John Weir Perry

“I have repeatedly been puzzled by the extreme turbulence that accompanies profound change in the psyche. When a true spiritual awakening or transformation is underway, one usually encounters the emotional experiences and accompanying images of death and of the annihilation of the world itself. The psyche is not gentle in its expressions. One would like to expect that these movements of the spirit should come about by educational means of a more genteel nature, with instructions, workshops, exercises, and other modes of gradual change in orderly sequence. Depth work in psychotherapy holds the hope that it might bring about this change in a more kindly fashion; but even there, as Jung has observed, there are passages in the work in which there occur very uncomfortable states of de-adaptation along the way and episodes of altered states of consciousness that can even be called transitory “psychosis” that are mild and short.

The question is, then: Why the need for all this upheaval? There are good reasons that rest upon a second query: What is spirit and what is its nature?

People often use the word spiritual loosely to signify something uplifting, like high-level thought; at the extreme it is spoken of as lofty, seraphic, and rarified, high above nature as though in some other realm, hence supernatural. One knows better how it looks and feels when one experiences it at work! In descriptions of cultures, the word is often used to designate those aspects that are not merely material, economic, or political.

When we look at the actual phenomenology of spirit, we get a different impression. The ancient words for this give us a lead, for they imply breath or air, particularly air in motion, and thus wind; in Hebrew ruach, in Greek pneuma, in Latin animus, in the Far East prana or chi, and so on. The word spirit itself conveys the meaning of breath, derived from the Latin spiritus. All these terms clearly denote a dynamism that is invisible as air but capable of being powerful as wind. It “bloweth where it listeth” the Gospel says, suggesting that it has a will of its own. In short, spirit is a strongly moving dynamism free of material structure.

These pointers lead us to think of this dynamism as pure energy, but on closer look we find a bit more than that — it is typically experienced as having a voice, as when persons are moved by the spirit. It seems then to have the property of intention and to be freighted with information. In this aspect we can think of it as “informed energy” or energy with the quality of mind….

… We may glean that spirit can be either free of bodily structure or can tend to be liberated from it. This I find helpful for understanding how spirit operates in psychological experience. For here again we find spirit tending constantly to seek release from its entrapment in habitual, routine, or conventional mental structures. Spiritual work is one of liberating this dynamic energy, which must break free of its suffocation in old forms: old emotional patterns, such as the complexes engendered in the family systems; assumptions about the nature of the world and human life; values that need revision from time to time as conditions change; and cultural forms derived from family, subculture, or dominant cultural conditionings that must change with the times. Again there are ancient traditions expressing this work of liberating spirit, such as the emotionally painful labors of the nature philosophers of medieval times dedicated to freeing nous from physis, spirit from imprisonment and matter — in the natural world and in the body.

In our times, if during a person’s developmental process this work of releasing spirit becomes imperative, but is not undertaken voluntarily with knowledge of the goal and with considerable effort, then the psyche is apt to take over and overwhelm the conscious personality with its own powerful processes. I have observed these in a large number of cases of acute “psychosis,” which I have formulated and called the renewal process.

For our present purposes I am focusing on two components of this sequence of motifs that highlight its disintegrative and reintegrative aspects: the emotional experiences and images of death and world disruption.

Whenever a profound experience of change is about to take place, its harbinger is the motif of death. The question why is not particularly mysterious, since it is the limited view and appraisal of oneself that primarily must be outgrown. This issue is compacted in the self-image, and to accomplish its transformation it must dissolve in the manner of death, to be renewed. In severe visionary states, one may feel that one has crossed over into the realm of death and is living among spirits of the deceased. In this one is being forced to let go of old expectations of oneself and to let oneself be tossed about by the winds of change.

