Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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Stanislav Grof

Psychedelics return, find us living in silos

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The headline of a feature article in The New Yorker (February 5, 1915) reports with some breathlessness that after several years of university investigation, “Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results.”

The less breathless author of the excellent and lengthy article, journalist Michael Pollan, describes the history of psychedelic research and reports on new clinical trials at New York University in which “psilocybin—the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms—was being administered to cancer patients in an effort to relieve their anxiety and ‘existential distress.’” One participant had applied to the study after reading that under the influence of the hallucinogen, “individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” (That sounds oddly familiar…do you hear it?) [Read more…] about Psychedelics return, find us living in silos

“Are you afraid of death?”, Part 3

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Months have gone by since my last post. Months, since I confidently promised a conclusion to my answer to Tomas’s question, “Are you afraid of death”? It’s been months.

People wonder (with reason) whether anyone who has had a distressing NDE will be terribly afraid of death. Because the usual response is an uncompromising  “yes,” I was really, seriously trying to figure out my answer. In the first responding post I talked about my realization that there are ways in which we are all afraid, because we’re hardwired to repel death. In the second part I went over why I am not afraid of the hell that most people mean when they ask the question, “Are you afraid of death?” Part three was to be my personal answer. I said it would have something to do with Carl Jung. But it’s been months. Why?  [Read more…] about “Are you afraid of death?”, Part 3

The experiential worlds of Stanislav Grof, M.D., #2: NDE realities

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The first book I read by Stanislav and Christina Grof was Beyond death: The gates of  consciousness (1980, Thames & Hudson). It is a concise and gorgeously illustrated look across time and different ethnic and religious groups at the astonishing similarities in their concepts of death and the afterlife. It was an eye-opener.

This post is taken from notes I made during my first reading of the book, with page numbers as notations. Some are quotes, others are paraphrases; all are, it seems to me still, very much worth taking in. [Read more…] about The experiential worlds of Stanislav Grof, M.D., #2: NDE realities

NDE, psyche, Stanislav Grof, and the nature of reality

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We have now spent several months—about six of them, in fact—digging around the concept of hell. I have pointed out that although it is deeply embedded in our culture, the Dante’s Inferno view of hell is not biblical. I have observed that hell does not register as a location on any GPS system. I have quoted theological views suggesting that hell may be something other than after-death punishment for bad behavior.

But the fact remains that whether or not we consider hell to be politically correct, or a belief we agree with, or a concept we despise, some people experience near-death and similar events that act very much like the traditional descriptions of hell.

Where do we go from here?

Today we are going to the fifty years of exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness conducted by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his partner (and wife) Christina Grof. Over their five decades of research, the Grofs have built what he refers to as “a useful source of data about the human psyche and the nature of reality.”

Exactly where we wish to go!

a useful source of data about the human psyche and the nature of reality

The quotes below are brief excerpts from a lengthy article.  A link to the complete article appears at the end of this post. 

Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

Stanislav Grof, M.D.

… My primary interest is to focus on experiences that have healing, transformative, and evolutionary potential and those that represent a useful source of data about the human psyche and the nature of reality. I will also pay special attention to those aspects of these experiences that reveal the existence of the spiritual dimensions of existence. For this purpose, the term non-ordinary states of consciousness is too general, since it includes a wide range of conditions that are not interesting or relevant from this point of view.

…I would, therefore, like to narrow our discussion to a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states of consciousness for which contemporary psychiatry does not have a specific term. Because I feel strongly that they deserve to be distinguished from the rest and placed into a special category, I have coined for them the name holotropic (Grof 1992).

This composite word means literally “oriented toward wholeness” or “moving in the direction of wholeness” (from the Greek holos = whole and trepein = moving toward or in the direction of something). The full meaning of this term and the justification for its use will become clear later in this article. It suggests that in our everyday state of consciousness we are fragmented and identify with only a small fraction of who we really are.

…Holotropic states are characterized by a specific transformation of consciousness associated with dramatic perceptual changes in all sensory areas, intense and often unusual emotions, and profound alterations in the thought processes. They are also usually accompanied by a variety of intense psychosomatic manifestations and unconventional forms of behavior. Consciousness is changed qualitatively in a very profound and fundamental way, but it is not grossly impaired as it is in the delirant conditions. We are experiencing invasion of other dimensions of existence that can be very intense and even overwhelming. However, at the same time, we typically remain fully oriented and do not completely lose touch with everyday reality. We experience simultaneously two very different realities, have ‘each foot in a different world.’

