The form of transpersonal connection we feel with another person can be referred to as "dual unity." Such experiences can occur during the practice of spiritual disciplines, particularly Tantric yoga, during periods of great emotional shocks or extraordinary joys, such as the death of a loved one or the birth of a child, or after ingesting psychoactive substances. They are also common between mothers and infants throughout pregnancy and nursing. In the experiences of dual unity, we have a sense of completely merging and becoming one with another person, yet also maintaining the sense of our own identity.
In clinical situations I have witnessed various forms of this dual unity literally hundreds of times. A particularly interesting example was a client of mine, Jenna, who experienced herself merging with her mother while reliving the intrauterine and nursing periods of her life.
During the session, she curled up into a fetal position, characteristic of a person who is in a deeply regressed state. Every wrinkle on her face seemed to disappear and she took on the qualities of a tiny infant. In a small voice, she described how close she felt to her mother now. She had a wonderful sense of actually becoming a part of her, merging with her, until there was no difference between her mother's feelings and her own. She felt that she could shift back and forth between being herself and being her mother. Sometimes she was an infant in the womb, sometimes a baby nursing at her mother's breast. Then she would switch roles, becoming her pregnant or her nursing mother. She could experience being both her mother and herself as an infant simultaneously, as if the two of them were a continuum, a single organism, or a single mind.
At one point, as she was experiencing this dual unity, symbiotically merging with her mother, she opened her eyes. As she looked at me she seemed very surprised. She explained that she felt she could read my thoughts and know what I was feeling, as if all boundaries between us had been dissolved. When she in fact described my thoughts she proved to be quite accurate.
This was, incidentally, a breakthrough moment for Jenna. As she experienced dual unity with her mother, then with me, she gained a new perspective on her early life, and she allowed herself to establish a deeper level of trust and communication with me. It is often this experience of dual unity that can help us establish deeper trust or understanding of others in our relationships with family and loved ones. It is safe to speculate, as well, that this aspect of the human consciousness may be the basis for what we call empathy.
Closely related to the dual unity experience is the experience of complete identification with another person. This occurs when we identify so fully with another person that we lose our own sense of identity and become them. A vivid example of this kind of identification occurred for my wife Christina while we were living at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur.
At the time Christina was lying in bed recovering from a viral infection. One of our friends, also living at Esalen, was the late anthropologist and generalist Gregory Bateson. During an exploratory operation surgeons had found in his lungs a malignant tumor the size of a grapefruit. The doctors told Gregory it was inoperable and that he had four weeks to live. While living at Esalen, he received many alternative treatments and actually lived more than two and a half years longer than the doctors predicted. During those years, Christina and I spent a great deal of time with Gregory and his family and become close friends.
On this particular morning, as she lay in bed, Christina had an overwhelming feeling that she was becoming Gregory. She had his giant body and his enormous hands, his thoughts, and his staunch British humor. She felt connected to the pain of his cancer and somehow knew with every cell of her body that he was dying. This surprised her because it did not reflect her conscious assessment of his situation.
Later that same day, Christina saw our friend Dr. Carl Simonton, who was visiting Esalen. Carl had spent the morning working with Gregory, using a method of visualization he had developed in conjunction with his work as an oncologist and radiologist. Carl told Christina what had transpired in his session with Gregory that morning. In the middle of the session, Gregory had suddenly announced: "I do not want to do this any more. I want to die." They immediately called Gregory's wife, Lois, and started talking about dying instead of fighting the cancer. The timing of this episode exactly coincided with Christina's experience of identification with Gregory.
This merging of individual boundaries can extend much farther, to involve an entire group of people who have something in common; they might belong to the same race, be of the same nationality or culture, or share a certain belief system, professional background, or predicament. Fleeting and superficial forms of such identification with the consciousness of a group can occur without profound or lasting change in consciousness. For example, people visiting Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were tortured and slain, often experience an overwhelming sense of sharing the terror, grief, and cruel deprivation suffered by all those who were imprisoned and died there. Similarly, people visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., find themselves sharing, if only for a moment, the suffering of all the young men and women who lost their lives in that war.
In altered states of consciousness, transpersonal experiences such as these can be very profound, vivid, and graphic, lasting for only seconds or for hours. It is possible, for example, to become all the mothers of the world who have lost their children to wars, all the soldiers who ever died on battlefields, or all of human history's fugitives and outcasts. Although it may be difficult to imagine for a person who has never had these experiences, one can have under these circumstances an absolutely convincing feeling of becoming all those individuals at the same time. One becomes a single consciousness that contains hundreds or even millions of individuals.
