The end of science is to advance knowledge. The primary end of philosophy is not knowledge, but life. Man can do without knowledge, but he cannot do without action. His first need is to live purposively and intensely. And philosophy, by illuminating the various levels of existence and pointing to its telos or end, enables him to do this [my italics].
We have already seen that many of the shamanic traditions have a similar method for dealing with incursions of a supernatural nature, particularly with the similarities between the techniques of regression hypnotherapy and the ‘Talking Back Ceremony’ of the Diné tradition. Both recall memories of anomalous events by placing the subject into a trance. Now, what struck me while reading about the therapeutic techniques deployed in cases of abduction, and particularly a useful component in the transformational process, was a type of exercise developed by the Czech psychologist, Stanislav Grof.
In the late 1950s Grof received a package of the then experimental drug LSD at his offices, where he was working as a psychologist. Grof decided to try the hallucinogenic compound on himself. He was astounded by the meaningful content of the experience. Wilson quotes his experience at length at the beginning of Alien Dawn:
I was hit by a radiance that seemed comparable to the light at the epicenter of an atomic explosion… This thunderbolt of light catapulted me from my body… My consciousness seemed to explode into cosmic dimensions.
I found myself thrust into the middle of a cosmic drama that previously had been far beyond even my wildest imaginings. I experienced the Big Bang, raced through black holes and white holes in the universe, my consciousness becoming what could have been exploding supernovas, pulsars, quasars, and other cosmic events. (1999: 2)
Of course the fact that this is reported––rather in the same manner as Ouspensky’s experiments with nitrous oxide––after ingesting a mind-altering drug, still nevertheless poses the question of just why these extraordinary and apparently cosmic experiences are indeed possible at all. They are not, it seems, random and chaotic, but symbolic, profound and intricate. Indeed, it suggests that the mind has enormous vistas opening before it; providing glimpses into either actual experiences of other realities, or, perhaps, initiating a sort of simulation of cosmogenesis in a vividly symbolic form. Like the other writers and shamans we have discussed in this essay, it provided for Grof what I have called the ‘cosmic viewpoint’, or recognition, in a sense, of cosmic telos.
Grof began as a Freudian, and indeed recognised that Freud had been correct in many respects. For Grof saw that when he administered small doses of LSD to his patients, they vividly relived childhood memories and experiences, along with all the typical traumas which Freud quite correctly identified. However, it was at higher doses, such that Grof himself took, that he realised that the human mind pans out, so to speak, and begins to experience semi-religious and mystical states. It was this nature and content of the experience that seemed to suggest to Grof the importance of Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious and its archetypal contents and/or realities.
Due to the controversial nature of LSD, and despite its apparently therapeutic benefits when professionally administered, it was eventually deemed illegal for use within the psychiatric establishment. At this point Grof had already relocated to America and had begun to develop a method of breath work which replicated the state of consciousness achieved through LSD dosing; this he called ‘holotropic breathing’. Holotropic is a word comprising of two Greek words: holos, which means whole, and trepin, which means to move in the direction of something––holotropic, therefore, means to move in the direction of wholeness.
Now what is interesting about all this is that the extreme and challenging nature of the abduction phenomenon was at first ignored, or wrongly diagnosed, by the medical establishment. There was, prior to more recent times, no framework with which to acknowledge the sheer anomalousness of what was being claimed. Particularly, as it turned out, from individuals that, under further analysis, seemed to be sane and healthy in every other respect.
It was quite natural for a Harvard psychiatrist such as John Mack to seek new models and methodologies within his own profession––ones which might enable a greater understanding of the ‘psychological’ phenomenon he had agreed to understand––and thus develop a working framework towards a suitable type of therapy. After all, reports of the abduction experience didn’t simply demand a different approach so much as an entirely different set of assumptions about the psyche and the nature of reality.
