6
Consequently: he who wants to have
Right without wrong,
Order without disorder,
Does not understand the principles
Of heaven and earth.
He does not know how
Things hang together.
—Chuang-tzu, Great and Small
Ethical Issues in Self-Exploration
One of the most important issues that keeps emerging in holotropic states of consciousness in many different forms and on various levels is the problem of ethics. At the time when our inner experiences focus on biographical issues, the ethical questions usually take the form of a strong need to scrutinize our life from childhood up to the present time and evaluate it from the moral point of view. This tends to be intimately linked with questions concerning self-image and self-esteem. As we review our life history, we might feel an urgent need to examine whether our personality and behavior measure up to moral standards—our own, our family’s, or our society’s. The criteria here are usually quite relative and idiosyncratic since they necessarily involve a strong personal, familial, and cultural bias. We essentially judge our behavior in terms of the values that have been imposed on us from the outside.
There exists another form of self-judgment in which we evaluate our character and behavior not by the ordinary everyday criteria, but against the background of the universal law and the cosmic order. Experiences of this kind occur in holotropic states of various kinds, but are particularly frequent as part of the life review in near-death situations. Many people who have come close to death talk about their encounters with a Being of Light and describe that in its presence they subjected their lives to merciless reckoning. This strong propensity of the human psyche for moral self-evaluation is reflected in scenes of divine judgment in eschatological mythologies of many different cultures.
As our process of self-exploration deepens, we can discover within ourselves highly problematic emotions and impulses that we were previously completely unaware of—dark and destructive aspects of our unconscious psyche that C. G. Jung referred to as the Shadow. This discovery can be very frightening and disturbing. Some of these dark elements represent our reactions to painful aspects of our history, particularly traumas in infancy and childhood. In addition, powerful destructive potential seems to be associated with the perinatal level of our psyche, the domain of the unconscious that is related to the trauma of birth. The hours of painful and life-threatening experiences associated with the passage through the birth canal naturally provoke a corresponding violent response in the fetus. This results in a repository of aggressive tendencies that we harbor in our unconscious for the rest of our life, unless we make special effort to confront them and transform them in some variety of experiential self-exploration.
In view of these disclosures, it becomes clear that the menacing doubles in such works of art as R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” do not represent fictitious literary characters, but the shadow aspects of an average human personality. Individuals who have been able to look deep into their psyches often describe that they discovered within themselves destructive potential that matches that of evil individuals in the category of Genghis Khan, Hitler, or Stalin. In view of such shattering insights, it is common to experience agonizing misgivings about our own nature and encounter great difficulties in accepting it.
When the experiential self-exploration moves to the transpersonal level, serious ethical questions are typically raised about humanity as a whole, about the entire species of Homo sapiens. Transpersonal experiences often portray dramatic historical scenes or even offer a comprehensive panoramic review of history. Such sequences bring powerful evidence that unbridled violence and insatiable greed have always been extremely powerful driving forces in human life. This brings the question about the nature of human beings and the proportion of good and evil in the human species.
Are humans at the core of their being just “naked apes” and is violence wired into the hardware of the human brain? And how do we explain the aspect of human behavior that psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1973) called “malignant aggression”—viciousness and destructivity that surpasses anything known in the animal kingdom? How do we account for the senseless slaughter in countless wars, for the mass murders of the Inquisition, for the Holocaust, for Stalin’s Gulag archipelago, for the massacres in Yugoslavia or Rwanda? It would certainly be difficult to find parallels for these behaviors in any of the animal species!
The present global crisis certainly does not offer a very uplifting and encouraging picture of contemporary humanity. Violence in the form of wars, riots, terrorism, torture, and crime seems to be escalating and the modern weapons have reached apocalyptic efficacy. Billions of dollars are wasted in the insanity of arms race worldwide, while millions of people live in poverty and starvation, or die of diseases for which there are known and inexpensive cures. Several doomsday scenarios, all of them human-made, threaten to destroy our species and with it all life on the planet. To the extent to which Homo sapiens is the crown of natural evolution, as we like to believe, is not only humanity, but also the very phenomenon of life, flawed in some fundamental way? In holotropic states, these questions can emerge with agonizing urgency and intensity.
Relativity of the Criteria for Good and Evil
The insights into ethical matters and answers to various moral problems are usually affected considerably as the process of deep self-exploration moves from one level of consciousness to another and we gain access to information that was not available to us before. To some extent, our ethical judgment about everyday matters can change quite drastically even without insights from higher levels of consciousness, simply by acquiring new information. With the benefit of hindsight, seeming blessings can later appear to be major disasters. What at one time was seen as a beneficial action can often take on a very ominous form as we reach deeper and more complete understanding of what is involved.
We can use here as an example the discovery of the insecticide DDT shortly after World War II. Initially, DDT was highly praised as an effective weapon against diseases transmitted by insects. Thousands of tons of this material were dumped into the swamps in various parts of the world in an effort to eradicate yellow fever and malaria, as well as used on a large scale to combat other diseases transmitted by insects. From a limited perspective, this seemed to be a very worthy and commendable project. DDT was considered such a positive contribution to humanity that in 1948 it brought its inventor Paul Müller a Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. However, what was once considered the epidemiologists’ dream turned out to be an ecological nightmare.
It was discovered that DDT was not biodegradable and the entire amount of it that had ever been produced was here to stay. In addition, because of its special affinity to fats, it showed increasing concentration as it moved up the food chain through plankton, small fish, large fish, birds, and mammals. In birds it often reached a concentration that interfered with the capacity to create viable eggshells. Now we know that DDT is responsible for the extinction of pelicans, cormorants, peregrines, eagles, and falcons in some locations. In its geographical spread, it has reached the Arctic and was detected in the fat of the penguins. It even found its way to human mammary glands and into mothers’ milk. Although it was taken from the market many years ago, it was recently implicated as a contributing factor in human breast cancer.
