This essay by Martin Nawrath on the Cosmic Walk was published in the magazine Psychology Today (11/ 2024), dedicated to transpersonal psychology. Martin Nawrath is a therapist and facilitator, trained primarily in process-oriented psychology, but also inspired by archetypal and analytical psychology. In recent years, he has focused on connecting mental health with environmental protection. He is the co-founder of Klidem - the Institute for Ecotherapy.
One of the passions of my youth was history and geography. Specifically, textbooks and their accompanying images. I still remember what the history books for the ancient period looked like, which I even took home with enthusiasm when I was throwing away old books. It was as if I needed to capture the images and information anchored in them on some deep level of memory. To know somehow firmly that this really happened: that's how it was, this preceded where we are today! I also remember the first pages of the atlas, where in the form of a pictorial spiral with a timeline it was precisely worked out what phases there were before the appearance of Homo sapiens, that is, we as people today. The pictures of planets and galaxies had a similar effect on me. They were textbooks! For a child of my age, for a boy of not entirely self-confident nature and with a relatively strong respect for the school authorities of the communist regime, it was an unquestionable concentration of knowledge and understanding. I also remember passionate debates with friends, in which I first defended evolution, strengthened by the factual and scientific weight of the textbooks, and then a few years later, as a formally baptized Catholic, I militantly defended the positions of Christianity for reasons of momentary immersion in faith. This was repeated and changed in certain forms, based on reading, meeting new friends and communities.
Forms of detachment
When, over time, especially in the post-revolutionary boom, I began to get acquainted with yoga, Buddhism, other forms of Christian faith, but also with shamanism as presented by Carlos Castaneda or the transpersonal psychology of Stanislav Grof, I again had the impression that I was somehow touching human history and the universe. Altered states of consciousness, mystical and peak experiences, rituals, ecstasy and everything that transpersonal psychology deals with shot me up. It shot up and gave a feeling of lightness, detachment and dizziness. I remember the dreams of that time. I could fly in them. I flew from tree to tree with amazing ease, letting myself be carried away by my dreamlike quality. And then, quite regularly and naturally, the dream ended, at a completely unexpected moment my ability to fly disappeared, followed by an understandable, unstoppable, hard and terrifying fall to the ground, during which I woke up.
It reminded me of another experience from my teenage years. I didn't just fall in love with girls. I also fell in love with the sky and the conversations under it and about it. I see and feel it like today. I'm lying with a friend in a meadow and my eyes are pulling me "there", but at the same time my body is painfully stuck "here". And so very much so. I experienced similar pain and contradictions as a ski jumper. That second when your feet with skis come off the edge of the bridge, and a moment later the force of gravity that mercilessly and hard pins you to the landing surface. Even today, when I occasionally see jumpers on TV, I bounce along with them and fall along with them - and I'm gripped by that touch of the ground again and again. To this day, I still feel dizzy when I look up and down. My body can't help it. It's not pleasant, I'd rather not experience it, but somehow I trust my body.
Growing down
Jung's interpretation of the collective unconscious usually refers more to the past. It speaks of archetypal images that are part of a given culture and society and appear in individual experiential and dream content. But the "überpersönlich" also aims "above". Above what is "only" personal, individual and limited. In Grof's words, even above what is limited only by matter, to something that exists outside of us and independently of us.
Taught by history, trained by heights, and burned by falls, I ask: how do we collectively touch "eternity" today without forgetting the reality of the mysterious gravity and power of the Earth and matter, which are undoubtedly part of life here?
I offer a concept and a practice that has always existed in some form. It is related to those who raised their heads to the stars. With astronomers, but also with astrologers and alchemists. Those unimaginable distances have always whipped our imagination - we longed to inhabit them. The wide and deep sky gave us enough space to fill it with facts, images and stories. In psychological language, one would like to say projections, but explaining the aforementioned endless process of all relating with one mechanism and word robs us of something from it and thereby impoverishes us.
It especially impoverishes the heart.
Heart of the Cosmos
With immense amusement, I read on the back cover of the book The hidden heart of the cosmos Brian Swimme read about the profession of this profound man. He is the director of the Center for the Story of the Universe. What a bold, funny, even cheeky statement. Without delving deeper into it, I would happily leave this role to him even if he had no subordinates as director. It is clear from his book that combining scientific knowledge into a story that he takes to heart is important not only for the completely original name of his profession, but first and foremost for us earthlings. Soaked in equations, metrics and numbers, we have long forgotten to live the universe, to live with the universe. As human beings, we cannot live well and meaningfully without a story. Not only do Einstein's theories and equations have something of the nature of the mystery in which we live, but there is somehow more secret and hidden than what I can bathe in in the morning. Make no mistake. Swimme is a scientist, a mathematical cosmologist. But he is also a great storyteller. A storyteller who is not afraid of poetry and metaphors. At the same time, he knows that imagination must be connected to the body and that if it breaks free from its chains, its bonds and its relationship with the Earth, it is neither creative nor healing. His language is at times scientific and at times mythopoetic. Swimme constructs the story in such a way that it allows us to grab hold of a firm scientific support from time to time, so that on the next stretch of the walk we can surrender to the surprise, inspiration and excitement of a new discovery. Such a text is truly initiatory. It takes us into the afterlife.
