Cellular Consciousness and The Chonyid Bardo: “Like a Prodigal Child, I Had Run Away from my Macrocosmic Home and Imprisoned Myself in a Narrow Microcosm.” (Paramahansa Yogananda)

The Creation of Space, the Primary Dualism, and “the Appearance of Peaceful and Wrathful Deities”: The First Fall From Grace, Sperm/Egg and Conception, Part One

First Fall From Grace

According to Wilber (1977), the primary dualism is the separation that first creates self and Other. Based upon both personal experience and study of several experiential growth modalities, I submit that this first fall from grace, the primary dualism, correlates ontogenetically with the phase of biological conception, more specifically with the creation of sperm and egg. Earlier I called this the first shutdown, which is the first time we have narrowed our consciousness, and I quoted Yogananda (1946), “Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm” (p. 168).

Wilber (1977) describes the characteristics of the primary dualism: “[T]his separation of subject from object marks the creation of space: the Primary Dualism itself creates space” (p. 120).

At the level of Mind, or Void, there is no form:

The Absolute Subjectivity is sizeless or spaceless, and therefore infinite; but with the rise of the Primary Dualism, the subject is illusorily separated from the object, and that separation, that “gap” between seer and seen, is nothing more than space itself. Man, in identifying exclusively with his organism as separated from his environment, necessarily creates the vast and grand illusion of space, the gap between man and his world. (Wilber, 1977, p. 120)

At the time of conception—specifically, with the creation of sperm and ovum—we have the emergence of form out of no-thing-ness (so to speak). That is, that there is the awareness of a separate thingness where before there was none. This awareness is referred to as cellular consciousness (Buchheimer, 1987; Farrant, 1987; Larimore, 1990a, 1990b). The memory we have of it is the earliest one we have of form within the frame of this particular physical form.

Cellular consciousness also relates to the beginnings of the Chonyid bardo, which, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and reported by Wilber (1980, pp. 165-172), is a “period of the appearance of peaceful and wrathful deities” (p. 165). These appearances are caused by a contraction against the Clear Light, which transforms that Reality into “primordial seed forms of the peaceful deities (cf., Grof’s BPM I level of experience in the womb) and these in turn, if resisted and denied, are transformed into the wrathful deities” (p. 165) (cf., Grof’s BPM II and III levels of pre- and perinatal experience—but more about these processes in the next sections). This is the time when—having missed the opportunity for mergence with the Clear Light during the Chikhai bardo, which occurs after death of the previous incarnation—one begins fleeing into form once again, attracted by the “impure lights” and “substitute gratifications” (p. 166).

That a separate consciousness exists here, at this cellular level, at least in the “reflections” that we call memory, is also evident in the research of psychedelics (Grof, 1976, 1980, 1985; Masters and Houston, 1967), in the re-experience that occurs in experiential psychotherapy and in the memory retrieval acquired through hypnosis (Gabriel (1992); Wambach, 1979). [Footnote 1].

The Breaking of the Vessels and the Scattering of the Divine Sparks

Shoham’s (1990) primary phase of separation is birth.

Nevertheless, with the additional perspective of pre- and perinatal psychology and of experiential psychotherapy we can add to and alter this formulation. Shoham writes, “In the first phase of separation, man is ejected from the comfortable womb and cruelly exposed to the elements in a manner that was recorded mytho-empirically in the Kabbalist catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels” (p. 35). Of course, I disagree with this. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, in the first phase of separation the individual leaves the godhead and generates form in the creation of sperm and ovum.

That the interpretation of the myth needs to placed farther back in time, into the womb, is indicated even in Shoham’s words, where he speaks of a “theurgic symbiosis and partnership between man and God” (p. 35). “Symbiosis” relates to the flow in <—> flow out feeling described as characterizing the BPM I or blissful womb state, i.e., before birth. It is indeed correct to describe this time also as a “partnership between man and God” in that the fetus feels that all its needs are immediately responded to as well as it partakes of the emotional-psychic field of its mother (the experiential analogue of whom is “God”).

Continue with In the Beginning, the “Thin Pipe From Infinity” … “Emanated Light Into the World”: We Begin with “Contraction” … Biological and Spiritual … How We Tell Ourselves That in Myth

Return to Mythology Tells the Tale of Our Lives as Cells: “Whatever Happened to Us in the Amnestic Years … Is Projected Toward Cosmogony, Magic, and Other Human Beings.”

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Footnote

1. Evidence from experiential psychotherapy is from Graham Farrant’s work as reported by him at various PPPANA conferences, in Aesthema (January 1987) and in the International Primal Association Newsletters, winter and summer, 1990; in works such as Gabriel, 1992; Hannig, 1982; Lake, 1981, 1982; and Noble, 1993; and from personal experience in primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork, among many other sources.

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

 

Continue with In the Beginning, the “Thin Pipe From Infinity” … “Emanated Light Into the World”: We Begin with “Contraction” … Biological and Spiritual … How We Tell Ourselves That in Myth

Return to Mythology Tells the Tale of Our Lives as Cells: “Whatever Happened to Us in the Amnestic Years … Is Projected Toward Cosmogony, Magic, and Other Human Beings.”

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

“Whatever Happened to Us in the Amnestic Years … Is Projected Toward Cosmogony, Magic and Other Human Beings”: Mythology Tells the Tale of Our Lives as Cells

Our Myths Reveal Our Earliest Life, Going Back to Before Conception: Biology As Mythology, Part Four: Mytho-Empiricism and Our Devolution of Consciousness

Mytho-Empiricism and Biology As Mythology

Finally, mythology provides clues as to the events of these times. Shoham (1990) is one in particular who has made this case. Putting forth an approach at meaning which he calls “mytho-empiricism,” he writes, “Mytho-empiricism is the utilization of myths not as illustrations of our theoretical premises but as their actual empirical anchors” (p. 34). He goes on to point out that scholars of myths have always regarded myths as reliable and faithful revelations of patterns of events that occurred prior to recorded history. Acknowledging that they can reflect patterns of events that are not otherwise accessible, he makes his case that the events that these myths are most actually reflecting are those of the earliest times in one’s individual … as opposed to cultural or collective … life. Thus, he writes,

[O]ur methodological anchor . . . is the conception of myths as projections of personal history. Individuals are aware of their personalities as the sole existential entity in their cognition. Therefore, myths cannot be divorced from the human personality. This awareness of existence is the only epistemological reality. Whatever happened to us in the amnestic years and even later is projected toward cosmogony, magic, and other human beings. The events that happened in the highly receptive amnestic years have been recorded by the human brain. Events that happened after the amnestic years may be recalled cognitively, but whatever happened within these first years of life would be played back , inter alia, by myths of cosmogony. Myths as personal history may therefore be regarded as the account of some crucial developmental stages in the formative years. (1979, p. 21)

Correlation Between the Ontogenetic and the Phylogenetic

He notes that there is a correlation, however, between the early individual and the early historical events:

Moreover, human development in the early formative years covers, in an accelerated manner, all the evolutionary phases of the species. Consequently, myths are also a projection of the development of the species as inherent in the development of the human individual. . . . That is, every human being experienced the Original Sin in his own development, so that the myth of the Fall is indeed a projection of an individual, yet universal, human developmental experience. (1990, p. 35)

I point this out because while in this part — Part Two — I will be using myths to indicate patterns of early individual events, in Part Three I will bring them to bear as additional perspective on some of the early events of our species.

