"I (Tarnas) should mention here that I lived for over ten years at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where I was the director of programs, and in the course of those years virtually every conceivable form of therapy and personal transformation, great and small, came through Esalen. In terms of therapeutic effectiveness, Grof's was by far the most powerful; there was no comparison. Yet the price was dear-in a sense the price was absolute: the reliving of one's birth was experienced in a context of profound existential and spiritual crisis, with great physical agony, unbearable constriction and pressure, extreme narrowing of mental horizons, a sense of hopeless alienation and the ultimate meaninglessness of life, a feeling of going irrevocably insane, and finally a shattering experiential encounter with death-with losing everything, physically, psychologically, intellectually, spiritually. Yet after integrating this long experiential sequence, subjects regularly reported experiencing a dramatic expansion of horizons, a radical change of perspective as to the nature of reality, a sense of sudden awakening, a feeling of being fundamentally reconnected to the universe, all accompanied by a profound sense of psychological healing and spiritual liberation. Later in these sessions and in subsequent ones, subjects reported having access to memories of prenatal intrauterine existence, which typically emerged in association with archetypal experiences of paradise, mystical union with nature or with the divine or with the Great Mother Goddess, dissolution of the ego in ecstatic unity with the universe, absorption into the transcendent One, and other forms of mystical unitive experience, Freud called the intimations of this level of experience that he had observed the "oceanic feeling," though for Freud this referred only as far back as infant nursing experiences of unity with the mother at the breast-a less profound version of the primal undifferentiated consciousness of the intrauterine condition."

SATYR

The satyr is a half-man half-goat (horns and hind quarters) creature symbolizing the animal urges in man.  As such they resent reason and all that is associated with it.  An illuminating example of the satyr's nature is found in the story of  Marsyas.  Athena, goddess of wisdom and  defensive war was said to have invented the flutes (symbol of earthly harmonies).   One day while walking past a pool of still water she gazed at her reflection and saw how the  the beautiful contours of her face were deformed (her cheeks puffed up) while she played the instrument.  In disgust the threw them to the ground and the lusty satyr Marsyas, who had been spying on her from the bushes, took them and learned to play with great ability.  He became so good at playing that he boasted to all that he was the greatest musician in the world, and would challenge even the gods.  Apollo accepted the challenge on the condition that the winner of the contest choose how the looser was to die.  Of course, Apollo, with his harp, won the competition and Marsyas, for his display of hubris, was tied to a tree and flayed alive.  The satyr figure was adopted by Christianity as the embodiment of Satan because of  the parallel relationship with the concept of the "scapegoat".

The labyrinth symbolizes a tortuous path and sometimes a type of prison out of which one cannot find a way.  The labyrinth figure can be described as a "geometrical figure with round or squared off exterior boundaries, the lines of which are to be understood as confining walls for a path running between them" (Jaskolski, 10).  The path, by running in the most circuitous fashion, completely fills up the interior space and inevitably ends up in the center.  The path in is also the path out. The most famous such structure was that built by King Minos to house the Minotaur (press the Labyrinth Text button below for an in-depth study of this symbol).  Psychologists associate the labyrinth with the "search for the center".  In this sense it can symbolize the path of life, a particular journey or the trials of a hero.