One reason the study of mystical forms of consciousness is of importance is that the experiences entail more than emotion—however exalted and elevated the feelings may be. Such experiences, both in the mystical literature of each world religion and in modern psychedelic research, are also claimed to include knowledge. Often there are descriptions of “beholding truth.” William James, the Harvard psychologist who published The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, chose to call this “the noetic quality” of mystical experiences. More recently, in Mysticism and Philosophy, published in 1960, Walter T. Stace from Princeton University formulated the category “Objectivity and Reality” to account not only for the certainty of intuitive knowledge, but also for the convincing intensity of such states of awareness.
Sigmund Freud, in spite of his many creative contributions to helping us understand the workings of our minds, was one person who had trouble comprehending this aspect of mental functioning. He called it “the oceanic feeling.” This term for mystical consciousness had been coined by Romain Rolland, a Frenchman who was a novelist, poet, and mystic and who, Freud wrote in his book
Civilization and Its Discontents, “calls himself my friend.” Unable to find mystical consciousness within his own mind, Freud himself tended to devalue the import of the experience and chose to interpret it as a memory of union with the mother’s breast before the individual self or ego developed. Yet even he acknowledged that “there may be something else behind this, but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.”
If the experience is understood as regression, even regression beyond the breast to memories of life in the womb, it appears that there is much more going on within the womb than Freud ever imagined. From the viewpoint of those who have known mystical forms of consciousness, the approach through changes in time perception to eternal dimensions may be understood either as regression or as progression, and the content discovered is usually described as substantially more than feelings alone. The poet William Wordsworth in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood may have been more on target, writing that “trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
We tend to think of experiential domains as “subjective,” of intuition at best as “a woman’s hunch,” and have learned to think of objective knowledge as inevitably associated with the cognitive process we call “thinking” or “reason.” In contrast, scholars of mysticism take intuitive knowledge seriously and point to two ways of knowing: intuition and rational thought. Rudolf Otto, the German theologian and scholar of comparative religions who in 1917 published Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy), formulated three categories of human mental processes: (1) the rational, (2) the irrational, and (3) the nonrational. It is his third category that accommodates the claims of the mystics.
When we reflect rationally on mystical literature or on the research reports of volunteers who have received psychedelic substances, how can we tell what may be “irrational” and what may be “nonrational”? Although this question can endlessly delight philosophers who specialize in epistemology, the mental gymnastics of trying to articulate and defend how we know what we think we know, it may be useful to examine two simple perspectives: (1) how the intuitive knowledge that one person reports compares to what others have reported, and (2) the subsequent attitudes and behavior manifested in the wake of the alleged knowledge, which William James called the “fruits for life.”
To address the first perspective, let it be noted that there are several tenets of knowledge that tend to be reported and “hang together” following mystical forms of experience. With acknowledgment of the limitations of language and how different words vary in meaning for different people, I will simply list and briefly discuss several of these tenets. The common core of insights typically includes the reality of (1) God, (2) immortality, (3) interrelationships, (4) love, (5) beauty, and (6) emerging wisdom.
GOD
This simple three-letter word (in English) has many variations of meaning for different people and evokes passions ranging from total devotion and awe to total indifference and disgust. For some, it conjures up an image of Michelangelo’s creator God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, a rather heavy-set man with a bushy white beard, surrounded by cherubs, dressed in a translucent garment, somewhere up there in the clouds, perhaps dodging jet planes. If he exists, he appears to be quite irrelevant to those who struggle through daily life. For others, God may be a destructive force, perhaps judgmental, manifested in thunder, plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis, and fatal illnesses. I have learned over the years that, when people label themselves as atheists and I ask what sort of God they don’t believe in, I often end up agreeing with them. Often, their concepts of God are quite undeveloped and still shaded by rebellion against ideas that adults, it is hoped well meaning, tried to force upon them in childhood and adolescence. Some immediately recall trying not to wiggle in uncomfortable pews during long, boring sermons. Others have experienced painful losses or life traumas that still eclipse their attempts to find meaning in any of the religious frameworks that they have encountered. Many have never had the opportunity or have never taken the time to explore concepts of God more in harmony with the perspectives of mystics and scholars on frontiers of science.
