Review of General Psychology 2007, Vol. 11, No.

3, 209 234

Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 1089-2680/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.11.3.209

Dark Nights of the Soul: Phenomenology and Neurocognition of Spiritual Suffering in Mysticism and Psychosis
Harry T. Hunt
Brock University Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the dark night of the soul in classical mysticism, with its painful metapathological loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilders early understanding of instabilities in the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganized hallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of body image/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/ embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abilities, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative transformations of consciousness. Dark night suffering can be seen as a semantic satiation leading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previous enhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared by clinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture. Keywords: presence, body image, ecological self, spirituality, schizophrenia

I. PHENOMENOLOGY: ENHANCING, DELETING AND REALIZING THE ECOLOGICAL SELF The following analysis unfolds from the intersection of two questions, each pertaining to the nature of spirituality and its seemingly inherent relation with human suffering and psychopathology. The rst question refers to what transpersonal psychologists such as Maslow (1971); Wilber (1984), and Almaas (1988) have termed metapathologiesWilliam James (James, 1902) preferred theopathiesthat can be specically stirred up by intense spiritual/mystical experiences. Spiritual metapathologies can show the same inner dynamics and phenomenology as schizoaffective conditions including grandiosity, painful social withdrawal, and especially here, despair and loss of all sense of meaning. Yet, despite considerable inner suffering the person can still more or less function within ordinary social lifeas in such key precursors to modern new age spiritualities as Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jung, Heidegger, and Gurdjieff (Hunt, 2003). The term meta is justied here in that true clinical psychosis inuences the entirety of ones life and typically leaves none of the room for major cultural innovation shown by such gures. So our rst question: How is it that highly developed mystical spirituality shows these specic parallels to the continuum of schizophrenic and schizoaffective conditions? The overall social and personal context of mysticism and psychosis could not be more differentwith the former basic to the sense of felt meaning and purpose in human existence as a whole and the latter reecting the extremity of its collapse. We will see below, however, that their various subphases can be so similar that the schizoaffective psychoses can be used as a window into the nature of spiritual sufferingand certainly vice

Harry T. Hunt, Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at Brock University Conference on H. Hunts Lives in Spirit, September 24-25, 2004. I thank David Goicoechea for organizing those meetings, Linda Pidduck and Dr. Marian Fojtik for editorial assistance, and Prof. Sid Segalowitz for helpful references. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Harry T. Hunt, Department of Psychology, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S 3A1. E-mail: hhunt@brocku.ca 209

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versa. These comparisons are not intended to pathologize spirituality, but are offered very much in the spirit of H. S. Sullivan (Sullivan, 1953, p. 32), on schizophrenia, that we are all simply more human than otherwise. There has long been the sense, in psychology from James (1902) and Freud (1933) to Sass (1992), and in neurology from Goldstein (1963) and Luria (1972) to Sacks (1987), that the extremities and sufferings of psychosis can illuminate fundamentals of the human condition otherwise difcult to see as such. The second question, and the one to be our initial focus, follows from a consensus among many analysts of spirituality, including Emerson (1844), James (1902); Heidegger (1927, 1962); Almaas (1988), and Hunt (1995), that the core of numinous or mystical experience lies in its nonconceptual, directly felt realization of an immediate sense of Being, presence, or thatnessalso related to the sheer suchness of Zen satori experience (Blofeld, 1962). In other words, if we follow the phenomenological analyses of Rudolf Otto (1923) and others (Stace, 1987; Studstill, 2005) that there is a cross cultural core to the world mysticisms and shamanisms that Otto termed the numinousa sense of awe, wonder, and mystery in response to a sensed contact with an allencompassing somethingthen at its core will be the experience of Being itself. This is the felt sense of a sheer facticity, thatness, or isnessthe wonder and deeply felt gratitude that there is something rather than nothing. James (1902) was one of the rst to conclude that it was the immediacy and fullness of this direct experience, more than its varying conceptualizations in multiple religious traditions, that conferred the ground, purpose, and meaning basic to all spirituality. This notion of a cross cultural core (Otto, 1923) or perennial philosophy (Smith, 1976) underlying the very different schematizations of the world religions has come in for criticism from cultural (Katz, 1978) and cognitive (Boyer, 1994) constructivists (see also Hunt, 2006). However, the demonstrated cross cultural similarities in hunter-gatherer shamanisms (Winkelman, 2000) imply a deep structure for human religious experience, perhaps akin to Chomskyean deep grammar for language. Otto himself analyzed numinous feeling into multiple dimensions (dependency, awe, mystery, oth-

erness) such that their selective cultural schematizations could already account for the diversity of religious beliefs so fundamental to social constructivists. Meanwhile, the ostensible overlap among the more developed experiences of the world mysticisms (Studstill, 2005) further highlights the commonalities already foreshadowed in tribal shamanisms. So our second question becomes: How is the experience of Being/isness underlying this core sense of numinous awe and mystery even possible for us as human beings? What are its cognitive and feeling roots in human self reference, given that its outward trance, aesthetic, and ritual expressions seem as specic to our species as language itself?

Levels of Self and the Experience of Being

The beginnings of an answer to how Being experiences are possible for us, and why they would have this personal and social impact, comes from exploring both the differentiation and nested interpenetrations among the multiple levels of the human experience of self. Cognitive and developmental psychologists such as Neisser (1988), Meltzoff and Moore (1995), Butterworth (1995), and Gallagher (2005), while using differing vocabularies, largely agree in distinguishing: (a) a primary ecological or bodily self, prenoetic and basic to perceptual-motor navigation and posturalspatial orientation; (b) a self referential or social sense of self, rst emerging with the cross modal mirroring capacities of even newborn infants and fundamental to the gradual interpersonal development of taking the role of the other (Mead, 1934) and theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978); and (c) a further and uniquely human meta cognitive, noetic, or introspective capacity that allows the discrimination and gradual representation of inner cognitive processes and states of consciousness, and follows from Vygotskys (1962) mid childhood development of inner speech and its felt sense of semantic meaning. The neurologist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder (1935), who will be so central to our later discussion, was perhaps the rst to show that the human sense of self was a complexly nested system involving all three of these levels,

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based on spatial/parietal, emotional/frontal, and postural/cerebellar layers of the central nervous system. More recently, Gillihan and Farah (2005) go so far as to suggest that this wide distribution of self across the nervous system, as also variously demonstrated by Damasio (1994); Gusnard (2004), and Saxe and Wexler (2005), strongly argues against any ultimately unitary system of self. This is consistent with William James (1890) conclusion that any inclusive ground for our different inner selves can be found only in the ongoing stream of consciousness itself. Because that can never be entirely encompassed by our self referential awareness, the fringe thereby created becomes the opening for both our vulnerability in sense of self and the open ended attempt at ground and context that would be the core of human spirituality. More specically, then, Neissers (1988) discussion of a primary proprioceptive selflocation of the organism in terms of an ecological self, common to all creatures moving within a perceptual surround, is derived from James Gibsons (1966, 1979) formulation of perception in terms of an ambient ecological array. Rejecting static understandings of basic perception, Gibson insisted that the essential functioning of the senses is based on the movement of a creature through its surrounding array. Such active navigation creates an open horizon ahead, out of which streams ambient gradients of surfaces and textures, which, closing behind the moving organism, continuously specify or self-locate its presence within a self-generated envelope of ow. This continual self-location is the essential function of a basic consciousness or sentience. For Gibson there is no outward there without the cospecication of a unique here given back by its surrounding array. The ow past from the open horizon ahead species a specic hole to be lled by the embodied ecological self of the creature of just the size, shape, and speed to generate just that array. Schilders (1935) concept of the body imageas the embodied core of the socialpersonal selfwas similarly coordinated with the outward environment as its continuously codetermined spatial position, muscle tonus, and posture. It will be central to what follows that the phenomenologies of human existence similarly developed by Merleau-Ponty (Varela, Rosch, & Thompson, 1991) and Heidegger

