"Spirituality" and unconsciousness - Part II

Although I should not need to say this, I hope it is understood that I was not talking about authentic spiritual experience in yesterday's post. There are genuine spiritual experiences and there are others, such as the ones I wrote about yesterday, which merely appear to be spiritual but are in fact something else. It is these latter that are dangerous, if they are mistaken for the real thing. That is when people can have breakdowns such as the ones I referred to yesterday.

Even "breakdowns", however, can be spiritual (See the earlier comment on the depression article in which the "breakdown" was actually a spiritual crisis. As such it was able to be handled with loving support). Psychiatry, of course, makes no such distinctions. An experience that involves the hearing of voices or the seeing of visions is taken to be a break with reality (the formal criterion which enables the Psychiatrist to designate it as "psychotic") whether it is pure fantasy (as it often is) or whether it is a genuine psychic phenomenon. There are no rules for distinguishing the two. If you are having such an experience you need a trusted friend who has your best interests at heart and who is open minded and open hearted, as well as possessing some skills and experience that are relevant to what you are experiencing. I have been in the situation of offering support to someone experiencing one of these breakdowns. So, too, has Harbans. We may not be able to define the difference in a philosophically adequate sense, but we can tell one from the other, at least with people whom we love.

My own experiences with phenomena that are sometimes called "psychic", sometimes "spiritual", sometimes "transcendental" and at other times "divine" - or are referred to as "altered states of consciousness" or "higher states of consciousness" - have convinced me that we are essentially spiritual beings. I generally do not allow myself to be drawn into discussions that begin with "What do you mean by "spiritual'?" Nor do I, in general, enter into abstract discussions of spirituality at all, including the crucial questions about what happens when we die or whether we have many lifetimes, what happens in between lifetimes or whether reincarnation is real or not. In our seminars and in one-to-one therapy sessions we deal with what people experience. Very rarely, we do past-life regressions, but more often we find there is sufficient material in this lifetime to work with (and, even, that focusing on a past life can be a distraction from what's going on in the present one). Our interest is in healing, which means growth, which implies awakening or becoming conscious. We avoid abstract discussion of spiritual questions because they very rarely, if ever, lead anywhere. We, ourselves (that is, Harbans and I) can only be effective if we are in what some might call an altered state of consciousness. In our everyday consciousness we can afford to be petty, or judgemental, for example. In our seminars we can not. We need to operate from - to use yet another word for our essential spiritual nature - Higher Self (if you like, our Atman). Yet another way of saying this is to say that we need to be an open channel for the divine energy of healing to flow through us.

Now none of this is going to be very helpful if you've never had such an experience. It's even less helpful if, never having had such an experience, you think you have. As I say, there are no rules to enable you to judge. If there were, I probaby would not be writing this article. At the end of the day, however, you are the best judge of your own experience, in spite of some of what has been written above. Your only real guide is your own inner wisdom, your own inner knowing, your own inner voice. What I have been saying, here and elsewhere, is that being born into and then living in what we like to call "the real world" (but especially modern society) makes it very difficult to hear this inner voice any more. For the most part, we are unable to differentiate this voice from all the other voices (those of our family, our culture, our school teachers, the mass media, doctors and scientists, and so on). This was the position I was in for most of the first 40 years of my life. I have told the story of my growth elsewhere and won't repeat it here. Everyone's story is different. Everyone's story is unique. The only universal theme is that our understanding and knowledge come from experience first and foremost. Reading, information in the form of concepts and philosophies come later, to help us conceptualise and make sense of our experience. It does not work very well in reverse. The other universal theme is the need for healing, removing some of the "rubbish" in order to enable our essential spiritual nature to manifest. As someone put it to me rather quaintly some 20 years ago, "It's like you need to get out of your own way".

I should add that there are at least two necessary ingredients in order for the kind of growth I am talking about to take place. Honesty and love (including compassion for yourself). Oh, yes - There is a third: Commitment.