Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
—John Steinbeck
The new vision of the psyche described in this book has far-reaching implications not only for each of us as individuals but for professionals in psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, and medicine. It can also help open up vast new territories in the study of history, comparative religion, anthropology, philosophy, and even politics. An in-depth study of the impact of this work on virtually every area of human exploration would, of course, require many volumes. But it is possible to briefly outline some of the most important areas affected by our new understanding of human consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, we can look at those implications in terms of the following four categories:
Human Consciousness and Its Relationship to Matter
Newtonian-Cartesian science views matter as the foundation of the universe. Scientists who adhere to this system of thought portray consciousness as a product of physiological processes taking place in the brain. From such a perspective, each of our consciousnesses is confined to the inside of our skulls, absolutely separated from the consciousnesses of other people. Traditional science also looks upon consciousness as an exclusively human phenomenon and tends to treat even the highest non-human life forms as little more than unconscious machines. However, careful study of the experiences that become available to us through non-ordinary states of consciousness, particularly those of a transpersonal nature, offer convincing evidence that these old definitions of consciousness are incomplete and incorrect.
While the picture we have here of human consciousness boxed up inside the skull might appear to be true where everyday states of consciousness are concerned, it ceases to explain what happens when we enter non-ordinary consciousness states such as trance states, and spontaneous psychospiritual crises, or those states achieved through meditation, hypnosis, psychedelic sessions, and experiential psychotherapy. The amazingly broad spectrum of experiences that become available under these circumstances clearly suggests that the human psyche has the potential for transcending what we ordinarily consider the limitations of space and time. Modern consciousness research reveals that our psyches have no real and absolute boundaries; on the contrary, we are part of an infinite field of consciousness that encompasses all there is—beyond space-time and into realities we have yet to explore.
Our most current research reveals that consciousness and the human experience are mediated by the brain, but they do not originate there, nor are they absolutely dependent on the brain. Consciousness clearly can do things that the brain and the sensory organs cannot. A suspicion that this might be so is not limited to transpersonal psychology and actually was expressed by one of the fathers of modern brain research, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Toward the end of his life, Penfield wrote the book The Mystery of Mind, in which he summarized his observations concerning the relationship between the human brain and consciousness. He stated that it was his opinion as a neurosurgeon that consciousness does not have its source in the brain. Later research, and particularly thanatology in its studies of near-death experiences, have added convincing evidence for Penfield’s position.
New scientific findings are beginning to support beliefs of cultures thousands of years old, showing that our individual psyches are, in the last analysis, a manifestation of cosmic consciousness and intelligence that flows through all of existence. We never completely lose contact with this cosmic consciousness because we are never fully separated from it. This is a concept found independently in mystical traditions throughout the world; Aldous Huxley called it the “perennial philosophy.”
The new approach to the human psyche that our most advanced research suggests closes the gap between traditional Western science and the wisdom of spiritual systems that are based on centuries of systematic observations of consciousness. When we take into consideration the new cartography described in this book, important cultural phenomena such as shamanism, the Eastern spiritual systems, and the mystical traditions of the world suddenly become normal and understandable forms of human endeavor, rather than psychopathological aberrations or fly-by-night fads.
In view of the new cartography of human consciousness, we begin to look upon studies by anthropologists and historians in a new light. Equipped with this knowledge of perinatal experiences, transpersonal experiences, and psychoid phenomena, we find new meanings in ancient rites of passage, healing ceremonies, and the ancient mysteries of death and rebirth. We can take as an example the rites of passage, ceremonies that were so much a part of human life before the Industrial Age; they marked and aided the progress of important biological or social transitions, such as the birth of a child, circumcision, puberty, marriage, death, or tribal migration. Most of these ceremonies involved non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by any of a number of techniques. Initiates taking part in these rituals often experienced death and rebirth, as well as profound connections in the transpersonal realm. Various healing ceremonies, for individuals, entire tribes, or even the entire cosmos, also typically used mind-altering techniques, through which links were made between participants and higher powers in nature or the universe.
In many advanced cultures, people were able to have similar experiences by exploring the sacred mysteries of death and rebirth. These were transformation rites based on specific mythologies and representing important elements of life in ancient civilizations. In Babylonia, for example, death and rebirth rites were held in the name of Ishtar and Tammuz; in Egypt they were performed in the name of Isis and Osiris. Ancient Greece and Asia Minor had the Eleusinian mysteries, the Dionysian rites, the mysteries of Attis and Adonis, and others. In antiquity, many important cultural and political figures were initiates of these mysteries. This included the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the playwright Euripides, and military leader Alcibiades. In all these traditions, participants had the experience of transcending everyday realities and exploring realities quite outside the realm of ordinary consciousness.
