PREVIOUS PAGE

"When a person descends into the abyss of existential alienation, no amount of human warmth can change it...

"It is only natural that someone facing this aspect of the psyche would feel a great reluctance to confront it. Going deeper into this experience seems like accepting eternal damnation. However, this state of darkness and abysmal despair is known from the spiritual literature as a stage of spiritual opening that can have an immensely purging and liberating effect. Usually, one cannot yet see that waiting on the other side of what feels like total destruction of the ego is a broader, more encompassing sense of self.

Extracts from Spiritual Emergency, by C. Grof and S. Grof:

"The opening of the channel between the conscious and the superconscious levels, between the "I" and the Self, and the flood of light, energy, and joy that follows, often produce a wonderful release.

"The preceding conflicts and sufferings, with the psychological and physical symptoms which they generated, vanish sometimes with amazing suddenness, thus confirming the fact that they were not due to any physical cause but were the direct outcome of the inner strife. In such cases the spiritual awakening amounts to a real resolution.

"But in other cases, not infrequent, the personality is unable to rightly assimilate the inflow of light and energy. This happens, for instance, when the intellect is not well coordinated and developed; when the nervous system is too sensitive; or when the inrush of spiritual energy is overwhelming in its suddenness and intensity. In extreme cases, the reaction can be so intense as to become pathological, producing a state of depression and even despair, with suicidal impulses. This state bears a close resemblance to psychotic depression -- once called "melancholia" -- characterized by an acute sense of unworthiness, a systematic self-depreciation and self-accusation, which may become so vivid as to produce the delusion that one is in hell, irretrievably damned. There is also an acute and painful sense of intellectual incompetence; a paralysis of the will-power accompanied by indecision and inability to act.

"But in the case of those who have had an inner awakening or a measure of spiritual realization, the disturbances should not be considered as a mere pathological condition, they have different, far deeper causes, as has been indicated by both Plato and St. John of the Cross with similar analogies."

In What is Enlightenment Andrew Cohen says:

"... The most challenging matter for the seeker of enlightenment is learning what it means to be nobody. Many think they want to be enlightened but actually without realizing it they only aspire to be better people. Better means powerful, wise, compassionate, fearless.

"To be enlightened means that the very centre falls away and we find ourselves standing nowhere in the middle of everything with nothing to hold on to -- including power, wisdom, compassion and courage.

"How many women have I seen who claimed they wanted to be free while at the same time tenaciously holding on to the idea of being a saint or a good person, deeply terrified of being nobody?

"How many men have I seen who thought they wanted to be enlightened, but who so obviously had infinitely more interest in power and knowledge than in emptiness?

"It's not possible to be nobody as long as we insist on being somebody."