Practice of Holoscendence: What Can We Learn from Near-Death Experience and How Can We Cultivate This Knowledge in Our Daily Lives?

Eugene Pustoshkin
(based on materials provided by Dr. Sergey Kupriyanov)

There is an astonishing and medically fully-documented story of Anita Moorjani’s recovery from terminal-stage cancer. One day she “woke up” in a coma state with a full-blown near-death experience. She reports how she experienced herself as pure nonlocal Awareness with a kind of 360-degree peripheral vision, sensed her relatives at a distance, heard things that were said at the ICU and outside which she couldn’t have possibly heard (according to stereotypical views of what’s possible), received the lessons of love, self-care, and meaning of life, and had a miraculous recovery from cancer. Anita explains that our contemporary culture is fear-based, so instead of wellness we look for sickness, thus selectively constructing our perception around fear of death and disease. (The links to her interview and public presentation are provided below in the Appendix.)

On this photo: Anita Moorjani (left) with Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra
On this photo: Anita Moorjani (left) with Wayne Dyer, Eckhart Tolle, and Deepak Chopra

Anita’s experience is remarkably similar to the discoveries made in Holoscendence, an Integral meta-paradigm for psychotherapy, interpersonal communication, self-growth, and spiritual practice pioneered by Dr. Sergey Kupriyanov, MD, PhD in Medicine (Helsinki, Finland), a psychotherapist with about 35 years of professional experience. While Anita came to her discoveries via a non-ordinary near-death state, the experiential part of Holoscendence stems from thousands hours of high-intensity professional work and interaction with thousands of people in the waking state and varieties of spontaneously arising peak experiences that often mediate healing and resolution of various unfinished businesses.

Holoscendence implicates cultivating a continuous eyes-open meditative interaction with others and the energetic flow of Life per se. All states and levels of consciousness-and-being are simultaneously included in the moment-to-moment and stage-by-stage ever-unfolding conscious and intuitive holoscendent flow.

Both in Anita’s near-death experience and Holoscendence:

• Life is experienced directly through Awareness per se (Spirit, Emptiness, silent space) rather than merely through senses;
• There is a simultaneity of experiencing everything all at once and in its dynamics;
• Communication with others is done not through thinking/talking but through space of awareness (“spacing” others rather than “thinking” them);
• There is a simultaneous enactment of locality and non-locality and time and timelessness: both the time-and-space-bound form and that which never enters the stream of time-and-space are integrated in the singular multidimensional being;
• Love, faith, compassion to other sentient beings come from silent space (or no-thing-ness), and not from the domain of manifested phenomena/things;
• The value of Essential Unique Self is realized directly (that is, your value in the eyes of God, Spirit, silent space);
• The dimension of death is included into a wider understanding of life beyond traditional description of life (rigid life narratives about possibilities and limitations of existence).

One nice thing about Holoscendence is that you do not need to die in order to learn this and pragmaticaly integrate it into your life. You work with your life-and-death fears by continuously rediscovering profound stillness in your heart, which opens direct access to your innermost source of creativity and texture of Love—Awareness. This stillness is evoked amidst all the daily activities, with no need to retreat from the world and with a proactive stance of creatively and responsibly embracing its numerous dignities and difficulties.

On this photo: A holoscendent meditative interaction during Sergey Kupriyanov’s Holoscendence workshop at the 1st Integral European Conference (Budapest, Hungary, May 2014)
On this photo: A holoscendent meditative interaction during Sergey Kupriyanov’s Holoscendence workshop at the 1st Integral European Conference (Budapest, Hungary, May 2014)

The famous author and anthropologist Carlos Castaneda wrote about two paths of knowing reality: the path of dreamers (via, e.g., non-ordinary states of lucid dreaming or, in our example, near-death experiences and such approaches as Arnold and Amy Mindell’s coma work) and the path of stalkers (meaning individuals meaningfully committed to fully living and investigating reality in the domain of wakefulness). While the latter is specifically emphasized in Holoscendence, both paths are integrated in its unitive embrace (alongside with dozens of different approaches).

The holoscendent approach to Narrative Therapy is also of interest here. In Holoscendent Narrative Therapy reality is being known not only through local time but also as holographically interwoven narratives which are simultaneously represented in the timeless nonlocal space of present Awareness. Holoscendence works on strengthening the narratives and meaning-making capacities by allowing one to directly access experiential and energetic domains. We weave our stories not simply by words, but by our whole beings. We ceaselessly signify our meanings and share our souls with each other and ourselves.

