Traditions:Ontopoiesis and spiritual emergence: patterns through the lifespan

As part of her varied and in-depth work on the phenomenology of religion and spiritual experiences, Olga Louchakova-Schwarz has described the stages of "spiritual emergence" — a concept from transpersonal psychology denoting a specific axis of human development on which our core notion of emergent phenomena is based —, bridging transpersonal psychology and classical phenomenology with her clinical experience as a transpersonal psychologist. Louchakova's account is based on her experience with patients undergoing repeated spiritual experiences for years and sometimes decades, and describes transformations in the very constitution of the world as our lived experience (the word she uses, onto–poiesis, means the "making" or "bringing forth" of "beings" or "being") throughout this development. According to her, "numinous, spiritual, spirituality-related, mystical-religious or exceptional human experiences show up in a developmental sequence [which] is consistent from person to person" and "may take up to several decades to complete." Crucially, she considers that "the sequential unfolding of spiritual experience is associated with stage-organized psychological changes", adding that:

• "The first experiences of self-transcendence into pure consciousness will always be followed by intermittent depression associated with the deconstruction of the “false” psychological self"
• "The process of adult ego development for people with spiritual emergence indeed becomes a process of psycho-spiritual development"
• "This psycho-spiritual developmental sequence may also be subject to developmental arrest", and "may be sensitive to environmental factors and nonordinary events spiritual experience unfolds in accordance with a certain tendency."
• Spiritual emergence "actualizes tendencies in the psyche which cause deconstruction, the subsequent emergence of new qualities, and an ordering and reordering of the phenomenological field of the mind, i.e. the life-world."
• "Experiences as different as a direct perception of auras, and the experience of the Union with Spirit, are present in the different stages of transformation in intentional consciousness"
• Overall, the core dynamics of the process are that "Intentional consciousness turns around to capture its origins, in the direction of transcendence of the sense of separate self, in the direction of the direct apperception of the interior structures of consciousness, or both."

Stages of development

1 - Beginning

• The basic sequence begins with experiences frequently studied by parapsychology, including:
  • telepathy
  • premonition dreams
  • clairvoyance
  • perception of the so-called subtle energies, such as the auras of trees or people
• [this is a] domain of experience
• changes happen in perception
• changes [occur] in the constructs of time, space, facticity, and materiality
• These changes effect mainly inter-subjectivity in the mind
• only mildly, or do not at all involve the constitution of intra-subjectivity
• The perception of subtle energy is the reduction of hyletic intentionality responsible for the constitution of the “material” body
• Changes may involve the perception of the body schema
• beginning of massive changes in the intentional field, that is, in the flow of intentionality back to its origins, namely, the phenomenological origins of the self
• Psychologically, these experiences correspond with the development of behavioral awareness
• Intra-psychically, these experiences occur at the boundary between self and other, as if the border becomes more permeable
• First attempts to access the subconscious

2 - Next Stage

• Involves a deepening of presence into the constituted self and specifically into egological experiences
• On the psychological level, this is the actualization of the self, and consequent recognition of I-Thou, both internal and external
• Several groupings of experiences emerge within this stage, including:
  • (a) The self is resolved into pure subjectivity; experiences of pure, formless awareness emerge, i.e. the variations of transcendence of the individual I; the self is experienced as non-local
  • (b) the meaning content of relations becomes available between the individual I and the transcendent Self; essential relations between the Divine and the human condition are unveiled, whether in theistic or atheistic framework
  • (c) self-transcendence occurs in the form of consciousness of the totality of all forms of life, omniscience, and omnipresence
• The location of changes in this stage may fall within both intra- and intersubjectivity
• Psychological counterparts include the previously mentioned deconstruction of the false self
• may be accompanied by fluctuations that imitate manic-depressive syndrome
• actualization of the shadow
• emergence of the central archetype
• This is an example of an experience where the deployment of new psychological elements and their re-ordering is especially possible
• may result in deep changes in the person, including positive, characterological transformation
• This stage initiates a process whereby the ego-faculties such as individual desire, individual action, and individual will gradually lose their common denominator, “individual,” and become simply desire, action, and will, – or God’s desire, God’s action, and God’s will
• The deepening and development of these “effacements” causes the emergence of psychological material from the psyche beyond an individual I
• Archetypes may thus emerge spontaneously to appear in dreams
• Awareness captures the structures of an unveiling super-ego, transforms and then incorporates them into the spheres of the self
• Experiences of Divine names
• an encounter with one’s spiritual familyvisions of uncreated light
• pure light of void
• space of pure consciousness
• lead to the next stage of experiences which may be called “God Union experiences.”

3 - Next stage (“God Union experiences”)

• One of the characteristic features of this stage is the stability of the spiritual vision
• ongoing sense of the presence of the sacred
• This process [...] remains open-ended as long as the capacity to articulate it remains to allow the description of experience to others

Changes subsequent to an Experience of Pure Consciousness – a Non-Normative Developmental Event

This category describes specific variants in an individual's experience.

• If spiritual emergence includes ego-transcendence resolving into “pure awareness” (known in Yoga as Samadhi), the phenomenal field of consciousness subsequently endures a number of specific, permanent changes
• These include the persistence of spontaneous épochè
• the “transparency” of inner space — i.e. activated direct intuition of the internal structures of consciousness
• Spontaneous eidetic and transcendental reductions emerge
• People with the experience(s) of pure awareness are more reflective in regard to their own development, that is, they possess a certain “ontopoietic intuition”
• The instance of conscious “pure awareness” may be seen as a nonnormative developmental event, heralding the rise of ontopoietic intuition
• For the researcher, these experiences offer the possibility of entering the interior lab of consciousness to directly see the origins of intentional processes that constitute the ordered structures of the self.