3
O landless void, O skyless void,
O nebulous, purposeless space,
Eternal and timeless,
Become the world, extend!
—Tahitian creation tale
What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable,
Likewise tasteless, constant, odorless,
Without beginning, without end, higher than the great,
stable—
By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of
Death.
—Katha Upanishad
Absolute Consciousness
After we have had direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions of reality, the idea that the universe, life, and consciousness could have developed without the participation of superior creative intelligence appears to us absurd, naïve, and untenable. However, as we have seen, the experiences of nature as ensouled and the encounters with archetypal figures are not in and of themselves sufficient to satisfy fully our spiritual craving. I therefore searched in the reports of the people with whom I had worked for states of consciousness that were perceived as reaching the ultimate frontiers of the human spirit. I was trying to find out what experiences would convey the sense of encountering the supreme principle in the universe.
People who had an experience of the Absolute that fully satisfied their spiritual longing typically did not see any specific figurative images. When they felt that they attained the goal of their mystical and philosophical quest, their descriptions of the supreme principle were highly abstract and strikingly similar. Those who reported such an ultimate revelation showed quite remarkable agreement in describing the experiential characteristics of this state. They reported that the experience of the Supreme involved transcendence of all the limitations of the analytical mind, all rational categories, and all the constraints of ordinary logic.
This experience was not bound by the usual categories of three-dimensional space and linear time as we know them from everyday life. It also contained all conceivable polarities in an inseparable amalgam and thus transcended dualities of any kind. Time after time, people compared the Absolute to a radiant source of light of unimaginable intensity, though they emphasized that it also differed in some significant aspects from any forms of light that we know in the material world. To describe the Absolute as light entirely misses some of its essential characteristics, particularly the fact that it also is an immense and unfathomable field of consciousness endowed with infinite intelligence and creative power.
The supreme cosmic principle can be experienced in tow different ways. Sometimes, all personal boundaries dissolve or are drastically obliterated and we completely merge with the divine source, becoming one with it and indistinguishable from it. Other times, we maintain the sense of separate identity, assuming the role of an astonished observer who is witnessing as if from the outside the mysterium tremendum of existence. Or, like some mystics, we might feel the ecstasy of an enraptured lover experiencing the encounter with the Beloved. Spiritual literature of all ages abounds in descriptions of both types of experiences of the Divine.
“Just as a moth flies into the flame and becomes one with it,” say the Sufis, “so do we merge with the Divine.” Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Indian saint and visionary, describes in one of his spiritual poems “a sugar doll who went to the ocean for a swim and completely dissolved.” By contrast, the Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila and Rumi, the great Persian transcendental poet, refer to God as the Beloved. Similarly, the bhaktas, Indian representatives of the yoga of devotion, prefer to maintain a sense of separateness from and a relationship with the Divine. They do not want to become Sri Ramana’s sugar doll who completely loses her identity in the cosmic ocean. The great Indian saint and mystic Sri Ramakrishna once exclaimed emphatically: “I want to taste sugar, not to become sugar.”
People who have had the experience of the supreme principle described above know that they have encountered God. However, most of them feel that the term God does not adequately capture the depth of their experience, since it has been distorted, trivialized, and discredited by mainstream religions and cultures. Even the names like Absolute Consciousness or Universal Mind that are often used to describe this experience seem to be hopelessly inadequate to convey the immensity and shattering impact of such an encounter. Some people consider silence to be the most appropriate reaction to the experience of the Absolute. For them, it is obvious that “those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.”
The supreme principle can be directly experienced in holotropic states of consciousness, but it eludes any attempts at adequate description or explanation. The language that we use to communicate about matters of daily life simply is not adequate for this task. Individuals who have had this experience seem to agree that it is ineffable. Words and the structure of our language are painfully inappropriate tools to describe its nature and dimensions, particularly to those who have not had it.
With all these reservations, I include the following report written by Robert, a thirty-seven-year-old psychiatrist, who in his session had the experience of what he considered to be the ultimate reality:
The beginning of the experience was very sudden and dramatic. I was hit by a cosmic thunderbolt of immense power that instantly shattered and dissolved my everyday reality. I completely lost contact with the surrounding world; it disappeared as if by magic. The awareness of my everyday existence, my life, and my name faintly echoed like dreamlike images on the far periphery of my consciousness. Robert … California … United States … planet Earth … I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of these realities, but they suddenly did not make any sense. Equally absent were any archetypal visions of deities, demons, and mythological domains that were so predominant in my previous experiences.
