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"
• "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