“Dark Nights of the Soul”: Phenomenology and Neurocognition ofSpiritual Suffering in Mysticism and Psychosis

Harry T. HuntBrock University

Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined tounderstand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the“dark night of the soul” in classical mysticism, with its painful “metapathological” lossof felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms ofschizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilder’s early understanding of instabilitiesin the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganizedhallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of bodyimage/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abili-ties, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative trans-formations of consciousness. “Dark night” suffering can be seen as a semantic satiationleading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previousenhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared byclinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture.

Keywords: presence, body image, ecological self, spirituality, schizophrenia

I. PHENOMENOLOGY: ENHANCING, DELETING AND REALIZING THEECOLOGICAL SELF

The following analysis unfolds from the in-tersection of two questions, each pertaining tothe nature of spirituality and its seemingly in-herent relation with human suffering and psy-chopathology. The first question refers to whattranspersonal psychologists such as Maslow(1971); Wilber (1984), and Almaas (1988) havetermed “metapathologies”—William James(James, 1902) preferred “theopathies”—thatcan be specifically stirred up by intense spiritu-al/mystical experiences. Spiritual metapatholo-gies can show the same inner dynamics andphenomenology as schizoaffective conditions—

including grandiosity, painful social with-drawal, and especially here, despair and loss ofall sense of meaning. Yet, despite considerableinner suffering the person can still more or lessfunction within ordinary social life—as in suchkey precursors to modern “new age” spirituali-ties as Nietzsche, Thoreau, Jung, Heidegger,and Gurdjieff (Hunt, 2003). The term “meta” isjustified here in that true clinical psychosis in-fluences the entirety of one’s life and typicallyleaves none of the room for major cultural in-novation shown by such figures.

So our first question: How is it that highlydeveloped mystical spirituality shows these spe-cific parallels to the continuum of schizophrenicand schizoaffective conditions? The overall so-cial and personal context of mysticism and psy-chosis could not be more different—with theformer basic to the sense of felt meaning andpurpose in human existence as a whole and thelatter reflecting the extremity of its collapse. Wewill see below, however, that their various sub-phases can be so similar that the schizoaffectivepsychoses can be used as a window into thenature of spiritual suffering—and certainly vice

Harry T. Hunt, Department of Psychology, Brock Uni-versity, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

A preliminary version of this paper was presented atBrock University Conference on H. Hunt’s Lives in Spirit,September 24-25, 2004.

I thank David Goicoechea for organizing those meetings,Linda Pidduck and Dr. Marian Fojtik for editorial assis-tance, and Prof. Sid Segalowitz for helpful references.

Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-dressed to Harry T. Hunt, Department of Psychology,Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S3A1. E-mail: hhunt@brocku.ca

Review of General Psychology Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association2007, Vol. 11, No. 3, 209–234 1089-2680/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2680.11.3.209

209

versa. These comparisons are not intended topathologize spirituality, but are offered verymuch in the spirit of H. S. Sullivan (Sullivan,1953, p. 32), on schizophrenia, that “we are allsimply more human than otherwise”. There haslong been the sense, in psychology from James(1902) and Freud (1933) to Sass (1992), and inneurology from Goldstein (1963) and Luria(1972) to Sacks (1987), that the extremities andsufferings of psychosis can illuminate funda-mentals of the human condition otherwise dif-ficult to see as such.

The second question, and the one to be ourinitial focus, follows from a consensus amongmany analysts of spirituality, includingEmerson (1844), James (1902); Heidegger(1927, 1962); Almaas (1988), and Hunt (1995),that the core of numinous or mystical experi-ence lies in its nonconceptual, directly felt re-alization of an immediate sense of Being, pres-ence, or “thatness”—also related to the sheer“suchness” of Zen satori experience (Blofeld,1962). In other words, if we follow the phenom-enological analyses of Rudolf Otto (1923) andothers (Stace, 1987; Studstill, 2005) that there isa cross cultural core to the world mysticismsand shamanisms that Otto termed the “numi-nous”—a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery inresponse to a sensed contact with an all-encompassing “something”—then at its corewill be the experience of Being itself. This is thefelt sense of a sheer “facticity”, thatness, orisness—the wonder and deeply felt gratitudethat there is “something rather than nothing”.James (1902) was one of the first to concludethat it was the immediacy and fullness of thisdirect experience, more than its varying concep-tualizations in multiple religious traditions, thatconferred the ground, purpose, and meaningbasic 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 criticismfrom cultural (Katz, 1978) and cognitive(Boyer, 1994) constructivists (see also Hunt,2006). However, the demonstrated cross cul-tural similarities in hunter-gatherer shamanisms(Winkelman, 2000) imply a deep structure forhuman religious experience, perhaps akin toChomskyean deep grammar for language. Ottohimself analyzed numinous feeling into multi-ple dimensions (dependency, awe, mystery, oth-

erness) such that their selective cultural sche-matizations could already account for the diver-sity of religious beliefs so fundamental to socialconstructivists. Meanwhile, the ostensible over-lap among the more developed experiences ofthe world mysticisms (Studstill, 2005) furtherhighlights the commonalities already foreshad-owed in tribal shamanisms.

So our second question becomes: How is theexperience of Being/isness underlying this coresense of numinous awe and mystery even pos-sible for us as human beings? What are itscognitive and feeling roots in human self refer-ence, given that its outward trance, aesthetic,and ritual expressions seem as specific to ourspecies as language itself?

Levels of Self and the Experience ofBeing

The beginnings of an answer to how Beingexperiences are possible for us, and why theywould have this personal and social impact,comes from exploring both the differentiationand nested interpenetrations among the multiplelevels of the human experience of “self”. Cog-nitive and developmental psychologists such asNeisser (1988), Meltzoff and Moore (1995),Butterworth (1995), and Gallagher (2005),while using differing vocabularies, largelyagree in distinguishing: (a) a primary “ecologi-cal” or “bodily” self, “prenoetic” and basic toperceptual-motor navigation and postural-spatial orientation; (b) a self referential or socialsense of self, first emerging with the crossmodal “mirroring” capacities of even newborninfants and fundamental to the gradual interper-sonal development of “taking the role of theother” (Mead, 1934) and “theory of mind”(Premack & Woodruff, 1978); and (c) a furtherand uniquely human “meta cognitive”, “noetic”,or introspective capacity that allows the dis-crimination and gradual representation of “in-ner” cognitive processes and states of con-sciousness, and follows from Vygotsky’s(1962) mid childhood development of “innerspeech” and its “felt sense” of semantic mean-ing.

The neurologist and psychoanalyst PaulSchilder (1935), who will be so central to ourlater discussion, was perhaps the first to showthat the human sense of self was a complexlynested system involving all three of these levels,

210 HUNT

based on spatial/parietal, emotional/frontal, andpostural/cerebellar layers of the central nervoussystem. More recently, Gillihan and Farah(2005) go so far as to suggest that this widedistribution of self across the nervous system, asalso variously demonstrated by Damasio(1994); Gusnard (2004), and Saxe and Wexler(2005), strongly argues against any ultimatelyunitary system of self. This is consistent withWilliam James’ (1890) conclusion that any in-clusive ground for our different inner selves canbe found only in the ongoing “stream of con-sciousness” itself. Because that can never beentirely encompassed by our self referentialawareness, the “fringe” thereby created be-comes the opening for both our vulnerability insense of self and the open ended attempt atground and context that would be the core ofhuman spirituality.

More specifically, then, Neisser’s (1988) dis-cussion of a primary proprioceptive self-location of the organism in terms of an ecolog-ical self, common to all creatures moving withina perceptual surround, is derived from JamesGibson’s (1966, 1979) formulation of percep-tion in terms of an ambient “ecological array”.Rejecting “static” understandings of basic per-ception, Gibson insisted that the essential func-tioning of the senses is based on the movementof a creature through its surrounding array.Such active navigation creates an open horizonahead, out of which streams ambient gradientsof surfaces and textures, which, closing behindthe moving organism, continuously specify orself-locate its presence within a self-generated“envelope of flow”. This continual self-locationis the essential function of a basic consciousnessor sentience. For Gibson there is no outward“there” without the cospecification of a unique“here” given back by its surrounding array.

