TransPersonal Consciousness
A BirthRight of the Human Kingdom
A Time of Wonder
Alexis Ffrench
Chapter 1 | Living, Dying and Transformation
“The shortest, the swiftest, and the surest way to plum
Truth is through a mortal leap into the Unknown”:
Henri Bergson
“Higher Energies Filter In”
“The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness
is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences
which have a meaning for our life also;
and that although in the main of these experiences and those of the world keep discrete,
yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.”
William James
Chapter 2 | The Journey to Ego
“The Nearing Death Experience” AND
Journey into the Unknown of the Beyond
“…an apparently universal process marked primarily
by the dissolution (chronic pain) of the body,
(embracing pain through the breath accompanied with witnessing the Self)
and the ascendancy of spirit.”
Kathleen Dowling Singh edited
Quality of Knowing
The energy field, or biofeld, around the body begins to manifest a
‘quality of intensity.”
The Qualities of Grace
of Relaxation, of Interiority, of Silence, of The Sacred, of Transcendence, of Knowing,
of Intensity, of Merging, of Experienced Perfection
Expanded states of consciousness or identity
Shimmering and Penetrating
passage to deeper being – psychoalchemy
Perceived Tragedy —> Experienced Grace
Chapter 3 | The Consciousness of the Ego: Halfway Home
“In the middle of the road we call our life,
I found myself in a dark wood
With no clear path through.”
Dante Alighieri
Translation by Jon Kabat-Zin, from Wherever You Go, There You Are (New York: Hyperion, 1940)
The Self maintains itself as a system of identity with its own equilibrium and continues
as it is until jarred sufficiently by both inner and outer experiences.
With significant jarring, the sense of Self moves beyond its former boundaries.
It can witness and dis-identify from it’s perspective.
As difficult as the Path of Return might be, the fortunate ones are those who begin
to experience and live in expanded states of consciousness long before they are called to the dying process.
The transformational possibilities inherent in suffering demand a context of meaning,
a framework that creates sense and order out of chaos.
Beyond Self – tragedy to grace.
There are realms beyond personal awareness…the dynamics of transformation.
Chapter 4 | The Path of Return
“It is the nature of all things that take form to dissolve again.”
Gautama Buddha
“…the Spirit returns to God who gave it.”
Ecclesiastes 12:7
“Who need be afraid of the merge?”
Walt Whitman
“The level of consciousness of the mental ego is a major fulcrum point, a milestone, of human development
from a transpersonal perspective. It is a turning point.”
Movement Beyond Ego
The implicate order of the Universe is enfolding us back into itself.
The Ground of Being itself is the attractor, beckoning us to a transpersonal unity.
The Path of Return is a complete and thorough psychic reorganization of identify, consciousness,
modes of knowing and modes of being.
It is a psychospiritual alchemy.
Although beginning with vague malaise, the period of transformation is eventually filled
with upheaval, panic, painful emotions and the powerful tidal waves
of the inpouring power of the Ground of Being.
Disintegration – a tearing of the veils that keeps us from seeing all that we do not want to see –>
–> Disillusionment – standing alone and mortally vulnerable –>
–> Despair – awareness of of our own emptiness; cannot go on for a moment longer –>
Feeling begins to have a flooding and overwhelming quality as the Ground of Being begins to assert itself,
seizing the sense of identify from the mental ego.
Primal repression is loosened in this letting go.
The Integration of Shadow and Persona
Loosening the mental ego’s identity ‘hold’ and awareness, the transformative field emerges. A tripartite field of consciousness , involving Experience, awareness of the experience –Empty Mind, and the generated Wisdom.
We travel through these transformative fields many times on the Path of Return,
spiraling through each time on a higher level of integration.
Knowledge begins to have a quality of what Wilber terms “vision logic” about it,
as we see and know more clearly in this expanded self.
The focus of our attention has shifted. Our attention is the controlling factor in determining that with which we identify. This is the primary dynamic in the process of transformation at every level of healing or growth.
We animate, through the amplifying power of the Ground of Being, that to which we put our attention.