The Freudian understanding of an individual unconscious was integrated into the therapeutic process, but what appears to open up in such non-ordinary experiences tended to be a much deeper and collective experience (as can be seen in Grof’s description of his vision of cosmic creation). Many of the reductionist models of the psyche, therefore, would tend to unnecessarily pathologise such phenomenon, reducing them to a type of psychosis or a meaningless hallucination. For Mack, however, the holotropic model developed by Grof provided the necessary vocabulary and methodology for grappling with the abduction experience.
Mack required ‘an expanded epistemology’ that enabled a more holistic approach to these ‘neglected aspects of ourselves as instruments of knowing’ (1994: 390). He describes the constricting paradigm of reductionist science as being a result of its basic assumptions, that is, its retention, often in the face of facts and reported anomalous experience, of the ‘dualistic, subject/object split that characterizes Western empirical science, including psychology’ (390). Grof’s breath work, then, combined with regression hypnotherapy, for Mack ‘became natural investigative allies’. The latter, of course, initiates access into these deeper states of consciousness. Whereas the former acknowledges the value of non-ordinary states of consciousness as an access point into deeper levels of psychic––and psychological––realities beyond everyday consciousness.
These states, again, open up on to a whole different substrate of existence, and in doing so provide glimpses into the mythological underpinnings which would ordinarily be rejected by more reductionist models. Nevertheless, rationality and reason were of course adhered to firmly: recording data, maintaining scientific discipline and protocol etc., were crucial in creating an atmosphere that was as professional as it was free from unnecessary influences (such as cross-contamination from ‘leading’ words being said in the hypnotherapy sessions, along with the prevention of biases and so on). The ‘alternative’ therapies were introduced simply to provide a degree of flexibility in exploring the wide range of emotions and non-ordinary states of consciousness that were fundamental to the abduction experience.
To return back to the UFO phenomenon more generally, it is a topic that requires a widening of the epistemological presuppositions of reductive science. This accounts for the adoption in many books, including Alien Dawn, of a broad and sometimes creative form of speculation which aims to tie-up the loose ends of a phenomenon that fundamentally frustrates the limits of the Western scientific consensus.
Martha Heyneman poetically describes the situation: ‘Today, we see rising before us a new shape. We can see its dim outlines through the fog… but we haven’t yet come ashore. We don’t yet inhabit our new picture of the universe’ (2001: 18). And when we do inhabit this new cosmology, and we have integrated its laws, we, says Heyneman, ‘extrapolate backwards’ to provide a new understanding of our origins––individually and cosmically––and where we might be going. In short, it provides us precisely with what the new existentialism sought to prove, and, furthermore, the required knowledge for Holroyd’s call for a philosophical basis of evolutionary action.
Now this brings us back nicely to the work of Grof and its philosophical implications as outlined by Richard Tarnas in his book The Passion of the Western Mind. For Tarnas the modern reductionist paradigm leaves us adrift in a ‘reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly contacted by cognition’. This, he argues, is because of a ‘cosmological estrange
ment of modern consciousness’ initiated by Copernicus followed by an ontological one by Descartes and an ‘epistemological estrangement initiated by Kant’ (2001: 419– 420). There is, as a result of this dark triad of estrangement, an existential situation that is along the lines of Wilson’s diagnosis in Beyond the Outsider:
There is a general feeling that the certainties provided by religion have been lost, and can never be replaced; science, by solving our practical problems, can only make this inner void more painfully obvious. It seems self-evident that in this sense of purpose, inner-direction, Western culture has been running at a heavy loss for at least a hundred years; it is a matter for speculation how long it can go on before becoming completely bankrupt. (1965: 17)
Tarnas similarly lays out a philosophical history to Wilson and provides a similar argument for the recognition of a level of existence composed of an archetypal ‘background of values’. These, as we shall see, play a significant role in evolution, particularly in the development of human consciousness. Indeed, Wilson called this underlying meaning of reality ‘the information universe’ in Beyond the Occult. Tarnas, however, begins from the premise that Jung was Freud’s true successor in the sense that he went much further with his theory of archetypes, for particularly in his later work, Jung ‘began to move toward a conception of archetypes as autonomous patterns of meaning that appear to structure and inhere in both psyche and matter’ and thereby ‘dissolving the modern subject-object dichotomy’ (2001: 425). Again this was Wilson’s realisation in Beyond the Outsider, for he too asked the question, ‘… what if science could replace that sense of individual meaning, the feeling of having a direct telephone line to the universal purpose?’ (1965: 183).