A fascinating discovery in speaking with mystics from different world religions is how secure they appear in their certainty of the reality of a sacred dimension of consciousness and how little they care about what words one may choose to describe it. If you like the word “God,” that’s fine; if you prefer “Yahweh,” “Jehovah,” “The Christ Consciousness,” “Allah,” “Brahman,” “The Great Spirit,” or simply “The Higher Power,” that’s also OK. If you would rather verbalize the ultimate reality as “The Void,” “Nothingness,” “Nondual Awareness,” “The Pure Land,” or “Celestial Buddha Fields,” even that is acceptable. Many words have been used in different religious traditions and philosophical systems, such as Rudolf Otto’s “Numinous,” Paul Tillich’s “The Ground of Being,” and even the Yale biologist Edmund Sinnott’s “the purposive properties of protoplasm.” Some Star Wars aficionados may be content simply to say, “May the Force be with you.” A theologian we have called Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, one credited with interrelating Neo-Platonic and early Christian thought in the late fifth century or early sixth, was fond of the term “The Nameless.”
Wayne Teasdale, both a Christian and a Buddhist monk who personally understood mystical consciousness and the promise of entheogens when wisely ingested, coined the term “interspirituality” to depict a mountain of truth with a common summit but many paths leading from its base to its ineffable peak. Within this model, each path is worth traveling and contains its own unique historical traditions and symbolic expressions of spiritual truths—its own wisdom and inspiration. Since no one person can travel all the paths at the same time, it generally makes sense to embrace the tradition of one’s childhood or culture, to learn to speak that language and appreciate the stories and ritual expressions that go with it. Yet one can travel on one’s own path and still respect and appreciate the paths of others that may be different. One can proudly own one’s own heritage and share it with one’s children as a valued treasure and still remain open to learning from other traditions, taking delight in finding common ground and in sharing differences in perspectives.
Within this metaphor, the paths come closer to one another as the summit of the mountain is approached. So it is that it becomes possible for a Christian to worship genuinely in a Hindu temple, a Jew to bow to Allah in an Islamic Mosque, a Buddhist to recite a Taoist prayer, or any other combination. Scriptures come to mind: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One” (Deut. 6:4). “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). “Say (Muhammad): He is God, the One and Only; God, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him” (Qur’an 112:1–4). “There is only one God, not the second; not at all, not at all, not in the least bit” (the Brahma Sutra). Those whose childhood experiences included singing around campfires at church or scout camps may well recall the song “He’s Got the Whole Wide World in His Hands.” It appears that the greater the awareness of the eternal grows in human consciousness, the less preoccupied the everyday personality becomes with its own favorite collection of words and concepts.
Before some religious scholars become critically disparaging or dismissive in response to the prior paragraph, let me again invoke the principles of ineffability and paradoxicality and request that readers attempt at least temporarily to suspend those words and concepts that structure our usual lives, be they religious or nonreligious. This is important because the experiential knowledge of “One God,” as will subsequently be discussed, also brings with it, if taken seriously, an awareness of the interconnectedness and interrelationships of all peoples irrespective of their national or cultural origins, which, in turn, has profound implications for intercultural understanding, ethics, and world peace. No matter how rich and personally meaningful our own religious heritages and practices may be, in the world of the twenty-first century it is myopically dangerous to ignore or devalue the traditions and perspectives of other cultures.
In approaching respectful understanding of the diversity of religious languages and traditions, it is also of critical importance to comprehend that there is a variety of very meaningful religious experiences. At this point in our discussion, the spotlight is on mystical consciousness, defined as a unitive awareness. Here, in the language of Hinduism, the Atman of the individual self recognizes that it is an integral fragment of the universal Brahman, as a single drop of water may fall into the vast ocean and merge with it. This is undeniably one form of experience reported in the historic literature of mysticism and by volunteers in projects of psychedelic research, and the profundity of the memory is almost unspeakably meaningful.