…The emotions associated with holotropic states cover a very broad spectrum that extends far beyond the limits of our everyday experience. They range from feelings of ecstatic rapture, heavenly bliss, and ‘peace that passeth all understanding’ to episodes of abysmal terror, murderous anger, utter despair, consuming guilt, and other forms of unimaginable emotional suffering that matches the descriptions of the tortures of hell in the great religions of the world.

The content of holotropic states is often spiritual or mystical. We can experience sequences of psychological death and rebirth and a broad spectrum of transpersonal phenomena, such as feelings of oneness with other people, nature, the universe, and God. We might uncover what seem to be memories from other incarnations, encounter powerful archetypal beings, communicate with discarnate entities, and visit numerous mythological landscapes. Holotropic experiences of this kind are the main source of cosmologies, mythologies, philosophies, and religious systems describing the spiritual nature of the cosmos and of existence. They are the key for understanding the ritual and spiritual life of humanity from shamanism and sacred ceremonies of aboriginal tribes to the great religions of the world.

…Holotropic states tend to engage something like an “inner radar,” bringing into consciousness automatically the contents from the unconscious that have the strongest emotional charge, are most psychodynamically relevant at the time, and are available for processing at that particular time.

…On the one hand, they appear on the same experiential continuum as the biographical and perinatal experiences and are thus coming from within the individual psyche. On the other hand, they seem to be tapping directly, without the mediation of the senses, into sources of information that are clearly far beyond the conventional reach of the individual.

… These observations indicate that we can obtain information about the universe in two radically different ways: besides the conventional possibility of learning through sensory perception and analysis and synthesis of the data, we can also find out about various aspects of the world by direct identification with them in a holotropic state of consciousness. Each of us thus appears to be a microcosm containing in a holographic way the information about the macrocosm

… The existence and nature of transpersonal experiences violates some of the most basic assumptions of mechanistic science. They imply such seemingly absurd notions as relativity and arbitrary nature of all physical boundaries, non-local connections in the universe, communication through unknown means and channels, memory without a material substrate, nonlinearity of time, or consciousness associated with all living organisms, and even inorganic matter. Many transpersonal experiences involve events from the microcosm and the macrocosm, realms that cannot normally be reached by unaided human senses, or from historical periods that precede the origin of the solar system, formation of planet earth, appearance of living organisms, development of the nervous system, and emergence of homo sapiens.

… If they are allowed to run their full course and are properly integrated, they represent a healing mechanism of extraordinary power.

…[A]ll that Freudian psychoanalysis has discovered about the human psyche represents at best the exposed part of the iceberg, while vast domains of the unconscious resisted Freud’s efforts and remained hidden even for him. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, using his incisive Irish humor, put it very succinctly: “Freud was fishing, while sitting on a whale.”

…According to Jung, the psyche is not a product of the brain; it is a cosmic principle (anima mundi) that permeates all of existence and our individual psyche partakes in this cosmic matrix. The intellect is just a partial function of the psyche, which makes it possible for us to orient ourselves in practical situations and solve everyday problems; it is incapable to fathom and manipulate the psyche.

… From the point of view of Western science, the material world represents the only reality and any form of spiritual belief is seen as reflecting lack of education, primitive superstition, magical thinking, or regression to infantile patterns of functioning. Direct experiences of spiritual realities are then relegated to the world of gross psychopathology, serious mental disorders. Western psychiatry makes no distinction between a mystical experience and a psychotic experience and sees both as manifestations of mental disease. In its rejection of religion, it does not differentiate primitive folk beliefs or fundamentalists’ literal interpretations of scriptures from sophisticated mystical traditions and Eastern spiritual philosophies based on centuries of systematic introspective exploration of the psyche. It pathologizes spirituality of any kind and together with it the entire spiritual history of humanity.

the psyche is not a product of the brain; it is a cosmic principle (anima mundi) that permeates all of existence

…Spirituality involves a special relationship between the individual and the cosmos and is in its essence a personal and private affair. At the cradle of all great religions were visionary (perinatal and/or transpersonal) experiences of their founders, prophets, saints, and even ordinary followers. All major spiritual scriptures – the Vedas, the Buddhist Pali Canon, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, and many others are based on revelations in holotropic states of consciousness.

