Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
As described by the poet, transpersonal consciousness allows us to experience past and future, leaping across boundaries that clocks, calendars, and the aging of our own bodies seem to make so real and so inexorable. Here we enter a world where we might experience ourselves as an embryo in the earliest stages of our intrauterine development or, even further back, the fertilizing sperm or fertilized ovum at the moment of conception.
Many people who have experienced the transcendence of linear time have gone even further back than the time spans of their own lives, connecting with ancestral memories, or drawing upon the memory banks of the collective unconscious, that vast sea of awareness that we have shared with all of humankind since the beginning of time. Such experiences, from various periods of history and from different countries, are often associated with a vivid sense of a personal memory of our spiritual rather than biological history; we can talk here about karmic or past life recall. On occasion people have reported memories of specific animal ancestors in the evolutionary pedigree. However, consciousness does not seem to be limited to human history or the history of living organisms. It is in principle possible to experience the history of the Earth before the appearance of Homo sapiens and even prior to the beginning of life on the Earth. Our consciousness seems to have the amazing capacity to directly access the earliest history of the universe—witnessing dramatic sequences of the Big Bang, the formation of the galaxies, the birth of the solar system, and the early geophysical processes that occurred on this planet billions of years ago.
For our purposes here, let us begin at the smallest scale of human life and move to the larger. For a variety of reasons, it is useful to first explore our ability to experience, through the transpersonal consciousness, the earliest stages of our own lives.
Embryonal and Fetal Experiences
The experiences people report for the embryonal and fetal stages of their lives cover a wide range, indicating that the quality of our experiences in these earliest phases of life is anything but universal. At the most positive end of the spectrum, people report that in their intrauterine life they experienced feelings of “oceanic ecstasy.” They felt a powerful mystical connection with all of life and the cosmic creative force that made it all possible. At the opposite end of the spectrum, people experience intense crises, with dominant feelings of anguish, paranoia, physical distress, and the sense of being attacked by demonic forces. Many but not all embryonal memories are associated with phylogenetic, karmic, and archetypal experiences, and with organ, tissue, and cellular consciousness.
Reports of embryonal and fetal experiences suggest that it is possible to experience not only gross disturbances during this period—such as the threat of abortion, the danger of natural miscarriage, intense mechanical concussions and vibrations, loud sounds, toxic influences, and physical diseases of the mother—but also the mother’s feelings. It is quite common to experience the mother’s emotional shocks, anxiety attacks, outbursts of hate or aggression, depression, sexual arousal, as well as feelings of relaxation, satisfaction, happiness, and love.
The exchange of information between the fetus and the mother can include many nuances of feeling as well as the transfer of complex thoughts and images. While reliving early life in the womb, many people have reported how keenly aware they were of thoughts and feelings that their mothers never verbalized in their everyday lives. For example, the person recalling intrauterine life might suddenly get in touch with the mother’s sense of conflict or resentment over her pregnancy or, conversely, might feel the mother’s happiness with the pregnancy and her joyous anticipation of the birth.
Having witnessed countless episodes of people moving back through time to re-experience their lives in the embryonal and fetal stages of life, and having experienced such episodes myself, I find it impossible to dismiss them as fanciful products of our imaginations. In many cases, the experiences recounted were verified against information provided by the mother, relatives, obstetricians, and medical records. We have also compared layperson’s descriptions of their fetal and embryonal life and development with information provided by medical handbooks. The result is that we have discovered amazing correlations between the objective information gathered from outside sources and the experiences people described. The following account of a training session of a psychiatrist is an excellent example of the complexities of embryonal experiences. It provides us with detailed descriptions of the earliest stages of our lives, even back to the moment of conception.
My consciousness became less and less differentiated, and I started experiencing a strange excitement that was dissimilar to anything I have ever felt in my life. The middle part of my back was generating rhythmical pulses, and I had the feeling of being propelled through space and time toward some unknown goal; I had a very vague sense of what the final destination might be, but the mission appeared to be one of utmost importance.
After some time, I was able to recognize to my great surprise that I was a spermatozoid and that the regular explosive pulses were the beats of a biological pacemaker that were transmitted to my long flagella, which was flashing in vibratory movements. I was involved in a hectic super-race toward the source of some chemical messages that had an enticing and irresistible quality. By then I realized (using the information I had as an educated human adult) that the goal was to reach, penetrate, and fertilize the egg. In spite of the fact that this whole scene seemed absurd and ridiculous to my scientific mind, I could not resist getting involved in this strange race with all seriousness and great expenditure of energy.
Experiencing myself as a spermatozoid competing for the egg, I was conscious of all the processes involved. What was happening had the basic characteristics of the physiological event as it is taught in medical schools. However, there were many additional dimensions that were far beyond anything that my fantasy could conjure up in the ordinary state of consciousness. The cellular consciousness of this spermatozoid was a whole autonomous microcosm, a universe of its own. I had a clear awareness of the complexity of the biochemical processes in the nucleoplasm and a nebulous sense of the chromosomes, genes, and molecules of DNA.
As he was perceiving these physiochemical configurations, the psychiatrist in the above narrative was also in touch with elements of ancestral memories, imprints from animal ancestors, mythological motifs, and archetypal forms. Genetics, biochemistry, mythology, and evolutionary history seemed to him to be inextricably interwoven, being different aspects of the same phenomenon. He said he had the sense that this microworld of the spermatozoid was, at that time, influenced and governed by primordial forces that were modifying and determining the outcome of the race. He described these forces as having “the form of karmic, cosmo-biological, and astrological forcefields.” He continued:
The excitement of this race was growing every second and the hectic pace seemed to increase to such a degree that it felt like the flight of a spaceship approaching the speed of light. Then came the culmination in the form of a triumphant implosion and ecstatic fusion with the egg. Shortly before the moment of conception, my consciousness was alternating between the speeding sperm and the egg experiencing strong excitement and expectation of a vaguely defined, but overwhelming event. At the moment of conception, the two units of consciousness merged and I became both of these germinal cells at once.
