If you want to know your past, look to your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look to your present actions.
—Traditional Buddhist saying
Expanding and exploring consciousness has been the central preoccupation of my life, ever since I was initiated into that path by the charismatic Timothy Leary, as a graduate student in the Harvard psilocybin project, in the early 1960s. For about ten years, together with a group of colleagues who became close friends, I worked on a variety of research projects with mind-expanding substances. A keen appreciation of the central role of mind-set or intention in understanding states of consciousness was perhaps the central insight that I took with me from those studies. After our research group left Harvard in a cloud of sensational controversy, several of us lived and worked together as an intentional community of seekers and artists on a large estate in Millbrook, New York. In 2010, my lifelong friend Ram Dass and I completed a conversational memoir of those years, including commentaries by a dozen others, under the title Birth of a Psychedelic Culture (2010).
By the late 1960s I was searching for a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness among Eastern philosophies, particularly Tantra Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as unconventional Western teachings, particularly those of Wilhelm Reich, C. G. Jung, and G. I. Gurdjieff. In my book Maps of Consciousness (1971) I wrote about several divination systems—the I Ching, the Tarot, and astrology, as well as alchemy and Tantra—as “maps” of areas of consciousness not generally dealt with in Western psychology. It had also become clear to me that psychedelics per se merely served to temporarily amplify perception, both internal and external, and that something else was needed to actually process and dissolve the conditioned obstructions to higher consciousness. I spent the decade of the 1970s in the intensive study and practice of the light-fire yoga methods taught by Russell Schofield (1906–1984) in the School of Actualism. I came to understand that these methods of purifying the channels of perception were akin to those described in Indian Agni Yoga, as well as Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Taoism. I have made these meditations part of my daily practice ever since and incorporate them into the divinations.
Through my close friendship with the Basque anthropologist Angeles Arrien, an initiate in the mystical practices of her people, I came to a much deeper appreciation of the universality of shamanic perspectives and the rich diversity of spiritual mythologies. My relationship with her was immeasurably helpful and sanity-preserving in dealing with certain paranoid cultic tendencies among the leaders of the Actualism school. I will also be forever grateful for her compassionate support during the greatest tragedy of my life—the death of my son Ari in a bicycle accident at the age of eight.
In the mid-1970s I started to teach at the California Institute of Asian Studies, an innovative graduate school in San Francisco dedicated to integrating Asian wisdom traditions into Western thought, particularly psychology. I taught at this school, later called the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), for three decades and was the academic dean for about ten years during the 1980s. Through it, I came into contact with a large number of teachers of consciousness transformation, both Asian and Western, as well as many brilliant and dedicated students from all over the world. The new approaches to developing human potentials in interpersonal and group dynamics, such as the “open encounter” then being pioneered by Will Schutz and others at the Esalen Institute, were very influential. My book on the underlying psychological dynamics of psychospiritual transformation was first published in 1986, and then republished as The Unfolding Self in 1998.
During the 1980s, I studied the shamanic drumming journey method of exploring consciousness and divination through the work of anthropologist Michael Harner, who was instrumental in reintroducing this core shamanic practice into Western culture. I became acquainted with the fasting vision quest practice through Steven Foster and Meredith Little of the School of Lost Borders and participated in Native American sweat lodge purification ceremonies with Richard Deertrack from the Taos Pueblo, among others.
My understanding of the role of mind-expanding plants and mushrooms in indigenous healing and divination ceremonies, particularly in Central and South America, was greatly deepened through my contacts with the pioneer psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, the intrepid explorer brothers Terence and Dennis McKenna, botanist-artist Kathleen Harrison, mycologist Paul Stamets, chemist and pharmacognosist Jonathan Ott, psychoactive ethnobotanist and Mayanist Christian Rätsch, art historian Claudia Müller-Ebeling, and Columbian anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Amazonian vegetalismo. I am deeply grateful to all these fellow consciousness explorers for their discoveries and insights, their vision, their humor, and their friendship.
Also during this time, in my practice of individual psychotherapy, I experimented with various ways of combining yogic and shamanic elements with psychological perspectives. Through the wise and generous therapist Leo Zeff, I was introduced to the therapeutic use of the empathogenic substance MDMA, which had been invented by the ingenious chemist Alexander Shulgin. I found this to be one of the best means for facilitating deep healing states of empathic and spiritual communion. Another valued teacher and friend during this time, and ever since, was the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, a pioneer of the psycholytic method of working with LSD, and later of Holotropic Breathwork, who discovered and elucidated the mysteriously intimate connections between birth experiences and the transpersonal archetypal realms of consciousness.
