5
Now I am moving back …. back to the Whole, where I belong … what joy to return. … Yes, now I know what I am, what I have been from the beginning, what I always will be …. a part of the Whole, the restless part that desires to return, yet lives to seek expression in doing, creating, building, giving, growing, leaving more than it takes, and above all desires to bring back gifts of love to the Whole … the paradox of total unity and the continuity of the part. I know the Whole. … I am the Whole … even as a part I am the totality.
—Robert Monroe, The Ultimate Journey
Whoever has parted from his source
Longs to return to that state of union.
—Rumi
Involution and Evolution of Consciousness
The process of creation as it was described in the preceding chapter results in an immensely rich spectrum of entities on many different levels of reality, ranging from the undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness through rich pantheons of archetypal beings to countless individual units constituting the world of matter. This process of successive divisions combined with increasing separation and alienation represents only one half of the cosmic cycle. The insights from holotropic states repeatedly reveal another part of this process consisting of events in consciousness that reflect a movement in the opposite direction—from the worlds of plurality and separation toward increasing dissolution of boundaries and merging into ever larger wholes.
For the sake of brevity, I refer to the descending part of the cosmic process, representing creation (involution of consciousness), as hylotropic, or oriented toward the world of matter (from the Greek hyle = matter, and trepein = moving in the direction of something). In a similar way, I call the ascending aspect of the cosmic process that mediates return to the original undifferentiated unity (evolution of consciousness) holotropic, or moving toward wholeness. As I have already mentioned earlier, this latter term is derived from the Greek holos, meaning whole, and trepein, as above, aiming for something.
These insights parallel the descriptions and discussions of these two cosmic movements described in various spiritual and philosophical systems. In the West, the founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus (1991), referred to the hylotropic process as Efflux and to the holotropic movement as Reflux. According to the Neoplatonists, the cosmos in all its variety of hierarchical gradations is created by a divine emanation from the supreme One. Humans have a potential access to the highest intellectual and spiritual realms and can rise to the consciousness of the World Soul. Plotinus’ ideas became a dominant theme of all Neoplatonic schools, as well as the writings of Christian mystics and German idealistic philosophers. A very comprehensive contemporary synthesis of the ideas concerning Descent and Ascent appears in the work of Ken Wilber (1995).
In the East, similar concepts found its most articulate expression in the writings of the Indian mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo (1965). Aurobindo argued that Brahman manifests as the world of matter in a process that he called involution and then progressively brings about an unfolding of his latent power in the course of evolution. Involution is a process of self-limitation and increasing density, by which the universal Consciousness-Force veils itself by stages and creates planes of existence. In its farthest reaches, it assumes the appearance of the inconscient material world. In each plane all the powers of consciousness belonging to the planes above it are involved, so that the full potential of the original and universal Consciousness-Force is enfolded and hidden even in the Inconscient.
Evolution is the opposite process, by which the Consciousness-Force emerges again from the apparent cosmic Inconscience and manifests its hidden powers. However, it is important to emphasize that for Aurobindo evolution is not an exact reverse of involution. It is not a gradual subtilization and rarefaction plane by plane that would eventually lead to reabsorption of all creation into the One Unmanifest. It is a gradual emergence of higher powers of consciousness in the material universe leading to an ever greater manifestation of the divine Consciousness-Force within its creation.
According to the insights from holotropic states, the universal process offers not only an infinite number of possibilities for becoming a separate individual, but also an equally rich and ingenious range of opportunities for dissolution of boundaries and fusion that mediate experiential return to the source. The unitive experiences make it possible for the individual units of consciousness to overcome their alienation and free themselves from the delusion of their separateness. This transcendence of what earlier appeared to be absolute boundaries and the resulting progressive merging creates larger and larger experiential units. In its farthest reaches, this process dissolves all the boundaries and brings about a reunion with Absolute Consciousness. The sequences of fusions occurring in many forms and on many different levels complete the overall cyclical pattern of the cosmic dance.
Varieties of Unitive Experiences
Although the unitive processes can be observed throughout all domains of existence, they are particularly rich and complex in human beings. Here they can also be studied most directly and systematically in the form of transpersonal experiences. Unfortunately, Western psychiatry does not differentiate between mysticism and psychosis and tends to treat mystical experiences of any kind as manifestations of mental disease. I have met during my professional career many people who received pathological labels, tranquilizing medication, and even shock therapy because they have experienced unity with other other people, nature, cosmos, and God.
Abraham Maslow (1964), the late American psychologist who played an important role in the founding of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, interviewed hundreds of people who had had spontaneous unitive states, or “peak experiences” as he called them. He was able to show that mystical experiences are not indications of pathology and do not belong into the handbooks of psychiatry. They often occur in people who do not have any serious emotional problems and would otherwise be considered “normal” by standard psychological criteria. Moreover, if these experiences occur in a supportive setting and are well integrated, they can have very beneficial consequences and result in better functioning, higher creativity, and “self-actualization.”
