Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research 3 страница

 

There was no question that I was connecting with something primordial — an ancient feminine archetype, that of the delivering mother. My body image included a large pregnant belly and female genitals with all the nuances of biological sensations. I felt frustrated by not being able to surrender to this elemental process — to give birth and be born, to let go and to let the baby out. An enormous reservoir of murderous aggression emerged from the underworld of my psyche. It was as if an abscess of evil had suddenly been punctured by the cut of a cosmic surgeon. A werewolf or a berserk was taking me over; Dr. Jekyll was turning into Mr. Hyde. There were many images of the murderer and the victim as being one and the same person, just as earlier I could not distinguish between the child who was being born and the delivering mother.

 

I was a merciless tyrant, a dictator exposing his subordinates to unimaginable cruelties, and also a revolutionary, leading the furious mob to overthrow the tyrant. I became the mobster who murders in cold blood and the policeman who kills the criminal in the name of law. At one point, I experienced the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. When I opened my eyes, I saw myself as an SS officer. I had a profound sense that he, the Nazi, and I, the Jew, were the same person. I could feel the Hitler and the Stalin in me and felt fully responsible for the atrocities in human history. I saw clearly that humanity's problem is not the existence of vicious dictators, but this Hidden Killer that we all find within our own psyche, if we look deep enough.

 

Then the nature of the experience changed and reached mythological proportions. Instead of the evil of human history, I now sensed the atmosphere of witchcraft and the presence of demonic elements. My teeth were transformed into long fangs filled with some mysterious poison, and I found myself flying on large bat wings through the night like an ominous vampire. This changed soon into wild, intoxicating scenes of a Witches' Sabbath. In this strange, sensuous ritual, all the usually forbidden and repressed impulses seemed to surface and found their full expression. I was aware of participating in some mysterious sacrificial ceremony celebrating the Dark God.

 

As the demonic quality gradually disappeared from my experience, I felt tremendously erotic and was engaged in endless sequences of the most fantastic orgies and sexual fantasies, in which I played all the roles. All through these experiences, I simultaneously continued being also the child struggling through the birth canal and the mother delivering it. It became very clear to me that sex, birth, and death were deeply connected and that satanic forces had important links with the propulsion through the birth canal. I struggled and fought in many different roles and against many different enemies. Sometimes I wondered if there would ever be an end to my awful predicament.

 

Then a new element entered my experience. My entire body was covered with some biological filth, which was slimy and slippery. I could not tell if it was the amniotic fluid, urine, mucus, blood, or vaginal secretions. The same stuff seemed to be in my mouth and even in my lungs. I was choking, gagging, making faces, and spitting, trying to get it out of my system and off my skin. At the same time, I was getting a message that I did not have to fight. The process had its own rhythm and all I had to do was surrender to it. I remembered many situations from my life, where I felt the need to fight and struggle and, in retrospect, that too felt unnecessary. It was as if I had been somehow programmed by my birth to see life as much more complicated and dangerous than it actually is. It seemed to me that this experience could open my eyes in this regard and make my life much easier and more playful than before.

 

 

BPM IV (The Death-Rebirth Experience).

 

This matrix is related to the third stage of delivery, to the final emergence from the birth canal and the severing of the umbilical cord. Here the fetus completes the preceding difficult process of propulsion through the birth canal and achieves explosive liberation as it emerges into light. Reliving of this stage of birth often involves various specific concrete and realistic memories, such as the experience of anesthesia, the pressures of the forceps, and the sensations associated with various obstetric maneuvers or postnatal interventions.

 

To understand why the reliving of biological birth is experienced as death and rebirth, one has to realize that what happens is more than just a replay of the original event. Because the fetus is completely confined during the birth process and has no way of expressing the extreme emotions and sensations involved, the memory of this event remains psychologically undigested and unassimilated. The way we in later life experience ourselves and the world is heavily tainted by this constant reminder of the vulnerability, inadequacy, and weakness that we experienced at birth. In a sense, we were born anatomically but have not caught up with this fact emotionally. 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 precedes rebirth is related to the extinction 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 by letting them emerge into consciousness, they are becoming irrelevant and are, in a sense, dying. As frightening as this process is, it is actually very healing and transforming. Approaching the moment of the ego death might feel like the end of the world. Paradoxically, when only a small step separates us from an experience of radical liberation, we have a sense of all-pervading anxiety and impending catastrophe of enormous proportions. It feels as if we are losing all that we are; at the same time, we have no idea of what is on the other side, or even if there is anything there at all. This fear drives many people to resist the process at this stage; as a result, they can remain psychologically stuck in this problematic experiential territory.

