Our discussion of brain and psyche has avoided the realm of experience most readily associated with the name, C. G. Jung: the spiritual, numinous, transcendent, and transformative. Because it has earned Jung the disparaging title of “mystic” among “hard-headed” writers from Sigmund Freud to J. Alan Hobson, we have first sought to establish a secure foundation in the discoveries and theories of today’s mainstream science for Jung’s ideas about the conscious mind and its “penumbra,” to use William James’ expression, the poorly illuminated and fuzzily defined region of human experience that might just as well be conscious. Jung calls it the “personal unconscious” — the domain of the complexes, those emotionally-guided, habitual distortions in our outlook that disturb conscious functioning in decidedly ordinary ways when we contrast them with the much more powerful effects of the archetypes.

          The discovery of the complexes guided the early years of Jung’s psychiatric practice. He first assumed that therapy might consist in simply informing the patient of the nature of her complex and the putative traumatic experiences that lay behind it. Grateful to be informed, although chastened to know the shameful truth about herself, the patient was to end her denials, face up to her obligations, and change the course of her life. This was clearly an overly optimistic plan, but not unlike Freud’s first naïve and briefly-held notion of what therapy ought to be. In his autobiography Jung even gives us some spectacular instances where the procedure seems to have worked (MDR: 114-30). Soon, however, he was talking about an “energy gradient” (CW6: ¶130). He was thinking of a waterfall, a ball rolling down an inclined plane, or the flow of electrons between the poles of a battery. Movement occurs in the psyche only when there is a natural down-hill flow of energy. We are rarely if ever successful at simply deciding to change. Something powerful must move us. “Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing . . . we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient” (CW7: ¶76).

          In the last analysis, what supplies psyche’s irresistible energy gradient is always the archetype with its “distinctively numinous character which can only be described as ‘spiritual,’ if ‘magical’ is too strong a word” (CW8: ¶405). When an archetype “becomes conscious, it is felt as strange, uncanny, and at the same time fascinating. At all events the conscious mind falls under its spell . . . [it] always produces a state of alienation” (CW8: ¶590). By means of its power to fascinate, an archetype can “mould the destinies of individuals [for good or ill] by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behavior” (CW5: ¶467). Ultimately experiencing an archetype is the bottom line in psychological transformation; for only the compellingly emotional down-hill flow of instinctual energy is capable of “producing extensive alterations in the subject” (CW7: ¶110).

When [in life] a distressing situation arises, the corresponding archetype will be constellated in the unconscious. Since this archetype is numinous, i.e., possesses a specific energy, it will attract to itself the contents of consciousness — conscious ideas that render it perceptible and hence capable of conscious realization. Its passing over into consciousness is felt as an illumination, a revelation or a “saving idea” (CW5: ¶450).

Jung’s language makes it clear that “the experience of an archetype” results in non-ordinary states of consciousness. He says the archetype feels irresistible, numinous, spiritual, magical, fascinating, compelling, transforming, and illuminating, and it supplies the conscious mind with a revelation or a saving idea. The power of an archetype, therefore, carries us beyond the merely empirical, beyond the soberly rational into altered states of consciousness. It reveals our kinship with the cave painters of the Upper Paleolithic. Altered states of consciousness belong to the neurocognitive apparatus of our human organism. Although Western culture has been suspicious of them for at least the last 500 years, relegating them to the realm of the “non-ordinary,” the “fantastic” and the “illusory,” they are truly normal and necessary for everyday life.

Jung in 1925

          To get an idea of the role altered states of consciousness play in Jung’s thought, we shall consider some of the highlights from an extremely important year of his life, 1925, when he turned fifty. In January, he had his first opportunity for extensive conversation with an individual living outside the thought-world of Western culture, in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Then, between March and July, in a seminar to some of his closest associates he described a series of altered states of consciousness that he himself had witnessed or experienced and that had played a determining role in the development of his theories. Finally, the year ended with his famous trip to Mt. Elgon, in Kenya, and another set of non-ordinary experiences and reflections.

New Mexico. Jung describes his non-Western interlocutor, Mountain Lake (Ochwiay Biano [1]) chief of the Taos pueblos, as an intelligent man, five to ten years younger than himself. Conversing with him was in some ways more satisfying than talking to another “European” (a term which, for Jung, includes all citizens of Western culture) (MDR: 247). Mountain Lake observed that white people are always staring, uneasily and restlessly seeking something. He said they act as if they were mad; and most disturbingly, they claim to think with their heads. Jung wondered with what Indians did their thinking, and Mountain Lake patted his heart (Ibid., 248). He evidently linked thinking to his body and emotions — the source of everything the West finds to be contaminating and unreliable when mixed with the purity of conceptual thought. Jung was impressed with the depth and confidence of the Indian’s demeanor. He found a stability there, a more secure foundation than anything Westerners knew. But when he got Mountain Lake speaking of mythic matters, Jung was surprised again:

It was astonishing to me to see how the Indian’s emotions change when he speaks of his religious ideas. In ordinary life he shows a degree of self-control and dignity that borders on fatalistic equanimity. But when he speaks of things that pertain to his mysteries, he is in the grip of a surprising emotion which he cannot conceal (Ibid., 250).

          The “Indian,” in short, is not ashamed to show the consciousness-altering effects of the archetypal energy-gradient. It is an essential aspect of his reality. He manifested this emotional attitude toward “mystery” while the two men were sitting on the roof of a pueblo, the New Mexico sun blazing above them. Mountain Lake pointed to the sun and asked: “Is not he who moves there our father? How can anyone say differently? How can there be another god?” Struggling for words, he “exclaimed at last, ‘What would a man do alone in the mountains? He cannot even build his fire without him.’” Jung wondered if the sun might not be “a fiery ball shaped by an invisible god.” Mountain Lake would have none of it: “The sun is God. Everyone can see that” (Ibid., 250f).

          Shortly, it became clear that this declaration pointed to the central mystery of Pueblo life, for Ochwiay Biano explained that his people “live on the roof of the world” and are “the sons of Father Sun.” They practice their religion to assist the sun in his daily journey across the sky, and not for themselves alone but for the whole earth. Despite this, the Americans foolishly and unaccountably try to prohibit them by outlawing their rituals and dances — the institutionalized activities that foster their altered states of consciousness and the mythic realities that underlie them. The Pueblo people, however, were not about to acquiesce: “If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.” Jung was deeply moved:

I then realized on what the “dignity,” the tranquil composure of the individual Indian, was founded. It springs from his being a son of the sun; his life is cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the father and preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent. If we set this against our own self-justifications . . . we cannot help but see our poverty (Ibid., 252).

          Here, in the awe shared by Jung and Mountain Lake, lies the ultimate significance of the archetype’s emotionally charged “gradient” and the altered state it brings about. It transforms a lifeless, mechanical world into a living cosmological mystery that is not separate from the individual but makes each of us a meaningful participant in the whole. We Westerners like to think that our foundations are rational and fully explicable. To find the truth, we demand hard-headed proof. Above all, we fear being led astray by misleading superstitions that may arise from less than sober states of consciousness. A life founded on such an idea of reality leaves us rootless, restless, and searching for we do not know what. By contrast, Mountain Lake lived his life as Jung had imagined a man should — once the thesis of Symbols of Transformation had come home to him, some ten years earlier. Here was a man who was “living his myth,” and doing so consciously. His dignity and imperturbable self-confidence bespoke the richness and depth of his lived world. He was no “primitive,” lost in muddle-headed ignorance and in need of enlightenment. In Jung’s view, he had what we have lost. Our frenetic “seeking” will never take us there. We need to stop and find our roots. Only the archetypes and the “revelatory” states of consciousness they induce will take us there.

The Seminar. Jung makes it clear to his followers in 1925 that he had been searching over the past three decades for a vantage point from which to view the human condition and to reduce the inevitable limitations that history and culture impose on any European academic of the twentieth century. He explored in several directions, especially our nearest cultural relatives in the European Middle Ages, and our most distant in the hunter-gatherers whose way of life had survived into the first quarter of the twentieth century. [2] Mountain Lake was not a hunter-gatherer, but he surely lived closer to that way of life than Jung did. Ultimately, Jung thought, we will not know ourselves with clear objectivity until we have been visited by an intelligent species like our own that has evolved in complete isolation from us, on a distant planet.

          Jung’s quest to understand the human mind was first sparked in 1896, when he was twenty-one, and discovered the peculiar talents of his somnambulist cousin, Helly Preiswerk, [3] the subject of his dissertation. “A little hypnosis would send her into a trance,” an altered state of consciousness that convinced Jung that the conscious world conceals something mysterious and quite different from what we ordinarily assume. He thought of Schopenhauer’s idea of the will as a blind and aimless urge to create; but there seemed to be nothing blind and aimless about Helly’s voices. The unconscious material seemed, rather, “to flow into definite moulds” (Sem25: 3f). His second lesson set in when, “after several years,” he began to realize that Symbols of Transformation was about himself, that the Miss Frank Miller whose fantasies he analyzed had become in the course of the writing his own anima and personified his own “autonomous thinking.” She “took over my fantasy and became the stage director to it” (Ibid., 27). While writing Symbols, he had been unaware that his thinking had been “directed” by an unconscious factor. But a dozen years later, in 1925, he had developed a relationship of trust with an inner advisor of a rather different character. His altered states were more conscious, and he was able to exercise more control in his relationship with them:

[N]ow I have within myself a “man” who is millions of years old . . . If we put things up to the unconscious, when we get the view that suits the “old man,” things go right. If I am holding views that are out of keeping with the unconscious, they are certain to make me ill, and so it is safe for me to assume that they contradict some main current in the universe (Ibid., 12).

