FOUR

The Ocean of Suffering

Sessions 11–17

The oceanlike immensity of joy

Arising when all beings will be freed,

Will this not be enough? Will this not satisfy?

The wish for my own freedom, what is that to me?

SHANTIDEVA, THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA

I’ve resisted starting this chapter for weeks, troubled by what I will be asking the reader to endure, afraid that some may slot these experiences into primitive theologies of hell, reinforcing stories of punishment and damnation when this is actually a story of rescue and deliverance. I’ve been advised by friends to temper the story, that those who have not entered these hell realms will not be able to understand them, that people will be frightened and contract. But I’m not going to take their advice. I’m going to ask the reader to follow me into deep suffering, and I do so for three reasons. First, this is simply where the journey went, and I promised an honest account. Second, these experiences offer us important insights into the workings of the collective unconscious of humanity. And third, I hope that by following me into this hell, you will be able to participate more fully in the heaven that follows.

In the sessions following the killing of the children, I entered a domain of collective anguish that was more challenging than anything I had previously faced and worse than anything I could imagine. It was completely different from the personal meltdowns that had preceded it. In session after session, I was brought back to the same landscape and systematically taken deeper into its mayhem. I came to call this domain the Ocean of Suffering, for it was a vast ocean of fury and pain, enormous in scope and intensity.

In the second half of these same sessions, I was taken on an extraordinary series of adventures that I will describe in the next two chapters. It is this pairing of great anguish with great blessings that makes these painful episodes bearable. Once you learn the rhythm, you learn to trust the cycle. If you open completely to whatever arises in your experience, however difficult it may be, and let it take you where it wants to go, the ordeal will build until it eventually reaches some peak expression. When it has spent itself for the day, your experience will then shift into positive transpersonal domains for the remainder of the session.

Completion is the key that keeps this suffering from becoming lodged in your system as trauma. If you take each round of suffering through to its completion, peace follows. What you then take away from the session is the complete cycle—pain followed by resolution followed by peace. How you meet these experiences makes all the difference in how they live in you afterward.

I think it’s better to bundle these early experiences of the ocean of suffering together rather than take you through them session by entire session. Concentrating them into a few pages, however, may make them appear worse than they actually were, if that’s possible. In actual practice, the ocean of suffering was broken up into installments lasting a few hours each and separated by months in which I had time to digest them and prepare myself for the next round. Once I learned what was waiting for me inside the sessions, the mornings of a session day were tense. Like a woman going into labor or a soldier going into battle, my attention turned deeply within as I prepared for what was about to happen. Carol called it “going into the tunnel.” It would start hours, sometimes days before a session.

The encounter with the ocean of suffering lasted fourteen sessions spread over two years of work. This work was coherent from beginning to end despite the fact that I stopped my sessions for six years in the middle of this series, for reasons I will explain in the next chapter. From the perspective of the experiences themselves, this six-year interruption was a mere bump in the road that changed nothing. But in terms of calendar time, there was a year of the ocean of suffering before the six-year break and a year after it, each containing seven sessions.

I will follow this order in telling the story, dividing it into these two halves. I will further divide the first year’s sessions into their cleansing phase and their ecstatic phase. Though this sounds complicated, it will simply be easier to tell the story this way. In this chapter, then, I will describe what happened inside the cleansing phase of the first year of the ocean of suffering, and in the next chapter, I will describe what happened inside the ecstatic phase of these same seven sessions. After that I will pick up the story on the other side of the six-year hiatus and describe where the ocean of suffering went from there.^*29

The Ocean of Suffering

The suffering I’m going to describe was difficult to weather, but it took me in gradually and gave me time to adjust to it. It repeatedly took me to my breaking point, but the breaking points were skillfully plotted, controlled by something or someone I never saw but always felt. You can observe this incremental deepening in the details of the sessions that follow. I did not understand the reason for these ordeals going into them, but the experiences were so consistent that I felt a deep logic operating there. When the full explanation was given me by the 24th session, it all made sense.^†30

The following experiences come from five sessions that took place in 1982 and 1983. During these same years, I earned tenure at my university and was awarded its Distinguished Professor Award for the first time. I mention this only to reinforce the point that even when one’s sessions become very intense, they do not undermine our ability to function competently in the world if they are well managed.

