The Psyche & Cosmos Advanced Program™

Spiritual Emergence & Emergencies

Understanding & Treatment of Transpersonal Crises
Module Two

Sherri: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Psyche & Cosmos Advanced Program:
Exploring the Frontiers of Transformation and Healing Using Archetypal
Astrology and Depth Psychology. Today we move into Module Two with Stanislav
Grof and Rick Tarnas. Enjoy as we move into Module Two.

Rick: Welcome, everyone. It's Rick and Stan bringing you Module Number Two. We're
going to today address the whole issue of spiritual emergencies and spiritual
emergences. We'll play on word with the idea that emergencies and crises can
turn out to be actually emergences of great psychospiritual consequence and
richness and depth if they are allowed to unfold in a kind of intelligently
supported environment. So, we're going to do that with Stan first describing the
overall phenomenon and the approach that emerged as Stan and Christina Grof,
in particular, were working with people who were in this condition. And then we
will look at a case history which was quite a dramatic one. It took place at Esalen
Institute where both Stan and I lived for many years and were working there
together, so we know the person and the case very well. And then we'll do the
analysis of that spiritual emergency and its resolution through the lens of
archetypal astrology and show the natal chart and transits. So, Stan, can you
take it from here? You can discuss the overall phenomenon of spiritual
emergencies which you and Christina were the ones really to name and give a
new frame of reference really for approaching this important phenomenon.

Stan: Hello, everybody. I would like to join Rick in welcoming you to our second
module. As Rick mentioned, we will focus on the phenomenon of spiritual
emergency which emerged out of our work with psychedelics and also,
Holotropic Breathwork. It became possible because of some of the things that
we already discussed, the expansion of the cartography to the perinatal level and
of transpersonal level. The recognition that the symptoms go deeper than just
postnatal biography, that they reach not only into the biographical level but also
the perinatal level and the transpersonal level. We also talked about the self-

January 11, 2018 | p. 1

healing intelligence and also the change that we have to make in relation to
spirituality. So, the concept of spiritual emergency is based on the observation
that there is a significant large subgroup of non-ordinary states of consciousness
that are currently diagnosed and treated as serious mental diseases, psychosis.
But if they're properly understood and they are appropriately supported, they
actually represent a radical impulse of the psyche to heal itself and simplify its
functioning. So, when we discovered this, we coined the term "spiritual
emergency," which is really a play on words. It comes from the Latin emerge
which means "to emerge." But if we have a situation that emerges suddenly and
represents a crisis, we talk about emergency, emergency vehicle, emergency
room. So this is a play on words, so just think that this is a crisis, this is an
emergency in people's lives. But if it's properly supported, it makes it possible to
emerge to another level of consciousness and I believe even to a different
evolutionary level.

We are usually referring to a Chinese pictogram that describes crisis. It's made of
two pictograms, one of which means danger and the other one means
opportunity. Now the spiritual emergencies are found in the ritual, spiritual
history of humanity. Those are the experiences of the shamans. They are the
experiences of yogis, experiences of the founders of religion, Christian mystics,
and in other areas of spiritual life. We know that all of these individuals
underwent this crisis, spiritual emergency. And they were actually able to
integrate it and became very significant figure in the religious history of
humanity. So, the experiences that we see in psychedelic sessions, that we see in
Holotropic Breathwork are very, very similar to what we find in the spiritual
literature of the world.

Now when I mention the term "spiritual emergency," particularly if there are any
people from the psychiatric field or psychological field, the usual question is,
what is the differential diagnosis between spiritual emergency and psychosis?
And I would have to say you cannot make differential diagnosis because
psychosis is not really a diagnosis. It's not backed up by any kind of biological
findings the way the diagnoses are in somatic medicine. We don't have any
changes that would be specific that we find in the blood, that we find in the
urine, on the X-rays, in the cerebrospinal liquid. So basically, the diagnosis is
based on the fact that these people have experiences and show behavior that
the current medical model, psychiatric model cannot explain, so it becomes
attributed to some kind of pathological process. The term that's usually used for
these states in psychiatry, we called them endogenous or we call them
functional. Now the term "endogenous" is basically useless. It's a kind of
expression that we use in medicine when we don't understand a problem. We
call it idiopathic. The term "endogenous" means generated from within. So, it
does not have a definition that we could sort of contrast with the definition of
spiritual emergencies.

January 11, 2018 | p. 2

So, the question is what can we do? What we can do, we can define the
characteristics of an episode of holotropic states that somehow makes a person
good candidate for an alternative approach when do very intense self-
exploration, aiming for self-transformation. We need to have some kind of a
criteria that would tell us whether this is a good candidate. So, what would be
these kinds of characteristics that would make an episode of holotropic state a
situation that is conducive to this alternative treatment, this alternative support?
Now the one thing is that we would see that that state would consist of the kind
of experiences that we daily see in our work with Holotropic Breathwork and
that we used to see in psychedelic sessions which means it will be a combination
of some kind of biographical experiences from childhood, from infancy. We
would see experiences related to birth, sometimes in the form of psychospiritual
death-rebirth process. We can also see many transpersonal experiences such as
past life experiences, experiences of archetypal beings or visits to archetypal
realms. When we see these experiences in psychedelic sessions or in Holotropic
Breathwork, we can work with them and they can be actually transformative and
healing. Why would that not apply to the experiences just because they emerge
spontaneously?

The other characteristic would be the attitude of the person to that experience,
whether they're willing to admit or accept that this is their process. That it's
coming from their own psyche, from their own unconscious and don't use a lot
of projection, sort of attributing to some kind of external sources. The next one is
something that we call communicative style. That means when the person
reports that experience, it's a very clear, very articulate description of some
pretty fantastic experiences which is very similar to a situation if we had a person
who had just an experience with 300 micrograms of LSD and is talking very
clearly about various perinatal and transpersonal experiences that they had. It
also requires good therapeutic relationship. In all those situations where we
work with people in spiritual crisis, in spiritual emergency, we had really good
relationship. They were cooperative, very willing to do that. It's also important
for the person to agree that we will be doing this inner work. So, if we present an
alternative to a patient like this, the patient might say, "Listen, I have had
enough of these inner experiences. Just give me something so that I feel
comfortable that I can sleep." That's very legitimate. But I think it's important to
show them that there is alternative which is difficult, which will take them into
some quite challenging areas in their psyche, but there is really hope for some
kind of a radical change.

