Author: Stanislav Grof and Rick Doblin

ASIN: B07W62JR6D

Volume II of the Encyclopedia.

EXCERPTS

The results were very disappointing. Condrau actually described occasional deepening rather than alleviation of symptoms. This is understandable since LSD, properly used, heals homeopathically—by temporary intensification of symptoms.

When LSD was administered in small dosages as an adjunct to psychotherapy in a series of sessions, it did not noticeably enhance the therapeutic process. Instead, it significantly prolonged the sessions and occasionally actually intensified the symptoms. It was definitely better to reverse the emphasis—to increase the dose of LSD and use psychotherapy for processing and integration of the experience.

Encouraging projection and using external stimuli for enforcing a specific type of experience tends to take the subjects’ attention away from focused introspection and interferes with the spontaneous self-healing intelligence of the psyche. The unconscious certainly has the capacity to take us to the dark recesses of our unconscious, including the experience of annihilation, death and rebirth, if that is a natural trajectory of the healing process. Attempts to create a “bad trip” and facilitate disintegration can be a deterrent, however, and discourage patients from continuing therapy.

Psychedelic therapy is the other popular way of conducting treatment with psychedelic substances. It consists of a small number of sessions with large doses of LSD: 400-600 mcg (a “single overwhelming dose”). The experiences are strictly internalized by the use of eyeshades and headphones. The treatment rooms are decorated with beautiful paintings and flowers and high-fidelity spiritual music is played throughout the sessions. Supervision is usually provided by two facilitators, preferably a male and female team. Preparation for the sessions consists of several hours of drug-free interviews. The purpose of these sessions is getting to know the patients’ life histories and their symptoms, developing a good therapeutic relationship, and explaining to them the effects of the psychedelic substance they will receive. After the sessions, the therapists schedule drug-free interviews to discuss the patients’ experiences and help them with the integration.

Using this approach brings very impressive therapeutic results; the life of many patients can be dramatically changed by one to three psychedelic sessions, but the mechanisms of this change remain obscure.

People who know their reaction to LSD can take small doses (25–75 mcg) to enhance their perception in natural settings, as long as they know the quality and dose of the substance they are taking and their reaction to it. For most people, this dosage range does not interfere with ordinary everyday functioning (with the exception of driving). It can greatly enhance the experience of hiking, swimming in a river, lake or ocean, and bring a new dimension to lovemaking. Sharing this experience with like-minded friends—listening to music, enjoying good food, and talking about philosophical and spiritual matters—can create very special social events. [Depending on an individual; 70mcg can already produce mild halucinations!]

Unless testing or comparing various dosages is our intention or is required by our research design, it is preferable to use higher dosages of LSD, around 250–500 mcg. It might mean a somewhat more demanding management of the sessions, but it brings faster and better results and it is safer. Lower dosages tend to activate the symptoms and not bring the experience to a good resolution, because they make it easier to use defense mechanisms. Higher dosages thus usually bring a cleaner resolution.

Leaving the eyes open and interacting with the environment in high-dose LSD sessions is dangerous and unproductive. It confuses and mixes the inner and outer and makes self-exploration impossible.

We also follow the general course or trajectory of the LSD session: the intensity of the music gradually increases, reaches a climax around three hours into the experience, and then becomes more emotional, comforting, and feminine. In the final stage of the session, the music becomes timeless, flowing, meditative, and quiet. We tend to avoid pieces of music which are well known and would guide the experience in a specific way, as well as vocal performances in languages that the client knows. If we use recordings of human voices, they should be perceived just as sounds of musical instruments and not convey any specific verbal message. About five hours into the session, it is useful to take a break and get a brief verbal report about the client’s experience. This might also be a good time to move outside. Ideally, the psychedelic sessions would be held in a beautiful environment—in the mountains, near a park, meadow, forest, river, lake or ocean. In the termination period of a psychedelic session, taking a shower or bath, or swimming in water can be an ecstatic and healing experience. This period can facilitate regression to a prenatal state or even take our experience to the beginning of life in the primeval ocean. Depending on the place and the time of day, we might want to take the client to a place where we can watch the sunset, the moon, or the night sky. If we do not have the luxury of any of the above, we try to find as much of a natural setting as we can. Psychedelic experiences tend to connect us with nature and make us realize how deeply we are connected and embedded within it, as well as how much the industrial civilization has obscured this and alienated us. If the session does not reach a good closure, it is essential to use bodywork to release any residual emotions or physical tensions and blockages. However, I have been able to find very few psychedelic therapists who are actually using this. The principles are the same as was described in the chapter on Holotropic Breathwork (pp. 365, Volume I). We do not use any preconceived techniques but let ourselves be guided by the healing intelligence of the client’s own psyche. We find the best possible ways to accentuate the existing symptoms and encourage him or her to fully express whatever this brings.

