Preface

Poppy Buchanan-Barker and Phil Barker

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

From Sunflower Sutra, by Allen Ginsberg

Given our long association with the fields of ‘mental health’ and ‘spirituality’, we believe that this book will enlighten, disturb and frustrate, although perhaps not in that order. It may well be necessary for the reader to be sufficiently frustrated to become disturbed so that, ultimately, a whiff of the heady aroma of enlightenment might be possible.

If our experience is anything to go by, the journey towards understanding, if not actual enlightenment, often seems like 99% perspiration, although inspiration also is necessary. Indeed, the more difficult the journey becomes the more we puff and blow, metaphorically – hence the more we need to inspire. But the sheer hard work of the journey is what we feel. Inspiration, we take for granted. Like many other important aspects of being human, the spiritual life is built on a paradox. We struggle to do something – achieve understanding or enlightenment – that we should just allow to come to us. However, if we do not make the effort – if we do not commit ourselves; if we do not let ourselves go – the gift we seek will not come. 

This paradoxical world of the Spirit seems like the right place to open this book. Spirituality is pretty much like breathing - betraying its Latin origins Spiritus means, literally, the breath (of life).  Throughout the course of our lives, the breath washes in, through, and out of our bodies, like twenty thousand daily waves. With each inhalation we sound an echo of our first breath, which whispered our entry into the world. With each exhalation, we rehearse the final breath, when we shall finally release our fragile grip on life and, at least, the physical living of it. The breath of life enters us, almost unbidden and certainly takes its leave of us without permission. However hard we try to control our breathing – through the rigours of yoga or one of the many forms of meditation – invariably we learn that we might be better off simply watching. If we have learned anything of any note about our own spiritual lives, this is it.

 Listen, watch and learn. Everything else is mere wallpaper.

Spirituality has always been with us, if not in the practice of everyday life, then at least within the various religious traditions and their philosophical backgrounds. However, spirituality as a discrete idea if not a movement caught fire in the final decade of the 20^th Century. To a great extent this reflected the widespread anticipation of spiritual fireworks at the imaginary Millennium. The children who born of the Age of Aquarius hoped that the striking of a clock would wake the gods from their slumbers to shower us with spiritual gifts. With the dawning of a new century, the freaky, fringe ideas that had become the bedrock of the New Age movement slipped effortlessly into the mainstream. Yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, angel consultations, crystal healing, and anything that could be passed off as esoteric, or at least ‘Eastern’, came as close to being fashionable as it is ever likely to get. Scots, like us, raised on a diet of mince and potatoes and Calvinistic self-reliance, now can but aromatherapy oils along with our sushi at Tesco’s, the supermarket of body and soul in the New Age of Enlightenment.  For those who considered themselves on a genuine spiritual quest - as opposed to simply keeping pace with celebrity wackiness - this is very bad news. However, if nothing else, this spiritual vogue shows how the rampant materialism of the West, had slowly been found wanting.

Such spiritual disenchantment had been a long time coming, and had its most obvious genesis in the anti-materialism of the Beat generation, fifty years earlier. In his infamous poem, Howl, Allen Ginsberg railed against the materialism of post-war America, which was symbolised in the psychotic breakdown of his friend, Carl Solomon. The frustrated, enlightenment seeking Everyman of Ginsberg’s poem appeared driven in every conceivable enlightenment-seeking direction, all at once:

 “who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy”

Although the Beats’ popularisation of consciousness-raising, especially when enabled by drugs, was very much a fringe event in the conservative 50s, the practice gained critical reinforcements with the arrival of the hippie generation a decade later. By the beginning of the 21^st Century, illicit drug taking had almost become a convention, especially among the young, but had also (sadly) become a defence against post-modern ennui or apocalyptic uncertainty, rather than the key to unlock Huxley’s Doors of Perception, or the pathway of the heart envisioned by Ginsberg and his beat brethren.

Two hundred years ago, William Blake wrote: 

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite

In a sense, Blake provided a visual and literary language for the kind of everyday mysticism which now litters the Internet, and which has been distorted greatly by the Mirror of Interpretation. Yes, the language of spirituality has entered our vernacular, but are we any closer to embracing what the words might represent?