The flow past from the open horizon aheadspecifies a specific “hole” to be filled by theembodied ecological self of the creature of justthe size, shape, and speed to generate just thatarray. Schilder’s (1935) concept of the bodyimage—as the embodied core of the social-personal self—was similarly coordinated withthe outward environment as its continuouslycodetermined spatial position, muscle tonus,and posture. It will be central to what followsthat the phenomenologies of human existencesimilarly developed by Merleau-Ponty (Varela,Rosch, & Thompson, 1991) and Heidegger

(Hunt, 1995) can be understood as amplifica-tions of the presence-openness dimension un-derlying Gibson’s depiction of ecological arrayand self.

There is considerable evidence that the hu-man self referential, symbolic self is bothsocially constructed and totally “embodied”or “nested” into the ecological bodily self.Gallagher (2005) has reviewed recent evi-dence for the progressive developmental in-tersection of an innate “body schema”, in thesense of Neisser’s ecological self, and whathe terms the “body image” as such, which isthe consciously exteriorized experience of thebodily self. The latter is both experientiallyembodied, as illustrated by its continuence inthe classic phantom limb effect following am-putation, and socially structured from infancythrough the cross-modal mirroring behaviorsdocumented by Meltzoff and Moore (1995).In effect, the body schema/ecological self weshare with nonsymbolic animals becomes en-tirely imbued with a second and eventuallysimultaneous social and semantic meaning—abit like the silvery polymorphous forms of theTerminator movies—and mediated by over-lapping but distinct neural pathways. Begin-ning in infancy, the interplay of kinestheticfacial expressions and proto-symbolic ges-tures with the corresponding forms generatedby visually perceived others constitutes thebeginning of a “taking the role of the other”that will generate both self and other as nec-essarily reciprocal constructs. The resultingfusions between an innate body schema andits symbolically articulated “body image” arebest illustrated in the late childhood appear-ance of “gesturing” phantom arms and handsin those born without actual limbs, and in thepossibility of spontaneous small gestural and/ordanced movements in those otherwise paralyzedthrough spinal injury or Parkinson’s (Gallagher,2005).

Schilder (1935), cited in this regard byMerleau-Ponty (1962), seems to have been thefirst to locate a symbolic basis of the humanbody image as originating developmentally inwhat would now be termed a social “mirroring”that gradually fuses kinesthetically and visuallyperceived forms of self and other into one’s ownunified and inherently interpersonal body im-age. He illustrated this kinesthetic-visual gestaltwith demonstrations of the characteristic confu-

211DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

sion between the body images of self and otherin pathological and hypnotic states—as morerecently illustrated by Blakemore, Bristow,Bird, Frith, & Ward (2005). Schilder also offersthe first experimental demonstration of illusionsin which subjects are induced to kinestheticallyfeel their own arm where they see it in a mirror,rather than where it really is—since also ex-tended by Botvinick and Cohen (1998). WhatSchilder termed the “synesthetic” predomi-nance of visually perceived other over kines-thetically felt self will become crucial below forunderstanding the impact of “altered states ofconsciousness” on sense of self in both mysticaland schizophrenic experience.

We can now approach an answer to the ques-tion of how direct experiences of Being or pres-ence, as such, could both be possible for humanbeings and have the all-inclusive sense of se-mantic significance found in mystical states.The metacognitive and introspective develop-ments of later childhood are based on a selfreferential reaching into spatial metaphors ab-stracted from the ecological array of perception.Lakoff and Johnson (1999), developing the ear-lier organismic cognitive psychologies ofArnheim (1969) and Werner and Kaplan(1963), have shown how abstract thought ingeneral, and any representation of an interior“stream of consciousness”, require the basicphysical metaphors or “image schemas” of center/periphery, high/low, inside/outside, and varietiesof kinesthetic “forces”. Indeed, for Lakoff andJohnson, as earlier for Emerson (1836) and Jung(1955), it is not just the representation but the veryexistence of more differentiated human feelingstates that requires the felt embodiment of thesemetaphoric patterns and, in Neisser’s (1976)terms, their creative “schematic rearrangement”—that is, as the inner sense of one’s hopes being“kindled”, “rising”, or “shattered”. The very grad-ual ontogenetic development of the full access tometaphor reflects this necessary crossing of thecognitive modules of “person” and “thing”, firstseen in childhood animism and synesthesias, theninternalized as the “felt sense” of meaning accom-panying Vygotsky’s “inner speech” (Hunt, 2005;Marks, 1978; Vygotsky, 1962).

Numinous experiences, as maximally ab-stract feeling states, are similarly carried andevoked by the felt embodiment of still moregeneral spatial dimensions drawn from the eco-logical array, such as light, darkness, flow, den-

sity, expansive force, and the openness of spa-ciousness itself. These abstract synestheticstates are what Laski (1961) has termed the“quasi physical” sensations of ecstasy. Ratherthan simply disappearing after the more specificaccess phases of mysticism, they appear to be-come more and more subtle—as in the feltdissolving of self into an “open radiance”(Guenther, 1989) or “shining” (Heidegger,1962) sensed as Being itself. The conclusion towhich we are drawn is that the Being/presence/isness states at the heart of mystical experiencesentail a “raising” of the most basic dimensionsof the ecological self (its kinesthetic presence)and outward perceptual array (space, openness)directly into our self aware, symbolic con-sciousness. These states would involve a se-mantic “waking up” or cross modal “embodi-ment” of the ecological self. This conclusion isfurther supported by the centrality in manymeditation traditions, including Tai Chi, of con-centrating on the “kath” or “hara”, the mid bodygravitational center of the body schema, and/orthe technique of fully sensing one’s arms andlegs as an encompassing “frame” for ongoingexperience (Almaas, 1988; Ogawa, 1998).There is also the cross cultural occurrence ofstandard bodily postures for ecstatic inductionand internal “energy flow” in yoga, shamanism,and pentacostalism (Goodman, 1986).

The full “realization” of Gibson’s ecologicalarray “affords” the multiple levels of mysticalexperience. That is normally blocked, however,by the more specific metaphoric reuses of spa-tial dimensions described by Lakoff andJohnson (1999) as the image schemas of appliedsymbolic intelligence. In mystical experience, itis the ecological self that “wakes up” as the feltbeing-here-now of presence, oriented toward a“Being” or “thatness” given forth by the hori-zonal openness of time ahead (Heidegger,1927), and which now “wells forth” as the“mystery” and “wholly other” qualities of purenovelty central to Otto’s definition of the numi-nous (Hunt, 1995, 2003, 2006). It is a purelyabstract but directly experienced form ofGibson’s array. The ecological self reemergesas a “presence” coordinated with an “openness”of the encompassing array that is typically“schematized” culturally as God or Absolute.The same symbolic embodiment fundamental toordinary social mirroring, gesture, and meta-phor, would be what now allows this experien-

212 HUNT

tial realization of the abstract felt meanings ofthe numinous—given, of course, a requisite anddifficult to achieve degree of detachment andmeta cognitive “witnessing”.

