The Holotropic Mind

by Stanislav Grof

  In a second form of creative inspiration, an idea may suddenly emerge long before its time has come. In this case, we might experience an "inspirational flash" from the transpersonal realm years or even centuries before the development of a scientific base that would justify or make sense of it. Examples of this are the atomistic theory of Leukippus and Democritus twenty-four hundred years before modern physicists had developed the technology for proving the existence of atoms, or the idea that life evolved from the ocean, formulated by the Ionic philosopher Anaximander over two thousand years before Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. In recent decades, after centuries of domination by Newtonian mechanics, scientific understanding of time, space, and matter has converged with visions of the universe expressed in Eastern religious texts that are thousands of years old. This convergence of modern Western science and ancient Eastern philosophy has been discussed by Fritjof Capra in his book The Tao of Physics, as well as by other noted physicists. It is now generally accepted in modern philosophy of science that intuitive insights of this kind represent an integral and important part of the scientific exploration of nature.

  The third and highest form of transpersonal inspiration is the Promethean impulse. This occurs when the scientist, inventor, artist, philosopher, or spiritual visionary has a sudden revelation during which he or she envisions an entire product in a completed form. The fact that a genius draws from transpersonal sources is reflected even in everyday

  language when we refer to such extraordinary achievements as "Divine Inspiration" or a "gift from God." Perhaps the most famous example of the Promethean impulse is Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, whose principles came to him in the form of kinesthetic sensations in his muscles. Another example is Nicola Tesla's construction of the first fully functioning alternating current generator whose complete design appeared to him in a vision. Tesla had similar visions from which he constructed working models for wireless power transmission, solar generators, generators that produce power from ocean waves, and finally a wide range of robotics.

  The Promethean impulse even occurs in mathematics, a discipline we usually associate with pure reason and logic. An outstanding example of this is the eighteenth-century mathematician and astronomer Karl Friedrich Gauss, who made many important contributions to the theory of numbers, the geometry of curved surfaces, and to the application of mathematics to electricity and magnetism. He was able to perform extremely complex calculations almost instantly, and he described his scientific and mathematical insights as coming to him with the speed of a lightning bolt—by "God's grace." In more recent times, an uneducated young man by the name of Srinivas Ramanujan, who had grown up in a small village in India, astonished top-ranking mathematicians at Cambridge with his amazing solutions of highly complex mathematical problems. According to Ramanujan, a goddess whom he called Namagiri imparted this mathematical wisdom to him in a series of revelatory dreams.

  Promethean inspiration is particularly common in the arts and religion. The English poet William Blake said of his work Milton: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will." The German writer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus were channeled in their complete form and required no corrections. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart claimed that he often found his symphonies in his head, in their complete and finished form, while Richard Wagner heard his music emanating from his "inner ear" as he composed. Johannes Brahms captured the Promethean inspiration very clearly in describing his creative process: "Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind's eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare inspired moods." Even more explicit are the words of Giacomo Puccini in his description of the process he experienced in the writing of the opera Madame Butterfly: "The music of this opera was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public."

  The fates of nations and the lives of billions of people have been profoundly affected by the divine illuminations of spiritual prophets. We have only to remember the revelations of Buddha under the Bo tree, Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus in the desert, Paul on the road to Damascus, and Mohammed during his visionary night journey for evidence of this. The sacred scriptures of the great religions—the Vedas, the Torah, the Bible, the Koran—are inspired writings that were channeled to their authors during nonordinary states of consciousness.

  In light of the overwhelming evidence we have regarding visionary experiences in virtually every area of life, it is remarkable to think that traditional Western science continues to ignore this crucial force in human history. The paradox is that René Descartes' Discourse on Method, the book that reformed the entire structure of Western knowledge and that provided the foundations for modern science, came to its author in three visionary dreams and a dream within a dream, which provided the key for interpreting the larger dream. What an irony it is that the entire edifice of rational, reductionist, positivist science, which today rejects "subjective knowledge" was originally inspired by a revelation in a non-ordinary state of consciousness!

  The Supracosmic and Metacosmic Void

  One of the most enigmatic of all transpersonal phenomena is the experience of the Void, the encounter with primordial Emptiness, Nothingness, and Silence. This extraordinary spiritual experience is of a highly paradoxical nature. The Void exists beyond form of any kind. While being a source of everything it cannot itself be derived from anything else. It is beyond space and time. While we can perceive nothing concrete in the Void there is also the profound sense that nothing is missing. This absolute emptiness is simultaneously pregnant with all of existence since it contains everything in a potential form.

