[spiritual_emergency]

I came across the following in my wanderings the other night. What follows is merely an excerpt of the article. To read it completely, follow the source link provided at the end of the excerpt.

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One of the most dramatic and fascinating ways that psychology and spirituality come together is in the phenomenon of spiritual emergency. This appendix brings the integral model to bear on the issue of spiritual emergency in the hopes of bringing some theoretical order and clarity to this puzzling experience.

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For the vast majority of people, opening to spiritual experience is a welcome and easily integrated process. However, for a small minority, spiritual experience occurs so rapidly or forcefully that it becomes destabilizing, producing a psycho-spiritual crisis. This is where spiritual emergence becomes spiritual emergency.

All the world’s spiritual traditions warn about different dangers along the way, the “perils of the path.” New and expanded states of consciousness can overwhelm the ego. An infusion of powerful spiritual energies can flood the body and mind, fragmenting the structures of the self and temporarily incapacitating the person until they can be assimilated. With kundalini awakening, for example, there is an inrush of energies along the spine and throughout the body that can overwhelm and incapacitate the ego and leave the person adrift in a sea of profound consciousness changes at every level – physical, emotional, mental. Spiritual systems have identified numerous types of spiritual crises in which the ego’s usual coping mechanisms are overcome.

Transpersonal psychology has shown how these crises are a kind of non-pathological developmental crisis that can have powerfully transformative effects on a person’s life when supported and allowed to run their course to completion (Grof & Grof, 1989; Lukoff, 1998; Cortright, 1997; Perry, 1976). The idea of spiritual emergency has gained prominence in the last decade. It includes phenomena ranging from the opening to psychic or paranormal abilities to the emergence of various kinds of altered states of consciousness.

Spiritual emergency was once dismissed by the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic establishment as merely a form of mental illness, requiring immediate medication and hospitalization in order to end it as soon as possible. This misdiagnosis and mistreatment aborted an otherwise growthful process of psycho-spiritual change. There have been numerous reported cases of individuals having their process frozen through medication and attendant psychiatric treatment. When the process becomes suspended like this, the individual is unable to complete the process and ends up feeling shamed and hurt by the misdiagnosis and mishandling, sometimes feeling doomed to having a lifelong mental illness which is actually but an artifact of this iatrogenic mistreatment.

Spiritual emergency is one area where the field of transpersonal psychology has had a significant impact on the larger field of psychology and psychiatry. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM IV), with the guidance of several transpersonally oriented psychologists and psychiatrists, now includes spiritual emergency as a diagnostic category under the classification “Spiritual or Religious Problem”, a non-pathological V Code which may be a focus of treatment. This represents a considerable change in attitudes in the mental health community toward religion and spirituality.

However, despite this inclusion into the DSM IV, there has been little impact upon clinical practice in terms of how the mental health field as a whole treats spiritual emergency. In part this is due to the lack of training and education about this process in the mental health field, and in part this is due to confusion that exists about the phenomenon itself.

There are three major theoretical and clinical problems in this area. The first is the number and types of spiritual emergency. The current classificatory schemes are complex and cumbersome. The most widely used classification of spiritual emergency originated with the Grofs’ book Spiritual Emergency (Grof & Grof, 1989), in which 10 categories of spiritual emergency are listed including: shamanic crisis, the awakening of kundalini, episodes of unitive consciousness, psychological renewal through return to center (a particular form of psychosis), the crisis of psychic opening, past-life experiences, communications with spirit guides and “channeling”, near-death experiences, encounters with UFOs, and possession states. These categories are phenomenological descriptions based on how people undergoing a spiritual emergency describe them; no claims are made for their objective validity.

Lukoff, Lu, and Turner (1998) list 23 categories of spiritual emergency, adding such things as loss of faith, joining or leaving a New Religious Movement or cult, questioning of spiritual values, meditation-related problems, and others that are concomitant with DSM-IV mental disorders. Nelson (1990) also includes Washburn’s (1988) regression in the service of transcendence as another type, such as is often seen during the mid-life crisis. Additional categories have been reported by others in the field. The Spiritual Emergence Network has identified “guru attack”, the death and dying process, and addictions. The DSM IV scheme for identifying such problems that are concurrent with other diagnostic categories makes for over 50 possible types.

These ways of organizing the field of spiritual emergency are clinically confusing and theoretically inconsistent. As it now stands, the category of spiritual emergency is a jumble of dissimilar categories, ranging from the deepest psychotic process to the highest states of mystical realization. How can a clinically meaningful diagnostic classification emerge from such widely different levels of functioning? Is it possible to make sense of these very disparate phenomena? Is there a simpler way to organize this field that reflects a deeper order to this process? Can the whole phenomenon of spiritual emergency be organized into a coherent whole? That is the first task of this appendix.

