SIX
Initiation into the Universe
Sessions 18–24
More than any other of the human types concerned with the sacred, the shamanic personality journeys into the far regions of the cosmic mystery and brings back the vision and the power needed by the human community at the most elementary level Not only is the shamanic personality emerging in our society, but also the shamanic dimension of the psyche itself.
THOMAS BERRY, THE DREAM OF THE EARTH
From a psychological perspective, it was probably not wise for me to stop my sessions when I did. If you interrupt your psychedelic work in the middle of an extended death-rebirth process, your system strains for closure but you are denying it the opportunity and the energy to complete the cycle. By entering the ocean of suffering, I had started something I could not completely walk away from. As a result, when I stopped my sessions, there was a residual tension in my life that affected my daily equilibrium more than I had expected.
For the first twelve months, I lost contact with my ordinary personality. This sounds more dramatic than it actually was. My mind and my memories were intact and I was able to function competently in the world, but my familiar sense of myself disappeared. I felt like I was being myself from memory, like I was no longer living from my vital center. After about a year, I began to feel my familiar self surface for a few hours here and there. After eighteen months, I was fully back.
Even then I had to manage my life carefully. Spiritual practices that I had done for years, I had to stop doing. Previously, meditation had always left me feeling relaxed and spacious, but now it undermined my equilibrium by making me more porous to my stormy insides and susceptible to their influence. In order to keep my life in balance, I had to thicken, not thin, the walls of my psyche. I began exercising more and eating a heavier diet. Putting on a little belly weight made me feel more grounded in the world. As the years passed, things got easier. It was as if the membrane of my mind grew gradually thicker, and I returned to my familiar experience of being “me.”
In the six years that I halted my sessions, I did many things. I published and moved up the academic ladder at my university. I finished two years of training at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, cleaning up this and that with one therapist and learning somatic approaches to healing with another. Carol and I completed our family, bringing two more wonderful children into the world. I read the past-life literature and spent three years exploring my own former lives through hypnotherapy, becoming intimately familiar with about a dozen of them. I published Lifecycles and met other authors in the field of reincarnation studies. I did a week-long Holotropic Breathwork intensive at the Omega Institute, where I met Stan and Christina Grof for the first time. After reading Robert Monroe’s book Far Journeys, I did a one-week training at the Monroe Institute in Virginia and began using his Hemi-Sync technology to explore states of consciousness that were gentler and nearer to hand than psychedelic states. I did many productive and worthwhile things, but underneath them all the psychedelic work kept calling me. It never left my awareness, and I spent many nights in my study pondering my sessions, waiting to resume this work. Finally, in the summer of 1990, it was time.
When I resumed my sessions, I felt solidly grounded in the world. My marriage was stronger, my career was going well, and my three children—now aged two through seven—were robust and happy (and loud). I didn’t know what to expect, but now, with Carol’s consent and support, I was ready to begin again. I was forty-one years old. The most intense decade of my life was about to begin.
The first year back was fierce. The ocean of suffering resumed exactly where it had stopped six years before without missing a beat. This fact deserves careful attention. In a different period of my life, with fresh expectations and under different astrological transits, the journey resumed exactly where it had stopped, demonstrating, I think, the precision and power of the intelligence guiding this exploration. From there the suffering escalated, repeatedly jumping its banks like a river in flood until it finally culminated seven sessions later in session 24.
This increase in the depth of cleansing was matched by a parallel increase in the depth of visionary splendor that opened during the ecstatic phase of these same seven sessions. Before the six-year hiatus, I had experienced the distillation of my entire life from beginning to end. After the hiatus, the platform of discovery shifted far beyond my personal reality. There was no explanation given for this shift; the sessions simply began at a different starting point. Now each time I came through the ocean of suffering, I was taken on a series of initiations into the universe and the Creative Intelligence behind the universe. I don’t know why I was shown what I was shown, but the sequence was deliberate and well crafted. It felt like an infinite intelligence was educating me, reminding me of things forgotten long ago but now in need of being remembered.
In this chapter, I’m going to let the sessions largely speak for themselves and keep my comments as short as possible, taking only one excursion into theory at the end of the chapter. Rather than separate the purification portion of these sessions from the ecstatic portion, as I did in the previous pair of chapters, I’m going to present the sessions whole, as they actually occurred. This will show the rhythm of disclosure more clearly—that as the purification goes deeper in the first half of the sessions, the exploration of the universe goes deeper in the second half.
As I spiraled deeper session by session into what I perceived to be the mind of the universe, certain themes began to repeat themselves in progressively more complex forms. I’ve softened this repetition here but have not eliminated it entirely. The subtlety and complexity of this educational spiral was fascinating to observe. Each individual session was complete within itself, but the mosaic unfolding across multiple sessions was richer still. It was only when the entire sequence was finished that the full picture became clear.
In this chapter, I will present seven sessions trimmed to their essential components. The names I gave these sessions are:
S 18 You and I Creating
S 19 The Cosmic Tour
S 20 The Council of Elders
S 21 Dying into Oneness
S 22–23 The Master Plan
S 24 Healing the Collective Wound
I would place these experiences largely at the subtle level of consciousness, with Dying into Oneness touching causal consciousness.
Session 18—You and I Creating
This session began where the last session stopped six years ago. The most difficult aspect of it to describe is the pain/agony/frenzy. Terrible pain. Driving, explosive, convulsive horror. It was beyond anything I had experienced before, blending the feeling tones of primordial civilizations and galactic cataclysm, including all human history and going beyond human experience, encompassing experiential dimensions I am unfamiliar with. It was enormous in scope and complexity. It had little to do with my individual human history. I could have lived on Earth a hundred thousand years and not begun to have touched the range of pain I experienced today.
In the early session, I was seeing complex patterns of life that began to simplify themselves step-by-step into a cosmic duality that resembled spinning yin/yang energies. I was approaching and merging with a cosmic duality that seemed to encompass the entire physical universe. This universe was saturated with women and mothers. I kept seeing thousands of pieces of life (urban neighborhoods, backyards, side streets) that Chris did not particularly care about or even notice, but there were mothers around the world who did care about them and thus my present “I” cared deeply about them. The net effect was that I became a collective cosmic mother caring for the planet as it writhed in pain. Though the pain was terrible, I would not abandon it. It was my child.
I struggled desperately against the chaotic pain of existence. The more I struggled, the more ensnared I became. Everything around me was a swirling vortex. Death was everywhere. I kept trying to extricate myself so I could at least meet my death head-on, but I couldn’t. Instead, I kept seeing myself die in a thousand crowded, twisted, uncomfortable positions. No meaning, just supreme indifference. “My life will count for something!” I cried, but death kept dispatching me at whim. My deaths were not purposeful but mere accidents, the result of the universe’s carelessness. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and couldn’t get out of the way. If my death lacked meaning, my life lacked meaning. I kept trying to escape the horror of my insignificance and kept failing.
I threw up, and in my violent retching I thought I was actually dying. I interpreted my sitter’s maneuvering of my body as confirmation of this. I recovered a vague sense of where I was and what I was doing. It felt like I had begun something important but that it had gotten completely out of control, and now I was going to die as a result. I remembered kissing my children good-bye this morning and thought it would be absolutely horrible not to return to them at the end of the day.