During episodes of holotropic states of consciousness, though, striking coincidences that seem meaningful tend to happen with great frequency.

Indiscriminate sharing of such experiences with the wrong people and acting under their influence can become the reason for psychiatric diagnosis and hospitalization.

The public, having Oedipal wishes of its own, admires the artist for the courage to express what they have repressed and for relieving them of their guilt. For the artist, the acceptance of his work means that the public shares his guilt, which relieves him of his own guilty feelings.

... the search for truth should be his career ...

Each participant was required to bring a professional problem they had been working on for at least three months, and a desire to solve it. The participants reported experiences of enhanced functioning: lower inhibition and anxiety, capacity to restructure problems in a larger context, enhanced fluency and flexibility of ideation, heightened capacity for visual imagery and fantasy, increased ability to concentrate, heightened empathy with people, more access to unconscious data, increased motivation to obtain closure, and ability to visualize the completed solution. [LSD stimulation]

Archetypes are abstract universal matrices that are themselves transphenomenal, but they can manifest in many different ways and on many different levels.

limitless boundless substance (apeiron)

The world of particulars is mercurial, subjected to constant change, and nothing ever remains the same. This is the reason why Buddha warned that attachment to material things is a source of human suffering. The world of Ideas is superior in comparison with the material world; it is real, eternal, reliable and always remains the same. The Ideas are enduring, which makes them similar to gods.

He concluded that we do not only have the Freudian individual unconscious, a psychobiological junkyard of rejected instinctual tendencies, repressed memories, and subconsciously assimilated prohibitions, but also a collective unconscious. He saw this vast domain in the psyche as a manifestation of an intelligent and creative cosmic force, which binds us to all humanity, nature, and to the entire cosmos. The collective unconscious has a historical domain that contains the entire history of humanity, while the archetypal domain harbors the cultural heritage of humanity—mythologies of all the cultures that have ever existed. In holotropic states, we can experience mythological motifs from these cultures even if we do not have any intellectual knowledge of them.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell 1947).

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

Modern materialistic science joined the centuries-old philosophical argument between the Nominalists and Realists and emphatically decided in favor of the Nominalists. The existence of hidden invisible dimensions of reality is an idea that is alien to materialistic science, unless these are material in nature and can be made accessible through the use of devices that extend the range of our senses, such as microscopes, telescopes, or sensors detecting various bands of electromagnetic radiation.

Deep personal experiences of this realm help us realize that the worldviews found in ancient and native cultures are not based on ignorance, superstition, primitive “magical thinking,” or psychotic visions, but on authentic experiences of alternate realities.

Spirituality is based on personal experiences of non-ordinary aspects and dimensions of reality. It does not require a special place or an officially appointed person mediating contact with the divine.

Instead of officiating priests, they need a supportive group of fellow seekers or the guidance of a teacher who is more advanced on the inner journey than they are themselves. By comparison, organized religion is an institutionalized group activity that takes place in a designated location, such as a sanctuary, church, or temple, and at a specified time and involves a system of appointed officials who might or might not have had personal experiences of spiritual realities. Once a religion becomes organized, it often completely loses the connection with its spiritual source and becomes a secular institution that exploits human spiritual needs without satisfying them.

