mate knowledge of the imaginal realm. In his ground-breaking essay, Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley suggested that such concepts as Hell and Heaven represent intrapsychic realities experienced in a very convincing way during non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances, such as LSD and mescaline, or various powerful nondrug techniques (Huxley 1959). The seeming conflict between science and religion is based on the erroneous belief that these abodes of the Beyond are located in the physical universe – Heaven in the interstellar space, Paradise somewhere in a hidden area on the surface of our planet, and Hell in the interior of the earth. Astronomers have developed and used extremely sophisticated devices, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, to carefully explore and map the entire vault of heaven. Results of these efforts, which have of course failed to find God and heaven replete with harp-playing angels and saints, have been taken as proof that such spiritual realities do not exist. Similarly, in cataloguing and mapping every acre of the planetary surface, explorers and geographers have found many areas of extraordinary natural beauty, but none of them matched the descriptions of Paradises found in the spiritual scriptures of various religions. Geologists have discovered that the core of our planet consists of layers of solid and molten nickel and iron and that its temperature exceeds that of the sun’s surface – hardly a very plausible location for the caves of Satan. Meanwhile, modern studies of holotropic states have brought strong supportive evidence for Huxley’s insights. They have shown that Heaven, Paradise, and Hell are ontologically real and represent distinct and important states of consciousness that all human beings can experience under certain circumstances. Celestial, paradisean, and infernal visions are inherent aspects of the experiential spectrum of psychedelic inner journeys, near-death states, mystical experiences, as well as shamanic initiatory crises and other types of spiritual emergencies. Patients often tell their psychiatrists about experiences of God, Heaven, Hell, archetypal divine and demonic beings, and about psychospiritual death and rebirth. However, because of their inadequate superficial model of the psyche, psychiatrists dismiss these experiences as manifestations of mental disease caused by pathological processes of unknown etiology. They do not realize that matrices for these experiences exist in deep recesses of the collective unconscious. An astonishing aspect of transpersonal experiences occurring in holotropic states of various kinds is that their content can be drawn from the mythologies of any culture of the world, including those of which the individual has no intellectual knowledge. C. G. Jung discovered this extraordinary fact when he studied the mythological motifs occurring in the dreams and psychotic experiences of his patients. On the basis of his observations, he realized that the human psyche has access not only to the Freudian individual unconscious, but also to the collective unconscious, which is a repository of the entire cultural heritage of humanity (Jung 1956, 1959). Knowledge of comparative mythology is thus more than a matter of personal interest or Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 27 (25)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=