Diego pignatelli
The kundalini syndrome, recently diagnosed by the American Psychiatric Association as a "spiritual and religious problem" (Turner, Lukoff, Barnhouse and Lu), is a real personal pseudo-pathological enigma which modern psychiatry does not intend to solve or, better still, finds hard to solve since psychiatry lacks the basic theoretical support which for centuries has come from an esoteric, thousand-year old science like the vedanta of the Hindu matrix or vedic science which integrates itself into a holistic support in the pseudo-pathological framework of kundalini, stabilising the pranic disturbances of breathing and channelling the energy of the chakras to the source of the serpentine reawakening.
Richard House
In his introduction, Frederic Spiegelberg refers to how Krishna's account illustrates the 'acceptance of everything that happens inwardly' - including despair and 'depressions and dangers almost to the point of ruination' (1971: 7). Certainly, many of Krishna's experiences seemed to be phenomenologically indistinguishable from what are in Western psychiatry diagnosed as 'psychotic' symptoms. Thus, for example, Krishna's experience of 'immersion of the ego in [a] stream of light is a common theme of religious mysticism, and also of psychopathological derangement' (Hillman, p. 69); Hillman compares Krishna's reported experiences with 'states of psychological dissociation, in which consciousness appears to break up into multiples of itself' (p. 70); and other events occurred 'which we call in the language of psychopathology, "depersonalization", disorientation", "alienation"' - and which are common to so-called 'paranoid', 'schizophrenic' and 'epileptoid' states (ibid., original emphasis).
Indeed, Hillman is convinced that had Krishna presented at a Western psychiatric clinic, he would have undoubtedly been diagnosed as having a 'psychotic' episode (and no doubt been 'treated' accordingly).
In an absolutely key passage of his commentary (pp. 70-2), Hillman points out that the world-view of Western psychiatric medicine has nothing other than its diagnostic categories for understanding these experiences, and that Krishna was fortunate to possess a non-pathological framework of understanding with which to make sense of what was happening to him. He makes a similar point later, when he states that it was 'the ideational context', 'the supporting frame which kept his experience from going wrong', and which enabled him to integrate what was happening to him (p. 94). Indeed, for Hillman 'it is conceivable that some of the experiences described in Western psychiatric interviews could also be viewed as the beginnings of enlightenment rather than as the beginnings of insanity' (p. 71) (note that even Hillman seems to be assuming a valid qualitative distinction between 'mystical enlightenment' and 'insanity', to which I do not necessarily subscribe - though a bit later he does acknowledge 'How close the borderlines are!' - ibid.). But 'in the West, we are so lacking in an adequate context [for these experiences] that we do indeed go to pieces at the eruption of the unconscious, thereby justifying the psychiatric view' (p. 95). Though Hillman, being a Jungian depth psychologist, envokes the metaphor of 'the unconscious' as an explanatory principle at this point, other, more transpersonal explanatory factors could of course also be envoked. Certainly, it was clearly valuable for Krishna 'to feel that what he was going through... had... a universal meaning' - a 'transcendent purposefulness' (pp. 95, 96).
Echoing a view I strongly advocate in this chapter, Hillman states that, in Western diagnostic psychiatry, 'what a person has, his diagnosis, has become more important than who a person is' (p. 71, my emphasis); and for Krishna, 'He did not want to be treated; [and] to be "cured" of what he had would have meant loss of both who he was and why he was... [B]y avoiding professional help, and by staying within the guidelines of tradition he guaranteed his own sanity' (ibid.): for 'If [his experience] were... argued away, diagnosed as sick, a whole world would collapse' (p. 131). Moreover, Hillman points to the disempowering, infantilising dynamic intrinsic to the professional medical-model relationship, where 'All health is on one side, sickness on the other... Gopi Krishna did not split the archetype of the healed one and the wounded one' (pp. 71-2).
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