I struggled with my death, surrounded by a vortex of horror that spread to the four corners of the universe. Psychological death and the specter of my biological death blended in the frenzy. Then suddenly, a shift took place in the swirling mayhem. Hundreds of small panels in my experience flipped over, like mini venetian blinds, showing me a completely different reality “underneath” this struggle. It was as if hundreds of feathers in a cloak of thousands were flashing bits and pieces of an alternative universe to me.
These flashes were showing me glimpses of ecstatic sweetness. Glimpses of everything I could want. It was the sweetest time of day. The sweetest time of life. The ecstasy of sex. Refreshing rest amidst exquisite gentleness. Shade under delicate leaves blowing softly in the wind. The sweetness of timing, of adjusting perfectly to the cycles that make up one’s life. Images of bounty. Everything you could ever desire. But these glimpses kept disappearing into the struggle. Back and forth, back and forth.
Though I was instantly drawn to this sweetness, for some reason I kept turning away from it and choosing instead to return to the larger struggle. The sweetness was something I had known in the beginning, something I had always known, but it was far away from me now. I struggled desperately to get back to the world, even though this world was nothing but agony for me. I would not abandon it. It was mine. It was everything I cared about and worked for. Someone had to take care of it. It was the world loved by the mothers of the world. It was my world, and I refused to abandon my creation.
Over and over again, this dance repeated itself. Then in the shifting back and forth between the pain of life and the ecstasy of dreams fulfilled, something new began to unfold. I was being reminded of something. I was not being allowed to entertain any thoughts of being a victim because of the suffering. I was not being allowed to experience this agony in terms of any agency outside myself doing it “to” me. Something kept hushing me and brushing aside my perceptions. When all alternatives had finally been cleared away, there was a moment of exquisite encounter. A loving, invisible presence took my face in its hands, looked into my eyes and said:
“What you have been seeing in the ecstatic glimpses
is not the origin of pleasure
but the origin of existence itself.”
With this insight, a bubble burst and a knowing swept through me. I was seeing what had created the physical universe and knew it to be my Essential Nature. This dimension of sweetness that could fulfill every wish was where existence itself came from. The words were:
“It is you and I creating, My Love.
All the suffering and ignorance
is simply what has happened since we separated.
All of it is part of you and I creating.
Do you remember now?
You and I decided to create
for the sheer joy of it.”
With this insight, an exquisite joy swept through me. I suddenly remembered what I was. At that moment, my identity was not Chris Bache but the Divine Feminine who had set out to create the physical universe and who was now being reunited with her Lover. Through these many glimpses, I had been patiently guided to rediscover my true nature and the purpose of my life. My nature was Consciousness and my work was Creation. All for joy.
The lesson here was to remember. Remember what I am. Remember what we are doing. Remember what our true nature is. And watch what we can do when we begin to create consciously instead of unconsciously. The essence of this lesson was to learn what could be accomplished when creation becomes a conscious process. We will be able to create anything we wish on Earth.
Comment
How do we reconcile the pain and suffering of physical existence with the Divine joy from which existence springs? Western religions have tended to solve this riddle with a theology of a Cosmic Fall followed by a redemptive Return to source. The physical world does not participate in this redemption but is abandoned when we return to Heaven. The theology of this session, however, is very different. Here the Divine is profoundly committed to creation. The stunning disclosure is that creation was a choice that I had in some way participated in, that all of us have participated in. Thus human suffering is not something being done to us. It is neither punishment nor accident. It is something that we voluntarily took on when we chose to participate in the co-creation of this universe, a process that is unfinished and incomplete.
On a sidenote, I’ve wondered sometimes whether pausing my sessions midcycle as I did may have actually contributed to the jump in the intensity of the ocean of suffering after my six-year break. When I stopped my sessions, it felt like I had left a storm churning inside me, successfully managed but always present beneath the surface of my life. Did the vortex I had set in motion continue to draw energy from the collective psyche even after I had stopped my sessions? Did the long pause add something “extra” to the fury that unleashed itself when I resumed the work? I don’t know the answer to this question.
Session 19—The Cosmic Tour
After a long opening, darker experiences began to emerge, but I was able to remain physically open and let them come. Again there was the frenzied, chaotic, physical, psychological anguish that I cannot put into words. At several places, I found myself wondering what all this pain was about. I was open and letting it come through me, but where was it coming from? I could not tell, but it broadened and deepened for a long time.
My consciousness was expanding and opening to more and more suffering. Eventually, I had the sense that my being stretched from horizon to horizon as I experienced a suffering that involved tens of thousands of people. Because I had gone into this state more slowly this time, it was not as confusing as before. Then I caught a glimpse of something behind the field of suffering, something enormous and familiar from the previous session. I reached more deeply into the suffering and eventually broke through to this larger dimension.
The Circle of Learning
In most of my sessions, I have simply been carried along from one transpersonal experience to another. Only once before have I had the experience of being able to consciously direct my experience. Now it was happening again. A circle opened around me and created a space that became an arena of dialogue between myself and a larger Consciousness. I discovered much to my surprise that this field was responsive to my thoughts. When I first discovered this, I had the ecstatic sensation of confronting an enormous Intelligence that included and surrounded my own. “That’s right,” it communicated to me. “That’s exactly what is happening.”
I began to ask it questions, and it answered by orchestrating my experience in the circle. It was an extremely subtle process, and the line between “my” consciousness and this larger Consciousness was often invisible to me. At times my reaction to an answer interacted with what I was being shown to sidetrack the lesson being given. I learned that I could stop these unwanted deviations by taking control of my thoughts. I could “clear the board” by stopping my reactions and waiting for the space I was in to clear. Once my mind was still, the lesson would continue.
The Cosmic Tree
After some intervening experiences, I was brought to an encounter with a unified field underlying all physical existence. I was confronting an enormous field of blindingly bright, incredibly powerful energy. This energy was the single energy that composed all existence. All things that existed were but varied aspects of its comprehensive existence. Experiencing it was extremely intense and carried with it a sense of ultimate encounter.
The experience then changed into a moving experience of the Cosmic Tree. The energy became a massive tree of radiant energy suspended in space. Seeming larger than the largest galaxy, it consisted entirely of light. The core of the tree was lost in the brilliant display, but limbs and leaves were visible around its edges. I experienced myself as one of its leaves. The lives of my family and close friends were leaves clustered near me on a small branch. All our distinguishing characteristics, what made us the individuals we were, appeared from this perspective to be quite minor, almost arbitrary variations of this fundamental energy.
I was taken around the tree and shown how easy it was to move from one person’s experience to another, and indeed it was ridiculously easy. Different lives around the globe were simply different experiences the tree was having. Choice governed all experience. Different beings who were all part of Being Itself had simply chosen these manifold experiences.
