What happens when we sense being stalled in our lives, trapped,
stuck at a place we’re not happy to be?
In spite of the funk, we may sense something new, something higher beckoning
us—but to go forward, we need a push, a jolt.
At such times, what can we do? How do we get that push or
jolt? Folks from the get-go have tried to figure it out. If we’re willing to try, there are many
ways. There are many doors to
transcendence; many patterns of behavior known to facilitate breakthroughs to
higher consciousness.
Some of these doors are easily available. They’re right in
front of us. Take ordinary
breathing. There are all kinds
breath-control methods for changing your mind. Pranayama in Hatha
Yoga is about increasingly subtle breath control. The Hysachasm school of Desert Monks used breath control to
induce God- consciousness. Nowadays
we have Stan Grof’s methods of hyper-ventilation for inducing states comparable
to psychedelic exaltation.
Eating is a totally available door to transcendence, for we
can always choose to fast, and fasting is a time-honored method of cultivating
higher grades of consciousness. It
is also a great ally in health maintenance. Aldous Huxley once suggested that people in the Middle Ages had
more visionary experience because they were forced to fast on account of
poverty and food shortage. Obesity
is spreading around the planet today; a symptom of the economic disease called
capitalism. If the obese chose fasting as their doorway to self-transformation,
people would be indebted. The
non-obese could do their part by eliminating meat from their diet. The meat
industry is a leading cause of proliferating greenhouse gases. (Nice irony if it turns out that cow
fart helps bring down world civilization.)
Diet is a doorway to
self-transformation. I use the
word in its older sense, not just for a weight-losing program. For the ancient
Greeks, diet was about your general life style. Fasting from meat is a great idea, but a really healthy diet
would require that we fast from the entire consumerist-capitalist ethos; in
that case, diet, radically understood, would be a political act and a spiritual
act—a living out of your worldview.
Certain liminal zones serve as doorways to higher realms of
consciousness. The hypnagogic
state is a door, that elusive state on the threshold of sleep. Most of the time
we hardly notice it. But it can be prolonged and open the mental eye to
visionary experience. I’ve learned
to prolong my trips into hypnagogia. I’m amazed at the crowds of totally real
and unique human faces I encounter, sometimes nearly nose to nose, which can be
unnerving.
Later in the night of sleep we enter into dream space, real
while it lasts, but amazingly different from waking space. Our nightly dream space is a portal to
things beyond. The dream itself is
a miraculous presence: out of our minds are born worlds and forms of life in
infinite variety. The dream is perhaps
the most common vehicle for a psychic experience. Dreams often give glimpses of things to come; the source of
wisdom and self-knowledge; signs of extraphysical contact between souls;
flashes of divine presence; the source of artistic and scientific
discoveries. There’s much to learn
about how to use dream life as a door to greater self-awareness and power.
Portals of transcendence are all around us. Right in the midst
of everyday reality there is a portal we call coincidence. Things come together
in strangely meaningful ways. Coincidences can change our lives, and some are
seen as divine intervention. Some
turn out to reveal a paranormal message trying push through to consciousness. So
coincidence can be a door to meaning and sometimes to what seems like a
miracle. Jung has written about synchronicity and today Bernie Beitman is tracking
the mysteries of coincidence, which you can follow with his book, Connecting With Coincidence.
Not all transcendent doorways are easy to approach. Sometimes they open without warning and
one is transformed in spite of oneself. Exaiphnes
is Plato’s word for sudden
illumination. I have spoken with
individuals who were transformed out of the blue, and spent their lives trying
to understand what happened to them.
The use of psychedelic substances is a perennial doorway to
transcendent consciousness, dating back to the Rig Veda and Eleusinian Mystery
Rites, but also a subject of contemporary research. For this, Michael Pollan’s recent
tour of psychedelia called How to Change
Your Mind will turn up the dial on your active imagination.
Other doors to greater consciousness are more
dangerous. One of the oldest used
to break free is ascetic practice.
I mentioned fasting already.
The ascetic tries to master the body so it becomes a perfect receptacle to
the divine influx. If you study
the life of a master mystic and super levitator like Joseph of Copertino, you
find a kind of ascetic practice that appears to modern taste as barbaric and
masochistic. It involved the complete transformation of his mind and body, but
the man himself was gentle and brought comfort to others, as evident in his
biography, Wings of Ecstasy.
One more example of a highly active doorway to
transcendence. Thanks to modern medical technology, it is possible to
resuscitate a person who is clinically dead. Many report
having extraordinary experiences during that time; a revelation of another
world. This typically jolts one
into changing one’s life. So we have to add to our list this last door of
transcendence—strangest of all, being near death.
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