SEVEN
The Greater Real of Archetypal Reality
Sessions 25–35
Archetypes thus can be understood and described in many ways, and much of the history of Western thought has evolved and revolved around this very issue.
RICHARD TARNAS, COSMOS AND PSYCHE
When the ocean of suffering reached its explosive culmination in the 24th session, I crossed into a reality that was ancient beyond reckoning. Even more striking than its age was the fact that it felt more “real” than physical reality. This was unnerving at first. We are not accustomed to thinking of reality as something that admits of degrees. Either something is real or it’s not real. And yet, each time I left my ordinary consciousness and entered this domain, I had the distinct sensation of moving from the less real to the more real. In one session I wrote, “It jars my soul to realize how watered down reality is inside space-time.” Like the prisoner freed from Plato’s cave, I had entered a deeper order of reality. I had entered the greater real of archetypal reality.
The next year and a half was a choppy and complex period. The cleansing continued to be fierce, so much so that at first I thought the ocean of suffering had not yet ended, but in time I came to recognize that something had changed. I was no longer being taken into vast tracts of human history. The ecstatic portions of these eleven sessions were also complex. I was repeatedly entering what felt to be archetypal reality, but it was not the world of archetypes described by either Plato or Carl Jung, or it was and it wasn’t. I saw parallels to the work of these thinkers in my experience but also differences. And there were many levels to this territory, some far removed from physical existence and some operating deep within it. Reality functioned differently in this domain, requiring new concepts and new ways of thinking. All these factors make the next eleven sessions hard to summarize.
As I was navigating this new territory, I was promoted to full professor at my university. What a strange, almost surreal juxtaposition of worlds. I wonder whether my colleagues would have supported my promotion had they known where I was spending my weekends.
I will not present whole sessions in this chapter as I did in the previous chapter, with one exception. These sessions were so complex that in order to convey their content effectively, I need to take them apart and put their pieces into a more coherent order. I will also trim away the detours, personal lessons, and repetitions that would complicate the main story that was unfolding. I don’t mean to even out all the twists and turns and fashion a story that is smoother than the original sessions were, but I don’t think it would be worthwhile to take the reader through all the ins and outs and uncertainties I struggled with at the time. That would be a winding road indeed. Instead, I will tell the story by weaving together segments from different sessions to illustrate the major themes and patterns that emerged over this next year and a half.
This strategy of lifting pieces of sessions out of their original context carries a certain risk, however—the risk of diluting the impact that whole sessions can have on us. Jumping from one segment to another can make the narrative begin to sound almost cavalier, like I am summarizing grandiose ideas instead of sharing life-changing experiences. The only way I know to avoid this risk is to ask the reader to put back what I am taking away, to remember that every segment comes from a long day in a long weekend. In this series, each session begins not at the foot of the mountain but at the base camp established in previous sessions. We are working at high altitudes here. At these altitudes, the extraordinary can begin to sound ordinary, but it isn’t. I can’t emphasize this too strongly. What happened in the ocean of suffering became the energetic foundation for everything that followed.
I experienced archetypal reality to be a bridge between the physical universe and the source of existence. Being ontologically prior to space-time in the Great Chain of Being, it is the seed reality of space-time. Many spiritual traditions describe creation as a process that flows from a single source until it becomes the entire universe. In Taoism creation is said to flow from the Eternal Tao to the Ten Thousand Things, in Buddhism from the pregnant emptiness of dharmakaya to the pulsing complexity of nirmanakaya.*46 On its way to manifesting physical reality, this outpouring of creativity manifests many intermediate levels, and the archetypal domain is one of these levels. More precisely put, the archetypal domain is actually a cluster of levels.
I spent only eleven sessions exploring this territory, crossing it in very large steps. What follows, then, is not in any way a complete or adequate description of this complex realm. The names of the nine sessions that I will address in this chapter are:
S 25 Grinding the Bones
S 26 Archetypal Reality #2
S 27 Archetypal Reality #3
S 28 Archetypal Meltdown
S 29 Cleansing #1
S 30 Cleansing #2
S 31 Cleansing #3
S 32 Release
S 33 A Flash of “God”
Entering Archetypal Reality
When I first entered archetypal reality, my identity as a human being began to fall away from me. I found that we have a sense of being human that is more basic than our sense of being a specific human. It is a felt sense of species identity that we share with all human beings beneath the details of our individual identity. In following the flow of existence back into archetypal reality, I had to cease to exist not only as a specific person but as a human being per se. This required a deeper surrender than ego-death. At first I struggled to hold on to my humanity for it had been the context for every experience I had ever had, but I could not stop what was happening. The pull was too strong. Eventually, I could no longer fit myself back into the form of Homo sapiens.
At this new level of consciousness, this larger “I” was being worked with to consolidate a platform of awareness that was “above” the field of human experience. The image that surfaced for this condition was the view of our planet from a space shuttle floating in high orbit above the Earth. This higher platform was a stable state of consciousness beyond the human species-mind. There I was being pumped with information about how reality functions at this level.
Being closer to the source of existence in the order of creation, this level of reality is much more energetically powerful than space-time. It operates at a higher “voltage,” so to speak. When I first broke through to this level in session 24, I had been plunged into its intense energy, which I experienced as a super-heated fire: “The energy formed rivers of liquid fire—white-hot lava flows and exploding sun flares.” In order to stabilize my awareness at this level, my system had to adjust to this intense energy. I had to literally become a being that could sustain these high levels of energy for hours at a time, otherwise my experiences there would be fragmented and I wouldn’t be able to remember them clearly. This represented a major challenge. The next session put me through an intense purification process that I now see was designed to help me make this transition. Anthropologists would call it an exercise in shamanic dismemberment. I called it: Grinding the Bones.
