Are Crop Circles Messages from Our Higher Self Urging Us to a Primal Return to Nature to save Ourselves? Crop Circles, UFOs, and the First Fall from Grace in Nature

UFOs, Crop Circles, and the World as an “Epiphenomenon” of Consciousness:  Matter As Metaphor, Part Five — A Call to Regain Harmony with Nature, Writ Large

What Occurs in Psychic Reality Manifests Physically

What Occurs in Psychic Reality Manifests Physically

On grosser levels of physical reality—other than brain—in the world, this is also true, according to Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. For every physical form … in the explicate order (borrowing from David Bohm‘s terminology) has its morphogenetic field or pattern in the implicate order. And since this implicate order is identical with what we normally call “consciousness” … as we have been establishing … a subset of which is thought or psyche or the mental, then what occurs in the realm of the psychic will often manifest (to us) in physical reality.

This perspective is fruitful for understanding many common but otherwise unexplainable events, such as synchronicity.

In Observing the World, We Are Observing Mind

Further, the idea that physical reality is comprised of psychic events means something astounding. What this means is that Reality has the same substance as do dreams: Material Reality has psychic substance. And literally, as the mystics say, life IS a dream. When we look at Reality we are observing the workings of Mind.

Or as some people would say, the workings of God.

Crop Circles and UFOs

This perspective also brings a whole new interpretation to many of the current unexplainables on the world stage: Crop circles and UFOs are two I would like to deal with briefly.

UFOs

A good example of how this occurs can be seen in the example of UFOs. There is a famous explanation of UFOs by Jung (1978), in which he stated that UFOs were a representation of our modern need for wholeness. In Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jung attributes this perception of glowing circular images to a psychic need.

It is interesting that Jung never, in that book, clearly states whether he thinks UFOs are real or hallucinated, and, considering the inconclusiveness of our understanding of these sightings, one can see why. But there may be another reason.

As pointed out earlier, Jung’s perception of reality was very much in line with the premises of this book: That is to say that psychic reality — what I call Experience and many call Consciousness — is the fundamental reality. Thus, it may be that Jung could not help but foresee the implications of that viewpoint, as I will set forth here: That is, that UFOs might actually be a “physical” manifestation — a collective perceptual reality — of that collective psychic need.

Crop Circles

To make this clearer, let me say that I am thus putting UFOs in the same category of physical reality as the phenomenon, even more recently emerged, of crop circles. Crop circles are indisputably physical: They stick around for a while, and there are many photos of them. And while some crop circles are acknowledged hoaxes, perpetrated by all too human agents, many others are not to be explained away so easily. [Footnote 2]

In these instances, circles (once again) are found written large in fields of cultivated plants. Often, these circles have elements of mandalas included on them.These mandala qualities only underscore the interpretation I am making that they also, like the glowing circular “saucers,” are manifestations (symbolically) of a pressing modern-day need for psychic integration and spiritual-emotional wholeness.

Our First Split from Grace — Agriculture, the Agrarian Revolution, the Neolithic Era

Consider this: These crop circle formations are clustered around neolithic sites — that is, ancient structures related to the time when we began using agriculture. Of the over ten thousand crop circles discovered to date, a staggering number of these, forty percent in fact, were found within a forty mile radius of Stonehenge. They line up with magnetic and electromagnetic lines on Earth as do Stonehenge, Avebury, the Uffington Horse, and dozens of other sites these crop circles are found near. Note that these sites are neolithic in origin, which is to say that they are from the time of the agrarian revolution when we made a major split from Nature and began controlling Her as opposed to being in harmony with Her as were our ancient hunter-gatherer forebears.

I have pointed out elsewhere how this agrarian revolution was a fall from grace in Nature — a setting up of a duality, the first major one, pitting humans against Nature. It represents the beginnings of radical mistrust and fear of Nature, hence control of Her, that we are seeing the dire consequences of today with the environmental collapse we have set in motion and are beginning to feel the effects of.

All this together lends itself to a fantastic conclusion about crop circles’ possible meanings for humanity: Is it possible that these agricultural circles are the way our innermost psyche, our inner higher unconscious reality is trying to tell us to “get back to where you once belonged” by placing a sign back at the exact place of our original detour?! Is it possible it is saying, “O.K., here is where you screwed up. Go back to GO, go back to wholeness and integration — the circles, see? Uh, do not collect any two hundred dollars though.”

Physical Reality As an Epiphenomenon of Consciousness

Regardless of one’s interpretation of crop circles, the point is that an opening to the possible understanding of phenomena such as crop circles arises with the acceptance of the new-paradigm primacy-of-the-psychic-world postulate — that is, if one simply considers psychic reality as the true reality and physical reality as only an “epiphenomenon” of it … instead of the other way around.

Footnotes

2. A few things to consider before dismissing crop circles: The Facts About December 2012 – Crop Circles. And Crop circles. And, most importantly, Crop Circles.

Continue with The Transformational Element of UFO Abductions and Its Blow to Materialism: We Are Being Booted Into a Higher Awareness and a Need to Save the Planet.

Return to The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

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Continue with The Transformational Element of UFO Abductions and Its Blow to Materialism: We Are Being Booted Into a Higher Awareness and a Need to Save the Planet.

Return to The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

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The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

“Listen Better!”: Physical Reality Is as Symbolic as the Images in Dreams… and Can Be as Readily Interpreted for Understanding Oneself and for Guidance on One’s Path

“Listen Better!”

The physical world and all its events are metaphor for consciousness; they are indirect spiritual perception, as we are seeing. We are taught in observing and letting the world and our Experience teach us. But, as Vasudeva encouraged Siddhartha, we must “Listen better!”

The Spiritual Code Written Into Our Reality

Mushrooms and Butterflies

When we do take in the world’s messages, we see that even the tiniest details of reality—of its architecture and components—are instructive to us on our journey. One example of how such teaching is to be found in even the most trivial of details of the physical world is discovered by reflecting on the shape of the “lowly” mushroom.

While the explanation to follow came to me on my own, many decades ago, I was to find confirmation of it years later in the thoughts of another writer as such:

Everyone knows that a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, and for ages the chrysalis process has been a charming metaphor for transformation. But what does a mushroom turn into, except for the ground?

A mushroom, as Alice discovered, can turn us into all kinds of new forms. But whether we shrink or expand, grow as tall as the sky, or become as short as a blade of grass, isn’t as important as the process of turning inward — the spiritual conversion of turning toward and into the inner life. What really matters is this inner change, a changing of attitudes, spirit, perception. In this light whole worldviews can be transformed in an instant.

The mystical experience has been described as “becoming one with the ground.” (Schiff, 1991, p. 9)

Thus, mushrooms, in their umbrella shape, are symbolic of the U-turn that is necessary in our spiritual evolution in returning to the ground of existence. They are “road signs” for the way hOMe.

This is interesting, more so, because mushrooms do in fact have psychedelic properties and they do, indeed, return us to the “ground,” as McKenna (1991), among others, so poetically explains.

The point is that not only is this U-turn necessary in spiritual evolution but that physical reality teaches us this, that physical reality, if we notice it, is constantly teaching us and guiding us . . . physical reality is metaphor and is as symbolic as the images in dreams. Indeed, one’s physical reality can be interpreted as readily as dream images in understanding oneself and seeking guidance on one’s path.

Fire

Another example is that of fire. Fire is a changing of matter into energy. It is no coincidence that it has become a universal symbol for the process of transformation wherein one goes from one’s personal, ego-based, desires and programs to transpersonal concerns and rootedness. For, indeed, is this not also a kind of going from matter (sensory awareness) and ego (body focusing) to spirit (consciousness) and energy (feeling awareness)?

Morphogenetic Fields

It should not be surprising, considering the foregoing, that when there are changes in psychic structures, there will often be noticeable physical changes which correspond to the psychic ones.

Brain Is the Tip of the Iceberg of Consciousness

In a way, this is the implication of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field theory. On the simplest level of this, scientists tell us that when learning takes place, evidence can be found of corresponding changes in the physical brain. Not surprising. Scientists are not able to reduce learning to physical changes in the brain: They cannot locate specific memories in the brain, and will never be able to completely do that, if we are not completely mistaken here. For the physical changes observable in the brain are merely the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of learning/memory. The real stuff is going on “below.” Or more correctly, the events of learning/memory/consciousness go on “inside” or “within” — which is, actually, even more correctly, the true “outside,” the true “without” or “objective” reality.

