Synchronicity and Spiritual Crises

Chris Mackey is a clinical psychologist in Australia and author of The Positive Psychology of Synchronicity: Enhance your mental health with the power of coincidence. He was also one of our guests on The Mystical Underground.

One of his key roles in ten years as a senior clinical psychologist in psychiatric hospitals was to help differentiate psychosis from other mental health conditions, including complex trauma reactions. He recently wrote a piece on synchronicity and spiritual crises, which he shared with us. We’re including part of here. You can read the entire article at the link at the end – or you can listen to his podcast on this topic!

From Chris:

Many people feel overwhelmed if they start to experience a huge increase of weird coincidences. This may be especially unsettling if people haven’t experienced such frequent or striking coincidences before. It can be hard to make to make any sense of them.

In such situations people may fear that they are going mad. Otherwise, they might believe that their experiences are genuine and meaningful, but family members or friends might think they are becoming mentally ill. For example, If the person is especially excited or energized by such experiences, it can seem to others that they are suffering from a bipolar disorder.

This raises the question of how you can tell the difference between non-ordinary states of consciousness, which overlap with recognized spiritual or mystical phenomena, and psychosis. This is a complex question as it can be difficult even for mental health professionals to tell the difference. Some people might even be experiencing a combination of both. It can be even more complicated when people have also experienced significant trauma reactions including dissociative symptoms, which may also have overlapping features with psychosis, including hearing voices.

However, it’s at least worth making the attempt to differentiate transpersonal experience from psychosis. Those who are experiencing such phenomena and are pushed toward psychiatric hospitalization tend to respond poorly, especially if they are mainly treated according to a rigid medical model focussing on medication. They might not only feel unnecessarily invalidated, but their mental health may deteriorate.

Here I am using the terms spiritual, transpersonal and mystical as overlapping descriptions of experience that has a numinous, or sacred, quality. William James, an influential American pioneer of psychology, defined mystical experience as being extraordinary experience with four key features. It is ineffable: that is, it’s impossible to describe the experience adequately in words. It is noetic, in that it conveys seemingly significant insight beyond what can be gained by the intellect. It is transient, being unsustainable for a long period. And it shows passivity: a sense of being influenced by something beyond our own will.

Striking and meaningful coincidences, also known as synchronicity, are one example of an experience that is recognized by many people and cultures as a potentially genuine spiritual or mystical phenomenon. Other transpersonal or mystical experiences may include hearing the voice of a deceased relative, déjà vu or near-death experiences. They can include suddenly developing psychic or other paranormal abilities such as clairvoyant visions of past or future events or telepathy. These experiences may arise in such a way that is overwhelming for an individual and they may fear that they are losing their mind. This is more likely if people have not discussed such experiences with others and don’t have any mental framework for thinking about them.

Click below to read the rest of the article. Or listen to the podcast!

Synchronistic experiences and spiritual crises

Here’s the podcast:

Separating the Psycho-spiritual from Psychosis