SPIRITUALITY STUDIES Volume 2 / Issue 2 FALL 2016
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S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 1 EDITORIAL Issue content Editorial 1 Adrián Slavkovský KenWilber’s Spectrum Psychology: Observations from Clinical Consciousness Research 2 Stanislav Grof Acknowledgement: AWay Toward Spiritual Communication 20 Sharon Lauricella Askesis and Politics: A Preliminary Look at the Impact of Christian Spiritual Practices on One’s Political Outlook 32 Amir Azarvan Explanation for the Mystical Practice III. 44 Květoslav Minařík Awakening: Saint Petersburg Talk 52 Sandó Kaisen Editorial Sometimes it is worth to ask the question: Do I live fully? If I feel that this is not the case, I can ask another question: What prevents me to live fully here and now? Disease, lack of time or funds, broken relationships? It is not primarily about whether our expectations are fulfilled, but whether we can face the challenges of life. Spiritual traditions and their important representatives offered as an aid other questions that can become a light, which guides us on the way to find answers and strategies for fulfillment in life. The first set of questions leads us inside: What is the content of my living out – of my consciousness, my perception of the outer and inner world? Is this process automatic or do I filter it somehow? How contributes it to the fullness of life? In this issue it is represented by three articles. Stanislav Grof deals with the theory of consciousness in relation to the transpersonal psychology. The article of Květoslav Minařík is a continuation of his articles from previous numbers and concerns concentration on flesh and the impact on the inner life of man. Sandó Kaisen speaks about understanding of Buddhist awakening. The second group of questions is about communication: How do I communicate with others? How does it affect the opportunity to live my life fully? Sharon Lauricella focuses on the importance of acknowledgement, of gratitude and of positive feedback in communication with others. Amir Azarvan is in turn concerned with the influence of the Christian eagerness on the way of communication about political beliefs. I wish you all that reading of this issue would help you to a fuller living out of your everyday life, no matter where you are, with whom you are and what kind of challenge you face. Adrián Slavkovský ←← Cover photography: Květoslav Minařík. Copyright © 2016 Zora Šubrtová. Spirituality Studies 2-2 Fall 2016 Publisher: The Society for Spirituality Studies Published in partnership with Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and European Union of Yoga Available online: www.spirituality-studies.org Editor-in-Chief: Doc. Dr. Martin Dojčár PhD. Graphic Design: Martin Hynek Contact: editor@spirituality-studies.org ISSN 1339-9578
2 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 KenWilber’s Spectrum Psychology: Observations from Clinical Consciousness Research Received August 30, 2016 Revised September 29, 2016 Accepted October 2, 2016 In his article Stanislav Grof evaluates the pioneering spectrum of consciousness theory of Ken Wilber and discusses its impact on the development of transpersonal psychology. Key words Ken Wilber, consciousness research, transpersonal psychology Stanislav Grof
S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 3 Stanislav Grof 1 Introduction When addressing the work of a theoretician whose pioneering work reaches the scope and quality achieved by Ken Wilber, even a critical essay has to begin with compliments and words of appreciation. In a series of books beginning with his Spectrum of Consciousness (Wilber 1977), Ken has produced an extraordinary work of highly creative synthesis of data drawn from a vast variety of areas and disciplines, ranging from psychology, anthropology, sociology, mythology, and comparative religion, through linguistics, philosophy, and history, to cosmology, quantum-relativistic physics, biology, evolutionary theory, and systems theory. His knowledge of the literature is truly encyclopedic, his analytical mind systematic and incisive, and the clarity of his logic remarkable. The impressive scope, comprehensive nature, and intellectual rigor of Ken’s work have helped to make it a widely acclaimed and highly influential theory of transpersonal psychology. However, for a theory of such importance, it is not sufficient to integrate material from many different ancient and modern sources into a system that shows inner logical cohesion. While logical consistency certainly is a valuable prerequisite, a viable theory has to have an additional property that is equally, if not more important. It is generally accepted among scientists that a system of propositions is an acceptable theory if, and only if, its conclusions are in agreement with observable facts (Frank 1957). Since speculations concerning consciousness, the human psyche, and spiritual experiences represent the cornerstone of Ken’s conceptual framework, it is essential to test their theoretical adequacy and practical relevance against clinical data. Ken himself does not have any clinical experience and the primary sources of his data have been his extensive reading and the experiences from his personal spiritual practice. He draws most of his clinical data from various schools, which use verbal methods of psychotherapy and conceptual frameworks limited to postnatal biography. For this reason, evaluating his ideas in the light of experiences and observations from modern consciousness research and from transpersonal therapy seems particularly important and necessary. My own background and approach have been almost a polar opposite to Ken’s and might thus serve as a useful complement to his theoretical work. For almost four decades, my primary interest has been clinical work exploring the healing and heuristic potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). Whatever theoretical writing I have done over the years has been based primarily on the reports of the people I have worked with. An additional important source of information and inspiration have been my own experiences of non-ordinary states induced by psychedelics and various non-drug means. The choice of professional literature I have studied has been strongly determined by the observations from my clinical work and the need to put them into a larger conceptual framework. The observations and data on which this paper is based come from two major sources – approximately two decades of clinical psychedelic research with LSD and other psychoactive substances, and another twenty years of work with holotropic breathwork, a powerful non-drug therapeutic method that I have developed jointly with my wife, Christina. It combines faster breathing, evocative music, and a specific form of energetic release work. The subjects in the psychedelic research projects were psychiatric patients with various emotional and psychosomatic disorders, alcoholics, drug addicts, terminal cancer patients, and “normal” volunteers – mental health professionals, scientists, artists, clergy, and About the author Stanislav Grof M.D. (1931) is a psychiatrist and a pioneering researcher into the use of non- ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of exploring, healing, and obtaining insights into the human psyche. He is one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. In 2007 Stanislav Grof received the VISION 97 award granted by the Foundation of Dagmar and Václav Havel in Prague.
