9. Mystical Experiences as Altered States of Consciousness. Transpersonal psychologists tend to view experiences of “mystical union,” “enlightenment,” “nirvana”, and related experiences as natural and beneficial nonordinary states of consciousness that may be subject to state-dependent learning effects. The idea that experiences of the sacred may be interpreted as altered states of consciousness arose from the two-fold observation that (a) psychedelic drugs have been used across centuries and cultures to induce religious experiences and (b) reports of some drug experiences are phenomenologically (descriptively or experientially) indistinguishable from accounts of natural mystical experiences (Doblin, 1991; Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1997; Smith, 1964, 2000; Walsh, 2003).
Observation from LSD research. Stanislav Grof (1975a, 1975b, 1980a, 1985) has reported that many of the transpersonal experiences observed to occur during psychedelic and psycholytic LSD sessions were phenomenologically indistinguishable from those spiritual experiences described in the literature of various ancient and indigenous African, Far East, Middle East, Asian, Western, and Native American religious and mystical systems of thought (i.e., temple mysteries, mystery religions, and so forth).
From the phenomenological point of view, it does not seem possible to distinguish the experiences in psychedelic sessions from similar experiences occurring under different circumstances, such as instances of so-called spontaneous mysticism, experiences induced by various spiritual practices, and phenomena induced by new laboratory techniques. (Grof, 1975a, p. 316)
Two types of spiritual experiences noted. Grof (2000) has noted that direct “spiritual” experiences that occur during psychedelic sessions tend to take two different forms: the immanent divine and the transcendent divine.
The first of these, the experience of the immanent divine involves subtly, but profoundly transformed perception of the everyday reality. A person having this form of spiritual experience sees people, animals, and inanimate objects in the environment as radiant manifestations of a unified field of cosmic creative energy and realizes that the boundaries between them are illusory and unreal. This is a direct experience of nature as god, Spinoza’s deus sive natura…The second form of spiritual experiences, that of the transcendent divine, involves manifestation of archetypal beings in the realms of reality that are ordinarily transphenomenal, unavailable to perception in the everyday state of consciousness. In this type of spiritual experience, entirely new elements seem to “unfold” or “explicate,” to borrow terms from David Bohm (1980), from another level or order of reality. (Grof, 2000, pp. 210-211)
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Religious experiences and transpersonal experiences are not identical. Although there is considerable overlap between so-called religious experiences and so-called transpersonal experiences, they are not identical. The relationship between transpersonal psychology and religion is similar to the relationship between transpersonal experiences and altered states of consciousness. As Grof (1975a) noted:
The term “altered states of consciousness” encompass transpersonal experiences; there are, however, certain types of experiences labeled altered states of consciousness, but do not meet the criteria for being transpersonal [i.e., involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond usual ego boundaries and the limitations of time and space]. For example, a vivid and complex reliving of a childhood memory occurs in an altered state of consciousness [e.g, in hypnosis or in psychedelic sessions], but do not meet the criteria for being transpersonal. (Grof, 1975a, p. 315)
The same relationship can be applied between transpersonal and religious experiences.
Some, but not all, transpersonal experiences are experiences of the sacred, but not all religious experiences are transpersonal.... Transpersonal disciplines are interested in transpersonal experiences that are not religious, and in research, interpretations, psychologies, and philosophies devoid of religious overtones…. espouse no particular religious convictions, …and usually assume that transpersonal experiences can be interpreted either religiously or nonreligously according to individual preference. (Walsh & Vaughn, 1993a, p. 6)
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Are drugs capable of inducing genuine religious experiences? Transpersonal psychologist Roger Walsh (2003) suggests: “Yes, psychedelics can induce genuine mystical experiences, but only sometimes, in some people, under some circumstances” (p. 2). According to Huston Smith (1964) in his article, “Do Drugs Have Religious Import?” the answer is that “There are…innumerable drug experiences that have no religious features…This proves that not all drug experiences are religious; it does not prove that no drug experiences are religious” (pp. 520, 523). Given the right mental set and physical setting, individuals report drug experiences that are indistinguishable from those reported by mystics across centuries and cultures (Doblin, 1991; Huxley, 1963; Watts, 1962). It seems that “subjectively identical experiences can be produced by multiple causes” (Walsh, 2003, p. 2), technically called “the principle of causal indifference” (Stace, 1988, p. 29).