  The Void transcends all ordinary concepts of causality. People who have experienced it become acutely aware of the fact that various forms can emerge from this Void and take on an existence either in the phenomenal world or as an archetype, and that they can do so without any apparent cause or reason. While the idea that something could occur or take form for no reason at all may seem incomprehensible to us from our everyday state of consciousness, that same idea does not surprise us in the least when we experience the Void. As in the quantum wave theories of modern physics, the Void may be perceived as being made up of an infinite number of "quanta," that is, bits and pieces that make up complete sets of possibilities for virtually anything to occur. By choosing a particular reality, that reality is created in consciousness.

  10. EXPERIENCES OF A PSYCHOID NATURE

  "The archetype when manifesting in a synchronistic phenomenon, is truly awesome if not outright miraculous—an uncanny dweller on the threshold. At once psychical and physical, it might be likened to the two-faced god Janus. The two faces of the archetype are joined in the common head of meaning."

  —Stephan A. Holler, The Gnostic Jung

  Of all the experiences in the transpersonal realm, those of a psychoid nature represent the greatest challenge to our everyday perception of reality. The term psychoid was first used by C. G. Jung in relation to archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung found that archetypes were shared by most or all of humanity, and in this sense they were transindividual, that is, not created by any one individual's history or experience. However, he originally believed that they were inborn psychological predispositions, similar to instincts, and thus had their representations in our brains.

  In his original formulation, Jung also described the archetypes as operating within the psyche but not possessing consciousnesses independent of us. Later, Jung revised his position. He came to believe that archetypes had consciousnesses quite separate from our own, and were able to think and act on their own. So they were not, in this view, like fictional characters created and controlled by their authors. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung himself described them
as: "higher things than the ego's will." He believed it was important to see them as beings that "I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life." He revised his earlier view of archetypes because it did not explain some of the important characteristics

  of archetypes, particularly as they related to the phenomenon Jung called synchronicity. He observed that there were many instances when archetypes interacted with events in the external world in ways that were meaningful and coherent, suggesting relationships between inner and outer realities that we cannot explain in terms of causality, which is one of the keys of traditional Western science.

  It was Jung's recognition of phenomena that exist outside cause and effect that led him to define synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle." Meaningful coincidences between the inner world—the world of visions and dreams—and the outer world of "objective reality" suggested to Jung that the two worlds were not as clearly separated as we might think. He began referring to archetypes as having a "psychoid" nature, that is they belonged neither to the realm of the psyche nor to the realm of material reality. Instead they existed within a strange twilight zone between consciousness and matter.

  The blurring of boundaries between consciousness and matter challenges everything we are taught in traditional Western thinking. From a very early age we are urged by our parents, teachers, and religious leaders to draw clear lines between the "subjective" and the "objective," the "real" and the "unreal," the existent and the non-existent, or the tangible and the intangible. However, a reality that is very similar to Jung's acausal universe is becoming recognized in modern science, notably in quantum-relativistic physics. For this reason, the study of psychoid phenomena lies at the frontiers of human knowledge. Unfortunately, a serious scientific approach to this area is exceptionally difficult.

  Not only does this category of experiences represent the most radical challenge to the traditional scientific worldview, but by nature it is strangely elusive and can have a capricious, almost trickster-like quality. This is further confounded by the fact that many experiences that belong to this category have been widely popularized in movies and novels. We have grown accustomed to assigning the existence of ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs, and psychokinesis to the imaginary world of horror movies and fictional stories. This popularization, while encouraging us to think about such matters, at least in an entertaining way, also has a tendency to trivialize, to condition us to thinking of them as "only make-believe."

  Since Jung's death, modern consciousness research and the study of nonordinary states have brought considerable support for his ideas concerning psychoid phenomena. At this point there can be no doubt that this is an area that deserves much more attention than it has received in the past. In this chapter we explore several types of transpersonal experiences that have psychoid characteristics. Their common denominator is that they are more than products of fantasy and imagination, yet they may be missing certain characteristics that would allow them to be defined as unequivocally "real" in the everyday sense of the word. In the following discussion, I apply the term psychoid in a way that extends beyond Jung's use of this word, which he originally reserved for archetypes.

  As I will be using the term here, psychoid experiences can be divided into three basic categories. The first category contains the most common psychoid phenomena—synchronicities, in the Jungian sense. It is here that we would place inner experiences that are synchronistic with events in the material world. Neither the inner experiences nor the external events are necessarily unusual in themselves; rather, it is the acausal link between them that is striking. The existence of synchronicities of this kind suggests that psyche and matter are not independent of one another but that they can enter into playful interactions where boundaries between them fade or dissolve altogether.

