 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
In October 1981 twenty people under the guidance of John Heron, who was then Assistant Director of the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, engaged in an Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) Research Group. This was a five-day residential workshop in the CAER programme which employed a method called ‘Cooperative Inquiry’ for researching ‘the other reality’ - a theme collectively agreed upon by the group. Several cycles of research were conducted building up to a ritual in the fogou. The results of this research were published by the Human Potential Research Project of the University of Surrey. I have drawn the following from these research findings and from my own recollections of having been part of that workshop.
Each cycle of research consisted of the group as a whole initially deciding what was going to be researched and how it was going to be done. Then the group engaged in an ‘action phase’, in which we did what we had decided to do. A ‘reflection phase’ followed in which the group examined experiences from the ‘action phase’, and also dealt with the possibility of collusion and delusion. The results of this cycle then fed into a next cycle, and so on.
Two of these cycles are of interest here. The first one generated criteria that can help in deciding whether perceptions of another reality are valid or not. The second example graphically illustrates how another reality can interface with this reality. All this is relevant, since much of this book concerns itself with perceptions of another reality.
The fogou ritual, which comprised our fourth cycle of research during the workshop, was simple. We met at an agreed location in the grounds and then proceeded in a line, chanting, into the main fogou passage, where we joined hands remaining silent and open to ‘impressions from the other reality.’ We then gathered outside the fogou on top of the creep passage whilst a member of the group offered prayers from inside the creep. Again we were silently receptive to whatever impressions wanted to come. After this we gathered in the grouproom and shared and reflected on our experiences.
People reported: ‘powerful trembling and shaking’ with energy surging through the body (6 people); ‘mental and physical cleansing (3); ‘impulses to act or move in various ways’ (8); a sense of two other presences in the other reality in fogou (2); ‘a lot going on in the other reality (2); strong images including faces in the walls of the main passage (5); ‘power’ which left people feeling ‘in awe’ and ‘positively shaken’ (many); and phrases like ‘overwhelmed’, ‘wonderful’, ‘very good feeling’, and ‘like a cool dip’ (5).
Outside the fogou four people sensed or ‘saw’ energy swirling out of the creep, like flames.
Summarising, John Heron identified five different kinds of experience:
Streaming of energy in and out of the energy field of the physical body.
‘Vision’, pictures or images - of faces, symbolic objects.
A felt sense of presences and their activities, and of subtle energies, in the other reality.
A sense of the numinous, of pervasive spiritual power.
Emotional uplift.
During the reflection phase the group members became concerned about the implicit assumption that we had been interacting with another reality at all. We decided to hold open the possibility that we were colluding with each other in order to delude ourselves and were confusing our ‘hysterically activated subjective fantasies with genuine impressions of the other reality’.
On the next day we therefore devised a ‘systematic falsification’ or ‘Devil's Advocate’ procedure to find ‘quite ordinary alternative interpretations, reducing assumed Altered States of Consciousness to somewhat pathological Ordinary States of Consciousness.’
The Devil's Advocate procedure involved each person sitting in a ‘Hot Seat’ and being challenged by other members of the group about statements that they had made about their experiences in the fogou the previous day. These statements had previously been recorded in writing. This is a brief sample:
Devil's Advocate: Your so-called ASC impressions are nothing but a form of attention-getting through promulgation of the bizarre.
Reply: This is possible; but other attention-seeking activities are less strenuous and less likely to be rejected.
Devil’s Advocate: Your so-called ASC impressions are a fantasy projection of your longing for the non-existent mystical.
Reply: I accept that some part of my experience may be just a projection of my longing; but equally such longing may exist precisely because of the reality of what is longed for.
Devil’s Advocate: Your so-called ASC impressions are nothing but unexplored aspects of your psyche projected out and sucked into the mass delusion under which some of you people in Cornwall operate.
Reply: I accept this as a possibility.
Devil’s Advocate: Your images of a warrior and a guardian are a displacement of your denied rage.
Reply: I am in touch with my rage; I have had no such images prior to the procession; I did not identify and do not identify with the warrior trip.
Devil’s Advocate: Your images of swords are but a projection of your psychological armouring and rigidity together with blocked sexual energy.
Reply: I am not heavily armoured, having worked on it a lot; and I am in touch with my sexual energy.
Devil’s Advocate: You are not in touch with another reality, you are just unable to cope with this reality.
Reply: I do not accept your dichotomy: there is only one comprehensive reality.
Devil’s Advocate: Your feeling of cleansing in the fogou is nothing to do with being psychic or having an ASC: it is entirely a physiological response to the physical conditions, as in any damp cave.
