Introduction to Dissertation
Unseen Gifts:
Turning Toward the Marginalization of Anomalous Experience
Research Topic
This research is part of a fifteen year personal inquiry concerning the categories of experience that expand one’s sense of what is real—as opposed to what Hafiz, a Sufi poet, called the unreal. He suggests the unreal comes to enslave us as children and can restrict our ability to imagine. In modern Western culture, material existence has been more likely to be designated as real than the imagination. Socrates, however, believed that “the unseen—those unchanging things you can only perceive with the mind,” was more real than “the seen—what you can touch and see and perceive.” Experience based in the unseen is often anomalous in nature; it is defined as those states not necessarily perceived by the five senses nor existing within a time/space continuum, and through which realities other than consensus ones are revealed. Anomalous experience commonly brings a jolt of recognition as well as a sense of being connected to something beyond oneself that evokes awe or reverence. Lastly, this kind of experience is frequently best accounted for by using the laws of quantum rather than classical physics.
Beginning in the early 1920s, physicists noticed that some events went “out of symmetry” with classical physics; they started referring to these as anomalous. In addition, those who researched the paranormal began using this term to describe what is “uncommon and deviating from ordinary experience or generally accepted explanations of reality.” The root word comes from the name of a Greek settlement, Omalos, built on an ancient plateau in Crete. The territory around the village itself was steep and uneven, thus was described as anOmalos and translated as “not the same as Omalos.”
In recent years many who had defined reality from a materialist, sensate, time-bound perspective have undergone an anomalous kind of experience that they find difficult to explain or situate within conventional schemas. According to a Gallop pole in 1991, thirteen million Americans have had a near-death experience where their material bodies, by medical definition, technically died, but some essence still maintained an awareness of events around them. In addition to near-death, anomalous experience can include categories such as pre-cognition, mystical encounter, spontaneous healing, telepathy, after-death visitation, alien abduction, and remote viewing—the ability to describe a distant, undisclosed location without ever having seen it previously.
As Western civilization turned more positivist and quantitative in the 1700 and 1800s, anomalous types of experience, which can be difficult to measure or verify due to their mostly non-physical, non-replicable, non-rational nature, became more circumspect. Although those with a materialist worldview may consider these experiences to be illusory, most who have undergone them often believe they seem more real than conventional reality—evoking more meaningful insights and feelings of deeper essential truth. David Wulff indicates that “any experience qualified as mystical . . . leaves a strong impression of having encountered a reality different from—and, in some crucial sense, higher than—the reality of everyday experience.” Mark Matousak, who wrote about his own mystical experience, describes this state as being “filled, instantly with silent knowledge, washed through with a peace I'd never known before, a profound sense of wholeness. I suddenly knew that divinity is real, and that I was an inextricable reflection of that reality." Neville Goddard states of mystical encounter: “the most intimate relationship on earth is like living in separate cells compared with this union.”
While these intense episodes of acute and extrasensory awareness can be quite meaningful, they are commonly considered difficult to express in words, thus theologians describe them as ineffable. Sigmund Freud writes of them as uncanny to give a sense of their strangeness; Carl Jung uses the word synchronicity to describe their odd but meaningful coincidences; Abraham Maslow conceptualizes about peak experiences to convey their ecstatic dimension; Rudolph Otto refers to them as numinous, which he forms from the Latin word, numen, meaning “powerful presence or spirit”; Rhea White utilizes the term exceptional human experiences; Gerald May labels them as unitive to emphasize the strong sense of connection they evoke; Stanislov Grof calls them non-ordinary, and, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer describes them as mind-matter anomalies. Those who have gone through these kinds of encounters will be referred to as experiencers—a term John Mack uses to describe those who have had alien encounters; some researchers also employ the term experients.
The first contemporary volume on anomalies from a clinical perspective did not appear until 1982 with Anomalistic Psychology, followed by The Psychology of Anomalous Experience in 1988. It would not be until 2003 that Varieties of Anomalous Experience was published—and under the auspices of the American Psychological Association. Its editors, led by Stanley Krippner, openly acknowledge their book’s literary precedent, written a century earlier by William James—Varieties of Religious Experience. They also note that “even when single and transitory, [this experience is] reported to have an enormous impact on the experient.” They concede, however, that “the study of anomalous experiences is still a marginal area of concern for psychology,” and define as anomalous “an uncommon experience that is believed to deviate from ordinary experience or from the usually accepted explanations of reality.”
