Dark Night, Early Dawn

Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind

Christopher M. Bache

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780791492413
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Argues that philosophical reflection today must include the findings of depth psychology and the critical study of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Combining philosophical reflections with deep self-exploration to delve into the ancient mystery of death and rebirth, this book emphasizes collective rather than individual transformation. Drawing upon twenty years of experience working with nonordinary states, Bache argues that when the deep psyche is hyper-stimulated using Stanislav Grof's powerful therapeutic methods, the healing that results sometimes extends beyond the individual to the collective unconscious of humanity itself. Dark Night, Early Dawn is the most important book I have read in recent years. Whenever I present a brief summary of its major ideas, either to students in my graduate classes or to general audiences, it unfailingly arouses intense interest. I believe Bache's work evokes this response because he has articulated, with superb clarity, rigor, and depth of insight, a radically expanded perspective on the deeper nature of individual human experience, a perspective that many have been gradually intuiting but had not yet been able clearly to formulate. "With moving honesty and a rare lack of inflation, Bache has brought forth a conception of the human psyche that intimately reconnects the personal ordeals and awakenings of the individual to the larger collective suffering and spiritual transformation of the entire human species, at this most crucial of historical thresholds. This is a book to read soon and to integrate carefully." -- Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View "This very important contribution to transpersonal psychology, I know very few books that represent such a unique balance of critical thinking and deep personal experience. The author's extensive knowledge of philosophical, religious, and psychological literature makes it possible for him to provide solid grounding for the profound insights from his nonordinary states of consciousness. Brings unusual clarity into several important problem areas and represents an important step toward an integration and synthesis of the observations and experiences involved. Christopher Bache is one of the most creative and imaginative thinkers in the transpersonal field." -- Stanislav Grof, author of The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness and Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy Christopher M. Bache is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University. He is the author of Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter One
The Pivot to Nonordinary States

The main difficulty here is to procure empirical material from which we can draw reasonably certain conclusions, and unfortunately this difficulty is not an easy one to solve. The experiences in question are not ready to hand. We must therefore look in the obscurest corners and summon up courage to shock the prejudices of our age if we want to broaden the basis of our understanding of nature.

—C. G. Jung, Synchronicity

My oldest son went on his first vision quest while I was working on this manuscript. As part of his preparation for this rite of passage, he met with the Native American elders who were overseeing his quest to be “talked out into spirit.” Being “talked out” involved making a deep inventory of his life to prepare himself mentally and emotionally for the experiences that might surface during his quest. After his stay in the wilderness was over and before any contact with his family or friends was permitted, he was “talked in from spirit” by the same elders, sharing his experiences with them and receiving their advice on how to integrate them into his daily life.

In some respects this entire book is an exercise in “talking myself in from spirit,” as it reflects my attempt to comprehend years of experiences in nonordinary states of consciousness and to integrate their insights into our understanding of human existence. Along the way I have come to believe, together with many others who have explored these states in a systematic manner, that these states are not only powerful agents of personal transformation but also important sources of information about the universe we live in. They offer us insights into not just our personal mind but the deep ecology of mind itself. As the restrictions of the physically grounded mind are lifted, one begins to gain access to what could be described as the universe’s inner experience of itself.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this development coming when it has at this time in human history. Just when Western culture had convinced itself that the entire universe was a machine, that it moves with a machine’s precision and a machine’s blindness, the ability to experience the inner life of the universe is being given back to us. Because machines are not conscious, the appearance of consciousness in the universe has been interpreted as a cosmic accident. The entire human endeavor has been emptied of existential purpose and significance because it has been judged to be a product of blind chance. When one gains access to the inner experience of the universe, however, one learns that, far from being an accident, our conscious presence here is the result of a supreme and heroic effort. Far from living our lives unnoticed in a distant corner of an insentient universe, we are everywhere surrounded by orders of intelligence beyond reckoning.¹

There is a parallel, I believe, between how the academic community has been responding to research on nonordinary states and how it initially responded to the feminist critique of patriarchal culture. Centuries of custom first led scholars to deny that there was anything unique to women’s experience that might revolutionize our intellectual and social institutions, and only slowly did feminists convince us that we had been missing half the picture. A similar battle is now being fought over nonordinary states. The mainstream voices that previously marginalized the testimony of women are now attempting to marginalize the testimony coming from these states, resulting in a continued skewing of our philosophical and psychological models in the direction of physical reality.² And yet, as with the gender issue, this resistance is misguided, because the kind of knowledge one acquires in nonordinary states of consciousness does not negate but complements and extends the knowledge gained in ordinary states.

