Myths do not come from a concept system; they come from a life system; they come out of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.
—Joseph Campbell, An Open Life: In Conversation with Michael Toms
There is a large category of transpersonal experiences that goes beyond both the time-space continuum and the reality we know in our everyday lives. Here we experience the world of myth, apparitions, communication with the dead, and the ability to see auras, chakras, or other subtle energies not generally recognized or verified by modern scientific methods. Here we might also experience meetings with spirit guides, “power animals,” and various superhuman or subhuman entities, or we might go on fantastic journeys to universes other than our own.
The late Aldous Huxley made the observation that the extraordinary world we encounter here is not to be too quickly dismissed as purely mental fabrications with no particular purpose. He said:
Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.1
In this chapter we will be exploring these remoter regions of consciousness in some detail, drawing from descriptions of experiential sessions by a variety of people. We will begin with one of the more controversial areas in this realm—communication with the dead.
Spiritualistic and Mediumistic Experiences
In this category we include spiritualistic seances, research into the possibility of survival of consciousness after death, telepathic communication with deceased relatives and friends, contacts with discarnate entities, and experiences in the astral realm. In the simplest form, people see apparitions of deceased people and receive messages from them. For example, the day following her husband’s death a woman saw her deceased husband sitting in his favorite chair in the living room. He greeted her and asked how she was doing. She answered that she was okay. Then he told her where to find some legal papers she would need for finalizing his estate. She had not known of their whereabouts and the information he gave her was useful, saving her many hours of searching. Experiences of this kind have been reported by clients in experiential psychotherapy, and psychedelic sessions, in the work of psychics, and by people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs).
In a more complex form of these experiences, a medium goes into a deep trance and in the process undergoes grotesque changes in his or her physical appearance. The medium’s postures, gestures, and facial expressions can appear quite alien, while the voice may undergo changes in inflection, accent, tonal quality, and cadence. I have witnessed people in these states speak in languages they did not know, and could not remember ever having heard or spoken in their normal, non-trance states. I have heard people speak in tongues, seen them do automatic writing, paint elaborate pictures, and produce obscure hieroglyphic designs. Intriguing examples of this can be observed in the Spiritist Church in the Philippines and Brazil, inspired by the teachings of Allen Kardec.
The Brazilian psychologist and psychic Luiz Antonio Gasparetto, closely related to the Spiritist Church, is capable of painting in a light trance in the style of a wide variety of painters of different countries of the world. Several years ago I had the opportunity to observe him closely during a month-long seminar at the Esalen Institute. What impressed me as much as his ability to produce paintings that captured the essence of the masters, was the tremendous speed with which he worked as he “channeled” the dead masters. During the periods in which he worked he produced as many as twenty-five canvasses per hour.
Gasparetto is able to work in complete darkness or in a red light that makes it virtually impossible to distinguish one color from another. Many times I watched as he executed two paintings at a time, one with each hand. He occasionally painted with his feet under the table and hidden from his own view, nevertheless producing paintings that were aesthetically pleasing and with the subtlety of color, style, form, and composition of one of the deceased masters.
If all communication with discarnate entities involved only visions and a vague, subjective sense of interaction with them, we could easily dismiss these experiences as figments of imagination or wishful thinking. But the situation is not quite that simple. There is often information given by the “discarnate being” that can later be verified. The following is a typical example of this, from the transcript of an experiential session of a young depressed patient whom I quoted in chapter 8 and have called Richard.
Richard experienced being in a space that had the characteristics of the astral realm. He reported seeing an eerie luminescence that was filled with discarnate beings. These beings were trying to communicate with him in a very urgent manner. He could not see or hear them, but he sensed their presence and was receiving telepathic messages from them. One of these messages was so concrete and specific that I decided to write it down.
He received a request to communicate with a couple in the Moravian city of Krom??íž. He was to let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was being well cared for. The message included the couple’s name, their street address, and their telephone number. There was no way that these data could have been known to either me or my client. The experience was extremely puzzling in terms of Richard’s biographical background and the therapy themes he was working on. He seemed unable to make a connection between his communications with the entities and anything in his own life.
After some hesitation, I finally decided to do what certainly could have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes had they known. I went to the telephone and dialed the number in Krom??íž. A woman answered and I asked her if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment she began to cry. When she calmed down she finally managed to tell me: “Our son is not with us any more. He passed away. We lost him three weeks ago.”2
A second example illustrating this realm of experience involved my close friend and former colleague Walter N. Pahnke. In 1971 he, his wife Eva, and their children went for a vacation in Maine. One day he went scuba-diving in the ocean by himself, close to the cabin where they were staying. He did not return. An extensive search failed to turn up either his body or any part of his diving equipment. Under these circumstances Eva found it extremely difficult to accept his death and complete the mourning process that normally helps people bring some closure to their grief. It seemed virtually impossible for her to believe that Walter was no longer a part of her life. Her last memory of him was as he left the cabin, full of energy and in perfect health. Unable to confirm his death she could not start the next chapter of her life without him.
Being a psychologist herself, Eva was qualified for an LSD training session offered through our institute for mental health professionals. She signed up for the training with the hope of gaining insight into how she might find closure and complete her grief over her husband’s death. In the second half of the session, she had a particularly vivid vision of Walter, during which she entered into a long and meaningful dialogue with him. He spoke to her about each of their three children and released her to start a new life of her own, unencumbered by a sense of commitment to his memory. At the end of the session, Eva felt profoundly liberated.
Just as Eva had begun to question whether she had perhaps just fabricated this dialogue with Walter in order to fulfill her own wishes, Walter appeared again, with a specific telepathic request. “I forgot one thing,” he told her. “Would you please do me a favor and return a book that I borrowed from a friend of mine. It is in my study in the attic.” He proceeded to give her the name of the friend and to tell her exactly where the book was located on the shelf. After completing the training session, Eva went home and followed the instructions Walter had given her concerning the book. She was able to find and return that book to its owner, in spite of the fact that she had had no previous knowledge of it.3
Through her work in transpersonal consciousness Eva was able to bring closure to her husband’s death in a way that even months and months of therapy in the biographical realm might have only partially accomplished.
As I thought about it later, it certainly seemed to me that it was completely in character for Walter to provide Eva with some way to verify her experiences. He had been a close friend of Eileen Garrett, a famous psychic and president of the American Parapsychological Association. Before her death, Walter had discussed with her the possibility of conducting an experiment after her death that would prove the existence of the Beyond.
One of the psychologists participating in our three year professional training had witnessed a wide variety of transpersonal experiences during the Holotropic Breathwork™ sessions of his colleagues, and he had a few of them himself. However, he continued to be very skeptical about the authenticity of these phenomena, constantly questioning whether or not they deserved any special attention. Then, in one of his holotropic sessions, he experienced an unusual synchronicity that convinced him that he might have been too conservative in his approach to human consciousness.