Traditional psychiatry has never adequately explained these forms of experience, their universality, and their cultural as well as psychological importance. The opportunity to scientifically observe non-ordinary states of consciousness with people from our own culture has provided us with some brand new clues into the meaning of the ancient journeys into other realities. It is now clear that these ancient practices were neither pathological phenomena nor the products of primitive superstition; rather, they were legitimate and highly sophisticated spiritual practices that acknowledged and paid homage to a much broader view of consciousness than has been held by those who adhere to the Newtonian-Cartesian model of reality. What is more, when the non-ordinary states are opened up to them, even scientifically cautious, and highly intelligent people of our own time and culture, find these experiences deeply moving and personally meaningful, providing them with dramatic breakthroughs in their beliefs.
One of the most important changes most people experience through non-ordinary states of consciousness involves a new appreciation for the role of spirituality in the universal scheme of things. Within the present century, academic psychology and psychiatry dismissed spirituality as a product of superstition, primitive magical thinking, and outright pathology. However, in the emerging understanding provided us by modern consciousness research over the past two decades, we are beginning to see that spirituality is inspired and sustained by perinatal and transpersonal experiences that originate in the deepest recesses of the human mind. These visionary experiences have a primary numinous quality, as C. G. Jung called it; they were the original sources of all great religions. Moreover, it has become obvious that human beings have a profound need for transpersonal experiences and for states in which they transcend their individual identities to feel their place in a larger whole that is timeless. This spiritual craving seems to be more basic and compelling than the sexual drive, and if it is not satisfied it can result in serious psychological disturbances.
The Nature of Emotional and Psychosomatic Disorders
New observations of human consciousness are also bringing about radical shifts in our views of mental health. Through specific historical developments, psychiatry became a medical discipline. This process was set in motion in the last century, when biological causes, such as infections, tumors, deficiencies, and degenerative diseases of the brain, were found for some—but by no means all—mental disorders. Although further scientific studies failed to prove the existence of biological causes for most neuroses, depressions, psychosomatic diseases, and psychotic states, medicine continued to dominate psychiatry because it was able to control the symptoms of many mental disorders.
At the present time, the medical model continues to play a paramount role in psychiatric theory, clinical practice, the education of physicians, and forensics. The term mental disease is loosely applied to many conditions where no organic basis has been found. As in medicine, the symptoms are seen as manifestations of a pathological process, and the intensity of symptoms is viewed as a direct measure of the seriousness of the disorder. Much of mainstream psychiatry focuses its efforts on suppressing symptoms. This practice equates the alleviation of symptoms with “improvement” and intensification of the same with a “worsening” of the clinical condition.
Another legacy of medicine in psychiatry is the emphasis placed on assigning diagnostic labels. However, while it is possible in purely physical illness to establish relatively accurate diagnostic labels based on clinical observation and laboratory tests, diagnostic labels in psychiatry are far more elusive. In addition, unlike the diagnoses of physical illness, the diagnostic labels in psychiatry do not provide physicians with clearly defined courses of treatment. In psychiatry, personal philosophy and beliefs, including the human relationships one establishes with patients, often play important roles in determining the course of treatment for most patients. For example, organically oriented psychiatrists may prescribe electroshock therapy for neurotics, while psychologically oriented psychiatrists may use psychotherapy with psychotics.
Work with people in non-ordinary states of consciousness has brought about remarkable changes in understanding and profound new insights about emotional and psychosomatic disorders that have no clearly defined organic cause. This work has shown that we all carry internal records of physical and emotional traumas, some of them biographical or perinatal in origin, others transpersonal in nature. Some people can reach perinatal and transpersonal experiences through meditation techniques, while others get results only through extensive experiential psychotherapy or psychedelic sessions. Some people whose psychological defenses are not so vigorous, may have such unconscious material surface spontaneously in the middle of their everyday activities.
When we start experiencing symptoms of a disorder that is emotional rather than organic in nature, it is important to realize that this is not the beginning of a “disease” but the emergence into our consciousness of material that was previously buried in the unconscious parts of our being. When this process is completed, the symptoms associated with the unconscious material are permanently resolved and they tend to disappear. Thus, the emergence of symptoms is not the onset of disease but the beginning of its resolution. Similarly, the intensity of symptoms should not be taken as a measure of the seriousness of the disease so much as an indication of the rate of the healing process. Clinical psychiatrists have known for decades that the patients with the most dramatic symptoms tend to have a much better prognosis than those with a few slowly and insidiously developing ones. And yet, the traditional treatment of choice is to suppress symptoms—preventing them from fully surfacing—a practice that, ironically, is known to prolong emotional illness.
Non-ordinary states of consciousness tend to work like an inner radar system, seeking out the most powerful emotional charges and bringing the material associated with them into consciousness where they can be resolved. In this process, already existing symptoms are exaggerated and the previously hidden, “unconscious material” that supports them comes to the surface. This process of the exaggeration of symptoms, followed by their resolution, parallels the principles of the healing system called homeopathy. Rather than defining symptoms as the problem, homeopathy sees symptoms as manifestations of the healing process. This, of course, runs contrary to the theories of modern medicine.