I began conducting groups that integrated the yogic spiritual practices I had learned with some of the newer psychological approaches, as well as shamanic divination ceremonies and council circles. In some of the groups I guided, both in Europe and the United States, we used mind-expanding plants and substances, both traditional and new, where this was possible and not prohibited. I gathered accounts of multiple experiences in such groups from several hundred individuals. This work with groups and individuals, extending over twenty years, has provided the empirical proving ground for the alchemical, yogic, and shamanic divination practices that I now teach, which use concentrative meditation, without substances, to heighten perception.
A series of dreams and visionary encounters impelled me to explore the shamanistic, animistic mythology of my pre-Christian Germanic ancestors. This required clearing, in my own mind, the racist obfuscations laid over that mythology by Nazi ideologues. In my search for the historical and prehistorical contexts of that mythology I was inspired by the groundbreaking work of the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. She became my cherished mentor and friend and wrote a foreword to my book on Nordic mythology, The Well of Remembrance (1994). In the course of studying and writing on those amazing mythic stories and poems, it unexpectedly became clear to me that they contained coded references to divination practices (such as “drinking from Mimir’s well”) that could still be used in a spiritual manner in our times.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, my interest in divinatory shamanism as a consciousness-expanding practice converged with my growing appreciation of the animistic spiritual cosmology common to indigenous people worldwide. At CIIS I was teaching and continuously updating my two main courses: one on the varieties of altered states of consciousness, both naturally occurring and induced; and the other on developing ecological consciousness. My thinking on the latter topic was greatly influenced by the persuasive writings of the cultural historian Theodore Roszak, who was advocating an intellectual marriage between the disciplines of ecology and psychology in what he called “ecopsychology.” I agreed with the basic concept, but wanted to avoid suggesting that we needed another specialty branch of academic psychology. So I preferred to call the needed integration “green psychology.”
I also participated in and learned from the wonderfully stirring and heartfelt Council of All Beings rituals that had been developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed. Their work integrates elements of Buddhist philosophy, systems thinking, deep ecology, and peaceful but passionate activism. I collaborated with them on several occasions, including a memorable two-week-long course the three of us led on a remote stretch of the coast in Southeastern Australia.
My investigations into the historical and prehistorical roots of the pathological disconnect of civilization from the living Earth, as well as some possible healing solutions, resulted in the book Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth (1999), for which Theodore Roszak and John Seed wrote a foreword and an afterword respectively. In that book I envisioned a transformation of human cultural attitudes and behavior toward the Earth—away from the dominator ideology that has prevailed in Western civilization for several thousand years. Along with many others thinkers and writers, I have become an advocate for a worldview that integrates a nonviolent and equitable global social order with a commitment to sustainability and the preservation of all of the Earth’s ecosystems. Nothing less than that, I believe, will enable the survival of our civilization.
During the late 1990s, in part through my friendship with German psychologists Norbert Mayer, Christian Rode, and Rolf Verres, I came into contact with the work of Bert Hellinger, who also became a friend and valued mentor. A former priest, African missionary, psychoanalyst, and peacemaker, he had developed a highly innovative approach, called “family constellations therapy,” for working with disturbances in transgenerational family systems, as well as in group conflict situations. In this kind of group work, individuals are guided to communicate at a deep soul level with deceased as well as living ancestors and family members, through the medium of “representatives.” As I studied Hellinger’s observations and insights concerning systemic family patterns extending beyond the veils of death, I felt encouraged and confirmed in my work with shamanic and alchemical divinations, especially since they were arrived at by a completely different route and from completely different premises than mine.
I have come to believe that the kind of civilizational transition that is required of us all will involve far-reaching transformations of consciousness in individuals, their families and their communities, and ultimately the global social order. I am inclined to agree with those who see these collective consciousness transformations already taking place, below the surface, in many thousands, perhaps millions, of individuals—even as the superstructures of military empire and corporate capitalism lurch from crisis to catastrophe.
An inspiring guide to the long view of this transition are the writings of visionary “geologian” Thomas Berry, who together with cosmologist Brian Swimme in their book The Universe Story (1992), provided an integrative evolutionary cosmology for our time. In this cosmology the objective scientific point of view and the subjective mythic and moral perspectives are equally recognized and valued. Thomas Berry has said that in the “ecozoic era” into which we are moving, our worldview will shift from seeing the world only as a “collection of objects” to seeing it also as a “communion of subjects.”
When in the course of a shamanic divination we invoke the spirit of an animal species or ancestor, we are communing with the subjects. When we relate with empathy or compassion to another living being, human or nonhuman, we are communing with a sovereign subject. Respecting the subjective sovereignty, equal to our own, of every living being we encounter, both human and nonhuman, both terrestrial and cosmic, is the Golden Rule for ethical behavior in all worlds, at every dimension.