Chapter Two
One of the most significant contributions of modern consciousness research to the emerging scientific world view has been an entirely new image of the human psyche. While the traditional model of psychiatry and psychoanalysis is strictly personalistic and biographical, modern consciousness research has added new levels, realms, and dimensions and shows the human psyche as being essentially commensurate with the whole universe and all of existence. A comprehensive presentation of this new model, beyond the scope of this book, can be found in a separate publication (Grof 1975). Here, I will briefly outline its essential features with special emphasis on its relationship to the emerging paradigm in science.
Although there are no clear boundaries and demarcations in the realm of consciousness, it seems useful for didactic purposes to distinguish four distinct levels or realms of the human psyche and the corresponding experiences: (1) the sensory barrier, (2) the individual unconscious, (3) the level of birth and death, and (4) the transpersonal domain. The experiences of all these categories are quite readily available for most people. They can be observed in sessions with psychedelic drugs and in various modern approaches of experiential psychotherapy using breathing, music, dance, and body work. Laboratory mind-altering techniques, such as biofeedback, sleep deprivation, sensory isolation or sensory overload, and various kinaesthetic devices can also induce many of these phenomena. A wide spectrum of ancient and Oriental spiritual practices are specifically designed to facilitate their occurrence. Many experiences of this kind can also occur during spontaneous episodes of nonordinary states of consciousness. The entire experiential spectrum related to the four realms has also been described by historians and anthropologists with respect to various shamanic procedures, aboriginal rites of passage and healing ceremonies, death-rebirth mysteries, and trance dancing in ecstatic religions.
Techniques that make it possible to enter experientially the realms of the unconscious mind tend initially to activate the sensory organs. Thus, for many individuals experimenting with such techniques, deep self-exploration starts with a variety of sensory experiences. These are of a more or less abstract nature and have no personal symbolic meaning; they can be aesthetically pleasing, but do not lead to increased self-understanding.
Changes of this kind can occur in any sensory area, although optical phenomena are by far the most frequent. The visual field behind closed eyelids becomes rich in color and animated, and the individual can see a variety of geometrical or architectural forms—dynamic kaleidoscopic patterns, mandalalike configurations, arabesques, naves of Gothic cathedrals, ceilings of Moslem mosques, and intricate designs resembling beautiful medieval illuminations or Oriental rugs. Visions of this kind can occur during any type of deep self-exploration; however, they are particularly dramatic after ingestion of psychedelics. The changes in the acoustic area can take the form of ringing in the ears, chirping of crickets, buzzing, chimes, or continuous sounds of high frequency. This can be accompanied by a variety of unusual tactile sensations in various parts of the body. Also, smells and tastes can appear at this stage, but they are far less common.
Fig. 7. Drawings of a Czech painter from one of the early. LSD experiments conducted by Dr. J. Roubicek* in Prague, representing dramatic unspecific distortions of the body image.
Sensory experiences of this kind have little significance for the process of self-exploration and self-understanding. They seem to represent a barrier that one must pass through before the journey into one’s unconscious psyche can begin. Some aspects of such sensory experiences can be explained from certain anatomical and physiological characteristics of the sense organs. Thus, for example, the geometrical visions seem to reflect the inner architecture of the retina and other parts of the optical system.
Fig. 8. Drawings of a Czech painter from one of the early LSD experiments conducted by Dr. J. Roubicek* in Prague. Picture a. represents a combined vision of a hospital nurse with a vial of a revulsive medicine and an emetic basin and a waiter with a bottle of red wine. Picture b. shows an illusive transformation of a traffic policeman as the subject saw him when he was driven home after the experiment.
The next most easily available experiential realm is the domain of the individual unconscious. Although phenomena belonging to this category are of considerable theoretical and practical relevance, it is not necessary to spend much time on their description, because most of the traditional psychotherapeutic approaches are limited to this level of the psyche. There is abundant, though highly contradictory, literature on the nuances of psychodynamics in the biographical realm. Experiences belonging to this category are related to significant biographical events and circumstances of the life of the individual, from birth to the present moment, which have a strong emotional charge attached to them. On this level of self-exploration, anything from the life of the person involved that is an unresolved conflict, a repressed traumatic memory that has not been integrated, or an incomplete psychological gestalt of some kind, can emerge from the unconscious and become the content of the experience.