At this point, I WAS THE TREE. Not that I was having the full range of its experience, but I knew myself to be this single, encompassing Consciousness. I knew that Its identity was my true identity. Though I had taken monism to heart years before, I was now actually experiencing the seamless flow of consciousness into crystallizations of embodiment. I was experiencing how consciousness manifests itself in separate forms while remaining unified. “So that’s how it works,” I said to myself. The freedom was sheer bliss.
As I left the experience of the Cosmic Tree, the sensation of intense energy subsided and I found myself to be once again in conscious communication with this vast, surrounding Consciousness. My experiential field was extremely clear.
The Cosmic Tour
For the next several hours, this Consciousness took me on an extraordinary tour of the universe. It was as though It wanted to show me Its work. It appeared to be the creator of our physical universe. It would take me somewhere or open me to some experience, and I would come to understand some aspect of the workings of the universe. Over and over again, I was overwhelmed at the magnitude, the subtlety, and the intelligence of what I was witnessing.
“That’s incredible.”
“I’m beginning to understand.”
I was repeatedly left breathless by the beauty of the design I was seeing.
Sometimes I was so staggered by what I was seeing that I would stop and It had to come back for me. “Keep up! Keep up!” It said, taking delight in my awe. Sometimes I was not sure what I was seeing and It would do something and suddenly everything would become larger and I would understand. Then It would take me on to something else.
This tour was the most extraordinary journey of my life. The vistas of intelligence repeatedly swept me into cognitive ecstasy. The irony, however, is that except for the small pieces I shall describe below, I am unable to re-create the details of what I saw. I simply don’t have enough Ph.D.s to fit the knowing I had there into my small Earth-bound mind. This does not lead me to question or doubt my experience. Even though I have lost large sections of the experience, I retain an unshakable epistemological certainty that this knowing was of a higher order of knowing than any I am capable of in my ordinary consciousness.*43
At one point, I was taken through a complex labyrinth of churning forces until I emerged above the turbulence into a wonderfully spacious and calm experiential field. I was told that we had come through the emotions of human experience. They had a restless, gnawing quality to them and composed such a mass of tangled energy that I was not surprised that they could blot out this subtler domain of peace and tranquility.
My elevation into this field felt like remembering, as did all my experiences on this tour. I was reawakening to levels of reality that I had previously known but had forgotten. Over and over again, I was reawakening to a level of experience I had left behind long ago. Remembering. It was not about “dying” at all but waking up and remembering.
I was then lifted into another “higher” and “larger” experiential field and then another. With each transition, I entered a new level of quiet and bliss-filled peace. It was as though an amnesia lasting billions of years was being lifted from me layer by layer. The more I remembered, the larger I became. Wave after wave of awakening was pushing back the edges of my being. To remember more was to become more.
Finally, I was lifted into a particularly spacious and peaceful dimension. As I remembered this dimension, I was overcome by an overwhelming sense of homecoming and felt fully the tragedy of having forgotten this dimension for so long. I cannot describe how poignant this was. Being fully restored to this dimension would be worth any cost. I asked what had happened, and It explained that we had left time. Then It said, “We never intended so many to get caught in time.” It felt like time was simply one of the many creative experiments of the multidimensional universe I was being shown.
Though these experiences were extraordinary in their own right, the most poignant part of today’s session was not the dimensions of the universe I was witnessing but what my seeing them meant to the Creative Consciousness I was with. It seemed so pleased to have someone to show Its work to. I sensed that It had been waiting billions of years for embodied consciousness to evolve to the point where we could at last begin to see, to understand, and to appreciate what had been accomplished in our self-evolving universe. I felt the loneliness of this Intelligence, having created such a masterpiece and having no one to appreciate Its work, and I wept. I wept for its self-isolation and in awe of the profound love that had accepted this isolation as part of a larger plan. Behind creation lies a Love of extraordinary proportions. The Intelligence of the universe’s design is matched by the depth of Love that inspired it.
Somewhere in here, I realized that I was not going to be able to bring the knowledge I had gathered on this journey back with me. The Intelligence I was with also knew this, making our few hours of contact all the more precious to It. There was nothing I was going to be able to do with this knowledge except experience it now. My greatest service was simply to appreciate what I was seeing. It seemed important to mirror existence back to its Creator in loving appreciation.
Comment
After this session came a very different kind of session in which I was put through a training exercise that taught me how to receive the levels of experiential learning that were beginning to open in the sessions. The Council of Elders was my mind’s way of giving form to an encounter with cosmic knowledge.
Session 20—The Council of Elders
In the early session, my body was being pushed to higher and higher levels of energy, making me nauseous and always on the edge of throwing up. The energy was enormous. I danced around the edges of the collective pain from previous sessions, but there was nothing new in it. I had already explored everything that was passing through me. And yet, after a while, I became caught up in it again. Things were moving very fast at this point. There was a raging pain, but it did not seem to be about me personally. I tried to understand how I might work with the pain, cooperate with it, but I could not see any way. I cast about for something resembling ego-death to yield to, but the concept was meaningless to me. By this time, I had very little sense of being a personal “me” at all.
After a period of time in this condition, I began to shift into positive transpersonal states. The transition was uneven, and I moved back and forth between the pain and transpersonal horizons several times before finally settling into a clear, spacious state. As I did, an interactive arena of dialogue with a Council of Elders opened around me. The music was the deep guttural chanting of the Tibetan monks of the Gyuto monastery. The head monk’s powerful bass voice grabbed me and held me fast, completely stopping my thought process. A voice said, “Stop everything and pay attention! Pay attention and learn!” Class had resumed.
Today’s session was a training exercise in learning how to learn in transpersonal states of awareness. It’s one thing if you are content to remain passive in these states while exotic experiences simply flow through you, but it’s another matter entirely if you want to become fully conscious at these levels. To do this, you have to learn how to stabilize your attention in order to experience completely what is happening. You must also learn how to keep your experience coherent with respect to levels of reality. My ability to do both had been improving, but now it appeared that I needed explicit training in this area.
The intelligence that brought our universe into existence is enormously sophisticated, its workings far beyond ordinary comprehension. If you want access to its knowledge, this intelligence has to teach you how to receive it. The Council of Elders were the guardians of the knowledge of what has been taking place in the universe for billions of years. Because I sought this knowledge, I was brought before the Council to receive it. This knowledge is not just given to you; you have to work for it. First you have to work to reach this level of awareness, and then you have to work to sustain the concentration necessary to receive the knowledge that is available here.
I was sitting with the Council at what felt to be the primal core of the universe, where the guardians conjure and make things happen. I did not see their specific form, but I felt their presence strongly. A charged field of synchronicity surrounded me, blending music and experience into a single flow.
I wanted to know things. An idea of something I wanted to understand came into my mind, and immediately the Council knew it and accepted it as a formal request. The head of the Council bellowed a thundering chant—“He wants to know this.” Then the others joined in and started an invocation. They chanted to gather power because you’ve got to gather the necessary power if you want to know certain things. You’ve got to say the mantra so many times. Even the Council of Elders had to gather power. I learned the hard way that I had to be prepared for what happened next.
