We thus discover that
our real identity is not the individual self, but the Universal Self.

If it is true that our deepest nature is divine and that we are identical with
the creative principle of the universe, how do we account for the intensity
of our belief that we are physical bodies existing in a material world? What
is the nature of this fundamental ignorance concerning our true identity, this
mysterious veil of forgetting that Alan Watts called “the taboo against
knowing who you are”? (Watts 1966). How is it possible that an infinite and
timeless spiritual entity creates from itself and within itself a virtual
facsimile of a tangible reality populated by sentient beings who experience
themselves as separate from their source and from each other? How can the
actors in the world drama be deluded into believing in the objective
existence of their illusory reality?

The best explanation I have heard from the people with whom I have
worked is that the cosmic creative principle traps itself by its own
perfection. The creative intention behind the divine play is to call into being
experiential realities that would offer the best opportunities for adventures
in consciousness. To meet this requirement, they have to be convincing and
believable in all details. We can use here as an example works of art such as
theater plays or movies. These can occasionally be enacted and performed
with such perfection that they make us forget that the events we are
witnessing are illusory and react to them as if they were real. Also, a good
actor and actress can sometimes lose their true identity and temporarily
merge with the characters they are impersonating.

The world in which we live has many characteristics that Absolute

Consciousness in its pure form is missing, such as plurality, polarity,
density, physicality, change, and impermanence. The project of creating a
facsimile of a material reality endowed with these properties is executed
with such artistic and scientific perfection that the split-off units of the
Universal Mind find it entirely convincing and mistake it for reality. In the
extreme expression of its artistry, represented by the atheist, the Divine
actually succeeds in bringing forth arguments not only against its
involvement in creation, but against its very existence.

One of the important ploys that help to create the illusion of an ordinary
material reality is the existence of the trivial and ugly. If we all were radiant
ethereal beings, drawing our life energy directly from the sun and living in a
world where all the landscapes would look like the Himalayas, the Grand
Canyon, and unspoiled Pacific islands, it would be too obvious to us that we
are part of a divine reality. Similarly, if all the buildings in our world looked
like Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, Xanadu, or the cathedral in Chartres, and we
were surrounded by Michelangelo’s sculptures and listen to Beethoven’s or
Bach’s music, the divine nature of our world would be easily discernible.

The fact that we have physical bodies with all their secretions, excretions,
odors, imperfections, and pathologies, as well as a gastrointestinal system
with its repulsive contents, certainly effectively obscures and confuses the
issue of our divinity. Various physiological functions like vomiting,
burping, passing gas, defecating, and urinating, together with the final
decomposition of the human body further complicate the picture. Similarly,
the existence of unattractive natural scenes, junkyards, polluted industrial
areas, foul-smelling toilets with obscene graffiti, urban ghettoes, and
millions of funky houses make it very difficult to realize that our life is a
divine play. The existence of evil and the fact that the very nature of life is
predatory makes this task almost impossible for an average person. For
educated Westerners, the worldview created by materialistic science is an
additional serious hurdle.
It is certainly easier to associate divinity with beauty than with ugliness.
However, in a larger context, including ugliness into the universal scheme
makes the spectrum of existence fuller and richer and helps to disguise the
divine nature of creation. The image of the hideous can be executed with
great perfection and to be able to do it constitutes an interesting challenge.
When we realize that the complex nature of Cosmic Consciousness
includes, among others, certain characteristics that we find on our level
reflected in artists and scientists, the tendency to explore the entire
spectrum of possibilities, including the ugly and disgusting, suddenly does
not seem very surprising.

The world of art, including painting, literature, and movies, can hardly be
accused of onesidedly favoring the beautiful and uplifting. Similarly,
scientists certainly do not shy away from exploring any aspect of existence
and many of them do not hesitate to pursue their passionate quest even if
their discoveries have dismal and ugly consequences for our world. Once
we realize the origin and purpose of the cosmic drama, the usual criteria for
perfection and beauty have to be drastically revised. One of the important
tasks on the spiritual journey is to be able to see the divine not only in the
extraordinary and ordinary, but also in the lowly and ugly.

According to our usual criteria, Albert Einstein is a genius who certainly

towers high above his fellow humans, let alone above a primate like a
chimpanzee. However, from a cosmic perspective, there is no hierarchical
difference between Einstein and an ape, since they are both perfect
specimens of what they were intended to be. Within a Shakespeare play, a
king is certainly superior to his court jester. However, the status of
Lawrence Olivier as an actor does not oscillate depending on which of them
he plays, as long as he delivers a perfect performance. Similarly, Einstein is
God impeccably impersonating Albert Einstein and a chimpanzee is God
playing perfectly the role of a chimpanzee.

Ordinarily, possessing a reasonable esthetic sense, we would admire the

work of Michelangelo or Vincent van Gogh and not feel much appreciation
for kitsch. This would make perfect sense if we were comparing ordinary
human efforts that have such drastically different results. However, the true
originators of these works were not the embodied selves of the authors but
the Absolute Consciousness and the cosmic creative energy working
through them with a specific purpose. If the creative intention was not to
produce a great piece of art, but quite specifically to add the phenomenon of
kitsch to the cosmic game, this project was perfect in its own way.

The same can be said about an ugly toad, a creature that was included in the
universal scheme for a specific purpose by the same source that was
capable of creating swallowtail butterflies. peacocks, and gazelles. It is the
absolute perfection of creation, understood in this sense, that seems to be
responsible for the “taboo against knowing who we are.” The virtual reality
simulating a material universe is worked out with such an acute sense for
miniscule detail that the result is absolutely convincing and believable. The
units of consciousness cast as the protagonists in the countless roles of this
play of plays get entangled and caught in the complex and intricate web of
its illusionary magic.

Creative Play of the Demiurges

The insights into the nature and dynamics of the cosmic game do not have
to emerge on the level of the supreme creative principle. Gail, a minister
who participated in our training program for professionals at the Maryland
Psychiatric Research Center, had in her psychedelic session an interesting
sequence that portrayed cosmogony as a competitive creative game of four
demiurgic suprahuman entities. Although her experience is very unusual,
since it involves several demiurgic beings rather than one creative principle,
I will include it here. It illustrates with exceptional clarity many of the
issues related to the problem of incarnation of spiritual beings and the
“taboo against knowing who you are.” Here is the corresponding excerpt
from her session:

I found myself in a dimension that seemed to lie beyond space and

time as we know it. What comes to my mind when I think about it now
is the concept of hyperspace used by modern physicists. However,
such a technical term would not describe the profound feeling of
sacredness, the awesome sense of numinosity associated with my
experience. I realized that I was a suprahuman being of immense
proportions, possibly one that transcended all limitations, or one that
 existed before any limitations were known. I did not have any form,
being just pure consciousness with superb intelligence suspended in
Absolute Space. Although there was no source of light there, I cannot
say I was in complete darkness.

I shared this space with three other beings. Although they were purely
abstract and amorphous like myself, I could clearly feel their separate
presence and communicate with them in a complex telepathic fashion.
We amused each other by various brilliant intellectual games;
fireworks of extraordinary ideas were being thrown back and forth.
The complexity, intricacy, and level of imagination involved in these
games by far surpassed anything known among humans. It was all
pure entertainment, l’art pour l’art, since in the form we were, none of
it had any practical implications.

I have to think in this context about whales who float in the ocean with
their enormous brains and are endowed with intelligence that matches
or surpasses ours. Since nature does not create and maintain organs
and functions that are not being used, the mental activity of the
cetaceans has to be comparable to that of humans. Yet. because of their
anatomy, they have only minimal capacity to give any tangible
physical expression to what is going on in their minds. I once read a
speculation of a researcher who suggested that the whales may be
spending most of their time entertaining each other using their
amazing voices that carry in the ocean over distances of hundreds of
miles. Do they tell each other stories and communicate artistic
creations? Do they have philosophical dialogues or play sophisticated
games? Or are they like Indian or Tibetan yogis who in their deep
meditations, in the solitude of their caves and cells, experience
connection with the entire history of the cosmos and other realities?

After this introduction, describing the general ambience and context of her
experience and reflecting on the disembodied existence as a purely spiritual
being, Gail focused on the part of her session that has immediate relevance
for our discussion about the “taboo against knowing who we are.”

One of the beings came up with an intriguing idea. It suggested that it

would be possible to create a game involving a reality with many
 different creatures of various sizes and forms. They would appear to be
dense and solid and exist in a world filled with objects of different
shapes, textures, and consistencies. The beings would come into
existence, evolve, have complex interactions and adventures with each
other, and then cease to exist. There would be groups of creatures of
various orders, each existing in two forms—male and female—that
would complement each other and participate in reproduction.

This reality would be bound by distinct space and time coordinates.

Time would show a mandatory flow from the past through the present
to the future and later events would appear to be caused by the
preceding ones. There would be vast historical periods, each different
from the others. One would have to travel to get from one place to
another and there would be many different ways to do it. A variety of
rigid limitations, rules, and laws would govern all the events in this
world, as it is with all the games. Entering this reality and assuming
different roles in it would provide exquisite entertainment of a very
unique type.

The three spiritual beings were intrigued, but incredulous, and expressed
serious doubts about the suggested project. As exciting as it sounded, it
seemed unlikely that it could be implemented. How could an unlimited
spiritual being existing in the world of all possibilities be made to believe
that it is confined to a solid body of a strange shape, with a head, trunk, and
extremities, and that it critically depends on the ingestion of other dead
creatures and the presence of a gas called oxygen? How could it be
convinced that it has a limited intellectual capacity and that its ability to
perceive is constrained by the range of something like the sensory organs. It
seemed too fantastic to be seriously considered! In what follows, Gail
describes how the demiurgic beings resolved the problem.

A heated intellectual exchange ensued. The originator of this plan

responded to all our objections, insisting that the project was perfectly
feasible. He/she was convinced that sufficient complexity and
intriguing nature of the script, consistent association of specific
situations with compelling experiences, and careful covering of all the
loopholes was all that was necessary. It would trap the participant into
 an intricate net of illusions and trick him/her into believing in the
reality of the game. We were getting increasingly fascinated by all the
possibilities and finally became convinced that this unusual project
was viable. We agreed to enter the game of incarnation excited by the
promise of extraordinary adventures in consciousness.

This experience has somehow resolved whatever concerns I have ever

had regarding the matter of karma. It left me with a firm conviction
that I am in essence a spiritual being and that the only way I could
have possibly gotten involved in the cosmic drama was through a free
decision. The choice to incarnate involves voluntary acceptance of a
large number of limitations, rules, and laws, as it always does when we
decide to play a game. From this perspective, it does not make sense to
blame anybody for anything that happens in our life. The fact that, on a
higher level, we have a free choice whether or not we enter the cosmic
game creates a metaframework that redefines everything that occurs
within it.

Vicissitudes and Pitfalls of the Return Journey

There exists another important reason why it is so difficult to free ourselves
from the illusion that we are separate individuals living in a material world.
The ways to reunion with the divine source are fraught with many
hardships, risks, and challenges. The divine play is not a completely closed
system; it offers the protagonists the possibility to discover the true nature
of creation, including their own cosmic status. However, the ways leading
out of self-deception to enlightenment and to reunion with the source
present serious problems and most of the potential loopholes in creation are
carefully hidden. This is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of
stability and balance in the cosmic scheme. These vicissitudes and pitfalls
of the spiritual path represent an important part of the “taboo against
knowing who we are.”

All the situations that provide opportunities for spiritual opening are
typically associated with a variety of strong opposing forces. Some of the
obstacles that make the way to liberation and enlightenment extremely
difficult and dangerous are intrapsychic in nature. Here belong terrifying
experiences that can deter less courageous and determined seekers, such as
encounters with dark archetypal forces, fear of death, and the specter of
insanity. Even more problematic are various interferences and interventions
that come from the external world. In the Middle Ages, many people who
had spontaneous mystical experiences were risking torture, trial, and
execution by the Holy Inquisition. In our time, stigmatizing psychiatric
labels and drastic therapeutic measures replaced accusations of witchcraft,
tortures, and autosda-fé. Materialistic scientism of the twentieth century has
ridiculed and pathologized any spiritual effort, no matter how well founded
and sophisticated.

The authority that science enjoys in modern society makes it difficult to

take spirituality seriously and pursue the path of spiritual discovery. In
addition, the dogmas and activities of mainstream religions tend to obscure
the fact that the only place where true spirituality can be found is inside the
psyche of each of us. At its worst, organized religion can actually function
as a grave impediment for any serious spiritual search, rather than an
institution that can help us connect with the Divine.

The technologies of the sacred developed by various aboriginal cultures

have in the West been dismissed as products of magical thinking and
primitive superstitions of the savages. The spiritual potential of sexuality
that finds its expression in Tantra is by far outweighed by the pitfalls of sex
as a powerful animal instinct. The advent of psychedelics that have the
capacity to open wide the gates to the transcendental dimension was soon
followed by irresponsible secular misuse of these compounds and the
threats of insanity, chromosomal damage, and legal sanctions.

Failed Experiment in Astral Projection

We are so deeply imbedded in our belief in an objectively existing and
predictable material world that a sudden collapse of our familiar reality and
violation of the “taboo against knowing who we are” can be associated with
indescribable metaphysical terror. I will illustrate this point by completing
the story about my “astral projection” from Baltimore to Prague that I
introduced earlier (p. 89–91). I interrupted my account at the point where I
felt trapped in a space-time loop, not knowing in which of these two cities I
actually was. Here is the rest of this extraordinary adventure in
consciousness:

I felt that I needed a much more convincing proof of whether or not

what I was experiencing was “objectively real” in the usual sense. I
finally decided to perform a test—to take a picture from the wall and
later check in the correspondence with my parents if something
unusual had happened at that time in their apartment. I reached for the
picture, but before I was able to touch the frame, I was overcome by an
increasingly alarming feeling that it was an extremely risky and
dangerous undertaking. I suddenly felt under the attack of evil forces
and perilous black magic. It seemed to me that what I was about to do
was a hazardous gamble, in which the price was my soul.

I paused and made a desperate effort to understand what was

happening. Images from the world’s famous casinos were flashing in
front of my eyes—Monte Carlo, Lido in Venice, Las Vegas, Reno—I
saw roulette balls spiraling at intoxicating speeds, the levers of the slot
machines moving up and down, and dice rolling on the green surface
of the tables during a game of craps. There were circles of players
passing around cards, groups of gamblers involved in baccarat, and
crowds watching the flickering lights of the keno panels. This was
followed by scenes of secret meetings of statesmen, politicians, army
officials, and topnotch scientists.

I finally got the message and realized that I had not yet overcome my
egocentrism and was not able to resist the temptation of power. The
possibility of transcending the limitations of time and space appeared
to me to be intoxicating and dangerously seductive. If I could exert
control over time and space, an unlimited supply of money appeared to
be guaranteed, together with everything that money can buy. All I
would have to do under those circumstances was to go to the nearest
casino, stock market, or lottery office. No secrets would exist for me if
I could have mastery over time and space. I would be able to
eavesdrop on summit meetings of political leaders and have access to
top-secret discoveries. This would open undreamed-of possibilities for
directing the course of events in the world.
I understood the dangers involved in my experiment. I remembered
passages from different spiritual books warning against toying with
supernatural powers before we overcome the limitations of our egos
and reach spiritual maturity. There was something that appeared even
more relevant. I found out that I was extremely ambivalent in regard to
the outcome of my test. On the one hand, it seemed extremely enticing
to be able to liberate myself from the slavery of time and space. On the
other hand, it was obvious that a positive outcome of this test would
have far-reaching and serious consequences. It clearly could not be
seen as an isolated experiment revealing the arbitrary nature of space
and time.

If I could get confirmation that it was possible to manipulate the

physical environment at a distance of several thousand miles, my
whole universe would collapse as a result of this one experiment, and I
would find myself in a state of utter metaphysical confusion. The
world as I had known it would not exist any more. I would lose all the
maps I relied on and felt comfortable with. I would not know who,
where, and when I was and would be lost in a totally new, frightening
universe, the laws of which would be alien and unfamiliar to me. If I
had these powers, there would likely be many others who would have
them too. I would have no privacy anywhere and doors and walls
would not protect me anymore. My new world would be full of
potential dangers of unforeseeable kind and unimaginable proportions.

I could not bring myself to carry out the experiment and decided to
leave the problem of the objectivity and reality of the experience
unresolved. This made it possible for me to toy with the idea that I had
been able to transcend time and space. At the same time, it left open
the possibility to see the entire episode as a peculiar deception caused
by a powerful psychedelic substance. The idea that the destruction of
reality as I knew it was objectively verified beyond any reasonable
doubt was simply too frightening.

The moment I gave up the experiment, I found myself back in the

room in Baltimore where I took the substance and within a couple of
hours my experience stabilized and congealed into the familiar
 “objective reality.” I never forgave myself for having wasted such a
unique and fantastic experiment. However, the memory of the
metaphysical terror involved in this test makes me doubt that I would
be more courageous if I were given a similar chance in the future.

The Secrets of False Identity

We can now sum up the insights from holotropic states concerning the
“taboo against knowing who we are.” On all the levels of creation, with the
exception of the Absolute, the participation in the cosmic game requires
that the units of consciousness forget their true identity, assume a separate
individuality, and perceive and treat other protagonists as fundamentally
different from themselves. The creative process generates many domains
with different characteristics and each of them offers unique opportunities
for exquisite adventures in consciousness. The experience of the world of
gross matter and the identification with a biological organism existing in
this world is just an extreme form of this universal process.

The mastery with which the creative principle is able to portray the different
realms of existence seems to make the experiences of the roles involved so
believable and convincing that it is extremely difficult to detect their
illusory nature. In addition, the possibilities of overcoming the illusion of
separation and experiencing reunion are associated with extreme difficulties
and complex ambiguities. In essence, we do not have a fixed identity and
can experience ourselves as anything on the continuum between the
embodied self and Absolute Consciousness. The extent and degree of free
choice, that we have as protagonists on the different levels of the cosmic
game, decreases as consciousness descends from the Absolute to the plane
of material existence and increases in the course of the spiritual return
journey. Since by our true nature we are unlimited spiritual beings, we enter
the cosmic game on the basis of a free decision and get trapped by the
perfection with which it is executed.

