cosmos. Each year brings an ever increasing sense of contentment. "
(ibid.)
He has never been rehospitalized, has led a stable work life, and has joined a church group. He is involved with community work and maintains close relationships with his family and friends. His integration of his experience is still deepening.
Everest's story illustrates a spiritual emergency in which psychological immaturity did not allow full integration of the spiritual experience at the time it was happening. His family, friends, and doctors considered Everest's experience as mental pathology, and did not support his entering it more deeply. His own understanding of his "odyssey," however enabled him to enter it fully and reap its transformational benefits.
Another example of spiritual emergency is taken from Chamberlin (1986) who worked with a group of 15-yearold boys in a psychiatric ward at the Menninger Foundation.
(He) taught (them) a variety of ways of altering their consciousness as a way of exposing them to alternatives to drug use. One of these methods involved biofeedback training with the eventual focus being on theta-wave training. During the time that the focus was on the thetawave training and immediately following it, some of the teenagers developed some out-ofthe-ordinary abilities. One of them began to have precognitive experiences that he perceived as strong intuitions and he needed to discuss these, particularly to validate them. Another person's reaction was more disruptive as he began to develop healing abilities. He was initially frightened by this ability. Later, he also began to notice that his electronic equipment was malfunctioning and that people in areas in which he would go would also report malfunctioning of electronic equipment. He was given some helpful suggestions about focusing his energy, at which point the electrical disruptions stopped. It appeared that this person was developing some shamanistic abilities, which in other cultures would have been given a lot of support. He was given articles to read about shamanism, and this reading resulted in a conceptual framework that was a great deal of comfort to him. However, he felt these abilities were something he did not have the time to work with and so he moved away from them. By not using them they appeared to stop.
(Chamberlin, 1986)
Conceptual Frameworks and Supportive Contexts
The reactions of Chamberlin's adolescents illustrates the importance of an appropriate conceptual framework and supportive social context for persons in spiritual emergence.
Persons in spiritual emergency are deeply influenced by their community of friends, family and health care workers. The mini-culture in Chamberlin's ward supported spiritual emergence in contrast to Everest's social community. Unlike most Western cultures, some cultures, like that in Tibet, hold a view of the world that allows spiritual experience to be integrated into normal life.
(The Tibetan culture is built on the knowing that) ... all dharmas are dreamlike, all phenomena are dreamlike. It's seen from the very beginning from that perspective ...Since it's seen from that point of view, when the world actually begins to fall apart in one's experience, it doesn't become that much of a clash, of a contradiction ...1 think what has been happening in the West is the concretization of the world as really something solid, a permanent thing. This has been something that has been built on since the development of sciences and Cartesianism, so that the (dream-like quality of existence) has been "kind of kept under control so to speak." Sometimes people have these kind of (spiritual emergencies) because the real nature of existence has been so repressed, and then suddenly these energies themselves spontaneously become a little bit overwhelming.
(Sogyal, 1985)
There is no comparable perspective in Europe or North America that supports spiritual awakening as part of natural human development. Thus, most of us Westerners are afraid of spiritual phenomena. They are strange to us. We need some conceptual context to help us make sense of these phenomena so that we can be more at peace with our own and more supportive of others' spiritual awakening.
Patterns of Spiritual Experiencing
All spiritual experiences, as mentioned previously, are indicators of the spiritual emergence process. Sometimes an episode of various intense spiritual experiences will happen in a meaningful pattern. If one intense spiritual experience is a shocking opening for an individual, a pattern of several intense spiritual experiences are even more apt to catalyze a spiritual emergency.
For the sake of creating some order we can take the liberty on paper to differentiate eight different patterns of spiritual emergency. It is important to bear in mind, however, that these patterns in actuality usually overlap and often occur simultaneously. Imagine trying to understand human physiology at birth from the perspective of just understanding the changes in the digestive system. You have to take into consideration all the various systems in the body - breathing, perceiving, absorbing, circulating, and eliminating - in order to understand the full impact of change occurring in the newborn. Likewise, if you try to understand the evolutionary crisis of spiritual emergency from the point of view of only one pattern of spiritual emergency, you will miss the full dimensions of the transformation in progress. Thus, although the patterns of spiritual experiencing do not function like interdependent systems (as in the body), they are usually profoundly interwoven.
Christina Grof and her husband, Dr. Stanislav Grof, have made many contributions to creating a transcultural conceptual framework for understanding the patterns of spiritual emergence. They draw from the work of many spiritual teachers, shamans, anthropologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Each pattern has certain characteristic features, or elements. A familiarity with these elements is essential for anyone working with people with spiritual problems.
The following eight patterns were first named by the Grofs (1985). The definitions I use supplement the definitions referred to by the Grofs.
1. Awakening of the Serpent Power (Kundalini)
A radical transformation in the individual's relationship to his or her bio-energy and openness to transpersonal levels of experience. This awakening is usually accompanied by powerful sensations of heat and energy streaming up the spine, tremors, violent shaking, unusual auditory sounds, and the impulse to perform complex movements similar to yogic postures. These phenomena are associated with a letting go of chronic muscular tensions connected to past trauma and/or patterns of holding the body associated with particular beliefs, i.e., a person afraid of the world will hold his body in one way, a bully will hold his body in another, etc. Physical indicators may run the spectrum from debilitating illness to extraordinary perceptions of light that bring on ecstatic feelings of bliss. Although the opening of the energetic system occurs in all spiritual emergence, not all people experience intense episodes of muscular spasm or unusual sounds and the impulse to move in strange ways.
2. Shamanic Journey - In this pattern the individual is often focused on elements of nature like animal guides, earth spirits, plant spirits, energies of the directions of north, south, east, west. On an inner level the individual is dealing with physical suffering and a personal encounter with death followed by rebirth. Descent to the underworld or ascent to the upperworlds are familiar aspects of the shamanic journey. Visions and premonitions of the future are often perceived in the intensity of this pattern. In shamanic cultures, these visions are seen as evidence of an individual's being a person able to heal others through access to extraordinary dimensions. In ancient cultures Shamanic Journey was often created through fasting and isolation in the wilderness because it was clearly a powerful opening to the inner resources of wisdom and compassion.
3. Psychological Renewal through Activation of the Central Archetype - This pattern is marked
