ON INTEGRAL ALCHEMY
The familiar image of the alchemist that has come down through history is that of an
old, bearded man with long robes bent over glass flasks in a medieval laboratory,
preparing a secret concoction that would turn lead into gold. This may be quaint and
charming, but it isn't really what alchemy is about. This is not to deny that medieval
alchemists were, in fact, preparing secret concoctions in their laboratories, but to
highlight the deeper reality beneath the surface appearance of things. Alchemists
knew that the secret substance, the so-called magical “philosopher's stone,” was
their own transformed consciousness. Unless they had gone through inner alchemy,
as a process of purification by fire to eliminate all of the heavy, leaden aspects of
their own personality in order to achieve a (golden) state of enlightened awareness,
there would be no corresponding change in the material world, or in the chemical
substances they were experimenting with in their laboratories.
Ancient adepts considered alchemy to be a scientific art of attaining the illumination
of non-dual, god-consciousness. It involved a passage from two dark nights, those of
the ego and of the soul, into the golden light of ascension. They divided it into a first
stage of inner alchemy, which aimed to perfect the microcosm of the personal,
human self by attaining self-mastery and inner balance - through an integration of
the darkest, disowned aspects of the unconscious - followed by a second stage of
theurgy, which was the union of the individual self with the divine macrocosm or
creative source of all life. Carl Jung called the first individuation and many others
have called it self-realization. The second has been described in many spiritual
traditions as the threshold of the dissolution of individuation and the birth of the
impersonal or divine self.
Although alchemy is often traced back to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes
Trismegistus, according to esoteric legends, it belongs to a much older, pre-history
of Atlantis. The legends claim that the secret art of alchemy was given to humanity
by ascended beings from other dimensions as a gift, for the purpose of accelerating
the evolution of the soul within a single lifetime, instead of going through countless
incarnations repeating the same errors of perception. This acceleration was made
possible through initiations by fire - a metaphor for the most extreme trials and
tribulations of life, which had to be embraced and even entered into deliberately, as
the necessary catalysts of a radical transfiguration. Illumination was attained when
the limitations of the human body and mind (as embodied and also imprisoned within
the five senses) were transcended, and awareness shifted to permanently inhabit the
field of unity consciousness. This art of transmutation was the most prized
knowledge and considered to be the ultimate culmination of the human journey, in
which the human element itself was lifted up and transcended.
There is much speculation about what happened to the lost tradition of pre-historical
alchemy, because what we have written access to are only fragments of an
incomplete and veiled knowledge that has been broken down and dispersed across
the distant lands of Egypt, Greece, South America, India, Tibet and Eurasia. The
Theosophists believed that there was a single ancient wisdom or perennial
philosophy, which was responsible for the uncanny coincidence explaining why so
many religions, spiritual practices, and indigenous shamanic traditions overlap in
their core ideas, even if they diverge in their means of access or points of entry.
Some systems work to achieve enlightenment primarily through the physical and
energetic bodies (Indian yoga and Taoist inner alchemy), others work mainly by
cultivating the mental/causal body and strengthening concentration (Buddhist
meditation, Gurdjieff fourth way practices), and others still by developing the power
of inner vision and the capacity to navigate astral dimensions (Egyptian & Greek
mystery schools and shamanic traditions).
In our contemporary context, which resembles a crowded, noisy marketplace of
spiritual commodities, the term “alchemy” has become a cool branding slogan that
suggests something otherworldly and magical, but which, in fact, has little to do with
the true meaning of the term. This is a polite way of saying that the majority of
new-agey, spiritual offerings that brand themselves as alchemy - sound alchemy,
alchemy of breath, twin flame alchemy, or alchemy of the dancing warriors, etc - may
certainly be interesting and entertaining stuff, but from the point of view of the
alchemist, they are something of a bullshit. Alchemy is not an adjective that can be
added onto a preexisting toolbox of techniques (like sound healing or breathwork or
trance dance); it’s a unified system of transformation with its own metaphysics and
corresponding methodologies. Any practice that genuinely identifies itself as
“alchemy” - in its original, esoteric sense - must embody these essential principles:
(1) The main axiom of alchemy is that there exists a single, common, energetic
substance (whatever it may be called - prana, chi, akasha, quintessence), which
permeates all things in existence, beyond the surface duality. And this underlying
oneness is what allows the transmutation from the lowest to the highest metaphorically, from lead into gold.
