EHEs serve as a means of moving the experiencer away from a more or less
exclusive identification with a self bounded by the skin and thought of
as separate from others and everything else (what Alan Watts called
"the skin-encapsulated ego") to an awareness of a Self that is
All Things, or what I call the All-Self. Exceptional human experiences
indicate that there may be a continuum of consciousness between these
two extremes of identity, and their import often is to move us toward
firsthand experience of the All-Self. Both senses of self are needed,
but exclusive identification with one or the other diminishes one's
quality of life. Ideally, one should be aware of both and not
exclusively identified with either. Perhaps because Western civilization
is based almost entirely on the conception of the separate
skin-encapsulated ego-self, we in the West have lost our awareness of
and become dissociated from the All-Self, except for special moments.
These "special moments" are exceptional experiences; through
cultivating them, we can once more achieve the frequent or even constant
awareness of the All-Self to complement the ego-self. (To be more
accurate, in as many different ways as there are individual humans, each
person increasingly reflects the All-Self in his or her way of life.
This is a basic tenet of the world’s religions, but it is basic EHE
psychology. It is also the subject matter of transpersonal psychology.)
Initially, a person experiences a spontaneous anomalous experience.
"Anomalous" implies that the experience is unexpected
according to standard Western science. It does not commit to any
particular type of explanation. Labeling an experience as
"anomalous" often results in its not being considered as part
of consensus reality. It is then neglected and forgotten, and anyone who
says they have had one is often laughed at and considered deluded.
Thus,
at this first stage, the anomalous experience, whether it be perceptual,
cognitive, or behavioral, originates outside the mainstream of the
experiencer’s ordinary conscious awareness or self-concept. At this
stage the experience is only an anomalous experience. Often it goes no
further. Because it is an anomaly, it is simply dismissed.
Some who have an
anomalous experience feel singled out by it in a personal way. At the
least, the experience seems personally very special and meaningful.
This
may be the beginning of the turn from a simple anomalous experience to
an exceptional experience (EE), which is a stage in the development of
an exceptional human experience. Those who are unable to make the
progression to an exceptional human experience may panic and ask,
"Why did this happen to me?" -- as if the sky had fallen upon
them. They tend to find life-depotentiating ways to distance themselves
from the experience and exclude it from their lives except as a
curiosity they cannot entirely forget. Those who respond in a life-potentiating
way are bolstered by this feeling of being singled out (although they
may well be frightened by it as well) and begin to weave it into their
life narrative. In Frontiers of the Soul, Grosso (Quest, 1992) writes:
"An extraordinary experience can be an ally or an enemy. ...
Whether
we advance or retreat ... depends on an act of our imagination, on the way
we see the pattern, on the meaning we take from the experience" (p.
224).
The experiencer
also tries to apply various ordinary explanations to the experience, but
it resists all attempts to explain it away. Here "ordinary"
refers to the assumptions of the ruling Western paradigm, so basically
this means one must be able to rule out all sensory cues as well as the
possibility of rational inference in trying to account for the
experience. Thus, it becomes an EE: the experiencer admits to him- or
herself that this anomalous experience or else anomaly of experience
actually happened in his or her case. (An anomaly of experience is a
"personal first" or a "personal best" in the
experiencer’s life that goes beyond the previous limits of their
experience.) Of course, coincidence can never be ruled out, and the
point at which one decides an experience can be passed off as "mere
coincidence" or "dumb luck" is a matter of personal
disposition, although in the case of extrasensory perception,
precognition, and psychokinesis, experimental parapsychology can provide
specific probabilities of the occurrence of each. An experiencer must
also consider various forms of self-delusion.
If the experience
withstands examination in Condition 3, the experiencer can only conclude
that it was genuine in terms of his or her own private experience of
reality up to this point. In other words, the experience seems as real
as any other life experience, in spite of its exceptional features.
As mainstream
Western culture rejects such experiences, experiencers at the EE stage
tend to feel separated from the conventional view of reality, and they
are afraid of what others would think about them if they knew about
their experiences. Nonetheless, they resolve to include the EE in their
personal life stories. This is an early stage in distancing from the
ego-self by holding to the conviction that the experience in fact did
happen even if it contradicts the prevailing worldview. Here the
ego-self plays a pivotal role, because bolstered by the conviction
provided by the All-Self, it nonetheless is the ego that chooses to
believe in the experience rather than give in to consensus reality and
dismiss it.
