Spiritual Emergence Experience, SEE
Schizophrenia, a Psychiatric Disorder, or Psychic Awakening?
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder hallmarked by hallucinations. The criteria for schizophrenia appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Fourth Edition, Revised Text, DSM-IV TR, published by the American Psychiatric Association. This is the manual mental health professionals use when they make diagnoses for billing purposes.
A new category, V62.89 has been recently added as a religious or spiritual problem. It was created because not all people who see and/or hear things are schizophrenic. This phenomenon has also been called spiritual awakening and mystical experience.
Spiritual Emergence Theory, Transpersonal Psychology
Transpersonal Psychology was developed in 1969 by Stanislas Grof, Abraham Maslow, Victor Frankl, Jim Fadiman and Antony Sutich. Its main purpose is to study different states of consciousness, especially the transpersonal consciousness state. This state transcending limits of the ego is known in all cultures and time periods by different names.
According to this theory, there are four main states of consciousness and different realities:
- Awake. The physical world prevails, as perceived by the sense organs;
- Dreaming. Also called Rapid Eye Movement, REM: consciousness, when dreaming one is cut-off from the physical world, but the perso touch with the psychic world by psychical functions;
- Sleep. Consciousness is cut-off from the psychical and physical worlds and is in a pure and luminous state, and;
- Transpersonal state. Reality becomes one with the universal and impersonal consciousness. The transpersonal state remembers visions of reality as described by quantum physics. Matter is seen as energy and light, transcends time limits and is an eternal and transtemporal dimension.
A meeting with physicists and transpersonal psychologists established the basis of a new scientific paradigm: the holistic. The transpersonal experience has great therapeutic value because it eradicates the dualistic illusion and awakens buried feelings of love and wisdom. It questions the nature of truth, addresses the problem of psychosis’ origin and hallucinations and the normality and reality of what the “I” is.
Spiritual Emergence Experience, Contradictory Theories
- Evolutionary thesis: Each normal human goes through different phases in one’s existence. The first is an undifferentiated one where there is total confusion between the internal and the external world. This is a formative period of an ego apart from the external world, a personal and relative time. The transpersonal period is composed of a living, different unity and a holistic view of the universe or part of it.
- Regressive thesis: Grof proposed that the transpersonal experience is a regression toward an undifferentiated state of an intra- and pre-uterine nature. Hallucinations and psychosis explanations are found through a regressive position along its map of consciousness.
Spiritual Emergence Experience - Grof’s Criteria
These standards exclude people with persecutory delusions, severe paranoid states, hallucinations and those who consistently use the defense mechanisms of projection, exteriorization and acting out.
There are episodes involving changes in consciousness and in perceptual, emotional, cognitive and psychosomatic functions. There is significant transpersonal emphasis in the process, such as death and rebirth sequences, archetypal phenomena, past incarnation memories, out-of-body experiences, incidence of synchronicities and/or extra-sensory perception with intense energetic states and identification with cosmic consciousness. Criteria include:
- Ability to see the condition as an inner psychological process and to deal with it in a healthy manner.
- Absence of underlying physical conditions and disorders, substance abuse and a long history of mainstream psychiatric treatment and hospitalizations.
- Reasonably good overall health allowing the client to safely withstand the stress associated with the experiential work.
Spiritual Emergency Experience
Grof recognized the downside of SEEs and termed it Spiritual Emergency Experience. The latter is more likely to turn into a spiritual emergency, negative experience, when:
- Individuals have no conceptual framework to support the experience which enables to understanding and accepting the phenomenon with balance.
- Individuals don’t have the physical or emotional flexibility to integrate the experience.
- Family friends and/or professionals of a person having the experience see the phenomenon in terms of psychopathological symptoms.
Sources:
- Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, (HarperSanFransico, 1991).
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