Ralph Metzner > Quotes

“There’s a swirling, weaving gridwork of light-patterns everywhere and all around. I can hear someone making choking and retching noises. RD was experiencing the vomit of the world’s suffering, but was not suffering himself, as he later told us. At first I can’t do anything – there is no “I” and nobody else. Then I notice that I’m being moved towards the sound, to reach out with my hand, to touch, to help, to give comfort. “I” didn’t decide to do this, it just happened, sort of like an amoeba oozing over toward the source of apparent distress signals. My voice appeared to be making soothing sounds while my hands appeared to be making touching, stroking gestures. Awareness then arose of the other individual, this particular man, RD. Only after that awareness, came the realization that “I” was doing this gesture, this movement (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“(Male) At this point I was in an utterly empty place, where the only remaining thing was light itself. There were no features, not even a sense of energy flux. The place seemed as full as it could be, without containing a single object or pattern. Getting somewhere else, or waiting for a manifestation, simply did not occur to me. The guide later called this space the “plenum void”, a term from mysticism that means the empty space that contains everything, a kind of featureless fullness. The basic nature of the experience was an initiation into the radiant void.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“My only reality was a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to contain all existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became Consciousness facing the Absolute. It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and ecstatic, creative and destructive…My ordinary identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. I retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, appears at the moment of our death (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“The Lacandones have no way of saying 'hello' or 'good-bye'; when they meet they just start talking, and when they depart they just walk away. It's as if the bonds of family and friendship are not disconnected by distance and therefore do not need to be reestablished.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“Once we recognize our inescapable embeddedness in the living, organic ecosystem and our mutual interdependence with all other coexisting species, our sense of separate identity, so strenuously acquired and desperately maintained, recedes more into the background. Instead, the relationships, whether balanced or imbalanced, take the foreground and become the focus of concern. This is the perceptual basis for a new and ancient point of view: it is holistic and inclusive and inevitably accompanied by a sense of wonder and reverence.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“The life and activities of the little world were for her not only the welcome object of sincere observation, but the individual being is always organically situated in the integrated macrocosm of the whole.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“The Lacandones have a prophecy that the world will be destroyed when the last mahogany tree is gone. The mahogany is the 'indicator species' for the rain forest; its health or death is indicative of the health or death of the entire ecosystem. The smoke from the burning of tropical rain forests can already be seen from satellites miles above Earth.

The indigenous people of the true, original First World are preparing themselves for the final struggle. Many have nothing left to lose, only the remaining trees and land, and their children, to fight for. As the Zapatistas declared: 'We are the dead, rising to die again so our people can live once more.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“(Female) I let go more fully than I ever have. I became the sounds and the movements – no controlling. That is the place where deep transformative healing takes place for me. It’s also the place where Spirits meet to help others to heal. I felt like my voice and movement were healing and clearing the fear that I didn’t need to hold anymore. It is the place where my seizures come from. The seizures are not an illness. They are an opening to other realms. My toning was multi-level. There was a woman’s voice with an overtone of my child’s voice and an undertone of my crone’s voice. I could feel the tones working in my body, opening and releasing. There was only pure sound…no holding back. I found my full voice…I was being born, reliving my physical birth… releasing fear and opening to a new way of being in the moment. Allowing myself to enter the flow of life and humanity and move with it, not against it.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“We were all wild humans before we became civilized in that peculiar process of self-domestication known as the Neolithic agricultural revolution. The word 'wild' is related to the word 'will'; the wild creature is self-willed, autonomous, not domesticated, living by nature's ways, not the laws of human beings.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“(Male) After moving into the space of formlessness, I felt directed toward my solar plexus area. It was very different than other experiences with healing body work – I was totally disidentified with my body, but somehow in it with a warmth of intention and orientation. I took a breath and a rippling of freedom passed through layers of mind out through the physical form. The pleasure of the experience brings waves of joy and a smiling feeling. Jaguar emerged when I asked to open to his fierceness within me, to have the courage to move through fear blocks. Jaguar, my power animal, appears as I focus on a tightness in my upper back. He is biting me there, where I am contracting with fear and holding back. His energy is filling me, I am becoming him, moving my face and arms as a jaguar. It feels very good, very strong, uninhibited. Then I feel the courage to let go of my job (which I had been too afraid to do) and move into creating my own livelihood.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“The reckless application of technology, harnessed to greed, degrades and destroys the ecosystems in which the energies of the elements are maintained in exquisite balance. Since the elements constitute us, we are also being degraded in the process. We are engaged in an ongoing assault on the planetary elements, the decimation of species, and the relentless suicidal degradation of our own habitats. In short, the situation can be called ecocide. Humankind is at war with nature.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“…Some timeless time later, dreamlike images began to emerge, the solar system, the Earth…the last to emerge was the sense of my everyday identity and awareness of my present life. I was sure that I had taken a dose that was excessive and that I was actually dying… I believed I was experiencing the bardo, the intermediate state before my rebirth in the next incarnation. Then I was seeing and experiencing many scenes from my past lives, playing out karmic history in my body but at the same time in a state of profound bliss, completely detached from these dramas (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“I get caught in a hell-world of some sort. In the initial phase, I’m aware of and merging with a kind of network of light, with a sense that this network or fabric contains all possibilities of experience. Each point of light represents a human experience, like what the Buddhists call a “seed-thought”. One of these points could be “fear of dying.” Things change so quickly, that this fear-seed usually doesn’t develop into a full-blown panic state. But if I get fixated on it, or resist letting it pass, I get stuck and the movement stops. The shimmering network freezes and congeals: it becomes brittle, harsh and glaring, like steel wires and bands. It closes in on me, like an immense spider’s web, tighter and tighter, as in Stan Grof ’s description of BPM-II. There is dread and terror associated with it and it can develop into a fullblown hallucination of a hell-realm. (These can occur with psilocybe mushrooms and LSD, too). It’s a fully developed hell, with demons torturing me, reminiscent of concentration camp accounts or the torture chambers of the Inquisition. It has a historical feel to it, as if I’m a participant-observer of collective human history, since I know these are not personal memories from my life. Being aware of the possibility of such hellish experiences and centering preparation would definitely reduce the chances of getting stuck in them (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“The weaving, waving field of geometric shapes and lines folds and falls over me, or I fall into it. I am seeing small spherical globules of white light, like pearls, that are glistening, shining moist, and perfectly aligned and interconnected in complex three-dimensional webs, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion structures, yet always changing, unfolding and enfolding. These webs are what constitutes my body, clustering in certain areas to make organs like my eyes.

