Modern research of non-ordinary states of consciousness has confirmed Jung's position on archetypes and has added another important dimension. In non-ordinary states, the boundary we ordinarily see between myths and the material world tends to dissolve. While the solid material world disintegrates into dynamic patterns of energy, the world of archetypal realities becomes increasingly real and palpable. Under these circumstances, mythological figures literally come alive and assume independent existences. The same is true about the landscapes and structures that make up the mythic world. The resulting experiential world is at least as concrete and convincing as our everyday reality.
In their most elemental and profound forms, archetypes are cosmic principles that are completely abstract and beyond the capacities of human perception. However, in non-ordinary states, they may also appear in forms that we perceive through inner sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, or the virtually palpable sense of a
presence.
Some archetypes are universal, with various expressions of them being found in all cultures of the world. There are also archetypal variations that are much more individualized. Thus the universal archetypes of Mother or Father epitomize all the essential characteristics of these roles without regard to race, color, culture, or specific circumstances. More specific and narrower archetypes are the Good Father and Good Mother or their negative counterparts, Tyrant Father and Terrible Mother. Other examples of universal archetypes would be the Wise Old Man or Woman, the Lover, the Martyr, the Trickster, and the Outcast.
Jung, who made a lifelong study of archetypes, recognized three key archetypes in his approach to human personality and behavior: (1) the Anima, or personification of the feminine aspects in a man's unconscious;
(2) the Animus, or the embodiment of the masculine elements in a woman's unconscious; and (3) the Shadow, which is the unknown, dark, and repressed part of our personalities. These three aspects of our psyches are ordinarily hidden and unknown to us, yet they exert strong influences on the choices we make in life and thus help shape our behavior and our life experiences, until we bring them into consciousness and get to know them.
Some time ago I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with these archetypes during a psychedelic session of my own. This personal experience has contributed greatly to my understanding of this fascinating aspect of our psyches.
Toward the end of a session, in which I had been experiencing remarkable visions depicting the Apocalypse, I suddenly saw a large stage. It seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere, suspended in cosmic space and outside of time. There was a magnificent parade of the personified universal principles (the archetypes) that through a complex interplay create the illusion of the phenomenal world, the divine play of cosmic consciousness that the Hindus call
lila.
This scene had a majesty and grandeur about it that is beyond my abilities to describe.
The archetypes I saw were protean figures with many facets, levels, and dimensions of meaning. It was impossible to focus on any particular aspect of them, since as I was observing them, they kept changing in unbelievably intricate holographic interpenetration. Each of them seemed to represent the essence of his or her
function and simultaneously all the concrete manifestations of this principle in the phenomenal world. While they were clearly individual entities, they comprised an enormous number of other beings and situations from all times and places in history.
I saw Maya, a mysterious ethereal principle symbolizing the illusion that creates the world of matter. There was an anima-like figure who was the embodiment of the eternal feminine principle or force. I saw a horrifying Mars-like figure who seemed to be the principle responsible for wars, all down through human history. There were the royal figure of the Ruler, the withdrawn Hermit, the elusive Trickster, and the Lovers, representing all the sexual dramas throughout ages. They all bowed in my direction, as if expecting appreciation for their stellar performances in the Divine Play of the universe. They seemed to actually enjoy my great admiration for them.
While there are the universal archetypal figures, as I have described above, there are also universal archetypal motifs or themes that we may encounter in transpersonal states of consciousness. These can be expressed as plots, parables, or stories whose conflicts and resolutions employ the archetypal figures. Many of these themes find their expression in human sexual and social life with which we are all familiar. As inner experiences, they may be identified as the source of biographical difficulties, that is, emotional conflicts that were set in motion early in our lives. An excellent example of this is the theme of the son's hatred for his father and affection for his mother, which Sigmund Freud popularized in his famous work with the Oedipus complex, a theme taken from Sophocles' play
Oedipus
Rex,
written over 2,000 years before. The counterpart of this archetypal theme is the Electra complex, the daughter's love for the father and hostility toward the mother.
The theme of the evil brother and the good brother was immortalized in the Bible story of Cain and Abel. Similarly, fairy tales and legends often express archetypal themes of this kind. "Snow White" and "Cinderella" describe painful conflicts between the girl and her bad mother or stepmother. "Hansel and Gretel" portrays the drama of two loving siblings endangered by the evil mother figure. Many stories from world literature are variations on the theme of the Lovers: Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise are but a few of the famous lovers. Other extreme forms of archetypal conflicts involve the Torturer and the Victim, the Killer and the Killed, the Tyrant and the Oppressed, and the Imprisoned and the Liberator. Freud said these myths have their source in biosocial conflicts that we experience in our everyday lives. From this point of view, the myth of Oedipus is an artistic creation inspired by the universal psychological conflicts that young boys experience at a certain age.
My own observations with non-ordinary states of consciousness strongly support Jung's belief that the archetypal world has an independent existence. This world is supraordinated to our everyday reality and represents its moving force. For example, Jung's understanding was that our actual conflicts with our fathers (if we are male) have universal roots; those conflicts are expressions of the Oedipus myth, which exists independent of us and our everyday reality. Joseph Campbell made this point very clear in his
Myths to Life By.
The same idea is expressed in Jean Shinoda Bolen's
Goddesses in Every Woman
and
Gods in Every Man.
