Neurological incident, illness, accident, Kundalini in
general, but especially some Kundalini, the shamanic path in general, NDEs in
general, but especially distressing NDEs, alien abductions, hauntings,
etc.
Why do some people have a very, very dark night of the soul
on the way to an evolutionary leap whereas others have a still challenging, but
much more pleasant, promptly rewarding journey? I mean it just blows my mind some of the autobiographies out
there right now of people who just *ping* started to have a psychic opening out
of the blue with, yeah, some fear, but holy moly, not that much, and lots of
fun and rewards right away.
In this post, we’ll look at distressing NDEs as one example
of the darker spiritual path, offer one hypothesis for why some people have the
darker path, and bring in psychologists Erik Erikson and Bonnie Greenwell for
support.
Pluralism disclaimer – Probably, darker spiritual openings
happen for many reasons, but I can’t help looking for a pattern. Maybe there are one or two factors that are
*more* correlated with the darker path.
Nancy Evans Bush is past president of the International
Association for Near Death Studies, and is now semi-retired after some thirty
years of research on NDEs. She has
specialized in gaining recognition and understanding for distressing NDEs,
having had one herself in early adulthood, with no help at that time for
processing it. She maintains a
fascinating blog at dancingpastthedark.com, and is also preparing a book on
distressing NDEs.
Ms. Bush recently posted an extremely useful summary of what
we know so far about NDEs. She reports
that approximately one in five NDEs are distressing, but there is both stigma
about reporting a distressing NDE and fear of hearing about them, so the
incidence might be higher.
Now, just the fact of having an NDE at all means a more
distressing spiritual opening is happening in that the individual had to get
very sick / injured and nearly die! And
even pleasant NDEs can cause much disruption and suffering after the fact, as
survivors integrate the learnings and go through big developmental leaps. Having said that, there is still a
significant difference between the impact of pleasant NDEs and distressing
NDEs.
Based on a lifetime of study, Ms. Bush reports that NDEs –
both pleasant and distressing – occur to people in all the obvious demographic
groups you might think of, including all levels of education, all levels of
religiosity, and all expectations about the afterlife. Furthermore, “There is no evidence that
character, religious activity, or moral status determines the type of NDE a
person will have. Saints have reported dreadful visionary experiences.
Criminals have reported glorious NDEs. Some individuals have experienced both”
(her blog, 19 Feb 12 post).
“Pleasant NDEs tend to convey powerful messages that are
common to all human experience, across religious and philosophical systems: a
mandate to love, to have compassion, to keep learning, and to be of service to others. Distressing
NDEs have less focused messages but follow the ancient shamanic pattern of
suffering/death/ resurrection, read as an invitation to profound
self-examination, disarrangement of core beliefs, and rebuilding into a new way
of understanding. (The new way commonly moves toward some aspect of the elements
described by positive NDEs: love, compassion, learning, service)” (19 Feb 12
post).
There are some parallels between the variety of NDEs and the
variety of Neuro-Kundalini experiences in recovery from psych meds. Some people have short recoveries, some
super-long, some people have big spiritual openings, some have more subtle
spiritual shifts. After seven years of
reading hundreds of people’s accounts, I can’t see any definite demographic,
personality, or psych history predictors (nor do medication factors definitely
predict outcome).
One hypothesis is that people who have more distressing
spiritual openings may have a very particular quality of *unconscious* anxiety
from early life that has not been resolved.
General level of conscious anxiety does *not* seem to correlate with
having a more difficult spiritual experience.
Nor does conscious depression or guilt.
Perhaps the key factor is unconscious mistrust of the parents / God /
the universe.
Erik Erikson, the famous 20th century
psychologist, built a brilliant model of developmental stages. Each stage is characterized by the physical
and psychological challenges that human life tends to present at around that
age. If the characteristic issues of a
particular stage are not resolved very well, there will be repercussions when
those issues come up again later in life.
