Transpersonal experiences challenge the belief that human consciousness is limited by the range of our senses and by the environment we entered at birth. While traditional psychology believes that our mental functioning and experience is the direct result of our brain's ability to sort out, assign meaning to, and store the information gathered by our senses, transpersonal researchers offer evidence that under certain circumstances we have access to virtually unlimited sources of information about the universe that may or may not have complements in the physical world. We will be exploring this fascinating area in the next section of the book.
III. THE TRANSPERSONAL PARADIGM
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
—Albert Einstein
6. AN OVERVIEW OF THE TRANSPERSONAL PARADIGM
"Consciousness cannot be confined to egocentric self-concepts. Existential identity is practical in terms of coping with the ordinary tasks of living in the world, just as Newtonian physics is practical for building bridges. However, exclusive identification with the existential self as an independent entity makes no sense in view of states of consciousness that transcend ordinary space/time limitations and operate in a reality that is more aptly
described in the language of subatomic physics."
—Frances Vaughan, The Inward Arc
To understand the transpersonal realm we must begin thinking of consciousness in an entirely new way. It is here that we begin to free ourselves from the preconception that consciousness is something created within the human brain and thus contained in the box represented by the bony structure of our heads. It is here that we look beyond the belief that consciousness exists only as the result of our individual lives. As we come to terms with the concept of the transpersonal realm, we begin thinking of consciousness as something that exists outside and independent of us, something that in its essence is not bound to matter. Contrary to our everyday experience, it is independent of our physical senses, although it is mediated by them in our everyday perception of life.
Transpersonal consciousness is infinite, rather than finite, stretching beyond the limits of time and space. To grasp the full dimensions of the transpersonal realm is perhaps as much a challenge for our everyday minds as lying out under the stars on a clear night and attempting to grasp the breadth and width of the vast unfathomable space where the heavenly bodies reside. Here under the cosmic umbrella of the night sky, we begin to recognize that the limits we perceive are in our minds, not out there in the vast, unlimited universe. And what is true for the outer space of astronomers is equally applicable to the inner space of the human psyche. It is difficult to avoid feeling anchored to our deeply ingrained beliefs that the universe must be finite and that each of our consciousnesses is separate from all others and confined within our brains. We also have great difficulty acknowledging that mind and consciousness might not be exclusive privileges of the human species but that they permeate all of nature, existing in the most elemental to the most complex forms. Struggle as we might, we seem unable to free ourselves from preconceptions imposed on us by our culture and by what we believe to be common sense. However, if we are to maintain these illusions it becomes necessary to ignore a vast body of observations and information coming from modern consciousness research and from a variety of other scientific disciplines. From all these sources comes evidence strongly suggesting that the universe and the human psyche have no boundaries or limits. Each of us is connected with and is an expression of all of existence.
The acceptance of the transpersonal nature of consciousness challenges many fundamental concepts in our society, concepts that affect us all at deeply personal levels. If we are to accept this new view of consciousness, it means accepting, also, that our lives are not shaped only by the immediate environmental influences since the day of our birth but, of at least equal importance, they are shaped by ancestral, cultural, spiritual, and cosmic influences far beyond the scope of what we can perceive with our physical senses.
Historical Precedents
It is only in the past twenty years that transpersonal consciousness has been acknowledged to be a subject for serious scientific investigation. Previously, transpersonal experiences were discussed in the context of the spiritual, mystical, religious, magical, or paranormal. This was not the domain of scientists but of priests and mystics. In spite of modern day prejudices against opening the transpersonal realm to serious research, there have been a large number of pioneers in human consciousness who have dedicated their lives to it. One of the most articulate and outspoken of these was the highly esteemed Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung.
Near the end of his life, Jung said that all his most mature work had grown out of transpersonal experiences he reported in Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), which was first published, in a limited edition, in 1916. In this book he described how he had broken through the barriers of everyday consciousness to enter a world that he had previously not even imagined could exist. In that world, he began communicating with an entity who called himself "Basilides." When Jung asked him about his origin, Basilides answered that he had lived in the city of Alexandria, centuries before Jung was born. It was Basilides who spoke to Jung about the "Pleroma," a transpersonal concept later echoed in Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious."