For this dissertation then, anomalous experience will additionally be understood as having been devalued or marginalized by the conventional culture because of its unusual nature.Marginalization is the process whereby individuals, groups, or experiences that are too dissimilar from the consensus reality of a dominant culture must remain at the edges of influence and are frequently exiled. Consensus reality is seen as a system that embraces those ideas and images utilized by the majority of the culture to designate what is acceptable in thought, feeling, and behavior. When the consensus perspective is challenged, it generally results in what Aftab Omer has labeled cultural gatekeeping, a concept that encompasses the process of marginalization:
Cultural gatekeepers [represent] the restrictive and resisting forces within a culture that maintain the dominant ideology and ensure conformity with that culture’s rules, norms, values, and taboos. They personify a set of beliefs and practices that legitimize the status quo through the influence of political, economic, and media institutions.
The gatekeeper consists of an introjected voice that is formed first by parental input and later through peer, institutional, and societal restrictions. Sandor Ferenczi coined the term introjection to describe what occurs as individuals accept and internalize parental or cultural norms, taking them on as their own personal beliefs or voices. When this happens, entities such as the introjected marginalizer—a special case of the gatekeeper—are formed. This particular introject or part then raises its often critical gatekeeping voice around experience that falls too far outside conventional reality.
From a general interest in anomalous experience and a growing sense of the complexities of marginalization gained during five years of participation in my graduate school cohort, I began to focus on the ways that turning toward the marginalization surrounding anomalous experience might impact those who were trying to resolve and integrate such an experience. I found it important to consider both anomalous experience and marginalization through three distinct, but interconnected categories—personal, cultural, and archetypal. The last grouping consists of those universal patterns and lenses described by Jung that often unconsciously shape our lives and are “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. . . . a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas.” John Van Eenwyk infers that although impersonal in nature, archetypes ultimately constellate on a personal level because “our minds at birth must contain inherent predispositions to perceive in categories.”
A personal expression of the archetypes largely occurs through the human affect system according to Donald Nathanson, who defines affect as “the biological portion of emotion—when some definable stimulus has activated a mechanism which then releases a known pattern of biological events.” Tom Cheetham suggests that when affective reality is denied it creates a sense of exile from others and from spirit. Pointing to the deeper spiritual and cultural characteristics of affect, Diana Fosha states that “core affective experiences are conduits to contact with the essential self and to optimal relational in-the-world functioning.” Mayer repeatedly emphasizes the importance of accessing affect as a condition for anomalous knowing and refers to “the emotional keys [that] are necessary to unlock the door of necessary sensitivities.”
It is this affective capability in humans, or what Jung termed the feeling function, that allows humans to access a sense of connection and empathy; the ancient alchemists called this coniunctio—Latin for “illumination through union.” A parallel concept for this deepened awareness of unity is that of participatory consciousness. Omer defines it as “states unobstructed by a delusionary sense of a separate self,” contrasting it with “non-participatory states of consciousness [that] are adaptive to stressful or traumatic circumstances and subsequently maintained through the gatekeeping mechanisms of adaptive identity.” He believes that this adaptive identity, which can prevent access to unified states, is caused by the “unavoidable trauma in life that restricts us from experiencing the full expression of our being.” On a personal level this trauma implies the need for what Melanie Klein terms, reparative experience, which can be understood as tending to the wounds of early separation and allowing meaningful connectedness within oneself or with others. Culturally, reparation implies the importance of becoming accountable for oppressive states of poverty, segregation, or genocide.
Archetypally, reparative states are entered into through what Donald Kalsched calls “transformative inclusion, which leads to a breakdown of Psyche’s beleaguered ‘I’ into the [unitive] state of a divine/human ‘we’—the surrender of the ‘old’ personality to something larger.” He describes psyche as that “organ of experience, which creates links and associations among elements of the personality in the interest of integration.” Joseph Coppin and Elizabeth Nelson speaks of psyche as that “great repository of ideas, images, emotions, urges, and desires that appear in the world, whether its source is personal or collective, conscious or unconscious.” They note that this description “is unlike more limited definitions that often equate the psyche with the personal mind.”