          These things did not happen by chance. Jung practiced “active imagination,” which he likened to “yogic concentration.” The conscious effort, he insisted, is essential. For archetypes have the ability to withdraw energy from the contents of consciousness so that “they become darkened and eventually unconscious . . . which in its turn gives the unconscious a favorable opportunity to slip into the space vacated” (CW8: ¶841). In active imagination, on the other hand, nature’s “darkening” process is reversed. By applying a strong, steady attention to the images that arose before his mind’s eye, Jung focused the psychic energy available to his ego in a way which animated images that were already active in his unconscious. The consciously applied energy brought them “to the surface,” and made them available for observation and engagement. By contrast, day-dreaming is a passive activity that may continue for hours without effort, whereas one soon finds active imagination tiring (Sem25: 35).

          When in December of 1913 he first “let [him]self drop” by deliberately imagining a passageway into the depths of the earth — what anthropologist Michael Harner and his students would call a “shamanic journey” (Harner, 1980) — Jung encountered a number of disturbing images and events that he struggled to understand by painting them and searching out thematic parallels in world mythology. Paramount among his imaginal encounters was a cast of regular characters who instructed him: a wise old man with a white beard who called himself Elijah, a beautiful but thoroughly untrustworthy blind woman named Salome, and a large black serpent. One of Elijah’s most important lessons was what Jung came to call “original thinking.” Elijah “said that I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but according to his views, thoughts were like animals in the forest, people in a room, or birds in the air” (Sem25: 95). By taking it for granted that we are the authors of our thoughts, we maintain the illusion that we are identical with our conscious mind and thereby devalue the source of our thinking, which resides in the unconscious. In place of this, Elijah recommended a meditative discipline. By turning our attention onto the thought process itself, we can observe the thoughts as they arise, given to us in a manner that “is immediately convincing [and] comes as a revelation.”

          “Original thinking” means attending to ideas as they “originate” and before they have been folded into our habitual assumptions. Jung found parallels to Elijah’s method in the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads (Ibid., 75). But unbeknownst to him, another continental thinker published a similar account in the same year of 1913. In Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, philosopher Edmund Husserl described a meditative discipline to “put out of action . . . the natural standpoint,” the naïve mode of thinking whereby cultural and other assumptions impose themselves, unnoticed, upon our thinking. Disabling the natural standpoint allows the philosopher to be “free from theory and free from metaphysics by bringing all of the grounding back to the immediate data . . . just as it is in reality experienced” (Husserl, 1913: 99f). [4] Husserl called his method the epoché, the “phenomenological reduction” or simply “bracketing.” He wanted to hold the “natural standpoint” at bay so that he could attend to “the things themselves”: ideas and images as they rise into consciousness. Another parallel to this sort of critical-minded introversion may be found in the “insight” meditation of Theravada Buddhism (vipassana [5]), where one aims “to apprehend cognition at a stage before it becomes assembled into higher cognitive events . . . directly apprehending the sensory aspect of a moment of consciousness before mapping a cognition upon it” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 25).

          A few evenings after his lesson on “original thinking,” Jung had a most extraordinary archetypal experience. He began his descent into the underworld only after great resistance; and then, he says, “a most disagreeable thing happened.” Salome began worshipping him, calling him the Christ, and claiming that he could cure her of her blindness. While Jung was struggling with his reaction to that, he found the snake encircling him several times from the ankles to the chest, while he stood with his arms extended in a crucifixion pose. He does not say whether he was trying to keep them away from the snake or whether his body simply took on that pose. Then Salome rose up and claimed she could see, while Jung felt his face reshaping itself into that of “an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.” He says he was afraid he was losing his mind, that he was under some evil spell personified by the sinister Salome (Sem25: 95-7). In fact, his shape shifted into that of Aion, one of the gods of late antique Persia. The lion-headed, snake-encircled Aion, whose image forms the frontispiece of Jung’s book of the same name, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (CW9ii), was known as the god of Endless Duration, the evil half of a pair of gods. His twin brother represented Eternity, the eternal and ever fascinating Now, against which Endless Duration is torment.

          While reluctantly undergoing the deification, Jung was reminded too strongly of his schizophrenic patients at the Burghölzli asylum. But he tells his students in the seminar that if one wishes to become conscious of crucial unconscious facts, one cannot do so without taking the risk, “without giving yourself to them”; and if you do, “then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so that you really go mad, or nearly so.” Still it is an awesome mystery, deification. In Jung’s case, he became the leontocephalus, the lion-headed god with the winged body of an ithyphallic human. He does not tell us whether the encounter with Salome was sexually charged, but he leaves us no doubt that deification, becoming “the vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile” was of decisive importance for him. “When the images come to you and are not understood, you are in the society of the gods or, if you will, the lunatic society; you are no longer in human society” (Sem25: 95). When you feel the lunacy, you are bound to be frightened and tempted to try to dismiss the experience as nonsense, whereupon you will derive no profit from it. Alternatively, you may be so swept up in it that you decide you really are some sort of misunderstood god and thereby “become a crank or a fool” — if not an outright schizophrenic (Ibid., 99).

          The 1925 Seminar ranges over the theory of psychological types and the history of Western culture since the Greeks, but its central message is that the modern “European” is no longer in touch with his unconscious. “Primitives show a much more balanced psychology, for the reason that they have no objection to letting the irrational come through, while we resent it” (Ibid., 105). The way to handle deification and all other “disagreeable” but overwhelming archetypal experiences is to let them be, take them as information that needs to be puzzled out. Neither deny them nor take them literally. Feel how they move you. Accept the reality that life is larger than you have been told.

To the primitive, life is far more voluminous than to us. We look at an animal and say that it is such and such a species, but if we knew that animal to be our ghost brother, it would be a different situation for us. . . . You may say a coyote is nothing but a coyote, but along comes one that is Dr. Coyote, a super-animal who has mana [6] and spiritual power. So says the primitive.

The unconscious should act for us like a super-animal. When one dreams of a bull, one should not think of it as being below the human only, but also as being above — that is of something godlike (Ibid., 106f).

Africa. From Nairobi Jung’s party drove out to see the great game preserve of the Athai Plains, and from a low hill he looked out on a magnificent expanse where great herds of grazing animals moved in silence: “This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being . . . There I was now, the first human being to realize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it” (MDR: 255). The whole scene took him back some eleven or twelve months to his conversations with Mountain Lake. He had envied his old Pueblo friend, the profound meaning granted to him through his myth about assisting his Father the Sun in his daily rounds:

I . . . had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own. Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given the world its objective existence — without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end (Ibid., 256).

Here was, evidently, the most profound altered state of consciousness Jung had had, or indeed, would have before his near-death experiences some two decades later. This time there was no “induction procedure” — no drumming or dancing, no ingestion of drugs, no existential crisis — just a silent vision of endless duration, Aion’s domain, the slow crawl of blind evolution suddenly illumined by conscious reflection. [7]

          No doubt this answer to his deepest longing was the last thing Jung had expected from his trip to Africa, for his aim had been to bring back information from the natives. He hoped to find unspoiled hunter-gatherers happy to share their dreams and mythic narratives. He learned a bit of Swahili in hopes of communicating with them, but found that it only helped in his conversations with his porters, who were generations removed from hunting and gathering. He did learn, however, that they distinguished between “big dreams” and “ordinary dreams.” Ordinary dreams were personal and held little interest. Big dreams, on the other hand, had mythic significance; they were infrequent but impressive, and tended to occur at decisive moments in the life of the dreamer or the group; they gave guidance, and they always had a collective meaning (cf. Burleson, 2005: 147). Jung seized upon this distinction and made it part of his Analytical Psychology, but he heard no big dreams from the Elgonyi, the remote tribe of herders (not hunter-gatherers) that he stayed with on the side of Mount Elgon. They told him that in the old days before the English had taken charge, their medicine men had had dreams and knew when war, sickness or rain would come. But now there was no need for that, since “the English know everything” (MDR: 265).

          It meant a great deal to Jung that big dreams could show a people the way to go and that some individuals were more likely than others to get the message; for it was his own experience that when it is crucial to know something, the unconscious will come to one’s assistance. Furthermore, this fact was perfectly coherent with the possibility that a people’s dreams might go silent when they no longer had charge of their own destiny — for then there would be nothing to constellate an answer from the unconscious. The biographer of Jung's Africa trip, Blake Burleson, accepts the possibility that Jung’s understanding might not have been wrong on these points, but he adds that the Elgonyi were far more politically astute than Jung. The Swiss psychiatrist had showed up at the head of an English-commissioned and English-equipped safari, with the approval of the English colonial authorities. Furthermore, it bore the name of their traditional enemies (The Bugishu Psychological Expedition), and Jung began his formal palavers “by setting forth the shauri, that is the agenda of the of the palaver” (MDR: 264). Burleson points out that shauri was a politically charged term that meant bringing a matter before the colonial authorities. The Elgonyi would have had every reason to think that Jung had been sent as a spy for the English (Burleson, 2005: 143f).

