Emergence Phenomena: Opening the Dialogue
The experiences individuals have as a result of “spiritual emergence” are many and simple categories often miss the subtle differences that are important to acknowledge. Especially if someone is a clinician and needing to make an assessment, i.e. if a client/patient is in a process of spiritual emergence or not. Daniel Ingram, MD, MSPH, and Olivier Sandilands, M.Res., wrote an article attempting to articulate the underpinnings of issues in defining “emergent phenomena” related to “emergence”. They also call for a new specialty to be formed. This is a valuable contribution to the dialogue for anyone interested in forwarding the field of spiritual emergence and emergency.
Emergence Phenomena: The abstract of this new article
“Meditation, psychedelics, and other similar practices or induction methods that can modulate conscious experience, are becoming increasingly popular in clinical and non-clinical settings. The phenomenology associated with such practices or modalities is vast. Many similar effects and experiences are also reported to occur spontaneously. We argue that this experiential range is still not fully described or understood in the contemporary literature, and that there is an ethical mandate to research it more extensively, starting with comprehensive documentation and definition. We review 50 recent clinical or scientific publications to assess the range of phenomena, experiences, effects, after-effects, and impacts associated with a broad variety of psychoactive compounds, meditative practices, and other modalities or events. This results in a large inventory synthesizing the reports of over 30,000 individual subjects. We then critically discuss various terms and concepts that have been used in recent literature to designate all or parts of the range this inventory covers. We make the case that specialized terminologies are needed to ground the nascent research field that is forming around this experiential domain. As a step in this direction, we propose the notion of “emergence” and some of its derivatives, such as “emergent phenomenology,” as possibly foundational candidates.”
Title and Link: Open Access
Sandilands, O., & Ingram, D. M. Documenting and Defining Emergent Phenomenology: Theoretical Foundations for an Extensive Research Strategy. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1340335. Published July 9, 2024.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1340335/full
Frontiers is a gold open access publisher. At the point of publication, all articles from their portfolio of journals are immediately and permanently accessible online free of charge. Frontiers articles are published under the CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and the source are credited.
Integrative Mental Health University received a grant from E-Benefactors in 2022 that allowed us to hire qualified help in updating some of our courses and creating a Resource Archive. Daniel Ingram, MD, volunteers to lend organization, structure, administration, networking, vision, funding, incubation, and other forms of support to the EPRC, Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. He is also the founder and acting CEO and Board Chair of Emergence Benefactors, a charity dedicated to supporting the EPRC.
I wish to thank Emma for posting this important article and I would like to share some impressions on my first reading (apologies for a somewhat simplified analysis). I strongly salute the authors’ work in seeking to “ to integrate spiritual, clinical, and scientific paradigms to promote beneficial outcomes and avoid harmful ones” (p.17). This is by no means an easy task, because the gaps and the entrenchment of different worldviews runs deep.
Also on a positive note, I liked the discussion around the popular concept of “altered states of consciousness”. I too disagree with the superficial acceptance of the latter. It is very good to see the inclusion of some knowledge of wisdom traditions particularly around “knowledges of suffering”. This, in one hand, counteracts the cultural proclivity for avoiding suffering as potentially fertile and meaningful in the human condition, not least in the meanders of mental health (such proclivity goes hand in hand with rushing to suppress symptoms rather than sourcing deep causes). On the other hand it opens up a much needed understanding about what is and is not detrimental in a process of spiritual emergence. Overall, it places the focus on individual process. That, in turn, pushes for a broader evolutionary cosmology of human development beyond the materialistic viewpoint to which psychiatry, unfortunately, is often in bondage with.
The interesting discussion on the term spiritual (and the reasons why the authors wish to avoid ‘spiritual’ emergence) is complex and debatable. Here starts what I consider shortcomings regarding the ontological and epistemological frame (aka worldview/paradigm) of the article.
When the authors pose the possibility of “there are not necessarily any intrinsically spiritual experiences” (p.13) they could equally pose the assertion ‘all experiences are intrinsically spiritual’. The reason they don’t do that is because they are coming from an atheistic viewpoint in which “(…) spirituality and religion are not primarily phenomenological, but mostly cultural and contextual, related to individual and collective meaning-making, respectively”. And, like most atheists, have difficulties in understanding that atheism too is a belief system, along side Jainism or any other cosmology.
From here, they stumble and fall in another classic atheistic trap, namely the clunky and often tense opposition between subjectivity and objectivity, regarding the first as avoidable and the second as desirable means to neutrality. More specifically, their way of understanding the reality of spiritual phenomena a) doesn’t integrate the first person knowledge and b) and doesn’t seem to be conscious of their own rational atheistic perspective and the consequences therein.
In congruence with this ontological position, they adopt what methodologically is the etic, not emic perspective (the “emic” approach is an insider’s perspective, the “etic” is an outsider’s perspective), assuming that good science can only be etic: “We explicitly aim to avoid directly contradicting the core assumptions of major scientific and orthodox traditions, and instead adopt a clinically pragmatic stance which focuses on what frameworks add value to care, improve outcomes and human flourishing” (p.11).
Impressively encompassing, the article is still operating within the confines of rational-empirical science with the familiar emphasis on accumulating data in a somewhat mechanical manner. Their methodology is therefore conventional, as they proceed to map bottom up all manner of phenomena, creating categories derived from empirical observation applied to what is the inner life, in yet another taxonomy. Knowing the profoundly fluid and interactive nature of the soul, this may prove to be not too wise an enterprise…
The recognition that their own viewpoint stems from a rational-logic approach doesn’t seem to be obvious to the authors. When they declare “we are interested in the pre-reflexive level associated with specific experiences and less about how they are related at the reflexive level”. For those that feel they are inside a spiritual emergence process, does this article convey a sense that the authors “grok” what is going on?
The other typical trait of a materialistic informed science is displaying a naif wish to reach neutrality, including juggling ethics to avoid bias or what the authors’ call “cultural baggage”. What they fail to recognise is that there are ways of knowing that can lift beyond detrimental bias and cultural debris, that work beyond assumptions and cultural conditioning but that are not rational but trans-rational in nature (that include and transcend the rational).
Fortunately such knowledge is emerging too ? announcing a new, more integrative way of doing science, one that includes first person (“subjective”) and second person (intersubjective) knowledge. One that goes beyond the mere outer form of things (natura naturata) to discern a more inner nature (natura naturans) that is not simply descriptive but participatory and empathic. For more on this, I suggest reading material on Goethe’s way of science with its ‘organic’ logic – which demands life-experience (rather than the scientific experience associated with inorganic logic).
To conclude, this rather long list of observations by no means wishes to diminish the recognition of the impressive amount of work, good will and relevance that sustains this article. In my view, it comes across as a very honest and committed way of establishing bridges that hopefully will transform the way mental health is being carried forth, in particularly using spiritual emergence as key stone for a new social architecture.