The Holotropic Mind

by Stanislav Grof

  During his lifetime, C. G. Jung had many powerful transpersonal experiences. I have already mentioned a dramatic episode in which he channeled his famous text Seven Sermons for the Dead: the entity that inspired this channeling introduced himself as the Gnostic Basilides. Jung also had experiences with his spirit guide Philemon who taught him much about the dynamics of the human psyche. Upon reflecting on this channeled material in the last years of his life, Jung said that most of his work had been derived from information he received in this way, and he was doubtful that his personal achievements in the study of the human psyche would have been possible had he limited himself to information he acquired by more traditional means.

  In the past two decades, channeling has become popular and has attracted the attention of large audiences. Jane Robert's popular series of writings received from an entity called "Seth" is among the books based on channeled information from spirit guides. There are also Pat Rodegast's Emmanuel's Books, Yarbo's Messages from Michael, and David Spangler's New Age Transformations: Revelations. One of the best known of the channeled texts is the best-selling book A Course in Miracles. It is very highly acclaimed by many lay people as well as nationally recognized professionals, such as Hugh Prather and Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., who use it as a basis for their lectures and seminars. The original work was channeled by Helen Schucman, a traditionally trained psychologist, atheist, and disbeliever in the paranormal with a solid university position and excellent professional credentials.

  Contacts with spirit guides, or channeling, belong to the wide spectrum of transpersonal experiences that can occur in non-ordinary states of consciousness. The following example is an account by a philosophy professor's experiences during a consultation with an entire group of spirit guides whom he perceived as a council of cosmic elders. It occurred during a session in which he entered a non-ordinary state of consciousness.

  The intelligence that brought our universe into existence is enormously sophisticated and the workings of this intelligence are far beyond human comprehension. If you want access to its knowledge, this intelligence has to teach you how to receive it. Since this intelligence is nothing other than your own being, it is a matter of learning how to be awake at more and more levels of "your" own being, or Being itself. Today, I was given a number of visions of the universe and instruction in how to take in these visions. It was mediated by a council of elders.

  The elders were the guardians of knowledge, the knowledge of what has been going on in the universe for billions and billions of years. Because I sought this knowledge, I was brought before the council of elders to get it. This knowledge is not just given to you, you have to work for it. You first have to reach this level of awareness and then you have to work to sustain the concentration necessary to receive the knowledge that they can make available to you.

  I was sitting with the council of elders at the primal core of the universe, the bowels of the earth where the guardians of physical existence conjure and make things happen. I wanted to understand, I wanted to know things. When an idea of something that I wanted to understand would come into my mind, the council immediately knew it and accepted it as a formal request. The head of the council bellowed a thundering chant: "He wants to know that"; then the others joined in and started an invocation. They chanted to gather power which is necessary to gain access to knowledge.

  According to the philosophy professor who had this experience, the council of elders gave him access to "experiential knowing" and allowed him to "see many pieces of how the universe works." He felt that he could "know anything" he wanted to know, if he had the strength to endure it. However, he felt that to endure it, he had to be able to "go flat out with existence," that is, to expand to the size of the reality he wished to know. Somehow his being able to see the universe in this way answered a longing so deep in him that he knew "it had been driving me for thousands and thousands of years." He continues:

  Sometimes I would make a mistake; I would get distracted while the elders were chanting. When this happened something would grab me right down to my bones and say: "Listen! Listen! Will you grow up?! Listen! That's not what this is about. Now pay attention!" Those big monks came grinding at me: "Listen! All of these things have their place. But if you want to understand the structure of the universe, you've got to be able to take it on at deep levels. You've got to be able to experience it!"

  Visits to Other Dimensions and Parallel Universes

  On occasion, transpersonal adventures seem to occur in alien environments, worlds with realities very different from our own. Often these worlds seem to be located on planes of reality that are parallel to, and which coexist with, our own. The entities that inhabit these other realms tend to possess bizarre forms, unlike anything we know in our physical reality; they often operate according to laws that are equally strange to us. Although many of these entities are intelligent creatures, they may have emotional and intellectual processes that bear little or no resemblance to our own.

  People describing their adventures in these other universes often liken them to ingenious science fiction stories, such as George Lucas's Star Wars movies or the most fantastic sequences from the American television series "Star Trek." The adventures themselves may be perceived as dangerous, sometimes owing to the hostile nature of the creatures involved, at other times owing to fear or uncertainty about the unknown. When the situation seems dangerous, it is because the visitor finds him- or herself in an environment that is completely foreign, a world in which one false move seems to promise disaster.

