CHANGES IN PERCEPTION AND TRANSCENDENCE
This chapter is written to highlight the category called Transcendence of Time and Space included in the definition of mystical consciousness. I am not trained in theoretical physics and barely begin to adequately comprehend the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who pondered the mysteries of time and space long and hard back in the eighteenth century. Others, more qualified than I, have written and will write their own books about the mysteries of matter and how its deepest substrates appear to behave differently than our sensory perceptions and usual styles of thinking would lead us to expect or even conceive as within the realm of possibility.
Huston Smith eloquently expressed this mind-boggling dilemma of our intellects in the essay “The Revolution in Western Thought,” published in 1961 in the Saturday Evening Post and reprinted in his book Beyond the Post-Modern Mind:
If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing us one which is at odds with our imagination…. That the table which appears motionless is in fact incredibly “alive” with electrons circling their nuclei a million billion times per second; that the chair which feels so secure beneath us is actually a near vacuum—such facts, while certainly very strange, posed no permanent problem for man’s sense of order. To accommodate them, all that was necessary was to replace the earlier picture of a gross and ponderous world with a subtle world in which all was sprightly dance and airy whirl.
But the problems the new physics poses for man’s sense of order cannot be resolved by refinements in scale. Instead they appear to point to a radical disjunction between the way things behave and every possible way in which we might try to visualize them. How, for example, are we to picture an electron traveling two or more different routes through space concurrently, or passing from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening space? What kind of model can we construct of a space that is finite yet unbounded, or of light which is both wave and particle? It is such enigmas which have caused physicists like P. W. Bridgman of Harvard to suggest that “the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all…. The world fades out and eludes us…. We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible by our minds.”
We all can understand that time and space clearly contribute to the organization of our lives in normal waking consciousness. Temporal experiences are catalogued in three files: past, present, and future—the third, we usually assume, includes potential, planned, unexpected, and unknowable experiences. At birth, we “discover ourselves in the world” (in the words of the existentialist Martin Heidegger), then live out our lives year by year as we age, experiencing many of the joys and pains of human existence, and finally arrive at death, that point of either cessation or transition of consciousness that comes to us all. We move through space from home to work, walking, driving, or flying from one city to another, or even through outer space to the moon or other planets. There are fairly reliable mathematics involved in all this as our trusty GPS demonstrates.
What is so perplexing is that people who have mystical experiences often claim not only that they were distracted or unaware of the passing of time, but that the state of consciousness they were experiencing was intuitively felt to be “outside of time.” In many alternate states of consciousness, with and without the assistance of entheogens, time may be experienced as slowed down or speeded up. If asked how much clock time has elapsed during a psychedelic session, one sometimes may make a very inaccurate estimate, in one direction or the other. We all experience this to some extent when we experience time passing rapidly when we are immersed in activities we enjoy and, conversely, we all know how slowly time can pass when we’re bored. For this writer, gardening, hiking in nature, or performing music usually entails decreased awareness of time; conversely, when I am waiting in long lines or stalled in heavy traffic seconds can feel like minutes. In his studies of highly self-actualizing people, Abraham Maslow called attention to reports of altered time perception amid creative fervor, when a poet or artist becomes “oblivious of his surroundings and the passage of time.” Perhaps these changes in time perception may be understood as precursory transitions to the mystical transcendence of time in which consciousness awakens to eternal dimensions, akin to a plane taking off on a rainy day, gradually penetrating through thick layers of clouds and then finally breaking through into a realm of dazzling blue sky and sunlight.
Space is similarly claimed to be transcended in mystical states. The heavenly realms are not experienced as located in a particular place, either in our universe or in another galaxy, like some vacation spot where one could send a spaceship if we knew the vectors to program in a targeted address. Rather, mystical consciousness is claimed to be “everywhere and nowhere” and space simply seems to be a concept that works well as we think and function in the everyday world of sense perception, but that somehow is either incorporated or left behind in the eternal realms.
This is true not only of visionary experiences, but of the contents of our fields of awareness in everyday existence. Is there a location for the thought you are having right now, the dream you recall from last night, or a memory from your childhood? Might it be found hiding microscopically encoded in a corner of one of the billions of cells in your nervous system? Searching for such a location might be as futile and inappropriate as examining a transistor from a television set in search of the attractive blonde woman who appeared on the screen last night and delivered the weather report during the evening news. In the final analysis, now in the early twenty-first century, we honestly do not know what we are, and it is very hard to think without reference to time, space, and substance. However, when all is said and done, even when we stare, with or without powerful microscopes, perplexed at the grey matter and white matter that comprise our central nervous systems, striving to comprehend our physiology as best we can, we do know
that we are and that there are experiential contents within our minds.
