Читать книгу A Sourcebook for Helping People With Spiritual Problems - Emma Inc. Bragdon - Страница 10

The reactions of Chamberlin's adolescents illustrates the importance of an appropriate conceptual framework and supportive social context for persons in spiritual emergence.

Persons in spiritual emergency are deeply influenced by their community of friends, family and health care workers. The mini-culture in Chamberlin's ward supported spiritual emergence in contrast to Everest's social community. Unlike most Western cultures, some cultures, like that in Tibet, hold a view of the world that allows spiritual experience to be integrated into normal life.

(The Tibetan culture is built on the knowing that) ... all dharmas are dreamlike, all phenomena are dreamlike. It's seen from the very beginning from that perspective ...Since it's seen from that point of view, when the world actually begins to fall apart in one's experience, it doesn't become that much of a clash, of a contradiction ...1 think what has been happening in the West is the concretization of the world as really something solid, a permanent thing. This has been something that has been built on since the development of sciences and Cartesianism, so that the (dream-like quality of existence) has been "kind of kept under control so to speak." Sometimes people have these kind of (spiritual emergencies) because the real nature of existence has been so repressed, and then suddenly these energies themselves spontaneously become a little bit overwhelming.

(Sogyal, 1985)

There is no comparable perspective in Europe or North America that supports spiritual awakening as part of natural human development. Thus, most of us Westerners are afraid of spiritual phenomena. They are strange to us. We need some conceptual context to help us make sense of these phenomena so that we can be more at peace with our own and more supportive of others' spiritual awakening.