History may well conclude that the past fifty years’ of ‘seeking after spiritual enlightenment’, ushered in a ‘New Age of Enlightenment’, which made the discussion of spirituality more acceptable. This allowed people to begin to explore the deeper significance of their often, all too mundane lives, who previously would have been excluded from the spiritual quest. In that sense, we should be thankful. However, this ‘New Age’ also trailed in all sorts of mud from the field of dreams of spiritual inquiry. All manner of frivolous excesses have been dragged in its wake, contributing to the dumbing down of the spiritual quest, which often has been translated into a ‘McDonaldised’ commodity fit for post-modern capitalism.

When we first sat down to talk about writing this book, our late friend and colleague David Brandon began to his own ‘Howl’ about the excesses, inaccuracies and vacuousness of much New Age spirituality. In particular, David railed against the ‘mantra-chanting, incense-burning, crystal swinging conventionality’ of much so-called contemporary spirituality. If we remember his humorous, yet passionate, tirade correctly, it was the mindless conventionality that bugged him most. He was protesting at the translation of spirituality into just another piece of commercial property: spirituality born of economics – a set of tapes, a weekend retreat at a country house, our very own, ready-to-use ‘course in miracles’. Any of these might bring us fulfilment, rendering us happier, turning us into ‘beautiful souls,’ bestowing the balm of calm on our troubled lives. All promising, at least by allusion, the manna of enlightenment – at least for the small proportion of buyers who might want to go that far.

How many of those who buy into the commercialised spirituality, that provoked David’s ire, is difficult to determine. The proportion is probably substantial, since much New Age spirituality appears to be merely a lever for personal growth and is, therefore, an extension of the Humanistic Therapies, the ‘Third Force’ psychology that also began around the time of Ginsberg’s Howl. The provocative, anti-establishment, psychological counter-culture, of ‘personal growth’ psychology, however has been largely assimilated into the pluralistic mainstream; hence the groaning ‘self-help’ shelves in the high street bookshops – ‘happiness in 24 hours’ and ‘the weekend guide to enlightenment’.

Even once arcane practices, like the Jewish kabbalah, which Ginsberg jokingly called ‘bop kabbalah’, have become fashion accessories for the rich and famous. Kabbalah-Lite, as it has become known, is the latest dream of a quick fix for the problems of living and dying. This mystical Jewish tradition of prayer and contemplation is now becoming the latest piece of hocus pocus for New Age dabblers with dollars to burn. As well as promising peace of mind, Kabbalah-Lite promoters offer lectures on ‘What Women Want (for men only)’, ‘Making Love Last’, ‘Overcoming our Hidden Addictions’, and ‘How to Read People in Five Minutes or Less’. Obviously the ancient mystics had a busier time than we might have appreciated. But, as Rebecca Fowler (2003) pointed out, this pseudo-mystical practice has an even more materialistic basis: promoters of Kabbalah-Lite promise to arrest the ageing process, and have introduced a whole range of  Kabbalah products – from mineral water, with ‘wisdom in every drop’ to skincare creams to ‘rejuvenate’ the baggy-eyed. Kabbalah-Lite may not be making an appearance in our supermarkets for some time yet but, with endorsements from the likes of Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor, it would appear only to be a matter of time.

The trivia of much New Age spiritual questing is, in our view, little more than the commercialisation of an ageless tradition. Certainly, the social critiques and creative commentaries of the Beat and Hippie generations are important, but they merely echoed humankind’s boundary-breaking, mystical soul searching that is, essentially, timeless. As we have travelled the world, we have been impressed by the uniformity of traditional spiritual metaphors, and the messages that appear inherent in their often-oblique references.

For us, spirituality has always involved our deepest feelings about life; which link us with our past; threading through us, connecting us with the living of life itself; emphasising home – a sense of place in the world; anchoring us to the land – not property, which is ephemeral- the soil that supported our ancestors now supports us.

