The Culmination of the Quest:
Death and Rebirth
It is only in the face of death that man’s self is born.
—St. Augustine 423
Both ancient religions and modern psychologies recognize the extraordinary impact of confronting death. “Let me know how fleeting my life is” sing the Jewish Psalms, while Christian monks chant “Death is certain, the hour uncertain,” knowing that as Mohammad said, “Death is a good advisor.”9 Irvin Yalom, one of today’s best-known psychotherapists, concluded from his extensive work with the dying that “a confrontation with one’s personal death…has the power to provide a massive shift in the way one lives in the world….Death acts as a catalyst that can move one from one stage of being to a higher one.”423
Spiritual practitioners must be willing to confront not only physical death but also ego death. This is the demise of an old, outmoded identity so that from its ashes can arise a new identity appropriate to spiritual life.
This motif of death and rebirth echoes through the world’s cultures and religions and, according to Ralph Metzner, indicates “the most radical and total transformation that consciousness and identity can undergo.”239 In aboriginal societies, rites of passage are enacted as death-rebirth rituals at important life transitions. In puberty rites, the childhood identities “die,” and boys and girls are reborn as adults. The Christian who undergoes a deep conversion may have a sense of dying to the old bodily self and being “born again” in the spirit or in Christ. “Unless ye be born again…” is a common warning in religious traditions.
Shamans have heeded these warnings, and death-rebirth experiences are widely regarded as essential for mastery. Rasmussen pointed out that
before a shaman attains the stage at which any helping spirit would think it worth while to come to him, he must, by struggle and toil and concentration of thought, acquire for himself yet another great and inexplicable power: he must be able to see himself as a skeleton. Though no shaman can explain to himself how and why, he can, by the power his brain derives from the supernatural, as it were by thought alone, divest his body of its flesh and blood, so that nothing remains but his bones….By thus seeing himself naked, altogether freed from the perishable and transient flesh and blood, he consecrates himself, in the sacred tongue of the shamans, to his great task, through that part of his body which will longest withstand the action of sun, wind and weather, after he is dead.299
Such experiences can occur either spontaneously or as a result of willed imagination or ritual enactment. They can be interpreted either metaphorically or literally. Shamans may view their death-rebirth experiences quite literally as actual physical events in which their bodies are first dismembered by the spirits and then reconstructed. Thus shamans may believe that
they are cut up by demons or by their ancestral spirits; their bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped off, the body fluids thrown away, and their eyes torn from their sockets. His bones are then covered with new flesh and in some cases he is also given new blood.89
The belief is that the practitioner now has a new stronger body fit for the rigors of shamanic work.
This dismemberment experience is similar to the Tibetan tantric practice of chö (gcod). Here practitioners cultivate detachment and compassion by deliberately visualizing their bodies being dismembered and offered to hungry demons to eat. But whereas for the tantric these experiences are voluntary visualizations, for the shaman they are involuntary trials.
Similar experiences of dismemberment and reconstruction, of death and rebirth also occur among contemporary Westerners. They may happen during intensive psychotherapy or spiritual practice and occur most dramatically in holotropic or psychedelic therapy sessions.
The term holotropic means moving toward wholeness or aiming for totality. Holotropic therapy is a technique devised by Stanislav and Christina Grof that combines hyperventilation, music, and bodywork. This powerful combination induces significant altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and deep psychological insights. In fact, holotropic therapy may be one of the most powerful, nondrug means of inducing therapeutic altered states.131
Holotropic and psychedelic sessions provide some of the most dramatic accounts of death-rebirth, and we can therefore use these accounts to fill out the information from shamanic traditions. Stanislav Grof, a research psychiatrist whose several thousand case studies are the world’s most extensive, portrays psychedelically or holotropically intensified death-rebirth as an experience of awesome power that shakes those who undergo it to their psychological and spiritual core. The following is a psychedelic account:
Physical and emotional agony culminates in a feeling of utter and total annihilation on all imaginable levels. It involves an abysmal sense of physical destruction, emotional catastrophe, intellectual defeat, ultimate moral failure, and absolute damnation of transcendental proportions. This experience is usually described as “ego death”; it seems to entail instantaneous and merciless destruction of all the previous reference points in the life of the individual.