A religious experience does not necessarily produce a religious life. Can a transient and time-limited drug-induced experience of the sacred produce an enduring and permanent religious or spiritual life? Not necessarily. “A single experience, no matter how powerful, may be insufficient to permanently overcome mental and neural habits conditioned for decades to mundane modes of functioning” (Walsh, 2003, p. 4). Major enduring life changes may occasionally occur (see, for example, the case studies of “quantum change” reported by Miller & C’de Baca, 2001), but long-term personality changes usually will require the long-term practice of some spiritual discipline, such as vipassana (mindfulness) meditation. As transpersonal psychologist Roger Walsh (2003) remarked:
The universal challenge is to transform peak experiences into plateau experiences, epiphanies into personality, states into stages, and altered states into altered traits, or, as I believe Huston Smith once eloquently put it, “to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light.” (Walsh, 1003, p. 4)
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10. Questions of Discernment Transpersonal psychology also allows for questions of discernment concerning the value, authenticity, and truth-claims of spiritual development to enter into discussion of religious issues. Questions of discernment include: How is one to differentiate the more valid, genuinely beneficial, and even enlightening “religious movements” from the less valid or even harmful, and what sort of believable criteria can be devised to tell the difference (Anthony, Ecker, & Wilber, 1987)? How can one distinguish a mystical experience with psychotic features from a psychotic experience with mystical features (C. Grof and S. Grof, 1990; Liester, 1996; Lukoff, 1985)?
Transpersonal Interpretation of a Religious Event: Medjugorje
The apparition of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia would certainly be considered both a spiritual experience and a religious event. Would it also be considered a transpersonal experience? In certain terms, the apparition of the Virgin Mary may be considered a transpersonal experience “in which the sense of identity or self [of the six young people at Medjugorje] extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos” (Walsh & Vaughn, 1993a, p.3), but is this all that is happening?
How does the universe participate in the creation of experiences of the sacred? What role does Being play in the manifestation of transpersonal events? Figure 1-6 provides one provocative interpretation of the Medjugorje phenomenon from the unique transpersonal perspective of writer and mystic Jane Roberts (1981a, 1981b).
Figure 1-6. Miracle at Medjugorie:
A Transpersonal Interpretation
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Figure 1-6. Miracle at Medjugorje: A Transpersonal Interpretation
(Roberts 1981a, 1981b)
In June, 1981, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus the Christ, began appearing to a group of young people in a remote mountain village in Yugoslavia. How would such an event be interpreted from a transpersonal perspective?
First of all, it is important to acknowledge that conventional religious concepts and rational true-or-false approaches can make interpretations of such highly creative and important phenomena as happened at Medjugorje extremely difficult. Living as we do in the modern scientific age, we search for certainties and are taught from childhood to consider physical facts as the only criteria of reality. We seem to think that if we can name and label exceptional events such as occur at Medjugorje a “miracle” or a “supernatural religious event,” one the one hand, or as a “schizophrenic delusion” or “serotonin hallucination,” on the other, then they will be more acceptable and real. The ordinary ego-directed mind wants its truths labeled, and clothed in the clear-cut contrasts of good or bad, true or false, black or white. Often this presents us with an irreconcilable dilemma because we are then put into the position where we must prove that the outside source of the “miracle at Medjugorje” – the Virgin Mary, Christ, or God the Father – really exists as it is physical experienced, interpreted, and perceived, or lose faith in the phenomenon, and face the fact that our perception and understanding is not infallible. The revelatory nature of the knowledge emerging from these six youth’s experience seems so supernormal because they (and we) try to view it from the perspective of normal waking consciousness and our usual work-a-day world concepts and schema. We naturally interpret its manifestation and any symbolic meaning it may have in the light of our beliefs of good and evil, the possible and the impossible.
We cannot understand what the Medjugorje phenomenon is unless we understand the nature of personality and the characteristics of consciousness.
From a transpersonal perspective, calling exceptional events such as occur at Medjugorje either a “miracle, ” and “supernatural religious event,” or as “schizophrenic delusion” or “serotonin hallucination,” remain rather conventional interpretations of greater truths about ourselves. The visions of these six youths may represent messages from multidimensional aspects of ourselves (being as we are a portion of All That Is) to selves who are in space and time. The Virgin Mary personality may represent a deep part of the structure of the psyche of the six youths as well as a definite personification of a multi-reality consciousness (or Virgin Mary entity). The messages they receive would represent the encounter of their personalities with the vast power of their own psyche in dramatized form with the source of their being (or “God” if you prefer), personified according to the ideas of these six young people. Note that such an interpretation of this important event, does not deny the validity or significance of the phenomenon, nor claims that the six young people are making it all up, nor that it proceeds from them alone.
When people pray or have authentic mystical experiences, it is important to recognize that, psychologically speaking, they are working through areas of the psyche. At some indescribable point, the psyche may open up into levels of being, reality, experience, or understanding usually unavailable to ego-directed awareness, and personify itself to get its message across, dramatizing itself through the creativity of the percipient’s beliefs and personality. The symbolization and personification is important psychologically. Quite legitimate and valid psychological experiences of basically independent, alternate realties become clothed in the garb of very limited, conventional images and ideas.
The six youths at Medjugorje have personified their experience in conventional religious terms, while instinctively sensing its multidimensional nature. The valid and significant creative material, the psychic content, becomes changed by the beliefs, symbols, ideas, and intents of the conscious mind of these six visionaries who must interpret the information they receive.
