Spiritual Psychosis and the Path to True Sanity

This episode features my presentation for the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS-US) annual conference in October, 2023. The original title was Metanoia: How Psychosis and Paranoia Ignited My Spiritual Awakening. I completely rewrote the talk a few days before, following a lightning bolt of creative energy that surfaced a structure I’d not previously made conscious. I called this the Psychotics Twofold Call to Adventure. It’s my attempt to contextualize and integrate experiences of paranoia and psychosis across a 12 year period. I suggest the twofold path of cultivating awareness and creating coherence, to re-relate to psychological content, and to understand the language of the soul. Metanoia means spiritual conversion, or the change of mind and heart. I suggest that psychosis, as a process of metanoia, has the potential to be a pathway to what R.D Laing calls “true sanity,” whereby the ego is “in service to the divine and no longer its betrayer.” The stages cover the unconscious tsunami and collapse into chaos, answering the inward call and the ego’s surrender, finding the inner sanctum, the world as meditation, divine emergence, initiation, and individuation, before closing with a note on how this relates to humanity’s current crises. And just a reminder before we jump into the conversation to please like, rate, subscribe and share to help more people access the podcast. Enjoy! 00:00 Intro 02:30 The Psychotic Drowns, the Mystic Swims 06:30 Fantasy vs. Fantasia and Invisible Realms 10:00 Metanoia As Cultivating True Sanity 13:00 My Psychotic Break 17:00 The Collapse Into Chaos 19:00 Answering The Inward Call 21:00 Following Spiritual Guidance 24:00 The Psychotics Twofold Call to Adventure 27:30 Finding The Inner Sanctum 30:00 The Ego's Annhilation 32:30 Finding The Cosmic Heart 36:00 The World as Meditation 39:00 Relating From True Centre 42:00 Divine Emergence and Individuation 44:00 The Initiation 48:00 From Chaos to Order 50:00 The Emergent Self 52:00 Metanoia: Humanity's Call to Adventure #spiritualpsychosis #spiritualgrowth #awakening #innerwork