Now the next thing that we look into was the question of diagnosis. If you study
psychiatry, there's a preoccupation with diagnosis and it's a very strenuous
process. We have already Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Number Five, and
there's always fight about what goes into that diagnostic manual and what

January 11, 2018 | p. 3

 doesn't. Typically, clinicians complain that they cannot really match what is
happening in their patients and what’s described in that manual. But we wanted
to have some kind of categories. Are there some significant characteristics of
some specific types of spiritual emergency that would be possible to give them a
name and maybe even approach them in a different way? So, what we were able
to do finally was to define about ten different types of these spiritual
emergencies that had some significant features that would make them distinct
and in some way different from others, but it was impossible to create very clear
demarcation lines. What spiritual emergency really is opening of the psyche so
that the contents from the deep unconscious emerge into consciousness. The
unconscious itself is a multilevel, multidimensional system. There are no
demarcation points. There are no pigeonholes there. So, when we created these
types, there was a significant overlap. There were certain characteristics that
appear in all of that. For example, that element of death-rebirth or the fact that
there were some really intense sensory perception elements in those states.
[0:14:53]
So, I will just briefly mention some of the most important types of spiritual
emergency, and then we look at a specific example of Karen. We'll see how
somehow the combined perspective of this expanded cartography of the psyche
and that lens of archetypal astrology would give us very deep understanding and
all sorts of certain clues for the therapeutic support. So we, for example,
discovered one category which was something that is known from anthropology
as the initiatory crisis of shamans. When people had the experience of visionary
journey into the unconscious, into the underworld, where they were attached by
evil spirits, they had to go through some very challenging ordeals, experience of
annihilation, dismemberment, and then experience of the magical journey into
the supernal realm. So that's the initiatory crisis of shamans is really a very
interesting example of spiritual emergency of a situation that looks like a very
serious mental disturbance and ends up through self-healing and improved
functioning in society. Shamans are typically healers. They are good politicians.
They are good artists. They function at least as well as the other members of the
tribe.

Another example would be what we call awakening of Kundalini. This is

something that comes from the Indian literature. The idea here is that there is a
cosmic energy, family nature that basically was involved in the creation of this
universe. We have representation of it in our sacral area, not in the physical
body but in the subtle, in the etheric, if you want. Normally, it is in a dormant
state. It is usually represented as a snake coiled three and a half times around
the male symbol of the lingam. The term Kundalini actually means "the coiled
one." The idea is that it can get activated by a variety of: the physical traumas,
childbirth, and so on, but particularly by what's called Shaktipat awakened by
Kundalini guru. There's actually also some extreme maneuvers that can wake up
this Kundalini. You should find a lot of warning. This is the most powerful

January 11, 2018 | p. 4

spiritual emergency but also the potentially most risky one. So when people
experience the activation of Kundalini, they have sense of energy flowing up
their spine. They have what's called kriyas, sort of outburst of unmotivated
emotions, also physical feeling, shaking, and so on. They can have visions,
experience past life experiences, and so on. This process is seen as essentially
benevolent, but there's a warning that people should not try to resist it. The
safest way is really find a situation where they can allow someone to go with
whatever the energy brings.

The third of those typical crises is what Abraham Maslow called peak
experiences. It's the most benign one that would not need any kind of
hospitalization. Basically, it's an experience of feeling a sense of oneness inside
and oneness with the external world, blissful feelings, peaceful or ecstatic
rapture, being beyond space and time. Having experiences which are amazing
but ineffable to be put in words. They have very significant positive after effects.
Now I will mention one more which is we're now getting to something that is
closest to what Karen experienced. This was based on the work of John Perry, a
Jungian analyst who actually created three centers where people could go. One
of them was Diabasis in San Francisco. One of them was in San Diego, the
Chrysalis. In these centers, he admitted people ideally when they have first
episode like this. People are not treated with tranquilizers. They were allowed to
go through whatever they had to go through. John would sit down with them
and help them to integrate the experiences using the Jungian maps. Now he
described the most radical, the deepest form of spiritual emergency that would
most likely get diagnosed as schizophrenia.

This was a situation where the person feels in the middle of a kind of a cosmic
battle, Manichaean kind of battle between good and evil, between forces of
darkness, forces of light. They see themselves as the central figure in this. They
are preoccupied with death. It's sacrifice, martyrdom, beyond the posthumous
journey of the soul, and so on. They have a sense that they are changing gender
and sometimes homosexual panic. They have the experience of hieros gamos
sacred marriage was another partner as a kind of internal event or can get
projected on another person. They also towards the culmination of this kind of
situation. They discover a radiant source of light, which is like a pearl, like a
jewel, which John Perry saw as a representation of the Self. And then somehow
rebuilding their personality from that experience of one's own divinity. Maybe
one more thing that's toward the end of this kind of process, people became
preoccupied with the curvature of the circle. They started drawing mandalas
which combined the circle and square, which was according to John Perry signs
of grounding of that experience where the circle represents the transcendental
and the square represents the earth, the grounding of this.

January 11, 2018 | p. 5

So, we can now go to the story of Karen. I will not go through any other types of
spiritual emergency, but I have a paper which I will give you for deepening
learning where you can read about the description of all these different types.
So, the situation with Karen was Karen was living and working at Esalen. She was
an extremely beautiful, shy, withdrawn person, and at the same time, very, very
bright and very physically active. She started having experiences in the middle of
her everyday life that very, very quickly escalated to the point that she became a
problem, management problem. The question was should she go into psychiatric
hospitalization, or is it something that we can handle at Esalen? So, we chose the
second approach. Esalen was very generous and gave Karen a special room in a
motel that belongs to Esalen. We took out all the furniture, just put mattresses
that make it very soft and safe. We were taking turns which means we were
spending about three hours with her. When it was Christina and myself, we
basically used the kind of approach that we do, encouraging her to fully express
the emotions, fully express the movements and the physical manifestation.
There were other groups of people who were coming to support her who had
very different ideas. So, there was not a unified approach which would have
been ideal to people, for example, who, when she was going through something
difficult, tried to retract her attention, would bring some flowers or something
else, trying to take her away from what she was experiencing. There were other
people who would her a massage or just simply have a conversation session with
her and so on. But we saw quite dramatic things in Karen, but it was not anything
significantly different from what we see not only in psychedelic sessions but in
Holotropic Breathwork.

