Spiritual crisis and late-stage capitalism: 4 lessons from the edge of sanity.
What wisdom can we gather from transformative crises in individuals to assist humanity’s urgent transition out of late-stage capitalism?
“The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities... Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.”
- People’s Agreement of Cochabamba
Imagining post-capitalist realities, ways of living and being that don’t reduce the earth and human life to what can be extracted from them is an essential step in moving towards a sustainable future. I believe this requires us to accept the breakdown of our current systems and seek a way of collectively alchemizing this time of collapse, into a ‘breakthrough’. Enacting a ‘breakdown to breakthrough’ transition for planet Earth will need to be informed by inner transformation, which then translates to wise, innovative outer action and social change. This is not a unique idea; the United Nation’s ‘Inner Development Goals’ harnesses the application of inner development and transformational skills to global challenges faced by humanity.
Going through my own transformative crisis, and having worked with countless individuals with similar journeys, it is my firm belief that there is valuable wisdom to be harnessed from those emerging from their own personal ‘breakdown to breakthrough’ experience. This is not to say that people with this experience have healed everything- there is always a shadow, a wound, a behaviour that needs attention, in all of us, forever. The reason I think that individuals who have had significant breakdowns leading to a palpable transformation in their everyday lives are worth learning from though, is because they hold an embodied knowing, a felt sense in their bones, of what the collective is moving through right now.
Slow, steady transformation over time in individuals is incredibly needed too, and no less profoud, in fact let's admit it- it’s a lot less messy, inconvenient and challenging too. However, despite the obvious difficulties of going through an acute crisis, there is something unique about the experience of emerging from a full blown crisis feeling more whole, more connected, more clear- especially when properly integrated with consistent spiritual practice and psychological therapy if needed. These are the ones who will have faced the void, their own death, their own delusions and their own divinity. They will have grappled with how to hold all of that, and what it means to be a human here at this time. They will have been humbled and brought to their knees a hundred times and found the strength to emerge from the rubble of their former lives, more loving and more aware.
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place” Paul Coelho.
This is what humanity needs to do on a collective level, but instead of valuing these people, society tends to shame them because they have embodied what we are all too afraid to admit- they have embodied madness and delusion; destructive and often inappropriate behaviour. They have played the role in this cosmic drama that no one wants to play- a crystal-clear mirror to the human collective of its own deep insanity. In Western society, we consciously and unconsciously suppress the symptoms of crisis to avoid the discomfort and inconvenience of looking in this mirror. We do this to individuals through medication and incarceration, as well as on a societal level, through consuming, overworking, self-medicating and addiction to our devices.
Key Learnings from the edge of sanity
1) Acceptance of one’s own delusions, madness, and self-destructive behaviour
A prerequisite for returning from the edge of sanity is the acceptance that we did indeed, for a time, lose our mind. The facing square on of one’s delusions and the inappropriate or destructive behaviour that may have arisen from them is what is required for long-lasting transformation to take place after a breakdown. I would assert without hesitation that humanity is in the grip of madness. In today’s world, where we continue to actively destroy the ecosystem upon which the physical sustainability of all life, including our own species, depends, only the most determined (and financially powerful) stay in complete denial of this. Capitalism relies on and thrives on the denial of our collective insanity and self destructive behaviour. It takes huge courage to admit you have been mad; it goes against every survival instinct in our bones, to risk exile from ‘the tribe’. Yet it is this neo-liberal tribalism permeating western society, that we must have the courage to exile ourselves from.
2) Facing death/mortality
Many people who have experienced a spiritual crisis will have had an encounter with death or their own mortality. This is sometimes by mistakenly believing they have died, which impacts the body/mind profoundly despite not being true. In Dark Night of the Soul experiences, there is a deep descent into the death realms. Other times it might be through the physical risk of crisis bringing the experiencer close to actual death, including through suicide attempts. What good, if any, do these encounters with mortality and death do for the human being in today’s world?
An ongoing relationship with death is essential for embedding the human experience within the appropriate context of the earth’s ecosystem. The death process is essential in the cycles of regeneration and renewal that are inherent to life on this planet as well as to the mysterious alchemy of transformation (Ladha & Murphey, 2022) so urgently needed now. Reciprocity is central to these currents of life, death and transformation- knowing when and how to receive, and when and how to let go, in balance with the greater whole, requires deep acceptance of death. In today’s death-phobic, growth-centric society, contemplating dying and as such, leaving everything behind that capitalism needs us to grasp at, is a radical act of liberation desperately needed by humanity.