10
Playing the Cosmic Game
Two birds beautiful of wing, friends and comrades, cling to a common tree,
and one eats the sweet fruit, the other regards him and eats not.
—Rig Veda

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be!
—George Gordon Lord Byron

The Three Poisons of Tibetan Buddhism

We have now explored in some detail the large and encompassing vision of
creation and the exalted image of human nature that have emerged from the
work with holotropic states. As we are nearing the end of our story, it seems
appropriate to examine the practical implications of this information for our
everyday life. How does systematic self-exploration using holotropic states
influence our emotional and physical well-being, our personality,
worldview, and system of values? Can the new discoveries give us any
specific guidelines that would help us to derive maximum benefit from
what we have learned? Can we use the new knowledge in a way that would
make our life more fulfilling and rewarding?

Spiritual teachers of all ages seem to agree that pursuit of material goals, in
and of itself, cannot bring us fulfillment, happiness, and inner peace. The
rapidly escalating global crisis, moral deterioration, and growing discontent
accompanying the increase of material affluence in the industrial societies
bear witness to this ancient truth. There seems to be general agreement in
the mystical literature that the remedy for the existential malaise that besets
humanity is to turn inside, look for the answers in our own psyche, and
undergo a deep psychospiritual transformation.

It is not difficult to understand that an important prerequisite for successful

existence is general intelligence—the ability to learn and recall, think and
reason, and adequately respond to our material environment. More recent
research emphasized the importance of “emotional intelligence”—the
capacity to adequately respond to our human environment and adequately
handle our interpersonal relationships (Goleman 1996).
Observations from the study of holotropic states confirm the basic tenet of
perennial philosophy that the quality of our life ultimately depends on what
can be called “spiritual intelligence.” It is the capacity to conduct our life in
such a way that it reflects deep philosophical and metaphysical
understanding of reality and of ourselves. This, of course, raises questions
about the nature of the psychospiritual transformation that is necessary to
achieve this form of intelligence, the direction of the changes that we have
to undergo, and the means that can facilitate such development.

A very clear and specific answer to this question can be found in different
schools of Mahayana Buddhism. We can use here as the basis for our
discussion the famous Tibetan screen-painting (thangka) portraying the
cycle of life, death, and reincarnation. It depicts the Wheel of Life held in
the grip of the horrifying Lord of Death. The wheel is divided into six
segments representing the different lokas, or realms into which we can be
born. The celestial domain of gods is shown as being challenged from the
adjacent segment by the jealous warrior gods, or asuras. The region of
hungry ghosts is inhabited by pretas, pitiful creatures representing
insatiable greed. They have giant bellies, enormous appetites, and the
mouths the size of a pinhole. The remaining sections of the wheel depict the
world of human beings, the realm of wild beasts, and hell. Inside the wheel
are two concentric circles. The outer one shows the ascending and
descending paths along which souls travel. The innermost circle contains
three animals—a pig, a snake, and a rooster.
 Figure 5.
The Tibetan Wheel of Life, held in the grip of the Lord of Death. In the
middle are three animals symbolizing the forces perpetuating the cycles of
death and rebirth: cock (lust), snake (aggression), and pig (ignorance). On
their right side is the dark path with descending victims of bad karma and
on the left side the light ascending path of the good karma. The six large
segments of the wheel represent the realms of existence into which one can
be born: realm of the gods, realm of the warrior deities, realm of the hungry
ghosts, hell, the animal realm, and the realm of the human beings. The
pictures on the rim of the wheel represent the chain of causation leading to
rebirth.

Copyright © The British Museum. Reprinted with permission of the

photographic service of the museum.
The animals in the center of the wheel represent the “three poisons” or
forces that, according to Buddhist teachings, perpetuate the cycles of birth
and death and are responsible for all the suffering in our life. The pig
symbolizes the ignorance concerning the nature of reality and our own
nature, the snake stands for anger and aggression, and the rooster depicts
desire and lust leading to attachment. The quality of our life and our ability
to cope with the challenges of existence depend critically on the degree to
which we are able to eliminate or transform these forces that run the world
of sentient beings. Let us now look from this perspective at the process of
systematic self-exploration involving holotropic states of consciousness.

Practical Knowledge and Transcendental Wisdom

The most obvious benefit that we can obtain from deep experiential work is
access to extraordinary knowledge about ourselves, other people, nature,
and the cosmos. In holotropic states, we can reach deep understanding of
the unconscious dynamics of our psyche. We can discover how our
perception of ourselves and of the world is influenced by forgotten or
repressed memories from childhood, infancy, birth, and prenatal existence.
In addition, in transpersonal experiences we can identify with other people,
various animals, plants, and elements of the inorganic world. Experiences
of this kind represent an extremely rich source of unique insights about the
world we live in.

In this process, we can gain considerable amount of knowledge that can be

useful in our everyday life. However, the ignorance symbolized in the
Tibetan thangkas by the pig is not the absence or lack of knowledge in the
ordinary sense. It does not mean simply inadequate information about
various aspects of the material world. The form of ignorance that is meant
here (avidya) is a fundamental misunderstanding and confusion concerning
the nature of reality and our own nature. The only remedy for this kind of
ignorance is transcendental wisdom (prajñaparamita). From this point of
view, it is very important that the inner work involving holotropic states
offers more than just increase of our knowledge about the universe. It is
also a unique way of gaining insights about issues of transcendental
relevance, as we have seen throughout this book.
Biographical, Perinatal, and Transpersonal Roots
of Aggression
Let us now look from the same perspective at the second “poison,” the
human propensity to aggression. The nature and scope of human aggression
cannot be explained simply by references to our animal origin. Seeing
humans as “naked apes” whose aggression is the result of some factors that
we share with animals, such as base instincts, genetic strategies of “selfish
genes,” or signals from the “reptilian brain,” does not take into account the
nature and degree of human violence. Animals exhibit aggression when
they are hungry, defend their territory, or compete for sex. The violence
exhibited by humans, which Erich Fromm called “malignant aggression”
(Fromm 1973), has no parallels in the animal kingdom.

Mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists attribute the specifically human

aggression to a history of frustrations, abuse, and lack of love in infancy
and childhood. However, explanations of this kind fall painfully short of
accounting for extreme forms of individual violence, such as serial murders
of the Boston Strangler or Geoffrey Dahmer type, and particularly for mass
societal phenomena like Nazism and Communism. Difficulties in the early
histories of individuals are of little help in understanding psychological
motives for bloody wars, revolutions, genocide, and concentration camps,
phenomena that involve large numbers of people. Self-exploration using
holotropic states throws an entirely new light on the problem of these forms
of human violence. Probing the depth of our psyche, we discover that the
roots of this problematic and dangerous aspect of human nature are much
deeper and more formidable than academic psychologists have ever
imagined.

There is no doubt that traumas and frustrations in childhood and infancy

represent important sources of aggression. However, this connection barely
scratches the surface of the problem. Deep systematic inner work sooner or
later reveals additional significant roots of human violence in the trauma of
biological birth. The vital emergency, pain, and suffocation experienced for
many hours during our delivery generate enormous amounts of anxiety and
murderous aggression that remain stored in our psyche and body. This
repository of fundamental mistrust and hostility toward the world
constitutes a significant aspect of the dark side of human personality that C.
G. Jung called the Shadow.

As we saw earlier, the reliving of birth in holotropic states is typically

accompanied by images of inconceivable violence, both individual and
collective. This includes experiences of mutilation, murder, and rape, as
well as scenes of bloody wars, revolutions, racial riots, and concentration
camps. Lloyd deMause (1975), a pioneer in the field of psychohistory, a
discipline that applies the methods of depth psychology to sociopolitical
events, studied speeches of political and military leaders, as well as posters
and caricatures from the time of wars and revolutions. He was struck by the
extraordinary abundance of figures of speech, metaphors, and images
related to biological birth that he found in this material.

Military leaders and politicians of all ages, referring to a critical situation or

declaring war, typically use terms that describe various aspects of perinatal
distress. They accuse the enemy of choking and strangling us, squeezing the
last breath out of our lungs, or confining us, and not giving us enough space
to live (Hitler’s Lebensraum). Equally frequent are allusions to quicksand,
dark caves, tunnels, and confusing labyrinths, dangerous abysses into which
we might be pushed, and the threat of engulfment or drowning.

Similarly, the leaders’ promises of victory tend to come in the form of

perinatal images. They pledge that they will rescue us from the darkness of
a treacherous labyrinth and guide us to the light on the other side of the
tunnel. They vow that after the oppressor is overcome, everybody will again
breathe freely. I have shown in another context the deep similarity between
the paintings and drawings depicting perinatal experiences and the
symbolism of posters and caricatures from the time of wars and revolutions
(Grof 1996).

However, even explanations recognizing perinatal sources of aggression do

not adequately account for the nature, scope, and depth of human violence.
Its deepest roots reach far beyond the boundaries of the individual, into the
transpersonal domain. In holotropic states, they take the form of wrathful
deities, devils, and demons and of complex mythological themes, such as
the Apocalypse or Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. I have given earlier
in this book several examples of these dark archetypal forces operating in
the depth of our psyche. Additional potential repositories of aggression on
the transpersonal level are past life memories and phylogenetic matrices
reflecting our animal past.

As we have seen, the study of holotropic states discloses a very shattering

and discouraging image of human nature and of the scope and depth of
aggression that our flesh is heir to. However, while it reveals the enormity
of the problem, it also offers entirely new perspectives and hopes. It shows
that there are unusually powerful and effective ways of dealing with human
violence. In deep experiential work that reaches the perinatal and
transpersonal levels, enormous amounts of aggression can be safely
expressed, worked through, and transformed in a relatively short time. This
work also throws new light on the nature of aggression and its relation to
the human psyche. According to these insights, aggression is not something
that reflects our true nature, but rather a screen that separates us from it.

When we succeed in penetrating this dark veil of elemental instinctual

forces, we discover that the innermost core of our being is divine rather
than bestial. This revelation is in full agreement with the famous passage
from the Indian Upanishads that I have quoted earlier. The message of these
ancient scriptures is very clear: “Tat tvam asi” (Thou art That)—“in your
deepest nature you are identical with the Divine.” In my experience,
responsible work with holotropic states can bring very encouraging
practical results. Deep inner self-exploration leads regularly to a major
reduction of aggression and of self-destructive tendencies, as well as an
increase of tolerance and compassion. It also tends to foster reverence for
life, empathy for other species, and ecological sensitivity.

Psychospiritual Sources of Insatiable Greed

This brings us to the third “poison” of Tibetan Buddhism, a powerful force
that combines the qualities of lust, desire, and insatiable greed. Together
with “malignant aggression,” these qualities are certainly responsible for
some of the darkest chapters in human history. Western psychologists link
various aspects of this force to the libidinal drives described by Sigmund
Freud. From this perspective, insatiable greed would be explained in terms
of unresolved oral issues from the time of nursing. Similarly, excessive
preoccupation with money would be associated with repressed anal
impulses and sexual extremes would reflect a phallic fixation. The craving
for power was most thoroughly described in the psychology of Freud’s
renegade disciple Alfred Adler, who saw it as a compensation for feelings
of inferiority and inadequacy.

The insights from holotropic states considerably enrich this picture. They
reveal additional deep sources of this aspect of human nature on the
perinatal and transpersonal levels of the psyche. When our process of
experiential self-exploration reaches the perinatal level, we typically
discover that our existence up to that point has been largely inauthentic. We
realize, to our surprise and astonishment, that our entire life strategy has
been misdirected. It becomes clear to us that much of what we have been
striving for has been strongly dictated by the unconscious emotions and
driving energies that were imprinted in our psyche and body at the time of
our birth.

The memory of the frightening and highly uncomfortable situation to which

we were exposed at the time of our delivery stays alive in our system. It
exerts a very powerful influence on us throughout our life, unless it is
brought fully into consciousness and worked through in systematic
experiential self-exploration. Much of what we do in life and how we do it
can be understood in terms of belated efforts to cope with this incomplete
gestalt of birth and the fear of death associated with it.

When this traumatic memory is close to the surface of our psyche, it causes
feelings of dissatisfaction with our present situation. In and of itself, this
discomfort is unspecific and amorphous, but it can be projected on a large
spectrum of issues. We can attribute it to our unsatisfactory physical
appearance or inadequate resources and lack of material possessions. It
might seem to us that the reason for our dissatisfaction is our low social
status and lack of influence in the world. We can feel that the source of our
discontent is insufficient power and fame, inadequate knowledge or skills,
and any number of other things.

Whatever might be the reality of the present circumstances, the situation

never seems satisfactory and the solution always appears to lie in the future.
Like the fetus stuck and struggling in the birth canal, we feel a strong need
to get to a situation that is better than the present one. As a result of this
compelling drive toward some future accomplishment, we never live fully
in the present and our life feels like a preparation for something better to
come.

Our fantasy reacts to this feeling of existential discomfort by creating an

image of a future situation that would bring satisfaction and would correct
the perceived deficiencies and shortcomings. The existentialists talk about
this mechanism as “auto-projecting” into the future. Consistent application
of this strategy results in a life pattern that people refer to as “treadmill” or
“rat-race” type of existence—pursuing fantasized mirages of future
happiness, while not being able to fully enjoy what is available in the
present. This misguided, inauthentic, and unrewarding approach to
existence can be practiced throughout the entire lifetime until death brings
the “moment of truth” and mercilessly reveals its emptiness and futility.

Auto-projecting into the future as a means of correcting existential

dissatisfaction is a “loser strategy” whether or not we achieve the desired
goals. It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding and misperception of
our needs. For this reason, it can never bring us the fulfillment we expect
from it. When we are not able to reach the goals we envision, we attribute
our continuing dissatisfaction to our failure to reach the alleged corrective
measures. When we succeed in attaining these goals, this typically does not
bring what we hoped for and our feelings of discomfort are not relieved. In
addition, we are not able to correctly diagnose why we continue feeling
dissatisfied. We do not realize that we are pursuing a fundamentally wrong
strategy of existence, one that cannot bring us fulfillment no matter what its
results are. We usually attribute the failure to the fact that the goal was not
sufficiently ambitious or that the specific choice of the goal was wrong.

This pattern often leads to a reckless irrational pursuit of various grandiose

goals that is responsible for many problems in our world and results in
much human suffering. This strategy lacks any connection to the realities of
life and can thus be acted out on many different levels. Since it never brings
true fulfillment, it does not make much difference whether the protagonist is
a pauper or a billionaire in the category of Aristotle Onassis or Howard
Hughes. Once our basic survival needs are satisfied, the quality of our life
experience has much more to do with our state of consciousness than with
external circumstances.

Misguided efforts to achieve satisfaction by pursuit of external goals can

actually bring paradoxical results. I have worked with people who after
decades of hard work and struggle finally reached the goal, about which
they had dreamed their entire life, and the next day became severely
depressed. Joseph Campbell described this situation as “getting to the top of
the ladder and finding out that it stands against the wrong wall.” This
frustrating pattern can be considerably weakened by bringing fully into
consciousness the memory of birth, confronting the fear of death connected
with it, and experiencing psychospiritual rebirth. By connecting
experientially to the memory of the prenatal or postnatal situation rather
than the imprint of the birth struggle, we significantly reduce the
unrelenting preoccupation with future achievements and are able to draw
much more satisfaction from the present.

However, the roots of our dissatisfaction and existential malaise reach even
deeper than the perinatal level. In the last analysis, the insatiable craving
that drives human life is transcendental in nature. In the words of Dante
Alighieri (1989), the great Italian poet of the early Renaissance, “the desire
for perfection is that desire which always makes every pleasure appear
incomplete, for there is no joy or pleasure so great in this life that it can
quench the thirst in our soul.” In the most general sense, the deepest
transpersonal roots of insatiable greed can best be understood in terms of
Ken Wilber’s concept of the Atman Project (Wilber 1980).

Wilber explored and described the specific consequences of the basic tenet
of perennial philosophy, which asserts that our true nature is divine. This
essence of our existence has been called by different names—God, the
Cosmic Christ, Keter, Allah, Buddha, Brahman, the Tao, and many others.
Although the process of creation separates and alienates us from our cosmic
source, our divine identity, the awareness of this connection is never
completely lost. The deepest motivating force in the human psyche on all
the levels of our development is the craving to return to the experience of
our divinity. However, the constraining conditions of the incarnate existence
do not allow the experience of full spiritual liberation in and as God.

We can use here as an illustration a story about Alexander the Great, a

person whose unique secular accomplishments would be difficult to match.
He came as far in achieving a divine status in the material world as any
human being can possibly hope for. This was actually expressed in one of
the attributes that was commonly associated with his name—Divine
Alexander. The story goes as follows:

After an unparalleled series of military victories through which he had

aquired vast territories lying between his native Macedonia and India,
Alexander finally reached India. There he heard about a yogi who had
unusual powers, or siddhis, among others the ability to see the future.
Alexander decided to pay him a visit. When he arrived to the yogi’s cave,
the sage was immersed in his regular spiritual practice. Alexander
inpatiently interrupted his meditation, asking him if he indeed had the
power to see the future. The yogi nodded in silence and returned to his
meditation. Alexander interrupted him again with another urgent question:
“Can you tell me if my conquest of India will be successful?” The yogi
meditated for a while and then slowly opened his eyes. He gave Alexander
a long gentle look and said compassionately: “What you will ultimately
need is about six feet of ground.”

It would be difficult to find a more poignant example for our human

dilemma—our desperate effort to seek realization of our divinity through
material means. The only way we can attain our full potential as divine
beings is through an inner experience. This requires death and
transcendence of our separate selves, dying to our identity as a “skin-
encapsulated ego.” Because of our fear of annihilation and because of our
grasping onto the ego, we have to settle for Atman substitutes or surrogates.
These change as we go through life and are always specific for a particular
stage.

