3. Architecture of emotional and psychosomatic disorders; 4. Effective therapeutic mechanisms; 5. Strategy of psychotherapy and selfexploration; 6. The role of spirituality in human life; 7. The importance of archetypal astrology for psychology. Unless we change our thinking in all these areas, our understanding of psychogenic emotional and psychosomatic disorders and their therapy will remain superficial, unsatisfactory, and incomplete. Psychiatry and psychology will be unable to genuinely comprehend the nature and origin of spirituality and appreciate the important role that it plays in the human psyche and in the universal scheme of things. These revisions are therefore essential for understanding the ritual, spiritual, and religious history of humanity – shamanism, rites of passage, the ancient mysteries of death and rebirth, and the great religions of the world. Without these radical changes in our thinking, potentially healing and heuristically invaluable experiences (“spiritual emergencies”) will be misdiagnosed as psychotic and treated by suppressive medication. A large array of the experiences and observations from the research of holotropic states will remain mystifying “anomalous phenomena”, events that according to the current scientific paradigms should not occur. Mental health professionals will also have difficulty accepting the therapeutic power of psychedelic substances, mediated by profound experiences that are currently seen as psychotic – as demonstrated by the terms that mainstream clinicians and academicians use to describe them: experimental psychoses, psychotomimetics, or hallucinogens. This view reflects the inability to recognize the true nature of holotropic experiences as germane expressions of the deep dynamics of the psyche. In view of my own initial resistance to the bewildering experiences and observations from researching holotropic states, as well as phenomena associated with them (such as astonishing synchronicities), I will not be surprised if the changes I am proposing encounter strong resistance in the academic community. This is understandable, considering the scope and radical nature of the necessary conceptual revisions. Professionals in conventional academic and clinical circles tend to confuse “map and territory” and see current theories concerning consciousness and the human psyche in health and disease to be a definitive and accurate description of reality (Korzybski 1931, Bateson 1972). We are not talking here about a minor patchwork, known as ad hoc hypotheses, but a major fundamental overhaul. The resulting conceptual cataclysm would be comparable in its nature and scope to the revolution that physicists had to face in the first three decades of the twentieth century when they were forced to move from Newtonian to quantum-relativistic physics. In fact, the conceptual changes I am proposing would represent a logical completion of the radical changes in our understanding of the material world that have already occurred in physics. The history of science abounds with examples of individuals who challenged the domiSpirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 9 (7)
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