When the knowledge that the Council unleashed came at me, it either sent me into cognitive ecstasy or it shattered me. If I was centered when the knowing hit me, it cascaded through me as an ecstatic orgy of insight. But if I had not controlled my thoughts and was not centered when it hit me, it completely shattered me, driving me beyond my capacity to maintain cognitive coherence. Both of these happened many times today.
The Council could focus my experience on different levels of reality, and sometimes the multiplicity of levels caused an almost comical confusion. Once, the Council was gathering power to give me the knowledge I had requested when suddenly a new question came to me, something that pertained to a different level of reality. The Council reacted in startled confusion and mild consternation. The change of focus would require them to shift their entire process. The head of the Council thundered a long solo note that brought everything to a standstill, then they decided to accept the new request and began a new invocation to gather the power necessary to generate access to this knowledge.
Sometimes the Council rejected my interruption. Once, I made the mistake of allowing myself to get distracted while the Elders were gathering power. Something grabbed me right down to my bones and said, “LISTEN! Will you grow up! Don’t get distracted! PAY ATTENTION! All of these things have their place, but if you want to understand the structure of the universe, you’ve got to be able to take it on. You’ve got to be able to EXPERIENCE it.”
Today the Council of Elders allowed me to experience many pieces of how the universe works. I could know anything I wanted if I could endure it, but to endure it I had to be able to “go flat out with existence”; that is, I had to be able to expand to the size of the reality I wished to have knowledge of. Being able to know the universe in this way answered a longing in me so deep that I knew it had been driving me for thousands of years.
Comment
The training given me in this session seems to have been productive, because in the next session everything shifted to a deeper register.
Session 21—Dying into Oneness
I was caught off guard by how terribly painful this session was. After all the previous sessions, I could not have imagined that there could be this much of a jump in suffering, but this session was many times more terrible than anything before.
It was not personal. My experiential boundaries stretched to include the entire human family and all human history, and this “I” was caught up in a horror that I am incapable of describing with any accuracy. It was a raging insanity, a surging kaleidoscopic field of chaos, pain, and destruction. It was as if the entire human race had gathered from all the corners of the globe and gone absolutely stark raving mad.
People were attacking each other with a rabid savagery, augmented by science fiction–like technology. There were many currents crossing and crisscrossing in front of me, each composed of thousands of people, some currents killing in multiple ways, some being killed, some fleeing in panic, others being rounded up, others witnessing and screaming in terror, others having their hearts broken by a species gone mad—and “I” was all their experiences. Floating through it were scenes of suffering caused by nature and human indifference. Thousands of starving children from around the globe, their bodies bloated in death, their eyes staring out blankly at a humanity that was killing them through systemic abuse and neglect. Lots of violence between men and women—rapes, beatings, intimidation, retaliation—cycles and cycles of destruction. The magnitude of the deaths and the insanity is impossible to describe.
What happened next emerged in the context of this larger field of agony. It was in one sense foreground against the backdrop of this horror, but in another sense it was not central at all. It is difficult to describe how one’s experience can be simultaneously so inclusive and so selectively focused.
At the center came forward the theme of sex. At first sex emerged in its pleasant form as mutual delight and erotic satisfaction, but soon it changed into in its violent form, as attack, assault, injury, and hurt. The forces of sexual assault were building in the crisscrossing fields of humanity as well. I was facing these brutal forces, and then behind my back was a little girl. It was both an individual child about three years old and all the children of the world simultaneously.
I kept trying to protect this child, to hold back the attack that was trying to reach her through me. But the longer I held them in check the more powerful they became. “I” had become thousands of people. The horror was beyond anything I can describe. Glancing over my shoulder, I could feel the field of frightened innocence, but now there was another element added—a strain of mystical embrace. Superimposed on the child was the Primal Female, the Goddess herself. She beckoned me to embrace her, and I knew instinctively that there could be no greater sweetness than that found in her arms. In holding myself back from violent sexual assault, I was also holding myself back from the mystical embrace of the Goddess, but I would not bring myself to rape this child, no matter how sweet the promise of redemption.
The frenzy continued to build until eventually I began to turn. Still holding back the terrible onslaught, I was now facing my victim and being torn apart by the forces of passion on one side and protection on the other. My victim was at once this helpless little girl and the Primal Woman inviting me to a sexual embrace of cosmic proportions. No matter how hard I fought what was happening, I was being drawn to unleash the fury. In horror and blind thirst, I was turning to rape, to attack, to kill, and yet I continued to fight what was happening with every ounce of my strength. The conflict drove me to deeper and deeper levels of intensity until suddenly something broke open inside me, and I came to the shattering realization that I was turning to rape and kill MYSELF.
The breakthrough was very multidimensional and confusing. The intensity of the struggle drove me through a breaking point where I suddenly confronted the reality that “I” was both the raping killer and the victim. In looking into my victim’s eyes, I discovered that I was looking into my own face. I sobbed and sobbed. “I’m doing it to myself!”
This was not a karmic inversion, a flip into a former life where victim and victimizer change places. Rather, it was a quantum jump to an experiential level that dissolved all dualities into a single, encompassing flow. My personal sense of “I” exploded into an innate Oneness that subsumed all people. It was collective in the sense of including all human experience, but utterly simple and undivided. I was one, aggressor and victim. I was both killer and killed. I was doing it to myself. Through all of history, I have been doing it to myself.
As this discovery was taking place at the center, it was also taking place in the crisscrossing fields that encompassed all humanity and all creation. All the unspeakable horrors that I had been experiencing were “Mine” in this larger sense. All the pain experienced in the violent creation of galaxies was caused by Me and felt by Me. The pain of human history was My pain. There were no victims. Nothing was outside of Me doing this to Me. I was responsible for everything that I was experiencing, for everything that had ever happened. I was looking into the face of My creation. I did this. I am doing this. I chose for all this to happen. I chose to create all these horrible, horrible worlds. But why?!
The Universe
Then in the distance, I began to see something. It kept expanding, from our solar system to the galaxy to the cosmos itself. It was the physical universe and the underlying forces that built and sustain the universe. It was something both physical and archetypal. It was not a symbolic representation of the universe but the real thing. It was continuous with the universe I had experienced on the Cosmic Tour, but many times larger and more complex. It was beautiful beyond words and absolutely captivating.
As I expanded into what I was seeing, I was becoming larger. I learned by becoming what I was knowing. I discovered the universe not by knowing it from the outside but by tuning to that level of my being where I was that thing. All I can do at this point is to sketch the highlights of the experiences that followed, which will not do justice either to their cognitive structure or to their experiential intensity.
What stood out for me in the early stages was the interconnectedness of everything to form a seamless whole. The entire universe was an undivided, totally unified, organic whole. I saw various breakthroughs—quantum theory, Bell’s theorem, morphogenetic field theory, holographic theory, systems theory, the grand unified theory—as but the early phases of science’s discovery of this innate wholeness. I knew that these discoveries would continue to mount until it would become impossible for us not to see the universe for what it is: a single unified organism of extraordinary complexity and subtlety reflecting a vast Creative Intelligence. The intelligence and love that was responsible for what I was seeing kept overwhelming me and filling me with reverential awe.