What Occurs in Psychic Reality Manifests Physically

On grosser levels of physical reality—other than brain—in the world, this is also true, according to Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. For every physical form … in the explicate order (borrowing from David Bohm‘s terminology) has its morphogenetic field or pattern in the implicate order. And since this implicate order is identical with what we normally call “consciousness” … as we have been establishing … a subset of which is thought or psyche or the mental, then what occurs in the realm of the psychic will often manifest (to us) in physical reality.

This perspective is fruitful for understanding many common but otherwise unexplainable events, such as synchronicity.

In Observing the World, We Are Observing Mind

Further, the idea that physical reality is comprised of psychic events means something astounding. What this means is that Reality has the same substance as do dreams: Material Reality has psychic substance. And literally, as the mystics say, life IS a dream. When we look at Reality we are observing the workings of Mind.

Or as some people would say, the workings of God.

Continue with Are Crop Circles Messages from Our Higher Self Urging Us to a Primal Return to Nature to save Ourselves? Crop Circles, UFOs, and the First Fall from Grace in Nature

Return to The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

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The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

The Teachings of Some Insect Planetmates: Knowing the Truth Doesn’t Make You Paranoic, It Makes You Pronoic.

While not approaching the profundity of the above revelation from Hermann Hesse, I have an example of this sort of teaching coming from the physical world occurring in my own life recently. The previous section on Siddhartha was written a while ago, but this event of mine happened only days ago and, by strange coincidence, at the same time that I was contemplating the posting of the section from Hesse.

A week ago, my wife and I picked up our trailer on our annual sojourn South for the winter. It had been stored on a friend’s rural property, deep in the California farm country, three hundred miles North of our eventual destination and six hundred miles from our origin.

We discovered soon enough that not quite a family of wasps, an actual nation of wasps had taken up abode in our trailer.

Now, my wife and I are both spiritual and pacifists, totally uninclined to kill anything, even insects. The death of other things is inevitable in living … we are not fools about it … but we try to learn a different attitude from what we were taught and try to see if peaceful coexistence, if not outright harmony and love, is possible with all that exists.

So our first inclination was to see how the wasps would react if they were simply left alone. We were not deluded in our efforts. Where they were clustered in spots we needed to use, I had to kill off entire families. As near as I can make out … and I’m still not sure … their nest is in a vent above the stove, accessible from the outside and allowing entrance to the inside. But it is not something I can get at to dislodge it. Still, they left us alone and were mysteriously absent except when we were in direct sunlight, when they would become agitated and would come out.

So after our minimal mopping up campaign, we continued down the road the hundreds of miles to our destination. You would think the little invaders would be swept away by the sixty mile per hour winds blowing through their home. But they were not.

Day after day when the sun would be the greatest they would come out. On the second day of this, they were out in forces that reminded me of Hitchcock or Stephen King movies. Scores if not a hundred of them flew above and around us. I had flashbacks to scenes from “The Birds.” One particular image from “The Hunger Games” came to mind, where the tracker jackers attacked and covered one unlucky contestant, stinging her into a puffy ghastly death.

Nevertheless, I tried to remain calm, lying on my bed, wondering what the proper response should be. I mean, this was extraordinary. My cat, Muff, who had been curiously focusing on these creatures at times, at this point looked up at me from the floor with wide terrified eyes and let out a meow of terror and confusion. Also, being the guy I felt it my obligation to protect wife and cat at any and all costs, even if it meant throwing my body between wasps and family.

Still, I was keen to find a different way than all-out war. I know that is what we need to do if we are to survive on this planet (saying this even now as a wasp friend of mine just came in and circled around my right hand as it was typing before flying on over to the window again). So at this time of full infestation, I stopped and watched and remained calm, having faith that Hichcockian horrors only exist in fantasy, not God’s real world.

Meanwhile, my wife went into action. To my amazement, she got out a Mason jar and its lid and began enticing one after another of these beasty things into it then releasing them outside. She encouraged them to leave by keeping the door open as well. I knew this was futile because they could and would come back inside, most of them. Or they would retreat to that inaccessible nest that we could not get rid of despite the hours of freeway driving. Still, I was awestruck by her complete lack of fear in her task. She was as aware as I that we could not live calmly in a tiny twelve by seven trailer with hundreds of wasps buzzing about our heads and filling the air all around. Yet she methodically and without a trace of skittishness, let alone fear, went about collecting and removing our unwanted visitors.

Knowing we could not live like this and realizing that my wife’s choice, while admirable, was ultimately futile, I watched and pondered my course of action. What came to mind was Sathya Sai Baba’s words on this, which were that though you should never kill another living thing, you must of course kill insects inside your house.

So, being also aware that there is no death anyway just transformation of consciousness from one form to another, I must confess I went about helping these tiny beings along in their “transformations.” I was inspired by my wife’s example of fearlessness, too, and with respect for each and every one of them, and with love and appreciation for their existence, I went about ending said existences for them, one after the other.

They were amazingly stupid and inept. They apparently were literally born yesterday, as I began to consider what might be the short and brutal life spans of wasps. I could easily kill or disable them with the sole of my sandal. They were much less able to withstand blows than comparable insects such as flies or mosquitoes. They were unbelievably less nimble. And they, unlike said flies or mosquitoes, did not return or retaliate either. I swear, I’m not sure they could sting you except by accidentally backing up into you! They seemed to have enough trouble just dealing with their confusion of being in an enclosed space with patches of light they could follow but which did not lead to any open space and was blocked to the outside … with glass, you see, or similar obstruction. I watched them going crazy on every sunlit window. They moved in endless ritual processions of futility.

Between both of our efforts we reduced the numbers of the invaders to a livable number—less than ten visible at any one time. And we relaxed again into our routine. It was at this point that again I could return to my pacifist approach of peaceful co-existence.

I lie there on my bed watching these insect planetmates, wondering what it was like to be them. I held no animosity toward them … quite the opposite. They were rather cute. They careened about on newly formed wings, their many legs, arms, and stinger bottoms dangling below. Jerking left and right as they flew peripatetically about, I was reminded of cartoons of such insects—Disney-like and from commercials. Hardly offensive these depictions, they were charming and affable. All this overlaying my perception, these youngsters from a different kind of mother seemed like infants trying to walk. They were charming and delightful. It filled me with warmth and love to feel this connection to another life form, which in my way of thinking could easily be me, have been me, or is me right now being a part of me I’m not presently aware of. At any rate, I felt love for them, and from them for all creation extending out from them. There was a palpable love filling up all space around me and I bordered the euphoric as I welled up in the poignancy of it all. Tears came, in apprehending such beauty and love.

And it occurred to me that this encounter with the wasps was like our relations with all things. Oh yes, we know the parable of the frog and the scorpion: The frog and the scorpion have an arrangement for the frog to carry the scorpion on his back across the stream (a wasp just said hello to the underside of my left wrist just then, as I was typing, and continued on). In exchange for this service the scorpion says he will not sting the frog. But in the middle of the stream the scorpion stings the frog and they both drown. The frog before dying cries out, “Why did you sting me? You know we will both drown!” The scorpion answered. “You should know I can’t do otherwise. For it is my nature.”

Well, watching the wasps I thought of that parable and had a different way of seeing it. Of course beings will do what is in their nature. I might even get stung by a wasp. But I might also get hurt by another human. I might get slighted or slandered in a way that is a great deal more painful than any insect bite.

And aren’t they much the same? Do I refrain from relationships because they can hurt me at times? No. Do I seek to kill off all other humans on the chance that one of them might hurt my feelings at some point? Of course not! So why do we kill off insects that would even more infrequently harm us?

More importantly, I realized that just as we could accept a sting from an insect, knowing it was only doing what is in its nature and not taking it personally, we could also see the people in our relationships that way: They only do what is in their nature, we do not need to take it personally. And as long as there are not too many of them—these hurts or such people—we can live in peaceful co-existence with potentially hurtful humans, knowing that the stings of relationship are almost always unintentional.