Session 11

The electrical spasms were intense, shooting me across the mattress. The music pulled on my darker spaces. My psychological anguish grew until I found myself trapped in a musical chamber of horrors. The tension was unbearable.

The music changed to tribal ritual chanting—complex breathing rhythms combined with shouts, grunts, and retching. As I let go to these sounds, I felt myself enter a primitive domain completely beyond any modern frame of reference. All familiar associations were suspended. Around me, through me, swirled fearful negative energies, elemental and barbaric. I was floating in a surging field of negative forces. I slowly became less frightened as there was less and less of “me” present to react to the experiences. As I dissolved into this field, I was emptied of all personal associations, hollow to anything but these ancient sounds, lost in another world, another time.

Session 12

The anguish thickened into a terrible horror acted out around me in psychedelic overkill. At first I was just witnessing these events, but as I died my boundaries dilated and I was drawn into the mayhem. Then “I” was being killed, mauled, and maimed. The forms of the horror were so many that they can’t be described. Against the chants, anything was possible. Disembowelings by the score, the mauling of lives, deaths in the thousands. Swirling forms of horror so overlaid that distinct images do not stand out. As the horrors compounded themselves, I eventually lost all my bearings, all coherent sense of meaning. Everything was dismantled by the unimaginable brutalities. I felt so overwhelmed that I collapsed into a state of complete overload.

Session 13

When it first began, I remembered the torture of the previous session—how deeply it had reached into my psyche, leaving no corner unexplored. Anything that could be used against me had been used. I felt the same thing beginning again, and I shuddered.

The horrors were more intense than the previous session, harder hitting and faster. They were so complex, multidimensional, and multi-thematic that I can barely describe them. It was war, savagery, destruction, killing, anguish. It felt distinctly European and premodern. Trying to describe it, I am reminded of Dante’s Inferno, but sped up incredibly fast and overlaid many times. It seemed to last hours. As the music switched to the Balinese “Monkey Chant,” everything intensified and went even further out of control. I was being overrun, assaulted, torn apart, and thrown aside thousands of times. There was nothing I could do, nothing any of us could do. There was no escape.

Session 14

The horrors were relentless. Driving Indian rhythms hammering away at me endlessly. Terrible, terrible pain. I kept searching for something comparable to previous sessions where the pain at least had some vague semblance of form, something I could see. But this time, the pain had no recognizable shape of any kind. It began as the pain of others, but experienced much closer than before. Soon, however, it became all mine.

The ordeal kept deepening. I would reach a breaking point and be shattered by the pain, resistance being impossible. Then the pain would slowly gather new momentum and plunge me into deeper agony, taking me beyond limits that just minutes before I had thought were impossible to exceed. A crescendo of torture would carry me to a new breaking point, I would collapse, and the process would repeat itself.

The music shifted to the powerful chants. I was in agony. The chanting surrounded me and pulled even more pain from me. It kept coming and coming. The pain was terrible. I lost track of it. I don’t know what happened next. After an eternity, the pain somehow ended. Amid soft strains of slowly paced, gentle Indian stringed instruments, my pain lay down.

Session 15

I don’t know how to describe what I’ve been through today, the places I was in, the destruction I was part of, the searing pain and torment of thousands and thousands of beings, myself with them, tortured to their breaking points and then beyond, and beyond. Not individuals but waves of people. The tortures not specific but legion. Destruction and pain, destruction and pain. I did not want to believe that regions of such unspeakable horror existed, but they do.