The problem of relativity of good and evil was addressed in an artistic way in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Devil and the Good Lord (Sartre 1960). The chief protagonist, Goetz, is a vicious and merciless military leader who in his unbridled ambition commits many crimes and evil deeds. When he sees the horrors of the pestilence that erupts in the besieged town occupied by his army, he is overwhelmed by fear of death and promises God to change his behavior if He saves his life.
At that moment, a monk miraculously appears and helps him to escape from the town through a secret underground passage. Goetz keeps his promise and begins to lead a life committed to unswerving pursuit of good. However, in its consequences, his new way of life causes more evil than his previous merciless, evil conquests. This play was clearly Sartre’s comment on the history of Christianity that is a prime example as to how merciless enforcement of the message of love can result in evil actions and cause suffering of unimaginable proportions.
The issue of ethics is further confounded by the differences in the moral codes from culture to culture. While certain human groups appreciate and cultivate the human body or even see it as sacred, others believe that anything related to flesh and physiological functions is a priori corrupt and evil. Some feel casual and natural about nudity, others require that women cover their entire body including parts of their face. In some cultural contexts, adultery was punishable by death, while, according to an old Eskimo custom, the host was expected to offer his wife in the spirit of hospitality to all male visitors of their home. Both polygamy and polyandry have been practiced in human cultural history as acceptable social alternatives. A tribe in New Caledonia used to kill fraternal twins, if one of them was male and the other female, because they committed incest in the womb. By comparison, in ancient Egypt and Peru, the law required that in the royal families the brother married his sister.
In Japan, suicide used to be not only recommended, but practically required in certain situations that were seen as dishonoring. In China and other places, when the ruler died, his wives and servants were killed and buried along with him. According to the Indian custom of sati, the widow was expected to follow her dead husband into the flames of the funeral pyre. Together with female infanticide, sati was practiced in India long after it had been outlawed by the British in the nineteenth century. Ritual human sacrifice was performed in many human groups and cannibalism was seen as an acceptable practice by some highly cultured groups, such as the Aztecs and the Maori. From a cross-cultural and transpersonal perspective, the rigid observance of customs and rules governing various psychobiological and social practices thus can be seen as a deliberate experiment of cosmic consciousness in which all possible experiential variations have been systematically explored.
Evil as an Intrinsic Part of Creation
One of the most difficult ethical challenges that emerges in holotropic states is to accept the fact that aggression is inextricably woven into the natural order and that it is not possible to be alive without this being at the expense of another life form. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch microbiologist and the inventor of the microscope, summed it up in one sentence: “Life lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will.” The English poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson called nature “red in tooth and claw.” Writing about the Darwinian worldview, biologist George Williams (1966) put it even stronger: “Mother Nature is a wicked old witch.” And Marquis de Sade, who gave sadism its name, used references to this cruelty of nature as a justification for his own behavior.
Even the most conscientious way of conducting our lives cannot help us to escape this dilemma. Alan Watts (1969) in his article “Murder in the Kitchen” discussed from this point of view the problem of meat-eating versus vegetarianism. The fact that “rabbits scream louder than carrots” did not seem to him a good enough reason to choose the latter. Joseph Campbell expressed the same idea in his tongue-in-cheek definition of a vegetarian as “a person who is not sensitive enough to hear a tomato scream.” Since life has to feed on life, whether it is of animal or vegetable nature, Watts recommended as a solution an approach found in many native cultures, both in communities of hunters/gatherers and agricultural societies. These groups use rituals that express gratitude for the eaten one and humble acceptance of their own participation in the food chain in both roles.
Ethical issues and decisions become particularly complex when the relevant insights and information come from levels of consciousness that are not ordinarily easily available, particularly those that include the spiritual dimension. Introducing spiritual criteria into situations of everyday life can become paralyzing if it occurs in an extreme form and is not tempered by practical considerations.
We can mention here as an example an episode from the life of the famous German physician, musician, philanthropist, and philosopher Albert Schweitzer. One day, he was treating in his jungle hospital in Lambarene an African native suffering from a serious septic condition. While he was standing by his body with a syringe filled with an antibiotic, he suddenly had to ask himself what gave him the right to destroy millions of lives of micro-organisms to save one human life. He was questioning by what criteria we assume the right to see human life as superior to that of all the other species.
Joseph Campbell was once asked how we can reconcile our spiritual worldview with the need to make practical decisions in everyday life, including killing to save life. He described as an example the situation of a small child who is in imminent danger of being bitten by a snake. When we intervene under these circumstances, killing the snake does not mean saying “No” to the snake as an integral part of the universal scheme, as a meaningful element of the cosmic order. It is not denying the right of the snake to exist as part of creation and does not necessarily mean that we do not appreciate its existence. This intervention is our reaction to a specific local situation, not a gesture of ultimate cosmic relevance.
Divine Roots of Evil
As we discover the existence of the world of archetypes and realize that its dynamics is instrumental in shaping the events in the material world, the focus of ethical considerations shifts from the personal and cultural levels to the transpersonal domain. The critical issue here is the fundamental dichotomy in the archetypal realm. We become aware of the fact that the pantheon of archetypal beings includes both benefic and malefic principles and forces or, using the terminology of pre-industrial cultures, blissful and wrathful deities. From this perspective, it is they who are responsible for the events in the material world. However, sooner or later it becomes clear that these entities themselves are not autonomous. They are creations or manifestations of a yet higher principle that transcends them and governs them. At this point, the moral inquiry finds a new focus; it is directed to the creative principle itself.
