From Burning in Hell to Rumi's Field

Am I going to burn in hell for eternity? Will my family still love me? Who am I? These questions detonated in my early twenties, when I read myself out of fundamentalism. Too many contradictions, too much hypocrisy. The Grofs call this a spiritual emergency: a crisis in which one's whole meaning system, its purpose, values, and beliefs, undergoes drastic change while psychological, social, and occupational functioning come undone (Fontelieu, 2026). Mine arrived through psychedelics, taken with a preacher's son, as I felt myself spinning into an abyss, the religious wardrobe I had been conditioned to wear suddenly unwearable. So much fear. The irony? I (ego) died and was resurrected, no longer mistaking my who for their what.

Whitmont (1969) insists that unless affect is felt fully in the body, it is not fully conscious. The descent was not an idea. It was somatic terror metabolized into freedom, or a transcendental liberation. Read through Collins, Hughes, and Samuels (2012), the rupture becomes more than private. They argue that spiritual emergencies are "solution bearers," an enantiodromia by which consciousness moves to redress modern humanity's one-sided materialism (p. 163). Their six propositions for deep transition, deep learning, deep citizenship, deep democracy, deep culture, deep ecology, and deep occupation, reframe the cure as a re-sacralizing of public life.

The one-sidedness my experience addresses is the collective's disenchanted literalism: the rationalist, materialist certainty that welds identity to dogma, whether religious or secular, and exiles mystery. It is the consciousness that pathologizes the numinous and mistakes the soul's upheaval for a mere symptom. My small resurrection rehearses the larger one Collins and his colleagues describe. Not severed, but "emergent transformation. Beyond right and wrong, where Rumi's field still waits for us all.

References

Samuels, A. (2012). Passions, persons, psychotherapy, politics: The selected works of Andrew Samuels. Routledge.

Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The symbolic quest: Basic concepts of analytical psychology. Putnam.