"There is no concept more familiar to us than that of spiritual energy, yet there is none that is more opaque scientifically."

"Are mystical experiences 'merely subjective?' Or are they accurate intuitions that reveal our deepest, basic existential nature? Only in the latter case would the experiences be valid windows into an 'ultimate reality' in the absolute objective sense. No one settles such issues in print."

The holarchy, as it's clearly visible to us, ends with the highest forms of human social organization. Beyond this, we can see nothing further, at least not with the same tools that we have used to understand the lower levels of the holarchy. But is this really the end of evolution? Can there be nothing beyond?

As we saw in Chapter 1, the original hierarchical worldview, the Great Chain of Being, postulated the existence of higher forms of life than human beings, culminating in God. Indeed, the Great Chain was a creation of God, and would have had no possibility of existence, and no meaning, without an intelligent creator. All the lower forms of life were ultimately defined in terms of their distance from God, the degree to which they were incomplete and unfulfilled.

Modern science, which as we have just seen provides so much evidence for holarchy in the physical, biological and mental worlds, has created an agnostic worldview which basically dismisses the possibility of higher forms of life. While most scientists are open-minded about the possibility that there may be other civilizations elsewhere in the universe, and that some of these civilizations may be composed of species more evolved than ours, it's important to understand that this is not what is meant by a higher level of existence in the holarchical sense. A higher level of existence, consistent with the principles we have seen operating at the physical, biological and mental levels, would both include and transcend human civilization, just as organisms include and transcend cells, and cells include and transcend atoms and molecules. In other words, if there is a higher level of existence, we don't have to go searching throughout the rest of the galaxy to find it. It's all around us; we're part of it.

To many of us who accept the holarchical worldview, moreover, there is evidence for such a higher level of existence, even if the evidence is not the sort that would satisfy a scientist. Mystics have for several thousand years described their experiences of a higher state of consciousness, in which one seems to transcend the ordinary identity as an individual and become part of something far greater. Transcendence, in this sense, seems quite analagous to the way I have used it to describe the emergence of lower levels of existence.

In the model of holarchy being developed today, therefore, higher levels of existence are taken for granted by some (though not all) theorists, and are assumed to be represented by higher states of consciousness that human beings can have at least fleeting contact with. We could say that these higher states take the place, fulfill the role, that God and the angels did in the Great Chain. Indeed, for many of the great Christian mystics, including John van Ruysbroeck, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila, the experience of a higher state of consciousness was a union, or at least an extraordinarily intimate communication, with the God of their Church (Underhill 1962).

In this chapter, we will consider some aspects of these higher states, as they relate to our ideas about holarchy. There have been a great number of attempts to describe all the great diversity of experiences human beings can have in altered states of consciousness (James 1925; Bucke 1962; O'Brien 1964a; Masters and Houston 1966; Laski 1968; Ornstein 1972; Tatt 1972; Wilber 1980; Pekala 1987; Austin 1998)--and taken togeteher, to argue that they form a consistent body of knowledge, which Aldous Huxley (1990b) dubbed the "perennial philosophy". My purpose here, consistent with the approach I have taken in earlier chapters, is not to provide a thorough review of this literature, but rather to see to what degree such experiences suggest the operation of principles that we have observed on the lower levels--in other words, to what extent is the higher analogous to the lower. Thus I will focus only on several well-established characteristics of higher consciousness, features that I believe find virtually universal acceptance among mystics of all times and places.

Before doing this, though, I believe something should said about how we come to know about higher states of consciousness, and the degree to which we can accept reports about them as valid. Many if not most scientists question both the reality and the relevance of these states, and are therefore likely to regard any worldview that attempts to include them as overambitious, at the very least, if not deeply flawed. While some polls suggest that this situation may be changing ( ), the criticism is serious and must be addressed. Take one of the classic observations of mystics of all times and places: an experience of being at one with the world, perhaps even with the entire universe. The skeptical scientist asks: has the individual really become one with all of existence, or is she just experiencing a very powerful illusion that she is?

The only response to this criticism is to point out that we can demonstrate that perception made while in higher consciousness is real in the same way that we accept that perception in ordinary consciousness is real. When a large number of people all claim to have experienced the same phenomenon, then science calls that phenomenon real. We accept that trees, rocks, animals, other people and so forth exist, because we all say we see them. We can even extend this process, using the proper tools, to cells, molecules and atoms, in one direction, and to distant stars and galaxies, in the other, which not all of us can experience. We accept all of these phenomena as real because of the principle of shared observation: different individuals carrying out the same procedures--e.g., isolating material from biological tissue, looking through a telescope--experience the same results.

Those of us who believe in the reality of higher states of consciousness make an analogous argument. There are certain experiences that a very large number of individuals have had while in such higher states; therefore, these states also deserve to be called real. In addition to the sense of oneness, for example, there is often a heightened sensory awareness; a transcendence of time and space; and certain profound insights into the relationships between different forms of life. Some of these experiences, such as heightened sensory awareness, clearly can't be illusions, for they simply extend, or intensify, the capacities of ordinary consciousness. With respect to other reported perceptions, particularly the sense of oneness with the world, one could perhaps object that the human brain is constructed in such a way that everyone, or many people, experience the same illusion. However, beyond the fact that such a widespread illusion, if it really were such, would be quite interesting scientifically, we can just point out that much the same argument could also be made with respect to our ordinary consciousness. Do we really know that trees, rocks, animals and so forth exist in a world separate from ourselves, or are our perceptions of these things all in the mind? This is basically the argument of George Berkeley--though in a more solipsistic form--which I discussed in the previous chapter. Though the argument is difficult to disprove, very few, if any, scientists accept it. To be consistent, then, they should at least be cautious about applying an analogous argument to higher state of consciousness.

