Consciousness that Transcends Spacetime:

its Significance for the Therapeutic Process

Dr. Andrew Powell

Introduction
Psychoanalytical therapy is tied to a metapsychology that has shown
little interest in developments in science over the last 50 years. This is
regrettable since, in consequence, certain crucial experiences that patients
bring to the consulting room are not often given the attention and meaning
they deserve.
I want to describe a new frame of reference that has become available
to us, which holds profound implications for humankind. Ironically,
psychoanalysis has given us some valuable signposts and yet the study of the
signposts seems to have become more important than taking the journey to
new places.
In the first part of the paper, I will set out some theoretical principles
that should help to throw light on the discussion of clinical cases that follow.

Where is Mind?
The assumption we usually make is that mind is located somewhere
behind the eyes and between the ears. This is not just because the brain
resides there, but also because input from the special sense organs enters
through apertures in the skull. Even if we question whether mind is actually
inside the head, we do generally house it within the body. It is an awareness
that begins when the baby puts it finger first in its own mouth and then its
mother’s mouth, registering the difference between the one-sided and two-
sided sensations. Later, looking in a mirror, especially a whole length one, the
child is amazed to see himself from the outside, and to be able to experience
himself as subject and object at the same time.
All this supports the common-sense notion that there is a subjective,
inner world within, experienced as me, and an objective reality out there,
which comprises everything and everyone else. The external world is
assumed to exist independently but consciousness, as the indispensable
function of mind, is needed to illuminate it, like a torch shining in the dark. So,
we all go about like torches, or to put it physiologically, as organisms able to
translate the vibrations which variously impact on our special sense organs as
light, sound, smell, taste and touch. Integrating these sensations enables us
to build up a picture of a solid and enduring external world.
This is the Newtonian worldview, where mathematical laws apply with
exactitude to the relationships of objects within the physical universe. It is also
a world in which cause precedes effect and time is the axis down which one
follows the other. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the clock is
steadily winding down. All processes, large and small, must eventually submit
to the arrow of time. It can only fly in the one direction – towards the heat
death of the Universe, calculated to occur in about one hundred billion years
time 1.
I need not labour this realist point of view, in which we are nothing but
players on the stage of life, seemingly arriving out of nowhere and going
nowhere except into death. While we are here, we can witness the miracle of

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existence but there is nothing real beyond the substance of the physical
universe, of which our brains are a part.
In such a world, where does mind fit in? The giants of the early
Renaissance took the dualist position. Rene Descartes saw the mind as
existing independently of geometrical categories and as evidence of the
workings of God. He is reputed to have said ‘without the soul there is no
consciousness’. Isaac Newton, too, was a deeply religious man, whose
researches were profoundly shaped by mystical reverie. But during the ‘Age of
Enlightenment’ that followed, Newton’s discoveries were taken to mean that
we live in a mechanical universe, one in which God, if he had any part to play,
was consigned to winding up the universe like a giant clock 2.
The current materialist scientific position is to dispose of the Divine
altogether. Consciousness is seen as a by-product of evolution, serving the
needs of the selfish gene and nothing but a remarkable epiphenomenon of
the brain. The findings of positron emission tomography, in which specific
areas of the brain light up when different thoughts and emotions are
experienced, are taken to substantiate this view.
But this does not mean that the brain generates mind. PET scan
findings can be equally well be interpreted as correlation effects. Further, no
one as yet has been able to explain how something non-material like mind
can be created by something of itself material. While most neuroscientists
hold that the best thing is to keep chipping away at brain function, there
remains an unavoidable problem. The ‘objective’ world out there can only be
known the agency of the mind, through the lens of subjectivity. Reality can
never be a thing apart from the measuring instrument. More than that, the
advent of quantum theory in the twentieth century has shed new light on this
conundrum, for it would now appear that the seemingly solid and real
objective world is actually created by our consciousness. The world is not as it
is, it is as we are! The whole thing is determined by the collapse of the wave
function, about which I’ll be saying more.