Relative Universality of Myths Correlated With Importance in Ontogeny

Shoham (1990) qualifies his claims for the reliability of mythic projections by noting the obvious deduction that myths can vary in the degree to which they accurately project the common early experiences of the individual and that a good indicator of their reliability as regards universal patterns of early experience is the relative universality of the particular myth’s appearance:

Myths, however, become archetypal projections of human experience only when they are widespread. The more common a human developmental experience, the greater its chances of becoming a mythical projection. The inverse is also valid: the more widespread a myth, the greater the chances that it is a projection of a widespread or even universal phase of human development. The universality of the Fall myth, for instance, points to the fact that its corresponding developmental phase, the expulsion of the separate self from the pantheistic togetherness of early orality, is indeed experienced by every human being. (1990, p. 35)

Separant-Fusion Personality Dialectic

The personality theory derived from such a mytho-empirical base constructs the person as embodying two radically opposed tendencies—one the desire for fusion and the other for separation:

Our personality theory envisages two core vectors, participation and separation . By participation, we mean the identification of ego with a person(s), an object, or a symbolic construct outside itself and the striving of the ego to lose its separate identity by fusion with this other, object or symbol. Separation is the opposite vector. These two vectors of unification-fusion and separation-isolation form the main axis of our personality theory. (Shoham, 1990, p. 33)

Stagelike “Degression”

It also puts forth a stagelike progression (or “degression”), created by these various earliest instances of separation or splitting off. The creation of these phases through splitting is remarkably like the creation of the spectrum of consciousness by the various splittings, creating the various dualities, that Wilber (1977) describes. The major difference is that Wilber’s contention is the building up of these in the Sole Eternal Moment and Shoham’s in the course of one’s earliest existence … Wilber’s as creating the consciousness in the Moment and Shoham’s as creating the personality. Shoham (1990) describes the progression:

The first phase is the process of birth. The second phase is the crystallization of an individual ego by the molding of the “ego boundary.” The third phase of separation is a corollary of socialization, during which, according to Erikson, one’s “ego identity” is reached. (p. 33)

And to these Shoham later adds a fourth.

Stages Beginning at Conception, Not Birth

In the chapters to follow, I will be presenting just such a progression, rather devolution, following the phases of early biological experience and correlating it both with the psychological development of the ego and personality development in general in a manner akin to Shoham’s as well as to the building up of the spectrum of consciousness according to Wilber.

However, the major difference between my progression and Shoham’s is that I start at conception as the first phase of separation and he starts at birth. In fact, I take Shoham’s phases and place them one step back, so to speak. His birth scenario becomes what I see to be conception; his early orality phase, my phase of birth. At the third phase we begin to coincide in that both of our third phases coincide with the phase of socionormative indoctrination that reaches its peak at around the age of four. And finally our fourth stages are also identical in depicting the puberty or identity phase.

I make these differences from Shoham for compelling reasons. For one thing, what Shoham gives as an example of birth in mythology is actually much more like conception. It is so much more like conception that I feel he would also have placed it there if he had not, in following mainstream ego psychologists and outdated Freudian notions, been led to believe that neither consciousness or memory can exist from that far back. Therefore, I feel he makes this mistake only because he is operating on the basis of mainstream psychology and an outdated psychoanalysis that sees the beginnings of psychic life only at birth.

It is not surprising he makes this mistake as it is only in the more recent field of pre- and perinatal psychology that we see the beginnings of psychic life going back into the womb and, in some understandings (including my own), to before conception. But with this understanding of where the beginning truly lies, his framework, his mythically expressed ontology, becomes strikingly fitted with the biological events. In altering his framework in this way, then, the following chapters will incorporate, for additional elucidation and perspective, the mytho-empirical light he sheds.

Continue with Cellular Consciousness and The Chonyid Bardo: “Like a Prodigal Child, I Had Run Away from my Macrocosmic Home and Imprisoned Myself in a Narrow Microcosm.” (Paramahansa Yogananda)

Return to Morphogenetic Fields Theory Makes Genetics Obsolete and Unnecessary … and Cellular Memory Understandable: The Theories of Morphic Resonance and “Prior Conditions”

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Biology and Mythology in Pictures. Chronological Order

Egg Experience. Inside Mother

Sperm Experience: Inside Father

Sperm Experience: Ejaculation

Sperm Experience: Sperm Journey

Sperm-Egg Encounter Experience: Coming Together of Sperm and Egg.

 

Conception Experience: Sperm Enters Egg

Conception Experience. Sperm’s Head “Explodes” … Joining of Sperm and Egg DNA

After Conception Experience. Remaining Sperm Die Off

Fertilized Egg/Zygote and Blastocyst Experience. Cells Multiply Euphorically

Implantation Experience. Implants Into Uterine Wall

Womb Experience

Birth Experience

(lol)

Biology as Metaphor, Biology as Mythology References

Adzema, Michael. (1985). A primal perspective on spirituality. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25(3), 83-116.

Adzema, Michael. (1993c). Womb With a View: Spiritual Aspects of Prenatal Experience. Unpublished manuscript. P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446.

Adzema, Michael. (1993d). Cells With a View: Spiritual and Philosophical Aspects of Sperm and Egg Experience. Unpublished manuscript. P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446.

Gardiner, Patrick. (1967). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). In Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Grof, Stanislav. (1976). Realms of the Human Unconscious. New York: Dutton.

Grof, Stanislav. (1980). LSD Psychotherapy. Pomana, CA: Hunter House.

Grof, Stanislav. (1985). Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Shoham, S. Giora. (1979). Salvation Through the Gutters. New York: Hemisphere Publications.

Shoham, S. Giora. (1990). The bridge to nothingness: Gnosis, Kabbala, Existentialism, and the transcendental predicament of man. ReVision, 13(1) [Summer 1990], 33-45.

Wilber, Ken. (1977). The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House.

Continue with Cellular Consciousness and The Chonyid Bardo: “Like a Prodigal Child, I Had Run Away from my Macrocosmic Home and Imprisoned Myself in a Narrow Microcosm.” (Paramahansa Yogananda)

Return to Morphogenetic Fields Theory Makes Genetics Obsolete and Unnecessary … and Cellular Memory Understandable: The Theories of Morphic Resonance and “Prior Conditions”

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Morphogenetic Fields Theory Makes Genetics Obsolete and Unnecessary … and Cellular Memory Understandable: The Theories of Morphic Resonance and “Prior Conditions”

These Cellular Patterns Form Our Makeup, Our Thoughts, Our Feelings, and Our Way of Viewing the World: Biology As Metaphor and Mythology, Part Three — The Legitimacy of Cellular Memory

The Legitimacy of Cellular Memory

Despite what I have just said concerning the importance of an analysis of the biological metaphors of form — especially as they exist on the cellular level surrounding conception — as reflecting something of importance to us in a hermeneutic or heuristic sense, I want to at least put out a case for the legitimacy of cellular memory as something in its own right. That is, the rest of Part Two will be based on a comparison of Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness with the observable events and forms (the behaviors of the specific biological forms) as they are known to occur through the observational aspects of the science of biology. Still, the interpretation between the philosophical system and the biological form will be aided, supported, and fed by, among other things, the direct experience of memories of these states and forms, down even to the earliest, by myself and by the reports of such experiences by others.