So, Karen had a very traumatic childhood. She was present at the age of three
when her mother committed suicide and stayed with the dead mother. Then her
father, who was an alcoholic, remarried and she was very, very badly abused
physically by her stepmother. She had a traumatic birth and also some significant
problems when she was delivering her own daughter, Erin. She experienced in
the session not only finding the dead mother but also several episodes of being
abused by the stepmother which were then opening up into past life experiences
of being an African slave, being tortured, being abused by the slave owners. She
had experiences of heat to the point that she couldn't stand any clothes and was
drinking a lot of water. At one point, she had the experience of becoming all
kinds of evil beings, from a witch to by this, she's like a malevolent witch and
also kind of a vicious monster. She was acting it all with movements of her body
and also with the appropriate sounds.

There was an episode where she focused on sex which she said she considered in
the past to be a very low kind of animal instinct and suddenly changed as a result
of her experiences completely the attitude towards sexuality. She was not
familiar with tantra, but she was giving us lectures that this is not just biological
impulse, that this is a sacred energy. She experienced the activation of activation

January 11, 2018 | p. 6

 of chakras sexually and the flowing of the Kundalini energy which is called Shakti.
She had amazing extrasensory perception, psychic abilities. For example, she was
informed about a lot of things that were happening in the world. She didn't have
any television in the room, but when Reagan and Gorbachev are meeting in
Reykjavík, she was telling us about that. She was telling us about other things
that were happening in the world. She had incredible insights. She found
people's weak points, and she was confronting them. I have seen something
similar in a psychiatric facility whenever I worked as a beginning psychiatrist. And
I see now that this might have been even a reason for some kind of drastic
interventions that a patient became psychic and had started exposing people's
weaknesses and at that point, the personnel decided that it's time for some kind
of a drastic intervention.
[0:30:00]
There were also situations where we would be coming for the session with her,
and we were talking about something. And as we walk into that room, she would
just join the discussion, as if she had been there from the very beginning. One of
the most characteristic signs of that condition was extreme activation, what we
call manic state. There was a feud of thoughts, incredibly fast and brilliant kind of
insights. She was communicating the names of songs or if she could, she actually
created a song for a particular occasion. She was dancing. She was acting out in a
variety of things to the point that people felt that this was really the best show in
town and liked to be with her, not just because of the love for her and
supporting her but also because it was an extraordinary experience to be with
her. She also had episodes where she relived her birth and also experiences from
the hospital when she was giving birth to her daughter. It was quite a traumatic
experience for her. She was preoccupied with death, martyrdom with sacrifice.
She had an experience of herself dying and then in the second half actually dying
and being born, the experience of psychospiritual death and rebirth. Then as we
were going on, she started experiencing a radiant source within her being like a
very precious pearl and was kind of discovering her own divinity. And then from
there, it started focusing more on the external world. Big Sur is a very beautiful
area with the mountains, with the ocean, so she had this really fine experience,
amplified experience of the beauty of nature. And then she started grounding
the experience, started recognizing that this was not really a crisis that the world
was in and she was seeing that this was her own inner process. And then in
about three weeks, she got sufficiently grounded that she was able to return
home and start taking care of her daughter.

Now I would like to say something about the support that we, I already
mentioned that if it was Christina and myself, we would just do what we now go
in Holotropic Breathwork sessions basically that would encourage her to express
what are needing to be expressed physically and emotionally. We wanted to be
sure that she had enough liquid, that she had enough vitamin, that she had
enough to eat. So, we kept a diary which was also like a report for the next group

January 11, 2018 | p. 7

that was coming to support her and where we wrote exactly how much she
drank, what she ate. And also summed up somehow what was happening, so
they have a continuity. We were worried about two vicious circles that typically
developed when people are in intense spiritual emergency. One of them is that
there is such an intensity of the emotions and sometimes the movements that is
burning the sugar and creates hypoglycemia. And it's a known that hypoglycemia
itself can bring unconscious material from the unconscious into consciousness.
For example, the spiritual practice, they would ask you to eat very lightly or even
fast. So, it's important to intervene here because it can create a vicious circle
that the intensity of the experience creates hypoglycemia, and hypoglycemia
tends to bring more material. So, it's kind of a vicious circle. So, the intervention
was that he would give her fast sugar. The brain can use only glucose. So, we
were using tea with honey or banana or anything that would have fast sugar.

Then the other possibility of a vicious circle, which has to do with insomnia,
people who are involved in this kind of process, they tend not to sleep. And it's
very well known that sleep deprivation itself can activate the unconscious and
bring the unconscious material into the surface. So, we were using at time
Librium or Valium, minor tranquilizers or barbiturates, to basically give her some
sleep. We didn't look at it is therapy but just as this situation of giving her
enough strength to be able to get involved in further therapy and self-
exploration. So, after the night when she slept, again we continued with the
same kind of an uncovering strategy. Now Karen emerged out of this in a kind of
amazing change. She was much more self-conscious. Her self-esteem grew. She
had a wonderful voice. Now she was actually able to do public performances.
She was generally just much more energetic, much more self-assured. Rick and I
had the opportunity to meet her quite a few times after this. It seems that this
condition persisted. There was no treatment necessary after this.

