of the sort to him.
One also often finds competing interpretations between the experiencer, who thinks their encounter is spiritual, and a psychiatrist, who thinks it is indicative of schizophrenia. Western psychiatry has, thankfully, become better in the last two decades at overcoming its strong historical aversion to spiritual experiences, and less hasty to label them as physical pathologies requiring medication. Instead, psychiatrists are realising that ‘out-of-the-ordinary experiences’, like hearing voices, seeing a spirit or sensing a presence, are quite common in the general population. Myers and his colleagues at the Society for Psychical Research first pointed this out in a national survey of 1882, where they found around 10 per cent of the population reported having had ‘a vivid impression of seeing, or being touched, or hearing a voice . . . not due to any external cause’. More recent surveys have also put the prevalence of ‘hallucinations’ in the general population at around 10 per cent – much higher than the one per cent diagnosed with schizophrenia.15 Sensing a presence is particularly common among the bereaved: 50 to 90 per cent of bereaved people sense the presence of their loved one following their death. Crucially, for most people, sensing a presence is not distressing, not correlated with mental pathology, and has never required medication or hospitalisation. On the contrary, it’s more often found to be comforting and associated with improved mental health. Cognitive scientists now suggest that all of our experiences of reality are, in a sense, ‘controlled hallucinations’ – our minds improvise a version of reality based on the flood of raw data from our brains and senses.16 How we interpret incoming data depends in large part on our culture.
But some people’s spiritual experiences really do seem pathological. This is all too apparent as one reads through the RERC database. Although Hardy intended it to prove the spiritual nature of man to ‘the intellectual world’, it sometimes seems a catalogue of human folly. Hardy actually had to start a whole category, ‘File Z’, for reports that seemed to be sent straight from the asylum. Respondents leap to conclusions, seizing on the flimsiest evidence as certain proof of divine communication. Some think they can control the weather, travel through time, or alter geopolitical events with their mind. They lose a sane sense of their ego’s boundaries. They also ramble on for pages and pages - sometimes even the heroic patience of Hardy’s secretary wears thin as she transcribes the accounts:
The Revelations started in 1968 and got stronger. At first I was told with a Voice in My Head. Then 1969 The Vioce [sic] said Get Pen & Paper. The Vioce [sic] which said I AM The Lord The Lord of Hosts they call Me. If you asked for The Sun I would not give it you, then went on to tell me why. Then said You have heard the saying a bad Apple in a barrel of Good ones will turn all bad unless taken out. (This goes on in a disjointed and illogical manner for 3 pages, which have not been put on to computer disk.)
One would expect this mixture of the sublime and the pathological in spiritual experiences, according to the James–Myers–Jung theory of the psyche. The subliminal mind, wrote Myers, ‘is a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house’.17 Spiritual experiences, by their theory, are liminal moments when the border between the conscious ego and the subliminal mind becomes porous, and the contents of the subliminal mind burst through. It can reveal pearls of wisdom, healing and power. But it can also reveal a lot of nonsense. We need to find a middle ground between the uncritical embrace of such experiences as perfect revelations, and the complete rejection of them as mental pathology.
What to do in a spiritual emergency
In 1971, the 23-year-old David Lukoff dropped out of Harvard’s doctoral programme in social anthropology and hitchhiked his away across the USA. In San Francisco he dropped acid for the first time. Four days later, he woke up in the middle of the night, went into the bathroom in the friend’s flat where he was crashing and looked in the mirror. He saw his right hand was in the classic mudra position. He immediately realised he was the reincarnation of the Buddha. And Jesus. He also realised his mission: to create a new Holy Book to redeem the human race. For the next week, he wrote in a rapture, barely sleeping, channelling the spirits of the Buddha, Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Jung, R. D. Laing and Bob Dylan. When he’d finished his 47-page revelation, he made several copies, then handed them out on a street corner in Berkeley. To his surprise, his new religion failed to take off. Over the next two months, his messianic certainty began to fade. He was still sure he’d written a work of genius, but as he read more widely and realised how unoriginal many of his insights were, this certainty also began to fade. He became ill, insomniac and depressed. Luckily for him, all this time he was supported by friends and family, who kept him fed, gave him somewhere to sleep and didn’t hospitalise him or insist he was crazy. Gradually, he began to recognise the positive aspects of his experience. He became interested in other people who’d gone through temporary psychoses with a strong religious or spiritual component. He came across the term ‘spiritual emergency’, introduced by transpersonal psychologists Stanislav and Christina Grof in 1978.18 He took a doctorate in psychology and worked at UCLA and elsewhere, particularly with psychotic patients also convinced they were God or the Messiah, to whom he found it quite easy to relate.
In 1989, Lukoff managed to get a new diagnosis introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, volume IV, the handbook for clinical psychiatry and psychology in Western culture, called ‘religious or spiritual problem’. This distinguished temporary spiritual psychosis, such as he had experienced, from the classic diagnosis of schizophrenia. A religious or spiritual problem was temporary, not a biological brain disorder, but could involve psychotic features, such as ego-inflation, hyper-meaning detection and disordered conduct. It might have positive aspects, like a greater sense of meaning and motivation.
Supportive communities
The challenge for a person having an ‘out-of-the-ordinary experience’, and for their loved ones, peers, psychologist or psychiatrist, is to integrate the experience and recognise its positive aspects, while guarding against the negative, like paranoia or ego-inflation, and then to find a positive calling that connects the person back into society. Lukoff says: ‘I was lucky in having a supportive peer group and family. Otherwise, I’d probably have ended up hospitalised with a lifelong diagnosis of schizophrenia, with all the stigma and medication that goes with that.’ A 2012 study by Charles Heriot-Maitland et al. found that while out-of-the-ordinary experiences like hearing voices or sensing a spirit happen in roughly 10 per cent of the population, those who are hospitalised for such experiences tend to have a worse outcome than those who aren’t.19 The crucial factor for determining if such an experience is problematic, they decided, was whether people found a community that helped them to a positive interpretation for their experiences. Most psychiatric hospitals are the precise opposite of such places: you are locked up and told your voices are the product of a crippling lifelong biological disease, that they’re meaningless and should be ignored, and that your diagnosis means you’re likely to be on the scrapheap of society for the rest of your life.
Of course, there are risks on the other side too: spiritual or religious communities may impose their own equally dogmatic interpretation on your experience, declaring it to be the Holy Spirit, or a demon, or a past life, or an alchemical symbol from the collective unconscious. One friend of mine, suffering from drug-induced psychosis, was told by a psychic healer that he was suffering karmic retribution for his previous life as a Nazi war criminal. This was not helpful. The best support networks seem to be more grassroots communities, which share authority horizontally and have a pragmatic, flexible and sympathetic response to the variety of people’s interpretations of their experiences.
A good example is the Hearing Voices Network, which was launched in 1987 and has revolutionised Western psychology’s attitude to voice-hearing. It was launched by two Dutch psychiatrists – Marius Romme and Sandra Escher – and by a voice-hearer called Patsy Gage. While in treatment, Gage read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which argues that voice-hearing used to be a much more ubiquitous phenomenon earlier
