The Individual; a Child of Many Mothers

The individual human mind is the one level of mind that can be discussed in concrete terms; only the individual has a tangible physical mind that we can hold in our hands and examine. Likewise, the individual experience of consciousness is the only one we know; any others can only be inferred.  In hypothesising about larger minds, there is always the danger of interpreting other minds, experiences or phenomena in human terms. The previous sections reviewed the evidence for other systems of mind. Are the various minds independent or are they all aspects of a universal consciousness, like individual waves upon the ocean? Is it possible to say how the nature of consciousness might vary between different systems of mind? The many different experiences of the individual consciousness--waking, sleeping, drugged, or ecstatic, suggest that the conscious experience of other minds may be vastly different in nature from our own.

A possible model for understanding how minds may interact comes from the individual mind itself. The human brain is actually two brains, a left brain and a right brain. In some cases of severe epilepsy, Doctors severed the connection between the two halves to prevent the seizures from spreading.  People who have had these operations cannot integrate the sensory input from one side of their body to the other.

Things that each eye sees will only be known to the opposite hemisphere of the brain.  In rare cases, the right hemisphere--normally mute--has the ability to communicate in writing.  When each hemisphere is asked questions via it's attached eye, the two hemisphere will give entirely different answers, suggesting that the two hemispheres are hosting two independent consciousness.  Sometimes information given to one hemisphere will pop into the other hemisphere's consciousness without their actually "seeing" it; and the individual will report it as a "hunch" or "guess," as though the knowledge was available to a higher level of consciousness, and through the interaction of the mind and consciousness, the individual was able to retrieve it, seemingly out of the blue.  

Could this phenomenon be similar to telepathy between two individual minds? Or the syncronicity between minds when break through ideas occur simultaneously between more than one person, or the inspiration that seems to bubble up in an artists mind when he is asleep? The split brain model can serve as an explanation for the relationship between the one and the many. The hive-mind model of science fiction stories where individuals in the collective have no independent existence is far from the only way separate minds can relate. The split brain model shows individual minds operating with their own free will, but still connected, receiving information, ideas or impulses that shape it's behavior. This model could help explain unsolved riddles in nature such as instinct and memory that scientists have been unable to solve just by studying the brain.

When we explored the possibilities of a Gaia mind or a collective human mind, we examined the ways in which individuals worked together or shared knowledge that could not be explained without a collective consciousness.  To fully understand the individual mind and how it has evolved through time, we must reverse the process and explore the many ways in which the individual is "connected" to other levels of consciousness and how these connections may have changed over time. Jung questioned whether the collective conscious would be the only thing not to have a history.  The same question should also be asked of the individual mind.

Transpersonal Consciousness

Ervin Laszlo offers a nice summary of what he calls "altered states of consciousness"--conscious activity and communication that can't be explained simply from the physical workings of the mind. Many of these experiences have achieved notoriety in the popular literature, such as near death experiences or out of body experiences. In other instances people appear to recall experiences from past lives; or to be able to affect other people's mental and bodily states across space and time. Individuals as well as cultures have sometimes shown a remarkable syncronicity in the development of ideas, artifacts and accomplishments.

Near death experiences were first given scientific legitimacy by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, and subsequently investigated by numerous clinical psychologists and specialized researchers. The experience is very similar in a significant proportion of people revived following close calls with death, regardless of the patient's age, sex, religious, cultural, educational or socioeconomic background. The experience usually includes some form of life review, which can take one of two forms; a panoramic memory which consists of a display of images and memories with little or no direct emotional involvement, and the life-review which involves emotional involvement and moral assessment. The clarity of memory is significant in both cases. As John von Neumann calculated, the amount of information an individual accumulates during a lifetime comes to about 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits, a staggering amount for a 10 centimeter brain to hold.

Somewhat more controversial is the recall of prior life experiences. Regression analysis patients are able to recall details from many previous lifetime. Patients of all ages remember stories of prior life experiences that are often associated with present problems and neurosis. In many cases, regression analysis and the accuracy of the memories has been challenged. But in some cases, information produced by the patients has included obscure historical and geographical particulars and personal histories that were subsequently verified. Moreover, most patients actually relive the experiences in the regressed state and their emotional tone and physiological responses are transformed beyond all reasonable bounds of accident or simulation. Ian Stephenson, a medical doctor in the U.S. had as many as 2,000 children recount past-life experiences, primarily between the ages of two and five. Significantly, the majority of these cases come from India where the believe in reincarnation has existed for thousands of years, suggesting the influence of collective memories.

Telepathy, in limited forms, has been demonstrated in the laboratory. In the 1970s, two Stanford researchers isolated two individuals and subjected one to bright flashes of light. EEG machines registered the brain wave patterns of both. The first registered the flashes of light immediately, but the second also began to produce the same patterns after a short period of time. At the National University of Mexico, in more than 50 experiments, two subjects were allowed to meditate together, then one was subjected to stimuli such as flashes of light or electrical shocks. In about a quarter of the cases, the EEG patterns were transferred from one subject to the other. Similar experiments at the Maimondes Hospital in New York City show a tendency for images to be sent during dream sleep.

Experiments with sick patients have demonstrated the effectiveness of prayer or meditation on a person's recovery. In one experiment a subject would create a small doll in a likeness of the patient, then would spend time alternating between 60 second intervals of nurturing the doll and intervals of rest. The electrodermal activity of the patients together with their heart rate were significantly different during the active nurturing periods than the rest periods while heart rate and blood flow showed a relaxation response. The old voodoo myths may have had some basis in truth after all.

The Shaman

The most widespread example of expanded human consciousness has been the shamanic experience which appeared in some form in all parts of the world.  In part 3, we placed the shamanic experience along with the prophetic and mystical experiences as the three forms of expanded consciousness in human religions.  But the shamanic experience differs from the others in that it has not been limited to any one historical era, and furthermore, it has been accessible to modern researchers studying the tribes that still practice it.  Is there something fundamental that the shamanic experience has to teach us?

In a seminal new work, Jeremy Narby draws on his own experiences with the Ashaninca people in the Peruvian Amazon to conclude that the shaman can communicate in his trance state "in defocalized consciousness with with the global network of DNA-based life."  The shaman, Narby argues, is in direct communication with the DNA itself.

Narby weaves an interesting argument in support of this--starting with his own experience taking ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic juice imbibed by the Ashaninca shamans.  Narby experienced visions of two gigantic boa constrictors that spoke to him without words.  Starting with this experience, Narby began to explore the consistency of shamanic imagery around the world.  The first similarity he noticed was the common imagery of a reptile or snake, often a "celestial serpent."   Joseph Campbell notes that "throughout the material in the Primitive, Oriental and Occidental ... myths and rites of the serpent frequently appear, and in a remarkably consistent symbolic sense.  Wherever nature is revered as self-moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life."  Typical was the comment by a Yagua shaman that "At the very beginning, before the birth of the earth here, our most distant ancestors lived on another earth ... " A further similarity was the near universal occurrence of twins in creation mythology.   Often these motifs merged together, in the form of a "double serpent'--such as the ancient Egyptian drawings of a snake splitting apart to have two heads.     It struck Narby that this was a perfect symbol for DNA, two strands connected together, splitting to duplicate. 

A similar theme is the axis mundi--the axis of the world.  Found all over the world this image typically takes the form of a rope, a vine, a ladder, or a stairway of celestial origin that links heaven and earth.  Often guarded by a serpent, the axis mundi gives access to the Otherworld and to shamanic knowledge; it is a passage normally reserved for the dead that shamans are able to use while living.  The ladder that gives access to knowledge is such a widespread theme among shaman that Alfred Metraux calls it the "symbol of the profession."  The western equivalent is the caduceus--a snake twined around a pole.