The research dealing with non-ordinary states of consciousness, has also given us new insights into the relative importance of postnatal biographical material. In mainstream psychiatry, we consider traumatic experiences in early childhood, along with more recent events in a client’s life, to be the key sources of neuroses and many psychosomatic disorders. With a few exceptions, psychiatric theoreticians feel that psychotic disturbances cannot be understood in purely psychological terms but must be caused by brain pathology not yet identified. However, our most recent research challenges both these assumptions.
Through observing clients in non-ordinary states we discover that their neurotic or psychosomatic symptoms often involve more than the biographical level of the psyche. Initially, we may find that the symptoms are connected to traumatic events that the person suffered in infancy or childhood, just as described in traditional psychology. However, when the process continues and the experiences deepen, the same symptoms are found to be also related to particular aspects of the birth trauma. Additional roots of the same issue can then be traced even further to transpersonal sources, for example, an experience in a past life, an unresolved archetypal theme, or the person’s identification with a specific animal.
Thus a person suffering from psychogenic asthma might first relive one or more childhood events involving suffocation, such as a near-drowning, suffering from whooping cough, or a bout of diphtheria. A deeper source of the same problem can be the near-suffocation of this person while in the birth canal. On the transpersonal level, the asthmatic symptoms might be related to past life experiences of being strangled or hanged, or even to elements of animal consciousness, such as identification with an animal victim smothered by a boa constrictor. For a complete resolution of this form of asthma, it is important to confront and integrate all the different experiences connected with the problem.
Deep experiential work has revealed similar multilevel structures in other conditions treated by psychiatrists. The perinatal levels of the unconscious, which we explored in the first chapters of this book, are important repositories of difficult emotions and sensations and are frequently found to be the source of anxiety, depression, feelings of hopelessness and inferiority, as well as aggression and violent impulses. Reinforced by later traumas from infancy and childhood, this emotional material can lead to various phobias, depressions, sadomasochistic tendencies, criminal behavior, and hysterical symptoms. The muscular tensions, pains, and other forms of physical discomfort that are a natural part of the birth trauma can later develop into psychosomatic problems such as asthma, migraine headaches, peptic ulcers, and colitis.
In our exploration of the third perinatal matrix (BPM III), we described how our experience could be associated with strong libidinal arousal. Thus, it is safe to assume that our first encounter with sexual feelings is associated with anxiety, pain, and aggression. Furthermore, it is here that we also encounter blood, mucus, and possibly even urine and feces. These associations would seem to be natural bases for the development of sexual deviations and perversions, even those as extreme as sexual murder. Sigmund Freud shook the world when he announced that sexuality does not begin in puberty but exists in infancy. Our newest observations suggest that we all experienced sexual feelings long before puberty or infancy—in fact, before we even came into this world. As much as this idea might stretch our sense of credulity, it provides a very plausible explanation for the sources of sexual pathology, particularly in its most extreme and bizarre expressions.
Additional observations suggest that suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, and drug addiction also have perinatal roots. Of special significance seems to be liberal use of anesthesia during childbirth; certain substances used to ease the mother’s pain teach the newborn on a cellular level to see the drug state as a natural escape route from pain and difficult emotions. These findings were recently confirmed by clinical studies, linking various forms of suicidal behavior to specific aspects of biological birth, among them: the choice of drugs to kill oneself was linked to anesthesia use during childbirth; the choice of hanging to strangulation at birth; and the choice of violent suicidal means to violent birth. As in the above example of psychogenic asthma, additional roots for all these problems can be found in the transpersonal domain: suicide attempts by hanging related to suffocation or being hanged in past lives; suicide by an overdose of drugs related to past life experiences with drugs; and suicide by violent means such as deliberately crashing an automobile, related to a past life event where a person underwent an experience with similar characteristics.
Our new understanding of emotional difficulties is not limited to neuroses and psychosomatic disorders. It can be extended to many extreme psychological disturbances known as psychoses. Traditional efforts to explain various psychotic symptoms psychologically have not been very convincing, particularly when clinicians attempted to interpret them only in terms of biographical events experienced from infancy through childhood. Psychotic states often involve extreme emotions and physical sensations, such as abysmal despair, profound metaphysical loneliness, hellish physical torture, murderous aggression or, conversely, oneness with the universe, ecstatic rapture, and heavenly bliss. During a psychotic episode a person might experience his own death and rebirth, or even the destruction and recreation of the entire world. The content of such episodes is often fantastic and exotic, featuring various mythological beings, infernal and paradisean landscapes, events from other countries and cultures, and extraterrestrial encounters. Neither the intensity of the emotions and sensations nor the extraordinary content of psychotic states can be reasonably explained in terms of early biographical traumas, such as hunger, emotional deprivation, or other frustrations of an infant.