(Hunt, 1995) can be understood as amplications of the presence-openness dimension underlying Gibsons depiction of ecological array and self. There is considerable evidence that the human self referential, symbolic self is both socially constructed and totally embodied or nested into the ecological bodily self. Gallagher (2005) has reviewed recent evidence for the progressive developmental intersection of an innate body schema, in the sense of Neissers ecological self, and what he terms the body image as such, which is the consciously exteriorized experience of the bodily self. The latter is both experientially embodied, as illustrated by its continuence in the classic phantom limb effect following amputation, and socially structured from infancy through the cross-modal mirroring behaviors documented by Meltzoff and Moore (1995). In effect, the body schema/ecological self we share with nonsymbolic animals becomes entirely imbued with a second and eventually simultaneous social and semantic meaninga bit like the silvery polymorphous forms of the Terminator moviesand mediated by overlapping but distinct neural pathways. Beginning in infancy, the interplay of kinesthetic facial expressions and proto-symbolic gestures with the corresponding forms generated by visually perceived others constitutes the beginning of a taking the role of the other that will generate both self and other as necessarily reciprocal constructs. The resulting fusions between an innate body schema and its symbolically articulated body image are best illustrated in the late childhood appearance of gesturing phantom arms and hands in those born without actual limbs, and in the possibility of spontaneous small gestural and/or danced movements in those otherwise paralyzed through spinal injury or Parkinsons (Gallagher, 2005). Schilder (1935), cited in this regard by Merleau-Ponty (1962), seems to have been the rst to locate a symbolic basis of the human body image as originating developmentally in what would now be termed a social mirroring that gradually fuses kinesthetically and visually perceived forms of self and other into ones own unied and inherently interpersonal body image. He illustrated this kinesthetic-visual gestalt with demonstrations of the characteristic confu-

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sion between the body images of self and other in pathological and hypnotic statesas more recently illustrated by Blakemore, Bristow, Bird, Frith, & Ward (2005). Schilder also offers the rst experimental demonstration of illusions in which subjects are induced to kinesthetically feel their own arm where they see it in a mirror, rather than where it really issince also extended by Botvinick and Cohen (1998). What Schilder termed the synesthetic predominance of visually perceived other over kinesthetically felt self will become crucial below for understanding the impact of altered states of consciousness on sense of self in both mystical and schizophrenic experience. We can now approach an answer to the question of how direct experiences of Being or presence, as such, could both be possible for human beings and have the all-inclusive sense of semantic signicance found in mystical states. The metacognitive and introspective developments of later childhood are based on a self referential reaching into spatial metaphors abstracted from the ecological array of perception. Lakoff and Johnson (1999), developing the earlier organismic cognitive psychologies of Arnheim (1969) and Werner and Kaplan (1963), have shown how abstract thought in general, and any representation of an interior stream of consciousness, require the basic physical metaphors or image schemas of center/ periphery, high/low, inside/outside, and varieties of kinesthetic forces. Indeed, for Lakoff and Johnson, as earlier for Emerson (1836) and Jung (1955), it is not just the representation but the very existence of more differentiated human feeling states that requires the felt embodiment of these metaphoric patterns and, in Neissers (1976) terms, their creative schematic rearrangement that is, as the inner sense of ones hopes being kindled, rising, or shattered. The very gradual ontogenetic development of the full access to metaphor reects this necessary crossing of the cognitive modules of person and thing, rst seen in childhood animism and synesthesias, then internalized as the felt sense of meaning accompanying Vygotskys inner speech (Hunt, 2005; Marks, 1978; Vygotsky, 1962). Numinous experiences, as maximally abstract feeling states, are similarly carried and evoked by the felt embodiment of still more general spatial dimensions drawn from the ecological array, such as light, darkness, ow, den-

sity, expansive force, and the openness of spaciousness itself. These abstract synesthetic states are what Laski (1961) has termed the quasi physical sensations of ecstasy. Rather than simply disappearing after the more specic access phases of mysticism, they appear to become more and more subtleas in the felt dissolving of self into an open radiance (Guenther, 1989) or shining (Heidegger, 1962) sensed as Being itself. The conclusion to which we are drawn is that the Being/presence/ isness states at the heart of mystical experiences entail a raising of the most basic dimensions of the ecological self (its kinesthetic presence) and outward perceptual array (space, openness) directly into our self aware, symbolic consciousness. These states would involve a semantic waking up or cross modal embodiment of the ecological self. This conclusion is further supported by the centrality in many meditation traditions, including Tai Chi, of concentrating on the kath or hara, the mid body gravitational center of the body schema, and/or the technique of fully sensing ones arms and legs as an encompassing frame for ongoing experience (Almaas, 1988; Ogawa, 1998). There is also the cross cultural occurrence of standard bodily postures for ecstatic induction and internal energy ow in yoga, shamanism, and pentacostalism (Goodman, 1986). The full realization of Gibsons ecological array affords the multiple levels of mystical experience. That is normally blocked, however, by the more specic metaphoric reuses of spatial dimensions described by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) as the image schemas of applied symbolic intelligence. In mystical experience, it is the ecological self that wakes up as the felt being-here-now of presence, oriented toward a Being or thatness given forth by the horizonal openness of time ahead (Heidegger, 1927), and which now wells forth as the mystery and wholly other qualities of pure novelty central to Ottos denition of the numinous (Hunt, 1995, 2003, 2006). It is a purely abstract but directly experienced form of Gibsons array. The ecological self reemerges as a presence coordinated with an openness of the encompassing array that is typically schematized culturally as God or Absolute. The same symbolic embodiment fundamental to ordinary social mirroring, gesture, and metaphor, would be what now allows this experien-

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tial realization of the abstract felt meanings of the numinous given, of course, a requisite and difcult to achieve degree of detachment and meta cognitive witnessing. More typically, this feeling of the presenceopenness of Being is largely and even barely implicitforming the background context for the more specic and applied symbolic usages which usually block any more direct realization of its totality. These implicit, typically ephemeral feelings can either be of the enhancement of presenceas in a metaphor mediated sense of depth, expansion, surging, or balance or of the deletion and distortions of presence implied in emptiness, sinking, constriction, or fragmentation. Damasio (1994, 1999) has termed these the background feelings of life itself or the sense of Being. Both Ratcliffe (2005) and Smith (1986) have understood such felt meanings as examples of Heideggers primordial Being experiences, and so as specic to an abstract human Being-in-the-world. Damasio (1999), meanwhile, has somewhat confused the place of these feelings of context (Ratcliffe) or world attunement (Smith) by basing them in a primitive or animal core consciousness of bodily states. He thereby misses the key implication of Lakoff and Johnson that it would be precisely the development of a self referential, human symbolic capacity that reaches back into body schema, postural tone, and tactile kinesthesis for the spatial metaphors necessary for both abstract thought and for these more directly embodied felt meanings of Being-in-the-world. Their further intensication becomes mystical experience. We can now return to our rst question and begin to see how all inclusive felt deletions of presence could become the phenomenological demarcation points for both the anhedonia of psychoticism and for a related metapathological loss of meaning in states of spiritual suffering whose maximum intensication is the dark night of the soul in classical mysticism.

Dark Nights Mystical Poverty and Absence

The enhanced self awareness of spontaneous mystical experience and/or prolonged meditative practice allows a direct experience of Being as presence-openness, as a realized state rather

than a concept, and based on a raising of the overall organization of the ecological array into semantic signicance. However, these initially freeing and blissful realizations can entail a later price. In a penultimate stage of mystical experience, prior to its classic completion in states of all encompassing felt unity, the mystic may encounter a form of suffering and loss of meaning variously termed dark night of the soul (Underhill, 1955), mystical poverty (Roberts, 1993), and/or absence (Almaas, 1988). It is here that we nd a deeply disorienting metapathology of emptiness and despair that seems identical in its inner phenomenology to the anhedonia that lies at the heart of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and is also foreshadowed in its earliest symptoms (Sass, 1992). It seems well documented from the descriptive literature of Christian mysticism (Underhill, 1955), Buddhist meditation (Blofeld, 1962), and classical introspectionism (James, 1890) that the sustained direct experience of ongoing consciousness, observed for itself in all its immediacy, entails a felt dissolution of the ordinary social-personal sense of self. It is seen through as a secondary construct from the perspective of a more primary thatness/isness. This release from the ordinary sense of self is central to the expansive, metaphor mediated ecstatic states commonly discussed as the core of religious or transpersonal experience what Underhill refers to as illuminative mysticism. These are the felt states of an enhanced sense of meaning in human existence that is the fruition of spirituality on both a personal and societal level (James, 1902). However, as the mystic gradually moves through these positive illuminations, mediated by abstract metaphors of ow, light, and darkness, toward a nondual unitive consciousness, the experience becomes progressively more subtle. Previous felt meanings of God/Absolute become more and more indistinguishable from stillness, silence, and emptiness. The ostensible absence here of both self and God can then lead to a sense of utter lossand to an unexpected inner crisis of nihilism. After all, neither God nor Being are concretely denable existents. To the extent that the illuminative expansions of earlier felt meanings still included subtle conceptual boundaries of self and Absolute, which is all but inevitable in the

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access stages of spirituality, and these then gradually dissolve, so does the persons prior level of directly numinous experience. One is left with. . .nothing (Almaas, 1988). The space of Being has become progressively raried to the point of ostensible nothingness. To paraphrase Heidegger (1993):
Being becomes indistinguishable from nothing. While encompassing and giving forth all that is, it neither exists as such, nor does it not exist. It is concretely immediate, yet it is not a thing. It is abstract, yet not a thought. It is not anything, yet it is.