This naturally gives rise to an entirely new series of questions. Is there one creative source that transcends polarities and is responsible for both good and evil? Or is the universe a battlefield where two cosmic forces, one essentially good and the other evil, engage in a universal combat, in the way it has been portrayed in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism, and Christianity? If so, which of these two principles is more powerful and will ultimately prevail? If God is good and just, omniscient and omnipotent, as we are told by mainstream Christianity, how do we explain the amount of evil in the world? How is it possible that millions of children are killed in a bestial way or die of starvation, cancer, and infectious diseases long before they could possibly commit any sins? The usual explanation offered by Christian theology, suggesting that God punishes these individuals in advance because He foresees that they would grow up into sinners, certainly is not very convincing.
In many religions, the concept of karma and reincarnation helps to explain how and why something like this can happen. It also accounts for the horrendous inequities among adults and the differences in their destinies. As we will explore later in this book, similar concepts existed also in early Christianity, particularly in its Gnostic form. Gnostic Christianity was condemned as a heresy by the ecclesiastical Church in the second century and, in the fourth century, was severely persecuted with the assistance of Emperor Constantine. Ideas concerning reincarnation of the same soul were banned from Christianity in A.D. 553 at a special congress in Constantinople. This left Christianity with the formidable problem of an omnipotent, just, and benevolent Creator of a world that is full of inequity and evil. The belief in reincarnation can provide answers to some most immediate questions concerning the dark side of existence, but does not address the problem of the origin of the karmic chain of causes and effects.
In holotropic states of consciousness, fundamental ethical questions concerning the nature and origin of evil, the reason for its existence, and its role in the fabric of creation emerge spontaneously and with great urgency. The problem of the morality of the creative principle that is directly responsible for all the suffering and horrors of existence, or that permits and tolerates evil, is truly a formidable one. The ability to accept creation as it is, including its shadow side and one’s own role in it, is one of the most challenging tasks we can encounter during an in-depth philosophical and spiritual quest. It is, therefore, interesting to review how these problems appear to those individuals who encounter them on their inner journey.
The experiences of identification with Absolute Consciousness or with the Void involve transcendence of all polarities, including the opposites of good and evil. They contain the entire spectrum of creation from the most beatific to the most diabolical aspects, but in an unmanifested form, as a pure potential. Since ethical considerations are applicable only to the world of manifest phenomena, which involves polarities, the problem of good and evil is intimately connected with the process of cosmic creation. For the purpose of our discussion, it is important to realize that ethical values and norms are themselves parts of creation and thus do not have an absolute independent existence of their own. In the ancient Indian sacred text, the Katha Upanishad, we can read:
As the sun, the eye of the whole world,
Is not sullied by the external faults of the eyes,
So the one Inner Soul of all things
Is not sullied by the evil in the world, being
external to it.
The Role of Evil in the Universal Scheme
Final understanding and philosophical acceptance of evil always seems to involve the recognition that it has an important or even necessary role in the cosmic process. For example, deep experiential insights into ultimate realities that become available in holotropic states might reveal that evil is an essential element in the universal drama. Since cosmic creation is creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, it has to be symmetrical. Everything that emerges into existence has to be counterbalanced by its opposite. From this perspective, the existence of polarities of all kinds is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite for the creation of the phenomenal worlds. This fact had its parallel in the speculations of some modern physicists about matter and antimatter, suggesting that in the very first moments of the universe, particles and antiparticles were present in equal numbers.
We have seen earlier that one of the “motives” for creation seems to be the “need” of the creative principle to get to know itself, so that “God can see God” or “Face can behold Face.” To the extent to which the divine creates to explore its own inner potential, not expressing the full range of this potential would mean incomplete self-knowledge. And if Absolute Consciousness is also the ultimate Artist, Experimenter, and Explorer, it would compromise the richness of the creation to leave out some significant options. Artists do not limit their topics to those that are beautiful, ethical, and uplifting. They portray any aspects of life that can render interesting images or promise intriguing stories.
The existence of the shadow side of creation enhances its light aspects by providing contrast and gives extraordinary richness and depth to the universal drama. The conflict between good and evil in all the domains and on all the levels of existence is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for fascinating stories. A disciple once asked Sri Ramakrishna, the great Indian visionary, saint, and spiritual teacher: “Swamiji, why is evil in the world?” After a short deliberation, Ramakrishna replied succinctly: “To thicken the plot.” This answer might appear cynical in view of the nature and scope of suffering in the world, seen in a concrete form of millions of children dying of starvation or various diseases, the insanity of wars throughout history, countless sacrificed and tortured victims, and the desolation of natural disasters. However, a mental experiment can help us to get a different perspective.
Let us for a moment imagine that we can eliminate from the universal scheme anything that is generally considered bad or evil, all the elements that we feel should not be part of life. Initially, it might seem that this would create an ideal world, a true paradise on earth. However, as we proceed, we see that the situation is much more complex. Suppose we start with the elimination of diseases, something that certainly belongs to the dark side of existence, and imagine that they have never existed. We soon discover that this is not an isolated intervention that selectively eradicates an evil aspect of the world. This interference has a profound effect on many positive aspects of life and creation that we hold in great esteem.
Together with the diseases we eliminate the entire history of medicine—medical research and the knowledge it imparts, the discovery of the causes of dangerous illnesses, as well as miraculous cures for them, such as vitamins, antibiotics, and hormones. There are no more miracles of modern medicine—life-saving operations, organ transplants, and genetic engineering. We lose all the great pioneers of science, like Virchow, Semmelweiss, and Pasteur, the heroes who dedicated their entire lives to a passionate search for answers to medical problems. There is also no need for the love and compassion of all those who take care of ailing people, from physicians and nurses to a variety of good Samaritans. We lose Mother Teresa together with the reason to award her a Nobel Prize. Here go the shamans and indigenous healers with their colorful rituals and knowledge of medicinal herbs, the miracles in Lourdes, and the Filipino psychic surgeons!