Space walk
A wider circle of scientists and theologians, not only connected to Brian Swimm, felt the need to connect the story of the universe with our walking, with what we do every day in intimate physical contact with the Earth, as an invitation to the afterlife. Thus the concept was born. Space walks or Walks through deep time. It was brought to the Czech Republic by the well-known cultural historian Jiří Zemánek, who also translated some books that develop and support this topic.
The principle of the walk is relatively simple. We translate the time scale of our cosmic history into distance. Whether we want to go back in time and start at the Big Bang (roughly 13.7 billion years) or settle for the moment when the Solar System was formed (4.6 billion), billions of years can mean, for example, a kilometer of our walk. The key “aha moment” of this procedure is the realization that two hundred thousand years of the existence of our own species Homo sapiens on a walk represents a stretch of just twenty centimeters! The industrial society of which we are a part and with which we firmly identify as the present everyday reality, is projected into just one fifth of a millimeter! Physically, it brings a feeling of dizziness, overcrowding and crampedness, or on the contrary, a great breath and distance. It depends on whether we can connect with our eyes and breath for a moment and identify with that infinite distance, so that by switching our attention for a moment we can devote ourselves to the tiny dimension of "now"!
Actual stops
The framework, the scale of the walk, is therefore essentially given, although we can adapt it. An important element are also the individual stops, where we have more space for our own imagination supported by scientific knowledge. If we choose the path from the very beginning, we naturally offer a deep immersion in the mystery of the big bang. To give a moment to one of the pioneers and teachers of this walk, Dominican Sister Miriam Theresa MacGillis, I will quote her imagination of the beginning: “13.7 billion years ago, from that place that was no-place, from that time that was no-time, the cosmos flared into existence in a silent glow of unimaginable brilliance. All the energy that had ever existed in the entire span of time exploded from a single point smaller than a grain of sand. An unimaginably vast number of elementary particles, light, and space-time itself unfolded and expanded from this quantum vacuum, from this primordial unity. If stars shine in the future and lizards squint in their light, these processes will be made possible by the same numinous energy that erupted at the dawn of time.” This collective walk offers an abundance of similarly powerful stops, which challenge the imagination, but also provide space for poetry or deep sensory experiences. From the big bang, we gradually reach the formation of our Solar System and the incredible power of the Sun – and not the insignificant role of the Moon. We can move on to experience the formation of the atmosphere and the necessary cooling power of water in the formation of planet Earth. Another miracle and stop on the way is undoubtedly the emergence of the first form of life. The monumental moment occurs at the moment of the emergence of photosynthesis, a simple mechanism expressed by a fascinating equation, which we can understand as a great sacrifice of the Sun's energy transforming into a daily feast for all creation hungrily absorbing carbon and oxygen. Not only these dazzling explosions of creativity, such as the subsequent emergence of multicellular organisms, but also inevitable collapses have their place in the walk. A moment that directly invites us to play with our senses is the point when the universe was first seen with our own eyes. Perhaps only a long stay in the dark can imitate the principle by which the universe began to observe itself. Along the way, we can also touch the ability of our non-human brothers to fly, swim, crawl, and also consciously connect with the strength of our own spine and skeleton, which is such a valuable support for us on the way. We can awaken our fingers, their mobility and sensitivity can be a direct transition to the awareness of the ability to change what has been created with our own and extended machine hands. And by walking, we may even get into the hot present of artificial intelligence, still insufficiently explored, and therefore frightening and fascinating.
Not that we don't know all this. But in a group ritualized and honestly trodden form, we are suddenly offered another dimension of experience. Maybe not as intense as psychedelics or deep, intense inhales and exhales, but somehow honestly sweaty in the bodies and dirty in the feet... It is an experience pinned to the ground as firmly as the stations of the cross are attracted by gravity proportional to the height of the hill on which the last station stands.
The heart of matter as a message
I try to be careful about how my Jungian heart perceives synchronicity. An eye too focused upward to the peaks of wondrous coincidences can lead us to complete blindness to the real earthly experiences of a sacred nature. These are valuable precisely because of their uniqueness and unexpectedness. The wait for them is sometimes unbearable in the valley of routine.
In this last paragraph, I cannot help but add that while writing this text, a trailer for a fresh translation of the great linker of evolution and its deep Christian content, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, jumped out at me in his work Heart of Matter. That event settled in my chest. With just two words, a sacred weight settled within me that I have no need to get rid of.
"How do we touch on "eternity" without forgetting the reality of the power of the Earth and matter, which is undoubtedly part of life here?"
Resources
- Berry, T. The Great Work: Our Journey into the Future. Malvern, 2021
- De Chardin, PT Heart of Matter. Malvern, 2024
- Swimme, BT The hidden heart of the cosmos. Malvern, 2019
- Winkler P. Transpersonal thinking in psychology and psychotherapy. Triton, 2016