For a fetus and the newborn, the Atman substitute is the bliss experienced
in a good womb and on a good breast. For an infant it is satisfaction of
basic physiological drives and of the need for security. By the time we
attain the adult age, the Atman project reaches enormous complexity. The
Atman surrogates now cover a wide spectrum and include, besides food and
sex, also money, fame, power, appearance, knowledge, and many other
things. At the same time, we all have a deep sense that our true identity is
the totality of cosmic creation and the creative principle itself. For this
reason, substitutes of any degree and scope will always remain
unsatisfactory. The ultimate solution for the insatiable greed is in the inner
world, not in secular pursuits of any kind and scope. Only the experience of
one’s divinity in a non-ordinary state of consciousness can ever fulfill our
deepest needs.

The Persian mystical poet Rumi made it very clear: “All the hopes, desires,
loves, and affections that people have for different things—fathers, mothers,
friends, heavens, the earth, palaces, sciences, works, food, drink—the saint
knows that these are desires for God and all those things are veils. When
men leave this world and see the King without these veils, then they will
know that all were veils and coverings, that the object of their desire was in
reality that One Thing” (Hines 1996). Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-
century English poet and clergyman, who was an ardent exponent of the
way of life he called “felicity,” reached the same realization when he had a
profound mystical experience. Here is an excerpt from his account
describing this event:

The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine.
The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all
the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew
no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all proprieties
and divisions were mine; all treasures and the possessors of them. So
that with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty
devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a
little child again that I may enter into the kingdom of God.

Walking the Mystical Path with Practical Feet

If we accept that the material universe as we know it is not a mechanical
system but a virtual reality created by Absolute Consciousness through an
infinitely complex orchestration of experiences, what are the practical
consequences of this insight? And what influence does the awareness that
our being is commensurate with that of the cosmic creative principle have
on our system of values and on the way we conduct our life? These are
questions of great theoretical and practical relevance, not only for each of
us as individuals, but for all humanity, and for the future of life on this
planet. In trying to answer them, we will again look at the insights of people
who have experienced holotropic states of consciousness.

For many religions, the recipe for dealing with the hardships of life is to
play down the importance of the earthly plane and to focus on the
transcendental realms. Some of these creeds recommend a shift in attention
and emphasis from the material world to other realities. They suggest
prayer and devotion as a way of communicating with various higher realms
and superior beings. Others offer and underscore direct experiential access
to transcendental realms by means of meditation and other forms of
personal spiritual practice. The religious systems with this orientation
portray the material world as an inferior domain that is imperfect, impure,
and conducive to suffering and misery. From their point of view, reality
appears to be a valley of tears and incarnate existence a curse or a quagmire
of death and rebirth.

These creeds and their officials offer their dedicated followers the promise
of a more desirable domain or a more fulfilling state of consciousness in the
Beyond. In more primitive forms of popular beliefs, these are various forms
of abodes of the blessed, paradises, or heavens. These become available
after death for those who meet the necessary requirements defined by their
respective theology. For more sophisticated and refined systems of this
kind, heavens and paradises are only stages of the spiritual journey and its
final destination is dissolution of personal boundaries and union with the
divine, or extinguishing the fire of life and disappearance into the
nothingness (nirvana).

According to the Jain religion, we are in our deepest nature pristine monads
of consciousness (jivas) and are contaminated by our entanglement in the
world of biology. The goal of the Jain practice is to drastically reduce our
participation in the world of matter, free ourselves from its polluting
influence, and regain our pristine status. Another example is the original
form of Buddhism called Theravada or Hinayana (the Small Vehicle). This
school of Buddhism is an austere monastic tradition that offers the teaching
and spiritual discipline necessary for achieving personal enlightenment and
liberation. Its ideal is the arhat, the saint or sage at the highest stage of
development, living as a hermit in seclusion from the world. Similar
emphasis on personal liberation (moksa) can also be found in the Hindu
Vedanta.

However, other spiritual orientations embrace nature and the material world
as containing or embodying the Divine. Thus the Tantric branches of
Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism have a distinctly life-affirming and life-
celebrating orientation. Similarly, the Buddhist Mahayana (the Great
Vehicle) teaches that we can reach liberation in the middle of everyday life
if we free ourselves from the three “poisons”—ignorance, aggression, and
desire. When we succeed, samsara, or the world of illusion, birth, and
death, becomes nirvana. Various Mahayana schools emphasize the crucial
role of compassion as an important expression of spiritual realization. Their
ideal is the Bodhisattva, who is interested not only in his own
enlightenment, but also in the liberation of all other sentient beings.

Let us take a look at this dilemma using the insights from holotropic states.
What can we gain from moving away from life and escaping from the
material plane into transcendental realities? And, conversely, what is the
value of embracing wholeheartedly the world of everyday reality? Many
spiritual systems define the goal of the spiritual journey as dissolution of
personal boundaries and reunion with the Divine. However, those people
who have actually experienced in their inner explorations identification
with Absolute Consciousness, realize that defining the final goal of the
spiritual journey as the experience of oneness with the supreme principle of
existence involves a serious problem.

They become aware of the fact that the undifferentiated Absolute

Consciousness/Void represents not only the end of the spiritual journey, but
also the source and the beginning of creation. The Divine is the principle
offering reunion for the separated, but also the agent responsible for the
division and separation of the original unity. If this principle were complete
and self-fulfilling in itself, there would not be any reason for it to create and
the other experiential realms would not exist. Since they do, the tendency of
Absolute Consciousness to create clearly expresses a fundamental “need.”
The worlds of plurality thus represent an important complement to the
undifferentiated state of the Divine. In the terminology of the Cabala,
“people need God and God needs people.”

The overall scheme of the cosmic drama involves a dynamic interplay of

two fundamental forces, one of which is centrifugal (hylotropic or matter-
oriented) and the other centripetal (holotropic or aiming for wholeness) in
relation to the creative principle. The undifferentiated Cosmic
Consciousness shows an elemental tendency to create worlds of plurality
that contain countless separate beings. We have discussed earlier some of
the possible “reasons” or “motives” for this propensity to generate virtual
realities. And conversely, the individualized units of consciousness
experience their separation and alienation as painful and manifest a strong
need to return to the source and reunite with it. Identification with the
embodied self is fraught, among others, with the problems of emotional and
physical suffering, spatial and temporal limitations, impermanence, and
death.

We can experience this dynamic conflict in its full form when our self-
exploration in holotropic states takes us to the brink of the ego death. At
this point, we oscillate and are torn between these two powerful forces. One
part of us, the holotropic one, wishes to transcend the identification with the
body-ego and experience dissolution and union with a larger whole. The
other part, the hylotropic one, is driven by the fear of death and by the self-
preservation instinct to hold onto our separate identity. This conflict is
extremely difficult and can represent a serious obstacle in the process of
psychospiritual transformation. It ultimately requires that we surrender and
sacrifice our familiar identity without knowing what will replace it on the
other side, if anything at all.

Even if our present way of being in the world is not particularly

comfortable, we might anxiously hold onto it when the alternative is
unknown. Yet we sense deep within ourselves that our existence as a
separate embodied self in the material world is, in and of itself, inauthentic
and cannot satisfy our innermost needs. We feel a strong pull to transcend
our boundaries and reclaim our true identity. It helps to know intellectually,
before we get involved in systematic inner work, that experiencing the ego
death is a symbolic experience and does not entail real death and
annihilation. However, the fear of dying and surrendering the ego is so
overwhelming and convincing that, when we are experiencing it, it is
difficult to trust this knowledge and find it comforting.

If it is true that our psyche is governed by these two powerful cosmic

forces, the hylotropic and the holotropic, and that these two are in a
fundamental conflict with each other, is there an approach to existence that
can adequately cope with this situation? Since neither separate existence
nor undifferentiated unity is fully satisfactory, what is the alternative? Is it
at all possible under these circumstances to find a solution, a life strategy
that would address this paradox? Can we find an eye in the hurricane of
these conflicting cosmic tendencies where we can rest in peace? Can we
find satisfaction in a universe whose fabric is woven by forces that oppose
each other?

Clearly, the solution is not to reject embodied existence as inferior and

worthless and try to escape from it. We have seen that experiential worlds,
including the world of matter, represent not only an important and valuable,
but absolutely necessary, complement to the undifferentiated state of the
creative principle. At the same time, our efforts to reach fulfillment and
peace of mind will necessarily fail, and possibly backfire, if they involve
only objects and goals in the material realm. Any satisfactory solution will
thus have to embrace both the earthly and the transcendental dimensions,
both the world of forms and the Formless.

The material universe as we know it offers countless possibilities for

extraordinary adventures in consciousness. As embodied selves, we can
witness the spectacle of the heavens with its billions of galaxies,
breathtaking sunrises and sunsets, waxing and waning of the moon, or the
wonder of the lunar and solar eclipses. We can watch fantastic displays of
clouds, the gentle beauty of the rainbows, and the shimmering luster of the
aurora borealis. On the surface of the earth, nature has created an endless
variety of landscapes, from great oceans, rivers and lakes to giant mountain
ranges, silent deserts, and the cold beauty of the Arctic. Together with the
astonishing variety of life forms in the animal and botanical kingdoms,
these provide endless opportunities for unique experiences.

Only in the physical form and on the material plane can we fall in love,
enjoy the ecstasy of sex, have children, listen to Beethoven’s music, or
admire Rembrandt’s paintings. Where else than on earth can we listen to the
song of a nightingale or taste baked Alaska? We could add to our list the
joys of sports, traveling, playing musical instruments, painting, and
countless others. The material world offers infinite possibilities for research
of the organic and inorganic realms, of the surface of the earth, of the depth
of the ocean, and of the far reaches of the cosmic space. The opportunities
for the explorations of the micro- and the macroworld are virtually
unlimited. In addition to the experiences of the present, there is also the
adventure of probing the mysterious past, from the ancient civilizations and
the antidiluvian world to the events during the first microseconds of the Big
Bang.

Benefits from Self-Exploration and Spiritual

Practice
To participate in the phenomenal world and to be able to experience this
rich spectrum of adventures requires a certain degree of identification with
the embodied self and acceptance of the world of matter. However, when
our identification with the body-ego is absolute and our belief in the
material world as the only reality unshatterable, it is impossible to fully
enjoy our participation in creation. The specters of personal insignificance,
impermanence, and death can completely overshadow the positive side of
life and rob it of its zest. We also have to add to it our frustration associated
with repeated futile attempts to realize our full divine potential within the
constraints imposed on us by the limitations of our bodies and of the
material world.

To find the solution to this dilemma, we have to turn within. Repeated

experiences of holotropic states tend to loosen our belief that we are a
“skin-encapsulated ego.” We continue to identify with the body-ego for
pragmatic purposes, but this identification becomes more tentative and
playful. If we have sufficient experiential knowledge of the transpersonal
aspects of existence, including our own true identity and cosmic status,
everyday life becomes much easier and more rewarding. As our inner
search continues, we also sooner or later discover the essential emptiness
behind all forms. As the Buddhist teachings suggest, knowledge of the
virtual nature of the phenomenal world and its voidness can help us achieve
freedom from suffering. This includes the recognition that belief in any
separate selves in our life, including our own, is ultimately an illusion. In
Buddhist texts, the awareness of the essential emptiness of all forms and the
ensuing realization that there are no separate selves is referred to as anatta,
literally “no-self.”

Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and Vipassana Buddhist teacher, describes

his first encounter with the concept of anatta during his meeting with the
late Tibetan spiritual teacher Kalu Rinpoche. Trying to get as much as
possible from his encounter with this remarkable human being, Jack asked
him with the eagerness of a zealous beginner: “Please, could you describe
for me in a few sentences the very essence of the Buddhist teachings?” Kalu
Rinpoche replied: “I could do it, but you would not believe me and it would
take you many years to understand what I mean.” Jack politely insisted:
“Please, can you tell me anyway? I would like to know.” Kalu Rinpoche’s
answer was brief and succinct: “You do not really exist.”

Awareness of our divine nature and of the essential emptiness of all things
that we discover in our transpersonal experiences, form the foundations of a
metaframework that can help us considerably to cope with the complexity
of everyday existence. We can fully embrace the experience of the material
world and enjoy all that it has to offer—the beauty of nature, human
relationships, love-making, family, works of art, sports, culinary delights,
and countless other things.

However, no matter what we do, life will bring obstacles, challenges,

painful experiences, and losses. When things get too difficult and
devastating, we can call on the large cosmic perspective that we have
discovered in our inner quest. The connection with higher realities and the
liberating knowledge of anatta and the emptiness behind all forms makes it
possible to tolerate what otherwise might be unbearable. With the help of
this transcendental awareness we might be able to experience fully the
entire spectrum of life or “the whole catastrophy,” as Zorba the Greek
called it.

Systematic self-exploration using holotropic experiences can also help us to

enhance and refine our sensory perception of the world. This “cleansing of
the doors of perception” as Aldous Huxley called it, referring to William
Blake’s poem, makes it possible to fully appreciate and enjoy all the
possibilities of the adventures in consciousness associated with embodied
existence. A general increase in zest is most dramatic during mystical states
and during the hours or days immediately following them. Here it is often
so intense that we can speak of an “afterglow.” In a more mitigated form,
this increase in zest and a generally enhanced quality of life represent
lasting aftereffects of such mystical revelations.

A person whose experience of life is limited to the hylotropic mode of

consciousness and who has not had experiential access to the transcendental
and numinous dimensions of reality will find it very difficult to overcome
deep-seated fear of death and find deeper meaning in life. Under these
circumstances, much of the daily behavior is motivated by the needs of the
false ego and significant aspects of life are reactive and inauthentic. For this
reason, it is essential to complement everyday practical activities with some
form of systematic spiritual practice that provides experiential access to the
transcendental realms.

In pre-industrial societies, the opportunity for transcendental experiences

existed in many different forms—from shamanic rituals, rites of passage,
and healing ceremonies to ancient mysteries of death and rebirth, mystical
schools, and the meditation practices of the great religions of the world. In
recent decades, the Western world has seen a significant revival of various
ancient spiritual practices. In addition, representatives of modern depth
psychology have developed effective new approaches facilitating spiritual
opening. These tools are available to all those who are interested in
psychospiritual transformation and consciousness evolution.

C. G. Jung, the forefather of transpersonal psychology, described in his

writings a life strategy that addresses both the secular and the cosmic
dimensions of ourselves and of existence. He suggested that we should
complement our everyday activities in the external world by systematic
self-exploration, by an inner search reaching into the deepest hidden
recesses of our psyche. By directing our attention inward, we can connect
with the Self, a higher aspect of our being, and benefit from its guidance. In
this way, we can draw on the immense resources of the collective
unconscious that contain the wisdom of ages.

According to Jung, we should not orient ourselves in life only on the basis
of the external aspects of the situations we are facing. Our decision-making
should be based on a creative synthesis of our pragmatic knowledge of the
material world and the profound wisdom drawn from the collective
unconscious during systematic inner self-exploration. This suggestion of the
great Swiss psychiatrist is in general agreement with the conclusions that
many people with whom I have worked over the years have drawn from
their holotropic explorations.

I have seen repeatedly that the pursuit of this strategy can lead to a more
fulfilling, enjoyable, and creative way of life. It makes it possible to be fully
in the world of everyday reality and yet be aware of the numinous
dimensions of existence and of our own divine nature. The ability to
reconcile and integrate these two aspects of life belongs to the loftiest
aspirations of the mystical traditions. Thus Sheik Al-’Alawi describes the
Supreme Station, the highest stage of spiritual development in the Sufi
tradition, as the state of being inwardly drunk with the Divine Essence and
yet outwardly sober.

Individual Transformation and Planetary Future

The potential benefits of this approach to existence transcend the narrow
interests of the individuals who practice it. This strategy applied on a
sufficiently large scale could have important implications for human society
and our future. In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that
humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science
has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent
problems in today’s world—combat the majority of diseases, eliminate
hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace
destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy.
The problems that stand in the way are not of an economical or
technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the
human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our
species. Because of the untamed forces in the human psyche, unimaginable
resources are being wasted in the absurdity of the arms race, power
struggle, and pursuit of “unlimited growth.” These elements of human
nature also prevent a more appropriate distribution of wealth among
individuals and nations, as well as a reorientation from purely economic
and political concerns to ecological priorities that are critical for survival of
life on this planet.

Diplomatic negotiations, administrative and legal measures, economic and

social sanctions, military interventions, and other similar efforts have so far
had very little success. As a matter of fact, they have often produced more
problems than they solved. It is becoming increasingly clear, why they had
to fail. It is impossible to alleviate this crisis by application of the strategies
rooted in the same ideology that created it in the first place. In the last
analysis, the current global crisis is of a psychospiritual nature. It is
therefore hard to imagine that it could be resolved without a radical inner
transformation of humanity and its rise to a higher level of emotional
maturity and spiritual awareness.

Considering the paramount role of violence and greed in human history, the
possibility of transforming modern humanity into a species of individuals
capable of peaceful coexistence with their fellow men and women
regardless of race, color, and religious or political conviction, let alone with
other species, certainly does not seem very plausible. We are facing the
formidable challenge of instilling humanity with profound ethical values,
sensitivity to the needs of others, voluntary simplicity, and a sharp
awareness of ecological imperatives. At first glance, this task might appear
too unrealistic and utopian to offer any real hope.

However, the situation is not as hopeless as it might appear. As we saw

earlier, profound transformation of this kind is exactly what happens in the
course of systematic inner work using holotropic states, whether it is
meditational practice, powerful experiential forms of therapy, or responsible
supervised work with psychedelic substances. Similar changes can also be
observed in people who experience spontaneous psychospiritual crises and
have the privilege of a good support system and sensitive guidance.

A strategy of existence integrating deep inner work with inspired action in

the external world could thus become an important factor in resolving the
global crisis, if it were practiced on a sufficiently large scale. Inner
transformation and accelerated consciousness evolution could significantly
improve our chances for survival and for peaceful coexistence. I have
collected and systematically described the insights from the study of
holotropic states hoping that those people who will choose this path or are
walking it already will find them useful and helpful during their own
journey.