(2) This oneness expresses itself through a system of correspondences from the
heavenly, planetary bodies to the human body and even into the smallest rock. The
most famous maxim from the Emerald Tablet expressing this correspondence is “as
above so below.” The macrocosm-microcosm relationship can be seen as a
metaphor for the universe mirroring in the individual self, but on another level “as
above so below” also highlights that the correspondence is one between spirit and
matter. Consciousness become projected into and mirrored in the physical world.
(3) The ultimate aim of alchemy is achieving union with the fundamental oneness or
divine source of creation. This does not mean simply having conceptual knowledge
of it, or attaining brief, peak experiences of feeling oneness with all things and then
lapsing back into a mundane perception of separation. It means embodying this
union in the ordinary moments of daily life.
(4) Before becoming an expression of the divine perfection of the macrocosm, the
alchemist needs to perfect the individual self (the microcosm) by integrating all the
fragmented parts of the personality and its contradictory desires, so there is no
longer any inner conflict or resistance. This overhaul requires a first stage of
de-conditioning from the attitudes, limiting beliefs and habits of behavior that have
been inherited from one’s environment and culture, which gives rise to a second
process of uncovering the true, impersonal self beyond the constructed personality.
(5) In the process of alchemical transformation nothing is rejected as bad or
undesirable because on the deepest level there is no duality of good and evil, or light
and dark. An important aspect of inner alchemy is the so-called darker or negative
emotions like hatred, anger, shame, fear and absolute terror, which have to be
entered into fully in order to become transformed into their underlying, positive
desire. These “dark” aspects of the self are transmuted not by resisting them or
fighting against them, but by embracing them and discovering what their hidden gifts
or inner gold is. In psychological terms, this is a transformation of the primal wounds
- both of the personal self (inner child), and of the transpersonal field of collective
karma. It is in this sense that entering willingly into negative peak experiences (called
nigredo by archaic writers) constituted the secret art of alchemy.
To make this last point more concrete and more graphic, for those of you familiar
with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film “Holy Mountain,” the alchemist is an adept who
knows how to transform shit into gold. The alchemist is not a light-worker (in the
sense of singing a merry song of positive thinking and joyful emotions) ... but a
shadow-worker, for who the prima materia, or the starting point of the spiritual
journey of enlightenment, is all the despised shit that inhabits the personal and
collective unconscious. Through practice, the shadow-worker becomes a master of
equanimity who can embrace love, bliss and joy as well as disturbance, turmoil,
conflict, dread, and even psychosis - or the whole pendulum swing of life’s
contradictory experience - as the most precious teachers on the path of illumination.
Our deepest wounds, griefs, and neuroses are not accidents or misfortunate errors,
but the necessary elements for creating the alchemical gold. The highest is to be
found by diving deeply into the lowest.
Alchemy is a path of spiritual acceleration. Transmutation between radically
dissimilar substances is a fact of nature - coal transforms into diamonds, but it takes
eons to achieve. What the alchemists seek, through their laboratory experiments as
a metaphor for tinkering with their own consciousness (and not only), is a shift of
velocity that goes from 0 to 100 in an instant. And this acceleration is achieved by
embracing whatever is disowned, despised, and difficult to love. In his
autobiography, Lester Levenson (a relatively unknown non-duality teacher who
influenced David Hawkins’ work) tells the story of his journey from rock-bottom to
enlightenment, which took place within 3 months after being diagnosed with a
terminal illness. He resolved to throw out everything he had learned and to start from
zero, and discovered that the secret to accelerating the frequency scale to reach the
highest bliss and peace in the shortest time was feeling love not for the people who it
was easy to appreciate, but for the most despicable cads, and the horrible abusers
who had wounded him. And that to get there he had to first make peace with his own
disgust and hatred, allowing it simply to be and to reach its peak as an energy, after
which it deflated and shifted naturally into a warm tenderness. Anyone who has
worked with psychedelic plants knows that the deeper the plunge into the despised
shit is, the higher the climb into bliss will be.