          Very likely Burleson is right, and that may be why Jung got nowhere asking the Elgonyi about their religious beliefs and practices. But it may also be that, like most cultures outside the Christian sphere, they had no concept of a separate domain that corresponds to “religion.” If they had a “religion” of some sort, it was so thoroughly commingled with every aspect of daily life that they could not tease it out, nor could Jung clarify his questions sufficiently to make himself understood. Instead, he had no choice but to catch them in the act, and he managed to do so because he himself liked to be up at dawn. He liked to take a campstool and sit on the edge of the mountain under an acacia tree, where he could watch the “dark, almost black-green strip of jungle” below him gradually turn to “flaming crystal.” “At such moments, I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy” (MDR: 268). Evidently the Elgonyi were familiar with this sort of altered state, because it was in response to the same holy dawn that Jung caught them in the act of practicing the religion they did not know they had. Every morning they would blow or spit into their hands and then hold their palms out toward the rising sun. Remembering Mountain Lake, Jung asked them if the sun were God and learned that the sun is God only at the moment when it rises (MDR: 269). Jung understood this to be a case of mystical participation: the sight of the rising sun and the overwhelming emotion of a corresponding altered state of consciousness occur simultaneously. The encounter with God is the coincidence of these two events, one cosmic and the other psychological.

Sunrise and his own feeling of deliverance are for him the same divine experience, just as night and fear are the same. Naturally his emotions are more important than physics; therefore what he registers is his emotional fantasies. For him night means snakes and the cold breath of spirits, whereas morning means the birth of a beautiful god (CW8: ¶329).

          Taken out of context, a passage like this might be read as evidence that Jung looked upon the “primitives” of Mt. Elgon with colonial distain. But he did not hide his own “timeless ecstasy” before the “most sacred hour of the day” when the forest and mountain become “a temple.” Furthermore, he found a troop of baboons a little further up the mountain from where he sat on his campstool, sitting quietly every morning at the edge of an east-facing cliff. The noise, commotion and constant energy of the baboons’ day evidently waited for a reverent greeting of the rising sun. Baboons, natives, and pith-helmeted Swiss were all moved by the same transcendent experience — the very definition of an archetypal pattern. Moreover, it was evident that such moments had been occurring, morning after countless morning, as long as those nodding herds had been grazing on the plains. Jung obtained partial evidence of such timelessness when he steamed down the Nile on his way out of Africa. There he passed the eastern wall of the ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel and saw on its façade a line of sculpted baboons, facing the rising sun side-by-side in the same attitude of reverence he had seen on Mount Elgon (MDR: 268f).

Lévy-Bruhl. When Jung says, “Sunrise and his own feeling of deliverance are for him the same divine experience,” he is citing what is one of the most common types of altered state of consciousness to be met with in human life. Usually he names it participation mystique, a term borrowed from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Jung’s allying himself with Lévy-Bruhl has not helped his efforts to explain himself, for Lévy-Bruhl is — if possible — even more poorly understood and unfairly dismissed than is Jung. Since “mystical participation” is such an important category of experience for Jung, a short explanation is in order.

          Lévy-Bruhl has a reputation for being an “armchair anthropologist,” one who writes about pre-literate peoples whom he has never visited but only read about in the publications of others. Even anthropologists see him that way. But he was a philosopher, not an anthropologist, and held the chair in History of Philosophy at the Sorbonne. After a book on Germany in the time of Leibniz, his interest shifted to moral philosophy, where he wished to publish an unimpeachable account of human ethics. He began with a book on Auguste Comte, the man who coined the term sociology, and then became fascinated with the Durkheim school of sociology, which inspired his Ethics and Moral Science. Lévy-Bruhl feared his views in the book were too theoretical and too much limited by European cultural assumptions. Like Jung and Husserl in the same second decade of the twentieth century, he wanted to transcend his parochial limitations and decided he had to get as far away from the European mind as possible.

          This is what led him to become an expert in the published reports of missionaries and colonialists working among pre-literate peoples in Africa, Australia, the Americas, and Oceania. He read critically, very astutely pointing out the prejudices that prevent Europeans from understanding the natives. He found case after case of breakdowns in communication that were rooted in cultural differences. For example, a certain Mr. W. B. Grubb in America was accused of stealing pumpkins from an Indian’s garden. Grubb defended himself by pointing out that it was well-known that he had been 150 miles away at the time the pumpkins were stolen. The Indian acknowledged this fact but asserted that Grubb was nevertheless guilty because he had been seen stealing the pumpkins in a dream. This argument is absurd to the European mind, but makes perfect sense to the “primitive.” Conflicts like this were what Lévy-Bruhl seized upon to make his case that there is a way of “thinking” that Europeans do not appreciate. “He [the primitive] will put up with two incompatible certainties and unlike the white man will not believe himself obliged to choose” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1945: 6). Jung made nearly the same point to his 1925 Seminar when he extolled the richness of primitive thinking in being more like “original thinking.” He said the primitive is not disturbed when irrationalities appear, while the European “resents” them.

          “Everybody knows” that Lévy-Bruhl was a bit of a racist for holding that “primitives” were “pre-logical,” that he held stubbornly to his errors for three decades but finally renounced them in notebooks where he was working out the ideas for what would have been his seventh book on primitive mentality. He died without writing the book, but the notebooks were published posthumously (Lévy-Bruhl, 1945). “Everybody” is as wrong about Lévy-Bruhl as he is about Jung. The Notebooks renounce nothing, but obsessively search for a way to convince his critics that his observations are correct. He does make it clear that his choice of “pre-logical” in the first book (How Natives Think, 1910) had been the obstacle. But he had already made that argument in his second book (Primitive Mentality, 1922). Indeed, the last sentence of the much-maligned How Natives Think already makes it clear that the object of his critique is as much Western thinking as it is the mental habits of primitives: “If it is true that our mental activity is logical and prelogical at one and the same time, the history of religious dogma and of philosophical systems may henceforth be explained in a new light.”

          In retrospect, it is clear that Lévy-Bruhl was trying to articulate a point of view in which mystical states of consciousness were taken as legitimate sources of personal and cultural information, alongside of and in tension with what we Westerners consider to be “ordinary” states of consciousness. By the publication of his third book on pre-literate mentality, The Soul of the Primitive (1927), he had begun to identify emotion as the critical factor in a mystical state of consciousness like participation mystique. Furthermore, this capacity for mystical thinking is “not limited to ‘primitive peoples’ but is present in every human mind” (Lévy-Bruhl, 1945: 101). He refers to Western folklore and the concept of “consubstantiality,” the theological concept that describes the Christian Trinity. [8] By the time of his Notebooks, he has adopted a language very similar to Jung’s: “In the affective complex which is created as soon as the primitive man believes himself in the presence of an act of witchcraft, it is the [imperceptible . . . supernatural force] which is by far the most important and, as a result, the most certain” (Ibid., 43, italics added). As an “undeniable” instance of participation mystique, he describes a primitive’s corpse lying in his hut while his ghost is alive, listening in on the conversations of the living, and in need of food and warmth. There is some mysterious identity between the empirical corpse and the invisible ghost. The connection is to be found in “the emotion caused by the death,” so that “participation is essentially feeling” rather than thinking (Ibid., 3).

          Jung was aware of the academic disfavor Lévy-Bruhl had suffered and defended him in several of his writings. [9] He found the philosopher to be an astute observer who had aptly named a universal characteristic of human psychology, and believed that the criticism he had received was due to “rationalistic superstition” (CW11: ¶817, n. 28). As an affective complex, participation mystique is essentially the same phenomenon that we discussed in Chapter 7. An habitual emotional reaction occurs so rapidly in the hypothalamus and amygdala that the cortex is left behind. Our body, and especially its autonomic nervous system, is placed into an attitude such as awe. What then stirs in our memory is the complex of associations that has been linked with that emotion throughout the course of our life. In the case of a personal complex, the topic of the last chapter, the associations are very likely to be idiosyncratic to the individual and her personal history. But in the cases discussed by Lévy-Bruhl, the associated images and concepts are typical and culture-specific. He aptly describes them as répresentations collectives. They are archetypal images generated by inherited brain structures and shaped by culture.

Altered States of Consciousness: An Overview

          In the last paragraph of his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James says that “the whole drift” of his education persuades him “that the world of our present consciousness is only one of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also.” Altered states of consciousness are what have given us access to those other meaningful worlds — at least since the cave painters of the last Ice Age. Over the past half millennium, however, Western culture has not been receptive to the idea that there may be anything of value in mystical or other altered states, even though a genuinely “scientific” spirit ought to be open to investigate every sort of phenomenon.