Yet this does not preclude other varieties of religious experience, such as visionary forms of awareness in which the everyday self relates lovingly with the divine, or states of conversion when guilt and grief are transformed by convincing feelings of forgiveness and unconditional acceptance, or the simple, quiet feelings of the presence of the divine in periods of prayer, meditation, serene love making, or communion with nature. All of these potential experiences, and undoubtedly even others, appear to be part of the human repertoire and may well be accessible to most, if not all, people. In subsequent chapters, these other states of mind will receive more attention.
Especially in Western religions, we have been very wary when speaking of the relationship between God (that is, ultimate reality) and human beings (that is, homo sapiens, or what theologians historically have called “Man”). Hebrew and Christian theology, along with some Islamic sources, includes the concept of the imago dei, the “image” of God in which we were created, and different theologians have debated whether the image denotes shared essence or merely a mirrored reflection. Quakers acknowledge the “inner light,” a spark of divine energy implanted like a seed within us all that may sprout into firsthand religious experiences. A similar perspective is found in the writings of Inayat Kahn, an Islamic Sufi, who discussed “Man, the Seed of God.” John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, interpreted his experience of his heart being “strangely warmed” as the presence of Christ, a manifestation of God in his life, and many Protestant evangelical denominations have continued to deeply respect and attempt to facilitate such experiences of religious conversion. In monastic communities, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Buddhist, experiences deemed revelatory or sacred tend to be deeply valued, though they may be verbally expressed in different ways.
So it is that Western preconceptions and language are poorly prepared to come to terms with the experience of the Atman/Brahman Unity as expressed in Hinduism. When a Western person says, “I am God,” even if as a poetic utterance, our impulse is to interpret the statement as a psychotic inflation of the ego and to urgently provide psychiatric counsel, if not inpatient hospitalization and antipsychotic medications. As mental health practitioners know well, there indeed are persons who make such claims who are also disoriented, confused, and unable to responsibly care for themselves and function safely in the world. For these people, hospitalization may be required to ensure safety and provide new grounding and reorientation in life.
It might help, however, if more mental health professionals appreciated that some of these people may be expressing a glimpse of a very impressive and potentially meaningful state of consciousness that they are presently unable to successfully integrate into their everyday lives, rather than simply dismissing their claims as “crazy.” A reasonably well-integrated, stable person with articulate verbal skills who recalls such a profound unitive state of consciousness, were he to speak at all, might own the ultimate insight that in the final analysis the energy that makes up his life is “God,” but this would be without inflation of the ego, since he also would acknowledge that the same is true of every other human being. Philosophers call this perspective
panentheism, not simply that “everything is God” (that is,
pantheism), but rather that the Sacred is to be found in the ultimate source or core of being. The Hindu tradition of 330 million deities, all of whom may be understood as facets of one unspeakably magnificent diamond of spiritual truth, or one ultimate Brahman, may also prove helpful in coping with the paradox of the relationship between ourselves and God or whatever term we may personally choose to point toward Ultimate Reality.
As illustration, let us consider two quotations from the personal reports of an eminent scholar of world religions, Huston Smith: the first, a classical Hindu experience, facilitated by mescaline; the second, a personal, more traditional Christian experience, which happened to be occasioned by psilocybin when he was serving as a guide during Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment. Both quotations have been published in other sources in the past, including Smith’s book Cleansing the Doors of Perception.
The world into which I was ushered was strange, weird, uncanny, significant, and terrifying beyond belief…. Plotinus’s emanation theory, and its more detailed Vedantic counterpart, had hitherto been only conceptual theories for me. Now I was
seeing them, with their descending bands spread out before me. I found myself amused, thinking how duped historians of philosophy had been in crediting the originators of such worldviews with being speculative geniuses. Had they had experiences such as mine, they need have been no more than hack reporters. But beyond accounting for the origin of these philosophies, my experience supported their truth. As in Plato’s myth of the cave, what I was now seeing struck me with the force of the sun, in comparison with which everyday experience reveals only flickering shadows in a dim cavern. How could these layers upon layers, these worlds within worlds, these paradoxes in which I could be both myself
and my world and an episode be both momentary
and eternal—how could such things be put into words?