The unified field underlying physical existence completely dissolved all boundaries. As I moved deeper into it, all borders fell away; all appearances of division were ultimately illusory. No boundaries between incarnations, between human beings, between species, even between matter and spirit. The world of individuated existence was not collapsing into an amorphous mass, as it might sound, but rather was revealing itself to be an exquisitely diversified manifestation of a single entity.
Dying into Oneness
As my experience of this seamless universe progressed, I came to discover that I was not exploring a universe “out there,” as I had in session 19, but a universe that “I” in some essential way already was. These experiences were leading me step-by-step into a deeper embrace of my own reality. I was exploring the universe as a dimension of my own existence, slowly remembering aspects of my being that I had lost contact with. This exploration seemed to answer a cosmic need not only to know but also to be known.
Initially, I was on a cosmic tour not unlike session 19 when I realized again that this larger field of consciousness that I was with (or in) had been waiting a long time to be recognized. Again I began to weep as I felt its heartfelt longing to be known. Then I asked something I had not asked before. I asked, “Who am I talking to?” With that question, my experiential field began to change, and I dropped into a new level of reality. It was as though I fell into a deeper operational level where I discovered that I was, in fact, with MYSELF. The creative impulse that had been “other” to me at the previous level was at this level Myself.
This mysterious progression repeated itself many times and in many variations. It continued for hours. I would be at one level of reality far beyond physical diversity, and as I sought to know this reality more deeply, I would experience a kind of dying, a falling away, and would slip into a new level where I would discover that this duality too was but another facet of Myself. Over and over again, in detailed progressions, I was led to the same fundamental encounter.
No matter how many times I died or how many different forms I was when I died, I kept being caught by this massive SOMETHING, this IT. I could not leave IT, could not escape IT, could not not be IT. No matter how many adventures I had been on, I had never stepped outside IT, never stopped being IT. There simply was no outside to My Being. There was no other in existence.
As I moved into these levels of increasing ontological simplicity, I entered a profound stillness that reawakened a distant, vague memory. “Where have I known this before?” By following this stillness, I was guided back to what seemed like a time before creation, back to the ontological fount of creation. In this stillness, I was “with Myself” in ways that I had been long ago, but not for billions of years. It was a time of reunion, a time of being whole after a terribly long separation.
From this extraordinary position, I began to actually be able to conceive of the possibility of the physical universe not having been created. The alternatives stood starkly before me. On one side was all the planning, all the work, all the confusion and uncertainty, and especially all the terrible suffering that was so fresh in my mind from earlier in the session. On the other side was the profound stillness and richness that was my current state. Why do it? Why manifest the universe if at such a cost?
An answer rose that was the same as I had been given before, in session 15: “Have we not learned anything?” This time it carried overtones of: “Has it not been worthwhile? Has it not been an adventure? Look what would not exist if we had not chosen to create.” This time I was not shattered, for the choice of creation seemed profoundly good. The thought that the entire physical universe might not have existed carried with it a terrible sadness. From this perspective, I was also able to feel that there was no fundamental flaw in the manifest order of creation. Despite all the suffering, everything was moving along fine—though it is profoundly unfinished.
I continued to ask my questions:
“What is happening here?”
“How does this work?”
“What has it been like for you?”
With each question, my experiential field changed, opening me to one cosmic process after another. I cannot describe these experiences adequately because the categories of thought derived from space-time do not lend themselves to remembering clearly or translating into words experiences of realities that lie outside space-time. Though my ordinary waking consciousness is being gradually changed by these experiences, it is still too cognitively restricted to be able to hold on to them in sufficient detail. What I experienced, however, repeatedly swept me into ecstasy.
“Amazing!”
“So that’s how that works!”
“Oh, goodness!”
“How much do you want to see?” I was asked. “More!” I answered, and always more would unfold. It kept unfolding for hours.
Comment
This was an extremely intense session, both in its pain and its joy, with pieces that are difficult to interpret. The suffering escalated into a frenzied animal passion that destroys everything it touches. The conflict between this bloodlust and my desperate struggle to protect the child seems to have been a device used to drive the energy to enormous proportions, eventually shattering the fundamental dualism that had created the rage and hunger in the first place. The mystical embrace of the Primal Woman was an archetypal fragment, a symptom of the hieros gamos, the “divine marriage” that occurs when differentiated existence reunites with the bliss of primordial essence. When the final breakthrough took place, I felt an explosion of healing ripple through the entire human family.
In the Cosmic Tour, I had explored the universe as a reality outside myself; in this session, I explored the universe as a dimension of my own being. This shift reflects the broader transition that takes place as one moves from the subtle level of consciousness, with dualism intact, into nondual causal consciousness. The peace of returning to the Oneness that swallows all partitions awakened a seed of remembering that changed me deeply, not instantaneously, but slowly over many years.
For the sake of efficiency, I’m going to merge the next two sessions. These sessions continued the story of creation but now deepened it by taking me in two different directions. First, they took me back to what felt like the beginning of creation, where I experienced creation as an act of love between two Cosmic Beings. This was a completely unexpected cosmology for me. Then, they took me forward in time and gave me a vision of where creation is taking humanity. I know this sounds monstrously arrogant, like ego run amok, but this is simply what happened.
This is the first time that the theme of humanity’s future entered my sessions, but it would not be the last. From this point on, the story of our collective evolution became a recurring theme in my work. Though I describe this story as a “master plan,” I do not mean this in a heavy handed, dictated-destiny sense of the phrase. I am simply trying to give voice to an encounter with the deep intentionality expressing itself in the unfolding complexity of our universe. In time this story became the meta-framework of my entire psychedelic journey and my entire life. I will say more about this in chapter 9, “The Birth of the Future Human,” but the story I will tell there began here, inside these two sessions.
My prayer at the beginning of my sessions had always been: “I surrender myself to whatever serves the common good. Whatever You need, I choose.” The pain of the 21st session had been so severe, however, that this time my prayer was: “Please let the suffering end.” But our conscious intentions do not guide these affairs. The pain did not end. It grew worse.
Sessions 22–23—The Master Plan
As the swirling currents of destruction and violence entered, I consciously opened to them, holding nothing in reserve. They carried me deeper and deeper into the peculiar logic of rivalries and wars, of violence and revenge, attack and counterattack. The violence escalated until it again breached historical boundaries, incorporating many historical periods simultaneously. Underneath all the different justifications given for specific wars was a common raging fury. As more layers and more epochs were added, I ceased to function as an individual person and became instead a field encompassing all the combatants. I was the field of which they were all parts. I was legion.
The suffering of the planet was enormous. It was the suffering of the species in specific historical configurations, massive but precise—the suffering of thousands of years of war, thousands of years of racial violence, and so on. This was a suffering that I was responsible for, not as an individual but as the unified consciousness of our species.
I could make a difference in the experience of this species. Would I choose to make a difference?
I could change things. How can I change things?
By focusing on the pain. By following the pain to its root.
Then death came to preoccupy my thoughts, death at many levels and in many forms. It became the background gestalt to everything that was happening. I felt myself dying as I slipped still deeper into the destructive flow. It was not a personal “I” that was dying at this point but something massive, something collective. This continued for perhaps an hour. I was lost in death for a long time.