In spite of the
sense of estrangement, the experience begins to work in the experiencer
like yeast in flour. It is almost as though the experience has altered
one’s being or shifted it in some way so that one’s attention is
moved to a new angle, and the "I" that sees, thinks, and
experiences is wider, deeper, fuller, and altogether more than the
person was aware of before the experience. Thus, the experience itself
to some extent distances one from the ego-self. As the experiencer
begins to respond constructively to the cognitive dissonance that is
created between the prevailing worldview, which says the experience
could not occur, and his or her conviction that it did, by continuously
affirming that the experience happened (as opposed to suppressing the
experience or belittling and dismissing it), the seemingly anomalous
event alters the daily life and consciousness of the experiencer. The
experiencer becomes aware of being tuned in, at special moments, to what
is experienced phenomenologically as a "different frequency."
A sense of peace and of the rightness of the world counteracts the sense
of discord between what is happening to the ego-self and the promptings
of the exceptional experience.
The experiencer
becomes more dissociated from the ego-self and begins to associate more
to the All-Self. Awareness of the latter is sometimes palpable and can
be turned to at will. A potentially long-term process has been initiated
that can eventually partly or fully transform the experiencer’s
identity and worldview in a direction that is outside consensus reality
but is more fully human. This transformation not only involves
self-actualization but also an experienced connectedness with the
All-Self, including other humans, life forms, the earth, and the cosmos.
One could say that the person has gained a sense that "the personal
is the cosmic." It is because these experiences, when one accepts
them and changes sufficiently to assimilate them, help experiencers to
reach their fuller human potential that one can call them exceptional
human experiences. Experiencers become more human than they were before
they had the EHE.*
[The] EHE
that initially calls one out is often synonymous with a sense of
vocation. This type of experience can be an EHE in itself, but it may
also be a component of many EHEs. It is as if before one has an EHE one
is a seeker; afterward one is a finder. Having contacted what William
James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, called one’s "higher
part that is conterminous and continuous with a MORE [his emphasis]
which is operative in the universe outside" (p. 499), answers start
coming not only from within but from without. One finds oneself immersed
in a vast reciprocal process that is experienced as both inside and
outside. (This makes sense as the All-Self is both inside and outside.)
Sometimes the experiences that come from outside and some of those from
within are additional EHEs, and the former, especially, reassure the
experiencer that something genuine is taking place and that he or she is
not simply deluded. Moreover, there sometimes are witnesses to these
additional EHEs, if not the first one.
These additional
experiences and their confirmation by others over a period of time give
the experiencer the sense that a path is opening up, and his or her
resolve is then increased not only to recall the initial experience and
follow it but to try to discover the path indicated by the subsequent
experiences, and if possible, never to lose sight of it. This process,
which I call the EHE
process, becomes not only personally but socially
meaningful, because it leads to changes in the way the person lives his
or her life, and this affects an increasingly larger circle of people.
Experiencers begin to meet many new people who have had a glimpse of the
All-Self, which increases their conviction of being on the right path,
and earlier relationships with persons who are totally identified with
the ego-self may fall away.
But though many
are called, not everyone chooses to follow unequivocally. To distance
oneself nearly totally from one’s identification with the ego-self can
be harrowing. It is as if one were being asked to step off a cliff with
no certainty as to how far one might fall. The life-potentiating wonder
of this fateful step is expressed beautifully by NDEer Anne Kahn. Following a car wreck in which she nearly died, she recalls that
"at the bleakest moment I was given this poem: When you come to the
edge of all your light and know that you must step forward, you also
know one of two things must happen. Either you will be given support, or
taught how to fly."
Once one makes
this leap, the die has been cast. It will no longer be possible to
identify solely with the ego-self. It will often recede from awareness,
as one is drawn ever more strongly, often by means of additional
exceptional human experiences, to the warmth, light, and certitude of
the All-Self, which by definition brings one to an awareness of one’s
interconnectedness with all things: all aspects of one’s self, other
people, animals, plants -- even the mineral kingdom and the Earth itself,
and beyond, the cosmos. And living in this knowledge, the way EHEers
live their lives change as well, but that is another
story.
This is based in
part on a chapter by the author titled "Dissociation, Narrative,
and Exceptional Human Experiences" written for Broken Images,
Broken Selves (Brunner/Mazel, 1997), edited by Stanley Krippner and
Susan M. Powers. See also the articles by White and Brown under EHE
Process [[on www.ehe.org]].
--
*Any
color shift, aside from links to other pages, is added highlight /
emphasis by R. Rocamora.