Another obviously dark and evil aspect of creation is the existence of oppressive regimes, totalitarian systems, genocide, and wars. When we focus our cosmic sanitation efforts on this area, we eliminate a significant part of human history. In this process, we lose all the heroic acts of freedom fighters of all times who sacrificed their lives for just causes and for the liberty of their countries and compatriots. There are no more triumphs of victory over evil empires and the intoxication of newly achieved freedom. We have to remove from the world the fortified castles of all historical periods and countries, as well as museums documenting the ingenuity of weapon-making, the mastery of defense, and the richness of military attires. Naturally, the elimination of violence from the cosmic drama will have profound reverberations in the world of art. The libraries, art museums, music collections, and movie archives would shrink considerably when we remove from them all the pieces of art inspired by violence and the fight against it.
The absence of metaphysical evil would drastically reduce the need for religion, since God without a powerful adversary would become a guaranteed commodity that would be taken for granted. Everything related to ritual and the spiritual life of humanity would now be missing from the universal scheme and none of the historical events inspired by religion have ever happened. Needless to say, we would also lose some of the best works of art—literature, music, paintings, sculptures, and movies—inspired by the conflict between the divine and the demonic. The world would be without its glorious Gothic cathedrals, Moslem mosques, synagogues, and Hindu and Buddhist temples, as well as other architectural gems inspired by religion.
If we continued further with this process of purging the universal shadow, creation would lose its immense depth and richness and we would eventually end up with a very colorless and uninteresting world. If this kind of reality were portrayed in a Hollywood movie, we probably would not find it worth seeing and the movie theaters would be empty. A widely used manual for successful screenplay writing stresses the importance of tension, conflict, and drama as necessary prerequisites for a successful movie. It actually specifically warns that portraying “life in a happy village” would guarantee a certain flop and box office disaster.
The filmmakers, who have a free choice to select any themes for their movies, do not usually choose sweet uneventful stories with a happy ending. They typically include suspense, danger, difficulties, serious emotional conflicts, sex, violence, and evil. And, of course, the creators of movies themselves are significantly influenced by the taste and demands of the audiences. To the extent to which God created humans according to his/her image, as we are told, it should not be surprising that cosmic creation follows the same principles that govern creative activity and entertainment in our world.
In the process of deep experiential self-exploration, we discover that creation is dichotomized on all the levels where we encounter forms and separate phenomena. Absolute Consciousness and the Void exist beyond the world of phenomena and thus transcend all polarities. Good and Evil as separate entities come into existence and manifest in the initial stages of creation when the dark and the light aspect of the Divine emerge from the undifferentiated matrix of the Void and Absolute Consciousness. While these two aspects of existence represent polar opposites and are antagonistic toward each other, they are both necessary elements in creation. In a complex and intricate interplay, they generate the countless characters and events on many different levels and in many dimensions of reality that constitute the cosmic drama.
Two Faces of God
In holotropic states, we can directly experience not only the unified creative principle, as I described earlier, but also separately either its benevolent or its malevolent form as two discrete entities. When we encounter the benevolent form of God, we selectively tune into the positive aspects of creation. At this point, we are not aware of the shadow side of existence and we see the cosmic play in its entirety as being essentially radiant and ecstatic. Evil appears to be ephemeral or entirely absent from the universal scheme of things.
The best approximation to the understanding of the nature of this experience is to describe it in terms of the ancient Indian concept of Sacchidananda. This composite Sanskrit word consists of three separate roots: sat meaning existence or being; chit, which translates as awareness; and ananda, which signifies bliss. All we can say about this experience is that we are identified with a radiant, boundless, and dimensionless principle, or state of being, that seems to be endowed with infinite existence, has infinite awareness or wisdom, and experiences infinite bliss. It also possesses an infinite capacity to create forms and experiential worlds out of itself.
This experience of Sacchidananda, or Existence-Awareness-Bliss, has its counterpart—a cosmic principle that epitomizes all the negative potential of the Divine. It represents a negative mirror image or an exact polar opposite of the basic attributes of Sacchidananda. We can think here of the introductory scene from Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles introduces himself to Faust: “I am the spirit that negates” (“Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint”). When we look at the phenomena that we consider bad or evil, we will see that they fall into three distinct categories, each of which represents the negation of one of the basic characteristics or attributes of Sacchidananda.
The first of the three basic qualities of the positive Divine is sat, or infinite existence. The corresponding category of evil is related to the concepts and experiences related to limited existence, termination of existence, and nonexistence. Here belongs the impermanence that rules the phenomenal world and the inevitable prospect of final annihilation of everything. This includes our own demise, the death of all living organisms, and the ultimate destruction of the earth, the solar system, and the universe. We can think here of the dismay of Gautama Buddha, when during his rides outside of his father’s palace he discovered the facts of disease, old age, and death. In our own tradition, medieval Christian clergy coined many laconic phrases reminding the population of this aspect of existence: “Dust to dust, and to dust thou will return,” “Remember death,” “This is how passeth the glory of the world,” or “Death is certain, its hour uncertain.”
The second important aspect of Sacchidananda is chit, or infinite awareness, wisdom, and intelligence. The corresponding category of evil is related to various forms and levels of limited awareness and ignorance. It covers a wide range of phenomena from harmful consequences of lack of knowledge, inadequate information, and misunderstanding in matters of everyday life to self-deception and basic ignorance about the nature of existence on a high metaphysical level (avidya). This type of ignorance was described by the Buddha and some other spiritual teachers as one of the important roots of suffering. The form of knowledge that can penetrate the veil of this ignorance and lead to liberation from suffering is called in the East prajñaparamita, or transcendental wisdom.
