Mysticism

First, I had a couple of strategic advantages. I held a PhD in philosophy, religious studies, and philosophy of religion, allowing me to study theology, mysticism, and mystical traditions—both Eastern and Western. I taught courses in comparative mysticism, spending a lot of time with great masters. Psychedelic and contemplative experiences are different genres. Psychedelic...

Well, the first book I wrote as an academic was Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life. I was interested in reincarnation early in my career. I encountered Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia. Around the same time, I encountered Stan Grof's research in his book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. I...

Hi everybody. It's nice to see your faces. Short introduction: I've made my living as a university professor in Ohio. I taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State. I focused on Eastern religion, psychology of mysticism, comparative spirituality, and Eastern thought. But what brings me here today is not...

These insights, while not new, are well established in mystical traditions but need to be continually engaged with and realized collectively.

I had been meditating since college and was familiar with different traditions. As a professor of religious studies, I had grounding in various spiritual traditions, teaching courses in psychology of religion and comparative mysticism. I thought sessions would help me break through obstacles in my contemplative practice. They opened a protocol of spiritual exploration...

Yeah, I was teaching classically Religious Studies courses, Introduction to World Religions, Eastern Religions, Buddhism, Psychology of Religion, Mysticism and Meditation, you know, classic curriculum.

Now, we know from studying mystical autobiographies, when an individual is opening to deeper, pure, more comprehensive, unitive states of consciousness, those states of consciousness are incredibly powerful and pure, and they tend to churn up the psyche and bring to the surface all the things that are distorting their natural ability to enter...

Yep.

There, I think we find the same answers in psychedelic work that we find in classic mystical traditions. The essence of the individual is the essence of the Divine. The essence of the one is the essence of the totality. We are, in essence, sparks of the Divine, drawn out of the unitive matrix...

Yeah, you know, in the Japanese tradition, there is something that the Zen monks call a sashin. A sashin is a period set aside for intense spiritual practice. So it's like a five-day, two-week meditation retreat, a session. And a session, to me, is kind of an anglicized version of sashin. For me to...

It's about learning. How far back does it go? Somewhere between grasses and chimpanzees. It's hard to think of individual blades of grass having individual consciousness. We usually think in terms of broad classes, but somewhere in the evolutionary process, individuality emerges. As that individuality emerges, there's a learning that deepens over time, and...

If you continue and press to the limits of your time and space identity, going through the transformation we call ego death, you begin to open to spiritual reality, farther removed from personal history. That's when experiences begin to overlap and converge. Spiritual reality isn't something you just enter and take from; it's interactive....

Dan, I love hearing you riff, man. I mean, that's just beautiful. Everything you're you're doing and putting together is just beautiful.

It's a gateway. You know, we have to let go of being small in order to enter into being large. It's not always easy to let go of being small, but it's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many of the mystical traditions...

It's a prana. We have to let go of being small to enter into being large, and it's not always easy to let go of being small. It's not just letting go of your personal identity. In therapy, we often focus on ego death, and many mystical traditions focus on ego death, but I...

Well, as I came to experience it, I experienced consciousness as like an infinite ocean. When we open ourselves in deep psychedelic states, it's like our mind is a seed catalyst that we drop into this ocean, and it crystallizes a set of experiences out of this infinite potential. By absorbing these experiences and...

Sure, it's very healing at the soul level, rather than the personal level. Personal healing occurred in relationships and early childhood relationships. I didn’t bring a lot of trauma into this life, so there wasn't much deeply buried in my psyche. At a deeper level, it was healing at the soul level. When one...

I don't know if this addresses the depth from which your question is coming, because I understand the true, kind of quandary from which that question arises. But the deepest answer I have is a mystical experience of oneness, in which goodness becomes an insignificant component, a spontaneous component, like the way you react...

This is one area where our work is complementary. You are a deeply committed, lifelong social activist, understanding social transformation beyond me. You understand the roots holding us back and see opportunities for deep social change at a collective, tangible level. My work has been more internally focused. Let me speak to the inside...

I think so. That's a widely held insight in many mystical traditions of the world. There's a deep collaboration, and this intelligence is interested in its expansion, and we are, in some ways at this point in time, one of the cutting edges of its expansion, its learning.

As one delves deeper into collective mind, archetypal reality, and spiritual reality, I had the advantage of a PhD in philosophy of religion and familiarity with spiritual traditions. I'd studied spiritual practices and the maps of various spiritual worlds, providing reference points for comparing my psychedelic experiences with other spiritual seekers using meditation, yoga,...