So while this analysis does not stand on the absolute veracity of those experiences by myself or by others, still the analysis is certainly aided and helped by a belief in their legitimacy. I will say a few words about how memory can occur of such events, and more importantly, how that memory can be related to the foundations of our consciousness. A complete explanation (as I see it) of exactly this — e.g., of how sperm and egg and zygote experience can lead to fundamental mythological, philosophical, and basic assumptions on the world, the self, and reality — can be found in two other recent works of mine (1993c, 1993d).

For our purposes here, let me just say that there are two possibilities that immediately come to mind: (1) what one might call the “prior conditions” theory and (2) Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields. Let us take them in turn.

The “Prior Conditions” Theory

What I am calling the “prior conditions” theory is simply that the end result of any learning process, at any point, contains within it, if somehow broken down, all the prior conditions that produced it. It is based on the simple idea that the upper stories of everything will be in some way related to its foundation, and, more exactly, that the actual and specific foundation of anything can be exactly determined by reversing or tracing back in turn each step of its progression or building up.

Thus, this proposition states that all the experience, all the learning that occurs, is based upon prior learning and that all that comes about is in some way founded or based on stages that preceded that stage. The way this is understood to occur is in somewhat the same way that in a computer program a later stage necessitates a prior stage or as in any formal operation or in any learning at all later learning builds necessarily on particular prior understandings.

For example, in the case of learning a language: The speaking of a language requires at one point that the various sounds were learned, which requires that further back pronunciation of the various letters that make up the sounds were learned. Therefore, even though one may not retain a memory of learning the sounds and the individual letters, those events are encapsulated within the end result. Those prior stages had to have been there, and in some way are part of the construction of the end development; so much so that breaking down the end result leads necessarily to the factors of which it is composed.

This can be demonstrated in the case of computer programs and of codes of various kinds. Either of them, given sufficient analytical power (as we can now harness with the help of computers) and sufficient time can be broken down into their original constituents and into their necessary pattern of development. This being true — and allowing, this one time only, the dispensation of leaning on a physicalist presumption — since brains are seen as comparable in many ways to remarkably powerful computers, would it be so bold to assert that it might be possible for them to come up with its exact original conditions out of the current resulting conditions?

The prior-conditions theory is at least one possibility, then, and it is consistent with current psychological understandings of learning, development, and related processes.

Furthermore, this sort of process is also demonstrated in the phenomenon in psychology called regression. In these instances people will revert to earlier and earlier states of being, exactly as they were originally built up. They will often wear the same sorts of clothes, get the same illnesses, have the same intonations in their speech, and so on.

We see thus that each later stage contains within it all earlier forms, in some way. And that this is not dependent simply on some psychological memory mechanism is demonstrated by the fact that we observe the same phenomenon at work in the physical world in the form of the building up of multistory skyscrapers as well as that of multistep computer programs.

So in understanding cellular memory in this sense it is simply a matter of extrapolating our understanding of psychological regression much farther back than we are used to and adding the notion that from each successive stage can be accurately deduced its prior stages in turn, that the later stages could not be exactly as they are save for that the earlier stages happened to be exactly as they are. So this is one way of understanding how this memory could be contained in the adult range of experiential possibilities and how it could be legitimate.

Morphogenetic Fields and Morphic Resonance

The other possible explanation, as I mentioned, is consistent with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory. It can be stated this way: That concerning Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, if things are done a particular way, they tend to be done that particular way in the future. He gives the example of ritual. A ritual is performed in the same way it has been for thousands of years, and there is a perceived potency in doing it that way in that there is somehow an accumulated power in each subsequent repetition of that act. He contends that somehow the field, the field of form, the morphogenetic field, is strengthened; the pattern is strengthened. Therefore when one re-enacts that pattern one is tapping into the field, via morphic resonance, that has been established.

Let us turn our attention now to thinking in terms of certain patterns that happen, for example, on the cellular level, to certain patterns that have been enacted for millennia. Keep in mind that Rupert Sheldrake’s theory is not just concerning human beings and their thoughts and actions but applies also to all of Nature and the entire Universe. So there are morphogenetic fields acting on plants, e.g., in the way that they produce the leaves of each individual plant. There is morphic resonance in all the patterns of Nature, even in the ways crystals develop. Thinking now in terms of the cellular level, human beings have been sperm and egg, have been fertilizing eggs for many millennia, have been sperm and eggs uniting the exact same way in conception for untold millennia.

In fact many mammals reproduce exactly this way also. So, all told, there is a rather strong habit built up, a rather strong pattern that is a field that is of this pattern that exists in the Universe because of the repetition of this pattern over and over again in the Universe. So all of the aspects of sperm and egg experience — for example the experience of the sperm, that is, the struggle of the sperm — has been enacted practically an infinite number of times, more than can be imagined. For this is a strong morphogenetic field in the Universe, a strong morphic pattern. The point of all this is that since we resonate with things that are similar to us, and since a sperm is of a human being, then we would resonate with this pattern as we would resonate with this pattern of the egg and its experience or pattern. Likewise we would resonate with the pattern of conception itself and all that is subsumed under that, and afterwards also.

And of course all of the development of the fertilized egg and the blastocyst — the embryo and the fetus and all that — is part of a morphic pattern that is very well established. For our species it has been continuing practically an infinite number of times, having been enacted and being currently enacted, so that our species would find that this pattern would form part of our makeup, resonating with those patterns, and would form our thinking processes and feeling processes, and would help to structure our way of viewing the world and all else.

Finally the theory of morphic resonance states that we resonate with things with which we are more alike than not alike. Since we are more like ourselves than anything else, it follows that we would resonate more with our particular experience as a sperm and egg, for example, with its unique events, than with the experiences of other humans, or of other mammals or other species for that matter … though those possibilities are not ruled out and in fact those kinds of events—trans-species sharing of experience of morphogenetic field—is actually reputed to occur at times (Grof 1976, 1980, 1985). At any rate, it is most likely we would resonate with and pick up on the field laid down by our own experience as such by our selves as an entity, as well as to a lesser extent resonating with and contacting the way it is done “in general,” or “traditionally,” by the species one belongs to. This also explains what in species other than our own is called instinct . It also makes understandable such remarkable patterns of behavior shared across generations, while genetic explanations, by contrast, appear rather preposterous.

Anyway, this is another way of looking at how these events at such an early level can actually influence the way we think, feel, and see the world, and how they can determine our basic assumptions about all of this.

Continue with Mythology Tells the Tale of Our Lives as Cells: “Whatever Happened to Us in the Amnestic Years … Is Projected Toward Cosmogony, Magic and Other Human Beings.”