The path of spiritual acceleration is a frequency game. And this game is played by
learning how to navigate feeling-states, and transform fear into courage, hate into
love, and agitation and turmoil into peace. The transformation is sparked by nor
attempting to escape the dissonance and discomfort, but riding through it, like a
rollercoaster. Feeling-states are not emotions, which are learned adaptations, but the
raw dance of energy pulsations in their nonverbal, nonconceptual dimension. It is the
dominant feeling-state that we are in habitually on a daily basis (which Hawkins
called, somewhat imprecisely, the “level of consciousness”) that determines the
contours of our external reality. That is why someone can verbalize affirmations (as
words that correspond to ideas) repeatedly, all day long, and they will not work to
shift anything.The words themselves are meaningless. As the hippies knew, it is the
“vibe” behind the words that reflects their underlying reality and what is projected into
the world.
I have chosen the term "Integral Alchemy" to describe my own system of practices,
which have evolved mainly through gnosis, as a direct form of inner knowing (or
cosmic download) received in “non-ordinary states of consciousness”. That
expression is a misnomer, since our “ordinary” state of consciousness is something
very unnatural to who we are - it represents a consensus trance in which our
attention is captured, hijacked and hypnotized by a dominant ideology that seeks to
cast a veil over our perception to keep us powerless and disconnected from
ourselves and from each other. And it is in the so-called non-ordinary states that we
are centered in the heart and in our inner vision, and have regained our lucidity,
clarity and sovereign power. The more we access those non-ordinary states through
meditation, breathwork and visionary journeys, the more they become habitual (and
ordinary) feeling-states that we can inhabit with eyes fully open, while engaging with
the world.
The adjective “integral” in Integral Alchemy doesn’t point to anything special; it is a
common word that means whole, complete and unadulterated (like integral bread) …
and it is also the root of integrity and integration. But I also chose the word integral
because it evokes an association with Ken Wilber's "Integral Theory,” which is a
project to subsume diverse theories into a single framework that encompasses the
"totality of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit". Integral alchemy, however, is not a
theory or philosophy; it is a concrete practice that is focused on the "how to" of
transmutation - on the laboratory, experimental work of transforming the prima
materia of the human being in all its dimensions, in order to achieve integration.
Integral suggests the attempt to unite what has been dispersed in the different
psycho-spiritual traditions, and to engage all levels simultaneously – the physical
body, the energetic dimension of the chakras, the practice of centering in the heart,
the shadow-work of digging through the basement of the personal and collective
unconscious, using mental discipline of focus and intent to attain concentration,
developing the inner vision of the third eye and the ability to navigate through the
astral dimensions, and being able to access the ineffable level of spirit that is
revealed through non-dual awareness.
On a certain level the desire to unite these different levels reflects my own
background and training - in transpersonal psychology, the occult teachings of
Hermeticism, Reichian bioenergetics, Buddhist meditation, Toltec wisdom, and the
shamanic exploration of higher dimensions. But I wouldn't exactly call these external
influences that I chose to mix together into an eclectic soup; they are fields of
knowledge and practice that I was lead to explore by intuition, which offered an
explanation and a deeper understanding of what was already happening in my inner
journeys, after the fact. These points of orientation all gave me a feeling of coming
home, as if I already knew them intimately, perhaps as unconscious memories of
previous initiations in other lifetimes. They allowed me to piece together the
fragments of the larger jigsaw puzzle.
What I am sharing in direct encounters and in the guidebook on Integral Alchemy are
practices that have evolved through my inner journeys and revelations – but with the
understanding that these are not idiosyncratic quirks but reflect universal truths, and
they can therefore be of benefit to others. The practices draw upon 3 pillars or
foundations, and move through 3 spirals, through which they are multiplied and
transformed. The pillars are dividing attention, heart centering, and the surrender
experiment, which work on the first spiral of the personal unconscious to understand
and dissolve imprints (character traits that develop out of trauma and keep up stuck
in repeating loops), and are transformed on the second, transpersonal spiral of the
collective unconscious to achieve radical forgiveness and clear karma, and shift on
the third spiral of the impersonal self to overcome the primal wound of separation
and resistance to life itself in order to attain equanimity. Working through the 3
spirals unites the different centers (mental, emotional and physical, or the head, the
heart and the life-force of the belly) and their particular forms of intelligence. The
spirals also represent different stages of the journey of awakening, which go up the
frequency scale from acceptance, to unconditional love, wisdom and peace.