Session 25
I went through many cycles of pain and resolution and then became caught in an acoustic ritual that was restructuring me at the core. The Tibetan chanting in the music blended seamlessly with scenes of primal Africa. I saw visions of a circle of elders surrounded by a large gathering of African dancers moving in rhythmic cadence. I was inside the circle, sometimes alone and sometimes with other initiates. The chanting was a kind of shamanic initiation, a ritual of purification and transformation. There was a violent quality to what was happening, as though I had volunteered for something that had gotten out of control. Nevertheless, I felt safe in the hands of these ancient ones even as they broke me down.
The elders grabbed me with their thundering song, held me fixed, and ground me up. For more than an hour and a half, the grinding continued without letup. Repeatedly the refrain: “This is a chanting that breaks bones.” The powerful incantations were grinding me down to my bones and then grinding my bones to dust.
It felt like the singers were chanting human desire out of me. I moved through a wide range of human experiences, into the basic desires that fuel all human endeavors, and the chanting followed me, grinding these desires out of me. We swept through human experience, encountering and extinguishing the basic emotional attachments that drive life. Again and again I had the sense of: “You won’t be able to go back to that after today.”
In place of human desire, the chanting poured a raw energy into me, channeling it directly into my bones. For seemingly endless time, they chanted power into my bones. This was the most prominent feature of the session. They were breaking me down and placing a power into my bones through vibration. Like a battery being charged, I kept drinking the energy in. I could feel changes taking place deep inside me as I absorbed more and more of this power.
The chanters had a feeling tone about them that was both compassionate and merciless, deadly serious but humorous. Like village grandparents holding a child by the arm and switching him dispassionately, the elders beat the desires of human existence out of me. Too old and too filled with life experience to get overly involved with the young one’s pain, they beat me soundly, watching me jump about with merciful humor. It was for his own good.
After the session, it took me longer than usual to regain the full use of my body.
Even after this dismemberment and reconstruction, managing the intense energy of this domain continued to be a challenge. Stabilizing these energetic transitions from one platform of awareness to another takes practice and repetition.
What I experienced in this reality over the next ten sessions can be divided into two broad categories. The first set of experiences was more Platonic in nature and took place at what I would judge to be a higher subtle level. The second set was more Jungian in nature and took place at a lower subtle level. Both of these domains were archetypal but at different orders of scale. (For a short description of the concept of archetype and how I use this term, see the addendum at the end of this chapter, page 169.)
The Living Forces of Archetypal Reality
When I entered the higher level of archetypal reality, my experience affirmed Plato’s core insight that there is a reality behind the physical universe that structures and informs our existence here, but what I encountered there did not match his description of this reality. What I experienced were not Plato’s eternal Ideas in the mind of an unchanging transcendent intelligence, but vast living dynamic forces embodying higher orders of intentionality and power and operating on a different order of time. It was like stepping off our feverishly spinning planet into the majestic arc of the Milky Way—all moving, all alive, but on different magnitudes of scale. Though these forces informed human experience, they were so far beyond humanity that even in my expanded state I could not grasp the full scope of their being. I could catch only fragments of their massive presence and hints of their influence.
In session 24, I had tried to describe these Massive Beings: “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.” Now in session 26, I tried again to describe what I encountered there, but once again I could not do justice to them.
Session 26
This was an extremely difficult session. It involved a quantum jump in level that was very challenging to navigate and makes summary difficult. Its foreignness leaves many of my experiences locked outside my current awareness. Only more sessions will expand the crack in the door.
In the early stages, there was the familiar chaos and frenzy. It built for a long time but was not particularly painful. Eventually, I found myself once again moving through swirling patterns to a level of reality that was archetypal. Its feeling tone was ancient, elemental, and extremely powerful.
My stay in this domain was long and complex but difficult to describe. Escalating power. Forms exploding into larger and larger patterns. Surging kaleidoscopic designs breaking into seemingly independent displays but coordinated by an invisible hand twisting the device. More patterns exploding to reveal the twisting hand more clearly, and here I encountered LIVING FORCES too different from me and too foreign to grasp accurately. I could only catch glimpses of their mode of being.
Ancient. Huge. Panoramic in scope. Celestial but facing Earth. Creating through humanity. Living through humanity. Satisfying themselves through humanity. I saw deeply into the fact that events in space-time echoed the intention of the Forces and Beings of this dimension. It was they who were living and working through the collective patterns of history. It was they who were loving through the embrace of thousands of Romeos and Juliets across the planet.
This vision of a deeper reality influencing humanity in profound but indeterminate ways was a sobering encounter, for we value our autonomy highly and like to see ourselves as free agents on the stage of history. Nevertheless, this core insight kept repeating itself through multiple sessions. Seeing this deeper reality did not make me feel compromised or paranoid. The majesty and scale of the intelligence I was witnessing was fascinating, and I felt no malicious or manipulative intent. I was simply seeing the truth of a complex reality that had always been.
Opening to this dimension of reality was demanding work. To allow myself to actually become part of this reality was extremely challenging, as seen in this excerpt from a few sessions later.