Dare we take seriously claims that, from the perspective of the Eternal Now, it might actually be possible to travel into the past, to recall not only the details of childhood events, but even prior lifetimes? Is it really conceivable that we may be capable of reliving fetal development or the evolution of our species as some have claimed? Books by Jean Houston and Robert Masters and by Stanislav Grof describe very unique experiences that stretch our imaginations regarding what might be possible, even extending into communication with nonhuman life forms. Those who have transcended space in mystical states have not uncommonly suggested that the universes we probe in astronomy and those we probe in microbiology ultimately somehow might be one and the same.
In terms of time perception, consider whether it might actually be possible to glimpse where the saga of history is heading and have valid, precognitive insights either of what may be determined or of what potentially may happen if we don’t affirm our freedom and act to change things. When a person claims to “remember the future,” should we quickly refer him or her for psychiatric care or respectfully honor the potential validity of experiential knowledge we still have no way of comprehending? Parapsychologists have been documenting examples of precognition for a long time, but their findings are so difficult to comprehend in the context of our dominant view of the nature of reality that they are still rarely given serious attention.
WALTER PAHNKE’S INITIATION AND POSSIBLE PREMONITION
Returning to the life of my friend Walter Pahnke, introduced in
chapter 3, let me add that, to the surprise of no one who knew him, once the award of his PhD was finally confirmed by Harvard University, he allowed himself to personally explore the effects of a psychedelic substance. The first occasion was an LSD session in Hanscarl Leuner’s clinic in Göttingen, Germany, on February 29, 1964. I found myself being a supportive presence with him, returning the favor he had done for me only two weeks earlier. In my journal that evening, I wrote: “His ecstatic shouts still ring in my ears: ‘Beauty, Oh!, I can’t believe it! Fantastic! Oh! I never could have imagined. Wow! Fantaaastic! Man, this is great! I never would have thought…. Joy, blessing, tenderness. Oh, Bill—this is great! You can’t imagine—Oh yes you can.’”
In subsequent years, we sometimes spoke of two styles of ecstasy, one extrovertive and explosive, one introvertive and quiet. Wally’s first experience clearly illustrated the former. Later in that same journal entry, I continued: “Near the end we spoke of many things, not least the sense of personal destiny we both feel to some degree. I have a feeling Wally and I may really work together someday. The same destiny that brought us together this time may well bring us together in the future, guiding two pioneers in a fantastic expedition. We feel such awe, such wonder, such humility in the midst of our joy.” Actually, we were able to collaborate in some research with psilocybin in Boston, along with the anthropologist Richard Katz and the psychiatrist Carl Salzman, in 1966, two years later—also the year I married with Wally standing beside me as my best man. Then we both moved to Baltimore in 1967 where we worked together in psychedelic research at the Spring Grove Hospital Center and then at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, especially devoted to exploring how entheogens in the context of brief psychotherapy might help terminal cancer patients to live more fully.
Then, after four years of collaborative psychedelic research in Baltimore, along with other intrepid investigators including Albert Kurland, Charles Savage, Sanford Unger, Stanislav Grof, Robert Soskin, Sidney Wolf, Lee McCabe, and others, I received a late-evening phone call on July 10, 1971. Sadly, I was informed that Wally had gone scuba diving, alone in the rocky ocean waters in front of his cabin near Bath, Maine, and had not resurfaced. Stunned, I hung up the phone and said to my wife, “Wally is dead.” The Coast Guard continued to trawl for his body during the night and into the next day. It never has been recovered.
In light of his death, the report he wrote of that first LSD experience of his in Germany fuels some of the awe and curiosity I experience when I ponder the mystery of time. His verbatim words with his own capitalization and underlining were as follows:
The most impressive and intense part of this experience was the WHITE LIGHT of absolute purity and cleanness. It was like a glowing and sparkling flame of incandescent whiteness and beauty, but not really a flame—more like a gleaming white hot ingot, yet much bigger and vaster than a mere ingot. The associated feelings were those of absolute AWE, REVERENCE, AND SACREDNESS. Just before this experience I had the feeling of going deep within myself to the Self stripped bare of all pretense and falseness. This was the point where a man could stand firm with absolute integrity—something more important than mere physical life. The white light experience was of supreme importance—absolutely self validating and something worth staking your life on and putting your trust in. The white light itself was so penetrating and intense that it was not possible to look directly at it. It was not in the room with me, but we were both somewhere else—and my body was left far behind.
Later, I again went deep within myself, and I had the image of going down deep into a dark, silent pool. Then I had a vision of absolute DIVINE love. It was like a flowing spring of silvery white liquid overflowing upward and was very beautiful to watch and feel. The feeling was of love and compassion toward the Divine and toward all men. I had the insight that all men had this same potential and worth within themselves. All men were equal in the sight of God and to my own feelings at this moment. I realized how I had not taken this enough into account in my past actions.
