This experience subsided after about ten minutes of clock-time; however, it transcended any concept of time and felt like eternity. The flow of the healing and nourishing energy and the visions of golden glow with peacock designs lasted through the night. The resulting sense of wellbeing stayed with me for many days. The memory of the experience has remained vivid for years and has profoundly changed my entire life philosophy. 5.7 The transpersonal domain of the psyche The second major domain that has to be added to mainstream psychiatry’s cartography of the human psyche when we work with holotropic states is now known under the name “transpersonal”, meaning literally “beyond the personal” or “transcending the personal”. The experiences that originate on this level involve transcendence of the usual boundaries of the individual (his or her body and ego) and of the usual limitations of three-dimensional space and linear time that restrict our perception of the world in the ordinary state of consciousness. The transpersonal experiences are best defined by describing first the everyday experience of ourselves and the world – how we have to experience ourselves and the environment to pass for “normal” according to the standards of our culture and of traditional psychiatry. In the ordinary or “normal” state of consciousness, we experience ourselves as Newtonian objects existing within the boundaries of our skin. The American writer and philosopher Alan Watts referred to this experience of oneself as identifying with the “skin-encapsulated ego”. Our perception of the environment is restricted by the physiological limitations of our sensory organs and by physical characteristics of the environment. For example, we cannot see objects from which we are separated by a solid wall, ships that are beyond the horizon, or the other side of the moon. If we are in Prague, we cannot hear what our friends are talking about in San Francisco. We cannot feel the softness of the lambskin unless the surface of our body is in direct contact with it. In addition, we can experience vividly and with all our senses only the events that are happening in the present moment. We can recall the past and anticipate future events or fantasize about them; however, these are very different experiences from the immediate and direct experience of the present moment. In transpersonal states of consciousness none of these limitations are absolute; any of them can be transcended. Transpersonal experiences can be divided into three large categories. The first of these involves primarily transcendence of the usual spatial barriers, or the limitations of the “skinencapsulated ego”. Here belong experiences of merging with another person into a state that can be called “dual unity”, assuming the identity of another person, identifying with the consciousness of an entire group of people (e.g. all mothers of the world, the entire population of India, or all the inmates of concentration camps), or even experiencing an extension of consciousness that seems to encompass all of humanity. Experiences of this kind have been repeatedly described in the spiritual literature of the world. In a similar way, one can transcend the limits of the specifically human experience and identify with the consciousness of various animals, 24 Stanislav Grof
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