After everything that I have been through in these sessions, I am amazed that there is anything that could scare me, but today there was. I was not frightened by the pain or the turmoil but by the sheer magnitude of what I was becoming. Everything was spinning madly, and I was being thrown into a reality that was so far beyond anything I had ever known that this panicked me. I knew that if I continued in this direction, the entire physical universe as I had known it would cease to exist as a reality for me. I was also scared by how easy it was becoming to enter God’s experience. (S 29)
The Tissue of Our Collective Being
My encounter with the Living Forces of archetypal reality at the high subtle level seemed to awaken in me a capacity to experience the sinews of humanity’s collective being at a lower subtle level. Or perhaps this is simply where I was directed next. I think that the most important insights I received in these eleven sessions came from this more Jungian level. More significant than my brief contact with the largely inscrutable powers of high archetypal reality, being immersed in the tissue of humanity’s collective being showed me organic processes operating beneath the surface of our individual lives and weaving humanity into a larger whole. It was as though I was being taught to recognize the living tissue of our species. My experiences affirmed Jung’s core insight of the existence of a collective unconscious, but I did not experience the archetypes that he discusses, such as the mother, father, child, wise old man, trickster, or hero. I’m not suggesting these are not part of the collective psyche, just that they were not part of my experience of it.
As my awareness stabilized at this level, I repeatedly experienced humanity as a single organism with intelligent networks running through it. These collective networks or meta-functions did not cancel or negate our individual agency; they were simply how life worked at a deeper level.
Session 27
The sense of an ultimate confrontation between myself and God continued through much of the early session. I knew that I did not know myself, and I wanted to know what I was. It was with this desperate and complete resolve to know my essence that I began to penetrate through many levels of something. It felt like being dragged underwater on a rope with seaweed tearing across my face. I kept holding on to some inner focus that allowed me to drive through layers and layers of an almost viscous material that tore at me as I plowed through it.
Eventually, I began to pass into archetypal levels that were familiar from previous sessions, but rather than stopping at these levels I continued to drive through them. The energy in my body was enormous, and I threw up violently multiple times in quick succession. The sensation of driving through layers continued but was now interspersed with new complex experiences. In some of them, I was learning to see at a collective level.
I witnessed many patterns in society as a rippling of our species organism at a transindividual level. Instead of seeing society as an aggregate of individuals, I was being focused on a deeper level of the phenomenon. Like a scientist who can focus his or her microscope at different levels of a tissue, I could focus my vision at a deeper-than-individual level of society.
At this deeper level, collective patterns suddenly jumped into view. They had always been there but undetected because I had not been focused at this level. Now that I saw them, I was able to see how certain dynamics in society represent coordinated influences from deep within the collective unconscious. I saw patterns of change rippling through society as “archetypal” forces pushing up through the experience of the species as a whole.
In session after session, I kept witnessing precise patterns of connectivity that weave our minds and even our bodies into larger wholes. In one session, I experienced our individual minds as nodes in the network of the species-mind, each of us fractally mirroring selective themes of this larger consciousness. I saw that healing the distortions that exist inside our individual minds has a ripple effect that contributes to the healing of the collective psyche as a whole. In another session, I saw that we all carry within us pieces of the physical diseases of our time and that by healing our individual bodies we contribute energetically to healing the collective body of humanity in a larger time frame. The human body was literally learning how to be healthy in our changing environment.
In still another session, I saw something like the Ayurvedic doshas active in the body of our species. In Ayurvedic medicine, it is believed that health exists when there is a balance between three fundamental bodily energies or doshas—Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. In this session, I saw the doshas flowing not only within our individual bodies but also through the body of humanity as a whole.
I was experiencing the organic complexity of the human species as a single organism, and the doshas appeared to be the sinews of this organism. The doshas were connective threads running through the entire species, “wiring” it together much as our neurological system wires our many cells into a single organism. I suspect that I was experiencing something larger and more complex than the doshas and that my mind interpreted these connective sinews in the terms it had available to it. (S 30)
I believe I was given these experiences of our collective being in order to prepare me for the visions of the birth of the Future Human that would follow in later sessions. They gave me the working knowledge of how our species operates that I would need to comprehend and absorb these later visions.
A Note on the “Gods” of the Subtle Level
While I experienced subtle level reality as being more real than space-time reality, I want to add that just because something manifests at the subtle level of consciousness does not mean that it is real in the deepest sense of the term. For example, when someone experiences a particular deity in their sessions exactly as it is described in a culture’s scriptural tradition—holding traditional ritual objects or wearing traditional regalia—I believe they are experiencing one of two things: either a collective thoughtform or a spiritual presence wearing the clothes of a collective thoughtform. Either way, both reflect the strong influence of the collective psyche, and this places the experience at the subtle level of consciousness.
A collective thoughtform is a living construct in the collective psyche that is generated, in this case, by millions of devotees focusing their prayerful intention on a specific deity over thousands of years. In my understanding, it is not that the ancient sages perfectly captured the true form of this celestial being, but rather that the description they gave this deity became the script that millions of believers then used in their devotions. Thoughts repeated frequently by large numbers of people and invested with deep emotions generate a kind of living imprint on the collective psyche, an imprint that can persist even after the culture that gave birth to it has perished.
I do not mean to trivialize such forms. Just the opposite. I think that collective thoughtforms are genuinely potent forces in the collective psyche. The gods we worship, including the secular gods of greed and power, become powerful currents in the collective unconscious. They may manifest in our sessions as powerful entities, but from a deeper perspective these entities are not ultimately real.
