IONS Review #52
June - August 2000

What the Butterfly Knows

"It was a dazzingly bright day, and I was facing the dramatic, rocky Big Sur coastline," Gunther recalls. "The ocean swells were gentle, seals were at play, and behind me were the coastal mountains. I was totally immersed in this peaceful scene, but then realized I wasn't simply enjoying the scenery in the normal sense. My consciousness had shifted. I had no sensation of standing on the balcony, but was fused with all of nature. I felt totally whole, as waves of joy and a calm inner strength possessed me. There was no I—only a 'we' as I became one with all I saw. I knew in those few moments that I was living at a level of reality that I had never achieved, or even believed was possible."

Nearly three decades later, Gunther—a successful Los Angeles entrepreneur—says he continues to find the experience compelling. Likewise, questions that came in the immediate wake of the experience are no less alive for him today. "Is this how we were designed to live, before the pure joy was civilized out of us? Is there a universal consciousness that I touched for those few minutes? Are we really all one, and is this connectedness and wholeness the true nature of reality?"

His questioning took on new urgency in 1997, when Gunther's twelve-year-old granddaughter was hit by a car and killed instantly. "She stepped out onto the street, was gone forever—and I am devastated," Gunther wrote at the time. "I have never known such pain, for my wife and me, for Eva and the life she will never have, and for our children whose lives are shattered." Struggling to make sense of the loss of "my beloved Eva," Gunther found himself perplexed by similarities between his experience of ecstatic oneness on the deck at Big Sur—and his experience of heartbreaking loss."

After the Esalen incident, I became less competitive. I saw the world with softer eyes, and I think it made me more tolerant and open," Gunther says. Likewise, Eva's death left him with "a broader, more piercing compassion for the hurting world in which we live—the dying babies in Rwanda, the starving children in North Korea, the grinding poverty in Bangladesh."  Yet it was what seemed to him a metaphysical semblance between the two dissimilar experiences that pushed Gunther's curiosity to new depths.

On the one hand, his moments of rapture on the California coast had left him with a visceral sense that "the world is far more complex, subtle, and mystical than I had ever imagined." In the aftermath of Eva's death, Gunther had an equally organic sense that he could sometimes "feel her energy." At times he tries to "absorb her energy into my body so that she will always be a part of me: Sometimes it happens, and other times I am left with only pain."

Gunther was also left with a desire to do what he could to find out if transformative experiences of various kinds can have a lasting effect on people's lives. "If we can examine what triggers these feelings," he thought, "and if there are common elements involved, then perhaps one day we can deliberately activate these personal growth opportunities." That's when he called the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

"Freud introduced us to the psychopathology of everyday life," she continues. "Modern psychology has left no stone unturned in documenting the myriad ways we humans fall short of what Abraham Lincoln called our better angels. We've learned a great deal through that approach. Yet we're still largely ignorant about human capacities for self-transcendence, unitive experience, and exceptional functioning." After discussions with Gunther, Schlitz invited interested IONS members to participate in an exploratory research project around "transformative life-changing experiences."

"Isn't it time to balance the ledger by focusing more," Schlitz asks, "on the kinds of experiences that so often lead us to say: 'This is who I really am' and 'This is what it's all about'?"

The experience of many project participants suggests that mind and matter share something like a secret sympathy.

A young woman named Samvara was one of some 200 people who wrote down and sent in first-person stories of transformative experiences. She described how, at 28, she felt trapped in an abusive relationship; her reservoir of hope was low. She had no way of knowing how things were about to change—just around the bend. Literally. She and her then partner were en route to another town when a bicyclist was hit by a semi truck right in front of them. Skilled in CPR, Samvara got out to help. Checking for a pulse, she found none.

"There I was, sitting on the ground with the body of this young man still glistening with the sweat from his workout. I began to speak out loud to him: 'I am sorry that this accident happened to you, but you have died. Try not to be afraid, because nothing can hurt anymore. You were riding your bike and a truck hit you. You need to let go of this world.' " Just then Samvara heard a voice in her head.