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Figure 1-6. Miracle at Medjugorje (continued)
(Roberts 1981a, 1981b)
Cognitive psychology reveals how schemata can limit our understanding of events, situations, and other people, and how we, in turn, often limit our own experience to fit the schemata what we have. This applies to self-schemata as well. Most people do not understand their own inner reality and many individuals have been taught to mistrust themselves. After all, the unconscious self, from the Freudian perspective, is acknowledged to be devious, capable of the most insidious subconscious fraud, and filled with infantile impulses that cannot be trusted. Revelatory material then must erupt as if it came from an outside source if it is to be accepted or even perceived at all.
On an inner level, the six youths of Medjugorje are perceiving something different and of significant importance to them, for beyond the boundaries of the known self, intuitive and revelatory knowledge springs into their existence to expand their conscious knowledge and experience. Yet mixing with their type of life space, imprinted by their psychological field, and sifted through the personalities of the percipients, the phenomenon - the appearance of the Blessed Mary - appears in line with the six youth’s ideas of Christianity and personality, even though the phenomenon’s own reality might exist in different terms entirely.
It may be that personifications of such entities as manifested in the “Virgin Mary” personality usually come through only as caricatures of their real natures because of our beliefs about the nature of personhood. The individual psyches of the six Medjugorje youths likely deflects and distorts the “Virgin Mary” personality to some degree and reflects it through their own nature as it expresses itself through them. The religious concepts of these six youths, in other words, form a grid or net or webwork of beliefs through which their deepest perceptions flow.
It is through the rather conventional Catholic image of the Virgin Mary that they have interpreted whatever manifestations their own psyche may have presented themselves with. The problem that is forever upon us is in making the symbolic personifications literal (for has not science taught us that only the literal fact is true?). The problem is never looking behind the symbolism of the communication, beyond the personification of the inner morality play that is the “Miracle at Medjugorje” for Catholics world-wide, for the greater meanings beneath.
As Jung clearly understood, the “Virgin Mary” personality is a symbol (or archetype) for other dimensions of our own personality. Its language is not literal truth in limited positivistic true or false terms. The symbols of the Medjugorje vision are a reality in an inner order of events that can only be stated symbolically in our own three-dimensional physical world of space and time. There is an inner and outer order of events.
The vision of the six youths of Medjugorje presents some very private information from that inner order. But like a round peg trying to fit a square hole, the resulting translation gives us events squeezed out of shape to some degree, as the six youths superimpose one kind of reality over another, interpreting one kind of information from the inner order in terms of the outer one, with all of its quite conventional beliefs, symbols, ideas, and images, altering it to some extent. The experience of these six youths become tinged with the entire bag of concepts and beliefs they hold, influenced by the religious and cultural beliefs of our time.
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Criticisms of Transpersonal Psychology
Transpersonal psychology has not been without its critics (Adeney, 1988; Ellis & Yeager, 1989; May, 1986; Schneider, 1987; E. Taylor, 1992).
Fundamental Christians have criticized transpersonal psychology as being nothing more than a mishmash of “New Age” ideas that offer an alternative faith system to vulnerable youths who turn their backs on organized religion (Adeney, 1988).
Philosophers have criticized transpersonal psychology because its metaphysics is naive and epistemology is undeveloped. Multiplicity of definitions and lack of operationalization of many of its concepts has led to a conceptual confusion about the nature of transpersonal psychology itself (i.e., the concept is used differently by different theorists and means different things to different people).
Biologists have criticized transpersonal psychology for its lack of attention to biological foundations of behavior and experience. Physicists have criticized transpersonal psychology for inappropriately accommodating physic concepts as explanations of consciousness.
Transpersonal psychiatrist Allan Chinen (1996, pp. 12-13), author of numerous works on the transpersonal dimensions of midlife and aging, identifies other criticisms that have been leveled against transpersonal psychology
“Unscientific” and opposition to empirical science. TP claims to validate the existence of what cannot be empirically verified. Methodological difficulty dealing with its scientific status makes the field appear to be largely founded on theory, experience, and belief with few objective tests of its theories.
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Trying to “leap across” the dark side of human nature, going directly to transcendental states, ignoring the tragic, more sinister aspect of life, including envy, suffering, guilt, and jealousy
Narcissistic preoccupation with the self and overemphasis on the individual at the expense of society and culture.
Reprehensible behavior of many “gurus” and spiritual leaders which casts doubt on the value of “spiritual enlightenment”
Uncertain relation between psychotic and transcendent states.
Fostering irrational belief in divine beings
Elevating animals and nature to equal importance with human beings
Questionable practical importance of transpersonal psychology for human problems
Inexperienced clinicians failure to recognize risks and dangers of transpersonal techniques
Tendency toward dogmatism, absolutism, and fanaticism.
Theory-laden definitions of transpersonal psychology can bias cognitive assumptions and presuppositions about the nature of reality, the self, the world, others, time, consciousness, highest potentials, development, health, and so forth, limiting its openness to alternative interpretations
Let us examine one of these criticisms in more detail – the criticisms of Albert Ellis (Ellis & Yeager, 1989), the founder of rational-emotive therapy (RET).
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