Return to Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Morphogenetic Field: Sperm, Egg

Morphogenetic Field: Sperm Surrounding Egg

Morphogenetic Field: Conception

 

Morpogenetic Field: Fertilized Egg Multiplying, Zygote, Blastocyst

 

Continue with Mythology Tells the Tale of Our Lives as Cells: “Whatever Happened to Us in the Amnestic Years … Is Projected Toward Cosmogony, Magic and Other Human Beings.”

Return to Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

To Read the Entire Book … free, on-line … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

Verifiable Memory of Events That Occurred Prior to Brain or Body Prove the Existence of “Spirit”: Biology As Metaphor and Mythology, Part Two — The Epistemology Revealed by Cellular Memory

Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

My attempt here is to skeletonize a portion of such an overall endeavor to show how it can be done and what kinds of meanings can arise. I will relate stages in the ontogenetic development of the human body to the dualities (splittings) of consciousness that, according to Wilber (1977), create the spectrum of consciousness.

Specifically, I will correlate the patterns of change in both form and experience (feeling) that a human undergoes with levels of consciousness. I will do this beginning with the sperm and egg; through the fetal, newborn, child, and adolescent forms; to the adult. What I am saying is that the forms that characterize the biological history of each individual (as delineated by the science of biology) and the processes that characterize the psychological history of each individual (as reported to us in the psychological sciences of the new experiential growth modalities) reflect, and correlate with, the changes in consciousness that Wilber describes as creating the spectrum of consciousness.

The Charge of Reductionism

Is this reductionistic? Am I saying that our ontogenetic development creates or causes the spectrum of consciousness? No. I no more mean that ontogeny creates the spectrum than that ontogeny creates phylogeny … in that, as they say, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

One might deduce, however, that since this ontogenetic development, that is, this human prenatal development, is prior (in time) to the spectrum of consciousness that we observe and study in the Now, a cause-and-effect relationship is the most likely connection. But I must respond that this assumes the primacy of the physical form (in its ontogenetic development) over consciousness. This presupposition is, of course, a cornerstone of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. Nevertheless, the very existence of consciousness or experience at the earliest levels I will be discussing (specifically, sperm, egg, zygote, and fetal) disputes the primacy-of-the-physical-universe postulate. To put it bluntly, consciousness can hardly be an epiphenomenon of brain activity if it exists when the brain does not.

Conversely, the body, brain, and cells cannot create the spectrum of consciousness for consciousness exists independent of them. The body reveals itself to arise from consciousness; it is the tip of the iceberg, which cannot be the foundation for the structures prior to or “below” or existing independently of it.

So the fact of memory and consciousness existing when the physical cells or the body cannot “create” them points inevitably to the primary reality/existence of something like Consciousness, Spirit, or Mind (or at least Energy) (see Adzema, 1985). Therefore, this type of impossible-to-have-existed-as-experience-or-to-be-existing-as-memory-according-to-the-N-C-paradigm experience can hardly be called the cause of the spectrum of consciousness. Indeed, something that cannot possibly exist within a paradigm can hardly be marshaled in to explain something within that paradigm.

However, if we accept the paradigm in which Consciousness, not form, is fundamentally real (which is exactly what we must do if we are going to look at evidence which supports, if not confirms, such a paradigm), and if we still want to accept the controversial concept of cause and effect, then the most we can really say is that prior experience of consciousness contributes to its later modifications. This perspective is certainly worthy of consideration.

The Legitimacy of Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

But were it true that prior experience causes the later modifications of Consciousness (or as Wilber terms it, “Mind”), that truth is congruent with an analysis such as this one that considers form as to its metaphorical heuristic value in understanding experience and existence (or Mind, Consciousness) as it is immediately apperceived in the only Reality of Now. As Wilber (1977) makes adequately clear, from the only Real perspective of Here and Nowness, Absolute Subjectivity, or Mind, all “past” events are nonreal (i.e., illusory) reflections of the Reality that is Now; they have no existence outside of this Now, so can hardly be called “causes” of Now.

From the perspective of Now, of Mind, of Absolute Subjectivity — which is the essence of the new paradigm — there is no cause and effect; there are only patterns of relationship existing Now. Hence these “prior” events are reflections of the immediate Reality, existing simultaneously in the Now as reflections, as metaphors. It is in this sense that they can be analyzed hermeneutically for their heuristic value in understanding the spectrum of consciousness as it arises this instant in the sole Eternal Moment.

The Legitimacy of Cellular Memory

Despite what I have just said concerning the importance of an analysis of the biological metaphors of form — especially as they exist on the cellular level surrounding conception — as reflecting something of importance to us in a hermeneutic or heuristic sense, I want to at least put out a case for the legitimacy of cellular memory as something in its own right. That is, the rest of Part Two will be based on a comparison of Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness with the observable events and forms (the behaviors of the specific biological forms) as they are known to occur through the observational aspects of the science of biology. Still, the interpretation between the philosophical system and the biological form will be aided, supported, and fed by, among other things, the direct experience of memories of these states and forms, down even to the earliest, by myself and by the reports of such experiences by others.

So while this analysis does not stand on the absolute veracity of those experiences by myself or by others, still the analysis is certainly aided and helped by a belief in their legitimacy. I will say a few words about how memory can occur of such events, and more importantly, how that memory can be related to the foundations of our consciousness. A complete explanation (as I see it) of exactly this — e.g., of how sperm and egg and zygote experience can lead to fundamental mythological, philosophical, and basic assumptions on the world, the self, and reality — can be found in two other recent works of mine (1993c, 1993d).

For our purposes here, let me just say that there are two possibilities that immediately come to mind: (1) what one might call the “prior conditions” theory and (2) Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance and morphogenetic fields. Let us take them in turn.

Continue with Morphogenetic Fields Theory Makes Genetics Obsolete and Unnecessary … and Cellular Memory Understandable: The Theories of Morphic Resonance and “Prior Conditions”

Return to Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Continue with Morphogenetic Fields Theory Makes Genetics Obsolete and Unnecessary … and Cellular Memory Understandable: The Theories of Morphic Resonance and “Prior Conditions”

Return to Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

Biology Reflects Consciousness: Biological Changes Reflect Changes in Experience and Create the Spectrum of Consciousness

“The Stuff of the World Is Mind-Stuff”

We are living in stimulating and revolutionary times. For, even as we watch, the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm is collapsing in the ocean of the new physics, “matter” is being swept away by “wavicles,” and scientists are beginning to acknowledge what the poet-seers have always known: that physical reality is metaphor, that the external world and all of its components are subtle yet elaborate webs thrown upon the formless, meaningful forms created from no-thing-ness . . . that matter is metaphor for Consciousness — which is the only real stuff knowable about existence, in fact is the only stuff of the Universe.

Physicist and astronomer, Arthur Stanley Eddington (1928) phrased it: “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” More recently, University of Minnesota physicist Roger S. Jones (1982) unveiled a position which he calls an “idealistic reevaluation of the physical world” (p. ix). He writes

I reject the myth of reality as external to the human mind, and I acknowledge consciousness as the source of the cosmos. It is mind that we see reflected in matter. Physical science is a metaphor with which the scientist, like the poet, creates and extends meaning and values in the quest for understanding and purpose. (1982, p. ix)

Even more recently, anthropologist Armand Labbe (1991) summed it up at a Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness conference saying, “Ultimately our physics . . . is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind and motion.”

