 The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience
by Ralph Metzner
Origin Press, 320 pages, 40 illustrations,
US $14.95, ISBN 1-57983-000-5
"For years I've followed a principle: Read anything Ralph Metzner writes. The Unfolding Self confirms that I'm still correct."
Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words
"Revelatory...lucid...thorough...scholarly...harvests the riches from a lifetime of intrepid and discerning spiritual research."
Publishers Weekly
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In The Unfolding Self, Ralph Metzner identifies the universal structures that underlie the varieties of transformative experience, much as William James did a century ago in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Featuring dozens of illustrations, this book, now a “One Spirit” Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, is a brilliant cross-cultural examination of the power of archetypal metaphors to nurture profound experiences of transformation. Don’t miss Metzner’s masterwork; no comparable psychology of spirituality exists that draws from such a rich lifework of scholarship and spiritual practice.
"The reader of The Unfolding Self can benefit from wise guidance concerning the realms of non-ordinary consciousness based on Ralph Metzner's vast learning, purity of purpose, and more than thirty years of testing the many varieties of transformative experience."
-- Robert McDermott, Ph.D. Editor of The Essential Aurobindo and The Essential Steiner
Praise for The Unfolding Self:
The Unfolding Self describes the universal metaphors for transformation that one can encounter in a spiritual journey. This is an excellent book for any individual to see and understand which metaphors of transformation appear in their personal, professional, and inner lives.
Angeles Arrien, author of The Four-Fold Way and Signs of Life
This book is a valuable guide to the farthest reaches of consciousness.
Larry Dossey, author of Prayer is Good Medicine and Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine
In The Unfolding Self, Ralph Metzner offers evolutionary metaphors for the transformations that occur as the mind sinks into the heart. A book well worth reading on the journey toward oneself.
Stephen Levine, author of A Year to Live
This book is a treasure house of ancient and modern wisdom offering a wealth of stories and metaphors that nourish the soul. It is essential reading for anyone exploring spiritual growth and transformation.
Frances Vaughan, author of Shadows of the Sacred
Read this book if you want to wake up to your full ecstatic potential. It presents profound insights and new pathways that will empower you to live your life ecstatically.
Margo Anand, author of The Art of Sexual Ecstasy and The Art of Sexual Magic
To hold images of transformation in one's mind is transformational in itself. Therefore, this book is magic and its author, with his depth of knowledge and wisdom, a high Magician! If studied and allowed to impress the mind, Metzner's work will quicken you into an acceleration of your unfolding. This book should be required reading for all seekers of Truth.
Jacquelyn Small, author of Awakening in Time and Rising to the Call
The Unfolding Self offers a wonderful account of the timeless metaphors that guide and describe profound inner transformation.
Roger Walsh, author of The Spirit of Shamanism and coeditor of Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision
Praise for the Previous Edition
I read this book with real enthusiasm and appreciation.
--Joseph Campbell
Ralph Metzner, long a distinguished leader in the study of the transformation of consciousness, provides a brilliant cross-cultural exploration of the powers of metaphor for characterizing and stimulating psycho-spiritual transformative experiences.
--Michael Harner, author of The Way of the Shaman
Metzner has done a masterful job of unveiling an endless variety of symbols pointing toward humankind as universal desire for wisdom. With metaphor and image, he makes the transformation process come alive.
--June Singer, author of Boundaries of the Soul
A well-written, beautifully organized, and pioneering description of the primordial images that mediate spiritual transformation. Metzner as analysis of religious archetypes ranks with the best works of comparative symbolism in our time.
--Michael Murphy, author of The Future of the Body
Ralph Metzner explores the varieties of religious experience through psychodynamic investigation of imagery. I found his book intriguing, informative, and at times illuminating.
--Elaine Pagels, author of Gnostic Gospels
PRESS RELEASE:
Metzner's "Summa" on Transformative Experience
When Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert launched the psychedelic revolution from Harvard in the early 1960s, few foresaw the explosion of interest in transformative experience so soon to follow. Like his colleagues Leary and Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), Ralph Metzner went on to become a key spokesperson for the consciousness movement. The collected wisdom of Metzner's thirty-five year journey since those legendary days is now available in The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience, a Spring 1998 release from Origin Press. This new edition of the original (Opening to Inner Light: Human Nature and Consciousness, Jeremy Tarcher/St. Martin's Press, 1986) is rewritten and enlarged, including two new chapters and 40 illustrations. Its reintroduction in the late 1990s reflects the continuing surge of interest in the spiritual revolution Metzner helped launch three decades ago.
In The Unfolding Self, Metzner draws from multiple disciplines and ranges across the world's cultures to uncover universal structures of spiritual transformation. As the "summa" of a long career of inquiry into the psychology of religion, it must be classed in the same lineage as William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, the century's first comprehensive study of inner transformation. Also like James, Metzner's approach is both soulful and scholarly. The Unfolding Self gathers a lifetime of academic research in clinical and transpersonal psychology and comparative religion, yet reflects Metzner's own experimentation with transformative disciplines -- his own deeply personal search into the depths of the human psyche.