  In this category of transpersonal experience, the boundaries between objective reality and the mythical realm of the collective unconscious are particularly blurred. One can be quite unsure whether one's experience is an actual visit to a remote planet within our cosmos, interdimensional travel to a parallel universe, or a visionary state involving the collective unconscious. The same problem of interpretation can exist with experiences involving UFO visitations from worlds outside our own and encounters with alien intelligences. As you will see in the discussion of UFO phenomena, experiences of this kind have an unusual quality that places them into a twilight zone between consensus reality and the world of consciousness and archetypes.

  Journeys into Mythic Realities

  Most of us think of myths as fictitious, made up stories about adventures experienced by imaginary heroes in non-existent countries—the products of fantasy and imagination. However, the pioneering work of C. G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, to name just two, has shown that this understanding of mythology is superficial and incorrect. They have demonstrated that true myths are manifestations of fundamental organizing principles that exist within the cosmos, affecting all our lives. Jung called them archetypes.

  These archetypes express themselves through our individual psyches, but they are not human creations. In a sense archetypes are supraordinated to our psyches and represent universal governing principles at work within our individual lives. According to Jung, powerful archetypes can influence not only our individual processes and behavior but large cultural and historical events as well. Archetypes are universal and they cross historical, geographical, and cultural boundaries, though they may appear under different names or show variations from culture to culture. Since myths involve archetypes, they can truly be said to have autonomy, and they are in no way dependent on us to create them. They exist in that vast sea of human knowledge that Jung referred to as the "collective unconscious," as real as the birds that fly in the sky or the marine life that swims in our oceans.

  Modern research of non-ordinary states of consciousness has confirmed Jung's position on archetypes and has added another important dimension. In non-ordinary states, the boundary we ordinarily see between myths and the material world tends to dissolve. While the solid material world disintegrates into dynamic patterns of energy, the world of archetypal realities becomes increasingly real and palpable. Under these circumstances, mythological figures literally come al
ive and assume independent existences. The same is true about the landscapes and structures that make up the mythic world. The resulting experiential world is at least as concrete and convincing as our everyday reality.

  In their most elemental and profound forms, archetypes are cosmic principles that are completely abstract and beyond the capacities of human perception. However, in non-ordinary states, they may also appear in forms that we perceive through inner sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, or the virtually palpable sense of a presence. Some archetypes are universal, with various expressions of them being found in all cultures of the world. There are also archetypal variations that are much more individualized. Thus the universal archetypes of Mother or Father epitomize all the essential characteristics of these roles without regard to race, color, culture, or specific circumstances. More specific and narrower archetypes are the Good Father and Good Mother or their negative counterparts, Tyrant Father and Terrible Mother. Other examples of universal archetypes would be the Wise Old Man or Woman, the Lover, the Martyr, the Trickster, and the Outcast.

  Jung, who made a lifelong study of archetypes, recognized three key archetypes in his approach to human personality and behavior: (1) the Anima, or personification of the feminine aspects in a man's unconscious;

  (2) the Animus, or the embodiment of the masculine elements in a woman's unconscious; and (3) the Shadow, which is the unknown, dark, and repressed part of our personalities. These three aspects of our psyches are ordinarily hidden and unknown to us, yet they exert strong influences on the choices we make in life and thus help shape our behavior and our life experiences, until we bring them into consciousness and get to know them.

  Some time ago I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with these archetypes during a psychedelic session of my own. This personal experience has contributed greatly to my understanding of this fascinating aspect of our psyches.

  Toward the end of a session, in which I had been experiencing remarkable visions depicting the Apocalypse, I suddenly saw a large stage. It seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere, suspended in cosmic space and outside of time. There was a magnificent parade of the personified universal principles (the archetypes) that through a complex interplay create the illusion of the phenomenal world, the divine play of cosmic consciousness that the Hindus call lila. This scene had a majesty and grandeur about it that is beyond my abilities to describe.

  The archetypes I saw were protean figures with many facets, levels, and dimensions of meaning. It was impossible to focus on any particular aspect of them, since as I was observing them, they kept changing in unbelievably intricate holographic interpenetration. Each of them seemed to represent the essence of his or her

  function and simultaneously all the concrete manifestations of this principle in the phenomenal world. While they were clearly individual entities, they comprised an enormous number of other beings and situations from all times and places in history.

  I saw Maya, a mysterious ethereal principle symbolizing the illusion that creates the world of matter. There was an anima-like figure who was the embodiment of the eternal feminine principle or force. I saw a horrifying Mars-like figure who seemed to be the principle responsible for wars, all down through human history. There were the royal figure of the Ruler, the withdrawn Hermit, the elusive Trickster, and the Lovers, representing all the sexual dramas throughout ages. They all bowed in my direction, as if expecting appreciation for their stellar performances in the Divine Play of the universe. They seemed to actually enjoy my great admiration for them.

