We can now try to summarize the insights from holotropic states describing existence as a fantastic experiential adventure of Absolute Consciousness—an endless cosmic dance, exquisite play, or divine drama. In producing it, the creative principle generates from itself and within itself a countless number of individual images, split units of consciousness, that assume various degrees of relative autonomy and independence. Each of them represents an opportunity for a unique experience, an experiment in consciousness. With the passion of an explorer, scientist, and artist, the creative principle experiments with all the conceivable experiences in their endless variations and combinations.
In this divine play, Absolute Consciousness finds the possibility to express its inner richness, abundance, and immense creativity. Through its creations it experiences myriads of individual roles, encounters, intricate dramas, and adventures on all imaginable levels.
This divine play of plays ranges from galaxies, suns, orbiting planets, and moons through plants, animals, and humans to nuclear particles, atoms, and molecules. Additional dramas unfold in the archetypal realms and other dimensions of existence that are not available to our perception in our everyday state of consciousness.
In endless cycles of creation, preservation, and destruction Absolute Consciousness overcomes the feelings of monotony and transcendental boredom. The temporary negation and loss of its pristine state alternates with episodes of its rediscovery and reclaiming. The periods that are full of agony, anguish, and despair are followed by episodes of bliss and ecstatic rapture. When the original undifferentiated consciousness is regained after it was temporarily lost, it is experienced as exciting, surprising, fresh, and new. The existence of agony gives a new dimension to the experience of ecstasy, the knowledge of darkness enhances the appreciation of light, and the extent of enlightenment is directly proportionate to the depth of previous ignorance. In addition, with each excursion into phenomenal worlds followed by return, the Universal Mind is enriched by the experiences of the different roles involved. By having concretized more of its inner potential, it has augmented and deepened its self-knowledge.
For this understanding of the cosmic process it is necessary to assume that the Universal Mind consciously experiences all aspects of creation, both as objects of observation and as subjective states. It can thus explore not only the entire spectrum of specifically human perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and sensations, but also the states of consciousness of all the other life forms of the Darwinian evolutionary tree. On the level of cellular consciousness, it can experience the excitement of the sperm race and the fusion of the sperm with the egg during conception, as well as the activity of the liver cells or neurons in the brain.
Transcending the limits of the animal kingdom and expanding into the botanical world, Absolute Consciousness can become a giant sequoia tree, experience itself as a carnivorous plant catching and digesting a fly, or participate in the photosynthesis in the leaves and germination of seeds. Similarly, the phenomena in the inorganic world, from interatomic bonds through earthquakes and explosions of atomic bombs to quasars and pulsars provide interesting experiential possibilities. And since in its deepest nature our psyche is identical with Absolute Consciousness, these experiential possibilities are, under certain circumstances, open to all of us.
When we view reality from the perspective of the Universal Mind, all the usually experienced polarities are transcended. This applies to such categories as spirit-matter, stability-motion, good-evil, male-female, beauty-ugliness, or agony-ecstasy. In the last analysis, there is no absolute difference between subject and object, observer and the observed, experiencer and the experienced, creator and creation. All the roles in the cosmic drama have ultimately only one protagonist, Absolute Consciousness. This is the single most important truth about existence revealed in the ancient Indian Upanishads. In modern times, it found a beautiful artistic expression in the poem entitled “Please Call Me by My True Names” by the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn:
Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive.
Look deeply; I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.
I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive.
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when the springs comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.
I am a frog swimming happily in the clear water of a pond,
and I am the grass-snake, who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog.
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.
I am a member of the Politburo with plenty of power in my hands, And I am the the man
who has to pay his debt of blood
to my people dying slowly in a forced labor camp.
My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills all four oceans.
Please call me by my true names,
So I can hear all my cries and laughs at once, So I can see that my pain and my joy are one.
Please call me by my true names
So I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.