Psychospiritual Growth: Peak experiences, God, and transformation

Psychospiritual growth is supported by creative expressive practices. Writing is one of them.

One day in the fall of 2018, I sat at a library in 29 Palms, California and re-read a hardcopy essay that I had been working on for a while. What I was trying to say wasn’t coming through. I had to open the conversation up—ask what the words wanted from me.

The essay was about the journey inside to inner space—extolling the virtues of personal evolution. It’s part of the process of understanding “higher purpose.” But my essay was falling flat. Phrases like “finding myself,” “knowing myself,” “higher purpose” felt deflated. They lacked force. A reader could get a sense of what I was referring to, but couldn’t feel the electricity in my experiences, which is what gave me the enthusiasm to write about them. I couldn’t activate the experiences for the reader—which was what I was trying to do. I wanted the essay to convey a feeling of motion, transformation, which translates to excitement–this is what my journey inside had given me. I wanted to convince the reader to embark on theirs.

• This is the transformation from human reality to the spiritual one.

I started play with the medium, the language, by going in and out–shifting my awareness of shape of the letters on the page, focusing and unfocusing my vision, moving from words to shapes words strung together made, and then back.

This became dharana—meditation—on the words. I was singularly focused on them. My field of vision started to blur. My peripheral vision blurred, too, and the library bookshelves turned into cases full of neon beams of light, and the books on them became crystals. The idea of the interconnectedness of all of the ideas, writers, and me to them became apparent. It registered in my mind as a felt sense registers in the body. And then I had a fleeting thought I was a medium, a part of this vast network who, through the act of writing, pulled ether into material and with that, create our world because information is our world. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the core of my being, then, and the vision vanished. The meditation was broken.

I left the library, touched by the experience, activated to another level, and fulfilled. Part of my higher purpose was being in dialogue, literally, creating words. I trusted that the words to share this experience would come to me. They did when I applied astrological insight.

I checked my natal chart for transits, which are contacts of placements (and noted through the shapes of the angles that the placements make). The universe is in constant motion. The celestial bodies are dynamic. The sun (creativity) was in Scorpio (transformation), making a contact to my Uranus in Scorpio. Uranus is the planet that represents higher consciousness and breakthroughs. The correlation doesn’t mean causation—the sun contacting Uranus didn’t “make” me have that momentary lapse in reality. But my awareness of the motion, the contact was power; the knowledge allowed me to engage with the cosmos in a meaningful way by starting a reflection (in my mind) on breakthrough , while noticing how my human reality broke down around me.

In the years since this experience, I have come to call it a peak experience. It’s a flight, a trip out of the ego, the everyday and into the nonlinear spaces beyond shared human reality. It’s what people using psychedelics seek. But peak experiences that do not integrate into human reality (of the individual) lack the meaning. They’re fun trips during which you knock on Self’s door, that all-pervasive consciousness, but then play chicken and run away. 

I realize that the point at which my excitement (in writing the essay all those years ago) dissolved was the point at which I realized most people live in fear of the numinous (of Self, of God, of whatever the invisible force beyond us is). My excitement was not to be reciprocated. It made this peak experience feel like something I needed to hide, as if it were only mental and I was mad as in crazy. No, the astrology of that time and space didn’t make me have a peak experience. Uranus and the Sun affected the energetics of my mind and how I perceived reality. But the portal there that opened was mine to step through. I find this point to be the one that is misunderstood about my position the most. How could I be “into astrology” and still “into God/Self” (which I collectively refer to as the “numinous”)?

• The celestial ecosystem (the effects of the planets reaching my direct experience) is just that, an ecosystem. I am within it. I have a relationship with the stars and planets just like I have a relationship with Earth, the oceans, the trees. When I was ready to witness beyond the confines of human reality, I did.
• God is there, too. It is Self, the all pervasive consciousness
• Self is numinous, mysterious, full of grace and wonder because I from my human perspective cannot see what it sees. I see for it, during peak experiences, when this awe-inspiring force reveals itself to me and I to it, my true nature. 

I have no fear of the numinous. I do, however, have the very human fear of being misunderstood. The fear has been so strong at times that I have withheld my voice and writing. Exploring the heights of the higher unconcious, the realm of the psyche that holds our soul evolutionary potential, is humbling. And we do not live in a world that values humility. Rather, the subtle nature of these powerful peak experiences has us turn them into spectacles of trippy vision where, if not meaning, we can at least get a good story out of it. 

I believe this reason is why my essay initially fell flat, and I slid into the quiet space of not recounting the story. 

But the experience in the library should not be silenced.  

As a I writer, I am a node on the network of words. Letters, words are power. My higher purpose—that which I seek so that I can offer to others—is to be a conduit for expansive conversations, ones in which words become a key to unlocking pathways toward transformation.I hope my excitement comes through here. I hope the power in my words reaches you. The years since this experience have given me integration, along with studies in psychosynthesis, the spiritual psychology developed by an Italian physician who was a contemporary of Jung and [briefly] a student of Freud. There is no human clarity in peak experience. There is numinous clarity, that an underlying energetic network connects us all and that network is sentient, ready to open the door to those who knock while recognizing that their humanity is exactly that which shuts the door again. We are all Self, God, spirit. This terrifies us because of the meaning behind the power of those words.

This transformative experience reminded me that not only am I spirit in nature, but that if I fear the numinous, I fear myself.

May all beings be happy and free // Om lokah samastah sukinoh bhavantu

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.