Now, Jung had provided a way of understanding a vast evolutionary source of meaning, and Wilson understood that this was the aim of evolutionary phenomenology, for it can ‘change man’s conception of himself and of the interior forces he has at his command, and ultimately to establish the new evolutionary type, foreshadowed by the “outsiders”’ (1965: 183). After all it is the outsider who intuits the limits of his cultural paradigm due to his instinct for an evolutionary system of values from which he can actualise himself. Without these, of course, he becomes a symptom of a sick culture.
If we use Tarnas’ analysis we can see that Wilson’s ‘outsiders’ recognise the ‘bankruptcy’ of values; a world in which the individual is, Tarnas says, at ‘once aroused and crushed’ in a cosmos that appears inhuman and against, precisely, our own humanity. Wilson describes the situation succinctly in Introduction to the New Existentialism (1980): ‘Man is alone in an empty universe; no act of his has any meaning outside itself––and its social construct’ (152). The world and the universe is a projected machine devoid of purpose, and yet, as Arthur Young pointed out, it’s ironic that nobody ever built a machine without an a priori purpose, and furthermore, the machine itself, says Rupert Sheldrake, is the ultimate anthropocentric projection of all––a man-made device that is entirely unnatural !
The outsider, however, ‘is not very concerned with distinction between body and spirit, of man and nature… For him, the only important distinction is between being and nothingness’ (1978: 37). In short, Wilson’s outsider is in search of absolutes; ways through which one can access a direct ‘telephone line’ to the universal purpose: a psychic link to the vital archetypal forces that underpin the development of consciousness––a sort of evolutionary mysticism. And yet, it is precisely at these binary junctures where man’s disconnection to ‘universal purpose’ appears like huge cracks until he finds himself increasingly relativised, and increasingly outside.
The new existentialism was an attempt by Wilson to provide the foundations for an evolutionary phenomenology in which man could access these meaningful levels of reality. Realities that are beyond the ever-increasing relativisms that radically diminish the important role of consciousness. Wilson’s recognition of the outsider’s plight is based on the distinction of ‘Absolute No’ versus ‘Absolute Yes’; two absolutes. Tarnas describes a similar situation:
We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfilment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. (2001: 420)
So what, then, would be the way outside? We can see that the new existentialism and Tarnas seem to be converging upon a solution, offering a phenomenology and a philosophy for advancing mankind’s search for meaning.
The archetypes of a culture for Tarnas and Grof have an almost universal origin and are not transcendent or entirely metaphysical. Instead, they are, as they were for Jung, a sort of encoded mythos which captures, usually in symbolic form, the evolutionary trials, tribulations and victories and successes that are echoed throughout the evolution both biologically and in terms of our consciousness.
Now, Jordan Peterson admirably summarises Jung’s position regarding a culture’s paradigms by asking what happens to the ‘representational structure in someone’s mind (in the human psyche, in human society) when anomalous information, of revolutionary import, is finally accepted as valid?’ This question, summarised by Peterson, presents Jung’s position:
What happens has a pattern; the pattern has a biological, even genetic basis, which finds its expression in fantasy; such fantasy provides subject material for myth and religion. The propositions of myth and religion, in turn, help guide and stabilize revolutionary human adaption [my italics]. (1999: 405)
Contrasting with Peterson’s summary we may also include the essentially destabilizing archetype of the trickster figure, with the UFO following not far behind.
