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Physical Introversion and Narrowing of Consciousness: Organ, Tissue and Cellular Consciousness. During these transpersonal experiences, the subject enters various parts of their body and witnesses or experientially identifies with the activities which are occurring within specific organs, tissues, cells or subcellular structures. |
Grof also characterizes other types of transpersonal experiences which have in common the experiential extension beyond consensus reality and space-time. He lists such phenomena as apparitions of and communication with deceased people, or experiences of the chakras, auras, meridians, and other subtle energetic manifestations.
He reports many incidents where individuals who have no particular knowledge of ancient myths or Eastern religious concepts have experiences, and have gained insights, into phenomena which have been included as traditions for thousands of years within ancient cultures and esoteric systems.26...These occurrences would suggest that individuals appear to have experiential access to mythological themes of all times and all cultures, and quite clearly support Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and archetypes.27
Grof states,
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The reports of subjects who have experienced episodes of embryonal existence, the moment of conception, and elements of cellular, tissue and organ consciousness abound in medically accurate insights into the anatomical, physiological and biochemical aspects of the processes involved. Similarly, ancestral experiences, racial and collective memories in the Jungian sense, and past incarnation memories frequently bring specific details about architecture, costumes, weapons, art, social structure and religious practices of the cultures and periods involved, or even concrete historical events. Subjects who experienced phylogenetic sequences or identification with existing lifeforms not only found them unusually convincing and authentic, but also acquired, in the process, extraordinary insights concerning animal psychology, ethology, specific habits or unusual reproductive cycles. |
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...Those individuals who experience episodes of conscious identification with plants or parts of plants occasionally report remarkable insights into such botanical processes as germination of seeds, photosynthesis in the leaves, the role of auxins in plant growth, the exchange of water and minerals in the root system, or pollination. Equally common is a convinced sense of conscious identification with inanimate matter or inorganic processes--the water in the ocean, fire, lightning, volcanic activity, tornadoes, gold, diamond, granite, and even stars, galaxies, atoms, and molecules. Even these experiences sometimes can mediate accurate information about various aspects of nature.28 |
Any individual who has never had a transpersonal experience would justifiably be very skeptical about their reality. One would likely pass them off as illusions or hallucinations. However, those individuals who have had a transpersonal experience would indicate that it was not only very real, but more intense and valid than their ordinary state of consciousness. They would all share a convinced sense of the happening. Therefore the questions must legitimately be asked: Is there any truth or validity to these experiences? Does one actually tap into a higher hierarchy of shared consciousness?
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