In my view, the gods depicted in our religious traditions, including the God of monotheism, are cultural approximations that fall far short of the reality they are attempting to represent. These forms fall away as deeper levels of reality continue to open. This applies to many archetypal phenomena, I think. When I eventually moved beyond the subtle level of consciousness in my sessions, I found myself moving beyond the images, stories, and beliefs that human history has imprinted on the collective psyche. The cultural forms we have worshiped and used to interpret life fell away like wardrobe falling off the shoulders of actors, and Nature stood naked before me once again, inviting me to see it afresh. All forms, even the glistening splendor of archetypal forms, are intermediaries to that which lies beyond form. As the author of the fourteenth-century Christian mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing reminds us, if we ever hope to glimpse the true nature of the Divine, we must unlearn everything that we have been taught about God.
Session 28
The 28th session was a powerful session that I will present in full. It wove together the themes of both high archetypal reality and the tissue of our collective being. Coming several sessions into this series, it was clearer than earlier sessions had been because by now I was learning my way about in this new territory. At the same time, it was a bit more complicated because it involved not one but two cycles of transformation. The first cycle carried me into high subtle level archetypal reality. The second cycle lifted me beyond this into causal reality, giving me a brief foretaste of things to come. Then it brought me back into space-time, but now experienced from a subtle level perspective.
Session 28—Archetypal Meltdown
As I expanded, I felt myself being dismantled, as if pieces of me were being torn away, and I had to repeatedly remind myself to let the process take me wherever it wanted. The field thickened and intensified for a long time. Again I had the sensation of driving through layers of thick emotional sheaths, burning them off. The process was being driven by incredibly powerful forces. I had no control over what was happening.
Eventually, I found myself moving through a particularly dense field that felt like the emotional sheath of the entire planet, the collective unconscious of the human species. Now I was above that field, at some higher archetypal level of reality. As many times before, I had the clear sensation that something was working with me to consolidate a clear position at this level so that I could receive instruction about how reality functions here. I felt myself to be “above the world,” in a region of intelligence that creates and sustains physical reality. I worked hard to establish greater clarity at this level by cooperating with the forces that surrounded and saturated me. Many insights came concerning the broad sweep of creation, how consciousness consolidates itself into matter deliberately and by stages.
The specific insights are less significant to me than the larger context of my condition. My experience was that the distance between the Consciousness that is the Source of all existence and our human consciousness is enormous, a vast sea with levels upon levels of intervening fields, and the lower fields are sourced in and emerge from the purposive intent of the higher fields. This was spellbinding to witness.
Archetypal Meltdown
After some time at this level, things changed. Everything around me began to spin and become very confused. I grabbed on to some focus at the center of this cyclone and held on. I was not resisting the change, but was holding still so that the change could happen to me. It was like being in the center of a tornado, at the center of an exploding sun. The energy moving through me was enormous. The power of this archetypal meltdown was many times greater than the meltdown of the species field had been. I felt this explosive fire burning things out of me, melting me down.
Suddenly, I realized that I was being taken into a different reality. The walls of the energy tornado were melting, and sparkling through on the other side was a completely new reality. Breaking through to this level carried with it a sense of supreme accomplishment. “I’m through,” I said, “I’m through.” In a way without precedent, I was through.
The most distinctive feature of this level was its brilliant Clarity. It was infinitely spacious, infinitely extended, saturated with intelligence, and clear. Clear beyond imagination. I never appreciated how much the collective psyche constitutes a constant background static to our minds. Here beyond that field, I experienced being conscious in a completely new way. I was clear. I was as I was meant to be. I opened myself and embraced this realm and was embraced by it. For a long time, I kept absorbing its soothing and healing energies. I cannot describe the enormous sense of relief and release. I was finally through.
The experiences that followed were active at many levels simultaneously. Material from my personal life, from the species-mind, the archetypal level, and this high spiritual level were all interwoven with an organic precision I cannot hope to reproduce. All I can do is identify specific themes, leaving out the resonant textures of the other levels that were moving in synchronized rhythm with these themes.
Interlaced Mind-Fields
Having reached this region of incredible clarity, I was not carried deeper into the transcendental side of things but instead was directed back into space-time, but now experienced as the interplay of what might be called quantum mind-fields. I was experiencing interlaced mind-fields saturating physical systems and weaving them into larger wholes. This phase of the session opened with a particularly moving experience of collective healing.
I was on an African plain where hundreds of people were dancing in celebration. The lions were far away, there was no danger, and no one was hungry. The tribe had survived the rigors of another year, and they were dancing their thanks and their celebration of life. This was one of the most extraordinary experiences of the session. I was able to take in the experience of these many people whole. I was the tribal mind reveling in celebration.
Their infectious joy and dance-induced ecstasy blended them into a single field of celebration. They knew what was happening, and they kept giving themselves over to the process, letting it deepen until they were completely awash with the unifying joy. They were one with themselves, each other, and their environment. I had never experienced anything like this before, and it was profoundly moving. How impoverished we are who have lost these rituals that activate the deeper weave of our connectedness.*47
My reference point for experiencing all this was an intelligence that saturated everything—the people, the animals, the fire, and the Earth itself. If I had to name it, I would call it Earth Consciousness. I discovered that not only did this celebratory dance heal the people—cleansing them of the pains of the year’s losses and healing the friction of interpersonal conflicts—to my surprise, it also healed the Earth itself. I actually experienced a release of energy that healed the field of this region of the planet.
In this context, I experienced a larger truth about collective intelligence that was repeated many times to make sure I understood the lesson. I saw that there were many discrete levels of consciousness operating in life. I was experiencing fields of consciousness running through and integrating physically discrete life-forms, and the tissue generated by these fields was differentiated but seamless. Many layers of intelligence were active simultaneously. Just as a human being shares his or her existence with many smaller biological life-forms whose lives are intertwined around our own, so at the mental level there were many larger life-forms around whom we are intertwined. In this setting, I experienced the following.