The similarity between DNA and the imagery of the shaman led Narby to postulate that the shaman was directly communicating with the information stored in DNA.  When he began to study the characteristics of DNA, he discovered that DNA emits electromagnetic waves corresponding to the narrow band of visible light.  According to researchers, this weak light is the equivalent to the intensity of a candle at a distance of 10 kilometers--but it has a surprisingly high degree of coherence--comparable to a laser.  Narby was reminded of the comment of one shaman that compared the spirits to radio waves--"Once you turn on the radio, you can pick them up.  It's like that with souls; with ayahuasca and tobacco, you can see them and hear them."

Narby's analysis can also be tied in to the Gaia theory.  DNA, after all, is Gaia's alphabet--the physical means of storing information.  If shaman are getting information from nature, DNA would be the physical medium that information was being stored in.  But as Gregory Bateson comments, the map is not the territory--the DNA is not the information, only the coding of the information.  DNA create proteins but the DNA itself does not contain the information about the properties of those proteins or their usefulness to the organism.  To gain this information, the shaman would have to be in contact with the mind of Gaia herself

The possibility that the shaman received information from cell DNA raises another interesting aspect--the common belief running through pre-civilized mythology that life has a celestial origin.  Ancient mythology contains a remarkable number of stories of cosmic serpents that descended from the heavens to create life on Earth. Another variation is the cosmic ladder or rope leading up to heaven--also connected with many creation myths.  Some modern shamans make the story more explicit.  A Yagua shaman tells that "At the very beginning, before the birth of the each, this earth here, our most distant ancestors lived on another earth ..."

Astronomer Fred Hoyle argues that life on earth may have begun by bacteria seeded from space, noting that bacteria have been proven able to survive in the vacuum of space.  A microbiologist at California Polytechnic State recently revived bacteria from the gut of an ancient bee trapped in amber for 135 million years.  Fossil evidence of bacterial activity has been found almost as far back as the Earth was habitable.  Approximately 3.9 billion years ago, the earth's surface cooled sufficiently to form a thin crust on top of the molten magma.  Traces of biological activity in sedimentary rock dates to 3.85 billion years ago and actual bacterial fossils have been found as far back as 3.5 billion years.

Bacteria and their DNA structures have existed essentially unchanged from the beginning.  Indeed, since most bacteria reproduce asexually, they are essentially immortal.  The remarkable stability of the DNA mechanism is only surpassed by the remarkable improbability of its appearing by chance.  The probability of DNA being formed purely by chance is, in the words of Prigogine, "vanishingly small ... even on a scale of ... billions of years."  And, apparently bacterial DNA appeared within millions of years, not billions--and then remained structurally unchanged for four billion years.

If Earth was indeed seeded by celestial bacteria, then the ancient myths take on a very real meaning.  Hidden in the imagery of snakes and axis mundi is very possibly the true story of the origin of life on Earth.  How did the ancients gain this wisdom, if not through that great  store of knowledge that is the Gaia Mind through her information storage system--DNA.

Tales From the Heart

Another recent book of seminal importance is The Heart's Code, by Paul Pearsall, a psychologist specializing in heart transplant patients.  Sounding a theme remarkably similar to Narby's, Pearsall argues that the heart itself contains many of the individual's memories, emotions, and drives.

A growing number of dramatic cases have resulted from heart transplant operations--perhaps the most stunning case involved an eight year old girl who who received the heart of a murdered ten year old girl. After the operation, the recipient began to wake up screaming at nights, complaining about dreams of the man who had murdered her donor.  After a number of sessions with a psychiatrist, the family decided to go to the police.  Using the descriptions provided by the girl, the police found the murderer and convicted him using evidence provided by the eight year old.

As Pearsall began to explore the phenomenon, he came to the conclusion that heart transplant recipients who experience some feelings about the donor are the rule, not the exception.  In cases that he dealt with, a forty one year old male received the heart of a nineteen year old girl who had been struck by a train.  The man commented that he "felt like nineteen again," but complained of dreams that he was driving a huge truck or was the engineer of a large steam engine.  He became convinced that the donor was driving a truck that was struck by a bigger truck.  A thirty-six year old female received the heart and lung of a twenty year old who was killed while running across the street to show her fiance a picture of her wedding dress.  Almost every night the recipient would dream about the donor, seeing her as young and pretty and very happy.  At the same time, she experienced a "new happiness in me I never experienced before."  

A thirty five year old female received the heart of a twenty-four year old year old prostitute killed in a stabbing.  Suddenly, she became, in her husband's words, a "sex kitten."  "Now I tire my husband out," the woman claimed.  I want sex every night.  I used to hate X-rated videos, but now I love them.  I feel like a slut sometimes."  A fifty two year old male received the heart of a seventeen year old boy killed by a hit and run driver and found his taste in music changing from classical to loud rock and roll, and his daughter complained that he was acting like a sixteen year old.  A forty seven year old female received the heart of a twenty three year old gay man shot to death in a robbery.  After the surgery she had shooting pains in her back, sometimes waking in the middle of the night with them.  She began to wear more feminine, revealing clothes and asked her husband if he had any gay fantasies.  

Pearsall argues that the heart is a source of a "subtle energy", citing as an example electro photographic pictures of a leaf fragment which contain precise images of the detached part of the leaf that had been discarded and destroyed. Like the brain, the heart has neurotransmitters that generate an electric current.  Along with certain hormones , the heart exercises a level of control over the brain. The heart, Pearsall claims, "plays a  major if fragile role in our overall consciousness."  This physical energy, Pearsall believes, is somehow connected to the basic "vital force" of the universe--a force that is nonlocal (everywhere), negentropic (does not dissipate), formative (creative not destructive), and organizing (integrative and not divisive.)  

Interestingly, both Narby and Pearsall consider consciousness to be a diffuse phenomenon, not necessarily tied to any one physical structure.  Narby writes that "the biosphere itself" is "a more or less fully interlinked unit" which is the "source of [shamanic] images."  Pearsall postulates "L" energy, an all present force, long recognized by traditional societies as 'chi," "mana,"  "Tao" or the "vital force."  But both Narby and Pearsall end up linking this force to a specific physical source; Narby to cellular DNA and Pearsall to the electro-cardiac system.  But we have seen in other areas that these sort of information/energy systems tend to have both a physical and non-physical component.  DNA and the systems of the heart are perfect candidates for physical carriers of information--the non physical component remains elusive.  Others have called it by many names, we call it Mind because this term opens itself to scientific exploration.

Mystical numbers and rhythms

Pearsall's focus on the heart brings us to another fascinating connection.   A typical, healthy, adult heart beating once per second--sixty times per minute--will beat 43,200 times in 12 hours.  This is a number that reappears time and again in traditional mythology. 

Joseph Campbell, perhaps the foremost scholar of mythology, told of a remarkable insight concerning the recurrence of a the number 432 in the mythology of many cultures and times. In ancient India, the cycle of time was considered to be 432,000 years, while the great cycle ran for 4,320,000 years. Two thousand years later, in twelfth century Iceland, the Hall of Odin was supposed to contain 540 doors and, at the end of time, 800 warriors would go through each door. 540 times 800 is 43,200. The next coincidence Campbell discovered came from third century B.C., Babylonian mythology which held that there were 432,000 years from the first city to the great flood and that ten kings ruled during that time. It occurred to Campbell that in the Book of Genesis, the ten patriarch from Adam to Noah account for 1,656 years,which is 86,400 weeks, twice the 432 pattern.

