S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 1 5 Stanislav Grof thony, St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and others, all experienced powerful visionary states that initiated and catalyzed their spiritual development. These experiences typically involved perinatal sequences that were strikingly similar to those that can be regularly observed in psychedelic and holotropic sessions. Christopher Bache has clearly demonstrated this in his studies of St. John of the Cross (Bache 1991) and St. Teresa of Avila (Bache 1985). The reports from powerful experiential sessions often read like passages from the Vedas, Upanishads, the Pali canon, the ancient books of the dead, the texts of Christian mystics, and other spiritual scriptures. The above examples show that spiritual opening typically involves powerful NOSC, often with prominent perinatal features. These, of course, might or might not be followed by a good integration and stabilization on a new developmental level. It is certainly possible to have powerful mystical experiences that do not result in spiritual evolution. On the other hand, it is also questionable how much spiritual development can occur without powerful experiences of NOSC. Ken emphasizes that he is writing in his work about “broad-scale growth and development patterns”, about a process through which “these domains enter awareness as a stable adaptation and not as a temporary experience”. However, he does not describe the mechanism that would be involved in such an evolution and transformation. If there is one, it would certainly not apply to most of the prominent figures he uses as examples. It is not clear what Ken’s entry into the spiritual realm through the “front door” would actually look like. If it is something resembling William James’ “educational variety” of spiritual development, where one would gradually open to the mystical dimension over a long period of time, in the way in which one learns to speak or develops an ego, it does not seem to be the mechanism driving the spiritual evolution of humanity. As the above examples illustrate, the spiritual opening of most famous mystics involved dramatic episodes of NOSC. During my work with psychedelics and holotropic breathwork, I have been aware of the difference between mystical experiences and consciousness evolution. I have written in different places about the personality changes following spiritual experiences and paid great attention to the circumstances that are conducive to permanent beneficial changes and factors that facilitate good integration. I have not yet attempted to offer a comprehensive theoretical framework dealing with the problems of consciousness evolution that would summarize my observations over the years. However, these observations leave no doubt in my mind that under good circumstances powerful “regressive” experiences can be harnessed in such a way that they actually result in permanent changes of the developmental structure. At the core of our controversy is a disagreement concerning the nature of “regressive” experiences and the role that they play in spiritual opening. Ken criticizes the position of the people that he calls “peak theorists” who believe that the entire spectrum of consciousness is always available, fully formed but submerged. According to him, transpersonal experience might involve the “reentering” or “re-experiencing” of a prepersonal occasion, such as pleromatic indissociation, perinatal patterns, archaic images, phylogenetic heritage, or animal/plant identification. However, this for Ken does not mean that the transpersonal elements reside in these archaic structures. It is transpersonal awareness that is instrumental in this process, not the archaic structures themselves. In his opinion, not a single prepersonal structure can in and of itself generate intrinsic transpersonal awareness. It can become the object of transpersonal awareness, and thus be “reentered” and “reworked”. It can then become a type of vehicle that is used, but never its source. Ken insists that in these cases the concept of the pre/trans fallacy, however occasionally paradoxical, thus remains firmly in place. The critical issue here is that “regressive” experiences, not only perinatal and prenatal, but also ancestral, racial, karmic, phylogenetic, and even those that reach farther back into the history of the cosmos often seem to form an integral part of spiritual opening. Whether we interpret this fact as the transpersonal awareness re-entering these archaic structures, as Ken prefers to describe it, or as manifestation of transpersonal potential inherent within them seems less relevant. Since, according to perennial philosophy and Ken’s own system, all of creation and the entire evolution in nature and in the cosmos is, in the last analysis, created by involution of Absolute Consciousness, I do not see any need to treat these elements as inherently different from the spiritual realm. The fact that superior creative intelligence guides the creative process and manifests on all its levels certainly leaves such a possibility open. In any case, Ken severely misunderstands the nature of perinatal experiences if he sees them as nothing but a replay of the actual experience of the fetus. His main objection is that regression to the pre- and perinatal state cannot convey any revelations about existence, because “the fetus in the womb is not aware of the whole world of intersubjective morals, art, logic, poetry, history, and economics” (Wilber 1995, 755). I do not see, however, how this makes any difference, since in discussing perinatal experiences, we are not talking about
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