Of course, relatively few people have experienced higher consciousness. Though mystics like to say that this experience is open to anyone willing to follow their practices, the latter are extremely difficult. When one adds to this the problem that genuine mystical experiences, essentially by definition, can't be adequately described in words, it's hardly surprising that many scientists and philosophers refuse to give the claims of mystics the same validity as they do the observations of science or the arguments of logic. The human mind can be extremely imaginative, and may convince itself of the truth of what it has imagined; it can also be fooled under some conditions, as I pointed out in the previous chapter. In an attempt to take the steam out of such objections, I will confine the discussion that follows largely to what is loosely referred to as the classical literature: Buddhist and Hinduist texts; the writings of certain Christian mystics of the Middle Ages; certain Islamic, particularly Sufi, writers; and some others. Most if not all of the mystics whose reports are found in this literature were themselves very much aware of the problems I just noted, and for this reason, among others, their experiences find a much wider range of acceptability among students of higher consciousness.

Even so, I feel there are certain remaining problems we should be aware of at the outset. First, the nature of one's contact with higher consciousness can undeniably be colored by the personal beliefs of the individual. Many of the great Christian mystics, for example, reported experiences that seem clearly shaped by the teachings of the Church, such as visions of saints, Christ on the Cross, or armies of angels and other heavenly hosts (Underhill 1960; Peers 1989, 1991; Furlong 1996). Another common, but far from universal, experience is of voices, often interpreted as the word of God. It may in fact be the case that most experiences of higher consciousness, at least up to a certain level, are intimately related to the psychology of the individual experiencing them. This doesn't necessarily mean that they have no validity, that they may not serve as important indicators of what others may expect as they traverse this path themselves. After all, there is a psychological aspect to spirituality; every genuine mystic understands the necessity of a purification process, which requires the individual to struggle against elements in his own makeup that would prevent him from realizing a higher state of being. But if we are to extract general principles from such experiences, we need to distinguish in such reports the universal aspects from the personal. This may not be easy. As Ken Wilber notes:

A second problem is that many, probably most, of the classical descriptions of higher consciousness have been reported by individuals under unnatural circumstances--withdrawn from society, in a monastery, a cave, or a forest, sitting very still, eyes closed, often attempting to shut out all sensory stimulation. It's certainly easy to justify this approach up to a point. The ability to experience higher consciousness is not given to any us of quickly or easily; it requires tremendous effort and concentration, and this is often easier to make away from the distracting influences of ordinary life. But in divorcing himself as much as possible from the ordinary world, the meditator, at best, loses the opportunity to see that world with his new vision, to experience it from the point of view of a higher world. And at worst, as the sensory deprivation experiments of John Lilly (1972) demonstrated, the mind under such conditions tends towards states that are not easily distinguished from hallucinations. Anything that can be imagined can be perceived as real.

Finally, given that higher consciousness is so far beyond the state most of us ordinarily live in, we shouldn't be surprised that most experiences of these states have been rather brief and fleeting. By far the greater part of the life of the mystic is spent somewhere between here and there (or they might say, between there and Here), on practices designed to reveal this higher state for greater and greater lengths of time. These intermediate stages have their own experiences associated with them, and while understanding such experiences are of the utmost importance for anyone wishing to follow the mystic path, any attempts to build models of higher-order reality must be aware of the distinction. Surely many of the different experiences reported by people in contact with a higher state of consciousness, particularly people without a long preceding program of training, are likely to reflect fragments of a higher vision, mixed and confused with more ordinary psychological experiences.

Bearing these caveats in mind, let's examine some of the most widely reported experiences of higher consciousness. In addition to providing a glimpse of what a higher level of existence might be like, this discussion is also intended to reveal the manner in which science and spirit can help each other, a fundamental problem that I laid out in the very beginning of this book. Spirit can help science by helping it to understand, at the very least, that there are levels of existence beyond those accessible to the ordinary human senses; and I hope, by defining some of the relationships of these higher levels to the lower ones. But conversely, science can help spirit by emphasizing certain rules of the game we call knowing reality. One of these rules, as we have just discussed, is that experiences should be reproducible, shared by different observers. Some others will emerge during this discussion.

If there is one defining feature of the experience of higher consciousness, it's that it does not, at a certain level, distinguish between subject and object. The individual no longer feels separated from the rest of existence, but is all of existence--or at least of a substantial portion of existence that is ordinarily perceived as separate.. References made to this feature of higher consciousness in the classical spiritual texts of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, and esoteric Christianity are so numerous, and so well known, that they require little discussion. A few quotes will make the point:

How are we to understand this experience of unity in the context of our model of the holarchy? In Chapter 4, I suggested that subject/object dualism results from our ability to see holons both below us and above us, with those below us seen as external objects, and those above us seen as part of ourselves, the subject. More specifically, this dual sense of perception reflects our position as fundamental systems on a level of existence that is not yet complete. We can participate in higher stages of existence, our social organizations, which allows us to experience them; yet as holons below them, we can't see them in the same way as we see holons on our own stage or on levels below us. This dualism is transcended only when we become part of, not just a higher stage, but a genuinely higher level of existence.

Indeed, it would seem that all the fundamental dualisms that we human beings ordinarily experience--not just inner vs. outer or mind vs. body, but true vs. false, good vs. bad, positive vs. negative, liberal vs. conservative, freedom vs. conformity, even, perhaps, higher vs. lower--ultimately stem from this dual sense of perception. Upon close examination, one member of each of these pairs is usually found to be associated with holons above us, into which we are evolving--mind, rationality, society, otherness--while the other member of each pair is associated with holons below us, from where we have come: body, emotion, and most basically, our original identity as autonomous organisms. Since our identity as holons by definition emerges from our relationships with other holons, our ability to see in both of these directions of the holarchy leads to a split in how we understand ourselves--what we in effect are is both what we were (the lower) and what we will be (the higher). Only when we realize a higher level of existence can these opposites be transcended or find union in a new autonomous holon that contains all of them as intimate parts of itself.

A key point deserves reiteration. This dualism we ordinarily experience does not result simply from the fact that we are not fully evolved, that we have not reached the highest state of consciousness possible to us. It results from the fact that we are between levels. We have partly transcended the mental level, but have not done so completely. When we completely transcend this level, and take up existence on the next level, we will be complete and autonomous forms of existence again. This does not necessarily mean that we will have gone as far as we can, that we will have reached the highest state of consciousness. It simply means that we will have reached a consolidation point, will have again become fundamental or zero-dimensional stages with no existence as yet in still higher stages on our level.