Campbell noted that all of these number add up to 9, the traditional number of the goddess. In India, people chant the 108 names of the Goddess 4 times a day, or 432 times. Even more remarkable, in astronomy, the complete procession of the equinoxes takes 25,920 years. Divide by 60 and you get 432.

Campbell's work suggests that there is a harmonical universe and heaven of numbers and that the human collective unconscious has been in touch with it for ages. Our own hearts beat to the ancient rhythms of the universe.  The traditional mythologies of man reflect these basic rhythms.

Paul Pearsall notes that "the energy of the heart, right down to our DNA, is musical and rhythmic in nature."  Geneticist Susumu Ohno, of the Beckman Research Institute, translated the four nucleotides in DNA into music; "do" for cytosine, "re" and "mi" for adenine, "fa" and "so" for guanine, and  "la" and "ti" for thymine.  His musician wife helped him chose a key and time and the duration for each note.  When the resulting composition was played by musicians, listeners compared it to Bach, Brahms and Chopin; many were moved to tears.  When Dr. Ohno translated one of Chopin's works to a chemical notation, it resembled the DNA formula for a human cancer gene.

According to the shamans of the entire world, one establishes communication with spirits via music.  Angelika Gebhart-Sayer discusses the 'visual music' projected by the spirits in front of the shaman's eyes; "It is made up of three dimensional images that coalesce into sound and that the shaman imitates by emitting corresponding melodies."  According to Graham Townsley, Yaminahua shamans learn songs, called koshuitti by imitating the spirits they see in their hallucinations, in order to communicate with them.  The words of these songs are almost totally incomprehensible to those Yaminahua who are not shamans.

The Greek mathematician Pythagorous, observing that planets are separated by intervals that correspond precisely to the harmonic lengths of strings, looked to music to understand the ultimate principles of proportion, order, and harmony in the universe, which he believed found ultimate expression in the "music of the spheres."  Mystics throughout history have been fascinated by harmonics, which occur according to a precise mathematical series of whole-number ratios.  Many traditions believe that the harmonics in sound are the source of its healing and spiritual power, and some refer to these overtones as "the light in music.".

Vertically connected people

Oliver Sacks, the psychiatrist who wrote Awakenings , believed that some people, such as the autistic, who had lost their horizontal connections with people and society, might possess an intensified vertical connection, a direct connection with nature, with reality, uninfluenced, unmediated, untouchable by any others.

He saw numerous examples of this vertical connection. Perhaps the most notable were the autistic twins who possessed an astonishing ability with numbers. Although they could not make the simplest of mathematical calculations, they would sit together and exchange six digit numbers, each one nodding and appearing to savor the number as the other said it. After some pondering, Sax figured out that all the numbers they were sharing were prime numbers. Looking up a table of primes, Sax joined them the next day and, after a few minutes, volunteered an eight figure prime. They both turned toward him with a look of intense concentration and wonder on their faces. After half a minute, they broke into smiles. The twins sat silently for about five minutes until one of them brought forth a nine digit prime, followed by the other. Sax, surreptitiously stealing a look in his book, added a ten digit prime. Within an hour the twins were swapping twenty digit prime numbers, numbers so large there was no simple method for checking that they were primes. The twins did not seem to operate with numbers like a calculator; they saw them, directly, as a vast natural scene.

In another case, a man who had suffered a nearly fatal case of meningitis in infancy and had been left retarded, possessed an extraordinary memory for music, having memorized more than 2,000 operas. But what impressed Sacks the most was that Bach lived for him, and he lived in Bach. The man seemed directly in touch with something fundamental about the music of the spheres. Sacks concluded that the soul is harmonical whatever one's IQ, and for some, like physical scientists and mathematicians, the sense of harmony, perhaps, is chiefly intellectual ... perhaps the need to find or feel some ultimate harmony or order is a universal of the mind, whatever its powers, and whatever form it takes ... mathematicians have always felt number as the great mystery, and the world as organized, mysteriously, by the power of number.

Darold Treffert, M.D. described the case of Leslie Lemke, an idiot savant who had remarkable musical talents.  Not only could he remember pieces and repeat them flawlessly, but he could improvise new musical passages based on classical pieces. In one test, Leslie and a professional musician were both given two passages, a lyrical piece by Grieg and an atonal composition by Bartok.  Leslie came up with 215 bars of improvisation based on the Grieg piece and 100 based on Bartok.  The musician produced 95 bars based on Grieg and 87 based on Bartok.  In addition, Leslie's improvisations on the Grieg piece used remote keys more frequently, inserted transitions from key to another more often, and used musical flourish and embellishment to a much greater extent.

Even more remarkable was the case of Ellen who was played part of a Mozart piece she had never heard before.  Not only could she play it back, but she continued on past the point where it had stopped playing as if she had heard all before and played it just as Mozart had written it.  Ellen showed another remarkable talent; at age 8 she had listened to the automatic time recording on the telephone.  After this she had possessed a remarkable sense of time and would obsessively tune into television programs at precisely the right time.  She could mimic the time recording, counting off the minutes and seconds, changing the hours after 59 minutes and 59 seconds even though she had never learned time before and never had the workings of a clock explained to her.

Dr. Bernard Rimland described a survey of 5,400 autistic children, of which 561 displayed special abilities.  In four cases the children showed consistent signs of extrasensory perception.  In one case, the child's teacher reported that when the parents decided to pick him up from school early rather than let him ride the bus, he would tell the teacher they were coming and go to open the door when they arrived.  Two other cases involved "an extraordinary ability to hear conversations out of range of hearing, and to pick up thoughts not spoken.  One child could accurately relate incidents that had happened to his parents which he could not possibly have known.  The girl Ellen, mentioned previously, once predicted exactly what would be in her christmas presents and once foretold a phone call by her sister just before she called--neither of which she could have known about beforehand.

These people, Sacks commented, seemed to employ a direct cognition--"like angels". They saw, directly, a universe and heaven of numbers. Numbers and music spoke to them, connected them directly to that basic harmony behind all things, not unlike the shamanic experience of Thomas Pinkston who, while in a shamanic trance, claimed that all levels of existence, including material and non-materiel levels as thoughts or feelings, have vibration, or sound underneath their surface manifestation.

Out of Body Experiences

Shamanic methods were strikingly similar all over the world for tens of thousands of years, suggesting that they had indeed connected into a very real realm. Modern out of body experiences show many interesting parallels to the shaman; writings on out of body experiences describe an astral cord that connects the astral body to the physical body. Both Indian Shamans and out of body researchers claim occasionally to be able to exercise telekinetic power over the objects they were observing. Both have reported being aided by spirit guides. Near death experiences often triggered the shaman's career; today some of the most vivid out of body stories come from close brushes with death.

Variations on the out of body theme have proliferated in recent history as people have become more interested in the subject. Some of the common themes in all these experiences have been an access to information, even a limited ability to foresee future events, and the appearance of spiritual "guides" to aid the searcher. On the other hand, some of the information gained from these experiences has not proven to be reliable. Often, what these out of body experiences sound most like are voyages into the collective unconscious. Such a repository for all knowledge and beliefs could account for the individual going through the experience returning with such newfound information.

The life of Edgar Cayce showed some similarity to the Shaman, but was quite different in other ways. Cayce discovered his abilities one day when he fell asleep with his head on a book and woke up knowing everything written in the book. For the next forty years, Cayce was able to put himself into a trance state and provide information from what he called the Akashic Records, or "God's book of Remembrance."  During a trance, Cayce would "become a portion of the records themselves." While connected to these records, all manner of information became available to him.  The records were "the compilation of every thought, word, and deed that had occurred in space and time since the dawn of creation.  In short, the Akashic records were essentially what we have been calling the collective unconscious.