This process of felt deletion can be understood as a kind of inevitable semantic satiation, with progressively more subtle levels of realization initially experienced more as the loss of previous more denite understandings rather than as a something in their own right. It is much as in the presentational symbolisms of the expressive arts (and metaphor mediated states of consciousness), where continual exposure to the same favorite music (or the same state) leads to a gradual attening and loss of its initially sensed signicance and fascination. Specic felt meanings must disappear under any sustained gaze, which alone may also allow their later reemergence in renewed forms. This penultimate crisis of loss of meaning in mysticism was termed by St. John of the Crossthe dark night. He distinguished a dark night of the senses, in which even precious symbolic forms become meaningless, a dark night of the emotions, with the attening and indifference of feeling to be further pursued below, and a dark night of the soul, associated with a sense of futility and pointlessness within all prior spiritual illuminations (Happold, 1963). Bernadette Roberts (1993) presents her own contemporary account of such sudden spiritual emptiness:
Instead of seeing the Oneness into which all separateness dissolved, everything now dissolved into an inexplicable emptiness. Where, for so many months there had been something, now there was nothing. In time, this emptiness became increasingly pronounced and difcult to live with. . ..But if the constant sight of emptiness was tedious and difcult to live with, it was as nothing compared to what I came upon one morning as I walked along the beach. Suddenly I was aware that all life around me had come to a complete standstill. Everywhere I looked, instead of life, I saw a hideous nothingness invading and strangling the life out of every object and vista in sight. It was a world being choked to death by an insidious void. . ..The sudden

Underhill (1955) abstracts from classical descriptions of this painful crisis terms such as blankness, stagnation, fatigue and lassitude, stupication, abandonment, and despair. Similar accounts are implied in the sudden loss of visionary and healing powers in shamanism (Eliade, 1964), and in Buddhist experiences of void or shunyata as mere emptiness and futility (Epstein, 1998; Kapleau, 1967). These states of absence can invoke a nihilistic sense of pointlessness and loss of interest in all manifestations of spirituality. They only give way, if they do, when the individual reaches a deeper level of humility, and so sees and surrenders unconscious boundaries of self and world that have stood in the way of the more positive subtleties of nondual unity. Eventually the still more ephemeral mediating spaces and radiating darknesses may reemerge from within the ostensible and painful sense of nothingness. Within traditional Christian mysticism, both the penultimate dark night of mystical poverty and even its potential unitive resolution can seem heretical and nihilistic. This is especially so in the negative theology or cloud of unknowing writings in which the ultimate Godhead is so wholly other and transcendent that it can only be described in terms of what it is not (Happold, 1963). For instance, for the famous 9th century Irish Abbot Erigena no description of God could be either afrmed or denied, since God, as beyond all categories, is the negative of all that is. To paraphrase:
Since God does not thereby have Being, he cannot act or be acted upon. He does not love and is not loved. Neither is He eternal, since that implies relative degrees of measurement. God cannot know the world, since it is and he is not. But the world cannot ultimately exist either, since it has Being only in the mind of God, which is not an existent. God does not know what He is, because He is not anything (Erigena, 9th century).

To begin to feel this while still in an ordinary (dualistic) perspective will be to suffer a loss of meaning. The closeness to a sense of inescapable pointlessness and nihilism was perhaps too

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much for the group of Erigenas apparently outraged and frightened novitiate monks, who are supposed to have stabbed him to death with their pens (Bett, 1964).

Anhedonia and Negative Symptoms

Mystical poverty, absence, and dark night would be the metapathological version of the anhedonia, or radical indifference and attening of affect, often understood as the core of the clinically crippling negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. The rst of the following accounts comes from the modern Indian mystic Gopi Krishna:
I lost all feeling of love for my wife and children. . ..The fountain of love in me seemed to have dried up completely. It appeared as if a scorching blast had raced through every pore in my body, wiping out every trace of emotion. . ..They appeared to me no better than strangers. (Krishna, 1967, p. 58)

It is remarkably similar in its inner phenomenology to these descriptions of anhedonia in schizophrenia:

My husband and I have always been happy together, but now he sits here and might be a complete stranger. I know he is my husband only by his appearance he might be anybody for all I feel toward him. (Landis, 1964, p. 325) . . .I am all the time losing my emotional contact with everything, including myself. . ..On rare occasions I am overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the ghastly destruction that is caused by this creeping uncanny disease. . ..This dead emotionless attitude toward myself. . ..I am as though half drugged. . ..My despair sometimes oods over me. But after each such outburst I become more indifferent. (Landis, 1964, pp. 324 5)

10-year predictor of later psychiatric difculties (Chapman, Chapman, Kwapil, Eckblad, & Zinser, 1994), and equally so for schizotypal and bipolar diagnosesperhaps also consistent with recent views (Eysenck, 1995) that most psychosis falls along an underlying schizoaffective continuum. The relation of anhedonia and related states of loss of meaning to depressive psychosis is complex and has come in for considerable discussion within contemporary phenomenological psychiatry. Schilder (1935) had earlier suggested that the break with consensual reality common to all psychosis, and implicitly within the neuroses, entailed a background depersonalization syndromea general loss of interest and bodily loss of felt aliveness. The intensication of this depersonalization would lead either to the world destruction fantasies of schizophrenia or to the painful nihilism of depressive psychosis (Schilder, 1953). More recently, Stanghellini (2004) has distinguished between a schizotypal anhedonia, based on a sense of indifference, loss of contact, and inner emptiness, and a depressive anhedonia, culminating in the delusions of nonexistence in Cotards syndrome, and based on a more overtly conicted sense of inner deadness. Fuchs (2005) similarly speaks of a sense of disembodiment and affective detachment in schizophrenia, contrasted with a depressive corporalization experienced as a sensed imprisonment within an immobilized bodily self. In both forms, a schizoaffective continuum culminates in a radical loss of all felt meaning. The dark nights of penultimate mysticism may have more of one form or the other.

Chapman, Chapman, and Raulin (1976) developed separate questionnaire inventories for physical and social anhedonia, based on an absence of pleasure in normally satisfying bodily and interpersonal experience. These were strongly correlated with each other in schizophrenic patient samples, and were especially elevated with the so called poor premorbid diagnoses associated with social isolation. They showed essentially no relation to positive symptoms of hallucination and delusion as indexed by their perceptual aberrations questionnaire (Mishlove & Chapman, 1985). On the other hand, it was the social anhedonia scale in normal college age populations that was the best

Transformations of Presence in Mysticism and Psychosis

How does it come about that the dark nights of penultimate mysticism and the anhedonias of chronic psychosis are so inwardly alike, especially given that the former is a development within cultural systems seeking a sense of overall purpose and meaning and the latter emerges in the context of a disastrous social withdrawal and personal collapse? We have seen that both states involve shifts in felt presence or sense of Being, but moving in predominantly different directions. The mystical and meditative traditions, once fully under-

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taken, initiate an enhancement of Being experience, perhaps initially clearest in its illumination or access phases, and whatever its relative interruption in a penultimate dark night. As we will trace in more detail below, the schizophrenias begin with a subtle but painful sense of deletion of presence and inner vitality, which, while interrupted by positive symptomology, can eventually intensify into the anhedonias of chronicity. In both states these shifts in sense of presence seem to be inherently conjoined with an intensied introspective sensitizationa shift to a purely observing or witness set toward ones own experience. The result is to profoundly shift both the sense of personal agency (I can) and ownership (I am) of ones own cognitive and affective mental processessuch that these can now seem created and/or initiated from an outside source although to very different effect in each state. Because the social-personal self is established and maintained by means of a continual self referential awarenessas in Meads (1934) taking the role of the other and its later metacognitive developmentwe can hypothesize that any shift in the underlying felt reality of the embodied core of self will lead automatically to an intensied introspective awareness, and potentially vice versa. We can then speak equally in terms of resultant altered states of consciousness and/or the experience of normally implicit features of ongoing consciousnessthat is, as microgenetically preliminary stages of moment to moment consciousness occluded by the usual applied focus of symbolic cognition (Flavell & Draguns, 1957; Hunt & Chefurka, 1976; Metzinger, 2003). Either way, the person is now sensitized to levels of cognition and feeling that are normally inaccessible, and so neither agentive nor owned in any ordinary sense. In schizophrenia what Sass (1992, 1998, 2000) and Parnas (Parnas & Handest, 2003; Parnas & Sass, 2001) have termed the hyperreexivity of heightened introspective consciousness in psychotic onset seems to arise in response to early, difcult to describe, prodromal symptoms of a diminished sense of presence, easily missed by others and/or often confused with depression. Initially there are vague descriptions of feeling diminished,

