Monday, 24 March 2014

Transpersonal Archetypal Forces at work or mental illness as defined by medicine?

We are first and foremost emotional beings who from conception begin to rage, weep and laugh and hide in terror and dance for joy- and seek to receive and give the emotion of love.
For me, by definition, everyone who is mad is in an archetypal, transpersonal experience, just as everyone who isn’t mad is too.

The artificial distinctions that label some mad people chronic schizophrenics and others blessed to be in a spiritual emergency don’t exist for me. The mumbling, homeless mad person is just as deserving of our seeing that they are in a spiritual wasteland where the Gods of the wasteland rule as the person who is having amazing, visionary experiences that we are inspired and maybe dazzled by,- who brings Hermes or Persephone or Kwan Yin into the room with us as often happened on I-Ward.

The New Age and sometimes Transpersonal Psychology over emphasis on defining spirituality and spiritual emergency and spiritual emergence as being only enlightening and uplifting is an unfortunate mistake. The elevator goes down as well as up.

Spiritual experience means to me the contact with spiritual energy. From my own initiatory madness some of it is dark I know. Some of it is light I know. Darkness initiates just as much as light does. It turns out that both light, love emanating energy and rightly feared dark, dangerous spiritual energies are sometimes active in bringing balance through transformative madness as well as in- ‘normal’ life.
Based on my experiences on I-Ward which I describe in my last blog, I believe that if you spend much time with people in acute madness experiences who aren’t medicated you will encounter an uncanny presence of what can be viewed as spiritual light as well as darkness.

Dr Michael Cornwall

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