If we expand the cartography of the psyche in the ways described in this book, many states traditionally attributed to some unknown pathological process in the brain suddenly appear in an entirely new light. The trauma of birth, which constitutes an important aspect of the unconscious, is a very painful and potentially life-threatening event that typically lasts many hours. It is thus certainly a much more plausible source of extreme emotions and sensations than most events in childhood. Furthermore, the mythological dimensions of many psychotic experiences represent a normal and natural characteristic of the transpersonal domain of the psyche, as suggested by Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. Moreover, the emergence of these deep elements from the unconscious can be seen as the psyche’s attempt to get rid of traumatic imprints and simplify its functioning.
All these observations led my wife, Christina, and me to the conclusion that many states currently diagnosed as mental diseases, and treated routinely by suppressive medication, are actually psychospiritual crises, or “spiritual emergencies,” as we call them. If properly understood and supported, they can result in healing and personal transformation. Throughout centuries, episodes of this kind have been described in the mystical literature as important aspects of the spiritual journey. They have occurred in the lives of shamans, founders of the great religions, saints, prophets, re-nunciates, and initiates in sacred mysteries of all ages. In 1980, Christina founded the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN)—a worldwide organization of people offering support and guidance to individuals in such psychospiritual crises—as an alternative to traditional treatment. Today the SEN mailing list contains thousands of addresses of people from the United States and many other countries of the world.
Psychotherapy and the Healing Practices
In most existing psychotherapy systems, the goal is to understand how the psyche works and why emotional disorders develop. Their goal in therapy is to use the theories they develop to change the way clients think, feel, behave, and make life decisions. Even in the most non-directive forms of psychotherapy, the therapist is considered to be the key vehicle for the healing process because he or she possesses knowledge and training superior to the client. This, then, is seen as sufficient qualification for the therapist to guide the client’s self-exploration through appropriate questions and interpretations.
The problem is that few schools of therapy agree about the most fundamental issues concerning the mysteries of the human psyche, the nature of psychopathology, or even therapeutic techniques. The approach to the same disorder differs according to the personal belief system of the therapist and to the school he or she belongs to. There have been no conclusive studies showing that certain schools are superior to others in getting therapeutic results. It is known that “good therapists” of different schools get good results and “bad therapists” get poor results. Moreover, the resulting changes in clients seem to have very little to do with what the therapists believe they are doing. It has been suggested that the success of psychotherapy might have nothing to do with the therapist’s technique and the content of verbal interpretations, but depend on factors such as the quality of the relationship in the therapeutic setting, the degree of empathy, or the client’s feelings of being understood and supported.
In traditional verbal psychotherapies, clients are expected to provide information about their present and past problems, and possibly describe their dreams, which are thought to provide insights into the unconscious. It is then up to the therapist to decide what is psychologically relevant. Thus Freudian analysts focus on sexual issues, Adlerian analysts emphasize material related to inferiority feelings and the pursuit of power, and so on. By contrast, the work with non-ordinary states of consciousness bypasses the problems of the theoretical differences between various schools and the therapist’s role as interpreter of psychological material. As you will recall, in non-ordinary states, the material with the strongest emotional charge is automatically selected and brought into consciousness. These non-ordinary states also provide necessary insights and mobilize our own inner healing forces with all their inherent wisdom and power. Try as we might to duplicate these natural healing processes, no school of psychology has even come close.
The most important requirement for the therapist employing non-ordinary states of consciousness is not to master specific techniques and steer the client in the desired direction, but to accept and trust the spontaneous unfolding of the process. It is essential to do this unconditionally, even if at times the therapist does not intellectually understand what is happening. This task challenges most professionals who depend on the theoretical guidance of their particular school of thought. With no effort on the part of the therapist, symptoms clear and personal transformations occur as a result of the unfolding of an unpredictable array of experiences—which may be biographical, perinatal, transpersonal, or all three. In Holotropic Breathwork™, in the work with spiritual emergencies, and in thousands of psychedelic therapy sessions in my earliest research, I have seen many dramatic healings and positive personality changes, which have completely eluded all my efforts at rational understanding.
In work with non-ordinary states of consciousness, the roles of therapist and client are quite different from those in traditional psychotherapy. The therapist is not the active agent who causes the changes in the client by specific interventions, but is somebody who intelligently cooperates with the inner healing forces of the client. This understanding of the role of the therapist is in congruence with the original meaning of the Greek word therapeutes, which means “the person who assists in the healing process.” It is also in agreement with C. G. Jung’s approach to psychotherapy, wherein it is believed that the task of the therapist is to mediate for the client a contact and exchange with his or her inner self, which then guides the process of transformation and individuation. The wisdom for change and healing comes from the collective unconscious and surpasses by far the knowledge that is intellectually available to the therapist.
While both therapist and client may occasionally feel frustrated because of the lack of rational understanding in the healing process, the dramatic positive changes that clients achieve, in relatively short periods of time, are more than sufficient compensation. In this kind of work, it becomes clear that it is impossible to use a rigid conceptual framework that forces clients’ issues into preconceived pigeonholes. As Jung suggested, there is no guarantee that what we observe in a particular therapeutic session has already been seen before and can be understood in terms of existing schools. The psyche is without boundaries and has seemingly infinite resources and creativity. For this reason, it is possible that in any therapeutic encounter we may very well witness or experience phenomena that have never before been observed. This makes therapeutic work an exciting ongoing adventure, filled with discovery and new learning at every turn.