After the fusion, the experience continued, still at a fast pace. In a condensed and accelerated way, I experienced the development of the embryo following the conception with full conscious awareness of tissue growth, cellular divisions, and even biochemical processes. There were numerous tasks to be met, occasional challenges, and critical periods to overcome. I was witnessing the differentiation of tissues and formation of new organs; I became the pulsating fetal heart, the columns of liver cells, and the epithelium of the intestinal mucous membrane. An enormous release of energy and light accompanied the embryonal development. I felt that this blinding golden glow had something to do with the biochemical energy involved in the precipitous growth of cells and tissues.1
At one point, he had a very definite sense of having completed the critical parts of his fetal development. He experienced this as a great accomplishment—both from his own point of view and in terms of the creative force of Nature. As he was returning to his ordinary state of consciousness, he was able to describe what he called “a strong feeling that this session will have a lasting effect on my self-esteem. No matter what my future will be like, I started my life with two great accomplishments, being the sole victor in the multi-million competition of the sperm race and having successfully completed embryogenesis.” Although the scientist in him reacted to these ideas with a certain degree of skepticism, if not humor, the emotions behind the experience were powerful and convincing.
The following example comes from records of therapy sessions with Richard, a man who had been suffering from chronic suicidal depressions. In one of his sessions, he felt immersed in fetal liquid and fixed to the placenta by the umbilical cord. He was aware of nourishment streaming into his body through the navel area and experienced wonderful feelings of symbiotic unity with his mother. They were connected with each other through the placentary circulation of blood that seemed to be a magical life-giving fluid.
Richard heard two sets of heart sounds with different frequencies that were merging into one undulating pattern. This was accompanied by peculiar hollow and roaring noises that Richard identified after some hesitation as those produced by the blood gushing through the pelvic arteries and by movements of gas and liquid during the peristaltic movements of the intestines adjacent to the uterus. He was fully aware of his body image and recognized it was very different from his adult one. He was small and his head was disproportionately larger than his body and extremities. On the basis of various experiential clues and with the use of adult judgment, he was able to identify himself as being a mature fetus just before delivery.
In this state, he suddenly heard strange noises coming from the outside world. They had a very unusual echoing quality, as if they were resounding in a large hall or coming through a layer of water. The resulting effect reminded him of the sound quality that music technicians achieve through electronic means in modern recordings. He finally concluded that the abdominal and uterine walls and the fetal liquid were responsible for this effect and that this was the form in which external sounds reached the fetus.
He then tried to identify what produced these sounds and where they were coming from. After some time, he could recognize human voices that were yelling and laughing and what seemed to be sounds of carnival trumpets. Suddenly, the idea came to him that these had to be the sounds of a fair, held annually in his native village two days prior to his birthday. After having put together the above pieces of information, he concluded that his mother must have attended this fair at the advanced stages of pregnancy.
When we asked Richard’s mother independently about the circumstances of his birth, without telling her about his LSD experience, she volunteered among other things the following story: In the relatively dull life of the village, the annual fair was an event providing rare excitement. Although she was in a late stage of pregnancy, she would not have missed this opportunity for anything in the world. In spite of strong objections and warnings from her own mother, she left home to participate in the festivities. According to her relatives, the noisy environment and turmoil of the mart precipitated Richard’s delivery. Richard denied ever having heard this story and his mother did not remember ever having told him about this event.2
The Time-Machine of Consciousness
While the possibility of cellular memory from the earliest stages of our lives may stretch the boundaries of our imaginations, it is by no means the greatest challenge posed by transpersonal experience. It is not unusual for people in non-ordinary states of mind to accurately portray material that precedes their conception or to explore the world of their parents, their ancestors, and of the human race. Particularly interesting are “past life” experiences, which suggest that individual consciousness might maintain continuity from one lifetime to another.
Probing the Childhoods of Our Parents
On many occasions, people in non-ordinary states have reported that they experienced episodes occurring long before their own conceptions. For example, many report being able to enter the consciousness of their parents during their mother’s or father’s childhoods and to experience through their parents’ consciousness events from that time. These sequences bring to mind Steven Spielberg’s movie Back to the Future, in which the characters race back and forth in time.
I recall the experience of a young Finnish woman who attended one of our workshops in Sweden. Inga experienced herself as a young soldier during World War II, a full fourteen years before her conception. The soldier she became was her father, and she was in the midst of a battle, experiencing it all through his senses and nervous system. She fully identified with him, reliving how his body had felt and the sharpness of the high adrenalin emotions he was undergoing at the time. She was acutely aware of everything that was happening in the area around her. While hiding behind a birch tree, a bullet whistled past and grazed his-her cheek and ear.
Inga’s experience was extremely vivid and compelling to her. She could not even imagine where such a memory could have come from. She did know that her father had fought in the Russo-Finnish war, but she was certain he had never told her of anything like the experience that had come to her mind. She decided to call her father on the phone and ask him about her experience.
After speaking with him for some time she reported back to the rest of the workshop group. As she spoke, she grew more and more excited, awed by her discovery. When she described what she had experienced to her father he had been absolutely astonished. Everything she described to him had actually occurred! Her descriptions of the battlefield and his thoughts and feelings that day were absolutely correct, down to the detailed descriptions of a birch tree forest where the event happened. He also assured her that he had never spoken to anyone about his experience because he had never considered it serious or interesting enough to tell. Though he had never verbalized it, the experience had somehow been passed along to his daughter.3
Early in our LSD research, psychiatrists and psychologists who wished to work with these drugs had to undergo extensive training, which included firsthand experiences with the drug, carefully monitored by trained therapists. In many cases, highly sophisticated and well-educated men and women, who had previously been quite skeptical of even relatively well-founded concepts such as Jung’s “collective unconscious,” found themselves, nevertheless, moving across both physical and temporal boundaries in their consciousnesses. In one case, for example, a fifty-year-old psychologist, Nadja, experienced a vivid and convincing identification with her mother. This episode reaches even farther back than Inga’s since it depicts an episode from Nadja’s mother’s early childhood.
Nadja reported that she experienced a sense of a dramatic shift in her ego identity. Suddenly she was her mother at the age of three or four. The year was 1902 and she was dressed in a starched, fussy dress, though she found herself in a very peculiar and unlikely place, which was especially puzzling because of the way she was dressed. She was hiding under a staircase. She felt frightened and lonely, painfully aware that something terrible had just happened. She realized that only moments before she had said something very bad, had been reprimanded, and someone had roughly put a hand over her mouth.