4 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 students. The breathwork sessions have been conducted in the context of a long-term training program of professionals and of experiential workshops with a broad cross-section of the general population. In addition to material from psychedelic and holotropic breathwork sessions, I am also drawing in this paper on my observations from work with individuals undergoing spontaneous mystical experiences and episodes of psychospiritual crises (“spiritual emergencies”) (Grof and Grof 1990). Over the years, Ken and I have exchanged some ideas, which involved both compliments and critical comments about our respective theories. During this time, the thinking of both of us has undergone certain changes and developments, as can be expected in an area as rich and complex as mapping the human psyche and exploring the dimensions of consciousness. I first addressed the similarities and differences between Ken’s spectrum psychology and my own observations and theoretical constructs more than a decade ago. In my book, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Grof 1985), I dedicated a special section to Ken’s spectrum psychology, where I briefly described where my own findings agreed and disagreed with Ken’s theories. In my critical comments, I addressed what I saw as logical inconsistencies in Ken’s conceptual system (omission of the pre- and perinatal period and misrepresentation of the problem of death) and the lack of correspondence between his conjectures and the facts of clinical observation (concerning the dynamics of spiritual development, the nature of psychopathology, and the strategy of psychotherapy). In what follows, I will elaborate on the comments I made at the time and focus on a few additional areas. I will also reflect on Ken’s extensive written reply to my criticism that has appeared in the notes to his recent bookSex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Wilber 1995). 2 Omission of the Pre- and Perinatal Domain in Spectrum Psychology My main reservation about Ken’s comprehensive and detailed theoretical system concerns what I perceive as his surprising conceptual blind spot in relation to the role and significance of prenatal existence and biological birth for the theory and practice of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy. The discovery of the psychological and psychospiritual importance of these two periods of human development belongs to the most important contributions of experiential psychotherapy and modern consciousness research to psychology. The observations in this area have been so impressive and consistent that they have inspired the development of pre- and perinatal psychology, including regular international meetings and rapidly growing body of literature. These observations have been so convincing that they have profoundly influenced the actual birthing practices and postnatal care of many open-minded obstetricians and pediatricians. In view of these facts, I found it very surprising that Ken, with his meticulous and comprehensive approach, has completely ignored the vast amount of data from both modern and ancient sources suggesting the paramount psychological significance of prenatal experiences and of the trauma of birth, as well as their relationship to spirituality. This bias is evident in his writings focusing on cosmology, human evolution, developmental psychology, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. Ken’s description of the evolution of consciousness of an individual begins with the pleromatic stage (the undifferentiated consciousness of the newborn), and continues through the uroboric, typhonic, verbal-membership, and mental-egoic levels to the centauric stage. He refers to this progression, from the newborn infant to the adult with fully integrated functioning of the ego, persona, shadow, and body, as the outward arc. According to Ken, at the evolutionary stage of centaur begins the truly spiritual development, or the inward arc, that takes the individual to the lower and higher regions of the subtle and causal realms and finally to the boundless radiance of Formless Consciousness and the ultimate unity with the Absolute (Wilber 1980). In his account of cosmogenesis or consciousness involution, Ken closely follows the highly culture-specific archetypal map from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thödol (Evans-Wentz 1960), rather than creating a more general and universal description that would be applicable in any cultural and historical context. His account of cosmogenesis thus begins with the ultimate consciousness, the immaculate and luminous Dharmakaya, proceeds through the specific visions of the Tibetan bardo realms, and ends-like the Bardo Thödol – with the moment of conception when the individual who has missed all chances for spiritual liberation is facing another incarnation. This is perfectly logical and understandable for the Tibetan text, which describes the experiences in the intermediate state between death and the next incarnation. However, it results in a major logical gap in Ken’s system that allegedly portrays the entire cosmic cycle of involution and evolution of consciousness. By ending the process of the involution of consciousness at the moment of conception and beginning the account of