The Roots of Human Violence and the Current Global Crisis
Among the most important implications of the new model of the psyche are insights of sociopolitical nature. Traditional science’s attempts to offer plausible explanations for the atrocities that characterize much of human history have been generally unconvincing, leaving much to be desired. The image of man as the “naked ape” who harbors murderous instincts that are a heritage from his animal past, fails to account for what the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called “malignant aggression,” which is uniquely human. While animals fight for food, sexual opportunity, and territorial concerns, no animal in nature comes even close to duplicating the senseless cruelties committed by human beings. Psychological efforts to explain our violence in terms of the biographical model of human consciousness have been equally frustrating and inadequate.
Just as we recognized the failure to account for individual psychopathology in terms of the traditional biographically oriented model, the inadequacy of these same methods becomes even more obvious when applied to the mass psychopathology of bloody wars, revolutions, cruelties of totalitarian regimes, the bestiality of concentration camps, and genocide. As with extremely violent behaviors of individuals, emotional pain experienced in infancy and childhood simply does not account for aberrant behavior of such proportions.
Psychological traumas associated with experiences shaping our psyches after our births are not sufficient to explain the horrors of Nazism, the atrocities of a Stalin regime, or the monstrous behavior associated with Apartheid. But when we add the perinatal and transpersonal perspectives that we find expressed in non-ordinary states of consciousness, events such as these begin to be more understandable. The trauma of birth involves a life-and-death struggle, with a potential for becoming the basis for many extremes of emotion. As an event that we all share, it has the potential for bringing about mass scale psychological aberrations, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people sharing a common experience of tremendous unconscious rage. The archetypes of the collective unconscious could also be sources of mass psychopathology, since they are endowed by extraordinary psychological power, cutting across all individual boundaries.
War is complex, of course, and involves many factors, including historical, political, economic, as well as psychological roots. We should not assume that war can be reduced to psychological factors only. However, while the more tangible aspects of the conflicts existing between nations have been receiving much attention, the psychological dimensions and roots of these crises have been ignored. Here modern consciousness research offers some interesting insights and clues. In non-ordinary states, the material that emerges from the unconscious frequently includes themes of war, totalitarian regimes, revolutions, the horrors of concentration camps, and genocide. Scenes expressing these themes can be extremely intense, experienced with a full range of emotions and physical sensations of both the victims and perpetrators.
When the sessions are dominated by BPM II, the person connects with the feelings of the child who is stuck in the birth canal before the cervix opens. This is often accompanied by scenes from human history experienced in the role of the victim. Such experiences involve identification with the population oppressed by a totalitarian regime, with civilians suffering in a war, with inmates of concentration camps, and with the downtrodden of all ages. Sequences of this kind occur even in sessions of people who have never personally experienced these situations in real life; and yet, their unconscious has intimate knowledge of all the emotions and sensations involved.
When the process moves to BPM III, the person identifies with the child struggling to escape from the birth canal after the cervix opens. At this point, the nature of the accompanying sociopolitical experiences changes dramatically. There are still scenes of violence but now the individual also identifies with the role of the aggressor. The process oscillates between identification with the victim and perpetrator; occasionally, one can also become an external observer. The predominant theme here is revolution; the oppression has become intolerable and the tyrant has to be overthrown. The goal is to attain freedom where one can “breathe” again. The experiences involve scenes from the French or the Bolshevik revolutions, the American Civil War, and other fights for freedom. And the actual moment of birth is often accompanied by scenes depicting the victories in various revolutions or the ends of wars.
The rich and comprehensive nature of emotions and sensations involved in these experiences suggest that they are not individually fabricated from sources such as adventure books, movies, and television shows. After witnessing thousands of therapy sessions in which material of this kind was involved I am thoroughly convinced that it originates in the collective unconscious. When, in our inner exploration, we reach the memory of the trauma of birth, this seems to open the gates into the collective unconscious where we access experiences of people who underwent similar predicaments in real life.
The Tyranny of the Shadow Self
After examining material of this kind for more than twenty years, I have been inevitably drawn to the very real possibility that the perinatal level of our unconscious, the part of our psyches that “knows” so intimately the history of human violence, may actually be partially responsible for wars, revolutions, and similar atrocities. Let me bring in another piece of evidence that does not come from modern consciousness research, but from careful historical research.
Following the publication of my first book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, I received a letter from Lloyd de Mause, a New York psychoanalyst and journalist. De Mause is one of the founders of psychohistory, a discipline that applies the findings of depth psychology to history and political science. Psychohistorians study such issues as the relationship between the childhood history of political leaders and their system of values and decision-making processes. They also try to establish links between child-rearing practices of a particular time and the nature of wars and revolutions. Lloyd de Mause was very interested in my findings concerning the trauma of birth and its possible sociopolitical implications, because they supported his own research.