3) Mythic images
When a spiritual crisis includes manic states, there are certain images and ideas that arise which seem to be universal to those experiencing these non-ordinary states. John Weir Perry, a psychiatrist and student of Jung studied these patterns and drew remarkable parallels between the influx of images experienced in manic states, with the myths and rituals of antiquity at times of civilizational change. Common themes include stories of creation and destruction, cosmic combat, powers of light and dark, chaos and order, and a vision of oneness expressed in messianic ideation. Through extensive research, he began to see the arising of these rich mythic images as the natural effort of the psyche to move towards a greater state of wholeness, as well as articulate a vision for a more harmonious society. Films like ‘Crazywise’ point to the valued role non-ordinary states of consciousness and those prone to them, play in traditional societies.
The fact that these visionary states are now pathologized, medicated and dismissed as useless and invalid by western medicine could correspond with the ‘crisis of meaning’ that being lost in the depths of late-stage capitalism has created. Thought leaders exploring the complexity of the current meta-crises facing humanity recognise the timeless role of myth in ushering in civilisational change. Two of these thought leaders, Ladha and Murphey (2022) put it like this: “As we expand the mytho-poetic landscape and the corresponding creation of embodied knowledge and cultures, we may avail ourselves to the direct wisdom of the Gaian entelechy and the quiet whispers of that which is beyond our perception” p.202.
4) Increased sense of interconnectedness and connection to the divine within.
A consequence of going through a spiritual crisis can be that during as well as after the non-ordinary states occur, there is an increased sense of interconnectedness with the rest of life, including Source, Oneness etc. In normal consciousness, without spiritual practices, psychedelics or spontaneous awakenings and crises, we usually feel most connected to our own body, mind and emotions, as well as the people, activities and issues that affect our daily lives. There might be an abstract belief that we are more than this, such as a soul, but this is quite different to having a tangible felt sense and unmistakable knowing of the interconnectedness of all life and the divinity within every Being. Spiritual emergencies often include these elevated states, where the former boundary of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ becomes expanded to include the mountains, the birds, the river, the person walking their dog- everything. This can lead to a number of behaviours (not all of them wise or helpful) but most of the time there is an overwhelming sense of compassion for all of life and an urgent sincere calling to usher in a more evolved, peaceful and enlightened consciousness on planet earth. Even when the interconnectedness is experienced as paranoia, there can be profound learnings as distilled by Ricky Derisz in this illuminating piece.
The lessons we can take from the subjectively positive states of interconnectedness that tend to go hand in hand with mania and spiritual crises, is not to encourage ‘ego death’, losing our identity or our personal boundaries. The most useful learning is around how we can feel ourselves to be both ‘the ocean and the wave’- connected to All that is, to the Divine, to the more-than-human world, to our communities and to people we formally saw as ‘Other’. And at the same time, honour ourselves as the wave, having a valid experience of individuality, and all the complexity and forgetfulness that comes with that. The emotionally numbed state of denial in which capitalism holds the majority of Western society requires a rigid and limited sense of self- an anxious, deeply paranoid wave, fearful and envious of the ocean it doesn’t know it is a part of. Fear is an exceedingly useful emotion to capitalism; it underlies much of humanity’s most destructive behaviour, including our grasping for 'more’ which then over time becomes a perceived entitlement for more.
Final Thoughts
This piece is an exploration of how crisis in individuals relates to the meta-crisis of our times, driven predominantly by late stage capitalism. It takes an unfinished look at the way personal, inner experiences of breakdown might inform a collective breakthrough into postcapitalist realities. Through working with people emerging from spiritual crises, the themes i’ve addressed above have an archetypal nature to them, ocurring again and again in the journeys of individuals. What does this mean? And how can these archetypes serve our journey as a species towards sanity and healing? These are the questions myself and many others are contemplating at this time.
A final point I need to address is the attempt in transpersonal psychology to differentiate a ‘spiritual’ crisis from plain old madness, which in my view is missing the point- for it is not in how a crisis manifests, but in how it transforms the person over time, that makes it a spiritually regenerative experience. Of course, the capacity to transform through crisis is dependent on a variety of socio-economic factors, exacerbated by late-stage capitalism, inequality and trauma.
This is why it is important to highlight the way the capitalist system stunts the psychic process of renewal in individuals through actively increasing inequality and poverty which research has shown make incarceration and over-medication of a spiritual crisis more likely.
It seems all the more poignant then, that the wisdom gathered through the very states of consciousness that capitalism most vigorously seeks to oppress, point to its remedy and demise.
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If you or somebody you know is emerging from non-ordinary states of consciousness and needing a spiriutally aware, psychologically safe container to integrate the experience, feel free to reach out for a 1:1 session with me.