…As we have seen, the observations from the research of holotropic states … require a drastic revision of our thinking in [psychiatry and psychology]. However, many of them are of such a fundamental nature that they transcend the narrow frame of these disciplines and challenge the most basic metaphysical assumptions of Western science and its Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. They seriously undermine the belief that consciousness is a product of neurophysiological processes in the brains and thus an epiphenomenon of matter; they strongly suggest that it is a primary attribute of all existence.

[To read the entire 30+-paged article, which includes a description of Grof’s convictions about the perinatal nature of non-ordinary states of consciousness, go here.]

Making sense of an NDE, distressing or otherwise

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A reader asks, “How do you make sense of these experiences?”  Ken Ring asked me that question once, and it seemed so totally unanswerable that I gave him a flip retort and absented myself from the conversation. I’ve felt bad about that for years, so, Ken, if by chance you’re reading this, here’s a more careful response (noting that it’s taken another twenty years to get here).

First, this is one of those questions with no single answer. Like learning to swim, making sense of these experiences is something we have to do for ourselves. Secondly, it strikes me that there’s less an “answer” than a chain of realizations. However, not to sound cryptic, let me just wander through some of my observations.

To be analytical, whatever sense is made of any NDE seems to depend initially on whatever vocabulary is available to the experiencer’s thinking. This is most easily explained if we think of an NDE not as a quasi-physical event but as an event in consciousness; from that perspective, what one encounters in an NDE is a series of concepts, to which we fit whatever identities we know of.

For instance, a person who has never heard of Hinduism or its content will not awaken thinking, “Omigosh, there was an elephant in the experience—Ganesha!”  On the other hand, a non-Christian living in a Judeo-Christian culture and perceiving a loving, male-seeming. robed guide might at least wonder if the presence was Jesus, simply because the concept of a loving Jesus is so familiar within the wider culture. Likewise, people in heavily infrastructured societies report tunnels; people with no such engineered environment report similarly shaped long-necked gourds or hollow reeds. In short, step one is the hunt for descriptively appropriate labels; this may be virtually instantaneous or it may continue well into awakening. Without labels, there can be no meaning.

Once labels have been found to describe the first impression, I think temperament comes into play. Psychological testing has shown again and again that a considerable chunk of the human population operates most comfortably with definite answers to life’s questions (not a chain of realizations, but answers). They look for certainty, and if that security is not evident, they may invent it.  It appears to me that this is where ideological precepts—whether religious doctrines or secular principles—serve as answers to “what was that?” So, depending on the person’s customary belief system, whether the labels applied to a distressing NDE describe it as a warning of hellfire or dismiss it as a hallucination, if the need for certainty is sufficiently strong that interpretation will harden like concrete.

Then come all the “buts.” But, not everyone wakes up with the NDE’s parts labeled. But, not everyone demands absolute certainty. But, what if the NDE and the description provided by my ideology/religion don’t fit? But, what if the explanation given by my belief system scares the wits out of me—what then?  But, what if the labels are wrong? But, how do we know any of this? But, (fill in your own question). This is the part that takes a long time.

It is well known in near-death circles that most people’s visual descriptions of their NDEs are almost invariable over time; their accounts of sequence and impressions do not waver. However, except in those cases of rock-hard ideological certainty, interpretation of an NDE—especially a distressing NDE—is likely to develop and mature over time as new information and insights become available, and as integration progresses. This is not to suggest that they necessarily begin “making things up,” as the actual description of the NDE does not change; only its possible meanings shift.

[Note: In cases where recollections of the experience re-emerge over time, discernment will be important, testing the new memory for its validity as part of the NDE rather than a conscious add-on or “false memory.” I believe this is a particular hazard with the NDEs of children whose impressed adults press for more and more information until there remains a kernel of NDE surrounded by sincere embroideries.]

With distressing NDEs, a maturation of understanding can happen provided that the person has not fallen into an irreversible conviction of doom. In my case, what saved me from that was the innate stubbornness that has also been the bane of my life. However real that first interpretation seemed, as years went by I flatly refused to accept it as final; it was not fair, it did not fit, and there must, somewhere, be a better answer.

Others may have different trajectories; but for me,  making sense not only of my own NDE but of others, once I knew about them, has gone through a whole range of stages. First, the immediate theological labeling, then terror, then repression, depression, and a great blank of many years. And then came the studying. That was like placer mining, sifting and sifting endless buckets of information for tiny glints of gold. (The list of references in the book Dancing Past the Dark takes up sixteen pages and is incomplete.)