Reply: But I have been in other damp caves in which I have not experienced any kind of cleansing of this sort.’
This is a tiny extract from a process that lasted a whole day. It was a valuable process because it highlighted the possibilities of mixing up ‘impressions of the other reality’ with the ‘projection of purely psychological material’. It also pointed to the possibility that ‘emotional longing for the other reality may be part of the evidence for it’. It seemed, too, that explaining away the other reality is often ‘less plausible than the assertion of its existence’.
Out of the Devil’s Advocate process we evolved a set of criteria to help distinguish ‘genuine impressions of the other reality’ from ‘purely subjective illusions’. The criteria, which have ‘interlocking support for each other’ were as follows:
Agreement: two or more persons have the same or similar impressions of the other reality.
Heterogeneity: the occurrence and the compatibility of very different sorts of impressions of the other reality, both serially and simultaneously, both in one person and in several.
Synchronicity: simultaneously occurring impressions of the other reality are meaningful in the same or in a similar way to two or more persons.
Spontaneity: impressions of the other reality often come unbidden; and the recipient did not want or intend to produce them in the way in which they occurred.
Independence: impressions of the other reality have a life of their own and they are not amenable to manipulation and interference, while their content may be unexpected and surprising.
Spatial reference: impressions of the other reality have reference to ‘locations out there’ in a subtle and profoundly extensive ‘space’ that is somehow within physical space.
‘...Taking all these six criteria together and applying them to the manifold experiential data... in the fogou, then there is a prima facie empirical warrant for saying that there were presences active in terms of subtle energy... within the physical space in and around the fogou during the time of our ritual activity there, and that what they were doing was potent, uplifting and energising for many of us human beings present.’
A further research cycle developed out of an incident which occurred spontaneously on the day following the fogou ritual. This incident involved something in ‘another reality’ entering this reality with effects which were observed by several people. Putting it another way, the Universe presented us with an opportunity for testing our criteria.
We were working with some of the feelings that were coming up for people as a result of the research group. This was an agreed and necessary part of our agenda, to ensure the smooth flow of our inquiry. A group member was working on present feelings which took her into a ‘past-life experience’. She returned from this journey with an imagined sword, which she ‘passed’ around the group. The ‘sword’ was ceremonially handed from person to person. As each person took it and weighed it, or saluted with it, or otherwise flourished it, the imaginary sword, from the ‘other reality’ seemed to take on more of a presence in ‘this reality’. David’s German Shepherd dog, Rosie, entered the room just as the sword was handed back to the original group member. She offered it to Rosie, blade first. Rosie, sniffing, examined a point in space where the sword tip would have been, then pulled back sharply with a snarl as if she had been pricked on the nose. Rosie’s response was more than just surprise at nothing being there. She behaved as if she had been hurt and kept a wary distance.
The group was impressed with this, and decided that the sword needed to be disposed of in some appropriate way. The woman who had found it then ‘placed’ it in a mirror on the wall. All this is documented in John Heron’s report. What followed later is not documented because it happened a week later.
Immediately following the research group, we had another workshop which at one point also used the mirror. This was unusual in itself, because it was the only other time that the mirror had been used in a group. Because it was a different group, nobody knew about the sword. The group took the mirror down, propped it on the floor, and each person interacted with their reflection. The mirror, it seems, spontaneously smashed.
A rational explanation of the whole sword affair would go something like this: Rosie the dog was hypnotised into believing in the existence of a sword by the group’s shared fantasy. The mirror smashed because someone dislodged it. There is no connection between these events. No sword was present in this, or in any other, reality. There is no ‘other reality’, only this one.
An alternative explanation might go: The sword had a reality in some part of the woman’s unconscious. A sword is an archetypal image that is part of the collective unconscious and was therefore also meaningful to the group. The combined energies of the group brought the sword to a point of embodiment below the threshold of human perception, but above the perceptual threshold of a dog. Rosie was hurt in her energy body. Partly embodied artefacts from the ‘other reality’ are dangerous. The ‘other reality’ summoned the next group to smash the mirror.
References: John Heron. Cooperative Inquiry into Altered States of Consciousness. Human Potential Research Project, Department of Educational Studies, University of Surrey, in association with the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, University of London, March 1984. And in Peter Reason (Ed) Human Inquiry in Action, Developments in New Paradigm Research. Chap 9, Impressions of the Other Reality. Sage 1988.
Fogou, A Journey Into The Underworld. Jo May. Gothic Image. 1996.
Contact Jo May-Prussak for copies of “Fogou”. £6.95 inc p&p.