Driving sitar and drums tearing me apart, plunging me into more and more primitive levels of anguish. Passing through previous levels, I eventually reached a level I can only liken to hell itself. Excruciating pain. Unspeakable horror beyond any imaginings. I was lost in a rampaging savagery that was without bounds. It was science fiction gone rabid. The world of the damned. The worst pictures of the world’s religions showing the tortures of hell only touch the surface. And yet, the torment cleanses one’s being. It tears every piece of flesh off your body until you’ve died a thousand times and can’t die any more. Then you find ways to die some more.

I know it is not easy to enter these experiences, even as a witness. If I have erred in bringing you here, I apologize. I show you these things not to ask for your mercy. I lived through these experiences, and I am well and strong. I share them with you to ask you to enter the mystery with me.

The Riddle of the Ocean of Suffering

What is this domain I had entered? Between sessions 11 and 15, I was systematically immersed in a deepening landscape of collective violence and anguish, but what is this landscape? Where does it come from and what does it represent?

Let me first dispense with what I trust is an inadequate interpretation—that these experiences represent some repressed cruelty or rage hidden in my personal unconscious or perhaps are the psychological payback for deeds I have actually committed. To both these suggestions, I answer simply that I am neither this cruel nor this violent. I have never felt rage of this sort, and repression of this magnitude would surely leave traces. I have my faults, of course, but nothing that could account for suffering like this.

A more plausible interpretation comes from Stan Grof, who has seen similar patterns of collective suffering emerge in many psychedelic sessions he has supervised. He summarizes them as follows:

A subject can experience himself as thousands of soldiers who have died on the battlefields of the whole world from the beginning of time, as the tortured victims of the Spanish Inquisition, as prisoners of concentration camps, as patients dying of terminal diseases, as aging individuals who are decrepit and senile, as mothers and children dying during delivery, or as inmates maltreated in chronic wards of insane asylums. (Grof 1976, 116)

Grof’s understanding of these episodes is that they are clusters of memories in the collective unconscious that get pulled into one’s personal death-rebirth process at the perinatal level of consciousness. Because the perinatal dimension lies at the interface of personal and transpersonal consciousness, perinatal experience can weave together material from both the personal and the collective psyche. Grof believes that these episodes of collective suffering are essentially bleed-through from the collective unconscious because of their resonance to some aspect of personal ego-death. That is, he sees ego-death as being the core experience here, and these clusters of collective experience are drawn to this core because they parallel some aspect of ego-death. If this were an opera, ego-death would be singing lead and these collective experiences would be the chorus.^*31

The collective psyche appears to organize its memories in ways that parallel how the personal unconscious organizes its memories. Grof has demonstrated that our personal unconscious organizes its memories into clusters of experience that come from different periods of our life but share a common emotional theme. As we saw in chapter 2, he calls these clusters of condensed experience COEX systems. The psychedelic experiences presented in this chapter suggest that the collective unconscious organizes its vast store of memories in a similar fashion. It appears to gather the memories of humanity into giant memory clusters that come from different people and different historical periods but share a common emotional theme. I call these collective memory clusters META-COEX systems. The structure of a META-COEX system parallels the structure of a personal COEX system, but it operates on a much larger scale and a different level of consciousness—the subtle level.

When I was going through these experiences, it meant a great deal to me to know that other explorers had undergone similar trials. It told me that whatever was taking place in my sessions was part of a larger pattern. Given the large database that Grof was basing his observations on, I initially adopted his interpretation of these episodes. It made intuitive sense to me that these patterns of resonance could be springing up between the personal and collective levels of the psyche.

My working assumption became that these collective ordeals represented a deepening of my personal ego-death, that they were a challenging phase of my individual spiritual journey, which I simply had to weather in order to be completely liberated. This assumption was reinforced by the fact that in-between my sessions, my ego, though softened, was still intact, with many of its failings and idiosyncrasies in place. If ego-death had already completed itself inside my sessions, I reasoned, shouldn’t I be more liberated outside my sessions? The fact that I was not completely liberated in my day-to-day life suggested that there were still fragments of ego alive within me, potentially driving these ordeals. I assumed that when my ego-death process was complete, these collective ordeals would stop because there would no longer be a core of unfinished ego-death for them to attach to.