The most frequent triggers of unitive experiences are natural and human-made creations of extraordinary aesthetic beauty. For some people, it can be the immensity of the star-filled sky, for others the majesty of giant mountain ranges, or the awesome stillness of the deserts. People visiting such natural wonders as the Grand Canyon, giant waterfalls, or some of the famous stalagmite caverns of the world can feel overwhelmed by their grandeur and experience a mystical rapture. The ocean, with the elemental power manifesting on its surface and the noble silence of its depth, is another frequent source of peak experiences. Similarly, such situations as watching a beautiful sunset, the magic of the aurora borealis, or a total solar eclipse can trigger profound unitive states of consciousness. However, it does not necessarily take events on such a grand scale to inspire mystical awareness. Under the right circumstances, it can be something as “ordinary” as a spider spinning its web or a hummingbird hovering over a flower and sucking nectar.
Exposure to exquisite artistic creations can have a very similar effect. Composers deeply engaged in creative work, performing musicians, as well as people in musical audiences, can occasionally lose their boundaries and literally merge with the music. They can have a sense of actually becoming music, rather than just listening to it. Great dancers, while on stage, often reach states where there is no more difference between the dancer and the dance. European Gothic cathedrals, Moslem mosques, the Taj Mahal, or Hindu and Buddhist temples, by their monumental beauty, have been instrumental in inducing mystical states in many thousands of people. Great sculptures, paintings, and other art objects of all ages and cultures can have a similar effect on sensitive individuals.
Another area of everyday life that is a frequent source of unitive experiences deserves special notice, since most of us probably would not associate it with mystical awareness. Many prominent athletes report that, at the time of their peak performances, they were in states that resembled mystical raptures. We tend to attribute stellar performances in various athletic activities to a combination of special physical endowment, psychological perseverance, unrelenting discipline, and rigorous training. The inside story from some of the world’s greatest athletes reveals that the players themselves often see it very differently. They attribute their extraordinary achievments to special states of consciousness that mediate for them capacities that border on the miraculous and supernatural (Murphy and White 1978). An important aspect of these states is typically a sense of losing individual boundaries and merging with various aspects of the environment.
It seems that the mystical raptures triggered by sport activities make it possible to transcend the boundaries of what we usually consider to be humanly possible. I have personally witnessed an astonishing example of such an extraordinary performance associated with a unitive state. It occurred during a monthlong seminar on Buddhism and Western Psychology that we conducted at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. A Korean swordmaster whom we invited as guest faculty offered as part of our program a special demonstration. He asked one of his disciples to lie down on the grass and placed a napkin and a large watermelon on his naked belly. He then retreated about fifteen feet and stood for a few minutes in quiet meditation, his head covered with a tightly fitting bag made of thick black velvet, and holding in his hand a giant, extremely sharp sword.
Suddenly all the dogs in the area started to howl and the swordsman joined in with a wild warrior scream. In a cartwheel fashion, he propelled himself in the direction of his disciple, who was quietly lying on the grass, and with a strong swing of his sword cut the watermelon on his belly in two pieces. There was a slight indention from the sword on the napkin, but the disciple was unscathed. Astounded, the spectators asked how he was able to accomplish such a spectacular feat. Everybody assumed that he was somehow able to remember and visualize the environment as he had seen it before he was blindfolded. He smiled and answered: “No, you meditate and wait until all is one—the swordmaster, the sword, the grass, the melon, the disciple—and then there is no problem!”
Experiences of mystical union have been beautifully captured in the world literature. For example, in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Edmund talks about his mystical raptures he experienced in connection with the ocean:
I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.
And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
Unitive Potential of Death, Sex, and Birth
While unitive experiences happen most likely in emotionally positively charged situations, they can also occur under circumstances that are highly unfavorable, threatening, and critical for the individual. In this case, the ego consciousness is shattered and overwhelmed rather than dissolved and transcended. This happens during severe acute or chronic stress, at the time of intense emotional and physical suffering, or when the integrity or survival of the body are seriously threatened. Deeply depressed people brought by a serious life crisis to the verge of suicide can suddenly experience a profound spiritual opening and transcend their suffering. Many others discover the mystical realms during near-death experiences at the time of accidents, injuries, dangerous diseases, and operations.
Death, an event that ends our individual existence as embodied selves, is a very logical interface with the transpersonal domain. The events leading to death, associated with it, and following it are a frequent source of spiritual opening. Suffering from a terminal illness or being in intimate interaction with people who are dying, particularly close friends or relatives, can activate one’s own issues around death and impermanence and be instrumental in a mystical awakening. The training of monks in Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism requires spending considerable amount of time with dying people. Certain Hindu Tantric traditions involve meditations in cemeteries, in the burning grounds, and in close contact with corpses.
