The Shadow Side of Spiritual Experiences
Tom Kenyon, M.A.
One day, many years ago, I received a desperate phone call from a colleague in California. He virtually begged me to see a student of his who had had a psychotic break after attending one of his nine-day Whole Brain Intensives. She lived in southern Florida with her husband, and both of them wished to see a counselor. She had not been “quite right” according to her husband ever since the incident. And her family had hinted, not so subtly, that if she didn’t improve soon, they would take legal action against my colleague and his Institute.
I arranged to see the couple over a weekend, and they arrived at my office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina early one Saturday morning. In the first two hours, all I did was to take down the history of what had happened.
There is a saying that truth is stranger than fiction and while it may strain your sense of reality, what you are about to read is the unembellished strangeness of an actual life experience.
Midge and The Madonna
Midge (not her real name), had attended my associate’s nine-day personal growth Intensive in California. And as a result of multiple brain stimulation sessions and spiritual meditation practices she experienced a major mystical encounter.
Around the eighth day of the Intensive Midge felt the distinct presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus enfolding her in agape—divine love. Then on the last day of the Intensive, Midge—the human being—was absorbed into the mythic loving presence of Mary, i.e., the Madonna.
While in this blissful state of being, she went about blessing people. And some people actually experienced healings in her presence. In my conversation with my colleague in California he verified that several of his students had shared with him the extraordinary nature of the spiritual encounters they had had with Midge/The Madonna.
Still in an ecstatic state of bliss, Midge (a.k.a. the Madonna) was taken by a taxi to the airport for her return trip home. While in the terminal she stopped at a newsstand to find something to read for the long flight back to the east coast.
The eyes of a different kind of “Madonna” looked up at her from off the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Seeing her name in print, she purchased the rag and read the article on Madonna in the waiting area. Of course Madonna, the queen of rock and roll, was a very different order of being than the Madonna that Midge had been immersed in—i.e., Mary the Mother of Jesus.
In her highly suggestive state of mind, Midge suddenly shifted her self-identity from the Mother of Jesus to Madonna the celebrity. She was no longer the Mother of Jesus; she was now a rock star traveling incognito.
She boarded the plane without incident. But at about 30,000 feet she saw demons on the wing. Taking off her spiked heels, she started banging on the window, trying to break it.
Flight attendants restrained her, and she cursed at them yelling that she had to get out onto the wing to save the plane from demons.
When the plane landed police escorted her to the nearest psychiatric hospital where she remained for a short time until anti-psychotic medication brought an end to her delusions.
By the time she saw me, she had been symptom free for about a month, but her husband reported that she seemed edgy and not quite herself.
On their second visit to my office, Midge seemed highly agitated. I asked her what was going on, and she proceeded to confess an act she had committed over ten years earlier.
It seemed that her husband’s family had owned a furniture store, and she was expected to work as an employee. She hated the job as well as the other employees, all of which were members of her extended family. One night she snuck back to the store and set it on fire. The thing burned to the ground, and the family decided not to rebuild. She had found a way out of her situation, but the guilt had been eating at her for over a decade. I remember her husband sitting there with his mouth hanging open. But amazingly, he did not seem to be too upset.
On our third and final visit, Midge seemed very relaxed, and both she and her husband seemed to have reconciled the arson. Checking up on her several months later, Midge had no further episodes or delusions. As far as she was concerned, the whole thing was behind her.
The Shadow and the Power of Myth
From a transpersonal standpoint, we could say that at the beginning stages of her experience, Midge entered the mythic or archetypal realms of consciousness. Indeed, it is not uncommon for persons involved in personal growth to have mystical experiences.
I believe that part of this is created by the context in which such work takes place. And I think some of it is due to brain chemistry.
A cursory glance at mystical experiences reported by saints and mystics from all over the world reveals distinct commonalities, despite vast differences in culture and tradition. Many of these commonalities have to do with changes in perceived time and space as well as other shifts in perception including high states of ecstasy and bliss. These changes all point to distinct alterations in brain chemistry and physiology.
Brain physiology is like a mirror of the mind. It reflects what is occurring, and vice versa. When changes take place in physiology there are often corresponding changes in perception and experience. From this perspective, many spiritual practices can be viewed as low-tech ways of altering brain physiology and thus perception and experience.