For many years, de Mause had been studying the psychological aspects of the periods preceding wars and revolutions; it interested him how military leaders can successfully mobilize masses of peaceful civilians and transform them into killing machines. His approach was very original and creative—in addition to the analysis of historical sources, he drew data of great psychological importance from popular caricatures, jokes, dreams, personal imagery, slips of the tongue, side comments of speakers, and even doodles and scribbles on the edge of the rough drafts of political documents. By the time he contacted me, he had analyzed in this way seventeen situations preceding the outbreak of wars and revolutionary upheavals, spanning many centuries—from antiquity to most recent times.
He was struck by the extraordinary abundance of figures of speech, metaphors, and images related to biological birth that he found in this historical material. Military leaders and politicians describing critical situations and making declarations of war typically use terms that apply equally well to perinatal distress. They accuse the enemy as “choking and strangling us,” of “squeezing the last breath out of our lungs,” of “confining” us, and “not giving us enough space to live” (Hitler’s Lebensraum). Equally frequent are allusions to dark caves, tunnels, and confusing labyrinths, dangerous abysses into which we might be pushed, and the threat of engulfment or drowning. Similarly, the promise of resolution comes in the form of perinatal images: leaders promise to guide us to the “light on the other end of the tunnel,” to “lead us out of the labyrinth,” and guarantee that after the oppressor is overcome, everybody will again “breathe freely.”
The subjects of Lloyd de Mause’s research included Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolph Hitler, Khrushchev, and Kennedy. He also found birth symbolism in the statements of Admiral Shimada and Ambassador Kurassa before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Particularly chilling was the use of perinatal language in connection with the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The airplane was given the name of the pilot’s mother, Enola Bay; the bomb had been nicknamed “The Little Boy,” which was painted on its side; and the code sent to Washington to signal its successful detonation was “The baby was born.” Since the time of our correspondence, Lloyd de Mause has collected many additional historical examples and refined his thesis that our memories of perinatal trauma play an important role in violent social activity.
Further support for these ideas can be found in Sam Keen’s excellent book The Faces of the Enemy. Keen brought together an outstanding collection of war posters, cartoons, and caricatures from many different historical periods and cultures. He demonstrated that the way the enemy is described and portrayed during a war or revolution is a stereotype that shows very little variation and has very little to do with the actual characteristics of the culture involved. According to Keen, the alleged images of the enemy are essentially projections of the repressed and unacknowledged shadow aspects of our own unconscious minds.1 Although we would certainly find in human history instances of “just wars,” those who initiate warring activities are typically substituting external targets for elements in their own psyches that should be properly faced in personal self-exploration.
Sam Keen’s theoretical framework does not specifically include the perinatal domain of the unconscious. However, the analysis of his material reveals a preponderance of symbolic images that are characteristic for BPM II and BPM III. The enemy is typically depicted as a dangerous octopus, a vicious dragon, a multiheaded hydra, a giant venomous tarantula, or an engulfing Leviathan. Other frequently used symbols include vicious predatory felines or birds, monstrous sharks, and ominous snakes, particularly vipers and boa constrictors. Scenes depicting strangulation or crushing, ominous whirlpools, and treacherous quicksands also abound in pictures from the time of wars, revolutions, and political crises. The juxtaposition of paintings from non-ordinary states of consciousness that depict perinatal experiences with the historical pictorial documentation collected by Lloyd de Mause and Sam Keen offer strong evidence for the perinatal roots of human violence.
According to the insights provided jointly by observations from non-ordinary states of consciousness and the findings of psychohistorians, we all carry in our deep unconscious powerful energies and emotions associated with the trauma of birth that we have not adequately mastered and assimilated. For some of us, these aspects of our psyches can be completely unconscious, while others can have varying degrees of awareness about their influence. When material of this kind is activated from within, or by real events in the external world, it can lead to bizarre individual psychopathology, including violence for which there seems to be no visible cause. It seems that, for unknown reasons, the awareness of the perinatal elements can increase simultaneously in a large number of people; this creates an atmosphere of tension, anxiety, and anticipation. A leader such as Hitler is perhaps more strongly influenced by perinatal energies than others in his culture while at the same time having the power to manipulate the collective behavior of an entire nation. With these two factors aligned it is easy for him to disown his unacceptable (and unconscious) feelings (the “Shadow self” in Jung’s terminology) and project them onto an external situation. The collective discomfort is blamed on the enemy and military intervention is offered as a solution.
War provides the opportunity to abandon psychological defenses that ordinarily keep the dangerous perinatal tendencies in check. Freud’s superego, a psychological force that demands restraint and civilized behavior, is replaced by the “war superego”: we now receive praise for the same behaviors that are unacceptable or even criminal in peacetime—murder, indiscriminate destruction, and pillaging. Once war erupts, the destructive and self-destructive impulses can be given free rein. The perinatal elements that we normally encounter in a certain stage of the process of inner exploration and transformation (BPM II and BPM III) are now manifest in real situations outside us, either in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield or in the form of television news. Various no exit situations, sadomasochistic orgies, sexual violence, bestial and demonic behavior, explosive energy releases, and scatology—which we ordinarily associate with perinatal imagery—are all enacted in wars and revolutions with extraordinary vividness and power.