The first inklings came with reading William James, then Arthur Koestler, Laurence LeShan, The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Then learning of Stanislav Grof’s work with the unconscious, and stumbling through the writings of Christian and Jewish mystics. Eventually, psychotherapist Alex Lukeman’s work on dreams. Intensive historical-critical study of scripture. Still later, it was a pastor saying to me, “You do know that for many seekers the Void is the ultimate spiritual experience, don’t you?” (That was a revelation!) As was bending spoons.

And then came a primary conceptual influence: photos from the Hubble telescope. I know, the photos are objective; but my subjective response was to see that the entire universe is made up of glorious light to deepest darkness, peace to unimaginable violence, sudden bursting events and unfathomable time spans. Just like our NDEs. The elements out there are the same as the elements in us. (Astrophysically speaking, we are made of stardust.) Whether one chooses to see this as the work of some natural process or the design of a Creator, the result is the same: This is where we live and the way it’s built, and the way it works is the way it works. Whether or not we have managed to describe those workings, we and our conceptions are drawn from an infinitesimally small pinprick corner of the whole—and that reality is way bigger than our intellectual abstractions.

So, first, I see enormity.  And this enormity makes me think of the work of people like James Fowler, whose life work has been to study stages of faith, and Lawrence Kohlberg and his work on stages of moral development, and Jean Piaget and the many others who charted the stages of our cognitive and psychological development. And always, always, human development is discovered to move from the narrowest of views (centered on self) to broader ones (to include, sequentially, parent, family, school, church or other group, community, country, world). Whether involved with religious or secular faith, the path to maturity always broadens. What is restricted becomes stunted.

In other words, when confronted by a mystery vaster than our own understanding, we are challenged to give up accustomed ways of thinking and discover more comprehensive ones, to widen the view. This kind of stretching is always difficult, even when it happens naturally as part of moving, say, from being a child into being a teen, or whenever the first questions come to test authority and one’s basic beliefs.

In situations of trauma, which includes events such as natural catastrophe or an NDE, the slow, natural stretching of the developmental process jerks with shocking suddenness. Alex Lukeman has described this type of “instant revelation” as bringing “the destruction of traditional and habitual patterns of perception and understanding, including religious belief structures and socially accepted concepts of the nature of human existence and behavior.” There is nothing to do but rebuild. If the challenge is obstructed—when questioning is discouraged or doubt forbidden—growth stops; the person stays a conceptual 8-year-old or 12-year-old forever.

Yet as Fowler and others discovered, properly understood, giving up the convictions of one life phase, while it may be painful, is not loss of faith but its transformation; it is a process that leads to growth and deepening of faith, the leaving of childhood for maturity and, perhaps, wisdom. It is like climbing a mountain and seeing the horizon expand: what is invisible from the valley will open to view as the climb progresses. For those who believe that all of truth resides only in the laws of the valley, this can terrify.

For a person with a strongly materialist bent, the challenge may be to begin taking seriously all the inexplicable things that hang over the edges of the box of physical explanations—the “paranormal” that may turn out to be entirely normal but is not yet understood, the unseen workings of spirit that cannot be measured or replicated. For a person from a bounded religious tradition, the challenge will almost surely be to see beyond the edges of any single doctrinal position, to where a larger community of trust and faith waits.

The reader who asked about making sense of distressing NDEs also wrote, “In one of your articles, you write about “finding the gift in the dark”. What was that gift for you? I’m trying to hold on to my deepest experience/intuition that love is at the heart of things.”

I’m so glad she asked, because it has led me to the discovery that this entire process, this series of realizations, has been the gift. It is a destination that would almost certainly never have been reached in my life without that NDE.

A recent observation by the Rev. William C. Green may be appropriate here:

When my son turned fourteen he was puzzled by his inability to enjoy the amusement park where we’d passed many summer days. He kept going on the same roller coasters that had thrilled him. He kept riding the bumper cars he once loved. He again threw balls at moving targets to win the toys he’d been drawn to collecting. But the harder he tried to enjoy himself the more disappointed he felt. Something was wrong. Something had changed. It was time to move on.

One writer said, “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another”… God, help us to let go of belief we have outgrown. May we move with you into the new life you have in store for us. Amen.

Shalom.