Much has been written in recent years by Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and others about the centrality of myths, dreams, and metaphors in the unfolding of the inner life. Metzner provides intellectual coherence to this discussion by identifying a dozen of the most salient images of inner transformation. This achievement led Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., anthropologist, educator, and author of The Four-Fold Way, to call Metzner's work "...a classic in understanding turning points in the spiritual journey."
In the years since his work with Leary and Alpert at Harvard, Metzner has published numerous groundbreaking works, while practicing psychotherapy and teaching consciousness studies. Says his academic colleague Robert McDermott, Ph.D., author of The Essential Aurobindo and president of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where Metzner is Distinguished Professor of Psychology: "The reader of The Unfolding Self can benefit from wise guidance concerning the realms of non-ordinary consciousness based on the author's vast learning, purity of purpose and more than thirty years of testing the many varieties of transformative experience."
"One Spirit" Book Club To Sign Unfolding Self
News Marks Growing Interest in Metzner's Masterwork
(Novato, CA) One Spirit -- a division of Book-of-the-Month-Club and the nation's largest book club for spiritual seekers -- has chosen Origin Press title The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience, by Ralph Metzner, for its highly selective book club list. The news was jointly announced today by Origin Press and its distributor, Associated Publishers’ Group (APG) of Nashville, TN.
"One Spirit chooses only about one of every 100 new titles submitted, and they recognized right away that this book belongs on their list," said Cary Johnson, vice president of trade sales for APG, who negotiated the book club rights with One Spirit. "What's best, One Spirit believes The Unfolding Self will remain in their catalogue for many months." Johnson also noted that One Spirit is one of the fastest-growing book clubs in the history of book clubs in America, with membership approaching an estimated one million members.
"We were pleased to learn that Ralph Metzner will join the elite of America's spiritual thinkers and writers on the One Spirit list," said Byron Belitsos, publisher of Origin Press. "This is due recognition for Metzner's leadership in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology for almost four decades."
The book club news is just one indicator of the growing interest in Metzner's unique volume. Reviews are forthcoming in Yoga Journal, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Noetic Sciences Review, Small Press Magazine, Pangaia, Earth Light, and many other national periodicals. Leading bookstores throughout the San Francisco Bay Area have also requested that Metzner make a stop on his regional book-signing tour, including Cody's Bookstore and Gaia Books in Berkeley, Copperfield's in Santa Rosa, Borders Books in San Rafael, and New Leaf in Larkspur.
Table of Contents
Introduction: From Caterpillar to Butterfly
Symbols and Metaphors of Transformation
Theories of Human Transformation
Variations on the Theme of Self-Transformation
1. Awakening from the Dream of Reality
Ordinary Awareness as Dreamlike
Dreaming, Sleeping, and Waking in Everyday Life
Transformation as an Awakening
2. Uncovering the Veils of Illusion
The World Perceived as Maya
The Transformation of Vision
Unmasking the Self
3. From Captivity to Liberation
Body and Form as Prison
Knots, Ties, Nets, and Bonds in Relationships
Strategies of Escape and Liberation
4. Purification by Inner Fire
Fire Deities and the Spirit of Fire
Hell, Purgatory, and the Fire of Purification
Kundalini and the Yoga of Fire
The Mystical Fire of Union
5. From Fragmentation to Wholeness
Psychic Fragmentation in Ordinary Awareness and in Madness
Shamanic Dismemberment: Osiris and Dionysus
Alchemical Separatio in Meditation and Psychotherapy
Approaches to Wholeness
6. Reconciling with the Inner Enemy
On Integrating the Shadow
Accepting the Unacceptable
From Denial to Affirmation
Purification and Elimination
From Inner Warfare to Inner Peace
On Facing One’s Demons
7. On Dying and Being Reborn
Conscious Death and Intentional “Dying”
Nearness to Death as Transformative Experience
Thanatos and Psychic Death
Alchemical Mortificatio
The New Birth and the Eternal Child
8. From Darkness to Light
Enlightenment of the Physical Body
The Illumination of the Mind
The Self as a Being of Light
9. Integrating the Inner Wild Animal
Remembering Our Evolutionary Ancestry
Animals in Folklore, Mythology and Religion
Tales of Animal Transformations
10. Unfolding the Tree of Our Life
The Tree as a Symbol of Self-Unfoldment
Climbing the Tree, Straightening the Pillar
The World Tree and the Inverted Tree
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge
11. Journey to the Place of Vision and Power
The Myth of the Wanderer
Departure and Threshold Crossing
Descent into the Depths
“Flying” and the Upper Realms
Journeys into Nonordinary Reality
Returning Home
12. Returning to the Source
Man as Stranger, Life as Exile
The Outgoing Path and the Returning Path
The Homeward Journey
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