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  I desperately tried to run as fast as I could but it seemed that I was progressing as if in a slow motion movie. I felt as if I were caught in a tractor beam; the deities and the walls of the ruins had a firm grip on me and were holding me under their spell. As this

was happening, images of the entire history of Palenque were still flashing through my mind. I could see the parking lot full of cars, separated from the ruins by a heavy chain. There was the predictable rational world of my everyday reality. I set my mind on the task of getting there, feeling that this would somehow save my life. At the time, I saw the chains as a boundary where the influence of the magic world of ancient gods ended. Has not our modern world conquered and discredited the empires based on beliefs in mythical realities?

  His expectations turned out to be correct. After what seemed like eternity, and with enormous effort, he reached the parking lot. At that moment, it was as if a heavy weight—physical, psychological, and spiritual—was lifted from his being. He felt light, ecstatic, reborn and pulsing with exuberant life energy. His senses felt cleansed and wide open; the glorious sunset during his return trip from Palenque, the dinner in a small restaurant in Villa-hermosa where he watched the pulse of life in the streets, and the tasting of fruit juices in the local jugerias were truly ecstatic experiences for him. However, he spent much of the night taking cold showers to alleviate the pain and itching from his many ant bites.

  Several years later, an anthropologist friend of his, who had studied the Mayan culture extensively told him that the ants played an important role in Mayan mythology and were deeply connected with the earth goddess and the rebirth process.

  The extreme form of group consciousness is the
identification with all of
humanity,
where no boundaries seem to be found in the experiential pool of the human species. In ancient literature, there are many examples of this, such as Christ's experience in the Garden of Gethsemane. However, I will use instead an example that comes from the world of modern technology, a transpersonal experience reported in Rusty Schweickart's account of the flight of Apollo 9, whose mission was to test the lunar module for future, manned landings on the moon.

  As his spaceship was orbiting the Earth, crossing various geographic and political boundaries at tremendous speed, Rusty found it increasingly difficult to identify himself as belonging to any particular nation. He saw the Mediterranean far below him and reflected that this cradle of civilization had for many centuries represented the entire known world. He imagined that the surface of the blue, green, and white globe that he was circling every hour and a half held everything that had ever meant anything to him—history, music, art, war, death, love, tears, games, and joys. His consciousness was undergoing a profound transformation.

  When you go around the earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change. You look down and you cannot imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross…. Hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you are not even aware of, you cannot even see it. From where you are, the planet is a whole and it is so beautiful and you wish you could take each individual by the hand and say: "Look at it from this perspective. Look at what is important!"

  During his walk in space these revelations suddenly exploded into a profound mystical experience. The camera designed to document his activities malfunctioned and for several minutes he had nothing to do but float in space, allowing the spectacle of the Earth, the cosmos, and all existence to bombard his consciousness. Very quickly he found it impossible to maintain his individual boundaries and instead identified himself as all of humanity.

  You think about what you are experiencing and why. Do you deserve this, this fantastic experience? Have you earned this in some way? Are you selected to be touched by God, to have some special experience that other men cannot have? You know the answer is no, there is nothing you have done to deserve this. It is not a special thing for you. You know very well at that moment—and it comes to you so powerfully—that you are the sensing element for man.

  You look down and you see the surface of the globe that you have lived on all this time and you know all those people down there. They are like you, they are you, you represent them. You are up there as the sensing element, that point out on the end…. Somehow you recognize that you are a piece of this total life and you are out in the forefront and you have to bring that back.

  It becomes a rather special responsibility and it tells you something about your relationship with this thing we call life. That is a change, that is something new and when you come back, there is a difference in that world now. There is a difference in that relationship between you and that planet and you and all those other forms of life on that planet, because you have had that kind of experience and it is so precious.

  Since his return from the Apollo 9 mission, Rusty has dedicated much of his life to bringing his vision to other people, sharing his transformation of consciousness. He has remained vitally interested and highly motivated in bringing peace and ecological harmony to our planet Earth and to humanity, with which he has become so deeply identified.

In the transpersonal realm it becomes possible to have experiential insight into the sensations of a mountain lion tracking its prey through a rocky canyon, the primal impulses of a giant reptile as it encounters a member of the opposite sex, or the powerful flight of an eagle. People have reported that after identification with animals they have obtained a profound organismic understanding of drives completely foreign to humans, such as the feelings that propel the eel or the sockeye salmon on their heroic upstream journeys, or the structural instincts of a spider spinning its web, or the mysterious experience of a gypsy moth's metamorphosis from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

  Our transpersonal experiences of entering the consciousness of animals can be extremely convincing. These can include feeling that we have adopted the body image, or that we are having sensations and instinctual drives unique to that animal's perceptions in their native environments. The nature and the specific features of these experiences often transcend the scope of human fantasy and imagination.

  In Bruxelles, a Belgian woman attending our workshop on Holotropic Breathwork™ had the following experience that brought her some remarkable insights into the behavior of whales, knowledge that she had not previously read or heard about.

  At one point, I felt cold air streaming through my head and had a taste of salty water in my mouth. A variety of sensations and feelings that were alien and definitely not human imperceptibly took over my consciousness. A new, gigantic body image started to form out of the primordial connection to the other large bodies around me and I realized I had become one of them. Inside my belly I sensed another life form and knew it was my baby. There was no doubt in my mind that I was a pregnant whale cow.