The third category of phenomena experienced as bad or evil includes elements that represent negation of another major characteristic of Sacchidananda, the element of unlimited bliss, or ananda. The experiences belonging here and their causes reflect the dark side in the most direct, obvious, and explicit way, because they interfere with an ecstatic experience of existence. They involve an entire range of difficult emotions and unpleasant physical sensations that are direct opposites of divine pleasure, such as physical pain, anxiety, shame, sense of inadequacy, depression, and guilt.
The evil demiurgic principle, the negative mirror image of Sacchidananda mentioned earlier, can be experienced in a purely abstract form or as a more or less concrete manifestation. Some people describe it as Cosmic Shadow, an immense field of ominous energy, endowed with consciousness, intelligence, destructive potential, and monstrous determination to cause chaos, suffering, and disaster. Others experience it as an anthropomorphic figure of immense proportions representing the all-pervading universal evil, or the Dark God. The encounter with the shadow side of existence can also take a more culture-bound form of specific deities, as exemplified by Satan, Lucifer, Ahriman, Hades, Lilith, Moloch, Kali, or Coatlicue.
I will use here as an illustration an excerpt from the report of Jane, a thirty-five-year-old psychologist, who experienced in her training session a shattering confrontation with the dark side of existence that culminated in an encounter with a horrifying personification of universal evil.
It seemed to me that I had lived my life up to this point with rosy glasses on my eyes that prevented me from seeing the monstrosity of existence. I saw countless images of various forms of life in nature being attacked and devoured by others. The entire chain of life, from the lowest organisms to the most highly developed ones, suddenly appeared as a brutal drama in which the small and weak get eaten by the large and strong. This dimension of nature was so striking and overbearing that I could hardly see any other aspects, such as the beauty of animals or ingenuity and creative intelligence of the life force. It was a shattering illustration of the fact that the very basis of life is violence; life cannot survive without feeding on itself. A herbivore is just a more hidden and mitigated example of predatory existence in this biological holocaust. The sentence “nature is criminal” that the Marquis de Sade used to justify his own behavior suddenly made new sense.
Other images took me on a tour of human history and provided clear evidence that it has been dominated by violence and greed. I saw the vicious combats of the cavemen using primitive clubs, as well as the mass slaughter caused by increasingly sophisticated weapons. Visions of the Mongolian hordes of Genghis Khan, sweeping through Asia senselessly killing and burning villages, were followed by the horrors of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and the African Apartheid. And yet other images portrayed the insatiable acquisitiveness and insanity of our technological society that threatens to destroy all life on this planet!
The ultimate irony and cruel joke in this dismal portrait of humanity appeared to be the role of the world’s great religions. It was clear that these institutions promising to mediate contact with the divine have often actually been a channel for evil. From the history of Islam spread by sword and spear through the Christian crusades and atrocities of the Inquisition to more recent religiously motivated cruelties, religion has been part of the problem rather than its solution.
Up to this point in the session, Jane had to witness a selective display of the shadow aspects of life, both in nature and in human society, without getting any insights concerning the causes of greed and violence. In a later phase, the experience took her directly to what seemed to be the metaphysical source of all evil in the world.
Suddenly the experience changed and I came face to face with the entity responsible for all I had seen. It was the image embodying the quintessence of timeless Evil, an incredibly ominous towering figure, radiating unimaginable power. Although I had no concrete measure, it seemed immense, possibly the size of entire galaxies. Although it was generally anthropomorphic and I could roughly recognize specific part of its body, it had no concrete form.
It was composed of rapidly changing dynamic images that flowed in holographic interpenetration. They portrayed various forms of evil and appeared in appropriate parts of the anatomy of this God of Evil. Thus the belly contained hundreds of images of greed, gluttony, and disgust, the genital area scenes of erotic perversion, rape, and sexual murder, the arms and hands violence committed by swords, daggers, and firearms. I felt awe and indescribable terror. The names Satan, Lucifer, and Ahriman emerged in my mind. But these were ridiculously meek labels for what I was experiencing.
The Separating Power of Evil
Some of the people who had experienced personal encounter with the Cosmic Evil had some interesting insights about its nature and function in the universal scheme of things. They saw that this principle is intricately woven into the fabric of existence and that it permeates in increasingly concrete forms all the levels of creation. Its various manifestations are expressions of the energy that makes the split-off units of consciousness feel separate from each other. It also alienates them from their cosmic source, the undifferentiated Absolute Consciousness. It thus prevents them from the realization of their essential identity with this source and also of their basic unity with each other.
From this point of view, evil is intimately linked with the dynamism to which I referred earlier as “partitioning,” “screen-work,” or “forgetting.” Since the divine play, the cosmic drama, is unimaginable without individual protagonists, without dictinct separate entities, the existence of evil is absolutely essential for the creation of the world as we know it. This understanding is in basic agreement with the notion found in some Christian mystical scriptures according to which the fallen angel Lucifer (literally, “Light-Bearer”), as a representative of polarities, is seen as a demiurgic figure. He takes humanity on a fantastic journey into the world of matter. Approaching this problem from another perspective we can say that, in the last analysis, evil and suffering are based on a false perception of reality, particularly the belief of sentient beings in their separate individual self. This insight forms an essential part of the Buddhist doctrine of anatta or Anatman (no-self).
The insight that evil is a separating force in the universe also helps to understand certain typical experiential patterns and sequences in holotropic states. Thus, ecstatic experiences of unification and consciousness expansion are often preceded by shattering encounters with the forces of darkness, in the form of evil archetypal figures, or passing through demonic screens. This is regularly associated with extreme emotional and physical suffering. The most salient example illustrating this connection is the process of psychospiritual death and rebirth, in which experiences of agony, terror, and annihilation by wrathful deities are followed by a sense of reunion with the spiritual source. This connection seems to have found a concrete expression in the Japanese Buddhist temples, such as the splendid Todaiji in Nara, where one has to pass by terrifying figures of wrathful guardians before entering the inside of the temple and facing the radiant image of the Buddha.