Freud and Jung

Sigmund Freud’s great discovery was to realize how much of
perceptual reality is shaped by the content of our projections, and to be able
to trace their source. He showed that mind is busy constructing a world out of
impulses, fears and desires, even though it may consciously know surprisingly
little about them. While Freud was unaware of the implications of quantum
theory, he intuited what the new physics was later to reveal – there is no such
thing as reality that stands apart from the observer.
At the same time, Freud’s early work, ‘Project for a scientific
psychology’ 3 reveals that he aimed to make psychoanalysis a science and,
not surprisingly, his aspirations were entirely in line with the prevailing
Newtonian paradigm. (Freud considered religion to be a neurosis and
analysed mystical experiences reductively as a regression to the oceanic
stage of infant narcissism.) As a result, psychoanalysis has been left with a
concept of mind that has shied away from the discoveries of post-Newtonian
science. Yet the very language of psychoanalysis suggests we are dealing all
the time with energies having more substance to them than mere metaphors.
For instance, we speak of anger that has been split off and projected. Such
talk is basic to the lexicon of object-relations theory. But what kind of
substance is this anger that can apparently be evacuated from one person’s
psyche and lodged somewhere else? How does it in some mysterious way get

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out from inside, across space and into another body/mind? How is it possible
to bypass cognition such that the disowned feeling is experienced as arising,
de novo, within the other?
Unlike Freud, Carl Jung postulated a Self that was unconfined by the
personal, in line with his sense of the deep connectedness between all things.
Throughout his life, Jung sought to accommodate supernatural and
extrasensory phenomena and was intrigued by the psychophysical
implications of quantum theory 4,5. Now that quantum theory is beginning to
make a wider impact, Jung’s ideas, having been relegated to the back shelf by
much of the psychotherapy community, are coinciding with advances in
consciousness studies.

Delimiting Mind
Analytical psychotherapy makes certain assumptions about the nature
of consciousness and its substrata, providing a rich framework of meaning but
also seriously limiting the field of exploration. In summary:

1. Mind has a conscious aspect, the waking state, characterised by a

rich fantasy life, capacity for reflection and insight, ego-adaptive
behaviour and creativity. But no less important is the unconscious
aspect of mind, revealed in dreams and through the analysis of its
defensive operations. In both cases, the search for meaning is
confined to the narrative of this one life, from birth to the present,
extending, of course, to all the intimate and social relationships that
have been formed and lived.

2. Mind is the property of the individual, each person being regarded

as (more or less) in possession of his or her own mind. Thoughts
and feelings are communicated by means of verbal or non-verbal
signals, coupled with the necessary capacity for empathic
identification by the receiver.

3. It is, however, recognised that one mind can affect another in

strange ways, especially with regard to unconscious processes.
Object-relations theory describes this by way of concretised
metaphors, projection, introjection, splitting and so on.

4. The focus of work is on the analysis of unconscious projections

through the interpretation of the transference. Attempts by the
patient to extend the relationship to the extra-transferential arena
are viewed with suspicion and are fended off or dealt with by further
interpretation of the transference.

5. Key existential questions like ‘why are we here?’ ‘What is it all for?’
‘Is there any ultimate purpose?’ ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Is there more than
this one life?’ have to be addressed as defences against the pain of
psychic reality, re-framed in terms of problematical personal
histories or taken as irreducible existential concerns, ultimately
outside the scope of the therapy.

For the therapist to participate in such discussion, there would be a significant

impact on the transference, since any shared speculation about these ultimate

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questions would be revealing of the therapist’s inner world. Yet the therapeutic
situation is extraordinarily intimate and where the therapist is open to such
questions, they frequently arise. More than that, when the therapist is
comfortable with such intimacy, strange coincidences can occur, going way
beyond what would be regarded as normal by consensus reality. Let me start
with one such instance 6.

Transcending space
I had been supervising a trainee psychiatrist with her first
psychotherapy patient, a young woman named Gillian. Gillian longed for
closeness but was deeply mistrustful of intimacy. The therapist was naturally
intuitive and open with her patient and helped her overcome her fears. With
the support of the therapist, Gillian decided to trace her birth mother, whom
she had never known. She followed up various leads only to discover that her
mother had died a year or two earlier. It was a bitter blow but she took it well.
A couple of weeks later, my trainee attended for supervision. She
seemed flustered and somewhat embarrassed. She said, ‘I want to tell you
something, you’ll probably think its stupid of me’. She went on to say that on
the previous Sunday, which she had been spending at home with her family,
she had suddenly experienced a terrible sadness. It came on inexplicably at
three in the afternoon and she could not shake it off. Then at about six o’clock
the feeling vanished as quickly as it had come.
On Monday, she saw her patient Gillian who told her that since the last
session, she had found out that her mother had been buried in a London
cemetery and that on Sunday she had gone there to try to find her. For hours
she had searched in vain but at three pm. she had found the grave and had
spent the next three hours there, crying for the mother she had never known.