In other words, subject/object dualism--and all the other dualisms that this one implies--is characteristic only of holons on intermediate stages of existence; it's a feature only of social holons, or the autonomous holons, like ourselves in our ordinary state of consciousness, that participate in these social holons. It's not characteristic of holons at the fundament of any level. From this it follows that levels of existence below us, as well as above us, may also experience a transcendence of subject and object.

This last point--that the experience of nondualism may be found in lower levels of consciousness as well as higher levels of consciousness--is unfortunate in one sense, for it suggests that lower levels may sometimes be confused with higher levels. Indeed, it has often been observed that states of consciousness found in people of earlier cultures, and also of young children, seem to have some of the characteristics of a higher state. Thus such people are reported to have some sense of oneness with the world, of connectedness to an environment we feel separated if not alienated from (Campbell 1959; Habermas 1979). This has led some people to see children, or people of earlier or less developed cultures, as role models in the quest for higher consciousness. Consider this statement by the Chuang-Tzu, a Chinese philosopher of the fourteenth century:

Transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber calls this confusion of a lower state of consciousness with a higher one the "pre-trans fallacy" (Wilber 1989). In the former state, subject and object are, as he puts it, "fused" together; they have not differentiated, revealed their different natures. This differentiation occurs as the child matures, or the human evolves, at which point there may be a reintegration of subject and object in a higher level of existence. In terms of the holarchy, we can say that subject and object can differentiate only after the maturing child begins to become a member of society, that is, to participate in the higher stages of social organization. To the extent that he does this, he develops the dual vision, directed to existence below him and to that above him. This is the dualism that must be transcended for the individual to realize a still higher form of nondualism.

More generally, nondualism is a basic experience of all autonomous holons, that is, fundamental holons that are not part of a higher level of existence. Thus a cell that is not part of an organism would have a nondual experience of the world, not distinguishing itself from its environment. This is zero-dimensional awareness, as I discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, in which the cell sees itself as the whole of existence. As soon as a cell begins to make such a distinction, to separate self from other--and most cells, even those outside the body, do behave in a way that suggests such a distinction--we can say that it has already begun to have some contact, however weak and tenuous, with the next level of existence.

And the same in the other direction. For a very important implication of this idea is that there may be states of consciousness beyond that in which evolving human beings first experience transcendence of subject/object duality. The new autonomous level of existence may become part of still higher stages, again experiencing a subject/object split (but now a much higher and more complex subject as well as object), to be transcended in still a higher form of existence. This idea seems quite consistent with the reports of many mystics who report more than one level of higher unity in their quest for complete identification with the Absolute (O'Brien 1964; deRopp 1967; Chen 1968; Wilber 1980; Pears 1991; Austin 1998). Teresa of Avila, for example, in the quote given above, was attempting to distinguish a unity in which one is truly merged with some higher form of intelligence from a lower unity that she described using the metaphor of marriage (Peers, 1989). In the latter kind of unity, there is still some dualism present; if we take the metaphor seriously, we might say the mystical marriage is a unity of some aspects or levels of existence, but not of all aspects or levels. Likewise, the quote from al-Hallaj, one of the greatest mystic followers of Mohammad, suggests a state of oneness that is not final--"two souls in one being". Based on many other reports of a similar nature, many theorists take it for granted that there are several levels of consciousness above our own (deRopp 1967; Wilber 1980).

Another hallmark of the higher state of consciousness is the absence of what we ordinarily call thought or mental activity. Indeed, meditation, the general term given to the process by which an individual gradually realizes a higher state, is best defined as the cessation of thoughts, or--which is really the same thing--observing them from a detached point of view:

In the previous chapter, I defined thoughts as part of our view of higher mental stages, that is, of the social organizations that we inhabit. When we look at these higher-order holons, tnoughts are what we experience. And because we are imbedded in these social groups, as firmly and as intimately as we are imbedded in any other part of existence, we think constantly. Homo sapiens is first and foremost a social animal.

In order to travel to a higher level of existence, we have to break these bonds, these connections to other individuals that occupy so much of our inner world. This is why the spiritual path is often described in terms of breaking attachments, or abandoning the world. Everything that connects us to the world as we ordinarily understand it has to be ruthlessly done away with, and this process is often extremely difficult, painful and downright frightening. In the Atman Project, where the process of human development is traced out from birth to the highest transpersonal levels, Ken Wilber (1980) points out that this process of breaking or "frustrating" connections occurs whenever one moves from one stage to a higher stage. In order to transcend a purely bodily-centered form of existence, the infant must break certain attachments to this body, such as fascination with the mouth or the genitals. To transcend her emotions, she must break attachments to instant gratifications, learning to identify with pleasures in the future rather than the present. Still further attachments are broken as the developing child and adolescent realizes higher forms of cognitive abilities. Almost all of these stages involve breaking and reforming social attachments

The same process of breaking attachments also occurs on the spiritual path, but it is not automatic. Ken Wilber (1998b) believes that the path to higher consciousness must unfold through a specific sequence of stages, just as a maturing child does. I will have more to say on this later, in Part 2, but here I do want to emphasize that while the higher consciousness may emerge through a specific sequence, there is no developmental program built into our brains that makes the process inevitable. On the contrary, most of us are, so to speak, fixated at a certain social stage of development, and those of us who attempt to transcend this stage receive none of the help from above that ensures the normal development of children. Yet the principle of development, in this very broad sense, is the same.

Should the individual be successful and reach the higher level, she no longer identifies with the social group-imbedded person. She transcends not only the individual human being, but all of the social order that includes human beings as well. It's not that these lower-order holons disappear; they simply become part of a much higher holon. To experience them, this higher form of existence does not have to look down or up; nor within nor without. It just is them.