Although the metaphysics and methodologies of this system have overlaps with
yogic, taoist and buddhist spiritual traditions (which I understand as offshoots of an
older system of alchemy that has been fragmented and partially lost), there are
several defining features that are different from the others: taking the darker,
repressed contents of the unconscious as the starting point (which is the reason that
renegade psychoanalysts like Assagioli and Jung gravitated toward alchemy and not
toward eastern spirituality), and also the anarchic emphasis on absolute sovereignty
and insubordination.
All the different practices of integral alchemy point to one final goal - union with the
divine spark that already resides as a latent power within us. And this union comes
experientially, through the vigilance and discipline of daily practice and the
attainment of direct flashes of insight through gnosis, in non-ordinary states of
consciousness - through visions, dreams and revelations that have a hypnogogic
quality and are made manifest through symbols rather than literally. The visions are
believed to come directly from a higher power that is greater than the limited,
personal imagination. This is why in this tradition - which is cryptic, anarchic and not
really a tradition with teachings that are handed down - there are no gurus or
teachers, and there are no initiations through transmissions from master to disciple.
It’s a do it yourself schooling through the wisdom of the higher self. If the alchemist
takes on a provisional role as a teacher, it is to nurture and develop the power of
each “student” … until the student comes to a point of understanding that no external
guidance is needed, or can be accepted, because the “master” has been there all
along, waiting to be birthed.
(You can read the individual chapters of the Integral Alchemy for free at: profanelight
dot wordpress dot com)
*
My book on Integral Alchemy is an attempt to lay out and to combine the fragments
of this jigsaw puzzle, as I now see them unfolding after many years of my own inner
practice and teaching others. The chapters of this how-to-manual are organized as a
series of spirals, in which the earliest building blocks are repeated and reworked on
increasingly deeper levels:
Three pillars:
<> Overview of our nature as vibrational beings
1. Heart Centering (the portal to unity consciousness)
2. Presencing & Dividing Attention (breaking the consensus trance)
3. Breathwork & Surrendering (navigatinv the threshold of letting go)
FIRST SPIRAL: : Trauma & the Personal Unconscious
<> Overview on shadow-work & dismantling unconscious imprints and trauma
1. Core wounds & tracking the formation of the ego-personality
2. Integrating Shadow projections
3. Relational alchemy (seeing through the heart)
4. Releasing self-judgment & unconditional acceptance
SECOND SPIRAL: Karma & Transpersonal Wisdom
<> Overview on dissolving karma and personality-soul integration
1. Recapitulating the past (releasing wounded family relationships)
2. Recapitulating romantic-patterns
3. Alchemical Extraction & union of opposities
4. Rewriting/erasing personal history
THIRD SPIRAL: Immanent Transcendence
<> Overview on the Impersonal Self
1. Overcoming Primal Dukkha (undoing the primal wound of separation)
2. Silence and emptiness as the gateway to equanimity
3. Open eye awareness (reframing heart centering, presencing and surrender)
4. Mastering Intent (understanding the emotional body, desire and pattern of
creating)
Short user’s manual
BACKGROUND
1. Text on Integral Alchemy
2. Revised text on Stages of Awakening
PILLARS
3. Mastery of awareness & breaking trance/dividing attention (or self-remembering)
4. Heart as Portal - Stabilizing Frequency by Heart Centering
5. Breathwork and allowing/surrendering - as key to alchemical transformation
PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS - Shadow work
6. Core wounds and dismantling imprints (tripartite division of personal sub/working
with subpersonalities)
7. Integrating Shadow Projections
TRANSPERSONAL
8. Recapitulation - radical forgiveness & gratitude
9. Alchemical Extraction
IMPERSONAL
10. Union of opposites - tapping into zero point
11. Meditation on silence and emptiness
INTEGRATION
12. Open eye meditation - allowing through open awareness & heart centering
13. Relational Alchemy (transforming interpersonal communication)
14. World as hologram (transforming interaction with environment)