More typically, this feeling of the presence-openness of Being is largely and even barely im-plicit—forming the background context for themore specific and applied symbolic usages whichusually block any more direct realization of itstotality. These implicit, typically ephemeral feel-ings can either be of the enhancement of “pres-ence”—as in a metaphor mediated sense of“depth”, “expansion”, “surging”, or “bal-ance”—or of the deletion and distortions of pres-ence implied in “emptiness”, “sinking”, “constric-tion”, 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 suchfelt meanings as examples of Heidegger’s “pri-mordial Being experiences”, and so as specific toan abstract human Being-in-the-world. Damasio(1999), meanwhile, has somewhat confused theplace of these “feelings of context” (Ratcliffe) or“world attunement” (Smith) by basing them in aprimitive or animal “core consciousness” ofbodily states. He thereby misses the key implica-tion of Lakoff and Johnson that it would be pre-cisely the development of a self referential, humansymbolic capacity that reaches back into bodyschema, postural tone, and tactile kinesthesis forthe spatial metaphors necessary for both abstractthought and for these more directly embodied feltmeanings of Being-in-the-world. Their further in-tensification becomes mystical experience.

We can now return to our first question andbegin to see how all inclusive felt deletions ofpresence could become the phenomenologicaldemarcation points for both the anhedonia ofpsychoticism and for a related metapathologicalloss of meaning in states of spiritual sufferingwhose maximum intensification is the “darknight of the soul” in classical mysticism.

Dark Nights

Mystical Poverty and Absence

The enhanced self awareness of spontaneousmystical experience and/or prolonged medita-tive practice allows a direct experience of Beingas presence-openness, as a realized state rather

than a concept, and based on a raising of theoverall organization of the ecological array intosemantic significance. However, these initiallyfreeing and blissful realizations can entail a laterprice. In a penultimate stage of mystical expe-rience, prior to its classic completion in states ofall encompassing felt unity, the mystic mayencounter a form of suffering and loss of mean-ing variously termed “dark night of the soul”(Underhill, 1955), “mystical poverty” (Roberts,1993), and/or “absence” (Almaas, 1988). It ishere that we find a deeply disorienting “meta-pathology” of emptiness and despair thatseems identical in its inner phenomenology tothe anhedonia that lies at the heart of the“negative symptoms” of schizophrenia and isalso foreshadowed in its earliest symptoms(Sass, 1992).

It seems well documented from the descrip-tive literature of Christian mysticism (Under-hill, 1955), Buddhist meditation (Blofeld,1962), and classical introspectionism (James,1890) that the sustained direct experience ofongoing consciousness, observed for itself in allits immediacy, entails a felt dissolution of theordinary social-personal sense of self. It is seenthrough as a secondary construct from the per-spective of a more primary “thatness”/“isness”.This release from the ordinary sense of self iscentral to the expansive, metaphor mediatedecstatic states commonly discussed as the coreof “religious” or “transpersonal” experience—what Underhill refers to as “illuminative” mys-ticism. These are the felt states of an enhancedsense of meaning in human existence that is thefruition of spirituality on both a personal andsocietal level (James, 1902). However, as themystic gradually moves through these positive“illuminations”, mediated by abstract meta-phors of flow, light, and darkness, toward anondual unitive consciousness, the experiencebecomes progressively more subtle. Previousfelt meanings of God/Absolute become moreand more indistinguishable from stillness, si-lence, and emptiness.

The ostensible absence here of both self andGod can then lead to a sense of utter loss—andto an unexpected inner crisis of nihilism. Afterall, neither God nor Being are concretely defin-able existents. To the extent that the illumina-tive expansions of earlier felt meanings stillincluded subtle conceptual boundaries of selfand Absolute, which is all but inevitable in the

213DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

access stages of spirituality, and these thengradually dissolve, so does the person’s priorlevel of directly numinous experience. One isleft with. . .nothing (Almaas, 1988). The“space” of Being has become progressively rar-ified to the point of ostensible nothingness. Toparaphrase Heidegger (1993):

Being becomes indistinguishable from nothing. Whileencompassing and giving forth all that is, it neitherexists as such, nor does it not exist. It is concretelyimmediate, yet it is not a thing. It is abstract, yet not athought. It is not anything, yet it is.

This process of felt deletion can be under-stood as a kind of inevitable semantic satiation,with progressively more subtle levels of realiza-tion initially experienced more as the loss ofprevious more definite understandings ratherthan as a “something” in their own right. It ismuch as in the presentational symbolisms of theexpressive arts (and metaphor mediated statesof consciousness), where continual exposure tothe same favorite music (or the “same” state)leads to a gradual flattening and loss of itsinitially sensed significance and fascination.Specific felt meanings must disappear underany sustained gaze, which alone may also allowtheir later reemergence in renewed forms.

This penultimate crisis of loss of meaning inmysticism was termed by St. John of theCross—“the dark night”. He distinguished adark night of the senses, in which even precioussymbolic forms become meaningless, a darknight of the emotions, with the flattening andindifference of feeling to be further pursuedbelow, and a dark night of the soul, associatedwith a sense of futility and pointlessness withinall prior spiritual illuminations (Happold,1963). Bernadette Roberts (1993) presents herown contemporary account of such sudden spir-itual emptiness:

Instead of seeing the Oneness into which all separate-ness dissolved, everything now dissolved into an inex-plicable emptiness. Where, for so many months therehad been “something,” now there was nothing. In time,this emptiness became increasingly pronounced anddifficult to live with. . ..But if the constant sight ofemptiness was tedious and difficult to live with, it wasas nothing compared to what I came upon one morningas I walked along the beach. Suddenly I was aware thatall life around me had come to a complete standstill.Everywhere I looked, instead of life, I saw a hideousnothingness invading and strangling the life out ofevery object and vista in sight. It was a world beingchoked to death by an insidious void. . ..The sudden

withdrawal of life, left in its wake a scene of death,dying and decay. . . . monstrous and terrible to lookupon. . . . Unwittingly I had been lured and entrappedin this monstrous state of no-self,. . . .Thus in thesemoments, surrounded by a terror I could not feel, andfrom which I could not escape, I seemed doomed toremain in the unlivable condition of having to stare outat a horrible nothingness without a single weapon ofdefense. (Roberts, 1993, pp. 46–47)

Underhill (1955) abstracts from classical de-scriptions of this painful crisis terms such as“blankness”, “stagnation”, “fatigue and lassi-tude”, “stupification”, “abandonment”, and “de-spair”. Similar accounts are implied in the sud-den loss of visionary and healing “powers” inshamanism (Eliade, 1964), and in Buddhist ex-periences of void or shunyata as mere emptinessand futility (Epstein, 1998; Kapleau, 1967).These states of absence can invoke a nihilisticsense of pointlessness and loss of interest in allmanifestations of spirituality. They only giveway, if they do, when the individual reaches adeeper level of humility, and so sees and sur-renders unconscious boundaries of self andworld that have stood in the way of the morepositive subtleties of nondual unity. Eventuallythe still more ephemeral mediating spaces andradiating darknesses may reemerge from withinthe ostensible and painful sense of nothingness.

Within traditional Christian mysticism, boththe penultimate dark night of mystical povertyand even its potential unitive resolution canseem heretical and nihilistic. This is especiallyso in the “negative theology” or “cloud of un-knowing” writings in which the ultimate God-head is so “wholly other” and transcendent thatit can only be described in terms of what it is not(Happold, 1963). For instance, for the famous9th century Irish Abbot Erigena no descriptionof God could be either affirmed or denied, sinceGod, as beyond all categories, is the negative ofall that is. To paraphrase:

Since God does not thereby have Being, he cannot actor be acted upon. He does not love and is not loved.Neither is He eternal, since that implies relative de-grees of measurement. God cannot know the world,since it is and he is not. But the world cannot ultimatelyexist either, since it has Being only in the mind of God,which is not an existent. God does not know what Heis, 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 ofmeaning. The closeness to a sense of inescap-able pointlessness and nihilism was perhaps too

214 HUNT

much for the group of Erigena’s apparentlyoutraged and frightened novitiate monks, whoare supposed to have stabbed him to death withtheir pens (Bett, 1964).