Organized religions tend to create hierarchical systems focusing on the pursuit of power, control, politics, money, possessions, and other secular concerns. Under these circumstances, religious hierarchy as a rule dislikes and discourages direct spiritual experiences in its members, because they foster independence and cannot be effectively controlled. When this is the case, genuine spiritual life continues mostly in the monastic orders, mystical branches, and ecstatic sects of the religions involved.

During his 1937 Dwight Harrington Terry lecture at Yale University, C. G. Jung suggested to those in the audience for whom the rituals of conventional religion had lost their efficacy that they might consider moving beyond the confines of established religion and practice direct experiential encounters with the unconscious. Properly followed, this intrapsychic ritual could bring an “immediate religious experience” and lead to the emergence of a highly personalized spiritual wholeness (Jung 1937).

According to scholars such as Margaret Mead and Mircea Eliade, the fact that the industrial civilization has lost meaningful, socially sanctioned rites of passage contributes significantly to the ills of modern society, particularly of the young generation—sexual acting out, drug abuse, and violence.

As the universe reveals its true essence as a virtual reality, as a cosmic play of consciousness, the world of matter is destroyed in the psyche of the individual.

Diplomatic negotiations, administrative and legal measures, economic and social sanctions, military interventions, and other similar efforts have had very little success; as a matter of fact, they have often produced more problems than they solved. It is obvious why they had to fail: the strategies used to alleviate this crisis are rooted in the same ideology that created it in the first place. And, as Albert Einstein pointed out, it is impossible to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them.

It has become increasingly clear that the crisis we are facing reflects the level of consciousness evolution of the human species and that its successful resolution, or at least alleviation, would have to include a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale.

The realization that human aggression cannot be adequately explained as a result of phylogenetic evolution led to the formulation of psychodynamic and psychosocial theories that consider a significant part of human aggression to be learned behavior.

There is no doubt that traumatic experiences and the frustration of basic needs in childhood and infancy represent important sources of aggression. However, psychedelic research and deep experiential psychotherapies have revealed additional, much more significant roots of violence in the deep recesses of the human psyche that lie beyond (or beneath) postnatal biography. The feelings of vital threat, pain, and suffocation experienced for many hours during the passage through the birth canal generate enormous amounts of murderous aggression that remains repressed and stored in the organism.

He demonstrated that the way the enemy is described and portrayed during a war or revolution is a stereotype that shows only minimal variations and has very little to do with the actual characteristics of the country and its inhabitants. This material also typically disregards the diversity and heterogeneity characterizing the population of each country and makes blatant generalizations: “This is what the Germans, Americans, Japanese, Russians, etc. are like!”

He did not specifically refer to the perinatal domain of the unconscious, but the analysis of his picture material reveals a preponderance of symbolic images that are characteristic of BPM II and BPM III. The enemy is typically depicted as a dangerous octopus, a vicious dragon, a multi-headed hydra, a giant venomous tarantula, an engulfing Leviathan, or ominous snakes, particularly vipers and boa constrictors. Scenes depicting strangulation or crushing, ominous whirlpools, and treacherous quicksand also abound in pictures from the time of wars, revolutions, and political crises.

The juxtaposition of pictures from holotropic states of consciousness that focus on the reliving of birth with the historical pictorial documentation collected by Lloyd de Mause and Sam Keen represents strong evidence for the perinatal roots of human violence. According to the new insights, provided jointly by observations from consciousness research and through the findings of psychohistory, we all carry in our deep unconscious powerful energies, emotions, and painful physical sensations associated with the trauma of birth that have not been adequately processed and assimilated.

The leader is an individual who is under a stronger influence of the perinatal dynamics than an average person. He also has the ability to disown his unacceptable feelings (the Shadow in Jung’s terminology) and to project them onto the external situation. The collective discomfort is blamed on the enemy and a military intervention is offered as a solution.