          The ancient texts of Hinduism identify four fundamental modes of consciousness, each radically distinct from the others and universally available to humans. They are waking consciousness, dream, dreamless sleep, and what is called turīya, “the fourth,” the super-conscious mode of illumination (Fischer-Schreiber, et al., 1989). In his book on the neurobiology of shamanism, anthropologist Michael Winkelman of Arizona State University specifies the same four modes, each physiologically distinct from the others. He calls the fourth state the “transpersonal or integrative” state of consciousness and finds that it has been employed in a striking variety of ways in different cultures (Winkelman, 2000: 113). Some of those cultural forms are fairly familiar: the cosmic journey of the shaman’s soul, the trance characterized by spirit-possession whereby mediums experience themselves as vessels of spirits or gods, the vision quest of Native Americans, and the experience of samadhi or enlightenment in various traditions from India to the Far East. According to Winkelman’s research, the neurobiology of all these activities is pretty much the same, while each cultural tradition varies from the others and thereby gives a different shape to the experience.

          Altered states of consciousness are by no means rare. Although mystical virtuosos are few and far between, we are all capable of altered states, and most of us in the West experience them far more often than we believe. All across the modern world, however, they are very well known. In the early 1970’s, Erika Bourguignon, anthropologist at Ohio State University, reviewed 488 societies from all continents and island groups, and found that ninety percent of them “have one or more institutionalized, culturally patterned form of ASC” (Bourguignon, 1973b). We in the West like to believe that altered states are exceptional, bizarre, absurd distractions from “real life,” even pathological addictions. The fact that humans everywhere are capable of and regularly employ altered states, however, strongly supports the proposition that they are universal capabilities of our human organism and that we would be better off knowing about them and about how and why we might use them. There is no question that Winkelman is right in calling them “fixed structures of consciousness that reflect latent human potentials” (Winkelman, 2000: 117). Archaeologist Brian Hayden believes such power was shared even by our remote ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years before the cave painters:

It seems certain that concepts of an “other world” were firmly in place by the time burials first occur, some 150,000 years ago if not before, as indicated by the use of red ochre in general rituals and the defleshed skull from Bodo, Ethiopia, some 600,000 years ago.

It also seems that Neanderthals were exploring deep caves, presumably for the purpose of inducing ecstatic or altered states, by at least 50,000 years ago if not many thousands of years earlier . . . It seems entirely possible that the shamanism complex did originate at least by Neanderthal times if not before; however, this cannot be conclusively demonstrated. Stronger evidence can be found in the subsequent Upper Paleolithic period (Hayden, 2003: 118).

The ubiquity of ASCs. Researchers from all the fields we have been drawing upon agree that one of the hallmarks of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine how things might be if they were different from what we see before us. We owe our survival, in fact, to our talent for momentarily leaving behind the literal, the empirical, the present moment in the outer world, in order to find useful information within. In situations like this, “imagination” does not refer exclusively to the realm of images; for without emotional valuation, we do not have enough “information” to make crucial decisions. Thus we semi-deliberately “drive” our consciousness into altered states in order to comprehend our life-situation more adequately than bare facts can represent. Furthermore, this process clearly resembles play. It is a central device that we (and all mammals) have been using since childhood to prepare ourselves for the crises that will inevitably arise in our lives.

          Consequently, our so-called “ordinary consciousness” is difficult to delineate. It is hedged about on all sides and even peppered within by non-ordinary sorts of awareness. We might well agree that balancing a checkbook, driving a car, and contriving an experiment in physics all belong to ordinary consciousness (or “directed thinking,” in Jung’s language), even though the differences between these three activities are enormous. But when we consider any one of them more closely, we find the situation to be highly complex. For instance, the motorist may be well aware of and appropriately reacting to ever-changing traffic conditions while never forgetting his destination, staying in touch with current clock-time as well as the time of his next scheduled appointment. All these details belong to ordinary consciousness. At the same time, however, our driver may be carrying on an imaginary argument with his boss, wonder what his therapist might have to say about the argument, and sporadically singing snatches of songs as they come up on his radio. The motorist, therefore, is simultaneously present to and absent from his task at hand, and the physicist’s situation is doubtless more complicated still. Thus the idea of “ordinary consciousness” is hardly more than a convenient fiction. If we pay attention to our states of mind, we have a hard time finding anything that is purely “ordinary” about our awareness. Indeed, with a little more careful attention to our consciousness, we will find the situation to be highly ambiguous. For as Jung, Husserl, and vipassana meditators have already shown us, the most ordinary thoughts we have conceal the process of “original thinking” under a great deal of conceptual overlay.

          While the ordinariness of any state of consciousness is difficult to define, it is not hard to find characteristics that most people will agree are definitely non-ordinary. Perhaps foremost among them is the main quality Jung observed in “original thinking,” the sense that this is not something I have consciously invented, rather that it has been “given” to me — even thrust upon me. There seems to be another agent involved, whether I am inclined to locate that agent in my unconscious psyche or in an invisible world of spirits. I feel, therefore, as though I have lost, to a greater or lesser extent, control over the contents of my consciousness. When a large measure of control seems to have been lost, I am apt to suffer wide fluctuations in my emotional state, possibly even oscillating between elation and despair.

           Very frequently ASCs are characterized by a change in our sense of passing time. Athletes, for instance, often speak of the game “slowing down” when they find themselves in a “groove” or a “zone.” Many who will never be proficient enough to consider themselves athletes have had the same sort of experience while playing a neighborhood game of basketball or softball. Anyone who has been involved in, or closely managed to avoid, an accident on the road or on the ski slope will be aware of time “slowing down” and the extreme clarity of the thinking processes just before the potential impact.

          Altered states of consciousness may also be attended by disturbances in thought process and perception. Certain images or thoughts may become more vivid while others fade out; susceptibility to suggestion may be heightened; images may become so energized that we find ourselves hallucinating. We may experience distortions in our bodily perceptions as our performance miraculously seems to improve or deteriorate.

          Many who report altered states of consciousness claim that what they have experienced can never be adequately expressed in words; something ineffable has happened; a window has opened onto another world of great significance. Such individuals will likely feel renewed or transformed.

          Several authors have listed common ASCs. Brian Hayden (2003: 70f) mentions joggers’ highs, anorectic highs, childbirth, and the rush associated with workaholism, states of terror, and sexual orgasm. David Lewis-Williams & David Pearce (2005: 46) list the hypnagogic state that initiates sleep, near death experiences, intense rhythmic dancing, drumbeats and flickering lights, fatigue, hunger, sensory deprivation, extreme pain, and intense concentration (as in meditation). All of these experiences regularly lead to altered states of consciousness. Dreaming, itself, is perhaps the most common altered state, and always expresses an ego-alien tendency. For dreams “desire” a reality that corresponds to “a neurocognitive structure” within the individual, that is an unconscious neural network (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 285).

          Story-telling fosters altered states by organizing a narrative stream of images that engages with our cultural expectations and oral heritage. Story-tellers take their listeners on “spiritual journeys” (Brody, 2000: 130). We in Western culture tend not to notice the altered nature of the conscious states thereby induced; and when we do notice, we are apt to devalue it with a trivializing label. “Many people in our society smoke marijuana for ‘kicks’ and the experiences produced are generally coded . . . as entertainment. Rastafarians, however, imbibe the drug as a sacrament, which leads to experiences imbued with sacred meaning within the context of their worldview” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 230). Thus, those who grow up witnessing shamanic healings, listening to rhythms and chants and dancing to them are “far more likely to enter into a sacred ecstatic state, than if they grow up in an industrial middle class environment” (Hayden, 2003: 73).

          Athletes who have known “the click of communality,” when their team gels into a radiant high-performance unit come to know “for a while at least, a higher level of existence: existence as it ought to be” (M. Murphy & White, 1978: 11). Even more extraordinary experiences are possible:

A well-known long-distance swimmer . . . who prefers to be anonymous, [said] that whenever his physical body is exhausted during a marathon competition, he relaxes it by floating overhead in his double while continuing to swim. When he reenters his body, he feels refreshed and can go for quite a while without fatigue (Ibid., 65).

Stories of a similar extraordinary nature have been gathered from explorers who have been pushed to the limits of their resources. Shackleton’s memoir of his 1916 South Pole expedition provides this example:

During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards, Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us” (Ibid., 67f).

Altered States and Transformation

          These two stories and hundreds like them, collected in a volume called The Psychic Side of Sports by Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute, and Rhea White, reference librarian and parapsychologist, tell us several things. First, altered states of consciousness can be enormously improbable, but so supportive and useful that anyone blessed with such an experience will hardly dare to doubt it. The narrators of both stories, however, are very uneasy about sharing them. They know the events are “too weird” for most people to accept, so they refuse to speak of them, unless they feel they have found someone exceptional who is likely to understand or at least not dismiss what they have to say. For this reason the swimmer has refused to allow his name to be used, and it is clear that Shackleton only dares mention his experience because it had been mentioned first by someone else. He goes out of his way to let us know that Worsley volunteered the information without prompting — that he was an independent witness. In a society like ours, this is the only sensible way to proceed, for those like Jung and Lévy-Bruhl who suggest that altered states are normal and valuable have been marginalized — even though the breadth of their scholarship and the depth of their education is never questioned.