In Middle Ages, Christian monks were asked to imagine in their meditations their own death and to visualize all the stages of decomposition of their bodies until the final disintegration into ashes. “Remember death!”, “Dust to dust!”, “Death is certain, the hour uncertain!”, “Thus passes the glory of the world!” were the mottoes guiding such practice. This was much more than morbid indulgence in death as some modern Westerners would see it. Experiences of deep encounter with death can trigger mystical states. By accepting impermanence and our own mortality on a deep experiential level, we also discover the part of us that is transcendent and immortal.
Various ancient books of the dead offer detailed descriptions of powerful spiritual experiences occurring at the time of biological death (Grof 1994). Modern research in the field of thanatology, a science studying death and dying, has confirmed many important aspects of these accounts (Ring 1982, 1985). It has shown that approximately one-third of the people who come close to death experience powerful visionary states including, among others, a condensed life review, passage through a tunnel, encounter with archetypal beings, contact with transcendental realities, and visions of divine light. In many instances, this can involve “veridical” out-of-body experiences, during which the individual’s disembodied consciousness accurately perceives what is happening in various close or remote locations. Survivors of such situations typically undergo a profound spiritual opening, personality transformation, and radical changes in their life values. In a fascinating research project that is currently underway, Kenneth Ring (1995) is studying near-death experiences in congenitally blind people, trying to confirm that in disembodied states they are able to observe their environment.
Talking about triggers of unitive experiences, we should not forget a particularly important category—situations that are associated with human reproductive functions. Many people, both men and women, report that they have experienced profound mystical states during love-making. In some instances, an intense sexual experience can actually be instrumental in what is described in ancient Indian yogic texts as awakening of Kundalini, or Serpent Power. The yogis see Kundalini as the creative energy of the universe that is feminine in nature. It lies dormant in the sacral area of the human subtle body until it is activated by a guru, by meditation practice, or by some other influences. The close connection that exists between this spiritual energy and the sexual drive plays an essential role in Kundalini yoga and in Tantric practices.
For women, situations associated with motherhood can become another significant source of unitive experiences. By conceiving, carrying, and delivering a child, women directly participate in the proces of cosmic creation. Under favorable circumstances, the sacred nature of these situations becomes apparent and is consciously experienced. During pregnancy, birth, and nursing, it is not uncommon to sense a mystical connection with the fetus or the infant and even with the world at large. We will return to the relationship between mysticism and the triad birth/sex/death later in this book.
Additional important triggers of unitive states are powerful mind-altering technologies that can facilitate and catalyze their occurrence. Holotropic experiences have played a critical role in the spiritual and ritual life of humanity and much effort has been exerted throughout centuries to develop ways of inducing them. I have briefly reviewed in the introduction to this book the ancient, aboriginal, and modern “technologies of the sacred” and the different contexts in which they have been used, from shamanism through the rites of passage, mysteries of death and rebirth, and various forms of spiritual practice to modern experiential therapies and laboratory consciousness research.
The Immanent and the Transcendent Divine
In holotropic states of consciousness, whether they occur spontaneously or are induced by the ancient and modern mind-altering techniques, it is possible to transcend in various ways the individual boundaries of the embodied self. These experiences offer us the opportunity to become other people, groups of people, animals, plants, or even inorganic elements of nature and of the cosmos. In this process, time does not seem to be an obstacle and past and future events can become as easily available as anything happening at present.
Experiences of this kind convey a very convincing insight that all boundaries in the material world are illusory and that the entire universe as we know it, in both its spatial and temporal aspects, is a unified web of events in consciousness. It becomes very clear that the cosmos is not an ordinary material reality, but a creation of intelligent cosmic energy or the Universal Mind. These experiences thus unveil the “immanent Divine,” deus sive natura, or God manifested in and as the phenomenal world. They also disclose that each of us is essentially commensurate with the entire web of creation and with all its parts.
While such transpersonal experiences dramatically change our understanding of the nature of everyday material reality, there are others that reveal dimensions of existence that are ordinarily completely hidden to our perception. This category includes discarnate entities, various deities and demons, mythological realms, suprahuman beings, and the divine creative principle itself. In contrast to the “immanent Divine,” we can talk here about the “transcendent Divine,” since the realms and beings that we encounter under these circumstances are not part of our everyday reality; they belong to a different domain and order of existence.
Experiences of this kind demonstrate that cosmic creation is not limited to our material world, but manifests on many different levels and in many dimensions. Similarly, the possibility of unitive experiences is not confined to the material realm, but extends into other domains. We thus can not only see and encounter the inhabitants of the archetypal regions, we can actually merge with them and become them. And in the farthest reaches of our experiential self-exploration, we can encounter the creative principle itself and recognize our fundamental identity with it.
The experiences of the immanent Divine reveal the sacred nature of everyday reality and the unity underlying the world of matter, which for a naïve observer appears to be made of separate objects. By disclosing that all boundaries within the material world are arbitrary, these experiences make it clear that each of us is essentially identical with the entire field of space-time and ultimately with the cosmic creative energy itself. By comparison, the experiences of the transcendent Divine do not just show us new ways of understanding and perceiving the familiar world of our everyday life. They reveal the existence of dimensions of reality that are ordinarily invisible, or “transphenomenal,” particularly those abounding in primordial cosmic forms and patterns that C. G. Jung (1956) called archetypes.