The first stage of his model is for the birth to 18-month
period and is called “Trust v. Basic Mistrust.” During this stage, we learn to
tolerate the inherent physical discomforts of life because, ideally, there is
so much consistency and predictability in our relationships with our
caregivers. Teething happens during
this stage, and, again, we learn to tolerate feeling a bit rejected by caregivers
who don’t want to be bitten because there is still so much external continuity
in the behavior of our caregivers. This
tolerance on their part also gives rise to trust in ourselves – in our capacity
to cope with our urges and to be trustworthy towards others (Childhood and
Society, pp. 119-220).
Erikson makes a rather surprising point that, as infants, we
can endure and recover from quite a bit of parental error, except for one
thing. Although trustworthy parenting
is desirable, the real key to creating a trusting human is to have parents who
believe life is meaningful. Erikson
specifies the importance of meaning within a societal or cultural context (pp.
221-2). I would extrapolate and
speculate that it would still be OK if a parent were significantly out of step
with her / his society, as long as s/he had a strong existential, teleological
conviction about the meaning of life.
Bonnie Greenwell, Ph.D. is a psychotherapist and teacher
with vast experience in Kundalini. She
is the author of “Energies of transformation:
A guide to the Kundalini process.”
Based on her study of many people going through Kundalini, she wrote:
“….I have found that the reaction of fear is especially
acute in people with a history of repressed physical or sexual abuse, who find
the awakening Kundalini energy has awakened childhood memories. Many experiences of transcendent states are
quite similar to dissociative states occuring during childhood abuse so that
the entire complex is reactivated. Such
people are forced prematurely into the need to do their “recovery” work, a
problem that is amplified by the disruption of their normal energy and
emotional states. In addition, the
patterning of feeling physical safety in the world, which should be the
birthright of every human, is often inadequate due to abuse and neglect. People who integrate this process
[Kundalini] easily often have a life-long, possibly cellular, sense of safety
and well-being in the world, that can be transferred into a willingness to
accept and explore this new experience” (p. 272).
I want to emphasize that I *do not* believe that everyone
who has a difficult spiritual opening has an abuse history. Greenwell is not saying that, either. Notice, rather, where her observation
overlaps with Erikson’s theory. The
odds are that parents who are abusive are a subset of parents who lack a strong
sense of the meaningfulness of life. In
fact, I think it’s safe to say that abuse survivors who were lucky enough to
have some caregiver who gave them a sense of conviction about the
meaningfulness of life recover more easily than abuse survivors who did not
have that crucial, mitigating help.
If there is a particular quality of unconscious mistrust in
the person who has a darker spiritual opening, and if it is rooted specifically
in an early caregiver’s own mistrust or nihilism about the meaningfulnes of
life, then we are talking about something very specific. We are not saying that having an anxious
parent or being an anxious person correlates with a darker spiritual
opening. We are not saying that lack of
religious faith or belief in an afterlife in the caregiver or experient is
predictive. The caregiver and the
experient may even have had quite a lot of sense of meaning and valuing of life
prior to any dark spiritual opening.
The experient may have been very high functioning, spiritual, religious,
humanistic, self-respecting. We’re not
necessarily talking about a broad stroke character trait.
Indeed, this putative, particular sector of the self that
carries this nihilism or mistrust may have been very unobvious in the person’s
life *until* the darker spiritual opening.
Unobvious, but crucial. Because
I have learned the hard way that you can be having a fairly well-balanced,
healthy, growing life and *still* be knocked upside the head by the Tao and
shoved to recognize whole swathes of life and reality that you hadn’t been
integrating yet.
In other words, it may be the main purpose of the darker
spiritual opening to tap that untapped nihilistic, mistrustful sector of the
self and push for an even deeper evolution of the individual than had been
required for leading a reasonably good life.
So, this has been a psychoanalytic / psychodynamic (and
existential) hypothesis. In the next
post, we’ll discuss a more transpersonal (and still existential) hypothesis.
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