A Recipe for Planetary Healing: Lessons from a

Native American Ceremony
I would like to close this chapter by relating an experience of profound
healing and transformation that occurred many years ago in a group of
people with whom I shared a holotropic state of consciousness. Although it
happened almost a quarter of a century ago, I still feel very moved and
tearful whenever I think and talk about it. This event showed me the depth
of the problems we are facing in our world where for many centuries hatred
has been passed from one generation to another. However, it also gave me
hope and trust in the possibility of lifting this curse and dissolving the
barriers that separate us from each other.

After I came to the United States in 1967, I participated in government-

sponsored research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center exploring
the potential of psychedelic therapy. One of our projects at the center was a
training program for mental health professionals. It made it possible to
administer up to three high-dose LSD sessions to psychiatrists,
psychologists, and social workers for educational purposes. One of our
subjects in this program was Kenneth Godfrey, a psychiatrist from the
Veterans Administration Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. I was the guide in his
three psychedelic sessions and we became very close friends.
When I was still in Czechoslovakia, I read about the Native American
Church, a syncretistic religion combining Indian and Christian elements and
using as a sacrament the Mexican psychedelic cactus peyote. I became very
interested in having a personal experience of a peyote ceremony that would
make it possible for me to compare therapeutic use of psychedelics with
their ritual use. After my arrival in the United States, I was looking for such
an opportunity, but without success. It turned out that both Ken and his wife
were of Native American origin and had good connections with their
people. When we were parting after Ken’s third session, I asked him if he
could mediate for me participation in a peyote ceremony and he promised
to try. Several days later, he called me on the phone and told me that a road
chief, who was a good friend of his, had invited me and several other
people from our staff to join a peyote ceremony of the Patawatome Indians.

The following weekend five of us flew from Baltimore to Topeka, Kansas.

The group consisted of our music therapist Helen Bonny, her sister,
psychedelic therapist Bob Leihy, professor of religion Walter Houston
Clark, and myself. We rented a car at the Topeka airport and drove from
there deep into the Kansas prairie. There, in the middle of nowhere, stood
several teepees, the site of the sacred ceremony. The sun was setting and the
ritual was about to begin. Before we could join the ceremony, we had to be
accepted by the other participants, all of whom were Native Americans. We
had to go through a process that resembled a dramatic encounter group.

With intense emotions, the native people brought up the painful history of
the invasion and conquest of North America by white intruders—the
genocide of American Indians and rapes of their women, the expropriation
of their land, the senseless slaughter of the buffalo, and many other
atrocities. After a couple of hours of dramatic exchange, the emotions
quieted down and, one after the other, the Indians accepted us into their
ceremony. Finally, there was only one person who had remained violently
opposed to our presence—a tall, dark, and sullen man. His hatred toward
white people was enormous. It took a long time before he finally reluctantly
agreed that we could join the group. It happened only after much pressure
from his own people, who were unhappy about further delays of the
ceremony.
Finally everything was settled, at least on the surface, and we all gathered in
a large teepee. The fire was started and the sacred ritual began. We ingested
the peyote buttons and passed the staff and the drum. According to the
Native American custom, whoever had the staff could sing a song or make a
personal statement; there was also the option to pass. The man who was so
reluctant to accept us sat directly across from me. It was clear that he did
not really wholeheartedly participate in the ceremony. Every time the staff
and drum made the circle and came to him, he very angrily passed them on.
My perception of the environment was extremely sensitized by the
influence of peyote. This man became a sore point in my world and I found
looking at him increasingly painful. His hatred seemed to radiate from his
eyes and fill the entire teepee.

The morning came and, shortly before sunrise, we were passing the staff
and the drum for the last time. Everybody said a few words summing up his
or her experiences and impressions from the night. Walter Houston Clark’s
speech was exceptionally long and very emotional. He expressed his deep
appreciation for the generosity of our Native American friends, who had
shared with us their beautiful ceremony. Walter specifically stressed the fact
that they accepted us in spite of everything we had done to them—invaded
and stolen their land, killed their people, raped their women, and
slaughtered the buffalo. At one point of his speech, he referred to me—I do
not remember exactly in what context—as “Stan, who is so far from his
homeland, his native Czechoslovakia.”

When Walter mentioned Czechoslovakia, the man who had resented our
presence all through the night suddenly became strangely disturbed. He got
up, ran across the teepee, and threw himself on the ground in front of me.
He hid his head in my lap and held my body in a firm embrace, crying and
sobbing loudly. After about twenty minutes, he quieted down, returned to
his place, and was able to talk. He explained that the evening before the
ceremony he had seen us all as “pale faces” and thus automatically enemies
of Native Americans. After hearing Walter’s remark, he realized that, being
of Czechoslovakian origin, I had nothing to do with the tragedy of his
people. He thus hated me throughout the sacred ceremony without
justification.
The man seemed heart-broken and desolate. After his initial statement came
a long silence during which he was going through an intense inner struggle.
It was clear that there was more to come. Finally, he was able to share with
us the rest of the story.

During World War II, he had been drafted into the U.S. Air Force and,
several days before the end of the war, he personally participated in a rather
capricious and unnecessary American air-raid on the Czech city of Pilsen,
known for its beer and its automobile factory. Not only had his hatred
toward me been unjustified, but our roles were actually reversed; he was the
perpetrator and I was the victim. He invaded my country and killed my
people. This was more than he could bear.

After I had reassured him that I did not harbor any hostile feelings toward
him, something remarkable happened. He went to my remaining four
friends from Baltimore, who were all Americans. He apologized for his
behavior before and during the ceremony, embraced them, and asked them
for forgiveness. He said that this episode had taught him that there would be
no hope for the world if we all carried in us hatred for the deeds commited
by our ancestors. And he realized that it was wrong to make generalized
judgments about racial, national, and cultural groups. We should judge
people on the basis of who they are, not as members of the group to which
they belong.

His speech was a worthy sequel to the famous letter of Chief Seattle to
European colonizers. He closed it with these words: “You are not my
enemies, you are my brothers and sisters. You did not do anything to me or
my people. All that happened a long time ago in the lives of our ancestors.
And, at that time I might actually have been on the other side. We are all
children of the Great Spirit, we all belong to Mother Earth. Our planet is in
great trouble and if we keep carrying old grudges and do not work together,
we will all die.”

By this time, most people in the group were in tears. We all felt a sense of
deep connection and belonging to the human family. As the sun was slowly
rising in the sky, we partook in a ceremonial breakfast. We ate the food that
throughout the night had been placed in the center of the teepee and was
consacrated by the ritual. Then we all shared long hugs, reluctantly parted,
and headed back home. We carried with us the memory of this invaluable
lesson in interracial and international conflict resolution that will
undoubtedly remain vivid in our minds for the rest of our lives. For me, this
extraordinary synchronicity experienced in a holotropic state of
consciousness generated hope that, sometime in the future, a similar healing
will happen in the world on a global scale.

11
The Sacred and the Profane
We do not understand much of anything, from the “big bang” all the way
down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness
of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.
—Lewis Thomas

Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be
counted counts.
—Albert Einstein

Spirituality and Religion in Modern Society

The understanding of human nature and of the cosmos shared by modern
technological societies is significantly different from the worldviews found
in the ancient and pre-industrial cultures. To some extent, this is a natural
result of historical progress and should be expected. Over the centuries,
scientists from different disciplines have systematically explored various
aspects of the material world and accumulated an impressive amount of
information that was not available in the past. They have vastly
complemented, corrected, and replaced earlier concepts about nature and
the universe. However, the most striking difference between the two
worldviews is not in the amount and accuracy of data about material reality.
It is a fundamental disagreement concerning the sacred or spiritual
dimension of existence.
All the human groups of the pre-industrial era were in agreement that the
material world which we perceive and in which we operate in our everyday
life is not the only reality.

Their worldviews, although varying in details, described the cosmos as a

complex system of hierarchically arranged levels of existence. In this
understanding of reality, which Arthur Lovejoy (1964) called the Great
Chain of Being, the world of gross matter was the last link. Higher domains
of existence included in pre-industrial cosmologies harbored deities,
demons, discarnate entities, ancestral spirits, and power animals. Ancient
and pre-industrial cultures had a rich ritual and spiritual life that revolved
around the possibility of achieving direct contact with these ordinarily
hidden dimensions of reality and receiving from them important
information, assistance, or even intervention in the course of material
events.

The everyday activities of the societies sharing this worldview were based
not only on the information received through the senses, but also on the
input from these ordinarily invisible realms. Anthropologists with
traditional Western education were often baffled by what they called the
“double logic” of the aboriginal cultures that they studied. While the natives
clearly showed great practical intelligence, possessed extraordinary skills,
and were able to produce ingenious implements for survival and sustenance,
they combined their pragmatic activities, such as hunting, fishing, and
building shelters, with strange, often complex and elaborate rituals. In these
they appealed to various entities and realities that for the anthropologists
were imaginary and nonexistent.

These differences in the worldviews find their strongest expression in the

area of death and dying. The cosmologies, philosophies, and mythologies,
as well as spiritual and ritual life, of the pre-industrial societies, contain a
very clear message that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end of
everything, that life or existence in some form continues after the biological
demise. The eschatological mythologies of these cultures are in general
agreement that a spiritual principle, or soul, survives the death of the body
and experiences a complex series of adventures in consciousness in other
realities.
The posthumous journey of the soul is sometimes described as a travel
through fantastic landscapes that bear some similarity to those on earth,
other times as encounters with various archetypal beings, or as a
progression through a sequence of nonordinary states of consciousness. In
some cultures the soul reaches a temporary realm in the Beyond, such as the
Christian purgatory or the lokas of Tibetan Buddhism, in others an eternal
abode—heaven, hell, paradise, or the sun realm. Many cultures have
independently developed a belief system in metempsychosis or
reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another
physical lifetime on earth.

All pre-industrial societies seemed to agree that death was not the ultimate
defeat and end of everything, but a transition to another form of existence.
The experiences associated with death were seen as visits to important
dimensions of reality that deserved to be experienced, studied, and carefully
mapped. The dying people were familiar with the eschatological
cartographies of their cultures, whether these were shamanic maps of the
funeral landscapes or sophisticated descriptions of the Eastern spiritual
systems, such as those found in the Bardo Thödol, The Tibetan Book of the
Dead.

Bardo Thödol deserves a special notice in this context. This important text
of Tibetan Buddhism represents an interesting contrast to the exclusive
pragmatic emphasis on productive life and denial of death characterizing
the Western industrial civilization. It describes the time of death as a unique
opportunity for spiritual liberation from the cycles of death and rebirth and
a period that determines our next incarnation, if we do not achieve
liberation. From this perspective, it is possible to see the experiences in the
bardos, or intermediate states between lives, as being in a way more
important than incarnate existence. In view of this fact, it is absolutely
essential that we prepare ourselves for this journey by systematic practice
during our lifetime.

These descriptions of the sacred dimensions of reality and the emphasis on

spiritual life are in sharp conflict with the belief system that dominates the
industrial civilization. Our worldview has been to a great extent shaped by
materialistically oriented science, which assert that we live in a universe
where only matter is real. Theoreticians of various scientific disciplines
have formulated an image of reality according to which the history of the
universe is the history of developing matter. Life, consciousness, and
intelligence are seen as more or less accidental and insignificant
epiphenomena of this development. They appeared on the scene after
billions of years of evolution of passive and inert matter in a trivially small
part of an immense universe. Clearly, the understanding of human nature
and of the universe based on such premises is in principle incompatible
with any form of spiritual belief. When we subscribe to this image of
reality, spirituality appears to be an illusory, if not delusional, approach to
existence.

This seeming incompatibility of science and spirituality is quite remarkable.

Throughout history, spirituality and religion had played a critical and vital
role in human life, until their influence was undermined by the scientific
and industrial revolution. Science and religion represent extremely
important parts of human life, each in its own way. Science is the most
powerful tool for obtaining information about the world we live in and
spirituality is indispensable as a source of meaning in our life. The religious
impulse has certainly been one of the most compelling forces driving
human history and culture. It is hard to imagine that this would be possible,
if ritual and spiritual life were based on entirely unfounded fantasies and
fallacies. To exert such a powerful influence on the course of human affairs,
religion has to reflect a very fundamental aspect of human nature, in spite
of the fact that it has often been expressed in very problematic and distorted
ways.

If the worldview created by materialistic science really were a true, full, and
accurate description of reality, then the only group in the entire history of
humanity that has ever had adequate understanding of the human psyche
and of existence would be the intelligentsia of technological societies
subscribing to philosophical materialism. All the other perspectives and
worldviews, including the great mystical traditions of the world and the
spiritual philosophies of the East, would by comparison appear to be
primitive, immature, and deluded systems of thought. This would include
the Vedanta, various schools of yoga, Taoism, Vajrayana, Hinayana, and
Mahayana Buddhism, Sufism, Christian mysticism, the Cabala, and many
other sophisticated spiritual traditions that are products of centuries of in-
depth explorations of the human psyche and consciousness.

Naturally, since the ideas described in this book are in basic congruence
with various schools of the perennial philosophy, they would fall into the
same category. They could be dismissed as irrational, ungrounded, and
unscientific and the evidence on which they are based would not even be
seriously considered. It seems therefore important to clarify the relationship
between religion and science and to find out if these two critical aspects of
human life are truly incompatible. And if we find out that there is a way of
bringing the two of them together, it would be essential to define the
conditions under which they can be integrated.

The belief that religion and science have to be mutually incompatible

reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of both. Correctly
understood, true science and authentic religion are two important
approaches to existence that are complementary and do not in any way
compete with each other. As Ken Wilber very appropriately pointed out,
there cannot really be a conflict between genuine religion and true science.
If there seems to be such a conflict, we are very likely dealing with “bogus
religion” and/or “bogus science” (Wilber 1983).

Much confusion in this area is based on serious misconceptions concerning

the nature and function of science, resulting in improper use of scientific
thinking. An additional source of unnecessary problems is a
misunderstanding concerning the nature and function of religion. For the
purpose of our discussion, it is essential to distinguish true science from
scientism and to clearly differentiate between spirituality and organized
religion.

Scientific Theory and Scientific Method

Modern philosophy of science has clarified the nature, function, and proper
use of theories in the exploration of various aspects of the universe. It
exposed the errors that allowed materialistic monism to dominate Western
science and indirectly also the worldview of the industrial civilization. In
retrospect, it is not difficult to see how this has happened. The Newtonian
image of the physical world as a fully deterministic mechanical system was
so successful in its practical applications that it became a model for all the
other scientific disciplines. To be scientific became synonymous with
thinking in mechanistic terms.

An important result of the technological triumphs of physics was strong

support for philosophical materialism, a position that Newton himself did
not hold. For him, the creation of the universe was inconceivable without
divine intervention, without the superior intelligence of the Creator. Newton
believed that God created the universe as a system governed by mechanical
laws. For this reason, once it had been created, it could be studied and
understood as such. Newton’s followers kept the image of the universe as a
deterministic supermachine, but disposed of the notion of an intelligent
creative principle as an unnecessary and embarassing leftover from the
irrational dark ages. Sensory data about material reality became the only
permissible source of information in all branches of science.

In the history of modern science, the image of the material world based on
Newtonian mechanics entirely dominated the thinking in biology, medicine,
psychology, psychiatry, and all the other disciplines. This strategy reflected
the basic metaphysical assumption of philosophical materialism and was its
logical consequence. If the universe is essentially a material system and
physics is a scientific discipline that studies matter, physicists are the
ultimate experts concerning the nature of all things and the findings in other
areas should not be allowed to be in conflict with the basic theories of
physics. Determined application of this type of logic resulted in systematic
suppression or misinterpretation of findings in many fields that could not be
brought into consonance with the materialistic worldview.

This strategy was a serious violation of the basic principles of modern

philosophy of science. Strictly speaking, scientific theories apply only to
observations on which they are based and from which they were derived.
They cannot be automatically extrapolated to other disciplines. Conceptual
frameworks articulating the information available in a certain area cannot
be used to determine what is and is not possible in some other domain and
to dictate what can and cannot be observed in the corresponding scientific
discipline. Theories about the human psyche should be based on
observations of psychological processes, not on the theories that physicists
have made about the material world. But this is exactly the way mainstrean
scientists have used in the past the theoretical framework of seventeenth-
century physics.

The practice of illicit generalization of the worldview of physicists to other

fields has been only part of the problem. Another serious but common error
that further complicates the situation is the tendency of many scientists not
only to adhere to outdated theories and generalize them to other fields, but
to mistake them for accurate and definitive descriptions of reality. As a
result, they tend to reject any data that are incompatible with their
theoretical framework, rather than seeing them as a reason to change their
theories. This confusion of the map with the territory is an example of what
is known in modern logic as “error in logical typing.” Gregory Bateson, a
brilliant generalist and seminal thinker who spent much time studying this
phenomenon, once facetiously stated that when a scientist continues making
errors of this type, he or she might one day eat in a restaurant the menu
instead of the dinner.

A basic characteristic of a true scientist is not uncritical adherence to

materialistic philosophy and unshakeable loyalty to the stories about the
universe promulgated by mainstream science. What characterizes a true
scientist is commitment to unbiased rigorous application of the scientific
method of exploration to all the domains of reality. This means systematic
collection of observations in specifically defined situations, repeated
experimentation in any domain of existence that makes application of such
a strategy possible, and comparing of the results with others working under
similar circumstances.

The most important criterion of the adequacy of a particular theory is not

whether it conforms with the views held by the academic establishment,
pleases our common sense, or seems plausible, but whether it it congruent
with the facts of systematic and structured observation. Theories are
indispensable tools for scientific reasearch and progress. However, they
should not be confused with an accurate and exhaustive description of how
things are. A true scientist sees his or her theories as the best available
conceptualization of the currently available data and is always open to
adjusting or changing them if they cannot accommodate new evidence.
From this perspective, the world view of materialistic science has become a
straitjacket that inhibits further progress instead of facilitating it.