          Ninety percent of the world’s societies may have institutionalized the cultivation of altered states of consciousness, but their attitudes toward such states and what people can do with them varies enormously. Charles Laughlin, John McManus, and Eugene d’Aquili in their book, Brain, Symbol & Experience (1990: 293-5), have addressed this issue by suggesting a typology of societies based on their openness toward altered states. They refer to our own society as “monophasic.” We admit only one “phase” of information gathering. Only ordinary states of consciousness may serve to provide reliable information. We hold that the real is always concrete and material; and we see the world as inanimate and soulless. Because Shackleton and the anonymous swimmer know this about our society, they know they have to be very careful about sharing their extraordinary experiences. They know their reputations may be at stake.

          Shackleton and the swimmer, however, no longer subscribe to the logic of a monophasic society, for they have found that altered states may be quite valuable aids to success in challenging endeavors. They would feel quite comfortable and be quite willing to speak openly in what C.D. Laughlin, et al., call a “minimally polyphasic” society. This clumsy expression describes a society that admits the existence and even endorses the use of altered states of consciousness, but does so in a “small” way. The authors mean that the linear conscious planning and materialistic assumptions of a monophasic society are not seriously challenged. Altered states are encouraged insofar as they are capable of enhancing the aims and achievements of ordinary consciousness. Shamanism, for example, may be an accepted means of healing diseases and interpreting dreams. It is admissible as an aid in the pursuit of goals that are barely distinguishable from those of a monophasic society. New Age movements in our own society are largely polyphasic in a minimal way. Their members want us to be open to altered states such as aura reading and channeling, and they would no doubt change us in small ways, by raising our eco-consciousness and promoting various tolerance programs to make war less likely; but, otherwise, they share our mainstream goals.

          “Maximally polyphasic” societies, on the other hand, encourage and promote altered states much more vigorously. Indeed, they value them in many ways more highly than they do ordinary states. Altered states of consciousness are not mere helpful adjuncts to life-as-usual, but rather resources for a radical critique. A society is “maximal” in promoting multiple phases of consciousness, when it strives to use non-ordinary states to induce transformations in the attitudes and personalities of its members. Jung, in 1925, was primarily concerned with a revolution in the European consciousness of his followers and patients that can only be described as “maximally polyphasic.” He found Western culture to be failing in contrast to the Pueblo society Mountain Lake described. Because the story of the incarnate, crucified God of Christianity no longer functioned as a meaning-giving myth for the West and because no replacement had yet appeared, the white man had become an anxious, hollow-eyed searcher who no longer knew what he wanted. Logic and materialism were no substitute for mythic roots. Mountain Lake and the Elgonyi had such roots; and now that Jung had experienced his deification as Aion and his revelatory transformation into “the second creator of the world,” he, too, had mythic roots. He envisioned his practice of Complex Psychology as a subversion of ordinary Western values — or perhaps a rediscovery of them. He encouraged his patients to pay attention to their dreams and other altered states and deliberately to take up the practice of active imagination with an eye to psychological transformation.

          C.D. Laughlin and his associates describe a fourth type of society, one that is of less interest for our purposes, for it is probably best exemplified by a monastery. The “polyphasic void society,” also uses altered states to transform its members, but this time the goal is highly specialized. Ultimate mystical states such as absolute union with the godhead, the experience of the void, the blown-out candle of nirvana, and other such descriptions define the central concern of the void society. [10]

Examples of transformative states of consciousness. Before exploring how it happens that altered states of consciousness can bring about significant and long-lasting, if not permanent, transformations in an individual’s attitude toward self and world, we shall take a look at a few autobiographical accounts: three individuals whose published writings have had an influence on this volume, a philosopher, an archaeologist, and Jung himself.

          G. William Barnard’s book, Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism (1997), paints a vivid portrait of a philosopher/psychologist who had a strong influence upon Jung. It is a book that does not neglect the wider thought world shared by the American, Swiss, English, and French pioneers of the early twentieth century who took altered states seriously. A year after the publication of Unseen Worlds, Barnard wrote a chapter for a book devoted to mysticism as an “innate human capacity” (Forman, 1998), in which he described James’ views on the nature of mysticism and illustrated his argument by telling the story of his own mystical experience. The reader can hardly escape the conclusion that Barnard’s momentous experience changed the course of his life and formed the foundation of his professional interest in William James, a writer who strove to expand the boundaries of what we take to be the legitimate scope of academic investigation. Indeed, it is likely that whenever one comes upon a scholar who has devoted a lifetime to trying to persuade our monophasic society of its blindness, biographical inquiry will uncover altered states of consciousness of a transformative nature. [11] Barnard’s experience occurred when he was only thirteen years old:

I was walking to school in Gainesville, Florida, and, without any apparent reason, I became obsessed with the idea of what would happen after my death. Throughout that day I attempted to visualize myself as not existing. I simply could not comprehend that my self-awareness would not exist in some form or another after my death. I kept trying, without success, to envision a simple blank nothingness. Later, I was returning home from school, walking on the hot pavement next to a stand of pine trees less than a block from my home, still brooding about what it would be like to die. Suddenly, without warning, something shifted inside of myself, as if I had been expanded beyond my previous sense of self. In that exhilarating and yet deeply peaceful moment, I felt as if I had been shaken awake. In a single, “timeless” gestalt, I had a direct and powerful experience that I was not just that young teenage boy but, rather, that I was a surging, ecstatic, boundless state of consciousness (Barnard, 1998: 170).

          If there is anything typical in this story of transformation, it is the fact that a process began in Barnard’s young mind that seemed to come from elsewhere. As in “original thinking,” the agent directing this process was not Barnard’s ego. He just “became obsessed” for no apparent reason, and his consciously-directed thought processes were incapable of working out the problem posed by that unconscious “other.” He could neither visualize nor comprehend what had been put so ineluctably before him. It is by no means incidental, of course, that the conundrum that took possession of his mind for some seven or eight hours happens to be the ultimate existential issue of human consciousness: the absurdity and inevitability of death. Finally, the solution to the crisis also came from elsewhere. Without warning, something “shifted”; he was awake for the first time; he was outside of time and saw it all at once in a single gestalt. His sense of personal identity was changed as his ego was overshadowed by a vast ecstatic reality that was also William Barnard. This is apparently the experience of the Archetype of archetypes, what Jung calls the “self,” the wholeness that transcends the ego while not failing to be in some sense “mine.”

          The second example also has to do with a confrontation with death on the part of a young man. English archaeologist Timothy Taylor has written The Prehistory of Sex (1996) which argues that conventional notions of what is “proper” in sexual relations have had far too great an influence on the conclusions scholars have drawn about the sex lives and burial practices of prehistoric peoples, where the evidence is necessarily limited to whatever grave goods have been unearthed, and sometimes how the skeletons have been arranged. Taylor believes that humans have always and in every society down through the millennia explored every possible variation of sexual experience. Our so-called perversities are part of our nature, too, and archaeology would be well served to beware of puritanical assumptions. In The Buried Soul (2002), he wants us to see the shadow side of souls and ghosts, and wants us to appreciate the uncanny altered states that are inspired in humans by the deaths of friends and relatives, the compulsive speculations on the possibility of life after death that accompany those states, and the reasons why our ancestors for tens of thousands of years insisted on burying their corpses twice. [12] Taylor has his antennae up for the most unsettling motives in our ancestors, and often makes a convincing case.

          His transforming experience occurred while he was on an archaeological dig in Austria in 1982 (Taylor, 2002: 249-58). He had just received word that he had been admitted to the doctoral program at Oxford but had not been granted any financial aid, and he feared that he would not be able to continue his studies. On that July night in Vienna, he found himself surrounded by death: the seeming death of his academic hopes, the corpses in the medieval Christian cemetery he had been helping to exhume, the eighth century skeletons in Hungary where he would be working a week later, and above all the recent death of his grandfather from a heart attack. His family had put the blame on young Taylor for the last of these deaths, and, inexplicably, he had fully accepted it.

          On the night of the incident, Taylor was staying with friends in their apartment. There had been much talk and some wine drinking. When his friends went to bed, Taylor remained awake, sitting in his chair, listening to the sound of the trams passing by in the street. Then, apparently without forethought and certainly without rehearsal or even having imagined such a thing, he stripped off his clothes, spread a bath towel over his chair to protect it, folded out the smaller blade of his Swiss Army knife and began making incisions on his arms, legs and rib cage. It appears that he was already in an altered state and directed by an agent foreign to his ego; for he began without debate and without decision. He says, “I was calm to begin with and, as I proceeded making incisions, I became even calmer.” Off and on, he felt a sting of pain, but that was only the surface of his consciousness: “I was somewhere deep inside myself untouchably strong . . . I felt fond of myself, perhaps for the first time. It was a miraculous feeling.”

          He says the endorphins took over, the body’s natural painkillers, and he was “floating” peacefully as he began to go over his body a second time, filling in the gaps between the wounds, when he began to be alarmed at the bleeding. His friends found him in the bathtub and cleaned him up. By then he was embarrassed before them, but he insists that the cutting “made me feel better, not just at that time, but ever since” (italics added).

I have never since felt the same intense calm as in those midnight hours when by some grace I found that I had the courage to act. The moment I started to cut, I began to draw my inner mental world and the outer physical world — symbolized and most directly exemplified by my body — closer together. What was needed was a physical act, one that revealed to me the immediate possibility of my own death (Ibid., 256).