not feeling myself, losing contact, feeling not human, losing all desire, not alive, or not feeling present. An introspective hyperreexivity is drawn into this vacuum of deleted presence, and the patientsto-be become more and more aware of background cognitive and affective processes that thereby lose their status as background medium and gain an intrusive thing-like quality. The person may feel that their mind is now like a machine, half awake, or as if someone else, or that they feel disembodied. These earliest signs of physical and social anhedonia generally occur in the context of an already painful social withdrawal and isolation. Both clinically (Sass, 2000) and experimentally (Mishlove & Chapman, 1985), they foreshadow the more extreme loss of meaning and emotional indifference at the core of the negative symptoms of later chronic states. Indeed, it may be that much of the dislike of many patients for standard neuroleptics, based on complaints of their dysphoric and attening affect (King, Burke, Lucas, 1995; Vorganti et al., 1997), follows from their articial induction of the deletion of presence which has already been so confusing and painful. At least the positive and compensatory delusions and hallucinations were part of an increased, if bizarre, sense of meaning that has now been chemically deleted. By contrast, the intensied introspective awareness of meditative practice is initially achieved by a personally heightened agentive effort, generally in the context of an enhanced sense of presence and salience already inspired by direct intuitions of the spiritual teachings sanctioning these demanding practices, and often supported by the intense solidarity of small group membership. The enhancement of presence that accompanies the initially expansive access experiences of meditation or spontaneous religious experience (Guenther, 1984; Walsh, 1977) will then draw its own heightened introspective sensitization to normally implicit levels and features of consciousness, which are then also experienced as automatic, involuntary, and other but in this very different organismic and social context. In both mysticism and psychosis, then, there is an unusually intensied, primarily observa-

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tional, taking the role of the other toward ones own ongoing, moment by moment stream of consciousness. Since this metacognitive capacity is already linked developmentally to theory of mind, allowing the inferring of mental states in others, ones own background conscious states have no choice but to emerge as other to a self that is now purely detached and observing to a degree not part of ordinary pragmatic living. One is now dialoguing with an externalized reection of ones own stream of consciousness (see also Hunt, 1995). However, in the subjectively perplexing vacuum of a deleted presence in schizophrenia, these states feel predominantly invasive and mechanical, whereas in the organismic context of an enhanced ecological self they become freeing and spontaneously expansive. Brett (2002) offers a corresponding analysis in which the mystics lack of identication with the ordinary self and its thoughts allows a nonreactivity and inner freedom, whereas in psychosis the contracting self has been phenomenally invaded by primitive identications with threatening others. We will consider below the neurocognitive and experimental evidence for a more integrated bodily awareness, spatial orientation, and physical balance in meditative and mystical states, along with their respective disorganization in psychosis, as further support for the notion of different organismic contexts for these overlapping transformations of consciousness. It remains here to trace more precisely the series of related stages leading, respectively, to psychotic anhedonia and spiritual dark night.

Comparative Phases of Spiritual and Psychotic Experience Heightened Introspection in First Rank Symptoms and in Meditation/Creativity
The most direct manifestations of Sass notion of a pathological hyperreexivity are the so-called rst rank symptoms of schizophreniainitially proposed as such by Schneider (1959) but since found throughout the wider schizoaffective continuum of acute psychoses (Mellor, 1970). Here the heightened introspective sensitivity to cognitive, affective, and conative processes, whose thematic content may at this point still be normal and situation

appropriate, is manifested in a sensed loss of their agency and sometimes ownership. Patients report made thoughts, made feelings, made actions, thought insertions and deletions, and automatically repeated thoughts out loud. The grammatically attenuated nature of such reports (Schreber, 1903) makes clear that what is being observed is the automaticity and truncation of the normally implicit processes of Vygotskys (1962) inner speech. What is most striking in these descriptions of what seems ones own mind more or less done by someone or something else is their third person invasive quality. What are logically ones subjective states come to have an increasingly thing-like mechanical quality, which will later become part of the literalization of metaphoric understanding central to thought disorder. The introspected consciousness in mindfulness meditation (Walsh, 1977), as well as in classical introspectionist psychology (Hunt, 1986, 1995), has a similar quality of not being done by oneself, but by some deeper, nonvoluntary force. William James (1890) states that it would be more phenomenologically accurate to say not I think, I feel, but rather it thinks, it feels, in the same sense that we say it rains. Thoughts and feelings are felt to unfold on their own, an observation also common to those describing the spontaneity of sudden creative insights. Thus, Nietzsche (1886, p. 397), in a widely quoted passage, says: A thought comes when it wishes, and not when I wish; so it is a perversion of the facts. . .to say that the subject I is the condition of the predicate think. However, the context of an enhanced sense of presence in these meditative and creative states, rather than its contraction, is reected in their felt sense of spontaneity and expansiveness. It is not, as with rst rank symptoms, that somehow these are not my thoughts, someone else must be doing/inicting them, but these are not my thoughts, they are freed and released from a deeper reality. It is a context of presence expansion and a vividly sensed freedom. The metaphors of ow and luminosity underlying these descriptions feel spontaneously animated from within. It is why they are sought and valued, rather than dreaded.

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The Compensatory Enhancement of Presence in Positive Symptoms and Its Continued Expansion in Mystical Illumination
The second phase of the schizophrenic continuumits hallucinatory and delusional, or positive symptomsare related to the corresponding metaphor mediated, illuminations of classical mysticism both as sudden intensications of felt presence and as the potential points of spontaneous interchange and reversal between these two otherwise distinct developmental directions. This is seen both in the spontaneous remissions of psychoses that can be mediated by mystical ecstatic states (Boisen, 1936; Bowers, 1974; Van Dusen, 1972) and in the psychotic or near psychotic breakdowns occasionally following immediately after intense mystical experience (Krishna, 1967; Lukoff, 1985). Again, however, the differing organismic and personal contexts are clear. Illuminative mystical states are further intensications of an enhancement and deepening of presence often felt as expressing a sort of abstract animism or cosmic consciousness of the universe itself (Bucke, 1901). The positive symptoms of schizophrenia partially correspond to these spiritual states because they reect a compensatory enhancement of presence and sense of meaning, however bizarre and often terrifying. They can be regarded, as also with Freud (1911), as an attempted recovery from the longer term anhedonic deletion of chronic psychosis. A mark of this heightened salience in psychosis, however, is its literalization and thing-like objectication of consciousnessthe person is literally Christ reborn, or strange electrical energies move through a physically hollowed body. A major indication that both these forms of enhanced presence entail the semantic waking up or incarnation of the ecological or bodily self comes from the characteristic transformations of body image in meditative and schizophrenic states. These can be understood as variations on the largely unremarked inner phenomenology of the body image rst described by Schilder (1928, 1935, 1942). Prolonged introspectionist observations of the stationary body and of tactile-kinesthetic illusions caused by elevators and amusement rides showed two lay-

ers to the tactile-kinesthetic side of the body image: (a) An outer boundary, not actually coinciding with the skin itself and felt as indenite and open (i.e., to expansion or invasion); (b) an inner core, often felt as hollow or more or less ephemeral, and sometimes with areas of greater weight/density in the lower abdomen or the base of the skull. This core can be experienced as moving beyond the actual body, in whole or part, as a tactile-kinesthetic aftereffect of vestibular stimulation. This latter phantom selfsometimes passing through the head and out into surrounding spaceseemed similar to the more limited phantom limb effects following amputation. Schilder (1935) was led to the conclusion that the inner felt core of the body image is phenomenologically identical with, and the source of, the more limited phantom limb effect, that is, that the felt body image is already this same phantom. The relation to out of body experience also seems clear, both in its kinestheticvestibular sensations of induction and its sometimes less dened elliptical shape (Green, 1968; Metzinger, 2003). The immediate tactilekinesthetic patternings of this introspected body image, so different from the visually perceived and common sense deniteness of the body, can themselves undergo direct synesthetic translations into corresponding visualized forms (Schilder, 1942). These kinesthetic-visual translations would then be the sources for the typical and partially overlapping transformations of the body image in schizophrenia and in subtle body meditational practices. Body image hallucinations have been widely discussed as a key part of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia (Chapman, 1978; Landis, 1964), wherein ones body seems not ones own, changed in shape or size, hollow and invaded by bizarre forces, or melting into external surroundings and objects. Andras Angyal (1935, 1936, 1937) seems to have been the rst to suggest that such body hallucinations reected an involuntary introspective sensitization to the features of Schilders inner and outer body image. Angyals patients described hollowness of the inner body, sometimes lled with strange electrical currents of kinesthetic motion, or sometimes in terms of specic, often frightening, holes or gaps in stomach, heart, or head. At other times, these inner forces were felt to pass outside the actual body into the room