Visionary experiences of this kind have been described again and again in sacred scriptures and the mystical literature of all ages. However, such experiences are not the exclusive privilege of the great figures of religious history—nor are they, as skeptics sometimes allege, the fanciful inventions of scheming priesthoods seeking ways to manipulate gullible crowds. One of the most surprising revelations of modern consciousness research has been the discovery that under certain circumstances, such as extraordinary states of mind, such visionary experiences can become available to virtually every one of us. They are afforded us by the transpersonal potentials of human consciousness.
The following is a contemporary example of the visionary experience of a mental health professional who visited the ancient Mayan ruins of Palenque in Mexico. This rather long report also involves transcendence of time and contains an account of an encounter with archetypal entities, which we have not as yet discussed. However, I have left the report intact because it is a particularly poignant example of the kinds of visionary capabilities available to us through transpersonal consciousness.
I found it increasingly difficult to relate to the ruins surrounding me simply as an admiring tourist. I felt waves of deep anxiety permeating my whole being and an almost metaphysical sense of oppression. My perceptual field was becoming darker and darker, and I started noticing that the objects around me were endowed with awesome energy and started to move in a most ominous fashion.
I realized that Palenque was a place where thousands of human sacrifices had taken place and felt that all the suffering of the ages somehow still hung around as a heavy cloud. I sensed the presence of wrathful deities and their thirst for blood. They obviously craved for more sacrifice and seemed to assume that I would be their next sacrificial victim. As convincing as this feeling was, I had enough critical insight to realize that this was an inner symbolic experience and that my life was not really in danger.
I closed my eyes to find out what was happening inside my psyche. All of a sudden, it seemed that history came alive; I saw Palenque not as ruins but as a thriving sacred city at the height of its glory. I witnessed a sacrificial ritual in incredible detail; however, I was not simply an observer, but also the sacrificial victim. This was immediately followed b
y another similar scene, and yet another. As I was getting amazing insights into Pre-Columbian religion and the role that sacrifice played in this system, my individual boundaries seemed to have completely disappeared and I felt increasingly connected to all those who had died in Palenque over the centuries to such an extent that I became them.
I experienced myself as an immense pool of emotions they had felt; it contained a whole spectrum of feelings—regret over the loss of young life, anxious anticipation, and strange ambivalence toward their executioners, but also peculiar surrender to their fate and even excitement and curious expectation about what was going to come. I had a strong sense that the preparation for the ritual involved the administration of some mind-altering drugs that raised the experience to another level.
He was fascinated by the dimensions of the experience and by the richness of insights that it entailed. He climbed the hill and lay down by the Temple of the Sun so that he could better concentrate on what was happening. Scenes from the past kept bombarding his consciousness with extraordinary force. His fascination was rapidly replaced by deep metaphysical fear. A message seemed to come to him, loud and clear: "You are not here as a tourist eavesdropping on history but as a sacrificial victim, like all the others who were sacrificed in the past. You will not leave here alive." He felt the overpowering presence of the deities demanding sacrifice, and even the walls of the buildings seemed to be thirsting for more blood—his. He continues:
I had experienced altered states of consciousness before in my psychedelic sessions and knew that the worst fears in these experiences do not reflect objectively existing danger and usually dissipate as soon as consciousness returns to normal. As convincing as the experience was, I wanted to believe that it was "just another one of those." But the feelings of impending doom became increasingly real. I opened my eyes and a feeling of bloodcurdling panic took over my entire being. My body was covered with giant ants and my skin was erupting into hundreds of red bumps. This was not just in my mind; this was really happening.
I realized that this unexpected complication provided an element that was previously missing to make my fears absolutely convincing. I had doubted that the experience alone could kill me, but now I was not sure what large amounts of the toxin of hundreds of giant Mexican ants unknown to me could do to one in an altered state of consciousness. I decided to run, to escape the ruins, removing myself from the influence of the deities. However, the time seemed to have slowed down almost to the point of stopping and my whole body felt enormously heavy, as if it were made of lead.
I desperately tried to run as fast as I could but it seemed that I was progressing as if in a slow motion movie. I felt as if I were caught in a tractor beam; the deities and the walls of the ruins had a firm grip on me and were holding me under their spell. As this
was happening, images of the entire history of Palenque were still flashing through my mind. I could see the parking lot full of cars, separated from the ruins by a heavy chain. There was the predictable rational world of my everyday reality. I set my mind on the task of getting there, feeling that this would somehow save my life. At the time, I saw the chains as a boundary where the influence of the magic world of ancient gods ended. Has not our modern world conquered and discredited the empires based on beliefs in mythical realities?