Non-local consciousness
What are we to make of this? We could just call it coincidence, which
pre-supposes that events are random and their concurrence takes place by
chance. In the Western world, we view a good deal of life in this way. In
China, on the other hand, it has been a fundamental principle of Daoism for
2,500 years that all events everywhere are understood to be interconnected,
down to the smallest detail – that we are all of us participants in this ocean of
the unseen, which moves us every bit as much as we like to think we move it.
We may maintain the illusion of separateness but ultimately, the observer and
the observed are one 7.
Daoism holds that the more we set aside the strident imperatives of the
ego, the more sensitive we become to the interconnectedness of all things.
States of reverie, reflection and meditation, when the noisy mind is stilled, re-
awaken our capacity to attune to the whole. A different order of consciousness
becomes available. At its most perfect, it is known in the Buddhist and Hindu
traditions as samadhi, a state of oneness in which space and time dissolve
such that words cannot describe.
Probably few psychotherapists regard themselves as mystics. But
maintaining free-floating attention, and the avoidance of memory and desire,
as Wilfred Bion advised 8, brings us to the threshold of this unitive state of
consciousness. There is a reversal of the usual figure/ground constellation for
instead of the ego being to the fore, primary attention is being given to the
ground of being, which is something sensed rather than cognised.

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 Let us consider the case study again. Could the close rapport between
patient and therapist have brought into play an unusual sensitivity of the non-
local kind, an instance of the so-called paranormal known as telepathy?
In the West, the scientific community has had such a vested interest in
upholding material realism that parapsychological research had to struggle for
decades to overcome the prejudice. However, experiments by J. B. Rhine at
Duke University in the 30’s paved the way for what is now a vast body of
evidence for the occurrence of extra-sensory perception, using the random
controlled trials beloved by statisticians. Clairvoyance, clairsentience,
telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, psychokinesis and healing have all
been subjected to experimental validation. 9
Looked at from the Newtonian perspective, these findings are
profoundly counter-intuitive but there are new scientific paradigms to which we
can turn, starting with the discoveries of Albert Einstein.

Surpassing the Newtonian worldview

In 1905 Einstein formulated the Special Theory of Relativity. This
theory was founded on two postulates, first that all motion is relative and
second, that the speed of light is always recorded as being the same.
The theory says that if I as the observer were to watch you accelerate
towards the speed of light, your clock would slow down relative to mine.
Further, the length of your spaceship would progressively contract, while its
mass would be increasing, until finally, since mass and energy are
exchangeable (E = mc²), if you went on to attain the speed of light, your mass
would become infinite.
In 1917, Einstein went on to publish his General Theory of Relativity.
He proposed that stars and planets, having mass, bent the very substance of
spacetime. Newton's famous apple falls to earth not on account of a
mysterious force called gravity but because it rolls into the local space-time
‘well’ created by the earth. Space tells matter how to move, while matter tells
space how to curve. This is a far cry from the world of our sense perceptions,
of stars and planets suspended motionless in infinite space.
Einstein was now in a position to consider what it would be like to be a
ray of light passing from the sun to the earth. At the speed of light, length in
the direction of travel shrinks to zero, as does time also. Therefore, from the
point of view of the light ray, it goes no distance in zero time. Without time and
distance, the concept of speed is meaningless. It is only from our position as
observers that light from the sun takes around 8 minutes to travel the 93
million miles to the earth.
In other words, it is the very act of our observing this light ray travelling
from the sun to earth that draws it out into the dimensions we know as space
and time. Space and time are not things in themselves but are created by the
observer 1.
We now have reason to believe we are living in a multidimensional
universe. String theory suggests that our four-dimensional spacetime unfolded
out of a plurality of other dimensions, most of which don’t occupy spacetime
like ours, yet are interpenetrating our world. Sub-atomic particles constantly flit
between universes. In particular, the 11th dimension is thought to be infinitely
long but existing only about one trillionth of a millimetre distant from every
point in our spacetime. Within it are thought to exist an infinite number of
parallel universes.

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 If we take off our Newtonian glasses, we can look at mind in a new
light. The brain, having mass, is anchored in local spacetime but the mind,
having no mass, has no such limitations. And since quantum physics deals
with events in which properties of mass are negligible, it makes good sense to
go there for the next clue.