Acting out unconscious impulses—whether these occur individually, in self-destructive behavior or interpersonal conflict, or collectively, through wars and revolutions—does not result in transformation, as would occur by bringing the same material to full consciousness, since insight and therapeutic intention are missing. Even when violent behavior results in victory, the goal of the unconscious birth memory—which was the driving force behind such events—is not achieved. The most triumphant external victory does not deliver what the unconscious expected or hoped for: an inner sense of emotional liberation and spiritual rebirth. Immediately following the initial intoxication of triumph comes a sober awakening followed by bitter disappointment. And it usually does not take long before a carbon copy of the previous oppressive system emerges from the ruins, since the same unconscious forces continue to operate in the individual and collective unconscious of the people. When we look carefully at history, we see this same cycle occurring again and again, whether the events involved are called the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, or World War II.
For many years, at the time when Czechoslovakia had a Marxist regime, I conducted deep experiential work in Prague. During this period, I collected a great deal of fascinating material concerning the psychological dynamics of Communism. Issues related to Communist ideology typically emerged while my clients were struggling with perinatal energies and emotions. It became obvious that the passion revolutionaries feel toward their oppressors receives powerful psychological reinforcement from their revolt against the inner prisons of their perinatal experiences. And, conversely, the need to coerce and dominate others was expressed time and time again as an effort to overcome the fear of being overwhelmed by one’s own unconscious. The murderous entanglement of oppressor and revolutionary thus seems to be an externalized expression of the turmoil experienced in the birth canal. This is not to say that there existed no external political problems to overcome; the point is that perinatal themes, felt with incredible intensity, dictated the ways in which these conflicts were perceived and acted out.
The Communist vision contains elements of psychological truth that make it appealing to large numbers of people. The basic notion that a dramatic experience of revolutionary proportions must occur before suffering and oppression will end, and that this upheaval will bring greater harmony, is correct in terms of the process of psychological death and rebirth and inner transformation. However, it is dangerously false when projected to the external world as a political ideology. The basic fallacy lies in the fact that what is essentially an archetypal pattern of spiritual death and rebirth is being given the form of an atheistic and antispiritual program.
It is interesting to note that while Communist revolutions have been extremely successful in their destructive phase, the promised brotherhood and harmony their victories promised have not come. Instead, the new orders have bred regimes where oppression, cruelty, and injustice ruled supreme. If the above observations are correct, no external interventions have a chance to create a better world, unless they are associated with a profound transformation of human consciousness.
Echoes and Reflections of Hell
The perinatal dynamics can also help us understand otherwise incomprehensible phenomena, such as the Nazi concentration camps. Professor Bastians from Leyden, Holland, who has had extensive experience in the treatment of the so-called concentration camp syndrome—emotional problems that develop decades after incarceration—pointed out that the concentration camp is in the last analysis a product of the human mind. The fact that the mental image of such an institution must have preceded its material existence suggests that there is a corresponding area in the unconscious psyche. Bastians expressed this quite succinctly: “Before there was man in the concentration camp, there was the concentration camp in man.”2 I have described earlier that the imagery involving Nazi concentration camps, Stalin’s labor camps, and other similar themes spontaneously emerge in the experiences of people confronting the perinatal level of their unconscious. Closer examination of the general and specific conditions in the Nazi concentration camps reveal that they are a realistic enactment of the nightmarish atmosphere of BPM II and BPM III.
Consider the barbed wire barriers, high-voltage fences, watch towers with machine guns, mine fields, and packs of trained dogs. All these certainly helped to created a hellish, archetypal image of the no exit situation so characteristic of BPM II. The elements of violence, bestiality, and sadism contributed to the atmosphere of insanity and horror that is so familiar to people who have relived their births. The sexual abuse of women and men, including rape and sadistic practices, existed on the individual level, as well as in the “houses of dolls,” the institutions that provided “entertainment” for the officers and offered an outlet for their most violent unconscious perinatal impulses.
One of the most astonishing aspects of the concentration camp practices was the violation of the basic hygienic precautions and the indulgence in scatology. Since this was in sharp contrast with the meticulous German sense of cleanliness and involved a disregard for the danger of mass epidemics, this clearly indicates that irrational unconscious forces were involved. Among the favorite jokes of the Nazi officers was to throw the eating bowls of the prisoners into the latrines and order them to retrieve them. At other times, they kicked inmates into the excrement as they squatted down to relieve themselves. As a result, many prisoners actually drowned in human waste.
