Resources

Lesson 2 - Care Based Tour of Online Resources

This is an Internet Guided tour of web sites that provide resources for a spiritual emergency patient or therapist working with treatment and integration issues. Begin by reading the case study on which the tour is based. The case study is of my own spiritual emergency which occurred in 1971.

RESOURCES ON SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY
The Internet contains many resources on spiritual emergencies. Below are some interviews with experts on spiritual emergencies that provide clinical perspectives on the growthful potential of such crises.

Visionary Experience or Psychosis?
Mental breakdown as a Healing Process
John Perry, MD worked extensively with individuals in the midst of acute psychotic episodes at Diabysis, the residential treatment center he founded (see Lesson 5). These are two links to interviews where he presents a Jungian growth model for acute psychotic episodes.

Spiritual Crisis
Christina Grof, author of books on spiritual emergency and co-founder of the Spiritual Emergency Network, describes her own transformative spiritual crisis.

RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL ISSUES
The Internet contains a vast library of resources on religion and spirituality (see the WWW Library of Religion and Spirituality). Since I found myself identifying with Buddha and Christ, I selected sites to learn more about who these figures were, their life stories, their messages. During my Jungian analysis, I learned to view Buddha and Christ as ideal models of my own inner self.

Tricycle.com: Buddhism 101 
The basics of Buddhism, including the life of the Buddha.Frequently asked questions about the life and death of Jesus Christ
The answers are given from a traditional Christian perspective: Who was Jesus? What did he say about himself? What evidence is there to support what he said? How and why did Jesus actually die? Did he really rise from the dead?C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, and Culture
Jung observed that patients in a psychotic state experience mythological and religious symbols. In my Jungian analysis, I learned to see the symbolic value of my own "hallucinations" and "delusions." This is the most fully developed web site on Jungian Analytical Psychology, including full text articles by Jungian analysts, a glossary of Jungian terms, dissertation abstracts, links to other Jungian web sites, listings of programs in Jungian training, and Jungian publishers. It is maintained by Donald Williams, MA, a Jungian Analyst in Boulder, CO. SHAMANISM
Both reading about shamanism, particularly shamanic initiatory crises, and participating in neoshamanic groups played a key role in integrating my spiritual emergency. Below are some of the resources that I found relevant to my own experiences. The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities
This interview with Daniel C. Noel, PhD, Professor of Religious Studies, explores the meaning and value of neoshamanic experiences, such as I encountered in my work with shamans. Shamanic practices provide a controlled way to access the ecstatic states of consciousness that I had first encountered in my spiritual emergency.The Way of the Shaman
Interview with Michael Harner, PhD, author of several books, including The Jivaro, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, and The Way of the Shaman. Dr. Harner is a former professor of anthropology and is currently the director of the Center for Shamanic Studies, which teaches Westerners how to live and practice as shamanic healers.

WWW Library on Shamanism.

LSD AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES
Fundamentally I view my spiritual emergency as an intense and disorienting mystical experience that served as my spiritual awakening. It was triggered by taking LSD for the first time. Huston Smith, PhD, Professor Emertus of Philosophy at MIT and author of numerous books on comparative religion, maintains that LSD-related religious experiences occur and are valid.

. . . given the right set and setting, the drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from ones that occur spontaneously. Nor need set and setting be exceptional. The way the statistics are currently running, it looks as if from one-fourth to one-third of the general population will have religious experiences if they take the drugs under naturalistic conditions, meaning by this conditions in which the researcher supports the subject but doesn't try to influence the direction his experience will take. Among subjects who have strong religious inclinations to begin with, the proportion of those having religious experiences jumps to three-quarters. If they take them in settings which are religious, too, the ratio soars to nine out of ten.
Do Drugs Have Religious Import? by Huston Smith, Ph.D., The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXI, No. 18, September 17, 1964

The Psychedelic Library
The Internet has a number of web sites that address the relationship between LSD and religious experience. This site has several articles on psychedelic drugs and religious experience by Alan Watts, Walter Houston Clark, and others.

Yet adverse reactions to psychedelic drugs do occur. A literature review concluded that broadly speaking, there are two types of outcome:

Acute, short-lived reactions are often fairly benign, whereas chronic, unremitting courses carry a poor prognosis. Delayed, intermittent phenomena ("flashbacks") and LSD-precipitated functional disorders that usually respond to treatment appropriate for the non-psychedelic-precipitated illnesses they resemble, round out this temporal means of classification.
— Strassman RJ. Adverse reactions to psychedelic drugs. A review of the literature. J Nerv Ment Dis 1984 Oct;172(10):577-95.

A Critical Review of Theories and Research Concerning Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) and Mental Health, Chapter 2: Psychosis 
By David Abrahart. LSD has also been linked to triggering psychotic episodes which don't always have a positive outcome, as this MA thesis shows in summaries of studies on this issue.

ONLINE AND SELF-HELP RESOURCES
Most people who have experienced a spiritual emergency want to find out more about the nature of these experiences and to learn about other people's spiritual emergencies. Below are web sites where anyone can post their experience, read about others, or request a referral for a therapist.

Spiritual Emergency Resource Center
A guide for clinicians and a self-help resource for people integrating a spiritual crisis. Several personal experiences are online, and people can post theirs in an online discussion forum.

Sacred Transformations
Personal stories of spiritual emergencies, visions, awakenings, and their effects.

The Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN@CIIS)
The SEN@CIIS Information and Referral Service offers support and resources for individuals experiencing difficulties with their spiritual growth (415-648-2610).

Spiritual Emergence Service
A non-profit Canadian society staffed by volunteers that offers information and referrals for people in psychospiritual crisis.