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Spiritual Emergence(y), Psychosis, and Personality: Investigating the Role of Schizotypy
Get PDFSpiritual emergency (SEY) refers to a process of spiritual emergence (SE) or awakening that becomes traumatic for an individual, leading to a state of psychological crisis. There is evidence that SE(Y) is associated with both psychotic symptomatology and personality traits. This study examined the relationship between SE(Y), psychotic symptoms, and schizotypy, a construct that addresses psychotic-like personality traits in the general population. A total of 250 participants completed an anonymous online questionnaire. Results showed that SE(Y) was positively correlated with positive symptoms of psychosis and schizotypy, but demonstrated only very weak to no correlations with negative symptoms of psychosis and schizotypy. The results also showed that disorganized schizotypy mediated the relationship between positive schizotypy and crisis; and positive schizotypy mediated the relationship between disorganized schizotypy and crisis. The clinical implications of these results include the identification of measurable clinical and personality markers that may help: (1) differentiate between SE(Y) and cases of clinical psychosis that have a poor prognosis, and (2) identify individuals who are at risk of experiencing the potentially debilitating effects of SE(Y)
Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon
Get PDFFalling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as secure attachment, with lifepartner potential. The larger themes were dynamic connection, secure attachment, astonishment, and passionate long-term relationships
Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist Part 2: The Futural Promise of Reich’s Naturalistic Bio-Energetic Spirituality
Get PDFThis is the second part of a consideration of the later Wilhelm Reich as anticipating a future planetary-wide “New Age” form of this-worldly spirituality in ways overlapping with figures from the same era of Western crisis from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Jung, Toynbee, Bergson, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil. Where the first part of this treatment of Reich as transpersonal psychologist traced his evolution from his bio-energetic psychotherapy to a Weberian this-worldly mysticism of a universal life energy, his cosmic orgone, with its attendant features of conflicted “spiritual emergency,” this second paper seeks to further develop some of its still largely unrealized implications. These include the relation of his later system to neo-shamanism; transpersonal psychologies of presence, Being-experience, and self actualization; essentializing reinterpretations of the historical Jesus; evolutionary continuities in contemporary consciousness studies; emergent system approaches in science; and the potential for a New Age planetary identity for humanity
Categorical Modelling of Conscious States
Get PDFIn the last several decades, there has been an explosion of research concerning consciousness with some efforts at mathematical modelling. The purpose of this paper is to model conscious states using categorical constructions. In particular, this modelling captures temporality, the intentional structure of consciousness, and meaning fields, which provide the templates for occurrent events. The architecture of conscious states naturally lends itself to applications of category theory, more specifically to sheaf-like constructions in which the stacks over a site are topoi whose germs are the objects of the topoi. Each topos represents the potential experiential content of an individual where the objects represent meaning fields, the phenomenological subject is represented by the terminal object, and the morphisms from the terminal object into the objects, the elements, represent attentional targeting of the specific content of meaning fields yielding an individual=s subjective experience. Temporality is represented by movement along the objects of the site, with different possible realities denoted by switching between contravariant functors over the site. This is an innovative way of modelling conscious states with the possibility of creating potentially useful ways of thinking about them that could then be empirically tested
Sexual Consent as Transcendence: A Phenomenological Understanding
Get PDFConsent to sex is a topic of much research, particularly with the goal of optimizing sex education for youth, college students, and military service personnel. Sex educators have tended to err on the side of clear and concise definitions of consent for ease of instruction. However, the sexual science literature has steadily shown that the navigation of consent to sexuality activity is much more nuanced, situated and contextual. When consent is conceptualized as a yes or no answer to particular sexual acts or sexual activity altogether, it overlooks the dynamic nature of how people experience consenting. This article examines consent in the sexual science research literature and then considers these findings through the lens of some of the contributions of phenomenological philosophy. We then discuss the experience of consent as a dialogic process that can lead to moments of transcendence of the self and deep reverence for the other, despite some moments of lack of clarity or ambiguity within the same sexual act
Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon
Get PDFFalling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as secure attachment, with lifepartner potential. The larger themes were dynamic connection, secure attachment, astonishment, and passionate long-term relationships
Relational Inquiry: Seven-Years Practicing Seven Relationships
Get PDFGreetings from Byron Bay—what follows is a postcard version of a seven-year cycle of relational inquiry retrospectively nicknamed The Rainbow of Desire. I outline our practices, explore five basic fields in our approach to new paradigm research, and present an updated version of my seven relationships model as a heuristic for understanding and participating in relational inquiry. As a contemporary spiritual expression, with roots in the Greek-Socratic tradition of research, and informed by Gestalt practice (not psychotherapy), this account may also be of value for persons interested in further Gestalt-transpersonal inquiry, research, and learning
Meaning-Making Among Intentionally Childless Women
Get PDFThis paper is a summary of a qualitative research project that focused upon meaningmaking processes as described by intentionally childless women. A grounded theory exploration, it involved semi-structured interviews with 30 cisgendered women aged 27–61 who chose childlessness early in life. Based on principles inherent to social constructivism and feminist theories, the subjective voices of the participants were analyzed as normative expressions of female identity. The main category that accompanied intentional childlessness was a sense of freedom. In addition, two additional thematic categories focused on ways the women view their contributions to their communities and experience belonging and a sense of meaning in the world. Some negative experiences associated with being intentionally childless were also reported. The majority of the women in this study noted that they feel no regret or have no second thoughts about their decision, while a third of the participants spontaneously noted that they experience their lives as superlative
The Castrated Gods and their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, and Spiritual Supremacy
Get PDFVoluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of godly castration emerge: divine dynastic conflicts involving castration; a powerful goddess paired with a weaker male devotee castrated because of his relationship with her; and magus gods whose castration demonstrates their superiority. Castration cults associated with some of these gods—and other gods whose sexuality was ambiguous, such as Jesus—some of them existing up to the present day, illuminate the spiritual powers associated with castration for gods and mortals