S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 5 Stanislav Grof consciousness evolution with the undifferentiated pleromatic experience of the newborn, Ken leaves out the entire embryonal development between conception and the moment of birth. I find this to be an astonishing omission for a system that is otherwise worked out with meticulous sense for detail and has received much acclaim for its logical cohesion and clarity of thinking. Even if the fetus had no conscious awareness during these periods and the pre- and perinatal events were not recorded in the brain (a position taken, increasingly implausibly, by academic psychiatry), this omission would leave a strange gap in Ken’s cosmic cycle. After all, we are talking here about a period of nine months of embryonal life during which the fetus undergoes a complex process of development from the fertilized ovum to a fully formed and differentiated organism. This is then followed by many hours or even a few days of a potentially life-threatening process of biological birth in which the fetus experiences a radical transformation from an aquatic organism to an air-breathing one. However, there exists important clinical and experimental evidence indicating that the fetus might be conscious during these nine months, that pre- and perinatal events play a cri- tical role in the individual’s psychological history, and that the memories of these early experiences are available for conscious recall and reliving. The memory of birth represents an important reservoir of difficult emotions and physical sensations that can contribute later in life to the development of various forms of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. Reliving and integrating pre- and perinatal traumas can have very beneficial effects; it can result in healing and profound psychospiritual transformation. Therapists working with powerful forms of experiential psychotherapies, such as primal therapy, psychedelic work, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork, or with individuals in psychospiritual crises, see these phenomena daily in their practices. Reliving of such events often is photographically accurate and occurs even in people who have no intellectual knowledge about their birth. The fact that it is often possible to verify various details of these experiences leaves little doubt that they represent authentic memories (Grof 1988). In addition, episodes of this kind are often accompanied by various specific physical manifestations that can be noticed by an external observer. The postures and movements of the body, arms, and legs, as well as the rotations, flections, and deflections of the head, can accurately recreate the mechanics of a particular type of delivery, even in people without elementary obstetric knowledge. Many details of such experiences can be confirmed if good birth records or reliable personal witnesses are available. In his recent book, Ken calls this evidence “controversial” (Wilber 1994, 585), which the practitioners of experiential therapies would certainly contest. The fact that the psychological importance of prenatal and perinatal events has not been accepted by mainstream psychiatry reflects the rigidity of deeply ingrained beliefs rather than the ambiguity of clinical observations. The most important of these is the conviction that the brain of the newborn is not capable of registering the traumatic impact of birth because the neurons in its cortex are not fully myelinized. This is not a well-substantiated scientific fact, but a ve- ry problematic assumption that is in conflict not only with observations from experiential therapy, but also rich experimental data concerning prenatal sensitivity of the fetus and its capacity to learn (Chamberlain 1988; Tomatis 1991). In any case, it is hard to imagine that hours of dramatic and often life-threatening experiences during biological birth would be psychologically less important than the immediately following pleromatic experiences of the newborn which receive much of Ken’s attention and have an important role in his scheme. We will return to this problem later in the section discussing Ken’s ideas about psychopathology. Besides leaving out the entire pre- and perinatal periods from his cosmic cycle of the involution and evolution of consciousness and ignoring the extensive evidence from modern experiential psychotherapies indicating the great psychological significance of these periods, Ken also fails to acknowledge the pioneering work of Otto Rank (Rank 1928), who emphasized the paramount importance of the intrauterine experience and of the trauma of birth. Rank is the only major figure in the history of depth psychology whom Ken treats in this way. Without any explanation, he neither incorporates Rank’s work concerning the birth trauma into his scheme of spectrum psychology, nor subjects it to critical analysis. In addition to ignoring all the clinical and experimental data concerning the prenatal and perinatal periods, Ken shows the same selective bias in regard to spiritual sources. Since in the discussion of cosmogenesis he draws so exclusively on Tibetan sources, it is particularly striking that he does not pay any attention to Tibetan texts that discuss in detail the challenges of prenatal development and birth (Sgam.po.pa 1971, 63–66). In Vajrayana, the intrauterine state is actually described as one of the six intermediate states or bardos (Evans-Wentz 1960, 102). And the Buddha himself made specific references to the trauma of birth as a major source of human suffering.