When I am making this point with my students, I sometimes draw an analogy with the daytime and nighttime skies. In the bright light of the daytime sky, our immediate surroundings are illumined with great clarity. This clarity is useful for carrying out the pragmatic chores of daily existence, but it overwhelms our more subtle vision and hides the stars that are always present. When the glare of the sun retreats and the night sky shows itself again, we exchange the experience of the close at hand for the experience of the far away. As the stars return, our vision expands to take in the larger rhythms of the cosmos. The night sky does not negate the daytime sky, but gives us a larger frame of reference from which to understand the trajectory of life.

Imagine for a moment a civilization that denied itself the vision of the night sky, a society where by custom no one dared leave their homes after sundown. Trapped within the sun-drenched world, they would have intimate knowledge of the things that lie near at hand but be unaware of these distant realities. Without knowledge of the night sky, they would have a deeply incomplete understanding of the larger cosmos within which they lived. They would not be able to answer the question, “Where did we come from?” with any accuracy. Cut off from the vision of the stars, they would be restricted to the relative immediacy of here and now, stranded in near-time and near-space. They would never discover our celestial lineage, never place our solar system in the Milky Way or the Milky Way in a cosmos almost too large to be imagined.

We are this civilization, of course. Taken as a whole, Western thought has committed itself to a vision of reality that is based almost entirely on the daylight world of ordinary states of consciousness while systematically ignoring the knowledge that can be gained from the nighttime sky of nonordinary states. As the anthropologist Michael Harner puts it, we are “cogni-centric.” Trapped within the horizon of the near-at-hand mind, our culture creates myths about the unreliability and irrelevance of nonordinary states. Meanwhile, our social fragmentation continues to deepen, reflecting in part our inability to answer the most basic existential questions. As long as we restrict ourselves to knowledge gained in ordinary states, we will not be able provide satisfactory answers to questions about meaning or value, because neither meaning nor value exist in mere sensation nor in the compounds of sensation. Similarly, we will not be able to explain where we came from or why our lives have the shape they do as long as we systematically avoid contact with the deeper dimensions of mind that contain the larger patterns that structure our existence.³

Though of enormous importance, the victories of the age of enlightenment were purchased at the terrible cost of systematically disparaging the depths of human experience and of prematurely dismissing our ability to penetrate these depths. In the modern university, being “rational” or “logical” includes the rider of not straying too far from sensate experience and its derivatives, and “critical thinking” is marked by its epistemological commitment to ordinary states of consciousness. Meanwhile, nonordinary states are little explored or understood, and their relevance to basic questions being raised in epistemology, philosophy of mind, or even ethics is seldom acknowledged. But this is changing. As the twentieth-first century opens, new evidence is challenging old assumptions in practically every department. Seldom have so many axioms been questioned on so many fronts at the same time. The historian of ideas can barely keep up with the revolutions brewing, and one of these revolutions, a major one I believe, centers on nonordinary states of consciousness.

The starting point of this book in the broadest sense, then, is the simple premise that philosophical reflection must today include the findings of depth psychology and the critical study of nonordinary states. Any philosophical system that excludes these states will produce a vision of reality that is profoundly limited in scope. Its refinements in one direction will be continually undermined by its inadequacies in the other, and the resulting system will be hopelessly imbalanced.

The Autobiographical Element in Transpersonal Philosophy

The philosophical discussion of nonordinary states cannot be done well from a distance but requires the commitment of personal experience. As Ken Wilber explains in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, to do philosophy in the transpersonal mode requires training in the spiritual disciplines. First must come years of transformative practice that push back the boundaries of experience. As these practices are mastered, one is gradually “ushered into a worldspace in which new data disclose themselves.”⁴ With repetition, new levels of experience and understanding open and eventually stabilize, leading to the third stage of checking one’s experiences against the experiences of others within the spiritual community.