A week later, as he was freeing a 1200 year-old skeleton from damp sand in Hungary, he realized that the inner psychic drama of his self-imposed transformation had had a powerful effect upon his attitude toward archaeology, too:

My experience helped me to break down an academically formalized, suspiciously bourgeois view of antiquity and forced me to start thinking in an emotionally engaged way about past states of mind, my sentiments now on the trail of cold chronologies (Ibid., 257).

          Much more than Barnard’s experience, Taylor’s was a sort of ritual, not one that he had learned, but one that has been enacted countless times by Westerners who have found themselves to be without meaning in their lives and without hope. Unlike those, however, who ended in hospitals and cut themselves over and over without reaching any goal or finding any solution — people whose only hope seems to be to find a way to stop doing it to themselves — Taylor has never needed to do it again. He found something permanent. He has felt better “ever since.” Life and death have a profound meaning for him, a universally human, archetypal meaning; and his life’s work has been defined by this meaning. He has a transcendent goal in his work, to represent the past in an emotionally engaged way — and thus to reveal us to ourselves — to find a way to enter the lives of those people whose skeletons he unearths and the survivors who decorated their corpses and arranged their limbs for an eternal rest.

          Jung experienced a number of transformative altered states in the course of his life. We have briefly considered the apprenticeship to Elijah (later called Philemon) which he underwent in his late thirties and illustrated in his soon-to-be published Red Book. More than a decade later, when he was about fifty, his meetings with Mountain Lake and the Elgonyi resulted in the experience and formulation of his “personal myth.” In his sixty-ninth year, 1944, he suffered a heart attack and lived for three weeks in another world, stripped of his “earthly existence,” floating in his “primordial form” a thousand miles out in space over Ceylon. [13] He was reluctant to accept the verdict that he must return to this “box world,” that had as much reality for him as a newspaper photo — tattered, black and white, two-dimensional. His nurse said he had had the “bright glow” she associated with the dying. He spent his days “weak, wretched, and . . . gloomy” with the thought that he had to return. In the early evening he would fall asleep and wake about midnight in a radiant ecstasy that he thought was “eternal bliss.” Then, while awake in this blissful altered state, he had visions of the wedding of the gods, the ultimate union of the opposites: Tifereth and Malchuth from the Kabala, the Marriage of the Lamb in Jerusalem, Zeus and Hera. Sometimes he was the one being wed. Sometimes he was the wedding (MDR: 289-98).

          Once recovered, Jung entered a fruitful period of writing. “The vision of the end of all things gave me the courage to undertake new formulations. I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts. Thus one problem after another revealed itself to me and took shape.” The visions “corrected” his attitude, made him tolerant of his mistakes and able to “affirm [his] own destiny.” He learned to accept unconditionally “things as they are” and to live his own life without compromise. He now believed he had experienced the truth behind the hundreds of pages he had written on medieval European alchemy, the mystical experiments undertaken by our closest cultural relatives. He had experienced the mysterium coniuctionis, the union of the opposites that produces the Philosophers’ Stone, the goal of the work, the life of conscious wholeness. Now he dared to edit those articles and have them published.

Statistical support. Each of these men underwent a confrontation with his own death that was vivid enough to be felt as a crisis, and each emerged from it with an enlarged sense of his own personal reality, the meaning of life, and the value of their professional efforts. Only Jung’s may be seen as a “near death” experience, even though it does not include a few of the popularly known elements associated with such events. Probably this has something to do with the fact that Jung’s experience occurred in 1944, some thirty-one years before Raymond Moody’s highly influential book, Life after Life told for the first time the stories of dozens of near-death experience stories and enumerated some eleven typical characteristics of the phenomenon. Although the popular literature on the near-death phenomenon is only about thirty years old, the experiences themselves must have been occurring as long as there have been humans capable of reflecting, dreaming, and dying. It seems clear that the near-death experience is an archetypal pattern which may have been shaped in recent decades in the same way that all archetypal patterns take on specific cultural form.

          Although popular discussions of near-death experiences often revolve around the question of whether they demonstrate the reality of a life after death, sober reflection will find no evidence for drawing such metaphysical conclusions. By definition, they are “near” to death: death is approached but not experienced. What they do point to, however, is the possibility that an archetypal experience of such monumental importance and existential immediacy may function as an integrative/transformative event and therefore benefit the lives of those who undergo it. [14]

          Kenneth Ring, professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, has done extensive statistical studies showing that those who have had the “core experience” usually find themselves profoundly changed by it. The “core experience,” as outlined by Moody, includes traveling out of body, passing through a tunnel, meeting others including a “being of light,” undergoing a life review, coming to a threshold that is not crossed, and then returning to this world (Ring, 1980: 23f). Some of these experiences are shared by shamans in their soul-journeys to other planes of reality and probably by our ancestors who planned and painted the Ice Age caves. Jung’s account does not include passage through a tunnel, but all of the other elements mentioned here were part of his experience.

          Ring’s research shows that the near-death experience is “largely independent of the means that brings it about” (illness, accident or suicide) (Ibid., 130), and also has no relationship to the religiousness of the subject (Ibid., 135). These and similar facts support the view that the near-death phenomenon is a universal human capability and not merely a cultural “suggestion.” The long-term effects, however, are the main point, for they make it clear that a near-death experience is powerfully integrating and transformative. Ring summarizes the results of his questionnaires and statistical analyses:

The typical near-death survivor emerges from his experience with a heightened sense of appreciation for life, determined to live life to the fullest. He has a sense of being reborn and a renewed sense of individual purpose in living . . . is more reflective and . . . adjusts more easily to the vicissitudes of life. . . . He becomes more compassionate toward others, more able to accept them unconditionally. He has achieved a sense of what is important in life and strives to live in accordance with his understanding of what matters (Ibid., 157f).

          Ring concludes that “the core experience is a type of mystical experience that ushers one into the holographic domain. In this state of consciousness, there is a new order of reality that one becomes sensitive to” (Ibid., 1980: 237). Here, by his italics, he seems to mean that the individual who has this sort of transforming experience comes to experience herself as a living part of the whole universe: “a gradual shift of consciousness from the ordinary world of appearance to a holographic reality of pure frequencies.” The language suggests the vision of the goal in non-dualist Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) or the universe of quantum mechanics. [15] Sometimes it seems as though Ring takes these images literally, while at other times he refers to them as “teachings” and “revelatory experiences,” much as Jung does. This latter interpretation appears to be supported by the expanded horizon of Ring’s second book, where he identifies the near-death phenomenon as belonging to “family of related experiences” which includes the Hindu and Buddhist cultivation of kundalini (1984: 227).

The Process of Transformation

          Most evolutionists agree with Brian Hayden that altered states of consciousness “are incomprehensible unless they also confer advantageous survival benefits” (Hayden, 2003: 21). William James had already hinted what those benefits might be, when he said that every phase of consciousness provides its own “world” of information. In the most pedestrian sense of all, altered states make us feel better. This is the perspective of the minimally polyphasic, who value altered states for augmenting and supporting our ordinary consciousness. Robin Dunbar, for instance, notes: “Religious people in general do suffer less frequently than non-religious folk from both physical and mental diseases; moreover, when they go down with something, religious people recover more rapidly from both the disease and any invasive treatment” (Dunbar, 2004: 172).

          By contrast, Jung’s efforts imply a maximally polyphasic perspective. Altered states are valuable less for supporting the world of ordinary experience than for opening the way to unexpected depth and engaging meaning. Jung sought a mythic depiction of reality, a world in which the irrational is not “resented.” He found that altered states of consciousness can make it possible for us to live in a richer world, more comprehensive, mysterious, and compelling. His dissatisfaction with European culture grew by stages. In his somnambulist cousin, he found a psyche capable of a will that was independent of the consciousness mind but by no means formless. From Elijah, he learned to pay attention to the subtleties of what the unconscious was giving him and to tolerate the irrational. Mountain Lake, made him realize that the ultimate gift from the unconscious would be a livable myth. In Africa, he found his own myth, the one that made him (and potentially every one of us) the second creator of the world. His near-death experiences brought him the “holographic” experience of being simultaneously both part of the cosmos and his individual self.

          The capacity of the human psyche to rise above its imprisonment in the ordinary world of matter and logic, Jung calls the transcendent function. He wastes no time speculating on how it might work, but merely notes that when we actively tolerate a conflict of interests, rational contradiction, or some other incompatibility, the self, our wholeness, somehow hands us a clue in the form of a symbolic solution to the problem (CW6: ¶828; CW7: ¶121; CW8: ¶131-93). The transcendent function is set in motion, when we maintain steady attention on the conflict and feel how it pulls us in two directions at once. There is nothing more the ego can do but hold to the unsatisfying truth of the situation — not in a spirit of resignation, but with aroused attention. Somehow in that charged atmosphere, the transcendent function generates an energy gradient and a compelling course of action is revealed.

Toward a phenomenology of transformation. Recent researchers have identified subsidiary processes that help us understand that mysterious Somehow that lies behind Jung’s transcendent function. Transcending the ordinary for the sake of personality change becomes less mysterious when the process is broken down into its parts. Utilizing such analyses, this section will describe what happens in more-or-less experiential language. It will be a phenomenology of transformation. The next section will take the objective point of view and consider the neurobiology of the same series of developments.

