expand our understanding of the stresses in our world that pull increasing numbers of individuals toward spiritual emergence. Transpersonal experiences can happen to anyone—a child, an adolescent, an adult, young or old. These experiences can happen spontaneously or with intention. They can happen anywhere: on a mountainside, in a therapy office, in church, in bed. They can catalyze feelings of deep peace or ecstasy. Perhaps some of us have these experiences quite often; but unless we have a name for them, they often pass us by unrecognized.
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of our institutions, especially our religious and medical establishments, to accommodate the needs of the public. Social service institutions are currently in a period of transformation, making changes in structure to respond to new needs. Special facilities in hospitals set aside for hospice care and natural childbirth are two examples of recent changes. It is now time for us to make organizational changes to more gracefully support spiritual emergence during the critical processes that carry us beyond the conventional norms of human development. Suggestions for this are included in this book. Realizing these institutional changes is the current goal for many of us involved with helping people in spiritual emergency.
The Transpersonal Levels
Transpersonal levels of experience go beyond personality and personal concerns. How do we know we are reaching these levels? What does it look like and feel like to have a transpersonal experience?
Ken Wilber, in The Atman Project,1 has described three levels of transpersonal experience—Subtle, Causal, and Atman (in ascending order). At these levels people have access to a fluid creativity from a higher order of inspiration than the personality. This kind of intelligence is native to geniuses such as Mozart. The transpersonal levels also offer the possibility of communing with entities of higher intelligence who personify wisdom, love, and compassion. For example, true psychic channels move to the Subtle level when they bring forth guidance from higher levels of consciousness. In the transpersonal realms, there is often a feeling of boundlessness, of being beyond the limits of time and space. Unusual things may appear as visionary inner experiences, or as actual externalized apparitions. Mental telepathy, healing abilities, psychic phenomena, are native to these realms, as is, ultimately, complete absorption in Higher Power, or God. Following is a more definitive description of each level.
The Subtle Level
The Subtle level is a level of conscious awareness that includes extrasensory perceptions indigenous to the body, as well as experiences apparently divorced from the body, such as out-of-body experiences (OOBE) and psychokinetic phenomena (objects moving without a physical catalyst). The Subtle level can be experienced in many and diverse ways that are directly related to a system of energy centers in the body, called chakras in Sanskrit, that are of a higher order than physiological organ systems. The chakras activate a higher order of perception than our five senses. Following are examples of Subtle level transpersonal experiences. The majority of Americans have experienced at least one of these.
A woman is sitting in a church/synagogue/temple where prayers are being invoked for someone who is ill. The woman has an inner feeling that she knows the person who is ill, or she senses his experience, even though she has never met him.
A new mother wakes in the middle of the night, keenly in tune with her baby, who sleeps in his room. She goes to him and finds that he has an unexpected high fever and needs her immediate care. She was using, albeit unconsciously, her "sixth sense," or ESP.
A woman is watching a sunset in the mountains. The beauty of the changing light overwhelms her. She becomes rapt in bliss, feeling a deep love and gratefulness for being alive.
A young man sits in meditation at the bedside of a sick friend and senses the presence of a higher energy, what we might call an angel, full of love and divine compassion, attending the ailing friend.
A man goes to a counselor for a past-life regression and has a deep emotional experience of himself as living five hundred years ago in another space/time orientation. Through the experience, he finds understanding and healing of several of his current relationships.
A child has a winged pixie as her playmate for several years. Together, they explore the natural world, play with leaves and acorns, dance on the grass.
The Subtle level is a dimension of conscious awareness—consciousness beyond but including material reality. In this dimension, life is sensed as having mythic proportions. People are brought into more direct and conscious relationship to their own life force, or prana in Sanskrit. It is not unusual to sense vibrations and streaming energy in the body, or even to see these manifestations of life energy in other people or natural elements. People more aware of the energy of their own humanness have a sense of belonging to the human race with a potent inner meaning never accessible before. This renewed awareness of dimensions beyond physical, objectified reality are often the basis of inspiration in the arts. Dante expressed his direct experience of Subtle realms this way:
Fixing my gaze upon the Eternal Light I saw within its depths,
Bound up with love together in one volume,
The scattered leaves of all the Universe .. .
Within the luminous profound subsistence
Of that Exalted Light saw I three circles
Of three colors yet on one dimension
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As rainbow is by rainbow, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.
The Causal Level
Few people experience Causal level consciousness for an extended period of time. They may experience it in deep meditation as a result of spiritual discipline or for a short period as a result of deep relaxation, being inspired by music, or nature, or a loving relationship. We have called these short periods "peak experiences." Some mind-altering substances can bring about Causal level experiences. It is a state of perfect ecstasy, bliss, untainted by any distracting thoughts, desires, or moods. The Causal level includes the awareness of Subtle and material dimensions, but also goes beyond them to the full realization of union with God. It is a state of being at one with Higher Power, or God, "love-in-oneness." At the Causal level there is no sense of time, only of eternity.
Michael, thirty-three, is an executive in an advertising agency in Los Angeles. He was committed to his spiritual growth, and researched ways in which he could accelerate his development. He wanted to realize God-consciousness within himself, and was willing to work hard to accomplish that. He attended a meditation retreat in 1987, with these results:
After three days of meditation and focus from 6:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. each day, I had opened up tremendously. I began sensing myself as just light. I would close my eyes and feel that my body was just full of light. For almost twenty-four hours I no longer assumed the roles and expectations I usually identify with. I even had to watch someone else at lunch to remember what a fork was for. The world was totally fresh and new! It made no difference who I was, who anyone was. Personal differences had very little importance. Most important was fully experiencing that we are all part of one thing. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are all one body. Never before have I felt so totally fulfilled, so completely ecstatic.
Michael's wife was extremely disturbed when she saw Michael after his retreat, because he could not be personal with her for twenty-four hours. He was completely absorbed in the Causal level.
Most religious traditions consider a teacher to be very important at this transitional point of spiritual growth. As Michael's experience illustrates, students moving more fully into transpersonal realms need reassurance and direction in letting go of life as they have seen it, letting go of the boundaries of time and space, letting go of themselves as the ones who witness life. Students need reassurance that dissolving these boundaries will not result in death or craziness, but rather in an opening to fuller life. They need guidance in integrating Causal level experiences into the rest of their lives so that relationships to partners, children, and jobs still proceed and grow in a natural course.