Indeed, it occurred to me that all things can live in peaceful harmony and co-existence if we but notice the love and attraction all beings have for each other—which truly is our divinity…that tendency to want to be One again. If we can remember that all beings are more likely frantically focused on getting to a light that is mysteriously blocked off and hardly intent on hurting us …. if we can recall that like wasps the stings from others are unintentional byproducts of the ritualistic machinations of their struggles to be free … then perhaps we can let go of those horror picture fears that the world, and its people, would swarm over and hurt us, if given the chance. Of course we occasionally get stung, but, unlike the frog, we hardly drown from it. No. To know the truth does not make one paranoic. It makes one pronoic—that is, inclined to believe that the rest of the world, given the chance, is out to love us.

Continue with The Spiritual “Code” That Is Written In Reality: Matter As Metaphor, Part Four — In the Tiniest Details — Mushrooms, Fire, Butterflies, and Morphogenetic Fields

Return to Looking Deeply Into the Message of the World … and Siddhartha: Have You Also Learned the Secret of the River That There is No Time? Everything Has Reality and Presence.

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Looking Deeply Into the Message of the World … and Siddhartha: Have You Also Learned the Secret of the River That There is No Time? Everything Has Reality and Presence.

Matter As Metaphor, Part Two: Taught by Nature, by That Which Is — The Heights of Learning and Transformation Possible in Wide-Angled Contemplation of the World

The physical world is our indirect perception (for direct perception, look within) of spiritual and psychic realities. Hence, the physical world can not help but express the spiritual and psychic. What I am saying is: Look around yourself; the world is rife with messages, both personal and universal, relating to your place in the Universe, the meaning of our existence, the meaning of existence itself, and, most importantly, of guidance for getting us back hOMe. If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found. And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Hermann Hesse (1951) gives us a charming story of just such teaching by Nature, by That Which Is. In Siddhartha he relates how the main character left the sensory world of business and marriage and became a river ferryman. Siddhartha’s inner voice draws him to such a life and guides him to listen to the river:

In his heart he heard the newly awakened voice speak, and it said to him: “Love this river, stay by it, learn from it.”  Yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it.  It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and its secrets, would understand much more, many secrets, all secrets.

But today he only saw one of the river’s secrets, one that gripped his soul. He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.  Who could understand, conceive this?  (p. 104)

Further guidance about the river is provided by Siddhartha’s friend, the elder ferryman, Vasudeva. Concerning his remarkable ability to listen, Vasudeva tells his protégé:

“You will learn it,” said Vasudeva, “but not from me. The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths. The rich and distinguished Siddhartha will become a rower; Siddhartha the learned Brahmin will become a ferryman. You have also learned this from the river.  You will learn the other thing, too.  (pp. 107-108)

Later, Siddhartha’s education progresses:

He once asked him, “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?”

A bright smile spread over Vasudeva’s face.

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?”

“That is it,” said Siddhartha, “and when I learned that, I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadow, not through reality. Siddhartha’s previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.”  (pp. 109-110)

And further on:

Often they sat together in the evening on the tree trunk by the river. They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, of perpetual Becoming. And it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts, perhaps of a conversation of the previous day, or about one of the travelers whose fate and circumstances occupied their minds, or death, or their childhood; and when the river told them something good at the same moment, they looked at each other, both thinking the same thought, both happy at the same answer to the same question.  (p. 111)

Such teaching, in contemplation of the river, continued for a long time. Until one day, Siddhartha was to learn a teaching surpassing all others. Once again, it is his mentor Vasudeva who directs him to look more deeply and listen more intently to the message of the World:

“You have heard it laugh,” he said, “but you have not heard everything. Let us listen; you will hear more.”

They listened. The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. He saw his father, lonely, mourning for his son; he saw himself, lonely, also with the bonds of longing for his faraway son; he saw his son, also lonely, the boy eagerly advancing along the burning path of life’s desires, each one concentrating on his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering. The river’s voice was sorrowful.  It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s mute glance. Siddhartha nodded.

“Listen better!” whispered Vasudeva.

Siddhartha tried to listen better. The picture of his father, his own picture, and the picture of his son all flowed into each other. Kamala’s picture also appeared and flowed on, and the picture of Govinda and others emerged and passed on. They all became part of the river. It was the goal of all of them, yearning, desiring, suffering; and the river’s voice was full of longing, full of smarting woe, full of insatiable desire. The river flowed on towards its goal. Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he has ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew. But the yearning voice had altered. It still echoed sorrowfully, searchingly, but other voices accompanied it, voices of pleasure and sorrow, good and evil voices, laughing and lamenting voices, hundreds of voices, thousands of voices.

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices — the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.

“Do you hear?” asked Vasudeva’s glance once again.

Vasudeva’s smile was radiant; it hovered brightly in all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. His smile was radiant as he looked at his friend, and now the same smile appeared on Siddhartha’s face.  His wound was healing, his pain was dispersing; his Self had merged into unity.

From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.  (pp. 136-139)

This is, of course, an elaborate illustration and expresses the heights of learning and transformation that are possible in such wide-angled contemplation of the World.

Continued with The Rest of the World, Given the Chance, Is Out to Love You: Matter As Metaphor, Part Three — Expect Less … and More … from Your Wasps

Return to The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe

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The Template for All You Believe Was Written in the Womb: Archetypes, Philosophy, and the Devolutional Theory of Consciousness and Spiritual Awareness

Everything You “Know” About Religion You Learned as a Fetus: We Are a Fever, Part Three — Later Prenatal Psychology Theorists — Breathwork, Myth, and Consciousness

Later Theorists — Dream Analysis

Francis Mott — Conception and Gestational Basis of Myth, Archetype, all Patterns of Macrocosmic and Microcosmic Realities and the Nature of Reality, Devolutional Model of Development

Francis Mott’s work is less well known even by this field’s standards, yet it is undeniably impressive. Mott’s (1960, 1964) major contribution lies in his focusing on basic patterns of mind and cosmos that correlate with prenatal feelings and states. He traced consciousness back to events around conception and saw these events as instituting patterns affecting all later experience and conceptual constructions. Through dream analysis he elicited these “configurations,” and he demonstrated their manifestation as seemingly universal archetypes in myths and universal human assumptions about the nature of reality. In fact, through his study of womb and conception patterns he claimed to have discovered patterns that underlie and unite all of reality at all levels of manifestation—astronomical, social, personal, cellular, and even nuclear. While this may seem rather grandiose, his work was highly regarded and admired by Carl Jung.

Mott also carried forward the intimations of earlier prenatal theoreticians, notably Rank and Fodor, on the gestational basis of archetypes. While he does not address or seek to discredit the range of, supposedly genetic, archetypes postulated by Jung, his work is highly suggestive of an experiential, specifically, pre- and perinatal, as opposed to genetic basis for many of these.

Denial and Incest Taboo

Mott (1960) also helped us to understand why if these prenatal memories are possible they are not more prevalent by suggesting denial is necessary in order to protect against incestuous feelings that might arise around feelings remembered from being inside one’s mother.

Devolutional Model of Consciousness Development

Finally, he made the postulation—hugely relevant to the theme of this work—that our original expanded capacity to feel is diminished, as he says, “divided,” by experience not increased by it. The idea is that there is a reduction in awareness as a result of early traumatic events, beginning around conception and then on, and not the buildup of consciousness and feeling that we assume from the mechanistic paradigm that sees consciousness as a byproduct of increasing physical, specifically brain, activity during our early years. (See, for example, The Doors of Perception: Each of Us Is Potentially Mind At Large… When Perception Is Cleansed, All Kinds of Nonordinary Things Happen and Occupy Science … A Call for a Scientific Awakening: In Tossing Away Our Species Blinders, We Approach a Truth Far Beyond Science.)

Later Theorists — Breathwork

Stanislav Grof — Breathwork, LSD, Birth and Prenatal, Myth and Archetype, Spiritual and Consciousness

A pioneer in this prenatal area is Stanislav Grof (1976, 1980, 1985, 1990, to name a few). His many works, providing a framework for conceptualizing perinatal and transpersonal experiences, are a profound and useful starting point for an investigation into this area.

In his use of LSD beginning in 1956 for psychotherapy, called psycholytic therapy, he discovered four levels of experience of the unconscious: the sensory, the biographical, the perinatal, and the transpersonal. He noted a tendency for growth and healing to occur in a progressive way through these levels. The sensory band is the level of expanded sensory awareness and is usually initially encountered by participants. The biographical band is the realm of the personal unconscious wherein unintegrated and traumatic memories and material from childhood and one’s personal history are retrieved, often relived, and integrated. The perinatal level of experience usually follows after dealing with the biographical material and involves the remembering, re-experiencing, and integrating of material that is related to the time prior to and surrounding birth. The transpersonal band, the level of spiritual experience, is usually reached after dealing with the other three levels.