"My name is Robert but they call me Bob," the voice said. Astonished, Samvara spoke back. 'I'm so sorry that you had this happen to you, Bob, just relax and let go of your body." Then Samvara broke down and cried. When she told her boyfriend what had happened, his verdict was instantaneous: "You're just hearing things." They proceeded on their out-of-town trip. When they got back several days later, Samvara went to the local newspaper office and found out that the bicyclist's name was Robert Wojeski.

"At that moment my life changed forever," Samvara says. "I had never had a belief in anything I couldn't see. I got out of the bad relationship and made several other major changes in my life. It was a pivotal point for me. I set out on a course of discovery, which I still travel."

Samvara's story is remarkable in an obvious sense: It hinges on a transaction-communication between the living and the dead that mainstream science holds not to be possible. When she told her story, something powerful happened. It changed. Not the story's details or content; Samvara's account of the facts stayed the same. What changed was the story's framework. By sharing her experience via the research project, her context of awkward isolation shifted to a context of shared meaning.

Sue Mehrtens of Mineola, New York, reflecting on a similar personal breakthrough, wrote: "I had never heard of anyone having an experience like mine. But I have also come to believe that everyone who is 'waking up' is doing so in his or her unique way." On the night of November 25, 1983, Mehrtens had a dream. "It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. There was no narrative, no action, like a typical dream. Rather, it was like a loud megaphone went off in my bedroom: 'Friends will die. Relatives will die. You will give up everything and your life will be transformed.' "

While still in the dream state, Mehrtens experienced an "ineffable bliss." She didn't want to leave that bliss, but found herself waking up. "I shared this experience with my husband, and then promptly forgot all about it—until five days later, when I learned of the death of my friend Hazel Crafts. I told my husband of Hazel's death, and he was the one who remembered my dream. He thought it was predictive, but, given my Cartesian prejudices, I pooh-poohed the idea."

In the following six weeks, Mehrtens lost another friend, two aunts, and an uncle, and her marriage disintegrated. "As everything in my life began to fall away, I had to face the fact that my view of reality had been far too limited: Clearly some dreams had to be taken seriously." What she calls "voice-over dreams" continued, giving her specific instructions. "Over the next twelve years I left college teaching, gave up my home in Maine, left all my friends, moved across country to the San Francisco Bay Area, set up a research business, named the business with the unintelligible name I was given in a dream, networked for work, as instructed in a dream, took clients, refused clients, moved ten times more . . . . Needless to say, many people in my family and circle of acquaintances thought I had gone bonkers."

Eventually she found a Jungian who "was able to recognize the archetypal experiences I was going through, and to assure me that I was not 'crazy' but was living out a mid-life crisis of rather substantial dimensions. Slowly, living from analytical session to analytical session, I began to feel better, to stop crying so much, and to get on with life."

Looking back, she now realizes that her marriage, home, job, and professional identity were "easy to give up . . . compared to the difficulty of giving up beliefs about myself, my lack of self-esteem, and what I expect from life." Mehrtens chronicled her rite of passage in a book entitled Dreaming to Wake to Life (Potlatch Press).

Near the end of the IONS research project, more than a dozen teachers of transformation—all long-term explorers of human potential—came together to reflect on the project. What patterns connected the stories of participants? What conclusions could be reached about the IONS project to guide future research? At a time when fundamental worldviews, paradigms of reality, and conceptions of human nature are being questioned and challenged, what insights could be distilled and disseminated to the growing number of people who feel reality is rapidly changing but aren't sure whether the changes are around us or inside us, or both?

Poring over so many life-changing stories, brimming with nonordinary experiences of different kinds, I was reminded of my early journalistic days when, in the name of theory, I developed a method for keeping reports of high-weirdness at a safe conceptual distance, while simultaneously claiming the high ground of "objectivity."

Your job was to make a reasoned, dispassionate case on behalf of, say, extrasensory perception of distant physical events. My job was to respond, as much by nuance as with words: Yes, I've seen the studies. Then I would trot out my One Question. "What's the mechanism?" You'd respond: "Well, we don't know." I'd be impressed with your honesty—not to be confused with being willing to concede ground. Tell me exactly how anomalous mind-matter interactions work, or go away. I never actually said such a thing, but it was my attitude.