Witnessing scenes of destruction and acting out of violent unconscious impulses, whether it occurs on the individual scale or collectively in wars and revolutions, does not result in healing and transformation as it would in an inner confrontation with these elements in a therapeutic context. The experience is not generated by our own unconscious, lacks the element of deep introspection, and does not lead to insights. The situation is fully externalized and the connection with the deep dynamics of the psyche is missing. Naturally, there is also no therapeutic intention and motivation for change and transformation. Thus, the goal of the underlying birth fantasy, which represents the deepest driving force of such violent events, is not achieved, even if the war or revolution has been brought to a successful closure. The most triumphant external victory does not deliver what was expected and hoped for—an inner sense of emotional liberation and psychospiritual rebirth. It usually does not take long until a facsimile of the old oppressive system starts emerging from the ruins of the dead dream, since the destructive and self-destructive forces have not been resolved and continue to operate in the unconscious of everyone involved.

He suggests that the memories of the violence perpetrated throughout the ages in human history have contaminated the field of collective unconscious in the same way in which the traumas from our infancy and childhood pollute our individual unconscious.

When the process of experiential self-exploration reaches the perinatal level, we typically discover that our life up to that point has been largely inauthentic in its totality, not just in certain partial segments. We find, to our surprise and astonishment, that our entire life strategy has been misdirected and therefore incapable of providing genuine satisfaction. The reason for this is that we were primarily motivated in our choices and behavior by our fear of death and by unconscious forces associated with biological birth, which we had not adequately processed and integrated. In other words, during biological birth, we completed the process physically but not emotionally. When our field of consciousness is strongly influenced by the underlying memory of the struggle in the birth canal, it leads to a feeling of discomfort and dissatisfaction with the present situation. This discontent can focus on a large spectrum of issues: unsatisfactory physical appearance, inadequate resources and material possessions, low social position and influence, insufficient amount of power and fame, and many others. Like the fetus stuck in the birth canal, we feel a strong drive and urge to get to a better situation that lies somewhere in the future. Whatever the reality of our present circumstances, we do not find them satisfactory. Our fantasies keep creating images of a future situation that appears more fulfilling than the present one. It seems that—until we reach it—our life will only be preparation for a better future, not “the kind of life we want or feel we should have.” This results in a life pattern that people involved in experiential self-exploration have described as a “treadmill” or “rat-race” type of existence. Existentialist philosophers talk about “auto-projecting” into the future. This strategy is a basic fallacy of human life. It is essentially a losing strategy, whether or not we achieve the goals that we have set for ourselves, since these external goals cannot deliver the satisfaction that we expect from them. We can never get enough of the substitutes that we don’t really want or need. [BUT, if we're after what we truly (intrinsically) want, we may find satisfaction. And we can find it in an instant. Usually, it's something immaterial e.g. living in line with one's life purpose, values etc. Note, that we're talking here about satisfaction, not pleasure!] When the goal is not reached, the continuing dissatisfaction is attributed to the fact that we have failed to reach the aspired corrective state. When we do succeed in reaching the goal of our aspirations, it also typically does not have much influence on our basic life feelings. The continuing dissatisfaction is then blamed either on the fact that the choice of the goal was not correct or that it was not ambitious enough. The result is either substitution of the old goal with a different one or an augmentated version of the same type of goal. In any case, the failure is not correctly diagnosed as being an inevitable result of a fundamentally wrong strategy of life that is incapable of providing satisfaction. This fallacious pattern applied on a large scale is responsible for the reckless irrational pursuit of various grandiose goals that results in great suffering and problems in the world.

Joseph Campbell described this situation as “reaching the top of the ladder then finding that it is leaning against the wrong wall.” The only strategy that can significantly reduce this irrational drive is full conscious reliving and integration of the trauma of birth in systematic inner self-exploration, and reaching the nourishing memories of the completed birth (BPM IV), the good womb (BPM I), and positive transpersonal states.

The deepest source of our dissatisfaction and striving for perfection is ultimately transpersonal in nature. In Dante Alighieri’s words: “The [desire for perfection] is that desire which always makes every pleasure appear incomplete, for there is no joy or pleasure so great in this life that it can quench the thirst in our Soul” (Alighieri 1990).