The relationship of a higher level of existence to our thoughts is therefore something like that we ordinarily have to our physical and biological aspects--the organs, tissues, cells and molecules that make us up. While from an academic or scientific point of view these holons are below us, in our everyday life we don't ordinarily consider them in that manner; they are just part of us. Their activity goes on, most of it below our awareness. In somewhat the same way--but again, without the dualism between self and other that we ordinarily experience--a higher level of existence has an identity completely transcending all of the thought processes.

In earlier chapters, we saw that different levels of existence, and different stages within a single level, exist on different scales of space and time. A cell has an extension in both time and space that is so far beyond that of its individual atoms that it is existing, for all practical purposes, in several new dimensions. The same is true for the organism in relationship to the cell.

We might expect, then, that individuals who access a genuinely higher state of consciousness would be aware of a greatly expanded scale of time and space. In a very general sense, this is born out by their descriptions of higher states, which suggest a scope of existence far beyond the ordinary world we live in. However, the mystic most commonly insists not that he is aware of a greater extension of space and time, but these very concepts disappear, no longer have any meaning:

How are we to understand this in terms of the holarchical model? One interpretation is that these reports are of the highest possible state of existence. In the view of most mystics, the highest or ultimate state of consciousness is a universal state that embraces and includes everything. This state is radically beyond all space and time. It's not just the highest level of existence, but all levels.

In the holarchical model, however, a transcendence of time and space is to be expected at any new level, not just the highest. A cell, as we have seen, exists in six dimensions on the physical level; yet it exists in zero dimensions on the biological level. An organism exists in six dimensions on the biological level, yet in zero dimensions on the mental level. A human being we have seen exists in higher mental level dimensions by virtue of participation in societies. In transcending this level, we might expect again to experience zero-dimensionality, relative to a still higher level. This zero-dimensionality is, by definition, a state where there is no sense of time or space. For both of these concepts, it should be apparent, are closely related to the existence of an other, separate from ourselves. Space is a way of defining the relationships of other objects to each other as well as to ourselves. Time is understood in terms of the way these relationships change.

The holarchical view thus suggest that as existence ascends in the holarchy it alternates between nondualism and a sense of no time and no space, at the beginnning of a new level; and a subject-object distinction, along with a sense of time and space, when between levels. The higher the level of existence the closer it is to a state in which it completely unifies and transcends these concepts, so that it's beyond them entirely. But each new level gives it some taste of this unity, before new distinctions appear, which become unified on a still higher level.

What would subject-object distinctions look like on a higher level of existence? We first have to understand what the initial access to a higher level is like, before there is dualism. Descriptions and discussions of higher consciousness often assume that this consciousness, by itself, comprises a higher level of existence. But we have seen that lower levels of existence are always associated with physical, biological and mental structures. The ordinary human consciousness is associated with the mental activities of thinking, memory, perception, sensation and so forth; with the biological brain and body of a human organism; and with the physical matter ultimately composing this body. All of these holons on different levels are connected. To the extent that lower forms of consciousness exist, they are likewise associated with holons such as cells or molecules.

In the same way, we would expect higher consciousness to represent, be a manifestation of, a holon that has some definite kind of physical, biological and mental structure--that is, a sort of super-organism. The most obvious candidate for this super-organism would be the earth itself--keeping in mind that by the earth we mean not simply the physical planet nor all its biological life (the biosphere) nor even the sum total of all human mental activity (what Teilhard de Chardin (1959) called the "noosphere"), but all of these, integrated into something transcending all of them. Higher consciousness, then, would be consciousness identifying with the earth, in somewhat the same way that human consciousness identifies with an individual human being. If there are still higher levels of consciousness possible to attain, they might be embodied in--now, or following further evolution--by still greater cosmic forms of organization: the solar system, the galaxy, and so on. Between the earth and these higher levels, there would be an awareness of self as planet and other as the rest of the universe, but now perceived in a very different manner.

P.D. Ouspensky was a well-known mathematician, and the model of holarchy that he developed had two mathematical aspects to it that gave it particular elegance. First, the relationship between one function and another function, on any level of existence, was postulated to be described by a certain large number, constant for all relationships on all levels. This number was approximately 30,000. Thus the ratio between the time of one respiratory cycle and one sensory impression was 30,000; so was the ratio between the time of one wake/sleep cycle and one respiratory cycle; and so was the ratio between a lifetime and a day/night cycle. In the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky holarchy, this one number fixed the temporal relationship between all these functions, not only for human beings, but for forms of life on other levels as well.

The second intriguing feature of Ouspensky's model was that a function occurring on one level of existence was another function on the next level. Thus the same number that fixed the temporal relationship between two processes on one level also, in effect, fixed the relationship between any two analogous processes on different levels. For example, the wake/sleep cycle of human beings was the respiratory cycle of the next higher level, the planet. During this twenty-four hour period, Ouspensky noted, the biosphere portion of the planet "breathed in" and "breathed out" once; that is, there was one cycle of photosynthesis, in which the planet as a whole took in carbon dioxide and expired oxygen, followed by a respiratory cycle in which the opposite exchange occurred. Likewise, a lifetime of a human being, in Ouspensky's model, was a wake/sleep cycle in the planet. And going in the other direction, a lifetime of a cell was equivalent to a single day in the organism, a wake/sleep cycle in the cell was equivalent to a respiratory cycle in the organism; a respiratory cycle in the cell occurred over the time of a single impression in the organism.

Ouspensky postulated this model as a working hypothesis, one in constant revision. His single constant certainly does not exactly describe the temporal relationships of some of these processes, and even the nature of these processes themselves are not always clear on some levels. Nor were levels of existence as clearly defined in his scheme as they are in modern holarchical models. For its time, however, when much less was known about the cellular and molecular processes within organisms, this model was extremely advanced and sophisticated. The basic concept of a single constant describing temporal (and spatial) relationships between different levels of existence is obviously intriguing, and certainly one that could be tested through further research. More specifically, as I noted in Chapter 3, the relationship of energy and information to hierarchical structure also suggests the possibility of a quantitative treatment of levels of existence. In principle, it might be some day possible to measure the amount of information in both the genome and the brain, using a common standard of information. This in turn would make it possible to calculate a ratio, much like Ouspensky's, that expressed the relationship between two levels of existence.