Science does not rest on a particular theory, no matter how convincing and
self-evident it might appear. The image of the universe and scientific
theories about it have changed many times in the history of humanity. What
characterizes science is the method of obtaining information and of
validating or disproving theories. Scientific research is impossible without
theoretical formulations and hypotheses. Reality is too complex to be
studied in its totality, and theories reduce the range of observable
phenomena to a workable size. A true scientist uses theories, but is aware of
their relative nature and is always ready to adjust them or abandon them
when new evidence emerges. He or she does not exclude from rigorous
scrutiny any phenomena that can be scientifically studied, including
controversial and challenging ones, such as nonordinary states of
consciousness and transpersonal experiences.

In the course of the twentieth century, physicists themselves have radically

changed their understanding of the material world. Revolutionary
discoveries in the subatomic and astrophysical realms have destroyed the
image of the universe as an infinitely complex, fully deterministic
mechanical system made of indestructible particles of matter. As the
exploration of the universe shifted from the world of our everyday reality,
or the “zone of the middle dimensions,” to the miscroworld of subatomic
particles and to the megaworld of distant galaxies, physicists discovered the
limitations of the mechanistic worldview and transcended them.

The image of the universe that had dominated physics for almost three
hundred years collapsed under the avalanche of the new observations and
experimental evidence. The commonsense Newtonian understanding of
matter, time, and space was replaced by the strange wonderland of
quantum-relativistic physics full of baffling paradoxes. Matter in the
everyday sense of “solid stuff” completely disappeared from the picture.
The neatly separated dimensions of absolute space and time fused into
Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time continuum. And the consciousness
of the observer had to be recognized as an element that plays an important
role in creating what earlier appeared to be purely objective and impersonal
reality.

Similar breakthroughs have also occurred in many other disciplines.

Information and systems theories, Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of
morphogenetic fields, the holonomic thinking of David Bohm and Karl
Pribram, Ilya Prigogine’s explorations of dissipative structures, the chaos
theory, and Ervin Laszlo’s unified interactive dynamics are just a few
salient examples of these new developments. These new theories show
increasing convergence and compatibility with the mystical worldview and
with the findings of transpersonal psychology. They also provide a new
opening for the ancient wisdom that materialistic science rejected and
ridiculed.

The narrowing of the gap between the worldview of hard sciences and that
of transpersonal psychology is certainly a very exciting and encouraging
phenomenon. However, it would be a serious mistake for psychologists,
psychiatrists, and consciousness researchers to let their conceptual thinking
be restricted and controlled by the theories of the new physics instead of the
old one. As I mentioned earlier, each discipline has to base its theoretical
constructs on the observations from its own field of inquiry. The criterion
for the validity of the scientific findings and concepts in a certain area is not
their compatibility with the theories in another field, but the rigor of the
scientific method with which they were obtained.

The Worldview of Materialistic Science: Fact and

Fiction
In general, Western science has been extremely successful in finding the
laws governing the processes in the material world and in learning to
control them. Its efforts to provide answers concerning some fundamental
questions of existence, such as how the world came into being and
developed into its present form, have been much less spectacular and
impressive. To get a proper perspective on this situation, it is important to
realize that what we know as the “scientific worldview” is an image of the
universe that rests on a host of daring metaphysical assumptions. These are
often presented and seen as facts that have been proven beyond any
reasonable doubt, while in reality they stand on a very shaky ground, are
controversial, or are inadequately supported by evidence.

In any case, the answers that materialistic science offers for the most basic
metaphysical questions are not more logical or less fantastic than those
found in perennial philosophy. Thus in regard to the origin of the universe,
there are many competing cosmological theories. The most popular of them
asserts that everything began some 15 billion years ago in the Big Bang
when all the matter in the universe, as well as time and space, emerged into
existence from a dimensionless point or singularity. The rival theory of
continuous creation portrays an eternally existing universe without a
beginning and an end, in which matter is continuously created out of
nothing. Neither of these alternatives represents exactly a rational, logical,
and easy to imagine solution to this fundamental question of existence.

Equally bold and problematic are the theories of materialistic scientists

concerning the biological realm. The phenomenon of life, including the
DNA and its capacity of self-reproduction, allegedly spontaneously
emerged from random interactions of inorganic matter in the chemical ooze
of the primordial ocean. The evolution from primitive unicellular organisms
to the extraordinary variety of species constituting the animal and plant life
on our planet then resulted from random mutations of the genes and natural
selection. And probably the most fantastic assertion of materialistic science
is that consciousness appeared sometime late in the evolutionary process as
a product of neurophysiological processes in the central nervous system.

When we subject the above concepts to rigorous scrutiny based on modern

philosophy of science, systematic application of the scientific method, and
logical analysis of the data, we will discover that they are hardly sober facts
and that in many instances they lack adequate support by the facts of
observation. The theory suggesting that the material constituting the
universe with its billions of galaxies spontaneously exploded into existence
from a dimensionless singularity certainly does not satisfy our reason. We
are left with many burning questions, such the source of the material that
emerged in the Big Bang, the cause and trigger of the event, the origin of
the laws governing it, and many others. The idea of the eternally existing
universe in which matter is continuously created out of nothing is equally
staggering in its own way. The same is true about the remaining scientific
theories describing the origin of our universe.

We are told that the cosmos essentially created itself and that its entire
history from the hydrogen atoms to Homo sapiens did not require guiding
intelligence and can be adequately understood as resulting from material
processes governed by natural laws. This is not a very believable
assumption, as many physicists themselves realize. Stephen Hawking,
considered by some the greatest living physicist, admitted that “the odds
against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang
are enormous.” And Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson once commented:
“The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the
more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we
were coming” (Smoot and Davidson 1993).

Reconstructive studies of the early processes during the first few minutes of
the existence of the universe have revealed an extraordinary and astonishing
fact. Had the initial conditions been only somewhat different, for example,
had one of the fundamental constants of physics been altered by a few
percent in either direction, the resulting universe would not have been able
to support life. In such a universe, humans would never have come into
being to function as its observers. These coincidences are so numerous and
unlikely that they inspired the formulation of the so-called Anthropic
Principle (Barrow and Tipler 1986). This principle strongly suggests that
the universe might have been created with the specific intention or with the
purpose of bringing forth life and human observers. This points to
participation of superior cosmic intelligence in the process of creation or at
least allows interpretation in those terms.

The failure of the Darwinian theory to explain evolution and the

extraordinary richness of life forms simply as a result of mechanically
operating natural forces is becoming increasingly obvious. The problems
and loopholes of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism have been summarized in
Phillip Johnson’s book Darwin on Trial (1993). While evolution itself is a
well-established fact, it is highly unlikely that it could have occurred
without the guidance of higher intelligence and that it has been—to borrow
Richard Dawkins’ famous term—the work of a “blind watchmaker”
(Dawkins 1986). There are too many facts in evolution that are
incompatible with such an understanding of nature.

Random mutations in the genes that represent the basic explanatory

principle of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution are known to be in most
instances harmful and are an unlikely source of advantageous changes in
the organism. Moreover, emergence of a new species would require a
highly improbable combination of a number of very specific mutations. An
example is the evolutionary transition from reptiles to birds that required,
among other things, simultaneous development of feathers, light hollow
bones, and a different skeletal structure. In many instances, the transitional
forms leading to new organs would not offer evolutionary advantage (as
exemplified by a partially developed eye), or would even represent a
liability (such as an incompletely formed wing).

To make things even more complicated for Darwinians, nature has often
supported the emergence of forms that clearly represent an evolutionary
disadvantage. For example, the beautiful tail of the peacock clearly makes
the male more vulnerable to predators. The Darwinians argue that this is
outweighed by the fact that beautiful tail attracts the females and increases
the opportunities for copulation and transmission of genes. This appears to
be a desperate effort to save the materialistic perspective at the price of
conceding that peahens might have quite extraordinary aesthetic and artistic
sensibilities. As Phillip Johnson (1993) pointed out, this situation is
certainly more compatible with the concept of intelligent divine creation
than with the Darwinian theory that gives all credit to blind material forces:
“It seems to me that the peacock and the peahen are just the kind of
creatures a whimsical creator might favor, but that an ‘uncaring mechanical
process’ like natural selection would never permit to develop.”

Important challenges against the Darwinian interpretation of evolution can

also be drawn from the analysis of paleontological findings. In spite of
enormous investments of time and energy, the existing fossil record has so
far failed to fill in the missing links between species. Its general profile has
not as yet been able to support a single transition from one species to
another. The “Cambrian explosion,” a sudden appearance of new
multicellular organisms with widely differing body plans within a
geologically negligible period of 10 million years (“the biological Big
Bang”) clearly demands a mechanism other than natural selection for its
explanation.

More importantly, all the above arguments against Darwinism and neo-
Darwinism focus only on the level of anatomy and physiology. They are
superficial and negligible as compared to the problems that have emerged
from biochemical understanding of various life processes. Modern science
has shown that the secret of life is on the molecular level. Until recently,
evolutionary biologists could be unconcerned with the molecular details of
life, because very little was known about them. The complexity and
intricacy of the molecular arrangements responsible for the structures and
mechanisms underlying life processes is so spectacular that it represents a
mortal blow for the Darwinian theory. In his recent book Darwin’s Black
Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Michael J. Behe (1996)
clearly demonstrated the failure of Darwinian thinking to account for the
molecular structure and dynamics of life. The power of his argument is so
devastating that it makes the problem of anatomy and fossil records
irrelevant to the question of evolution.

The statistical improbability of life emerging out of random chemical

processes is astronomical, as was clearly demonstrated by scientists of the
stature of the world-famous astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick,
the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. The existence of over 200,000
proteins that have highly specialized biochemical and physiological
functions in living organisms represents, in and of itself, an insurmountable
problem. Fred Hoyle (1983) found the solution to this dilemma in
embracing the theory of panspermia, according to which microorganisms
are distributed throughout the universe and were brought to our planet by
interstellar travel, possibly in the tail of a comet. Hoyle concluded that life
is “a cosmological phenomenon, perhaps the most fundamental aspect of
the universe itself.”

Francis Crick (1981) went even farther. According to him, to avoid damage
by the extreme interstellar conditions, the microorganisms must have
traveled in the head of a spaceship sent to earth by a higher civilization that
had developed elsewhere some billions of years ago. Life on our planet
started when these organisms began to multiply. Hoyle’s and Crick’s
approach does not, of course, solve the mystery of the origin of life; it
simply defers it to another time and location. Both of them avoid the
problem how life came into existence in the first place.

Information theorist H. Yockey (1992), who had attempted to assess the

mathematical probability of the spontaneous origin of life, concluded that
the information needed to begin life could not have developed by chance.
He suggested that life be considered a given, like matter or energy. On the
basis of the existing scientific evidence, it is highly implausible that the
origin of life on our planet and the development of the rich plethora of
species are the result of random mechanical forces. It is hard to imagine that
they occurred without the intervention and participation of superior cosmic
intelligence.

This brings us to the most critical point of our discussion, the claim of
materialistic science that matter is the only reality and that consciousness is
its product. This thesis has often been presented with great authority as a
scientific fact that has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. However,
when it is subjected to closer scrutiny, it becomes obvious that it is not and
never was a serious scientific statement, but a metaphysical assumption
masquerading as one. It is an assertion that cannot be proved and thus lacks
the basic requirement for a scientific hypothesis, namely testability.

Consciousness and Matter

The gap between matter and consciousness is so radical and profound that it
is hard to imagine that consciousness could simply emerge as an
epiphenomenon out of the complexity of material processes in the central
nervous system. We have ample clinical and experimental evidence
showing deep correlations between the anatomy, physiology, and
biochemistry of the brain, on the one hand, and conscious processes, on the
other. However, none of these findings proves unequivocally that
consciousness is actually generated by the brain. The origin of
consciousness from matter is simply assumed as an obvious and self-
evident fact based on the belief in the primacy of matter in the universe. In
the entire history of science, nobody has ever offered a plausible
explanation how consciousness could be generated by material processes,
or even suggested a viable approach to the problem.

The attitude that Western science has adopted in regard to this issue
resembles the famous Sufi story. On a dark night, a man is crawling on his
knees under a candelabra lamp. Another man sees him and asks: “What are
you doing? Are you looking for something? “The man answers that he is
searching for a lost key and the newcomer offers to help. After some time
of unsuccessful joint effort, the helper is confused and feels the need for
clarification. “I don’t see anything! Where did you lose it?” he asks. The
response is very surprising; the owner of the key points his finger to a dark
area outside of the circle illuminated by the lamp and mumbles: “Over
there!” The helper is puzzled and inquires further: “So why are you looking
for it here and not over there?” “Because it is light here and I can see. Over
there, I would not have a chance!”

In a similar way, materialistic scientists have systematically avoided the

problem of the origin of consciousness, because this riddle cannot be solved
within the context of their conceptual framework. There have been
instances where some researchers claimed to have found the answer to the
brain-consciousness problem, but these efforts do not withstand a closer
scrutiny. The most recent example of this kind is the widely publicized
book The Astonishing Hypothesis by the British physicist and biochemist
Francis Crick (1994), Nobel laureate and co-discoverer with James Watson
of the chemical structure of the DNA. As we read his book, “the astonishing
hypothesis” turns out to be nothing more than a restatement of the basic
metaphysical assumption of materialistic science: “You, your joys and your
sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and
free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve
cells and their associated molecules.”

In the specific treatment of the problem, Crick first simplifies the problem
of consciousness by reducing it to the process of visual perception. He then
proceeds to review a long list of experiments showing that the act of visual
perception is associated with the activities in the retina and in the neurons
that belong to the optical system. This is nothing new; it has long been
known that seeing an object involves chemical and electric changes in the
retina, in the optical tract, and in the suboccipital cortex. More refined and
detailed study and analysis of these processes do not contribute anything to
the solution of the basic mystery: What is it that is capable of transforming
chemical and electric changes in the cerebral cortex into a conscious
experience of a reasonable facsimile of the observed object?

What materialistic science wants us to believe is that it is possible that the

brain itself has the capacity to somehow translate these chemical and
electric changes into a conscious subjective perception of the observed
material object. The nature of the process and mechanism capable of
carrying out this operation eludes any scientific analysis. The assertion that
something like this is possible is a wild and unsubstantiated conjecture
based on a metaphysical bias rather than a scientific statement supported by
solid evidence. Crick’s book lists impressive experimental evidence of
correlations between consciousness and the neurophysiological processes,
but it avoids the central and critical issue. We are back to the Sufi story
mentioned earlier.

The idea that consciousness is a product of the brain naturally is not

completely arbitrary. Like Crick, its proponents usually refer to the results
of many neurological and psychiatric experiments and to a vast body of
very specific clinical observations from neurology, neurosurgery, and
psychiatry, to support their position. When we challenge this deeply
ingrained belief, does it mean that we doubt the correctness of these
observations? The evidence for a close connection between the anatomy of
the brain, neurophysiology, and consciousness is unquestionable and
overwhelming. What is problematic is not the nature of the presented
evidence but the interpretation of the results, the logic of the argument, and
the conclusions that are drawn from these observations.

While these experiments clearly show that consciousness is closely

connected with the neurophysiological and biochemical processes in the
brain, they have very little bearing on the nature and origin of
consciousness. There actually exists ample evidence suggesting exactly the
opposite, namely that consciousness can under certain circumstances
operate independently of its material substrate and can perform functions
that reach far beyond the capacities of the brain. This is most clearly
illustrated by the existence of out-of-body experiences (OOBEs). These can
occur spontaneously, or in a variety of facilitating situations that include
shamanic trance, psychedelic sessions, hypnosis, experiential
psychotherapy, and particularly near-death situations.

In all these situations consciousness can separate from the body and
maintain its sensory capacity, while moving freely to various close and
remote locations. Of particular interest are “veridical OOBEs,” where
independent verification proves the accuracy of perception of the
environment under these circumstances. There are many other types of
transpersonal phenomena that can mediate accurate information about
various aspects of the universe that had not been previously received and
recorded in the brain.

Let us now take a closer look at the relevant clinical observations and
laboratory experiments, as well as the interpretations of the evidence
provided by traditional science. There is no doubt that various processes in
the brain are closely associated and correlated with specific changes in
consciousness. A blow on the head leading to brain concussion or
compression of the carotid arteries limiting the oxygen supply to the brain
can cause loss of consciousness. A lesion or tumor in the temporal lobe of
the brain is often associated with very characteristic changes of
consciousness that are strikingly different from those observed in persons
with a pathological process in the prefrontal lobe. The differences are so
distinct that they can help the neurologist to identify the area of the brain
afflicted by the pathological process. Sometimes a successful neurosurgical
intervention can correct the problem and the conscious experience returns
to normal.

These facts are usually presented as conclusive evidence that the brain is
the source of human consciousness. At first glance, these observations
might appear impressive and convincing. However, they do not hold up
when we subject them to closer scrutiny. Strictly speaking, all that these
data unequivocally demonstrate is that changes in the brain function are
closely and quite specifically connected with changes in consciousness.
They say very little about the nature of consciousness and about its origin;
they leave these problems wide open. It is certainly possible to think about
an alternative interpretation that would use the same data, but come to very
different conclusions.

This can be illustrated by looking at the relationship between the TV set and
the TV program. The situation here is much clearer, since it involves a
system that is human-made and incomparably simpler. The final reception
of the TV program, the quality of the picture and of the sound, depends in a
very critical way on proper functioning of the TV set and on the integrity of
its components. Malfunctions of its various parts result in very distinct and
specific changes of the quality of the program. Some of them lead to
distortions of form, color, or sound, others to interference between the
channels. Like the neurologist who uses changes in consciousness as a
diagnostic tool, a television mechanic can infer from the nature of these
anomalies which parts of the set and which specific components are
malfunctioning. When the problem is identified, repairing or replacing these
elements will correct the distortions.