 

When the individual overcomes the metaphysical fear encountered at this important juncture and decides to let things happen, he or she experiences total annihilation on all levels. It involves a sense of 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 the individual's life — seem to be mercilessly destroyed. Immediately following the experience of total annihilation — hitting "cosmic bottom"— one is overwhelmed by visions of light that has a supernatural radiance and beauty and is usually perceived as divine.

 

The survivor of what seemed like the ultimate apocalyptic destruction experiences only seconds later visions of divine light, radiant celestial beings, paradisean landscapes, fantastic displays of rainbows, and peacock designs. He or she feels redeemed and blessed by salvation, reclaiming his or her divine nature and cosmic status. At this time, one is frequently overcome by a surge of positive emotions toward oneself, other people, nature, and existence in general. This kind of healing and life-changing experience occurs when birth was not too debilitating or confounded by heavy anesthesia. If the latter was the case, the individual has to do psychological work on the specific traumatic issues involved.

 

The following account of a death-rebirth experience describes a typical sequence characteristic of BPM IV.

 

However, the worst was yet to come. All of a sudden, I seemed to be losing all my connections to reality, as if some imaginary rug was pulled from under my feet. Everything was collapsing and I felt that my entire world was shattered to pieces. It was like puncturing a monstrous metaphysical balloon of my existence; a gigantic bubble of ludicrous self-deception had burst open and exposed the lie of my life. Everything that I ever believed in, everything that I did or pursued, everything that seemed to give my life meaning suddenly appeared utterly false. These were all pitiful crutches without any substance with which I tried to patch up the intolerable reality of existence. They were now blasted and blown away like the frail feathered seeds of a dandelion, exposing a frightening abyss of ultimate truth — the meaningless chaos of the existential Emptiness.

 

In the next moment, I was facing a terrifying giant figure of a dark goddess whom I identified as the Indian Kali. My face was being pushed by an irresistible force toward her gaping vagina that was full of what seemed to be menstrual blood or repulsive afterbirth. I sensed that what was demanded of me was absolute surrender to the forces of existence and to the feminine principle represented by the goddess. I had no choice but to kiss and lick her bleeding vulva in utmost submission and humility. At this moment, which was the ultimate and final end of any feeling of male supremacy and machismo I had ever harbored, I connected with the memory of the moment of my biological birth. My head was emerging from the birth canal with my mouth in close contact with the bleeding vagina of my mother.

 

Filled with indescribable horror, I saw a gigantic figure of a deity towering over me in a threatening pose. I somehow instinctively recognized that this was Bhairava, the Hindu god Shiva in his destructive aspect. I felt the thunderous impact of his enormous foot that crushed me, shattered me to smithereens, and smeared me like an insignificant piece of excrement all over what I felt was the bottom of the cosmos. Just as I experienced total annihilation, there appeared divine light of supernatural radiance and beauty whose rays exploded into thousands of exquisite peacock designs. From this brilliant golden light emerged a figure of a Great Mother Goddess who seemed to embody love and protection of all ages. She spread her arms and reached toward me, enveloping me into her essence. I merged with this incredible energy field, feeling purged, healed, and nourished. What seemed to be some divine nectar and ambrosia, some archetypal essence of milk and honey, was pouring through me in absolute abundance.

 

Then the figure of the goddess gradually disappeared, absorbed by an even more brilliant light. It was abstract, yet endowed with definite personal characteristics, conscious, and radiating infinite intelligence. It became clear to me that what I was experiencing was the merging with and absorption into the Universal Self, or Brahman, as I have read about it in books of Indian philosophy. This experience subsided after about ten minutes of clock-time; however, it transcended any concept of time and felt like eternity. The flow of the healing and nourishing energy and the visions of golden glow with peacock designs lasted through the night. The resulting sense of wellbeing stayed with me for many days. The memory of the experience has remained vivid for years and has profoundly changed my entire life philosophy.

 

 

The Transpersonal Domain of the Psyche.