  A second category represents an important step beyond the first. Here we would place events in the external world that are associated with inner experiences and that traditional science would deem impossible. Typical examples of events that belong to this category include manifestations witnessed by participants in spiritistic seances and the so-called Poltergeist phenomena occurring around certain individuals. These two types of experiences have been thoroughly researched by many outstanding parapsychologists. Similarly, spiritual literature describes "supernatural luminosity" around the bodies of certain saints, while modern athletes occasionally report events that fall into the realm of the physically impossible. Another phenomenon that belongs here is the twilight zone of UFO encounters, which also has distinct psychoid features.

  A third category is reserved for the forms of psychoid experiences where mental activity is used to deliberately manipulate consensus reality. This includes psychokinesis, ceremonial magic, healing and hexing by aboriginal people, and supernatural feats of the yogis (called siddhis).

  Synchronicity: Worlds Beyond Cause

  Newtonian-Cartesian science describes the universe as an infinitely complex system of mechanical events that are strictly deterministic, governed by the principle of cause and effect. Every process in the world has its specific causes and, in turn, causes other things to happen. In spite of the uncomfortable paradox that it entails—the problem of defining the original cause of all causes—this understanding of reality continues to be the basic credo of traditional scientists. Thinking in causal terms has been so successful in Western science that it has been hard to even imagine processes that would not be subjected to the dictate of cause and effect—except, of course the beginning of the universe itself.

  Because of this deeply ingrained belief in causality as a central law of nature, Jung hesitated for many years to publish his observations of events that refused to fit into this mold. He postponed publication of his work on this subject until he and others had collected literally hundreds of convincing examples of synchronicity, making him absolutely sure that he had something valid to report. In his famous work, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung expressed his view that rather than being an absolute law of nature, causality is a statistical phenomenon. Furthermore, he made the point that there are many instances where this "law" does not apply.

  Most of us have encountered strange coincidences that defy ordinary explanation. The Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, one of the first to be interested in the scientific implications of this phenomenon, reported a situation where his tram ticket bore the same number as the theater ticket that he bought immediately afterward; later that evening the same sequence of digits was given to him as a telephone number. The astronomer Flammarion cited an amusing story of a triple coincidence involving a certain Mr. Deschamps and a special kind of plum pudding. As a boy, Deschamps was given a piece of this pudding by a Mr. de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he saw the same pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and asked the waiter for a serving. However, it turned out that the last piece of the pudding was already ordered—by Mr. de Fortgibu, who just happened to be in the restaurant at that moment. Many years later, Mr. Deschamps was invited to a party where this pudding was to be served as a special rarity. While he was eating it, he remarked that the only thing lacking was Mr. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old man walked in. It was Mr. de Fortgibu who burst in on the party by mistake because he had been given a wrong address for the place he was supposed to go.

  As interesting as the collections of similar events might have been, Jung was primarily interested in those coincidences where various external events were meaningfully connected with inner experiences. This was the variety of apparent coincidences that he referred to as synchronicities; these involve a "simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state." Among the many instances of synchronicity in Jung's own life, one is particularly famous; it occurred during a therapy session with one of his patients. This patient was very resistant to treatment and up to the time of this particular event little or no progress
had been made. She had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. During the analysis of this dream Jung heard a sound at the window. Upon opening it he found a scarab-like rose-chafer beetle on the windowsill trying to get inside. It was a very rare specimen, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that can be found in that latitude. Nothing like that had ever happened to Jung before. He opened the window, brought the beetle inside, and showed it to the client. This amazing synchronicity had a profound impact on her process and marked the beginning of a psychological renewal.

  My wife and I have both observed many extraordinary synchronicities in our work and have experienced them repeatedly in our own lives outside our work. One in particular is still vivid in my memory. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my wife, Christina, went through a psychospiritual crisis that lasted twelve years and involved spontaneously occurring episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness. At a certain period, one particular symbol appeared repeatedly in her visions: a white swan. In the evening after a day when she had a particularly significant experience involving the vision of the swan, we both participated in a shamanic session with anthropologist-shaman Michael Harner, whom we were hosting at our month-long seminar at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Michael was staging a healing ceremony of the Salish Indians involving a "spirit canoe." In this ceremony the shaman goes on a visionary trip to the underworld to retrieve the soul of a client who has come to him for help. During this inner journey the shaman has three encounters with an animal, which is thereafter identified as the client's guardian spirit or power animal. In this particular session, Christina volunteered to be the client. Michael went on his visionary journey to the underworld, and when he returned he whispered into Christina's ear: "Your spirit animal is a white swan." After this she danced the swan dance in front of the group.