At that time, my only reality was a mass of swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all of Existence in an entirely abstract form. It had the brightness of myriads of suns, yet it was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive … all of that and much more. I had no concept, no categories for what I was witnessing. I could not maintain a sense of separate existence in the face of such a force. My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. Time lost any meaning whatsoever.
In retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, that according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thödol, appears at the moment of death.
Robert’s encounter with the Supreme lasted approximately twenty minutes of clocktime, although during the entire duration of his experience time did not exist for him as a meaningful dimension. While this was happening, he had no contact with the environment and was not able to communicate verbally. Then he slowly began experiencing a gradual return to ordinary reality, concerning which he wrote:
After what seemed like eternity, concrete dreamlike images and concepts began to form in my experiential field. I started to feel that something like the earth with large continents and specific countries might actually exist somewhere, but it all seemed very distant and unreal. Gradually, this crystallized further into the images of United States and California. Later, I connected with my everyday identity and started to experience fleeting images of my present life. At first, the contact with this reality was extremely faint. For some time, I thought that I was dying and that I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state between the present life and the next incarnation, as it is described in the Tibetan texts.
As I was regaining contact with ordinary reality, I reached a point where I knew that I would survive this experience. I was lying on the couch feeling ecstatic and awed by what had been revealed to me. Against this background, I was experiencing various dramatic situations happening in different parts of the world throughout centuries. They seemed to be scenes from my previous incarnations, many of them dangerous and painful. Various groups of muscles in my body were twitching and shaking, as my body was hurting and dying in these different contexts. However, as my karmic history was being played out in my body, I was in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from these dramas.
For many days afterwards, it was very easy for me to reach in my meditations a state of peace and serenity. I am sure that this experience will have a lasting influence on my life. It seems impossible to experience something like this and not be profoundly touched and transformed by it.
The Pregnant Void
The encounter with Absolute Consciousness or identification with it is not the only way to experience the supreme principle in the cosmos or the ultimate reality. The second type of experience that seems to satisfy those who search for ultimate answers is particularly surprising, since it has no specific content. It is the identification with Cosmic Emptiness and Nothingness described in the mystical literature as the Void. It is important to emphasize that not every experience of emptiness that we can encounter in nonordinary states qualifies as the Void. People very often use this term to describe an unpleasant sense of lack of feeling, initiative, or meaning. To deserve the name Void, this state has to meet very specific criteria.
When we encounter the Void, we feel that it is primordial emptiness of cosmic proportions and relevance. We become pure consciousness aware of this absolute nothingness; however, at the same time, we have a strange paradoxical sense of its essential fullness. This cosmic vacuum is also a plenum, since nothing seems to be missing in it. While it does not contain anything in a concrete manifest form, it seems to comprise all of existence in a potential form. In this paradoxical way, we can transcend the usual dichotomy between emptiness and form, or existence and nonexistence. However, the possibility of such a resolution cannot be adequately conveyed in words; it has to be experienced to be understood.
The Void transcends the usual categories of time and space. It is unchangeable, and lies beyond all dichotomies and polarities, such as light and darkness, good and evil, stability and motion, microcosm and macrocosm, agony and ecstasy, singularity and plurality, form and emptiness, and even existence and nonexistence. Some people call it Supracosmic and Metacosmic, indicating that this primordial emptiness and nothingness appears to be the principle that underlies the phenomenal world as we know it and, at the same time, is supraordinated to it. This metaphysical vacuum, pregnant with potential for everything there is, appears to be the cradle of all being, the ultimate source of existence. The creation of all phenomenal worlds is then the realization and concretization of its pre-existing potentialities.
When we experience the Void, we have a sense that while it is the source of all existence, it also contains all creation within itself. Another way of expressing it is to say that it is all of existence, since nothing exists outside of its realm. In terms of our usual concepts and logical norms, this seems to involve some basic contradictions. It would certainly seem absurd to think about emptiness as containing the world of phenomena, the essential characteristic of which seems to be that they have specific forms. Similarly, common sense is telling us that the creative principle and its creation cannot be the same, that they have to be different from each other. The extraordinary nature of the Void transcends these paradoxes.