Mind and the quantum domain

In 1947 a landmark experiment in the non-local nature of
consciousness was carried out 10. Research under conditions of sensory
shielding demonstrated that the electroecephalograms of two people who
were empathically attuned showed synchronisation, no matter that they were
now placed in different buildings. An evoked potential in the first EEG, caused
by a flash of light, instantaneously produced a transferred potential
interrupting the alpha rhythm of the second EEG.
Then, in 1965, research on two pairs of identical twins showed that eye
closure in one (stimulating alpha rhythm) instantly induced alpha rhythm in the
brain of the other 11.
As yet, there was no explanation for such extraordinary findings, but in
1982 physicists found that particles such as electrons can communicate
instantaneously with each other regardless of the distance, be they one metre
or a million miles apart, provided the particles shared at the outset what is
called quantum entanglement. And instantaneous means just that - there is no
transmission time taken; the communication takes place outside of spacetime.
For identical twins, coming from the same fertilised ovum, quantum
entanglement is indeed how life begins. Indeed, the experiment on sensory
shielding suggests that empathic attunement between two people is sufficient
to generate quantum entanglement. In 1992, further research on brain wave
correlations showed that these effects also take place instantaneously, just as
with electrons 12. So we can fairly say that in the fields of both particle physics
and consciousness research, the conventional rules of space and time have
been superseded.

The quantum paradigm

Pivotal to quantum theory is the Wheeler delayed-choice experiment,
which shows that light behaves both as wave and particle, depending entirely
on the mindset of the experimenter. There is simply no fixed objective state,
as Newtonian physics pre-supposed.
This uncertainty characterises quantum mechanics. An electron does
not ‘hop’ from one orbit to another around the nucleus like a spinning billiard
ball as was once thought. Instead, it exists in the virtual state as a probability
wave spread throughout all of space. The electron only manifests in its space-
time location when a conscious observer makes the measurement. This is
known as the collapse of the wave. And there is only a statistical probability
that the electron will appear where you expect it to be. It may just materialise
hundreds, thousands or even millions of miles away. When it does so, it
materialises in zero time.
Such fundamental non-locality reveals the breathtaking
interconnectedness of the cosmos. The physicist David Bohm coined the term
‘Holoverse’ in which, he said, ‘the entire universe has to be thought of as an
unbroken whole’ 13. In it, space and time are manifestations of what Bohm
calls the ‘explicate’ order, no more than one special case within a generality of
implicate orders that enfold. More extraordinary still, while the human mind, as

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we know it, requires to be enfolded in physical reality, at the same time it
appears to enfold and contain the totality, just like a hologram. This is known
as a tangled hierarchy.
When consciousness collapses the wave function, mind and matter
arise simultaneously, like two sides of one coin. According to the quantum
physicist Amit Goswami, in doing so, the brain-mind combines Newtonian and
quantum properties 14. Its classical Newtonian function generates the
subjective world of sense perception that obeys the law of cause and effect,
gives us linear time and provides us with memories, a personal history and a
stable identity. However, this is contingent on the wave function collapsing in
line with the maximum probability according to all the countless collapses that
have previously taken place. The physical world has structural stability
because the probability wave has been generated by millions of individual
consciousnesses pooled together over time. Yet since the wave contains, in
potentium, all that was, is and ever shall be, there is in theory no limit to what
is possible. For instance, we know that healing by remote intention, or prayer,
does really work, as shown in a replicated random controlled trial on recovery
in intensive care units 15,16.
We now have a paradigm that addresses the old problem of mind/body
dualism. It is not a case of either/or but both/and. Our universe started with
the quantum entanglement we call the Big Bang, since when everything (and
everyone) is connected to everything else. Millisecond by millisecond,
consciousness repeatedly collapses the wave, breaking the entanglement and
precipitating a physical reality composed of time, space, and objects with
mass. But the mind itself, unbounded by sense perception, travels freely
beyond spacetime. While some people have exceptional powers of
extrasensory perception, everyone can become more sensitive to this function
when the signal to noise ratio is amplified by stilling the constant flow of
thoughts.

Implications for psychotherapy

I’ll now discuss some implications for clinical work, and look at how the
therapeutic arena enlarges when transpersonal aspects of consciousness are
included:

Energy depletion
Psychotherapists know well how some sessions can leave you
exhausted. From the quantum point of view this is not surprising. The
empathic rapport sought by the therapist provides exactly the right conditions
for quantum entanglement. Where there is an energy imbalance, the wave
repeatedly collapses in favour of the patient’s needs. The therapist soon gets
depleted, just like a battery going flat. The phenomenon is well known in
Qigong circles. The more depleted a person’s subtle energy or qi, the more
they tend to latch onto someone with stronger qi 7. Just as water flows
downhill, the gradient of the qi will always flow from high to low unless special
precautions are taken. Otherwise the depressed patient goes off with a spring
in his step leaving the therapist slumped in his chair!
At first sight, managing this would seem to be difficult to reconcile with
the empathic receptiveness needed for the therapeutic interaction. However,
at the level of subtle energies the solution is straightforward. As soon as the
therapist becomes aware of what is going on, he needs to draw down qi from
the universal energy field and compassionately re-direct it, through himself as

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a conduit, to the patient. The universal energy field is limitless, unlike one’s
own personal supply.