The deepest motivating force of the psyche on all levels of consciousness evolution is to return to the experience of our divinity. However, the constraining conditions which surround the consecutive stages of ego development stand in the way of attaining this experience. Real transcendence requires the death of the separate self, dying to the exclusive autonomous subject. Due to the fear of annihilation and grasping onto the ego, the individual has to settle for Atman substitutes or surrogates, which are specific for each particular stage. For the fetus and the newborn, this means the satisfaction experienced in the good womb or on the good breast. For an infant, this is the experience of age-specific physiological satisfaction and security. For the adult, the range of possible Atman Projects is large: besides food and sex, it also includes money, fame, power, appearance, knowledge, and many others. Since our deep sense that our true identity is the totality of cosmic creation and the creative principle itself, substitutes of any degree and scope (the Atman Projects) will always remain unsatisfactory. Only the experience of our divinity in a holotropic state of consciousness can ever fulfill our deepest need. The ultimate solution for insatiable greed is in the inner world, not in secular pursuits of any kind.

Efforts to change humanity would have to start with psychological prevention at a very early age. The data from prenatal and perinatal psychology indicate that much could be achieved by changing the conditions of pregnancy, delivery, and early postnatal care. This would include improving the emotional preparation of the mother during pregnancy, practicing natural childbirth, creating a psychospiritually informed birth environment, and cultivating emotionally nourishing contact between the mother and the child in the postpartum period. The circumstances of birth play an important role in creating a disposition to violence and self-destructive tendencies or, conversely, to loving behavior and healthy interpersonal relationships.

People involved in responsible psychonautics also describe increased zest, joie de vivre, and an enhanced ability to enjoy the simple things in life, such as walks in nature, listening to music, interacting with other people, love-making, and savoring food. As the content of the perinatal level of the unconscious emerges into consciousness and is integrated, it results in radical personality changes. The experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth and a conscious connection with positive postnatal and prenatal memories reduce irrational drives and ambitions. This causes a shift of emphasis from the past and future to the present moment.

Some of these changes have important implications for human society at large. One frequent result of responsible psychonautics is the increase of racial, sexual, political, and religious tolerance. Differences among people appear to be interesting and enriching rather than threatening, whether they are related to gender, race, color, language, political conviction, or religious belief. Another frequent change is the replacement of competitiveness with synergy and cooperation. Many psychonauts discover the power and efficacy of the Taoist wu wei (creative quietude, doing by being), when life is not governed by ambitious drives and begins to resemble instead the soft martial arts or surfing. With this life strategy, more is accomplished with less effort and the results are not only personally satisfying, but also serve the larger community. Very frequently, this can be associated with remarkable, helpful synchronicities, such as the unexpected appearance of the right people, information, and resources.

Although religious activities are generally practiced, socially sanctioned, or even formally encouraged, from a strictly scientific point of view, any involvement with spirituality appears to be irrational and indicates emotional and intellectual immaturity, stemming from either a lack of education, superstition, or regression to primitive magical thinking. Direct experiences of spiritual realities are seen and diagnosed as manifestations of psychosis, a serious mental disease. Religion, bereft of its experiential component, has largely lost the connection to its deep spiritual sources and as a result has become empty, meaningless, and increasingly irrelevant in the life of an average Westerner. In this form, religion cannot compete with the persuasiveness of materialistic science backed up by technological triumphs. Under these circumstances, religion has ceased to be a vital force during our life, as well as at the time of dying and death. Its references to life after death, posthumous adventures of the soul, and abodes of the Beyond, such as heaven and hell, have been relegated to the realm of fairy tales and handbooks of psychiatry. The entire ritual and spiritual history of humanity has been pathologized.

According to Western neuroscience, consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, a product of the physiological processes in the brain, and thus critically dependent on the body. The death of the body, more specifically of the brain, is then seen as the absolute end of any form of conscious activity. Belief in the posthumous journey of the soul, afterlife, or reincarnation is usually dismissed as a product of wishful thinking of people who are unable to accept the obvious biological imperative of death, the absolute nature of which has been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Very few people, including most scientists, realize that we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced by the brain and not even a remote notion of how something like that could possibly happen. In spite of it, this basic metaphysical assumption remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science and has a profound influence on our entire society.