Witnessing the former dimensions of self as object, we are no longer confined to them as subject.
The Integration of Mind and Body
The release of energy from the Ground of Being effectively reawakens the body. It removes the block placed by primal repression, filling the body with powerful forces of release and purification. (Many wisdom traditions recognize this release of organismic or bodily energy potentials by various names: among them kriyas, shaktipat, and kundalini.
A spontaneity of centered existence begins to emerge: the very experience of existence is amplified.
There are major explosions of anger, joy, orgasm, and grief. It is the home of deep catharsis.
“Regression in the service of transcendence” – a free-fall
A thorough psychic reorganization: the death of the personal self and the beginning transformation and emergence
of the transpersonal self. It is usually a painful phase of deconstruction that clears the way for the building
of a new depth of consciousness.
The Holy often treats us ungently. The Holy is essential; it does not respond to the inessential.
Metaphorically, there are “winds” during the free fall, the ripples and transmutations of the Ground of Being. They can “lift one up” as the extraordinary experiences of visions, intuitive wisdom, and raptures, and then “fling one down” again
as the power of the Ground of Being burns off the remaining dross of separateness.
Entering the Transpersonal Realms
Transpersonal states of consciousness unfold as the depth of integration of the self and the Ground of Being increases. Integration, as always, occurs as the self moves more deeply into the interior of a level of consciousness.
Bliss begins to quiet into a more centered experience of grace, a still awareness of the sacred.
The heart is open and the mind is clear, of one and the same essence, where knowing and being being to coalesce,
where a sense of blessedness and quiet grace presides – the entry into the phase of transpersonal integration.
“The task of a human being is to transform suffering into joy.”
Awareness reveals, to the one blessed with this transformation, that a human being is far more than anyone “believes.” There is a deeper, interior consciousness or identity that is untouched by peripheral fluctuations, remaining,
through the course of them, stable, centered, open, and free.
At this level of consciousness, called by many traditions the Subtle dimensions, we have touched the soul.
The levels of matter and life and mind have been integrated in, subsumed by, the level of the soul functioning
through the personality. The soul begins to illumine the integrated mindbody.
The fear of death beings to dissolve.
Attention becomes a tool of transformation in its capacity to transcend time by so deeply entering the present.
Nonlocal and infinite nature of reality – dawning recognition of the eternal and the infinite.
Present-centered awareness – naked attention.
I am the awareness that is contemplating All in its Divinity. As Mesiter Eckhart puts it:
“The eye is me which is seeing God is the ey in God which is seeing me.”
Chapter 5 | Tragedy to Grace
Hope Reframed
A ‘door ajar’ allows
the little thing with feathers
to fly inside.
And never stops – at all….”
Emily Dickinson
Waiting with my door ajar
And suddenly I feel it…a warmth, a shimmering…first around my head and then radiating throughout me…
enveloping within and without.
This sensation and awareness stops me dead in my tracks.
And I bask in a consciousness of Presence that elicits profound tears of gratitude and a sense of wellbeing.
All shall be well…
even though the ice-pick pain in my jaw and face also waits with me in this moment suspended in time.
Hope is ‘graced’ from the Beyond
…a gift from the Ground of Being.
One afternoon after a summer rainstorm, I was running and playing in the street, splashing in puddles. Standing in the middle of Redbud Drive, a shower began and rain was gently falling on my head. As my eyes gazed west into the early evening sky, a rainbow appeared.
My arms reached out to catch the raindrops.
Kiss the Rain
Meyers, arr. Hauser
I lived on Redbud Drive in Knoxville, Tennessee as a child. Our front yard was covered in dogwood trees with only one redbud tree.
The side street that led into our driveway was uphill.
The rain kissed my face that day ….so many years ago.
And as equilibrium peeks from around the clouds
into a blue sky underneath a rainbow umbrella,
and one redbud tree graces my driveway,
I Kiss the Rain.
Once again, I am this little girl
…this time, standing in a shower of Gratitude.
Many times during my lifetime,
this memory has washed over me
with a deep sense of peace.