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and into potential interpersonal relation with others, based, Angyal thought, on kinestheticvestibular aftereffects of actual and imagined movements. That such introspective sensitizations are themselves also engaging the gestural-semantic embodiment basic to metaphor generation, and central for Lakoff and Johnson to all thought and language, follows from clinical observations that these seemingly bizarre sensations, so confusing and emotionally upsetting to patients, often have for the observer clear metaphoric references of which the patient seems largely unconscious. The patient may complain my head is hollow and empty in confusional states, or my heart has been taken out of my chest with interpersonal abandonment (Freud, 1915; Searles, 1965). Searles (1965) and more recently Stanghellini (2004) suggest that these sensations are frozen or literalized versions of metaphors whose fully felt meanings have become unbearable. Bizarre, synesthetically amplied sensations of emptiness, fragmentation, and decomposing are all too autosymbolically depictive of what is happening socially and personally in their lives. With Stanghellini (2004), these states are part of a protested, but ultimately defensive disembodiment and disincarnation. They would follow from the progressive deletions of felt presence in the semantically elaborated ecological self of schizophrenia. I have already shown elsewhere (Hunt, 1995) how the classical body centers or chakras of the Eastern meditation traditions and the inner column of space or hollow body experiences involved in Kundalini energization states, are based on the semantic enhancement of the inner form of Schilders body image here in the context of a progressively expanding sense of presence. The chakras, and related lataif system of Susm (Almaas, 1988), can be understood as synesthetic felt meanings emerging from the fusion of tactile-kinesthetic segments of the body image with vivid imagistic colors, geometric or mandala designs, and vocally expressive sounds or mantras. The resultant enhancements of felt presence are linked to the transformation of standard conictual emotions (fear, rage, jealousy), as also released in bioenergetic body therapies, into the metaphorically mediated illuminations of ecstasy described by Laski (1961) and Almaas (1988).

On a more general level, Almaas (1986) has independently distinguished between an outer, indenite or open, body image boundary through which numinous states are felt to pass expansively outwardand an inner or core body imagewhich can be synesthetically experienced as a dense, undifferentiated, and all encompassing black space. Progressive experiences of this dense black space on levels of more and more potential subtlety are associated with nondual realizations of an all-originating voidat rst raising fears of personal annihilation and death. We could add that it is the inherent coordination of ecological self and surrounding array that allows this fully realized synesthetic fusion of inner density with black open spaciousness, and so affords the nondual unitive experience of classical mysticism. We can now also begin to see how the increasingly subtle/semantically satiating levels of this dissolving black spaciousness could reach a level of ephemerality and sheer subtlety of felt meaning such that they sink beneath the unconsciously held boundaries of self basic to ordinary social and personal identity. This would usher in the hopefully penultimate dark nightthe sudden, painful absence or nonexistence of the very enhancements of presenceopenness previously realized.

Deletions of Presence in Anhedonia and the Mystical Dark Night

To return then to mystical dark nights and poverty, it becomes understandable how this penultimate phase, so variable in its actual occurrence and depth, could have essentially the same inner phenomenology as the more terminal anhedonias of schizoaffective states. At the same time, it would remain only a relative or meta pathology, allowing the individual a more or less, if now somewhat muted, ordinary functioning within a consensual social reality. However painful the diminishment and felt loss of presence, it emerges within the organismic context of a longer term enhancement. Its phenomenal disappearance will expose previously unconscious and contracted layers of personal and bodily self. Their gradual later transparency and release will have the potential to reveal the more subtle levels of Being-experience that must for now appear as a literal emptiness and nihilistic pointlessness.

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The anhedonia at the core of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and the penultimate dark nights of spirituality can thus mutually illuminate each other, as the extremes of the spontaneous rhythms of the expansion and contraction of vitality that are the normal existential background of the sense of self. In schizoaffective anhedonia the longer term tendency toward loss of felt presence nally completes itself, whereas in mystical poverty a deepening of meditative witnessing reveals a nonsubstantiality within previous enhancements of presence only to be transformed into more subtle levels of unitive mysticism with a more complete letting go of the ordinary boundaries of self. We could say that schizophrenic anhedonia distills the despair of the spiritual dark night, without its previous tacit assurance of a steadily expanded presence. Indeed, some of the pain of the dark night comes from the memory of this contrast and the awareness of a seemingly complete loss of meaning in the very midst of its ostensibly more authentic realization. This broader context contains spiritual despair as a meta version of the more total life context of suffering in the patient.

By contrast the full semantic embodiment of open spaciousness confers an inner spontaneity and freedomthe sense of Being itself as magical display and gift:
With the realization of free space in which all things are identied, anything that emerges is known to be unborn in its origin. This is the attainment of the ultimate refuge. . .Detached, without any tendency to slow the natural progression from unitary totality to. . .the following moment, no fear arises. . ..Rather there is a continuous sense of amazement at the ineffable beauty and sublimity of. . .the perfection of the moment. (Tulku, 1973, p. 106)

Chronic Contraction Versus Unitive Release

The contrast between the frozen sense of space in chronic schizophrenia and the sense of openness in nondual unitive mysticism is striking. In schizophrenia, there is a mechanical quality of stasis that eventually permeates the actual ecological array:

Both of these extreme forms reach into and semantically incarnate the structure of ecological self and array as a whole, but in the differently directed contexts of contraction and withdrawal on the one hand, and increasing openness and inner freedom on the other. There is considerable experimental evidence for these contrasting directions of felt presence in research showing that outward measures of the embodied ecological self, in terms of physical balance, spatial orientation, and spatial cognitive abilities, are associated with contrasting forms of consciousness transformation forming a continuum linking the extremes of classical mysticism and psychosis.

II. EXPERIMENTAL AND NEUROCOGNITIVE REFLECTIONS OF PRESENCE: BALANCE, SPATIAL COGNITION, AND THE ECOLOGICAL SELF Well short of classical mysticism and clinical schizoaffective states, we can distinguish between altered states of consciousness that have an integrative and creatively enhancing impact and those more dissociative and disintegrative in their personal and cognitive effects. The key to the neurocognitive bases of these more positive versus more negative transformations of consciousness will come from a reconsideration and extension of Paul Schilders (1942) observations on the relation of psychiatric hallucinatory syndromes to specic decits in the vestibular balance system and in closely related orientational and spatial analytic abilities. For Schilder these syndromes reect an underlying disorganization in the body image as the foundation of the sense of personal self. In turn, we will see that the more integrative transformations of consciousness associated with spontaneous mystical experiences, meditative states, and lucid and creative/metaphoric forms of dreaming are correlated with superior performance on these same measures of physical bal-

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ance and spatial skills. Meanwhile, and exactly as Schilder would have predicted, tendencies to dissociative states and nightmares are associated with balance and spatial decits, but less extremely than for adult and childhood schizophrenia. These ndings are what one would expect if integrative and disintegrative states of consciousness involve the semantic engagement or raising of the basic form of the ecological self into self-referential awareness either as an enhanced or deleted sense of existential presence.

Integrative Versus Dissociative States of Consciousness

There is by now considerable evidence of a single dimension of individual difference for proclivity to altered state experience, including hypnotizability (Hilgard, 1968), creative and impactful dreaming (Hunt, 1989), responsiveness to meditation (Travis, Arenander, & DuBois, 2004), psychedelic drugs (Bresnick & Levin, 2004; Fischer, 1975), and spontaneous synesthetic and related imagistic experiences (Glicksohn, Salinger, & Roychman, 1992), as well as dissociative states (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) and the perceptual aberration and magical ideation components of schizotypy (Brod, 1997). These are all strongly correlated with questionnaire measures variously termed imaginative involvement (Hilgard, 1974), fantasy proneness (Lynn & Rhue, 1988), transliminality (Thalbourne, Houran, Alias, & Brugger, 2001), and the most widely used, Tellegen and Atkinsons (1974) imaginative absorption. These questionnaires have in common items indexing the tendency to become absorbed in imagination, nature, aesthetic/creative activities, and/or spontaneous subjective statesin short to intrinsically value an immediate experiential attitude over a more instrumental and pragmatic one. Imaginative absorption, however measured, is a component of the more general dimension variously termed openness to experience, in McCrae and Costas big ve factor analytic model of personality (along with neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) (McCrae, 1993) or creativity/psychoticism in Eysencks (1995) and Claridges (1987) earlier competing big three (with neuroticism and extraversion) (Hunt, Dougan, Grant, & House, 2002). There is evidence that this general dimension of experiential openness,