Granted, this is an extreme position, a strict Idealist stance. But it is the only truly supportable one, in light of what we know from the new physics. That would be enough in itself to cause us to reflect on it. But this perspective is also supported, even demonstrated, by the discoveries of the “new psychology” as well. More about that later.

It is ironic that it would be the most “materialistic” and “hardest” of the sciences that would be leading the charge against the primacy-of-the-physical-world postulate (and, unfortunately, leaving the rest of the sciences — both social as well as natural sciences — behind). The discoveries from quantum physics, though some of them almost a hundred years old now, are, only with difficulty, being assimilated into the other sciences. For the most part, they are largely ignored; science going along ‘as if’ . . . that is, as if the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm were still viable, as if the physical world was really “objective” reality, as if the mind could validly be considered an epiphenomenon of brain activity. So the old paradigm holds sway despite its inadequacy.

This is understandable, however. For truly acknowledging these newer perspectives requires a reformulation of theoretical positions, a rethinking of the Universe in much the same way that astronomical theories needed to be reformulated after the Copernican revolution. What we do not need are theories that disfigure themselves in trying to incorporate some (not all) of the new information and new perspectives in the way of the convoluted theories of the pre-Copernican astronomers who refused to accept the newer paradigm postulations.

This book, to the contrary, consistently presents a new-paradigm perspective.

In doing so it includes a rethinking of some theoretical constructions associated with Ken Wilber who, from this analysis, appears as inconsistent as pre-Copernican astronomers in devolving his theories.

The Import and Consequences of the Primacy-of-Consciousness Postulate

It may also be argued that the new-paradigm primacy of consciousness is irrelevant to much of what is done in normal science. Whatever the truth of that, it must be acknowledged that theoretical positions that ignore the very foundations upon which they are based—that is, the subjectivity of the observer—are going to be weaker for that. Yet, acknowledging even that, one could argue that there is no clear idea of how to go about applying these new perspectives. How could they be used? How could they be relevant? What implications might they have?

It is in answer to these questions that I offer the following analysis of how these perspectives could be used in the understanding of child development. I propose a devolutional model—one that is rooted in Wilber’s (1977) “spectrum of consciousness” theory. It is based also in the findings of new-paradigm experiential psychotherapies—that is, those that place primacy upon experience over concept, “territory” over “map,” and percept over object.

The implications of this approach, I hope to show, are for no less than the validity of the current direction of child-caring, the effectiveness of mainstream psychiatric approaches, and the direction of psychological and spiritual growth. It is my belief that such implications will not be considered to be irrelevant or unimportant; and I will deal with them at length in Part Three.

Biology As Metaphor

At any rate, the knowable premise of the new science is that our physical world is a construction (of consciousness); that it can be metaphor, only, of the unknowable That Which Is; that, therefore, matter is metaphor. It follows that the sciences, which study this reflection of the unknowable Real, provide metaphors about metaphors.

Moving in the Air Without Support

Schopenhauer saw it much the same way. His understanding of “ideas” is very close to what I am saying about science being composed of metaphors about metaphors. Gardiner (1966) explains this viewpoint of Schopenhauer:

Schopenhauer distinguished a further class of ideas, namely, what he termed “ideas of Reflection,” or sometimes “ideas of ideas” (Vorstellungen von Vorstellungen). It is in terms of these that we think about and communicate the contents of our phenomenal experience. In other words, they are the general concepts by virtue of which we can classify phenomena according to common features that are of interest or importance to us, forming thereby a conceptual structure or system which may be said to mirror or copy the empirical world. The function of this system is essentially a practical one; it provides a means of memorizing, and generalizing from, our observations of how things behave under varying conditions, and hence of putting to use what we learn from experience. Schopenhauer insisted, moreover, that this system cannot legitimately be separated from the foundation of empirical reality upon which it is based, and he claimed that concepts and abstract notions that cannot be traced back to experience are comparable to bank notes “issued by a firm which has nothing but other paper obligations to back it with.” Consequently, metaphysical theories that pretend to offer an account of the world purely a priori, and that in doing so employ terms or propositions not susceptible to empirical interpretation, are empty of cognitive content; they “move in the air without support.” (p. 327)

In modern terms, “the map is not the territory” — the scientific construct is not the same as the experiential/ empirical reality of existence; and the farther they are removed from each other, the more unsubstantial becomes the construct — ultimately collapsing of its own weight.

Analyzing Scientific Dream-Weaving

Nonetheless, these metaphors — despite the threat of their moving “in the air without support” and cognizant of their practical value; these metaphors — because of the fact of their being for the empirical world a reflection or “mirror,” which we then call “physical facts,” “objective reality,” or “scientific truths”; these metaphors can be analyzed in the same way that dream symbols are analyzed, that is, to uncover their deeper meanings.

Furthermore, this uncovering means essentially that we can discern their meanings for ourselves; “deeper meaning” being that understanding that relates the symbol to ourselves and that gives us understanding of our inner and outer actions and guidance for such behavior. In this way we can relate these “ideas about ideas,” these scientific truths, back to our empirical, experiential, subjective reality . . . back to the base that they were originally the reflections and mirrors of. Thus we can come full circle, looking at ourselves from both inside as well as outside of ourselves and approaching, to the degree that a person can, a fuller understanding of ourselves and the world with which we are inseparable.

Specifically, then, for our purposes here, in looking at the biological sciences’ metaphors of the human body — especially as concerns its structure, function, and ontogenetic and phylogenetic developments — we can discern and analyze an “underlying” meaning — a reflection of the Real, or of what Wilber (1977) calls Mind.

It is especially heuristic to analyze body for, as it has been said, body is concretized mind. This is not to mean concretized Mind—in Wilber’s sense—but concretized ego (in the sense of the separate self, in the sense of mind as used by Satya Sai Baba and other teachers who say that, ultimately, mind must be destroyed). Therefore, in contemplating the metaphors of the biological understanding of body, we can discern patterns and derive meanings concerning the separate self—its evolution, relationship to the whole, patterns of activity, stages of development, essence, and its experience of itself.

Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

My attempt here is to skeletonize a portion of such an overall endeavor to show how it can be done and what kinds of meanings can arise. I will relate stages in the ontogenetic development of the human body to the dualities (splittings) of consciousness that, according to Wilber (1977), create the spectrum of consciousness.

Specifically, I will correlate the patterns of change in both form and experience (feeling) that a human undergoes with levels of consciousness. I will do this beginning with the sperm and egg; through the fetal, newborn, child, and adolescent forms; to the adult. What I am saying is that the forms that characterize the biological history of each individual (as delineated by the science of biology) and the processes that characterize the psychological history of each individual (as reported to us in the psychological sciences of the new experiential growth modalities) reflect, and correlate with, the changes in consciousness that Wilber describes as creating the spectrum of consciousness.