Relationship to the Topic
As I worked in graduate school to understand how anomalous experience allowed a deeper sense of connection at these three levels, and conversely, how marginalization diminished it, I began to reflect on my own experiences of the unseen—especially one that occurred in 1991. It had changed my perception of reality in noteworthy ways and kindled intense responses in me that led to a number of critical, life-altering decisions. Certainly this particular episode had become the central defining point of my life. It surprised me then to realize how I myself had unconsciously diminished and subtly marginalized the core of my experience—one that had seemed so remarkable, so mind-shattering at the time and yet eventually become a distant recollection. It seems I gradually reduced it to the level of far less consequential memorabilia spanning fifty years of life, and although I was not particularly afraid to tell others about my experience, I was beginning to read in the literature of those who were. This brought an initial awareness into how images of anomalous experience become exiled personally, culturally, and archetypally. I also started noticing how seldom people shared these experiences and how little interest our culture has typically had in these phenomena.
As a child, I do not recall specifically having an anomalous experience, although I certainly was labeled a “day-dreamer” and often scolded by teachers for window-gazing instead of concentrating on my studies. I also remember that my perceptions and emotions were frequently denied or shamed. The adults around me would say, “Oh, you don’t really feel that way;” or “You’re just too sensitive”; and for additional containment, they would sometimes add, “What will people think”? Being a fairly compliant youngster, I willingly denied the reality they wanted me to repress, but I remember times of intense loneliness as well as painful disconnection from myself and others during childhood.
I eventually came to realize that most of the adults in my life had simply been trying to protect me from overwhelming experience and emotions that were too difficult for even them to confront. In spite of understanding this intellectually, their restrictions substantially impacted my ability to sustain a subjective, embodied reality. It was not until I entered therapy at age 29 that I began the long, complex process of reclaiming an experientially grounded truth. Then at 45, I went through the experience that eventually led to this research. It showed me images and understandings so outside cultural consensus that I have had difficulty in reconciling them ever since. This experience happened one day when I spontaneously slipped into a hyper-connected, u nitive state.
The path to my experience probably began while working as a project architect for an educational complex when I developed a friendship with a building official. Neither of us wanted to threaten our marriages, and we rarely saw one other due to living in distant cities. We began talking about various spiritual topics, and the connection between us soon deepened. Eventually this powerful but sublimated energy from our conversations started to reverberate through every aspect of my life—to my co-workers, my friends, my children, and even my partner. One day, I was stopped at a traffic signal after exiting the freeway; Ray Lynch’s etheric music, No Blue Thing, was playing on the car stereo.
Suddenly, I went from sitting at that stoplight on an ordinary, sun-filled day, to being enveloped by a kind of opaque cloud—and it seemed like I was not really in a body anymore. I felt no fear as everything was so euphoric in this place that was no-place. I had such an astonishingly serene sense within me. Although this state could only have lasted at most 30 seconds, I marked no time and felt dangled in forever. I seemed to float in some space-less knowing that had a sense of ultimate oneness—a state of indestructible belonging that instantly repaired all past abandonments and human rejections.
I could not see anything below me or above me, and actually there was no way to tell where “I” stopped and “Oneness” began. During this experience I also sensed that I knew absolutely everything! Later as I reflected on this feeling of unbounded knowledge, I realized that it was rationally quite absurd, but for those few moments it felt absolutely true and accessible—even in subjects such as calculus or exotic foreign languages. The other facet of this experience that seemed remarkable was feeling that everything was utterly perfect with the universe. I no longer had to struggle or worry about anything! Knowing this helped me grasp how much chronic anxiety I had been carrying in my life.
Then, as suddenly as I had been taken away from it, I was back in my truck—the car next to me was pulling away from the stoplight so I knew it was time to proceed through the intersection. The terrain around me was certainly familiar, but it seemed like it was shimmering and quite vivid. Most of all, however, I felt absolutely ecstatic. This unitive experience continued to deeply impact me over the next several weeks. My perceptions of life changed radically. I could read esoteric literature and understand complex psychological concepts easily. Also it was effortless to intensely connect with others—from the unknown clerk in the video store to those in my most intimate circle.