Arrogant? Unspeakably. But it served to keep mind and matter as they belonged—separate. Reality remained safe. I slept well. Somewhere along the way, I woke up. That's to say things changed when I met William James (Essays in Radical Empiricism) and became friends with his notion that accurate and fair observations depend upon disciplined familiarity with actual data. The familiarity might come through controlled experiment; or by examination of naturally occurring events; or by comparisons of subjective reports and dependable testimonies to unusual phenomena.

What matters most, writes Michael Murphy in The Future of the Body, is that "without data from many domains of inquiry, without various kinds of knowing, our understanding of human development will be incomplete."

These days I smile when I hear echoes of my former Quest for Mechanism in the words of Arbiters of Reality, who busy themselves with ridding science of inconvenient anomalies. While working on this article, I mentioned to a self-styled "debunker" the existence of cases in which someone is said to exert subliminal influence upon others in ways that harmonize conflicting persons; or—conversely—use the subliminal influence to cause discord and suffering.

"Well," he replied, after a long silence. "Of course this begs the question of how such a transaction could be possible . . . "Bad faith in the guise of skepticism? Almost certainly. Still, I can't bring myself to get too haughty, because I myself continue to wrestle with a version of my old "how does it work" conundrum. Presently this takes the form of trying to weave together two threads—one of cosmic scale, the other closer to the subject of this article.

1) In evolution, matter seems to have preceded the emergence of organic life, which in turn seems to have preceded the emergence of mind. So far, fine. But how could "dead" atoms or quanta (the materialist definition of matter) generate, or give rise to, meaning, purpose, value, and creativity?

2) Numerous participants in the IONS project described experiences suggesting that, far from being essentially separate, mind and matter share something like a secret sympathy. As opposed to being merely coincidental, this sympathy seems to be an irreducible fact of existence, at least in the tiny portion of the Milky Way we call home. Consider these core elements from the project:

— Feeling that someone is watching you, then turning to meet his or her gaze. Correctly sensing the location of lost objects without the help of sensory cues.

— Spontaneously apprehending the presence of someone physically distant or dead, by direct and vivid contact.

— Feeling the pains of a distant friend, then discovering he or she is ill or injured. Accurately sensing someone's prayers on your behalf.

— Saying something unexpected in unison with someone else. Having the same dream a friend does. Appearing to correct a machine's malfunction by mental intention alone.

— Out-of-body experience (during which you may see your own body) after which you report events that could not be known to you in ordinary circumstances. Feeling that you have invisible hands that touch another person, after which the person responds as if he or she had been touched.

I can appreciate the visceral inclination, especially among philosophical materialists, to stand against the unsettling implications of such mental-physical hybrids. However, I'm unacquainted with evidence that the ultimate intention of reality is to satisfy human categorical preferences. "Even ordinary day-to-day experience cuts across our cuts between possible/impossible, real/unreal, inner/outer, here/there, now/then, subject/object, illusion/reality, all the time," writes R. D. Laing in The Voice of Experience. "We often enough have to concede that what cannot be, must be, only because it is."

This doesn't mean we're obliged to embrace evidence for human transformability simply because the world happens to be filled with remarkable possibilities which frequently decline to fit human expectations or preferences. It does mean that the intellectual burden rests with those who would assert that the sampling presented in the IONS project is uncorroborated, therefore dismissible. To the contrary, the IONS database of transformational experiences is strikingly consistent with reports of extraordinary physical, mental, and spiritual capacities as recorded in the oral and written histories of every culture—supplemented by contemporary scientific studies of exceptional functioning.

The challenge rather is to search for coherent conceptual frameworks (there may be more than one) that are compatible, remembering Michael Murphy's stipulation, with "data from many domains of inquiry" and "various kinds of knowing." This in turn requires an experimental approach. What might be the simplest model capable of accounting for consistently reported elements of such reports (for instance, the experience of saying something unexpected in unison with someone else)? What predictions might that model offer beyond the observed features themselves? How might our future change if such predictions are valid? In the spirit of these questions, I consider the following hypothesis:

Before there was evolution, there was involution.

