I originally wrote this article summary for Theta, the magazine of the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, and it’s reprinted with their kind permission. Ring’s mapping of inner space is a handy shorthand for describing the farthest-out adventures of human consciousness.
Kenneth Ring, A Transpersonal View of Consciousness: A Mapping of Farther Regions of Inner Space. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Vol. 6 No. 2. 1974, 125-155.
Beginning with the notion that our Western conceptions of consciousness are extremely rudimentary (in Sanskrit, for example, there are twenty terms used to differentiate states of consciousness; in English, we distinguish merely between the conscious and the unconscious), the author says we must construct a more trustworthy map for these inner regions.
“To avoid the kind of misunderstanding that arises so often when a ‘far out’ experience of consciousness is utterly misconstrued or dismissed altogether as ‘unreal’ because the listener attempts to fit it into the procrustean bed of Western conceptions of consciousness,” he introduces a map with eight different levels of consciousness, all of which, except for ordinary waking consciousness, and the preconscious (referring to contents which lie outside the field of immediate awareness but which could become conscious at any time), are generally regarded as “altered.”
Suggesting that one view the map as a pyramidal structure, with ordinary waking consciousness at the top, and the other levels spreading out below, he sketches in the other regions: the psychodynamic unconscious (or the Freudian unconscious, the source of important memories, impulses and desires); the ontogenetic unconscious (a transitional zone between the personal and the transpersonal, not explainable in Freudian terms, in which embryonal and fetal experiences are stored); the trans-individual (the source of incarnational memories, as well as racial and archetypal experiences); the phylogenetic unconscious (a realm completely beyond human forms, in which we may encounter our own evolutionary development and experience animal and plant consciousness); the extra-terrestrial unconscious (out-of-body experiences, including the meeting of spirit guides and traveling to other locations in the universe; also the source of ESP and mediumistic phenomena); the superconscious (an experience of the ultimate force in the universe, involving a profound spiritual ecstasy). Beyond this is the void, experienced as underlying the whole of creation. This is the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, where the journey to the remote regions of consciousness comes to an end.
Although most systems of spiritual growth require being able to function in any region, likewise being stuck in any particular level is like being in prison, Ring reminds us. Most teachers, in fact, warn against becoming attached to those outer regions that nourish such powers as astral projection or telepathy. To get stuck at any point is to be distracted from the final goal.
To show how the map can be useful, the author relates to it four disparate-seeming altered states: drug-induced states, meditation, psychosis, and dying. Some of his conclusions:
Drugs: The trip is likely to be uncontrolled, as the drug flings the individual awareness to an unfamiliar realm. In principle, there is no limit to the number of regions which drugs may help one to enter. But the trip is of limited duration. One always comes down.
Meditation: The journey seems to encompass the same spaces as drugs, but is more gradual and under the control of the meditator. Since there are no chemicals involved, this is generally regarded as providing a purer trip, less likely to be colored by perceptual changes due to chemical side-effects from impurities in the drug.
Psychosis: Psychotic functions are said to be located in the transpersonal. The traditional symptoms — hearing voices, having visions, claiming god-like powers — are explainable as transpersonal phenomena. Cases of alleged possession “can be easily understood as manifestations of consciousness which can occur when an individual’s awareness has tripped out to the extra-terrestrial region.” Psychosis can be viewed as a path, Ring says, like drug-taking and meditation, though with the obvious drawbacks — that it is involuntarily taken, for one, that the maps for this trip are practically non-existent, for another, and that the psychotic individual, unlike the mystic who is prepared for his journey, is thrust into these regions without any warning, and labeled as sick.
Death and Dying: The findings of researchers on near-death experiences closely coincides with religious tradition and the visions of mediums and clairvoyants, suggesting that consciousness continues after the death of the physical body, and that it travels to another plane, where it encounters spiritual entities. “To cast this journey . . . within the framework of our map . . . the individual’s consciousness is freed from its customary waking center, and, instead of ceasing, is propelled out to the extra-terrestrial region of inner space.”
As Ring says of his map, it is “not merely an abstract diagram of the geography of consciousness” but refers to the voyage we are all destined to take to the farther regions of inner space. As such, it is a map worth knowing how to read.