Anhedonia and Negative Symptoms

Mystical poverty, absence, and “dark night”would be the “metapathological” version of theanhedonia, or radical indifference and flatteningof affect, often understood as the core of theclinically crippling “negative symptoms” ofschizophrenia and schizotypicality. The first ofthe following accounts comes from the modernIndian mystic Gopi Krishna:

I lost all feeling of love for my wife and children-. . ..The fountain of love in me seemed to have dried upcompletely. It appeared as if a scorching blast hadraced through every pore in my body, wiping out everytrace of emotion. . ..They appeared to me no better thanstrangers. (Krishna, 1967, p. 58)

It is remarkably similar in its inner phenom-enology to these descriptions of anhedonia inschizophrenia:

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—hemight be anybody for all I feel toward him. (Landis,1964, p. 325)

. . .I am all the time losing my emotional contact witheverything, including myself. . ..On rare occasions Iam overwhelmed with the sudden realization of theghastly destruction that is caused by this creepinguncanny disease. . ..This dead emotionless attitude to-ward myself. . ..I am as though half drugged. . ..Mydespair sometimes floods over me. But after each suchoutburst I become more indifferent. (Landis, 1964,pp. 324–5)

Chapman, Chapman, and Raulin (1976) de-veloped separate questionnaire inventories forphysical and social anhedonia, based on an ab-sence of pleasure in normally satisfying bodilyand interpersonal experience. These werestrongly correlated with each other in schizo-phrenic patient samples, and were especiallyelevated with the so called “poor premorbid”diagnoses associated with social isolation. Theyshowed essentially no relation to “positivesymptoms” of hallucination and delusion as in-dexed by their “perceptual aberrations” ques-tionnaire (Mishlove & Chapman, 1985). On theother hand, it was the social anhedonia scale innormal college age populations that was the best

10-year predictor of later psychiatric difficulties(Chapman, Chapman, Kwapil, Eckblad, &Zinser, 1994), and equally so for schizotypaland bipolar diagnoses—perhaps also consistentwith recent views (Eysenck, 1995) that mostpsychosis falls along an underlying schizoaffec-tive continuum.

The relation of anhedonia and related statesof loss of meaning to depressive psychosis iscomplex and has come in for considerable dis-cussion within contemporary phenomenologicalpsychiatry. Schilder (1935) had earlier sug-gested that the break with consensual realitycommon to all psychosis, and implicitly withinthe neuroses, entailed a background deperson-alization syndrome—a general loss of interestand bodily loss of felt aliveness. The intensifi-cation of this depersonalization would lead ei-ther to the world destruction fantasies of schizo-phrenia or to the painful nihilism of depressivepsychosis (Schilder, 1953). More recently,Stanghellini (2004) has distinguished between aschizotypal anhedonia, based on a sense of in-difference, loss of contact, and inner emptiness,and a depressive anhedonia, culminating in thedelusions of nonexistence in Cotard’s syn-drome, and based on a more overtly conflictedsense of “inner deadness”. Fuchs (2005) simi-larly speaks of a sense of “disembodiment” andaffective detachment in schizophrenia, con-trasted with a depressive “corporalization” ex-perienced as a sensed imprisonment within animmobilized bodily self. In both forms, aschizoaffective continuum culminates in a rad-ical loss of all felt meaning. The “dark nights”of penultimate mysticism may have more of oneform or the other.

Transformations of Presence in Mysticismand Psychosis

How does it come about that the “darknights” of penultimate mysticism and the anhe-donias of chronic psychosis are so inwardlyalike, especially given that the former is a de-velopment within cultural systems seeking asense of overall purpose and meaning and thelatter emerges in the context of a disastroussocial withdrawal and personal collapse? Wehave seen that both states involve shifts in feltpresence or sense of Being, but moving in pre-dominantly different directions. The mysticaland meditative traditions, once fully under-

215DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

taken, initiate an enhancement of Being experi-ence, perhaps initially clearest in its illumina-tion or access phases, and whatever its relativeinterruption in a penultimate “dark night”. Aswe will trace in more detail below, the schizo-phrenias begin with a subtle but painful sense ofdeletion of presence and inner vitality, which,while interrupted by “positive” symptomology,can eventually intensify into the anhedonias ofchronicity.

In both states these shifts in sense of pres-ence seem to be inherently conjoined with anintensified introspective sensitization—a shiftto a purely observing or witness set towardone’s own experience. The result is to pro-foundly shift both the sense of personalagency (“I can”) and ownership (“I am”) ofone’s own cognitive and affective mental pro-cesses—such that these can now seem createdand/or initiated from an outside source—although to very different effect in each state.Because the social-personal self is establishedand maintained by means of a continual selfreferential awareness—as in Mead’s (1934)“taking the role of the other” and its later“metacognitive” development—we can hy-pothesize that any shift in the underlying feltreality of the embodied core of self will leadautomatically to an intensified introspectiveawareness, and potentially vice versa. We canthen speak equally in terms of resultant “al-tered states of consciousness” and/or the ex-perience of normally implicit features of on-going consciousness—that is, as “microge-netically” preliminary stages of moment tomoment consciousness occluded by the usualapplied focus of symbolic cognition (Flavell& Draguns, 1957; Hunt & Chefurka, 1976;Metzinger, 2003). Either way, the person isnow sensitized to levels of cognition and feel-ing that are normally inaccessible, and soneither “agentive” nor “owned” in any ordi-nary sense.

In schizophrenia what Sass (1992, 1998,2000) and Parnas (Parnas & Handest, 2003;Parnas & Sass, 2001) have termed the “hy-perreflexivity” of heightened introspectiveconsciousness in psychotic onset seems toarise in response to early, difficult to describe,prodromal symptoms of a diminished sense ofpresence, easily missed by others and/or oftenconfused with depression. Initially there arevague descriptions of “feeling diminished”,

“not feeling myself”, “losing contact,” “feel-ing not human”, “losing all desire”, “notalive”, or “not feeling present”. An introspec-tive hyperreflexivity is drawn into this vac-uum of deleted presence, and the patients-to-be become more and more aware of back-ground cognitive and affective processes—that thereby lose their status as backgroundmedium and gain an intrusive thing-like qual-ity. The person may feel that their mind isnow “like a machine”, “half awake”, or “as ifsomeone else”, or that they feel “disembod-ied”. These earliest signs of physical and so-cial anhedonia generally occur in the contextof an already painful social withdrawal andisolation. Both clinically (Sass, 2000) andexperimentally (Mishlove & Chapman,1985), they foreshadow the more extreme lossof meaning and emotional indifference at thecore of the “negative symptoms” of laterchronic states. Indeed, it may be that much ofthe dislike of many patients for standard neu-roleptics, based on complaints of their dys-phoric and flattening affect (King, Burke,Lucas, 1995; Vorganti et al., 1997), followsfrom their artificial induction of the deletionof presence which has already been so con-fusing and painful. At least the “positive” andcompensatory delusions and hallucinationswere part of an increased, if bizarre, sense ofmeaning that has now been chemically de-leted.

By contrast, the intensified introspectiveawareness of meditative practice is initiallyachieved by a personally heightened agentiveeffort, generally in the context of an enhancedsense of presence and salience already in-spired by direct intuitions of the spiritualteachings sanctioning these demanding prac-tices, and often supported by the intense sol-idarity of small group membership. The en-hancement of presence that accompanies theinitially expansive access experiences ofmeditation or spontaneous religious experi-ence (Guenther, 1984; Walsh, 1977) will thendraw its own heightened introspective sensi-tization to normally implicit levels and fea-tures of consciousness, which are then alsoexperienced as automatic, involuntary, and“other”— but in this very different organismicand social context.

