Psychosis, Mystical Experiences and Reality

First of all psychosis and mystical experiences can be considered both kinds of altered states of consciousness available to all of us. And according to David Lukoff we can encounter people who report just mystical experiences, others who present just psychotic episodes, and others who show us mystical experiences with psychotic features or psychotic disorders with mystical features.

Psychosis and mystical experiences correspond to a different mode of perception, different from the 'normal' reality construted by a consensus created from certain beliefs, paradigms and experimentations. In this sense, they are both abnormal experiences, mainly in our occidental civilization based in an empiristic science. What can not be proved and reconstructed by sensorial experimentations is not true, doesn't exist, is not real.

Psychosis and mystical experiences are both subjective experiences in which individuals by the release of an information-filtering process have access to new or unassimilated old experiences.

If the individual is in good mental health, he can deal with these experiences in a good way integrating them in his self and consequently in his life. Developing a positive attitude towards the process, he is able to learn with the experiences gaining important insights and using this process to improve his personal growth. According to S. Stahlman's article it occurs in mystical states of consciousness as described by William James, Abraham Maslow and Robert Ornstein among others, and in episodes of acute psychosis with a positive outcome studied by S. Epstein, Peter Buckley and David Lukoff.

It's worth to pay attention that in these cases there is no conceptual disorganization and we can notice a good pre-episode functioning what means that the individual was in good contact with the daily consensus reality.

As in altered states of consciouness individuals have access to knowledges beyond the rational realm, coming from the right hemisphere of the brain that is sensitive, intuitive and integrative, these new and sudden knowledges as insights and creative wisdon can seem strange, crazy or even being opposite to the intellectual and scientific knowledge.

In fact there are different kinds of knowledges from different processes both available to human consciousness and necessary in our evolution. Nevertheless if society identifies the reality with what is proved by the left hemisphere of the brain exclusively, it won't accept what is perceived and comes from different states of consciousness, disqualifying it.

I'll give you an example. I was attending an inpatient who would pass by a surgery to reconstruct his esophagus. He was a spiritualistic person. After the surgery, he had a strong infection in his lung and needed to breath with helper machine. When I went to see him, I had the impression he was looking at something above us and then I asked it to him. So he demanded me to give him a paper and a pen, and wrote there were enlightened beings that had come to see him and he was at ease. When I told it to the physician, he said it was a disturb of consciousness because of the low oxigen level in the inpatient's brain. Two days later the patient died.

In this case, what was real? What did really exist? It seems that the physician and the patient lived in different realities. The patient was able to share the consensus reality with the physician although he had an wider perception. This way he presented a good 'reality contact'.

People forget that science is an attempt to describe and understand the reality around us. It's a limitated map, not the reality itself. And we need to reconstruct time by time this map with more subtle tools in order to attaining more subtle realms and correcting distortions. As an example we can mention the periods of paradigm's change in our occidental culture when science gave us suddenly another perception of reality, showing the old knowledges as distorted or limitated ones.

Besides that we've already heard about people who transcended the consensual representation of reality telling us about new and different aspects of universe and in turn were ignored or segregated as crazy people, having meanwhile their knowledges validated and aproved some time later.

Instead of denying or discriminating different experiences of reality, it would be worth to approach them without prejudices, prejudments or theories, trying to catch them up as they present themselves in an intuitive and immediate way. This is called 'époché' or 'phenomenological reduction', a method to approach the essences of things. Later we can make a refletion and form concepts about them, not forgeting that we need both brain's hemispheres to live and be in relation with the reality.

Instead of withdrawing in a particular view, to share different experiences allows us to compose an wider, deeper and more complete understanding of the reality as in the story of some blind men trying to know an elephant. Each of them touched a different part of it, having a partial impression about the animal. For not constructing biased ideas, they needed to share their different impressions so that they could form a more exact understanding and concept about the elephant.

According to these reflections above, when you ask me if there's a reason for alarm if an individual's reality disagree with the 'consensus' reality, I answer 'yes', not for the individual but for the society, because perhaps it may be a signal that the 'consensus' reality is distorted or limitated.

However, a psychotic disorder of personality do exist and can imply much suffering and pain, and sometimes even dangers to the individual or to the others. So as a method for evaluating a person's reality I propose the phenomenological one as described shortly above. Nevertheless this is not a method for diagnostic evaluation but for comprehensive evaluation, where we need first to submerge in the other person's subjectivity in order to catching up his experience as the person lives it but without mixing ourselves with it. This way we can gradually come with this person to an objectivity without losing his particular way to experience the reality. We can be able to 'correct' together the distortions that bring him damages and sufferings.

Using this kind of approach an involuntary treatment can be felt not as an agressive intrusion and invalidation, but as a friendly and respectful help. And we, the professionals, may be able to know better how the person is functioning in different situations of his daily life dealing with different stimuli.

In short, psychosis and mystical experiences imply both a kind of rupture with the 'normal' reality in the mode of perceiving and dealing with it. However in the psychosis this rupture brings the person to a disorganization in his self and in his life wherea in the mystical experiences this rupture, if the individual is in good mental health, is followed by a reorganization in a higher level expressed in his way of being and in his life that shows us an wiser and deeper harmony.