As we have seen earlier, the world of archetypes, although normally imperceptible, is not entirely separate from our everyday material reality. It is intimately interwoven with it and plays a critical role in creating it. In this way, it represents a supraordinated dimension that forms and informs the experience of our everyday life. The archetypal domain thus represents a bridge between the world of matter and the undifferentiated field of Cosmic Consciousness. For this reason, the experience of the transcendent divine is more than just the experience of another “cosmic channel.” It also provides insights into the process by which material reality is created; it gives us a “glimpse into the cosmic kitchen,” as one of my clients in Prague called it.
The cosmic play offers many opportunities for experiences that make it possible for us to temporarily step out of the role we are playing in the universal script, recognize the illusory nature of everyday reality, and discover the possibility of reunion with the source. Holotropic states provide an understanding of such unitive experiences that is diametrically opposite to the position of mainstream psychiatrists. Rather than being distortions of the correct perception of the material world caused by a pathological process in the brain, these experiences offer profound insights into the true nature of reality. They reveal the existence of phenomena that represent intermediate stages in the process of creation between the undifferentiated consciousness of the Universal Mind and the specifically human experience of the material world. Because they involve transcendence of individual boundaries and expand the sense of one’s identity in the holotropic direction, they serve as important landmarks on the journey to spiritual awakening.
The Enigma of Space and Time
Before closing our discussion of the cosmic process as an intricate fabric of hylotropic and holotropic experiences, we have to discuss another important aspect of cosmic creation, namely its relation to space and time. When we describe the creative process as a movement from undifferentiated unity to plurality, our conditioning will very likely lead us to imagine that this process had to begin in a specific location and to unfold in linear time. However, the critical stages of this process occur in regions that lie beyond time and space as we know them. As we have seen, the cosmic creative principle transcends all the distinctions and polarities whatsoever and that includes space and time.
In our everyday life, everything that we encounter has distinct and definite space and time coordinates. Our experience of time as linear and space as three-dimensional is very compelling and convincing. As a result of it, we tend to believe that these characteristics of time and space are mandatory and absolute. In holotropic experiences, we can discover to our surprise that there exist many important alternatives to our usual perception and understanding of these two dimensions. In visionary states, we can experience not only the present, but also the past and, occasionally, even the future. The sequences of events can appear to be circular, they can unfold along spiral trajectories, or actually run backwards. Time can also stop or be altogether transcended. On the levels on which cosmic creation occurs, the past, the present, and the future coexist rather than follow one another and, consequently, all the stages of the process are happening simultaneously.
The concept and experience of space appear to be equally arbitrary when we are in a holotropic state. Any number of different spaces in various hierarchical arrangements can be created in a playful fashion and none of them seems to be more objective, real, and mandatory than others. The transition from the microcosm to the macrocosm does not have to occur in a linear fashion. The small and the large can be freely interchanged in a random and capricious way. Experiential identification with a single cell can effortlessly become one that involves an entire galaxy and vice versa. These two dimensions can also coexist in the experiential space of the same person. Consequently, the baffling paradox of finiteness versus infinity that we experience in our everyday state of consciousness is transcended and ceases to exist.
To illustrate the complexities of experiencing time and space in holotropic states, I will describe one of the most extraordinary adventures in consciousness that I have experienced during the forty years of my inner explorations. It occurred in a high-dose psychedelic session that I had at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center shortly after my arrival in the United States in 1967. Here is an excerpt from my account of that session:
Somewhere in the second half of my session, I found myself in a very unusual state of mind. It was a feeling of serenity, bliss, and simplicity mixed with awe in regard to the mystery of existence. I sensed that what I was experiencing was similar to what the early Christians must have experienced. It was a world where miracles were possible, acceptable, and even plausible. I was pondering about the problems of time and space and had great difficulty understanding how I could have ever believed that linear time and three-dimensional space are absolute and mandatory dimensions of reality.
It appeared to me rather obvious that there are no limits whatsoever in the realm of spirit and that time and space are arbitrary constructs of the psyche. I suddenly realized that I do not have to be bound by the limitations of time and space and can travel in the time-space continuum quite freely and without any restrictions. This feeling was so convincing and overwhelming that I wanted to test it by an experiment. I decided to try if I could travel to my parents’ apartment in Prague, which was many thousand miles away.
After determining the direction and considering the distance, I imagined myself flying through space to the place of my destination. I had the experience of moving through space at an enormous speed but, to my disappointment, I was not getting anywhere. I could not understand why the experiment did not work, since my feeling that such space travel should be possible was very convincing. All of a sudden, I realized that I was still under the influence of my old concepts of time and space. I continued to think in terms of directions and distances and approached the task accordingly. It occurred to me that the proper approach would be to make myself believe that the place of my session was actually identical with the place of my destination. I said to myself: “This is not Baltimore, this is Prague.
