Additional observations suggest that suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, and drug addiction also have perinatal roots. Of special significance seems to be liberal use of anesthesia during childbirth; certain substances used to ease the mother's pain teach the newborn on a cellular level to see the drug state as a natural escape route from pain and difficult emotions. These findings were recently confirmed by clinical studies, linking various forms of suicidal behavior to specific aspects of biological birth, among them: the choice of drugs to kill oneself was linked to anesthesia use during childbirth; the choice of hanging to strangulation at birth; and the choice of violent suicidal means to violent birth. As in the above example of psychogenic asthma, additional roots for all these problems can be found in the transpersonal domain: suicide attempts by hanging related to suffocation or being hanged in past lives; suicide by an overdose of drugs related to past life experiences with drugs; and suicide by violent means such as deliberately crashing an automobile, related to a past life event where a person underwent an experience with similar characteristics.
Our new understanding of emotional difficulties is not limited to neuroses and psychosomatic disorders. It can be extended to many extreme psychological disturbances known as psychoses. Traditional efforts to explain various psychotic symptoms psychologically have not been very convincing, particularly when clinicians attempted to interpret them only in terms of biographical events experienced from infancy through childhood. Psychotic states often involve extreme emotions and physical sensations, such as abysmal despair, profound metaphysical loneliness, hellish physical torture, murderous aggression or, conversely, oneness with the universe, ecstatic rapture, and heavenly bliss. During a psychotic episode a person might experience his own death and rebirth, or even the destruction and recreation of the entire world. The content of such episodes is often fantastic and exotic, featuring various mythological beings, infernal and paradisean landscapes, events from other countries and cultures, and extraterrestrial encounters. Neither the intensity of the emotions and sensations nor the extraordinary content of psychotic states can be reasonably explained in terms of early biographical traumas, such as hunger, emotional deprivation, or other frustrations of an infant.
If we expand the cartography of the psyche in the ways described in this book, many states traditionally attributed to some unknown pathological process in the brain suddenly appear in an entirely new light. The trauma of birth, which constitutes an important aspect of the unconscious, is a very painful and potentially life-threatening event that typically lasts many hours. It is thus certainly a much more plausible source of extreme emotions and sensations than most events in childhood. Furthermore, the mythological dimensions of many psychotic experiences represent a normal and natural characteristic of the transpersonal domain of the psyche, as suggested by Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and its archetypes. Moreover, the emergence of these deep elements from the unconscious can be seen as the psyche's attempt to get rid of traumatic imprints and simplify its functioning.
All these observations led my wife, Christina, and me to the conclusion that many states currently diagnosed as mental diseases, and treated routinely by suppressive medication, are actually psychospiritual crises, or "spiritual emergencies," as we call them. If properly understood and supported, they can result in healing and personal transformation. Throughout centuries, episodes of this kind have been described in the mystical literature as important aspects of the spiritual journey. They have occurred in the lives of shamans, founders of the great religions, saints, prophets, re-nunciates, and initiates in sacred mysteries of all ages. In 1980, Christina founded the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN)—a worldwide organization of people offering support and guidance to individuals in such psychospiritual crises—as an alternative to traditional treatment. Today the SEN mailing list contains thousands of addresses of people from the United States and many other countries of the world.
Psychotherapy and the Healing Practices
In most existing psychotherapy systems, the goal is to understand how the psyche works and why emotional disorders develop. Their goal in therapy is to use the theories they develop to change the way clients think, feel, behave, and make life decisions. Even in the most non-directive forms of psychotherapy, the therapist is considered to be the key vehicle for the healing process because he or she possesses knowledge and training superior to the client. This, then, is seen as sufficient qualification for the therapist to guide the client's self-exploration through appropriate questions and interpretations.
The problem is that few schools of therapy agree about the most fundamental issues concerning the mysteries of the human psyche, the nature of psychopathology, or even therapeutic techniques. The approach to the same disorder differs according to the personal belief system of the therapist and to the school he or she belongs to. There have been no conclusive studies showing that certain schools are superior to others in getting therapeutic results. It is known that "good therapists" of different schools get good results and "bad therapists" get poor results. Moreover, the resulting changes in clients seem to have very little to do with what the therapists believe they are doing. It has been suggested that the success of psychotherapy might have nothing to do with the therapist's technique and the content of verbal interpretations, but depend on factors such as the quality of the relationship in the therapeutic setting, the degree of empathy, or the client's feelings of being understood and supported.
In traditional verbal psychotherapies, clients are expected to provide information about their present and past problems, and possibly describe their dreams, which are thought to provide insights into the unconscious. It is then up to the therapist to decide what is psychologically relevant. Thus Freudian analysts focus on sexual issues, Adlerian analysts emphasize material related to inferiority feelings and the pursuit of power, and so on. By contrast, the work with non-ordinary states of consciousness bypasses the problems of the theoretical differences between various schools and the therapist's role as interpreter of psychological material. As you will recall, in non-ordinary states, the material with the strongest emotional charge is automatically selected and brought into consciousness. These non-ordinary states also provide necessary insights and mobilize our own inner healing forces with all their inherent wisdom and power. Try as we might to duplicate these natural healing processes, no school of psychology has even come close.