We usually assume that the thoughts rising within our individual awareness are “our” thoughts, our private creation. Yet now I saw that some of these thoughts are not “ours” at all in a strict sense, but the registering in our local awareness of a collective thought rising in the species-mind as a whole, a thought that had been initiated at a deeper, centralized level of intelligence.
On a smaller scale, sometimes thoughts arise within our mind from the proximate influence of specific people if their mental field is strong enough to make itself felt in our field. Unfamiliar thoughts pass through us, tugging at us, and we dismiss them as a passing mood or an idea that did not make much sense and let it go at that. We think our mind is bound by our physical senses, but it is not.
I experienced clearly that the individual and collective energy of everything that surrounds us creates a collective net of influences that flows through our conscious and unconscious awareness. Usually, we do not notice these subtle fields of influence, but in my current state I could clearly distinguish their distinct patterns of vibration. Together they formed the seamless tissue of Manifesting Intelligence.
These porous fields of energy are focused by our individual bodies, but they are not confined there. Any specific body-mind configuration lives for a time, but its field endures as a cell in still larger fields. My personal body-mind would end, but another would materialize to take up where it left off. In this way, my individual energy field would grow and evolve as the Soul-Field I am part of grows and evolves.
In addition, my life experience would become part of the collective field of my species. Every experience I have ever had, including all my session experiences, will become part of the collective learning of my people. It will become part of their collective memory. No absolute boundaries in either space or time. Only the blending of fields of energy with many levels of intelligence running through it all.
As part of this instruction, sessions dating back ten years were reviewed and placed in perspective. The purpose was to show me how the various pieces fit into this larger mosaic. Pieces that had been incomplete now appeared complete, and the whole cohered.
The Cycle of Purification
This was such a rich and illuminating session that what happened in the next three sessions caught me completely by surprise. This jarring sequence eventually led me to recognize a dynamic operating in the sessions that I had not fully grasped until now. Though I discovered this dynamic at this particular stage, I eventually came to see that it is not a level-specific dynamic but one that repeats itself at multiple levels of consciousness, making it an important feature of psychedelic practice. This dynamic is the cycle of purification.
After the bliss of the 28th session, my next three sessions were filled with extreme nausea, sickness, and physical malaise. It went on for hours each session. Though these sessions were spread over several months, in their misery, they felt like a single session. When this cycle started, I was mystified that the visionary splendor of the 28th session would be followed by such gut-wrenching distress, but here I was, floating in a sea of riveting discomfort, forced to endure something that was extremely unpleasant but otherwise devoid of content. The energy was very high, causing me to throw up so many times that I ruptured blood vessels in my face.
In the fourth session in this series (S 32), the cleansing deepened. Now instead of being dissolved into acute physical distress, my awareness kept fragmenting again and again until I became completely and utterly Plural, which I capitalize to signal the distinctly archetypal quality of this experience. The more I became Many, the more confused things became. I kept surrendering to this fragmentation until eventually I found myself trapped in a world of utter chaos. My experience was completely inscrutable, without even the organization provided by suffering. Then the breakthrough occurred.
Suddenly, or not so suddenly, I can’t be sure, the tension of being stuck that had been building for four sessions shifted, and I began to sense an extraordinary feeling of release. I was not aware of anything that might explain this transition as my experiences were hopelessly chaotic and I could see no order in them whatsoever. All I know is that after months of being caught in a spiderweb of psychedelic chaos, of being unable to move, to comprehend, to think, or even to experience coherently, suddenly, I began to experience an extraordinary freedom. This freedom was delicious beyond description. Extraordinary relief and thanksgiving. For hours I soaked in this freedom that was surprisingly devoid of cognitive content. (S 32)
When I tried to make sense of these experiences, I first applied Grof’s perinatal theory to them, but while certain perinatal elements were present—nausea, a sense of entrapment, and release—many other elements were missing. There was no existential crisis, no confrontation with the meaninglessness of existence, and no physical seizures—all of which had been present in earlier sessions. And while the chaos and loss of coherence were reminiscent of ego-death, experientially, this particular chaos cut much deeper and marked a more fundamental unraveling than the death of my personal ego.
Then, looking through my notes, I found the seed of a concept that had been introduced in the 28th session, which seemed to address this pattern of symptoms. There it was called the “cycle of healing,” but as my understanding of this cycle deepened in the years ahead, I began to call it the cycle of purification.
The core of the cycle is this: increased awareness triggers the surfacing of toxins in the system that in turn precipitates a crisis of disease followed eventually by a higher level of health. This cycle operates at many levels—at the physical level, the psychological level, and even the historical level. (S 28)
My first entry into the higher energy of archetypal reality (S 24) had been followed immediately by the purification of shamanic dismemberment in Grinding the Bones (S 25). Being emptied of the passions of human existence had been a form of purification that had helped my awareness stabilize beyond the species-mind. I think that something similar was happening inside these four sessions. I think that the purity and clarity of the state of causal consciousness I briefly entered in session 28 triggered a physical detoxification so intense that it lasted four sessions.