The pleroma is both beginning and end of created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air…. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and infinite…. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities what are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous.
While Jung learned much from his communications with his inner guide Basilides, it was his association with a second entity, which he encountered at the transpersonal level, that would ultimately have a more profound influence on his work. This second figure, a "spirit figure" who called himself Philemon, provided Jung with counsel and guidance in his work throughout the rest of his life. Indeed, at the end of his life Jung credited much of his most successful and creative work to his association with Philemon.
Another precedent in support of transpersonal levels of experience can be found in Abraham Maslow's lifetime work on peak experiences. He urged that there was a need to "depathologize" the psyche, that is, to look upon the "inner core" of our being not as the source of metaphysical darkness or illness but as the source of health and as the wellspring of human creativity. It was his belief that Western civilization had obscured the importance of this inner core by approaching it more as a superstition than as a reality, or by treating it as the source of evil, dangerous, neurotic, or psychotic impulses—something to be suppressed or repressed.
Maslow demonstrated throughout his work with people who were highly "self-actualized" that one's full potential could be realized not by suppressing signals from the inner core but, on the contrary, by learning to listen to them. His research indicated that while the "voices and impulses" from this inner core (like Jung's Philemon) might be "weak, subtle and delicate, very easily drowned out by learning, by cultural expectations, by fear of disapproval," it was nevertheless true that: "Authentic selfhood can be defined in part as being able to hear these impulse-voices within oneself…." He said: "No psychological health is possible unless this essential core of the person is fundamentally accepted, loved and respected."
Nearly a hundred years ago, William James, one of the fathers of modern psychological research, reflected on how we ourselves set up arbitrary boundaries that in effect fence in our psyches. Like Jung and Maslow, he made urgent pleas to open ourselves up to the vast possibilities inherent there.
Most people live…in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily
organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.
Exploring and Mapping the Transpersonal World
In our ordinary, or what we think of as normal, states of consciousness, we experience our lives as taking place only within that range of awareness we experience with the five senses. Here, in our normal consciousness state, we define reality by the sights, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells of the world around us. Our perception of the world is also limited to the present moment and the present location. We can recall the past, of course, or we can fantasize about what may occur for us in the future. We can also be aware of various things that are happening outside the range of our senses. However, we do not have the feeling that we are directly experiencing the past, future, or remote events; we clearly have the sense that these other times and other places exist only in our imaginations. We are creating them, as a novelist creates the characters and landscapes in his or her book.
When we enter the realm of transpersonal experience, we burst through barriers that we take completely for granted in our everyday lives. At this point various historical events, moments that belong to the future, and elements of the world that we would normally consider to be outside the range of our consciousness, appear to be as real and authentic as anything we have
ever experienced. We can no longer assume that what we encounter here are products of our imaginations. The world of the transpersonal exists quite independent of us. Jung observed this in his earliest meetings with his spirit guide Philemon, stating that it was clearly the guide and not Jung who spoke. Philemon explained how Jung treated thoughts as though they were generated by himself, while for Philemon "thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air." Jung concluded that Philemon taught him "psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." This helped Jung to understand "that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend."
In the transpersonal realm, we experience an expansion or extension of our consciousness far beyond the usual boundaries of both our bodies and our egos, as well as beyond the physical limits of our everyday lives. The more I have explored this realm in my own research, the more I am convinced that experiences in transpersonal consciousness can include the entire spectrum of existence itself.
As with entering any new territory, it is important to study the transpersonal domain with a certain degree of caution and at least some degree of apprehension. Our apprehension grows from realizing we are entering the unknown. Our caution comes from recognizing that it is a pioneering venture into uncharted terrain and changes may be required of us as we move forward. Those who have already made their way into this new territory have a responsibility to others to map out the new region so that others might be encouraged to join them. Mapping out human consciousness is not like mapping out a geographic region, to be sure, but there are guidelines and markers we can make along the way to help others recognize where they are and what to expect.