Suffocation in gas chambers and the fires in the ovens of the crematoria were additional elements in the hellish, nightmare environment of the camps. All these are themes that people in non-ordinary states of consciousness often encounter in their inner experiences in the context of BPM III. In peacetime, atrocities similar to these have been perpetrated during prison uprisings; apparently overcrowding and the abuse of prisoners tends to activate unconscious perinatal elements, and eventually erupts in violent uprising and rebellion.
Significant roots for major sociopolitical upheavals can also be found on the transpersonal level. C. G. Jung believed that the archetypes of the collective unconscious not only influence behavior of individuals, they also govern large historical movements. From this point of view, entire nations and cultural groups are capable of acting out mythological themes. For example, in the decade preceding the outbreak of World War II, Jung found in the dreams of his German patients many elements from the Nordic myth about “Ragnarok,” the twilight of the gods. He concluded from this that this archetype was emerging in the collective psyche of the German nation; he predicted that it would lead to a major world catastrophe that would ultimately turn out to be self-destructive for the German people. In many instances, clever leaders specifically use archetypal images to achieve their political goals. Thus Hitler exploited the mythological motifs of the supremacy of the Nordic race and of the millennial empire, as well as the ancient Aryan symbols of the swastika and the eagle. Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein have ignited the imaginations of their Moslem followers by references to jihad, that is, the holy war against the infidels.
Although it is not an easy task to establish conclusive proof in this area, our full consideration of the perinatal and transpersonal levels of the psyche promises new and exciting possibilities for the study and understanding of human history and culture. Probably the most intriguing among the new insights are those related to the current global crisis. We all have the dubious privilege of living in an era when the world drama is reaching its culmination. The violence, greed, and acquisitiveness that have shaped human history in the past centuries have reached such proportions that they could easily lead not only to complete annihilation of the human species, but to extermination of all life on this planet. The various diplomatic, political, military, economic, and ecological efforts to correct the present course all seem to make matters worse rather than better.
Does it not seem possible that our efforts at peace fail because none of our present approaches have addressed that dimension which seems to be at the center of the global crisis: the human psyche? There is enough wealth in the world to guarantee a good living standard for everyone on the face of the earth. Similarly, it is not necessary for millions of people to die of diseases for which contemporary medicine has effective remedies. Modern science has the know-how to develop clean and renewable sources of energy and prevent the deterioration of our physical environment. The main obstacle we face as a species is found in the present evolutionary level of our consciousness. That is the primary cause of the senseless plundering of natural resources, the pollution of our water, air, and soil, and the shameful waste of unimaginable amounts of money and energy in the insanity of the arms race. For this reason, it is important to learn as much as we can about the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the predicament we are all facing.
In our modern world we have externalized many of the essential elements of BPM III. When working to achieve transformation on an individual level, we know that we must face and come to terms with these themes. The same elements that we would encounter in the process of psychological death and rebirth in our visionary experiences appear today as stories on our evening news. We see the unleashing of enormous aggressive impulses in wars and revolutionary upheavals throughout the world, in the rising criminality, in terrorism, and in race riots. Sexual experiences and behaviors are taking unprecedented forms, manifested as sexual freedom for youngsters, promiscuity, open marriages, gay liberation, sadomasochistic parlors, overtly sexual books, plays, movies, and many others. The demonic element is also becoming increasingly manifest in the modern world. The rising interest in satanic cults and witchcraft, the increasing popularity of books and horror movies with occult themes, and satanic crimes attest to that fact. The scatological dimension is evident in the progressive industrial pollution, accumulation of waste products on a global scale, and rapidly deteriorating hygienic conditions in large cities.
Many people with whom we have worked have volunteered very interesting insights into this situation. Over the past few years hundreds of people have expressed the belief that humanity is at a crossroads, facing either collective annihilation or an evolutionary jump in consciousness of unprecedented proportions. It seems that we are all involved in a process that parallels the psychological death and rebirth that so many people have experienced individually in non-ordinary states of consciousness. If we continue to act out the destructive tendencies from our deep unconscious, we will undoubtedly destroy ourselves and all life on our planet. However, if we succeed in internalizing this process on a large enough scale, it might result in evolutionary progress that can take us as far beyond our present condition as we now are from the primates.
As utopian as this might seem on the surface, it might very well be our only real chance. Over the years I have seen profound transformations in people who have been involved with serious and systematic inner quests. Some of them were meditators and had a regular spiritual practice. Others had spontaneous episodes of psychospiritual crises or participated in various forms of experiential psychotherapy and self-exploration. As their level of aggression decreased, they became more peaceful, more comfortable with themselves, and more tolerant of others. Their ability to enjoy life, particularly the simple pleasures of everyday existence, increased considerably.
Deep reverence for life and ecological awareness are among the most frequent consequences of the psychospiritual transformation that accompanies responsible work with non-ordinary states of consciousness. The same has been true for spiritual emergence of a mystical nature that is based on personal experience. It is my belief that a movement in the direction of a fuller awareness of our unconscious minds will vastly increase our chances for planetary survival. I hope that this book will make a contribution toward those ends, offering assistance and guidance for those who will choose this path or are walking it already.