In the previous section, I have argued that the experience of a higher level of consciousness is one in which our ordinary concepts of space and time are transcended. Such a trancendent relationship, however, does not seem to describe with complete accuracy the mystic's perception of the world. The processes operating on the level the mystic has transcended do not become insignificant, beneath his perception; on the contrary, mystics often report that the ordinary world becomes much more significant. The mystic's view of existence is not simply broader, but deeper, not simply more extensive, but also more intensive. Aldous Huxley (1990a) called this opening the doors to of perception; others have often described the experience as one of seeing the "suchness" of things:

While I accept the notion of immanence, however, I have two problems with using it to explain the mystic's extraordinary perception of meaning and significance in ordinary life. First, only the very highest level of existence can be this Ground of all existence; no other level is. As I have suggested earlier in this chapter, there are probably several levels of existence above our own, and while some mystics may have indeed experienced fleeting contact with the highest, many of their reports are most likely from a lower, presumably more accessible level. In this level they would not be unified with this Ground of all existence, so they should not experience immanence of it in all things.

How, then, do we explain the mystic's insistence of a greater awareness of the ordinary world? Recall that a fundamental system on any level of existence is both zero-dimensional and six-dimensional. It's zero-dimensional with respect to the new level above it; this is what gives it its experience of nondualism and transcendence of space and time. But it's simultaneously six-dimensional with respect to the level it has just transcended. It's this latter relationship, I contend, that is manifested when the mystic, at the next level of existence above our shared mental level, views ordinary life. From this next level, the mystic is still quite capable of perceiving the ordinary world, and the new dimension provides a greater richness than that we ordinarily experience. As I noted in Chapter 5, this means that one can simultaneously experience both permanence and change, for example.

This suggests, then, that the depth of the mystic perception, its ability to penetrate far into our ordinary world even as it simultaneously functions on a world above that, is more of a quantitative than qualitative change. The mystic sees what others see, or might see, in the ordinary world, but much more quickly and clearly. He grasps in a moment what others might conceivably understand over a great length of time (or what many others, society, have already come in some sense to understand)--but no more than this. Mystics can't see below our level to still lower levels. I have never heard of a mystic claiming that he could see, for example, the very cells in an organism, or the very atoms of matter--at least, not during the period of time before science made us aware of these holons. The occasional reports of such visions that now appear, I seem to notice, tend to come from scientists very familiar with these holons from their own work:

Guess which one of these quotes comes from a physicist, and which from a neurobiologist? I'm not questioning that each had an unusual experience. I am questioning that they had a universal view of reality, one accessible to anyone (and I am definitely questioning that the author of the second quote was able "to consciously intervene and intentionally change" molecules in her body). I believe that we should give such insights about as much validity as we give to the medieval Christian mystics' visions of Christ, or voices of God.

Another characteristic of higher consciousness I want to discuss is its relationship to energy. In Chapter 3, I suggested that as existence ascends the holarchy, it gains in its content of both energy and information, which may in fact be the same thing. Thus we would expect a higher state of existence beyond our own to be associated with a higher level of energy. This is at least suggested by the reports of mystics, such as the quotes presented earlier. Another kind of observation that is consistent with higher consciousness representing a higher energy level is that following an experience with a higher state, through either an intense meditative effort or though drugs, individuals sometimes report a great physical, emotional and mental exhaustion, a complete depletion of their normal reserves of energy (Peers 1989).

Nevertheless, the term "energy" as used by mystics can seem quite obscure, and difficult to relate to physical energy. To approach this issue, I want to bring in my own experiences of higher states of consciousness, made over a period of nearly thirty years. While I can't validate these experiences by pointing to similar reports by large numbers of other individuals, I feel far more certain of them than anything I have read in some book. Furthermore, even if they be regarded as no more than anecdotal evidence, I believe they are relevant to this discussion because they exemplify the kind of insights one can obtain when one does not withdraw completely or permanently from the ordinary world, but interacts with it while following a process of meditation. Under these circumstances, there is the possibility of an overlap between the scientific or empirical view and the spiritual view. This is of value to science, because it provides a new way of looking at the world that it studies. Yet it's also of value to spirit, beause it exemplifies the scientific approach that the mystic requires in order to realize spirit.

Meditation is not something one does only while sitting quietly in a lotus position; it has to be done every waking moment of one's life. Not only is this necessary in order to retain the progress one has made, but it's extremely valuable in teaching one about oneself. Meditation in action is the same as karma yoga, or what Gurdjieff called "remembering oneself" (Ouspensky 1961). As we gradually stop out thoughts, we become able to observe ourself objectively. This is not a matter of introspection, in which thought tries to see itself. The observer or "witness" is not thought, but simply the higher level of awareness, as it gradually shines through.

In Gurdjieff's system, this relationship was illustrated in the concept of a small accumulator (the ordinary mental apparatus), and a large accumulator, where the energy of mental activity was diverted (Ouspensky 1961). Energy in this system was actually transformed through a large number of levels, corresponding to physical matter, living cells, organisms, and a number of higher levels beyond our own. All these levels were considered to be material, but differing in their degree of "fineness". According to Gurdjieff, some of these transformations occurred naturally in the human body, through processes common to every member of the species, while others required spiritual efforts. By making these efforts, the entire ascending chain was open to accumulation of the finest forms of energy.

It therefore seems that the two needs or aims of the human organism--physical/biological on the one hand and spiritual on the other--compete with each other. When one engages in any activity--and particularly physical activity, which requires much more energy per unit of time than mental or emotional activity--part of the energy that could otherwise be used to raise one's level of awareness must be diverted to the activity. This energy not only reduces the rate by which awareness can be increased through meditation, but may also drain off energy previously acquired through meditation.