In order to correct our life trajectory we need to gain and cultivate access to all those dimensions. Anita’s experience is but one evidence of that the territory, discovered and disclosed by the Holoscendence Approach, is very real and very available to each one of us, once we are ready to allow our multidimensional life story unfold in spontaneous and constructive ways. Holoscendence as an integral transformative practice allows to leverage the best of lessons learned in such extraordinary states as near-death experiences, integrate them into your daily practice, and spontaneously re-live, re-member, and re-experience their beneficial effects to improve and sustain the quality of your life.

To learn more about Holoscendence, please see this PDF brochure: http://scribd.com/doc/239294558/Holoscendence-Method-Introduction

APPENDIX. The links to Anita Moorjani’s story

Anita Moorjani’s book Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dying-Be-Me-Journey-Healing/dp/1848507836

“In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body-overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system-began shutting down. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth… and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was able to be released from the hospital within weeks… without a trace of cancer in her body!

Within these pages, Anita recounts stories of her childhood in Hong Kong, her challenge to establish her career and find true love, as well as how she eventually ended up in that hospital bed where she defied all medical knowledge.

As part of a traditional Hindu family residing in a largely Chinese and British society, she had been pushed and pulled by cultural and religious customs since she had been a little girl. After years of struggling to forge her own path while trying to meet everyone else’s expectations, she had the realization, as a result of her epiphany on the other side, that she had the power to heal herself . . . and that there are miracles in the Universe that she had never even imagined.

In Dying to Be Me, Anita freely shares all she has learned about illness, healing, fear, «being love,» and the true magnificence of each and every human being!

This is a book that definitely makes the case that we are spiritual beings having a human experience . . . and that we are all One!”

Part 1: Anita Moorjani’s Near-Death Experience While Dying Of Cancer — Author of Dying To Be Me

“You won’t want to miss this life-changing conversation with Anita Moorjani. This is the first of two videos. This is the closest I’ll ever get to interviewing an actual spirit, because Anita Moorjani is able to share with us what it was like to be out of her body and in the spirit world, including her ability to see the past and future, experience timelessness, know her life’s purpose, feel the emotions of others, and even know what caused her life-threatening illness in the first place.

Anita Moorjani’s story will surely blow your mind and get you pondering what she teaches for weeks after watching this conversation. In a nutshell, Anita fell into a coma due to late-stage cancer. Her husband was told by doctors that she had less than 36 hours to live (her organs were shutting down). All the while, Anita was having a near-death experience, was given the choice to return to her body or not, chose to finish out her life, then had the most remarkable healing ever documented. Today, Anita Moorjani shares her experience and her important message about love and joy. ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV”

Part 2: Lessons From A Near-Death Experience: Anita Moorjani Discusses Her Coma Induced NDE

“This is the second of Bob Olson’s two-part life-changing conversation with Anita Moorjani, the author of Dying To Be Me. In this video conversation, Anita Moorjani reveals the lessons she learned during her coma-induced near death experience. Anita shares with us lessons about fear, love, cancer and what the spirit world is truly like. One of the most valuable interviews ever done on the spiritual aspects of cancer, death, life after death and healing. What Anita Moorjani teaches us about how to keep ourselves healthy and happy is truly transforming.

Anita Moorjani’s story will blow your mind and get you pondering what she teaches for weeks after watching this conversation. In a nutshell, Anita fell into a coma due to late-stage cancer. Her husband was told by doctors that she had less than 36 hours to live (her organs were shutting down). All the while, Anita was having a near-death experience, was given the choice to return to her body or not, chose to finish out her life, then had the most remarkable healing ever documented. Today, Anita Moorjani shares her experience and her important message about love and joy. ~ Bob Olson, Afterlife TV”

Anita Moorjani’s TEDx presentation: Dying to be me! Anita Moorjani at TEDxBayArea

“Doctors had given Anita Moorjani just hours to live when she arrived at the hospital in a coma on the morning of February 2nd, 2006. Unable to move as a result of the cancer that had ravaged her body for almost four years, Anita entered another dimension, where she experienced great clarity and understanding of her life and purpose here on earth. She was given a choice of whether to return to life or not, and chose to return to life when she realized that «heaven» is a state and not a place. This subsequently resulted in a remarkable and complete recovery of her health. Anita’s riveting talk will inspire you to transform your life by living more authentically, discovering your greatest passions, transcending your deepest fears, and living from a place of pure joy. Her true story will radically alter your current beliefs about yourself, your purpose on earth, your health, your relationships, and your life!”