The experiment was powerful for me, and it left a permanent mark on my experienced worldview. (I say “experienced worldview” to distinguish it from what I think and believe the world is like.) For as long as I can remember I have believed in God, and I experienced his presence both within the world and when the world was transcendentally eclipsed. But until the Good Friday Experiment, I had had no direct personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals, and born-again Christians describe. The Good Friday Experiment changed that, presumably because the service focused on God as incarnate in Christ…. For me, the climax of the service came during a solo that was sung by a soprano whose voice (as it came to me through the prism of psilocybin) I can only describe as angelic. What she sang was no more than a simple hymn, but it entered my soul so deeply that its opening and closing verses have stayed with me ever since … My times are in Thy hands, my God … the gestalt transformed a routine musical progression into the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced.
IMMORTALITY
During mystical experiences, there is often an intuitive conviction that the eternal realms of consciousness are indestructible and not subject to time. This insight is typically reported as having been blatantly obvious when mystical consciousness was occurring. “Consciousness” from this perspective perhaps may be best understood as the ultimate energy that makes up all that is and is to be found at the core of all that is. Such energy may change form or evolve—or dance as depicted in the Hindu image of Nataraja, the dancing Shiva—but it cannot cease to be. Paradoxically, it may simultaneously be experienced both as the unchanging One described by the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides and as the constantly changing river of life emphasized by his compatriot, Heraclitus. This understanding of the ultimate nature of energy is, as many readers may realize, similar to the views of quantum physicists. As noted in books like Fritjof Capra’s
The Tao of Physics, the writings of mystics and physicists often sound very similar. The religious word for this indestructibility of energy is “immortality”; the mathematical word is “infinity.” In philosophical circles this may be called “panpsychism,” a way of viewing reality in which everything is ultimately understood to be the energy some of us would call mind or consciousness.
This intuitive insight within mystical consciousness is especially relevant for those of us who are mortal, and especially for people in close proximity of the experience we call “death.” One of the most meaningful aspects of my career in psychedelic research has entailed administering entheogens to terminal cancer patients in the context of brief psychotherapy and supporting them through various alternative states of human consciousness. When mystical forms of experience have occurred, there has almost always been reported a concomitant loss of the fear of death, which, in turn, contributes to reduced depression, anxiety, preoccupation with pain, and interpersonal isolation, and often enables the person with cancer to live the remainder of his or her current lifetime more fully. Research in this humane application of psychedelics in medicine is once again in process, with recent studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, at New York University, and in Solothurn, Switzerland, perhaps paving the way for the legal offering of an intervention, most likely with psilocybin, to appropriate people in palliative care divisions of hospitals and in hospices in the foreseeable future.
In illustration, consider this report, written by a thirty-one-year-old cancer patient, married with two children and suffering from advancing Stage IV lymphoma, who received the psychedelic substance dipropyltryptamine (DPT):
[After entheogen administration] I first went to a place that seemed to completely lack the qualities of this world as we know it. I seemed to transcend time and space and I lost complete identification with the “real” world. The experience seemed to me to be as if I was going from this world back to another world before this life had occurred…. The actual changing from this life to whatever was before this life seemed to be involved in a very bright silver mass of energy with very strong electrical current…. Strangely enough I felt that I had been in that mass of energy at one time before. When I was there everything seemed to make sense…. It was a very beautiful world, one in which love was very much a part…. The basic theme that I perceived … was that life continues to go on and we are basically some form of essence from a Supreme Being and we are part of that Supreme Being…. I don’t have the fear of death that I once had…. I have found that everyday living seems to be much more enjoyable. Small things in life that I may have overlooked I seem to appreciate now. I have a much greater and deeper understanding of other people … and a much greater capacity to try to fulfill other people’s needs…. Overall I think that I am a much more content individual, having had the great opportunity to just glimpse for a very short moment the overall thinking of God, of possibly being brought into His confidence for just a brief period, to be reassured that there is a very beautiful, loving masterful plan in this Universe for all of us.