One in Many, Many in One
Any attempt to apply ethical values to the process of cosmic creation has to take into consideration an important fact. According to the insights presented in this book, all boundaries that we ordinarily perceive in the universe are arbitrary and ultimately illusory. The entire cosmos is in its deepest nature a single entity of unimaginable dimensions, Absolute Consciousness. As we saw earlier, in the beautiful poem by Thich Nhat Hahn, all the roles in the cosmic drama have, in the last analysis, only one protagonist. In all the situations that involve the element of evil, such as hatred, cruelty, violence, misery, and suffering, the creative principle is playing a complicated game with itself. The aggressor is identical with the attacked, the dictator with the oppressed, the rapist with the raped, and the murderer with his victim. The infected patient is not different from the bacterial agents that invaded her and caused the disease, or from the doctor who applies the antibiotic to stop the infection.
The following excerpt from a session of Christopher Bache, the professor of philosophy and religion whose description of the experience of the Void I cited earlier, is a very vivid illustration of the shattering realization of our essential identity with the creative principle:
At the center came forward the theme of sex. At first sex emerged in its pleasant form as mutual delight and erotic satisfaction, but soon it changed into in its violent form, as attack, assault, injury, and hurt. The forces of sexual assault were building in the crisscrossing fields of humanity as well. I was facing these brutal forces, and behind my back was a child. I was trying to protect this child from them, to hold them back and prevent them from reaching it. The horror intensified as the child became my precious three year old daughter. It was she and it was all children of the world simultaneously.
I kept trying to protect her, to hold back the attack that was pushing through me, and yet I knew that eventually I would fail. The longer I held the forces in check, the more powerful they became. The “I” here was not just a personal “I” but thousands and thousands of people. The horror was beyond anything I can describe. Glancing over my shoulder I could feel the field of frightened innocence, but now there was another element added to it—a strain of mystical embrace. Superimposed upon the child was the Primal Female, the Mother Goddess herself. She beckoned me to embrace her, and I knew instinctively that there could be no greater sweetness than the one found in her arms.
In holding myself back from violent sexual assault, I was also holding myself back from the mystical embrace of the Goddess, yet I could not bring myself to rape and kill my child no matter how sweet the promise of redemption. The frenzy continued to build until eventually I began to turn. Still holding back the terrible onslaught of killing, I was now facing my victim and being torn apart by the forces of passion on one side and protection on the other. My victim was at once my helpless, innocent, fragile daughter and the Primal Woman inviting me to a sexual embrace of cosmic proportions.
After a long period of agonizing battle against the horifying onslaught of violent impulses, Chris was gradually able to surrender to them and let them play themselves out. The resolution of this excruciating situation came when he was able to discover that behind the separate protagonists of these violent scenes was only one entity—himself as the creative principle.
No matter how hard I fought what was happening, I was being drawn to unleash the fury. In horror and blind thirst I was turning to attack, to rape, to kill, and yet I continued to fight what was happening with every ounce of my strength. The struggle drove me to deeper and deeper levels of intensity until suddenly something broke open, and I came to the shattering realization that I was turning to kill and rape myself. This breakthrough was very multidimensional and confusing. The intensity of my struggle drove me beyond a breaking point where I suddenly confronted the reality that I was both the raping killer and the victim. Experientially I knew that we were the same. In looking into my victim’s eyes, I discovered that I was looking into my own face. I sobbed and sobbed. “I’m doing it to myself.”
This was not a karmic inversion, a flip into a former life where victim and victimizer changed places. Rather, it was a quantum jump to an experiential level that dissolved all dualities into a single, encompassing flow. The “I” I now became was not in any way personal, but an underlying oneness that subsumed all persons. It was collective in the sense of including all human experience, but utterly simple and undivided. I was one. I was aggressor and victim. I was rapist and raped. I was killer and killed. I was doing it to myself. Through all of history, I have been doing it to myself.
The pain of human history was my pain. There were no victims. Nothing was outside of me doing this to me. I was responsible for everything that I was experiencing, for everything that had ever happened. I was looking into the face of my creation. I did this. I am doing this. I chose for all this to happen. I chose to create all these horrible, horrible worlds.
The Forms of Emptiness and the Emptiness of Forms
In any metaphysical discussion concerning the existence of evil, we have to take into consideration another important factor. Careful analysis of the nature of reality, whether experiential, scientific, or philosophical, will reveal that the material world and all the events in it are essentially void. The texts of various Buddhist schools offer meditational practices through which we can discover the emptiness of all material objects and the absence of a separate self in our own being. By following the instructions for spiritual practice, we can reach experiential confirmation of the basic tenet of Buddhism—that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
This statement, which appears paradoxical or even absurd to our everyday state of consciousness, reveals a profound truth about reality that has been confirmed by modern science. In the first decades of this century, physicists conducted systematic research exploring the composition of matter all the way to a subatomic level. They discovered in this process that what they had earlier considered to be solid matter turned out to be increasingly empty. Eventually, anything even remotely resembling solid “stuff” completely disappeared from the picture and was replaced by abstract probabilistic equations.
What the Buddhists discovered experientially and modern physicists experimentally is in essential agreement with the metaphysical speculations of Alfred North Whitehead (1967), one of the greatest philosophers of this century. Whitehead calls the belief in enduring existence of separate material objects the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” According to him, the universe is composed of countless discontinuous bursts of experiential activity. The basic element of which the universe is made is not enduring substance, but moment of experience, called in his terminology actual occasion. This term applies to phenomena on all the levels of reality, from subatomic particles to human souls.