6 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 Ken responded to my critical comments concerning his omission of the pre- and perinatal period in the copious notes to his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Wilber 1995, 585–8, 741–63). We have had some exchange about this issue over the years, but this was the first time that he formulated his reaction in written form. He expresses his amazement about the amount of difficulties that various people perceived in regard to the task of “integration of the Grof and Wilber models”. According to him, such integration is actually a relatively simple matter. He points out that it was actually this lack of perceived difficulty, together with complications in his personal life, that prevented him from making the necessary adjustments in his theory at least ten years earlier. Opening the discussion on this subject, Ken makes a vague reference to a “large body of theory and (controversial) evidence for the intrauterine state and the birth process (and birth trauma)” [Ken’s parentheses]. And then, “having simply allowed that some of this evidence could indeed be genuine”, he creates for this entire domain a new category in his developmental scheme – fulcrum 0 (F–0) preceding the fulcrum of the pleromatic stage (F–1) and the six subsequent ones (Wilber 1995, 585–88). At this point, I will not argue with Ken whether the evidence for the psychological importance of the birth trauma deserves to be considered controversial. I have addressed this problem earlier and will return to it in another context. Instead, I will briefly describe and discuss his proposal. He suggests that the new fulcrum shows the same general features as any other fulcrum, namely: 1. An initial state of undifferentiation or indissociation (in this case the prenatal state); 2. A period of intense and often difficult differentiation (the birth process/trauma itself); 3. A period of postdifferentiation and (post-uterine) consolidation and integration, in preparation for the next round of differentiation/ integration (F–1). The extensive and complex experiential patterns associated with the consecutive stages of biological birth that I call basic perinatal matrices (BPMs) would thus simply become three subphases of fulcrum 0, with BPM II and BPM III both subsumed into a single subphase (subphase 2). BPM I would thus be subphase 1 of F–0, reflecting the oceanic indissociation experience of the fetus, both in its undisturbed and disturbed aspects. BPM II would be the beginning of subphase 2, or the differentiation process, that involves “cosmic engulfment” and “no-exit hellish pressure”. BPM III would be the later stage of subphase 2, with the beginning of the expulsion from the womb, “volcanic” ecstasy, sadomasochistic pleasure/ pain, experience of dismemberment, etc. And, finally, BPM IV would be subphase 3, the postpartum neonatal state, during which the child must integrate its new sense of separation from the mother. At the same time, this is the beginning of the pleromatic F-1, during which the infant with its new selfsense still cannot distinguish its own self-boundaries from those of the physical world around it. As much as I appreciate Ken’s acknowledgment of the exis- tence of the perinatal level of the unconscious and its inclusion in his developmental scheme, I feel that the ad hoc addition of another fulcrum (F–0) and the fusion of two perinatal matrices into one of its subphases does not do justice to the importance of this domain. Although it might render an impressive graphic scheme that pleases the eye and satisfies the need for logical order, it fails to grasp the real parameters of the perinatal experience. The easy solution that Ken offers is in fundamental conflict with the facts of observation. First of all, the second and third matrix are related to two phases of birth that are in many respects radically different from each other, both physiologically and experientially. For this reason, lumping them together into one subphase of F–0 makes little sense. In addition, the urgency and extreme intensity of birth experiences and their association with a serious threat to body integrity and to survival of the organism put them into a completely different category than the stages of postnatal development. A radical transition, from an aquatic form of life whose needs are being continually satisfied by the placentary circulation to the extreme emotional and physical stress of the birth struggle and then to a radically new existence as an air-breathing organism, is an event of paramount significance that reaches all the way to the cellular level. Even a relatively normal birth without complications is certainly a process of an entirely different order than learning to speak or developing an ego. This is clearly evident from the amount of time it takes in experiential therapy to bring the perinatal material into consciousness and integrate it. And a difficult birth and poor postnatal circumstances can constitute a profound trauma that colors the entire life history of the individual. Much of what has been said above is related primarily to prenatal and perinatal events occurring in the context of the early psychobiological evolution of the individual. It seems that much of Ken’s initial hesitation to include these stages in his scheme was based on his uncertainty whether the events from this time are consciously experienced by the fetus and/or recorded in the memory banks. However, this is
S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 7 Stanislav Grof only one aspect of the problem. Perinatal matrices are not defined as stages of the psychobiological evolution of the fetus, but as experiential patterns that occur in self-exploration of adults involving NOSC. They are thus primarily related to psychospiritual evolution and only secondarily serve as indirect evidence for the importance of the early psychobiological events. In other words, they are much more than simple records of the original fetal experience. Besides containing distinct fetal elements, they also function as an important interface with the archetypal and historical domains of the collective unconscious and with species consciousness. For this reason, they cannot be simply reduced to a fetal fulcrum. I will return to this point later in this paper. 