It is of interest that cancer patients and others who find such profound mystical experiences in their memory banks are not necessarily convinced of personal immortality, that is, the continued existence after death of the everyday personality that goes with our common names. “Life
after death” implies a temporal sequence. Rather, they tend to report a conviction that Eternity, or Infinity, a state of consciousness outside of time, is so unquestionably real to them that it does not matter one way or another whether the everyday personality survives when the body stops functioning and decomposes. They often express a conviction that ultimately “all is well” in the universe, reminiscent of the familiar words of the fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich, who is known for saying, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” One volunteer wrote, “I know that Being is eternal, whether I exist or not. I have no fear of losing my ego.” This could be understood in the framework of Zen Buddhism, in which it is believed that, if one can be fully present, one can find in the center of each moment a portal that opens to the Infinite. The spiritual world thus not only may be seen as awaiting us before time (birth) and after time (death), but also is always to be found in the “Eternal Now,” with or without a functioning body. In Christian language, it may be described as awakening to the “Christ consciousness” or “resting in the arms of the Lord.”
These reports from the perspective of unitive-mystical consciousness of course do not rule out the possibility of personal immortality. There are other states of consciousness that may well be relevant to understanding death from other perspectives. I recall a research volunteer who was convinced that he had spent approximately two hours during his psilocybin session in a meaningful and personally helpful conversation with his deceased brother. Similarly, it is not uncommon to feel immersed in another historical period or life-story, which some interpret as evidence for reincarnation. Whether indicative of the creative acumen of a novelist or literal experiences within unique states of consciousness, such reports merit respect while we may withhold judgment about their ontological validity.
INTERRELATIONSHIPS
Logically, it makes sense that if, indeed, there is a great unity or oneness, that every part of that unity must somehow be interconnected and interrelated. From the experiential perspective of mystical consciousness, this is often avowed to be literally true. On the human level, every person is a member of the “family of man,” your own brother or sister, all of whom may be understood as emanations from the universal source, quite in harmony with the Neo-Platonic theory of Plotinus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the early second century
CE, and of course with Plato himself before him. It is intriguing to speculate on Plato’s participation in the Eleusinian mystery religions that included the ritual ingestion of a hallucinogenic brew called
kykeon and how his ideas might have been influenced by his own entheogenic experiences. In the symbolic language of Hinduism, this interconnectedness may be understood as part of the bejeweled web or net of Indra, the Vedic Lord of Heaven, in which we all participate. As the English language has accommodated the women’s movement, the time has come to leave terms with masculine bias like “mankind” and “family of man” in the dust of history and refer to “humankind” and “the human family” instead.
If we humans are indeed all relatives, linked both through our genes and in the spiritual vortices of our minds, we must also acknowledge the emphasis that existential philosophers have placed on struggle as an intrinsic part of human existence. We do tend to fight with one another in the realm of ideas debated in universities, in the chambers of the United Nations, and sometimes on actual battlefields. Sometimes the struggle is akin to two friends arm wrestling in good-natured style; sometimes it becomes the ugly devaluing of the other and the urge to destroy the other. How we cope with anger and our definitions of “good” and “evil” become prominent here and we act out our parts with passion on the ever-changing stage of human history.
In the cosmic dance of Shiva, individual lives, civilizations, and even solar systems and galaxies are understood to come into being and go out of being. They are created and then destroyed, not unlike when a child builds a tower with blocks, gleefully knocks it over, and then builds once again. From this perspective, the processes of death and rebirth, of all we consider dreadful and all we view as glorious, are integral to the nature of ultimate reality. God dances in the creative process that always continues, sometimes fiercely and majestically, sometimes joyfully and playfully. The image of the Hindu god Kali depicts this well: a dark mother goddess with human skulls hanging around her neck whose image may be found hanging on the walls of many Indian living rooms, not as a threat to be feared, but as a manifestation of the divine to be loved.