His expectations turned out to be correct. After what seemed like eternity, and with enormous effort, he reached the parking lot. At that moment, it was as if a heavy weight—physical, psychological, and spiritual—was lifted from his being. He felt light, ecstatic, reborn and pulsing with exuberant life energy. His senses felt cleansed and wide open; the glorious sunset during his return trip from Palenque, the dinner in a small restaurant in Villa-hermosa where he watched the pulse of life in the streets, and the tasting of fruit juices in the local jugerias were truly ecstatic experiences for him. However, he spent much of the night taking cold showers to alleviate the pain and itching from his many ant bites.
Several years later, an anthropologist friend of his, who had studied the Mayan culture extensively told him that the ants played an important role in Mayan mythology and were deeply connected with the earth goddess and the rebirth process.
The extreme form of group consciousness is the identification with all of humanity, where no boundaries seem to be found in the experiential pool of the human species. In ancient literature, there are many examples of this, such as Christ's experience in the Garden of Gethsemane. However, I will use instead an example that comes from the world of modern technology, a transpersonal experience reported in Rusty Schweickart's account of the flight of Apollo 9, whose mission was to test the lunar module for future, manned landings on the moon.
As his spaceship was orbiting the Earth, crossing various geographic and political boundaries at tremendous speed, Rusty found it increasingly difficult to identify himself as belonging to any particular nation. He saw the Mediterranean far below him and reflected that this cradle of civilization had for many centuries represented the entire known world. He imagined that the surface of the blue, green, and white globe that he was circling every hour and a half held everything that had ever meant anything to him—history, music, art, war, death, love, tears, games, and joys. His consciousness was undergoing a profound transformation.
When you go around the earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change. You look down and you cannot imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross…. Hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you are not even aware of, you cannot even see it. From where you are, the planet is a whole and it is so beautiful and you wish you could take each individual by the hand and say: "Look at it from this perspective. Look at what is important!"
During his walk in space these revelations suddenly exploded into a profound mystical experience. The camera designed to document his activities malfunctioned and for several minutes he had nothing to do but float in space, allowing the spectacle of the Earth, the cosmos, and all existence to bombard his consciousness. Very quickly he found it impossible to maintain his individual boundaries and instead identified himself as all of humanity.
You think about what you are experiencing and why. Do you deserve this, this fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you selected to be touched by God, to have some special experience that other men cannot have? You know the answer is no, there is nothing you have done to deserve this. It is not a special thing for you. You know very well at that moment—and it comes to you so powerfully—that you are the sensing element for man.
You look down and you see the surface of the globe that you have lived on all this time and you know all those people down there. They are like you, they are you, you represent them. You are up there as the sensing element, that point out on the end…. Somehow you recognize that you are a piece of this total life and you are out in the forefront and you have to bring that back.
It becomes a rather special responsibility and it tells you something about your relationship with this thing we call life. That is a change, that is something new and when you come back, there is a difference in that world now. There is a difference in that relationship between you and that planet and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you have had that kind of experience and it is so precious.
Since his return from the Apollo 9 mission, Rusty has dedicated much of his life to bringing his vision to other people, sharing his transformation of consciousness. He has remained vitally interested and highly motivated in bringing peace and ecological harmony to our planet Earth and to humanity, with which he has become so deeply identified.
Bridging the Chasms Between Species
In the transpersonal realm it becomes possible to have experiential insight into the sensations of a mountain lion tracking its prey through a rocky canyon, the primal impulses of a giant reptile as it encounters a member of the opposite sex, or the powerful fligh
t of an eagle. People have reported that after identification with animals they have obtained a profound organismic understanding of drives completely foreign to humans, such as the feelings that propel the eel or the sockeye salmon on their heroic upstream journeys, or the structural instincts of a spider spinning its web, or the mysterious experience of a gypsy moth's metamorphosis from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
Our transpersonal experiences of entering the consciousness of animals can be extremely convincing. These can include feeling that we have adopted the body image, or that we are having sensations and instinctual drives unique to that animal's perceptions in their native environments. The nature and the specific features of these experiences often transcend the scope of human fantasy and imagination.
In Bruxelles, a Belgian woman attending our workshop on Holotropic Breathwork™ had the following experience that brought her some remarkable insights into the behavior of whales, knowledge that she had not previously read or heard about.
After a powerful sequence of being born with triumphant emergence into light, things started to quiet down. I was feeling more and more peaceful and calm, and my experience seemed to acquire incredible depth and breadth. I had an increasing sense that my consciousness had a distinctly oceanic quality until I felt that I actually became what can best be described as the consciousness of the ocean. I became aware of the presence of several large bodies and realized that it was a pod of whales.
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