Right here and now, I am in my parents’ appartment in Prague.”
When I approached the task in this way, I experienced peculiar and bizarre sensations. I found myself in a strange, rather congested place full of electric circuits, tubes, wires, resistors, and condensers. After a short period of confusion, I realized that my consciousness was trapped in a TV set located in the corner of the room in my parents’ apartment. I was trying, somehow, to use the speakers for hearing and the tube for seeing. After a while, I had to laugh since I realized that this experience was a symbolic spoof ridiculing the fact that I was still imprisoned by my previous beliefs concerning space, time, and matter.
The only way of experiencing distant locations that I could conceive of and accept was one that was mediated by television. Such a transmission, of course, is restricted by the velocity of the electromagnetic waves involved. At the moment when I realized and firmly believed that my consciousness could transcend any limitations whatsoever, including the speed of light, the experience changed rapidly. The television set turned inside out and I found myself walking in the apartment of my parents in Prague.
At this point, I did not feel any drug effect and the experience was as real as any other situation in my life. The door of my parents’ bedroom was half open. I looked in, saw their bodies on the bed, and heard them breathing. I walked to the window and looked at the clock on the street corner. It showed a six-hour difference from the time in Baltimore where the experiment took place. In spite of the fact that this number of hours reflected the actual time difference between the two zones, I did not find it to be a convincing evidence. Since I intellectually knew the time difference, my mind could have easily fabricated this experience.
I lay down on the couch in the corner of one of the rooms to reflect on my experience. It was the same couch on which I had spent my last psychedelic session before my departure to the USA. My request for permission to travel to the USA on a fellowship had been initially turned down by the Czech authorities. My last session in Prague happened at a time when I was waiting for the response to my appeal.
Suddenly, I felt a wave of overwhelming anxiety. A strange and uncanny idea emerged in my mind with unusual force and persuasiveness: Maybe I had never left Czechoslovakia and was now coming back from the psychedelic session in Prague. Maybe the positive response to my appeal, the journey to the USA, joining the team in Baltimore, and having a session there was just a visionary journey motivated by strong wishful thinking. I was trapped in an insidious loop, a vicious spatio-temporal circle, unable to determine my real historical and geographic coordinates.
For a long time, I felt suspended between two realities, both of which were equally convincing. I could not tell whether I was experiencing an astral projection to Prague from my session in Baltimore or coming down from a session in Prague in which I had experienced a trip to the United States. I had to think about the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu who awoke from a dream in which he was a butterfly and for some time could not decide whether he was not actually a butterfly dreaming of being human.
Meaningful Coincidences and Synchronicities
I would like to discuss in this context another important aspect of holotropic states that has far-reaching implications for our understanding of time and space. Transpersonal experiences are often associated with strange meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained in terms of linear causality. In a universe, as it is described by materialistic science, all events should obey the law of cause and effect. Any coincidences that defy explanation in causal terms are then attributed to the fact that the phenomena involved are too complex and that we lack the knowledge of all the contributing factors. Because of all these unknown “hidden variables,” the final outcome can be predicted only statistically, not in specific detail. However, on occasion, the statistical improbability of certain coincidences in our everyday life is so staggering that it makes us question the adequacy of such an interpretation.
A friend of mine recently shared with me a remarkable coincidence that had occurred in his family. His wife and her sister, who lives in another city, were both woken up in the course of the same night by the presence of a bat in their bedrooms. They both responded to this one-time occurrence in their lives in exactly the same way. Although it happened in the middle of the night, they immediately called their father, woke him up and related to him this unusual event. As most of us know, situations violating statistical probabilities are much more frequent than one would expect. I have personally experienced over the years many extraordinary coincidences in my own life. One of them was particularly relevant because of its important consequences and is worth describing.
In 1968 when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia, I was in the United States on a scholarship at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. After the invasion, I was asked by the Czech authorities to return immediately, but decided to disobey and stay in the United States. As a result, I was not able to visit my native country for almost twenty years. During this time, I could not maintain open contact with my friends and colleagues in Czechoslovakia. It would have been politically dangerous for them, because my stay in the United States was considered illegal. After the liberation of Eastern Europe, the board of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), of which I was president, decided to hold its next meeting in Czechoslovakia and I traveled to Prague to find some potential sites for this meeting.
After my arrival at the Prague airport, I took a taxi to my mother’s apartment. After my mother and I had spent some time together and caught up with each other, she went to see a neighbor to make some arrangements and I was in the apartment alone. I sat down in an armchair, had a cup of tea, and reflected about my mission. Because of my long absence, I lost all my contacts, was not familiar with the situation, and did not have an idea where to start. I contemplated the situation for about ten minutes, but was not getting very far. Suddenly my train of thoughts was interrupted by a loud ringing of the doorbell. I answered the door and recognized Thomas, a younger psychiatrist colleague of mine who in the old days used to be my close friend. Before my departure to the United States, we shared some explorations of nonordinary states by sitting for each other in our psychedelic sessions. He had heard from an aquaintance of his about my visit to Prague and came to welcome me.
