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A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe"—a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

  There are few people who have not, under certain circumstances, experienced the extension of their everyday boundaries. At such times, our illusions of separateness blur and fade like the last rays of the sun at the end of the day. For fleeting moments in the afterglow we find ourselves merging with other people, identifying with how they experience the world. Or we find ourselves tuning into the consciousness of an entire group of people, identifying with the griefs or joys of a whole society, race, or all of humanity. In a similar vein, we can lose ourselves in nature, perhaps during a trek in the mountains or deep in a redwood forest, and then we leap beyond the limits of our exclusively human existence, to vividly experience the lives of plants, animals, or even inorganic objects or processes. The following inspired passage from Eugene O'Neill's play
Long Day's Journey into Night,
where Edmund describes his night cruise on a sailboat, is a beautiful example of a transpersonal state that transcends ordinary limits of human experience.

  In altered states of consciousness this new perception of the world becomes dominant and compelling. It completely overrides the everyday illusion of Newtonian reality, where we seem to be "skin-encapsulated egos" existing in a world of separate beings and objects. In the extreme forms of transpersonal perception we can experience ourselves as the whole biosphere of our planet or the entire material universe.

Perhaps the most familiar transpersonal experience for many of us happens in our relationships with the people closest to us. During love making, or while sharing other ecstatic moments, the demarcations between
I and thou
seem to flee. We suddenly become aware that consciousness is quite separate from our bodies. Our two consciousnesses blend together, becoming one, challenging the physical boundaries we usually take so much for granted. While this is happening we might also feel unified with the creative source from which we came and of which we are each a part.

  The form of transpersonal connection we feel with another person can be referred to as "dual unity." Such experiences can occur during the practice of spiritual disciplines, particularly Tantric yoga, during periods of great emotional shocks or extraordinary joys, such as the death of a loved one or the birth of a child, or after ingesting psychoactive substances. They are also common between mothers and infants throughout pregnancy and nursing. In the experiences of dual unity, we have a sense of completely merging and becoming one with another person, yet also maintaining the sense of our own identity.

  In clinical situations I have witnessed various forms of this dual unity literally hundreds of times. A particularly interesting example was a client of mine, Jenna, who experienced herself merging with her mother while reliving the intrauterine and nursing periods of her life.

  During the session, she curled up into a fetal position, characteristic of a person who is in a deeply regressed state. Every wrinkle on her face seemed to disappear and she took on the qualities of a tiny infant. In a small voice, she described how close she felt to her mother now. She had a wonderful sense of actually becoming a part of her, merging with her, until there was no difference between her mother's feelings and her own. She felt that she could shift back and forth between being herself and being her mother. Sometimes she was an infant in the womb, sometimes a baby nursing at her mother's breast. Then she would switch roles, becoming her pregnant or her nursing mother. She could experience being both her mother and herself as an infant simultaneously, as if the two of them were a continuum, a single organism, or a single mind.

  At one point, as she was experiencing this dual unity, symbiotically merging with her mother, she opened her eyes. As she looked at me she seemed very surprised. She explained that she felt she could read my thoughts and know what I was feeling, as if all boundaries between us had been dissolved. When she in fact described my thoughts she proved to be quite accurate.

  This was, incidentally, a breakthrough moment for Jenna. As she experienced dual unity with her mother, then with me, she gained a new perspective on her early life, and she allowed herself to establish a deeper level of trust and communication with me. It is often this experience of dual unity that can help us establish deeper trust or understanding of others in our relationships with family and loved ones. It is safe to speculate, as well, that this aspect of the human consciousness may be the basis for what we call empathy.

  Closely related to the dual unity experience is the experience of
complete
identification with another person.
This occurs when we identify so fully with another person that we lose our own sense of identity and become them. A vivid example of this kind of identification occurred for my wife Christina while we were living at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur.

  At the time Christina was lying in bed recovering from a viral infection. One of our friends, also living at Esalen, was the late anthropologist and generalist Gregory Bateson. During an exploratory operation surgeons had found in his lungs a malignant tumor the size of a grapefruit. The doctors told Gregory it was inoperable and that he had four weeks to live. While living at Esalen, he received many alternative treatments and actually lived more than two and a half years longer than the doctors predicted. During those years, Christina and I spent a great deal of time with Gregory and his family and become close friends.

  On this particular morning, as she lay in bed, Christina had an overwhelming feeling that she was becoming Gregory. She had his giant body and his enormous hands, his thoughts, and his staunch British humor. She felt connected to the pain of his cancer and somehow knew with every cell of her body that he was dying. This surprised her because it did not reflect her conscious assessment of his situation.

  Later that same day, Christina saw our friend Dr. Carl Simonton, who was visiting Esalen. Carl had spent the morning working with Gregory, using a method of visualization he had developed in conjunction with his work as an oncologist and radiologist. Carl told Christina what had transpired in his session with Gregory that morning. In the middle of the session, Gregory had suddenly announced: "I do not want to do this any more. I want to die." They immediately called Gregory's wife, Lois, and started talking about dying instead of fighting the cancer. The timing of this episode exactly coincided with Christina's experience of identification with Gregory.