It is very difficult to explain to a person who has not experienced unusual states of consciousness how it is possible to experience oneself as a universal archetype such as the Great Mother, who represents the essence of motherhood and the qualities of all mothers of the world throughout all of human history. Perhaps the best way to do that is to imagine a single, three dimensional figure. It is constructed in such a way that as you walk around it, viewing it from a new angle each time, you are presented with still another aspect of that figure—though all aspects seem to be just another view of the whole. This has actually been demonstrated in holography. Several years ago a composite hologram was exhibited in Honolulu. It was called "The Child of Hawaii," which was a collection of individual faces of many Hawaiian children co-existing in a single holographic image. Though it actually contained scores of faces, they were all superimposed into what appeared to be a single figure but which changed, revealing a new face each time you changed your viewing angle or position.
Some mythological figures and motifs, though variations on universal archetypes, are specific to a particular culture or religion. For example: Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary have specific meanings for Christians; the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Kuan Yin are uniquely Buddhist; and the Rainbow Serpent belongs to the Dreamtime world of the Australian Aborigines. Regardless of their universality or specificity, deities appearing in the transpersonal realm fall into two distinct categories: the first associated with forces of light and good, such as Christ, Apollo, Isis, or Krishna; the second associated with darkness and evil, such as Satan, Hades, Set, and Ahriman. In many instances, a single deity may embody both the light and the dark, the good and the evil. This is particularly characteristic for Oriental deities, while the mythology of the Western world tends to be strictly dichotomized. Examples of such deities that transcend polarities are the Hindu Brahma or the five Buddhas described in the
Tibetan Book of
the Dead.
The World of Archetypes
Many people on spiritual paths first encounter archetypal deities in the context of the death-rebirth process. In part I of this book we explored some of the ways in which various aspects of our biological histories merge with archetypes from the collective unconscious. Here the encounter with these seemingly horrifying, wrathful deities is a very important part of the deathrebirth process. For a person on a spiritual path, they are carriers of a symbolic death of the ego, a step that is necessary for spiritual opening. It is also at this point that the blissful archetypes are first encountered at the moment of rebirth or in the oceanic bliss of the womb.
The archetypal figures of both the blissful and wrathful deities are endowed with great energy and numinous power. When we encounter them, the experience is usually associated with strong emotions. The quality of the response depends on the nature of the deity; it can be anything from rapture and supreme bliss to metaphysical terror, overwhelming physical or emotional pain, and feelings of losing one's mind. However, as powerful as these confrontations may be one does not have the sense of confronting the Supreme Being or ultimate force in the universe. These deities—blissful or wrathful—are themselves creations of the higher force, personifications of key universal principles. Joseph Campbell referred to this fact in many of his lectures, especially in the context of religious worship. He emphasized that individual deities should not be worshiped for themselves but should be seen as concrete expressions of the supreme creative force that transcends any form. In his words, they should be seen as "transparent to the transcendent of which they are expressions."9
Many years of research have demonstrated that in non-ordinary states of consciousness we can not only witness mythic and archetypal realities, we can actually
become
these archetypes. We can completely identify with Sisyphus rolling his rock up the steep hill in the depths of hades. We can become Theseus slaying the Minotaur in the dark Labyrinth. We can radiate with the beauty of Aphrodite or shine in the glory of Helius and Apollo. We can take on the body image and the inner experiences of such mythic creatures as Cerberus, Cyclops, or Centaurus.
It has been remarkable to find that people raised in one culture, or belonging to a particular race, are not limited to the archetypes of that culture or race. In our research we have seen, for example, that white, urban, middle class Americans can have meaningful encounters while in non-ordinary states of consciousness with such legendary heroes as the Polynesian Maui or Shango, the Bantu god of sex and war. Over the years I have, on many occasions, witnessed European and American women who became the Hindu goddess Kali, taking on the traditional facial expressions of that figure, with the tongue stretched far out of their mouth, even though they had no previous knowledge about that figure. Conversely, during workshops in Japan and India, we witnessed several participants, born and raised in those traditions, who had powerful identifications with Christ.
Occasionally, even the world of fairy tales comes alive, and we meet or identify with mermaids, elves, fairies, gnomes, or trolls. It is particularly interesting to note that in many cases, where people had no previous knowledge of certain mythological figures, they were not only able to
ex
perience
them accurately and with great detail but they were able to draw pictures with details that perfectly matched ancient descriptions of those figures. After one has seen literally thousands of pieces of evidence of this kind, it becomes quite clear that everyone has access to the archetypal themes of all times and all cultures, not just the cultures of our present biological birth.
Our research involving non-ordinary states of consciousness thus supports the concepts of C. G. Jung, who suggested that in our dreams and visions we can experience myths that are not from our own cultures and that were previously unknown to us from our readings, viewing of art, or conversations with others. This is the world of the "collective unconscious," an infinite ocean of knowledge from which we can each draw. In this age of advanced technology, we might compare the collective unconscious to a transmitting station that constantly broadcasts every bit of program material and information ever transmitted by radio and television. At any time we can "switch channels," changing from the channel of everyday life to which we normally stay tuned, to an infinite number of other channels, crossing the boundaries of time, space, and even species. It is virtually impossible to imagine that we are always surrounded by this information and that we are able to tap into it whenever we wish. But our analogy of the radio waves gives us an approximation of the immensity of information we can access through the collective unconscious.
Intuitive Deciphering of Universal Symbols
Since Freud's classic work on the interpretation of dreams, the study of psychological symbols has been an important part of depth psychology. According to Freud, symbols represent something that we already know but that we find objectionable and unacceptable. In our dreams such problematic material—usually sexual in nature—is replaced by the corresponding symbol; thus, for example, a train rushing through a tunnel might express a person's frustrated sexual desires. Freud spend many years trying to identify all the symbols that represent the male and female sexual organs, intercourse, and other aspects of instinctual life.