We can, and should, distinguish three quite different paradigms for the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness. One is the notion of states of consciousness—both the ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and non-ordinary or altered states, whether induced by drugs or other catalysts, and whether positive or negative. This is the paradigm that is most amenable to the testing of correlations between brain functions and consciousness.
A different paradigm is the notion of stages of consciousness development: in the course of the normal life cycle human beings go through different phases, and there are identifiable stages on the path of spiritual growth toward enlightenment. A third paradigm is that there are levels, planes, or dimensions of consciousness—permanent structural features of the individual psyche and of our collective, shared external reality. We shall discuss the stages and levels paradigm in this chapter before going further in our investigation of states of consciousness in subsequent chapters.
Western psychology has concerned itself with the stages of psychological development that a child goes through on its way to adulthood, such as Freud’s psychosexual stages, or Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, or Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson spoke of six stages of the life cycle with characteristic challenges in each stage. In the psychology of C. G. Jung we find the idea of two halves of the life cycle, divided by the midlife crisis: the first half of individualization, becoming a distinctive individual; and the second half of individuation, moving toward undivided wholeness.
In Part Two, Alchemical Divination, I identified three main stages of the life cycle: the formative years of childhood and young adulthood till the late twenties; the productive or middle years of the thirties, forties, and fifties; and the elderhood years of the sixties and beyond. In the formative phase, the main focus is on growing, developing, and learning. Our sense of identity expands from being totally embedded in the family matrix to becoming part of the larger community, society, and world. The middle phase of adulthood is the time we settle down to a career, growing a family, pursuing our life’s chosen goals, and making a contribution to the community. The elder phase tends to be a time of reflection, of teaching and guiding the young, consideration of one’s legacy, and contemplation of what lies beyond death.
The stages paradigm comes at an understanding of consciousness in a quite different way than the concept of states, ordinary or non-ordinary. These are three different basic orientations toward life at different ages. Individuals in all three phases of their life cycle go through the ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming; and they may experience involuntary or intentional altered states, ecstatic or traumatic, induced by external catalysts or occurring spontaneously.
The three-stage model is expanded to a four-stage one if we add the prenatal epoch. It is now widely accepted in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology that the embryo and fetus is a fully sentient human being, exquisitely attuned to its parents and its environment. From my experience, I have come to understand that the prenatal stage of development is where the most deep-seated defensive identity patterns are established, often with long-lasting consequences for the individual.
The second variant of the consciousness stages paradigm is found in the literature of Eastern and Western religious psychology, as well as in the literature of esoteric and transpersonal psychology. For example, in her book on Christian mysticism, Evelyn Underhill identified five stages on the mystic path: (1) awakening or conversion to divine reality; (2) purgation or purification; (3) illumination and ecstatic visions; (4) death of the old self, also called “dark night of the soul”; and (5) union with the divine.
Another beautiful example, from the literature of Zen Buddhism, are the ten Ox-Herding pictures, symbolizing ten stages of seeking enlightenment. In these allegorical images, the man represents the personal ego-self; and the wild ox that he first tracks and finds, and then captures and tames, is his wild animal nature. The first stage is called “searching for the ox,” and the tenth, “entering the city with bliss-bestowing hands.” This last image symbolically portrays the stage of the bodhisattva—in the Buddhist mahayana tradition, an enlightened being who returns from the nirvana state (where “both ox and man are transcended”) to function in the world with compassion for the enlightenment of others.
One of the most complex and detailed maps of stages of consciousness evolution, both for the individual and for the collective culture, is found in the work of Ken Wilber. His model blends Western psychological theories about the development of consciousness from childhood to adult maturity with Eastern and esoteric teachings about stages of spiritual development.
It is important to recognize that such scenarios of spiritual development represent a different perspective than the altered states paradigm. Those who imagine that a yogic adept or Zen master is always in a state of enlightenment bliss or nirvana are confusing states and stages. The Buddhist texts are clear, for example, that Gautama Buddha entered into the state of nirvana (where there is not the arising of even a single thought or impulse), stayed there for eight days, and then “came down,” as it were, and worked the rest of his life to teach and preach, found monasteries, and walk, eat, and drink among others, until the death of his physical form.