They also constitute all other bodies and forms around me. Each individual is a kind of cluster in this infinite ever-changing molecular web. Each thought or feeling or experience is also a local cluster in this holographic matrix of all possibilities. A sun of pure white light radiates out from the center of the swirling, pearl-studded crystalline grid. It is too intensely bright for me to maintain the focus of attention, so gradually I lose awareness of it and emerge back out of the infinite oneness back into my body-form (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“All the elements were there: the frozen feeling bubbling up and permeating my body like quantum foam fizzing up to engulf the fragmenting mind, the feeling of acceleration, my dissolving self urging me to let go, to surrender, as I was sucked into the visionary maelstrom. … The experience was far more austere (than in the earlier trials – ed.) Reality is a hallucination generated by the brain to help make sense of our being; it is made of fragments of memory, associations, ideas, people you remember, dreams you’ve had, things you’ve read and seen, all of which is somehow blended and extruded into something resembling a coherent conscious narrative, the hallucination we call “experience.” Dimethyltryptamine rips back the curtain to show the raw data before it has been processed and massaged. There is no comforting fiction of coherent consciousness; one confronts the mindless hammering of frenzied neurochemistry (McKenna, Dennis. The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss – My Life with Terence McKenna. St. Cloud, MN: North Star Press, 2012, p. 160).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“When the anthropologist asked the Kwakiutl for a map of their coast, they told him stories:

"Here? Salmon gather. Here? Sea otter camps. Here seal sleep. Here we say body covered with mouths."

How can a place have a name? A man, a woman may have a name, but they die.

We are a story until we die. Then our names are very dangerous.

A place is a story happening many times.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“I noted that I was feeling a profound affection and admiration toward these people, whom I don't know and can't even understand. I also felt affection emanating from them toward me and toward each other. Those not participating in the ceremony were also included in this empathic web, as were the creatures and plants of the forest all around us—indeed, the whole world of sky and earth, rain and sunlight, wind and rocks, and trees. It seemed that by not understanding the words being said, I could concentrate totally on the waves of positive feeling that were washing through the group.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“The relentless pursuit of consumer goods feeds the entitled 'false self,' while the insecure and empty inner self remains anxious and wounded—driven then to buy even more goods to cover up the inner emptiness. The empty self seeks the experience of being continually filled up in an attempt to combat the growing alienation.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“A shattering annihilation, a feeling of being inside an explosion, and being fragmented into countless tiny shards. I felt as though I was being turned inside out, as though my innards were extruding through my mouth. My body was apparently rolling on the ground (as I later realized), coiled into a ball like the ourobouros serpent. All distinctions between inner and outer, self and other, above and below, were obliterated. Animal sounds appeared to be coming from my mouth. There were no feelings of fear, indeed no feelings at all, other than a kind of impersonal ecstasy. No sense of body, no sense of self, no “I” – only a sparkling sense of awe-inspiring beauty (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“I found that visual and auditory imagery of the elements in nature consistently induced in people's experience the qualities of consciousness associated with the elements in the alchemical and other earth-based traditions:

Images and sounds of air and winds, of clouds and winged creatures, triggered associations of the mental realm, the expansive and swiftly changing world of thoughts and ideas, of words and poems and songs.

Images and sounds of the water element, of oceans, tides, sea creatures, waves, rivers, springs, lakes, and rain, often released powerful emotions and feeling memories, both positive and negative.

Images and sounds of fire energy, such as the sun, lightning, volcanoes, and electrical fields, were associated in people's experience with creativity, imagination, enthusiasm, vision, and intuition.

Images and sounds of the earth element, of rocks and mountains, land and forest, plants and minerals, induced associations of kinesthetic and somatic awareness, of sensory contact and pleasure, of solid and substantive form.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“(Female) Within seconds of inhaling, the room filled with an amber-gold veil which seemed to coat everything. My entire body and mind were filled with visual, vibrational sound, which appeared like millions of tiny, flashing points of light. An intense swirling feeling came over my body and mind, and I felt a rapid and complete loss of control as I swirled downward into a very deep, bottomless whirlpool. I experienced a very sensual, unitive state with my partner (also voyaging). I experienced our essences blending like the mixing of water colors while still feeling each of us as individuals – he later confirmed something similar at the same point. As I swirled and lost control, a deep pain within me expressed itself as a high-pitched moaning that came screeching out of the very depths of me. I witnessed and felt this happening without capacity, or desire, to stop it from happening. With this sound I twisted and twirled downward, not knowing if my body was actually doing this or if it was a very strong inward sensation.

The next thing I knew, I was in a vast, dark space like a night sky, yet there was a slight whirling around me. I was no longer whirling, but the space around me was. My mind was fragmented into a million pieces which seemed to be floating around me in this space. I didn’t know where I was or who I was. When I noticed this I felt lost and afraid. While there were no sign posts indicating a direction, I spontaneously made a kind of mental intention to go towards something and as a result began to move in a direction in this inner space. I then heard a deep, loving, feminine voice slowly say “That’s right. You can do it.” It was a voice from within this space, the voice of the guide. Upon hearing it, I was deeply, utterly relieved – her voice so soothing and warm, reassuring and firm. She felt ancient and familiar to me. I felt I knew what to do now, yet was overwhelmed with the task – I felt I was in an insane state of mind. While it felt like the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, I knew I had to move within this space in a certain direction. There were no visual clues, only an internal sense that once I had moved that I was going in the right direction. I was going Home.
I heard a noise in the room and recalled where I was, that I was travelling with the Jaguar. I brought conscious attention to my breathing and gradually re-collected myself. I sat up and as I looked around the room at everyone I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she awoke from her long dream – I recognized everyone as ancient friends. I asked the women to form a cocoon around me and when they did I burst into tears and sobbed very deeply, accompanied by a very deep feeling of relief and return. I felt ancient connection and experienced a grounding and inner contact with my spiritual nature.

During the days following my journey, I alternated between anxiety and elation and experienced an amazingly broad range of levels of consciousness throughout my daily activities. I could easily perceive multiple levels of existence and experienced an increase in empathic and psychic ability. I also experienced a tremendous amount of sexual energy and greatly heightened orgasmic responses in my entire body. At quiet moments I felt very deeply relaxed and centered.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“(Male) This medicine hurled me deep into the fiery firmament, with instantaneous, absolute death of ego, no-self on the quantum level of consciousness-chaos, harmony and bliss. The deepest fullest release from the chains of illusion. This big bang of God-orgasm, creation overwhelming bliss, no choice but absolute surrender to the primal current. Flooding back to consciousness, still fully aware as the body was permeated and open to the infusion of the ultimate ground of being. Body fully open to assimilate throughout every atom of being blissful non-attached truth of the unlimited eternally fresh, fiery present. Left with a sense of unbounded joy and sensory delight beyond description.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“We were mothered out of the substance of this planet. Her elements, her periodicities, her gravitational embrace, her subtle vibrations still mingle in our nature, worked a billion years down into the textures of life and mind. Logically, the individual human being is a living organic system that exists as part of the larger living organic system that we call the biosphere, or Earth.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“After the stormy disruption of the elements, there comes a great peace. The elements then shine with a wonderful clarity, fire has no searing heat, air is free of dense clouds, water does not rage and flood, and the earth is not fragile and crumbling. Sun, moon, and stars sparkle in brilliant illumination and beauty; they stand still, so that there is no night, but only day.

Since the body, as well as the psyche, is composed of the elements, there is great healing as the scattered and bruised fragments of our being are brought together again, in wholeness. The fiery aspect of our nature glows golden like the dawn; the air of our mind is clear and shining; the water currents of our body and the emotional currents of our psyche become transparent and still; the earthy part of our nature, our flesh and bones, becomes strong and well-proportioned. Here is revealed a vision of the total transformation possible for the human being—a psycho-alchemical transmutation of the elements from a state of disorder and conflict to a state of harmony and balance.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth

“Something like a mask or blind over the right side of my face appears to be coming loose. I can feel the cheek muscles rippling under the skin, and facial nerves twitching, a sense of energy currents inside my body being aligned and balanced.

When I let go within, feelings of great peacefulness, a soft breathing in the heart, gently approaching knots of contraction or pain. Out of a hard nugget of pain somewhere, a serenely exploding flare of light energy spreads throughout the body. The softly ascending light flare consists of sparkling jewels and precious stones, as if the pain had been a locked-up treasure chest that was suddenly unlocked.

I am shown that if I can make certain sounds, the vibrations can actually disintegrate crystallized nuggets of pain or tension. Continued perception of ascending and descending glissandos, as if on a harp, but soundless, kinaesthetic, synaesthetic, soothing, healing (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“I lost all contact with the surrounding world, which completely disappeared…The awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts and my life disappeared… I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense… There was no biographical or transpersonal content, images, archetypes…none of these dimensions seemed to exist, let alone manifest. I had no concepts, no categories for what I was witnessing (Grof, Stanislav. When the Impossible Happens. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc. 2006).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“Multi-colored lines of light formed a kind of dome covered in a faceted geometric network of jewels, the whole dome spinning silently. The jewelled dome seemed to become a kind of lens, through which I could see into other worlds beyond, where the points of light were stars and galaxies. At first there were tiny scintillating sparks of light against a velvety blackness. They merge to become a brilliantly colored, weaving, flowing tapestry of geometric forms, extending infinitely in all directions. Then this kaleidoscopic field of patterns dissolved my body into it, so that I don’t see it anymore – I have become part of it (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“(Female) I experienced what I can only describe as pure awareness, though not self-identified. An awareness that travels in search of more, ever increasing, ever expanding and unattached – free of any limit, binding or density. It was pure awareness moving through space, though not like a dark starry sky, rather like the intervals between everything all combined. The “I” or “me” was gone. It was an experience of no individuality yet I had very definite awareness and full existence. I said “I need help” – expressing a desire for the attention of others to enable me to focus, maneuver and navigate in such an unknown dimension. With the group attention, we journeyed to the “left-overs” of God, as Carlos Castaneda put it, or the outer limits of God. Then jointly we journeyed beyond, co-creating, co-realizing and traveling – exploring out into the very “nothing” beyond the universe, and then into the somethingness of form, like the energy of somethingness at the atomic or molecular level. We began recapitulating the evolution into form, rapidly entering all phases and kingdoms – the elemental, mineral, vegetable, animal…each with a new found awareness, understanding and capability. An experience of “Hey, look what I can do” of grand proportions. Each evolution finding itself, experiencing the opportunity of intention – particularly in the human form, and delighting in it, deliriously and hysterically. It literally cracked me up, through all the episodes of evolution.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“(Male) I was somehow able to guide my body to a laying position, though I had very little body awareness. A deeper letting go seemed to occur by allowing the body to rest without muscular effort. All body awareness dissolved into awareness of soft, expansive currents of bliss. Even the sense of joy and amazement which this engendered dissolved as identity merged into formless Being. At that edge between Form and Formlessness, I felt the sense of being at a threshold which I had never before crossed. With both the joy and the difficulty of a birth, separate identity was relinquished, and all that remained was boundlessness. The relief and the sense that finally the ancient, primordial Search was over was utterly indescribable. There seemed to be an oscillation between pure undifferentiated Being and Observing Ego, because I had awareness of coming into Form, feeling profound ecstasy, joy, gratitude and love, and then dissolving back into That which from these feelings flowed. I became aware of a sense of arriving, of finally having found what felt like I had been looking for – for eons. I realized that where and who I am is self-evidently beyond life and death. A thought arose of my dying sister-in-law, and relief spread throughout at realizing the fallacy of death. A vague sound was associated with this relief, a wetness reminded me of bodily existence and I realized I was crying.”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar

“Spirituality is not separate or above nature—the spiritual is the natural. Spiritual practice consists in communing with the living intelligences perceived to be indwelling in nature, with conscious respect and reverence.”
― Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming our Relationship to the Earth