As the above discussion suggests, none of the events from our everyday life, and, for that matter, none of the situations that involve suffering and evil, are ultimately real in the sense we usually think about them and experience them. To illustrate this, I will return to the movie analogy that I used earlier. When we are watching a movie or a television show, what we see as separate protagonists are actually various aspects of one and the same undivided field of light. We have the choice to interpret our perceptions as a complex real-life drama or realize that we are witnessing a dance of electromagnetic and acoustic waves of various frequencies that are carefully orchestrated and synchronized for a specific effect. While an unsophisticated person or a child might mistake the movie for reality, a typical moviegoer is well aware of the fact that he or she is participating in a virtual, make-believe reality.
The reason we decide to interpret the play of light and sound as a real story and the progonists as separate entities is that we are interested in the experience that results from such a strategy. We actually make a voluntary choice to go to the movie theater and agree to pay the entrance fee, because we actively seek the experiences involved. And while we decide to react to the situation as if it were real, we are, on another level, aware that the characters in the movie are fictional and that the protagonists are actors who volunteered to participate. Particularly important from the point of view of our discussion is the knowledge of the moviegoers that the persons killed in the movie did not really die.
According to the insights decribed in this book, the human predicament closely parallels that of the moviegoer. We made, on another level of reality, the decision to incarnate, because we were attracted by the experiences that material existence provides. The separate identity of the protagonists in the cosmic drama, including our own, is an illusion and the matter of which the universe seems to be made is essentially empty. The world in which we live does not really exist in the form in which we perceive it. The spiritual scriptures of the East compare our everyday experience of the world to a dream from which we can awaken. Frithjof Schuon (1969) put it very succinctly: “The universe is a dream woven of dreams: the self alone is awake.”
In the cosmic drama, as in a movie or a theater play, nobody is killed or dies, since a larger and deeper identity is assumed or resumed after a particular role ends. In a certain sense, the protagonists and the drama do not exist at all, or they exist and do not exist at the same time. From this point of view, to blame the Universal Mind for the existence of evil in the world would be equally absurd as to sentence a movie director for the crimes or murders committed on the screen. Naturally, there is one important difference between sentient beings and the protagonists in the movies. Even if the beings in the material world are not what they appear to be, the experiences of physical pain and emotional suffering associated with their role are real. This, of course, is not the case as far as the movie actors are concerned.
This way of looking at creation can be very disturbing, in spite of the fact that it is based on very convincing personal experiences in holotropic states and is also generally compatible with scientific findings about the nature of reality. The problems become obvious as we start thinking about the practical consequences that such a perspective has for our life and our everyday conduct. At first sight, seeing the material world as “virtual reality” and comparing human existence to a movie seems to trivialize life and make light of the depth of human misery. It might appear that such a perspective denies the seriousness of human suffering and fosters an attitude of cynical indifference, where nothing really matters. Similarly, accepting evil as an integral part of creation and seeing its relativity could easily be seen as a justification for suspending any ethical constraints and for unlimited pursuit of egotistical goals. It might also seem to sabotage any effort to actively combat evil in the world.
However, the situation in this regard is much more complex than it might appear at a superficial glance. First of all, practical experience shows that the awareness of the emptiness behind all forms is not at all incompatible with genuine appreciation and love for all creation. Transcendental experiences leading to profound metaphysical insights into the nature of reality actually engender reverence toward all sentient beings and responsible engagement in the process of life. Our compassion does not require objects that have material substance. It can just as easily be addressed to sentient beings who are units of consciousness.
The awareness of the emptiness underlying the world of forms can help us significantly in coping with difficult life situations. At the same time, it does not in any way make existence less meaningful or interfere with our ability to enjoy the beautiful and pleasant aspects of life. Deep compassion and admiration for creation is in no way incompatible with the realization that the material world does not exist in the form in which we experience it. After all, we can have an intense emotional reaction to powerful works of art and profoundly empathize with their characters! And, unlike in the works of art, in life all the experiences of the protagonists are real!
Impact of the Holotropic Process on Ethical Values and Behavior
Before we can fully appreciate the ethical implications that deep transcendental insights can have for our behavior, we have to take into consideration some additional factors. Experiential exploration that makes such profound insights available typically reveals important biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal sources of violence and greed in our unconscious. Psychological work on this material leads to a significant reduction of aggression and to an increase of tolerance. We also encounter a large spectrum of transpersonal experiences in which we identify with various aspects of creation. This results in deep reverence for life and empathy with all sentient beings. The same process through which we are discovering the emptiness of forms and the relativity of ethical values thus also significantly reduces our proclivity to immoral and antisocial behavior and teaches us love and compassion.
We develop a new system of values that is not based on conventional norms, precepts, commandments, and fear of punishment, but on our knowledge and understanding of the universal order. We realize that we are an integral part of creation and that by hurting others we would be hurting ourselves. In addition, deep self-exploration leads to the experiential discovery of reincarnation and of the law of karma. This brings us awareness of the possibility of serious experiential repercussions of harmful behaviors, even those that escape societal retributions.
Plato was clearly aware of the profound moral implications of our beliefs concerning the possibility of life continuing beyond the biological demise. In Laws (Plato 1961a) he has Socrates say that disconcern for the postmortem consequences of our deeds would be “a boon to the wicked.” In advanced stages of spiritual development, a combination of the decrease of aggression, decline of egocentric orientation, sense of oneness with sentient beings, and the awareness of karma become important factors governing our everyday conduct.
It is interesting to mention in this context C. G. Jung and the crisis he experienced when he became aware of the relativity of all ethical norms and values. At that point, he seriously questioned whether, from a higher perspective, it really matters at all what behavior we choose and whether we follow ethical precepts. After some deliberation, he finally found a satisfying personal answer to this problem. He concluded that, since there are no absolute criteria for morality, every ethical decision is a creative act that reflects our present stage of consciousness development and the information that is available to us. When these factors change, we may retrospectively see the situation differently. However, that does not mean that our original decision was wrong. What is important is that we did the best we could do under the circumstances.