I found out to my astonishment that just as Thomas was leaving his apartment, his home telephone rang. It was Ivan Havel, a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence and the brother of the Czech president Václav Havel. He and Thomas went to the same school and remained close friends ever since. It turned out that Ivan Havel was also the head of a group of progressive scientists who during the Communist era had secret underground meetings exploring the new paradigm and transpersonal psychology.
This group had heard about my work in the lecture of a friend of mine, a Soviet dissident scientist, Vasily Nalimov. Ivan Havel knew that Thomas and I were friends and called him to mediate contact between me and the group. Because of this peculiar set of coincidences, it took me only ten minutes to get access to the ideal support for the ITA conference—a group of highly competent professionals vitally interested in the subject and the head of the state, who happened to be a deeply spiritually oriented statesman. The conference that was held in 1993 under the aegis of Václav Havel and was very successful.
Probably the most famous case of coincidence is an amusing story about a certain Monsieur Deschamps and a special kind of plum pudding told by the French astronomer Flammarion and quoted by Jung. As a boy, Deschamps was given a piece of this rare pudding by a Monsieur de Fontgibu. For ten years that followed, he had no opportunity to taste this delicacy until he took a trip to Paris. There he saw the same pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and asked the waiter for a serving. However, it turned out that the last piece of the pudding was already ordered—by Monsieur de Fontgibu, who just happened to be in the same restaurant at that moment. Many years later, Monsieur Deschamps was invited to a party where this pudding was served as a special rarity. While he was eating it, he remarked that the only thing lacking was Monsieur de Fontgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old man walked in looking very confused. It was Monsieur de Fontgibu, who burst in on the party by mistake because he had been given a wrong address for the place he was supposed to go.
The existence of such extraordinary coincidences is difficult to reconcile with the understanding of the universe developed by materialistic science. It is easier to imagine that these occurrences have some deeper meaning and that they are playful creations of cosmic intelligence. This explanation is particularly plausible when they contain an element of humor, which is often the case. I will use here as an illustration a true story from the life of the American astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon. The astronomical improbability of something like this happening by chance combined with the exquisite humor of the story makes this certainly one of the most unique “coincidences” of all time.
Descending from the lunar module, just before his foot touched the surface of the moon, Neil Armstrong said his famous words: “One small step for man; one giant step for mankind.” It is much less known that, as he was climbing back from the moon surface into the lunar module, he muttered another sentence, “Good luck Mr. Gorski.” After his return to earth, curious reporters inquired what this sentence meant, but Armstrong refused to reveal it. Some thought it might have been addressed to a Soviet cosmonaut, but there was no one of that name. After frustrating efforts of the journalists, the entire affair was forgotten.
Last year, at a party in Florida, someone brought it up again. This time, Neil Armstrong felt free to disclose the meaning of the sentence since, in the meantime, Mr. Gorski and his wife had died. When Neil was a boy, the Gorskis were their next-door neighbors. One day, Neil was playing ball in his backyard with his friends. At one point, the ball landed in the Gorskis’ garden under the open window of their bedroom and Neil was appointed to retrieve it. The Gorskis were in the middle of a heated argument. As Neil was picking up the ball, he heard Mrs. Gorski screaming: “Oral sex? You want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex the day the kid next door walks on the moon!”
Although coincidences of this kind are extremely interesting in and of themselves, the work of C. G. Jung added another fascinating dimension to this challenging phenomenon. The situations discussed above involved highly implausible concatenations of events in the world of matter. Jung observed and described numerous instances of astonishing coincidences in which various events in consensus reality were meaningfully linked to intrapsychic experiences, such as dreams or visions. He coined for this type of coincidence the term synchronicity.
In his famous work, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung (1960) defined synchronicity as “a simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” Situations of this kind show that our psyche can enter into playful interaction with what appears to be the world of matter. The fact that this can happen blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective reality.
Among the many instances of synchronicity in Jung’s own life, one is particularly famous; it occurred during a therapy session with one of his clients. This patient was very resistant to treatment and to the notion of transpersonal realities. Up to the time of this particular event, little or no progress had been made. She had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. During the analysis of this dream Jung heard a sound of something hitting the window. He went to check what happened and found a shiny rose-chafer beetle on the windowsill trying to get inside. It was a very rare specimen, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that can be found in that latitude. Nothing like that had ever happened to Jung before. He opened the window, brought the beetle inside, and showed it to the client. This amazing synchronicity had a profound impact on this patient and became an important turning point in her therapy.