  This merging of individual boundaries can extend much farther, to involve an entire group of people who have something in common; they might belong to the same race, be of the same nationality or culture, or share a certain belief system, professional background, or predicament. Fleeting and superficial forms of such
identification with the consciousness of
a group
can occur without profound or lasting change in consciousness. For example, people visiting Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were tortured and slain, often experience an overwhelming sense of sharing the terror, grief, and cruel deprivation suffered by all those who were imprisoned and died there. Similarly, people visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., find themselves sharing, if only for a moment, the suffering of all the young men and women who lost their lives in that war.

  In altered states of consciousness, transpersonal experiences such as these can be very profound, vivid, and graphic, lasting for only seconds or for hours. It is possible, for example, to become all the mothers of the world who have lost their children to wars, all the soldiers who ever died on battlefields, or all of human history's fugitives and outcasts. Although it may be difficult to imagine for a person who has never had these experiences, one can have under these circumstances an absolutely convincing feeling of becoming all those individuals at the same time. One becomes a single consciousness that contains hundreds or even millions of individuals.

  Visionary experiences of this kind have been described again and again in sacred scriptures and the mystical literature of all ages. However, such experiences are not the exclusive privilege of the great figures of religious history—nor are they, as skeptics sometimes allege, the fanciful inventions of scheming priesthoods seeking ways to manipulate gullible crowds. One of the most surprising revelations of modern consciousness research has been the discovery that under certain circumstances, such as extraordinary states of mind, such visionary experiences can become available to virtually every one of us. They are afforded us by the transpersonal potentials of human consciousness.

  The following is a contemporary example of the visionary experience of a mental health professional who visited the ancient Mayan ruins of Palenque in Mexico. This rather long report also involves transcendence of time and contains an account of an encounter with archetypal entities, which we have not as yet discussed. However, I have left the report intact because it is a particularly poignant example of the kinds of visionary capabilities available to us through transpersonal consciousness.

  I found it increasingly difficult to relate to the ruins surrounding me simply as an admiring tourist. I felt waves of deep anxiety permeating my whole being and an almost metaphysical sense of oppression. My perceptual field was becoming darker and darker, and I started noticing that the objects around me were endowed with awesome energy and started to move in a most ominous fashion.

  I realized that Palenque was a place where thousands of human sacrifices had taken place and felt that all the suffering of the ages somehow still hung around as a heavy cloud. I sensed the presence of wrathful deities and their thirst for blood. They obviously craved for more sacrifice and seemed to assume that I would be their next sacrificial victim. As convincing as this feeling was, I had enough critical insight to realize that this was an inner symbolic experience and that my life was not really in danger.

  I closed my eyes to find out what was happening inside my psyche. All of a sudden, it seemed that history came alive; I saw Palenque not as ruins but as a thriving sacred city at the height of its glory. I witnessed a sacrificial ritual in incredible detail; however, I was not simply an observer, but also the sacrificial victim. This was immediately followed by another similar scene, and yet another. As I was getting amazing insights into Pre-Columbian religion and the role that sacrifice played in this system, my individual boundaries seemed to have completely disappeared and I felt increasingly connected to all those who had died in Palenque over the centuries to such an extent that I became them.

  I experienced myself as an immense pool of emotions they had felt; it contained a whole spectrum of feelings—regret over the loss of young life, anxious anticipation, and strange ambivalence toward their executioners, but also peculiar surrender to their fate and even excitement and curious expectation about what was going to come. I had a strong sense that the preparation for the ritual involved the administration of some mind-altering drugs that raised the experience to another level.

  He was fascinated by the dimensions of the experience and by the richness of insights that it entailed. He climbed the hill and lay down by the Temple of the Sun so that he could better concentrate on what was happening. Scenes from the past kept bombarding his consciousness with extraordinary force. His fascination was rapidly replaced by deep metaphysical fear. A message seemed to come to him, loud and clear: "You are not here as a tourist eavesdropping on history but as a sacrificial victim, like all the others who were sacrificed in the past. You will not leave here alive." He felt the overpowering presence of the deities demanding sacrifice, and even the walls of the buildings seemed to be thirsting for more blood—his. He continues:

  I had experienced altered states of consciousness before in my psychedelic sessions and knew that the worst fears in these experiences do not reflect objectively existing danger and usually dissipate as soon as consciousness returns to normal. As convincing as the experience was, I wanted to believe that it was "just another one of those." But the feelings of impending doom became increasingly real. I opened my eyes and a feeling of bloodcurdling panic took over my entire being. My body was covered with giant ants and my skin was erupting into hundreds of red bumps. This was not just in my mind; this was really happening.

  I realized that this unexpected complication provided an element that was previously missing to make my fears absolutely convincing. I had doubted that the experience alone could kill me, but now I was not sure what large amounts of the toxin of hundreds of giant Mexican ants unknown to me could do to one in an altered state of consciousness. I decided to run, to escape the ruins, removing myself from the influence of the deities. However, the time seemed to have slowed down almost to the point of stopping and my whole body felt enormously heavy, as if it were made of lead.