3 The Psychological Importance of Biological Death Another major difference between my own observations and Ken’s model involves the psychological importance of biological death, both in connection with the perinatal level and independently from it. In his early writings, Sigmund Freud expressed the opinion that the problem of death is irrelevant for psychology, since our unconscious does not know linear time and thus does not recognize and acknowledge our mortality and impermanence. However, later clinical observations related to the phenomena that seemed to challenge his concept of the “pleasure principle” led him to the conclusion that it is impossible to have a viable psychological system without including the phenomenon of death as an essential element (Freud 1955). This realization represented an important turning point in Freud’s theoretical speculations. To account for psychopathological disorders that seemed to defy the “pleasure principle” (such as sadomasochism, automutilation, and violent suicide), he formulated in the last two decades of his life a psychology that was significantly different from his early writings. In his final version of psychoanalysis, he described the psyche as a system reflecting the conflict between two opposing forces, the sexual instinct, Libido or Eros, and the death instinct, Destrudo or Thanatos (Freud 1964). According to a statistical survey conducted by Brun (1953), ninety-four per cent of psychoanalysts refused to follow Freud in this final stage of his thinking. The observations from NOSC clearly show that Freud was essentially correct in his assessment of the importance of death for psychology, even though they do not specifically support his understanding of Thanatos. These new findings show that what Freud refers to as Thanatos is not a biological instinct, but a psychological force reflecting the individual’s encounters with life-threatening events from postnatal biography and, particularly, from the perinatal period. These connections make the element of biological death essential for the understanding of the disorders that defy Freud’s “pleasure principle” and a variety of other psychological phenomena (Grof 1985). In addition, the psychological representation of death has deeper sources in the archetypal domain of the collective unconscious in the form of eschatological deities and motifs and also plays an important role in karmic experiences. Freud saw Thanatos as a biological instinct and did not recognize the deep psychological connection between death and the trauma of birth. He also refused to accept Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and its archetypal dynamics. And, as a materialist, he wanted to anchor psychology deeply in biology and was not ready to give serious attention to the karmic dimension of the psyche. However, in his general awareness of the psychological importance of death and in his (unfortunately superficial and fleeting) recognition of the possible significance of birth, Freud was far ahead of his followers, whose writings Ken uses as his main sources. Ken does not simply ignore Freud’s later writings like the majority of his followers. He actually keeps the term Thanatos, but changes the meaning of this concept in a way that dilutes and trivializes Freud’s insights. For Freud, Thanatos was a brutal force that operates throughout our life and finally reduces us back to the inorganic state. For Ken, Thanatos is a relatively meek evolutionary mechanism associated with the transformation of consciousness from one level to the next. It is instrumental in the process of abandoning one developmental stage and moving to the next one (Wilber 1980). This involves generally a long and slow transition that is part of natural evolution, a kind of psychological equivalent of the first and second teething. The problems that might occur during these developmental transitions have a different degree of relevance than acute emergency situations that threaten the individual’s survival or body integrity. In an extensive critique of the way various theorists use the term Thanatos and of the resulting confusion (Wilber 1983), Ken emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between biological death and the “ego-death”, or “death” and “Death”. However, he himself entirely misses the psychological importance of the experiences associated with life-threatening events and makes no distinction between “dying” to a developmental level and the experiences associated with biological death. He equates dying with abandoning the exclusive identification with a particular structure of consciousness, which makes it possible to transcend that structure and
8 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 move to the next level. This mechanism would thus apply to such extended and gradual processes as learning to speak and developing an ego. The situation is further confounded by the fact that, in another context, Ken also sees Thanatos as the force that drives the involution of consciousness and thus cosmogenesis (Wilber 1980). In the outward and inward arc of consciousness evolution, Thanatos is, according to Ken, the principle that dissolves the structures associated with various forms and levels of what he calls the Atman project. It is the principle that is responsible for abandoning substitute selves and substitute gratifications and mediates the movement toward the Absolute. However, in the context of cosmogenesis, Ken equates Thanatos with the force that drives consciousness away from the reunion with the Dharmakaya and into incarnation. Here it thus allegedly prevents the only true gratification there is, which is the union with the Absolute, and drives consciousness in the direction of unsatisfactory substitute gratifications that characterize the Atman project. The experiences of encounter with biological death receive no attention at all in Ken’s spectrum psychology. This is in sharp contrast with clinical observations from deep experiential self-exploration and psychotherapy (primal therapy, rebirthing, holotropic breathwork, psychedelic therapy, and work with people in psychospiritual crises). In all these situations, memories of life-threatening events such as serious diseases, accidents, and operations in postnatal life, the process of biological birth, and crises of intrauterine life represent a category of special psychological significance. In NOSC, additional profound encounters with death occur in the context of transpersonal experiences, such as karmic and phylogenetic memories and archetypal sequences. This material clearly supports the view that it is essential to distinguish the process of transition from one developmental stage to another from the life-threatening events that endanger the very survival of the organism. Learning to speak and thus “dying” to the typhonic stage of development or developing an ego and thus “dying” to the verbal-membership stage does not stand comparison with situations that threaten the survival or integrity of the organism, such as near drowning, a serious operation, a car accident, a difficult birth, or an imminent miscarriage. Equally powerful and compelling can be experiences of death in a previous incarnation, identification with an animal attacked and killed by a predator, or annihilation by a wrathful deity. Life-threatening experiences are of a different logical type and are in a meta-position in relation to the mechanisms involved in evolutionary processes on various developmental levels that Ken describes as Thanatos. They endanger the existence of the organism as a separate biological entity without regard to the level of its development. Thus, a critical survival threat can occur during embryonal existence, at any stage of the birth process, or at any postnatal age, without regard to the level of consciousness evolution. In my 1985 critique of Ken’s views, I expressed my opinion that any model of human nature that lacks a genuine appreciation of the paramount significance of birth and death is bound to be incomplete and unsatisfactory. The inclusion of the perinatal level of the unconscious and of the phenomenon of biological death and acknowledgment of their relevance would give Ken’s model more logical consistency and greater pragmatic power. However, since he lacks genuine understanding of the perinatal dynamics and does not appreciate the psychological significance of the experience of death, his model cannot account for important clinical data, and his description of the therapeutic implications of his model will remain the least useful and convincing part of his work for clinicians dealing with the practical problems associated with various emotional and psychosomatic disorders. 