The most important requirement for the therapist employing non-ordinary states of consciousness is not to master specific techniques and steer the client in the desired direction, but to accept and trust the spontaneous unfolding of the process. It is essential to do this unconditionally, even if at times the therapist does not intellectually understand what is happening. This task challenges most professionals who depend on the theoretical guidance of their particular school of thought. With no effort on the part of the therapist, symptoms clear and personal transformations occur as a result of the unfolding of an unpredictable array of experiences—which may be biographical, perinatal, transpersonal, or all three. In Holotropic Breathwork™, in the work with spiritual emergencies, and in thousands of psychedelic therapy sessions in my earliest research, I have seen many dramatic healings and positive personality changes, which have completely eluded all my efforts at rational understanding.
In work with non-ordinary states of consciousness, the roles of therapist and client are quite different from those in traditional psychotherapy. The therapist is not the active agent who causes the changes in the client by specific interventions, but is somebody who intelligently cooperates with the inner healing forces of the client. This understanding of the role of the therapist is in congruence with the original meaning of the Greek word
therapeutes,
which means "the person who assists in the healing process." It is also in agreement with C. G. Jung's approach to psychotherapy, wherein it is believed that the task of the therapist is to mediate for the client a contact and exchange with his or her inner self, which then guides the process of transformation and individuation. The wisdom for change and healing comes from the collective unconscious and surpasses by far the knowledge that is intellectually available to the therapist.
While both therapist and client may occasionally feel frustrated because of the lack of rational understanding in the healing process, the dramatic positive changes that clients achieve, in relatively short periods of time, are more than sufficient compensation. In this kind of work, it becomes clear that it is impossible to use a rigid conceptual framework that forces clients' issues into preconceived pigeonholes. As Jung suggested, there is no guarantee that what we observe in a particular therapeutic session has already been seen before and can be understood in terms of existing schools. The psyche is without boundaries and has seemingly infinite resources and creativity. For this reason, it is possible that in any therapeutic encounter we may very well witness or experience phenomena that have never before been observed. This makes therapeutic work an exciting ongoing adventure, filled with discovery and new learning at every turn.
The Roots of Human Violence and the Current Global Crisis
Among the most important implications of the new model of the psyche are insights of sociopolitical nature. Traditional science's attempts to offer plausible explanations for the atrocities that characterize much of human history have been generally unconvincing, leaving much to be desired. The image of man as the "naked ape" who harbors murderous instincts that are a heritage from his animal past, fails to account for what the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called "malignant aggression," which is uniquely human. While animals fight for food, sexual opportunity, and territorial concerns, no animal in nature comes even close to duplicating the senseless cruelties committed by human beings. Psychological efforts to explain our violence in terms of the biographical model of human consciousness have been equally frustrating and inadequate.
Just as we recognized the failure to account for individual psychopathology in terms of the traditional biographically oriented model, the inadequacy of these same methods becomes even more obvious when applied to the mass psychopathology of bloody wars, revolutions, cruelties of totalitarian regimes, the bestiality of concentration camps, and genocide. As with extremely violent behaviors of individuals, emotional pain experienced in infancy and childhood simply does not account for aberrant behavior of such proportions.
Psychological traumas associated with experiences shaping our psyches after our births are not sufficient to explain the horrors of Nazism, the atrocities of a Stalin regime, or the monstrous behavior associated with Apartheid. But when we add the perinatal and transpersonal perspectives that we find expressed in non-ordinary states of consciousness, events such as these begin to be more understandable. The trauma of birth involves a life-and-death struggle, with a potential for becoming the basis for many extremes of emotion. As an event that we all share, it has the potential for bringing about mass scale psychological aberrations, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of people sharing a common experience of tremendous unconscious rage. The archetypes of the collective unconscious could also be sources of mass psychopathology, since they are endowed by extraordinary psychological power, cutting across all individual boundaries.
War is complex, of course, and involves many factors, including historical, political, economic, as well as psychological roots. We should not assume that war can be reduced to psychological factors only. However, while the more tangible aspects of the conflicts existing between nations have been receiving much attention, the psychological dimensions and roots of these crises have been ignored. Here modern consciousness research offers some interesting insights and clues. In non-ordinary states, the material that emerges from the unconscious frequently includes themes of war, totalitarian regimes, revolutions, the horrors of concentration camps, and genocide. Scenes expressing these themes can be extremely intense, experienced with a full range of emotions and physical sensations of both the victims and perpetrators.
When the sessions are dominated by BPM II, the person connects with the feelings of the child who is stuck in the birth canal before the cervix opens. This is often accompanied by scenes from human history experienced in the role of the victim. Such experiences involve identification with the population oppressed by a totalitarian regime, with civilians suffering in a war, with inmates of concentration camps, and with the downtrodden of all ages. Sequences of this kind occur even in sessions of people who have never personally experienced these situations in real life; and yet, their unconscious has intimate knowledge of all the emotions and sensations involved.
When the process moves to BPM III, the person identifies with the child struggling to escape from the birth canal after the cervix opens. At this point, the nature of the accompanying sociopolitical experiences changes dramatically. There are still scenes of violence but now the individual also identifies with the role of the aggressor. The process oscillates between identification with the victim and perpetrator; occasionally, one can also become an external observer. The predominant theme here is revolution; the oppression has become intolerable and the tyrant has to be overthrown. The goal is to attain freedom where one can "breathe" again. The experiences involve scenes from the French or the Bolshevik revolutions, the American Civil War, and other fights for freedom. And the actual moment of birth is often accompanied by scenes depicting the victories in various revolutions or the ends of wars.