The next thing I can reconstruct is that I was emerging on the “other side” of death. This involved a strange reversal of perspective. As I crossed into what lay beyond this collective suffering, I began to realize that instead of causing my death, this pain was now being used to drive me to this higher level of awareness, like waking a drunk by slapping him in the face. When I would begin to lose my focus at this deeper level, something would direct more waves of collective pain through me, more slaps, and I would get clearer, would see more, would know more. Over and over again, this happened, until eventually I was firmly established in this new reality.
I entered a spacious and quiet domain “beyond” and “above” the collective unconscious of humanity, beyond the species-mind. As I entered this domain, I was met by a large assembly of beings who appeared to have been called to participate in today’s events. They had the feeling tone of being master shamans. Under their watchful eye I was being escorted to an arena where a day of disclosure had been planned.
What “I” was at this point is difficult to describe. The hours of painful cleansing had already shattered my egoic reality and left me in an extremely porous transpersonal state. As we approached the arena, the procession was stopped at regular intervals and interrogated. In order to be allowed to continue, one had to demonstrate one’s knowledge of the workings of the universe. My work and my person were being scrutinized. I was surprised to find that I appeared to possess the required knowledge, as I was always passed along. This was a deeply moving experience. It felt like I was being initiated into a shamanic fellowship, that my entire life had been planned toward this end.
With each checkpoint, my experiential reality changed as deeper and deeper modes of archetypal experience of incalculable age and expanse opened. Eventually, space-time reality was left behind entirely, and I found myself alone in a condition that was seemingly without boundaries of either time or space, soaking in the bliss and clarity of transcendence.
I then learned that I was going to be shown a portion of the master plan for the human species. As preposterous as this suggestion may sound to our ordinary consciousness, in my current state, it seemed entirely feasible. I had no time to debate these matters, for suddenly something opened and I was drawn into a vast, concentrated stream underlying physical reality. This stream appeared to be the formative intent of the Creative Intelligence itself. I dissolved completely into this stream and became one with it. The following experiences emerged while I was in this condition.
Cosmic Lovers
I was taken back to the beginning of creation and there experienced human evolution in the context of a larger cosmic process. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the most extraordinary LOVE, a love unlike anything I had ever encountered before. It was as if a dam had burst and love was coming at me from every direction, so much love that I could barely take it in even in my expanded state. It was a romantic love, cosmic in scope and intensity. As I stabilized under this amorous assault, I began to remember a romance from deep within my history. An ancient love, a divine love of unbelievable proportions.
I was a Cosmic Being being loved by another Cosmic Being. Though at one level I had never been separated from my Lover, at another level we had been separated for billions of years, and my return was rekindling our ancient love.
Creation seemed to be a reality that had come forth from a dynamic relation between two Cosmic Beings who had themselves emerged from a Primal Unity. One being, who felt more like a “She,” had plunged Herself into the task of creating space-time and the physical universe, knowing in advance that She would eventually lose Her self-awareness in this work and become unconscious of Her true nature for billions of years. The other being, who felt more like a “He,” had remained fully conscious outside of space-time. The creating half had voluntarily submitted to this long and painful isolation in order to create the raw substance of the physical universe, which would in time become transparent to divine intention as matter evolved into increasing self-awareness. With this phase of the work now largely complete, the self-imposed exile was coming to an end, and the Lovers were at long last being reunited.
The magnitude of the Love that lies at the fount of the creation of our universe is beyond description. To awaken to this Love was to remember a primordial decision that I had somehow participated in. It was part of my spiritual genetic makeup, something I had inherited along with everything else that I had not understood about my life. Remembering choices made before matter and time even existed, I reconnected with the Divine Love that had inspired these choices. This experience shattered my heart, and I wept deeply.
I experienced all the suffering that humanity had endured through history as taking place inside this Cosmic Love. I realized that all the suffering inherent in evolution was noble beyond words. It was all part of a cosmic plan that had been entered into freely by all the participants, however unconscious of this fact we have become along the way. The nobility of great suffering shouldered voluntarily in the name of Divine Love, suffering that would stretch across millions of years, suffering that would become so utterly inscrutable that it would be used as evidence that the universe was devoid of compassion, this was the nobility of humanity’s gift to the Creator. All of the suffering that humanity had endured and would endure, especially the suffering of forgetfulness itself, was part of a consciously chosen creative process, a process that had not yet come to fruition.
Our Collective Awakening
From here I pivoted to the second lesson of the day. The order and design of evolving life is not something that is imposed on it from without; it surges up from within life itself. It is something that lives in the fire of the atomic process and surges forward in all the micro and macro-jumps of evolution. It is a restless churning to become more that burns within life. In human beings, the focus of this churning is consciousness, and at this point I was immersed in the forces driving the evolution of human consciousness.
Out of the seething desires of history, out of the violent conflicts and the scheming of individuals and nations, there is now driving forward a new awareness in human consciousness. Its birth in us is no less difficult or violent than the birth of a new continent. It drives upward from the floor of our being, requiring a transposition of everything that has gone before to make room for its new organizational patterns.
The great difficulty I have is describing the enormity of what is being birthed. The true focus of this creative process is not individuals but all humanity. It is actually trying to awaken our entire species. What is emerging is a consciousness of unprecedented proportions, the entire human family integrated in a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its Fundamental Nature. Our thoughts tuned to Source Consciousness. This unified field did not suffocate our individuality but liberated it into new orders of self-expression.
Having moved beyond linear time into Deep Time, I experienced this collective awakening as both a projected destiny and a realized actuality. It was simultaneously something to be accomplished and something already accomplished. The scale of what I was witnessing took my breath away.
Comment
Because of the master story I had been given in these two sessions, I returned to the psychedelic arena three months later with a clearer sense of the landscape I was entering. Things were beginning to make more sense to me now: why my personal transformation had been supplanted by the work of collective transformation, why the killing of the children, why the ocean of suffering. Seeing that humanity was entering a critical phase of its evolutionary journey helped me understand why I had refused to abandon creation in session 18 despite the pleasures available to me in spiritual reality. Having been reunited with the forces and intention of creation, I saw more clearly what was happening in history and the role I was being asked to play in this unfolding. All of this came to a head in the next session when the ocean of suffering reached its peak. Perhaps because the collective ordeal was coming to its culmination, this session began in the quiet beginnings of my life, as if to recapitulate and clarify the entire progression.
Session 24—Healing the Collective Wound
The session began slowly and smoothly with blissful mother/infant experiences. I was back with my mother as a newborn babe, experiencing the soothing bliss of being held at her breast. This feeling of closeness deepened and became more elemental, shifting from sleeping at her breast to being an embryo in her womb. It then deepened further to become the peace of spiritual existence before conception. In this pre-incarnated state, I was experiencing an extraordinary tranquility, a soothing bliss of wholeness that rested my soul. I was retracing my history, remembering where I had come from, where all of us have come from.