Continue with Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

Return to Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)

To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

 

Continue with Cellular Memory’s Challenge to Materialism and Support for Panpsychism: The Body Arises from Consciousness, Not Vice-Versa, but There Is a Legitimacy to Heuristic Inquiry Into Form

Return to Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)

To Access the Entire Book, of which this is an excerpt, Go To Falls from Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split): Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering

The Priests in the Church Were Keeping Out All the Screaming People, Forcibly Repressing, Refusing to Acknowledge It: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Seven

(continued from The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review [Footnote 1])

More Nestling Up With the Implicate, Or

Before and After the Western Fall (Split) (June 19, 1992)

This is a holotropic session of this day:

It started out when the music was very rhythmic, and the hands were doing a lot of fertilized-egg kinds of movements and embryonic kind of stuff. And sometimes I was having images of Prague and of inside the city—especially Old Town Square and the towers. [Prague is where the holotropic workshop was being held.]

And I kept having pictures of people who had lived here, and all the suffering that had gone on here, and the striving. I kept picturing the people who had lived and written books and everything, plays and philosophies, inside their little rooms—all the different kinds of lives that people had here [Prague].

I kept picturing Swami [Sathya Sai Baba] and kept saying: “Oh Swami,” as if I were feeling and acknowledging what had gone on here: the feelings and desires, the struggles and the yearnings, and all those human things and feelings that had passed through this place. And I felt sad for all these people, the hardship they had gone through and all the feelings. And then I got up and went to the bathroom.

And when I came back it was just very peaceful. The drumming and everything was just something that was there. And I enjoyed parts of it: There were African parts, and they would have drumming and I would understand what it would be like to be an African person in a tribe.

At one point, however, the African tribe music sounded different or not good. And I had the feeling that this was singing from another tribe, not my own, an enemy tribe or something; I didn’t like it.

And then as it went off into different phases of music I would often feel very good—very interesting and beautiful in a certain way. And then it went into Native American chanting; and I thought that was incredible, that I must have been an indigenous American at one time … just wonderfully beautiful.

And it was either just before or just after that there was this Gregorian-type Church music. And one of the things that I kept having—scenes from Prague going through my head the entire time—and one of the scenes was the inside of a church.

And when the Gregorian music came on, I pictured the inside of that church again. And one of the interesting things was I realized at a certain point that people in the room around me were screaming [they actually were, in reality]—and there was a lot of that going on—and I had this feeling as if—when the Gregorian music was on—that the people in the church, the priests that is, that they had this reality going on in which they were keeping out all the screaming people, they were keeping them all outside the church, trying to repress that, trying to deny the reality of that. And so I felt like I was tuning into the reality of this place: That they [the priests and ecclesiasts] would forcibly try to repress this other element and keep it out of their consciousness, would refuse to acknowledge, let alone deal with it.

An Afterthought

As many as 30 million women were murdered horribly over a period of 300 years during the middle ages for having any trace of free-mindedness. This was done under the direction of the Catholic Church. They were often burned at the stake.

It is no coincidence that what followed for next four hundred years of Western “civilization” was a pall of Stepford wifery unparalleled among the cultures of humans, which we are only with great difficulty over the last hundred years awakening from.

Yet these forces of repression and murder continue with us today wishing to take us back to such middle age benighted views. They exist in the anti-abortion movement, even among mainstream Republicans, again with women as the direct target. And they exist in the tea party and conspiracy circles, even among some progressives, where feminism and progressive-liberal ideas are called “illuminati” — showing again that free-thinking women and enlightened views will not be tolerated … and will be scapegoated for all the horrors of the 1% and the powers that be, just as they were in the times of Catholic tyranny.

By the way, I’ve been misunderstood if anyone thinks this is just an attack on the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church was the primary evil then. I mentioned Western civilization. There are many more evil perpetrators today. It is not about blaming any institution. This is a product of our “civilization” and its anti-body, anti-sexual, anti-Nature insanity and the inherent evil of hierarchical societies in general.

Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review

Footnote

1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences

Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.

 

However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.

Continue with Biology as Metaphor and Mythology, Part One: “The Map Is Not the Territory” and Biological Phases As Levels of Consciousness

Return to The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Womb with a Review: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love

A Review of Womb Life: I Was Experiencing Creation … and the Sensuous Wonderful Feeling of Being Alive and Growing….

(continued from The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive [Footnote 1])

And then I seemed to tire of that, or the music changed. And after a while I went into a period where I felt like I didn’t want to be on my back, and I went to one corner of the mat. And I told myself it was because it was wet where I’d been, but I went to one corner and I lay on my side.

And all of a sudden that made sense. My hands were moving like little fetal hands; and I was still feeling blissful. In fact I was thinking: “I don’t want to become a big baby and have BPM II.” I just wanted to stay a blastocyst. But I noticed that even as a fetus I was still grocking and digging and having a great time; and the music was still wonderful and I was still floating around. I still had movement in my hands and in my body to go with the music, to just groove with the rhythms of existence. And I felt like I was getting bigger. It seemed like I was going through a stage where I was really fetal, on my side. But then I felt the need to get up on my knees. And there was this really strong compulsion to get, like, on my head, to have my head down, and to have all the weight in my neck.

And when I did that finally—and it took me a while to get into that position, because it felt like the confines of gravity were working against me—I just wanted to tumble! But I couldn’t do that because I wasn’t in a gravityless situation. But eventually when I did get into that position it felt very right. And that was pretty good, too, but it was kind of cramped. And so I eventually stopped—it was too painful to maintain very long.

So I turned over on my side and just listened to the music. And then I spent a lot of time just listening to the music and realizing how great it was to exist and how beautiful it all is and how beautiful people are. And I began to think that that’s why we come here, to have this wonderful experience of reaching out to people.

And I began to realize that the blastocyst knows somehow that it’s reaching out to everyone else in the universe, even when it’s just a blastocyst. It’s reaching out because it knows the bliss of connecting with others. And the mandala that I envisioned would just be these cells multiplying outward with these snakelike arms reaching out in several directions to spin oneself around, or to reach out for more, or to just reflect the sensuous wonderful feeling of being alive and growing.

This is great. I’m real glad I’m doing this, and I hope I can continue to capture these feelings and to come from this space.

I want to say one other thing, and that’s that I realized at one point that I used to do things where—when I’d have a holotropic or a primal session—that I would go and do a review of all my past issues of pain. It was almost like doing a summary first, and then at the end I might get into something new. But I would often do the summary: Like I would sometimes be repeating the trauma of not having my mother after birth— and my lips would be sucking and there’d be nobody there; and going through the pain of getting out of the womb—being stuck in the womb; and just do that whole repeat. And then sometimes after doing all of that I’d go into sperm feelings.

But this time it was as if my body was doing a review, a summary of all that I’d learned: life from sperm to egg, fertilized egg, blastocyst, all the way to fetus, and then all the way to the second stage, all the way to BPM II—like the whole sequence of BPM I was being reviewed. And I thought this is a much better time to be doing a review of than of what happens later on, after the pain starts [from BPM II onwards, as mentioned in the previous paragraph].

So this is what I was experiencing, this wonderful being a creative process. I was experiencing creation. They say Om is the sound of creation, the creative sound; everything comes from that—the primordial sound, primordial symbol. So I kept wondering if my “ohing” sounds would turn into Om [it never exactly did].

One other thing: I was feeling one time how what I was expressing was the feeling of love, that I was feeling love and expressing that. And that there is a pain in unexpressed love; the pain [of life] is that we express all our pain [and suffer through all that], and we don’t get to feel the great love, which is kept in check.