  While there are the universal archetypal figures, as I have described above, there are also universal archetypal motifs or themes that we may encounter in transpersonal states of consciousness. These can be expressed as plots, parables, or stories whose conflicts and resolutions employ the archetypal figures. Many of these themes find their expression in human sexual and social life with which we are all familiar. As inner experiences, they may be identified as the source of biographical difficulties, that is, emotional conflicts that were set in motion early in our lives. An excellent example of this is the theme of the son's hatred for his father and affection for his mother, which Sigmund Freud popularized in his famous work with the Oedipus complex, a theme taken from Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex, written over 2,000 years before. The counterpart of this archetypal theme is the Electra complex, the daughter's love for the father and hostility toward the mother.

  The theme of the evil brother and the good brother was immortalized in the Bible story of Cain and Abel. Similarly, fairy tales and legends often express archetypal themes of this kind. "Snow White" and "Cinderella" describe painful conflicts between the girl and her bad mother or stepmother. "Hansel and Gretel" portrays the drama of two loving siblings endangered by the evil mother figure. Many stories from world literature are variations on the theme of the Lovers: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise are but a few of the famous lovers. Other extreme forms of archetypal conflicts involve the Torturer and the Victim, the Killer and the Killed, the Tyrant and the Oppressed, and the Imprisoned and the Liberator. Freud said these myths have their source in biosocial conflicts that we experience in our everyday lives. From this point of view, the myth of Oedipus is an artistic creation inspired by the universal psychological conflicts that young boys experience at a certain age.

  My own observations with non-ordinary states of consciousness strongly support Jung's belief that the archetypal world has an independent existence. This world is supraordinated to our everyday reality and represents its moving force. For example, Jung's understanding was that our actual conflicts with our fathers (if we are male) have universal roots; those conflicts are expressions of the Oedipus myth, which exists independent of us and our everyday reality. Joseph Campbell made this point very clear in his Myths to Life By. The same idea is expressed in Jean Shinoda Bolen's Goddesses in Every Woman and Gods in Every Man.

  It is very difficult to explain to a person who has not experienced unusual states of consciousness how it is possible to experience oneself as a universal archetype such as the Great Mother, who represents the essence of motherhood and the qualities of all mothers of the world throughout all of human history. Perhaps the best way to do that is to imagine a single, three dimensional figure. It is constructed in such a way that as you walk around it, viewing it from a new angle each time, you are presented with still another aspect of that figure—though all aspects seem to be just another view of the whole. This has actually been demonstrated in holography. Several years ago a composite hologram was exhibited in Honolulu. It was called "The Child of Hawaii," which was a collection of individual faces of many Hawaiian children co-existing in a single holographic image. Though it actually contained scores of faces, they were all superimposed into what appeared to be a single figure but which changed, revealing a new face each time you changed your viewing angle or position.

  Some mythological figures and motifs, though variations on universal archetypes, are specific to a particular culture or religion. For example: Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary have specific meanings for Christians; the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin are uniquely Buddhist; and the Rainbow Serpent belongs to the Dreamtime world of the Australian Aborigines. Regardless of their universality or specificity, deities appearing in the transpersonal realm fall into two distinct categories: the first associated with forces of light and good, such as Christ, Apollo, Isis, or Krishna; the second associated with darkness and evil, such as Satan, Hades, Set, and Ahriman. In many instances, a single deity may embody both the light and the dark, the good and the evil. This is particularly characteristic for Oriental deities, while the mythology of the Western world tends to be strictly dichotomized. Examples of such deities that transcend polarities are the Hindu Brahma or the five Buddhas described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  The World of Archetypes

  Many people on spiritual paths first encounter archetypal deities in the context of th
e death-rebirth process. In part I of this book we explored some of the ways in which various aspects of our biological histories merge with archetypes from the collective unconscious. Here the encounter with these seemingly horrifying, wrathful deities is a very important part of the deathrebirth process. For a person on a spiritual path, they are carriers of a symbolic death of the ego, a step that is necessary for spiritual opening. It is also at this point that the blissful archetypes are first encountered at the moment of rebirth or in the oceanic bliss of the womb.

  The archetypal figures of both the blissful and wrathful deities are endowed with great energy and numinous power. When we encounter them, the experience is usually associated with strong emotions. The quality of the response depends on the nature of the deity; it can be anything from rapture and supreme bliss to metaphysical terror, overwhelming physical or emotional pain, and feelings of losing one's mind. However, as powerful as these confrontations may be one does not have the sense of confronting the Supreme Being or ultimate force in the universe. These deities—blissful or wrathful—are themselves creations of the higher force, personifications of key universal principles. Joseph Campbell referred to this fact in many of his lectures, especially in the context of religious worship. He emphasized that individual deities should not be worshiped for themselves but should be seen as concrete expressions of the supreme creative force that transcends any form. In his words, they should be seen as "transparent to the transcendent of which they are expressions."9