So, this was a situation where had it been treated traditionally, she would have
ended up on big dosages of tranquilizers and process would be remain
unfinished, which means it would require a lot of maintenance dosages. I have
seen quite a few people who were hospitalized and treated with tranquilizers
when they were in a bad trip, had a very difficult experience. Sometimes ten or
20 years later, they were still in the psychiatric facility getting maintenance
dosages. And when an attempt was made to reduce the dose, the process was
still there, and the self-healing intelligence is trying to complete it which was
interpreted so that the patient is still ill and needs the maintenance dosages. She
also didn't have a sense of stigma. She had some embarrassment with this
drama that she created, but she referred to it as, "I cracked my mirror." Her
general attitude towards that experience is positive. She didn't look at it as some
very bad part of her life.

January 11, 2018 | p. 8

 I think I will end here and pass it over to Rick to give us the astrological correlates
so that we will see how that combination that we are talking about, which
means the expanded cartography of this psyche, that includes the perinatal level
and transpersonal level actually makes it possible to see this process as natural
rather than pathological. Because the experiences which are of part of spiritual
emergency would be the experiences of different perinatal matrices, would be
experiences of past life experiences, would be experiences of archetypal beings
or visits to archetypal realm. So, when we have this large cartography, this is
basically confronting something that is an integral and germane part of the
human psyche. Usually, the intent in psychiatry is to see some kind of
pathological process as a reason why these experiences come. That this is
generated, the content is generated by the effect of the pathological process of
the brain, whereas with this new approach, this basically means activation of the
deep realms of the unconscious and what is emerging is the psyche per se. Only
the psyche has incredibly bigger dimensions than we describe in current model.

Now then, as you will see, if we bring astrology into this, it again deepens the
understanding, gives us a sense why a condition happened at that particular time
and also gives us a sense archetypically why it took the form that it took. And it
becomes an extremely useful tool, guide for people in spiritual emergency.
Because without this kind of a tool, when they confront professionals, they get a
message that they suffer from a mental disease which is kind of unpredictable.
So, they have to expect that this can come at any time back. So, if they had just
one episode and doesn't repeat, they would be seen as psychotics in remission.
It's just a possibility of having one experience of this kind. It's enough to give
them a lifetime diagnosis. Whereas, if you look at it with this kind of lens of
archetypal astrology, you will get a sense that this reflects the quality of the
transits. And you have some sense as to what might be the points in the future
where there is a danger of something like this happening again. So, it's gives you
not only deeper understanding of the current episode but also some prognostic
clues if you look in the future transits.

Rick: Thank you, Stan. This was a truly significant event in our community's history
there, our community life there at Esalen because Karen, and that name is a
pseudonym that we just are using to keep her life more confidential. Karen was a
very beloved member of the community and had been for quite a few years. I
think at that point probably it's been over eight years that she'd been part of the
Esalen community. For example, she was a beloved babysitter of my young son
when he was very young. She just was very well liked and appreciated. But there
was this quality of her personality that had a kind of melancholic slightly drifting
through life. Not quite knowing almost like who she was or where she was going.
She often came to me to talk about her birth chart, her transits, to have better
self-understanding. Even to the point of sometimes she asked about her mother
who had committed suicide and asked us to look at her chart and to get some

January 11, 2018 | p. 9

 insight perhaps on what was happening for her mother which happened so early
in her life, in Karen's life. That she of course, at any point in a person's life for
that happened where there's a suicide of a parent, that's going to be an
extraordinary psychotrauma. But when it happens to you when you're three
years old and you find your mother and you're with her alone for hours, I mean
just an enormous psychological impact. And then the whole unfolding history
after that with the stepmother who was physically abusive and very judgmental
of her and so forth.
[0:45:11]
So, we often would discuss her chart and as well as her mother's and the transit,
et cetera. And one of the reasons for the frequent discussions of this was that
she was looking to get a better handle on who she was because of this basic
confusion of selfhood, of her identity. At that point, I had studied many people's
lives and birth charts and had a decent sense for the kinds of personalities that
we would tend to see in reflection of particular birth charts and their major natal
aspects. There was always a kind of mystery and riddle really about Karen's chart
because she had such a chart that had such strong planetary aspects, the
archetypal energies. Just in terms of looking at astrological portrait that one
would have the impression that this would be a person of considerable force and
personality, of extraordinary creativity, unpredictability, and a number of other
personal qualities which I'll unpacked in a few moments. It just really wasn't
visible. It's like there is a kind of general inhibition on her character, on her
personality rather that seemed to dampen or keep under a kind of nebulous
cloud those personality characteristics that one would have expected would be
more conspicuous and vivid and projected out into her inner personal field than
they were.

So, when this sudden episode started unfolding over really a several-week period
there, in the fall of 1986, she suddenly was manifesting or expressing the exact
archetypal energies that one would have anticipated looking at her birth chart
but hadn't been seeing up until that point. And it's as if a kind of lid came off and
extremely potent, vivid, hyper-dramatic version, almost operatic version of each
of these aspects were being played out before our eyes larger-than-life quality.
There was a vividness that one can all only speak of as in a sense archetypal
itself. Because when you deep inner work, when you have LSD sessions or very
powerful visionary experiences and so forth and you start tapping into the
archetypal dimension, everything becomes much more vividly alive and potent
and kind of what we might say would be ontologically intensified. You have a
feeling that the flower you're looking at or the tree or the bird is not just an
ordinary flower or tree or bird. It's like the archetypal version of it with a capital
B for bird or capital T for tree. They just have a larger-than-life character. This
seemed to be what was coming out in her during this spiritual emergency.

January 11, 2018 | p. 10

What was great is that after having been supported in allowing this upsurge of
unconscious contents that had been in her unconscious and kind of locked in her
psyche and her body for years. Now being supported in a way giving birth to
what had been suppressed in her deep psyche, she was able to give birth to her
future self. And in that way, when she came out of this kind of larger-than-life
archetypally highly charged several-week period, she came back to a way of
being in the world where she was again a person that could interact with
everybody else in a more normal ordinary way. But now she had connection to
these gifts, these talents, these capacities of self-expression and confidence that
had been lacking earlier. So that a kind of happy medium had been found
between the larger-than-life archetypal eruption compared with the previous
state of inhibited personality and suppression of so many of her intrinsic
capacities and qualities.