Synchronicities and Inner Exploration
Synchronistic events are particularly frequent in the lives of people who experience holotropic states of consciousness in their meditation, psychedelic sessions, experiential psychotherapy, or spontaneous psychospiritual crises. Transpersonal and perinatal experiences are often associated with extraordinary coincidences. For example, when in our inner exploration we are approaching the experience of the ego death, dangerous situations and accidents can suddenly accumulate in our life. I am not talking here only about events in which we ourselves are in some way instrumental, but about those that are caused by other people or by independent external factors. When we face the ego death and experience rebirth in our inner process, such situations tend to clear up as magically as they developed. It seems that we are given the alternative of inner psychological death versus literal physical damage or destruction.
Similarly, when we have a powerful experience of a shamanic type that involves an animal spirit guide, this animal can suddenly keep appearing in in our life in various forms with a frequency that is beyond any reasonable probability. In one of our six-day training modules, a participating psychologist experienced in her holotropic breathwork session a powerful shamanic sequence in which an owl played an important role as her power animal and spirit guide. That same day, she returned from a walk in the forest with remnants of an owl. When she was driving home after the module had ended, she noticed by the side of the road a large wounded bird. She stopped the car and came closer; it was a large owl with a broken wing. The owl allowed her to pick him up and take him to the car without showing any signs of resistance. She took care of the bird until he was able to fly and return to his natural environment.
At the time of inner confrontation with the archetypal images of the Animus, Anima, Wise Old Man, or Terrible Mother, ideal examples of these figures tend to emerge in physical form in our everyday life. It also has been the experience of many people that when they become involved in a project inspired from the transpersonal realms of the psyche, remarkable synchronicities tend to occur and make their work surprisingly easy. My experience with the ITA conference in Prague described earlier would certainly fit into this category.
When we are involved in a systematic inner quest that includes work with holotropic states, we can expect with reasonable certainty that, sooner or later, we will encounter extraordinary meaningful synchronicities. Sometimes, we will notice only occasional individual coincidences, other times, we might be flooded by entire chains of them. According to their content, they can be very uplifting or oppressive and terrifying. In either case, they can lead to serious problems in everyday life if they are convincing and cumulative.
Traditional psychiatry does not distinguish between true synchronicities and psychotic misinterpretation of the world. Since the materialistic worldview is strictly deterministic and does not accept the possibility of “meaningful coincidences,” any intimation of extraordinary synchronicities in the client’s narrative will be automatically interpreted as delusions of reference, a symptom of serious mental disease. However, there cannot be any doubt about the existence of genuine synchronicities, where any person who has access to the facts has to admit that the coincidences involved are beyond any reasonable statistical probabilities.
Consciousness Research and Modern Physics
Jung was well aware of the fact that the phenomenon of synchronicity was incompatible with traditional thinking in science. Because of the deeply ingrained belief in causality as a central law of nature, he hesitated for many years before he published his observations of events that refused to fit into this mold. He postponed publication of his work on this subject until he and others had collected literally hundreds of convincing examples of synchronicity, making him absolutely sure that he had something valid to report.
Struggling with this phenomenon, Jung became very interested in the developments in quantum-relativistic physics and in the alternative worldview that it was bringing. He had many intellectual exchanges with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, and became familiar with the revolutionary concepts in this field. Jung was aware of the fact that his own observations appeared much more plausible and acceptable in the context of the new emerging image of reality. Additional support for Jung’s ideas came from no less than Albert Einstein, who, during a personal visit, encouraged Jung to pursue his idea of synchronicity because it was fully compatible with the new thinking in physics (Jung 1973).
Since the above discussion about the arbitrary and ambiguous nature of time and space might seem implausible or even impossible to somebody who has not had transpersonal experiences, it seems appropriate to mention some astonishing alternatives to our usual understanding of reality that have emerged in the course of this century in modern physics. The fantastic and seemingly absurd insights from holotropic states pale considerably when we compare them with the daring speculations about the microworld and macroworld entertained by many prominent representatives of modern physics. The most outrageous theories concerning the nature of reality that have been formulated by quantum physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists are taken seriously when they can be backed by mathematical equations, while similar concepts are met with criticism and even ridicule if their source is consciousness research or transpersonal psychology.
According to a leading cosmogenetic theory, there was a situation about 15 billion years ago when time and space did not exist. They were created together with matter during the Big Bang, when the universe was born in a cataclysmic explosion of unimaginable proportions from a dimensionless point, or singularity. And, conversely, billions of years from now time and space might again cease to exist when the universe collapses into itself. A similar process is already underway in our cosmos in those places where dying giant stars rapidly contract, knock themselves out of existence, and create what the physicists call “black holes.” Inside the black holes, beyond a certain boundary that the physicists refer to as the “event horizon,” time, space, and physical laws as we know them do not any more exist.
At the beginning of this century, in a conceptual breakthrough of unprecedented proportions, Albert Einstein replaced Newton’s three-dimensional space and linear time by a four-dimensional space-time continuum. In Einstein’s universe, it is possible to travel in space-time in a way we ordinarily travel in space. Einstein’s famous equation suggests that time slows down proportionately to the velocity of a moving system and stops when the velocity reaches the speed of light. In a system moving faster than light, time would actually run backwards. Californian physicist Richard Feynman received a Nobel Prize for his discovery that a particle moving forward in time is identical with its antiparticle moving backward in time.