Toxic projections
Here, the therapist has to deal with something more damaging than
energy depletion, which is the impact of negative projections, frequently
intensified by the transference. Psychotherapists are trained to maximise their
sensitivity to their patients, to take on board these projections, contain them,
analyse them and then, hopefully, find a way to return them to the patient in a
form that will assist with integration of the psyche. But few psychotherapists
know about the need for psychic protection. Without understanding this, they
put themselves at risk.
From the quantum point of view, remember that there is no inside and
outside - these are simply constructs of spacetime. Projections don’t actually
travel anywhere, for everything is already everywhere. And so the minds of
therapist and patient share the wave function until collapse of the wave.
Where there is a pathological need to split off and project, the wave will
predominantly collapse in favour of the patient’s defensive need, resulting in
the unwary therapist becoming a ready vessel for negative affects.
In healing and spiritualist circles, the need for psychic protection is well
known. Failure to attend to this can cause anxiety and depression, as well as
all kinds of somatic reactions: headaches, weakness, heart, chest, abdominal
and pelvic symptoms. To avoid falling ill, healers invoke protection and there
are many ways to do this: asking for divine or angelic assistance or bringing
down white light, for instance. All thought forms are regarded as having real,
though subtle, substance, and while even the most toxic projections can be
viewed with understanding and compassion, it is not helpful to ‘contain’ them
at the expense of one’s own health. They need gently deflecting away to a
safe place. One approach is to regard everything in the universe as having its
part to play in the totality, and so the negative thought form is sent, with love,
to ‘its rightful place in the universe’, wherever that may be.

Higher state of consciousness

In analytical treatments, the therapeusis takes place in ordinary waking
consciousness and any heightened or unusual state of awareness tends to be
treated with suspicion. While pathology does always need to be considered,
from the transpersonal perspective there is another crucial possibility – that a
profound oneness with the cosmos is taking place. When this happens, it is
not something to be tackled reductively but honoured as the breakthrough to a
raised level of consciousness17.
In the esoteric tradition, opening to oneness is the work of the upper
chakras. It is essential that the patient is securely ‘earthed’ through the
function of the lower chakras, otherwise there is the danger of a psychotic
reaction 18. But from the soul perspective, we knew the loving embrace of the
universe long before we were ever held in our mother’s arms. Once born, we
re-discover in human form what we already knew, before our minds became
embodied 19. This is the guiding function of the archetypes. Jung was
prompted to write ‘Life is a touchstone for the truth of the spirit’ 20.
Experiencing the whole is to know forever something greater than the sum of
the parts. Like returning from the near-death experience, the parts never look
quite the same again.

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The group matrix
As a group analyst, I have been intrigued by the way group processes
take place within a transpersonal matrix, which at times behaves like a
quantum field 21. I am convinced that the group as a whole acquires an
energetic identity, a morphic field, to use Rupert Sheldrake’s term 22, to which
everyone in the group gives, and from which everyone takes. The field
maintains its energetic presence between group meetings and not surprisingly
becomes a highly charged transference object.
Every group has its own distinctive character, but all groups that are
well managed have one thing in common; the wisdom of the group proves
greater than the sum of the individuals in it. Therapeutic groups instinctively
take the form of the mandala, a circle representing the archetype of
wholeness. There can never be neutrality to this archetype. People are either
afraid of the negative pole, fearing to be swallowed up and to lose their
individuality, or desirous of merging with, and being nourished by the
mysterium tremendum, as Jung called it.
We are all endlessly oscillating between particle and wave, so to
speak, and the matrix of the group allows us to explore the richness of this
figure/ground reversal – at one moment having the group to the fore, and in
the next, retrieving one’s individual sense of self. The group is a microcosm of
the cosmic totality. Out of the quantum entanglement comes, with each
collapse of the wave, an endless series of rebirths. As Buddhism teaches, this
arises in a ceaseless, moment-by-moment, renewal of consciousness.