I might just say that with respect to this overall phenomenon of spiritual
emergencies and how important it is to recognize that this is a potential when
somebody enters into these deep and troubling, troubling to them and troubling
to the people around them, experiences. That one doesn't leap to the
conventional psychiatric solution of medicating it out of existence, suppressing
it, putting them in an institution, keeping them on maintenance dosages for life
and having a life time diagnosis. If that had been the case, some of the greatest
mystics, for example, of human history likes Saint Teresa in the 16th century who
William James called the expert of experts on mystical experience in his
estimation as he just described her in Varieties of Religious Experience, that great
chapter on mysticism. Or if you look at Saint John of the Cross and his deep, Dark
Nights of the Soul or if you look at Meher Baba and many Indian mystics who
went on to have a major spiritual impact on their world. But at a certain crucial
point usually in their youth and as they're coming into maturity, they go through
some extremely difficult experiences that would have been diagnosed as
psychotic and would have been suppressed and medicated and institutionalized.
Saint Hildegard von Bingen is another one great Christian mystic and leader of
religious women in the Middle Ages. So, of these had experiences of extremely
vivid visions, hallucinations. They'd be paralyzed by these visions. They'd be in
physical pain or even agony at times. They might be for weeks at a time, seeming
to be in a kind of somnolent withdrawal from the world. They might go through
what would be regarded today as profound clinical depression, in the case of
John of the Cross's dark night of the soul. All these cases, these individuals went
on to bring forth really deep and authentic spiritual insight and vision and
positive impact on their communities and world.

So, what I'd like to do now is to is share my screen and show you. First, we'll look
at Karen's birth chart, and then we will look at the transits that she had for this
episode, this very powerful experience when she was 29 years old. So here we
have Karen's birth chart. At this point, everybody here in this course, which is the

January 11, 2018 | p. 11

 advanced course, will have some basic foundational knowledge that we need to
be able to examine this chart and have it be meaningful to us. The most
important thing is to recognize what these planets are in each case. Of course,
the Moon and the Sun here towards the base of the chart are the most easily
recognizable. And then I'll just go counterclockwise just to remind people if
they're not already astrologically initiated outside of these courses that Stan and
I are teaching. Many of you will recall this from the first basic course that we did
this past fall. So, after the Moon and the Sun, this symbol here is for Uranus. And
then moving up further, Mars, of course, easily recognizable. Mercury, which
looks a little like Venus but has those little wings at the top there. And this is
Pluto, and this is Venus, again very easily recognizable. You see that these four
planets are in a quadruple conjunction which when they're all in that same sign
as they are in the sign of Leo here, that's also called the stellium, but these four
planets in conjunction and then two more, the Sun and Uranus, are also in Leo.
So, she has a very strong Leo component here, though I will be putting more
focus on the particular aspects, these conjunctions in particular, and then we'll
keep going. As we move up here to Jupiter, this is right at the horizon, Jupiter
would have just sat when she was born. You can see that Karen was born almost
11:00 p.m. at night, 10:50, and that's why the Sun is very low in the sky here,
below the horizon. She was born just before the new Moon. So, the Moon is
pretty close to the Sun. The very next night, it would have been an exact new
Moon and the Moon would be exactly conjoining the Sun. That's Jupiter there. It
looks like a stylized four. And then here is Neptune like the trident Poseidon and
Neptune, the god of the ocean. And then here is Saturn at the highest part of the
chart.

So, I was mentioning in my initial description there of my many sessions with

Karen going over her chart, there had always been this kind of paradox or even
contradiction between what we could see in the chart and what we're seeing
lived out in her at least visible personality. For example, she has a Sun-Uranus
conjunction. Now the Sun has so much to do with the sense of selfhood, of
having a personal identity. It's the hero in one's soul that is bringing forth
something into the world with a kind of centrifugal energy. It radiates. It shines.
It is expressive. It carries one's essential being energetically into the world. to
have Uranus in a conjunction with it tends to, really it's like the Promethean
solar hero or heroine. It's somebody who I think of the famous Sun-Uranus
women in the sciences, somebody like Madame Curie; or in literature, the great
19th century French novelist George Sand or Gertrude Stein; or in anthropology,
Margaret Mead; in philosophy and feminism, Simone de Beauvoir.
[0:59:47]
These are all Sun-Uranus figures who, because Uranus has so much to do with
the liberating of whatever it touches, it has an emancipatory drive, like
Prometheus, who liberated humankind from the power of the old gods, gave
them fire, the fire of inspiration, of civilizational advance, taught all the arts and

January 11, 2018 | p. 12

sciences to humankind, et cetera. That Uranian/Promethean energy that's
symbolized by Uranus, when it is on the Sun, either by transit or by natal aspect,
you tend to see this where there is quite a decisive emphatic activation of the
creative self in the world. In a way, that kind of sparkles that usually other
people can see it quite vividly. Think of somebody like Bob Dylan, born with the
conjunction. Everybody could see around him, even in this very early 20s, as he
arose in New York City, he's amazing. There's a creativity. There's a willingness to
be different, to be original, to express one's particular mode of being in creativity
that is quite conspicuously visible to the rest of their environment. That just
seemed to be missing in all those years during her 20s when she was part of our
community. I knew her very well. She seemed much more adrift.

Now she does have, as you can see, see Neptune up here? Late Libra, almost in
Scorpio, and that's a tight square to the Sun in early Leo here. See that red line
there, it's a square. It's a 90-degree angle from the Sun to Neptune. And you do
see with Sun square Neptune, in any Sun-Neptune hard aspect, there is a
potential for at least a period of disorientation or kind of drifting or confusion or
not quite knowing. It's like a kind of nebulousness around that sense of selfhood.
There can also be a kind of permeability or a porous self, and that porosity can
be expressed in the interpersonal world that one is kind of chameleon-like in
one's environment or one has kind of leaky boundaries as it were in how one
relates to the world. One can be easily influenced, be very impressionable, but it
also can be that way with respect to the inner world, that one can be porous
through unconscious energies that can be shaping one's consciousness in ways
that make one, for example, might be being in tune with other dimensions of
reality or with other identities that can easily come in and kind of possess the
solar principle of selfhood.

