In my novel Above All Shadows Rides the Sun, I imagine Stanislav Grof giving a talk at Esalen about the range of 26 human transpersonal experiences. As always, Dylan Steffan, now 35, is the lead / narrating character.
Big Sur
July 20, 1974
I’m glad Yale has joined me for a talk by Stan Grof on the third and uppermost domain of human consciousness – the transpersonal level. The evening weather is pleasant as a couple dozen of us sit on lawn chairs and listen to Grof with the ocean and sunset to our west.
Grof speaks about the most extraordinary phenomena in the calmest and most clear-headed way. I’ve found him to be not only wise but totally sane – and he’s a very cool guy, very hip. He approaches everything with wits and heart and deep appreciation, and there’s also something fearless about him. Most of all, I’ve found him to be trustworthy on a deep existential level – perhaps because he has such a profound trust in the human psyche.
He talks about his first LSD experience in 1956, after listening for two years (as a grad student in psychiatry) to clients talk while on LSD. He moved beyond Prague and beyond the planet and became one with the universe. He became convinced that consciousness is a cosmic phenomenon – as are beauty and intelligence – not something generated by brain matter and activity.
He tells us about how he then began using LSD with his clients in clinical therapy and found many of them reliving their births. He began rethinking the assumptions of psychiatry’s “respectable edifice” – with “its clay feet” – and discovered patterns in what his clients were experiencing.
Most of all, he learned how the birth experience becomes a template for much of our experience, influencing us unconsciously, including generating male fear of the feminine. The helplessness of Matrix Two and the anger of Matrix Three set up a drive for power and, often, perverse sadomasochistic tendencies. By tapping into our psyche’s innate capacity for healing, psychedelic and deep-breathing experiences can liberate us from all our self-destructive energies.
Then Grof turns to transpersonal experiences:
Once one has worked through and integrated psychodynamic material and perinatal material, after one’s ego death and rebirth, the primary features of all future psychedelic sessions are transpersonal experiences.
What are transpersonal experiences? Experiences beyond our body and ego boundaries and beyond the limits of space and time.
In our usual states of consciousness, we experience ourselves as existing within the boundaries of our physical body. In transpersonal experiences, we move beyond the boundaries of our body, of our ego, and of time or space or both.”
So our awareness encompasses what, exactly?
Our awareness encompasses other persons, or an aspect or aspects of the external world.
There are three types of transpersonal experience. Experiences of consciousness moving through time. Experiences of consciousness transcending the limits of space. And experiences beyond objective reality.
Let’s start with the experiences of moving through time. There are six:
First, fetal experiences and even embryonal experiences. These overlap with the perinatal experiences we’ve already discussed.
Second, ancestral experiences. You regress in time to periods preceding your own conception. Your memory transcends the limits of your own life. You get in touch with information in the lives of your biological ancestors – your parents, grandparents, or generations before them. You may relive short episodes from an ancestor’s life. You may tune into an ancestor’s personality. You may identify with one of your ancestors. Or your experience may be more diffuse – sensing the psychological atmosphere in your family at some point in the past. You can gain intuitive insights into your family’s cultural attitudes, belief systems, customs, traditions, and biases. You are likely to gain new understanding of personal problems or conflicts with roots in your family’s past. Some may be problems for yourself today with their roots in incongruence, incompatibility, or friction between your maternal family and your paternal family.
Third, racial and collective experiences. Your consciousness goes to a different country or a different century or both. You observe a brief episode or a long, elaborate sequence of a society or culture in the past. You may identify with one or more people in that culture. You gain insights into the social structure, cosmology, religious worship, moral code, art, technological development, or other aspects of this culture. Most frequently, people journey back to societies with highly developed religions, philosophies, and art – like ancient Greece, Egypt, India, China, or Japan or to the Mayans or the Incas. And it’s vivid. You become an embalmer in ancient Egypt. You get up and dance a Muslim Sufi dervish.
Fourth, evolutionary experiences. You observe or identify with animals up and down the evolutionary continuum. You experience being a salmon on its heroic journey against the flow of a mighty river. You experience turning from an egg into a caterpillar into a chrysalis into a butterfly.
Fifth, precognition, clairvoyance, or clairaudience. You anticipate events that will happen in the future. Or you go back in time and sense what is happening in a particular time period.
And sixth, reincarnation experiences.
The second type of transpersonal experiences are experiences of consciousness expanding the limits of space. There are twelve of these:
First, dual unity. Your consciousness merges with the consciousness of another person. Either with them doing the same or only you doing it. You move beyond your ego boundaries into a state of oneness with the other person. You still have your own identity but you’re fused with this person. You have profound feelings of love and of the sacredness of the relationship.
Second, identification with other persons. You take on another person’s body image, psychological characteristics, attitudes, thoughts, emotions, postures, movements, facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms, and voice inflection. People in psychedelic states do this most frequently with Lincoln, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Galileo, Einstein, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Saint Teresa of Avila.
Third, identification with a group of people. You identify with the people of one race, one nationality, one cultural heritage, one religious faith, one profession, one social class, one ideology, or one shared destiny. You identify with persecuted Jews or Christians, with Muslims on their way to Mecca, with the suffering of all soldiers who’ve ever died on a battlefield, with all loving mothers who tenderly tend to their children’s well-being. You may even identity with every member of the human race, with all of humanity. These experiences usually generate a sensitivity to the problems and needs of people in various societies and they usually generate a deep appreciation for the range of religions, philosophies, and cultures.
Fourth, identification with an animal. You identify with an animal in the present rather than back in evolutionary time.
Fifth, identification with a plant. This is rare but it enhances one’s love of nature.