This “dying before dying” has two important consequences: it liberates the individual from the fear of death and changes his or her attitude toward it, as well as influencing the actual experience of dying at the time of the biological demise. However, this elimination of the fear of death also transforms the individual’s way of being in the world.

I have yet to meet a single Western academician who has done extensive inner work involving holotropic states and continues to subscribe to the current scientific understanding of consciousness, psyche, human nature, and the nature of reality as taught in Western universities. This is entirely independent on the educational background, IQ, and specific area of expertise of the individual involved. The difference regarding the possibility of consciousness after death thus exactly reflects the differences in the attitude toward holotropic states. Ancient and pre-industrial cultures held these states in high esteem, practiced them regularly in socially sanctioned contexts, and spent much time and energy developing safe and effective techniques for inducing them.

Western society pathologizes all forms of holotropic states (with the exception of dreams that are not recurrent or nightmares), spends a lot of time trying to develop effective ways of suppressing them when they occur spontaneously, and tends to outlaw tools and contexts associated with them. Western psychiatry makes no distinction between a mystical experience and a psychotic experience and sees both as manifestations of mental disease. In its rejection of religion, it does not differentiate between primitive folk beliefs or the fundamentalists’ literal interpretation of scriptures, and the sophisticated mystical traditions and Eastern spiritual philosophies based on centuries of the systematic introspective exploration of the psyche. This misguided approach has pathologized the entire spiritual history of humanity.

Any attempts at describing transcendental experiences have to rely on the words of the colloquial language that has been developed to communicate about objects and activities as we experience them in the ordinary state of consciousness. For this reason, language proves to be inappropriate and inadequate when we want to talk about the experiences and insights encountered in various holotropic states of consciousness. This is particularly true when our experiences focus on the ultimate problems of existence, such as the Void, Absolute Consciousness, and creation.

Other descriptions emphasized the immense desire of the Divine to get to know itself and to discover, explore, and experience its hidden potential. This can only be done by exteriorization and manifestation of all the latent possibilities in the form of a concrete creative act. It requires polarization into subject and object, the experiencer and the experienced, the observer and the observed. A similar idea can be found in medieval kabbalistic scriptures, according to which God’s motive for creation is that “Face wants to behold Face” or “Gods wants to see God.”

Creation can also be viewed as a colossal experiment that expresses the immense curiosity of Absolute Consciousness, a passion that is analogous to the infatuation of a scientist who dedicates his or her life to exploration and research.

As we also saw, sometimes the insights concerning the forces underlying creation do not reflect overflowing abundance, richness, and mastery of the cosmic creative principle, but rather absence or lack of something important, deficiency, need, or desire. For example, it is possible to discover that, in spite of the immensity and perfection of its state of being, Absolute Consciousness realizes that it is alone. This Loneliness finds its expression in an abysmal yearning for partnership, communication, and sharing, giving and receiving love, a kind of Divine Longing.

Another important motivating force behind the creative process that has occasionally been reported in this category is the divine source’s primordial craving for the experiences that characterize the material world. According to these insights, Spirit has a profound desire to experience what is opposite and contrary to its own nature. It wants to explore all the qualities that, in its pristine nature, it does not have and to become everything that it is not. Being eternal, infinite, unlimited, and ethereal, it longs for the ephemeral, impermanent, transient, limited by time and space, solid, tangible, concrete, and corporeal.

Another important “motive” for creation that is occasionally mentioned is the element of Monotony. However immense and glorious the experience of the Divine might appear from the human perspective, for the divine, it will always be the same and, therefore, monotonous. Creation can then be seen as a titanic effort expressing a transcendental longing for change, action, movement, drama, and surprise.

It should be mentioned again that the language we are using presents a special problem for expressing what we have experienced in transcendental realms. The best we can do is to find some meek parallels and approximations in feelings that we know from our everyday life.