Eager to share this incredible experience that had just occurred, I tried to tell others about it and explain its stunning qualities. Although none tried to deny what had happened or overtly marginalized me, those I shared it with appeared unable to respond to it in any substantial way and never brought it up again. I remember it feeling quite odd that they would have little or no curiosity about it, but with time I just learned to expect this lack of reaction. While I would never trade my anomalous experience for anything in the world, integrating its strange reality with a more consensus one has not been simple or without consequence. Unfortunately, the surrounding normative culture seemed to have no readily recognizable categories into which I could place what had happened to me.
Over the last 15 years, the impact of my unitive experience gradually diminished. As I began to look at this erosion more closely, however, I saw that part of it was due to a subtle level of marginalization around my experience—nothing blatant but quite effective none the less. In realizing how important it felt to deliver my experience out of exile and enter more deliberately into participatory consciousness, I chose to research the ways in which turning toward a marginalized anomalous experience could provide a more aware relationship with what Omer calls “intensities of the imagination.” Most of all, I wanted experiencers to grasp how all of this could be transformative for their own lives.
Theory-in-Practice
This research study on anomalous experience is situated within the orientation of Imaginal Psychology. The term imaginal was first used in 1647 and later pressed into use by Henry Corbin in the 1960s to describe a non-dual state accessed through image; although commonly thought of as visual, images may be auditory, oral, or even tactile. An imaginal approach, which reclaims soul as its primary concern and explores images of the psyche, has evolved over the last thirty years. Omer advises that soul can best be understood through a collage of meanings, so that while he defines it as “the individualizing property of being,” he also sees it as “the self that is inseparable from other—the objective being brought to and expressed in a subjective state, [which] embodies that mysterious stillness, aliveness, and otherness at the core of being.” Imaginal Psychology encompasses the concepts of the four other psychological orientations—cognitive-behavioral, depth, humanist, and transpersonal—but has its own distinctive theoretical perspective on the soul or psyche.
Theories and practices used in this research are based in Imaginal Transformation Praxis, which has been developed by Omer to conceptualize the personal, cultural, and archetypal lenses through which experience is perceived. He believes that “soul wants to experience its unitive nature”; this generally entails sacrificing individual identity and “requires derailment” through disidentification from parts of the psyche that restrict access to the soul’s participatory character. Omer indicates that this capacity allows “the emergence of a spacious awareness free from frozen images of self”; he defines disidentification as the ability “to loosen the grasping and clutching of personal or adaptive identity, which is formed in the course of coping with environmental impingement and overwhelming events.” Omer explores adaptive states:
[When] coping with overwhelm, the developing soul constellates self images associated with adaptive patterns of reactivity. These self images persist as an adaptive identity into subsequent contexts where they are maladaptive and barriers to the unfolding of Being.
In Imaginal Transformation Praxis, disidentification is approached through an awareness of psychological multiplicity, described by Omer as “the existence of many distinct and often encapsulated centers of subjectivity within the experience of the same individual.” When humans are unable to access a sense of their multiplicity, it is usually because either personal or cultural gatekeepers are attempting to protect the personality from chaos and dissolution by muting expression and inhibiting participation. Omer speaks of gatekeepers as “anti-transformative agents,” which instill doubt and self-condemnation within the individual. This frequently leads to reification, literalization, and fundamentalism. For purposes of this study, the term, marginalizer—a special case of Omer’s gatekeeper, will be used because it relates to more socio-cultural implications of exile and exclusion found with anomalous experience. When one part of the psyche marginalizes other, less acceptable parts, it is called internalized oppression.
The term internal marginalizer will be used to denote the part of the psyche that oppresses the self and whose function it is to prevent experience that might be overwhelming to that self. If a culture tends to gatekeep or marginalize experience—including anomalous ones—access to participatory consciousness becomes inhibited. When this happens it usually means individuals have fallen under the influence of what Omer calls cultural trance states. He defines these as “collective states of complacent passivity and loss of individuality that deaden us to what is possible,” and are in contrast to cultural sovereignty—“an awakening from cultural trance and domination.”
These trance states are often the basis of psychological and cultural exile, thus limit access to what Omer calls the spacious center; he defines this as the “dynamic interaction between a culture’s center and periphery [where] the creative potentials of diversity, conflict, and chaos can be actualized.” The ability to express highly subjective states that accompany marginalization from this center can undo these trance states and support movement between the center and the periphery. This kind of expression also deepens participation and cultural accountability; ultimately it also supports the cultivation of peer communities that make possible reparative experience.