Involution is the doctrine—advanced by Hegel, Henry James Sr, Sri Aurobindo, and others—that the world's development is based on the implicit action, descent, or involution (literally, "the state of being involved or entangled") of a Supreme Principle or Divinity. "Each of these philosophers believed that the progressive expression of higher forms or qualities is made possible by their secret existence of immanence in nature," writes Murphy in The Future of the Body.

Here's the core idea. The Source (also known as Spirit; God; Tao; Rigpa; Mahamaya; Geist; Brahman; Archetypal Form; Big Bang) periodically "gets lost"—for the sheer play of it—by throwing itself outward as far as possible, to see how "far out" it can get. Thereby Source temporarily "forgets" itself in each descending level of decreasing consciousness—all the way "down" to a point at which Source exists in a state of alienation, separation, dismemberment, and fragmentation. When involution is complete—that is, when Source ("the higher") has become completely enfolded in matter ("the lower")—the process of unfoldment can begin—and does, according to this doctrine. Thus does Source, having never truly "lost" itself at all, return to itself through the process of evolution, beginning in and through matter, which "seems" to be dead but is actually brimming with the "stuff" of Source, as potential waiting to be tapped.

This idea, which finds expression in the world's great esoteric traditions, provides insight, language, and philosophic grounding for many of the most provocative features of transformative experiences. One such feature is the frequently reported insight that the entire world is "alive" or "sentient." The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gives voice to this view in the doctrine of panpsychism, or panexperientialism, which holds that all phenomena in the universe—subatomic entities, cells, and humans alike—continually contact and influence other entities, with varying degrees of creativity. This perspective finds soul, experience, or subjectivity everywhere, even in physical elements.

Involution also provides conceptual underpinnings for the observation that evolution seems to produce emergent structures, processes, and laws (or habits) that had not previously existed. We encounter what we experience as novelties that cannot be explained or predicted by—or reduced to—the conditions, events, or patterns they grew out of. For instance, in a purely materialistic universe, the experience of saying something unexpected in unison with another person can only be "a coincidence." In a universe where Source is involved in varying degrees at various levels, such an experience could be seen to confirm the "secret sympathy" mentioned earlier.

There's one additional feature of transformative reports—the experience of a radical widening and deepening of personal identity—which doctrines of involution help bring into clear relief. Several research participants echoed Richard Gunther's striking experience at Big Sur: "I had no sensation of standing on the balcony, but rather was fused with all of nature . . . . There was no 'I'—only a 'we' as I became one with all I saw." Many subjects mentioned moments of apprehending all objects of perception as if the objects were contained within them; awakening to a witness self that's fundamentally distinct from particular thoughts, impulses, feelings, or sensations; feeling as if they were suddenly more real, more genuine, more authentically themselves.

If something like involution does precede evolution—and if our essential nature is identical with the primordial Source—it's possible that there's something shockingly normal about the radical restructuring of the entire psyche that has been variously referred to as cosmic consciousness, mystical experience, union with God, peak experience, ecstasy, or liberation.

Images of involution suggest that capacities for transformation may well be inherent in the world fabric of which we are woven. If so, opportunities for awakenings are literally everywhere; we're cultivating transformation (or choosing not to) in each moment of our lives. Since numinous experience so often emerges spontaneously, it's tempting to imagine the enfoldment of "higher" states and stages in the givens of ordinary experience as signals awaiting our response. Moments of deep connection, typically resonant with images of homecoming, suggest the ancient Platonic doctrine anamnesis, or "recollection," which asserts that we can remember primordial ideas underlying sense impressions.

Perhaps it's time to get serious about attempting to identify activities that characteristically evoke such capacities, and assemble these elements into open-ended, nondogmatic programs of practice. If embraced by enough people, such practice might constitute a decisive next step in the world's evolutionary adventure; that's the predictive dimension of the hypothesis. If we are indeed "wired for transformation," getting good at transformative practice is synonymous with experimenting with the codes.

This assumes that evolution is unfinished. And that, in a way that's suddenly imaginable, the next step may be up to us.

Keith Thompson's articles have appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Psychology Today, and Utne Reader. He is the author of Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination and To Be a Man: In Search of the Deep Masculine.

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