An experience in South America occasioned by ayahuasca comes to mind, the description of which was titled “The Garden of Souls.” Within it every human being was a unique work of art in the process of creation, all together on an infinite chessboard. Philosophical concepts of freedom and determinism come into play here. None of us creates ourselves, yet through the gift of freedom we participate in the uniqueness of our individual lives. Philosophers and theologians reflect on this gift of freedom, without which we would be robots, and on the challenge to use the gift wisely. Perhaps there are times when the divine intelligence at the core of being (for those who can imagine such a construct) compassionately views the messes we humans have created, in our wars, our environmental degradation, and our social injustices. Yet, while bemoaning the slowness of our evolution and awakening, one could imagine that the Divine still affirms faith in the primal decision to have endowed us with the freedom to think and choose. Philosophers of history may see a gradual evolution in process as time progresses toward “the Kingdom of God” or some future Utopia. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, saw us gradually progressing, sometimes kicking and screaming, toward “the Omega Point” when consciousness and the universe will “become one.”
LOVE
At the conclusion of The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, perhaps writing out of his own mystical experiences, concluded, “It is love that moves the sun and other stars” (Paradiso 33:145). In mystical consciousness, this love is typically known and subsequently described as much more than human emotion. Poetic and idealistic as it sounds, it is often claimed to be the ultimate nature of the energy that makes up the world, awaiting us all in the source or ground of our being. One cannot help but note that Dante chose the word “comedy” to embrace all the dramas of hell, purgatory, and heaven in his book, perhaps congruent with the Hindu concept of lila or divine play. In spite of all the pathos and tragedies we experience in daily temporal existence, mystics testify to the validity of a transcendental perspective beyond usual human cognition where all makes sense in an eternal world permeated by love.
As emphasized by theologians like the Protestant scholar Edgar Sheffield Brightman, love may often be understood as a manifestation of the personal nature of God. A loving relationship between an individual person and God does constitute a devotional baseline in much of Christianity and in Bhakti Yoga. Many of us daily direct inner cascades of words, formal or spontaneous, called prayer to Lord Jehovah, Lord Jesus, Lord Krishna, or Lord Buddha, entrusting “all that one is” to “the Lord.” Mystics through the ages, typified by St. Teresa of Avila, have especially exemplified this form of experience. Formalized styles of prayer, notably in Judaism and Islam, and often in Christianity, may or may not entail this personal, experiential feeling of being in relationship with something or someone sacred. Friedrich Heiler, a German theologian who wrote a book called
Das Gebet (Prayer) back in 1932, suggested simply that prayer is what we discover ourselves doing when life gets sufficiently difficult, whether we believe in any particular religious framework or not. In this perspective, prayer may be seen as a basic human instinct to seek for a spiritual connection with something beyond the everyday personality.
Though it sometimes may be more a matter of language than actual experience, more abstract and universal ways of experiencing and expressing this ultimate love often occur in the reports of those who have known mystical consciousness. God may be described as “more than a person.” Thus, as illustrated in the earlier quotations from Huston Smith, there appear to be two ways to encounter this ultimate energy: one in relationship between the everyday self and God, and one in the ineffable merging of identities—another instance of paradoxicality, the Both/And principle. Again, it is not a question of “which is right”; rather, there appear to be two different ways (if not more) in which love may be discovered and experienced in alternative states of awareness. On different occasions, it appears that the same person can experience both forms of consciousness or that one may open into the other.
BEAUTY
Another tenet of the intuitive knowledge often reported in the wake of mystical states of awareness concerns what some would call the absoluteness of beauty. This is a rather radical claim for us in a culture that tends to view little as “absolute,” especially when it comes to judgments of art. We like to say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” From the perspective of mystical consciousness, it may be not only “in the eye,” but also in the brain and in the mind (whatever that ultimately may be understood to be).