States of consciousness are also states of body. Higher states of consciousness demand higher functioning bodies. Causal consciousness is an exceptionally pure state of awareness. Entering this condition triggers a spontaneous purging of impurities from one’s body and mind. I don’t know what these impurities consist of, exactly. I see them as the biochemical correlates of our petty judgments, our lower sentiments, and our self-cherishing emotions—anything that distorts the unity that is emerging in our embodied awareness. Johannes Tauler, a student of Meister Eckhart and one of the great Rhineland mystics of the fourteenth century, spoke of the demands that spiritual realization makes on the body when he said in one of his sermons, “Believe me, children, one who would know about these matters would often have to keep to his bed for his bodily frame could not support it.”*48
In the years that followed, this pattern of breakthrough followed by detoxification repeated itself like clockwork in my sessions as the spiral of initiation continued to turn. I found that after each major breakthrough to a deeper level of consciousness, there was often a turgid “carrying out the garbage” quality to the sessions that followed, so much so that I came to dread the sessions that immediately followed a major breakthrough. An analogy from mining comes to mind. After an explosion opens a new vein of ore deep in the mountain, you still have to carry away the rocks to get complete access to its riches.
The cycle of purification is the combustion cycle of growth in sustained psychedelic work. The essence of the cycle is this. Being propelled into a deeper level of reality shifts one into a higher energetic state, and this higher energy “shakes loose” impurities from one’s mental, emotional, and physical being. In subsequent sessions, one’s system works to empty itself of these toxins as it continues to absorb the purity and intensity of this new energy. By sweeping out the old to make way for the new, eventually a clearer and stronger energetic platform is established on which future sessions will build.
Let me take this one step further. When this cycle of purification reaches particularly deep, it becomes a cycle of death and rebirth. I had originally thought that death and rebirth was a one-time event, but after going through this cycle multiple times at different levels of consciousness, I began to realize that in psychedelic sessions, “ death” is actually a very intense form of purification.
After you have died and been reborn many times in your sessions, eventually the very concept of death begins to lose its meaning. You learn through repetition that at the deepest level of your being, it is impossible to die. The form that we are can be shattered, our reality can be repeatedly destroyed, but our innermost essence always reemerges. The phoenix always rises. When the process of purification reaches particularly deep, when it reaches so deep that it begins to dissolve the structure of our life as we have known it, it becomes purification unto death. When it empties us of all that we have known and all that we have been, a crisis is reached where what we have been collapses and we are carried forward into a new level of reality.
This breakthrough is a genuine rebirth because at this new level “we” are no longer what we had been before. We have become a different kind of being with new capacities and access to new categories of experience. In this transition, there is continuity of awareness (the thread of memory) but a discontinuity of capacity (we can experience things we could not experience before). If after stabilizing at this new level we continue to drive forward, the combustion cycle of purification will begin again, and we will eventually enter a new cycle of death and rebirth as new levels of reality continue to open.
Reincarnation and Collective Purification
I now want to put on the table one final insight that emerged during this period, but to do so will require a substantial expansion of our frame of reference. Here I want to expand the cycle of purification to include the entire human species functioning as a single organism. To make this transition, we need to return to the concept of reincarnation.
The literature on reincarnation almost always discusses rebirth from the perspective of the individual soul. Karma and rebirth are presented as the engine driving the soul’s individual evolution. Though we all incarnate, the dynamics of collective reincarnation are seldom discussed, except as they apply to small groups of people, such as lovers, friends and family, or people caught in some collective tragedy, such as a natural disaster. I include my own work in this assessment. In Lifecycles, I too kept the discussion of reincarnation focused at the level of the individual soul and one’s soul family. It’s not that this perspective is false, but given the breadth of the collective experiences reported in this chapter, it now appears to me to be incomplete.
To think of reincarnation exclusively in terms of the individual soul is to be caught in a kind of atomistic thinking characteristic of psychic level discourse, where one experiences the spiritual world as being composed of separate spiritual beings. It is not that this reality is false, but when consciousness opens to the subtle level of reality, the connective tissue of life begins to stand out more. At this deeper level, individual souls can sometimes be experienced as cells in a larger species soul. These are not alternative truths but simultaneous truths reflecting different layers of the complex fabric of existence.
If humanity is as deeply interwoven and interconnected as the experiences presented here suggest, then we should not be surprised to discover that there is a collective dynamic operating inside reincarnation itself. My thinking began to shift in this direction when I had the following experience of collective karma in session 20.
One vision made a particularly deep impression on me today. It was a vision of karma that de-emphasized the individual and emphasized the larger being that was evolving itself in the billions of karmic cycles unfolding simultaneously at any given moment in history. I was witnessing not the cycle of individual karma but much larger developmental cycles that emerge in history from all of our individual karmic patterns integrated into massive collective patterns within the species. I was witnessing Nature advance her own evolution through our many lives. The process was so beautiful and elegant that it impacted me deeply. The wisdom, intelligence, and love that created and orchestrated this vast mechanism of the perpetual growth of our species was astounding. (S 20)
This early experience of the collective dynamics of karma deepened in the present series of sessions when the cycle of purification expanded to encompass the entire human species. Now I witnessed the dynamics of reincarnation operating inside humanity’s evolution as a species. In the following session, the expansion of time and space was enormous, marking a particularly deep entry into subtle level reality.
Session 29
After hours of extremely high-energy purification, I began to experience physical existence as a unified field, as an unbroken tissue or matrix. Individual life-forms were crystallizations of this matrix. My very incarnation was a distillation of this living fabric. Both my virtues and my imperfections, my strengths and my weaknesses were part of its self-evolution.
In this context, I saw that the cycle of purification pertains not only to individuals but also to humankind as a whole as it reincarnates again and again through history. In order to evolve itself beyond its current level of development, the unified fabric of human consciousness was systematically cleansing itself of the legacy of its past through the coordinated reincarnation of billions of people who carried that legacy into their incarnations.