In both mysticism and psychosis, then, thereis an unusually intensified, primarily observa-

216 HUNT

tional, “taking the role of the other” towardone’s own ongoing, moment by moment“stream” of consciousness. Since this metacog-nitive capacity is already linked developmen-tally to “theory of mind”, allowing the inferringof mental states in others, one’s own back-ground conscious states have no choice but toemerge as “other” to a “self” that is now purelydetached and observing to a degree not part ofordinary pragmatic living. One is now “dialogu-ing” with an externalized reflection of one’sown stream of consciousness (see also Hunt,1995). However, in the subjectively perplexingvacuum of a deleted presence in schizophrenia,these states feel predominantly invasive andmechanical, whereas in the organismic contextof an enhanced ecological self they becomefreeing and spontaneously expansive. Brett(2002) offers a corresponding analysis in whichthe mystic’s lack of identification with the or-dinary self and its thoughts allows a nonreac-tivity and inner freedom, whereas in psychosisthe contracting self has been phenomenally in-vaded by primitive identifications with threat-ening “others”.

We will consider below the neurocognitiveand experimental evidence for a more integratedbodily awareness, spatial orientation, and phys-ical balance in meditative and mystical states,along with their respective disorganization inpsychosis, as further support for the notion ofdifferent organismic contexts for these overlap-ping transformations of consciousness. It re-mains here to trace more precisely the series ofrelated stages leading, respectively, to psychoticanhedonia and spiritual “dark night”.

Comparative Phases of Spiritual andPsychotic Experience

Heightened Introspection in First RankSymptoms and in Meditation/Creativity

The most direct manifestations of Sass’ no-tion of a pathological hyperreflexivity are theso-called “first rank” symptoms of schizophre-nia—initially proposed as such by Schneider(1959) but since found throughout the widerschizoaffective continuum of acute psychoses(Mellor, 1970). Here the heightened introspec-tive sensitivity to cognitive, affective, andconative processes, whose thematic contentmay at this point still be normal and situation

appropriate, is manifested in a sensed loss oftheir agency and sometimes ownership. Patientsreport “made thoughts”, “made feelings”,“made actions”, thought “insertions” and “dele-tions”, and automatically repeated “thoughts outloud”. The grammatically attenuated nature ofsuch reports (Schreber, 1903) makes clear thatwhat is being observed is the automaticity andtruncation of the normally implicit processes ofVygotsky’s (1962) “inner speech”. What ismost striking in these descriptions of whatseems one’s own mind more or less done bysomeone or something else is their third personinvasive quality. What are logically one’s sub-jective states come to have an increasingly“thing-like” mechanical quality, which willlater become part of the literalization of meta-phoric understanding central to thought disor-der.

The introspected consciousness in mindful-ness meditation (Walsh, 1977), as well as inclassical introspectionist psychology (Hunt,1986, 1995), has a similar quality of not beingdone by oneself, but by some deeper, nonvol-untary force. William James (1890) states thatit would be more phenomenologically accu-rate to say not “I think”, “I feel”, but rather “itthinks”, “it feels”, in the same sense that wesay “it rains”. Thoughts and feelings are feltto unfold on their own, an observation alsocommon to those describing the spontaneityof sudden creative insights. Thus, Nietzsche(1886, p. 397), in a widely quoted passage,says: “A thought comes when “it” wishes, andnot when “I” wish; so it is a perversion of thefacts. . .to say that the subject “I” is the con-dition of the predicate “think”.” However, thecontext of an enhanced sense of presence inthese meditative and creative states, ratherthan its contraction, is reflected in their feltsense of spontaneity and expansiveness. It isnot, as with first rank symptoms, that some-how “these are not my thoughts, someone elsemust be doing/inflicting them”, but “these arenot my thoughts, they are freed and releasedfrom a deeper reality”. It is a context ofpresence expansion and a vividly sensed free-dom. The metaphors of flow and luminosityunderlying these descriptions feel spontane-ously animated from within. It is why they aresought and valued, rather than dreaded.

217DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

The Compensatory Enhancement ofPresence in “Positive” Symptoms and ItsContinued Expansion in MysticalIllumination

The second phase of the schizophrenic con-tinuum—its hallucinatory and delusional, or“positive” symptoms—are related to the corre-sponding metaphor mediated, “illuminations”of classical mysticism both as sudden intensifi-cations of felt presence and as the potentialpoints of spontaneous interchange and reversalbetween these two otherwise distinct develop-mental directions. This is seen both in the spon-taneous remissions of psychoses that can bemediated by mystical ecstatic states (Boisen,1936; Bowers, 1974; Van Dusen, 1972) and inthe psychotic or near psychotic breakdowns oc-casionally following immediately after intensemystical experience (Krishna, 1967; Lukoff,1985).

Again, however, the differing organismic andpersonal contexts are clear. Illuminative mysti-cal states are further intensifications of an en-hancement and deepening of presence—oftenfelt as expressing a sort of abstract animism or“cosmic consciousness” of the universe itself(Bucke, 1901). The “positive” symptoms ofschizophrenia partially correspond to these spir-itual states because they reflect a compensatoryenhancement of presence and sense of meaning,however bizarre and often terrifying. They canbe regarded, as also with Freud (1911), as anattempted recovery from the longer term anhe-donic deletion of chronic psychosis. A mark ofthis heightened salience in psychosis, however,is its literalization and thing-like objectificationof consciousness—the person is literally Christreborn, or strange “electrical” energies movethrough a physically hollowed body.

A major indication that both these forms ofenhanced presence entail the semantic “wakingup” or “incarnation” of the ecological or bodilyself comes from the characteristic transforma-tions of body image in meditative and schizo-phrenic states. These can be understood as vari-ations on the largely unremarked inner phenom-enology of the body image first described bySchilder (1928, 1935, 1942). Prolonged intro-spectionist observations of the stationary bodyand of tactile-kinesthetic illusions caused byelevators and amusement rides showed two lay-

ers to the tactile-kinesthetic side of the bodyimage: (a) An outer boundary, not actually co-inciding with the skin itself and felt as indefiniteand open (i.e., to expansion or invasion); (b) aninner core, often felt as hollow or more or lessephemeral, and sometimes with areas of greaterweight/density in the lower abdomen or the baseof the skull. This core can be experienced asmoving beyond the “actual” body, in whole orpart, as a tactile-kinesthetic aftereffect of ves-tibular stimulation.

This latter “phantom” self—sometimes pass-ing through the head and out into surroundingspace—seemed similar to the more limitedphantom limb effects following amputation.Schilder (1935) was led to the conclusion thatthe inner felt core of the body image is phenom-enologically 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 experi-ence also seems clear, both in its kinesthetic-vestibular sensations of induction and its some-times less defined elliptical shape (Green, 1968;Metzinger, 2003). The immediate tactile-kinesthetic patternings of this introspected bodyimage, so different from the visually perceivedand common sense definiteness of “the body”,can themselves undergo direct synesthetictranslations into corresponding visualized forms(Schilder, 1942). These kinesthetic-visual trans-lations would then be the sources for the typicaland partially overlapping transformations of thebody image in schizophrenia and in “subtlebody” meditational practices.

Body image hallucinations have been widelydiscussed as a key part of the “positive symp-toms” of schizophrenia (Chapman, 1978;Landis, 1964), wherein one’s body seems notone’s own, changed in shape or size, hollow andinvaded by bizarre forces, or melting into ex-ternal surroundings and objects. Andras Angyal(1935, 1936, 1937) seems to have been the firstto suggest that such body hallucinations re-flected an involuntary introspective sensitiza-tion to the features of Schilder’s inner and outerbody image. Angyal’s patients described hol-lowness of the inner body, sometimes filledwith strange “electrical” currents of kinestheticmotion, or sometimes in terms of specific, oftenfrightening, holes or gaps in stomach, heart, orhead. At other times, these inner forces were feltto pass outside the actual body into the room

218 HUNT

and into potential interpersonal relation withothers, based, Angyal thought, on kinesthetic-vestibular aftereffects of actual and imaginedmovements.