          Not all altered states of consciousness effect major changes in the organization and integration of a psyche. The majority of non-ordinary experiences may easily be co-opted by ordinary consciousness as healings, sources of alternate perspectives, or simply entertaining “kicks.” By contrast, transformative or integrative states cannot be so co-opted, for they decommission the ordinary and bring about a radical reorganization of brain and psyche.

          Lesser altered states, however, play an important role in the process, for when they are valued and cultivated, they tend to call our ordinary assumptions into question. The more seriously we take them, the more likely they are to “destabilize” our habitual waking attitude toward self and world. This, in turn, opens the door to more dramatic effects, more serious self-questioning, as well as the re-evaluation of life-goals and practices. In short, by “destabilizing” normality they play a permissive role in the “manifestation of integrative potentials” (Winkelman, 2000: 115). First the habitual world of experience must be rendered fragile, overloaded with non-ordinary information that splits the seams of our ordinary assumptions. The evidence points to the wisdom of the East, whose mystics say that enlightenment cannot be reached through the efforts of the ego, alone. Rather, fruit falls from the tree the moment it is ripe. When the disciple is ready, any sound, sight or blow from the master’s staff can be the occasion of enlightenment. The accumulation of experiences that conflict with consensus reality is what “ripens” the psyche for change.

          It is not always easy to accumulate enough destabilizing information to split the seams of our habitual attitudes, because brain and psyche function automatically to reduce conflict. The linear, logical, left-brain tendency to find consistency readily suppresses and judges invalid conflicting information — particularly the “irrational” bits that Westerners so much “resent.” All of our cultural training resists transformation. Therefore any practices that encourage tolerance for the non-ordinary will surely assist the process of transformation. Jung, for example, might urge a patient to become curious about disturbing images and feelings, even to paint them or write poems about them, in a process akin to active imagination. When we engage in such practices, we hold off our compulsion to bring everything that is new into harmony with the old and familiar and to discard the unusual as absurd and meaningless.

          A process like this occurs naturally in REM sleep, that “basic mammalian memory process for evaluating experience and forming strategies” (Winkelman, 2000: 136). It is the reason our dreams seem so ordinary and matter-of-fact while we are dreaming and so absurd when we wake up. “During dreams we find access to the activity and content of the oppositional infrastructure upon which ego consciousness rests. This activity . . . never pauses . . . [and behind it] are the fundamental neurognostic [16] organizations often referred to in Jungian terms as archetypes” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 268).

          C.D. Laughlin and his associates, McManus and d’Aquili, are unusual among scientific investigators in having a fairly accurate understanding of what Jung meant by the term archetype. What they do not emphasize here, however, is the fact that the archetype induces an energy gradient which makes attractive and compelling the new set of images and ideas and the new course of action. In the last analysis, it is always fascination or emotional attraction that makes psychological change possible. Splitting the seams of our old certainties, by itself, will only produce confusion and discontent; and in its extreme form, terror. The introduction of an energy gradient sets us rolling downhill toward new ways of thinking and being. This is the implication of Ring’s work on the near-death experience. The realm of light at the end of the tunnel and the beings of light that seem to live there personify the gradient in that they represent an after-death existence of far greater scope and meaning than the two-dimensional, black-and-white “box world” the individual has left behind. By analogy with Ring’s near-death experience, transformation unfolds “according to a single pattern almost as though the prospect of death serves to release a stored, common ‘program’ of feelings, perceptions, and experiences” (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 122).

          Unconscious, unintegrated material will appear to the ego, with its passion for coherence and consistency, as non-ordinary, even absurd. An altered state as comprehensive as the near-death experience, however, introduces a new energy gradient which changes the organization of the mind. A simultaneous presentation of the familiar and the non-ordinary occurs in an “integrative mode of consciousness . . . [that is] analogous to Jung’s transcendent function” (Winkelman, 2000: 265). When this happens, the conscious mind is presented with “the understandings of the unconscious mind” (Ibid., 194) in such a way that a mysterious and compelling compatibility is revealed. Subjectively, such a “revelation” demonstrates incontrovertibly in the form of direct evidence that (a) there is more to one’s being than the empirical ego and (b) there is more to reality than what can be known through ordinary states of consciousness (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 227).

The Neuropsychology of Transformation

          If neural processes in the brain and the experience of a conscious psyche are two descriptions of the same phenomenon, we should expect that transformative/integrative states of consciousness will show up in the brain as harmonious, holistic forms of neural functioning. The brain ought to be as unified as the transformative state of consciousness that it supports, and that is precisely what we find.

          Such unified brain states are exceptional, for as the chapter on the complexes describes, most everyday conscious activities involve specialized portions of the brain operating with relative independence from one another; sometimes they are even in conflict — as when a complex is constellated and an emotional over-reaction interrupts sober, confident, well-adapted behaviors. In such a situation, the “emotional brain” overwhelms the more “rational” cortex. That “emotional brain” is also called the “limbic” system because, anatomically, its constituents form a sort of “fringe” (limbus, in Latin) around the stalk that connects the two hemispheres of the cortex. It is also called the “paleomammalian” brain because it entered evolution inside the skulls of the earliest mammals. It includes the structures we discussed in the previous chapter: thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. The limbic system is responsible for, among other things, maintaining altered states of consciousness characterized by alpha and theta brain waves, which are slower and more regular than the beta waves we employ in ordinary waking consciousness. Beta waves are relatively fast and irregular, a situation that reflects the ever-changing outer-worldly conditions to which an animal must adapt if it is to survive while searching for food and water, fleeing from enemies, and the like. The slower, more regular alpha waves characterize reverie states and dreaming, while the still-slower theta waves characterize the deepest states of meditation.

          The first major pair of opposed brain structures in the ordinary waking state, then, are the limbic system and the cortex (the paleomammalian and neomammalian parts of the brain). The second pair are the two hemispheres of the cortex. The dominant (usually left) hemisphere is responsible for linear, linguistic, logical, and conceptual understandings, while the less dominant hemisphere recognizes patterns, and shapes, and generally views its situation in the world as a matter of generalized wholes (gestalts). The third opposition is that between neurocognitive structures (neural networks) that are conscious and those that fall outside of the conscious field. In integrative states of consciousness, the entire brain enters into a hierarchic unity: the limbic system “drives” the frontal cortex, normally unconscious networks enter a widened conscious field, and the two hemispheres are synchronized (Winkelman, 2000: 129). In its integrative state, the brain is as unified as is the “self” in Jung’s conception. To understand how this state is achieved, we shall proceed one step at a time.

Tuning the autonomic nervous system. Standard descriptions of the nervous system divide it into two parts, the central nervous system (CNS) and the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The central nervous system includes the brain, spinal cord and most of the nerve net that branches out from them to innervate the “voluntary” striated muscles that move our skeleton and that also gather sensory information to bring back to the brain for processing. Nearly all that we have said so far about the nervous system has been limited to the functioning of the CNS. The autonomic nervous system, on the other hand, innervates the “smooth,” involuntary muscles and glands of the internal organs, which operate for the most part outside of conscious control. The autonomic nervous system can be “tuned” because it actually comprises two opposed subsystems, called the sympathetic and parasympathetic. Because the sympathetic nervous system arouses the body for emergencies, it is often called the fight-or-flight system. The parasympathetic system, by contrast, is often called “quiescent” because it regulates digestion, growth, relaxation, and sleep. To “tune” the ANS means to regulate the balance between sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic quiescence. “Manipulations of the autonomic nervous system . . . are the basis for experiences of higher phases of consciousness” (Winkelman, 2000: 166).

          Several high-energy states of autonomic tuning have been found to underlie significant types of altered states of consciousness. In the following paragraphs, I rely largely upon the work of C.D. Laughlin, et al. (1990: 319-21); d’Aquili & Newberg (1999: 24-6, 90f); and Winkelman (2000: 127-45).

          a. Hyperarousal of the sympathetic system. This “tuning” is typically achieved by vigorous activity, including rituals done to rapid drumbeat and singing, extended periods of intense dancing, long-distance running, and other extreme athletic feats extended over long periods of time. Because they all involve pushing the body to its limits, these techniques of achieving high arousal are known as “bottom-up driving.” Brain and psyche (the “top”) are affected by high stresses placed on the body (the “bottom”); or perhaps only upon the sensory organs in the case of rhythmic drumming or flashing lights. The sympathetic system can also be driven to high arousal “from the top-down,” by intense mental activities, as when Francis of Assisi deliberately placed himself in a condition of shame and terror before “the Lord of the Whole Earth” (cf. Haule, 2004). Practitioners of “left-hand Tantra” employ a similar technique when they “heroically” violate the five taboos in order to induce a powerful state of arousal (cf. Haule, 1999b).

          The effects of stimulating the sympathetic system to a high state of arousal are keen alertness and concentration, much as we know through experiencing moments of impending disaster, when everything slows down and our thought processes are strangely clear and vivid. One has the feeling of being able to channel vast quantities of energy without special effort. One feels oneself inside of and traveling along with a powerful impersonal “flow.”

          b. Hyperarousal of the parasympathetic system. Probably “hyperquiescence” would be an appropriate description of this condition, if it were not for the fact that the term seems self-contradictory. What is meant is that the parasympathetic system goes into overdrive, affecting portions of the limbic brain and the endocrine glands that produce hormones to reduce breathing, heart-rate, and waste-product collection, while engorging the erectile tissues and increasing salivation. Bottom-up driving includes fasting and other austerities that cause the body to conserve its resources; slow, sedate rituals; and extended sexual foreplay accompanied by intense concentration. Top-down driving involves most forms of sitting meditation when pursued with prolonged intensity.