whether measured in terms of McCrae or Eysenck, is correlated with increased dopaminergic activation (DeYoung et al., 2005) and/or enhanced and unusually coherent EEG theta across multiple brain regions (Glicksohn & Naffuliev, 2005; Stough et al., 2001). The latter effect has also been reported for advanced TM meditators (Travis & Pearson, 2000). These psychophysiological ndings are consistent with a heightened sensitivity to novelty that appears in its most intense form in the sense of awe and fascination basic to both Ottos denition of the numinous core of spiritual experience and Sullivans sense of the uncanny (Sullivan, 1953) in acute psychotic onset. Not surprisingly, given the partial overlap in the mid phase phenomenologies of classical mysticism and clinical psychosis discussed above, absorption/openness is a strikingly bivalent dimension. It correlates, on the one hand, with creativity (McCrae, 1993), metaphor utilization and sensitivity (Hunt & Popham, 1987), empathy (Wickramasekera & Szlyk, 2003), and general imaginativeness (Wild, Kuiken, & Schopocher, 1995), and, on the other, with schizotypy and narcissism (Widiger & Trull, 1992), dissociative identity disorder (Levin, Sirof, Simeon, & Guralnick, 2004; Waldo & Merritt, 2000), traumatization (Irwin, 2001), and hypochondria (McClure & Lilienfeld, 2002). Recent research has found the simultaneous presence of integrative versus disintegrative forms of absorption/openness within the same study. Hunt et al. (2002) compared undergraduate populations on Tellegens measure of imaginative absorption, as the most generic measure of experiential openness, with the Hood (1975) questionnaire of mystical experiences, as indexing the more positive forms of high absorption, and with the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986) as indexing more negative forms of absorption. Whereas the Hood questionnaire and Dissociative Experiences scale were both strongly correlated with imaginative absorption, they were not correlated with each other and only the dissociative scale went with neuroticism. These different congurations for positive and negative forms of absorption are consistent with Lynn and Rhues (1988) nding of two different childhood developmental pathways to high levels of adult fantasy proneness, with those also showing higher levels of MMPI psychoticism

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coming from a background of childhood trauma and isolation, in contrast to another group characterized by parental encouragement of spontaneous creative and fantasy activities. We get a picture here of a background, partly genetic, predisposition to a sensitive openness (McCrae et al., 2001), which crossed by trauma is more likely to lead to dissociative vulnerability, while with familial support, and in the absence of major developmental destabilization in sense of self, will be more constructively used in the context of creativity and spirituality. We would also expect the existence of mixed forms along any continuum linking the more distinct extremes of mysticism and psychosis. Barrons (1969) original work on highly creative artists and scientists found a combination of unusually high scores on MMPI psychoticism and simultaneous endorsement of ego strength words reecting sensed embodiment and presence, such as vitality, energy, spontaneity, and strength. Meanwhile, a factor analysis of the Hood questionnaire of mystical experiences found separate dimensions for felt unity, noetic understanding, and dissolution of self (Hood et al., 2001). In contrast to studies showing correlations of the overall Hood and related scales with measures of emotional stability (Hunt et al., 2002; MacDonald, 2000), Hood et al. found the dissolution of self factor signicantly related to questionnaire psychoticism, depression, and somatization of stress. There is also some evidence that a personal spiritual search in itself can entail painful feelings of meaninglessness. Day and Peters (1999) found that both the members of new age spiritual movements and traditional Christian churches were signicantly higher than a nonreligious control group on introvertive anhedoniaperhaps illustrating the relative diminution in sense of meaning that may motivate the search for enhanced presence underlying all spirituality. The elevation of the new age group on the positive subfactor of perceptual aberrations however, also a correlate of Tellegen absorption, shows the enhancement of salience inherent to more explicitly experiential forms of spirituality.

Schilder on Destabilization of the Spatially Embodied Self in Hallucinatory States

Paul Schilder (1886 1940), whose work remains sadly under assimilated in the context of

current interest in consciousness as presence and phenomenal embodiment (Damasio, 1999; Gallagher, 2005), offered key observations toward a theory linking destabilization of the body image, as core of the personal-social ego, with psychotic and neurological syndromes of hallucination. Central to his highly original cross-disciplinary writings, bridging neurology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, is the notion that all consciousness of the environment is inseparable from self embodiment. Schilder (1935) also applies this notion of postural embodiment in all outward perception to the symbolic level of body image as necessarily social, or as we would now say, cross modally mirrored. Accordingly, the social withdrawal and collapse of the sense of self in pathology will also be reected in postural distortions, spatial disorientation, and dizziness. We have seen that Schilder (1928, 1935, 1942) identied the human body image as multilayered and represented on parietal (predominantly right hemisphere), vestibular, and cerebellar levels. He was especially struck by the way in which neural damage on any of these levels could produce similar hallucinatory syndromes, synesthetically elaborating kinesthetic distortions of the body image. Schilder (1953) concluded that a syndrome of depersonalization and feelings of unreality, as a loss of felt embodiment, ran to varying degrees through the subjective experiences of both neurosis and psychosis. It was also linked to dizziness and spatial disorientation, and so readily opens to the above visual-spatial anomalies. Depersonalization also entailed a defensive and narcissistically paralyzing self awareness, the extremes of which seem identical to Sasss (1992) more recent ndings on the role of hyper-reexivity in rst rank symptoms. Schilder (1942) saw schizophrenia itself as a functional interparietal syndrome, in which a profound social withdrawal of the self disconnects the kinesthetic-parietal and visualoccipital sides of the body image, releasing visual and somatic hallucinations. He located a similar hallucinatory syndrome in mescalin, and so it is especially intriguing that later psychedelic drug research found that disorganizing bad trip reactions, in contrast to experiences of meaning enhancement, were also based on anomalies of the body imageincluding depersonalization, bodily weakness, and extreme dizziness (Linton & Langs, 1964).

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For Schilder (1942), a vestibular syndrome of dizziness and disorientation is incipient in all psychopathology, since the conict of competing emotional reactions must also evoke, in the core of the bodily self, the perception of competing physical forces, and so trigger vestibular disorientationincluding the automatic eye movements of visual nystagmus. Indeed, dizziness is a potential physiological component of anxiety itself. Intense anxiety often includes within its phenomenology a vestibular imbalance syndrome of vertigo, bodily numbness and weakness, somatic sensations of interior sinking in the lower body, pressure in the head and eyes, and the feelings of nausea that would also be part of a disgust/avoidance reaction as the organic core of repression and defense (Angyal, 1941; Schilder, 1942). Along these lines, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1962) labeled what he termed the primal agonies of early infancy as including sensations of falling forever, fragmentation, and dissolving or disappearing, while Tustin (1986) found early memories of terrifying sensations of falling into an innite black nothingness and related spatial disorientations in recovering autistic and schizophrenic children. In more recent clinical research, not only is a vestibular dysfunction syndrome prevelant in clinical panic disorder and agoraphobia (Jacob et al., 1996), but physiologically caused nystagmus and vertigo often become part of a self-perpetuating functional anxiety disorder in their own right. The fear of provoking further sensations of vertigo, with its deep emotional distress, in turn becomes a conditioned signal for panic, nausea, and dizziness. Chronic vertigo becomes its own form of anxiety neurosis (Godemann, Koffroth, Neu, & Heusser, 2004; Yardley, 1994). Whereas Schilders concern was entirely with neurological and psychiatric hallucinatory syndromes, it is also well known that intense vestibular activation has been a traditional, cross cultural method for the induction of ecstatic and transpersonal states of consciousnessas in repetitive dancing, Su dervish spinning, and shamanic balancing (Siegel, 1979). Accordingly we can expand Schilders hypothesis of dysfunctional balance and spatial disorientation as manifestations of body image decit in hallucinatory syndromes, and suggest that the more integrative, transpersonal states of consciousnesswith their enhanced sense of

presenceshould be most available to those with a greater sense of embodiment, as outwardly indexed by good physical balance, spatial orientation, and spatial analytic skills such as block designs and embedded gures tests. In turn, we could expect that the more disintegrative alterations of consciousness, where, as above, higher absorption is crossed with trauma and neuroticism/psychoticism, will be associated with relative decits in these same balance and spatial skills.1

Integrative States of Consciousness and Enhanced Bodily Balance and Spatial Abilities
There is much cumulative evidence for the association of superior performance in physical balance and spatial-analytic abilitiesas at least partial indicators of embodied presence with states of consciousness and forms of imaginative absorption that could be considered as broadly creative, integrative, and/or spiritual. Integrative or enhanced forms of dreaming, for instance, include: (a) lucid dreamsthe self awareness and identication of the dream while it is in process, and a capacity that is part of some Eastern spiritual traditions and more frequent in Westerners practicing long-term meditation (Hunt, 1991; Travis & Pearson, 2004); (b) the archetypal/mythological form of dreaming of
1 Measures of physical balance and spatial skills as indicative of integrative versus disintegrative states of consciousness are reminiscent of the older cognitive style literature on eld independence versus eld dependence (Witkin and Goodenough, 1981). These researchers used ability to adjust the body and/or a visual stimulus to the vertical upright and the embedded gures test as twin measures of the greater autonomy, inner orientation, and higher self-esteem of eld independence despite the difculty of understanding cognitive ability as a style. Like the measures of physical balance and block designs in states of consciousness research, these measures of eld independence only minimally correlated or factored together. They seem better conceived now in terms of coherence of the body image in Schilders sense, since it is their separate correlation with integrative vs. disintegrative forms of imaginative absorption that would make them partial outward indicators of the embodied sense of self. Obviously physical balance on its own will often be determined by extent and kind of athletic training, whereas spatial analytic skills are to a large degree part of a nonverbal abstract intelligence and its educational development. It is the component of each that overlaps as outward expressions of the embodied self that is under discussion here.