The transience of death

Joan came to see me after the death of her husband Ted, having
nursed him through a long and debilitating illness. They had been together
some forty years and her loss left her stricken with grief. Each new day was a
living nightmare. She continually felt Ted's presence around the house but it
only brought her pain. Yes, it was possible that life after death continued on in
same way, but how could that help her now?
I asked Joan if she would like to try to make contact with Ted in a way
that might help bring her peace of mind. At my suggestion she shut her eyes,
relaxed, and I encouraged her to ‘find’ Ted wherever he might be. After a
couple of minutes, a faint smile played on her lips and I asked Joan what she
could see. She replied that she could see Ted in his cricket whites playing
cricket and looking very fit and happy. Then a look of deep sadness passed
over her face. I asked whether she would like to speak with Ted and she
nodded. So l suggested she now walk up to him and see what might happen.
After a moment, Joan said that she was standing next to him and he had put
his arm around her. What was he saying? He was saying ‘Don't worry,
everything is going to be all right.’ I asked Joan to look around her. Was there
anyone else present? Then she could see her deceased sister and parents
smiling and waving to her 19.
This simple example, which is capable of interpretation at many levels,
illustrates how one’s perspective changes when a larger frame of reference is
experienced. There are beginnings and endings, but they are felt to be part of
a journey in which this existence is but one short stop. It is not a question of
denying loss, but integrating it into the greater flow of life 18.

Soul awareness
Carol’s story had been one of terrible abuse and hardship and for many

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years she had taken refuge in alcohol. During the first interview, I encouraged
her to look inside herself and tell me what she found there.
What Carol saw was ‘her heart beating so hard it could burst’. What did
she want to do with it? She put it to rest in a silk lined coffin, saying ‘only
death will bring it peace’. But then after a moment the heart transformed into a
little whirligig of energy. It would not be trapped but flew about the room. So
she released it and watched it fly away.
Images of the soul are incapable of death. After all, the soul is our
personal quotient of eternal and infinite consciousness. But Carol was not
ready or able to harness her soul for her own benefit. She did not take up the
offer of therapy, which would have meant abstaining from alcohol.
Nearly four years later Carol came to see me again, in the meantime
having faced up to her drinking. This time, she went inside herself, into a dark
cave, where she found a treasure chest. I asked if she could pick up the
treasure chest and see if there was any way out. She put it under her arm and
soon found an archway and went through. Now she found herself in a sandy
desert, by a pool of water and some trees. She sat by the water, resting
peacefully and said with a sigh, ‘This is for me!’ (All her life she has rushed
around trying to please others). Did she want a drink? She drank deeply of the
cool fresh water. Now where did she need to go? She immediately found
herself back home, still holding the treasure chest, studded with jewels and
very beautiful. She placed it on the floor in the middle of the room. Following
this session, therapy was offered and accepted.

Working with the Higher Self

I saw a young man who had suffered great distress as a teenager. At
the time, he had been encouraged to seek guidance from a priest, with
disastrous results. The priest was untrained in psychotherapy but took it on
himself to convince Roger, as I will call the patient, that his problems all
stemmed from the fact that his parents had never loved him. This wasn’t true -
the priest was massively projecting his own problem onto Roger. But the
young man was vulnerable and started to believe his mentor. Soon he
became deeply alienated from his parents, which only worsened his isolation
and depression.
After a period of psychotherapy, the effects of the abuse by this priest
had largely been overcome. But at follow up a year later, Roger reported that
he could still feel something wrong, for there was a persisting sensation of
physical discomfort. He explained, ‘it’s as if a big splint has entered the right
side of my neck and gone down through my chest’.
I asked Roger what this splint, if it could speak, would say. The answer
came straight back, ‘Anger!’ It occurred to me that Roger’s anger with the
priest may have acted like a splint to keep him functioning, but rather than
going down this track, I asked him instead what he should do about it. He said
despairingly ‘I don’t know - ‘It’s part of me’. I suggested he try closing his eyes
and allowing himself to float upwards, away from his body. Then he was
simply to observe himself sitting down there in the chair with his problem. I
repeated the question and without a second’s hesitation, he said emphatically,
‘I need to pull it out!’ With encouragement this is what he visualised himself
doing, drawing it out inch-by-inch. It left a raw wound in its track. How was he
going to dispose of it? Roger answered, ‘I want to put it in the garden, and let
it weather away naturally, like wood’. We concluded by spending time
envisaging cleansing and anointing the wound until Roger was satisfied with

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the result.
When we dis-identify with the problem and are able to set aside the
hurts of the ego, a solution often presents itself. The ‘collapse of the wave’
from the perspective of the Higher Self enabled Roger to create and
experience a different reality, one in which there was room for the healing of
an old wound to take place.