Since we know the basic principles of the television technology, it is clear

to us that the set simply mediates the program and that it does not generate
it or contribute anything to it. We would laugh at somebody who would try
to examine and scrutinize all the transistors, relays, and circuits of the TV
set and analyze all its wires in an attempt to figure out how it creates the
programs. Even if we carry this misguided effort to the molecular, atomic,
or subatomic level, we will have absolutely no clue why, at a particular
time, a Mickey Mouse cartoon, a Star Trek sequence, or a Hollywood
classic appear on the screen. The fact that there is such a close correlation
between the functioning of the TV set and the quality of the program does
not necessarily mean that the entire secret of the program is in the set itself.
Yet this is exactly the kind of conclusion that traditional materialistic
science drew from comparable data about the brain and its relation to
consciousness.

Western materialistic science has thus not been able to produce any
convincing evidence that consciousness is a product of the
neurophysiological processes in the brain. It has been able to maintain its
present position only by resisting, censoring, and even ridiculing a vast
body of observations indicating that consciousness can exist and function
independently of the body and of the physical senses. This evidence comes
from parapsychology, anthropology, LSD research, experiential
psychotherapy, thanatology, and the study of spontaneously occurring
nonordinary states of consciousness. All these disciplines have amassed
impressive data demonstrating clearly that human consciousness is capable
of doing many things that the brain (as understood by mainstream science)
could not possibly do.

Science and Religion

The authority that materialistic science enjoys in modern society has made
atheism the most influential ideology in the industrial world. Although in
the last decades this trend seems to be reversing, the number of people who
seriously practice religion and think of themselves as “believers” has
certainly decreased considerably with scientific progress. Because of the
spell that materialistic science exerts on industrial societies, even believers
often find it difficult to avoid the undermining and discrediting influence
that Western science has had on religion. It is very common for people with
religious upbringing to reject religion of any kind when they receive
scientific education, because they start seeing any spiritual inclination as
primitive and undefendable.

Organized religion, bereft of its experiential component, has largely lost the
connection to its deep spiritual source and as a result has become empty,
meaningless, and increasingly irrelevant in our life. In many instances, live
and lived spirituality based on profound personal experience has been
replaced by dogmatism, ritualism, and moralism. The most belligerent
partisans of mainstream religion insist on literal belief in the exoteric
versions of spiritual texts that appear childish and blatantly irrational to the
educated modern mind. This is further confounded by the untenable
positions that religious authorities maintain in regard to some important
issues of modern life. For example, denying women the right of ministry
violates democratic values and dwelling on the prohibition of contraception
in face of such dangers as AIDS and overpopulation is absurd and highly
irresponsible.
If we consider the descriptions of the universe, nature, and human beings
developed by materialistic science, it is clear that they are in sharp contrast
with the accounts offered by the scriptures of the great religions of the
world. Taken literally and judged by the criteria of various scientific
disciplines, the stories of the creation of the world, origin of humanity,
immaculate conception, death and rebirth of divine personages, temptation
by demonic forces, and judgment of the dead belong to the realm of fairy
tales or handbooks of psychiatry. And it would be very difficult to reconcile
such concepts as Cosmic Consciousness, reincarnation, or spiritual
enlightenment with the basic tenets of materialistic science. However, it is
not impossible to bridge the gap between science and religion if both are
correctly understood.

As we have seen, much confusion in this area is caused by serious

misconceptions concerning the nature and function of science and scientific
theories. What is presented as a scientific refutation of spiritual realities is
often based on scientistic argumentation rather than science. An additional
source of unnecessary problems concerning religion is a serious
misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the spiritual symbolism in sacred
scriptures. This approach is characteristic of fundamentalist movements in
mainstream religions.

When scientism and fundamentalism collide, neither side seems to realize

that many of the passages in spiritual scriptures around which the
controversy revolves should not be understood as references to concrete
personages, geographical places, and historical events, but as accounts of
transpersonal experiences. Scientific descriptions of the universe and the
stories in religious texts do not relate to the same realities, they do not
compete for the same terrain. As mythologist Joseph Campbell pointed out
in his inimitable style, “the immaculate conception is not a problem for
gynecologists and the promised land is not a piece of real estate.”

The fact that modern astronomers have not found the images of God and
angels on the photographs made by even the best of telescopes is not a
scientific proof that they do not exist. Similarly, our knowledge that the
inside of the earth consists of liquid iron and nickel does not in any way
disprove the existence of the underworld and hell. Spiritual symbolism
accurately portrays events and realities that we experience in holotropic
states of consciousness and does not refer to occurrences in the material
world of our everyday reality. Aldous Huxley made this very clear in his
excellent essay “Heaven and Hell” (Huxley 1959). The only field that is
capable of approaching the problem of spirituality scientifically is thus
consciousness research focusing on systematic and unbiased exploration of
nonordinary states of consciousness.

Many scientists use the conceptual framework of contemporary science in a

way that resembles a fundamentalist religion more than it does science.
They mistake it for a definitive description of reality and authoritatively
implement it to censor and suppress all observations that challenge its basic
assumptions. The worldview of materialistic science is clearly incompatible
with the theologies of organized religions and the authority that science
enjoys in our society certainly works in favor of its position. Since most
people in our culture are not aware of the difference between religion and
spirituality, the destructive influence of this kind of “science” affects not
only religion, but extends to spiritual activity of any kind. If we want to
achieve clarity concerning the basic issues involved in this conflict, it is
essential to make a clear distinction not only between science and
scientism, but also between religion and spirituality.

Spirituality and Religion

The failure to differentiate between spirituality and religion is probably the
most important source of misunderstanding concerning the relationship
between science and religion. Spirituality is based on direct experiences of
nonordinary dimensions of reality and does not necessarily require a special
place or an officially appointed person mediating contact with the Divine. It
involves a special kind of relationship between the individual and the
cosmos and is, in its essence, a personal and private affair. The mystics base
their convictions on experiential evidence. They do not need churches or
temples; the context in which they experience the sacred dimensions of
reality, including their own divinity, are their bodies and nature. And instead
of officiating priests, they need a supportive group of fellow seekers or the
guidance of a teacher who is more advanced on the inner journey than they
are themselves.
At the cradle of all great religions were visionary experiences of their
founders, prophets, saints, and even ordinary followers. All major spiritual
scriptures—the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Buddhist Pali canon, the Bible,
the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and many others are based on direct
personal revelations. Once religion becomes organized, it often completely
loses the connection with its spiritual source and becomes a secular
institution exploiting the human spiritual needs without satisfying them.
Instead, it creates a hierarchical system focusing on the pursuit of power,
control, politics, money, possessions, and other secular concerns.

Organized religion is institutionalized group activity that takes place in a

designated location—a temple or a church—and involves a system of
appointed officials who may or may not have had personal experiences of
spiritual realities. Religious hierarchy tends to actively discourage and
suppress direct spiritual experiences in its members, because they foster
independence and cannot be effectively controlled. When this happens,
genuine spiritual life continues only in the mystical branches, monastic
orders, and ecstatic sects of the religions involved.

There is no doubt that the dogmas of organized religions are generally in

fundamental conflict with science, whether this science uses the
Newtonian-Cartesian model or is anchored in the emerging paradigm.
However, the situation is very different in regard to spiritual experiences. In
the last twenty-five years, systematic study of these experiences has become
the main focus of a special discipline called transpersonal psychology.
Spiritual experiences, like any other aspect of reality, can be studied
scientifically; they can be subjected to careful, open-minded research. There
is nothing unscientific about unbiased and rigorous study of these
phenomena and of the challenges they represent for a materialistic
understanding of the world. The critical question in this regard is the nature
and the ontological status of mystical experiences. Do they reveal deep
truths about some basic aspects of existence or are they products of
superstition, fantasy, or mental disease?

The main obstacle in the study of spiritual experiences is the fact that
traditional psychology and psychiatry are dominated by a materialistic
philosophy and lack genuine understanding of religion and spirituality. In
their emphatic rejection of religion, they do not make a distinction between
primitive folk beliefs or the fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of sacred
scriptures, on the one hand, and sophisticated mystical traditions or Eastern
spiritual philosophies, on the other. Western materialistic science has
indiscriminately rejected any spiritual concepts and activities, including
those based on centuries of systematic introspective exploration of the
psyche. Many of the great mystical traditions developed specific
technologies for inducing spiritual experiences and combined observation
and theoretical speculation in a way that resembled modern science.

An extreme example of this lack of discrimination is Western science’s

rejection of Tantra, a system that offers an extraordinary spiritual vision of
existence in the context of a comprehensive and sophisticated scientific
worldview. Tantric scholars developed a profound understanding of the
universe that has been in many ways validated by modern science. It
included sophisticated models of space and time, the concept of the Big
Bang, and such elements as a heliocentric system, interplanetary attraction,
spherical shape of the earth and planets, and entropy.

Additional achievments of Tantra included advanced mathematics and the

invention of the decimal count with a zero. Tantra also had a profound
psychological theory and experiential method, based on maps of the subtle
or energy body involving psychic centers (chakras) and conduits (nadis). It
has developed highly refined abstract and figurative spiritual art and a
complex ritual (Mookerjee and Khanna 1977).

Psychiatric Perspective on Religion

From the point of view of Western academic scientists, the material world
represents the only reality and any form of spiritual belief reflects lack of
education, primitive superstition, magical thinking, or regression to infantile
patterns of functioning. The belief in any form of existence after death is
not only refuted, but often ridiculed. From a materialistic perspective, it
seems absolutely clear and unquestionable that the death of the body,
particularly the brain, is the end of any form of conscious activity. Belief in
the posthumous journey of the soul, an afterlife, or reincarnation is nothing
but a product of wishful thinking of people who are unable to accept the
obvious biological imperative of death.

People who have direct experiences of spiritual realities are in our culture
seen as mentally ill. Mainstream psychiatrists make no distinction between
mystical experiences and psychotic experiences and see both categories as
manifestations of psychosis. The kindest judgment about mysticism that has
so far come from official academic circles was the statement of the
Committee on Psychiatry and Religion of the Group for the Advancement
of Psychiatry entitled “Mysticism: Spiritual Quest or Psychic Disorder?”
This document published in 1976 conceded that mysticism might be a
phenomenon that lies between normalcy and psychosis.

In the present climate, even the suggestion that spiritual experiences

deserve systematic study and should be critically examined appears absurd
to conventionally trained scientists. Showing serious interest in this area, in
and of itself, can be considered a sign of poor judgment and blemishes the
researcher’s professional reputation. In actuality, there exists no scientific
“proof” that the spiritual dimension does not exist. The refutation of its
existence is essentially a metaphysical assumption of Western science,
based on an incorrect application of an outdated paradigm. As a matter of
fact, the study of holotropic states, in general, and transpersonal
experiences, in particular, provides more than enough data suggesting that
postulating such a dimension makes good sense (Grof 1985, 1988).

At the cradle of all great religions of the world were powerful personal
experiences of the visionaries who initiated and sustained these creeds—the
divine epiphanies of the prophets, mystics, and saints. These experiences,
revealing the existence of sacred dimensions of reality, were the inspiration
and vital source of all religious movements. Gautama Buddha, meditating
under the Bo tree, had a dramatic visionary experience of Kama Mara, the
master of the world illusion, of his three seductive daughters trying to
distract him from his spiritual quest, and of his menacing army attempting
to intimidate him and prevent him from reaching enlightenment. He
successfully overcame all these obstacles and achieved illumination and
spiritual awakening. On another occasion, the Buddha also envisioned a
long chain of his previous incarnations and experienced a profound
liberation from karmic bonds.

Mohammed’s “miraculous journey,” a powerful visionary state during

which archangel Gabriel escorted Mohammed through the seven Moslem
heavens, Paradise, and Hell, was the inspiration for the Koran and for the
Islamic religion. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Old Testament offers a
dramatic account of Moses’ experience of Yahwe in the burning bush and
the New Testament describes Jesus’ temptation by the devil during his stay
in the desert. Similarly, Saul’s blinding vision of Christ on the way to
Damascus, St. John’s apocalyptic revelation in his cave on the island
Patmos, Ezechiel’s observation of the flaming chariot, and many other
episodes clearly are transcendental experiences in nonordinary states of
consciousness. The Bible describes many additional instances of direct
communication with God and the angels. The descriptions of the
temptations of St. Anthony and of the visionary experiences of other saints
and Desert Fathers are well-documented parts of Christian history.

Western psychiatrists interpret such visionary experiences as manifestations

of serious mental diseases, although they lack adequate medical explanation
and the laboratory data supporting this position. Mainstream psychiatric
literature contains articles and books that discuss what would be the most
appropriate clinical diagnoses for the great figures of spiritual history. St.
John of the Cross has been called a “hereditary degenerate,” St. Teresa of
Avila dismissed as a hysterical psychotic, and Mohammed’s mystical
experiences have been attributed to epilepsy.

Many other religious and spiritual personages, such as the Buddha, Jesus,
Ramakrishna, and Sri Ramana Maharshi have been seen as suffering from
psychoses, because of their visionary experiences and “delusions.”
Similarly, some traditionally trained anthropologists have argued whether
shamans should be diagnosed as schizophrenics, ambulant psychotics,
epileptics, or hysterics. The famous psychoanalyst Franz Alexander, known
as one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine, wrote a paper in which
even Buddhist meditation is described in psychopathological terms and
referred to as “artificial catatonia” (Alexander 1931).
Religion and spirituality have been extremely important forces in the
history of humanity and civilization. Had the visionary experiences of the
founders of religions been nothing more than products of brain pathology, it
would be difficult to explain the profound impact they have had on millions
of people over the centuries and the glorious architecture, paintings,
sculptures, and literature they have inspired. There does not exist a single
ancient or pre-industrial culture in which ritual and spiritual life did not
play a pivotal role. The current approach of Western psychiatry and
psychology thus pathologizes not only the spiritual but also the cultural life
of all human groups throughout centuries except the educated elite of the
Western industrial civilization that shares the materialistic worldview.

The official position of psychiatry in regard to spiritual experiences also

creates a remarkable split in our own society. In the United States, religion
is officially tolerated, legally protected, and even righteously promoted by
certain circles. There is a Bible in every motel room, politicians pay
lipservice to God in their speeches, and collective prayer is a standard part
of the presidential inauguration ceremony. However, in the light of
materialistic science, people who take seriously religious beliefs of any kind
appear to be uneducated, suffering from shared delusions, or emotionally
immature.

And if somebody in our culture has a spiritual experience of the kind that
inspired every major religion in the world, an average minister will very
likely send him or her to a psychiatrist. It has happened on many occasions
that people who had been brought to psychiatric facilities because of intense
spiritual experiences were hospitalized, subjected to tranquilizing
medication or even shock treatments, and received psychopathological
diagnostic labels that stigmatized them for the rest of their lives.

Holotropic States of Consciousness and the Image

of Reality
The differences between the understanding of the universe, nature, human
beings, and consciousness developed by Western science and that found in
the ancient and pre-industrial societies is usually explained in terms of
superiority of materialistic science over superstition and primitive magical
thinking of native cultures. Careful analysis of this situation reveals that the
reason for this difference is not the superiority of Western science, but the
ignorance and naïvité of industrial societies in regard to holotropic states of
consciousness.

All pre-industrial cultures held these states in high esteem and spent much
time and energy trying to develop effective and safe ways of inducing them.
They possessed deep knowledge of these states, systematically cultivated
them, and used them as the major vehicle of their ritual and spiritual life.
The worldviews of these cultures reflected not only the experiences and
observations made in the everyday state of consciousness, but also those
from deep visionary states. Modern consciousness research and
transpersonal psychology have shown that many of these experiences are
authentic disclosures of ordinarily hidden dimensions of reality and cannot
be dismissed as pathological distortions.

In visionary states, the experiences of other realities or of new perspectives

on our everyday reality are so convincing and compelling that the
individuals who have had them have no other choice than to incorporate
them into their worldview. It is thus systematic experiential exposure to
nonordinary states of consciousness, on the one side, and the absence
thereof, on the other, that sets the technological societies and pre-industrial
cultures ideologically so far apart. I have not yet met a single individual
who has had a deep experience of the transcendental realms and continues
to subscribe to the worldview of Western materialistic science. This
development is quite independent of the level of intelligence, type and
degree of education, and professional credentials of the individuals
involved.

Holotropic States of Consciousness and Human

History
In this book, we have explored in some detail holotropic states of
consciousness, their nature, content, and profound effect on the worldview,
hierarchy of values, and strategy of existence. What we have learned from
the study of holotropic experiences throws an entirely new light on the
spiritual history of humanity. It shows that spirituality is a critical
dimension of the human psyche and existence and takes authentic religion
based on direct experience out of the context of pathology, where it has
been relegated by materialistic science.

All the cultures in human history except the Western industrial civilization
have held holotropic states of consciousness in great esteem. They induced
them whenever they wanted to connect with their deities, other dimensions
of reality, and with the forces of nature. They also used them for diagnosing
and healing, cultivation of extrasensory perception, and artistic inspiration.
They spent much time and energy trying to develop safe and effective ways
of inducing them. As I described in the introduction to this book, these
“technologies of the sacred,” mind-altering techniques developed in ancient
and aboriginal cultures for ritual and spiritual purposes, ranged from
shamanic trance-inducing methods of various indigenous cultures to so-
phisticated practices of various mystical traditions and Eastern spiritual
philosophies.

The practice of holotropic states can be traced back to the dawn of human
history. It is the most important characteristic feature of shamanism, the
oldest religion and healing art of humanity. Holotropic states are intimately
connected with shamanism in several important ways. The career of many
shamans begins with spontaneous episodes of visionary states, or
psychospiritual crises, that the anthropologists call, with a typical Western
bias, “shamanic illness.” Others are initiated into the shamanic profession
by practicing shamans through similar experiences induced by powerful
mind-altering procedures, particularly drumming, rattling, chanting,
dancing, or psychedelic plants. Accomplished shamans are able to enter
holotropic states at will and in a controlled way. They use them for healing,
extrasensory perception, exploration of alternate dimensions of reality, and
other purposes. They can also induce them in other members of their tribes
and provide for them the necessary guidance.