During the action of entheogens in sufficient dosage, most people report a sense of awe at how much they can see with their eyes closed. Eyes suddenly, as in dreaming, seem to have little if anything to do with seeing. The intricate visionary patterns often discovered, sometimes of abstract lines, often initially of pure gold on a jet-black background, reminiscent of the vaulting of Gothic cathedrals, intricately decorated Romanesque arches, or the symmetrically unfolding designs in the domes of some Islamic mosques, tend to evoke feelings of amazement. Then, as if entering the Platonic world of Forms, one may encounter exquisite, richly colored, and detailed images of gods and goddesses, precious gemstones and metals, living sculptures of museum quality, vast landscapes, stretches of outer space, and so forth. Where does all this come from? Is this heaven, God’s “dwelling place”? Typically one does not “think” that these images are beautiful, as if one were making a value judgment; rather, one intuitively recognizes them as beautiful and may seem to dissolve into them and participate in the magnificence portrayed. The pure quantity of such imagery is often striking. One person described the rapid flow of images as “roller-skating through the Louvre,” occasionally pausing to ponder a single masterpiece and the revelations it contains and then zooming down corridors containing countless paintings and sculptures, all of incredible beauty.
I recall an experience with ayahuasca when unitive consciousness had transitioned into an awareness of a personal observer who was viewing a bird’s-eye perspective of a medieval mountainside, filled with winding paths, forests, fields, streets, and houses and occupied by hundreds of people and animals, all busily going about their simple daily routines. What was so amazing in this particular state of consciousness was that I could choose to zero in and carefully observe individual people in the scene. I did this repeatedly, selecting different men, women, children, and even animals. I could see not only color and form, but detailed facial expressions and even the intricate designs on the fabric of women’s dresses and lace accessories. It was like viewing a painting of a medieval scene in incredibly sharp focus that had become totally alive. If you ask how to understand such an experience, I haven’t a clue. One could suggest that it was a memory from a prior lifetime, a God’s-eye view of a particular scene in human history, or a manifestation of creative resources I never knew I possessed that conceivably someday could be expressed in a painting or by writing a novel. That it happened, however, remains vividly in my memory and contributes to the profound awe I experience concerning the potentials of human consciousness. I have known vivid or lucid dreams, some that were “dreams within dreams” in which one recognizes the dreaming process, that contained similar detail, but never with this degree of conscious control and focus, and never with such clear, enduring memory.
EMERGING WISDOM
The philosophical term “entelechy” refers to a purposive, meaningful process of unfolding content within awareness. In visionary states, quite in contrast to the fleeting visual phenomena typically encountered when psychedelics are ingested in relatively low dosage, the images and thematic progressions that lead one toward and into mystical consciousness and that appear as the ego subsequently begins to become reconstituted are often experienced not as random, but as creatively choreographed. Sometimes it is as though they illustrate personally potent story lines like those unfolding within a skillfully written novel. The very manner in which these experiential sequences present themselves is often described as exquisitely beautiful, their manifestation typically appearing to constitute evidence of a skillful and compassionate wisdom within our minds. This dynamic is often described as the divine coming to the individual human life and working effectively within it to effect personal teachings, redemption, or transformation. This is reflected in the respectful reference to ayahuasca and to peyote as “the Teacher.” Psilocybe cubensis, a well-known species of sacred or magic mushrooms, is often called “The golden teacher.”
So, to recapitulate and summarize here, let us note again that the intuitive knowledge often intrinsic to mystical forms of consciousness typically includes insights pertaining to (1) God, (2) Immortality, (3) Interrelatedness, (4) Love, (5) Beauty, and (6) Emerging Wisdom. In the mystical states that we consider “complete,” “all the above” and more seem to apply.
FRUITS FOR LIFE
In thinking about whether mystical consciousness should be considered irrational or nonrational, it is also helpful to consider the “fruits for life” that often appear to follow its occurrence. Those who remember this profound dimension of human experience often report a feeling of progressive integration in the months and years afterward. As time moves forward, they may claim to feel more compassionate, more tolerant of others, more creative, more courageous, and more self-accepting and at peace within themselves. Such claims now can be studied in research frameworks through follow-up interviews and psychological testing, both of the people who report mystical experiences and of the close friends and family members who observe their attitudes and behavior on a daily basis. Initial scientific confirmation of this phenomenon has been found in the Hopkins studies to date, notably Katherine MacLean’s statistical discovery of positive changes in the domain of personality structure called Openness following mystical experiences. This is a striking development, since until recently most personality theorists have believed that the domains that structure our personalities are quite indelibly fixed by the time we arrive at adulthood. Undoubtedly, such positive effects can be nurtured and reinforced by spiritual disciplines and other life activities that one may choose to follow after the occurrence of the mystical experiences themselves.