Far less familiar is the companion piece to this death motif: the image of world-destruction. Like the self-image, the world-image is a compacted form of the very complex pattern of how one sees the world and how one lives in it. We learn most about this from cultural anthropologists, who find that, in times of acute and rapid cultural change, visionaries undergo the somewhat shattering experience of seeing the world dissolve into a chaos and time whirl back to its beginnings. This dissolution of the world-image clearly represents a death of the old culture to pave the way for its renovation. The same applies in the case of an individual’s life: when a transformation of one’s inner culture is under way, dissolution of the world-image is the harbinger of change. During this process, expressions of cultural reforms are explicit.

These and other archetypal affect-images have the function of implementing the processes of the spirit: of liberating and transforming its energies, which will then slip out of the old structures lingering on from the recent past and into new ones geared to the near future. All this happens in the interests of development, that is, of cultivating a more capacious consciousness, open to dimensions of experience it had been closed to before. Not only are these two motifs, self-image and world-image, companion pieces in the process, but they also share the same image for the representation: the mandala. The entire process of renewal evidently is a work of this powerful affect-image representing the psyche’s governing Center.

Needless to say, the energy that has been bound up in the structures of the old self-image and world-image — in the issues of what one is and what sort of world one lives in — has to be immense. In dreams or visions, nuclear explosion is a frequent expression of its release. The enormous charge of psychic energy is on loose during the renewal process and raises havoc for a period. Though one’s own proper nature is struggling to break through, one may feel that who one is and what one’s values are, seem to be up for grabs for a while. Indeed, the values and emotional issues of life all seem to fall into division as clashing opposites.

Yet the energy does not remain long in suspense, but quickly seeks its reincarnation into new structures, expressed in the form of images and experiences of rebirth and world regeneration. A new sense of oneself appears along with fresh interests and motivations in the world. The new birth activates one’s memory of the actual events of one’s first birth , thus linking these phenomenon with those studied by Stanislav Grof. Following upon this there also occurs an inner re-enactment of emotional experiences in the early years.

The cataclysm of this kind of crisis in spiritual processes always reminds me of the biblical warning, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” because in the intermediate time between the initial visions of death and world disruption and their resolution and renewal, one is apt to be caught in the grip of fear. There is dismay over finding oneself in isolation inasmuch as communication of one’s experiences is not usually received empathetically. Just at the time one is seized with an inordinate need for loving reception, one finds oneself instead either alone with it or surrounded by professionals who want to suppress what is happening and make one conform to the ways of the former self and former world….

I have been dwelling on the more extreme forms of visionary states because the deep psychic process is so much out in the open that one can learn much to help understand its nature. The more usual form of spiritual emergence, while showing the same psychic contents and processes, may be far less disruptive. There is a broad range of severity from the horrendous to the mild, depending perhaps on how vigorous the resources of the person’s consciousness are and how rich in its repertory one’s unconscious psyche might be. The handling of it is the same in one respect though: the process of renewal needs a partner.

What turns out to be the ultimate goal of spiritual emergence in the renewal process? I think the most concise way of putting it is that it is the same as that of the mystic way or of meditation, which is phrased in Buddhist practice as wisdom and compassion (love). These are what emerge in the process and what are required of the partner in the work.

For most persons the very moment of slipping over the edge into the onslaught of confusion and welter of visionary images is marked by the experience of dying and entering the afterlife. Leading up to this crucial point there usually has been a gradual shift of attention from involvement with the conventional reality to concerns with that other reality, the inner life. What this signifies psychologically is that at this point of the break, there occurs a dramatic drop of energy out of the conscious field simultaneously with an intense activation of the archetypal level of the deep psyche with its profusion of mythic imagery. This surcharge of energy produces what Roland Fischer calls the “high arousal state.” Such psychological terms are adequate for a dispassionately objective account of these events, but for the subjective side one must think in the language of overwhelming cataracts of mythic ideation and symbolic forms. In this state every occurrence seems to conjure up a multiplicity of meanings…. “

John Weir Perry, Trials of the Visionary Mind: Spiritual Emergency and the Renewal Process, SUNY Press