Shamanism is quite ancient, probably at least thirty to forty thousand years

old; its deepest roots can be traced far back into the Paleolithic era. The
walls of the famous caves in southern France and northern Spain, such as
Lascaux, Font de Gaume, Les Trois Frères, Altamira, and others, are
decorated with beautiful images of animals. Most of them represent species
that actually roamed the Stone Age landscape—bisons, wild horses, stags,
ibexes, mammoths, wolves, rhinos, and reindeer. However, others like the
“Wizard Beast” in Lascaux are mythical creatures that clearly have magical
and ritual significance. And in several of these caves are paintings and
carvings of strange figures combining human and animal features, who
undoubtedly represent ancient shamans.

The best known of these images is the “Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères,” a
mysterious composite figure combining various male symbols. He has the
antlers of a stag, eyes of an owl, tail of a wild horse or wolf, human beard
and penis, and paws of a lion. Another famous carving of a shaman in the
same cave complex is the “Beast Master” presiding over the Happy Hunting
Grounds teeming with beautiful animals. Also well known is the hunting
scene on the wall in Lascaux. It shows a wounded bison and a lying figure
of a shaman with an erect penis. The grotto known as La Gabillou harbors a
carving of a shamanic figure in dynamic movement whom the archeologists
call “The Dancer.” In addition, on the clay floor of one of the caves, the
discovers found footprints in circular arrangement suggesting that its
inhabitants conducted dances, similar to those that are still being performed
by many aboriginal cultures for the induction of trance states.

Figure 6.
The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères . A composite figure combining various
 male symbols—the antlers of a stag, the eyes of an owl, the tail of a wild
horse or wolf, a human beard, and the paws of a lion.

Source: Reprinted from The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph

Campbell. Used by permission of Harper Collins Publishers, Inc. ©
Copyright 1989 by Harper and Row.

Figure 7.
Beast Master . An engraved figure from Les Trois Frères cave representing
the “Animal Master,” a half-animal, half- human shamanic figure standing
in the middle of the “Happy Hunting Ground” surrounded by wild animals.

Source: Reprinted from The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph

Campbell. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ©
Copyright 1989 by Harper and Row.
 Figure 8.
Hunting Scene (Lascaux). A hunting scene from the Lascaux cave
representing an eventrated bison bull and a man with bird-like features and
an erect penis, very likely a shaman in a trance. Near him is a bird perched
on a staff.

Source: Reprinted from The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph

Campbell. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc ©
Copyright 1989 by Harper and Row.

Figure 9.
The Dancer. A dynamic shamanic figure from the cave called La Gabillou.
 Source: Reprinted from The Way of the Animal Powers by Joseph
Campbell. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. ©
Copyright 1989 by Harper and Row.

Shamanism is not only ancient, it is also universal; it can be found in North

and South America, in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, Micronesia, and
Polynesia. The fact that so many different cultures throughout human
history have found shamanic techniques useful and relevant suggests that
the holotropic states engage what the anthropologists call the “primal
mind”— a basic and primordial aspect of the human psyche that transcends
race, sex, culture, and historical time. Shamanic techniques and procedures
have survived until this very day in cultures that have escaped the profound
influence of the Western industrial civilization.

The ritual and spiritual life in most native societies is practically

synonymous with inducing holotropic states of consciousness in the context
of healing rituals and various other sacred ceremonies held for a variety of
purposes and occasions. Of special importance are the so-called rites of
passage, first defined and described by the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van
Gennep (1960). These are powerful rituals that have been performed in
various pre-industrial cultures at the time of important biological and social
transitions, such as circumcision, puberty, marriage, birth of a child,
menopause, and dying.

Like the shamanic procedures, the rites of passage use powerful mind-
altering technologies. The initiates have profound holotropic experiences
that revolve around psychospiritual death and rebirth. This is then
interpreted as dying in the old role and being born into the new one. Thus,
for example, in one of the most important of such ceremonies, the puberty
rite, the psychological death and rebirth of the adolescents is understood as
death of boys and girls and birth of adult men and women. An important
function of similar rituals is also to provide experiential access to the
transcendental realm, validate the group’s cosmology and mythology, and
establish or maintain the individual’s connection with other realities.

Holotropic states of consciousness also played a critical role in the ancient

mysteries of death and rebirth, sacred and secret procedures in which
initiates experienced powerful psychospiritual transformation. These
mysteries were based on mythological stories about deities symbolizing
death and transfiguration. In ancient Sumer, it was Inanna and Tammuz, in
Egypt Isis and Osiris, and in Greece the deities Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, and
Persephone. Their Mesoamerican counterparts were the Aztec Quetzalcoatl,
or the Plumed Serpent, and the Hero Twins of the Mayan Popol Vuh. These
mysteries were particularly popular in the Mediterranean area and in the
Middle East, as exemplified by the Sumerian and Egyptian temple
initiations, the Mithraic mysteries, or the Greek Korybantic rites,
Bacchanalia, and the mysteries of Eleusis.

An impressive testimony for the power and impact of the experiences

involved is the fact that the Eleusinian mysteries were conducted regularly
and without interruption for a period of almost two thousand years and kept
attracting prominent people from the entire ancient world. The cultural
importance of the mysteries for the ancient world becomes evident when we
realize that among their initiates were many famous and illustrious figures
of antiquity. The list of neophytes included the philosophers Plato,
Aristotle, and Epictetus, the military leader Alcibiades, the playwrights
Euripides and Sophocles, and the poet Pindaros. The famous statesman
Cicero, who participated in these mysteries, wrote a exalted report about
their effects and their impact on the ancient civilization in his book De
Legibus (Cicero 1987).

In the telestrion, the giant initiation hall in Eleusis, three thousand

neophytes at a time experienced profound psychospiritual transformation.
The exposure of such large numbers of people, including prominent
philosophers, artists, and statesmen, to powerful holotropic states had to
have an extraordinary impact on Greek culture and thus on the history of
European culture in general. It is truly astonishing that this important aspect
of the ancient world has remained largely unrecognized and
unacknowledged by historians.

The specifics of the mind-altering procedures involved in these secret rites

have remained for the most part unknown, although it is likely that the
sacred potion kykeon that played a critical role in the Eleusinian mysteries
was a concoction containing alkaloids of ergot similar to LSD (Wasson,
Hofmann, and Ruck 1978) and that psychedelic materials were also
involved in the Bacchanalia and other types of rites. Whatever
“technologies of the sacred” were used in Eleusis, their effects on the
psyche of the initiates had to be profound to keep the interest and attention
of the ancient world alive for a period of almost two millennia.

Holotropic states have also played an important role in the great religions of
the world. I mentioned earlier the visionary experiences of the founders that
served as the vital source and inspiration for all the major religions. While
these initial experiences were more or less spontaneous and elemental,
many of these religions developed in the course of their history
sophisticated procedures specifically designed to induce mystical
experiences. Here belong, for example, different techniques of yoga,
meditations used in VipassanA, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as
spiritual exercises of the Taoist tradition and complex Tantric rituals. We
could also add various elaborate approaches used by the Sufis, the mystics
of Islam. They regularly used in their sacred ceremonies, or zikers, intense
breathing, devotional chants, and trance-inducing whirling dance.

From the Judeo-Christian tradition, we can mention here the breathing

exercises of the Essenes and their baptism involving half-drowning, the
Christian Jesus prayer (hesychasm), the exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, and
various Cabalistic and Hassidic procedures. Approaches designed to induce
or facilitate direct spiritual experiences are characteristic of the mystical
branches of the great religions and of their monastic orders.

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly

effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness. The
knowledge of these powerful tools reaches far back, to the dawn of human
history. In Chinese medicine, reports about psychedelic plants can be traced
back more than 3,000 years. The legendary divine potion referred to as
haoma in the ancient Persian Zend Avesta and as soma in India was used by
the Indo-Iranian tribes several millennia ago and was probably the most
important source of the Vedic religion and philosophy.

Preparations from different varieties of hemp have been smoked and

ingested under various names (hashish, charas, bhang, ganja, kif,
marijuana) in the Oriental countries, in Africa, and in the Caribbean area for
recreation, pleasure, and during religious ceremonies. They have
represented an important sacrament for such diverse groups as the
Brahmans, certain Sufi orders, ancient Scythians, and the Jamaican
Rastafarians.

Ceremonial use of various psychedelic materials also has a long history in

Central America. Highly effective mind-altering plants were well known in
several Pre-Hispanic Indian cultures—among the Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs,
and Mazatecs. The most famous of these are the Mexican cactus peyote
(Lophophora williamsii), the sacred mushroom teonanacatl (Psilocybe
mexicana), and ololiuqui, seeds of different varieties of the morning glory
plant (Ipomoea violacea and Turbina corymbosa). These materials have
been used as sacraments until this day by the Huichol, Mazatec,
Chichimeca, Cora, and other Mexican Indian tribes, as well as the Native
American Church.

The famous South American yajé or ayahuasca is a decoction from a jungle

liana (Banisteriopsis caapi) and various other plant additives. The Amazon
area is also known for a variety of psychedelic snuffs. Aboriginal tribes in
Africa ingest and inhale preparations from the bark of the eboga shrub
(Tabernanthe iboga). They use them in small quantities as stimulants and in
larger dosages in initiation rituals for men and women. The above list
represents only a small fraction of psychedelic compounds that have been
used over many centuries in ritual and spiritual life of various human
groups all over the world.

Holotropic States in the History of Psychiatry

Holotropic states of consciousness played a very important role in the
development of depth psychology and psychotherapy. Most books
describing the early history of this movement trace its beginnings to the
Austrian physician and mystic Franz Anton Mesmer. Although Mesmer
himself attributed the changes in consciousness experienced by his patients
to “animal magnetism,” his famous Paris experiments were forerunners of
the extensive psychological work with clinical hypnosis. Jean-Martin
Charcot’s hypnotic sessions with hysterical patients conducted in the Paris
Salpetrière and the research in hypnosis carried out in Nancy by Hippolyte
Bernheim and Ambroise Auguste Liébault played an important role in the
professional development of Sigmund Freud.

During his study journey to France, Freud visited both Charcot and the
Nancy group and learned to use hypnosis. He employed this skill in his
initial explorations of the unconscious of his patients. But holotropic states
had a critical role in the history of psychoanalysis in yet another way.
Freud’s early analytical speculations were inspired by his work with a
hysterical patient whom he treated jointly with his friend Joseph Breuer.
This client, to whom Freud refers in his writings as Miss Anna O.,
experienced spontaneous episodes of holotropic states in which she
repeatedly psychologically regressed into her childhood. The opportunity to
witness the reliving of traumatic memories that occurred in these states and
the therapeutic effects of this process had a deep influence on Freud’s
thinking.

For a variety of reasons, Freud later radically changed his strategies. He

abandoned the use of hypnosis and shifted his emphasis from direct
experience to free association, from actual trauma to Oedipal fantasies, and
from conscious reliving and emotional abreaction of unconscious material
to transference dynamics. In retrospect, these changes were unfortunate;
they limited and misdirected Western psychotherapy for the next fifty years
(Ross 1989). As a consequence of this development, psychotherapy in the
first half of this century was practically synonymous with talking—face to
face interviews, free associations on the couch, and the behaviorist
deconditioning.

As psychoanalysis and other forms of verbal psychotherapy gained

momentum and reputation, the status of direct experiential access to the
unconscious changed dramatically. Holotropic states that had been earlier
seen as being potentially therapeutic and capable of providing valuable
information about the human psyche became associated with pathology.
Since that time, the prevailing practice in the treatment of these states, when
they occur spontanously, has been to suppress them with all available
means. It took many years before professionals began to rediscover the
value of holotropic states and of direct emotional experience.
Holotropic States and Modern Consciousness
Research
The renaissance of professional interest in holotropic states began in the
early 1950s, shortly after the discovery of LSD-25, with the advent of
psychedelic therapy. It continued few years later with new revolutionary
developments in psychology and psychotherapy. A group of American
psychologists and psychiatrists who were deeply dissatisfied with
behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis felt and expressed the need for a
new orientation in their fields. Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich
responded to this call and launched a new branch of psychology that they
called humanistic psychology. Within a short time, this movement became
very popular.

Humanistic psychology provided the context for the development of a

broad spectrum of innovative therapies. While traditional psychotherapies
used primarily verbal means and intellectual analysis, these new so-called
experiential therapies emphasized direct experience and expression of
emotions. They also used various forms of body work as an integral part of
the process. The best known among them, Fritz Perls’ Gestalt therapy (Perls
1976), has since become very popular and is widely used, particularly
outside the academic circles.

In spite of these radical departures from mainstream therapeutic strategies,

most of the experiential therapies still relied to a great degree on verbal
communication and required that the client stay in the ordinary state of
consciousness. However, some of the new approaches were so powerful
that they were able to profoundly change the state of consciousness of the
clients. Besides psychedelic therapy, this included some of the noe-Reichian
techniques, primal therapy, rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, and a few
others.

Although these new experiential methods have not yet been accepted by
mainstream academic circles, their development and use started a new
chapter in the history of psychotherapy. They are closely related to ancient
and aboriginal psychospiritual technologies that have played a critical role
in the ritual, spiritual, and cultural history of humanity. If, in the future, they
are accepted and their value recognized, they certainly have the potential to
revolutionize the theory and practice of psychiatry.

In the second half of this century, significant contributions to the

technology of inducing holotropic states have come not only from clinical
work, but also from laboratory research. Biochemists have been able to
identify the active alkaloids of many psychedelic plants and produce them
in the laboratory. The most famous among them are mescaline from peyote,
psilocybine from the Mexican magic mushrooms, and ibogaine from the
African eboga shrub. Less known but important are harmaline from
ayahuasca, tetra-hydro-cannabinol (THC) from hashish, and the tryptamine
derivatives found in the South American snuffs and in the skin secretions of
certain toads.

Chemical research has also added to this already rich psychedelic

armamentarium the extremely potent semisynthetic LSD-25 and a large
number of synthetic substances, particularly MDA, MDMA (Ecstacy or
Adam), 2-CB, and other amphetamine derivatives. This made it possible to
conduct systematic clinical and laboratory research of the effects of these
compounds on a large scale and to study the physiological, biochemical,
and psychological processes involved.

A very effective way of inducing holotropic states is sensory isolation or

deprivation, which involves a significant reduction of meaningful sensory
stimuli. Its extreme form involves total immersion in a large, completely
dark, and acoustically isolated tank and a custom-made waterproof mask
with an airpipe. Similarly, sleep deprivation and even dream deprivation
can profoundly change consciousness. Dream deprivation without sleep
deprivation can be achieved by waking experimental subjects every time
their rapid eye movements (REM) indicate they are dreaming. There also
exist laboratory devices that make it possible to learn lucid dreaming.

Another well-known mind-altering laboratory procedure is biofeedback, a

method that allows to guide the individual by electronic signals into specific
experiential realms characterized by preponderance of certain frequencies
of brainwaves. A rapidly growing market now offers a rich spectrum of
mind-altering devices that can induce holotropic states of consciousness by
combining in various ways acoustic, optical, and kinesthetic stimulation.
The account of new avenues in consciousness research would not be
complete without mentioning thanatology, a discipline focusing on the
study of near-death experiences (NDEs). Thanatological research has been
the source of some of the most remarkable observations in the entire
transpersonal field.

The renaissance of interest in holotropic states that we have witnessed in

the last few decades has generated an extraordinary amount of
revolutionary data. Researchers of different areas of consciousness research
have amassed impressive evidence that seriously challenges the theories of
materialistic science concerning the nature of consciousness. It leaves little
doubt that the current scientific worldview that assumes primacy of matter
and sees consciousness as its derivative cannot be adequately supported by
facts of observation.

As a matter of fact, the observations from transpersonal psychology directly

contradict the current image of consciousness as a byproduct of
neurophysiological processes in the brain. The existence of the “veridical
out-of-body experiences” in near-death situations would alone be sufficient
to topple this leading myth of materialistic science. These experiences show
that disembodied consciousness is capable under certain circumstances of
accurately perceiving the environment without the mediation of senses.

What is probably most remarkable in the present situation is the degree to

which academic circles have managed to ignore and suppress all the new
evidence that shatters the most fundamental metaphysical assumptions of
materialistic science. The recognition of the limitations of the existing
conceptual frameworks to assimilate the new revolutionary data prompted
Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, the two founders of humanistic
psychology, to launch yet another psychological discipline that has become
known as transpersonal psychology. This field studies the entire spectrum
of human experience including the holotropic states and represents a serious
attempt to integrate science and spirituality.

Conclusions
The main purpose for writing this final chapter was to establish that the
cosmology described in this book is not incompatible with the findings of
science, but with the philosophical conclusions that were inappropriately
drawn from these findings. What the experiences and observations
described in this book challenge is not science, but materialistic monism. I
hope that I have been able to show that the materialistic worldview rests on
a number of questionable metaphysical assumptions that are not adequately
supported by facts and scientific evidence.

What characterizes true science is open-minded and open-ended application

of the scientific method of inquiry to any domain of reality that allows it, no
matter how absurd this undertaking might appear from a traditional
perspective. I believe that pioneers in various areas of modern
consciousness research have done exactly that. They have studied with
great courage a wide spectrum of holotropic experiences and amassed in the
process vast amounts of fascinating data. Many of the phenomena they have
observed represent a crucial challenge to deeply ingrained beliefs that have
long been falsely considered to be established scientific facts.

The more than four decades that I have spent in consciousness research
have convinced me that the only way the proponents of materialistic science
can maintain their present worldview is by systematically censoring and
misinterpreting all the data concerning holotropic states. They have
certainly successfully used this strategy in the past, whether the source of
the challenging data was historical study, comparative religion,
anthropology, or various areas of modern consciousness research. This
certainly is true about parapsychology, psychedelic therapy, and experiential
psychotherapies. Thanatology and the work with laboratory mind-altering
techniques are additional examples.

I am convinced that this strategy cannot be continued indefinitely. It is

becoming increasingly evident that the basic assumptions that represent the
cornerstones of materialistic monism are at present not adequately
supported by scientific data. In addition, the amount of evidence from
consciousness research that has to be suppressed and ignored is rapidly
growing. It is not enough to show that the claims of transpersonal
psychology are incompatible with the worldview of materialistic science.
To silence the conceptual challenges, it would be necessary to demonstrate
that the observations from transpersonal psychology and consciousness
research, including those described in this book, can be adequately
accounted for and explained in the context of the materialistic paradigm.