4 The Spectrum of Psychopathology Ken’s interpretation of psychopathology is another area, which is in fundamental disagreement with the observations from experiential therapies, psychedelic research, and work with individuals in psychospiritual crises. This is related to the fact that he uses as his sources schools of depth psychology (particularly classical psychoanalysis and ego psychology) whose members use verbal methods of psychotherapy, are conceptually limited to biographical models of the psyche, and do not have even an elementary understanding of the perinatal and transpersonal domains. Modern revisions of classical psychoanalysis that Ken heavily relies on have refined the understanding of postnatal dynamics and object relationships, but share Freud’s narrow biographical focus. Ken basically uncritically accepts the dynamic classifications of emotional and psychosomatic disorders developed by the pioneers of classical psychoanalysis beginning with Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham (Fenichel 1945) and later modified and refined by representatives of ego psychology, such as Otto Kernberg, Margaret Mahler, and Heinz Kohut (Blanck and Blanck 1974). The common denominator for the theories of all these authors is that they do not see biological birth – whether it has a normal or pathological course – as an event that has psychological relevance. They thus accept the per-
S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 9 Stanislav Grof spective of academic psychiatrists who do not consider birth to be a psychotraumatic experience and fail to see that it has any implications for psychopathology, unless it causes irreversible damage to the brain cells. As I have suggested earlier, there is a general belief in official academic circles that the newborn child lacks consciousness and that the neonatal cortex is incapable of registering the birth process and store the information about it, because it is not fully myelinized. Ken has essentially accepted this position and incorporated it into the main body of his work. At the time when he did most of his theoretical writing about psychology and psychopathology, his theoretical speculations about psychological development and its vicissitudes had their starting point in the pleromatic stage of the newborn. Even today, he does not have an adequate understanding of the perinatal dynamics, its deep connection with the transpersonal realm, and its role in psychopathology, as well as spiritual development. For this reason, he has not been able to notice this deficit in his sources. And although he has a deep and extensive knowledge of the transpersonal realms, he sees them as being essentially irrelevant for the development of the common forms of psychopathology. Ken’s conclusions are in sharp conflict with the experience of the practitioners of various experiential approaches, such as rebirthing, psychedelic therapy, and holotropic breathwork, who witness dramatic reliving of the birth process daily in their work. However, one does not have to have such firsthand clinical experience to be able to see the logical inconsistency in current academic thinking concerning the psychological impact of birth. The representatives of all the schools of dynamic psychotherapy attribute a critical psychological role to the early mother-child relation and to the subtleties of nursing. A good example is Harry Stack Sullivan who claims that the nursing infant is able to distinguish between the “good nipple” (the breast of a loving mother that gives milk), the “evil nipple” (the breast of a rejecting or nervous mother that gives milk), and the “wrong nipple” (a thumb or big toe that does not give milk at all). He sees such experiences as instrumental in the future development of emotional and personality disorders (Sullivan 1955). And yet the same dynamic psychologists who attribute to the infant such sensitivity and discrimination deny that it can be in any way influenced by the experience of biological birth. We are asked to believe that it is possible for the infant not to experience and/or register in memory many hours or even several days of a highly taxing and life-threatening situation and then immediately after birth become a “connoisseur of female nipples” capable of differentiating nuances in the experience of nursing. This is hardly an example of rigorous logical thinking or a well-grounded scientific conclusion. It is much more likely a result of psychological repression and denial of this extremely painful and frightening event, rationalized by the use of scientific language. The justification of this position by references to incomplete myelinization of the cerebral cortex of the neonate can hardly be taken seriously in view of the fact that the capacity of memory exists in many lower organisms that do not have a cerebral cortex at all, including unicellular life forms that possess primitive “protoplasmatic memory”. The image of the newborn as an unconscious being who is incapable of registering and remembering the process of biological birth is also in sharp conflict with extensive research data showing extraordinary sensitivity of the fetus already during intrauterine life (Verny 1987). Ken, who is usually extremely astute, sharp, and discriminating, does not notice these extraordinary discrepancies and takes all the psychodynamic schools at their face value. According to psychoanalysis and ego psychology, psychogenic disorders can be adequately understood in terms of postnatal biographical events and related psychodynamic processes. Different psychopathological syndromes are explained as resulting from problems in specific stages of postnatal libidinal development and from the difficulties in the evolution of the ego and of the object relationships. Psychoses thus allegedly have their origin in early infancy while neurotic or psychosomatic disorders are anchored in later childhood. Accepting this way of thinking, Ken sees psychoses (autistic psychoses, symbiotic infantile psychoses, most adult schizophrenia, and depressive psychoses) as results of regression to early developmental stages of postnatal development, and thus as fully pre-personal and pre-rational disturbances. He then associates various psychoneuroses with later fulcrums of postnatal development. By contrast, difficulties of spiritual development are for him transpersonal and post-rational disorders. As I have already indicated, in the recent modification of his model Ken makes some concessions to perinatal dynamics by creating for it a new fulcrum (F–0) and briefly outlining his ideas about the implications of this revision for psychopathology (Wilber 1995, 585–6). According to him, the new fulcrum (F–0) would participate in the development of psychopathology in a way similar to all the other fulcrums. Developmental malformations of its specific subphases (disruption at the dissociation, differentiation, or integration subphase) would result in specific pathologies.