 

The second major domain that has to be added to mainstream psychiatry's cartography of the human psyche when we work with holotropic states is now known under the name transpersonal, meaning literally "beyond the personal" or "transcending the personal.” The experiences that originate on this level involve transcendence of the usual boundaries of the individual (his or her body and ego) and of the usual limitations of three-dimensional space and linear time that restrict our perception of the world in the ordinary state of consciousness. The transpersonal experiences are best defined by describing first the everyday experience of ourselves and the world - how we have to experience ourselves and the environment to pass for "normal" according to the standards of our culture and of traditional psychiatry.

 

In the ordinary or "normal" state of consciousness, we experience ourselves as Newtonian objects existing within the boundaries of our skin. The American writer and philosopher Alan Watts referred to this experience of oneself as identifying with the "skin-encapsulated ego.” Our perception of the environment is restricted by the physiological limitations of our sensory organs and by physical characteristics of the environment. For example, we cannot see objects from which we are separated by a solid wall, ships that are beyond the horizon, or the other side of the moon. If we are in Prague, we cannot hear what our friends are talking about in San Francisco. We cannot feel the softness of the lambskin unless the surface of our body is in direct contact with it. In addition, we can experience vividly and with all our senses only the events that are happening in the present moment. We can recall the past and anticipate future events or fantasize about them; however, these are very different experiences from the immediate and direct experience of the present moment. In transpersonal states of consciousness none of these limitations are absolute; any of them can be transcended.

 

Transpersonal experiences can be divided into three large categories. The first of these involves primarily transcendence of the usual spatial barriers, or the limitations of the "skin-encapsulated ego. Here belong experiences of merging with another person into a state that can be called "dual unity," assuming the identity of another person, identifying with the consciousness of an entire group of people (e.g. all mothers of the world, the entire population of India, or all the inmates of concentration camps), or even experiencing an extension of consciousness that seems to encompass all of humanity. Experiences of this kind have been repeatedly described in the spiritual literature of the world.

 

In a similar way, one can transcend the limits of the specifically human experience and identify with the consciousness of various animals, plants, or even with a form of consciousness that seems to be associated with inorganic objects and processes. In the extremes, it is possible to experience consciousness of the entire biosphere, of our planet, or the entire material universe. Incredible and absurd as it might seem to a Westerner committed to materialistic philosophy and to the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, these experiences suggest that everything that we can experience in our everyday state of consciousness as an object, has in the holotropic states of consciousness a corresponding subjective representation. It is as if everything in the universe has its objective and subjective aspect, the way it is described in the great spiritual philosophies of the East. For example, in Hinduism all that exists is seen as a manifestation of Brahman and in Taoism as a transformation of the Tao.

 

The second category of transpersonal experiences is characterized primarily by overcoming of temporal rather than spatial boundaries, by transcendence of linear time. We have already talked about the possibility of vivid reliving of important memories from infancy and of the trauma of birth. This historical regression can continue farther and involve authentic fetal and embryonal memories from different periods of intrauterine life. It is not even unusual to experience, on the level of cellular consciousness, full identification with the sperm and the ovum at the time of conception. But the historical regression does not stop even here; it is possible to have experiences from the lives of one's human or animal ancestors, and those that seem to be coming from the racial and collective unconscious as described by C. G. Jung. Quite frequently, the experiences that seem to be happening in other cultures and historical periods are associated with a sense of personal remembering (déjà vu); people then talk about reliving of memories from past lives, from previous incarnations.

 

In the transpersonal experiences described so far, the content reflected various phenomena existing in space-time. They involved elements of the everyday familiar reality - other people, animals, plants, materials, and events from the past. What is surprising about these experiences is not their content, but the fact that we can witness or fully identify with something that is not ordinarily accessible to our experience. We know that there are pregnant whales in the world, but we should not be able to have an authentic experience of being one. The fact that there once was the French revolution is readily acceptable, but we should not be able to have a vivid experience of being there and lying wounded on the barricades of Paris. We know that there are many things happening in the world in places where we are not present, but it is usually considered impossible to actually experience or observe something that is happening in remote locations and historical periods (without the mediation of the television and a satellite). We may also be surprised to find consciousness associated with lower animals, plants, and with inorganic object and processes.

 

The third category of transpersonal experiences is even stranger; here consciousness seems to extend into realms and dimensions that the Western industrial culture does not even consider to be "real.” Here belong numerous encounters or even identification with deities and demons of various cultures and other archetypal figures, visits to mythological landscapes, and communication with discarnate beings, spirit guides, suprahuman entities, extraterrestrials, and inhabitants of parallel universes. Additional examples in this category are visions and intuitive understanding of universal symbols, such as the cross, the Nile cross or ankh, the swastika, the pentacle, the six-pointed star, or the yin-yang sign.