Sixth, oneness with all life and with Creation. You feel a unity with all the life on this planet – with all human and animal and plant life. This can be present life or evolutionary life or both. This evokes a profound love of nature.
Seventh, awareness of matter. You sense your unity with inorganic elements and forces – an ocean, a fire, a volcano, an earthquake, a windstorm, electromagnetic forces, dances of atoms or molecules. Or with manmade technology.
Eighth, awareness of our planet. You take in all inorganic forms – including geological ones – and all life forms.
Ninth, awareness of phenomena beyond our planet. You take in the sun or the moon or planets in our solar system – or stars and planets in other solar systems or galaxies, or supernovas, quasars, black holes, or interstellar space.
Tenth, out-of-body experiences. Your consciousness moves beyond your physical body.
Eleventh, telepathy. You read another person’s minds.
And twelfth, awareness of organ, tissue, or cells within your own body. Your consciousness shrinks down to an entity smaller than your body – to one part of your body.
Lastly, there are eight experiences beyond objective reality – for a total of 26 varieties of transpersonal experience. Here are the eight experiences beyond objective reality:
First, intuitive understanding of a universal symbol. You grasp the meaning of a mandala, the cross of Christ, the star of David, an ancient Egyptian ankh, the lotus flower, the Taoist yin-yang, a diamond, the Buddhist wheel of death and rebirth, or the circle.
Second, activation of the chakras.
Third, experiences of inhabitants of other planets.
Fourth, encounters with the forces of good and the forces of evil. Deities. Angels and demons.
Fifth, encounters with spirits of those who’ve died or with beings on higher planes. Maybe you encounter a spirit guide, teacher, or protector. Maybe you exchange vibrations of frequencies at higher energy levels. Usually you are conveyed sources of light energy without any communication. Maybe you receive an extrasensory message.
Sixth, experiences of myths and archetypes. You identity with or enact a sequence from some primordial or legendary social type or role. The Hero or Superhero. The Enlightened Ruler. The Lover. A legend of human ambitions for knowledge, like Faust’s. The Father, the Wise Old Man, the Cosmic Man, the Mother, Mother Nature, the Earth Mother, the Great Mother, the step-mother to a battered step-daughter, the good brother, the good sister, the Martyr, the Fugitive, the Outcast, the Tyrant, the Fool, the Good Samaritan, the Vicious Spoiler, the Ascetic or Hermit, the Shadow, the Animus or Anima, the Persona. Maybe an entire Dark Age or Golden Age. Maybe a tale of great love endangered by unfortunate circumstances or intrigues.
Seventh, awareness of the Universal Mind. Your consciousness encompasses the totality of existence. You encounter the reality underlying all realities. You are confronted with the supreme and ultimate principle that represents all being. The illusions of matter, space, time, the three-dimensional world, and subjective realities are transcended. You see that there is one mode of consciousness which is their common source and denominator. You are encountering existence itself -- boundless, unfathomable, and ineffable – and this is both profound and intellectually satisfying. The Universal Mind is formless, dimensionless, and intangible – the principle of infinite existence, infinite awareness and knowledge, and infinite bliss. These experiences transcend reason and language – except the language of metaphor and parable. You are experiencing cosmic unity with intuitive insights into processes of creation of the phenomenal world.
And eighth, experience of the supra-cosmic and meta-cosmic Void. Here, beyond space and time, underlying the world of phenomena, is the uncreated Supreme – the primordial, ultimate source and cradle of all existence. This Field is pregnant with form, including the subtle forms of the Universal Mind. And now you know that this Field and the Universal Mind are identical and freely interchangeable – two aspects of the same phenomenon.
To conclude, psychedelic experiences generate a keen interest in religious, mystical, and philosophical matters and a powerful desire to incorporate the spiritual dimension into one’s way of life. I’ve seen it happen hundreds of times.
After some appreciative departing chit-chat with Dr. Grof, Yale and I head for Esalen’s famous hot tubs.
I’m buoyant. “The most fascinating thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Mind-blowing!” says Yale. “I’m totally blown away!”
“I need time, lots of time, to process all this.”
“My head is swimming.”
“Like we have no place to stand on firm ground.”
Once in a hot tub, we set plans for another psilocybin mushroom experience. Neither of us can hide our enthusiasm from our face.
As I look out at the sunset over the ocean, the conscious experience of the human being seems more vast than ever. Grof has altered my worldview, my view of human nature, and my view of clinical challenges.
Everyone at Esalen and in the transpersonal psychology field recognizes the spiritual nature of humanity. Everyone in this movement is aware of their consciousness or their soul or both. Our spiritual dimension is not an add-on. It’s the core dimension of our being. We are spiritual beings in physical bodies.
It’s Yale that raises a fundamental challenge we’ve both been thinking about. “All these folks have left the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most have turned to Eastern faith traditions. But I see no reason to leave. I will always be a Quaker, always stay in the Christian fold.”
“Same here, Yale.”
“However, it’s going to take a lot of intellectual work by a lot of people to absorb all this into a Christian worldview.”
“At this point, Cousin, I can’t even see where someone would start.”
My mind turns back to my therapy work. I can only begin to imagine how I will integrate Grof’s view of the transpersonal realm into my work with my clients. How can one person see so much – and see it with such clarity?
Sitting in the hot tub, I should be relaxed. Certainly I’m inspired by Grof. But I stare down at my palms. My mind is numb and racing at the same time. I fidget with my hands, my shoulders slump, and I sag back. I stare into space, feeling overwhelmed.
One thing’s clear to me. I don’t need a third year of psychiatry school, a residency, or a psychiatry degree. Johns Hopkins has nothing more to offer me. It’s time to open my new therapy practice in Denver and begin working with clients again.