1 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 A fixation at the fusion/indissociation subphase might thus predispose a person to “somatic mystical” fusion with the world; a disruption at the differentiation subphase might create a predisposition to the “hellish no exit” vital shock, intense sadomasochistic activity, and involutional depression; and fixation at the integration stage might lead to delusional messianic complexes. Similarly, the formations and malformations at this F–0 would “incline (but not cause)” subsequent development to tilt in the same direction. Thus a profound “no exit” malformation of the differentiation subphase might, for example, create a strong disposition to depression, withdrawal, and inhibitions. Ken offers here a comparison with the formation of a pearl, where a grain of sand influences the shape of subsequent layers. However, even with this modification, Ken does not begin to account in his theory for actual clinical observations. In experiential psychotherapies using NOSC, people working on various forms of depression, psychoneuroses, and psychosomatic disorders typically discover that these disorders have a multilevel dynamic structure. In addition to their connections with traumatic events in infancy and childhood, as expected by traditional academic thinking, these disorders have important roots in the perinatal domain and also beyond that in the transpersonal realm (Grof 1985). Therapeutic work on psychoneuroses and psychosomatic disorders, guided not by the therapist but by the spontaneous healing mechanisms activated by NOSC, will thus typically take the clients beyond postnatal biography to the perinatal and transpersonal domains. Under these circumstances, the therapeutic process does not follow a linear trajectory. If it is not restricted by the strait-jacket of the therapist’s professional convictions, it will freely move between the biographical, perinatal, and transpersonal levels, often even within the same session. For this reason, effective work with emotional and psychosomatic disorders requires a therapist who uses a framework that is open to all the bands of the spectrum. The idea of breaking the therapeutic process into stages during which he or she is seen by different therapists, each of whom is a specialist in fulcrum-specific treatment modality, is thus highly unrealistic. In addition, since both the perinatal and transpersonal experiences have the quality that C. G. Jung called “numinosity”, it is impossible to draw a clear line between therapy and spiritual evolution. With an open approach, the process that initially began as “therapy” will often automatically change into a spiritual and philosophical quest. The integral link between psychopathology and the perinatal, as well as transpersonal, domains is even more obvious in psychotic conditions. While in psychoneuroses and psychosomatic disorders the perinatal and transpersonal roots are not immediately obvious and have to be discovered in experiential therapy, in psychoses they often represent a manifest aspect of their phenomenology. Without this recognition, the phenomenology of psychotic experiences and their relationship to mystical states will continue to present a serious challenge for Ken’s conceptual system. In discussing the relationship between schizophrenia and mysticism in his book The Atman Project (Wilber 1980, 152), he describes his position as being “somewhere between” the approach of traditional psychiatry for which both schizophrenia and mysticism as purely pathological and the attitude taken by researchers like R. D. Laing and Norman O. Brown, who see both as examples of ultra-health. Ken accepts the position of Anton Boisen, R. D. Laing, Julian Silverman, and others who observed that, under favorable circumstances, the psychotic episode can actually result in healing and become a growth experience: by regression in the service of the ego, the psychotic patient returns to “a deep structure (bodyself or otherwise) that was ‘traumatized’ during its construction in infancy or childhood... and then, as it were, re-builds the personality, ground up, from that point... After re-contacting or ‘re-living’ that deep complex or deep structure disturbance, then the upper layers of consciousness spontaneously reshuffle or rebuild themselves around the newly refurbished deep structure” (Wilber 1980, 157). According to Ken, this process of regressive healing and transformation remains restricted to the fulcra of postnatal biography. However, the psychotic process is not limited to material from infancy and childhood. It also frequently includes the theme of death and rebirth and the specific symbolism characteristic of perinatal matrices. Should we believe that for some mysterious reasons the process of this reparative regression has to stop short of the split caused by the trauma of biological birth, Ken’s new fulcrum 0? It certainly does not stop there in deep experiential work using NOSC. There this regression proceeds to the perinatal level where the process often connects to the transpersonal domain. John Perry’s observations from many years of clinical work with psychotic patients clearly demonstrate that similar mechanisms operate also in the psychotic process. They show that the reparative regression and restructuring of personality typically includes the motif of death and rebirth as an essential element and reaches deep into the archetypal level to the Self or the “central archetype” (Perry 1953, 1974). John Perry’s pioneering work that C. G. Jung welcomed as “a messenger of a time when the psyche of the mental patient will receive the
