Jung’s perspective and follows the same strategy. The facilitators create a protective and supportive environment and help the clients enter a holotropic state. Once that occurs, the healing process is guided from within by the clients’ own inner healing intelligence and the task of the facilitators is to support what is happening. This process automatically activates unconscious material with strong emotional charge that is close enough to consciousness to be available for processing on the day of the session. In holotropic states, the psyche and the body manifest their capacity to function together as an integral self-organizing and self-healing system. The therapists and facilitators are thus spared the hopeless task of trying to determine what in the client’s process is “relevant” and what is merely tangential. They simply support whatever is spontaneously emerging from moment to moment, trusting that the process is guided from within the client by an intelligence surpassing the intellectual understanding, which can be obtained by professional training in any of the schools of psychotherapy. Clients and participants in workshops and training might be using terms like COEX systems, BPMs, archetypes, and so on, but this reflects their direct experience of what has spontaneously emerged and not the interpretations of the facilitators. 5.6 The role of spirituality in human life The leading philosophy of Western science has been monistic materialism. Various scientific disciplines have described the history of the universe as the history of developing matter and they accept as real only what can be measured and weighed. Life, consciousness, and intelligence are then seen as more or less accidental side-products of material processes. Physicists, biologists, and chemists recognize the existence of dimensions of reality that are not accessible to our senses – but only those that are physical in nature and can be revealed and explored by using various extensions of our senses, such as microscopes, telescopes, and specially designed recording devices, or laboratory experiments. This kind of universe has no place for any kind of spirituality. The existence of God, the concept of invisible dimensions of reality inhabited by nonmaterial beings, the possibility of survival of consciousness after death, and the concept of reincarnation and karma are relegated to fairy tale books and handbooks of psychopathology. From a psychiatric perspective taking such phenomena seriously implies ignorance, unfamiliarity with the discoveries of materialistic science, superstition, and primitive magical thinking. If intelligent persons believe in God or Goddess, they simply have not freed themselves from the infantile images of their parents as omnipotent beings and project them into Heaven or the Beyond. And direct experiences of spiritual realities, including encounters with mythological beings and visits to archetypal realms, are considered manifestations of serious mental diseases – psychoses. The study of holotropic states has thrown new light on the problem of spirituality and religion. Key to this understanding is the discovery that in these states it is posSpirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 25 (23)
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