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Aria Veritas's avatar

" —though I nearly drowned as I learned to swim."

To my mind this watery metaphor is the meaning of the myth of Atlantis, Noah's Ark, the Deluge etc.. The Deluge may have been literal, but seems the point is to have 'built an ark' before the first lightning bolt brings on the chaotic storm (there's even an arc...uate nucleus in the brain).

(And I liked this enough to steal/repurpose your Campbell quote too btw. Yoink and thanx!)

I had a friend who used to tell me I had delusions of grandeur (late teens. Last week I heard 80+% of teens want to be famous). A few months before the Big Jump (2022) I'd told my husband I'd be happy to do the budget routine for the rest of my life. Life was small, quiet and so good.

During the kundalini trip (like a week of hardcore LSD every day) I was ordered (by "God") to accept I was to die as nothing and it felt utterly fantastic, like a get-out-of-jail-free card.

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alistair's avatar

Thank you for this piece and making it public. This is an important topic. Not only because things like psychedelics are increasing in popularity, but so are things like meditation, which as you mention here, and elsewhere, are not neutral to the psyche. It seems also that more and more people are feeling a state of meaninglessness in the world and so are starting to turn towards spiritual practices that can have these effects you describe, as well as others not discussed here. Yet, people are invited by our society, without any preparation into these kinds of potentially transformative states and experiences, without so much as a discussion of what can happen, the profound changes to your psyche and the bad (and even sometimes good) consequences that can result from engaging such practices or experiences. Instead, they are simply treated as another commodity on the marketplace to be consumed. Just go check your community for yoga classes, kundalini classes, meditations, circling, etc.

These practices have been in many ways irresponsibly extracted from long, living traditions, in which the practitioners are embedded in the traditions and held inside structures and communities that prepare people for the practices, walk them into it, help them navigate it, help them process it, and help them pull themselves out of the darkness when they venture too far. I think this is likely a result of the commodification of everything by our society, an emphasis on having mode over being mode, our too rigid of a scientific “objective” materialist approach to reality,and many other factors that make up this meta-poly-meaning-crisis thing that is all the rage these days.

Yet, these very practices and tools, I suspect are also one part of our way out of the mess we find ourselves in as I suspect humans may need to fundamentally alter their relationship with themselves that requires a certain amount of transcendence. It is quite the quagmire and beyond my feeble brain’s ability to try and solve this issue of how do we take these things and put them into a safe community of practice? I don’t suspect that the western “secularized” man is going to start going back to the churches, Sufi orders, zen orders, and different mystical traditions, such that they can find themselves in a responsible sapiential community with elders and teachers and peers that can help people navigate these experiences and states. Nor do I suspect that it is wise to turn people to traditional scientific communities or laboratories to engage in these experiences as they are missing key pieces of the puzzle, i.e., wisdom that our mystical traditions have accreted through the ages, hell we don’t even have a scientific agreement as to what a healthy psyche is from which to make normative statements about what that is. Maybe some combination of science and sapiential communities needs to be developed?

I also worry about how people who may have these experiences will be stigmatized and pathologized inappropriately by our medical scientific complex and may have their lives ruined as a result of it. Even in these alternative spaces where people are engaging in the use of psychedelics or even just spiritual practices, I have personally seen how this very topic you speak about in this article is ignored as if it isn’t a real and dangerous issue for people, and I have also reached out to people in these communities to seek guidance on these topics you address, just to be ignored by those people. Then, I have seen when they see these issues arise, they try and avoid addressing it or quietly shuffle the people off the stages, maybe because it would get in the way of their work for there to be an acknowledgment that bad things can happen to people when they are not prepared or located in an appropriate community setting where others can help others.

So, first and foremost, thank you for this article. And second, I would love to eventually hear more of your thoughts on how these issues can best be addressed, so that more than just the lucky few, like yourself, and Carl Jung, can navigate these experiences and continue to function without breaking down.

I’m also curious if you have come across in your research, Pierre Grimes, his philosophical midwifery, and specifically his thoughts about what he calls pathologos? It seems to me that he has some good insights into what happens when you start to poke around your psyche with meditative and spiritual practices that are intended to help you unfold yourself further and develop. I have heard his students talk about experiences like the psychosis described in your article as a result of engaging in spiritual practices, and how Pierre responds to them, discussing this as an issue of pathologos. I am not him and have not spoken with him, so I can’t confirm my understanding of it is correct, but it seems that these manic and psychotic responses or even sometimes panic attacks or that result from these practices (or substances) are the pathologos fighting against your development. The pathologos (according to my limited understanding) seems to be the constructs our parents and societies bake into us until about adolescence about how we are supposed to be as people, what our roles and cultures expect of us, and that these help us to fit in to our society and culture, but at the same time, they are artificial limitations that prevent us from actually developing ourselves. When you engage in activities or substances that allow you to break free from these, your ego structures (part of the pathologos) respond as if there is a foreign invader threatening them which causes the psyche to respond. I suspect that those grandiose ideas that are had during these experiences are one way the “ego” and pathologos try and keep to the old ways of being, by making it about “you” and how “special” you are, thus reinforcing the artificial Cartesian self in an attempt to keep you from developing.

But I somewhat digress. Thanks for this article and I hope to see many more discussing this important issue.

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