The following example is the description of an experience of the Cosmic Void of Christopher Bache, a philosopher of religion, who has been involved for many years in a systematic spiritual quest:
Suddenly an enormous Void opened up inside this world. Visually, It took the form of a warping of my visual field, as if a giant, invisible bowl had been inserted into my seeing and was bending all the lines out to the outer edges of the picture. Nothing was torn or disrupted, but everything was being stretched and stopped to reveal this underlying reality. It was as if God suddenly paused between inhaling and exhaling, and the entire universe was suddenly suspended, not dissolved but held in its place for an eternity. It was a gaping, yawning opening in existence.
At first this sensation took my breath away, both literally and figuratively, and I waited in suspension for movement to be restored. But movement was not restored. I was fully conscious, but absolutely suspended. And this suspension went on and on and on. I could not believe how long it lasted. As I soaked in this experience I realized that this was the Void out of which all form springs. This was the living Stillness out of which all movement flows. This contentless experience of concentrated consciousness that was pre-form and outside-form had to be what Eastern philosophers called sunyata. When slowly movement resumed and the forms congealed, in the wake of the Void came an exquisite sense of “suchness.” Fresh from the Void, I touched the edges of experiencing existence “just as it is.”
On several occasions, people who experienced both the Absolute Consciousness and the Void had the insight that these two states are essentially identical and interchangeable, in spite of the fact that they can be experientially distinguished from each other and that they might appear conceptually and logically incompatible. These individuals claimed to have witnessed the emergence of creative Cosmic Consciousness from the Void or, conversely, its return into the Void and disappearance. Others experienced these two aspects of the Absolute simultaneously, identifying with the Cosmic Consciousness and, at the same time, recognizing its essential voidness.
The experience of the Void as the source of creation can also be associated with the recognition of the fundamental emptiness of the material world. The realization of the voidness of everyday reality is the core message of one of the most important spiritual texts of Mahayana Buddhism, the Prajñaparamita Hridaya Sutra or Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra. In the text Avalokiteshvara addresses Buddha’s disciple Shariputra: “The nature of form is emptiness, the nature of emptiness is form. Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form. … Feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness are also like this.”
It is interesting that the concept of the vacuum that is a plenum and of the “pregnant void” also exists in modern physics. A statement by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum physics and the “father” of antimatter, describes it in these words: “All matter is created out of some imperceptible substratum and … the creation of matter leaves behind it a ‘hole’ in this substratum which appears as antimatter. Now, this substratum itself is not accurately decribed as material, since it uniformly fills all space and is undetectable by any observation. But it is a peculiarly material form of nothingness, out of which matter is created.” The late American physicist Heinz Pagels is even more explicit: “The view of the new physics suggests: ‘The vacuum is all of physics.’ Everything that ever existed or can exist is already there in the nothingness of space … that nothingness contains all being” (Pagels 1990).
In their experiments, involving acceleration of elementary particles to high velocities and their collisions, physicists have observed creation of new subatomic particles emerging from what they call the “dynamic vacuum” and their disappearance back into this matrix. Of course, the similarity is only partial and does not go very far. The problem of cosmic creation is not limited to the origin of the fundamental building blocks of matter. It has important aspects that are outside of the reach of physicists, such as the problem of the origin of forms, order, laws, and meaning. The Void that we can experience in holotropic states seems to be responsible for all the aspects of creation, not just the raw material for the phenomenal world.
In our daily life, everything that happens involves complex chains of causes and effects. The assumption of strict linear causality is a necessary prerequisite for traditional Western science. Another fundamental characteristic of material reality is that all processes in our world follow the law of conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed into other forms of energy. This way of thinking appears to be adequate for most of the events in the macroworld. However, it breaks down when we trace the chains of causes and effects back to the beginnings of the universe. When we apply it to the process of cosmic creation, we are confronted with formidable problems: If everything is causally determined, what is the original cause, the cause of causes, the Prime Mover? If energy has to be conserved, where did it come from in the first place? And what about the origin of matter, space, and time?
The current cosmogenetic theory of the Big Bang, suggesting that matter, time, and space were simultaneously created out of a dimensionless “singularity” some 15 billion years ago, can hardly be accepted as an adequate rational explanation of the deepest mystery of existence. And we generally cannot imagine that a satisfactory answer could be anything else but rational. The solution to these problems provided by transcendental experiences is of an entirely different nature and order. Experiencing Absolute Consciousness, the Void, and their mutual relationship makes it possible to transcend the baffling paradoxes that plague scientists theorizing about a material universe governed by causality and mechanical laws. Holotropic states can provide satisfactory answers to these questions and paradoxes; however, these answers are not logical, but experiential and transrational in nature.