In one of his sessions he had a vivid experience of encountering his grandmother, who had been dead for many years. He had been very close to her in his childhood and he was deeply moved by the possibility that he might be really communicating with her again. In spite of a deep emotional involvement in the experience, this man continued to maintain a posture of professional skepticism about the encounter. He knew that during her lifetime he had many real interactions with her and theorized that from old memories he could easily have created a great variety of imaginary encounters.
However, this encounter with his dead grandmother was so emotionally profound and convincing that he simply could not dismiss it as a wishful fantasy. He decided to seek proof that the experience was real, not just his imagination. He asked his dead grandmother for some form of confirmation and received the following message: “Go to aunt Anna and look for cut roses.” Still skeptical, he decided on the following weekend to visit his aunt Anna’s home and see what would happen. Upon his arrival, he found his aunt in the garden, surrounded by cut roses. He was astonished. The day of his visit just happened to be the one day of the year that his aunt had decided to do some radical pruning of her roses.4
Experiences of this kind, though certainly far from being definitive proof of the existence of astral realms and discarnate beings, clearly suggest that this fascinating area deserves the serious attention of consciousness researchers.
Energetic Phenomena of the Subtle Body
In non-ordinary states of consciousness it is possible to see and experience energy fields that have been described in the mystical traditions of the East but have not been objectively verified by Western science. I am speaking here of “auras,” “subtle bodies,” “acupuncture meridians,” “nadis,” “chakras,” and the like. When considering these energy fields it is important to keep in mind that, even in the traditions from which these concepts evolved, it has always been thought that such experiences are associated with the subtle rather than gross physical worlds.
It came as a great surprise to me, many years ago, when Westerners who were totally unfamiliar with these systems, described experiencing such subtle energetic phenomena in great, accurate detail. Some saw energy fields represented by colors around other people, matching the descriptions of auras in ancient esoteric texts. Others experienced in their bodies a flow of energy along conduits that exactly corresponded with diagrams of nadis and chakras from ancient Indian Tantric scriptures or acupuncture meridians from ancient Chinese medical texts.
The ability to see auras, and even to diagnose people’s general condition by them, has been practiced for thousands of years. And the work with subtle energies of the body is one of the ancient healing traditions. In this country, I have witnessed the work of Jack Schwarz who is able to use auras to “read” people’s past medical histories and diagnose current diseases. His abilities have been tested and documented again and again by medical researchers, under quite rigorous conditions. Schwarz’s credentials, overall, are impressive indeed.
Among the various systems employing subtle energies is the concept of Serpent Power, or Kundalini. According to the Hindu and Buddhist Tantric traditions, Kundalini is perceived as the creative energy of the universe. It is believed that this energy ordinarily lies in a dormant state at the base of the human spine. It can be activated by spiritual practices or contact with a guru, or it may ascend spontaneously, triggered by unknown factors. When it is awakened, it rises in the form of active energy, or Shakti, up through conduits in the person’s subtle body (nadis); along the way, it opens up and activates the psychic centers (chakras) of the body, of which there are seven, located from the base of the spine to the crown of the head.
During a Kundalini experience, there are often powerful sensations of heat and energy that seem to stream up the spine. Along with this rising energy the person may experience intense emotions, tremors, spasms, violent shaking, complex twisting movements, and a wide spectrum of transpersonal phenomena.
My wife, Christina, had such an experience during her first marriage, with the birth of her son—an experience that would ultimately trigger her own quest into the meaning of the transpersonal realm. In preparation for natural childbirth, she had learned to use the Lamaze breathing to help the process. In the final stages of the delivery, she had the following experience.
I felt an abrupt snap somewhere inside of me as powerful and unfamiliar energies were released unexpectedly and began streaming through my body. I started to shake uncontrollably. Enormous electrical tremors coursed from my toes up my legs and spine to the top of my head. Brilliant mosaics of white light exploded in my head, and instead of continuing the Lamaze panting, I felt strange, involuntary breathing rhythms taking over.
It was as though I had just been hit by some miraculous but frightening force, and I was both excited and terrified; the shaking, the visions, and the spontaneous breathing were certainly not what I had expected from all of my months of childbirth preparation.5
During the birth of her second child, Sarah, she began to have similar sensations and experiences, but this time the doctors administered tranquilizers to suppress what she was feeling. Some years later, a friend invited her to meet Swami Muktananda. Although Christina had little interest in spiritual matters at that time of her life, she used the opportunity to take a weekend off from her responsibilities as a wife and mother.
During the retreat, she sat with others and learned to meditate. Swami Muktananda lectured them from time to time, and his appearance made an important impact on her. Then, on the second day of the retreat, she had an unexpected experience.
During a meditation period, he first looked at me and then, with some force, slapped me several times on the forehead with his hand. The impact of that seemingly simple event blew the lid off the experiences, emotions, and energies I had been holding down since Sarah’s birth.
Suddenly I felt as though I had been plugged into a high-voltage socket as I started to shake uncontrollably. My breathing fell into an automatic, rapid rhythm that seemed beyond my control, and a multitude of visions flooded my consciousness. I wept as I felt myself being born; I experienced death; I plunged into pain and ecstasy, strength and gentleness, love and fear, depths and heights. I was on an experiential roller coaster, and I knew I could no longer contain it. The genie was out of the bottle.6
During Kundalini experiences such as this, the person may begin laughing or crying involuntarily. They may start chanting songs or mantras, speaking in tongues, emitting animal sounds, and assuming spontaneous yogic gestures and postures. To the uninitiated observer the person having such an experience may appear to have completely lost their senses. And for the person undergoing the experience without proper preparation, there may be fear that they are going crazy. However, when one approaches the Kundalini experience within the yogic traditions it is seen as an increased awareness of what we call the transpersonal realm, and a dramatic opening to spiritual life.
Contact with Animal Spirits
In earlier discussions of animal consciousness, we explored transpersonal experiences involving full identification with the physical forms of various species. However, it is also possible to experience spiritual aspects of a particular species or its archetypal essence.
Experiences of animal spirits or “power animals” play an important role in shamanism, the oldest religion and healing art of humanity. Shamans of various aboriginal traditions make contact with animal spirits during non-ordinary states of consciousness, achieved either spontaneously or through deliberate trance-inducing techniques. They use their connections with these animal spirits for many different purposes, from locating prey for tribal hunters to diagnosing and healing diseases.
Through his or her guardian spirit or power animal, a shaman might connect with the powers of the animal world and other forces of nature. Within shamanic traditions, animal spirit guides can represent the powers of the entire species, which the shaman draws upon for additional knowledge or energy for healing, hunting, or bringing about change that is required within his or her tribe. Techniques for contacting these spirits or powers vary from one culture to another. The Zuni peoples (the Ashiwi) of New Mexico, for example, use small stone carvings of animals, called “fetishes”; through these they call up the spirit of the animal, who either communicates with them directly or acts as a mediator between humans and higher spiritual forms of the natural world.
In shamanic cultures, power animals are seen as sources of personal vitality, health, and the ability to live a joyful existence in harmony with nature. Many of the dances, chants, prayers, and other aspects of ritual life in these cultures revolve around power animals—communicating with them, adopting aspects of their wisdom or power, and re-establishing links with them when the connection has been lost through negligence or lack of reverence, or by offending either the animal spirits or one of the greater spirits of the natural world.