Besides the revelations concerning the motives or reasons for creation (the “why” of creation), the experiences in holotropic states often bring illuminating insights into the specific dynamics and mechanisms of the creative process (the “how” of creation). These are related to the “technology of consciousness” that generates experiences with different sensory characteristics and, by orchestrating them in a systematic and coherent way, creates virtual realities. Although the descriptions of these insights vary in terms of details, language, and metaphors used to illustrate them, they typically distinguish two interrelated and mutually complementary processes that are involved in creating the worlds of phenomena. The first of these is the activity that splits the original undifferentiated unity of Absolute Consciousness into infinite numbers of derived units of consciousness. The Divine engages in a creative play that involves complicated sequences of divisions, fragmentations, and differentiations. This results in experiential worlds that contain countless separate entities endowed with specific forms of consciousness which have a convincing sense of self-awareness and autonomy. There seems to be general agreement that these come into being through multiple divisions and subdivisions of the originally undivided field of Cosmic Consciousness. The Divine thus does not create something outside of itself but, through divisions and transformations, creates within the field of its own being. The second important element in the process of creation is a unique form of partitioning, dissociation, or forgetting, through which the filial conscious entities progressively and increasingly lose contact with their original source and the awareness of their pristine nature. They also develop a sense of individual identity and absolute separateness from each other. In the final stages of this process, intangible but relatively impermeable screens exist between these split-off units and also between each of them and the original undifferentiated pool of Absolute Consciousness.

The relationship between Absolute Consciousness and its parts is unique and complex and cannot be understood in terms of conventional thinking. Aristotelian logic and our common sense tell us that a part cannot simultaneously be the whole and that the whole, being an assembly of its parts, has to be larger than any of its components and cannot be a part. In the universal fabric, separate units of consciousness, in spite of their individuality and specific differences, remain on another level essentially identical with their source and with each other. They have a paradoxical nature, being wholes and parts at the same time.

The creative intention behind the divine play is to call experiential realities into being that would offer the best opportunities for adventures in consciousness, including the illusion of the material world. To meet this requirement, these realities have to be convincing and believable in all details. As an example of this, works of art such as theater plays or movies can occasionally be enacted and performed with such perfection that they make us forget that the events we are witnessing are illusory and react to them as if they were real. Also, a good actor or actress can sometimes lose their true identity and temporarily merge with the character they are portraying.

In the extreme expression of its artistry, represented by the atheist, the Divine actually succeeds in bringing forth arguments not only against its involvement in creation, but against its very existence.

Beethoven’s or Bach’s music.

All the situations that provide opportunities for spiritual opening are typically associated with a variety of strong opposing forces. Some of the obstacles that make the way to liberation and enlightenment extremely difficult and dangerous are intrapsychic in nature. Major breakthroughs, such as psychospiritual death and rebirth, are preceded by terrifying encounters with evil forces, a consuming fear of death, and the specter of insanity. Such experiences can deter less courageous and determined seekers.

In addition, the dogmas and activities of mainstream religions tend to obscure the fact that the only place where true spirituality can be found is inside the psyche of each of us. At its worst, organized religion can actually function as a grave impediment for any serious spiritual search, rather than an institution that can help people connect with the Divine. By denigrating its members and instilling guilt in them, it makes it difficult for them to believe that they can find the divinity within themselves. It might also cultivate the false belief that regular attendance of formal divine service, prayer, and financial contributions to the church are adequate and sufficient spiritual activities that make a serious spiritual quest unnecessary.

One of the motives for creation seems to be the “need” of the creative principle to get to know itself, so that “God can see God” or “Face can behold Face.” To the extent to which the Divine creates in order to explore its own inner potential, not expressing the full range of this potential would mean incomplete self-knowledge.

However, when we conduct a mental experiment in which we try to sanitize creation by eliminating all that we consider bad or evil, such as diseases and violence, from the universal scheme, we will get a different picture. Starting with diseases, we quickly realize that such an act of ethical sanitation will also eliminate from the world many aspects of existence that we value and appreciate enormously—healers of all ages, the history of medicine, the invention of medications and surgical interventions that save lives, and all the good Samaritans who have dedicated their lives to alleviate suffering, such as Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa. If we imagine a world in which there is no violence or war, we eliminate the triumphs of victory over tyrants, dictators, and oppressive regimes, the heroism of freedom fighters, all the creative intelligence and advances in technology that were developed during the making of weapons and inventing defenses and protection against them—fortresses and fortified castles, the armor of Samurai warriors and medieval knights, colorful pageantry and parades, and all the books, movies, music, paintings, and sculptures inspired by war and the conflicts between good and evil—not to mention the ecstatic ending of wars and efforts to transcend our violent impulses by resolving them internally in deep self-exploration.

