to study brain regeneration and memory in the same animal. To establish a system for the investigation of the dynamics of memory in a regenerating brain, they developed a computerized system to train flatworms in an environmental familiarization protocol. They showed that worms exhibited environmental familiarization, and that this memory persisted for at least 14 days – long enough for the brain to regenerate. They further showed that trained, decapitated Planaria exhibited evidence of memory retrieval after regenerating a new head model system. The authors propose planaria as a key model species for mechanistic investigations of the encoding of specific memories in biological tissues. The assertion that the newborn is not aware of being born and is not capable of forming memory of this event is also strongly conflicts with extensive fetal research showing that the fetus is extremely sensitive even in the prenatal stage (Tomatis 1991; Whitwell 1999; Moon, Lagercrantz, and Kuhl 2010). The most likely explanation of this striking logical inconsistency occurring in individuals trained in rigorous scientific thinking is psychological repression and resistance in regard to the terrifying memory of biological birth. The second transbiographical domain of the new cartography is best called “transpersonal” because it includes a rich array of experiences in which consciousness transcends the boundaries of the body/ego and the usual limitations of linear time and three-dimensional space. This transcendence leads to experiential identification with other people, groups of people, other life forms, and even elements of the inorganic world. Transcendence of time provides experiential access to ancestral, racial, collective, phylogenetic, and karmic memories. Yet another category of transpersonal experiences can take us into the realm of the collective unconscious that the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung called “archetypal”. This region harbors mythological figures, themes, and realms of all the cultures and ages, even those of which we have no previous intellectual knowledge (Jung 1959). In its farthest reaches, individual consciousness can identify with the Universal Mind or Cosmic Consciousness, the creative principle of the universe. Probably the most profound experience available in holotropic states is identification with the Supracosmic andMetacosmic Void, Primordial Emptiness and Nothingness that is conscious of itself. The Void has a paradoxical nature; it is a vacuum, in the sense that it is devoid of any concrete forms, but it is also a plenum, since it seems to contain all of creation in a potential form. The existence and nature of transpersonal experiences violate some of the most basic assumptions of materialistic science. They imply such seemingly absurd notions as relativity and arbitrary nature of all physical boundaries, nonlocal connections in the universe, communication through unknown means and channels, memory without a material substrate, the nonlinearity of time, or consciousness associated with all living organisms, and even inorganic matter. Many transpersonal experiences involve events from both the microcosm and the macrocosm, realms that cannot norSpirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 15 (13)
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