Then within this profound serenity and love, I began to experience pain. The pain deepened and broadened for a long time. As always, my capacity to experience pain built on the previous sessions. Its depth and scope were beyond description. Again it breached the boundaries of history, and I saw clearly that this type of suffering exists in some domain that gathers the experiences of humanity in some collective embrace. I had a clearer sense than in previous sessions that I was experiencing not multiple, discrete historical epochs so much as something that was “once removed” from actual experience. It was a gathering of the memories of human experience, a collective remembering. As before, there were millions of people involved and tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years. The suffering was enormous. Any attempt to describe it would simply become a repetition of extremes.
Although the suffering was much worse than in previous sessions, there was also something new present. The pain had begun in love, and I was shown that the pain did not represent a rupturing of love but was itself an expression of this love. Being born into space-time, even the very birth of space-time itself, was an expression of unshakable love.
I began to sense that by consciously experiencing this pain as an expression of love, I could transform it. I began to feel that I was being used in some larger capacity to heal our species. Humanity had endured all this suffering without realizing why it had done so. By re-experiencing the memory of this pain knowing that it was part of a creative process rooted in cosmic love, my species was being healed in some way. I realized that the more pain I could take in, the more healing I could mediate. This discovery brought forth even deeper compassion for the countless beings I was experiencing myself to be. At this point, I began to embrace the suffering, to actively seek it out, to take in as much of it as I could. Pain became my ally, my instrument of deliverance.
It is hard to describe how one can reach out and absorb suffering of this magnitude. It was as though I could open and take into my being the pain of whole groups of people, of whole collective endeavors, of wars and rebellions, of droughts and social upheavals. As I did, the sweep of the pain kept getting larger and larger, reaching deeper into human and prehuman history. The process kept accelerating until it reached an unbelievably frenzied pitch. Enormous energies were involved. Eventually, these energies reached such gigantic proportions that the sensation became one of frenzied power rather than pain. Pain was present, but “I” became larger than the pain. I had moved into a state of ecstatic power, feeding on the pain of the planet. This continued for a long, long time.
Eventually, I found myself slowly emerging from the swirling mayhem. Still surrounded by the fading chaos, I began to see a larger world beyond it. I began to recognize shapes and sense the atmosphere of transcendence. To enter this world again filled me with delight, exhausted relief, awe, wonder, and a poignant sense of homecoming. How good it felt to be back.
This world was ancient and archetypal. It had the feeling tone of being more inherently “alive” than space-time. To exist here was to be part of this aliveness. It was a domain populated by Massive Beings larger than any gods imagined on Earth. I saw powerful forces that I understood to be the forces driving physical existence, but their forms were felt more than seen. Visually, they resembled the majestic sweep of distant galaxies spinning through deep space, but this is simply the best my mind could do to give them form and scale.
Rather than letting me rest in this new domain, the energy generated by embracing the collective suffering continued to build to unbelievable extremes even here. The energy formed rivers of liquid fire—white-hot lava flows and exploding sun flares. Usually these currents surrounded me in displays of extraordinary power and beauty, but several times I was drawn into them. I was immersed in suns exploding into rivers of fire shooting into space. The liquid fire poured through me, completely consuming me and transporting me. There is no experiencing these things without being changed at the core.
After returning to my ordinary consciousness after the session, I have not been able to return to accepting the physical world as real in the same way as before. My experience of this other domain has now deepened to the point that it has become part of the fiber of my being. I now carry within me a visceral knowing that what appears here as solid is in fact an energy that is rooted in another reality. Everywhere around me I see stage, props, and actors.
Expanding the Narrative—Who Is the Patient?
I don’t think these six sessions are well served by further commentary. Every time I attempt it, I find that my words dilute their message, so better to let them stand as they are. In the last section of this chapter, I want to pivot from experience to theory. Theory pales before experience and can feel like a weak postscript, and it is, but in order for me to integrate my experiences, I had to understand them. This required that I expand my understanding of what is possible in these states and how the universe works in them.
Individual Model
When I began this work, I was thinking in terms of a model of transformation that held that the purpose of undergoing these exercises was to heal and enlighten the individual. When Grof discussed the therapeutic impact of psychedelic therapy, he always focused on how it affected the individual patient, and occasionally the patient’s significant partner. When he reflected on how this therapeutic movement might influence the emerging global crisis, he did so in terms of the cumulative impact of healing large numbers of people one person at a time. Accordingly, when the ocean of suffering opened after what had appeared to be a solid ego-death in sessions 9 and 10, I interpreted it to mean that some stubborn remnant of my ego must have slipped through the therapeutic net and that my ego-death was unfinished. I thought that this collective suffering would eventually lead to a more complete ego-death.
Eventually, however, this interpretation was overwhelmed by the sheer intensity and quantity of the suffering involved. These episodes went on for too many years and were too extreme in their content for me to continue seeing them as collective experiences drawn in through resonance to the core of my unfinished ego-death. This eventually forced me to reassess the boundaries of this entire enterprise. The conclusion I came to, both intellectually and experientially, was that these collective episodes were not aimed primarily at the transformation of my personal consciousness. Instead, they were aimed at nothing less than the transformation of the collective psyche as a whole.
Collective Model
I wrote Dark Night, Early Dawn in part to answer the question: Why did death become as large as it did in my psychedelic journey? What is driving the healing process when it opens to such collective tracts? In that book, I abandoned the person-centered narrative I had been assuming and adopted an expanded narrative. By integrating Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic fields into Grof’s paradigm, the way opened to viewing these collective ordeals as part of a larger transformational process aimed at healing wounds still carried in the collective psyche. I argued that in highly energized psychedelic states, the collective unconscious is sometimes activated to such a degree or in such a manner that it triggers a collective healing process. Through some fractal flip or quantum entanglement I had not anticipated or even thought possible at the time, the “patient” in my sessions had shifted from being me to being some portion of humanity itself.
This interpretation proposes that the working of the collective psyche parallels the working of the personal psyche in key respects. It proposes that just as painful experiences can accumulate and block the healthy functioning of the individual, similar blockages can occur at the collective level. It suggests that the unresolved anguish of human history might still be active in the collective memory of our species, burdening its life just as our personal unresolved anguish burdens ours. Continuing the parallel, if the conscious engagement of unresolved pain can bring therapeutic relief at the personal level, the same may also occur at the species level. Normally, we would expect such healing to take the form of reform movements or cultural shifts in which large numbers of people confront and heal some painful legacy from our past. Within the context of LSD therapy, however, a new possibility seems to be emerging. In this setting, an individual seems to be able to tap into and directly facilitate a healing of some portion of the collective psyche. The process of engaging and healing a collective META-COEX system in a psychedelic session is essentially the same as engaging and healing a personal COEX system, but enacted on a much larger scale and a different level of consciousness. Grof has embraced this expansion of his paradigm.
