APPENDIX I
What Dies and Is Reborn?
My psychedelic journey generated a repeating cycle of death and rebirth that systematically initiated me into progressively deeper levels of consciousness. This generates a thought-provoking question: What exactly is dying and being reborn in this spiral of initiation? There is often an acute sensation of dying at the deeper levels, but what does this sensation attach to? Is it simply ego dying over and over again, or is there something more going on? I want to briefly propose four overlapping answers to this question.
1. The Ego
In the early stages of the journey, what is dying is our physical identity, the body-mind ego. What is dying is the bundle of habits, beliefs, and aptitudes created by our earthly history. We must let go of everything our physical existence has told us that we are in order to enter what lies beyond physical existence. But in later sessions, after ego has surrendered its grip on our consciousness, what exactly is dying then?
2. The Species Ego
When the wheel of death and rebirth is turning at the subtle level of consciousness where the deaths are largely collective, what is dying, I think, is some portion of the species ego. If the patient in these sessions expands beyond the personal psyche to the collective psyche, then what is being engaged, healed, and eventually transcended is some matrix of memories held in the collective unconscious that contributes to our historical self-identity as a species. Though we participate in these deaths and feel them acutely, what “we” are at this stage has shifted. In these sessions, we are no longer our private self but have expanded to encompass some aspect of the species-mind.
The pulse of the life one is living in these hours is the pulse of human history. The COEX systems that are resolving themselves in these exercises are not personal complexes but META-COEX systems within the collective unconscious. The intelligence that initiates and guides this collective rebirth is not the individual’s higher self but something like the higher self of the human species, the archetypal intelligence that connects us to the Creative Intelligence of the universe.
Given the therapeutic nature of my work in the ocean of suffering, my description of species ego-death in Dark Night, Early Dawn and in this book has tilted in the direction of releasing the trauma of pain and violence, but many of the META-COEX systems that shape our collective identity do not involve acute suffering. Many are simply culturally engrained habits that constrict our sense of what we are and who we can be. A piece of the species ego dies, for example, whenever we have a deep experience of transcending cultural prohibitions or conventional thinking. Opening to ecstatic transpersonal landscapes can help dissolve collective belief systems that are constricting our felt sense of connection to each other and the universe. The liberation of our species has many moving parts.
But after our work at the collective level has run its course and reached its conclusion, what is dying when the spiral of death and rebirth continues to turn? As broad a reality as the species ego is, in the end it is a human-centric phenomenon. In the context of the vast cosmos, our species consciousness is a relatively small thing. Sooner or later, transpersonal experience outgrows these human proportions, and we must look for larger explanations of what is dying in these later sessions.
3. The Shamanic Persona
To make sense of what took place in my sessions at this juncture, I have introduced the concept of the shamanic persona.*71 I think all psychedelic journeyers have had the experience that after a session has ended, we sometimes cannot remember all the experiences and insights we had during the session. And yet, when we reenter the psychedelic state in our next session, this “missing knowledge” is present once again, waiting for us. Something in our psyche has remembered our experience at a level deeper than our egoic awareness. Similarly, when our sessions get underway, we often have a sense of resuming our “psychedelic identity,” a stable transpersonal identity that is familiar to us from our previous sessions and deeper than our egoic identity. When we enter the psychedelic state, we “walk with the old ones” once again.
