Grofians Unauthorized
Discussion Group
TRANSPERSONAL EXPERIENCES
"The common denominator of this rich and ramified group of unusual experiences is the individual's feeling that his or her consciousness has expanded beyond the ego boundaries and has transcended the limitations of time and space."
- Beyond the Brain
"Many experiences belonging to this category can be interpreted as regression in historical time and exploration of one's biological, cultural, or spiritual past. It is not infrequent in experiential sessions to experience quite concrete and realistic episodes of fetal and embryonic life. Many subjects report vivid sequences on the cellular level of consciousness that seem to reflect their existence in the form of the sperm and ovum at the time of conception. Sometimes the regression appears to go even further and the individual has a convinced feeling of reliving episodes from the life of his or her biological ancestors, or even drawing on the pool of collective and racial memories. On occasion, subjects report experiences in which they identify with various animals in the evolutionary pedigree, or have a distinct feeling of reliving memories of their existence in a previous incarnation."
"Some other transpersonal phenomena involve transcendence of spatial rather than temporal barriers. Here belong the experiences of consciousness of another person, group of persons, or all of humanity. One can even transcend the limits of a specifically human experience and tune in to what appears to be the consciousness of animals, plants, or inanimate objects. In the extreme, it is possible to experience the consciousness of all creation, the entire planet, or the entire material universe."
- Beyond the Brain
"Another important group of transpersonal experiences involves precognition, psychic diagnosis, clairvoyance, clairaudience, psychometry, telepathy, out-of-body experiences, and other paranormal phenomena. Some of them are characterized by a transcendence of ordinary temporal limitations, others by transcendence of spatial barriers, or a combination of both. Since many other types of transpersonal phenomena frequently involve access to new information through extrasensory channels, the clear boundary between psychology ad parapsychology tends to disappear or become rather arbitrary when the existence of transpersonal experiences is recognized and acknowledged."
"The existence of transpersonal experiences violates some of the most basic assumptions and principles of mechanistic science. They imply such seemingly absurd notions as the relativity and arbitrary nature of physical boundaries, nonlocal connections in the universe, communication through unknown means and channels, memory without a material substrate, nonlinearity of time, or consciousness associated with all living forms (including unicellular organisms and plants) and even inorganic matter."
"Many transpersonal experiences involve events from the microcosm and macrocosm - realms that cannot be directly reached by human senses - or from periods that historically precede the origin of the solar system, of planet Earth, of living organisms, of the nervous system, and of Homo sapiens. These experiences clearly suggest that, in a yet unexplained way, each of us contains the information about the entire universe or all of existence, has potential experiential access to all its parts, and in a sense IS the whole cosmic network, as much as he or she is just an infinitesimal part of it, a separate and insignificant biological entity."
- Beyond the Brain
"The theoretical challenge of these observations - formidable as it may be in itself - is further augmented by the fact that, in experiential work, transpersonal experiences correctly reflecting the material world appear on the same continuum and intimately interwoven with others whose content is not in agreement with the world view predominant in Western civilization. We can mention here the Jungian archetypes - the world of deities, demons, demigods, superheroes, and complex mythological, legendary, and fairy tale sequences. Even these experiences can be associated with accurate information about folklore, religious symbolism, and mythical structures of various cultures of the world that the subject has not been familiar with or interested in prior to the experiential session. The most generalized and universal experiences of this kind involve identification with cosmic consciousness, the Universal Mind, or the Void."
- Beyond the Brain
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