And the pain is that the love is not able to be fully felt or released unless we do this kind of work, of course.

Continue with Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)

Return to The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive

Footnote

1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences

Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.

However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.

Continue with Tribes and Wonder Versus Civilization and Suffering: More Nestling Up With the Implicate Order, Or Before and After the Western Fall (Split)

Return to The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

   

Pot, LSD, the Illuminati, and the Real Revolution

Other then what is generally known about the effects of marijuana, pot does something else psychologically – it “bends” defenses and takes people into places that are, initially, hard to deal with but ultimately beneficial. I have been talking for a long time about how we need to access the perinatal. Well, pot takes one in that direction.

Many folks are too defended to get the experience of mind expansion into the recollective-analytic from pot that we know can occur. For them it stays on the sensory level only. Enhanced sensory appreciation is all they get.

But pot can eventually open one up to self-analysis and self-awareness.

But this first comes up in the form of paranoia, when folks project the uncomfortable feelings coming up onto the world. They begin to see what is actually within them as being outside of them. They see one’s inner darkness as being an outer darkness.

When one defends against going into this deeper level … and begins doing things like covering up the uncomfortable feelings arising with booze or other substances like speed … then the person gets stuck in the paranoia. Because this happens, the ruling rich folks can see this as a substance aiding their agenda of keeping the people confused and stupid and tilting after illuminati windmills instead of going after them.

However, what they don’t know is that for some people, or for these folks above, later on, this is seen as a step in the right direction. For when one integrates this inner darkness, one can go on to both the symbolic-existential levels and the integral levels, which take one into archetypal and spiritual dimensions of the self.

Now, the reason I make the distinction with LSD, is because LSD speeds up the entire process. It does not just “bend” psychic defenses against inner truth, it “blasts them away”! In so doing, there is less chance of folks getting stuck in the darkness of recollective-analytic confusion and projecting it onto the outside world in the form of imaginary demons, illuminati, or reptiles. No, one is “forced” to go through the inner transformation … for the inner realities cannot be denied. It brings about the inner transformation that authorities truly fear. Hence it is the drug that will absolutely never be legalized as long as these filthy rich can control things for their profits.

So, pot can be useful to the ruling class in their agenda of instilling fear into the masses, keeping them divided against each other, ignorant of their self-sabotage … for example, feeding people with the idea that in not voting and ceding power to the ones who have it makes folks somehow “awakened” and superior (btw, lol) … and keeping the masses tilting at imaginary “illuminati” demons while the 1% picks their pockets.

Whereas, LSD can never be useful to the ruling class. It, and the other psychedelics, are direct affronts to their matrix of misunderstanding. It is why they attacked the 60s generation and their drugs and to this day even promote the idea that the new age and the hippies, the products of this psychedelic mind expansion, are “illuminati.”

In this way, they cover up, in the minds of the uninformed, the abuses they are committing by scapegoating the real threats to their power: That is, those who would be psychedelically, or otherwise, like the new-agers and the hippies of that bygone era, enlightened to the feelings beyond the paranoia—those of unity with and compassion for All That Is.

For more – Culture War, Class War Chapter Three: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Opposing Worlds

And – Culture War, Class War Chapter Four: Drugs of Choice and Generational Cultures – Concocted Worlds

Of course I’m for legalizing marijuana. But it will be the first new recreational drug legalized for a reason: It facilitates paranoid thinking in folks. Hence it creates a whole new fertile field of fearful minds for the right-wing and the 1% to plant with illuminati and reptile nonsense to take attention away from themselves.

Now, if LSD were legalized we’d have a *real* fucking revolution!

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive: The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss

Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Five — “Bliss to Exist”: A Strong Plant Blossoming, Digging Deep and Casting High, ‘Tis Bliss to Exist.

(continued from Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order [Footnote 1])

The Sound of Creation, or “‘Tis Bliss to Exist” (April 28, 1992)

It’s the holotropic session of Tuesday of the first module. It started out with a long period of movement and that mid-space between consciousness and unconsciousness, and it was O.K.

And then just like yesterday, it was right about in the middle that a certain musical piece started to be really delicious; and I couldn’t help wanting to breathe with it and become part of it more and just express my feeling of deliciousness. And I started to breathe more and started to enjoy breathing more with the music and moving a little with the music, and then at a certain point the sperm movement started to happen in my body.

And then it was shortly after that when I recognized certain egg feelings in me. Again I was feeling this deliciousness, a feeling of attraction and desiring, just loving everything, loving the music, and my hands were going out to the sides. I was going into all kinds of opening and closing movements, almost like a sea creature or sea vegetable. My hands were going all kinds of ways, like a floating movement; but then I became centered on these egg movements, like bringing in, and my body came together this one time very much like what Farrant talks about when he describes bringing your arms together and bringing the egg in; and so there was that kind of a thing going on.

.

And after a while I was lying there and I felt rather round; I was feeling amazingly round. And I remember the last thing—when I was feeling like I was the egg—my hands went out to the sides and I was waving them up and down. And it was this amazing feeling of softness in my hands. It was like I was in an altered state, hard to describe.

But I began to feel like I was switching into a different mode of consciousness, like I was on a strange drug, or I was becoming a different kind of a creature.

 

But then after that there was this sensation of feeling very big, very round rather. And then it was just these small movements in my hands, and my hands reaching out and putting something back, reaching out and putting something back; and it was going on in my hands and my legs.

And that went on for a little while, and then it started to get more and more. A lot of it was the music, like wanting to take in the music. Or I was doing it in tune with the music, like I was this pulsating one-celled animal.

And then the most amazing part of it was that as this one-celled animal I was expanding, getting bigger. It was a wonderful feeling, and there was also a sense of power. It was a beautiful feeling; and then this piece of music came on with a sense of power to it.

I was reaching my hands and legs in four directions, like reaching out, reaching out my hands and my feet. And I realized that this was my bliss in life, this sense of reaching out and expanding, getting to know more and more, getting to be more and more, getting to be more and more creative in more directions. This is the bliss that I follow, and it’s making me happier and happier in my life right now.

It was like, here I was, right from the beginning, feeling this bliss as an early template, as a fertilized egg becoming more and more, expanding and multiplying; it’s that wonderful feeling of expanding and multiplying and reaching out more and more, just an infinite amount of more is out there to reach out to.

And it was just so much; I had this feeling like “God,” or maybe I was God; this was a God-like feeling, but this was the bliss of God; this is what it is all about, this expanding and reaching out, eternal experience, eternal bliss.

It was just so wonderful that I had to start expressing it, I had to vocalize it, little by little, with sounds coming out of me, almost synchronistically, with the music. Like I didn’t plan it that way but these sounds like “ooooooh” and “oooo” started coming out of me with the music. They were the only expression for that wonderful feeling I was having that I could think of. It was the only proper expression of that wonderful feeling, and I began to realize there was a real lack of ways to express the bliss, that there were many ways to express pain, but so few ways to express joy and bliss. We are really limited in this way.

And physically it was like my hands were expressing this bliss; each time I reached out it was this wonderful feeling of joy and just being alive.