I want to suggest that in the repeated opening and closing of consciousness in our sessions, a semiautonomous, state-specific consciousness is formed that retains and integrates all our psychedelic experiences, including those that our egoic self cannot retain. This consciousness not only remembers our experiences, it also preserves the knowledge and capacities we acquired in them. I call this psychedelically generated self-awareness the shamanic persona. The shamanic persona reflects the natural aggregating function of life. Life remembers and holds on to its experience at all levels, as Rupert Sheldrake and Ervin Laszlo have argued.*72 The shamanic persona can be thought of as a state-specific alter ego. In calling this entity the shamanic persona, I am not suggesting that it has a masking function but am simply drawing attention to the fact that it is a living identity that changes as our psychedelic experience deepens. It could also be called the shamanic self.†73
The more transpersonal experience we have accumulated in our sessions, the stronger our shamanic self will be. If our psychedelic experiences have been chaotic and fragmented, our shamanic self will be weaker. If our experiences have been well focused and clear, it will be stronger and more stable. The more successfully we have integrated our psychedelic experiences into our conscious awareness, the “closer” and more familiar our shamanic self will feel to our ordinary sense of self. It will feel more like “us,” a natural extension of our earthly identity. Conversely, the less well integrated our experiences have been—either because of poor session management or because the content of a session was particularly deep—the more “distant” and “other” our shamanic self will feel to us.
Because the shamanic persona is a synthesis of a specific set of experiences, it is a specific entity with a specific identity. It is not an archetype. It is the living memory of our unique psychedelic history, and as such it has built into it the character and limitations of that history. A shamanic persona that embodies stabilized psychic level experience, for example, is a very different entity than a shamanic persona that embodies stabilized subtle level experience or causal level experience. By “stabilized experience,” I mean that we have entered a certain level of consciousness often enough that we have acclimated to the territory and learned the terrain. Our psycho-physical system has undergone the necessary purifications and adaptations for us to maintain coherent awareness and good recall at this level.
I think that the concept of the shamanic persona adds a third layer to the answer of what is dying and being reborn in this continuing cycle of death and rebirth. When our consciousness begins to open to levels of awareness that are deeper than the levels we have previously experienced, our entire psychedelic history must yield to this new territory. Just as our Earth identity dies in ego-death, our accumulated psychedelic knowledge and the self-identity based on that knowledge must surrender and die before a still deeper mode of transpersonal awareness can fully emerge in our sessions. In essence, then, what I think is dying in these later openings is our shamanic persona, the living memory of our psychedelic history. Though the death of the shamanic persona may feel like a personal death, it is not the ego that is dying here but a deeper identity that has been birthed inside our sessions. It is a hybrid identity that is both personal and transpersonal, with many transpersonal experiences woven into it.
In a sustained psychedelic regimen, our shamanic persona may die and be reborn multiple times as new levels of reality continue to open. After ego-death, a shamanic persona emerges as the living integration of our early transpersonal experiences. As our experience continues to deepen in subsequent sessions, that first shamanic persona will eventually have to surrender and die, giving birth to a second shamanic persona that will integrate our new transpersonal experiences. This second persona will retain the memories and knowledge of the first persona and add to it the new knowledge and capacities gained at this second level. If we continue to push the boundaries of experience, sooner or later this second shamanic persona will also have to surrender in order for a still deeper dimension of consciousness to open and become fully operational.
This pattern of successive deaths and rebirths is the natural rhythm of all identities that emerge on the psychedelic path. The essence of these identities, like all identities in the world of samsara, is the Absolute, but the form these identities take reflects the changing depth and breadth of our experience. Eventually, one simply becomes comfortable with the fluid nature of all points of reference within our vast, self-aware universe.
4. A Dimension of the Cosmos
Let me now suggest a fourth answer to the question of what is dying and being reborn in our sessions by drawing on the concepts of the psychic, subtle, and causal levels of experience.
The threads of experience that make up the shamanic persona at the psychic level of consciousness will tend to be personal and soul-centered in nature, as we saw in chapter 5, “Deep Time and the Soul.” At the low subtle level where collective patterns begin to predominate, the threads become increasingly collective and specieswide. At higher subtle levels where the currents of experience are more archetypal, the threads of the shamanic persona become correspondingly archetypal. If we continue this progression into causal levels of consciousness, the threads of experience become so universal in scope that the category of the shamanic persona becomes too small to adequately describe what is dying and being reborn in these meltdowns.