During my research, I have been surprised to discover that experiences with animal spirits are by no means limited to people from aboriginal cultures. In work with non-ordinary states these same kinds of experiences are very common with people from even the most modern, technologically oriented urban societies. Communications with power animals occur regularly in holotropic and psychedelic sessions, shamanic workshops, and in spontaneous psychospiritual crises (spiritual emergencies). I have often witnessed situations in which the power animal experiences were so convincing that they triggered, in previously skeptical Westerners, a deep and genuine interest in shamanism. In a surprising number of cases, people have been so transformed that they eventually pursued further systematic study of shamanism with experienced shamans or anthropologists.
Experiences with animals take many different forms and it is important to distinguish between them. Sometimes the animal appears in a dream or vision and can simply be a symbolic expression of the language of the unconscious mind. The meaning of these images can usually be deciphered through dream analysis, such as Freudian psychotherapy or other approaches to dream interpretation. In dreams or visions, animals may represent a cryptic message revealing something about the experiencer’s own feelings and personal qualities. Thus the image of a tiger or panther might be deciphered as an expression of intensely aggressive feelings in the dreamer, while a stallion, bull, or goat might symbolize that person’s strong sexual drive.
Symbolic images of this kind need to be differentiated from transpersonal identification with various animals. With the latter, people report that the experience is unusually vivid and authentic, and there is no confusion about the animal having an identity that is quite independent of the person who envisions it. The independent identity of the animal is often confirmed by the fact that the experience reveals information about the animal that the experiencer could not have previously known.
The person who has a truly transpersonal experience with an animal presence usually resists any efforts to assign symbolic meanings to the experience; it is what it is—an experience of being or communicating with an animal—and there is nothing to interpret or analyze.
In addition to identifying with an individual animal, it is also possible to identify with the “soul” of an entire species, composed of the collective experiences of all members of this group. The existence of an entity such as the soul of a species has been seriously explored in Western science. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes that the memories and wisdom of various species are stored in what he calls “morphogenetic fields,” which are not accessible to the methods of contemporary science but apparently are accessible through shamanic techniques. Gregory Bateson also discussed this in his pursuit of the role of mind in nature.
The experience of animal spirits or power animals is very different from symbolic experiences of animals or transpersonal identification with individual animals and the species. Symbolic experiences are creations of the unconscious mind, and identification with individual animals, or the soul of various species, deals with phenomena that reflect the physical world. By contrast, power animals belong to the realm of archetypal reality. They have extraordinary characteristics that differentiate them from animals we might encounter in nature. They radiate unusual energy, have the ability to communicate in the language of humans, and may even manifest by alternating between taking animal and human form. Sometimes they function in uncharacteristic environments. For instance, a serpent might fly in the air, with or without the help of wings. These incongruous features show that the spirit animal transcends the usual roles of similar animals in nature.
The following is an excellent example of experiencing animal consciousness and communicating with animal spirits reported by consultant and writer Hal Zina Bennett, who first began working with Zuni fetishes nearly twenty years ago. In this Native American system, the shaman communicates with the animal spirit through a small stone figure of the animal in question.
As instructed by my guide I held the little stone figure (a Mountain Lion carved from stone) in my right hand and addressed it by its role in traditional Zuni thought, that is, “Guardian of the North.” The communication was very powerful and very direct—I would say visceral rather than verbal—as if I could connect with every cell of the animal’s body, occasionally being that body rather than observing it. In a moment I received a clear mental picture of a beautiful, sleek, very dignified lioness standing almost hidden in a clump of high grasses at the edge of a canyon.
Mountain Lion approached me cautiously, pacing back and forth in a relaxed zig zag pattern as she came. Her eyes seemed to regard me lazily, yet I was aware of what I can only describe as an energetic connection between us. If I moved or even had any aggressive thoughts or feelings about her she would sense a shift in this energetic connection and instantly bolt. I was aware of feeling fear and respect for her but something within told me I was safe in her presence as long as I maintained my present state of mind, which was simply to learn from her.
When there was no more than six or eight feet between Hal and the animal, the mountain lion stopped, looked directly at him, and suddenly grew tense, every muscle in her body alert and ready. She stared at him, and it seemed to him that “she was targeting my very soul.” For perhaps as long as a minute he sat transfixed, fearful that she would spring at him at any moment, and he imagined her tearing him to shreds with her sharp claws. Hal continues:
She suddenly thrust her neck forward, bared her teeth and shrieked at me, a deafening, bloodchilling howl that sent tingling, electric waves up my spine. Then she stopped and I was flooded with feelings of love and appreciation for her, no longer fearful but in absolute awe of her. Then she lay down, groomed herself briefly, then turned her head and seemed to be gazing past me, as if it was of no concern to her whether I was there or not.
I heard a wonderful rumbling sound from deep in her body and it took me a moment to realize she was purring, as a domestic cat might do except with greater volume, a deep, rumbling tone that resonated in the trunk of my body in an almost sexual way.
As I say, there were no words between us, yet in that moment we were together I received a new perspective on maintaining individual boundaries and territories, as well as a reverence for hunting and a deep, sacred respect and love for the spirit of your prey. Mountain Lion had a profound understanding of nature and related to it not as a place but as an awesome force within which every individual took part, be they hunter or hunted or be they creatures who somehow lived outside that system of animal life.
For several days in a row, Hal returned to this place in his mind, each time learning more about the mountain lion and her perspective on life. She has since become his main spirit counselor when issues involving personal boundaries or the right use of power arise.
Encounters with Spirit Guides and Suprahuman Beings
Perhaps one of the most rewarding experiences in the transpersonal realm is meeting spirit guides. The guides are perceived as suprahuman beings who exist on higher planes of consciousness and higher energy levels. They may appear in recognizably human forms, speaking to us as a person might speak to us in a dream, as radiant light, or a powerful energy field. Only rarely do these guides communicate to us with words. Instead, information is conveyed telepathically through channels other than our five senses.
Many people who have spirit guides that assist them in their lives say they appeared quite spontaneously. They may emerge suddenly during a period of inner crisis, during a serious illness, after a physical injury, or through spiritual practices. Some spirit guides introduce themselves by name; others remain anonymous.
Spirit guides offer many different kinds of assistance. They may intervene and provide advice in the face of danger, or offer their counsel to us when we are going through difficult periods of psychological or spiritual growth. After they have served us through a crisis or emergency they may never appear again, or they may continue to serve us in our everyday affairs.
There is a wonderful story about spirit guides that C. G. Jung relates in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. One day Jung received a visitor from India. The visitor was a spiritual leader in India, and because Jung was very interested in Indian thought, they had a long conversation. When Jung asked the man the name of his spiritual teacher his visitor replied that it was “Shankaracharya.” This name was familiar to Jung as Shankaracharya had been a great Vedas commentator. However, Jung thought it impossible that his visitor could have had this same man as a teacher since Shankaracharya had been dead for centuries. Wanting to clear up this question, Jung asked his visitor if the Shankaracharya he was speaking of was the one who had been dead for several hundred years.