Many of the cures Cayce discovered for these people were later found to be published in contemporary journals. Cayce also made predictions for the future, but these were less specific and more inaccurate the farther into the future they went. Furthermore, Cayce returned with much information on subjects such as the lost continent of Atlantis, which were speculated about at the time but which have not been backed up by science. All of these experiences are more in line with a body of collected knowledge and experience rather than an eternal source of truth.  Out of Body experiences today often result in "knowledge" of alien beings from other planets, a subject more in line with today's interests.

Near death experiences are another close variation on the same theme; people return with special knowledge or foreknowledge of events. During a near death experience, Dannion Brinkley reported that he journeyed to a "place of learning" where, in the presence of "Beings of Light", he was able to know everything that was important to know. I could ask any question and know the answer. It was like being a drop of water bathed in the knowledge of the ocean or a beam of light knowing what all light knows. The water imagery seems particularly apt, for if Dannion had returned to a collective consciousness where all human knowledge was stored, his individual consciousness was indeed like a drop of water reimmersed in the whole. Dannion also claimed to see visions of the future, though his visions were often indecipherable to him until after the event had happened, and all of the predictions he claims have come true have involved near term incidents.

Out of body researcher Robert Bruce reported a similar store of knowledge which contained probabilities stemming from, and created by, past events, actions and thoughts. According to Bruce, the events in this storehouse that are most easily visible are those events with the greatest amount of energy around them. Some insight into the future was possible, but it was a confusing maelstrom of symbolism that is caused by the belief systems of the major religions. Again, Bruce's experience coincided with Cayce's or Brinkley's, sounding much like an experience of the collective unconscious.

Explaining the mystical experience as a journey into the collective unconscious is a compelling argument. It would explain the sense of unity mystics feel, their access to remarkable new knowledge, and perhaps even their limited ability to foresee future events. It would also explain why each mystic sees his experience in terms relevant to his own society and time.

One major difference stands out between the modern mystic and the ancient shaman however; the shaman communicated directly with nature, with the plants and animals, and often was aided by animal guides instead of human spirit guides. This major shift indicates the possibility that something had happened to the mystical experience as society advanced, that perhaps the earlier, more "primitive" societies were in closer connection to the Gaia consciousness, that for them, these ancient eddies of the human collective were not so neatly separated from their own mother in nature.

Deep Mystical Experiences

Other mystical experiences clearly seem to go deeper than an exploration of collective human knowledge. For example Richard Burke's revelation came on him quite suddenly as he was driving home from a poetry reading. Burke had a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahminic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahminic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love.

Kundalini master, Gopi Krishna, after years of practice at Kundalini meditation, experienced a breakthrough mystical experience; I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, spreading outward while the body, normally the immediate object of its perception, appeared to have receded into the distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of a corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light simultaneously conscious and aware of every point, spread out, as it were, without any barrier or material obstruction. ... I was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe.

Burke and Krishna had gone deeper than the collective unconscious; they had no "spirit guides" to lead them through the stored fields of human knowledge. The wisdom they described could not be expressed in words; it was about more fundamental truths. Perhaps they had gone all the way to that ultimate mystery, the consciousness that is the source of all being.

The development of the individual

In section three, we suggested that the collective unconscious developed over time; that the nature of consciousness is a function of both mind and information and thus can grow and change. Can we find any evidence that the nature of the individual consciousness has changed over time?

A number of thinkers have speculated on the stages of development of human consciousness.  The first to attempt a systematic explanation was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.  In his 1807 work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel argued that the spirit of the absolute existed within all men, emanating as consciousness. As the spirit struggles to know its true essence it evolves through different stages.  The first, most basic stage is sense perception.  The second stage emphasized society, which became most important in determining its values and goals.  This stage saw the appearance of self-consciousness, and along with it, the striving to inflict one's will on others and the struggle to become the master of nature itself.  The third stage involved a transition from the mind that attempts to master to the mind that strives for freedom, as the thinking mind withdrew into its own process, free of the outer world.  But the individual mind tended to pass beyond mere contemplation into skepticism and began to seek a transcendent explanation outside of human experience.  The final stage, according to Hegel, was the emergence of 'absolute knowledge' which would allow the spirit to come to fully realize its own nature.

Darwin's theory of evolution sparked a new round of thought about the evolution of consciousness. Around the turn of this century, the philosopher Henri Bergson argued--similarly to Hegel--that physical evolution was propelled by a subtle non-material force, that Bergson called the elan vital,which insinuates itself into organic matter.  The essential nature of this force was consciousness itself.  The direction and purpose of evolution is to free up consciousness from the strictures of organic matter.

A decade after Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit priest and geologist, expanded on Bergson's ideas.  Chardin believed the evolution of complexity in the physical world was accompanied by the evolution of quality in the world of conscious experience. Like Bergson, de Chardin believed that consciousness ascended to greater richness and depth as the physical organism achieved greater greater complexity--in fact, this was the purpose of evolution. Just as the evolutionary web of life on Earth transformed the entire planet, forming a biosphere, the ever-expanding mental life of humanity would encircle the earth forming a web of inner life which de Chardin termed the noosphere, culminating ultimately in a planetary consciousness, or noosphere.

Several writers have gone beyond these general descriptions  to hypothesize specific stages in the development of human consciousness.  Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin, Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, and Ken Wilber's Up From Eden all outline a series of stages the individual consciousness has progressed through from the archaic unity to present level of individual consciousness.  Understandably, none of these writers can be too specific concerning the mechanisms of this change; however two basic themes emerge.  The first is the emergence of the individual consciousness from the whole.  Gebser speaks of an "unconscious participation in the group soul," saying that "the more man released himself from the whole, becoming 'conscious' of himself, the more he began to be an individual."  Erich Neumann, working from a Jungian perspective, Neumann emphasizes the emergence of the individual consciousness from the collective human whole; "The individualized conscious man of our era is a late man, whose structure is built on early, pre-individual human stages from which individual consciousness has only detached itself step by step.  The evolution of consciousness by stages is as much a collective human phenomenon as a particular individual phemonenon."  These "emergence" theories fit well with our Gaia Mind/Human Mind/Individual Mind analysis if one accepts that all conscious experience is to some degree transpersonal, then the history of the human conscious experience, as reflected in its mythology, represents a steadily shifting balance between the three levels of mind.

Ken Wilber's analysis emphasises the second theme; that the nature of the individual conscious experience has evolved over time.  Wilber writes in the New Age tradition first enunciated by Joachim of Fiore 900 years ago; "As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness."  Wilber's holds room for the emergence view, saying that man began "immersed in the subconscious realms of nature and body, of vegetable and animal, and initially experienced himself as indistinguishable form the world," but primarily Wilber is describing an evolving experience of consciousness.  Early man lived in "a time of slumber, in the subconscious sphere, the life of the lilies of the field."  Similarly, Gebser speaks of a"consciousness mutation" that "unfolds toward overdetermination: toward structural enrichment and dimensional increments; it is intensifying and inductive--a plus mutation."  Separating these two strands is difficult since the evidence used to demonstrate them could be interpreted to support either.  More importantly, the nature of the conscious experience of previous generations is obviously lost to us.  Their minds have left artifacts that we can judge, but separating out the subtleties of the conscious experience from these remains is tenuous at best.   