Omer sees gatekeeping as a primary deterrent to accessing states of ecstasy. In his theory on the ecstatic imperative, he asserts that “turning away from participation is turning away from ecstasy—a fundamental psychological necessity.” Constructive ecstatic experience is gained through transformative practices such as reflexive participation, which he describes as entailing “an ability to surrender through creative action to the necessities, meanings and possibilities inherent in the present moment.”
This kind of action involves accessing the imagination and allows the creative transgression of taboo in ways that are effective but can prevent dangerous levels of exile. Reflexive participation also allows the loosening of adaptive identity by working with various internal subjectivities or parts. This practice is cultivated through seven steps that include: allowing how one has been affected and becoming aware of that reaction; describing and expressing the reaction; identifying the imaginal structures that underlie the reaction from a personal, cultural, and archetypal perspective; and finally, unfolding creative action. Omer defines imaginal structures as “assemblies of sensory, affective, and cognitive aspects of experience constellated into images that both mediate and constitute experience. The specifics of imaginal structures are determined by an interaction of personal, cultural and archetypal influences.” He notes that reflexive participation brings the ability to transmute experience, where one moves through various imaginal structures in a way that changes one’s relationship to the resultant reactivity:
During the individuation process, imaginal structures are transmuted into emergent and enhanced capacities as well as a transformed identity. Any enduring and substantive change in individual or group behavior requires a transmuting of imaginal structures. This transmutation depends upon an affirmative turn toward the passionate nature of the soul.
He also advises that transmuting involves a “sacrifice of the retaliatory urge.” This is often supported by the Friend, composed of “those deep potentials of the soul to guide and act with passionate objectivity found at the threshold of an initiatory experience.”
Participation can also be expanded through practices of possibility, which are related to the prophetic imagination and its capacity to envision alternative futures. Omer defines a capacity as “a distinct dimension of human development and human evolution that delineates a specific potential for responding to a domain of life experience.” He warns: “We need practices of possibility because so much of conventional reality is based in despair.” For purposes of this research, a tangential concept—the As-if Friend—was developed to support experiencers in validating alternate realities and to counter marginalizing voices. This aspect of the Friend has the ability to act as if a desired outcome has already been achieved even if it is not fully realized at that point in time.
Transformative practices are also needed to restore expression and participation that has been marginalized through cultural trauma—a term that Omer uses to describe those experiences that overwhelm and originate beyond the personal. Unless cultural wounds are resolved, marginalized individuals have little access to the spacious center and radical peerness. The latter is defined as “an embodiment of relationship based on mutual recognition of existential personhood.” Omer suggests radical peerness occurs as members of a community engage at the level of ritual and reflexivity, enabling “profound collaboration among those participating [and] engendering a temporary suspension of fear, suspicion, indifference, conflict and even hatred.” These aspects of community frequently bring a sense of connection and ecstatic experience.
Lastly, Omer finds that cultural trance states generally restrict acceptance of what is labeled the objective psyche. Jung, who coined this term, believes that this aspect of the psyche is “independent of human or cultural influence.” He indicates that the objective psyche has the “ability to heal, to make whole, [but] is at first strange beyond all measure to the conscious mind.” Omer points out that in a culture which undermines the unseen, there is often little understanding around this kind of objectivity, and truth must rely on more personal interpretations for its base—a condition that places too great a burden on the individual, adaptive self. In this sense, the term objective does not connote science’s positivistic meaning, but something more vast, more archetypal, and more universal. In their exploration of the participatory paradigm, John Heron and Peter Reason refer to this as givenness.
Research Problem and Hypothesis
After considering the various elements that inform this topic and situating them conceptually in Imaginal Transformation Praxis, the following Research Problem was established: In what ways can turning toward the marginalization surrounding anomalous experience become transformative? Extensive study has been done around anomalous experience itself, but little has been conducted in relation to first approaching its marginalization to reclaim validation of the original experience. The Research Hypothesis stated: The revaluing of an exiled anomalous experience is enhanced through exploring its marginalization within a ritualized container and engaging in practices of possibility that invite images from the objective psyche. Although this hypothesis was substantially confirmed, several unpredicted outcomes emerged from the actual research.