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such interest to Jung and involving an enhanced creative imagination (Cann & Donderi, 1986; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990); and (c) higher levels of dream bizarreness, as the core dimension of dreaming correlated in numerous studies with waking measures of creativity (Hunt, 1989). Consistent with the enhanced sense of kinesthetic presence in both lucid and archetypal dreaming, and often associated with peak or ecstatic feelings, repeated studies have found superior performance on measures of physical balance (walking a balance beam, adaptive nystagmus reactivity) in subjects reporting higher levels of dream lucidity (Gackenbach & Snyder, 1988) and archetypal dreaming (Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Lucid dreamers are also signicantly better, compared to controls, in block designs and the embedded gures test (Gackenbach & Snyder, 1988). Higher levels of lucid and archetypal dreaming are both correlated with the Hood mystical experiences questionnaire (Hunt, Gervais, Shearing-Johns, & Travis, 1992; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Meanwhile, the more general dimension of dream bizarreness has been signicantly associated with block designs (Foulkes, 1982; Pariak & Hunt, 1992), greater kinestehetic content in dream reports (Slater & Hunt, 1997), and with superior balance beam performance (Slater & Hunt, 1997; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Poor balance may operate here as a kind of repressive or contractive mechanism in dream formation, inhibiting creative bizarreness through a self inhibition induced by reactive disorientation. This model is supported by ndings that articial vestibular/postural stimulation during REM sleep can also be a specic inducer of unusually intense dream bizarreness (Nielsen, 1993). A similar pattern emerges with mystical, meditative, and related transpersonal states. The Hood questionnaire of mystical experience has been signicantly correlated with superior balance and spatial orientation (Ayers, Beaton, & Hunt, 1999; Swartz & Seginer, 1981). Higher performance levels on block designs and/or embedded gures are also found in individuals reporting higher levels of mystical experience (Hunt et al., 1992), long-term meditators (Alexander et al., 1990), adult subjects claiming early childhood experiences of mystical and out-of-body states (Hunt et al., 1992), and adult

subjects reporting higher levels of out-of-body experience (Cook & Irwin, 1983).

Disintegrative States of Consciousness and Spatial/Orientational Decit

A reciprocal picture emerges for nightmare intensity and frequency. We can consider nightmares as indicators of disintegrative consciousness in the context of dreaming, also supported by their association at higher levels with schizotypicality and dissociative tendencies (Belicki, 1992; Claridge, Clark, & Davis, 1997; Levin & Raulin, 1991). Thus, Ayers et al. (1999) and Spadafora and Hunt (1990) found a signicant relationship between nightmares and poor balance beam performance. Adult nightmare frequency, which is negatively related to the Hood questionnaire of mystical experiences, is also associated with decits in spatial ability on block designs and embedded gures tests (Slater & Hunt, 1997; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Adult recall of higher levels of childhood night terrors is similarly linked to lower performance on embedded gures and block designs (Hunt et al., 1992). In terms of a more general schizotypal dimension of waking personality, Guralnik et al. (2000) found poor performance on the Wechsler Block Designs to offer the best cognitive performance discrimination between a clinical sample of depersonalized patients and normal controls. Meanwhile, there has been some debate over whether a vulnerability to schizophrenia, as based on high absorption/openness combined with low intelligence (Eysenck, 1995), may actually rest predominantely on performance decrements specic to spatial abilities, especially as indexed by block designs (Aylward, Walker, & Bettes, 1984; Berenbaum & Fuiita, 1994). Such views are consistent with a predominant right hemisphere decrement in schizotypicality and schizophrenia that could be reected in vulnerabilities in self-awareness, metaphor, and spatial ability (Richardson, Mason, & Claridge, 1997). The most striking deciencies in spatial orientation have been found in balance and vestibular functioning in both adult and childhood schizophrenia. Angyal and Blackman (1940) were the rst to measure the extreme vestibular dysfunction that Schilder (1935) had suggested as the heart of body image deletion in schizo-

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phrenia. They found essentially no nystagmus eye movement response to inner ear caloric stimulation in a group of chronic catatonic schizophrenics who also reported the syndrome of hallucinatory body image anomalies discussed above. Their performance was entirely nonoverlapping with normal controls. Similarly, Ornitz and Ritvo (1968) found no nystagmus response whatsoever in a group of autistic children, who also showed typical postural anomalies, arm apping and whirling, and aversion to elevators. Pollack and Krieger (1958) found the same radical diminishment of nystagmus and postural orientation in a group of older schizophrenic children. More recent research with adult schizophrenics, varying in terms of subtype and medication, gives a less clear picture, showing more an irregularity in strength of nystagmus rather than its absence (Levy, Holzman, & Proctor, 1983). Jones and Pivak (1983, 1985) also found decreased nystagmus velocity and an inability to suppress induced nystagmus through voluntary visual xation, consistent with organic syndromes with parietal and cerebellar damage, as well as with autopsy ndings of cerebellar deterioration in some chronic schizophrenics (Martin & Albers, 1995). A central vestibular-cerebellar decit seems also to be involved in the anomalous smooth pursuit eye movement tracking widely replicated in schizophrenia, schizotypicality, and bipolar psychosis (Holzman, Levy, & Proctor, 1976; Sweeney et al., 1994; Chen et al., 1999). Tracking anomalies are seen by some researchers as a biological marker for vulnerability to schizophrenia and schizoaffective psychosis (Holzman, Solomon, Levin, & Waternaux, 1984; Lencer, Trillenberg-Krecker, Schwinger, & Arolt, 2003). Ross et al. (1996) and Siever et al. (1994) found these eye movement pursuit decits to be signicantly greater in anhedonic and socially withdrawn (negative symptom) patients. Yet the decits are inversely related to the perceptual aberration scale of positive schizotypy, also considered as a correlate of imaginative creativity (Brod, 1997) and positive forms of absorption (Goulding, 2004; McCreery & Claridge, 2002). That the tracking decit may be more than simply genetic follows from Irwin, Green, & Marshs (1999) ndings in a large normal sample of a signicant relation between tracking decits and reports of child-

hood trauma, suggesting a more general relation to the disintegrative side of absorption/ openness. Eye movements are determined both by attentional visual scanning functions, which are predominantly frontal and prefrontal, and by cerebellar functions related to posture, body movement, and balance, with the extreme of cerebellar predominance seen in the spinning induced, automatic compensatory eye movements of the nystagmus reex itself (Kolb & Whishaw, 1996; Pompanieno, 1974). One would expect constraints on the attentional scanning component where an extra load has been placed on the balance/postural component of the body image, whether through a genetic basis for schizophrenia itself, or a similarly demonstrated (McCrae et al., 2001) genetic basis for the more general personality dimension of openness to experience when crossed by vulnerability to trauma and/or destructive familial relations. Indeed, Pivak, Bylsma, & Cooper (1988) found normal tracking velocities in both schizophrenics and organic cerebellar patients under darkened stimulation conditions that eliminate peripheral attentional distractions. The hypothesis that disturbances in the body image with psychosis, and potentially with trauma in general, would put an extra load on the cerebellar component of eye movements may also make sense of certain therapeutic techniques common to both bioenergetic therapies (Reich, 1949) and the more recent Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) (Shapiro, 1995). In both, deliberately sustained large eye movements while reexperiencing traumatic memories are associated with a signicant lessening of anxietyand even in some cases the sudden release of expansive transpersonal states (Almaas, 1986; Parnell, 1996). A catatonoid freezingalso referred to as tonic immobility (Gallup, 1974)is part of the most basic organismic response to unavoidable traumatic stress, a general avoidance response that often entails a xed staring (Stern, 1988). Accordingly, deliberate and sustained slow eye rolling, or the side to side movements of EMDR, would at least temporarily break the patterns of constrained eye movements that have been imprinted on the level of an original postural freezingand so requiring an extra cerebellar contribution as part of that defense. The theoretical basis for these

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eye movement therapies follows from Schilder on balance and posture as central to the embodied self and its defensive contraction.