S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 1 1 Stanislav Grof interest that it deserves” (Jung’s foreword to John Perry’s book The Self in Psychotic Process, Perry 1953) has unfortunately not been mentioned in Ken’s discussion of schizophrenia and mysticism. This brings us to the problem of the participation of trans- personal elements in the experiences of psychotic patients. While emphasizing that a sharp distinction between pre- and trans- is all-important for this matter, Ken admits that the disruption of the egoic syntax opens the individual not only to “mythic thinking and magical references”, but somehow also to “invasion” of material from transegoic realms that can lead to valid spiritual revelations. He suggests that the disruption of the editing and filtering functions of egoic translation leaves the individual open and unprotected from both the lower and the higher levels of consciousness. As the egoic translations begin to fail and the self is drawn into pre-egoic realms, it “is also open to invasion (castration) from the transegoic realms” [Ken’s parentheses]. He emphasizes that he personally does not see any other way to account for the phenomenology of the schizophrenic break than to assume that a dual process is set in motion: the individual begins to regress to the lower levels of consciousness while, at the same time, he is invaded by the higher (Wilber 1980, 152). This peculiar mixture of regressive phenomena and trans- personal elements in psychotic (and mystical) experiences cannot be easily accounted for without understanding that the perinatal realm of the psyche is not just a repository of memories of biological birth, but also a natural experiential interface with the transpersonal domain. Without this realization, the fact that genuine spiritual insights can sometimes be channeled through psychotic personalities and experiences will have to remain for Ken’s system “a mystery”– a fact that he himself admits. Similarly unexplained remains in his theory the observation that “true mystics occasionally reactivate regressive complexes on their way to mature unity states”. In spite of the fact that Ken acknowledges frequent mysterious invasion of transpersonal insights in psychotic patients, mysticism remains for him miles apart from psychosis. It represents for him a purely transegoic progression, whereas psychosis is primarily characterized by a regression to early infancy in the service of the ego. This is clear from Ken’s interpretive comments to Erich Fromm’s description of the psychotic experience that, at least partially, allows interpretation in perinatal terms: “He can be possessed by the passion to return to the womb, to mother earth, to death [pleromatic incest]. If this aim is all-consuming and unchecked, the result is suicide or insanity [pleromatic castration]. A less dangerous and pathological form of a regressive search for unity is the aim of remaining tied to the mother’s breast [maternal incest], or to mother’s hand, or to the father’s command [paternal incest]. Another form of regressive orientation lies in destructiveness, in the aim of overcoming separateness by the passion to destroy everything and everybody [what we call ‘substitute sacrifices’]” (Wilber 1980, 153) [Ken’s parentheses]. The lack of recognition of the perinatal and transpersonal elements in the dynamics of unusual experiences leads Ken to simplistic interpretations that sometimes border on the bizarre and absurd. A salient example is his approach to the experiences of ritual satanic cult abuse, a complex and baffling phenomenon that in the last decades has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Ken believes that these experiences are nothing but distorted childhood memories and gives as an example a hypothetical situation where the source of the experiences of satanic cult abuse is the infant’s observation of his or her mother carving the Thanksgiving turkey (Wilber 1994, 303). Any serious researcher of the UFO phenomena and of alien abduction experiences would also be surprised to find out that Ken believes that a similar misinterpretation of childhood memories could adequately account for the rich spectrum of fascinating and puzzling observations in their field. I feel that personal experience of working with clients suffering from problems of this kind would give Ken more respect for the extraordinary nature of these phenomena and the depth of the issues involved. Ken actually uses his understanding of psychoses as F–1 pathologies as a theoretical justification for pharmacological and physiological treatments as primary therapeutic interventions in these disorders: “Most forms of severe or process psychoses do not respond well (or at all) to psychoanalytic therapy, psychotherapy, analytic psychology, family therapy, etc.– despite repeated and pioneering efforts in this area. These disturbances seem to occur on such primitive level of organization (sensori-perceptual and physiological) that only intervention at an equally primitive level is effective – namely, pharmacological or physiological (which does not rule out psychotherapy as an adjunct treatment)” (Wilber 1986, 127). Ken does not mention here the possibility of successful psychotherapeutic work with many people who by traditional psychiatry are or would be diagnosed as psychotic. While the earlier psychotherapeutic interventions based on the psychoanalytic model were severely limited by the therapists’ tendency to interpret all psychotic phenomena in terms of postnatal development, strategies using larger cartographies of the psyche and supporting the experiences of the clients
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