Since entering a community of practice that favors intuition, direct apprehension of the spiritual world, and personal transformation, I have encountered a range of attitudes toward growth and seen a number of journeys. What I notice often is a tendency in my communities toward fearing and desiring a form of spiritual realization imagined to be like a lightning bolt striking the Tower and changing the landscape utterly and forever.
There is a variety of language I’ve heard around it. Often the words use images like “broken” and “shattered.” They evoke wounding, destruction, and dissolution as almost necessities for growth. The language seems to suggest a belief that the main obstacle to perceiving and comprehending the spiritual world is a kind of rigidity of mind and firmness of the psychological container that will not allow the truth to enter into awareness.
In my life and work I’ve known people who experienced psychotic episodes in which their experiences of the world are decidedly different. To describe it as purely chaotic seems wrong, though chaos is present, but there is often a way in which the mind in a state of delusion is actually more fixed and rigid. Perhaps it is a way the psyche continually strives toward some kind of balance, off-setting the intensity of being open to so many scary thoughts and sensations by holding very tightly to a story about reality that is different from our consensus reality.
One of the chief distinctions between a delusional belief and any other belief is the capacity to which a person is willing or able to question and explore the belief and consider alternatives. When a song I was just thinking about comes on, I might simultaneously think it’s the universe sending a message, or it’s my phone listening to me and tracking my data to send me the right song, or it’s just a funny coincidence. The capacity to entertain all three possibilities, or even more, is a sign of a non-delusional mind that is flexible but contained.
On the other hand, I’ve interacted with many sincere spiritual folks who experience traumatizing and deeply unsettling experiences that might be labeled as delusional by people who don’t share that context. Often these folks arrive at an understanding of what’s happening to them through happenstance, talking to a lot of people and trying to find someone with a similar enough experience that they can make a story that makes enough sense to hold the experience without it completely throwing their lives into discord. They’re trying not to be broken by putting a name to what’s happening.
So much freedom comes when we can name what’s happening to us and separate it out from a story of being “broken.” Whether we can label it with a medical diagnosis, a psychological diagnosis, a political analysis, a family story, a myth—all of it serves to bring the struggle into the light and let us work with it. Writer Misha Magdalene wrote a really beautiful and related insight into identity labels being like the handle on a coffee cup. Our raw experience is like hot coffee, a wonderful brew that is tricky and dangerous to handle directly. Instead, we need cups with handles to contain experience and give us a way to work with it. Misha spoke to our identity labels as the handles to these cups, but I want to gently stretch that metaphor to encompass the stories we tell about who and what we are, that includes identity but also includes our stories of illness.
Getting back to the point—my peers who have experienced traumatizing, life-upending spiritual crises and incursions of the other-than-human world into their bodies and lives have found a way to get a handle on these experiences by telling a story that is very different than the delusional belief of a person in active psychosis. It retains the flexibility of mind, the humility to acknowledge when what’s happening is beyond our capacity to fully understand and name, and the containment of identity that allows for an integration of the disruptive experience. In an active state of psychosis, integration seems to be much harder. I have an image of gripping tightly to the bucking bronco while it’s actively trying to kick you off—that seems, from the outside, to be the paradox. But that’s also incredibly adaptive. It makes sense to hold on tightly to the story that seems to explain it all, even if it’s a horrible story, instead of letting go and feeling whelmed by the chaos.
There was a time when I envied and yearned for that same level of mystical spiritual disruption, while fearing the psychotic splitting and discord. Now I am not sure there is anything to envy or fear in either direction. My bias is toward a grounded state of self-awareness, contained by a sense of identity but open to a sense of interconnection with the material and non-material worlds. States of active psychosis may be scary, dangerous, and destructive, but the person experiencing them remains a human being who’s just having an intense experience and needs support. The mystic, too, needs support and community in integrating what they’re experiencing.
But neither, getting back to the original point, is necessary or intrinsically validating of your spiritual practice. Enlightenment isn’t always the lightning-struck Tower, it is also the gradual flowering of the dawning sun’s light that transforms the sky. My own sense of growing spiritual awareness started a long time ago with a wish to live in a more magical world, and a hope and fear that spiritual realities were real, and now has progressed into a simple curiosity with some knowing. As I use this computer without really understanding how it works, there are spiritual experiences that I’ve come to trust while recognizing my way of understanding and talking about them is at best a guess that will continue to evolve with time and practice.
The lovely thing is that we don’t need to believe anything to start practicing, we only need to be willing to try and interested in where the practice takes us. Eventually, practice introduces to us what we need to learn and experience. A regular practice, like daily meditation and prayer, offers a great deal of support in holding and integrating these revelations that might otherwise be shocking. So the experience that we might have feared would “break” us may, when the time comes, feel like a sudden shock that settles easily, like a chiropractic adjustment.