There is a kind of knowledge that comes from digesting other people’s experiences and a another kind entirely that comes from taking the inner journey oneself. If one has only secondhand knowledge of these states, one labors under a great disadvantage. Verbal accounts in books hint at but never capture the extraordinary depth and texture of the experiences that open in them. Only if you have first-hand knowledge of the territory can you appreciate how hard language has been pushed before it falls silent, unable to say more yet with so much more needing to be said. Only if you have personally entered these waters can you understand the strength and scope of the currents that flow here. Without this personal knowledge, you can quickly lose control of the material. You may miss connections that are obvious to the experienced eye and see correlations where there are none. By the same token, one’s transpersonal reflections necessarily reflect the limits of one’s experience. The experiences of others can help extend one’s intuitions but are no substitute for experience itself. Because there is no getting around this basic restriction, the best one can do is own it, even take refuge in it. This means abandoning the goal of trying to give a definitive account of the entire transpersonal domain and instead simply bringing forward a perspective based on one’s experience and placing it in respectful dialogue with the perspectives brought by other explorers.⁵.

The conflict of philosophical paradigms begins with an argument over what experiences it is possible for human beings to have. Only if we are convinced that certain experiences actually occur will we then begin to ask about the implications of these experiences for human existence. I have had articles rejected by professional journals because cautious editors simply could not believe that the experiences I was analyzing were possible, in this case not my own experiences but ones previously published by others. Incredulous referees penciled in the margins comments like: “How is it possible for a human being to actually experience this?” or “How do you mean this? Metaphorically?” Mainstream philosophy and psychology is based almost exclusively on ordinary states of consciousness. Lacking personal experience of nonordinary states, these editors naturally could not comprehend how the boundaries of experience could be stretched to such seemingly impossible limits.

Over time I began to realize that if the transpersonal paradigm was going to make inroads in mainstream thought, individuals were going to have to be willing to incorporate into their analysis the actual experiences on which their proposals were based. The more radical or aparadigmatic the concepts one is proposing, the more important it is to provide the experiential evidence for the claims being made. In transpersonal philosophy, where the experiences in question are not shared by the population at large, it is particularly important to own the experiences that underpin one’s theoretical analysis. The situation parallels the difficulty survivors of near-death episodes (NDEs) have had getting their observations to be taken seriously by the medical community. It was only after thousands of NDEers were willing to make their experiences part of the public record that resistance began to soften, and we began to move to the next stage of asking what these experiences were revealing to us about the cosmos we inhabit.

For all these reasons there is no escaping the necessity of writing from a basis in personal experience when addressing the questions raised in this volume. Thus, the chapters that follow weave together theoretical discussion and my own session experiences. I hope this autobiographical element will rest lightly on the project, however, and will not distract attention from the true focus of inquiry. Furthermore, this is not autobiography in the usual sense, for the levels of consciousness discussed here are universal and, as we will see, show up in contexts as divergent as contemplative monasteries and hospital emergency rooms.⁶ Let me now describe the investigative discipline used in this study.

Stanislav Grof and Nonordinary States of Consciousness

While meditation has been an important part of my life for many years, the methods of exploring consciousness that lie at the heart of this book are those pioneered by Stanislav Grof. I encountered Grof’s work shortly after completing graduate school in 1978 and since that time my self-exploration and philosophical reflection have unfolded in dialogue with his research, together with the great wisdom traditions of the world, especially Christianity and Buddhism. In Realms of the Human Unconscious (1976) and LSD Psychotherapy (1980), Grof summarized sixteen years of clinical experience exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances, particularly LSD-25, ten years at the Psychiatric Research Institute of Prague and six as chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland. Although the therapeutic use of psychedelics was no longer legal in the United States when he wrote these books, Grof believed that our society would eventually find the wisdom to reappropriate this extraordinary family of drugs that had demonstrated their safety and therapeutic effectiveness in carefully structured clinical settings for many years.⁷ In The Adventure of Self-Discovery (1985), Grof drew upon twelve years of work as scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, during which he and his wife Christina created a therapeutic method called “Holotropic Breathwork” that evoked powerful nonordinary states of consciousness without the use of psychoactive substances. Holotropic Breathwork uses long periods of faster breathing, evocative music, and body work to activate and engage the deep psyche. Holotropic means “aiming for wholeness,” and refers, says Grof, to states of consciousness that are oriented toward the whole of existence. It contrasts with hylotropic states of consciousness, which are states that are “oriented toward the world of matter,” or ordinary sensory awareness.