A Mystical-Schizophrenic Continuum of Presence and Neurocognitive Coherence

There is considerable evidence that mystical and meditative practices, and schizophrenia and schizotypicality, are the extremes of a more general continuum of presence and feeling of reality, whose neurocognitive manifestations are an enhancement versus diminution of cortical connectivity and EEG coherence. The above review of enhanced spatial abilities and balance in transpersonal states and dysfunction in psychosis gets its further context as part of this broader connectivity dimension. Andreasen, Paradiso, & OLeary (1998) have suggested that the core of schizophrenic pathology is a dysmetric failure of cortical connectivity, including cerebellar based coordination and timing, which is certainly consistent with research on reduced blood ow/brain shrinkage in frontal, temporal, parietal, and cerebellar regions (Nierenberg et al., 2005; Phillips & Silverstein, 2003). Buchanan et al. (2004) found a pattern of decreased connection between prefrontal areas and the heteromodal association areas in the parietal and angular gyrus regions in schizophrenia. Heteromodal parietal areas are widely seen as key to the cross modal integration capacity basic not only to the human symbolic capacity in general (Geschwind, 1965; Taylor, 2003), but also to the integration of higher level visual and kinesthetic patterns that are fundamental to the body image (Gallagher, 2005; Schilder, 1935), and so also to social mirroring. A right parietal diminution and/or disconnection would be part of both the curious form of anosognosia in schizophrenic patients, wherein they often lack any self awareness of their disorder as such (Gambini, Barbieri, & Scarone, 2004), and for widespread ndings of decit in theory of mind measures of understanding of others cognitive processes (Brune, 2005). Attesting to the multiple layers of a potentially integrated sense of self, a temporary remission of organic anosognosia can be induced by stimulating lower level vestibular functioning (Bisiach, Rusconi, & Vallar, 1991; Storrie-Baker et al., 1997). It also seems relevant that articial centrifugal spinning

triggering extreme nystamuswas widely used as a treatment for psychotic states in the early 1800s (Pain, 2006). Meanwhile, research on meditative and ecstatic states has shown specic involvements in these same parietal areas (Azari et al., 2001; Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, & dAquili, 2003; Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck, 2004). To the extent that these regions are basic to a symbolic system linking sense of self and other as cognitive reciprocals of each other, as also seems implied by parietal correlates of out-ofbody states (Blanke et al., 2004), ndings of enhanced parietal-frontal connectivity (Tononi, 2005) are consistent with traditional mystical accounts of an accelerated unselng, or loss of egocentrism, and an increased empathy and compassion for others as coemergent with the deeper sense of presence developed in these practices. The full semantic embodiment of ecological self would indeed have to include these right parietal areas, along with the cerebellar roots of the body image, and so would entail a related development of social mirroring. Advanced meditation involves an attunement to a background eld of consciousness, whose increased meditative access seems to be correlated with an unusually coherent EEG in the theta bandwidth, across anterior and posterior regions and left and right hemispheres (Travis & Pearson, 2000). Widespread EEG theta would appear to be the level of activation which affords a maximized coherence across the widest possible neural areas, still lower levels passing into unconsciousness and higher risking seizure (Fischer, 1975). We have already seen that theta enhancement is also part of the neural background for the individual difference dimension variously dened as openness (Strough et al., 2001) and psychoticism/creativity (Glicksohn & Naftuliev, 2005). Widespread theta coherence as the setting for a maximum attunement to consciousness as eld operates on a level of central activation just short of sleep onset, and indeed it takes long practice before meditative witnessing can be sustained and deepened at this level. This ts well with the phenomenology of developing mystical realization, such that its expressive metaphors of ow, luminosity, and radiating darkness become progressively more subtle and ephemeral as the initial phases of intensive illumination are attenuated. Staying with this pro-

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cess will require an ever more subtle attunement at lower and lower levels of neural activation and potential higher coherence that are themselves easily disrupted. Some such derailment must follow from remaining, perhaps hitherto unconscious, xations in sense of self that are deeply imprinted at the postural balance and spatial orientation levels of the body image, pushing the meditator back out of the delicate level of psychophysiological attunement that might alone help to resolve them. The ostensible disappearance of hitherto liberating expansions of presence that now require these more subtle levels of experience leaves the spiritual seeker with an emerging, all too obtrusive awareness of xated levels of self that had ostensibly already been transcended. This will have much to do with the frustration and loss of meaning of the classical dark night. Only a correspondingly subtle level of openness will allow a reconnection with the still more subtle expressions of unitive absorptionand so explain why they are so infrequent and so readily interrupted by these metapathologies of spirituality.2

Conclusions
The spiritual path of direct mystical/numinous experience can at some point entail a metapathological crisis of loss of meaning, nihilistic despair, and death of feeling that are also part of the inner dynamics of the deletion of presence extending from the early onset phases of schizophrenia to its chronic terminus in anhedonia and social withdrawal. The patient accounts documented by Sass (1998, 2000) show a similar, but utterly more devastating version of this dark night of the soul, since the latter is a radical loss of meaning still framed within the context of a previous enhancement of presence. The similarity in the inner phenomenology of this relative deletion of presence in penultimate mysticism to the devastating diminishment of chronic psychosis shows why any directly experiential search for spiritual realization should not be undertaken lightly. The intrinsic orientation of our symbolic recombinatory intelligence toward novelty, and so our openness to continuous creative expressions of felt meaning, will also require a related process of ongoing semantic satiation through which previous realizations of meaning undergo

inevitable loss of signicance through repetition. The emergence of the new will depend on the simultaneous deletion of the old. With respect to the metaphoric or presentational intelligences of the arts and spirituality, these cycles of meaning emergence and satiation occur both within the individual as well as on a collective cultural level. With respect to the latter, the sociologists Weber (1963) and Sorokin (1957) have independently traced through multiple civilizations the cycles of religious secularization and periodic visionary renewals, the latter based on reformulations of numinous experience in ways more congruent with current social reality. Weber and Sorokin followed Nietzsche (1886) in the suggesting that the modern West had been in a long period of secularization of traditional Judaio-Christian spiritualityand we can see both prophetical fundamentalisms and new age mysticisms as contemporary signs of these attempted renewals. Certainly the stormy psychoticism of contemporary forms of creativity and the metapathologies of directly engaged spiritualities show the relative fragility of the cultural felt meanings that seek to create, preserve, and recreate the realizations of presence that give a sense of ground and meaning to our personal and social existence. The economic and cultural conditions in the modern materialist West that will predispose especially those higher on absorption-openness toward renewals of a primary spirituality, especially in its more new age or this worldly forms (see also Hunt, 2003), will often entail a prolonged and painful transition. In effect, the search for a sense of presence beneath ordinary
Such neurocognitive accounts of processes mediating mystical experience have appeared to some to call into question any phenomenology of a direct contact with an immediate presence and Being. For Metzinger (2003), if transpersonal states are based on the semantic expression of the complex neural processes underlying the body schema, they automatically lose any claim to a direct, unmediated reality. However, if the metaphoric vehicles of ecstatic states are higher cognitive elaborations of the ecological self and surrounding array, which for Gibson are in direct resonance to the changing physical environment, then the semantic realization of presence-openness does have its own claim to reality status. Put otherwise, since we actually do exist, the Being experiences of mysticism are not models or representations of something else. Being experience is not a model of itself, it is itself our human attunement to the existential reality of being alive.
2

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social-personal reality, while living day to day in a secular society that must continually reinvoke the ordinary sense of self which has also been seen through as unreal and illusory, will bring about a sort of experiential or aesthetic crucixion to parallel the more traditional Christian ethical one. This will be more like a long gray night of the soul, blocking any deeper shift into the unitive realization of openness and surrender of the classical other worldly mysticisms. The more subtle mediations of presence that might reground and reconnect will then appear more as emptiness and nonexistence covered over and blocked by the relatively noisy defenses still possible against further loss. Curiously, as also pointed out in the negative theology of Altizer (2003), the vague sense of alienation that characterizes much of contemporary secular culture is an understated spiritual nihilism aligned with the sense of absence at the heart of the classical dark night. It is unconsciously attuned toward just the more subtle, if occluded, levels of numinous experience that can reestablish the semantic embodiment of the ecological self and a renewed sense of the presence/ Being that has grounded traditional cultures. This collective suspension in a gray night of the soul, and its metapathological anhedonias, is already reected in major visionary gures of the recent pastin Nietzsches later loneliness and despair, Thoreaus nal withdrawn malaise, the older Jungs painful isolation and existential uncertainty, and Heideggers own struggle with the nothing (Hunt, 2003). Even a radically secularized culture will not escape the implicit categories of spirituality as the form of intuitive-imagistic intelligence whose function is precisely the struggle for a unitive sense of meaning and purpose.

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Received July 20, 2006 Revision received January 10, 2007 Accepted February 5, 2007