That such introspective sensitizations arethemselves also engaging the gestural-semanticembodiment basic to metaphor generation, andcentral for Lakoff and Johnson to all thoughtand language, follows from clinical observa-tions that these seemingly bizarre sensations, soconfusing and emotionally upsetting to patients,often have for the observer clear metaphoricreferences of which the patient seems largelyunconscious. The patient may complain “myhead 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 re-cently Stanghellini (2004) suggest that thesesensations are frozen or literalized versions ofmetaphors whose fully felt meanings have be-come unbearable. Bizarre, synesthetically am-plified “sensations” of “emptiness”, “fragmen-tation”, and “decomposing” are all too autosym-bolically depictive of what is happeningsocially and personally in their lives. WithStanghellini (2004), these states are part of aprotested, but ultimately defensive disembodi-ment and “disincarnation”. They would followfrom the progressive deletions of felt presencein the semantically elaborated ecological self ofschizophrenia.

I have already shown elsewhere (Hunt, 1995)how the classical body centers or “chakras” ofthe Eastern meditation traditions and the innercolumn of space or “hollow body” experiencesinvolved in “Kundalini” energization states, arebased on the semantic enhancement of the innerform of Schilder’s body image—here in thecontext of a progressively expanding sense ofpresence. The chakras, and related lataif systemof Sufism (Almaas, 1988), can be understood assynesthetic felt meanings emerging from thefusion of tactile-kinesthetic segments of thebody image with vivid imagistic colors, geo-metric or mandala designs, and vocally expres-sive sounds or mantras. The resultant enhance-ments of felt presence are linked to the trans-formation of standard conflictual emotions(fear, rage, jealousy), as also released in bioen-ergetic body therapies, into the metaphoricallymediated “illuminations” of ecstasy describedby Laski (1961) and Almaas (1988).

On a more general level, Almaas (1986) hasindependently distinguished between an outer,indefinite or open, body image boundary—through which numinous states are felt to passexpansively outward—and an inner or corebody image—which can be synesthetically ex-perienced as a dense, undifferentiated, and allencompassing black space. Progressive experi-ences of this dense black space on levels ofmore and more potential subtlety are associatedwith nondual realizations of an all-originating“void”—at first raising fears of personal anni-hilation and death. We could add that it is theinherent coordination of ecological self and sur-rounding array that allows this fully realizedsynesthetic fusion of inner density with blackopen spaciousness, and so “affords” the nondualunitive experience of classical mysticism. Wecan now also begin to see how the increasinglysubtle/semantically satiating levels of this dis-solving black spaciousness could reach a levelof ephemerality and sheer subtlety of felt mean-ing such that they sink beneath the uncon-sciously “held” boundaries of self basic to or-dinary social and personal identity. This wouldusher in the hopefully penultimate “darknight”—the sudden, painful “absence” or non-existence of the very enhancements of presence-openness previously realized.

Deletions of Presence in Anhedonia andthe Mystical Dark Night

To return then to mystical “dark nights” and“poverty”, it becomes understandable how thispenultimate phase, so variable in its actual oc-currence and depth, could have essentially thesame inner phenomenology as the more termi-nal anhedonias of schizoaffective states. At thesame time, it would remain only a relative or“meta” pathology, allowing the individual amore or less, if now somewhat muted, ordinaryfunctioning within a consensual social reality.However painful the diminishment and felt lossof presence, it emerges within the organismiccontext of a longer term enhancement. Its phe-nomenal disappearance will expose previouslyunconscious and contracted layers of personaland bodily self. Their gradual later transparencyand release will have the potential to reveal themore subtle levels of Being-experience thatmust for now appear as a literal emptiness andnihilistic pointlessness.

219DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

The anhedonia at the core of the negativesymptoms of schizophrenia and the penultimatedark nights of spirituality can thus mutuallyilluminate each other, as the extremes of thespontaneous rhythms of the expansion and con-traction of vitality that are the normal existentialbackground of the sense of self. In schizoaffec-tive anhedonia the longer term tendency towardloss of felt presence finally completes itself,whereas in “mystical poverty” a deepening ofmeditative witnessing reveals a nonsubstantial-ity within previous enhancements of presence—only to be transformed into more subtle levelsof unitive mysticism with a more complete let-ting go of the ordinary boundaries of self. Wecould say that schizophrenic anhedonia distillsthe despair of the spiritual dark night, withoutits previous tacit assurance of a steadily ex-panded presence. Indeed, some of the pain ofthe “dark night” comes from the memory of thiscontrast and the awareness of a seemingly com-plete loss of meaning in the very midst of itsostensibly more authentic realization. Thisbroader context “contains” spiritual despair as a“meta” version of the more total life context ofsuffering in the patient.

Chronic Contraction Versus UnitiveRelease

The contrast between the frozen sense ofspace in chronic schizophrenia and the sense ofopenness in nondual unitive mysticism is strik-ing. In schizophrenia, there is a mechanicalquality of stasis that eventually permeates theactual ecological array:

For me, madness was. . .a country, opposed to reality,where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving noplace for shadow. . ..In this stretching emptiness all isunchangeable, immobile, congealed, crystallized. Ob-jects are stage trappings, placed here and there, geo-metric cubes without meaning. . ..the remorseless sunweighing down trees and hours under its electric rays.(Sechehaye, 1951, pp. 24, 17)

By contrast the full semantic embodiment ofopen spaciousness confers an inner spontaneityand freedom—the sense of Being itself as mag-ical display and gift:

With the realization of free space in which all thingsare identified, anything that emerges is known to beunborn in its origin. This is the attainment of theultimate refuge. . .Detached, without any tendency toslow the natural progression from unitary totality to-. . .the following moment, no fear arises. . ..Ratherthere is a continuous sense of amazement at the inef-fable beauty and sublimity of. . .the perfection of themoment. (Tulku, 1973, p. 106)

Both of these extreme forms reach into andsemantically “incarnate” the structure of eco-logical self and array as a whole, but in thedifferently directed contexts of contraction andwithdrawal on the one hand, and increasingopenness and inner freedom on the other. Thereis considerable experimental evidence for thesecontrasting directions of felt presence in re-search showing that outward measures of theembodied ecological self, in terms of physicalbalance, spatial orientation, and spatial cogni-tive abilities, are associated with contrastingforms of consciousness transformation forminga continuum linking the extremes of classicalmysticism and psychosis.

II. EXPERIMENTAL AND NEUROCOGNITIVE REFLECTIONS OF PRESENCE:BALANCE, SPATIAL COGNITION, AND THE ECOLOGICAL SELF

Well short of classical mysticism and clinicalschizoaffective states, we can distinguish betweenaltered states of consciousness that have an inte-grative and creatively enhancing impact and thosemore dissociative and disintegrative in their per-sonal and cognitive effects. The key to the neuro-cognitive bases of these more positive versusmore negative transformations of consciousnesswill come from a reconsideration and extension ofPaul Schilder’s (1942) observations on the rela-tion of psychiatric hallucinatory syndromes to

specific deficits in the vestibular balance systemand in closely related orientational and spatialanalytic abilities. For Schilder these syndromesreflect an underlying disorganization in the bodyimage as the foundation of the sense of personalself. In turn, we will see that the more integrativetransformations of consciousness associated withspontaneous mystical experiences, meditativestates, and lucid and creative/metaphoric forms ofdreaming are correlated with superior perfor-mance on these same measures of physical bal-

220 HUNT

ance and spatial skills. Meanwhile, and exactly asSchilder would have predicted, tendencies to dis-sociative states and nightmares are associated withbalance and spatial deficits, but less extremelythan for adult and childhood schizophrenia. Thesefindings are what one would expect if integrativeand disintegrative states of consciousness involvethe semantic engagement or “raising” of the basicform of the ecological self into self-referentialawareness—either as an enhanced or deletedsense of existential presence.