Now we see this with somebody like Jung who was born with the Sun square
Neptune. C. G. Jung, on the one hand, who also, by the way, had a Sun-Uranus
conjunction, so he actually had just this exact combination. Now Jung is a male in
a very patriarchal culture and period. He's got professional respect. He's a
physician. He's already recognized in his career. He's well off in many ways,
financially and so forth. So, there's all sorts of ways in which a man at that point
had a lot of buttressing of his egoic structures, of his capacity to strengthen or
armor the solar self and to help protect against that vulnerable permeability.
And yet, even in his case, when he started having his very powerful spiritual
emergency in the 1913 to approximately 1917 or so period, about five years into
1918, there were times where he was just having to hold on to his chair. He
writes about it in Memories, Dreams, Reflections to remind himself. As his visions
are coming in, he's getting visions of bloodbaths of a catastrophic level coming
across the continent of Europe. This is a few months before World War I. He's
feeling as if like something this kind of catastrophe was going to flood across the
European continent. He started having very powerful dreams and visions. I think

January 11, 2018 | p. 13

in his case, he was both getting overwhelmed by it. But he's also kind of inviting
it because he knew there was a treasure there or he sensed there was. At the
same time, it was very scary for him. I think a lot of Jung's caution around not
wanting people to take psychedelic drugs, for example, when he started learning
about mescaline in the earlier 20th century and then LSD in the 1950s became
more widespread including, of course, in his own country, Switzerland, being
used in a therapeutic context just starting at that point. He had a lot of concern
about the potential for the delicate ego structure of a person to be overwhelmed
or basically the consciousness to be so flooded, overwhelmed that it could be
drowning in the unconscious material. I think he himself experience that strongly
enough that he was very cautious about others who might not have come out of
it as well as Jung managed to.

So, I'm bringing this up because if you then look at a young woman earlier or
originally like a very young girl going through much more severe psychotrauma
with the suicide of her mother, the physical abuse in childhood, there is a much
more fragile ego and the consciousness hasn't had a chance to form a more
robust sense of identity and selfhood. So, we saw this in the first set of courses
that Stan and I did for Shift where in our first case history where we looked at
the case of Flora who had that very powerful possession state and she had a
Sun-Neptune conjunction natally, which was being very activated by transit at
the time for her sessions with Stan. And again, you have that same combination
of two girls growing up in a patriarchal environment, going through a lot of
abuse, trauma, and coming out with a pretty fragile psychic equilibrium. So,
there there's a greater susceptibility with this Sun-Neptune at the same time
that there is this greater access to the transpersonal dimensions, the spiritual
dimensions, to other identities, other realities, visions, dreams. Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, that's what Jung is all about, the name of his autobiography.
You can see the problematic sides of that Sun-Neptune coming through prior to
this spiritual emergency in that quality of kind of identity confusion and lack of
knowing how to direct your life. Because the Sun is that part of us that has a
feeling of this is where I'm going. This is who I am. This is my identity. This is my
direction in life. It's that heroic trajectory that the Sun takes each day from dawn
and then across the sky and to the noon and then sunset and then into the
underworld night sea journey which was very much what this episode was
about.

Let me say a couple other things about her natal chart before we look at her
powerful transits. This quadruple conjunction, this too was something that, as
someone who had done quite a bit of astrological research at this point back in
the 1970s when she first became part of the Esalen community, I would have
expected much more vivid expressiveness of these. For example, the Venus-
Pluto conjunction can be someone who loved very sensuously. The erotic
energies tend to be quite potent. Freud, for example, was born with that Venus-

January 11, 2018 | p. 14

 Pluto conjunction, and his whole psychology is based on the pleasure principle,
on the potency of Eros in shaping psychic experience. And then the Mercury-
Pluto conjunction, the intensity of mind and verbal communication that can be
sometimes tends towards using obscenities or using plutonic language from the
underworld, the very instinctual language like Robin Williams who's born with
the Mercury-Pluto conjunction. And then with Mars there, I mean a Mars
conjunct Mercury, that brings the warrior aggressive energy in with the Mercury,
the mind and communication and the messenger of the gods. You put those two
together, this is a person who tends to be quite capable of defending their ideas,
to be quite forceful in speech, incisive. And when you put Pluto in a triple
conjunction, that makes it even more intense. It can even be a kind of volcanic
driving energy that's both sexual and aggressive and verbal and diagnostic as it
were that Mercury can be, that gives names to things, et cetera. All this was so
strong in her chart and yet not visible prior to this, and then suddenly became
floridly visible at the time of her spiritual emergency.

And then, finally, I'm just going to know two other things. One, see the Moon
here has no major aspects. In conventional astrology, in the astrological
tradition, when you don't have any major aspects to a planet that can indicate a
certain challenge in integrating that archetypal principle into the rest of the birth
chart, into the rest of the personality, it's interesting because the Moon and its
very strong relationship to the mother, to the early childhood, to the maternal
field, the mother-child relationship, that was deeply wounded in Karen's case.
And she so lacked experience of being properly mothered that in fact when she
had her own child, she didn't feel she really knew how to be a mother. Like how
do you feed, take care of, change the diapers, things like that. She had to start
from ground zero. I remember it very well because I'm the eldest of eight
children, for example, so I knew very well how to do all those things with all my
younger brothers and sisters. So, when my own firstborn came, it's almost like
he was my youngest brother, just a little bit younger than my actual youngest
brother. When Karen was babysitting, it was like a kind of just basically initiating
her into how you care for a child, and that was still a challenge prior to the her
with her own child, prior to this episode. And then afterwards, it's like she had
been able to integrate this. She became a very devoted mother now to both of
her children who are pretty grown up at this point.
[1:15:30]
And then the last thing I'm going to point out is that, on the one hand, Saturn is
trine, very harmonious aspect to the Sun and Uranus. This can bring in a certain
long-term stabilization and maturation to the personality and how one expresses
one's creative individuality that this represents. But her Saturn is also in a square
to, that's what this red line, to Venus and Pluto. I particularly want to focus on
that Saturn square Pluto because that is eight degrees away from exact, and it
definitely came through in her life experience of having to face death very early,
the trauma of the loss of the mother. But as we will see in the episode, the kinds