In both methods the aim is to powerfully stimulate the unconscious, to amplify its patterns bringing them into conscious awareness, and then to engage them fully, experiencing completely whatever the patterns are.⁸ Through the unrestricted engagement of one’s inner experience (lying down, eyes closed, inwardly focused), the patterns build in intensity until they come to a critical threshold. The same patterns will keep showing up in a variety of forms until a climax of expression is reached—some inner gestalt is consciously realized or some reservoir of pain drained—and then the pattern dissolves. The energy trapped in this pattern is released or integrated, and the psyche is then free to flow into more expansive forms of awareness. If the process is repeated many times, deeper and more elemental patterns begin to emerge. However basic or irreducible these patterns may seem at the time, they can be dissolved by undefended engagement. Once they are dissolved, new worlds of experience will open.

Grof has demonstrated at considerable length that the experiences that emerge in LSD-assisted psychotherapy and Holotropic Breathwork are essentially identical. The triggers used to activate the deep psyche differ, but the dynamics and potentials that emerge are the same and reflect, he thinks, the innate structures and capacities of consciousness itself. Because of this overlap in experiential content, I propose for simplicity’s sake to collapse these two methods and to refer to the states of consciousness that emerge using either of Grof’s therapeutic regimens as “psychedelic states,” intending the term in its generic sense of “mind-opening,” not its narrow sense of “involving the use of psychoactive agents.” While this usage is not ideal, the alternative, calling them “holotropic states,” is worse because “holotropic” is an awkward term that is familiar only to a very specialized audience. We need a third term here, something user-friendly and neutral with respect to method, but I’ve not been able to come up with a good one. Until someone does, I will go with “psychedelic.”

The longer I have worked with psychedelic states and spoken with others who have undertaken similar work, the more I have come to appreciate how deeply the therapeutic use of these states differs from their recreational use. Because this distinction is often lost on even an educated public, let me emphasize it here. For deep change to take place in the psyche, it is not enough simply to awaken extraordinary experiences. Powerful experiences come and go and may amount to very little in the long run. For enduring change to take place, there must be a container for holding these experiences in conscious awareness and for engaging them completely until they exhaust themselves—both during the session itself and in one’s life between sessions. If powerful experiences are brought forward from the unconscious but are not held in this manner, they will give but a temporary release from the patterns that bind, a passing transpersonal distraction from our aching condition of psychospiritual imprisonment. The therapeutic use of these states, therefore, aims at the complete engagement of one’s inner patterns until those patterns dissolve themselves, and this takes many years.

The patterns that emerge in this work come from many layers of our being, most of which were not even recognized in the West until recently. Grof has shown that beyond those mapped in conventional psychodynamic theory are patterns that come from the womb, from previous incarnations, and from beyond individual human existence altogether. The patterns that bind may come from what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious or from even deeper in the evolutionary web. In this work we confront barriers to experience that are so foreign to our everyday consciousness that we cannot see how they are restricting us until after we have worked through them and broken through to what lies beyond.

Psychotherapists working with patients who are recovering a traumatic episode from their past know that beyond the pain of remembering exists a state of health and wholeness that will be realized only if the trauma is allowed to surface and be consciously reappropriated. The trauma has trapped their patients’ awareness, holding it in a narrow orbit of pain or disfunction until the memory of the original event can finally be brought back into awareness and digested. Only then will they really be free to move on to new life adventures. Work in psychedelic states follow...