I came to this conclusion only after great struggle. For years I kept trying to fit my psychedelic experiences into the model of individual transformation. Opening to a narrative of collective transformation felt monstrously arrogant. How can a single person impact something as large as the collective unconscious of our species? It felt like I was inflating my ego even to suggest the possibility, and yet this shift was demanded by the experiences themselves. Not only did the quantity of suffering shatter the myth of individual therapy, but the quality of suffering was demonstrating that this was an inherently collective dynamic. Years later, after I had concluded my journey, I learned that Marie Louise von Franz, a life-long collaborator with Carl Jung, had come to a similar conclusion about the collective import of deep transformative work. She wrote:
Whenever an individual works on his own unconscious, he invisibly affects first the group and, if he goes even deeper, he affects the large national units or sometimes even all of humanity. Not only does he change and transform himself but he has an imperceptible impact on the unconscious psyche of many other people. (Von Franz 1985, 17; quoted in Nicol 2015, 14)
Moving to a model of collective transformation represented an enormous transition for me because with this pivot we are no longer speaking of an individual “having transpersonal experiences.” Here the individual dissolves into preexisting fields of collective consciousness. At this point, it is these collective fields that become the “working unit” of experience in these sessions. This requires a new way of thinking about what is taking place in our sessions and a new therapeutic calculus. In letting go of the person-centered narrative, I was surrendering to a universe whose workings were stranger and more complex than I had previously imagined.
The Spiral of Death and Rebirth
Let me now add one way in which my thinking has moved beyond Dark Night, Early Dawn. In that book, I attempted to integrate the narrative of collective healing into Grof’s model of consciousness by retaining the term perinatal for these collective ordeals and expanding the rationale for their appearance. Rather than let go of the perinatal vocabulary, as I probably should have, I bent over backward to stretch it by proposing that in some instances a person’s experience of the perinatal domain could “slant” toward the transpersonal side of the personal/ transpersonal interface. I also suggested that there were “two tiers” of death and rebirth intertwined in these collective ordeals, one aimed at personal ego-death and a second aimed at species ego-death.*44
At the present time, however, I have shifted to what I think is a simpler and more elegant way of understanding the ocean of suffering. I now see death and rebirth as a cycle that repeats many times as we move into progressively deeper levels of consciousness. Being an archetypal cycle, any single death-rebirth experience may incorporate material from multiple levels of consciousness. But looking back over the trajectory of all my sessions, I now recognize that the death-rebirth cycle was repeating itself in different forms at different levels of consciousness. The image below may help convey this point.
Fig. 2. Spiral of Death and Rebirth
(image by Jason Bache, Nerds Ltd.)
Below the horizontal line is ordinary consciousness in physical reality; above it is the vast territory of transpersonal consciousness. The drop at the bottom represents individual egoic consciousness. The lowest circle represents the first cycle of death and rebirth at the perinatal level of consciousness, where one transitions from physical consciousness to early transpersonal consciousness. The higher circles represent subsequent cycles of death and rebirth at progressively deeper levels of transpersonal consciousness. Though I distinguish psychic, subtle, and causal levels of consciousness in this book, I do not have a personal stake in how many levels of consciousness there may be or how many times the wheel of death and rebirth may turn. This image is open at the top. It represents the process of progressive initiation, not a complete map of the territory one is being initiated into.
The essence of my revision of Dark Night, Early Dawn, then, is this. Rather than see the ocean of suffering as a protracted first turning of the wheel of death and rebirth at the perinatal level, I now see it as a second turning of that wheel. Coming after the ego-death that had taken place at the perinatal level of consciousness in sessions 9 and 10, the ocean of suffering is the second movement of a larger symphony, a movement taking place at the subtle level of consciousness, a movement whose dynamics are inherently collective, focused on a collective patient and aimed at a collective transformation. If the first turning of the wheel of death and rebirth culminates in individual ego-death, this second turning of the wheel aims at species ego-death—a transformation of the collective psyche that when fully realized will result in a profound shift in how our species experiences itself and the surrounding world.
In offering this assessment of my sessions, I am not suggesting that the bleed-through interpretation that Grof originally proposed for similar collective episodes is wrong, only that it applies in some circumstances and not others. It applies best, I think, when these collective elements show up in sessions where the individual is clearly engaged in a perinatal process with prominent fetal features. In these conditions, the principle of resonance may explain how clusters of transpersonal experiences of death and dying may be drawn into one’s personal ego-death process. But in circumstances where one has already moved through the perinatal process and undergone a solid ego-death, I think we must expand our frame of reference to explain what is taking place when collective episodes like those in the ocean of suffering show up.
The proposal that death and rebirth takes place at multiple levels of consciousness falls within the broad framework of Grof’s body of work, where he points to the numerous forms that death can take at transpersonal levels. In The Ultimate Journey, for example, he writes:
We may identify with our ancestors or people from different countries and historical periods who are dying or whose lives are threatened. Such sequences from the collective unconscious can sometimes be associated with a sense of personal remembering, which characterizes them as past incarnation memories. Death can even be experienced in full identification with an animal or a plant. Death is also powerfully represented in the collective unconscious as mythological motifs of death and rebirth and as various eschatological themes, including specific death gods and underworlds of various cultures, the archetype of Death, astral or bardo realms, the posthumous journey of the soul, and the abodes of the Beyond.*45 (Grof 2006, 309)
Furthermore, Grof supports restricting the term perinatal to death-rebirth experiences that have strong fetal components. In a personal exchange with me on this topic in October 25, 2006, he wrote:
I feel that for clarity, we should change the terminology and make it clear that the term perinatal should be used only for fetal experiences . . . and not for experiences of death and rebirth on higher levels of the transpersonal spectrum with no relation to biological birth.
I want to be careful not to overstate the therapeutic impact that one person’s sessions may have on the collective psyche. How can we even begin to estimate such a thing? If I add up the total number of hours I spent in these states and multiply them by the number of people I subjectively felt myself to be, the total is a pittance compared with the total suffering humanity has endured. And yet, I don’t think we should discount their therapeutic impact either. Every act of healing, large or small, contributes to healing the larger whole. My hope is that through our combined efforts on many fronts, we are helping the human family move closer to its collective transformation.
Why Did the Suffering End?
Let me conclude this chapter by taking up a question that I asked in the closing pages of Dark Night, Early Dawn. If the individual and the species are as deeply interwoven in these sessions as I have suggested, why does the collective suffering end for an individual even though it continues for the species as a whole? If we can open to the suffering of others in our psychedelic sessions and impact that suffering to some degree, how does it happen that the individual ever completes his or her work at this level while the suffering of the species-mind continues?
I’ve thought about this a great deal because for me it’s not just a theoretical question. The more deeply you have experienced merging with the species-mind and taking on its pain, the more pressing this question becomes. It may be that given the sheer magnitude of planetary suffering, any one person is only allowed to do so much. Perhaps some cosmic oversight simply says “That’s enough!” and one is released from further obligation. Alternatively, it may be that we become more useful to the larger project of life by moving into levels of reality that lie beyond the species-mind. Personally, I think it’s the latter, because of experiences I will share in chapter 8.
At this point, all I can say is that the collective ordeal did end for me and a new phase of the journey began. In this new phase, the enormous field of energy that had been activated and freed in healing the ocean of suffering began to be focused in a way that drove me through a new set of experiential boundaries. The wheel of initiation was about to take another turn.