From her hiding place, Nadja could see her relatives—aunts, uncles, and cousins—sitting on the porch of a large frame house, dressed in old-fashioned clothes characteristic of that time. Everyone was talking, unaware of her or her unhappiness. She was filled with a sense of failure, overwhelmed by the unfathomable demands of the adults—to be good, to behave herself, to talk properly, to keep herself clean. It seemed impossible to please them. She felt alienated and ashamed.
As with all such cases, we urged Nadja to attempt to verify this experience, to see if it connected with any objective reality. Soon after the event, Nadja spoke with her mother. She did not want to admit to her mother that she had taken LSD, since she knew her mother would not have approved. Instead, she told her mother that she had dreamed about being her as a little girl, hiding under the steps, deeply ashamed, peaking out at the adults on the porch who were so unmindful of her. No sooner had she begun than her mother interrupted, filling in the details just exactly as Nadja had experienced them. Her mother’s detailed descriptions of the event matched Nadja’s LSD experience exactly, including details of the large porch and the steps leading up to it, as well as the descriptions of the peoples’ clothes, and even the dress she herself had been wearing, covered by a starched white pinafore.4
Exploring the World of Our Ancestors
Sometimes the experiential exploration of our ancestry takes us into the lives of grandparents now dead or even into the lives of relatives who lived centuries before us. These distant ancestral experiences are characterized by a sense of being wholly convinced that the person or persons with whom we are identifying belong to our own bloodline. This sense of a genetic connection is often described by those who experience it as “primordial,” something that cannot be conveyed with words but must be experienced.
True ancestral experiences of this kind are always congruent with the racial, cultural, and historical backgrounds of the person through whose eyes we are seeing. In a few instances, apparent discrepancies—such as a person of Anglo Saxon descent having Native American or African ancestral experiences—were cleared up when closer examination of the family genealogy confirmed the accuracy of the experience. Very often, the ancestral memories contain objective data, allowing us to verify them; this might include information about customs, habits, belief systems, family traditions, idiosyncrasies, prejudices, and superstitions known to be held or practiced by the ancestor in question.
Additional support for the authenticity of ancestral experiences can come from observing the people having these experiences. Very often, in both workshops and private therapy sessions we have noted dramatic changes in the person’s physical appearance and behavior. For example, a person’s facial expressions, physical posture, gestures, emotional reactions, and thought processes may all take on characteristics of the ancestor in question.
Sometimes ancestral experiences can be vivid, with complete and very specific details that can be easily verified. At other times, they can be vague and diffuse, revealing only impressions and emotional atmospheres concerning attributes such as the quality of relationships between members of a certain family, tribe, or clan. As a psychiatrist, I have been particularly interested to see how often these ancestral experiences yield insights into personal problems we may be having in the present. I am convinced that these glimpses into the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even more distant relatives, can help us better understand, and often resolve, conflicts in our present lives.
The following example illustrates the rich and accurate historical information that we can assemble from some ancestral experiences, providing us with valuable insights concerning periods that might otherwise be lost to history. This particular experience is interesting because it was eventually confirmed not only by focused historical research but by an unexpected synchronistic event.
In systematic LSD therapy, a young woman, whom I will call Renata, being treated for a complex neurosis, experienced many scenes that took place in Prague in the seventeenth century. During that period, which was just before the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, Bohemia, part of today’s Czechoslovakia, came under the rule of the Habsburg dynasty. In an effort to destroy feelings of national pride, the Habsburgs captured and beheaded twenty-seven members of the Czech nobility in a public execution at the Old Town Square in Prague.
During her sessions with me, Renata described many images and insights concerning the architecture of the period, typical garments that people were wearing, as well as weapons and utensils used in everyday life. She was able to describe complex relationships between the royal family and the vassals. All these things came to her in great detail and with profound understanding, though she had never studied this historical period. (In validating many of the details she reported, I had to consult scholarly resources.)
Many of Renata’s experiences related particularly to a specific nobleman who was executed by the Habsburgs. In a dramatic sequence, Renata relived the actual details of this man’s execution, experienced as if she was inside his body. As a witness to Renata’s reliving of this personal drama, I must admit that I shared her bewilderment and confusion. In an effort to understand what was happening, I chose two different approaches. In one, I spent considerable time verifying the historical information she was reporting, and I found an astonishing amount of objective evidence linking her story to this piece of seventeenth-century history. In the other, I applied all my psychoanalytic skills, hoping to uncover any evidence that might suggest that her historical experiences were actually disguised childhood conflicts or emotional struggles in her present life. But try as I might I could not explain her transpersonal experiences from the psychological problems she was harboring.
Two years after my work with Renata, after I had moved to the United States, I received a long letter from her. She told how she had recently happened to meet her father, whom she had not seen since she was three years old, when her parents divorced. She had dinner with him in his home and afterward he showed her the product of his favorite hobby, which was a genealogical graph tracing the family history back through the centuries. To her amazement, she found that her father and she were descendants of one of the noblemen executed by the Habsburgs that fateful day in the early 1600s. This information only confirmed her previous suspicion, that certain emotionally charged memories can be imprinted in the genetic code and transmitted through the centuries to future generations.5
After overcoming my initial shock I realized there was a flaw in Renata’s interpretation. Even if it were true that memories could be passed along through the genetic code, death would naturally cut off the route of transmission that would make this possible. In other words, since the nobleman had been executed he would not have genetically passed along the experience of his death to Renata. Even as I thought about this, I found myself unable to ignore the remarkable correlation between Renata’s experiences and her father’s genealogical findings. Was all this just an incredible but meaningless coincidence or do such incidents deserve more serious attention?
I decided that the amazing synchronicity of Renata’s experience being followed by her meeting with her father, who then presented her with the genealogical information that seemed to support her experience, could not be written off as an accident. But what could explain these events? Did the information about the nobleman’s death reach Renata’s psyche through a telepathic connection with her father, whom she did not even know? If so, how could it have been translated from raw genealogical information into vivid experiential sequences that were so rich in historical detail?
I theorized that it might have been possible for a survivor of the nobleman’s family, say a son or a daughter, to have genetically passed this information along to Renata. The witness, in this case, would have had to experience his or her father’s execution while in a transpersonal state of “dual unity,” sharing the actual emotions and sensations of the executed man from his own vantage point. Or could it be that the universe is, in the final analysis, just a divine play of consciousness where all natural laws are ultimately arbitrary, and where any one of us, at any time, can somehow access any material that ever existed or will exist for anyone, anywhere, unfettered by the illusions of matter, space, and time? One thing seems sure: There are principles at work in the universe that are far beyond the capacities of the human imagination. Certainly there are phenomena whose reality cannot be explained by the belief systems imposed on our culture by Newtonian science.