In conclusion, realizing a higher state of consciousness is a process of gaining a certain kind of energy, and there is a definite relationship between this energy and the more familiar kind of energy that is necessary to the function of the human organism. In Chapter 3, I suggested that there were holarchical levels of energy associated with holarchical forms of life. These levels of energy are embodied in the associations between fundamental holons on each level--atoms, cells, organisms. The kind of energy obtained through meditation is a still higher level, transcending and including the physical, biological and mental forms of energy. It exists in the same fundamentally asymmetric relationship with respect to the lower forms of energy as they have among themselves. Just as atoms don't spontaneously assemble into cells, or cells into organisms, human beings do not spontaneously and effortlessly attain a higher form of consciousness. All the great spiritual classics testify to the enormous efforts necessary.

This understanding of meditation, it seems to me, provides a very valuable perspective on spiritual practice. There has been a great deal in the spiritual literature about "shorter paths" and "accelerated methods." There are certainly practices that work and those that don't, but when one becomes aware--not just intellectually, of course, but most primarily, through experience--of the relationship of higher consciousness to energy, one begins to appreciate that no path is short or accelerated. The process of gaining energy is very slow--only a very small portion can be obtained every day--and the amount required is very great. Perhaps it would be possible, with more knowledge of holarchical relationships, to estimate fairly accurately how much energy--and therefore, perhaps, how long a time--is required to realize the next higher state of consciousness. Though I can provide no such estimate here, my own experience has given me the absolute certainty that my entire life will not be not long enough.

Another experience commonly associated with higher states of consciousness is freedom. Freedom as described by mystics is perhaps even less easy to comprehend than some of the other features of higher states that I discussed earlier. It's certainly a vaguer notion than nondualism, for example, or even than the ineffable quality of suchness. And perhaps more than most other often-reported experiences, it's a very easy concept to be deluded about. Who, after all, can't say that he feels freer?

Yet if the experience of freedom is a difficult one to describe in public, verifiable terms, it's nonetheless quite consistent with principles on lower levels of holarchy. As I discussed in Chapter 2, all holons are subjected to constraints from those holons above them. The higher in the holarchy a holon is, the fewer constraints it must experience. It follows that freedom increases with holarchical development.

Nor should it be difficult to understand the kind of constraints that one escapes by realizing a higher level of existence. In Chapter 4 I discussed the social constraints that bind us, the limits on not only our physical behavior, but also our mental and emotional behavior that our social organizations place on us. In a higher state of existence, where there is no thought and no desire, the possibility of mental and emotional constraint is gone. While in this state, an individual may still be part of a society and follow its rules. Yet she is no longer constrained by these rules, because she no longer is attached to this society. She is, as the old saying goes, in the world yet not of it.

But contact with a higher level of existence also introduces us to, and perhaps frees us from, other constraints on our existence. These constraints, at least as they appear to us, are not really hard to see, but they are so fundamental to our existence as human beings that we take them for granted, normally not even considering them in discussions of freedom. As organisms, we must live in a certain kind of environment, one with a relatively small range of temperatures, a certain composition of gasses in the atmosphere, the presence of water and sources of energy. We also must die within a certain span of time, usually less than a century.

By transcending our human existence we have the possibility of transcending these limits as well. Certainly if we take seriously the idea that the next higher level of existence is planetary, then we transcend our ordinary mortality. While a planetary level of existence may still be constrained by certain requirements of temperature, atmosphere and energy, these constraints are more relaxed than those for any one species. It also has a lifetime measurable in millions or billions of years.

I pointed out earlier that there are several other features of existence that seem to increase as we ascend the holarchy, including information, energy and complexity. One problem with using any of these qualities as a measure of holarchical development, however, is that they apparently may increase without limit. Is there a limit to the amount of energy or information present in the Universe? The physicist would say energy is limited, but it's such a vast amount that it seems infinite for all practical purposes. Whether there is a limit to information or complexity is more problematic.

Freedom, however, when defined in terms of the number of constraints on a holon, suggests that there is a limit to the holarchy. If we experience fewer constraints as we ascend the holarchy, there should come a point at which there are no constraints at all, when we have complete freedom. This point of complete freedom should correspond to the highest level of existence possible, the level that encompasses all other levels.

This idea, again, is very prominent in the teachings of Gurdjieff (Ouspensky 1961). In his holarchical model, every form of existence was subjected to a certain number of laws; in the case of ourselves, this number was twenty-four or forty-eight, depending on our development. By further evolution, however, we could free ourselves from some of these laws. The Gurdjieffian holarchy was defined in such a way that every new level or perhaps stage of existence was accompanied by a halving of the number of laws or constraints. Thus at the next level of existence, an evolving consciousness would be subject to only twelve laws; at the level beyond that, six laws; then three, and finally one.

As with the earlier discussion of mathematical holarchical relationships in the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky system, one does not have to believe in the exact numbers to appreciate the value of the approach. It seems to me that it should be possible, with a sufficient understanding of lower levels of existence, to define the kinds and number of constraints operating on holons at these levels, including our own. If we can do this, the way may be open to determining the number of levels of existence possible above our own. Such an estimate could provide a way of using a purely scientific approach to arrive at an understanding--an answer to a specific question--that has to now been possible only through a spiritual approach. Each approach may help validate the other.

The features of higher consciousness I have just discussed provide mystics with a way of communicating their experiences to like-minded people. For the community of individuals interested in these higher states, they are the data used to explore and define these states in a collective manner, to map them onto intersubjective domains, as Ken Wilber (1989) puts it. If higher consciousness is to be considered part of a worldview that includes phenomena explored by traditional science, however, it would be very helpful if it could in some manner be related to the brain. Most scientists and philosophers interested in mind and consciousness probably have not had much if any experience of higher states of consciousness, and as I pointed out earlier, generally don't take them very seriously. If, on the other hand, it were possible to correlate higher states with unique activity in the brain, this might go some ways towards convincing scientists that these states are worthy of investigation. As with ordinary consciousness--indeed, far more so--we should not expect such studies to tell us what higher consciousness is, how it emerges from brain function (I will discuss this issue in the following section). But just as neuroscientists are beginning to identify the areas of the brain and the types of neuronal processes associated with various forms of mental activity of which we have conscious experience, so we might reason that experiences of higher consciousness might also be accompanied by changes in brain function.