Jean Gebser

Spanish philosopher, Jean Gebser, outlined five major structures of consciousness--the archaic, magic, mythical, mental and integral.  They have emerged during human history as successively dominant patterns, though they have overlapped considerably.  Gebser's primary inspiration came from the world of art, particularly the discovery of perspective during the Renaissance.  The discovery of perspective, Gebser writes, "is so closely linked with the entire intellectual attitude of the modern epoch that we have felt obliged to call this age the age of perspectivity and characterize the age immediately preceding it as the 'unperspectival' age."  Gebser finds evidence that a new structure of consciousness in modern painting, notably Picasso, which is "aperspectival"...."time is no longer spacialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension."    

Each of Gebser's structures of consciousness is associated with a new perspective view. The archaic structure of consciousness was essentially prehuman and involved a form of awareness that was "zero-dimensional."  This is the original state of biblical paradise: a time where the soul was dormant, a time of complete non-differentiation of man and the universe.  Gebser found only two direct statements that gave evidence of this early period.  The first is a statement by Chuang-tzu that; "Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept;" a lack of dreams indicating to Gebser the dormancy of the soul.  The second piece of evidence came from the observation that the colors blue and green were not distinguished in the language yet; that the same term was used for the color of the sky as for the sprouting of a plant which Gebser takes to mean a non-differentiation of world and sky.  "The identity of earth and sky is an expression of the macrocosmic harmony; taken together, microcosmic and macrocosmic harmony are nothing less than the perfect identity of man and universe."    

Early humans moved into the magical structure of consciousness, released from their harmony or identity with the whole, marking a point where "a first process of consciousness began."    Whereas archaic consciousness was zero-dimensional, representing a posture of identity with the natural world, magical consciousness was one dimensional, allowing a sense of unity but not of complete identity.  The individual was egoless at this time, his primary sense of identity was with the tribe or group.  Gebser here shows most clearly his similarity to the Gaiamind/human mind/individual mind model, saying that the use of magic shows that "man, or the human group, is still only a co actor in [nature]; but he is already acting for himself.  This represents a far-reaching step away from the complete unity.  The group, beginning to grow dimly conscious of itself as a unity (the ego-group), begins to free itself from its merger with nature, breaking that spell with a counterspell of its own."

The Mythical structure of consciousness was two dimensional, mere knowledge of an event was no longer satisfactory, it must be located in time or place.  The mythical structure had be located with the beginnings of a consciousness of time.  To Gebser, the essential characteristic of the mythical structure is the "emergent awareness of soul" because "when we speak of "time" we are also speaking of "soul."  Myths are the "most visible sign of an emerging consciousness.  In particular, Gebser finds that the mythologies of the sea voyage are symbols of man's mastery over the soul.  But myths have a collective meaning as well.  Myths are "the collective dreams of the nations formed into words."  As with the magical structure, the mythical structure represents an emergence of both the individual consciousness and the collective human consciousness. 

The fourth stage, the mental structure of consciousness--or the "perspectival world"--fully emerged with the Renaissance, but can bee seen as far back as the fifth century B.C.  Gebser finds early foundations for the mental structure in the Greek theory of knowledge, the Hebrew doctrine of salvation, and Roman legal and political theory.  Philosophy became the primary form of expression for the mental structure, just as mythology had been for the mythical.  In 480 BC Pharmenides could say the "thinking and being is one and the same."  Greek drama offered further evidence of the emergence of the mental structure--and of the emergence of the individual out of the collective.  In Greek drama, the individual, or persona emerged or "sounded through" the collective as represented by the chorus (per-sonare means "to sound through.").

Gebser believed that the final stage of consciousness, the integral structure, was presently emerging, which Gebser felt was typified by a tangible grasp of time.  Time is no longer specialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension.  Painters such as Picasso brought to consciousness "all of the temporal structures of the past latent in himself."  Living with time as a tangible reality meant living in the manifest world of the present, as experienced by every mystical tradition in the world.  Gebser hoped that this final stage would help end the rampant problems of the unchecked ego as manifested in the mental structure of consciousness. 

Ken Wilber

More recently, Ken Wilber proposed four  historical stages of consciousness; the uroboric, the typhonic, the membership and the egoic stages, which he relates to Gebser's archaic, magical, mythical and mental stages.  Wilber suggests an additional four stages of development awaiting humans as they move into transpersonal consciousness.  The uroboric epoch was named after the myth of the Heavenly Serpent, called by some "the most ancient deity of the prehistoric world" typically pictured as a snake eating its own tail.   During this time, which Wilber related with protohumans as early as six million years ago, consciousness was "cosmocentric," meaning that it was invested in nature as a whole--a period associated with the mythical paradise of Eden when the anguish of separation and with individual existence and death was not known.  As with Gebser, Wilber believes that this was an age where there was no distinction between the individual and the group or the surrounding world.  But Wilber's interpretation leaves no room for the possibility of the individual consciousness nestled within a larger mind.  Drawing on developmental psychology, Wilber calls early man's state pre-subject/object not trans-subject/object--"largely ignorant of boundaries and space and time."

The typhonic epoch--named after Typhon, the youngest offspring of Gaea who was half man and half animal--represents the midpoint between animal consciousness and full human consciousness.  Wilber suggests that it runs from the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man , about 200,000 years ago, down to the origin of agriculture.  Wilber likens this to Freud's infantile body-ego.   Wilber draws on a psychological  analogy again, comparing mythic-membership experience of consciousness with Freud's concept of the primary process which he saw working most vividly in dreams, where images transform easily and readily to a type of magical plasticity, and one image can symbolize several different things at the same time.  The magical epoch saw the first real sense of self and with this separation came a new kind of fear.  As the Upanishads puts it; "Wherever there is other, there is fear."  This new fear lead to the seeming paradox that "people who are afraid of living are also especially frightened of death."  These fears, Wilber believes helped drive early humans to such innovations as culture and a sense of time.    

The membership epoch, which Wilber dates from the 10th millennium B.C.--the dawn of agriculture--was stimulated by a high degree of proficiency with language and the evolution of a truly transcendent religious mythos.  Wilber believes that a "profound expansion of consciousness allowed man to picture the future more clearly, and thus plan and farm for it."  This new consciousness caused him to apprehend his own mortality more vividly and "this forced him to project his existence through the future so as to meet himself tomorrow."  Farming communities brought a membership consciousness, which to Wilber "is just another way of saying that farming consciousness was temporal consciousness, a consciousness that transcended the simple present and therefore could farm the world of the future."  Language was the major vehicle of this new temporal consciousness., Wilber claims, pointing to  researchers from Piaget to Arieti.  Wilber called it the membership epoch because of the dramatic increase in the size of settlements.  No longer simple tribes of 20 or so, people began to settle into ever larger towns that eventually amounted to thousands.  Employing another phsycological comparison, Wilber relates the central early mythology of the Great Mother to the psychological drama in early children where, "the mother is the one partner with whom the baby plays out the separation drama." 

Wilber traces the beginnings of the mental-egoic epoch to the first few millenia B.C. , following the "high membership period" from around 4500 to 1500 B.C.  Wilber divides the egoic period into low middle and high periods, which occurred in the West from roughly 2500-500 B.C. for the low, 500 B.C. to 1500 A.D. for the middle and 1500 to the present for the high.  At this stage, the self "had to break free of the Great and Chthonic Mother, and establish itself as an independent, willful, and rational center of consciousness."  Entirely different forms of mythology emerge during this time.  Beginning with the mythological triumph over the Great Mother, the Hero Myth becomes the central myth of the new period.  Mankind had progressed to the point where the rapid growth of consciousness allowed it to reach far beyond the physical body.  At the same time, it was confronted with an ever more intense realization of, and reflex against, death to which the ego reacted against by dissociating the mind and body.  For Wilber this stage of human development held profound repercussions since the loss of a sense of connection with the earth developing during this time contributed to the environmental problems that plague us today.