When we experience the transition from the Void to Absolute Consciousness or vice versa, we do not have the feeling of absurdity that we would have in the usual state of consciousness, while considering the possibility of something originating out of nothing or, conversely, disappearing into nothingness without traces. On the contrary, there is a sense of self-evidence, simplicity, and naturalness about this process. The experiential insights in this regard are accompanied with the feeling of sudden clarification or an “aha” reaction. Since on this level the material world is seen as an expression of Absolute Consciousness and the latter, in turn, appears to be interchangeable with the Void, transcendental experiences of this kind provide an unexpected solution for some of the most difficult and taxing problems that beset the rational mind.
The insights of people who have experienced holotropic states of consciousness concerning the source of existence are strikingly similar to those found in perennial philosophy. I have already mentioned the description of cosmic emptiness from the Prajñaparamita Sutra. Here is a passage from the ancient Tao Te Ching by the Chinese sage Lao-tzu (1988):
There was something formless and perfect
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
Infinite. Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
It flows through all things,
inside and outside, and returns
to the origin of things.
Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian visionary and mystical poet, describes the source of creation in these words: “Nonexistence is eagerly bubbling in the expectation of being given existence. … For the mine and treasure-house of God’s making is naught but nonexistence coming into manifestation.” And here, for comparison, are two passages from the Jewish mystical tradition. The thirteenth-century Cabalist Azriel of Gerona says the following: “You may be asked: ‘How did God bring forth being from nothingness? Is there not an immense difference between being and nothingness?’ Answer as follows: ‘Being is in nothingness in the mode of nothingness, and nothingness is in being in the form of being.’ Nothingness is being and being is nothingness.” And the fourteenth-century Cabalist David Ben Abraham he-Lavan writes: “Ayin, Nothingness, is more existent than all the being of the world. But since it is simple, and every simple thing is complex compared with its simplicity, it is called Ayin.” And, according to the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “God’s nothingness fills the entire world; his something is nowhere.”
Words for the Ineffable
Illuminating insights into ultimate realities experienced in mystical states cannot be adequately described in our everyday language. Lao-tzu was well aware of it and put it very succinctly: “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” Any descriptions and definitions have to rely on words that have been developed to denote objects and activities in the material world as it is experienced in daily life. For this reason, ordinary language proves to be inappropriate and inadequate when we want to communicate about the experiences and insights encountered in various holotropic states of consciousness. This is particularly true when our experiences focus on the ultimate problems of existence, such as the Void, Absolute Consciousness, and creation.
Those who are familiar with the Eastern spiritual philosophies, often resort to words from various Asian languages when describing their spiritual experiences and insights. They use Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, or Japanese terms like samadhi (union with God), sunyata (Void), kundalini (Serpent Power), bardo (intermediate state after death), anatta (no-self), satori (enlightenment experience), nirvana, ch’i or ki energy, and the Tao for high transcendental states or, conversely, samsara (the world of birth and death), Maya (world illusion), avidya (ignorance), and the like when referring to everyday reality. These languages were developed in cultures with high sophistication in regard to holotropic states and spiritual realities. Unlike the Western languages, they contain many technical terms specifically describing nuances of the mystical experiences and related issues. Ultimately even these words can be fully understood only by those who have had the corresponding experiences.
Poetry, although still a highly imperfect tool, seems to be a more adequate and appropriate means for conveying the essence of spiritual experiences and for communicating about transcendental realities. For this reason, many of the great visionaries and religious teachers resorted to poetry while sharing their metaphysical insights. Many people with whom I have worked recalled and quoted passages from various transcendental poets. I have often heard them say that, after their own mystical experience, visionary poems that they previously had not comprehended or related to, suddenly became clear and illumined with new meaning.
Particularly popular among the people involved in spiritual quest seem to be transcendental poets from the Middle East, such as the mystics Omar Khayyam, Rumi, and Kahlil Jibran, and the Indian visionaries Kabir, Princess Mira Bai, and Sri Aurobindo. I have chosen here as an example a poem by Kabir, a fifteenth-century Indian sage, son of a Moslem weaver in Benares. In his long life that lasted 120 years, Kabir drew on the best of the Hindu and of the Sufi tradition and expressed his spiritual wisdom in ecstatic verses. The following poem echoes the parallels between the natural cycle of water and the creative process described in the following section of this book.