Experiencing human existence as a completely unified field made everything much easier to understand. The latticework of Mind that saturates and coordinates our individual lives has a logic to it that subsumes our individual perspectives. Today, physical reality was dissolving into its underlying matrix, and with it the reality of individual psyches disappeared. What I had previously conceptualized in atomistic terms as individual people choosing to reincarnate in order to clear their personal karmic patterns, I was now experiencing as a centralized decision to incarnate entire generations to cleanse the human mind-field of its collective karmic legacy. I saw no sustainable distinctions between individuals, only the web of life operating in an integrated, unified manner.
Our current historical period appeared to be one of collective detoxification and healing. The cultural gains we had made (around slavery, racism, gender discrimination, species-ism) were flushing to the surface toxins buried deep within the collective psyche. It was emphasized that this stage of detoxification would be followed by something new and exciting. The incarnating of these toxins was not simply about healing our past, it was also about laying the foundation for a new future for humanity.
This visionary experience of the entire human species reincarnating with common purpose, taking on itself the burden of collective purification in order to advance a collective unfolding, opened a new world of understanding to me. It was my first experience of a theme that would be repeated and deepened in the years ahead. This shift of perspective from individual to collective intention in reincarnation radically expanded my understanding of the scale of intelligence operating in history.
With this transition, the final wall between our individual evolution and humanity’s collective evolution came down. Individual karma and collective karma became completely transparent to each other. I saw that individuals and humanity were evolving together in an incredibly subtle and synergistic dance. This interplay of the individual and the species became the central theme of Dark Night, Early Dawn.
The visionary experiences reported in this chapter extend our line of sight so far beyond the physical horizon that I cannot provide any evidence to support them other than the possibility of their being replicated by other journeyers. It is experience, naked and undefended, and there it must rest. And yet, I wish I could reach into my heart and give the reader a taste of these experiences. To actually touch the intelligence of the universe operating at such great depth and breadth changes forever how you experience life.
A Note on Learning How to Learn in Psychedelic States
One of the great challenges of entering intense psychedelic states of consciousness is learning how to learn from experiences that are breaking all the rules as they redefine the possible. In these states, our deepest instincts are often overturned and reversed. One learns to yield to, even welcome the offensive rather than pull back from it. Painful experiences can become something you seek out rather than avoid. The utterly bizarre can become the familiar so many times that you cannot anticipate what shape the next twist of learning will take. You may find yourself stuck in some endless repetitive maze where it is not clear what is happening, what you are doing to perpetuate this stalemate, or what you might do (or stop doing) to shift the situation. It may not even be clear whether this is a situation you can influence or whether it is something you simply must endure, as the following excerpt illustrates.
No matter how hard I tried or how many different strategies I explored, I could not slip the experiential bonds that held me fast. My struggle lasted an excruciatingly long time. I tried active strategies and passive strategies. I experimented with a hundred forms of surrender. I looked for ways to “die,” searching out whatever that might mean in this context. My repeated failure gave me many opportunities to step back and reassess my situation. I reviewed everything that I had learned in previous sessions about navigating these impasses. I knew that death was but a metaphor for complete surrender. I knew that you sometimes had to make heroic choices before the walls would come tumbling down. I knew that sometimes you had to look repeatedly with no expectations to really see what was being shown you. I tried everything I could, but nothing worked. I stayed stuck in this spot, hovering between two worlds for what seemed like endless time. (S 26)
The experiential contexts in which you are asked to learn are so extreme and so unprecedented that you must learn a new way of learning. Through practice, I am slowly finding how to work with these states, how to open to their distinctive possibilities, how to receive the radically unknown. I am learning to watch with reduced expectations, to step back and observe, to experiment, and to use synchronicities in the music. Above all, I am learning to bracket my assumptions. Bracketing one’s assumptions is inherent in all learning, of course, but the difference with psychedelic states is the degree of bracketing required. Anything you believe is true, you may discover is false. What is “unthinkable” may turn out to be completely natural. Anything you believe you are, you may discover you are not.
There is a distinctive feeling that accompanies this kind of radical learning. It is a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, hair-on-fire spectacle of wonder. It is the wonder of coming to the brink of the known world and risking everything by plunging over the edge. To learn at this level is to fold back the covers of the universe. It is a completely intoxicating and never forgotten experience.
A Flash of “God”
I would like to close this chapter with a final experience that took place near the end of this series of sessions and that pointed to where the sessions would be going next. Before doing so, however, I need to mark a change that has taken place in the cleansing portion of these sessions.
We have seen cleansing take many forms already. Early on, it was turning my personal identity inside out, then it was embracing the collective fury of the ocean of suffering followed by the fiery transition into archetypal reality. This was followed by shamanic dismemberment and then the nauseating detoxification triggered by first contact with causal consciousness. At every stage, I’ve tried to identify the logic behind the cleansing, to mark what is being emptied and why. Starting in session 32, a new form of cleansing entered the picture—a deep fragmenting into Many, leading to impenetrable chaos. This fragmentation into chaos continued for many sessions, indicating that something new had begun. Every surrender to the unknown involves an element of chaos, of course, but this was more than that. This marked a particularly deep undoing.
Rather than try to explain this particular form of cleansing now, I want to simply note it and reserve judgment on it until we see where it goes. As a general rule of thumb, you often cannot understand what is taking place in a session from the perspective of the level of consciousness you are in. It is only after you have transitioned to the next level of consciousness that the rationale behind a particular dynamic may become apparent. In these trials, we must trust the universe without understanding why things are unfolding the way they are. Fortunately, the universe rewards our trust, as it did here.