Finally, I believe that the mythic realm is an inherent part of our being. If a person goes deep enough into the inner terrain of his or her own mind, he or she will eventually encounter mythic or archetypal beings. Certain types of inner work, as well as some kinds of brain stimulation, unveil this interior mythic realm of being, and I believe this is what happened for Midge.
Her contact with the Madonna, the Mother of Jesus, was an authentic contact with the mythic realm of being (i.e., a loving universal feminine presence). However, because Midge had a weak sense of herself (i.e., a poorly maintained ego) and unresolved shadow material, she was not able to sustain contact with the mythic realm, but instead descended into a mental aberration.
Midge had a dark secret that had been eating at her for over ten years. The guilt and psychological conflict around the arson had rushed to the surface like a breeching whale once her personal identity had dissolved during her mystical encounter with the numinous (light filled) feminine archetype of Mary.
The fact that Midge changed identities when reading an article about Madonna, the rock star, points to her general psychological instability and her lack of a strong egoic identity.
The term ego has a different connotation in psychology than it does in many spiritual circles. The ego, from a psychological perspective, is simply one’s sense of self. It is a center point of reference, and it is critical to psychological wellness.
As a psychotherapist, I find it highly un-resourceful and sometimes down right dangerous to involve oneself in ego bashing in the name of spirituality.
The problem is not with the ego, per se. The ego is just a sense of one’s identity. Had Midge possessed an intact ego, I suspect she would have never needed to be institutionalized.
But she did not have a strong sense of self, and so she was fertile ground for a psychotic break. For her, the shifting of self-identity from Midge to the Madonna was a release from her psychological prison, but the problem was that she hadn’t earned being released from jail or even paroled. She had not come to terms with her shadowy and fiery secret. And the psyche demands a type of internal justice. By bringing her shadow material (i.e., the arson) into the light of conscious awareness she was freed from an unconscious torment that had haunted her for years.
While some spiritually minded persons might say that Midge’s problem was her ego, I contend that her difficulties weren’t caused by her ego anymore than the temperature gauge on your car is to be faulted for warning you that the engine is running hot. They’re both mechanisms. And the ego is a mechanism of consciousness (or mind) that has one sole purpose–to navigate with a sense of personal identity through the myriad experiences of life.
Had Midge possessed a strong egoic identity, her encounter with Mary would have been different. She could have received the blessings that encounters with such beings bring without the distortions of her personal conflicts. Had she a strong ego, it would have ensured that she came back to a sense of herself when the experience with Mary ended. But she did not have this, and so there was nothing to bring her back to center.
A look at the psychological state of mystics during their ecstatic encounters, demonstrates regular shifts from personal identity to the mythic quite clearly.
Read the accounts of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa Avignon and Meister Eckhardt and other mystics you will see that they were often completely absorbed by their mystical encounters. The sense of self vanished for the duration of their sojourns into the heavenly or celestial realms. It was only as they began to “return to earth” that a sense of self returned.
Compare this with reports of samadhi (yogic trance) experienced by yogis and yoginis (female yogis), and you will see something similar. In the more intense forms of samadhi there is a complete loss of self. In these altered states of consciousness there is only pure consciousness without an object, and this is often accompanied by feelings of ecstasy and bliss.
But even though both ecstasy and bliss are parts of our innate nature, so are the psychological conflicts we have inherited and/or created for ourselves.
Midge’s psyche had been disturbed all these years by unresolved shadow material, namely her previous un-owned acts of arson and cowardice. But when her shadow was brought into the light of awareness, her internal conflict came to an end.
Final Thoughts
I think it is difficult for many of us involved in spiritual pursuits to acknowledge our own personal shadow material. It is too confronting to look at our own negativity with clear vision. But to pursue the light filled realms of our being without paying attention to our un-owned emotional material (i.e., our shadow) is, in my opinion, self-limiting. True spiritual enlightenment encompasses and transforms the entire spectrum of our being from the heights of illumination to the nadir points of our self-loathing. Anything short of this is, for me, a type of spiritual travesty.
Before I took a one year sabbatical from teaching I pondered what would be the greatest contribution I could offer my sangha (spiritual community). I decided to teach a workshop on the Shadow, which I called Entering the Nigredo, the nigredo being one of the distinct phases of internal or spiritual alchemy. The goal of internal alchemy is nothing short of a radical metamorphosis of self, and this remarkable change takes place through the active transformation of our emotional dross (symbolized as lead) into spiritual treasure (symbolized as gold).