I have been thinking of the difference
between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?
Because someone has made up the word
“wave,” do I have to distinguish it
from water?
There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.
That is a string of beads one should look at with
luminous eyes.
We have also our own rich Western tradition of visionary poetry, represented by William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and others. People who have experienced mystical states often refer to these poets and recite passages from their work. Here is as an example William Blake’s often quoted poem capturing the mystery of the immanent divine:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The Beyond Within
In systematic spiritual practice involving holotropic states of consciousness, we can repeatedly transcend the ordinary boundaries of the body-ego and identify with other people, animals, plants, or inorganic aspects of nature and also with various archetypal beings. We discover in this process that any boundaries in the material universe and in other realities are ultimately arbitrary and negotiable. By shedding the limitations of the rational mind and the straitjacket of commonsense and everyday logic, we can break through the many separating barriers, expand our consciousness to unimaginable proportions, and eventually experience union and identity with the transcendental source of all being.
When we reach experiential identification with Absolute Consciousness, we realize that our own being is ultimately commensurate with the entire cosmic network, with all of existence. The recognition of our own divine nature, our identity with the cosmic source, is the most important discovery we can make during the process of deep self-exploration. This is the essence of the famous statement found in the ancient Indian scriptures, the Upanishads: “Tat tvam asi.” The literal translation of this sentence is “Thou are That,” meaning “You are of divine nature,” or “you are Godhead.” It reveals that our everyday identification with the “skin-encapsulated ego,” embodied individual consciousness, or “name and form” (namarupa) is an illusion and that our true nature is that of cosmic creative energy (Atman-Brahman).
This revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is the ultimate secret that lies at the core of all great spiritual traditions, although it might be expressed in somewhat different ways. I have already mentioned that in Hinduism Atman, the individual consciousness, and Brahman, the universal consciousness, are one. The followers of Siddha Yoga hear in many variations the basic tenet of their school: “God dwells within you as you.” In Buddhist scriptures, we can read: “Look within, you are the Buddha.” In the Confucian tradition, we are told that “Heaven, earth, and human are one body.”
The same message can be found in the words of Jesus Christ: “Father, you and I are one.” And St. Gregory Palamas, one the greatest theologians of the Christian Orthodox Church, declared: “For the kingdom of heaven, nay rather, the King of Heaven … is within us.” Similarly, the great Jewish sage and Cabalist Avraham ben Shemu’el Abulafia taught that “he and we are one.” According to Mohammed, “whoso knoweth himself knoweth his Lord.” Mansur al-Hallaj, the Sufi ecstatic and poet known as “the martyr of mystical love,” described it in this way: “I saw my Lord with the Eye of the Heart. I said: ‘Who art thou?’ He answered: ‘Thou.’” Al-Hallaj was imprisoned and sentenced to death for his statement: “Ana’l Haqq—I am God, the Absolute Truth, the True Reality.”
The Divine and Its Creation
We can now summarize the insights from holotropic states of consciousness concerning the creative principle, the nature of reality, and our own nature. As we have seen, these insights echo the message of the great spiritual traditions of the world. They suggest that the world of solid matter—featuring three-dimensional space, linear time, and unrelenting causality, as we experience it in our ordinary states of consciousness—does not have an independent existence of its own. Rather than being the only true reality, as it is portrayed by materialistic science, it is a creation of Absolute Consciousness.
In the light of these insights, the material world of our everyday life, including our own body, is an intricate tissue of misperceptions and misreadings. It is a playful and somewhat arbitrary product of the cosmic creative principle, an infinitely sophisticated “virtual reality,” a divine play created by Absolute Consciousness and the Cosmic Void. Our universe that appears to contain countless myriads of separate entities and elements, is in its deepest nature just one being of immense proportions and unimaginable complexity.
The same is true about all the other dimensions and domains of existence that we can discover in holotropic states of consciousness. Since there are no absolute boundaries between the individual psyche, any part of creation, and the cosmic creative principle itself, each of us is ultimately identical with the divine source of creation. We thus are, collectively and individually, both the playwrights and actors in this cosmic drama. Since in our true nature we are identical with the cosmic creative principle, we cannot assuage our cravings by pursuits in the material world, no matter what their nature and scope. Nothing short of the experience of mystical unity with the divine source will quench our deepest longing.