 Interestingly, Wilber extends the evolution of consciousness to four additional levels, which he claims advanced individuals of each age have been able to achieve.  The first level, which Wilber calls Nirmanakaya, corresponds to shamanistic trance, psychic capabilities, kundalini and hatha yoga.  The second, Sambhogakaya, corresponds to angelic and archetypical visions, saintly religion of halos and subtle light and sound, nada and shabd yoga, or saguna Brahman.  The third is Dharmkaya, the unmaifest Void, the Godhead, identity of soul and God, transcendence of subject-object, or I and the Father are one; while the forth is Svabhavikakaya which is identity of manifest and unmanifest, the perfect and radical transcendence into and as ultimate Consciousness as Such, or absolute Brahman-Atman.  The first three of these correspond to what we have described as the three great modes of revelations; the shamanic, prophetic and transcendent.  Since Wilber does not take these phenomena to indicate trans-personal experiences associated with the corresponding consciousness level, he concludes that individuals who have these experiences must have evolved to a more advanced level of consciousness.

Erich Neumann  

Psychologist Erich Neumann took a different approach.  Neumann saw the development of man as a struggle enacted on three fronts; the outside world of extrahuman events, the community as the sphere of interhuman events, and the psyche as the world of interior human experience.  According to Neumann, "millions of years of ancestral experience are stored up in the instinctive reactions of organic matter, and in the functions of the body there is incorporated a living knowledge, almost universal in scope ... The Great Mother has a wisdom infinitely superior to the ego, because the instincts and archetypes that speak through the collective unconscious represent the "wisdom of the species" and its will. ...The real source of conflict between the individual and the unconscious lies in the fact that the unconscious represents the will of the species." The parallel to the Gaia Mind, the collective unconscious and the individual mind is  nearly perfect.  Neumann uses mythology to track the interplay between the individual, the group and the whole.  From the urobos, an image "traceable in all epochs and cultures," Neumann moves to the mythology of the great mother,, the separation of the world parents, the hero myth, and transformation mythology.  Neumann writes that the phenomenon of fusion originally existed between man and the world as well as between the individual and the group.

Neuman claims that the farther back we go in human history, the rarer individuality becomes and the more undeveloped it is.  Humans were originally part of the collective psyche of their group and enjoyed only the narrowest range of action as an individual.  For Neumann, all the social, religious, and historical evidence points to the late birth of the individual from the collective and from the unconscious. The unconscious state is the primary and natural one, and the conscious state the product of an effort that uses up libido. We return to an earlier state, Neumann argued, in the world of dreams. In our dreams, we inhabit an interior world without being aware that we do so, for all the figures in the dream are the images, symbols, and projections of interior process.

Neumann calls the psychological state of early humans the urobos stage during which individuals had no systematized consciousness. The urobos stage, with its incomplete separation of the ego and nonego, lives on in the mythological archetype of paradisical wholeness. For the ego, lonely and unhappy in consequence of its necessary development, this image of a lost stage of childhood is a symbol of irreplaceable loss.  As the ego begins to emerge from its identity with the uroboros, it takes up a new attitude to the world, and the individual's view of the world, archetypes, symbols, gods and myths express this change.  The first step beyond the uroboros came in the mythology of the great mother, which had two sides, the creative goddess of motherhood and destiny and the wicked, devouring mother  of plague, famine and flood.  "She is mankind's instinctive experience of the world's depth and beauty, of the goodness and graciousness of Mother Nature who daily fulfills the promise of redemption."

The next stage, when the ego first begins to separate from the collective, is ruled by the image of the Mother Goddess with the divine child.  "It emphasizes the necessitous and helpless nature of the child and the protective side of the mother."  The Mother Goddess suckles the child, protects it, and even brings it back to life in the case of Isis and Horus.  Unlike the uroboros with its sense of contentedness and wholeness, the mythology of the Mother Goddess begins to show feeling of transitoriness and mortality, impotence and isolation.  Thus, the Mother Goddess has a second, more fearful nature as the goddess of the chase and of war,  Her rites were bloody and her festivals were orgiastic.  The bloody and savage nature of the great Mother Goddess held a fascination for newly independent human minds.  Death was no longer so clearly a part of the natural process, no longer simply a return to the collective whole; it was now starting to be something alien and threatening.  This was part of the cost of separation.

The separation of the ego from the original unity continued in creation myths of separation.  Primitive peoples commonly believed that the sky and earth were originally joined together, and their splitting to be central to creation.  This original separation becomes personified in the separation of the world parents--as in the Egyptian myth of the sky god Nut and the earth god Geb.  This separation also represents the dawning of ego consciousness and its separation from the Great Mother--"the development of ego consciousness consisted in its gradual emancipation from the overpowering embrace of the unconscious."  Because of this split with the original unity, humans sense a loss of the original unity of the world and God, "cleft asunder by some prehuman guilt" and their expulsion from the original garden of eden.  The ego consciousness is strengthened by laying down of taboos and moral attitudes which delimit conscious action from unconscious, and by the use of ritual whereby the individual becomes "the responsible center of the cosmos; on him depends the rising of the sun, the fertility of crops, and all the doings of the gods."

The Hero Myth marks the complete independence of the human ego, his total personality has detached itself from the natural context of the surrounding world and the unconscious.  With the hero myth, however, the center of the universe becomes the spot upon which man stands; "thus the hero is the archetypical forerunner of mankind in general."  Furthermore, the leader becomes a hero image, and the tribal ancestors represent a direct line back to the creator god, further humanizing the divine.  Neumann portrays the development of the heroic personality in Jungian terms as a defense mechanism and means of adaptation to the collective.  Not only has the ego separated from its original identity with the collective (Gaian) consciousness, it now must mediate its existence with the collective human unconscious.  

The task of the hero in the earliest of myths is the slaying of the Great Mother, often portrayed as a dragon (continuing the snake imagery of the uroboros.)  This task, according to Jung, "produces a transformation of personality which alone makes the hero a hero, that is, a higher and ideal representative of mankind.  The dragon fight has three main components: the hero, the dragon and th treasure.  By vanquishing to dragon the hero gains teh treasure, which is the end product of the process symbolised by the fight.   Before the fight the hero receives help from heaven, mythological evidence for his divine parentage and thus his superiority to normal man.  Through the struggle, the hero shows himself a hero and transforms his nature.  Once transformed, the hero returns to his home to assume a new role as leader/savior of his society. Thus, while the hero myth represents a major step in the development, he is still connected to the human collective00in stark contrast to the modern anti-hero who has taken his journey of separation to its logical conclusion and separated from the human collective as well as the Gaian, to become completely individual.  

Evaluating the Theories

Ken Wilber, whose theories are the most recent, pushes the time of unity the farthest back--to pre human forerunners.  Neumann and Gebser, who are dealing with evidence created by human civilizations, must place all phases of conscious development within the bounds of human history.  Some recent animal experiments suggest that the dawn of individual consciousness may go back even further.  In 1970 experiments, Gordon Gallup found that Chimpanzees who viewed their own image in a mirror show a clear sense that they were viewing themselves. They would stand before the mirror and groom virtually inaccessible parts of their bodies, pick food from their teeth, make faces, and stick out their tongues. Gallup then anesthetized chimps and marked the ridge of one eyebrow and the top half of the opposite ear with a bright red dye. The chimps would touch the marked spot on themselves while looking at their images in the mirror. Orangutans, were found to pass the test; gibbons and the many species of monkeys that were tested all failed.   More recent experiments with dolphins have shown the same sort of self awareness.