Racial and Collective Experiences
Racial and collective experiences go a step beyond ancestral memories. Racial experiences can involve people outside one’s immediate family or blood line, extending out to any members of the same race. This process can reach beyond racial lines to other racial groups and to collective memories of humanity as a whole. I mentioned earlier that psychiatry traditionally looks upon our psyches as being affected only by what we have experienced first hand, through our physical senses or as a result of our own interpretations of these experiences. However, our observations of hundreds of people who have reported ancestral, racial, and collective experiences support Carl Gustav Jung’s assertion that our psyches are also deeply affected by a collective unconscious that gives us access to a vast warehouse of memories encompassing all of human experience from the beginning of time.
During a holotropic training we conducted in California, a European psychiatrist reported the experience which follows. As you read this description, bear in mind that this woman had absolutely no intellectual knowledge of Native American history. Yet, her experience was strikingly reminiscent of the Cherokee Tear Trail and other events in the lives of American Indians during the Indian Removal Act. Here is what she reported.
Suddenly everything seemed cold, abysmal, and hopeless. I felt an enormous force moving me far beyond the boundaries of my present life, to a remote historical period. My ordinary self seemed to have shrunk to the size of a photon and then temporarily vanished. I became another person—an old, small, and incredibly wrinkled Indian woman with rich braids of greasy hair.
I saw a vast open plane and on it an assembly of thousands of Indians. They sat in groups or clans, surrounding a circle of their elders, who were calm, determined, and motionless. They expected from their people an answer: if they choose Death or the Journey. Those who had chosen death receded into radially arranged long and low cottages. When the decision process had ended, the elders imparted death on their brothers and sisters using poisoned darts. These accepted it calmly as if it were a sacred fulfillment of their lives. When the last of them had died, the women got up and danced the dance of reconciliation with death; it included sowing and sprouting of kernels. Following this, the men stood up and performed the dance of strength, peace, and reconciliation with death.
Having completed the rituals described above, those who participated in the dance of reconciliation got up and began to leave. The woman who had this experience said that her “entire being was permeated by sadness and grief for which there are no words.” With slow rocking movements, she started chanting, a quiet, monotonous chant that expressed what she was feeling. She continued:
Inside, I cried and wept over the death of thousands of my people—children, old ones, and men and women of all ages. I saw a long procession of them, walking over the mountains, exhausted, starved, desperate, hopeless, and dying on the way. While being an old, internally empty Indian woman, I also felt like an ancient barren mountain. Completely motionless, I followed them until they disappeared from my sight; however, in some sense, I was still with them, in their endless journey forward and nowhere, in life and death.6
People experiencing racial and/or collective episodes may find themselves participating in dramatic though usually brief sequences that take place in more or less remote historical periods, cultures, and countries. These are typically associated with specific insights concerning relationships between people, the social structure, religious practices, moral codes, art, and the technology of the historical periods involved. Sometimes we observe complex gestures, postures, and symbolic movements of the person who is having racial or collective experiences. Time and time again, objective observers with a knowledge of the countries or peoples the subject is experiencing will confirm that these movement patterns are appropriate and characteristic of the peoples and times being experienced.
In both therapy and workshop sessions, we have seen people assume complex postures (asanas) and gestures (mudras) from ancient Yogic traditions even though they have had no prior knowledge or experience with this spiritual practice. In many instances, people experienced themselves participating in practices belonging to cultures that were, in their ordinary states of consciousness, completely unknown to them. With no previous knowledge or training they engaged in movements characteristic of the! Kung Bushman trance dance, the whirling of the dervishes from the Sufi tradition, ritual dances performed in Java or Bali, and symbolic gestures of the Indian Kathakali that express themes from Hindu mythology, as they are performed along the Malabar coast.
On occasion, people experiencing other lives speak in languages—sometimes obscure, archaic ones—of which they have no knowledge in their ordinary lives. In some instances, the authenticity of the languages used has been confirmed through audio recordings made of sessions where this phenomenon occurred. In other cases, the vocal performances had all the elements of a language, but we were unable to decipher what was being said. This does not necessarily mean that the vocal production was not an authentic language of some ethnic group. Linguists agree that it is extremely difficult to identify all of the thousands of languages and dialects spoken on this planet. However, the fact that we have been able to positively confirm a large number of such instances dispels doubt about the authenticity of this phenomenon. Occasionally, however, the sounds are quite clearly inarticulate gibberish or what is known in certain groups as “speaking in tongues.”
Ancestral and racial experiences often bring deeper insight into the symbolic meanings of cultural practices, even when the people involved had no previous interest or knowledge of them. Our follow-up research to verify the accuracy of such experiences has time and again shown them to be accurate, though they often involve information that would be available only to scholars and other committed specialists.
I have witnessed, for example, a person who had no background whatsoever in ancient cultures describe details of Egyptian funeral practices, based on his vivid past life experiences. He has passed along, in great detail, information such as the esoteric meaning and form of special amulets and sepulchral boxes, the meaning of the colors chosen for funeral cones, the technology of embalmment, and the purpose of specific ritualized practices. Having experienced himself as an embalmer in ancient Egypt, he was able to describe the size and quality of the mummy bandages, materials used in preparing the mummy cloth, and the shape and symbolism of the four Canopic jars used to hold specific organs taken from the body. Our follow-up research revealed that details he had reported about the symbolic figures on each jar, as well as the specific contents of each, were found to be accurate, though this was not knowledge that was generally available to the public.7
The Mystery of Karma and Reincarnation
For most of us born and raised in the Western European traditions, the notion of past lives and karma seems alien, if not bizarre and childish. However it is difficult to overlook the fact that for thousands of years religious writings from a great many societies have discussed past lives, reincarnation, and karma and have described the impact of these on our present lives. From the viewpoint of these writings, none of us comes into life with a “clean slate.” Rather our present lives are part of a continuum that can extend far back into many previous lifetimes, and will most likely extend forward into many more. In non-ordinary states of consciousness memories of past lives are woven into a tapestry of experience that includes present life memories around birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
We are well aware that contemporary Christianity and traditional science denounce or even ridicule such beliefs. However, research in transpersonal psychology continues to provide ample evidence that this area of study is a veritable treasure trove of insights into the nature of the human psyche. So convincing is the evidence in favor of past life influences that one can only conclude that those who refuse to consider this to be an area worthy of serious study must be either uninformed or excessively narrow-minded.
Over the years my observation of people who have had past life experiences while in non-ordinary states of consciousness has convinced me of the validity of this fascinating area of research. I would like to share with you some examples that both convince us that past life phenomena are extremely relevant and that our knowledge of them can help us resolve conflicts and live better lives in the present.
In the mid-1960s, while heading a psychedelic research and treatment program for cancer patients at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, I had the opportunity to work with an unskilled laborer whom I will call Jesse. He was admitted to our program with an advanced skin cancer that had spread to his internal organs. Jesse was virtually illiterate and had no knowledge whatsoever of karma, reincarnation, or any other beliefs associated with Eastern thought. In fact, under normal circumstances it might have been assumed that his strict Catholic upbringing would have made these subjects taboo for him.
Jesse had been losing his struggle against cancer, knew he was going to die, and was deeply troubled and anxious as a result. He agreed to undergo psychedelic therapy as a way of attempting to come to terms with his anxieties. In the beginning his focus was on his guilt about the way he had lived his life. He had been raised as a Catholic, had married and divorced, and for the past several years had lived out of wedlock with another woman. He firmly believed in the Church doctrine that in the eyes of God he would always be married to his first wife, making his present situation adulterous and sinful.
In his sessions he had visions of war scenes and monsters, of great junkyards strewn with corpses, skeletons, rotting offal, and garbage spreading foul odors. His own body lay there, wrapped in stinking bandages, eaten away by cancer. Then a gigantic ball of fire appeared and all this mess was dumped onto the purifying flames where it was rapidly consumed. Though Jesse’s flesh was destroyed, he realized that his soul survived and he found himself at the judgment of the dead, with God weighing his good and evil deeds. In the end, Jesse’s positive deeds outweighed the negative ones and he felt tremendously freed of his burdens. At this point he heard celestial music and started to understand the meaning of his experience.
He became aware of a powerful message flowing through him, through nonverbal channels that seemed to permeate his entire being. The message was: “When you die, your body will be destroyed, but you will be saved; your soul will be with you all the time. You will come back to earth, you will be living again, but you do not know what you will be on the next earth.”
As a result of this experience Jesse’s pain was greatly alleviated and the acute anxiety he had been suffering disappeared. He emerged with a deep belief in the possibility of reincarnation, a concept that was in conflict with his own religious tradition. Jesse died peacefully five days later, perhaps a little earlier than he otherwise would have. It was as if his mind had been freed to surrender in his struggle against his inevitable death. It was almost as if he was hurrying to go on to what he had called “the next earth.”
In Jesse’s work with me, there had never been any discussion of reincarnation or the survival of the soul after physical death. On his own, or with a little help from sources that neither he nor I had previously recognized, he had come up with a rather complex view of what occurs after death, a vision that gave him profound security in the last days of his life.8
While Jesse’s experience might be dismissed as a wishful fantasy, others contain remarkable details that might be verified. Although I have had a number of my own past life experiences, none was more vivid or more convincing than one that was associated with my first tour of Russia. This experience illustrates how these past events can be interwoven with our most recent individual history and how we might employ the extraordinary healing potentials of these memories.
In 1961 I took part in an organized group tour of Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. We were assigned official Intourist guides and all our sight-seeing was closely supervised; unsupervised sight-seeing was strictly prohibited. Just before our departure, I had learned about Pechorskaya Lavra, a Russian Orthodox monastery in Kiev located in ancient catacombs inside a mountain. This place was the spiritual center of the Ukraine and I had heard that the Bolsheviks had spared it because they feared a civilian uprising. When I first heard about this place I felt a strange and powerful emotional attraction to it and a desire to visit it.
In Kiev I learned that Pechorskaya Lavra was not on our itinerary, and I felt myself becoming very restless. Recognizing that I was doing so at great risk, I decided to visit Pechorskaya Lavra on my own. I spoke fluent Russian so I was able to get a cab, which took me to the monastery. I walked through a maze of catacombs lined with the mummies of all the monks who had lived and died there for several centuries. Their skinny hands, covered with skin that the years had turned to brown parchment, were clasped as if in prayer. Narrow corridors opened out into caves, decorated with powerful icons and dimly illuminated by candle light. Through clouds of heavy smoke, fragrant with incense, I saw groups of chanting monks with long beards, who appeared to be deep in trance.
As I made my way slowly through the catacombs, I was myself in an unusual state of consciousness; I had the distinct feeling that I knew this place intimately. I could anticipate every turn, every new encounter. Then I came upon a mummy whose hands were in a strange position; they were not clasped in prayer like the others. I experienced a wave of emotion that came from the depth of my being. I had never before felt anything even remotely similar to what I was feeling at that time. I ended my excursion and returned to my hotel, relieved to find that my absence had gone unnoticed by my Intourist guides.
Following my return from Russia, I continued to be preoccupied with memories of the catacombs, especially with my strange reactions to the mummy I had seen there with the unclasped hands. However, I quickly became immersed in my research and somehow the experience faded from my memory. Then, many years later, when I was working at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, the director of the institute brought in Joan Grant and her husband Dennys Kelsey, a European couple known for their innovative hypnotic therapy. During their four-week visit to our center our staff members had the opportunity to experience personal sessions with the couple.
Joan, a French woman, had the ability to put herself into a hypnotic trance and experience episodes from other times and places that had the quality of past life memories. She was the author of several books based on this extraordinary ability. Dennys was a British psychiatrist and hypnotist. In their work together they hypnotized the clients and asked them to go as far back in memory as they needed to go to resolve the source of their problem. Often people found the original source of their conflicts in past lives. Joan had the ability to tune into the clients’ experiences with them and guide them to resolutions of their problems.
The issue I wanted to work on with them had to do with a conflict I sometimes felt between sensuality and spirituality. In general, I had great zest for life and enjoyed all the pleasures that human existence offers. But occasionally I experienced a compelling desire to withdraw from the world, to dedicate my life wholly to spiritual practice. Dennys hypnotized me and instructed me to go back in time to the place where this problem began. Suddenly I was a Russian boy standing in a large garden and facing a palatial house, which I realized was my home. I heard Joan speaking to me, as if from a great distance: “Look at the balcony!” Without wondering how she knew I was looking at a house with a balcony at that moment, I did just as she said. I saw an old woman with crippled and contorted hands sitting on the balcony in a rocking chair. I knew that this was my grandmother, and I felt a wave of love and compassion for her.
Suddenly the scene shifted. I was in the street of a nearby village, feeling that the simple but colorful peasant life of the moujiks was an exciting escape from the rigid lifestyle of my wealthy family. I realized that I had come to this place on numerous occasions. Then I saw myself in the dark, primitive workshop of a blacksmith. A giant, muscular man, half-naked and covered with hair, stood in front of a glowing furnace. He was pounding with a huge hammer on a piece of red-hot iron, which he was shaping on the anvil. All of a sudden I felt a sharp pain in my eye. My entire face contorted in a painful spasm and tears poured down my cheeks. With horror, I realized that I had been hit in the face by a piece of red-hot iron and that I was badly burned.
I experienced the emotional pain of a ghastly disfigured adolescent, with the agony of sexual longings that could not be satisfied and the sting of repeated rejection as a result of my repugnant scars. In despair, I made the decision to become a monk, ending up at Pechorskaya Lavra. Over the years my hands became severely disfigured. Was this the result of arthritis or a hysterical reaction modeled after my beloved grandmother’s disease?
The last scene I remembered from this session was my own death and somehow being aware that I was placed in a coffin by the wall of the catacombs. My crippled hands could not be clasped together in prayer, indicating a successful closure of my monastic life, which even to my death represented a bitter retreat from the more sensual life for which I had longed.
As the session neared its end I began to sob, overwhelmed by a mixture of anger, grief, and self-pity. I then became aware of Joan massaging my hands. Slowly I felt them relaxing, no longer spastic and contorted as they had been. Finally, she took my hands in hers and brought them together in the universal gesture of prayer. Instantly, there swept over me a sense of resolution, as if something deep within me had healed. Since that moment, I have never again experienced the conflict between sensuality and spirituality that had troubled me.
In the process of experiencing episodes from past lives, people often heal emotional and physical symptoms that they suffer from in their present lives. For example, I have seen chronic depression, psychogenic asthma, a variety of phobias, severe migraines, psychosomatic pain, and similar symptoms reduced or completely eradicated following a past life experience. Had this been all there was to it, one could explain the healings that come out of past life experiences as the result of symbolic resolutions, constructed by the psyche. However, these healings often involve another dimension of reality, suggesting that something more than symbolic processes are operating here.
My own past life experience, which I related above, involved the healing of an inner conflict I had felt; the healing did not directly involve other people and could have been symbolic in nature. However, past life experiences often include other people, and the healings that come about can involve an interesting level of synchronicity. For example, I once worked with a person who was involved in a very difficult adversarial relationship of long standing. During a past life experience he saw this adversary as his murderer in a lifetime they had shared long before. After going into the past and forgiving that crime, the client instantly changed his present life feeling toward this person. Old animosities and fears instantly faded and he saw the person in a new light. As this was occurring, his one-time enemy was simultaneously but independently undergoing a similar personal experience halfway around the world that transformed him in the same direction. Within approximately the same time period, both people had experiences that changed their basic perspectives, healing their relationship, which had been so filled with animosity. Though the incidents that changed the two people seemed at the time to be entirely unrelated, they nevertheless had the effect of reuniting them.
This particular example, though extraordinary, is not unusual in my work. Again and again I have seen karmic partners experience dramatic changes that released them from the past and allowed them to heal old wounds, which had existed for many, many years. These changes of attitude occurred within minutes of each other, even though the people involved were often separated by thousands of miles and had no direct communication between them.
Have We Lived Before?
What I have thus far described concerning past life experiences raises important questions for any serious consideration of reincarnation. We might ask, does the existence of karmic experiences necessarily prove that we have lived before? Does it mean that we had a series of lifetimes preceding this one? And does it mean that we continue to be accountable for our actions from one lifetime to another? To answer these questions it can be useful not only to examine evidence refuting or supporting these beliefs but also to take a historical look at our own beliefs and prejudices on this subject. All too often it is what we have been taught to believe rather than our fair examination of more objective evidence, that determines our judgments about phenomena that cannot be directly verified through our physical senses or mathematics.
We have to remind ourselves that reincarnation and karma represent the very cornerstones of the major religions of India: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. Reincarnation and karma are also integral to Tibetan Vajrayana, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and a number of South Asian Buddhist sects.
In ancient Greece, several important schools of thought embraced a belief in reincarnation; these included the Pythagoreans, the Orphics, and the Platonists. The same doctrine was adopted by the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Karaites, and other Jewish and semi-Jewish groups. It was also held by the Neoplatonists and Gnostics and formed an important part of the kabbalistic theology of medieval Jewry. Similar ideas can be found in such historically, geographically, and culturally diverse groups as various African tribes, the Jamaican Rastafarians, American Indians, Pre-Columbian cultures, the Polynesian kahunas, practitioners of the Brazilian umbanda, the Gauls, and the Druids.
In our modern Western society, reincarnation has been accepted by the Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and certain spiritualists. At first glance, it would appear that a belief in reincarnation is alien to, or even incompatible with, the Christian faith. However, this has not always been so; beliefs in reincarnation were part of early mystical Christianity. According to St. Jerome, a saint living in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the subject of reincarnation was given an esoteric interpretation that was accessible to only the elite of the Church.
The most famous Christian thinker speculating about the existence of souls returning to earth was Origen, one of the greatest Church Fathers of all times. His works, written in the third century A.D. (particularly his book entitled On First Principles), were condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople, convened by Emperor Justinian in 553 A.D. This verdict read: “If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls and shall submit to the monstrous doctrine that follows from it, let him be anathema!” Although this edict certainly helped establish reincarnation as heretical, religious scholars find traces of similar ideas in the writings of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and St. Francis of Assisi.
In the past three centuries, these negative attitudes toward reincarnation in Western culture have been clearly supported by Newtonian science. The prevalent bias of the modern industrialized world is one of excluding all forms of spirituality as erroneous and misleading. Thus we see that the world seems to be divided between those who firmly believe in reincarnation, those who are neutral or simply not interested, and those who reject it entirely.