Four Modes of Experiencing—the Basic Perinatal Matrices

Grof has also delineated four matrices of experience, four general experiential constructs, which he called basic perinatal matrices (BPMs). He discovered that experiences at all levels of the unconscious often group themselves in four general ways that are roughly related to the four stages of birth. Thus, Basic Perinatal Matrix I (BPM I) is related to the generally blissful or “oceanic” feelings that often characterize the fetus’s state in the womb in early and middle pregnancy. BPM II is characterized by “no exit,” hellish feelings that are related to the situation of the fetus in late pregnancy when the confines of the womb become ever more apparent but there is as yet no indication of any possibility of relief. BPM III relates to the birth process itself, the birth struggle, which is still characterized by feelings of compression and suffering but in which there is movement and change and thus hope of relief through struggle. If BPM II can be compared to hell, where there is no hope, BPM III is more like purgatory. Finally, BPM IV relates to the actual entry into the world, the termination of the birthing process, and is characterized by feelings of triumph, relief, and high, even manic, elation.

Because of their importance in understanding all else that follows in this work, I will return to provide a much more detailed elaboration of these matrices shortly, and it will in turn be further expanded upon in the chapters following.

In his descriptions of the levels of experience and the matrices of perinatal experience, Grof has provided useful maps of the unconscious and experience in nonordinary states, which have incredible heuristic value in our understanding of cross-cultural religious and spiritual experience, psychopathology, personal growth, and consciousness and personality in general. And they have been utilized successfully in providing a context and guide for many tens of thousands of participants in his psycholytic and holotropic therapies.

However, while Grof is exhaustive in his descriptions of fetal and perinatal experience, he says less about the earlier experiences in the womb—the first trimester—and even less about conception and the experiences of sperm and egg—what is known as cellular consciousness. Still, this area is beginning to be discussed among his followers. And through his current nondrug modality, called holotropic breathwork, people are accessing these areas and beginning to give word to them (e.g., Carter, 1993).

Frank Lake—Breathwork, First Trimester, Early Experience as Foundation for Myths

Frank Lake, though less well-known again, has probably been the premier theoretician on the topic of prenatal events during the first three months of gestation. Just prior to his death in the early eighties, he wrote a culmination of his thirty-year investigation into pre- and perinatal influence in two works titled Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling and The First Trimester. In these works he goes beyond his other works (for example, 1966) in placing the roots of all later experience, and in particular, distress, at the first three months of physical existence.

Lake began his investigation of re-experience in 1954. Like Stanislav Grof, he did this using LSD, initially, in the psycholytic therapy that was being developed at that time to facilitate therapeutic abreaction. Later he, again like Grof, developed a nondrug modality to accomplish the same thing. His method of “primal therapy” employed a type of fast breathing—again, like Grof’s later technique—to access theta-wave brain levels, which are levels of consciousness that he saw as crucial to accessing and integrating these memories.

His thirty-year research led him to the realization of the importance of ever earlier experience. Thus his earlier stress on the importance of birth gave way to his later emphasis on the first trimester in 1981 (Tight Corners in Pastoral Counselling) and in 1982 (The First Trimester).

He stressed the maternal-fetal distress syndrome, beginning at around implantation, as a major time of trauma. He also described a blastocystic stage of relative bliss just prior to that.

His one other major disagreement with Grof was his belief that the mythological and symbolical elements described by Grof were a product of LSD and that the first trimester events were the actual roots of much of such symbolism and supposed transpersonal/mythological scenarios (1981, p. 35).

Later Theorists — Myth and Sacred Text/Mysticism

S. Giora Shoham — Devolutional Model of Development, Falls from Grace

While not strictly a pre- and perinatal psychologist, I include this too little-known theoretician and criminologist because of the close relationship and influence his work has had upon my own work regarding the Falls from Grace. Falls from Grace and other devolutional models of consciousness postulate that during life and over time, beginning at conception, we actually are reduced in consciousness and awareness, not increased in it, and it corresponds to a “brain as reducing valve” theory of consciousness. (Again, See The Doors of Perception and Occupy Science.)

While I initially constructed and wrote down my devolutional theory of consciousness—Falls from Grace—without the benefit of Shoham’s work, upon discovering it I could not help but be both confirmed and reinspired by the astounding resonance his understanding has with my own.

Shoham (1979, 1990) starts his devolutional model in the womb and carries it through birth, weaning, and the oedipal periods of development. Though I disagree with his model by beginning mine at the creation of sperm and egg—as does other devolutional theorists like Francis Mott and David Wasdell—in virtually all other major instances his model corresponds to my own if one simply … in keeping with a normal trend in child development in general as it begins to integrate the new pre- and perinatal evidence … places everything back a little farther in time—in this case, specifically, one stage back.

Continue with The First Trimester, Cellular Memory and Conception, and Foundations of Myth and Personality: Your View of the World Was Stamped on You When You Were Just a Cell

Return to We Are a Fever, Part Two — The Evidence That Life’s Blueprint Is Written at Birth: Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Overview — Early Theorists, Psychoanalysis, and Birth

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The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe

Matter As Metaphor, Part One: Physical Realities as Metaphors for Inner Realities … The Physical World Is Our Indirect Perception of Psychic and Spiritual Realities

If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found. And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Physical Realities As Metaphors for Inner Realities

The modern day holy man from India, Sathya Sai Baba, explained, “He who seeks the Guru can find him in every word spoken within his hearing, in every incident that happens around him” (1991, p. 16).

There is every reason to believe that he meant this literally. And, considering that in this context “guru” had the meaning of God and the cosmic divinity, the statement bespeaks much more than that as well.

Lawlor (1989b) tells us how the Australian Aborigines’ idea that the world is a metaphor or imprint for a truer inner reality is the essential element in their world view. As he put it:

All of existence is the projection outward of internal, subjective states into objective ideas, forms, and substances; the Sky is the “dreaming” of the Earth. All life and all energies emerge from the Earth, even those we consider subtle and celestial. There is a constant exchange between the Earth and its dreaming. The stars in the sky are the spirit energy of beings who were born from, and who have lived on, Earth, just as all men emerge into the world from the female womb. These ancestral beings return from the dreaming (the starry firmament) as radiated light and heat, which generate new life on Earth.  The male sperm is analogous to this radiation as it fertilizes the female but, itself, was born from the female.  Our minds and imaginations are always attempting to listen to the voice returning from the starry ancestors and we then reimage them.  (p. 43, emphases mine)

In another place Lawlor (1992) phrases it: “The dreamtime creation myths of the Aborigines guided them to see the physical world as a language, as a metamorphosis of invisible spirit’s psychological and ethical realms” (p. 22).

Similarly, Laing (1988) tells us, “The whole world was once part of man’s psyche, but no longer” (p. 62).

This idea of the physical universe as reflecting and expressing our basic spiritual and psychological realities is a common perception and viewpoint of mystics of all traditions.  In the West, the twelfth century mystic, Hildegard, wrote about this vision of reality.  Of her, it’s been said, “Hildegard plainly uses physical laws as illustrations of spiritual truths” (Uhlein, 1991, p. 54).  And further on: “Physical images are most useful to Hildegard in comprehending the things of the soul” (p. 54).  This relates to the idea of physical reality as metaphor.

Another quote:

Like the Platonists, she understands the world to consist of four elements: fire and water, earth and wind.  She employs these pairs archetypically, to describe psychological traits and to create complex analogies for spiritual development.  (p. 54)

The point is that this is the same way in which we are talking about physical reality as metaphor: that in fact the world as we perceive it gives us lessons in underlying realities which are, in the absolute sense, more true; that, in actual fact, the psychological traits of which she speaks are simply reflected in nature in the form of earth, wind, fire, and water, and so on.

This perspective is expressed poetically this way:

Proving What?

How in autumn, even before the leaves fall,
When they’re all at their height of color,
Next year’s leaves are already there, tiny,
on either side of the stem of each leaf
where it meets the branch,
Already there, waiting,
Before the leaf that is still there
is dead and falls,
Tiny folded leafbudsheath
Resembling two hands in prayer
Palm to palm with fingers extended.

