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. 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", and adds 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

2 - Next Stage

3 - Next stage (“God Union experiences”)

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

Developmental Event