As has already been mentioned, Western schools of psychotherapy, with the exception of psychosynthesis and Jungian psychology, have not acknowledged spirituality as a genuine and authentic force of the psyche. Most theoretical speculations have not taken into consideration the wealth of knowledge about consciousness and the human mind that has been accumulated through the ages by the great spiritual traditions of the world. The profound messages of these systems have been either entirely ignored or discarded and explained away as primitive superstition, an elaboration of infantile conflicts, or cultural equivalents of neurosis and psychosis.
In any case, spirituality and religion have been treated by Western psychiatry as something that the human psyche generates as a reaction to external influences—the overwhelming impact of the surrounding world, threat of death, fear of the unknown, conflict-ridden relationship with parents, and the like. The only framework available for a direct experience of alternative realities of a spiritual nature has been, until recently, that of mental disease. In concrete clinical work with patients, religious beliefs have usually been tolerated as long as they were shared by large groups of people. Idiosyncratic belief systems deviating from codified and culturally accepted forms, or direct experiences of spiritual realities, tend to be interpreted as pathological and indicative of a psychotic process.
Several exceptional researchers have found this situation untenable and challenged the traditional psychiatric view of spirituality and religion. Roberto Assagioli, the Italian-born founder of psychosynthesis, saw spirituality as a vital force in human life and an essential aspect of the psyche. He interpreted many of the phenomena that mainstream psychiatry treats as psychopathological manifestations to be concomitants of spiritual opening (1977). Carl Gustav Jung also attributed great significance to the spiritual dimensions and impulses of the psyche and created a conceptual system that bridges and integrates psychology and religion. Another important contribution to a new understanding of the relationship between mysticism and human personality came from Abraham Maslow. On the basis of extensive studies of individuals who had had spontaneous mystical, or “peak,” experiences, he challenged the traditional psychiatric view that equated them with psychosis and formulated a radically new psychology. According to him, mystical experiences should not be considered pathological; it seems more appropriate to view them as supernormal, since they are conducive to self-actualization and can occur in otherwise normal and well-adjusted individuals.
The observations from psychedelic therapy and other forms of deep experiential work fully confirm the views of these three researchers and suggest an even more radical formulation of the relationship between human personality and spirituality. According to the new data, spirituality is an intrinsic property of the psyche that emerges quite spontaneously when the process of self-exploration reaches sufficient depth. Direct experiential confrontation with the perinatal and transpersonal levels of the unconscious is always associated with a spontaneous awakening of a spirituality that is quite independent of the individual’s childhood experiences, religious programming, church affiliation, and even cultural and racial background. The individual who connects with these levels of his or her psyche automatically develops a new world view within which spirituality represents a natural, essential, and absolutely vital element of existence. In my experience, a transformation of this kind has occurred without exception in a wide range of individuals, including stubborn atheists, skeptics, cynics, Marxist philosophers, and positivistically oriented scientists.
In view of these facts, an atheistic, mechanistic, and materialistic approach to the world and to existence reflects deep alienation from the core of one’s being, a lack of genuine self-understanding, and psychological repression of the perinatal and transpersonal realms of one’s psyche. It also means that the individual in question identifies one-sidedly with only one partial aspect of his or her nature, that characterized by the body-ego and the hylotropic mode of consciousness. Such a truncated attitude toward oneself and toward existence is, in the last analysis, fraught with a sense of the futility of life, with alienation from the cosmic process, and with insatiable needs, competitive drives, and ambitions that no achievement can satisfy. On a collective scale, such a human condition leads to alienation from nature, an orientation toward “unlimited growth,” and an obsession with objective and quantitative parameters of existence. This way of being in the world is ultimately destructive and self-destructive on both the individual and the collective planes.
In a process of systematic in-depth self-exploration, death-rebirth sequences and transpersonal phenomena occur on the same experiential continuum as biographical material, the analysis of which is considered therapeutically useful in traditional psychiatry. It is therefore interesting to examine how conventional recollectiveanalytical-psychotherapeutic work is related to the process of spiritual opening. Clinical observations suggest that biographically oriented analysis and transpersonal experiences are two complementary aspects of the process of systematic self-exploration.
A gradual working through of the traumatic aspects of one’s early history tends to open the way to the perinatal and transpersonal experiences that mediate the spiritual opening. Conversely, individuals who have deep spiritual experiences early in the process of self-exploration, with psychedelics or other powerful experiential techniques, find subsequent work on the remaining biographical issues much easier and faster.
Particularly those who have experienced states of cosmic unity have an entirely new attitude toward the psychotherapeutic process. They have discovered a new, unexpected source of strength and their true identity. They now see their current life problems and past biographical material from a completely new perspective. From this new perspective, the events of their present existence do not seem to have the same overwhelming relevance that they had before. In addition, the goal of the psychological work is now clear; further self-exploration resembles the broadening and clearing of a road to a known destination, rather than blind digging in a dark tunnel.
The therapeutic potential of the experiences that have a spiritual quality by far surpasses anything available in connection with manipulations focusing on biographical material. Any conceptual system and technique of psychotherapy that does not acknowledge and utilize the perinatal and transpersonal domains of the psyche not only offers a superficial and incomplete image of human beings, but deprives itself and its clients of powerful mechanisms of healing and personality transformation.
Dependence on a narrow conceptual framework can prevent scientists from discovering, recognizing, or even imagining undreamed-of possibilities in the realm of natural phenomena. This can be illustrated by two examples from modern physics. A scientist rigidly clinging onto the Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe that implies the indestructibility of matter could not conceive of utilizing atomic energy, which requires fission of the atom. Similarly, the system of mechanical optics that views light as particles (photons) offers no theoretical access to holography, which utilizes interference of light waves. Projected into the future, a physicist who would treat Einstein’s theory of relativity as an accurate description of reality, rather than a useful but ultimately limited model, could never conceive of travel and communication faster than light. For the same reason, psychiatrists adhering to strictly biographical models of human beings cannot imagine the transformative power associated with perinatal experiences or transpersonal states of consciousness.
A strictly personal concept of the unconscious limited to biographically explainable elements is not only less effective and of limited value, but ultimately antitherapeutic. A logical consequence of such a theoretical orientation is to put psychopathological labels on perinatal and transpersonal phenomena that cannot be explained or accounted for in such a limited context. This then creates an unsurmountable obstacle for the recognition of the healing and transformative power of the process that involves the perinatal and transpersonal domain. In the context of traditional thinking, healing and spiritual opening is thus interpreted as pathology, which must be suppressed at all costs through the use of various drastic measures. As a result of this therapeutic strategy, contemporary psychiatry faces a strange situation: much of the combined efforts of psychiatrists, psychologists, neurophysiologists, biochemists, and other related professionals is one-sidedly directed toward interfering with processes that have unique therapeutic and transformative potential.
On the positive side, it should be acknowledged that in light of the present limited understanding of the nature of psychopathology and the lack of a truly healing strategy in psychiatry, the use of tranquilizers has had great historical significance. It did humanize the medieval atmosphere of psychiatric wards; it has prevented and alleviated much suffering; and it has probably saved many thousands of human lives.