Integrative Versus Dissociative States ofConsciousness

There is by now considerable evidence of asingle dimension of individual difference forproclivity to altered state experience, includinghypnotizability (Hilgard, 1968), creative andimpactful dreaming (Hunt, 1989), responsive-ness to meditation (Travis, Arenander, &DuBois, 2004), psychedelic drugs (Bresnick &Levin, 2004; Fischer, 1975), and spontaneoussynesthetic and related imagistic experiences(Glicksohn, Salinger, & Roychman, 1992), aswell as dissociative states (Bernstein & Putnam,1986) and the perceptual aberration and magicalideation components of schizotypy (Brod,1997). These are all strongly correlated withquestionnaire measures variously termed imag-inative involvement (Hilgard, 1974), fantasyproneness (Lynn & Rhue, 1988), transliminality(Thalbourne, Houran, Alias, & Brugger, 2001),and the most widely used, Tellegen andAtkinson’s (1974) imaginative absorption. Thesequestionnaires have in common items indexingthe tendency to become absorbed in imagination,nature, aesthetic/creative activities, and/or sponta-neous subjective states—in short to intrinsicallyvalue an immediate experiential attitude over amore instrumental and pragmatic one.

Imaginative absorption, however measured,is a component of the more general dimensionvariously termed “openness to experience”, inMcCrae and Costa’s “big five” factor analyticmodel of personality (along with neuroticism,extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientious-ness) (McCrae, 1993) or “creativity/psychoti-cism” in Eysenck’s (1995) and Claridge’s(1987) earlier competing “big three” (with neu-roticism and extraversion) (Hunt, Dougan,Grant, & House, 2002). There is evidence thatthis general dimension of experiential openness,

whether measured in terms of McCrae orEysenck, is correlated with increased dopami-nergic activation (DeYoung et al., 2005) and/orenhanced and unusually coherent EEG thetaacross multiple brain regions (Glicksohn &Naffuliev, 2005; Stough et al., 2001). The lattereffect has also been reported for advanced TMmeditators (Travis & Pearson, 2000). Thesepsychophysiological findings are consistentwith a heightened sensitivity to novelty thatappears in its most intense form in the sense ofawe and fascination basic to both Otto’s defini-tion of the numinous core of spiritual experi-ence and Sullivan’s sense of the “uncanny”(Sullivan, 1953) in acute psychotic onset.

Not surprisingly, given the partial overlap inthe mid phase phenomenologies of classicalmysticism and clinical psychosis discussedabove, absorption/openness is a strikingly biva-lent dimension. It correlates, on the one hand,with creativity (McCrae, 1993), metaphor utili-zation and sensitivity (Hunt & Popham, 1987),empathy (Wickramasekera & Szlyk, 2003), andgeneral imaginativeness (Wild, Kuiken, &Schopflocher, 1995), and, on the other, withschizotypy 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 simultaneouspresence of integrative versus disintegrative formsof absorption/openness within the same study.Hunt et al. (2002) compared undergraduate pop-ulations on Tellegen’s measure of imaginative ab-sorption, as the most generic measure of experi-ential openness, with the Hood (1975) question-naire of mystical experiences, as indexing themore positive forms of high absorption, and withthe Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein &Putnam, 1986) as indexing more negative formsof absorption. Whereas the Hood questionnaireand Dissociative Experiences scale were bothstrongly correlated with imaginative absorption,they were not correlated with each other and onlythe dissociative scale went with neuroticism.These different configurations for positive andnegative forms of absorption are consistent withLynn and Rhue’s (1988) finding of two differentchildhood developmental pathways to high levelsof adult “fantasy proneness”, with those alsoshowing higher levels of MMPI psychoticism

221DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

coming from a background of childhood traumaand isolation, in contrast to another group charac-terized by parental encouragement of spontaneouscreative and fantasy activities. We get a picturehere of a background, partly genetic, predisposi-tion to a sensitive “openness” (McCrae et al.,2001), which crossed by trauma is more likely tolead to dissociative vulnerability, while with fa-milial support, and in the absence of major devel-opmental destabilization in sense of self, will bemore constructively used in the context of creativ-ity and spirituality.

We would also expect the existence of mixedforms along any continuum linking the moredistinct extremes of mysticism and psychosis.Barron’s (1969) original work on highly creativeartists and scientists found a combination of un-usually high scores on MMPI psychoticism andsimultaneous endorsement of “ego strength”words reflecting sensed embodiment and pres-ence, such as “vitality”, “energy”, “spontaneity”,and “strength”. Meanwhile, a factor analysis ofthe Hood questionnaire of mystical experiencesfound separate dimensions for felt unity, noeticunderstanding, and dissolution of self (Hood et al.,2001). In contrast to studies showing correlationsof the overall Hood and related scales with mea-sures of emotional stability (Hunt et al., 2002;MacDonald, 2000), Hood et al. found the disso-lution of self factor significantly related to ques-tionnaire psychoticism, depression, and somatiza-tion of stress.

There is also some evidence that a personalspiritual search in itself can entail painful feelingsof meaninglessness. Day and Peters (1999) foundthat both the members of new age spiritual move-ments and traditional Christian churches were sig-nificantly higher than a nonreligious control groupon “introvertive anhedonia”—perhaps illustratingthe relative diminution in sense of meaning thatmay motivate the search for enhanced presenceunderlying all spirituality. The elevation of thenew age group on the positive subfactor of “per-ceptual aberrations” however, also a correlate ofTellegen absorption, shows the enhancement ofsalience inherent to more explicitly experientialforms of spirituality.

Schilder on Destabilization of the SpatiallyEmbodied Self in Hallucinatory States

Paul Schilder (1886–1940), whose work re-mains sadly under assimilated in the context of

current interest in consciousness as presenceand phenomenal embodiment (Damasio, 1999;Gallagher, 2005), offered key observations to-ward a theory linking destabilization of thebody image, as core of the personal-social ego,with psychotic and neurological syndromes ofhallucination. Central to his highly originalcross-disciplinary writings, bridging neurology,psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, is the notionthat all consciousness of the environment isinseparable from self embodiment. Schilder(1935) also applies this notion of postural em-bodiment in all “outward” perception to thesymbolic level of body image as necessarilysocial, or as we would now say, cross modally“mirrored”. Accordingly, the social withdrawaland collapse of the sense of self in pathology willalso be reflected in postural distortions, spatialdisorientation, and dizziness. We have seen thatSchilder (1928, 1935, 1942) identified the humanbody image as multilayered and represented onparietal (predominantly right hemisphere), vestib-ular, and cerebellar levels. He was especiallystruck by the way in which neural damage on anyof these levels could produce similar hallucinatorysyndromes, synesthetically elaborating kinestheticdistortions of the body image.

Schilder (1953) concluded that a syndrome ofdepersonalization and feelings of unreality, as aloss of felt embodiment, ran to varying degreesthrough the subjective experiences of both neu-rosis and psychosis. It was also linked to dizzi-ness and spatial disorientation, and so readilyopens to the above visual-spatial anomalies. De-personalization also entailed a defensive andnarcissistically paralyzing self awareness, theextremes of which seem identical to Sass’s(1992) more recent findings on the role of hy-per-reflexivity in “first rank” symptoms.Schilder (1942) saw schizophrenia itself as afunctional interparietal syndrome, in which aprofound social withdrawal of the self discon-nects the kinesthetic-parietal and visual-occipital sides of the body image, releasing vi-sual and somatic hallucinations. He located asimilar hallucinatory syndrome in mescalin, andso it is especially intriguing that later psyche-delic drug research found that disorganizing“bad trip” reactions, in contrast to experiencesof meaning enhancement, were also based onanomalies of the body image—including deper-sonalization, bodily weakness, and extreme diz-ziness (Linton & Langs, 1964).