In the past twenty years, a large number of investigators have attempted to do this (Delmonte 1985; Wallace 1993; Austin 1998). Typically, these studies approach this problem by comparing measurements of some indicator of brain activity, such as EEG, neurotransmitter release or regional blood flow, in individuals with some experience in a spiritual practice with control subjects who have not (Dillbeck and Vesely 1986; Jevning et al. 1996; Mason et al. 1997; Liubimov et al. 1998; Lou et al. 1999). More recently, the paradigm has been extended to the assessment of cognitive, moral, affective or other mental functions (Alexander and Langer 1990). The basic question motivating all these investigations is simply: what scientifically measurable differences, if any, can we find between those experiencing higher consciousness and those not?

Many of these studies have reported significant differences, though there is some controversy over this (Holmes 1984). The real problem, though, as ought to be obvious, is that there is no way to establish that someone who claims to be experiencing higher consciousness really is. The characteristic features of higher consciousness I discussed in the previous sections have been defined from very detailed reports of individuals, who have taken great pains to describe, within the obvious limits of language, what they experienced. Rarely, if ever, do the subjects in studies of brain and mental functions submit such reports; most often, it's simply assumed that since they have practiced meditation, they should be at a higher state of consciousness than controls. They may indeed be experiencing something that the controls are not, but whether it's really a significantly higher state of consciousness is unfortunately rarely debated.

One major reason for doubting the authenticity of the experiences of these subjects, in my view, is that the great majority of studies I have seen use individuals who have relatively little experience with meditation. Typically, they have participated in a program for just a few weeks or a few months. If one takes seriously the reports in the classic literature of mysticism that the spiritual path is a very long and extremely demanding process--and my own experience leaves me with absolutely no doubt about this--then one has to be extremely skeptical of studies employing beginners. This is all the more so when the meditative experience they have had is limited to a few minutes or a few hours a day--as it apparently is by those who run and participate in these studies at one of the leading institutes devoted to this research, the International Maharishi Center in Fairfield, Iowa.

Let me be very blunt about this. In my experience--and though I can't prove it's true for others, I am as personally certain of this as I am that others, too, must eat, breathe and sleep, just because I know I must--to go anywhere on the spiritual path requires a total commitment. This means meditating always--every waking moment of every day, for one's entire life. As I pointed out earlier, even this level of dedication will most likely not bring one permanently to the next level of consciousness; but it will raise one's consciousness well above the ordinary level. Part-time meditation does not work. One cannot simply sit and watch one's thoughts or breathing for a hour or two every day, then let it "carry over" to the rest of life, as the currently popular saying goes. The efforts made in meditation do not "carry over" in this sense; one either continues the struggle all the time, wherever one is and whatever one happens to be doing, or one loses whatever infintesimal glimmer of consciousness one had realized. As I hope the previous section on energy made clear, the natural state of human beings is to expend energy, by thinking, and only by the most unrelenting opposition to this state does one have even a chance of realizing higher consciousness. People who think they can realize higher consciousness by what they call meditating for a portion of every day are doing just that--thinking they are realizing higher consciousness. Meditation is not about thinking; it's about struggling with thinking.

Does this mean we should give up trying to correlate the scientific brain with the spiritual experience? I do suspect that those individuals, probably exceedingly rare, who have realized a significantly higher level of consciousness most likely are not going to make themselves readily available for such studies. On the other hand, James Austin, in his massively documented Zen and the Brain (1998), shows us that there are other ways to approach the question. From conventional neuroscience, we know quite a bit about systems in the brain that might be expected to be relevant to some of the experiences associated with higher consciousness. Continued research in this field, correlated with studies of ordinary consciousness, is likely to shed significant light on the possible correlates of higher consciousness. If and when higher consciousness becomes more generally recognized by society--an issue I will return to in the final chapter of this book--more direct studies of the phenomenon may become feasible. In the meantime, I'm sure the studies of meditating individuals will continue, and I will continue to follow their reports with a great dose of skepticism.

In concluding this discussion of higher consciousness and higher levels of existence, I want to discuss a central issue raised by the very existence of these states. Can higher consciousness be understood as emerging from lower levels of existence--the human brain and its interactions with other brains in human societies--or has this consciousness existed prior to the emergence of human beings and their societies? The answer to this question obviously has enormous implications for our understanding of not only consciousness itself, but of the entire evolutionary process. If higher consciousness existed prior to human beings, then it's most likely a fundamental feature of the universe. We then understand the universe beginning not from below, with material existence, as the conventional scientific worldview holds; but from above, by an intelligent creator. Furthermore, if consciousness is fundamental, then the hard problem that I discussed in the previous chapter becomes reframed: we no longer ask how physical and biological processes could give rise to consciousness, but rather how they become associated with it.

If, on the other hand, higher consciousness has emerged from our level of existence, then the conventional scientific view of evolution from the bottom-up may perhaps still be preserved. Just as atoms combined to form molecules and cells, cells formed organisms, and organisms societies, higher levels of existence, with associated higher levels of consciousness, my have emerged from below. As difficult as it may be to understand how even ordinary consciousness, let alone higher consciousness, emerged in this manner, the rationale for trying to understand is at least there.

We might begin this discussion by noting that the evolution of even ordinary consciousness, of the kind we all take for granted, is not easy to explain. I pointed out in the previous chapter that many philosophers believe that the hard problem aspect of consciousness, our direct experience of it, is logically separable from the brain. That is, one could imagine zombies with all the functional aspects of human mentality, yet with no conscious experience. If one accepts this argument, then it's virtually impossible to explain the evolution of consciousness by Darwinian processes, involving natural selection. In order for a feature to be selected, it must give the organism some kind of advantage over other organisms. If consciousness is completely separable from the function of the mind, however, it would provide no such advantage.

