The Call of Spiritual Emergency: From Personal Crisis to Personal Transformation. Emma Inc. Bragdon

might likewise overwhelm him. This is the madness society fears. But if an individual has the capacity to integrate the spiritual experience into her ordinary day-to-day life, it enhances her life, giving her access to higher levels of human development beyond ego. This is called spiritual emergence.

      Spiritual Emergency Versus Psychosis

      Spiritual emergency is a term that describes critical points in the process of spiritual emergence. Spiritual emergency marks a period of spiritual experiences that is overwhelming, when a person is struggling to integrate the feelings, thoughts, perceptions, and energy associated with the episode. It can happen that the crisis may be incapacitating for a time, making it impossible to carry on normal activities of work or childrearing. In this case, the person needs the care of someone who perceives his inner experiences as meaningful. This helper would be a support person who follows him through the full cycle of his crisis and helps him find a conceptual framework to make sense of the experience.

      Intense spiritual experiences and inspired states of mind may often look similar to psychosis. In a purely spiritual experience persons may be preoccupied with an inner experience to the extent that they may not care to communicate with others. Instead, their communication is taking place with inner guides or higher forces. If given the proper context and guidance, persons undergoing these experiences can reach higher levels of functioning and bring spiritual gifts to their human community. On the other hand, visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, and inability to communicate are symptoms of psychotic behavior that may indicate a person is falling from a normal level of functioning into a diseased state. Psychotic states that are pathological, rather than gateways to higher functioning, are very real, and need to be treated by health professionals.

      Spiritual Emergence: My Story

      I never confused my own spiritual awakening with mental disease, because of the excellent guidance I received. My process of integrating my spiritual experiences illustrates many types of transpersonal experiences. It depicts a spiritual emergence process that has not included a severely debilitating spiritual emergency. I never had a crisis that incapacitated me for a period of more than a few moments. Still, after each of my intense awakenings I felt disoriented, alone, and often fearful as I tried to integrate the experiences.

      When I was still very young, at eighteen, I met Graf Karlfried von Durkheim, who modeled for me how to hold ordinary reality simultaneously with the extraordinary spiritual dimension, and thus to integrate the two. He was a psychoanalyst, an intuitive, a meditator, a man of God, and an author (Hara: The Vital Center in Man). People who were lost or wanted assistance in their personal development came to him. He had them meditate, and he gave them therapy. He helped them integrate their spiritual experiences into their lives.

      Within two years, I met several other teachers of this type. In fact, at twenty, I transformed my life: I went from being an art student to being a Zen Buddhist nun, just so I would have more access to teachers who would help me learn how to dovetail my ordinary consciousness with my expanding awareness of spiritual dimensions. I was intent on learning this.

      While following a monastic lifestyle, for the first time I felt at home in this world. For the first time I felt I could live out my private life and my innermost longings. Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery, nestled in the mountains behind Big Sur in California, was also the first place I met a group of people my age like myself. I could sense the longing they had, which matched my own: We all wanted to return to who we were in essence, to liberate ourselves from the attitudes and concepts of the collective society around us. We were all trying to get away from the deep pain we had seen in our parents and other relatives, and experienced through their stories of World War II or their personal lives of depression and alcoholism. We were all dedicated to finding a way to live on this planet that would not generate war and depression.

      We rose at 4:30 a.m. for morning meditation. We went down to the meditation hall, an all-stone building with no heat. It was below freezing most mornings. We sat on our meditation cushions in long rows, facing the wall. We sat for forty minutes, trying to remain totally still to improve our concentration, to align with our will to stop all suffering. Several times during the day we repeated this vow:

      Sentient beings are countless

      I vow to save them all.

      Tormenting passions are innumerable—

      I vow to uproot them all.

      The gates of the Dharma* are manifold—

      I vow to pass through them all.

      The Buddha's way is peerless--

      I vow to realize it.

      (*Levels of truth.)

      We were practicing an Eastern form of meditation based upon the teachings of the Buddha. Although most of us at Tassajara had grown up in Christian or Jewish families, none of us had found satisfactory ways in our churches or synagogues that offered direct access to the experience of Truth.

      After forty minutes, we had a walking meditation for five minutes, then sat again for forty. This was followed by a study period in the dining hall, then a return to the meditation hall for twenty minutes of chanting and breakfast in silence. The day proceeded ritually, with work, meditation before lunch, chanting, lunch as a meditation in a ritual form, a short break, work, bath, chanting before dinner, dinner in ritual form, a break, then either a lecture or meditation. This was the measure of our days. I was twenty-one years old at the time.

      In order to have the privilege of joining this life, I was asked to show my commitment in the traditional way. I was to sit continuously for five days, rising from my meditation only for chanting and meals, a bathroom break, or to sleep at the scheduled time at night. During these five days, through the chill of the morning and the 90° heat of the afternoon, the flies crawling over my lips, the devastating aching in my knees, I reached the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy. My feelings covered all the territory: anger, rage, sadness, helplessness, power, joy, hysteria, peace, love, gratitude, longing, satisfaction, fear, courage, willfulness, surrender, excitement, boredom, endurance, ease. I would never be able to blame another person for giving me these feelings—they were all within me, just waiting to burst out in some unpredictable rhythm.

      Accompanying this roller coaster of feeling were body sensations that were wholly new to me. As I relaxed deeper into my experience of my true self, the tensions that had held me captive as I tried to fit the mold of who I should be to fit into the collective world began to release. Suddenly my body would begin to shake, as if my spine were a whip in the hand of some invisible force. I would bounce and shake as if I were astride a wild bull. Afterward I would feel a calm, a sense of being more whole and closer to my essence. Somehow my body knew how to shake me in order to return me to who I was, to unbind me from the rigid conditioning that had confined my body as well as my thoughts and my feelings.

      So the five-day meditation was one of the greatest gifts I had ever received. It taught me that my own body was a guide to my essential self. It taught me that I am not only a sensitive receiver, responding to the stimulation of others, but an organism looking for ways to express itself. The meditation helped me to study the action of my inner life, which seemed to move from high drama to undisturbed quiet, notwithstanding that no "thing" was happening to me; I was just sitting there.

      One of the other gifts I received during my time at Tassajara was the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a wise old man. When Lama Govinda arrived for a visit, I had no doubt that he personified wisdom and compassion; he had the regal quality of someone who had attained those human virtues and carried them gracefully. When he stepped out of the car, he put on his maroon mitred Lama's hat. He wore a matching long maroon robe. His white beard gently fell to the top of his chest. His face was lined with the deep marks of age. His eyes bestowed a depth I had never seen in a human being. In them were the worlds I longed for and identified with. In them were his travels to Tibet, his training as a Lama, his research as a scholar, his isolated hours as a writer. I was lucky enough to be chosen to attend him and his wife during their stay.

      Through Lama