Proving what?
Life after death exists
even before you’re dead.

Or how when a redwood tree is cut down or blown over
It doesn’t die because the roots
Curl up out of the earth and become
new trees,
Each of which can grow to be
Just as tall just as old
as the tree which was there before.
It’d be as if you were cut off at the ankles
And your top taken away to make The Milwaukee Journal
And your toes curled into the ground and came up
as ten new “you’s — looking exactly like you
and being exactly like you.
And so a redwood you see now that’s 2000 years old
may’ve come from the root of a redwood that was
2000 years old
that may’ve come from the root of a redwood that was
2000 years old
so far back that it’s literally one million years old!
And that’s why they’re called Sequoia sempervirens,
ever-living.

Proving . . . what?
Even before you’re dead
life after death exists.  (Antler, 1991, p. 61)

At this point, I feel it is important to stress that I am proposing much more than that the physical world is a source of metaphors or analogies for expressing psychic and spiritual truths.  If this were all there were to it, I would be saying nothing more than that our perceptions of reality are a good poetic source, which is rather close to asserting nothing at all.

One’s Experience of Reality Is the Wisest and Most Beneficent of Teachers.

From the preceding chapters, it should be clear that what I am saying is that the physical world is our indirect perception (for direct perception, look within) of spiritual and psychic realities.  Hence, the physical world can not help but express the spiritual and psychic.  What I am saying is:  Look around yourself; the world is rife with messages, both personal and universal, relating to your place in the Universe, the meaning of our existence, the meaning of existence itself, and, most importantly, of guidance for getting us back hOMe.  If one is open to this possibility, the messages/truths are everywhere to be found.  And the Universe and one’s experience of Reality becomes the grandest, wisest, truest, and most beneficent of teachers.

Continue with Looking Deeply Into the Message of the World … and Siddhartha: Have You Also Learned the Secret of the River That There is No Time? Everything Has Reality and Presence.

Return to Humans Have Developed Language Because of Their Inability to Truly Communicate … We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity: Ritual as Shadow, Part Eleven

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The Template for All You Think Was Created at Birth: Overview of the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Field — Early Theorists, Psychoanalysis, and Birth

We Are a Fever, Part Two — The Evidence That Life’s Blueprint Is Written at Birth: Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology Overview — Early Theorists, Psychoanalysis, and Birth

Overview of the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Field—Early Theorists: Psychoanalysis and Birth

Sigmund Freud — Birth as Prototype for All Anxiety

While Freud (1927) disregarded major effects of birth on personality, he still saw the birth experience as the prototype of all later anxiety. His overall disregard of birth, however, was largely influenced by the belief—although discredited (see Chamberlain, 1988), still common in mainstream psychology and medicine today—that a newborn does not possess the neurological capacity for consciousness at birth.

Otto Rank — Psychoanalysis, Birth Trauma, Foundations of Personality and Some Myth, Separation Anxiety

Other early psychoanalysts disagreed with Freud on this. Otto Rank is the most notable of these. Following Freud’s basic psychoanalytic reasoning for personality patterns in early infancy, he asserted basic patterns of experience and ideas that are rooted in even earlier experience. Rank (1929) claimed the deepest, most fundamental patterns of these personality constructs originated at the time of birth, which Freud thought was not possible. Based upon the dream, fantasy, and other patterns of associations arising in his patients in psychoanalysis, Rank postulated a birth trauma, which he saw as a critical event in laying down in each of us particular patterns of thinking, motivation, and emotion for the rest of our lives. Notable among these prototypes was a feeling of a paradise once known but somehow lost, a separation anxiety caused by the separation at birth, and a resulting futile and lifelong struggle to re-unite with that golden age and that early beloved because of a desire to return to the womb.

Nandor Fodor — Dreamwork, Birth and Prenatal Processing and Relivings, Prenatal Origins of Consciousness and Trauma

Also a psychoanalyst, Fodor (1949) focused on the reflections of birth and prenatal material in dreams. He also designed interventions in therapy to release the negative effects of birth and to process prenatal memories. He was the first to mention actual relivings of birth, in which veridical memories were recovered. He agreed with Rank on many points, but he stressed the origins of consciousness and of trauma being in the prenatal period.

Donald W. Winnicott — First Primal Therapist? Birth Relivings, Importance of Birth—Negative Imprints but Positive Effects, Too 

Another psychoanalyst, and pediatrician as well, Winnicott (1958) also held that birth is remembered and is important. He insisted that the birth trauma is real, but he disagreed with Rank and Fodor that it is always traumatic. He suggested that a normal, nontraumatic, birth has many positive benefits, particularly for ego development. Still, he contended that traumatic birth is permanently etched in memory and leaves a lifetime psychological scar. Winnicott (1958) also suggested the possibility of prenatal trauma.

He has been called the first primal therapist in that he described the first birth primals—actual observable relivings of birth—spontaneously occurring by some of his patients during their sessions with him. Thus he was beginning the trend beyond mere talking association or dream analysis as ways of accessing and integrating this material.

Overview of the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Field — Later Research and Theorists: Hypnosis, Primal Therapy, and Birth

David Cheek and Leslie LeCron — Hypnosis, Birth Memories and Imprints on Personality and Relation to Psychiatric Disorders

Cheek and LeCron (1968) used hypnosis to retrieve early memories in their patients. They discovered that memories earlier than what they expected, going back to birth, were possible. Importantly, a relief of symptoms seemed to follow from the re-experience of these birth memories. They came to the conclusion that a birth imprint occurs, which is induced by the extreme stress of that time and is resistant to fading from later experience. Further they asserted that this imprint could be the cause of a wide spectrum of psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders.

Leslie Feher — Psychoanalysis, Birth, Cutting of Umbilical Cord, Separation Trauma

Feher (1980) sought to extend the Freudian tradition farther back into areas that, she asserts, were until only recently unknowable. Thus, she describes a natal theory and therapy that includes experiences of cutting the umbilical cord, birth, and even prebirth. In fact, she considers the cutting of the umbilical cord to be central in her theory of trauma, calling it the “crisis umbilicus,” and echoes Fodor in claiming that it is the true origin of the castration fears made so much of in psychoanalysis. This is so because, according to Feher, the cord and placenta is an object of security and is considered by the fetus to be part of him- or herself. Thus, this cutting represents a supreme threat in being a separation from a total life support system, a major organ, a part of oneself. In these ways, she also brings forward for renewed appreciation Rank’s speculations on the element of separation trauma as a crucial element of the birth trauma.

Arthur Janov — Primal Therapy, Traumas of Birth and Early Life and Healing Them, Empirical Foundations and Neurophysiology of Early Events and Healing 

Perhaps the major theorist and popularizer of the phenomenon of re-experience (which he termed primaling), Janov was reluctant to acknowledge the pervasiveness of pre- and perinatal re-experience and trauma. Yet when he did, it was in a major work on birth trauma, which remains as a touchstone in the field in its depth and detail. Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience, published in 1983, among other things places birth as the determining factor in creating basic personality constructs, called sympathetic and parasympathetic, which roughly coincide with the more common terms introversion and extroversion.

This work is more empirical and neurophysiologically rooted than most in the field. While the book is recognized in the field, Janov and his work have not gotten anywhere near the respect and attention that they deserve. He remains the unfortunate kicking-boy of a movement that is itself scapegoated by the academy and the larger scientific community.

Thomas Verny — Primal Therapy, Birth, Especially Womb Life and Relation to Personality … Prenatal Mother-Infant Bonding 

The actual stimulus for a new field of pre- and perinatal psychology and the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health—APPPAH was Thomas Verny’s (1981) The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. His work brought together a good deal of the new empirical research that had opened the doors to us on the events in the womb. While himself a practitioner of “holistic primal therapy,” he integrated the accumulating data from the phenomenon of re-experience with the new information from the more traditional, “objective,” scientific research into the prenatal—made possible by the latest advances in technology.