And I also began to realize a connection with the haiku I had written. The haiku was a perfect premonition of what I was now feeling—the haiku being,

A strong plant blossoming,

Digging deep and casting high,

‘Tis bliss to exist.

That was a perfect premonition, because that’s exactly what it felt like to me when I was stretching in each direction: digging deep and casting high, taking in and then throwing it out again as far as I could … and this wonderful feeling of power and bliss in being able to do this and knowing that it was endless, eternal. It was bliss, and so I expressed that for a long time.

Continue with The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review

Return to Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order

Footnote

1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences

Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.

However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.

Continue with The Bliss of Connection with Others … But There Is a Pain in Unexpressed Love: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Six — Womb with a Review

Return to Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel

Past Lives, Other Lives, and The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal”: A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Four — Sidling Up to the Implicate Order

Warriors, Priests, Cells, and a Juicy Glowing Blastocyst on the Rise: Western Culture Has Created This Vast Hole in People … Primal Desire … and Love

(continued from Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace [Footnote 1])

A Juicy Glowing Blastocyst on the Rise (February 8, 1992)

I was just thinking how the mandala that I drew earlier was a picture of my feelings, but it ended up looking like I was this glowing blastocyst: And I was trying to reach out to these cells. And what that was representing was my juicy feeling, wanting to help all these people that I felt connected with, like my family. I realized how that’s a feeling that’s gone with me throughout my life, and so it’s amazing how this reflects a certain biological stage in our early life.

What the mandala was showing was this juicy glowing blastocyst—which I felt I was when I was lying in that comfortable space coming up out of this underlying blue, comfortable, wonderfully comfortable, blue waves; with all these black signs of pain trying to fuck with it, and put out its light, but at the same time wanting to reach out to these other people [these other cells].

But it looks like the blastocyst is coming out from the spirit world, and it’s being attacked by all these one-celled animals that want to eat it up or something—which could be something biological—but it wants to reach out to connect with the uterine wall. Incredible.

A Ball of Experience, or Sidling Up to the Implicate Order (February 9, 1992)

Past Lives, Other Lives

I want to add this to my holotropic experiences of yesterday. There were times when I felt like the music was tapping me into all kinds of experiences; it was all just a ball of experience, and the music was giving me glimpses of what experience was like in all kinds of different ways, all different parts of time and space; and it was fascinating.

It wasn’t all either good or bad—it was just different, interesting. In fact a lot of it was not even good—it’s just that it was so different it made it interesting.

Warriors, Priests

I did have the sense at one point that maybe there was a couple of past lives that I was tapping into. And one concerned my being a priest. I remember my feelings of wanting to put my hands up in the motion of blessing somebody with the sign of the cross, and how that seemed so natural to me. In tapping into this I had the sense of myself dressed as a priest and having my hands like that—it felt natural.

Another past life concerned something which was entirely opposite. I don’t remember what that was: perhaps a warrior. And then there have been feelings recently of identifying with black community and black lifestyle; feeling very wonderful and natural and “at home” in that way of being.

The Implicate Order As Uterine Wall (February 9, 1992)

And Cells

Another note: After I looked at my mandala, it occurred to me that the people I was trying to reach out to could be thought of as cells, which I as a blastocyst was trying to implant into. And in the course of the sharing that followed the holotropic session, I felt myself distinctly unresponded to, that I had reached out several times and got no response from all the people around me.

This seemed to reflect exactly what the situation would have been on the cellular level. It’s possible this was indicating that I as a blastocyst was trying to implant into the cellular wall and found no response, found it to be difficult, and that the uterine wall was unresponsive.

This relates to how I perceive my mother to have probably been emotionally unresponsive to my needs and my desires to connect with her. This relates to my feelings of total despair when I’m unable to get through to Mary Lynn, and also to my feelings of despair and agony in not being able to get through to my family—who can now be seen as reflecting these various cells that I’m trying to connect with.

The Vast Hole of the “Not the Tribal” (April 27, 1992)

The session today was pretty uneventful; I’m pretty tired.

There was one somewhat profound thing that happened though. And it had to do with a particular piece of music that sounded like African tribal men who were chanting real fast at one point. And then there was what sounded like an old woman doing this real squeaky-sounding thing with her voice, which was part of what they were supposed to be doing all together, and it was integrated with the rest. And all together it was a very bizarre sounding piece of music, with drums.

Primal Desire … and Love

And what it triggered in me was as follows: I had been having these feelings of just loving the music even though it was strange. I had been doing that for several pieces, even though it was strange; and I wanted more and more of it. In fact, I was reaching out to grab it [the music], like I was a blastocyst reaching out to connect with the wall or something, or like I was an egg reaching out to connect with the sperm. And it was that kind of great desire—just loving it.

The Beauty of It All

I was thinking over and over again about the beauty, the beauty of it all, how beautiful everything is. And then I began to realize it was love, and then there was this feeling of being like in a primal setting [like being in a primal culture, tribe] and feeling what it’s like to be loving everybody and wanting them, and thinking that they were beautiful … so beautiful to be alive and to be with people.

And it was just this feeling of love for them and beauty about being alive.

We Do Not Have a Tribe

And then I thought about myself being in this place [in the holotropic training group], and I thought it was similar. But there was also something different, which was that the Western world did not have tribes. People are brought up separate from each other, and the Western culture has created this vast hole in people and how that wasn’t bearable, all the time we were in existence. And it’s just the saddest thing, about this gigantic hole in each and every one of us because none of us had a home, we lacked that place where we belonged, we did not have a tribe.

Another strange aspect of this session was whereas I really enjoyed the music, and the music could not be loud enough for me in the beginning, afterwards it seemed too loud. I didn’t like it at all then.

Continue with The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive

Return to Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace

Footnote

1. Cellular/ Transpersonal Experiences

Having established the legitimacy of transpersonal aspects of prenatal, and especially cellular, re-experience, it remains to be seen what light this new perspective throws upon traditional formulations. I suggest to you that this perspective is a catalyst to a radical reformulation of traditional concepts of consciousness and development. My understanding is that it supports a view compatible with Eastern, Platonic, and “primitive” philosophical renderings—which can be characterized as Emanationist —and completely undermines the dominant Western evolutionary paradigm. I delineate such a perspective, which I call the Falls from Grace Theory, beginning in the next chapter.

However, let us first take a look at a sampling of the kinds of experiences and perspectives that are possible at this cellular and prenatal level of re-experience before attempting to see deeper into the structure of consciousness and development, presented immediately afterwards, which contains and makes sense of them. The current chapter—A Foray Into Cellular/Transpersonal Consciousness—contains transcripts of cellular/transpersonal experiences I had through the modality of holotropic breathwork. In order to retain the flavor and potency of the raw experience itself, these transcripts are only slightly edited and are from the descriptions of my experiences I recorded immediately after having them.

Continue with The Sound of Creation and Cellular Template of Eternal Bliss: I Was This Pulsating One-Celled Animal … Each Reaching Out Was Joy of Being Alive

Return to Life Is a Sickness … for the Purpose of Getting Us Well: A Foray Into Cellular/ Transpersonal Consciousness, Part Three — There Is Always Grace

Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel

friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel