Ralph Metzner

“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

“Stanislav Grof, in his account, related receiving a whole series of death-and-rebirth visions of his past incarnations and witnessing the struggles of these past dyings with calm, even ecstatic detachment. Like Grof, I also found myself rapidly reviewing a series of past lives especially the deaths of these lives:

Images of decapitation, dismemberment, disembowelment flashed by, in rapid succession, including an image of being run through the chest with a sword – yet there was no fear or horror associated with these images. The following thoughts occurred: “Death comes to all, now it’s your turn. This is it, the termination. Resistance is impossible and pointless besides. It’s too late, the annihilation has already happened.” As I gradually came back into my body, after ten minutes in real time, I felt bathed in pure joy and completely at peace with myself, the world and my death (RM).”
― Ralph Metzner, The Toad and the Jaguar