One of his conclusions from this combination of lines of inquiry was that “birth and prenatal experiences form the foundations of human personality” (1981, p. 118). His other conclusions center around the importance of intrauterine bonding in that his research strongly suggests that the prenate, via pathways hormonal and unknown, picks up on the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the mother. More importantly, he asserted, the imprint of these factors on the fetus predetermines the later mother-child relationship. He emphasized that positive thoughts and feelings toward the fetus—”maternal love”—acts to cushion the new individual against the normal stresses and unavoidable harshness inherent in birth and early infancy. Yet all of this cannot be completely avoided. “Birth is like death to the newborn,” writes Verny (1984, p. 48).

David Chamberlain — Hypnosis, Confirmed Validity of Birth Memories 

David Chamberlain (1988), for many years the president of APPPAH, has further substantiated the claim of consciousness at birth and the accuracy of pre- and perinatal memory in the phenomenon of re-experience. He reported one study he did in which he compared hypnotically retrieved memories of birth from mother and child and found an astonishing degree of conformity in their responses. Of note was the degree of inner consistency and originality in these memories as reported by the former neonate. They often contained technical details of the delivery and labor unlike what would be expected of the medically unsophisticated, a perceptive critique of the way the birth was handled, and other details of the event that could not have been known through normal conscious channels.

Overview of the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Field — Later Theorists: Societal Implications, Psychohistory, Birth and Prenatal

Lloyd deMause — Psychohistory, Prenatal and Poisonous Placenta, Sociohistorical Implications of Gestational and Birth Events 

Lloyd deMause (1982, 1987) was instrumental in establishing the new interdisciplinary field of psychohistory. In his study of historical happenings he discovered that stages in the progression of events related to stages in the progression of gestation and birth … which stages happened to correspond, by the way, remarkably well with Stanislav Grof‘s four stages of birth, his Basic Perinatal Matrices, as we shall see.

He found that natal imagery especially predominates in societies during times of crisis and war, when national purpose and state of affairs are construed as a need to escape or break free from an enclosing and constricting force. He also noted the suffering fetus and the poisonous placenta as sources of these later metaphors and imagery. In fact, in studying the imagery in the national media of various countries he has been able to predict political, social, and economic events such as wars and invasions, recessions, and political downfalls.

His work begins to look at the prenatal influences and imprints and how they related to macrocosmic issues of politics, history, social movements, and issues of war and peace. His work is extremely relevant to the issues of this book and we will be returning to him again and again in this work.

Continue with Everything You “Know” About Religion You Learned as a Fetus: We Are a Fever, Part Three — Later Prenatal Psychology Theorists — Breathwork, Myth, and Consciousness

Return to We Are a Fever, Part One: Perinatal Psychology, the Phenomenon of Re-Experience, and my Personal Involvement with This Research into Our Actual “Human Nature”

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Humans Have Developed Language Because of Their Inability to Truly Communicate … We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity: Ritual as Shadow, Part Eleven

Language Versus True Communication: Language Is Communication Metaphor and With Its Absence Comes a Greater Ability for Psychic Communication

Language As Communication Metaphor … It Is a Reflection of Real Communication

In the same way that ritual is a reflection of experience and is not real experience — that it is an attempt to “magically” evoke real experience and instead prevents real experience by filling up with falsity the psychic space and existential moment in which real experience could happen — so also language is only a reflection of real communication, is only a pseudo-communication, which not only substitutes for the real thing but also prevents the real thing from happening by filling up the space available.

Real Communication

But then what might that real communication be? To discover that, it might be helpful to go back to the times and places where language is not available for communication. These times are (1) the preverbal state of the human fetus and infant, (2) the preverbal state of our primate progenitors, (3) the nonverbal state of various sages who have adopted this mode, and (4) the nonverbal state in meditation or other altered states of consciousness.

What is characteristic of all these states — to the extent we can know it — is that with the absence of the substitute of language comes a greater ability and awareness of psychic communication — that is, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, empathy . . . you name it. This is widely accepted as true for sages, of course. And it is fairly well established for meditators.

But we are finding it is true of many similar nonverbal states produced by various consciousness-altering techniques — for example, primal therapy, holotropic breathwork, rebirthing, the ingestion of LSD. That it may also be true of the preverbal state of the fetus and infant is also gaining acceptance, both because of the experiences of those in the various regression psychotherapies who’ve reexperienced those times and their accompanying states, as well as the accumulation of empirical data.¹

Now, as for our primate progenitors, we must speculate. But we can do so based upon some important trends. One is the tendency for greater psychic communicative ability to be characteristic of current “primal” peoples, who are less split from Nature, and thus closer to our primate “biological” foundations, than is the average dissociated Westerner. The other is the argument and the evidence presented by the provocative work on the “bicameral mind” (Jaynes, 1976).

We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity

Anyway, the point of all of this is that we see a tendency for greater “direct” communication to occur (to be possible) in situations where less overt communication is being done. Is it possible then that those who we think of as having no language are language-less because of no need for language? Here again we have an example of where the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” philosophy may apply. And here again we show the human species’s unerring tendency — a characteristically neurotic one — to go mucking where there is no need to, as a substitute for attending where the need truly is (that is, focusing on the spiritual), to therefore go substituting pseudo and desperately frenetic activity for real activity.

Footnote

1. See “Are Telepathy, Clairvoyance and ‘Hearing’ Possible In Utero? Suggestive Evidence as Revealed During Hypnotic Age-Regression Studies of Prenatal Memory” by David B. Cheek, M.D.

Chapter Two — Ritual As Shadow References

Adzema, Michael. (1993a). Being NOT O.K.: Child-“Rearing” in the Patriarchy and the Third Fall From Grace. Unpublished manuscript. P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446.

Adzema, Michael. (1993b). Falls From Grace: Child ‘Development’ in Transpersonal Context and a Devolutional Model of Consciousness. Unpublished manuscript. P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446.

Cheek, David B. (1992). Are telepathy, clairvoyance and ‘hearing’ possible in utero? Suggestive evidence as revealed during hypnotic age-regression studies of prenatal memory. Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, 7(2), 125-138.

French, Marilyn. (1985). Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals. New York: Ballantine Books.

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Grof, Stanislav and Grof, Christina. (1989). (eds.) Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Goldberg, Herb. (1983). The New Male-Female Relationship. New York: New American Library/ Signet.

Halifax, Joan. (1993). The world wound. The Quest, 6(1), 16-23.

Hesse, Hermann. (1965). Demian. New York: Bantam.

Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Jones, Roger S. (1992). Time for a change. MindField: A Quarterly Source Journal for Consciousness, 1(3), 53-86.

Keyes, Ken. (1982). The Hundredth Monkey. Coos Bay, OR: Vision Books.

Lawlor, Robert. (1989). Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.

Lawlor, Robert. (1989). Sexuality and the universe evolving. New Frontier, November, 1989, 9-10, 43.

Lawlor, Robert. (1992). Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International.

Mack, John E. (1992). Other realities: The “alien abduction” phenomenon. Noetic Sciences Review, No. 23, Autumn 1992, 5-11.

McKenna, Terence. (1991). The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco: Harper-Collins.

Roberts, Jane. (1972). Seth Speaks. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall/ Bantam.

Roszak, Theodore. (1992). Mind in the cosmos: Agnosticism and the anthropic principle. MindField, 1(3), 87-127.

Roszak, Theodore. (1992). The Voice of the Earth. Simon & Schuster.

Rubin, Theodore Isaac (1983). One to One: Understanding Personal Relationships. New York: Pinnacle.

Sheldrake, Rupert. (1991). The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God. New York: Bantam.

Starhawk. (1989). The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Tarnas, Richard. (1991). The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View. New York: Harmony Books.

Terry, Sara. (1992). Alien territory. The Boston Sunday Globe, The Boston Globe Magazine, October 11, 1992, 20-27.

Thompson, Keith. (1991). Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.

Thompson, Keith. (1989). The UFO encounter experience as a crisis of transformation. In S. Grof and C. Grof (eds.): Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

White, John. (1990). The Meeting of Science and Spirit. New York: Paragon House.

Wilber, Ken. (1981). Up from Eden. New York: Anchor Books.

Continue with The World Is Rife with Messages — Personal and Universal — Regarding the Meaning of Existence, Our Place in the Universe, and Guidance for Getting Us hOMe

Return to Consciousness Expansion Is Inevitable in Human Development … We Will Always and Everywhere Do and Be What Is Perfect: Ritual As Shadow, Part Ten — The Psyche Heals Itself

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“Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part Three: Sins of the Fathers. Our Combined Energies Constitute an Incredible Force.