Let me qualify by saying I don't consider my experiences to be normative in any generalizable way. There are so many medicines, ways of using them, and personalities engaging this infinite consciousness. It's foolish to think any one person's experience is a map for others. I'm interested in others' experiences non-judgmentally. When we work...

Thank you, David. Let me shift into screen sharing, if I can do this correctly. Good. Okay. Well, thank you, David, and thank you, everybody. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with you tonight, and I really look forward to sharing with you the experiences that I'm reporting in this book,...

To paraphrase Huston Smith: a mystical experience does not a mystic make, and that's true, but a mystical experience does a materialist unmake. I think it can undo some of the metaphysical constrictions of our era and open us up to a deeper understanding of what's actually taking place. Once you dissolve into the...

Diamond luminosity work entry, mystical absorption into Divine crystalline body—deep experiences, preparatory for Great Awakening session in 1995. Instead of diamond luminosity, experienced as entire species, deep dissolution in collective unconscious over years for this one session preparation. Challenging assimilation over years.

I think it is possible to say. I think Stan Grof's work allows us to say it, where he's dealing with integrating the experiences of thousands of people. I'm only talking about integrating my experiences, but my experiences fit comfortably within the larger matrix Grof's work has explored. It's a complicated answer because, on...

When we experience realities that are beyond us, or dimensions of consciousness that are beyond our own, and when we're tapping into those qualities like infinite compassion, infinite intelligence, and infinite creativity, these are qualities we tend to associate historically with various deities. It's not surprising that our mind would couple the phenomenology of...

Wouldn't that have been interesting? I did have an opportunity to do some teaching at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, but this came rather late in my series. Basically, I did my work between 1979 and 1999, when I was between 30 and 50 years old,...

Yeah, well, I've not done any of Stan's training in Holotropic Breathwork directly but rather as a colleague. Stan is a primary intellectual figure for me, and we've been in dialogue at conferences. Absolutely, one can enter these states without using psychedelics. Psychedelics are an amplifier of consciousness, but it's consciousness that does the...

What does it take to be a good person today? A commitment to serving a good that's not private, opening up to future generations, beings unlike me. Goodness is simple. It gets complicated in enacting it, but at its core, it's an action from oneness. If it's not from oneness, there's something not to...

It's a pleasure to be here, and I've enjoyed our conversations prior to this, which our present dialog grew out of. I am a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, retired from Youngstown State University. In the course of my teaching, I've taught courses on world religions and Eastern religions, Transpersonal psychology of religion,...

A lot of work at the medical level, at the therapeutic level, really focuses on ego dissolution, transcending the limitations of your physical body, entering into a deeper communion, into mystical experiences. What I found was when you—and I did this work—it wasn't just one cycle of death-rebirth. Now, in this image, the drop...

I know this is a radical story. I understand how far beyond most people's experience this is and how off the wall it is, but basically, you go through deep purification processes, which are well known in the spiritual, mystical traditions. You're clearing a lot of material not only from your own body-mind history...

Yeah, I'd be glad to. I came out of graduate school in 1978. I was trained as a philosopher of religion. I was raised in the Deep South and got my PhD from Brown University. I had finished my dissertation, published part of it, and was looking for where to take my research next....

Well, I'm the last person you would expect to have written this book. I was raised in the Deep South, grew up in Mississippi. I studied theology at the University of Notre Dame. I was actually in the seminary for three years in high school and one year in college. I did my master's...

Well, as I say in the book, I think ineffability is overrated as a category. It really comes from William James in discussing this talk. One of the qualities of mystical experience is ineffability. Of course, ultimately our rational mind and our verbal mind fall silent when confronting the infinite. But I work very,...

I've always been envious of people who had spontaneous mystical experiences early on. That’s not how it's been for me. I've always been kind of deeply locked into my body and my physical experience. I was reasonably well educated in Western religious thought and became educated in Eastern religious thought, in a broad spectrum...

I've always envied people who had mystical experiences from a young age. That wasn't my path. I've been deeply locked into my body and physical experiences. I was reasonably well-educated in Western and Eastern religious thought but had no background in psychedelics. In many ways, I'm the last person you'd expect to write a...

I wanted to understand my consciousness and, through that, the nature of reality itself. Stan's work suggested one could access not only personal unconsciousness but the cosmological mind, the mind of God. I wanted to learn as much about the universe as I could and understand the truth about my own being. As a...

I want to thank Swamiji for taking us into such a wonderful, spacious place. It was a little disorienting for me because I went so deep with him that when he was finishing, I suddenly realized I have a talk to give. I would also like to mention that the cosmology that emerges in...