It did not surprise us, therefore, to find echoes of our own Celtic spirituality, in the spirituality of the indigenous people of Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), or North America; New World locations with very ancient spiritual roots; places and peoples that embrace timeless connections with the Spirit world of the past, through connection with the ground of being in the present– the land. Indeed, the land provides us with another useful metaphor. The ground - which serves as the canvas upon which we trace the metaphorical journey of the heart; which serves as the shadow-catcher for each living movement; which serves as the drum for the dancing rhythm of our footfalls – is the great servant, but also is the great teacher: yet another paradox. Our value and love of the land is bred from respect, not from an appreciation of Real Estate. The value of the land lies in its inherent worthlessness, which may also signal something of the paradox of the spiritual quest. We go seeking that which we already own; we pursue the gift that is already ours; we cherish the priceless truths that, essentially, are worthless.

T S Eliot, witnessed the ravages of mental distress, through the experience of his first wife, Vivienne, and then spent many years in more direct confrontation with his own daemons beneath the cloud of his depression. In Little Gidding he evoked the futile necessity of human searching:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning

In our original culture, Eliot’s turn for home echoes the symbolic searching embedded in Celtic knotwork, where each line threads its way outwards, as if seeking the ultimate Light, only to thread its way back to where it started. In Celtic spirituality this starting and endpoint is the hearth, where the spiritual traveller will not only find warmth and comfort, but will also experience, again, the Light that has always been shining (unrecognised) from within. If spirituality teaches us anything it is, as Buddha urged:

            Hold to the truth within yourselves

            As to the only lamp

If the appreciation of the elliptical search for the Light, through spirituality, is timeless, then its association with the field of mental health is much more recent. We have possessed a language for discussing people in mental distress, for only a few hundred years. Before the Enlightenment everyone who defied our immediate understanding was lumped together into a swirling, tumbling lunatic mass, and was – at least to the god-fearing – evidence of daemonic possession. In the 21^st century, we have abandoned all such primitive explanations. Now, we believe that we are more enlightened, as we play with the language of mental illness, mental disorder and (for the politically correct) mental health problems. However, this received wisdom – largely medical in origin and focus – still invokes an abstract force, which apparently takes over, and takes charge of, the person in mental distress. People may no longer be possessed by daemons and other malign forces. Instead, they are possessed by schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder – which are as invisible and malign, as the daemons that once possessed our fearful imaginings. It goes without saying that both are highly resistant to empirical testing. People can and do experience great distress. We appear only to have changed the names and the attributions of the ‘distressors’.  The science fiction film “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, from our 50s childhood, was subsequently read by film students as an allegory for the ‘capture’ of American minds by Communism. It could just as easily be read today as a metaphor for madness. We still do not know who or what is doing the capturing but it certainly continues to terrify us.

Arguably, if any one thing has triggered our spiritual renaissance, it is the dehumanising force of materialism, which reminds us to what extent we have lost touch with our deeper human values and needs, if not actually our sense of ‘soul’. The scientific project first imagined by Freud aimed to kill of the ancient notion of the soul, replacing this with a more modern notion of the mind. Now, the rampant reductionism of contemporary neuroscience, threatens to kill of the idea of the mind, establishing the brain not only as the medium of our experience, but also as the experience itself. I compute therefore I am.

Culturally, at least in the West, we have greatly over-valued physical appearances, possessions, hedonistic pleasure seeking and creature comforts, as if the acquisition and maintenance of these material ‘treasures’ was the point of life. Modern science approaches the problems of life and living from a similar angle, giving credence only to what can be seen and measured, believing that only the physical is real.

Contemporary psychiatry is typical of this materialistic world view, believing that mental illness is a function of chemical imbalance and that all so-called “inner experience” is a mere by product of brain activity. By focusing exclusively on the relationship between brain and behaviour, this view denies the importance of the spiritual dimensions of human nature and suggests that any such ‘immeasurable’ aspect of life does not actually exist.

 
Such an outlook has nurtured the crazy notion that human suffering can be eliminated, most commonly by simply popping a pill. Sadly, many of the psychotherapies, which focused on ‘exploring’ the experience of being human, have largely surrendered to the psychological version of this biomedical reductionism – using various psychological ‘techniques’ to control and contain ways of thinking and feeling. The net result is the flattening – in a normative sense – of the range of ways of being human. This is representative of the scary kinds of future-world imagined in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. Who would have thought that the freedom to feel, think and believe would have represented such a threat at the beginning of the 21^st Century? Despite the apparent liberalisation of the Western culture, the underpinning value base appears narrower than ever. 