  And then came another wave of the birth process. However, this time it had a different quality than the previous episodes. It had gargantuan proportions, as if the ocean were stirred from its very depth; at the same time it was surprisingly easy and natural. I experienced my genitals in the most intimate way, with all the nuances of these birthing activities associated with profound visceral understanding of how whales give birth. What I found most amazing was how they use water to expel the baby by sucking it into their genitals and working with hydraulic pressure. It seemed significant that the baby was born with its tail first.

  I described this woman's experiences to a workshop we were giving much later in California. One member of the group happened to be a marine biologist. He described how whales give birth to their young and fully confirmed that the insights of the young Belgian woman had been accurate. This is just one of hundreds of confirmations of extraordinary insights that people have received while in altered states. I have been repeatedly surprised by the voracity of these insights, which often involve highly specific and detailed information even with people who had no previous knowledge, interest, or experience in the subject.

  Another experience of animal consciousness that comes to mind is that of a person who had been engaged for several years in serious self-exploration. He described how he had experienced being an eagle. He soared on the air currents, skillfully using changes of the positions of his wings. He scanned the area far below him with his eyes, noting that everything on the ground seemed magnified as if seen through powerful binoculars, allowing him to recognize the tiniest details in the terrain. When he spotted movement, it was as if his eyes froze and zoomed in. He described his new visual ability as being something like tunnel vision, looking through a long, narrow tube. He said: "The feeling that this experience accurately represented the mechanism of vision in raptor birds—something I had never thought about or had been interested in—was so convincing and compelling that I decided to go to the library to study the anatomy and physiology of their optical system."

  The experiences of animal consciousness are not limited to species that stand higher on the evolutionary ladder, such as primates, cetaceans, birds, or reptiles. They can reach the level of insects, worms, snails, and even coelenterates; such experiences involving lower life forms can also provide amazing new insights and information. I remember in particular a Holotropic Breathwork™ session in which a person identified with a caterpillar and experienced, on a very basic level, how it perceived the world, moved, and consumed leaves.

  The experience culminated with the formation of a cocoon and with a specific state of consciousness associated with that stage of its life cycle. This person then witnessed at a subcellular level in his own body the miracle of metamorphosis. Following his experience he commented on how surprised he was to discover that the process of metamorphosis involved a complete disintegration of the caterpillar's body inside the cocoon, to then emerge from this amorphous ooze in its completely new form as a butterfly. After the emergence from the cocoon he experienced the process of drying and stretching his wet and folded wings, and then the triumph of his first flight.

  This person had no previous knowledge of the metamorphosis process, whereby the caterpillar's body is completely dissolved and liquefied by proteolytic enzymes in the cocoon. He had no previous interest in entomology or biology in general; it was his transpersonal experience that awakened him to one of the great mysteries of nature—that of the morphogenetic fields that provide an energetic template for teasing out the form of a butterfly from the liquefied body of the caterpillar.

  Our potential for voyaging into the consciousness of other species does not stop with animals. No matter how fantastic and absurd it might seem to traditional researchers, and no matter how it may stretch the limits of common sense, it is not possible to completely dismiss reports of people who claim to have experienced the
consciousness of plants and botanical pro
cesses.
Over the years I have observed hundreds of just such experiences and have even had several such experiences myself. This made it possible for me to recognize how amazingly authentic they are and how much they offer in terms of helping us unravel the alchemical mysteries of the botanical kingdom.

  Experiences of plant consciousness cover a wide range, from bacteria, ocean plankton, and mushrooms, to Venus fly traps, orchids, and Sequoia trees. These experiences can offer interesting insights into the process of photosynthesis, pollination, the function of the growth hormone
auxine,
the exchange of water and minerals in the root system, and many other physiological functions of various plants. To illustrate this type of experience I have chosen a description of identification with a Sequoia tree, reported by a person during a holotropic session. These magnificent trees, I might add, often appear in non-ordinary states of consciousness, and their appearance never fails to evoke philosophical and metaphysical speculation.

I would have never considered seriously the possibility that there could be anything like plant consciousness. I have read some accounts of experiments pointing to the "secret life of plants" and claims that consciousness of the gardener can influence the harvest. I always considered such stuff to be unsubstantiated and flaky New Age lore. But here I was, completely transformed into a giant Sequoia tree and it was absolutely clear to me that what I was experiencing actually occurs in nature, that I was now discovering dimensions of the cosmos that are usually hidden to our senses and intellects.

  The most superficial level of my experience seemed to be very physical and involved things that Western scientists have described, only seen from an entirely new angle—as consciousness processes guided by cosmic intelligence, rather than mechanical happenings in organic or unconscious matter. My body actually had the shape of the Sequoia tree, it
was
the Sequoia. I could feel the circulation of sap through an intricate system of capillaries under my bark. My consciousness followed the flow to the finest branches and needles and witnessed the mystery of communion of life with the sun—the photosynthesis. My awareness reached all the way into the root system. Even the exchange of water and nourishment from the earth was not a mechanical but a conscious, intelligent process.