          The effects of extended high levels of arousal in the parasympathetic system are described as oceanic tranquility and bliss. All burdens and stresses fall away. Probably this is what Jung referred to when he said that his humanity was stripped away and he was left in his “primal form” during his near-death experience. The movement of time that characterizes ordinary consciousness dissolves into an eternal now. The individual is free of intrusive thoughts, feelings or bodily sensations. It is a state of relaxation usually associated with sleep, except that in this case it is illumined by heightened awareness.

          c. ANS spillover phenomena. In the extraordinary situations that produce the integrative/transformative state of consciousness, the halves of the autonomic nervous system — although they usually inhibit one another — experience simultaneous overdrive. In the first case, when the quiescent system is pushed to its limits, eruption of the arousal system can sometimes break through. At this point, the state of oceanic tranquility opens onto the state described in yoga manuals as “absorption in the object.” The meditator loses awareness of the usual separation between herself and the object of her one-pointed attention, and she seems to become one with it. When this happens, she feels a tremendous release of blissful energy.

          In the other direction, the sympathetic system, when pushed to its limits for an extended period of time, becomes exhausted. The synaptic vesicles in the brain that are responsible for the synthesis, storage, and release of the primary neurotransmitter of the sympathetic system, noradrenaline, have a limited lifetime. When they become exhausted, the sympathetic system collapses and the parasympathetic takes over. This results in an orgasmic, rapturous explosion of ecstasy in the midst of the “flow” experience that had been in effect before the spillover.

          Spillover in either direction results in what d’Aquili and Newberg call activation of the “holistic operator.” This is the capacity of brain and psyche to experience a union of the opposites, a blurring of the usual cognitive boundaries, and an ecstatic sense of belonging to the whole: internal union, union with all of humanity, and union with the cosmos.

The integrative state of consciousness. Contemporary research shows that the brain functions as a series of systems nested within other systems (d’Aquili & Newberg, 1999: 69); it is coherent with Jung’s 1935 conception of Complex Psychology, according to which it is not ultimate building blocks that we should be looking for, but rather for patterns within patterns. Still, some patterns conflict with and inhibit others, which leads to our everyday experience of our consciousness being fragmented. Such fragmentation is largely “a by-product of both the evolutionary specialization of the left [temporal] lobe for language and serial sequencing of movement and the capacity of consciousness to be canalized [by] . . . conditioned entrainments” (C.D. Laughlin, et al., 1990: 133). Those “conditioned entrainments” are exemplified by the complexes we discussed in the last chapter.

          Ordinary consciousness, therefore, seems to lock us into a world that is filled with objects, events, and processes that entrain the same neural networks whereby we recreate for ourselves the same experiences over and over again. Within such a lived-world, it is hardly surprising that humans, as far back as we can see into our evolutionary past, have sought “to release the stranglehold that the conscious rational mind has on our thoughts and experiences [and] to open up channels of communication and experience to other parts of the brain such as the right hemisphere and the older emotional parts” such as the limbic system (Hayden, 2000: 66). All altered states of consciousness have the capacity to reduce that stranglehold, and all point to and give us a taste for a larger and more satisfying world of experience. All of them have the effect of exhausting the dominant hemisphere that is responsible for what Jung calls “directed thinking,” for it “fatigues more rapidly and releases control to the right hemisphere” (Winkelman, 2000: 194).

          Nevertheless, it is only the integrative state of consciousness that is capable of completely transforming our experience of brain and psyche. Spillover from a highly aroused parasympathetic nervous system entrains the frontal cortex that usually works on behalf of the ego. This entrainment from within (as opposed to the complex-reaction which entrains via events observed in the outer world) is achieved by “highly coherent and synchronized slow-wave discharges emanating from the limbic system and related lower brain structures.” What results is an “integration of information processing across all three levels of the brain and the two hemispheres” (Ibid., 114). By the three levels of the brain, he means, from top to bottom: the cortex, the limbic system, and the brain-stem and other ancient parts that are sometimes called the “reptilian brain.”

          As a consequence of this unified brain operation, neural networks that normally remain unconscious become accessible in the form of “[objective] content rather than as self” (Ibid., 129). This peculiar expression corresponds to Jung’s observation that individuation cannot begin until an “other” appears in the unconscious with which the ego can enter into dialogue (e.g., CW14: ¶753; CW18: ¶1171). Winkelman means that in ordinary consciousness we take the feelings and notions that occur to us as part of ourselves. We lack the perspective provided by “original thinking” and have no distance from them. We are thus apt to conclude that I am the type of person who has such lofty or nasty feelings. In the integrative state, however, this unconscious material appears as other than me and therefore contains information I can learn how to use. This gives me “greater flexibility and conscious control [over my] biological and mental systems” (Ibid.).

          The integrative/transformative state of consciousness is an archetypal pattern in the sense that all humans are capable of experiencing it. It is something we have in common with all our ancestors going back at least as far as the Upper Paleolithic, and very likely much farther. Insofar as everything biological and psychological is comprised of patterns nested within patterns, the process of integration/transformation is the Archetype of archetypes, the largest pattern within which all the others are nested. An archetypal behavior pattern like communicating in language, for instance, has nested within it patterns of sound recognition, gesture and body-language responsiveness, concept formation, and many other contributing faculties. But linguistic understanding has to slide out of the driver’s seat for transformation to occur. It is not that language can play no part in the transformation, for we will be able to articulate aspects of the process while it is going on and after it has ended. But the language archetype will become just one of many nested means of understanding when the entire brain and psyche are synchronized by coherent slow waves from the limbic system that integrate all of the information processing regions of the brain. The unified constellation of brain activity is the integrative/transformative state. It is how our physical substrate behaves when the “self” operates as “transcendent function.”

          When an the individual finds the “personal myth” that gives his life transcendent meaning, it will appear in this exceptional state of consciousness. Unquestionably, near-death experiences are a form of the integrative state. Winkelman seems to suggest, too, that “big dreams” are related to the same phenomenon, for they reflect “transpersonal and cross-modal potentials” that imply “limbic-frontal integration,” though in more limited form (Ibid., 142).

 

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1. Also known as Antonio Mirabal. Jung carried on a correspondence with his “friend,” Mountain Lake, two examples of which have been published (Letters I: 101f; II: 596f).


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2. Until he met Mountain Lake, these searches had been made primarily in the library. Although he read widely, he was very strongly influenced by the books of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who also did not visit the people he wrote about, but exhaustively studied the extant literature from the field. More about Jung and Lévy-Bruhl later in the chapter.


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3. In the seminar, he does not identify his cousin, but only calls her a “young girl.”


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4. There are no references to Husserl or any of the phenomenologists in Jung’s Collected Works. It is the thesis of my doctoral dissertation that Jung was a naïve phenomenologist, struggling to find a language to describe his observations but without help from what he might have found in the philosophical discipline begun by Husserl and pursued by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others (Haule, 1973).


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5. Vipassana, the more widely used term in recent Western publications, comes from the classical language of early Buddhism, Pali; the corresponding Sanskrit term is vipashyana. It means “clear thinking” which leads to recognition of “the three marks of existence”: impermanence, suffering, and egolessness (Fischer-Schreiber, et al., 1989). Jung’s interest was clearly about unmasking the ego’s illusion of being in control.


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6. Mana is a Polynesian word for “spiritual power,” and the starting point for some of the earliest attempts to construct a consistent anthropological vision of the full range of religious experience by such writers as Lévy-Bruhl and Gerardus Ver der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1933).


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7. This formulation is also suggestive of the philosophical school of phenomenology, because four years after Jung’s 1925 seminar, Martin Heidegger published one of the great books of the twentieth century, Being and Time, which has as its theme that human existence (Dasein) is the “Shepherd of Being,” because it alone is conscious and forms the “clearing” in which Being appears.


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8. In the three-person God of Christianity, the Son and the Holy Spirit are “of the same substance” as the Father. This makes the three of them “con-substantial.”


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9. E.g., CW8: ¶507, n.12; CW9i: ¶41; CW11: ¶817, n. 28.


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10. I have written about the pursuit of the void as a transcending of more limited altered states in Chapter 11 of my book on Tantra (Haule, 1999b).


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11. The experience that lies behind my work is discussed in Chapter 3 of Perils of the Soul (Haule, 1999a).


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12. Discussion of these issues will be taken up in Chapter 9 of this volume.


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13. Described with an accuracy that the rest of us could not know before the satellites and moon shots of a quarter century later.


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14. I discuss near death experiences in much more detail in Chapter 4 of Perils of the Soul (1999a).


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15. Exploration of this issue is already developing a rich literature, e.g., N. C. Panda, The Vibrating Universe. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1995; Mark S. G. Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1987.


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16. By neurognostic, the authors refer to ways of knowing (gnosis = knowledge) that depend upon the neural structure of the brain.