“Yes, I mean him,” the man replied, to Jung’s amazement.
“Then you are referring to a spirit?” Jung asked.
“Of course it was his spirit,” the man replied. “There are ghostly gurus, too. Most people have living gurus. But there are always some who have a spirit for a teacher.”7
Throughout the ages, people have received information from suprahuman entities and spirit guides. Sometimes the recipients keep the information for their own use; at other times they act as mediators, sharing the communications with others. In recent times, such shared communication has been referred to as “channeling.” In some cases, communications of this kind have become meaningful for millions of people the world over. It is generally accepted that the Vedas, which belong to the oldest religious scriptures of the world, were based on revelations channeled by ancient Indian sages and seers. Similarly, according to the Moslem faith, the Koran was channeled by Mohammed in visionary states. In the United States, the influential Church of the Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, has as its source revelations channeled by Joseph Smith during the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Those who have read the works of Alice Bailey will know that many books that bear her name actually came to her through an entity who called himself “The Tibetan.” Bailey herself acknowledged this spirit guide as the true author of a number of her writings. The highly esteemed psychologist Roberto Assagioli communicated with the same entity, crediting him with the key principles of the system of personal growth he called “psychosynthesis.” In some instances, spirit guides provide a pragmatic, useful service, such as directing the channel to passages in books that provide necessary information about a specific subject.
During his lifetime, C. G. Jung had many powerful transpersonal experiences. I have already mentioned a dramatic episode in which he channeled his famous text Seven Sermons for the Dead: the entity that inspired this channeling introduced himself as the Gnostic Basilides. Jung also had experiences with his spirit guide Philemon who taught him much about the dynamics of the human psyche. Upon reflecting on this channeled material in the last years of his life, Jung said that most of his work had been derived from information he received in this way, and he was doubtful that his personal achievements in the study of the human psyche would have been possible had he limited himself to information he acquired by more traditional means.
In the past two decades, channeling has become popular and has attracted the attention of large audiences. Jane Robert’s popular series of writings received from an entity called “Seth” is among the books based on channeled information from spirit guides. There are also Pat Rodegast’s Emmanuel’s Books, Yarbo’s Messages from Michael, and David Spangler’s New Age Transformations: Revelations. One of the best known of the channeled texts is the best-selling book A Course in Miracles. It is very highly acclaimed by many lay people as well as nationally recognized professionals, such as Hugh Prather and Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., who use it as a basis for their lectures and seminars. The original work was channeled by Helen Schucman, a traditionally trained psychologist, atheist, and disbeliever in the paranormal with a solid university position and excellent professional credentials.
Contacts with spirit guides, or channeling, belong to the wide spectrum of transpersonal experiences that can occur in non-ordinary states of consciousness. The following example is an account by a philosophy professor’s experiences during a consultation with an entire group of spirit guides whom he perceived as a council of cosmic elders. It occurred during a session in which he entered a non-ordinary state of consciousness.
The intelligence that brought our universe into existence is enormously sophisticated and the workings of this intelligence are far beyond human comprehension. If you want access to its knowledge, this intelligence has to teach you how to receive it. Since this intelligence is nothing other than your own being, it is a matter of learning how to be awake at more and more levels of “your” own being, or Being itself. Today, I was given a number of visions of the universe and instruction in how to take in these visions. It was mediated by a council of elders.
The elders were the guardians of knowledge, the knowledge of what has been going on in the universe for billions and billions of years. Because I sought this knowledge, I was brought before the council of elders to get it. This knowledge is not just given to you, you have to work for it. You first have to reach this level of awareness and then you have to work to sustain the concentration necessary to receive the knowledge that they can make available to you.
I was sitting with the council of elders at the primal core of the universe, the bowels of the earth where the guardians of physical existence conjure and make things happen. I wanted to understand, I wanted to know things. When an idea of something that I wanted to understand would come into my mind, the council immediately knew it and accepted it as a formal request. The head of the council bellowed a thundering chant: “He wants to know that”; then the others joined in and started an invocation. They chanted to gather power which is necessary to gain access to knowledge.
According to the philosophy professor who had this experience, the council of elders gave him access to “experiential knowing” and allowed him to “see many pieces of how the universe works.” He felt that he could “know anything” he wanted to know, if he had the strength to endure it. However, he felt that to endure it, he had to be able to “go flat out with existence,” that is, to expand to the size of the reality he wished to know. Somehow his being able to see the universe in this way answered a longing so deep in him that he knew “it had been driving me for thousands and thousands of years.” He continues:
Sometimes I would make a mistake; I would get distracted while the elders were chanting. When this happened something would grab me right down to my bones and say: “Listen! Listen! Will you grow up?! Listen! That’s not what this is about. Now pay attention!” Those big monks came grinding at me: “Listen! All of these things have their place. But if you want to understand the structure of the universe, you’ve got to be able to take it on at deep levels. You’ve got to be able to experience it!”8
Visits to Other Dimensions and Parallel Universes
On occasion, transpersonal adventures seem to occur in alien environments, worlds with realities very different from our own. Often these worlds seem to be located on planes of reality that are parallel to, and which coexist with, our own. The entities that inhabit these other realms tend to possess bizarre forms, unlike anything we know in our physical reality; they often operate according to laws that are equally strange to us. Although many of these entities are intelligent creatures, they may have emotional and intellectual processes that bear little or no resemblance to our own.
People describing their adventures in these other universes often liken them to ingenious science fiction stories, such as George Lucas’s Star Wars movies or the most fantastic sequences from the American television series “Star Trek.” The adventures themselves may be perceived as dangerous, sometimes owing to the hostile nature of the creatures involved, at other times owing to fear or uncertainty about the unknown. When the situation seems dangerous, it is because the visitor finds him- or herself in an environment that is completely foreign, a world in which one false move seems to promise disaster.
In this category of transpersonal experience, the boundaries between objective reality and the mythical realm of the collective unconscious are particularly blurred. One can be quite unsure whether one’s experience is an actual visit to a remote planet within our cosmos, interdimensional travel to a parallel universe, or a visionary state involving the collective unconscious. The same problem of interpretation can exist with experiences involving UFO visitations from worlds outside our own and encounters with alien intelligences. As you will see in the discussion of UFO phenomena, experiences of this kind have an unusual quality that places them into a twilight zone between consensus reality and the world of consciousness and archetypes.
Journeys into Mythic Realities
Most of us think of myths as fictitious, made up stories about adventures experienced by imaginary heroes in non-existent countries—the products of fantasy and imagination. However, the pioneering work of C. G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, to name just two, has shown that this understanding of mythology is superficial and incorrect. They have demonstrated that true myths are manifestations of fundamental organizing principles that exist within the cosmos, affecting all our lives. Jung called them archetypes.
These archetypes express themselves through our individual psyches, but they are not human creations. In a sense archetypes are supraordinated to our psyches and represent universal governing principles at work within our individual lives. According to Jung, powerful archetypes can influence not only our individual processes and behavior but large cultural and historical events as well. Archetypes are universal and they cross historical, geographical, and cultural boundaries, though they may appear under different names or show variations from culture to culture. Since myths involve archetypes, they can truly be said to have autonomy, and they are in no way dependent on us to create them. They exist in that vast sea of human knowledge that Jung referred to as the “collective unconscious,” as real as the birds that fly in the sky or the marine life that swims in our oceans.
Modern research of non-ordinary states of consciousness has confirmed Jung’s position on archetypes and has added another important dimension. In non-ordinary states, the boundary we ordinarily see between myths and the material world tends to dissolve. While the solid material world disintegrates into dynamic patterns of energy, the world of archetypal realities becomes increasingly real and palpable. Under these circumstances, mythological figures literally come alive and assume independent existences. The same is true about the landscapes and structures that make up the mythic world. The resulting experiential world is at least as concrete and convincing as our everyday reality.
In their most elemental and profound forms, archetypes are cosmic principles that are completely abstract and beyond the capacities of human perception. However, in non-ordinary states, they may also appear in forms that we perceive through inner sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, or the virtually palpable sense of a presence. Some archetypes are universal, with various expressions of them being found in all cultures of the world. There are also archetypal variations that are much more individualized. Thus the universal archetypes of Mother or Father epitomize all the essential characteristics of these roles without regard to race, color, culture, or specific circumstances. More specific and narrower archetypes are the Good Father and Good Mother or their negative counterparts, Tyrant Father and Terrible Mother. Other examples of universal archetypes would be the Wise Old Man or Woman, the Lover, the Martyr, the Trickster, and the Outcast.
Jung, who made a lifelong study of archetypes, recognized three key archetypes in his approach to human personality and behavior: (1) the Anima, or personification of the feminine aspects in a man’s unconscious; (2) the Animus, or the embodiment of the masculine elements in a woman’s unconscious; and (3) the Shadow, which is the unknown, dark, and repressed part of our personalities. These three aspects of our psyches are ordinarily hidden and unknown to us, yet they exert strong influences on the choices we make in life and thus help shape our behavior and our life experiences, until we bring them into consciousness and get to know them.
Some time ago I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with these archetypes during a psychedelic session of my own. This personal experience has contributed greatly to my understanding of this fascinating aspect of our psyches.
Toward the end of a session, in which I had been experiencing remarkable visions depicting the Apocalypse, I suddenly saw a large stage. It seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere, suspended in cosmic space and outside of time. There was a magnificent parade of the personified universal principles (the archetypes) that through a complex interplay create the illusion of the phenomenal world, the divine play of cosmic consciousness that the Hindus call lila. This scene had a majesty and grandeur about it that is beyond my abilities to describe.
The archetypes I saw were protean figures with many facets, levels, and dimensions of meaning. It was impossible to focus on any particular aspect of them, since as I was observing them, they kept changing in unbelievably intricate holographic interpenetration. Each of them seemed to represent the essence of his or her function and simultaneously all the concrete manifestations of this principle in the phenomenal world. While they were clearly individual entities, they comprised an enormous number of other beings and situations from all times and places in history.
I saw Maya, a mysterious ethereal principle symbolizing the illusion that creates the world of matter. There was an anima-like figure who was the embodiment of the eternal feminine principle or force. I saw a horrifying Mars-like figure who seemed to be the principle responsible for wars, all down through human history. There were the royal figure of the Ruler, the withdrawn Hermit, the elusive Trickster, and the Lovers, representing all the sexual dramas throughout ages. They all bowed in my direction, as if expecting appreciation for their stellar performances in the Divine Play of the universe. They seemed to actually enjoy my great admiration for them.
While there are the universal archetypal figures, as I have described above, there are also universal archetypal motifs or themes that we may encounter in transpersonal states of consciousness. These can be expressed as plots, parables, or stories whose conflicts and resolutions employ the archetypal figures. Many of these themes find their expression in human sexual and social life with which we are all familiar. As inner experiences, they may be identified as the source of biographical difficulties, that is, emotional conflicts that were set in motion early in our lives. An excellent example of this is the theme of the son’s hatred for his father and affection for his mother, which Sigmund Freud popularized in his famous work with the Oedipus complex, a theme taken from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, written over 2,000 years before. The counterpart of this archetypal theme is the Electra complex, the daughter’s love for the father and hostility toward the mother.
The theme of the evil brother and the good brother was immortalized in the Bible story of Cain and Abel. Similarly, fairy tales and legends often express archetypal themes of this kind. “Snow White” and “Cinderella” describe painful conflicts between the girl and her bad mother or stepmother. “Hansel and Gretel” portrays the drama of two loving siblings endangered by the evil mother figure. Many stories from world literature are variations on the theme of the Lovers: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise are but a few of the famous lovers. Other extreme forms of archetypal conflicts involve the Torturer and the Victim, the Killer and the Killed, the Tyrant and the Oppressed, and the Imprisoned and the Liberator. Freud said these myths have their source in biosocial conflicts that we experience in our everyday lives. From this point of view, the myth of Oedipus is an artistic creation inspired by the universal psychological conflicts that young boys experience at a certain age.
My own observations with non-ordinary states of consciousness strongly support Jung’s belief that the archetypal world has an independent existence. This world is supraordinated to our everyday reality and represents its moving force. For example, Jung’s understanding was that our actual conflicts with our fathers (if we are male) have universal roots; those conflicts are expressions of the Oedipus myth, which exists independent of us and our everyday reality. Joseph Campbell made this point very clear in his Myths to Life By. The same idea is expressed in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Every Woman and Gods in Every Man.
It is very difficult to explain to a person who has not experienced unusual states of consciousness how it is possible to experience oneself as a universal archetype such as the Great Mother, who represents the essence of motherhood and the qualities of all mothers of the world throughout all of human history. Perhaps the best way to do that is to imagine a single, three dimensional figure. It is constructed in such a way that as you walk around it, viewing it from a new angle each time, you are presented with still another aspect of that figure—though all aspects seem to be just another view of the whole. This has actually been demonstrated in holography. Several years ago a composite hologram was exhibited in Honolulu. It was called “The Child of Hawaii,” which was a collection of individual faces of many Hawaiian children co-existing in a single holographic image. Though it actually contained scores of faces, they were all superimposed into what appeared to be a single figure but which changed, revealing a new face each time you changed your viewing angle or position.
Some mythological figures and motifs, though variations on universal archetypes, are specific to a particular culture or religion. For example: Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary have specific meanings for Christians; the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin are uniquely Buddhist; and the Rainbow Serpent belongs to the Dreamtime world of the Australian Aborigines. Regardless of their universality or specificity, deities appearing in the transpersonal realm fall into two distinct categories: the first associated with forces of light and good, such as Christ, Apollo, Isis, or Krishna; the second associated with darkness and evil, such as Satan, Hades, Set, and Ahriman. In many instances, a single deity may embody both the light and the dark, the good and the evil. This is particularly characteristic for Oriental deities, while the mythology of the Western world tends to be strictly dichotomized. Examples of such deities that transcend polarities are the Hindu Brahma or the five Buddhas described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The World of Archetypes
Many people on spiritual paths first encounter archetypal deities in the context of the death-rebirth process. In part I of this book we explored some of the ways in which various aspects of our biological histories merge with archetypes from the collective unconscious. Here the encounter with these seemingly horrifying, wrathful deities is a very important part of the death-rebirth process. For a person on a spiritual path, they are carriers of a symbolic death of the ego, a step that is necessary for spiritual opening. It is also at this point that the blissful archetypes are first encountered at the moment of rebirth or in the oceanic bliss of the womb.
The archetypal figures of both the blissful and wrathful deities are endowed with great energy and numinous power. When we encounter them, the experience is usually associated with strong emotions. The quality of the response depends on the nature of the deity; it can be anything from rapture and supreme bliss to metaphysical terror, overwhelming physical or emotional pain, and feelings of losing one’s mind. However, as powerful as these confrontations may be one does not have the sense of confronting the Supreme Being or ultimate force in the universe. These deities—blissful or wrathful—are themselves creations of the higher force, personifications of key universal principles. Joseph Campbell referred to this fact in many of his lectures, especially in the context of religious worship. He emphasized that individual deities should not be worshiped for themselves but should be seen as concrete expressions of the supreme creative force that transcends any form. In his words, they should be seen as “transparent to the transcendent of which they are expressions.”9
Many years of research have demonstrated that in non-ordinary states of consciousness we can not only witness mythic and archetypal realities, we can actually become these archetypes. We can completely identify with Sisyphus rolling his rock up the steep hill in the depths of hades. We can become Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the dark Labyrinth. We can radiate with the beauty of Aphrodite or shine in the glory of Helius and Apollo. We can take on the body image and the inner experiences of such mythic creatures as Cerberus, Cyclops, or Centaurus.
It has been remarkable to find that people raised in one culture, or belonging to a particular race, are not limited to the archetypes of that culture or race. In our research we have seen, for example, that white, urban, middle class Americans can have meaningful encounters while in non-ordinary states of consciousness with such legendary heroes as the Polynesian Maui or Shango, the Bantu god of sex and war. Over the years I have, on many occasions, witnessed European and American women who became the Hindu goddess Kali, taking on the traditional facial expressions of that figure, with the tongue stretched far out of their mouth, even though they had no previous knowledge about that figure. Conversely, during workshops in Japan and India, we witnessed several participants, born and raised in those traditions, who had powerful identifications with Christ.
Occasionally, even the world of fairy tales comes alive, and we meet or identify with mermaids, elves, fairies, gnomes, or trolls. It is particularly interesting to note that in many cases, where people had no previous knowledge of certain mythological figures, they were not only able to experience them accurately and with great detail but they were able to draw pictures with details that perfectly matched ancient descriptions of those figures. After one has seen literally thousands of pieces of evidence of this kind, it becomes quite clear that everyone has access to the archetypal themes of all times and all cultures, not just the cultures of our present biological birth.
Our research involving non-ordinary states of consciousness thus supports the concepts of C. G. Jung, who suggested that in our dreams and visions we can experience myths that are not from our own cultures and that were previously unknown to us from our readings, viewing of art, or conversations with others. This is the world of the “collective unconscious,” an infinite ocean of knowledge from which we can each draw. In this age of advanced technology, we might compare the collective unconscious to a transmitting station that constantly broadcasts every bit of program material and information ever transmitted by radio and television. At any time we can “switch channels,” changing from the channel of everyday life to which we normally stay tuned, to an infinite number of other channels, crossing the boundaries of time, space, and even species. It is virtually impossible to imagine that we are always surrounded by this information and that we are able to tap into it whenever we wish. But our analogy of the radio waves gives us an approximation of the immensity of information we can access through the collective unconscious.
Intuitive Deciphering of Universal Symbols
Since Freud’s classic work on the interpretation of dreams, the study of psychological symbols has been an important part of depth psychology. According to Freud, symbols represent something that we already know but that we find objectionable and unacceptable. In our dreams such problematic material—usually sexual in nature—is replaced by the corresponding symbol; thus, for example, a train rushing through a tunnel might express a person’s frustrated sexual desires. Freud spend many years trying to identify all the symbols that represent the male and female sexual organs, intercourse, and other aspects of instinctual life.
Jung strongly disagreed with Freud’s symbolic interpretations. According to him what Freud was talking about should be referred to as “signs”; they were simply other ways of representing a known reality, not unlike the pictograms used on traffic signs along our highways. Jung suggested that true symbols are not cryptic statements about biological functions but were references to complex transcendental realities.
For centuries, universal symbols have played important roles in many religions. The Indo-Iranian swastika, for instance, an armed cross pointing counterclockwise, is an ancient symbol of peace and well-being related to the solar disc. (In its clockwise form it became the infamous Hackenkreuz, symbol of the German Nazi Party.) The centuries-old Hindu symbols of Shiva lingam and yoni have multiple meanings, ranging from the male and female sexual organs and generative functions to static and dynamic forces of existence—pure consciousness and the energy of creation. The cross, a symbol of prehistoric origin, has deep universal meanings in many different cultures. In its most ancient connotation, it points to the sun and through the sun to the creative power of the universe. To others it symbolizes all of existence because it represents the four cardinal points or directions and the center. In the mainstream Christian tradition it symbolizes the historical crucifixion of Jesus, while in esoteric mystical Christianity it refers to different aspects of incarnation, spiritual death, and rebirth. Its Egyptian variety, the Nile cross or ankh, was the most sacred symbol of the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, where the neophytes discovered their immortality and eternal life.
The six-pointed star—two overlapping triangles pointing in opposite directions—has many different meanings, depending on the period and culture. In ancient and medieval alchemy, it portrayed the union of the four elements—earth, water, fire, and air. In the Kabbalah, it is called the “Star of David” and represents an illuminated person in whom the lower consciousness (upward pointing triangle) strives to reach higher levels and the higher consciousness (downward oriented triangle) tries to make itself effective and functional in the physical world. In the Tantric tradition, the six-pointed star represents the union of male and female principles.
The famous Taoist yin-yang symbol represents the dynamic interplay of feminine and masculine principles, or passive and active aspects of the Tao, the creative principle of the cosmos. Similarly, the lotus played an important role in the spiritual symbolism of many cultures, including those of ancient Egypt, India, and Central America; in all it was a symbol of human spiritual potential.
It continues to amaze me that many people in transpersonal states of mind not only spontaneously envision such symbols but are also able to decipher their deeper esoteric meaning—even when they hold no previous intellectual knowledge of the spiritual traditions from which these designs came. This strongly suggests that these are not logos designed by humans for religious purposes but are elements of a symbolic language belonging to the collective unconscious.
Experience of the Creator and of Cosmic Consciousness
In the most dramatic and all-encompassing transpersonal experiences, boundaries seem to dissolve and distinctions between ourselves and other people, objects, or forces disappear. We experience oneness and encounter, or even fully identify with, the creative principle of the universe. Depending on the extent to which we still maintain the sense of our everyday identity, we can experience this encounter either as an awed witness or as the creative force itself. This creative principle may take a variety of forms. Sometimes it appears as a personified Demiurge, or creator, an archetype of high order that has power over all others. I have encountered instances where people experienced more than one Creator, for example, male and female deities working jointly, as they sometimes appear in the mythologies of many cultures, or even a hierarchy of universes and creators. More frequently, the creative force of the universe is perceived as something beyond any form—pure consciousness endowed with supreme intelligence and the capacity to create any and all experiential worlds, seen and unseen, physical or etheric.
Experiences of cosmic consciousness have been described in many religious scriptures throughout history. The ultimate creative principle has been known by many names—Brahman in Hinduism, Dharmakaya in Mahayana Buddhism, the Tao in Taoism, Pneuma in Christian mysticism, Allah in Sufism, and Kether in the Kabbalah. The basic message in the mystical traditions has been that not only can we experientially connect with the creative principle but each of us, in a sense, is the creative principle. This is possible because all boundaries in the universe are ultimately illusory, arbitrary, and can therefore be transcended. The best known expression of this perennial wisdom is the famous statement Tat tvam asi (or “Thou art That,” you are the Godhead) found in the ancient Indian Upanishads. Modern research in non-ordinary states of consciousness has brought strong support for this understanding of human nature, since it shows beyond any doubt that transcendent states of consciousness can be reached by a variety of consciousness-expanding methods.
When we experience identification with the cosmic consciousness, we have the feeling of enfolding the totality of existence within us, and of comprehending the Reality that underlies all realities. We have a profound sense that we are in connection with the supreme and ultimate principle of all Being. In this state, it is absolutely clear that this principle is the ultimate and the only mystery; once its existence is accepted, everything else can be understood from it and explained. The experience of cosmic consciousness is boundless, unfathomable, and beyond expression. Yet, even a short experiential exposure to it satisfies fully our craving for understanding. All questions about the mysteries of life seem to be answered and there is no need to go any further. Communicating this to those who have not had this experience is neither possible nor necessary. It becomes a self-validating and deeply personal experience.
Probably the most famous statement about the futility of attempting to capture the essence of the cosmic source in thought or language comes from Lao-tsu, a Chinese sage who lived in the fourth century B.C.:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.10
The languages of cultures with ancient spiritual traditions that are based on experiential self-exploration (such as Chinese, Tibetan, or Sanskrit) have a rich and sophisticated vocabulary describing various mystical states of consciousness. However, even then the terms adequately convey the meaning only if we can relate them to a personal experience. In Indian spiritual and philosophical scriptures, there is the concept of Saccidananda, which describes the experience of cosmic consciousness. This composite word is made up of three roots: sat, meaning existence; chit, meaning awareness or intelligence; and ananda, meaning bliss. Thus, Saccidananda suggests “blissful intelligent awareness of existence.” It is an experience devoid of any concrete content, yet the being it represents possesses the capacity for creating infinite experiential worlds.
If the experience of encountering the ultimate creative force cannot be described in everyday language, poetry perhaps comes closer to doing it justice, though even poetry falls far short. The spiritual poetry of Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Kabir, Kahlil Gibran, Sri Aurobindo, or Saint Hildegard von Bingen comes closest to expressing this experience.
The following description of cosmic consciousness is by a person who has been involved in systematic self-exploration for a number of years. I offer it here because it provides us with at least a hint of the feelings, thoughts, and insights that arise in the process.
The experience then changed into an extremely powerful and moving experience of the Cosmic Tree. The unified field of cosmic energy that I had experienced before now became a massive tree of radiant energy suspended in space. Larger than the largest galaxy, it was composed entirely of light. The core of the tree was lost to the brilliant display but limbs and leaves were visible around its edges. I experienced myself as one of the leaves; the lives of my family and close friends were leaves clustered around me on a small branch. All of our distinguishing characteristics, what made us the individuals we were, appeared from this perspective to be quite minor, almost arbitrary variations of this fundamental energy.
I was taken around the tree and shown how to move from one person’s experience to another and it was ridiculously easy. Different lives around the globe were simply different experiences the tree was having. Choice governed all experience; different beings who were all parts of Being Itself had simply chosen these manifold experiences. At this point, I was the tree. Not that I was having the full range of its experience, but I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that Its identity was my true identity.
Though I had taken monism to heart years before, I was now actually experiencing the seamless flow of consciousness into crystallizations of embodiment. I was experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining unified. I knew that fundamentally there was only One Consciousness in the universe. From this perspective my individual identity and everybody else’s appeared temporary and almost trivial. To experience my true Identity filled me with a profound sense of numinous encounter.
For the next several hours, this Consciousness took him on an extraordinary tour of the universe. It was as if it wanted to show him its work. He was convinced that this consciousness was the Creator of our entire physical universe. It would take him somewhere, or open him up to experiences, and he would eventually come to understand the hidden workings of the cosmos. Over and over again, he was overwhelmed at the magnitude, the subtlety, and the intelligence of what he was witnessing. The beauty of the design was such that he was constantly left breathless by what he was seeing. He continues:
This tour was the most extraordinary journey of my life. The vistas of intelligent design repeatedly swept me into cognitive ecstasy. Though these experiences were amazing in their own right, the most poignant aspect of today’s session for me was not the discovered dimensions of the universe themselves, but what my seeing and understanding them meant to the Consciousness I was with. It was so happy to have someone to show its work to. I felt that it had been waiting for billions of years for embodied consciousness to evolve to the point that someone could at last see, understand, and appreciate what it had accomplished.
I felt the loneliness of this Intelligence having created such a masterpiece and having no one to appreciate its work, and I wept. I wept for its isolation and in awe of the profound love that had accepted this isolation as part of a greater plan. Behind creation, I felt a Love of extraordinary proportions. All of existence is an expression of Love. The intelligence of the universe’s design is equally matched by the depth of Love that inspired it.
Somewhere in here I realized that I was not going to be able to take back with me the knowledge I had gathered on this journey. The Intelligence I was with also knew this, making our few hours of contact all the more precious to it. There was nothing I was going to be able to do with this knowledge, except experience it now. My greatest service was simply to appreciate what I was seeing. It seemed extremely important to mirror existence back to its Creator in loving appreciation. To see, to understand, and to appreciate.11
In this type of experience we can get profound insights into the process of creation and even feel the forces and impulses involved. We can sense an impelling abundance of creative energy, immense love and compassion, an irresistible artistic impulse, boundless curiosity, and a passion for experimentation. This identification with the creative energy of the cosmos often inspires a new attitude toward life and becomes the foundation for a new understanding of existence. Most people feel exalted as they discover their real cosmic status and gain an entirely new perspective on their daily problems. Many leave behind all feelings of being victimized by their everyday trials and tribulations, or even by such global problems as economic strife and war, knowing that on another level they are active participants in the creation of a universal drama.
Occasionally, people can have negative reactions to cosmic insights of this kind. Some find it difficult to return to their everyday consciousnesses and assume roles that seem trivial in light of what they have just experienced. Others may feel disappointed because of a realization that as human beings they are just actors in a predetermined cosmic play and they resist awakening to that fact. Peoples’ reactions and insights to this experience can range from feeling disappointed to feeling that they have an important role to play in the continuing evolution of consciousness. There do not seem to be simple answers to the questions that arise as a result of the experience of cosmic consciousness; ultimately the answer we get is that our own individualized search for answers is an integral part of the evolution of cosmic consciousness.
The experience of cosmic consciousness provides important insights for deepening our understanding of the highest forms of creativity. The literature on creativity is filled with examples of extraordinary artistic, scientific, philosophical, and religious inspiration that came from a transpersonal source and that occurred in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Even the shortest “flashes” of mystical insight often trigger extraordinary results. The degree to which people participate in these moments of insight and discovery vary greatly from one individual to another. In general, the mechanisms involved fall into three large categories.
In the most superficial form of creative inspiration, the person struggles for months or years with a difficult problem and is unable to find an answer. Then, quite suddenly, unexpectedly, and often in a single burst, the person finds his or her solution. This usually comes while that person is in a non-ordinary state of consciousness—while dreaming, during a period of grave physical exhaustion, in a hallucination caused by high fever, or during meditation. The often quoted example of this is the case of Friedrich August von Kekule, who had a sudden vision of the chemical formula for benzene—an insight that gave birth to modern organic chemistry—while gazing into his fireplace coals. Similarly, the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev envisioned his famous periodic table of elements while he was lying in bed exhausted after a long struggle to categorize these elements according to their atomic weight. A long series of similar situations includes Niels Bohr’s planetary model of the atom, Heisenberg’s formulation of the basic principles of quantum physics, and the discovery of chemical transmission of neuronal impulses for which Otto Loewi received a Nobel Prize.
In a second form of creative inspiration, an idea may suddenly emerge long before its time has come. In this case, we might experience an “inspirational flash” from the transpersonal realm years or even centuries before the development of a scientific base that would justify or make sense of it. Examples of this are the atomistic theory of Leukippus and Democritus twenty-four hundred years before modern physicists had developed the technology for proving the existence of atoms, or the idea that life evolved from the ocean, formulated by the Ionic philosopher Anaximander over two thousand years before Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In recent decades, after centuries of domination by Newtonian mechanics, scientific understanding of time, space, and matter has converged with visions of the universe expressed in Eastern religious texts that are thousands of years old. This convergence of modern Western science and ancient Eastern philosophy has been discussed by Fritjof Capra in his book The Tao of Physics, as well as by other noted physicists. It is now generally accepted in modern philosophy of science that intuitive insights of this kind represent an integral and important part of the scientific exploration of nature.
The third and highest form of transpersonal inspiration is the Promethean impulse. This occurs when the scientist, inventor, artist, philosopher, or spiritual visionary has a sudden revelation during which he or she envisions an entire product in a completed form. The fact that a genius draws from transpersonal sources is reflected even in everyday language when we refer to such extraordinary achievements as “Divine Inspiration” or a “gift from God.” Perhaps the most famous example of the Promethean impulse is Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, whose principles came to him in the form of kinesthetic sensations in his muscles. Another example is Nicola Tesla’s construction of the first fully functioning alternating current generator whose complete design appeared to him in a vision. Tesla had similar visions from which he constructed working models for wireless power transmission, solar generators, generators that produce power from ocean waves, and finally a wide range of robotics.
The Promethean impulse even occurs in mathematics, a discipline we usually associate with pure reason and logic. An outstanding example of this is the eighteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Karl Friedrich Gauss, who made many important contributions to the theory of numbers, the geometry of curved surfaces, and to the application of mathematics to electricity and magnetism. He was able to perform extremely complex calculations almost instantly, and he described his scientific and mathematical insights as coming to him with the speed of a lightning bolt—by “God’s grace.” In more recent times, an uneducated young man by the name of Srinivas Ramanujan, who had grown up in a small village in India, astonished top-ranking mathematicians at Cambridge with his amazing solutions of highly complex mathematical problems. According to Ramanujan, a goddess whom he called Namagiri imparted this mathematical wisdom to him in a series of revelatory dreams.
Promethean inspiration is particularly common in the arts and religion. The English poet William Blake said of his work Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will.” The German writer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus were channeled in their complete form and required no corrections. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart claimed that he often found his symphonies in his head, in their complete and finished form, while Richard Wagner heard his music emanating from his “inner ear” as he composed. Johannes Brahms captured the Promethean inspiration very clearly in describing his creative process: “Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare inspired moods.” Even more explicit are the words of Giacomo Puccini in his description of the process he experienced in the writing of the opera Madame Butterfly: “The music of this opera was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.”12
The fates of nations and the lives of billions of people have been profoundly affected by the divine illuminations of spiritual prophets. We have only to remember the revelations of Buddha under the Bo tree, Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Paul on the road to Damascus, and Mohammed during his visionary night journey for evidence of this. The sacred scriptures of the great religions—the Vedas, the Torah, the Bible, the Koran—are inspired writings that were channeled to their authors during non-ordinary states of consciousness.
In light of the overwhelming evidence we have regarding visionary experiences in virtually every area of life, it is remarkable to think that traditional Western science continues to ignore this crucial force in human history. The paradox is that René Descartes’ Discourse on Method, the book that reformed the entire structure of Western knowledge and that provided the foundations for modern science, came to its author in three visionary dreams and a dream within a dream, which provided the key for interpreting the larger dream. What an irony it is that the entire edifice of rational, reductionist, positivist science, which today rejects “subjective knowledge” was originally inspired by a revelation in a non-ordinary state of consciousness!
The Supracosmic and Metacosmic Void
One of the most enigmatic of all transpersonal phenomena is the experience of the Void, the encounter with primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence. This extraordinary spiritual experience is of a highly paradoxical nature. The Void exists beyond form of any kind. While being a source of everything it cannot itself be derived from anything else. It is beyond space and time. While we can perceive nothing concrete in the Void there is also the profound sense that nothing is missing. This absolute emptiness is simultaneously pregnant with all of existence since it contains everything in a potential form.
The Void transcends all ordinary concepts of causality. People who have experienced it become acutely aware of the fact that various forms can emerge from this Void and take on an existence either in the phenomenal world or as an archetype, and that they can do so without any apparent cause or reason. While the idea that something could occur or take form for no reason at all may seem incomprehensible to us from our everyday state of consciousness, that same idea does not surprise us in the least when we experience the Void. As in the quantum wave theories of modern physics, the Void may be perceived as being made up of an infinite number of “quanta,” that is, bits and pieces that make up complete sets of possibilities for virtually anything to occur. By choosing a particular reality, that reality is created in consciousness.