An existential psychiatrist and philosopher, Karl Jaspers, coined the term “the unconditioned imperative” (die unbedingte Forderung) to refer to the experience of love, bubbling up like a spring, deep within the human mind. He understood it to be discovered and encountered in the experiential depths, often amid struggles with guilt and grief when glimpses of the sacred that he called “Transcendence” occurred. This could well be viewed as the love of God, called agape by theologians, that not only heals those who experience it, but also demands expression in and through their lives in interaction with other people and the world.
Similarly, St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), perhaps writing out of mystical experiences of his own, is reputed to have said, “Love and do as you will. If you keep silence, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love.” In modern language, one could acknowledge the sanctity of expression of both “tender love” and “tough love.”
People who have known mystical consciousness, at least in their more centered states of mind, may be viewed by some as radiating a presence, wisdom, compassion, or power beyond themselves, manifested in diverse ways ranging from loving in gentle and intimate ways to risking one’s life for a cause of social justice.
The image of the great Indian seer Ramana Maharshi may be illustrative. As described by the journalist Paul Brunton in his book
A Search in Secret India, published in 1935, Ramana sits silently on his tiger skin, surrounded by disciples and visitors who claim to feel spiritually nurtured and healed, simply by being in his presence. As Ramana Maharshi may illustrate the “Being” pole of a compassionate continuum, so perhaps Mother Teresa may illustrate the “Doing” pole in her social activism in the slums of Calcutta. If indeed love of this magnitude dwells in the depths of each of us, a basis for ethics may be understood to be hardwired, perhaps genetically encoded, within the human organism. Healing in depth psychotherapy may be correspondingly viewed as approaching and dissolving the obstacles within to strengthen the connection with this inner source of love.
INCREASING TOLERANCE AND UNDERSTANDING
Perhaps we all inevitably grow up with stereotypes, regardless of our culture of origin. I recall an experience in the beautiful heights of northern India with fragrant pine forests and crystal-clear, cascading streams. There I visited an abandoned Anglican church, built of stone in Gothic architecture, left behind by the British when India became an independent nation. The old church was located in McLeodganj, now a predominantly Buddhist area near the Dalai Lama’s compound where prayer flags flutter in the wind, and I walked in. It was in disrepair, no longer had a priest or congregation, and had become a tourist attraction. My visit happened to occur in spring, actually on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Christian liturgical season of Lent. A Buddhist tour guide met me, invited a contribution, and proceeded to plug in a string of miniature colored lights on a dusty artificial Christmas tree to illustrate “what Christians do.”
Similarly, having grown up in a somewhat conservative Christian atmosphere with the idea that members of Eastern religions tend to sit around gazing at their navels, quite insensitive to social needs and injustices, I was jolted into sanity when I visited the Sikh Golden Temple in the Indian city of Amritsar. Never have I witnessed such a well-organized, cooperative venture for providing free meals to people—literally feeding over forty thousand pilgrims and visitors every day of the year (and as many as one hundred thousand on holidays), coupled with impeccable cleanliness, almost constant music, and the sharing of their sacrament, or Prasad, with anyone who comes to worship, crossing the bridge over the sacred lake and entering the glistening temple. The good will and joy in the temple compound were contagious and I found myself sitting cross-legged on the ground with other volunteers around the edge of a large white sheet, busily helping to make chapattis.
In India, people greet one another with “Namaste,” meaning, “I honor the divine within you.” My impression was that many people in India, regardless of their specific religious identities, genuinely feel this sense of interpersonal connection and relatedness. The shared spirituality, whether Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, Christian, or Zoroastrian, was palpable. Commitment to any religious tradition and practice appeared to be acceptable and respected. Perhaps what might be pitied or merit disapproval would be total religious disengagement and a lack of commitment and identity.