I am beginning to realize that different forms of consciousness interact differently with our metabolism. This should have been previously obvious to me from a wide range of nonordinary experience, but wasn’t.

There are interesting implications here, particularly that our bodies conserve a vast array of previously active potentials with which our ancestors were actively familiar (in fact, I presume these were ordinary to them, and that our own experience would be distinctly non-ordinary in comparison). For example, there are states of energetic utilization of organs in the torso that radically alter cognitive character and function; some produce certain forms of insight and radically altered sensing abilities, and some of these are directly involved in dreaming.

Effectively, the body (the human form itself) is a library of the phase-states that comprised our cognitive evolution, and I have good reason to believe (direct experience) that it is possible to trigger an event where this library effectively ‘plays back’ its conservations in sequential order, giving us a tour of each of the developmental forms our species experienced beginning with the animal… and including the powers and perceptions appropriate to them. It is strange to realize this, but our own bodies are structured in such a way as to represent basic phases: vegetative (feet/intestines), animal(legs, hips), magical (abdomen/reproductive systems), mythical (torso), mental(upper body/hands/head), and integral (all of these at once).

One might imagine, then, that our ‘first birth’ is as a human person into human culture, somewhere within the context of humanity as a whole. The oft-described ‘second birth’ appears to be our birth as the ‘form or paradigm’ of humanity. During this birth, usually as an adult, we directly, personally experience the cognitive, spiritual, psychological, emotional, and mystical development of our species… and, much like childhood, but ramified by the circumstances in which this occurs, this experience is an ordeal.

It would not surprise me to discover that a wide range ‘mental disorders’ are related to peculiar aspects of this potential (to be born again into the form of humanity), and may represent various incomplete or failed attempts to catalyze the processes that result in the ordeal.