And yet, I continued to have reservations about this interpretation. These experiences were so extreme and so vast in scope that it was difficult for me to see them as a secondary aspect of a more primary process, as being drawn into my sessions from the collective psyche through resonance to my personal ego-death. And while there were certain structural parallels to my earlier perinatal experiences, many components of that supposedly “core” dynamic were missing here. The fetal sensations that had been present in earlier sessions had disappeared, and the physical discharges were fading. Nor was I feeling the same intense existential angst I had felt in previous sessions. The challenge here lay simply in repeatedly opening to vast fields of human suffering and violence. This felt like a dynamic unto itself, not an echo of a dynamic.

On the Eve of Stopping

I entered the last two sessions of this series knowing that I was about to stop my work for an unknown period of time. In the 16th session, something unexpected happened. When everything disintegrated into its chaotic flow, the pain escalated into a frenzy so extreme that it morphed into an orgy of bhaktian rapture. Just as the suffering reached a fevered pitch, the thought of the Divine flashed in my mind and I surrendered completely. Caught in surging elemental forces, I became a devotee singing to the Divine in ecstatic trance. He was vast and he played me like a trumpet. My consciousness was the instrument and my life the melody.^*32

This eruption of bhaktian devotion caught me by surprise because it was completely different from my usual approach to spirituality, which has always been more mental in character. Of the four spiritual paths in Hinduism—jnana (knowledge), karma (service), raja (meditation), and bhakti (devotion)—bhakti is the path I have least identified with, and yet here it was.

In the 17th session, the consciousness behind my sessions seemed to shift its message in anticipation of the coming interruption. I have no doubt that this is what happened. In this session, the collective suffering returned in full force until it completely saturated my experience.

The anguish that is always so hard to describe surrounded and saturated me. I was being relentlessly pursued. There was no escaping the torment. It followed me everywhere, surrounding me completely. At one point I remember searching through all the pain looking for my death to orient to. All the anguish seemed meaningless without my death to give me my bearings. But there was no haven “I” could retreat into, not even the haven of my own death. The only “I” that existed was hundreds of being-fragments, and all of them were suffering. (S 17)

This time, however, I was refusing to surrender to the pain and rejected everything that was happening to me. Eventually, I was backed up against a psychological wall and was told that if I persisted in rejecting the suffering, I would be turning my back on humanity, on life itself. To not care seemed to be the ultimate existential withdrawal from life. With multiple scenarios echoing this refrain, I was being confronted with an absolute choice of whether to open to this pain or not. At this point, my “No” changed to a “Yes.” This transition felt like a conversion in the deepest religious sense.

In the middle of terrible suffering I found myself saying, “Yes! I can make a difference. Yes! I accept responsibility.” I was accepting responsibility for the anguish and for trying to make a difference in the lives surrounding me. This shift was fundamental. It reached to depths I cannot now fathom and impacted me in ways I cannot summarize. It seemed a free choice on the most basic of questions.

With this acceptance, the torment suddenly changed to positive themes. Themes of young children—happy excitement, delighted play, self-abandoned joy. Many scenarios of childhood wonder and adventure. This was the beginning of a “new way.” It contrasted with the former negative way in every respect. It was simple instead of chaotic, shared instead of individual, fresh instead of repetitive. I felt cleansed and made new. (S 17)

As I was stopping my sessions, a commitment to resume them at some point in the future had been solicited and was given. Whatever the ocean of suffering was, my work with it was not finished.

I did not see it then, but I see now that the vision of happy children in this session was the inverse of the vision of the killing of the children that had marked my entry into the ocean of suffering. The children’s joy was the result of something that had taken place inside the ocean of suffering, even though that process was still incomplete. Instead of being violently killed, they were now beginning to inherit a positive life. It felt like I was touching something deep in humanity’s future, that I was being reminded that this work was for generations yet to be born.