A second problem confronting the clinician who is dealing with clients in various degrees of psycho-spiritual crisis is determining how best to intervene. What interventions can most effectively facilitate this process so it can develop optimally? For some types of spiritual emergency certain interventions are indicated, while for others the exact opposite is required. How can we best match intervention strategies with appropriate differential diagnoses? Suggesting meaningful treatment strategies is the second task.

A third problem is how to ascertain what is actually going on for a client. Depth psychology gives us a great appreciation of the psyche’s capacity for fantasy, imagination, and self-deception. For many people, the self-diagnosis of a spiritual emergency is much more appealing than that of, for example, paranoid schizophrenia. What portion of these phenomena are true spiritual infusions of higher energies and mystical states, what portion consists of images and fantasies from the collective unconscious, and what part are eruptions from the individual’s personal unconscious?

A New Way of Viewing Spiritual Emergency

Taking a simplified version of an integral schema of the psyche, various types of spiritual emergency can be viewed as being centered at a particular level of consciousness. This proves useful theoretically as a framework for organizing the entire field of spiritual emergency. It also proves clinically useful by providing a basis for assessment and devising intervention strategies to assist the process toward resolution. It is important to recognize that there are no hard and fast boundaries between these levels of consciousness. Each level includes all that is above it but not below, and each level subtly shades into the next level in a mutual interpenetration along the edges.

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<font color=#7B68EE>[*] Level 1: Conscious - Existential level: This is the most superficial level of consciousness, our ordinary awareness of self and outer world.</font>

<font color=#0000FF>[*] Level 2: Personal Unconscious level: Following Freud, this is the plane of consciousness which western psychology has explored most thoroughly. Though psychoanalysis has made the most detailed study of this domain, the existential and humanistic psychology movements have also charted significant areas, such as the importance of the somatic domain, and have expanded our understanding of this level.</font>

<font color=#00008B>[*] Level 3: Symbolic - Collective Unconscious level: The unearthing of the collective unconscious was Carl Jung’s great discovery. This level operates in images and symbols, and it is a dimension of consciousness that is shared by all human beings. It consists of the archetypes, universal forms or configurations of psychic potential that shape the psyche and organize psychological experience. This level is a meeting ground between the universal forces and the human psyche, a bridge which links the cosmic with the personal, a realm where universal forces take human form.</font>

<font color=#4B0082>[*] Level 4: Intermediate level: This is the realm of the inner (subtle) physical, inner vital, and inner mental planes that open to the larger, cosmic dimensions of the universe, beyond the physical creation. The philosopher Huston Smith (1976) notes in writing about the perennial philosophy that this intermediate level is a part of every major religious system in the world. It includes psychic phenomena such as ESP and clairvoyance. It is the domain of the spirit world that contains good and evil spirits (devas or angels and asuras or demons), ghosts and recently deceased souls, and fairies or nature spirits. This level encompasses different planes of nonphysical manifestation (or different bardos in Tibetan), including bissful heaven realms (or lokas in Hinduism) and painful hell realms. It includes the shamanic world, which has both higher regions and lower regions into which the shaman journeys. The intermediate level also involves the subtle body or astral body as well as the energy of kundalini and the chakras or energy centers within the human energy field (the aura.)</font>

<font color=#BA55D3>[*] Level 5: Soul or Spirit level: The central being is the ground of consciousness. Above it is atman or Buddha nature, the eternal and non-evolving spirit that is one with the Divine and that part of us emphasized by the nontheistic systems such as Buddhism and kevela advaita vedanta. Below, here in the manifestation, it is the evolving soul or psychic center, our unique spiritual individuality, a spark of the Divine, which is highlighted by the theistic traditions of the world such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.</font>

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Levels of Consciousness and Types of Spiritual Emergency

Locating different forms of spiritual emergency within different levels of consciousness yields a framework in which to organize the various phenomena into more easily understandable categories. Further, by gearing intervention strategies to specific levels of consciousness, this gives us a key for both assessment and treatment.

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For additional information, including specific suggestions for each level of consciousness one might be dealing with, read the rest of the article.

Source: An Integral Approach to Spiritual Emergency [PDF File]

See also: [*] Spiritual Emergency: A Useful Diagnostic Model?
[*] Psychosis as an Altered State of Consciousness
[*] Mania as Spiritual Emergency
[*] The Far Side of Madness: Psychosis as Purposive