 

In its farther reaches, individual consciousness can identify with cosmic consciousness or the Universal Mind known under many different names - Brahman, Buddha, the Cosmic Christ, Keter, Allah, the Tao, the Great Spirit, and many others. The ultimate of all experiences appears to be identification with the Supracosmic and Metacosmic Void, the mysterious and primordial emptiness and nothingness that is conscious of itself and is the ultimate cradle of all existence. It has no concrete content, yet it contains all there is in a germinal and potential form.

 

Transpersonal experiences have many strange characteristics that shatter the most fundamental metaphysical assumptions of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and of the materialistic world view. Researchers who have studied and/or personally experienced these fascinating phenomena realize that the attempts of mainstream science to dismiss them as irrelevant products of human fantasy and imagination or as hallucinations - erratic products of pathological processes in the brain - are naive and inadequate. Any unbiased study of the transpersonal domain of the psyche has to come to the conclusion that these observations represent a critical challenge not only for psychiatry and psychology, but for the entire philosophy of Western science.

 

Although transpersonal experiences occur in the process of deep individual self-exploration, it is not possible to interpret them simply as intrapsychic phenomena in the conventional sense. On the one hand, they appear on the same experiential continuum as the biographical and perinatal experiences and are thus coming from within the individual psyche. On the other hand, they seem to be tapping directly, without the mediation of the senses, into sources of information that are clearly far beyond the conventional reach of the individual. Somewhere on the perinatal level of the psyche, a strange flip seems to occur and what was up to that point deep intrapsychic probing becomes experiencing of the universe at large through extrasensory means. Some people have compared this to an "experiential Moebius strip,” since it is impossible any more to say what is inside and what is outside.

 

These observations indicate that we can obtain information about the universe in two radically different ways: besides the conventional possibility of learning through sensory perception and analysis and synthesis of the data, we can also find out about various aspects of the world by direct identification with them in a holotropic state of consciousness. Each of us thus appears to be a microcosm containing in a holographic way the information about the macrocosm. In the mystical traditions, this was expressed by such phrases as: "as above so below" or "as without, so within."

 

The reports of subjects who have experienced episodes of embryonal existence, the moment of conception, and elements of cellular, tissue, and organ consciousness abound in medically accurate insights into the anatomical, physiological, and biochemical aspects of the processes involved. Similarly, ancestral, racial and collective memories and past incarnation experiences provide quite frequently very specific details about architecture, costumes, weapons, art forms, social structure, and religious and ritual practices of the culture and historical period involved, or even concrete historical events.

 

People who have phylogenetic experiences or experience identification with existing life forms not only find them unusually authentic and convincing, but often acquire in the process extraordinary insights concerning animal psychology, ethology, specific habits, or unusual reproductive cycles. In some instances, this is accompanied by archaic muscular innervations not characteristic for humans, or even such complex behaviors as enactment of a courtship dance of a particular animal species.

 

The philosophical and scientific challenge associated with the already described observations, as formidable as it is all by itself, is further augmented by the fact that transpersonal experiences correctly reflecting the material world often appear on the same continuum as and intimately interwoven with others that contain elements which the Western industrial world does not consider to be real. Here belong, for example, experiences involving deities and demons from various cultures, mythological realms such as heavens and paradises, and legendary or fairy-tale sequences.

 

For example, one can have an experience of Shiva's heaven, of the paradise of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc, of the Sumerian underworld, or of one of the Buddhist hot hells. It is also possible to communicate with Jesus, have a shattering encounter with the Hindu goddess Kali, or identify with the dancing Shiva. Even these episodes can impart accurate new information about religious symbolism and mythical motifs that were previously unknown to the person involved. Observations of this kind confirm C. G. Jung's idea that beside the Freudian individual unconscious we can also gain access to the collective unconscious that contains the cultural heritage of all humanity.

 

It is not an easy task to convey in a few sentences conclusions from daily observations from over fifty years of research of holotropic states of consciousness and make this statement believable. It is not realistic to expect that a few sentences would be able to override the deeply culturally ingrained world-view in those of the readers who are not familiar with the transpersonal dimension and who cannot relate what I say to their own personal experiences. Although I myself had many experiences of holotropic states and the opportunity to observe them closely in thousands of other people, it took me years to fully absorb the impact of this cognitive shock.