We can understand the difference between these paradigms in terms of the difference between “oneness” and “wholeness.” Oneness, called samadhi in the yoga traditions and nirvana in Buddhist teachings, refers to a state of consciousness where there is no perception of distinctions, just undifferentiated, blissful awareness, without any content. Wholeness, on the other hand, refers to the integrated yet open-ended and evolving totality of our being. As we move toward wholeness (in a process that C. G. Jung called individuation), there may be experiences of states of mystical oneness, as well as states of being lost and distracted by illusions, and experiences of functioning in our chosen life paths and communities.
My last example of the stages paradigm is from the writings of the nineteenth-century German scientist-mystic Gustav Theodor Fechner. Here we encounter a three-stage model of human existence, remarkably perceptive in its understanding of human development and the mysteries of the soul, and yet expressed in purely philosophical language, without the trappings of any religious doctrine, either Western or Eastern. In Fechner’s view, the three phases of every human existence are (1) the prenatal phase, in which we grow the somatic equipment for our embodied life, from the seed-form of conception to birth; (2) the middle phase between birth and death, in which we grow and nourish the divine soul-seed through our life experiences; and (3) the postmortem phase of the hereafter, where we are liberated from the limitations of the embodied stage (Fechner, 1992).
Conceptual maps of different realms of consciousness and reality are found in the Asian spiritual traditions, in indigenous shamanistic worldviews, in Western esoteric and mystical writings, and in twentieth-century psychological theories. It is far beyond the scope of this book to attempt anything like a systematic comparison of these different mappings. I will only briefly describe selected examples of such dimensional theories and teachings, in order to clarify the nature of this paradigm and how it differs from the paradigms of states and stages.
It should be understood that the levels of consciousness are not temporary states of consciousness—rather, they are permanent structural features of our own being, and of the world around us. One could say that during particular states of consciousness, such as a dream state or a meditation, we are focused “in” a particular realm or level. In what I am calling the functional waking state, we are focused in the time-space material level. In the Sufi tradition we hear the metaphor that the human being inhabits a many-storied mansion, but has long lived exclusively on the ground floor—pointing to the possibility of expanding or raising consciousness into the “higher” realms during meditative or visionary states. We may suppose that the higher our spiritual development, the more we have conscious and intentional access to all the many realms.
It is important to recognize the implicit spatial metaphors in this psychic model. Unconscious mental images are not really located “below” conscious ones. Actually, they’re not really located anywhere. Quantum physicists now tell us that awareness is non-local, like photons and subatomic particles. Furthermore, the implicit spatial metaphor is compounded by linguistic “reification” (literally, “thing-making”). When we name an abstraction, we concretize it and make it somehow more real. In actuality, we know that there is neither an entity nor a place called “the Unconscious.” There are, of course, feelings, thoughts, and impulses of which we are not aware—until we become aware of them.
Jung also posited a collective unconscious, a realm of archetypes—primordial images and thought-forms shared more or less by all human beings. In our dreams and visions our personal imagery may be blended with the archetypes of the collective unconscious. For example, an individual’s feelings and perceptions of their personal mother may be bound up with the Great Mother Goddess archetype. Later Jungian analysts and scholars drew a further distinction, inserting a layer they called cultural unconscious between the personal and the collective. For example, the image of the Madonna or Virgin Mary is the archetypal Great Mother expressed in the cultural symbolism of the Christian West.
We can see that Eastern and Western esoteric traditions have presented integrated worldviews in which the physical, psychic, and spiritual aspects of our being are recognized and named. Western psychological schools, whether the cognitive, behavioral, social science, or psychoanalytic strands, are the inheritors of the Western materialist, mechanistic worldview in which the spiritual dimensions are considered the domain of religion and disconnected from science. The writings of Jung and his followers in the depth psychology traditions, basing their theories on clinical observations made in the course of psychotherapy and dream analysis, accommodate the spiritual dimensions of human experience as being primordial images or archetypes contained in the collective unconscious.
I believe, along with scientists such as Fritjof Capra, Joanna Macy, Ervin Laszlo, David Korten, and others, that a living systems worldview will be and should be considered the foundational science paradigm of the present age. In such a worldview, reality—both microcosmic and macrocosmic—is recognized to be organized in many levels or dimensions, and the various sciences study the patterned interrelationships between and within levels. Such a multidimensional perspective is most amenable to the inclusion of the observations made in different states of consciousness and the mappings of the different realms of consciousness into a truly integrative and holistic worldview.