If an individual consciousness reaches down into the animal world, then it likely existed throughout all of human history, and the various evidence for a uroboric sense of unity that has been gathered by these authors must be explained by other means.  The Gaia Mind/Human Mind/Individual Mind paradigm works well since the sense of unity comes from the relative strength of mind not the level of consciousness.  Furthermore, since mind and information are inextricably connected in our model, it stands to reason that any significant change in the accumulation or storage of information--on an individual or collective basis--would affect the relative position of that mind in the balance. Leonard Shlain demonstrates in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the mythological developments that we have associated with the emergence of the collective human mind coincide with the development of the alphabet.  The first two cultures in which the alphabet took hold were the Greeks and the Israelites.  Hebrew mythology made the most decisive break with the goddess mythology that had preceded it; so much so that only brief hints of the old mythology can be found in the Old Testament.  For the Hebrew, the world had been created specifically for mankind, man had been given dominion over all of nature, and when destruction came, it came as a result of human failing.  The ascendance of the collective human consciousness is clear.  For the Greeks, the alphabet brought an early flowering of the individual.  In their art, and philosophy as well as in their development of political democracy, the Greeks showed a sense of the individual unmatched in ancient times.  Gebser notes that the individual perspective flowered in fifth century Greece only to be submerged again until the Renaissance.

The ebb and flow of the three minds, particularly the individual, suggests that the strength of the mind rather the that evolution of consciousness that has been determinative in human history.  However, some evidence suggests the second may be taking place as well.  Near Death experiences and past life regressions--while of murky scientific value--paint a picture of human souls progressing through many lifetimes.  The possibility certainly can't be taken with any scientific certainty, but it can't be ruled out either.  In fact, if we survey the history of beliefs in the afterlife, there are patterns that emerge that suggest the possibility of just such a development of consciousness.

A Natural History of Heaven

Descriptions of the afterlife, whether from mystics, near death experiences or other out of body experiences, have shown a remarkable consistency for thousands of years.  But if you extend the view back to the earliest records, a clear evolution emerges, and it is an evolution that ties in neatly with the evolution in human mythology that we saw from Gaia centered to human centered to the individual.  It is also an evolution that nicely reflects the themes in the development of the individual.  

The abode of the afterlife has evolved from a dreary, nondescript underworld to a heavenly garden restricted to an elite few, into a more broadly accessible paradise of infinitely more beauty than our own realm, abounding with opal lakes, bright seas and rainbow rivers,  and indescribably beautiful meadows, forests and mountains, with weather that was always pleasant--punctuated with luminous snow and rain of many colored lights.  Individuals in this realm can materialize any body they want, can see with any area of their body and communicate telepathically.  More recently, this pastoral paradise was added to with celetsially beautiful cities.  NDEers, yogic adepts and ayahuasca using shamans all have described these cities with remarkable consistency.  Twelfth-century Sufis were so familiar with them that they even gave several of them names.  The most notable feature of these great cities is that they are brilliantly luminous.  They are also frequently described as foreign in architecture and so sublimely beautiful that like all of the other features of these
realms words fail to describe them.  Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg called them places of "staggering architectural design, so beautiful that you would say this is the home and the source of the art itself."

The important question is; what is the nature of these afterlife abodes?  Are they structures of the imagination or do they have some independent reality.  The continuity of NDE and other mystical experiences over time suggests that something more is in play than the individual imagination.  Some people who have studied the phenomena suggest that the afterlife environment is something created and shaped by the mind.  Near Death researcher Joel Whitton reported NDE cases where individuals would materialize their own clothes, food, even their bodies, just by thinking them into existence.  Sufi mystics believed that the afterlife world was created out of the subtle matter of alam almithal, or thought.  Even space itself was created by thought.  But this did not mean that the afterlife worlds were unreal, rather it was a plane of existence "created by the imagination of many people."  

The Sufi's formula of an afterlife world created by the imagination of many sounds strikingly close to suggesting that it is created by a collective consciousness, or collective human mind.  This is an analysis that fits in very well with all of the evidence we have seen here.  Furthermore, an overview of the contours of the afterlife as they have evolved over human history fit very nicely with the overall trend in human mythology presented in part 3--a gradual shift from Gaia centered to human centered to the individual.  The trends in the perception of the afterlife also fit nicely with the theories of the development of the individual which we just reviewed.

If we can extrapolate early hunter-gatherer beliefs from from present day counterparts, then we can say that early humans' concept of the afterlife was inextricably bound up with the Gaian whole.  Many tribal communities believe that everything has a soul--their view of the world is panpsychic.  The Senegalese Badyaranke say that the soul can dissociate itself from the body by its own volition and is capable of transforming itself into any natural phenomena.  The Indonesian Mentawai also ascribe a soul to everything: animals, plants and all material objects.  Their hunters first try to attract the soul of an annual by performing an appropriate ceremony.  Tribes close to nature, whose existence is based exclusively on hunting and the natural environment, obtain their helping spirits and their spiritual advisors from the plant and animal kingdoms and from elementary phenomena such as lightning, thunder, rainstorms, the sun, the moon, various planets and also from a great variety of nonmaterial entities.

The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt developed a new concept of the afterlife, divorced from the natural world and located either in the heavens or under the world.  In the earliest myths, heaven was the abode of the human gods and only a handful of humans were believed to have joined them. In Mesopotamian mythology, only two cases are known of humans who joined the gods; the wise Adapa, the blameless first human being and priest of Eridu, and Etana, the king of Kish after the world flood. In Egypt, during the Old Kingdom, only the king was believed to spend his afterlife in heaven.  By the Middle Kingdom (2100 BCE to 1700 BCE), aristocrats could have themselves declared "righteous" and obtain divine glorification in the realm of the dead. Two Egyptian conceptions of the heavenly afterlife were the Field of Reeds and the Field of Offerings.  The Field of  Reeds was located in the eastern quarter of heaven.  It was originally a place of ablution, purification, and rebirth that allowed the dead to follow the sun westward and to reach paradise in the Field of Offerings.  Yet both fields were abodes where the dead tilled their pieces of land, an agrarian motif that would reoccur in all subsequent visions of heaven.  By the Middle Kingdom, even poor Egyptians could expect to be allotted plots of land to be tilled in the Field of Reeds.   

A more common theme in this era was the gloomy realm of the dead located under the earth.  Among the earliest Mesopotamian myths are those of Inanna and Ishtar descending to the underworld to rescue loved ones.  While the terrain of the underworld was not so comprehensively described as in later years, it was clearly not a desirable place to be.  In India, the Vedic afterlife was spent in the underground abode of Yama who had been the first to die and journey to the land of the dead.  In the lustreless realm of Yama, the soul was not supposed to expect any particular glamour; it was simply the abode of the ancestors.  Yet other Vedic hymns spoke of a heavenly abode for those who survived a post mortem judgment.  Similarly, the ancient Greeks believed that the dead survived in a shadowy Hades, except for special people, the heroes; local celebrities, mythological characters, great warriors, seers, or rulers, whose psyche remained on earth and interfered in human affairs. Later the Greeks added the fields of Elysium, a heavenly abode for the specially chosen ones.  Homer described Elysium as a pretty meadow on the banks of the river Oceanus at the western edge of the Earth.  The theme of a lustreless afterlife is echoed among some modern tribal cultures.  Among Fiji Islanders, most souls reside in an underwater Hades called Murimuria where they pound muck with clubs.