 

Because of space considerations, I cannot present detailed case histories that could help to illustrate the nature of transpersonal experiences and the insights which they make available. I have to refer those readers who would like to explore this area further to my books The Adventure of Self-Discovery and Psychology of the Future (Grof 1978, 2000), where I discuss in detail various types of transpersonal experiences and give many illustrative examples of situations where they provided unusual new information about different aspects of the universe. The same books also describe the method of holotropic breathwork, which opens the access to the perinatal and transpersonal realms for anybody who is interested in personal verification of the above observations (see the information on our website holotopic.com). Comparable information focusing specifically on psychedelic sessions can be found in my book LSD Psychotherapy that has now been available for many years in a new edition (Grof 1994).

 

The existence and nature of transpersonal experiences violates some of the most basic assumptions of mechanistic science. They imply such seemingly absurd notions as relativity and arbitrary nature of all physical boundaries, non-local connections in the universe, communication through unknown means and channels, memory without a material substrate, non-linearity of time, or consciousness associated with all living organisms, and even inorganic matter. Many transpersonal experiences involve events from the microcosm and the macrocosm, realms that cannot normally be reached by unaided human senses, or from historical periods that precede the origin of the solar system, formation of planet earth, appearance of living organisms, development of the nervous system, and emergence of homo sapiens.

 

The research of holotropic states thus reveals an astonishing paradox concerning the nature of human beings. It clearly shows that, in a mysterious and yet unexplained way, each of us harbors the information about the entire universe and all of existence, has potential experiential access to all of its parts, and in a sense is the whole cosmic network, as much as he or she is just an infinitesimal part of it, a separate and insignificant biological entity. The new cartography reflects this fact and portrays the individual human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the entire cosmos and the totality of existence. As absurd and implausible as this idea might seem to a traditionally trained scientist and to our commonsense, it can be relatively easily reconciled with new revolutionary developments in various scientific disciplines usually referred to as the new or emerging paradigm.

 

I firmly believe that the expanded cartography, which I have outlined above, is of critical importance for any serious approach to such phenomena as shamanism, rites of passage, mysticism, religion, mythology, parapsychology, near-death experiences, and psychedelic states. This new model of the psyche is not just a matter of academic interest. As I will try to show in the remaining pages of this article, it has deep and revolutionary implications for the understanding of emotional and psychosomatic disorders and offers new and revolutionary therapeutic possibilities.

The Nature and Architecture of Emotional and Psychosomatic Disorders.

 

Traditional psychiatry uses the medical model and the disease concept not only for disorders of a clearly organic nature, but also for emotional and psychosomatic disorders for which no biological cause has been found. Psychiatrists use quite loosely the term "mental disease" and try to assign various emotional disorders to specific diagnostic categories comparable to those of somatic medicine. Generally, the time of the onset of symptoms is seen as the beginning of the "disease" and the intensity of the symptoms is used as the measure of the seriousness of the pathological process. Alleviation of the symptoms is considered "clinical improvement" and their intensification is seen as "worsening of the clinical condition. "

 

The observations from the study of holotropic states suggest that thinking in terms of disease, diagnosis, and allopathic therapy is not appropriate for most psychiatric problems that are not clearly organic in nature, including some of the conditions currently labeled as psychoses. We have all experienced the vicissitudes and challenges of embryological development, birth, infancy and childhood. This has left traumatic imprints in the unconscious of all of us, although we certainly differ as to their intensity, extensity, and also availability of these memories for conscious experience. Every person also carries a variety of more or less latent emotional and bioenergetic blockages, which interfere with full physiological and psychological functioning.

 

The manifestation of emotional and psychosomatic symptoms is the beginning of a healing process through which the organism is trying to free itself from these traumatic imprints and simplify its functioning. The only way this can happen is by emergence of the traumatic material into consciousness and its full experience and emotional and motor expression. If the trauma that is being processed is of major proportions, such as a difficult birth that lasted many hours and seriously threatened biological survival, the emotions and behavioral expressions can be extremely dramatic. Under these circumstances, it might seem more plausible to conclude that these manifestations are the result of some exotic yet unknown pathology rather than realize that they represent a potentially beneficial process. However, properly understood and supported, even such extreme symptoms can be conducive to healing, spiritual opening, personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.