In mapping out the transpersonal realm, I found it useful to think in terms of the following three experiential regions: (1) an expansion or extension of consciousness within the everyday concept of time and space; (2) an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the everyday concept of time and space; and (3) "psychoid" experiences.
This list represents the types of transpersonal experiences that I have witnessed in my own research and that have been described repeatedly by various respected authorities in the field. Although we will discuss the different types of transpersonal phenomena separately, in practice they often occur in various combinations with each other or with perinatal and biographical experiences. So, for example, karmic experiences, and figures of
various archetypal deities, often emerge for the first time in connection with basic perinatal matrices. Similarly, embryonal experiences can appear in combination with phylogenetic memories, with an experience of cosmic unity, or with visions of various blissful deities and demons.
In the following chapters, we will be exploring the three key categories on this list in greater detail, beginning with the expansion of consciousness within everyday concepts of time and space, then moving on beyond spacetime and to the psychoid experiences that we find at the further edges of transpersonal consciousness.
7. JOURNEYS BEYOND PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES
"The psyche at times functions outside of the spatio-temporal law of causality. This indicates that our conceptions of space and time, and therefore of causality also, are incomplete. A complete picture of the world would require the addition of still another dimension…"
—C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
In our everyday lives, most of us think of the world in which we live as being made up of highly individualized physical bodies—some animate, others inanimate—each possessing its own fixed and absolute boundaries. All of our senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—seem to tell us that we are, at least physically, separate from all we survey. There is a difference between ourselves and other people and between ourselves and the rest of the universe that seems to indicate that we are each sovereign, autonomous, and singular. However, consciousness research of the past few years has begun to show us that our physical boundaries may be much more illusory than real. Like the proverbial mirage of a cool, bubbling spring seen by the thirsty desert traveler, the boundaries we perceive between ourselves and the rest of the universe may best be understood as products of our minds.
At the outermost reaches of human consciousness research we discover that science has taken us full circle to a vision of our lives as being very much like that described by the wise elders of ancient and Oriental cultures. Sri Aurobindo tells us:
We have to see all becomings as developments of the movement in our true self and this self as one inhabiting all bodies and not our body only. We have to be consciously, in our relationships with this world, what we really are—this one self becoming everything that we observe. All the movement, all energies, all forms, all happenings we must see as those of our one and real self in many existences.
Similarly, we see the above theme reflected in the words of Albert Einstein:
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe"—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.
There are few people who have not, under certain circumstances, experienced the extension of their everyday boundaries. At such times, our illusions of separateness blur and fade like the last rays of the sun at the end of the day. For fleeting moments in the afterglow we find ourselves merging with other people, identifying with how they experience the world. Or we find ourselves tuning into the consciousness of an entire group of people, identifying with the griefs or joys of a whole society, race, or all of humanity. In a similar vein, we can lose ourselves in nature, perhaps during a trek in the mountains or deep in a redwood forest, and then we leap beyond the limits of our exclusively human existence, to vividly experience the lives of plants, animals, or even inorganic objects or processes. The following inspired passage from Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey into Night, where Edmund describes his night cruise on a sailboat, is a beautiful example of a transpersonal state that transcends ordinary limits of human experience.
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 into 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 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…like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a se
cond, there is meaning.
In altered states of consciousness this new perception of the world becomes dominant and compelling. It completely overrides the everyday illusion of Newtonian reality, where we seem to be "skin-encapsulated egos" existing in a world of separate beings and objects. In the extreme forms of transpersonal perception we can experience ourselves as the whole biosphere of our planet or the entire material universe.
Identification with Other People
Perhaps the most familiar transpersonal experience for many of us happens in our relationships with the people closest to us. During love making, or while sharing other ecstatic moments, the demarcations between I and thou seem to flee. We suddenly become aware that consciousness is quite separate from our bodies. Our two consciousnesses blend together, becoming one, challenging the physical boundaries we usually take so much for granted. While this is happening we might also feel unified with the creative source from which we came and of which we are each a part.
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