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Cosmic Consciousness, Transcendence and Dissociation
The following is excerpted from The Toad and The Jaguar, published by Green Earth Foundation.
The distinction between dissociation and transcendence is not always easy to make, especially for individuals with experiential background in Eastern or Western spiritual teachings. In the course of the Harvard project in the early 1960s, we experimented with DMT in the form of intra-muscular injections. While most of us found the experience to be more or less out-of-body, chaotic and dissociative, one of our visitors was an Indian with extensive experience in kundalini yoga, who after the injection assumed a seated yoga posture, closed his eyes and sat motionless and silent in deep meditative absorption for 40 minutes, thanked us and left.
Someone with little or no prior experience with meditative states or practices might simply go completely unconscious, i.e. dissociate, while those with more experience might find themselves in transcendent, out-of-body or absorptive trance states that can be only partially remembered and described afterwards. Body movements, sounds and verbal utterances that are observed by others but not remembered by the subject – also indicate dissociative disconnect, no matter how pleasurable the subjective experience. The ability to make sense of the experience would certainly be a function of having had some prior experiences of transcendent consciousness and acquaintance with the literature of meditative practices.
Stanislav Grof, a very experienced explorer of psychedelic realities, relates an experience with 5–Meo-DMT in his autobiographical book When the Impossible Happens. He smoked what he later estimated to have been 25 mg, i.e. at the high end of the dosage spectrum, unaware of the extreme potency of this substance. He describes dissociative aspects early in the experience:
I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared….The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts and my life disappeared… I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense. … There was no biographical or transpersonal content, images, archetypes… none of these dimensions seemed to exist, let alone manifest. I had no concepts, no categories for what I was witnessing.
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/08/cosmic-consciousness-transcendence-and-dissociation/