After the subject has experienced the limits of total annihilation and “hit the cosmic bottom,” he or she is struck by visions of blinding white or golden light. The claustrophobic and compressed world…suddenly opens up and expands into infinity. The general atmosphere is one of liberation, salvation, redemption, love, and forgiveness. The subject feels unburdened, cleansed and purged, and talks about having disposed of an incredible amount of personal “garbage,” guilt, aggression, and anxiety. This is typically associated with brotherly feelings for all fellowmen and appreciation and warm human relationships, friendship and love. Irrational and exaggerated ambitions, as well as cravings for money, status, fame, prestige and power, appear in this state as childish, irrelevant and absurd. There is often a strong tendency to share and engage in service and charitable activities. The universe is perceived as indescribably beautiful and radiant. All sensory pathways seem to be wide open and the sensitivity to the appreciation of external stimuli is greatly enhanced. The individual tuned into this experiential area usually discovers within himself or herself genuinely positive values, such as a sense of justice, appreciation of beauty, feelings of love, and self respect as well as respect for others.129
This emotional power has been wonderfully portrayed by the artist Sherana Harriette Frances who was a subject in an early LSD research study.101 Her exquisite drawings, some of which are reproduced here, not only offer a graphic account of an LSD-induced death-rebirth, but also portray amazing similarities to perennial shamanic experiences.
INTERPRETING THE DEATH-REBIRTH EXPERIENCE
Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected.
—Sogyal Rinpoche 306
The process of death and rebirth has occurred numberless times throughout history, but interpretations have varied dramatically. Contemplatives esteem it as a spiritual death and resurrection, while contemporary psychedelic researchers might diagnose it as a disintegration and reconstitution of the self-image. Shamans, however, have traditionally taken it to be a literal destruction and reconstitution of their physical bodies. For them, images of bodily dismemberment are interpreted quite literally, and this literal, concrete interpretation of mental imagery is a theme echoed throughout much of shamanism.
What can we make of this recurrent experience of agonizing death and dismemberment, followed by a healing process of rebirth and reconstitution? Clearly this is a powerful, perennial experience that has been sought by many and has burst unsought on many others. It appears to represent a deep, archetypal process of the psyche, a process with considerable healing potential. The following hypothesis attempts to understand this process in contemporary psychological terms.
The death-rebirth experience appears to be a transformative process most likely to occur at times of overwhelming emotional arousal. This arousal activates psychological tensions and conflicts to levels unsustainable by the old conditioning and uncontainable by the old identity and worldview. The result is a crisis in which old patterning forces can no longer maintain the former psychological balance. Old conditioning, psychodynamic forces, beliefs, and identity are overwhelmed, and the psyche’s organization temporarily collapses.i The key result of this collapse, says Grof, is that “what is destroyed in this process is the old, limiting concept of oneself and the corresponding restricting view of existence and of the universe.”129
This process is projected and witnessed as “autosymbolic images,” images that picture one’s psychological state. The initial phase of unbearable psychological tension and breakdown may be experienced symbolically as visions of physical torture, bodily dismemberment, death and decay or as war and destruction.
This destructured chaos opens the way to reconstruction. With conditioning and dynamics dissolved, reorganization can be guided by the mind’s innate holotropic drive toward health and wholeness. For one of the most hopeful of all contemplative and clinical discoveries is that the psyche is inherently self-organizing and self-optimizing, and under supportive conditions it can be not only self-healing but also self-actualizing, self-transcending, self-awakening, and self-liberating.j The result can be a reconstructed psyche and identity that are unbound from the past, and therefore less conflicted and less symptomatic, and consequently more healthy, integrated, and whole. The death of the old self allows birth of the new.
This reconstruction and rebirth are reflected in the accompanying imagery. The shaman may see the spirits reconstructing her body, the therapy patient may witness images of birth, or the contemplative may experience being “reborn in the spirit.”
This process may account for the dramatic breakthroughs and benefits that can follow death-rebirth experiences. These benefits may include resolution of the initiation illness in shamans, relief of chronic psychopathology in patients, and freedom from egotism in spiritual practitioners. Just how dramatic these benefits can be is evident from both ancient and contemporary accounts. Stanislav Grof concludes that “powerful experiential sequences of dying and being born can result in dramatic alleviation of a variety of emotional, psychosomatic, and interpersonal problems that have previously resisted all psychotherapeutic work.”131
Two thousand years ago, Jesus offered a metaphor that has echoed across centuries: “A grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls into the ground and dies; but if it dies, it brings a rich harvest.” The experience of death-rebirth can bring a rich harvest and, as with so many psychological and spiritual transformations, it was shamans who first recognized and harvested it.
Figure 5. As her altered state deepens, she experiences falling downward through a whirlpool-like tunnel, past skeletal symbols of death and destruction, to a lower world.
Figure 6. In the lower world, she experiences being pierced and tortured and is surrounded by images of death and decay.
Figure 7. She is torn apart and reduced to a skeleton, but sees a light above her that she struggles desperately to reach.
igure 8. As she struggles to escape from this realm of all-consuming death and destruction, she feels herself being offered assistance.
Figure 9. She sees a bird, which for shamans is often a power animal and a symbol of spirit, and appeals to it for help.