– my standing in the middle
of the street,
– arms outstretched
to touch the sky,
– absolute awe and wonderment
of the blue sky peeking around billowy dark clouds,
– all dancing underneath
a rainbow umbrella.
Chapter 6 | The "Special Conditions" of Transformation
Catalysts of Transformation
The unfolding of transpersonal consciousness out of the level of identity of the separate self
demands an energy beyond the ordinary energy that allows the mental ego to remain in stasis.
Wisdom traditions have outlined a path to Unity Consciousness or God-realization. There appears to be a fundamentally, underlying sequence of stages in the process of unfolding, evolving consciousness that reveal the same path ‘home’:
These skillful means have been described by Ken Wilbur as “the injunctive way,”
the way that points to ‘the path within to beyond’.
The destabilization of consciousness demands an enabling energy into the system of the self through experience.
A skillful means, although evoking pain and anxiety, is the way out of the pain and anxiety of the separate self. It provides a vehicle for dissolving the boundaries we have crated and for healing the wounds engendered by those boundaries.
The healing occurs in the experience of the pain of the boundary.
All skillful means involve the quality of attention and it is precisely the quality of attention that is the enabling energy.
Ken Wilbur states: “Ultimately, a person in [meditation]…..[as in dying] must face having no recourse at all.
Having no recourse, no way out, no way forward or backward, he is reduced to the simplicity of the moment.
His boundaries collapse and, as St. Augustine puts it, ‘he arrives at That Which Is.'”
[The Spectrum of Consciousness, p. 283]
“Human thought is awareness in motion: samadhi is awareness at rest.”
Philip Kapleau
“[Meditation], like nearing death, is a mental state of intense yet relaxed inquiry and attention.”
The development of meditative stability involves the increasingly controlled and practiced use
of the autonomic nervous system, which is composed of two complementary elements:
1- The sympathetic nervous system is the physiological correlate for the state of vigilant attention.
2- The parasympathetic nervous system is the physiological correlate for the state of relaxation.
With the practice of [meditation], these two systems are not only amplified in themselves and in their physiological effects, but they are amplified in a state of balance, one with the other.
In the process of [meditation], at a point of stillness, the power of the Ground of Being reveals itself.
There are no ‘ideas’ at this point or ‘control’ .
When the Self becomes infused with the power of the Ground of Being, the ‘idea’ of ‘control’ is long since behind the emerging unfolding consciousness that is now [meditating]. As the point where the influence of the Ground of Being
can be experienced, a spontaneous psychospiritual transformation is already under way.
In quieting consciousness, [meditation] also allows us to experience the awareness of being an organism,
the vibrancy of being alive, and so beings to heal, to dissolve, the boundary between mind and body.
As the boundary between mind and body dissolved, there is a loosening of primal repression.
Here the power of the Ground of Being enters consciousness and the transpersonal journey begins.
[Meditation] can be seen as a tool with the power to loosen and destabilize ordinary mind, the conscious mind of the personal identify, allowing access to deep resources that are essential ingredients of awareness, of life-in-form.
We simply claim more of who we really are in this creative act of becoming whole.
The process is not one of destroying the ego but exploring it and integrating it.
The Experience of Our Existence
The Path Within to the Beyond
The Presence of MindBody Awareness and the integration of body and ego –
a remapping of the previous boundaries between mind and body.
Primal repression loosens as the boundary between mind and body fades.
This process explores and integrates the Ego.
Exploration and integration producs an expansion – of being, of awareness and of identity.
What amplifies bodily awareness?
In her book, “The Grace of Dying”, Kathleen Dowling Singh focuses on terminal illness.
Are there other circumstances or experiences besides terminal illness and meditation practices
that can amplify mindbody awareness?
BREATH
The constant rhythm of breathing in and out maintains an intersection with the Ground of Being,
a sense of interconnectedness and Nowness.
“Student, tell me, what is God?”
‘It is the breath inside the breath.”
Kabir
Death and Childbirth –
the power of the body, of life itself, of energy informing the natural world
Attention
LaserLight
Surrender
‘Thy will be done.”