“Sure It’s Hard! But Always Are We Here Helping You,” Part Three: Sins of the Fathers. Our Combined Energies Constitute an Incredible Force.

Summary of “Sure It’s Hard But Always Are We Here Helping You”: This details the spiritual experience I had in 1980 which set me on this path to help the planet and the planetmates. I was shown by certain entities the path of our devolution as a species, thousands of years ago, and was told that we need to turn this around immediately. I was told that there were many others at work right now doing the same thing, so I need never despair, at the immensity of the task. Most importantly, I was told that we are receiving help… always…in our efforts. I was led to believe that these higher powers, of which we are yet to know, are fully engaged in our endeavor on this planet and assisting us at every turn.  [Footnote 1]

Sins of The Father

Regardless of how you may wish to label the preceding experience, it remains one whose message has stayed with me through all the intervening years, a message that has rung true and helped me through other difficult spaces.  In fact, I still reflect on it and can’t help believing there is a lot to it.  Consider:  Generation after generation of Western culture has engaged (with little awareness of the consequences) in passing down their personal pain and trauma, in some form or other, onto their offspring.  And they in turn dump it on theirs.  We know that child abusers were themselves abused as children; but this is just a very blatant example of how the pattern operates.  On and on and back through into hazy unrecorded history this situation has existed; this vicious cycle has perpetuated itself.

But many of us in these extraordinary times, and goaded on by the specter of global catastrophe, for one thing are saying:  “Let it end with me!”; “Let us not continue this madness any further!”  Attempting to break the cycle of “kill and be killed,” of hurting and then inflicting hurt, attempting to halt the prevailing insanity, we make the Gandhian effort to take the energy into ourselves, to change ourselves lest we, also, be like the generation before — forever passing on the insane legacy.

So why should we think this would be easy?!  We are trying to bring to an end, in our single lifetimes, the accumulated results of untold generations of our ancestors dumping their pain and insanity onto their descendants.

But Always Are We Here Helping

So of course it’s hard!  And for me to realize this fact allows me to accept it.  That is, it allows me to accept this task and to take up my place in the ranks of those arrayed in the purpose of undoing the craziness rather than to turn away in despair at the immensity of the task or to quaver in paralysis before it.

This experience has also provided me with a wonderful outlook on the people around me.  I look around to the many people who are working spiritually to change themselves and this crazy world — who are serving, mending, and healing others and themselves.  In doing so I have this sense of brother/sisterhood — that we are all engaged in an immense undertaking . . . that we are synergizing our energies in an endeavor which is not merely crucial, it is imperative . . . not just for our personal growth, for our personal satisfaction or well-being — although that’s not to be discounted — it is necessary for the very survival of this planet.

I feel that if this task had been easier it would have been done long ago by well-intentioned ancestors.  Indeed, it may only be because the survival of this planet is now at stake that substantial numbers of us have at this point, finally, accepted the challenge.

Many of us are aware of the seeming intractability of the situation we face — both personally and globally.  But what I feel now is not so much the despair at the difficulty of the task but rather, because of what I was taught through this experience, I feel a sense of belongingness, cosmic belongingness, if you will . . . a sense that I’m not alone.  I feel that many others are working at this same thing in this day and age.  Our combined energies — along with the energies of the Universe that are working with us — together constitute an incredible force.  Confronted with the enterprise we have before us, this force may just be sufficient to do on this planet what has never been done before here (as far as we know).

So to all who occasionally despair, I can only repeat, “Sure it’s hard, but always are we here helping you.”

Continue with We Are a Fever, Part One: Perinatal Psychology, the Phenomenon of Re-Experience, and my Personal Involvement with This Research into Our Actual “Human Nature”

Return to A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.

Footnote

1. Journal Entry Complete. Just as it was written over thirty years ago. For those interested in hearing the entire experience:

Journal Entry of June 28, 1980:

I was lying in bed last night with Maddie. Couldn’t sleep, air conditioner too loud. Suddenly I was aware of all this energy coursing through my body. Was really scaring me. My body zinging, intense ringing (buzzing?) in my ears, rushes flowing through me. Was scared I was going crazy, would hurt Maddie, would become possessed or something, etc. Tried focusing on my third eye so as to control it like I did in Portland.

That may have helped some, but I could sense, and was scared of, other “presences” in the room. I thought I heard a woman’s voice behind me over my left shoulder and that scared me. Without realizing the transition, I found myself projected into this panorama of history and a woman’s voice was narrating.

She described how once there had lived “noble” beings. I could see vast and colorful panoramas of peoples exuding “nobility” and “integrity” (for want of better words to describe what they were like). They walked and paraded before me and were all around me. Then the woman explained that the peoples degenerated and, as if in demonstration, I began seeing battles and wars played out before my eyes. I was in the midst of them!

However, I was still aware that I was in my body lying on my bed, because I could feel myself against it. Even so I was afraid that I would begin taking on the bodies of participants in the battles and would feel pain like they were obviously feeling. This feeling was especially strong when I was in the midst of the convergence of two groups of warring parties (their garb reminded me of Israelites or people of Biblical times or something). The group I was facing were going at each other with hatchets and I was afraid of becoming a participant and possibly feeling an ax chunking into my neck or skull. But although it was happening all around me, nobody in the crowd noticed me; it was as if I wasn’t there. In fact at one point I believe they actually may have passed through me!

This scene passed, along with other dramas, and it was explained to me that now it was time for a regeneration of peoples on this “plane[?]” to regain their former “nobility[?],” “integrity[?]” (again for lack of better words).

Still feeling that I was conscious, i.e., knowing that it was all happening to me while I was really lying in bed; I let myself walk through many landscapes and terrains, which I felt I could easily have lived in at one time and which I felt had all existed at some time or place or did now exist somewhere in the world or Universe. I walked through small shack towns. I remember a small group of bedraggled people huddled together in one. There were many kinds of pastoral settings also: some beautiful with rolling, lush hills, and some not as beautiful — rocky terrain, etc. All seemed to be viable habitats for different people. I had the thought that these may have been places/lives that I had lived in at one time.

Certain places brought up bad feelings in me, foreboding, scared feelings. In fact it can be said that the whole time it was happening I was scared about the experience. I feared meeting some dangerous and evil entity or being stuck in an undesirable place. When I was in one particular environ/habitat that wasn’t very pleasant, I remembered something that Seth had said about consciously altering and changing his environment. In line with that I decided to stop believing in the one that I was in and see what happened.

What happened was that environment went away and then there was a blank grayness as I waited for a new scene to appear. I continued to be aware that I was in a trancelike state and that I had a body lying in bed. I would at times vaguely return to the feeling in my body and would feel myself on my back, hands and arms outstretched, mattress against my back, in a very deep state of relaxation and suspended animation which had a feeling of heaviness or deadness about it. My body didn’t need to move and it was perfectly comfortable.

I could hear the air conditioner running, also, and even Maddie’s breathing next to me. Several times, I don’t remember exactly when, Maddie had reached over and put her arm around me, both times only for an instant, before she rolled back away from me. Neither of the times did it disturb the deep state that I was in or cause me to rise at all out of it. I simply felt warm and good towards her at the affection she was showing me. I even had the thought that, considering the fact that she only did it for a moment before turning away, that somehow she knew what was going on, in some deeper, nonconscious part of herself, and was reassuring or encouraging me.

Anyway, I was securely very deep and felt that I wasn’t going to be suddenly disturbed from it unless, perhaps, I let it. But I really didn’t want to do that. I was rather scared and apprehensive most of the time, as mentioned, but, more importantly, it was all so damned interesting! There is no doubt that I was thoroughly enjoying the color, the panorama, the expanse and freedom of consciousness, the fact that I was experiencing something important and that I had never experienced before, so that I dearly wanted to stay there despite the fear.

Sometime after the gray place, I believe it was, I was aware of some kind of light far off in the distance that I could travel to if I liked. At around that time I could hear Maddie saying to somebody (about my body in bed): “Is he moving at all? Is he breathing? Do you think he’s dead?” and so on. I remember thinking to myself how silly that sounded and that “No, I’m not dead, I’m just in this deep trance and everything.” But then suddenly I began to wonder if maybe I was dead! It had all been so strange that maybe I had actually died in my sleep!