If it is true that our psyche is governed by these two powerful cosmic forces, hylotropic and holotropic, and that these two are in fundamental conflict with each other, is there an approach to existence that can adequately cope with this situation? Since neither separate existence nor undifferentiated unity is fully satisfactory in and of itself, what is the alternative? Clearly, the solution is not to reject embodied existence as inferior and worthless and try to escape from it. We have seen that phenomenal worlds, including the world of matter, represent not only an important and valuable, but also absolutely necessary, complement to the undifferentiated state of the creative principle. At the same time, our efforts to reach fulfillment and peace of mind will necessarily fail, and possibly backfire, if they involve only objects and goals in the material realm. Any satisfactory solution will thus have to embrace both the earthly and the transcendental dimensions, both the world of forms and the Formless.

The material universe as we know it offers countless possibilities for extraordinary adventures in consciousness. As embodied selves, we can witness the spectacle of the heavens with its billions of galaxies and the natural wonders on earth. Only in the physical form and on the material plane can we fall in love, enjoy the ecstasy of lovemaking, have children, listen to Beethoven’s music, or admire Rembrandt’s paintings. The opportunities for the explorations of the microworld and the macroworld are virtually unlimited. In addition to the experiences of the present, there is also the adventure of probing the mysterious past, from lost ancient civilizations and the antediluvian world to the events during the first microseconds of the Big Bang.

To participate in the phenomenal world and to be able to experience this rich spectrum of adventures requires a certain degree of identification with the embodied self and acceptance of the world of matter. However, when our identification with the body-ego is absolute and our belief in the material world as the only reality is unshatterable, it is impossible to fully enjoy our participation in creation. The specters of personal insignificance, impermanence, and death can completely overshadow the positive side of life and rob us of its zest. We also have to include the frustration that comes from our attempts to realize our full divine potential while constrained by the limitations of our bodies and of the material world.

To find the solution to this dilemma, we have to turn inside, to a systematic inner quest. As we keep discovering and exploring various hidden dimensions of ourselves and of reality, our identification with the body-ego becomes progressively looser and less compelling. We continue to identify with the “skin-encapsulated ego” for pragmatic purposes, but this orientation becomes increasingly more tentative and playful. If we have sufficient experiential knowledge of the transpersonal dimensions of existence, including our own true identity and cosmic status, everyday life becomes much easier and more rewarding.

Awareness of our divine nature and of the essential emptiness of all things, which we discover in our transpersonal experiences, form the foundations of a meta-framework that can be of considerate help to us in coping with the complexity of everyday existence. We can fully embrace the experiences of the material world and enjoy all that it has to offer. However, no matter what we do, life will bring obstacles, challenges, painful experiences, and losses. When things get too difficult and devastating, we can call on the broader cosmic perspective that we have discovered in our inner quest.

In this perspective, the planets do not “cause” specific events any more than the hands on a clock “cause” a specific time. Instead, the planetary positions seem to be indicative of the cosmic state of archetypal dynamics at that time.

The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky…. Everything in the world is full of signs…. All events are coordinated…. All things depend on each other; as has been said, “Everything breathes together.”

But while the archetype may be a cause, I would not consider it the cause, as archetypal factors are always acting in complex recursive relationship with human agency, level of consciousness, cultural context, concrete circumstance, interpersonal field, genetic inheritance, past actions, and many other possible factors.

The cosmos is a living, ever-evolving matrix of being and meaning within which the human psyche is embedded as a co-creative participant.

...possibility that the collective unconscious is in some way embedded in the universe itself, whereby the planetary motions reflect at a macrocosmic level the unfolding archetypal dynamics of human experience. In Platonic terms, the evidence seems to reflect the existence of an anima mundi informing the cosmos, a world soul in which the human psyche participates as a microcosm of the whole.