January 11, 2018 | p. 15

of experiences that Stan described Karen having, it was quite striking how she
had experiences of being a slave, being whipped, being oppressed in quite
ruthlessly cruel ways. Those are some of the really difficult expressions of the
Saturn square Pluto aspect which you definitely see played out in history during
Saturn-Pluto periods as I set forth in Cosmos and Psyche where so many of the
periods of history that involve some kind of basically historical contractions
where one faces some of the darkest aspects of human existence have that
Saturn-Pluto quality. I think of Joseph Conrad who wrote, The Heart of Darkness
about human cruelty in Africa that was right during a Saturn square Pluto period
that he wrote that. Anyway, I've described that in greater detail in that book. So
again, she had signs of this in her childhood. But when it came forth in the
spiritual emergency, it just got vividly played out in past life experiences and in
other archetypal phenomena.

So, let us now move from this to her quite striking transits, and the way we do
that is we go here to a bi-wheel. We do Karen's chart in the center. So here you
see again her chart is the inner wheel, the birth chart. There is that Sun-Uranus
conjunction, et cetera. All right, that's all on the inside. Now on the outside are
the planets at the time in October of 1986 when she was at the height of her
spiritual emergency. Now because this lasted for several weeks, I'm wanting to
just focus on the outer planets which moved slowly and were basically what we
call in orb that is they were within a close enough to exact alignment with her
natal chart for that entire period. The other plants and then the Sun and the
Moon, they move much faster, so the Sun day by day moves one degree and
Mercury, Venus, Mars, and, of course, the Moon, they move much faster. But I'm
just focusing here on the outer planets.

Now the first one I want to point out to you is that Saturn return. You couldn't
get much more. This happens to everybody between age 28 and 30 and then
again in one's late 50s. It takes approximately 29 and a half years for Saturn to go
around the chart once and come back to where it was and then at the birth. That
period of 28 to 30 is typically a period where one is completing the whole first
30-year cycle of one's life and beginning the next. So, it is a period of endings
and beginnings, often seeming to have a kind of karmic quality, to use a more
esoteric term/spiritual term, and Saturn is very much a planet that archetypally
relates to karma in its various ways, in its various forms. There does seem to be a
sense in one's late 20s, 28 up to age 30, of a number of events, inner and outer,
tend to happen that move one towards a kind of rapid maturational threshold,
often a maturational crisis of some kind, frequently confronting death,
confronting mortality, confronting one's limits, the ending of one's childhood,
one's youth, and the moving into maturity. Often, it establishes a kind of
groundwork, a foundation for the personality that endures really for the rest of
one's life and very frequently they're significant career shifts, relationship shifts
and so forth.

January 11, 2018 | p. 16

Now in itself, the Saturn return doesn't tend to coincide with spiritual
emergencies particularly. That is much more likely to take place, first of all, if
there is some predisposition towards psychologically and biographically towards
having such a dramatic eruption of the unconscious. But in terms of transit
timing, the outer planets tend to be quite in evidence. What I want you to see
here is that by the way, the Saturn return that is the same transit that was going
on for Flora. She was 28 at the time of that powerful crisis working with Stan
where she came out of it really with a whole new life. Think of the Saturn return
as in itself a kind of birth contraction and death contraction. It's the ending that
brings about a beginning. It definitely has a contracting energy. It's like you feel
the pressure, but it's like the divine sculpture that could be bringing forth
something through its pressure of real value. But look at the Sun-Uranus
conjunction, which I pointed out a few minutes ago, didn't seem to be really in
evidence prior to her spiritual emergency. But then during this period, really the
whole period of her Saturn return in her late 20 but very tight here at the time of
the spiritual emergency. Pluto is exactly squaring this Uranus and it's within eight
minutes of the square in terms of celestial longitude on the ecliptic square to
Uranus. Pluto square Uranus and to the Sun. It lights up this whole field of the
Sun-Uranus conjunction.

Think of Pluto-Uranus as, for example, like the 1960s had a Uranus-Pluto
conjunction. Everybody had it from roughly 1960 well into the early '70s there
was a Uranus-Pluto conjunction. It's the plutonic, volcanic, Dionysian powerful
energies that just pressure through and are suddenly liberated by the break into
social reality, into personality when it comes into aspect with Uranus, which is
sudden, unpredictable, brings sudden changes, can be very creative but also very
disruptive. It's like the '60s energy just erupted inside of her and carrying with it
her Sun. First, she was just shining so much. I mean just her personal energy, the
activity, the creativity was just bursting forth like an explosion. It's like suddenly
a wallflower had turned into Madonna, who was very popular at that time, and
with whom Karen mentioned more than once as identifying with Madonna, with
that kind of taboo-breaking, sexualized, highly creative, performative personality
that Madonna had. She was kind of carrying that, almost feeling like she was her
at times. That's that Neptune square Sun where you can easily identify with
other personalities, can take on their qualities.

We are all going through Pluto square Uranus in the sky right now, this period,
really a kind of eruption of the underworld, of the Dionysian, as well as an
empowerment of the forces of change and rebellion and disruption and the
liberation of those who have been suppressed or oppressed or are kept from
having their voice and so forth. This is a once-in-a-lifetime transit, Pluto squaring
her Sun-Uranus conjunction, and it's just like from that point, first of all, came
through in flying colors during this episode and then after the perhaps six, seven

January 11, 2018 | p. 17

 weeks or so, she was able to integrate all that got liberated and bring it into
equilibrium in her personality. Let me also mention something important that
Stan pointed out. In the course of the journey, there's often a feeling, especially
towards the end, there can be a movement, a sense of a sacred marriage
emerging. And also, as Stan said, there's the focus on mandalas as a symbol of
the Self that Jung spoke about, a self that is grounded in the spiritual all. It's both
highly individuated, but it's also archetypally connected to the universal, to the
collective psyche and the archetypal psyche where all the depths of meaning and
purpose lie. One of the symbols that often comes up in such visions and spiritual
transformations is that of the pearl. I remember Karen speaking about as she
was in the later stages, she would hold her womb and say, "There's a pearl in
here." And she would hold it within and say, "It was just so precious." That was a
sign of her Sun was being born. Her solar self was emerging after this
tremendous struggle and after years of it really being under lock and key through
her biographical circumstances.