Although in advanced transpersonal experiences we can transcend evil, its existence appears to be very real in our everyday life and in various other experiential realms, particularly in the archetypal domain. In the world of religion, we often encounter tendencies to portray evil as something that is separate from the Divine and alien to it. Holotropic experiences lead to an understanding that one of my clients called “transcendental realism.” It is an attitude that accepts the fact that evil is an intrinsic part of creation and that all realms that contain separate individuals will always have both a light and a shadow side. Since evil is inextricably woven into the cosmic fabric and indispensable for the existence of experiential worlds, it cannot be defeated and eradicated. However, while we cannot eliminate evil from the universal scheme of things, we can certainly transform ourselves and develop radically different ways of coping with the dark side of existence.
In deep experiential work we realize that we have to experience in our life a certain amount of physical and emotional pain and discomfort that is intrinsic to incarnate existence in general. The First Noble Truth of the Buddha reminds us that life means suffering (duhkha) and it specifically refers to situations and circumstances that are responsible for our misery—birth, old age, disease, dying, association with what we do not like, separation from what is dear to us, and not getting that which we wish for. In addition, each of us experiences suffering that is specific for us and reflects our destiny and karmic past.
While we cannot avoid suffering, we can have a certain influence on its timing and the form it takes. My observations from the work with holotropic states indicate that when we confront the dark side of existence in a focused and condensed form in deliberately planned sessions, we can significantly reduce its various manifestations in our everyday life. There are some other ways in which systematic self-exploration can help us to cope with suffering and with the experience of the difficult aspects of existence. After we have learned to endure the extreme intensity of the experiences in holotropic states, our baseline and threshold for suffering undergo profound changes and the trials and tribulations of everyday life are much easier to bear.
We also discover that we are not body egos or what the Hindus call name and form (namarupa). In the course of our self-exploration, we experience radical shifts in our sense of identity. In holotropic states, we can identify with anything from an insignificant speck of protoplasm in a vast material universe to the totality of existence and Absolute Consciousness itself. Whether we see ourselves as helpless victims of overwhelming cosmic forces or the co-authors of our life scripts will naturally have a far-reaching impact on the degree of suffering we experience in life or, conversely, on the amount of delight and freedom we enjoy.
Evil Archetypes and the Future of Humanity
Before closing this chapter, I would like to mention some interesting insights from holotropic states concerning the relationship between evil, the future of humanity, and survival of life on our planet. We are all painfully aware of the severe and dangerous global crisis that we are facing as we are about to enter into the next millennium. We clearly cannot continue acting as we have in the past throughout most of human history and hope to survive. It has become imperative to find ways to curb human violence, to dismantle weapons of mass destruction, and to secure peace in the world. Equally important is to stop industrial pollution of the air, water, and soil and to reorient our economy to renewable sources of energy. Another important task is to eliminate poverty and hunger in the world and to provide treatment for all the people suffering from curable diseases.
Many of us are deeply concerned about this situation and have a sincere desire to avert it and to create a better world. It is obvious that the situation in the world is critical and it is hard to imagine any easy remedial actions that would correct it. The difficulty in finding solutions is usually attributed to the fact that the current global crisis is extremely complex and involves an intricate web of problems that have economic, political, ethnic, military, psychological, and other dimensions. The solutions, if they were possible, are seen as corrections of the deviant trends in these different areas.
In holotropic states, we discover that this problem has also a disturbing metaphysical dimension. We become aware of the fact that what is happening in our world is not determined solely by material causes. In the last analysis, it is a direct reflection of the dynamics in the archetypal domain. The forces and entities operating in this domain are strongly polarized; the pantheon of archetypal figures includes both benevolent and malefic deities. The archetypal principles—good, neutral, and evil—represent an integral part of creation and indispensable elements in the cosmic game. For this reason, it is not possible to eliminate evil from the universal scheme of things. Half of the archetypal pantheon cannot be simply “put out of business.”
In view of these insights, it becomes obvious that if we want to improve the situation in the world and reduce the influence of evil elements on our everyday affairs, we have to find less destructive and less dangerous forms of expression for the archetypal forces responsible for them. It is imperative to create appropriate contexts that would make it possible to honor these archetypal forces and to offer them alternative outlets that would enhance instead of destroy life. Occasionally, holotropic states bring interesting ideas suggesting what these activities and institutions would look like.
The primary strategy for reducing the impact of the potentially destructive archetypal forces in our world would be to find for them safe channels of expression in holotropic states of consciousness. This could include programs of systematic spiritual practice of different orientations, various experiential forms of psychotherapy mediating access to perinatal and transpersonal experiences, and centers offering supervised psychedelic sessions. Of great importance would also be a return to socially sanctioned ritual activities comparable to those that existed in all ancient and aboriginal cultures. Modern versions of rites of passage would make it possible to consciously experience and integrate various difficult destructive and self-destructive energies that would otherwise have a disturbing effect on society. Additional interesting alternatives would be dynamic new art forms and entertainment modalities using the technology of virtual reality.
These transformative technologies could be complemented by various outward-oriented activities serving the same purpose. Thus the powerful and potentially destructive explosive energies that are currently expressed in internecine wars could be partially channeled through a large scale globally integrated space program or other similar technical projects. Another possibility would be competitive events of various kinds, from sports tournaments to racing events involving modern technology. Some of the energy could also be channeled through sophisticated amusement parks, elaborate carnivals, and pageants similar to the festivities of the ancient and medieval royalty, aristocracy, gentry, and general population. If there is any validity in the above insights, the task of developing these new forms certainly represents an interesting challenge.