At that point I recalled the accounts I’d heard and read about of people dying and not knowing they were dead, how they would often hang around and watch other people’s reaction to their death (and this could go on for days). I remembered how Steve had once told me something to the extent that if that should happen that one shouldn’t get carried away and fascinated by the after-death state but that one should “get down on one’s knees” (figuratively speaking) and search out the source and the presence of God. Thinking that was perhaps when I actually looked around and saw the light.

At any rate, I found myself wondering if I wanted to be dead. This place was certainly an interesting one, even with the apprehensions. And it sure seemed to be a change (so far, anyway) from the constant struggling to survive and grow. But I also felt that there were just so many loose ends left unresolved in my life. There were so many areas that I’d made good progress in but had not yet taken to completion. My love for Maddie (next to me), which was only just beginning, came to my mind as an example.

And so I decided to find out if I was dead or not, both to know if I should go heading for the light (if I was) or to reassure Maddie (if I wasn’t). I determined to get into my body and, with an effort and strain, I forced myself up from the depths, forcing my body to move and sit up. I was mildly surprised to find that I was able to do this, bringing myself into physicality and into a half-sitting position. In this position I looked over to see Maddie sleeping next to me, I could hear the air conditioner whining, and so forth. I realized then that she hadn’t “physically” been sitting over me, talking about me, but I also felt that some part of her must have. (We used to have this thing when we slept together that often we would feel like we had been communicating with each other on some kind of subconscious level the whole night long. We wouldn’t ever remember all that we had said but we would often both remark about it the next morning).

Realizing that I wasn’t dead, I lay back down and let myself drift back into the deepness. All I remember, after this point, is talking to Maddie, probably about what had happened to me, explaining it to her, though I’m not sure that was all of it. Also I remember at least one other time, maybe two, forcing myself to waking consciousness to see if Maddie was awake (as if in an experiment), because it really seemed that we were actually, physically awake and talking to each other. I thought we were lying in bed physically talking. It was hard to believe it when I forced myself awake only to find her lying beside me asleep.

After that there were some actual dreams, quite different from what had been going on earlier. I fell into sleeping and dreamed of being in my Grandmother’s home. I remember reading a book, sitting in a chair in her kitchen. There were other people there also; they were sitting in the same kind of straight-backed, none-too-comfortable wooden chairs.

---

I remember that early on, when I was doing all the traveling and stuff, that I didn’t know how I’d possibly remember all the experiences that happened to me and all the things that I saw and learned. It seemed like a lot of time was crammed into that short period. I remembered hoping just that I would retain as much of it as I could, especially hoping that I wouldn’t just blot it all out as it felt important.

Don’t Despair, There Are Others Doing It With You, and We’re Here, Too

I feel like the meaning of the part about the regeneration of the peoples on this plane was an answer to my despair at working on getting through my feelings. It’s like it was saying: “Sure it’s hard! What you’re talking about is the reversal of hundreds of generations of degenerate and violent habit, custom, and activity. But we’re talking about changing that also, and you’re not the only one working at it. There are many others in your time period struggling to do it just like you.”

And the feeling that left me with was/is “So don’t despair. There are others like you doing it, and we’re (out here) helping you too.”

Continue with We Are a Fever, Part One: Perinatal Psychology, the Phenomenon of Re-Experience, and my Personal Involvement with This Research into Our Actual “Human Nature”

Return to A Cosmic Slap: I Was Told “Once There Lived “Noble” Beings” and Now Is the Time for a Regeneration of Peoples to Regain What We Lost.

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Consciousness Expansion Is Inevitable in Human Development … We Will Always and Everywhere Do and Be What Is Perfect: Ritual As Shadow, Part Ten — The Psyche Heals Itself

Spiritual Process Encompasses All Experience — the Agonies and Ecstasies — and Harmonizes All Reality Toward Our Unique Unfolding on a Path of Exquisiteness

Ritual Bonds One with Society, Not Self

So the upshot is that ritual is not a reunion with self, it is a reinforcement of the separation from self.

And why societies have these reenactments is for the person to bring forward and bring to bear those memories of an important and traumatic time—one’s birth—and associate it with coming more into alignment with society and its needs … that is, as if to die a little more to one’s real self and to create or birth a fake self in line with and to the liking of one’s culture.

The most obvious example of that is the way men and women are turned into killers and pawns of society through the elaborate rituals of becoming soldiers, as in boot camp. This is exactly the opposite of real inner transformation, which happens in a non-ritual-like manner and in which one “dies” to some elaborate act outs in society and culture—as they say, it is the giving up of “desires” or the relinquishing of false hopes and cherished dreams—and is reborn into one’s real self, rediscovering one’s real potentials and connection with Nature and the Divine.

 The Psyche Heals Itself

For what may be most essential, at this critical time, is to learn to be a little humbler in our belief that we know what’s to be done. It was our controlling all-knowingness that compelled us to seek to rearrange Nature in our image in the first place. Maybe we should step back a bit from that attitude when we seek now to change that, instead of thinking to add this change of consciousness, like one more project, one more conquest, to our ego-nurturing list of achievements.

Maybe what is needed now is to stop doing, to stop ritualizing . . . to simply leave ourselves open to learning. It may be that what we need to learn is not another technique, another how-to this or that, but a simple letting be, of oneself, of allowing.

a natural psychological consciousness expansion is inevitable in human development … in giving up the struggle, the constant trying, out of fear of some consequences, or other, one falls into a process beyond oneself. 

For what we are discovering is that a natural psychological consciousness expansion is inevitable in human development; that in giving up the struggle, the constant trying, out of fear of some consequences, or other, one falls into a process beyond oneself.

This may erupt initially in the form of a “spiritual emergency.” But this is only a seeming emergency and is actually a spiritual emergence; it is not a breakdown but a breakthrough — a real one.

we will always and everywhere do and be what is needed, what is exactly perfect 

Gurus, shamans, and experiential pioneers of all stripes have noted the importance of accessing a spiritual process that pervades all aspects of one’s experience. In surrendering and trusting totally, in this way, we open up. And then what arises is always different from what we expect and includes all sorts of phenomena and experiences, all linked to our growth and resolving our blocks.

We begin to learn an attitude of surrender to process. That we can throw ourselves, time and again, into Experience and still, somehow, be upheld and even embraced, despite ourselves, gives us confidence in a beneficent Universe and allows us to foster surrender in all situations — knowing with a fuller knowing our link to the Divine, that we will always and everywhere do and be what is needed, what is exactly perfect at that particular time.

leaving ourselves open to Experience in any way that it should choose to teach us is what is required

Leaving ourselves open to Experience in any way that it should choose to teach us is what is required. Placing ourselves, for reasons of growth, into ritualistic situations that control, limit, and preordain the intensity and type of experience that one will have is to reinforce the problem.

The problem is control, is fear of the unexpected. And in this respect archaic rituals are as useless and time-wasting — and as likely to preclude, through immersion in the hypnotically familiar — as are more modern rituals such as evening TV-watching and the 9-to-5 daily routine.

The only major difference is that archaic rituals have currently the mystique about them of the mysterious and the mystically powerful. So in this aspect they are even more harmful in that they foster the illusion of growth, through the eliciting of pseudo-experience, and thereby make even more unlikely that one will be motivated toward surrendering to one’s authentic experience.

spiritual process takes over, leading us onward to more encompassing realms. The psyche “heals” itself, if only allowed to do so

Thus, what is most necessary is to simply “be” where we are “at.” And to be most fully where we are means to be most fully in process — to be in touch with the underlying flow that is the epigenetic protagonist of healing and creation, growth and transcendence. And once attuned to process, one can “be here” while working, walking, making love, or moongazing. For spiritual process takes over, leading us onward to more encompassing realms. The psyche “heals” itself, if only allowed to do so, and in a miraculously synchronous way that is reminiscent of the way the body does.

This spiritual process is a natural flow of creation that encompasses all experience, the agonies and ecstasies of existence, and harmonizes all of reality, both internal and external, in a pattern that is unique for every individual and oriented toward one’s patient unfolding in the path of exquisiteness.

Continue with Humans Have Developed Language Because of Their Inability to Truly Communicate … We Substitute Pseudo for Real Activity: Ritual as Shadow, Part Eleven

Return to Vision Quests, UFO Abductions, Brainwashings, and Boot Camps: Ritual As Shadow, Part Nine — Initiation, Authentic and Inauthentic

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