I knew Wally to be an exceptionally brilliant man who did indeed manifest absolute integrity. He seemed to want to optimize every moment of every day, as if he somehow always knew that his life-span was limited. I recall repeatedly running behind him down several flights of stairs, two steps at a time, to arrive at the cafeteria of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center seconds before it closed, and finally choosing to accept and affirm my own pace in life, which was considerably slower. In a foreign city, he’d want to visit all the tourist attractions in one afternoon; I’d tend to be content with exploring one or two wings of a single museum. He’d drive miles out of his way to find gasoline a few pennies cheaper or to obtain a free colorful drinking glass filled with cottage cheese. He always insisted on cutting his own hair in a mirror—sometimes with rather questionable outcomes!
In spite of his medical training and academic brilliance, Wally was also accident-prone. I remember him coming to work on crutches and hobbling down hallways during at least two different periods of time. He knew he suffered from what might be called a “spoiled only child syndrome” and that sometimes he could be quite preoccupied with his own agendas and insensitive to the needs of family, friends, and colleagues. Finally, refusing to wait a few minutes longer to be joined by his wife, he put on scuba gear he had borrowed from a friend (never having gone scuba diving before), dove into the Atlantic Ocean, and vanished, leaving behind his wife, parents, and three children between the ages of two and ten. Was he brilliant or stupid?
Wally was certainly considered smart, as evidenced by his many degrees, his many accomplishments, and his 99th percentile scores on the Graduate Record Examination. Yet emotionally he was crippled and was desperately trying to slow down and bond more with his family. My wife lovingly called him “an intellectual giant and an emotional dwarf.” When I spoke at his memorial service in Baltimore, I acknowledged that everyone who loved Wally had also been angry with him and I observed many heads nodding in expressions of agreement. While some have speculated about suicidal intent, I knew him well enough to accept his death as evidence of mere impulsiveness and the reckless stupidity of an otherwise brilliant man.
But here is the crux—the enigma that my mind sometimes ponders in the middle of the night: No other volunteer in my experience has ever described “a flowing spring of silvery white liquid overflowing upward” during a psychedelic session, though “going down deep into a dark, silent pool” may be somewhat more consonant with the usual repertoire of images of sacred experiences. Together, the two phrases are certainly suggestive of bubbles from a tank of compressed air at the time of his death and the descent of his body into a dark crevice in the ocean’s depths, though that simply could be a strange coincidence. Right … or?
Wally’s LSD experience with its possibly precognitive sequence occurred in 1964 at age thirty-three; his death occurred in 1971 at age forty. I have wondered if it was his destiny, determined to occur no matter what he did in terms of personal growth, and if he somehow had a glimpse of the future in his LSD session. Or was a potential end of his life revealed to him along with the freedom to alter the trajectory he was on? If the latter is the case, perhaps he failed to emotionally mature fast enough and finally took one chance too many. Maybe some disciplinary principle in the universe ruled: “That’s it! No more chances.” Or perhaps he was simply born with a forty-year lifespan, uniquely perfect in its design. He did make his contributions to the world.
To add to the mystery, thirty-six days before his death, Wally arrived at work seriously shaken by a dream from the night before in which he had jumped out of a plane without a parachute. As a man who rarely remembered dreams, its intensity and dominance in his field of consciousness surprised and concerned him. He wrote the dream down and gave me a copy: “As I fell nearer to what I thought was the end of my life, I felt an overpowering feeling of disgust at my misjudgment or stupidity—I need not have jumped without a parachute—what was I thinking of—how did I ever think I could have gotten away with it? … As I drove to work I kept thinking about the dream—couldn’t get it out of my mind. It seemed very vivid—more so than almost any dream I can remember.”
As in a child’s “choose your own adventure” book, Wally reported that his dream had four different endings:
I for a short time had split level consciousness—I hit the ground with a terrific impact and then I was falling again. I seemed to live through different outcomes: (1) the end with blackness; (2) the end, then spirit consciousness and presence at my funeral; (3) impact with splintered legs and prolonged hospitalization—an invalid or cripple; (4) impact—miraculous survival. I somehow escaped injury and walked away. One of those miracle landings that I have read about.
As these different possible endings alternated with falling it seemed that somehow the 4th ending had happened. What luck, yet almost too good to be true. Yet I was not too sure it had really happened—or had I just ended the dream before really finding out. This was unclear, but the latter seemed the case.
Philosophers have long pondered deterministic forces in life and how they may be balanced with human freedom. From the perspective of mystical consciousness, this may simply be one more of those paradoxes of “Both/And,” where there is truth to be found in both perspectives and ultimate understanding continues to elude us. The best I have ever been able to verbalize when pondering this paradox is to conclude that perhaps we are determined to believe in the illusion of freedom, for if we do not act as though we are free, what is determined will fail to occur. Meanwhile, we live our lives and act in the world as best we can.