I think this point, by itself, is a fairly substantial argument for the notion that consciousness, in some sense, is fundamental, having preceded the evolutionary process. It's not compelling, however, and not just because not all philosophers accept the logical possibility of zombies. Even if consciousness provided no selective advantage to us, it might still have evolved through a non-Darwinian process. I will be discussing such alternative evolutionary processes in Part 2. Here it will suffice to say that some scientists believe that at least some evolutionary changes occurred through processes that occurred more or less inevitably, and which therefore were not subject to selection. So the zombie argument does not unequivocally rule out the possibility that consciousness could have emerged from the brain.

So what observations or evidence can we bring to bear on this question? To most people who have experienced higher consciousness, the answer to this question is so obvious it's hardly worth discussing: Higher consciousness is fundamental, not emergent. Mystics come to this view because the experience itself, as I noted earlier, is so often associated with an enormous sense of meaning and significance. One feels that one has returned to one's origins, is becoming unified with something that was always there--the Self. Indeed, the most radical forms of mysticism, such as that taught by the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna, deny that there is anything to attain (O'Brien 1963).. The Self is always there.

A skeptical (and experientially ignorant) scientist will probably dismiss this argument. Just because an individual has an overpowering feeling that higher consciousness has always existed doesn't mean that it has. But to this evidence can be added a second important observation. As I noted earlier, many mystics have claimed there is not one but two or more states of being above our ordinary one (Ouspensky 1961; O'Brien 1964; deRopp 1967; Chen 1968; Wilber 1980; Peers 1991; Austin 1998). If one takes this claim seriously, then it's much more difficult to argue that higher consciousness is emergent. One could conceive of a higher level of existence gradually coming into being through the organization of human societies on earth; but how could still another level above that exist?

I will be discussing the process of evolution in detail in the second part of this book. For now, however, we can just note that our conventional understanding of the process is that one level emerges at a time. It may be--indeed, we will see that it does happen--that a higher level may begin to emerge before the evolution of the level immediately below it is complete. However, we have no evidence at all--from all we know about how evolution on earth has occurred up to now--that more than one level of existence can emerge at the same time. How could it? How could organisms begin to evolve until cells were fairly well along? How could cells emerge before there were atoms? In just the same way, an emergent process can't account for the existence of two or more levels of consciousness above our own.

Of course, the mystic's experience of more than one level of existence above the ordinary one is even briefer and rarer than the experience of a single higher level of existence. Furthermore, because the experience is generally simply in terms of consciousness; I'm not aware of any reports describing higher levels in terms of holons with physical, biological and mental components that could be related to ours. So one might still be skeptical of higher levels of existence in any sense related to the one science in which understands levels. Still, a phenomenon has to be explained. Whatever the further reaches of mystic experience represent, they don't connect easily with a holarchy that is evolving from the bottom up.

A final means of approaching this issue might be to ask whether human beings in the past were able to experience higher consciousness. If higher consciousness is emergent with human societies at a certain point in their evolution, one might expect that this experience would be fairly recent in our history. At the very least, one might imagine that more people today would experience higher consciousness than did so in the past; and that their experiences, on average, would be in some sense deeper or higher.

The answer to this question, unfortunately, is not very clear. There is no denying, of course, that experiences of higher consciousness go back at least several thousand years, to individuals like Buddha, Jesus and Plato. If one accepts Joseph Campbell's interpretations of certain myths, we might push the dates back at least several thousand more years (Campbell 1959), though this interpretation has been contested (Wilber 1995). But in any case, whether more people--that is, a greater proportion of people--today have some experience of higher states, and whether these experiences in general are deeper and more profound than those of earlier mystics, are very difficult questions to address. Numerous polls suggest that a very large number of people believe they have experienced higher consciousness (Austin 1998), but as I noted above, this doesn't mean they have. And in any case, we have no basis for comparison with people of earlier ages, when polls of this kind were unknown.

Transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber, one of the foremost proponents of the mystical view that higher consciousness is fundamental and creative of all of existence, has ironically argued that one can see such a progression. In his view, the peak experiences of mystics of the past were not as advanced as those of more recent times, and he relates this to the fact that the average mode of consciousness--one well below the mystic one--was also below that of human beings today (Wilber 1981). That is, people today, on average, have a rational/logical mode of consciousness, or something near that, whereas people of several eons ago tended to have a lower mode, what he calls mythic. Thus in Wilber's view, mystics of today are starting with a higher consciousness than those in the past, and therefore, have not quite so far to go to realize still higher states.

I will return to the problem of evolution of higher consciousness in Part 2, in the final chapter of this book. For now, I conclude that there are substantial arguments that consciousness can't be considered simply a higher level of existence, related to us much as we are related to matter and life, but that it's beyond, and prior to the holarchy. Thus while we can get cells by putting atoms and molecules together in a certain way; we can get organisms by putting cells together in a particular way; and I believe we can get mind, in the functional sense, by putting cells and organisms together in a particular way; I don't believe we get consciousness by putting any of these lower holons together in a certain way. Consciousness is a separate phenomenon, transcendent to the entire hierarchy. While there are unquestionably different holarchical levels of consciousness, all of them, in my view, can be understood as holons at a particular level experiencing some portion of this total or universal consciousness. These levels of consciousness, as I discussed in Chapter 4, can be represented as a separate scale in the holarchy, as they are in Wilber's model. However, it seems simpler to me to have one scale, simply adding that holons at particular positions on this scale can experience consciousness to different degrees. I believe that this view is consistent with Wilber's position:

I'm well aware that as long as relatively few people have experienced higher consciousness, this argument may not be taken very seriously by the scientific/philosophical community. Even among those scientists and philosophers who do have some experience of higher states--and recent polls suggest there are more than a few such individuals ( )--there is often a tendency not to introduce them too seriously into discussions of our scientific worldview. Because I'm writing a book that addresses people who may not have had such experience, I have emphasized the development of reasonable criteria of evidence, based on reports that seem to have stood the test of time. I believe if we apply this evidence with caution, we can and should use these experiences to expand our understanding of lower levels of existence as well. But my own beliefs have nothing to do with this evidence. If no one else had ever experienced or written about higher consciousness, I would be not a whit less certain of its reality. Indeed, I have yet to find anyone, past or present, who shows any understanding of some of my experiences, but this has never caused me to doubt them.

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