Malevolent energies
Janet, now in her mid-twenties, had been depressed for many years.
Her problem went back to a boyfriend in her teens who had left her feeling
badly abused. Soon afterwards she developed gynaecological symptoms, for
which now, she was told, she might require a hysterectomy. Along with her
current physical symptoms, she experienced difficulty in allowing closeness
and intimacy, though she very much wanted this.
I asked her to go within and scan her body and tell me what she found
there. Right away she described ‘a nasty dark red thing’ attached to her
womb. I invited it to speak and it explained, through Janet, that it had been
there since Janet was seventeen. It was belligerent and boastful, saying it had
made her ill and wasn’t finished yet - probably it would end up giving her
cancer. Janet suddenly exclaimed out loud ‘It’s a demon!’ I asked her if she
wanted to work on freeing herself, which she was very keen to do. I suggested
she visualise angels enclosing the demon in a bubble of light. At once it cried
out in fear ‘stop, I’m going to burn’. So I exhorted it to go deeper and deeper
into the darkness within itself. Could it see anything? After a little while it said
with astonishment that it could see a light! A moment later it experienced
being flooded with the light and far from burning, it cried out in wonder saying
‘this feels so good, I feel so warm and nice! Then it went on to say with great
remorse, ‘what have I done? I have caused such pain and misery!’
This transformation of energy, or of psychic structure, if you like, is
characteristic of spirit release therapy 23,24. We can see the demon as being
just that, an extraneous entity that attached when Janet was especially
vulnerable or we could consider it psychoanalytically as a split-off
condensation of pathological object relations. From the clinical standpoint, the
task is to decide when to work for integration and when to go for removal. In
this case, the energetic complex was treated as a spirit attachment and
released into the light.

Other places, other times

Peter, aged 27, came to see me complaining of an acute and
unaccountable fear of water. A good swimmer, with no evident neurotic traits,
he had been travelling on a small ferry when he developed a panic attack,
with sweating, racing pulse and breathlessness.
Peter had been looking over the side of the boat at the time and the
thought came to him that if he were to fall overboard, he would be swept away
and would drown. No one would ever know what had happened to him.
Going into Peter’s personal history, there was no obvious
psychodynamic trigger for this acute anxiety. So I invited him to go back to the
moment when the panic began, by closing his eyes and picturing himself right
there, this time letting himself imagine that he was falling into the water.
Peter’s body immediately began jerking and thrashing about. I said to him
‘What’s happening?’ and he cried out, ‘I can’t get free, ’I’m drowning’. I then
asked him to go back in time to just before this moment. He said despairingly,

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‘We’ve been rammed and water’s coming in the boat’. Why can’t you get free?
‘I’m chained to the boat!’ I asked him what sort of boat this was and he said
‘it’s a trireme’ (a warship used in ancient Greece).
I then took Peter forward again to the moment of drowning. His
struggling movements became weaker and then he went limp. What was
happening now? ‘I’m leaving my body, I’m rising up through the water and I’m
going higher, up into the sky’. What can you see? ‘There’s a bright light, I want
to go there’. Before you leave, look back on this life you just lived and tell me
about yourself and how old you are’. ‘I’m 27’ he said, and then the story
emerged of a young man who had been captured in war and had spent the
last two years as a slave oarsman on a Greek trireme. During a naval battle
with the Persians, the ship had gone down taking all the slaves with it. The
young man’s wife and children would never know what had become of him.
By creating an affect bridge, as it is called, I had facilitated the entry
into what is commonly known as a ‘past life’ 25. The therapeutic effect can be
immediate and lasting. The process can be understood in different ways; as
an actual ‘other life’ once lived, as cryptomnesia (the historical facts having
been absorbed previously and now enacted as a psychodrama) or as the
collapse of the wave containing this event, to which Peter had been
particularly susceptible. Since the quantum field is transpersonal, it is
impossible to say whether the experience really belonged to Peter as an
individual, or whether he gained access to a collective memory bank. Perhaps
this doesn’t really matter, so long as the he got the help he was looking for.