Session 33—A Flash of “God”
The release in session 32 had been so profound that I did not know what to expect in today’s session. Even so, when the session opened, I was surprised to find myself slipping into the shadows of fragmentation again. Against the primal songs, I dissolved into an extremely unpleasant, dark chaos.
The core of my experience was that where there had previously been an ordered singularity, there was now only a hopelessly disordered Plurality. The chaos continued to deepen for a long time until I despaired of knowing where it would end or how it could ever resolve itself. I was pulled through so many breaking points that it seemed like this could go on forever. I had no bearings either of content or endurance. I have long pondered the many forms that death can take in these sessions, and today I register that, for me at least, chaos is a deeper layer of the unraveling than pain.
I was in the chaos, I was the chaos, when suddenly everything began to dissolve in a rainfall of brilliant, sparkling white light. The light was reverberating ecstasy, an indescribable joy. The transition was unstable, and soon I was again immersed in waves of confusion. From within this confusion, I remembered the experience of light and focused on it, and in this way eventually established myself in the light. Now I was light—actually, fully, and absolutely. To grasp the experience, you have only to grasp the experience of being light—to have the expanse, the depth, and the simultaneity of light. I did not stay in this condition long, but it was the pivot to a rich afternoon.
From this incredible day, there is one experience that stands out above all the others. Life was spread out in front of me in a captivating display of exquisite diversity, subtlety, and finesse. I was enjoying the splendor of life’s harmonious complexity when suddenly I experienced this same reality as a single, unified field. Unity hit me like a lightning bolt. The experience was so concentrated, so intense that it blasted me instantly beyond all previous frames of reference.
It withdrew as suddenly as it had come, leaving me stumbling about, picking up the pieces of my mind, trying to comprehend what had just happened. Making associations in the rapture left by its withdrawal, I knew that this had been an encounter with a reality that in previous centuries would have been labeled “God.” God is One. All is One. How naïve I have been. How completely unprepared for what lies ahead. I spent the remaining hours of the session digesting this experience, which could not have lasted more than one second.
Addendum: Plato, Jung, and Archetypes
The concept of archetypes has a long and complex history from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Carl Jung, a history that has been succinctly summarized by Richard Tarnas in his extraordinary books The Passion of the Western Mind (1991) and Cosmos and Psyche (2006). Plato gave the concept its classical formulation. At the heart of his vision of reality is a transcendent intelligence that orders and informs all things. Archetypes are the timeless Universals or Forms within this intelligence that give the world its structure, the master blueprints of creation, as it were. Plato saw these Forms as being perfect, unchanging, and super-ordinate to matter.
In his early and middle years, Jung gave a more psychological reading to the archetypes, seeing them as inherited psychological structures within the collective unconscious, innate “dispositions to act” that precede and shape individual experience. He saw them as behavioral tendencies with pictorial counterparts, the dominants of the collective unconscious. In his later years, Jung stepped one step closer to Plato by extending his understanding of archetypes beyond the psychological domain. His study of synchronicity led him to see archetypes as principles operating not just in our minds but also in the larger sphere of nature itself, connecting our inner experience and outer circumstances in meaningful and striking ways.
When I use the term archetypal, I am borrowing from both these thinkers while at the same time qualifying their formulations. First, I use the term in a quasi-Platonic sense to point to a level of reality beyond space-time that informs and structures space-time. I say “quasi-Platonic” because I did not experience the “pure Forms” or “timeless Universals” that Plato describes. As I experienced it, the archetypal domain is a living reality that is always changing, though much more slowly and on a different order of time than physical reality.
Second, I use the term in a quasi-Jungian sense to describe patterns in the collective unconscious of humanity—patterns of collective memory, collective thought, collective learning, and even collective physiology. Like Jung, I understand the collective psyche to be the matrix within which our individual psyches operate, underpinning and influencing all our psychological, emotional, and mental processes. However, I see the collective psyche as being more dynamic than Jung did. I see it as itself learning and evolving over time, and therefore I see archetypes at this level as evolving over time. I also see them as more numerous than the relatively small handful of archetypes Jung analyzed.
In these respects, my view of the collective unconscious has been influenced by Rupert Sheldrake and his work on morphic fields and formative causation, which I have found to be deeply congruent with my psychedelic experience. From Sheldrake’s perspective, the collective psyche, or species-mind, influences its individual members, as Jung suggests. But Sheldrake goes further than Jung in proposing that the collective psyche also receives and integrates the learning of its members. Sheldrake envisions a complex feedback loop operating between the species-mind and individuals that allows the species-mind to learn as its members learn. Collective learning progresses more slowly than individual learning, but when the species-mind eventually grasps a truth, the resulting shift ripples through the entire species resulting in faster learning curves.*49
Going one step beyond Sheldrake, I see the species-mind as lying between two systems of consciousness. I believe it is open “from below” to the individual psyches of its members, as Sheldrake suggests, but I also see it as open “from above” to more inclusive fields of consciousness. It not only learns from its individual members, it is also informed by more encompassing levels of consciousness, as suggested by the sessions reported in this chapter. This throws new light on the problem of creativity, which is a problem that Sheldrake has acknowledged his theory cannot solve. As many highly creative people have reported, deep creativity is often experienced as an infusion from above, and I suspect that something like this takes place higher up the Great Chain of Being as well.