Keeping this perspective in mind regarding our beliefs and prejudices about reincarnation, let us again return to our original question. Is there anything modern consciousness research can contribute to the problem? The most important contribution is the realization that it is neither correct nor helpful to speak of reincarnation as a “belief,” that is, as an opinion. Let me explain.
The reincarnation doctrine is not a matter of belief but a serious effort to conceptualize very concrete and specific experiences and observations related to past lives. While the existence of the experiences is a fact that can be confirmed by any serious researcher familiar with non-ordinary states of consciousness, there are various ways to interpret the same data. This is not so different from any other scientific question. After all, the theory of gravitation is not the same as gravity itself. Similarly, while we might refuse to take seriously past life experiences because we do not like the theories of reincarnation, we would not think of applying the same thinking to gravity, that is, denying that objects are falling because we do not like the theories that explain it.
There are observable facts about reincarnation. We know, for example, that vivid past life experiences occur spontaneously in non-ordinary states of consciousness. These require no programming or previous knowledge about the subject. In many instances, these experiences contain accurate information about periods before our own that can be objectively verified. Therapeutic work has shown that many emotional disorders have their roots in past life experiences rather than in the present life, and the symptoms resulting from those disorders disappear or are alleviated after the person is allowed to relive the past life experience that underlies it. Synchronicities associated with these experiences also suggest that past life phenomena deserve serious attention. Ian Stevenson’s research involving children who claimed to remember incidents from past lives also provides us with further supportive evidence for the importance of this area.
The belief that individual consciousness survives the death of the physical body is one way to explain these observations. But it is a mistake to confuse this with final “proof.” It is important to remind ourselves that science never “proves” anything; it only “disproves” and “improves” existing theories. The history of science itself teaches us that no single theory explains all aspects of any phenomenon, and there is always more than a single theory that claims to account for the observable facts. It should be possible, then, to honor past life experiences and come up with alternative explanations that do not include the theory that souls survive death or that there is a continuity of individual consciousness from one lifetime to another.
Actually, we do find at least two alternative explanations in spiritual literature. In the Hindu mystical tradition, for example, the literal belief in reincarnation is considered to be an inferior interpretation of karma. This theory suggests that all boundaries and divisions in the universe are arbitrary. In the final analysis, only the creative principle of Cosmic Consciousness exists. Only it incarnates, that is, takes physical form. From this point of view, the entire universe is a divine play (lila) of one Supreme Being (Brahman). Anyone who grasps this concept will see that karmic appearances are just another level of illusion.
Another explanation is that the entity that incarnates is the entire field of human consciousness. This field, which can be called the Oversoul, includes all human life; spread over the entire planet, and all time, it assumes individual identities in order to explore and learn about itself. After the death of an individual, the unassimilated portions of that life experience return to the Oversoul, where they become building blocks for future incarnations. Like the image of the multi-chambered Nautilus shell, the theory of Oversoul incorporates the concepts of separation and continuity in a way that transcends both.
Extra-Sensory Perception and Parapsychology
The interest in transpersonal phenomena is not new to Western science, nor is it limited to the field of psychology. For many decades parapsychology, admittedly a highly controversial discipline among more respected fields of science, has been studying ways that we might access information without using our sensory organs. Parapsychology has explored various forms of extra-sensory perception (ESP), that is, the ability to transcend spatial boundaries, distances, and the limitations of linear time. These abilities could thus have been included in our previous discussions but I have chosen to describe them in a separate section because of the interest they have received from parapsychologists.
The ESP phenomena characterized by transcendence of spatial boundaries include out-of-body experiences, the ability to experience remote events, and telepathy. ESP phenomena characterized by transcendence of the time barriers include precognition (knowledge about events that are yet to happen) clairvoyance (seeing past and future events) and psychometry (extrasensory access to the history of objects).
Experiences of consciousness detaching from one’s body, or out-of-body experiences (OOBE), occur in a variety of forms and degrees. They can take the form of isolated episodes throughout one’s life, or they can occur in clusters or strings of events that are part of the process of transpersonal crisis or psychic opening.
This type of experience can be triggered in a variety of ways, such as through life-threatening emergencies, near-death situations and experiences of clinical death, sessions of deep experiential therapy, psychospiritual crises, and the ingestion of certain psychoactive substances. Some of the most noteworthy experiences of this kind are described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. These ancient descriptions were not taken seriously by scientists until recently, when modern research in experimental psychiatry and thanatology confirmed their authenticity.
We can experience consciousness leaving our bodies, detaching from it, and then looking back at the body; in more advanced forms we can leave our bodies and fly off to various remote locations.
Many years ago, not long after my arrival in the United States, I had a supervised LSD session as part of a training program for mental health professionals. During that session I suddenly felt a strange mixture of serenity and bliss. I felt I had entered an amazing world, like that of the early Christians, where miracles were possible, acceptable, and understandable. I started thinking about the problems of time and space and the insoluble paradoxes of infinity and eternity that baffle our reasoning minds in ordinary states of consciousness. I could not understand how I could have let myself be brainwashed into accepting the simple-minded concept of one-dimensional time and three-dimensional space as being mandatory and as existing in objective reality. In the state I was in, it appeared to me rather obvious that there could be no such limits in the realm of the spirit, since time and space were nothing more than mental constructs.
In the transpersonal realm of consciousness, any number of spaces and times could be created and experienced. In this world a single second was freely interchangeable with an eternity. In this situation, it occurred to me that I did not have to be bound by the limitations of time and space. I could travel in the space-time continuum without restrictions. I was so convinced this was true that I decided to try traveling in this way to Prague, the city of my birth, many thousand miles away. I set myself in motion and had the sensation of flying through space at a tremendous speed. But to my great disappointment, and contrary to my expectations, I was getting nowhere.
Immediately I realized that I was still under the influence of my old concepts of space and time and was thinking in terms of directions and distances. It occurred to me that the proper approach would be to make myself believe that the place of the session was identical with the place of my destination. When I approached my task in this way, I experienced some very bizarre sensations. I found myself in a strange, rather congested place full of vacuum tubes, wires, resistors, and condensers. After a short period of confusion, I realized I was trapped in a television set located in an apartment in Prague where I had spent my childhood. I was trying, somehow, to use the speakers of the television set for hearing and the television tube for seeing. It became clear to me that I was facing the last conceptual obstacle, since the means by which I was overcoming the illusion of distance had somehow been modeled after modern electronics.