The vibration of love

Rosemary came to see me several years after her teenage daughter
Tessa was involved in an accident that left her severely brain damaged and in
a vegetative state. Rosemary felt deeply responsible for the accident and she
could not escape the torment of her guilt and grief, which visited her nightly.
She was like a wire tightened to breaking point. Now she could not bring
herself to look at her once lovely daughter, who had developed severe
contractures. ‘I cannot bear seeing what Tessa has turned into,’ she raged,
after a rare visit to the nursing home.
I had been struck by a comment she made, that she dreaded going to
see Tessa because as soon as she went near the room, Tessa who normally
lay silent and motionless would start to make loud moaning noises. I
wondered aloud if Tessa could somehow sense her mother’s presence. At
first Rosemary denied the possibility but then she broke down in tears.
How could we help Rosemary go back and face her daughter? Without
this there could be no healing. I advised her when going into the room
immediately to fix her gaze on Tessa’s eyes, making sure not to look at her
body while she approached her. We took plenty of time to rehearse this.
When mother came for her next appointment, she told me she had gone right
close up to Tessa, making sure to look only in her eyes. Tessa then stopped
moaning. Rosemary found herself cradling her daughter and telling her that
she loved her and would be coming again. One year later, Tessa was
beginning to communicate with the help of a clock alphabet, was trying to
crawl and was being assessed for surgery for treatment of her contractures.
Research by Valerie Hunt into the human bio-energy field, or aura, at
UCLA, has confirmed that we are highly sensitive to changes in the auric field
26
. It behoves us as therapists to be mindful that the energy fields of the
therapist and the patient are communicating even before the session begins.

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An apt synchronicity
I’ll finish these clinical examples with an event that could have passed
for coincidence, yet which I felt to be more. Synchronicity is always in the eye
of the beholder, and this, at any rate, is how I saw it.
First, I should underline that the term ‘consciousness’ as I have used it
in this paper, means far more than that we are sentient beings. I have
attempted to colour in a picture of staggering connectedness between all that
is, a life force permeating the universe, which we come most close to in the
impulse of love. Yet the workings of the universe go way beyond our human
limitations. We can sense the whole, but only dimly. It is like taking a very
small piece of a holographic plate - the entire picture is there, but the image is
too faint to make out much detail.
It was a warm summer afternoon. My patient, a young woman, had
begun telling me apprehensively about her sexual problems. She longed to be
able to surrender to her own desire for the man she loved, but for certain
reasons, it seemed that she could never overcome her inhibitions.
At that moment, a bee flew through the open window and landed on the
near corner of the small table that was placed right next to my patient and me.
This was a queen bee, and she was not alone, for she was mating with the
victorious drone. Oblivious of their surroundings, the bees made love – there
is no other word for it – for the remaining 20 minutes of the session. Their
delicate, sensual and rhythmic coupling had my patient and me lost for words.
Nature was giving the two of us a master class on how the energy of the
cosmos, the yin and yang, is intended to flow. To discover it in full, we
humans have to learn how to let go of our egos, with their histories of woe and
fears for the future, and to venture into a universe in which, ultimately, ‘All
shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’ 27.

Conclusion
In conclusion, there can be no conclusion! I have wanted to show that
beginnings and endings are no more than punctuations in spacetime. They
simply mark physical birth and death, while framing the multitude of intensely
meaningful events that come between.
To escape into spirituality as a defence against the challenges of life
would be as futile as plunging into carnal pursuits in order to evade the
spiritual self. The Daoist view is that we stand poised between heaven and
earth, with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. The view from up
there is not to be missed, for the trials and tribulations of life can be seen to be
part of a greater whole. Our brief stay in this world of sense perception
provides a classroom for the soul and the lessons learned go with us
elsewhere, as studies of the Near Death Experience suggest 28. Although it
may be a shocking thing to say, from the point of view of soul there is no such
thing as a bad experience; the greater the hardship, the more profound the
spiritual challenge.
Psychotherapy aims to alleviate distress with insight and compassion
and is a vocation of the highest calling. But we must never succumb to the
hubris of thinking that we have the measure of life in its infinite ramifications.
We are midwives to the task of helping people discover what it is in them to
become. To know when to address a problem reductively and when to turn
towards the greater whole is of the essence. And if we find, sometimes
unexpectedly, that we are engaged in spiritual midwifery, let us not hesitate to
give every assistance to the birth of the spiritual self.

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Dao University of Hawaii Press
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Nexus Vol. 9:3 2002
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25. Woolger, R. (1999). Other Lives, Other Selves. Bantam Books
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‘Project Report, A Study of Structural Integration from Neuromuscular,

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 Energy Field and Emotional Approaches’ Boulder, CO: Rolf Institute of
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NY and London

©Andrew Powell 2003

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