Theoretical physicists John Wheeler, Hugh Everett, and Neil Graham became known for their “many worlds hypothesis,” according to which the universe splits every instant into an infinite number of universes. In his bestselling book, Kip S. Thorne (1994), professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, seriously discussed the possibility of using in the future “wormholes” for instant transport to various locations in the universe that lie many light years away and even for travel back in time. According to David Bohm (1980), a longtime co-worker of Albert Einstein, the world as we know it represents only one aspect of reality, its “explicate” or “unfolded order.” Its generating matrix is the “implicate order,” an ordinarily hidden region in which both space and time are enfolded.
I have included this brief excursion into the world of modern physics because the imaginative and creative thinking in this discipline forms such a striking contrast to the narrow-minded approach of academic psychiatrists and psychologists to the human psyche and consciousness. It is certainly encouraging to see to what extent physicists have been able to overcome many deeply ingrained preconceptions in their search for the understanding of the world of matter. Perhaps the startling speculations of contemporary physics will help us approach with an open mind the extraordinary and challenging findings of modern consciousness research.
The Cosmic Dance
We can now try to summarize the insights from holotropic states describing existence as a fantastic experiential adventure of Absolute Consciousness—an endless cosmic dance, exquisite play, or divine drama. In producing it, the creative principle generates from itself and within itself a countless number of individual images, split units of consciousness, that assume various degrees of relative autonomy and independence. Each of them represents an opportunity for a unique experience, an experiment in consciousness. With the passion of an explorer, scientist, and artist, the creative principle experiments with all the conceivable experiences in their endless variations and combinations.
In this divine play, Absolute Consciousness finds the possibility to express its inner richness, abundance, and immense creativity. Through its creations it experiences myriads of individual roles, encounters, intricate dramas, and adventures on all imaginable levels. This divine play of plays ranges from galaxies, suns, orbiting planets, and moons through plants, animals, and humans to nuclear particles, atoms, and molecules. Additional dramas unfold in the archetypal realms and other dimensions of existence that are not available to our perception in our everyday state of consciousness.
In endless cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction Absolute Consciousness overcomes the feelings of monotony and transcendental boredom. The temporary negation and loss of its pristine state alternates with episodes of its rediscovery and reclaiming. The periods that are full of agony, anguish, and despair are followed by episodes of bliss and ecstatic rapture. When the original undifferentiated consciousness is regained after it was temporarily lost, it is experienced as exciting, surprising, fresh, and new. The existence of agony gives a new dimension to the experience of ecstasy, the knowledge of darkness enhances the appreciation of light, and the extent of enlightenment is directly proportionate to the depth of previous ignorance. In addition, with each excursion into phenomenal worlds followed by return, the Universal Mind is enriched by the experiences of the different roles involved. By having concretized more of its inner potential, it has augmented and deepened its self-knowledge.
For this understanding of the cosmic process it is necessary to assume that the Universal Mind consciously experiences all aspects of creation, both as objects of observation and as subjective states. It can thus explore not only the entire spectrum of specifically human perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and sensations, but also the states of consciousness of all the other life forms of the Darwinian evolutionary tree. On the level of cellular consciousness, it can experience the excitement of the sperm race and the fusion of the sperm with the egg during conception, as well as the activity of the liver cells or neurons in the brain.
Transcending the limits of the animal kingdom and expanding into the botanical world, Absolute Consciousness can become a giant sequoia tree, experience itself as a carnivorous plant catching and digesting a fly, or participate in the photosynthesis in the leaves and germination of seeds. Similarly, the phenomena in the inorganic world, from interatomic bonds through earthquakes and explosions of atomic bombs to quasars and pulsars provide interesting experiential possibilities. And since in its deepest nature our psyche is identical with Absolute Consciousness, these experiential possibilities are, under certain circumstances, open to all of us.
When we view reality from the perspective of the Universal Mind, all the usually experienced polarities are transcended. This applies to such categories as spirit-matter, stability-motion, good-evil, male-female, beauty-ugliness, or agony-ecstasy. In the last analysis, there is no absolute difference between subject and object, observer and the observed, experiencer and the experienced, creator and creation. All the roles in the cosmic drama have ultimately only one protagonist, Absolute Consciousness. This is the single most important truth about existence revealed in the ancient Indian Upanishads. In modern times, it found a beautiful artistic expression in the poem entitled “Please Call Me by My True Names” by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn:
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply; I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on
the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when the springs comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake, who, approaching
in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the Politburo
with plenty of power in my hands,
And I am the the man
who has to pay his debt of blood
to my people dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full
it fills all four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
So I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
So I can see that my pain and my joy are one.
Please call me by my true names
So I can wake up and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.