As soon as I accepted that there are no limits for consciousness, I broke through the television screen and found myself walking around in my parents’ apartment. The experience was as sober and real as any other experience of my life. I walked to the window and looked at the clock on the street corner. It showed a six-hour time difference from the place I had left back in the States. In spite of the fact that this reading correctly reflected the time difference of the two time zones, I did not find it convincing evidence. I knew the time difference intellectually and, of course, my mind could easily have fabricated this experience.
I wanted more convincing proof that what I was experiencing was “objectively real” in the usual sense. I finally decided to set up a test. I would remove a picture from the wall and later check with my parents to see if they had noticed anything unusual in the apartment. I reached for the picture but was overcome by an unpleasant feeling that what I was about to do was a dangerous undertaking. I felt myself immersed in an uncanny atmosphere that was suggestive of evil forces and black magic. It seemed as if I was gambling with my own soul. I instantly stopped what I was doing to reflect on the consequences of my actions.
Images of world-famous casinos filled my mind’s eye. I saw roulette balls spiraling at intoxicating speeds, the mechanical movements of slot machines, dice jolting on gambling tables, scenes of gamblers playing baccarat, and the flickering lights of the keno panels. This was followed by images of eavesdropping on secret meetings of politicians, army officials, and scientists. I realized that I had not yet overcome my egocentrism and would not be able to resist the temptation to use my psychic powers for my own selfish needs. If I could, in fact, have control over time and space, I could have an unlimited supply of money by knowing ahead of time the outcomes of races and games. No secrets would exist. I could eavesdrop on summit meetings, and have access to top-secret discoveries in science and the military. This would open undreamed-of possibilities for controlling the course of history throughout the world.
I started understanding the dangers involved in my experiment. I remembered passages from different books warning against toying with these powers before overcoming the selfish drives of one’s own ego. I found that I was extremely ambivalent about carrying through with the test of my apparent powers. If I could confirm that it was possible to manipulate the physical environment from a distance of several thousand miles, my whole universe would collapse and I would find myself in a state of utter metaphysical confusion. The world I knew would no longer exist.
In the end I could not bring myself to carry through with the intended experiment. This made it possible for me to continue toying with the idea that perhaps I had, in that session, conquered time and space. The moment I gave up the experiment, I found myself back in the States in the room where the session had begun.
To this day there are times when I deeply regret that I wasted such a unique opportunity to test my ability to manipulate space-time. However, the memory of the metaphysical horror involved makes me doubt that I would be more courageous if given another opportunity to follow through with a similar test. Fortunately, the authenticity of out-of-body experiences can be tested in a different way. In the past two decades this fascinating area has been systematically explored by a young scientific discipline called “thanatology,” which specifically focuses on experiences related to death and dying.
Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and other highly respected researchers, have repeatedly confirmed that people in near-death situations have had out-of-body-experiences (OOBEs), during which they were able to witness events happening in other rooms or even distant places. These accounts have been objectively verified by independent observers. The ultimate challenge to Newtonian science in this area of research has been the discovery that clinically blind people experiencing OOBEs describe scenes that are visually accurate, though after recovering from the disease or trauma that caused the near-death experience they are not able to see. Our observations about near-death experiences confirms passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which suggest that immediately following death we assume a “bardo body” that can transcend the usual limitations of time and space and travel quite freely around the earth.
During the period of time when I was actively involved in thanatological work, I visited a hospital in Miami. A physician there had just verified an unusual near-death experience of a Cuban immigrant woman. During cardiac arrest she had an OOBE in which she found herself back in Cuba. She was in a house where she had once lived but had not visited for many years. She recovered from the heart attack, but she was very upset by what she had seen during her OOBE. She reported that the people who now lived in the house had made some changes that she did not like. They had moved things around, had exchanged some pieces of furniture, and had painted the fence a shade of green that she found appalling. Her attending physician had been able to verify that she had accurately described the changes that had occurred in the house during her absence—including the fact that the fence had been painted an unusual shade of green.
Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute. Russell Targ’s research of “remote viewing” involves two people. The “viewer” stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a “beacon” person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer.
The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer’s random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer’s ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ’s associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site—even before he got there or knew what he would see!
While the early research of remote viewing involved men and women who had been chosen because of their psychic abilities, it was soon learned that virtually anyone could be trained to perform this task. Most researchers have been convinced that remote viewing and other telepathic abilities are normal human capacities. After experiencing remote viewing for themselves, many people report that the process of developing this skill does not involve new learning so much as it involves “unlearning” negative conditioning that claims these abilities are not “real.”
Good clairvoyants are able to access information about their clients’ pasts or the history of a physical object with no visual or verbal clues. I have repeatedly witnessed psychics Anne Armstrong and Jack Schwarz access complex, detailed information of this kind. The ability to obtain information in this way suggests that memory may exist independent of the physical body, maintaining a cogent form that can be recognized by human faculties other than the five senses. Rather than being like a railroad track with a narrow route extending out into the distance in two directions (past and future), time may be more like an endless sea, every drop of which we can instantly access, regardless of where we might be standing.
As a researcher of human consciousness, it is very clear to me that along with our experiences of extraordinary perception there often comes a deep metaphysical fear, just as I experienced when confronted with the possibility of projecting myself through space and time to my parents’ apartment. This fear is rooted in the fact that such experiences challenge and undermine fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality. When this fear occurs, it so threatens the basic assumptions by which we operate in our daily lives that it is usually much easier to deny the existence of the perception than it is to embrace and trust what we have experienced. In other words, when confronted with a choice between accepting a new worldview and quelling our fears, we often choose the latter.
Beyond Space and Time to a Mythological World
In this and the previous chapter, we have explored how transpersonal consciousness allows us to investigate experiences that transcend the boundaries of space and time. Even within this realm of experiences, however, the people we see and the events we encounter resemble “real” people or events, though perceived in entirely new ways than we know them in our everyday lives. However, transpersonal consciousness allows us to go further than this. We may also encounter entities, situations, and places that bear little or no resemblance to the realities we know in our day-to-day lives. It is here that we go beyond more familiar experiences and enter the world known to shamans and seers, the world of deities, demons, and suprahuman beings known from myths and fairy tales.