This book emphasises the need to turn inward, listening to the various messages that are channelled through our core being. Rather than dismiss these experiences as one form of ‘disorder’ or another, we invite the reader to recognise the various stories that are re-told here, as evidence of the difficult and often very messy soul-work, which people often are required to undertake; evidence of the spiritual quests that serendipity has organised for them; evidence of the abundant resourcefulness of the human being, when faced with the apparently ‘unintelligible’.  As Frattaroli (2002) recently noted, psychiatric symptoms like anxiety and depression are not themselves diseases, but are evidence of the soul's attempt to resolve an inner conflict —by forcing us to pay attention to the unconscious dark side of ourselves that we would rather ignore.

 

The people who have joined us on this attempt to ‘break through’ the contemporary opposition to understanding the spiritual dimensions of mental health and mental distress, have struggled long and hard to gain the wisdom that informs their writing. Although the authors are not united by any specific philosophical, religious or mystical tradition, they do share an appreciation that the various struggles, which Life scatters upon the Path, have been put there for a purpose. What exactly is the purpose is not often clear, but clearing the way, surmounting the obstacles and generally taking the next, painful step, appear to be what is asked of us. With each step, the point of our existence may become clearer, or it might become even more obscured. If the authors we have gathered together here are to be believed, the outcome is not as important as the simple fact that we have taken that next step. Knowing that we are ‘on the Path’ appears to be sufficient of itself.

In Part One we consider spirituality as a reflection of the process of change. We provide a brief overview of the contemporary history of spiritual inquiry in the field of mental health. In Part Two, we consider spirituality as a reflection of the process of meaning-making.  David Brandon cautions against any attempt to reduce spirituality to any common denominator, far less to its ‘key constituents’ and Ann Drysdale reminds us that the ‘reality’, which we experience, is – of necessity – personal. This peculiar vision of ourselves within our world of experience, is undoubtedly one of the building blocks of all spiritual understanding. We conclude this section with a consideration of how all our experiences – of ourselves as well as of the world outside of us – are part of the Great Whole, the One that is represented by different names in all the main faith systems, but which, at bottom, appears to be the same, enduring Truth of all existence.

In Part Three we consider spirituality in terms of different forms of journey. Ian Beech reviews the Buddhist appreciation of the problem of craving, and how our inability to ever satisfy our cravings, leads to emotional pain and spiritual isolation. Liam Clarke reviews the potent power of confession, both as a social contract, which can weaken a person’s capacity to engage in ‘soul-searching’, but also a rich metaphor for expressing everything that we might encounter on the journey to our inner spaces. Eihblin Inglesby takes the idea of the spiritual journey one stage further by considering the traditional concept of pilgrimage, within which pilgrims consider not, ‘who’ they are but ‘where’ they are. Sally Clay demonstrates, through her own witness, the importance of practice to the whole spiritual quest, and Cathy Conroy reads her own spiritual journey – in and through madness - as one imbued with grace. In concluding this section, Peter Wilkin reveals how we might encounter epiphany in everyday life, suggesting that the wisdom of the infinite lies waiting in the wings of our mundane existence.

In Part Four we consider the potential for healing that lies within even the most terrifying forms of madness. Nikki Slade charts the process of disintegration and re-building that changed her life, which is reviewed in a short commentary by her friend and colleague, Larry Culliford and Sue Holt describes how the urge towards spiritual healing, that can be thrown up by madness, can often be thwarted by mental health services. Gary Platz turns the traditional role of spirituality upside-down, as he describes how his madness acted as the spur for his spiritual journey towards self-healing.

Finally, given all the references we have made here in this Preface to the quick-fix, fast-food, materialistic branding of spirituality, we conclude with a consideration of the power of ‘waiting’. As many of the authors have suggested, the practice of life is its purpose and, through careful, compassionate practice, we may, ultimately, be rewarded. The critical question is not can we make the commitment but have we the patience?

Eliot TS (1974) The Four Quartets. Harvest Books, NY

Fowler R (2003) Kabbalah-lite, the cult with great skincare. The Sunday Times, Jan 20^th, News Review, p. 5.

Frattaroli E (2002) Healing The Soul in the Age of the Brain:
Why medication isn’t enough Penguin Putnam, New York

Ginsberg A (1984) Collected Poems 1947-1980 Harper & Row, New York