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METAPHORS OF TRANSFORMATION with RALPH METZNER, Ph.D.

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our program tonight is going to deal with "Metaphors of Transformation," and my guest, Dr. Ralph Metzner, is a professor and academic dean of the California Institute of Integral Studies, and the author of several books, including Maps of Consciousness and Opening to Inner Light. Ralph is also extremely well known for having co-authored The Psychedelic Experience back in the 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Welcome, Ralph. It's a pleasure to have you here.

RALPH METZNER, Ph.D.: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

MISHLOVE: You've gone through quite a journey of transformation yourself since the psychedelic years. In your most recent book, what you've attempted to do is to look at the various metaphors in spiritual traditions and other traditions that deal with human transformations, and show how they do apply, and how they're useful road maps, so to speak. What is a metaphor, really, and why would a metaphor be important or useful?

METZNER: Well, before saying that, I'd like to say something about this concept of transformation of consciousness, which actually on a personal note started for me with the research that we did with psychedelics in the sixties, because it was at that time for me -- and I'm not saying that this is necessarily so for others, although it was for some -- a crucial turning point. And the turning point in consciousness, I think, could be described something like this: that it was like for the first time, at the time of my first experience with psychedelics, I realized that the external world, the reality that we perceive, isn't just something that is unalterably given, but rather depends to a very great degree on things going on within myself -- namely my attitudes, my choices, my values, my feelings, and my beliefs. And that experience started me off on a quest which I've been on ever since, which is to discover, really, the basic underlying principles and the methods by means of which such transformations of consciousness occur, and also how they can be applied in healing, in psychotherapy, in education, in learning, and in personal and spiritual growth.

MISHLOVE: At some point in this process the notion of metaphors became very important to you.

METZNER: Right. So what I realized, after studying the very many different systems of consciousness transformation, the ancient spiritual traditions of East and West, and also studying the accounts of people today who undergo a transformative experience, whether that be in psychotherapy or spontaneously in their everyday life, is that certain consistencies emerge. And it seemed to me, when I first started noticing it, that although there may be hundreds of specific techniques -- techniques including breath and meditation and yoga and energy and light and sound and drugs and many other methods, psychotherapy --

MISHLOVE: Chanting, prayer --

METZNER: Chanting -- I mean, they go on and on and on -- shamanic methods, and so forth. And you find the many different methods used in the various traditions, and also in contemporary work -- that people are rediscovering many of these ancient methods. But there seem to be only a dozen or so basic patterns of the transformation itself, how it is experienced -- the phenomenology of it, one would say. And these patterns are described in the form of metaphors. And they're described as metaphors because ordinary language has a very hard time dealing with these states and these transformations, because by definition they are a transformation out of the ordinary into the non-ordinary, the extraordinary, the supernatural, the miraculous, as it's sometimes called, the magical, the transcendent, the sacred, the mysterious -- many different terms that point to other kinds of realms of being, or other kinds of realms of consciousness that lie outside of the framework of our usual view of reality.

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