Methodology and Research Design
The first efforts at a methodology that adequately responded to both the subjective and objective states of awareness typical of anomalous experience can be found in the Participatory Research paradigm. Heron gives a flavor of its character and focus:
The participatory worldview allows us as human persons to know that we are part of the whole rather than separated as mind over and against matter. . . . Every boundary, every finite limit to the seeing and hearing of my perceptual field, declares its latent infinity. Each limit in containing the known declares there is an unknown beyond it. . . . The circumscription of our perceiving is fraught with the boundlessness of the given.
While participatory methodologies have played an important part in the effort to validate the kinds of experience that relate to the givenness of the objective psyche, Imaginal Inquiry was developed by Omer to further refine and expand this process. A crucial element within this style of research is the necessity for reflexivity in relationship to imaginal structures that could influence interpretations made by the researcher. Omer defines reflexivity as “the capacity to engage and be aware of those imaginal structures that shape and constitute our experience.” By being reflexive about these structures, researchers can factor in the perceptual and interpretive lenses that impact the validity of their research outcomes and lead to unconscious bias via the quantum observer effect.
Imaginal Inquiry was utilized for this study, in part because of its perspectives on anomalous experience. Omer notes that “the Imaginal Approach encourages us to try on something unlike ourselves—the anomaly, the uncanny.” This research focused its methodology on evoking the experience of marginalization around the anomalous episodes of its 12 participants. One person dropped out of the study due to her fear of sharing the story of her experience with the group; the other 11 attended all sessions and completed the research activities with a few minor exceptions. Participants were recruited through contacts with therapists and agencies where I had worked as well as from various populations that typically have a high incidence of such experiences. Participants were selected on the basis of having had an experience considered so out of the ordinary that it was hard to reconcile with everyday reality and also felt unresolved. Their experience had to have occurred within the last 10 years. An applicant’s level of psychological awareness was taken into consideration as was their mental stability. The methodology was designed to provide a gradual turning toward marginalization over the course of three research sessions. Participants were aware that this was a focus; they were not, however, told that their work with practices of possibility and images from the objective psyche would be evaluated in relation to the ability to revalue anomalous experience.
Assisted by co-researchers, Irene Ives, Joy Stephenson Kolker, and Ilka de Gast, three data collections sessions were conducted—each two weeks apart. The first two sessions were approximately six hours long and the final one lasted four hours. These took place at Lomi Psychotherapy Clinic in their group room, which opened onto a newly landscaped inner courtyard. An altar was placed in the center of the room and care was taken to create a sense of sanctuary for exploring the stories of anomalous experience.
To evoke the experience of marginalization around anomalous experience, various clips from the film, Phenomenon, were shown. Omer’s multiplicity triads were utilized to encourage expression from three established positions—the Experiencer, the Marginalizer, and the As-if Friend. Experience was also evoked by viewing stereograms—three-dimensional images that required the viewer to release initial perceptions revealing a previously unseen figure. Finally, a guided visualization assisted participants in requesting an image of possibility from the As-if Friend.
To facilitate expression of what was evoked during the research, participants were asked to respond to journaling questions and do an art-making process that involved semi-transparent collaged images. During the final session, key moments from the research—both at an individual and group level—were selected by participants and researchers alike. This allowed for the interpretation and integration of learnings obtained from the research. In meetings that were held apart from the data collection sessions, the researcher and co-researchers debriefed on four separate occasions to discuss concerns about specific participants and to be accountable for any of their own imaginal structures that might influence or bias interpretations around the research.
Learnings
Data from the research sessions as well as co-researcher debriefs was articulated through five primary learnings. A cumulative learning was condensed from them: The marginalization surrounding anomalous experience can be transmuted through sharing the stories about these immensities of the imagination within ritualized peer communities, encouraging disidentification from the introjected marginalizer, and engaging in practices of possibility that lead to ecstatic states of participatory consciousness.
Each learning contains six sections: first, a phenomenological description of what happened at various points during the research sessions and researcher debriefs; second, an account of how I, as the researcher, was affected by what happened; third, an exploration of my imaginal structures that were activated during the research process; fourth, an overview of the theories used to make meaning around what happened; fifth, an interpretive section based on those theories; and in a sixth section, the learnings were assessed for any bias that could impact their validity, especially in relation to the observer effect when unconscious structures can inadvertently impact research outcomes.
