being humiliated and invalidated rather than celebrated. Hundreds of stories from people who have had spiritual emergencies, and have been misdiagnosed as having mental disease were collected by Ring (1984) and the Grofs (1989, 1990). Because our Western culture generally has not accepted spiritual emergence phenomena as the product of a sane mind, most of the people who have had Near Death Experiences (NDE) are inhibited from talking about their experiences from fear of being considered, and treated, as crazy.
According to Ring, people who have NDE are usually counseled by their doctors, nurses, and clergymen to forget the memories of the experience ...as if it was only a hallucination or a bad dream attributable to stress. Many NDEr's who have not had people to validate their experience wonder if they were crazy. Some, however, spend their lives affirming the truth of their experience in spite of their community's lack of support.
Ring (1984) wrote about one woman who met a divine being during a NDE. Later, during the birth of her child she experienced a "surge of great joy" when she realized that her child would be able to go with the divine being she met when she was in her NDE. After her baby died a few days after birth, she did not experience the grief her doctor and minister expected her to go through. She wrote:
Well, I soon realized that my acceptance back into this world depended upon 'pretending' to forget, and 'pretending' to grieve the loss of my baby. So, I did this for everybody else's sake - except my husband, who believed me, and gained some comfort from it, second-hand. It was a dropped 'subject,' but never forgotten.
Clearly a change in the attitudes of the public in general and health-care professionals in particular toward the validity of NDE phenomena might produce dramatic benefits. We might not fear death, might believe in the existence of divine beings, and might feel we could talk about the transpersonal phenomena that have a profound impact on our lives.
Summary
Spiritual emergence is a personal realization of a reality beyond ego reality, and, ultimately, one's unity with all things. The outcome of a spiritual experience may be gradual spiritual emergence or problems related to spiritual emergency. When the individual with spiritual problems is given an appropriate conceptual framework and community support, spiritual emergence is made more likely.
When a person with spiritual problems is perceived as out of touch with reality, he or she may be subjected to an inappropriate diagnosis and course of treatment which intensifies the problems. The new DSM-IV (1994) category allows us to differentiate spiritual experiences as a "condition that may be a focus of clinical attention" but is not necessarily indicative of mental disorder. Thus, spiritual experiences are not necessarily symptomatic of mental disorder. However, there is still a considerable lack of clarity about distinguishing "spiritual problems" from Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Possession states, out-of-body experiences and other spiritual experiences could be diagnosed as indicators of spiritual problems or a dissociative disorder. Further study is needed to clarify these distinctions.
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