The early descriptions of the afterlife by the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians as a a dreary, nondescript underworld would fit well with the kind of development of the individual consciousness that has been outlined by Erich Neumann.  Neuman describes early humans as having no continuity of consciousness; "Only with the progressive systematization of consciousness is there an increase of conscious continuity, a strengthening of the will and a capacity for voluntary action....things "just happen."  The uroboric state is unquestionably a "borderline" state." If the individual soul continues after death, it would be entirely plausible that these weaker souls, coming at the an early stage of the development of the human collective consciousness would experience a more poorly defined afterlife than at a later, stronger stage.

Some support for this comes from past life regression work done by Michael Newton who discovered that some of his patients could remember between life experiences as well as past lifes.  Newton confirms the continuity of the afterlife images over time; "People may see fields of wildflowers, castle towers rising in the distance, or rainbows under an open sky.  These first ethereal Earth scenes of the spirit world don't seem to change a great deal over a span of lives for the returning soul, although there is variety between client descriptions."  But Newton also talks about certain souls who do not experience this heavenly afterlife, but are "detached from the mainstream of souls going back to a spiritual home base."  These include those spirits who do not accept the fact that their physical body is dead and fight returning to the spirit world for reasons of personal anguish, and those who have been subverted by, or had complicity with, criminal abnormalities in a human body.  The first type Newton describes as "immature entities with unfinished business in a past life on Earth."  Souls that become involved with human evil, Newton writes, "should generally be considered at a low level of development."  Beginner souls, according to Newton, "who are habitually associated with intensely negative human conduct in their first series of lives must endure individual spiritual isolation....a kind of purgatory."  If these conjectures are true, it would seem to make sense that the dawn of human history would find grim, foreboding afterlives more prevelent.  

Near death experiences seem to buttress this interpretation.  George Gallup surveyed near death experiences and found frightening experiences that involved "featureless, sometimes forbidding faces; beings who are often present but are not at all comforting; a sense of discomfort, especially emotional or mental unrest, feelings of confusion about the experience; a sense of being tricked or duped into ultimate destruction."  Graig Lundahl describes these experiences as characterized by "feelings of extreme fear or panic, emotional and mental anguish, being lost and helpless, intense feelings of loneliness and a dark, gloomy or barren and hostile environment.  A study of "distressing near-death experiences" by Dr, Bruce Greyson of the University of Connecticut found several kinds of unpleasant afterlife experiences; the frightening void where the individual is isolated, possibly able to see other individuals, but unable to communicate with them, echoes of the blissful afterlife experiences but unpleasant, and experiences that contain the archetypical hellish experiences.  But Dr. Greyson had to gather thousands and thousands of near death experiences and was only able to cull some fifty unpleasant afterlife experiences.  This evidence further suggests that a historical development of the soul has taken place--the frightening, nondescript afterlife that was the norm in the earliest recorded civilizations has become, over time, an experience reported by only the smallest minority of people.

Early on in the modern era a new dimension to the afterlife was added, sometimes called the "City of Light."  As early as the third century B.C., the prophet Enoch reported a vision of heaven that includes a a wall of crystal, then a large mansion of crystal, all surrounded by flames of fire, and a second mansion made of fire.  The landscape around the City of Light still shows a remarkable constancy that it has shown since fields of Elysium.  - describes it as "similar to that of each but much more beautiful and without blemish....No accounts were found where individuals observed prairies or deserts...consistently mountains, hills--some of them small green hills and some tall hills with a rock or two--and valleys.  Little mention of animal life inside the City of Light, but numerous references in the surrounding countryside--most frequently birds, but also including cattle, sheep, horses, lions, tigers, beavers, bears, squirrels, deer and monkeys."

Surrounding the City of Light and separating it from the countryside is some kind of barrier that limits access to the City.  During some NDE experiences, some people found that they were denied access to the City because they had not completed specific obligations back on earth--again hinting at a gradation among souls and a development of the individual over time.  The vision of Drythelm, related by the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, describes a bright, flowery meadow, filled with "many companies of happy people."  But he learns that this is only the antechamber of heaven--as "The City of Light" had become the higher level of the afterlife.  Descriptions of the City of Light again show remarkable consistency over the centuries.  Every feature blends together harmoniously, perfectly, and beautifully with the flowers, shrubs and trees complementing the physical structure of the buildings.  The City is surrounded by massive walls made of brilliantly hued material.  Streets separate the buildings..some are made of material that resembles marble while others appear to be paved with solid crystal-clear gold paving stones.  Some people witnessed multiple cities.

Another area where the afterlife experience has evolved over time can be seen in the kind of guide that escorts the soul to the afterlife.  Contemporary hunter-gatherer or early agrarian peoples hold the belief that if the past it was relatively easy for living people to got to heaven, but that the secret of ascent has been lost.  The usual vehicles that would transport someone to heaven were clouds or birds.  The soul itself could turn into a bird upon death.  Historically, the "soulbird," who appears to aid the deceased at the moment of departure, was the most common motif of early mythological traditions.  Birds were a common symbol of the soul.  In the mythologies of Egyptians, Parasees, Scythians and North American Indians, eagles, hawks and thunderbirds were said to appear at the moment of death to serve as spirit guides.  In Greek, Roman and Nordic mythologies, the swan or gander were said to appear to aid the departed in their transition to death.  

By the middle ages, the typical guide was human in form.  The majority of medieval people who had NDEs felt that they were guided after death.  These guides were nearly always spiritual beings, most commonly their favorite saints or angels.  Often they said that the same angel who came to help them in the process of departing from their body also accompanied them for the remainder of their journey.  In nearly every instance, these guides are portrayed as luminous figures of beauty and wisdom, dressed in brilliant white robes.  

Angelic guides still appear in contemporary NDEs, although they are much more frequent in the near death stories of children than in the accounts of contemporary adults.  George Gallup's survey of NDE experiences found that only 23 percent of those who undergo NDEs encountered other people after they left their bodies, and seldom at the instant of death as so often happened earlier in history.  Gallup also found that the incidence of angels or saints to be lower; with deceased relatives being the most common guides in the contemporary experience.  Contemporary guides provide the soul with comfort and guide them through the life review process, whereas in the past they often performed the additional function of providing a tour of hell.

The history of afterdeath visions closely follows the pattern that mythology in general has followed, from Gaia centered to human centered to individual centered.  It suggests a development of the individual consciousness over time from a "uroboric" consciousness that recedes back into an undefined state after death to a sustained awareness that goes on after death, needing a collective construct for support.  It seems to fit in neatly with our Gaia/Human analysis.

Conclusion

Several themes emerge from all this; consciousness on all levels is a transpersonal experience--indeed the varieties of transpersonal experiences that have been documented blur the very distinctions between the individual and the whole.  While the conscious experience has grouped around the three great levels of mind; Gaian, human and individual--each of which has profoundly influenced human history--each of theses contains its own sublevels, and currents.  Even the individual begins to look like a conglomeration the closer we look.  Split brain patients and multiple personality patients both raise the possibility of multiple consciousness within one body, while Paul Pearsall's study of heart transplant patients suggest that the heart is a separate, minor mind with it's own level of consciousness.  This is particularly interesting because the heart consciousness that Pearsall describes is a lower level of consciousness just as Gebser, Wilber and Neumann hypothesize for early human history.  We as individuals may on our own small level be recreating the system that was Gaia.

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