For me, the category of the shamanic persona is always tinged with selfhood; it is an extension and expansion of my individual identity. As such, it is too small an entity to describe the experiential quality of these later deaths, at least as I have experienced them. It may still apply, but by itself it is an incomplete description. Clearly, we’re marking stages on a continuum here, but eventually it feels necessary to try to conceptualize these advanced transitions within a larger frame of reference. But here the clear road runs out, and things become more uncertain. At this point, I can only share intuitions I’ve formed over the years.
How does one describe the larger arc of life that sparks in these advanced meltdowns? How much can we truly know about the role these mega-deaths may play in the deeper web of life? What need do such deep levels of reality have of “rebirth” at all? I don’t know the final answer to these questions, but I believe we should begin by viewing everything that takes place in our psychedelic practice from the perspective of the Great Chain of Being as a whole.
Let me start with an observation I made in the closing pages of Dark Night, Early Dawn:
To use Ken Wilber’s vocabulary, if we are a holon functioning as a part within a series of ever-enlarging wholes, then the death-rebirth dynamic may have different functions for different levels of reality, all of which are being realized simultaneously. From the perspective of the smaller holon, for example, the effect of death-rebirth may be liberation into that which is larger, while the effect of the same transition from the perspective of the larger holon may be to allow it greater access to and integration with the smaller field. An event that functions as spiritual “ascent” from below may simultaneously function as “descent” from above. (Bache 2000, 298)
This insight invites us to think about the dynamics of death and rebirth more multidimensionally. It is an insight that generalizes across multiple levels of reality. At the subtle level of consciousness, for example, death and rebirth may open a portal that serves not only to drain destructive energies out of the species-mind but also to infuse healing energies into the species-mind from a higher source, as the sessions reported in chapter 8 demonstrate. At still deeper levels, such portals may allow any number of transcendental blessings to be infused directly into lower orders of existence. The question then becomes: How does the addition of this principle of infusion from above influence the question of how we might understand what is dying and being reborn at these deep levels of psychedelic experience?
Let me draw upon Sri Aurobindo’s involutionary/evolutionary cosmology here because it resonates strongly with the cosmology that emerges in psychedelic work, as Stan Grof has demonstrated in his beautiful book The Cosmic Game. According to Sri Aurobindo, in the cascading involution of the Divine, many levels of existence are manifested. While these levels may be porous from “above,” they are less porous from “below.” Like looking through a series of one-way mirrors, the Divine looking “down” sees everything It has become, but looking “up” from lower levels, the Divine sees less.*74 When we who are below manage either by hard labor or by grace to access some of these higher levels, a special magic sometimes takes place.
Assume for the moment that through the fiery exercises of psychedelic exploration we have managed to stabilize experience at the high subtle level of consciousness. In order to reach this level, what “we” are has changed. We are no longer our private selves but have temporarily become some aspect of subtle level reality. Inside our sessions, we live as a life-form that breathes this rarified air. When through further exercises a doorway opens to still deeper levels of consciousness at the causal level, my experience has been that it allows a cosmic communion to take place between the causal and subtle realms. Deep communes with deep. Bringing different levels of spiritual reality into conscious communion with each other, even if for only a few hours, seems to nourish and bring joy to the weave of existence as the “below” remembers the “above” and the blessings of “above” pour more freely into the “below.” What is taking place is a cosmic dance between deep levels of the divine fabric. It is God communing with God, nourishing Its self-manifesting, self-emergent being in ways we may glimpse but perhaps never fully comprehend.
What dies and is reborn, then, in these advanced cycles of death and rebirth? Beyond the ego, beyond the species ego, beyond the shamanic persona, what “dies,” I think, is something of truly cosmic proportions. Something deep in the fabric of the universe surrenders and in that surrender is nourished from above. Some dimension of existence extraordinarily vast awakens more completely to Itself, and much to our surprise, the Divine appears to genuinely appreciate our collaboration in facilitating this communion.