There is only one condition for its occurrence: the issue must be of sufficient emotional relevance. Herein lies a tremendous advantage of experiential psychotherapy in comparison with predominantly verbal approaches. Techniques that directly activate the unconscious seem to reinforce selectively the most relevant emotional material and facilitate its emergence into consciousness. They thus provide a kind of inner radar that scans the system and detects contents with the strongest emotional charge. This not only saves the therapist the effort of sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, but protects him or her from having to make such decisions, which would of necessity be biased by the therapist’s own conceptual framework and many other factors.1
By and large, biographical material that emerges in experiential work is in agreement with the Freudian theory or one of its derivatives. However, there are several major differences. In deep experiential psychotherapy, biographical material is not remembered or reconstructed; it can be actually fully relived. This involves not only emotions but also physical sensations, pictorial elements of the material involved, as well as data from other senses. This happens typically in complete age regression to the stage of development when the event happened.
Another important distinction is that the relevant memories and other biographical elements do not emerge separately, but form distinct dynamic constellations, for which I have coined the term COEX systems, or systems of condensed experience. A COEX system is a dynamic constellation of memories (and associated fantasy material) from different periods of the individual’s life, with the common denominator of a strong emotional charge of the same quality, intense physical sensation of the same kind, or the fact that they share some other important elements. I first became aware of COEX systems as principles governing the dynamics of the individual unconscious and realized that knowledge of them was essential for understanding the inner process on this level. However, later it became obvious that the systems of condensed experience represent a general principle operating on all the levels of the psyche, rather than being limited to the biographical domain.
Most biographical COEX systems are dynamically connected with specific facets of the birth process. Perinatal themes and their elements, then, have specific associations with related experiential material in the transpersonal domain. It is not uncommon for a dynamic constellation to comprise material from several biographical periods, from biological birth, and from certain areas of the transpersonal realm, such as memories of a past incarnation, animal identification, and mythological sequences. Here, the experiential similarity of these themes from different levels of the psyche is more important than the conventional criteria of the Newtonian-Cartesian world view, such as the fact that years or centuries separate the events involved, that ordinarily an abysmal difference appears to exist between the human and animal experience, or that elements of “objective reality” are combined with archetypal and mythological ones.
In traditional psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, there is an exclusive focus on psychological traumas. Physical traumas are not thought to have a direct influence on the psychological development of the individual or to participate in the genesis of psychopathology. This contrasts sharply with observations from deep experiential work, where memories of physical traumas appear to be of paramount importance. In psychedelic work and other powerful experiential approaches, reliving life-threatening diseases, injuries, operations, or situations of near-drowning are extremely common and their significance clearly far exceeds that of the usual psychotraumas. The residual emotions and physical sensations from situations that threatened survival or the integrity of the organism appear to have a significant role in the development of various forms of psychopathology, as yet unrecognized by academic science.
Thus, when a child has a serious life-threatening disease, such as diptheria, and almost chokes to death, the experience of vital threat and extreme physical discomfort is not considered to be a trauma of lasting significance. Conventional psychology would focus on the fact that the child, having been separated from the mother at the time of hospitalization, experienced emotional deprivation. Experiential work makes it obvious that traumas involving vital threat leave permanent traces in the system and contribute significantly to the development of emotional and psychosomatic disorders, such as depressions, anxiety states and phobias, sadomasochistic tendencies, sexual problems, migraine headaches, or asthma.
The experiences of serious physical traumatization represent a natural transition between the biographical level and the following realm, which has as its main constituents the twin phenomena of birth and death. They involve events from the individual’s life and are thus biographical in nature. Yet the fact that they brought the person close to death and involved extreme discomfort and pain connects them to the birth trauma. For obvious reasons, memories of diseases and traumas that involved interference with breathing, such as pneumonia, diptheria, whooping cough, or nearly drowning, are particularly significant.