Now, in addition, all these qualities that we were talking about before, the Mars,
Mercury, Pluto, Venus, this dramatic quadruple conjunction, I mean you don't
see quadruple conjunctions like that very often and which didn't seem to be
particularly evident in her personality earlier now became so vivid. I mean here
she was highly sexualized. First of all, the overall sense of heat flooding through
her body, that's the plutonic fire. So, Pluto was squaring her Sun-Uranus so the
fiery plutonic energy is just driving through. So, it's got a purgatorial cathartic
force, and it's putting her through experiences of physical heat. She couldn't
keep clothes on her body because it was just intolerable, which wasn't a big deal
at Esalen because people didn't wear clothes there with the baths and pool and
so forth. Nudity was just part of the culture. But in her case, this wasn't done at
the baths or the pool. It's just being in the safe container of the space that Esalen
had set aside for her to go through these experiences. So that's where she just
tended not to keep her clothes on because of this overwhelming heat flooding
through her. That is not unusual with people who go through spiritual
emergencies.
[1:30:27]
I think it also has something to do with recreating the perinatal, the fetal
experience because there's a sense that clothes aren't appropriate. The
unconscious wants to, as much as possible, replicate how it was in its original
form. But the force of her personality, even sometimes being physically, I mean
she was such a gentle person, and now suddenly she could be very forceful
through her words. Sometimes it was with sexual aggressiveness like saying
things like, "I want to fuck you," just like looking at the person that was taking
care of her or being very brutally diagnostic of the foibles or the psychological
weaknesses or pathology symptoms that a given person who might be sitting for
her would have. She, with uncanny directness and accuracy, would kind of nail
this tendency which the other person then had to deal with, almost like they

January 11, 2018 | p. 18

were working with Fritz Perls or somebody aggressively telling them this is where
you're really just lacking in self-insight and here is your problem and then deal
with it. There is that quality.

Now Uranus brings in all this creativity that suddenly got unleashed as well, and
you combine that with the fact that she's born with Venus and Mercury in
conjunction. You often see that where a person communicates that's Mercury
through a song, for example, or through the arts. She could make up songs in the
spur of the moment, very creatively just walk down the spiral staircase where
she was staying and speak from the loft and just sing to the person a song that
she would come up with words, often plays on words that would be uncannily
appropriate for that person and this situation. But then the expletives, that
Mercury-Pluto conjunction that I spoke about, her tendency to use obscenities
but also to be very penetrating with her thinking and perception and diagnoses,
suddenly all this became available to her personality. And then after she had
started to land and ground herself through the support of the community that
helped her through this, she was able to really integrate all these characteristics
in a very life-enhancing way. Now transiting Uranus, you can see right here is
that 19 and a half Sagittarius. So, it's coming into the trine to the Mars-Mercury
conjunction. Actually, as you move week by week after this point, Uranus trines
one by one each of these planets. It's liberating in a very fruitful way all of these
energies into our life, which having already undergone the dramatic earthquake
of the Pluto squaring Uranus-Sun, she was now able to bring these into an
integrated equilibrium of psychic capacities.

This is one of the things I kind of want to complete the analysis with is every part
of the chart is linked to every other part and particularly the Sun, which is, of
course, the Sun or the solar system and it's center of the psyche system in so
many ways. So, when one is able to find that pearl, align oneself with the Higher
Self as well as the true self and overcome the false self that comes as a result of
trauma, of fear, of social constraint and so forth, the entire personality, all the
planets come along with it. Think of Dorothy with bringing along with her the
Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, she now had available to her
her courage, Mars. She had available to her her mind, her brain that the
Scarecrow was lacking. And Venus, she was able to bring her heart into her
psychic whole, her capacity. So, in some sense, she was able to integrate the
whole chart through this dramatic spiritual emergency.

I'll just end with this interesting point about Jung and Karen, they both having
the Sun square Neptune. Jung had this powerful confrontation with the
archetypal psyche which totally disoriented him, put him through his paces,
visions, dreams, sense of he might be going crazy. He'd have to remind himself,
"I'm Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. I've got five children. I'm going to see my patients
tomorrow morning. I live at this address." He's holding on to his solar identity

January 11, 2018 | p. 19

 amidst the flooding in of the Neptunian archetypal unconscious. But as a result
of that tremendous confrontation, he was able to integrate these great images
and archetypal energies into his being in a way that helped him basically discover
the Self, that is a self that is simultaneously the individuality that's in a close
relationship to the ego but is also in connection with a Higher Self, the Atman-
Brahman union, to use Indian terms or Hindu terms. So, his whole notion of a
Self that is simultaneously something that is at the core of our own ultimate
personality as well as is a reflection of a Higher Self that has a more divine
quality, that's carried in the very term. And the capitalized S of Self, that's what,
in many ways, I think Karen's spiritual emergency was able to bring about,
because it was so well supported.

I hope that you can take from this presentation a glimpse into, on the one hand,
the extraordinary precision with which archetypal astrology can provide insight
into both the timing and the nature of powerful pyschospiritual experiences and
transformative episodes in one's life, but also to integrate the point that Stan
was bringing up in the first half of this module. The tremendous importance of
basically being in more of a midwife position, a supportive relationship to such a
process of a spiritual emergency which can be seen more as a natural birthing
process rather than a pathology that needs to be suppressed at any cost. So, on
behalf of Stan and myself, great to share this with you. In these upcoming
modules, we will provide more and more information and also a larger set of
areas that you can apply this kind of understanding to. So, we'll see you next
week.

© 2018 The Shift Network. All rights reserved.

January 11, 2018 | p. 20