Now, UFO entities, as we have seen in Jorjani’s recognition that their intentions seem to ‘sink into… the mythic folklore of a culture’, present a disturbing number of problems. Jorjani concludes in favour of a very thoroughgoing phenomenological as well as scientific analysis of the subject to prevent a potentially dangerous shift in the public perception towards cults and an anti-scientific religion aided by these cosmic tricksters. This is along the same lines as Jacques Vallée’s Messengers of Deception, which Wilson felt was a ‘step backward into conspiracy theories’ (1999: 134), and yet these realities, insofar as they occur in misguided beliefs and dangerous cults, indeed do make up a part of the developing UFO mythos.
The fault may lie fundamentally in the belief that all experiences are uniform and under control by the same entities––and some may be archetypal manifestations of the deviant trickster––that ‘dialectical antagonist’ who works to challenge, subvert, obscure and to fool––with a goal that is essentially enigmatic and mercurial by definition.
Harpur indeed notes that hoaxes usually aim to ‘expose some flaw in society’, and, ‘There is a sinister aspect to all hoaxers. They play god behind the scenes’ (2003: 167). These ‘scenes’ seem to be played out upon and within human consciousness. Their origin, and often symbolism, appears to be archetypal and in some cases heuristic. One gets the sense that there is an almost Socratic urgency behind it all to ‘Know Thyself’, their aim being, as Wilson suggests, is like any good teacher: ‘by making the pupil want to learn’ and to ‘lure free will into expressing itself and its own existence’ (1999: 337). The transformational results, as we have seen, confirm a multidimensional as well as profound recognition that it is us, in the end, who are masters of our own destiny. Indeed, it is very rare that these entities make promises, and if they do, they are usually symbolical and rarely fulfilled.
There is the sense that they are saying, like Wilson’s character in The Mind Parasites: ‘Nothing could be more dangerous for the human race than to believe that its affairs had fallen into the hands of supermen.’
This brief digression into the murkier areas of archetypes, particularly the trickster figure and its deceptions, has been necessary simply to acknowledge
the problems of an undisciplined approach to archetypal forces. Jorjani, like Grof, recognises the substrate of powerful evolutionary forces that are anything but passive. And great care must be taken, with the aid of reason and, indeed, precisely the archetypal forces––availed by science––that counteract the ‘psychological warfare’ by recognising the familiar ‘calling cards of the archetypal trickster’ (2016: xliv). Science itself, for Jorjani, is powered by archetypal forces embodied in such archetypes as Prometheus and Atlas.
Now, with each paradigm there is, implicit within it, a lifespan, for such a metaphor or model can only last as long as it remains a practical model of reality, and after that, the anomalies eventually flood in overwhelmingly. Rather like metaphors themselves, as Bernardo Kastrup argues convincingly, we must treat them as ‘disposable vehicles’ rather than adhere to them too preciously. But we may instead, he continues, use them ‘to describe a new idea gestalt’. Importantly, he concludes, ‘Once this essential meaning is conveyed, one must discard the vehicle as if it were disposable packaging, lest it outlive its usefulness and turn into an intellectual entrapment.’ This, of course, has been the essential message of this essay, and it is also captured in Goethe’s Faust:
All that doth pass away
Is but a symbol.
And yet, with each passing symbol there is an often-traumatic transitional period that births a new, more substantial, symbol to account for the limitations of the old one.
Grof’s work provides the link between the symbolic and evolutionary metaphoric worlds, and the material and biological world of human experience. He does so, Tarnas explains, by providing ‘a more explicit biological ground to the Jungian archetypes, while giving a more explicit archetypal ground to the Freudian instincts’. Much of the archetypal imagery that occurs in Jung’s analysis is obviously drawn from religion, story, and mythology and so on, and further still it exists in a collective unconscious.
Evolutionary Metaphors Page 15