I seriously doubt that mainstream materialistic critics would be more

successful in accomplishing this task than the researchers in the
transpersonal field have been themselves. I have the privilege of knowing
most of them personally. They all have traditional academic backgrounds
and had exerted great effort to find conventional explanations for their
findings before they decided to seek a radical alternative. I know from my
own experience that it was the disturbing and painful inadequacy of the old
paradigm to account for the data and not iconoclastic zeal and delight that
was responsible for the origins of transpersonal psychology.

It is important to emphasize that the cosmology described in this book is not

in conflict with the facts and observations of any scientific discipline. What
is being questioned and challenged is the appropriateness of the
philosophical conclusions drawn from these observations. The ideas in this
book do not change any of the specifics described by materialistic science.
They simply provide an overarching metaframework for the phenomena
constituting consensus reality. According to the materialistic worldview, the
universe is a mechanical system that essentially created itself and
consciousness is an epiphenomenon of material processes. The findings of
transpersonal psychology and consciousness research strongly suggest that
the universe might be a creation of superior cosmic intelligence and
consciousness an essential aspect of existence.

There exist no scientific findings that demonstrate the priority of matter

over consciousness and the absence of creative intelligence in the universal
scheme of things. Adding the insights from consciousness research to the
findings of materialistic science provides a more complete understanding of
many important aspects of the cosmos for which we currently have
unsatisfactory and unconvincing explanations. These include such
fundamental questions as the creation of the universe, the origin of life on
our planet, the evolution of species, and the nature and function of
consciousness.
In addition, this new perspective on reality includes as its integral part the
rich spectrum of holotropic experiences and related phenomena. This is a
large and important domain of existence for which materialistic science has
failed to provide reasonable and convincing rational explanations. After
repeated frustrating attempts, I have myself given up hope that I would be
able to explain my experiences and observations in the context of the
conceptual framework that I received during my academic training. If any
of the critics of transpersonal psychology succeed in presenting a
convincing, sober, and down-to-earth materialistic explanation of the
extraordinary world of holotropic experiences, I will be the first one to
welcome it and congratulate them.

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Whitehead, A. N. 1929. Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan.

Whitehead, A. N. 1967. Science and the Modern World. New York:

Free Press.

Wilber, K. 1980. The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human

Development. Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Publishing House.
 Wilber, K. 1983. A Sociable God: Brief Introduction to a
Transcendental Sociology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Wilber, K. 1995. Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality: The Spirit of

Evolution. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Wilber, K. 1996. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala

Publications.

Wilber, K. 1997. The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World

Gone Slightly Mad. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

Williams, G. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.

Yockey, H. 1992. Information Theory and Molecular Biology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Index
A
Absolute, the. See Consciousness, Absolute

absolute nothingness. See Void

Adler, Alfred

aesthetic appreciation

enhanced in holotropic states

aggression, destruction and violence. See also murder; violence

malignant

perinatal experience and

roots of

birth trauma and

separates people from their true nature

Al-C Alawi, Sheik

Alexander, Franz

Alexander the Great

Alighieri, Dante

animal past lives, persons with

animals, identification with

annihilation, experiences of. See also death

during moment of birth

anthropocentrism

anxiety. See fear

archetypes. See also collective unconscious; specific archetypes

as bridging material and spiritual worlds

in holotropic breathwork

in holotropic states

perinatal access to

Arrien, Angeles

art. See also drama creation and

Asch, Sholem

astral projection, experiment in

astrology

atheists’ dilemma as seen in holotropic states

Aurobindo, Sri

auto-projecting into future

Azriel of Gerona

B
Bache, Christopher

Bardo Thödol. See Tibetan teachings

Barrow, J. D.

Bateson, Gregory

Behe, Michael J.

Being of Light

belief. See also holotropic states; reincarnation; worldview

changed by transcendental experience

birth. See also perinatal experience

anesthesia during

annihilation experiences during

as biographical-transpersonal interface
as gateway to collective unconscious

guidelines for

imprinting during

mother’s experience during

fear of death and

as sexual

as spiritual

as unitive

preparation for

as psychospiritual dividing line

reliving of

death and rebirth during

death motifs in

resistance to

sexual arousal during

spiritual impact of

spiritual

trauma of

destructive aggression rooted in

effects of
Black Mass, perinatal experience and

Blake, William

bliss. See Sacchidananda

Bodhisattva

body-ego. See also skin-encapsulated ego

overidentification with

transcending boundaries of

Bohm, David

Bolen, J. S.

boundaries. See also under body-ego

absence of

in intrauterine experience

arbitrariness of physical

transcending of individual

during sex

BPMs. See perinatal matrices

Brahman. See also creative principle

brain, consciousness and the

brainwashing, sexual ecstasy during

Brave New World (Huxley)

Buchanan, John

Buddha

Buddhism. See also Tibetan teachings

Byron, George Gordon

C
Cabala

Campbell, Joseph

Capra, Fritjof

causality, linear

synchronicities transcending

Charcot, Jean-Martin

Chardin, Teilhard de

children, past life memories of

choking. See suffocation

Christianity

origins in spiritual experiences

Chuang-tzu

Cicero

claustrophobic experiences, perinatal

coincidences. See synchronicities and coincidences

collective unconscious. See also archetypes

perinatal experiences and

compassion

connectedness. See interconnectedness of all things

consciousness. See also holotropic states

of the ecosystem

in holotropic states

gap between matter and

involution and evolution of

modern physics and research on

Consciousness, Absolute. See also creation; divine; Universal Mind

experiences of

identification with

material world as creation of

revelations about

contradictions, in holotropic states. See also polarities

creation

dynamics of

partitioning of Absolute Consciousness

revealtions about
metaphors for

phases of

pregnant Void as source of

reasons for

as experiment

as longing of Absolute Consciousness

as overflow of abundance of Absolute Consciousness

role of consciousness in

creative principle. See also Brahman

transcends distinctions and polarities

transcends space and time

Crick, Francis

crucifixion, perinatal experience and

D
darkness/dark side motif

perinatal experience and

uncovered in holotropic states

Darwinian theory, failures of

Dass, Ram

Davidson, K.
Dawkins, Richard

death. See also annihilation; dying before dying; suicidal depression;

terminal illness

archetypes of

during birth regression

attitudes toward. See also reincarnation, beliefs about

of ego

prior to rebirth

encounters with

as mystical/spiritual opening

mystical states and

experienced during moment of birth

experienced in holotropic states

fear of

during childbirth and delivery

loss of via ritual death and rebirth

interface with transpersonal domain

near-death experiences

as catalyst for mystical experience

elements of birth in

reckoning in
sexual component of

psychospiritual

death motifs

perinatal

during reliving of birth

deities and demons

experienced in holotropic states

déjà vécu

déjà vu, past life memories and

deMause, Lloyd

depression, suicidal

resolved through spiritual openings

determinism vs. free will

devil archetype. See also deities and demons; satanic imagery

perinatal roots of. See also hell motif

Dionysus

Divine, immanent/transcendent

divine, the. See also Consciousness, Absolute

identification with

religions and
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

drama

fictional

life as a

drugs, psychedelic

dying before dying

in shamanic traditions

Dyson, Freeman

E
Eckhart, Meister

ecosystem consciousness

in holotropic states

ecstasy. See also Sacchidananda

Einstein, Albert

empathy. See compassion; identification

Empedocles

emptiness, forms of. See also Void

engulfment experiences

during reliving of birth

environmental crises. See global crisis

epistemology. See also belief

ethical decisions, as creative acts

ethics

felt in holotropic states

as part of creation

relativity of

Everett, Hugh

evil. See also deities and demons; suffering

archetypes of. See also hell motif

future of humanity and

how to deal with

divine roots of

holotropic experiences and

as intrinsic part of creation

reasons for

religions’ view of

separating power of

transcended in transpersonal experiences

universality of

experience. See also specific experiences

creation of one’s own

levels of

F
false vs. true identity

fear, perinatal roots of. See also under death

fictional literature. See also drama

filmmaking, creation of material reality and

fire motif, perinatal roots of

Flud, Robert

formlessness. See Void

free will vs. determinism

Freud, Sigmund. See also psychoanalysis

holotropic states in Anna O. case

Fromm, Erich

future of humanity, evil archetypes and

G
Gennep, Arnold van

global crisis

individual transformation and

lessons from Native American ceremony

metaphysical dimension of

God. See also atheists; Consciousness, Absolute; deities and demons;

Divine

experiences of

two faces of

Godfrey, Kenneth

Goleman, D.

Graham, Neil

greed, insatiable

spiritual and perinatal sources of

Grof, Christina

Grof, Paul

Grof, Stanislav

astral projection experiment

holotropic experiences of

life experiences of

research of

guilt, perinatal experience and

H
Hahn, Thich Nhat

Hall, Joseph

Hall, Manly

hallucinogenic drugs. See drugs, psychedelic

Harner, Michael

he-Lavan, David Ben Abraham

Hell motif, perinatal roots of

helplessness, during birth experiences

hero’s journey motif, perinatal roots of

Hinduism

Hines, B.

Hitler, Adolf

Hofmann, Albert

holons

holotropic breathwork

holotropic states. See also “peak experiences”; shamanic experiences;

transpersonal experiences

atheist’s dilemma as seen in

belief changes following

case material of

characteristics
ethical values and behavior influenced by

experiences in

aesthetic appreciation enhanced

archetypes

contradictions coexisting

dark unconscious material uncovered

death and rebirth

deities and demons

ecosystem consciousness

ethical concerns

evil

of other persons’ lives

reliving birth

sexuality

unitive

violence

induction methods. See also drugs, psychedelic; “peak experiences,”

triggers for

insights and revelations from. See also specific topics

into Absolute Consciousness

archetypal
into creation, dynamics of

into creation of one’s own reality

mythological

philosophical and spiritual

as inspiration for religions

myths about

pathologizing of

role in history of psychiatry

role in religion

space and time and

suppression of

taboos against

terminology for

verbal limitations in describing

visionary

holotropic vs. hylotropic processes

Hoyle, Fred

humanistic psychology

Huxley, Aldous

hylotropic vs. holotropic processes

I
identification

with Absolute Consciousness

with animals

with body-ego

with the divine

with microscopic entities

perinatal, with Jesus’ crucifixion

identity

false

secrets of

loss of

perinatal experience and

idolatry

Inanna

intelligence, spiritual

interconnectedness of all things

introspection. See self-exploration

J
Jain religion

Jesus, crucifixion of perinatal identification with

Johnson, Philip E.

joy. See ecstasy; Sacchidananda

Jung, Carl G.. See also archetypes

K
Kabir

karma. See past life memories; reincarnation

Katha Upanishad

Khanna, M.

Koestler, Arthur

Kornfield, Jack

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von

Kundalini

L
language, limitations of

Lao-tzu

Laszlo, Ervin

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von monadology of

life after death. See reincarnation

linear causality, synchronicities transcending

Locke, John

loneliness, perinatal experience and

Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill)

Lovejoy, Arthur O.

LSD. See drugs, psychedelic

Lucifer

M
Maharshi, Sri Ramana

Malekulans

Maslow, Abraham

masochism. See under pain

material world

materialistic science. See science, materialistic

maya

McCririck, Pauline

McDermott, Robert

Mesmer, Franz Anton

Metzner, Ralph
microcosm and macrocosm

monadology, of Leibniz

Monroe, Robert

Mookerjee, A.

morality. See ethics

motherhood, unitive experiences in. See also birth

murder

erotically motivated

perinatal experience and

Murphy, M.

music, triggering peak experiences

mystical states. See Consciousness, Absolute; holotropic states; “peak

experiences”; shamanic experiences

mythology

perinatal roots of

revelations from holotropic states

N
Native American ceremony, lessons from

near-death experiences. See under death

Newton, Isaac
nothingness. See Void

nursing, unitive experiences during

O
ocean, mystical raptures and

Odent, Michel

old age, attitudes toward

O’Neill, Eugene

orgasm

experienced as dying

as psychospiritual rebirth

Origen (Origenes Adamantius)

Osiris

out-of-body experiences

near-death

Oversoul

P
Pagels, Heinz

pain. See also evil; suffering

transformed into sexual arousal

transformed into transcendental experience

Pañchamakara

paranoia, perinatal

part-whole relationships in universe. See also microcosm and macrocosm

past life experiences

experiencing others’ lives

past life memories

of animal past lives

in children

déjà vu experience and

unique features of

verification of

ways to access

“peak experiences”

beneficial effects of

triggers for

beautiful creations

peak athletic performance

perinatal experience. See also birth

access to archetypal domain

of Hitler

insatiable greed rooted in

as psychospiritual dividing line

as purposeful

sadomasochism and

satanic imagery and

as spiritual opening

symbolism of aggression and

synchronicities and coincidences and

timelessness during childbirth terror

transpersonal realm and

perinatal matrices, basic (BPMs)

BPM I

absence of boundaries in

access to archetypal domain in

images of paradise in

oceanic feeling in

toxic womb experience in

BPM II

death motifs in
engulfment/devouring experiences in

helplessness during

as stage in spiritual opening

BPM III

death and rebirth motifs in

sexual component in

violence in

BPM IV

fire motif in

Perls, Fritz

Persephone

physics, modern. See also Einstein

consciousness research and

Plato

play

cosmic

mystery play of universe

Plotinus

poetry, transcendental experience in

polarities, transcending of. See also contradictions

pornography, perinatal experience and

pregnancy, experiences during. See also birth

dreams of death and destruction

unitive

pregnant Void. See Void, pregnant

primal mind

primal therapy

psychedelic drugs. See under drugs

psychiatry

role of holotropic states in history of

Western, materialistic worldview of

psychoanalysis, history of holotropic states and

psychoanalytic treatment

intellectualism of

psychotherapy. See also birth, reliving of

experiential, purposes of

intellectualism of

role of past life memories in

psychotic episodes

mystical states confused with

Q
quantum physics. See physics, modern

R
Ramakrishna, Sri

rape, perinatal experience and

Rawson, Philip

reason, inadequacies of

rebirth, experience of

ego death prior to

in holotropic states

during moment of birth

perinatal experience and motif of

regression. See also birth, reliving of; holotropic states

past life

reincarnation

animal past lives and

beliefs about. See also death, attitudes toward

religions and

evidence for
in Tibetan Buddhism

religion(s). See also idolatry; spiritual practice; worldview

divorces evil from the divine

idolatry in

inspired by spiritual experiences

role of holotropic states in

science and

spiritual experience suppressed in

vs. spirituality

resurrection, experienced during moment of birth

Ring, Kenneth

Rinpoche, Kalu

Roberts, Jane

Roob, A.

Ross, C.

Rumi, Jalaluddin

S
Sacchidananda

sadomasochism. See also under pain

perinatal experience and

Sancta Clara, Abraham à

Sartre, Jean-Paul

satanic imagery. See also deities and demons; devil archetype

perinatal

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Schuon, Frithjof

science

materialistic, worldview of

changed by transcendental experiences

metaphysical assumptions of

Western psychiatry and

religion and

scientism vs.

spirituality and

scientific theory vs. scientific method

self-exploration

benefits from

synchronicities and

self-image. See also identity

perinatal experience and

selfishness. See greed

sensory deprivation

sex

mystical states during

sexual abuse, perinatal experience and

sexual arousal

during birth regression

orgasm

pain transformed into

sexual perversion, perinatal experience and

sexuality

as boundary transcending

in holotropic states

perinatal origins

spirituality and. See also Tantric practices

as unifying or alienating

Shadow. See darkness/dark side motif

shamanic experiences

shamanism

Sheldrake, Rupert
skin-encapsulated ego. See also body-ego

Smith, H.

Smoot, G.

Socrates

soul. See Oversoul

space and time

dimensionality of

holotropic states and

transcended by creative principle

Sparks, Cary

Sparks, Tav

spiritual beliefs. See also belief; religion(s); worldview

as based on direct experience

spiritual emergencies

spiritual experiences. See holotropic states; specific experiences

spiritual intelligence

spiritual practice, benefits from

spirituality. See also religion(s) vs. religion

sports, triggering mystical experiences

St. Jerome
St. Teresa

Steindl-Rast, Brother David

Stevenson, Ian

suffering. See also evil

suffocation, sexual arousal during

suicidal depression

resolved by spiritual openings

supreme principle of universe. See Consciousness, Absolute

Sutich, Anthony

Sutra, Avatamsaka

Sutra, Prajñaparamita

synchronicities and coincidences

inner exploration and

transpersonal and perinatal experiences and

T
Tantric painting

Tantric practices

Tantric science

Tao Te Ching (Lao-tzu)

Taoism
Tarnas, Rick

Tart, Charles

terminal illness, spiritual awakenings during

therapy. See psychotherapy

Thomas, Lewis

Thorne, Kip S.

Tibetan teachings. See also Buddhism

Tibetan Wheel of Life

timelessnes

during childbirth terror

Tipler, F. J.

Traherne, Thomas

transpersonal experiences. See also Consciousness, Absolute; holotropic

states

synchronicities and coincidences in

as transcending evil

U
unitive experience

mother’s experience of childbirth as

Universal Mind. See also Consciousness, Absolute

universe, mystery play of

Upanishad, Mundaka

V
Vaughan, Frances

violence. See also murder

birth trauma and

experienced in holotropic states

visionary holotropic states

Void, pregnant

experiences of

as source of creation

vulnerability, perinatal experience and

W
Walsh, Roger

Wambach, H.

water. See ocean

Watson, James

Watts, Alan

Western science. See under science

Wheeler, John

White, R. A.

Whitehead, Alfred North

Wilber, Ken

Williams, George C.

witches, perinatal experience and

Wolf, Fred Alan

Wordsworth, William

worldview. See also under science, materialistic

attitudes toward death and

lifestyles and

perinatal experience and

Y
Yantra, Purushakara

Yockey, H.