Learning One found that those intensities of the imagination present within anomalous experience require ritualized storytelling and the attunement of a shared group field in order to be normalized, validated, and reclaimed. The commonality of the stories and the valuing of them by peers were pivotal for participants—and for the community as a whole. Learning Two centered on the awareness that anomalous experience, which is culturally taboo, evokes an archetypal force field of marginalization resulting in negative affects and attitudes of devaluation, self-exile, or privatizing. The process of turning toward marginalization appeared difficult for participants to tolerate but was critical in opening the group to expanded expression and as-if perspectives. Learning Three found that the introjected marginalizer operates in an embedded and projected way related to anomalous experience until it can be consciously recognized and expressed, allowing for disidentification from exiling voices. The ability to disidentify from the introjected marginalizer was critical for increased creativity, expression, and the revaluing of anomalous experience. Learning Four focused on how access to images of possibility arising from the objective psyche is impeded by the dynamics of marginalization, but can be restored through practices that engage an “as-if” perspective and allow the reinterpretation of cultural trance states. When participants were able to meet the As-if Friend, they found an extended sense of possibility and access to non-normative interpretations that could address the four restrictive beliefs they had described earlier. In Learning Five it was discovered that a ritualized peer community, which engenders creative expression, positive affect, and the ecstatic states of participatory consciousness is foundational for transmuting the marginalization around anomalous experience. It was not until the data had been closely studied that the importance of radical peerness in demarginalizing and revaluing anomalous experience became apparent.
Significance and Implications of the Study
The contributions of this research will ultimately be found in how fully it supports experiencers, therapists, and all those embedded in cultural trance states to turn toward as well as transmute the marginalization around anomalous experience. Until the exile around these experiences is brought into awareness and expressed, it is unlikely that the center-periphery dynamic, which “engages and recognizes differences that were previously denied, suppressed, and trivialized,” will be able to reach its full potential.
There are ample myths available—both ancient and modern—that explore exile, the workings of cultural trance, and the longing for deepened connection to the sacred so evident in many contemporary symptoms of distress. In researching this topic, I frequently peered through a mythological lens to clarify as well as reflect on the relationship between marginality and the ability to access expanded states of reality. Kalsched believes that “the central issue of all myths and religions is finding the balance between human states of reality and numinous ones”—between Socrates’ seen and unseen.The Cave, in which Plato writes about the nature of reality, describes men chained to chairs that face forward, only allowing them to see shadows of the real Forms that are behind them and merely projected onto the cave walls. Larry and Andy Wachowski’s futuristic film, The Matrix, which was chosen as this research’s guiding myth, utilizes images based on Plato’s Cave; it has as its central premise, the possibility of seeing through consensus reality by “ingesting the red pill.” Another myth reviewed for this research was Suhrawardi’s 12 th century, Recital of the Occidental Exile, which addressed similar issues as those of The Cave and The Matrix but from a far more sacred and religious perspective.
The learnings from this dissertation have had implications for research participants, the orientation of Imaginal Psychology, psychotherapists, the culture, and for me personally. The first implication lies in the necessity of expanding awareness around the marginalization that exists in relation to anomalous experience. Second, is the necessity of encouraging therapists and others to invite, explore, and value the stories of anomalous experience from clients. Third, is the necessity of broadening Imaginal Psychology’s influence with respect to cultural understandings of anomalous experience. Fourth, is the necessity of recognizing the difficulty our culture has with creating adequate rituals and practices to address anomalous experience. Fifth, is the necessity of establishing peer communities that revalue and create fertile ground for further anomalous experience.
Certainly the fear and doubt of marginalizing voices make difficult adversaries in Western culture. If, however, anomalous experience, as I have come to know it, actually is a calling card of the imagination, it is an unseen gift that humans can no longer afford to deny and devalue. This research, with its foundation of ritualized peer community, expressions of psychological multiplicity, and practices of possibility, has constructed scaffolding from which experiencers can begin to transmute the marginalization around these non-ordinary encounters and deeply revalue them. Perhaps then those possibilities that are our birth-right—and which are found in the expanded perspectives of participatory consciousness—will unfold at the personal, group, community, professional, and cultural levels.