222 HUNT

For Schilder (1942), a vestibular syndrome ofdizziness and disorientation is incipient in allpsychopathology, since the conflict of compet-ing emotional reactions must also evoke, in thecore of the bodily self, the perception of com-peting physical forces, and so trigger vestibulardisorientation—including the automatic eyemovements of visual nystagmus. Indeed, dizzi-ness is a potential physiological component ofanxiety itself. Intense anxiety often includeswithin its phenomenology a vestibular imbal-ance syndrome of vertigo, bodily numbness andweakness, somatic sensations of interior sinkingin the lower body, pressure in the head and eyes,and the feelings of nausea that would also bepart of a disgust/avoidance reaction as the or-ganic core of repression and defense (Angyal,1941; Schilder, 1942). Along these lines, thepsychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1962) labeledwhat he termed the “primal agonies” of earlyinfancy as including sensations of falling for-ever, fragmentation, and dissolving or disap-pearing, while Tustin (1986) found early mem-ories of terrifying sensations of falling into aninfinite black nothingness and related spatialdisorientations in recovering autistic andschizophrenic children. In more recent clinicalresearch, not only is a vestibular dysfunctionsyndrome prevelant in clinical panic disorderand agoraphobia (Jacob et al., 1996), but phys-iologically caused nystagmus and vertigo oftenbecome part of a self-perpetuating functionalanxiety disorder in their own right. The fear ofprovoking further sensations of vertigo, with itsdeep emotional distress, in turn becomes a con-ditioned signal for panic, nausea, and dizziness.Chronic vertigo becomes its own form of anx-iety neurosis (Godemann, Koffroth, Neu, &Heusser, 2004; Yardley, 1994).

Whereas Schilder’s concern was entirelywith neurological and psychiatric hallucinatorysyndromes, it is also well known that intensevestibular activation has been a traditional,cross cultural method for the induction of ec-static and transpersonal states of conscious-ness—as in repetitive dancing, Sufi dervishspinning, and shamanic balancing (Siegel,1979). Accordingly we can expand Schilder’shypothesis of dysfunctional balance and spatialdisorientation as manifestations of body imagedeficit in hallucinatory syndromes, and suggestthat the more integrative, transpersonal states ofconsciousness—with their enhanced sense of

presence—should be most available to thosewith a greater sense of embodiment, as out-wardly indexed by good physical balance, spa-tial orientation, and spatial analytic skills suchas block designs and embedded figures tests. Inturn, we could expect that the more disintegra-tive alterations of consciousness, where, asabove, higher absorption is crossed with traumaand neuroticism/psychoticism, will be associ-ated with relative deficits in these same balanceand spatial skills.1

Integrative States of Consciousness andEnhanced Bodily Balance and Spatial

Abilities

There is much cumulative evidence for theassociation of superior performance in physicalbalance and spatial-analytic abilities—as atleast partial indicators of embodied presence—with states of consciousness and forms of imag-inative absorption that could be considered asbroadly creative, integrative, and/or spiritual.

Integrative or enhanced forms of dreaming,for instance, include: (a) lucid dreams—the selfawareness and identication of the dream while itis in process, and a capacity that is part of someEastern spiritual traditions and more frequent inWesterners practicing long-term meditation(Hunt, 1991; Travis & Pearson, 2004); (b) thearchetypal/mythological form of dreaming of

1 Measures of physical balance and spatial skills as in-dicative of integrative versus disintegrative states of con-sciousness are reminiscent of the older cognitive style lit-erature on field independence versus field dependence(Witkin and Goodenough, 1981). These researchers usedability to adjust the body and/or a visual stimulus to thevertical upright and the embedded figures test as twin mea-sures of the greater autonomy, inner orientation, and higherself-esteem of “field independence”—despite the difficultyof understanding cognitive ability as a “style”. Like themeasures of physical balance and block designs in states ofconsciousness research, these measures of field indepen-dence only minimally correlated or factored together. Theyseem better conceived now in terms of coherence of thebody image in Schilder’s sense, since it is their separatecorrelation with integrative vs. disintegrative forms ofimaginative absorption that would make them partial out-ward indicators of the embodied sense of self. Obviouslyphysical balance on its own will often be determined byextent and kind of athletic training, whereas spatial analyticskills are to a large degree part of a nonverbal abstractintelligence and its educational development. It is the com-ponent of each that overlaps as outward expressions of theembodied self that is under discussion here.

223DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

such interest to Jung and involving an enhancedcreative imagination (Cann & Donderi, 1986;Spadafora & Hunt, 1990); and (c) higher levelsof “dream bizarreness”, as the core dimensionof dreaming correlated in numerous studieswith waking measures of creativity (Hunt,1989).

Consistent with the enhanced sense of kines-thetic presence in both lucid and archetypaldreaming, and often associated with peak orecstatic feelings, repeated studies have foundsuperior performance on measures of physicalbalance (walking a balance beam, adaptive nys-tagmus reactivity) in subjects reporting higherlevels of dream lucidity (Gackenbach & Snyder,1988) and archetypal dreaming (Spadafora &Hunt, 1990). Lucid dreamers are also signifi-cantly better, compared to controls, in blockdesigns and the embedded figures test(Gackenbach & Snyder, 1988). Higher levels oflucid and archetypal dreaming are both corre-lated with the Hood mystical experiences ques-tionnaire (Hunt, Gervais, Shearing-Johns, &Travis, 1992; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Mean-while, the more general dimension of dreambizarreness has been significantly associatedwith block designs (Foulkes, 1982; Pariak &Hunt, 1992), greater kinestehetic content indream reports (Slater & Hunt, 1997), and withsuperior balance beam performance (Slater &Hunt, 1997; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990). Poorbalance may operate here as a kind of repressiveor contractive mechanism in dream formation,inhibiting creative bizarreness through a selfinhibition induced by reactive disorientation.This model is supported by findings that artifi-cial vestibular/postural stimulation during REMsleep can also be a specific inducer of unusuallyintense dream bizarreness (Nielsen, 1993).

A similar pattern emerges with mystical,meditative, and related transpersonal states. TheHood questionnaire of mystical experience hasbeen significantly correlated with superior bal-ance and spatial orientation (Ayers, Beaton, &Hunt, 1999; Swartz & Seginer, 1981). Higherperformance levels on block designs and/or em-bedded figures are also found in individualsreporting higher levels of mystical experience(Hunt et al., 1992), long-term meditators(Alexander et al., 1990), adult subjects claimingearly childhood experiences of mystical andout-of-body states (Hunt et al., 1992), and adult

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

Disintegrative States of Consciousnessand Spatial/Orientational Deficit

A reciprocal picture emerges for nightmareintensity and frequency. We can consider night-mares as indicators of disintegrative conscious-ness in the context of dreaming, also supportedby their association at higher levels with schizo-typicality and dissociative tendencies (Belicki,1992; Claridge, Clark, & Davis, 1997; Levin &Raulin, 1991). Thus, Ayers et al. (1999) andSpadafora and Hunt (1990) found a significantrelationship between nightmares and poor bal-ance beam performance. Adult nightmare fre-quency, which is negatively related to the Hoodquestionnaire of mystical experiences, is alsoassociated with deficits in spatial ability onblock designs and embedded figures tests(Slater & Hunt, 1997; Spadafora & Hunt, 1990).Adult recall of higher levels of childhood nightterrors is similarly linked to lower performanceon embedded figures and block designs (Hunt etal., 1992).

In terms of a more general schizotypal di-mension of waking personality, Guralnik et al.(2000) found poor performance on the WechslerBlock Designs to offer the best cognitive per-formance discrimination between a clinicalsample of depersonalized patients and normalcontrols. Meanwhile, there has been some de-bate over whether a vulnerability to schizophre-nia, as based on high absorption/openness com-bined with low intelligence (Eysenck, 1995),may actually rest predominantely on perfor-mance decrements specific to spatial abilities,especially as indexed by block designs(Aylward, Walker, & Bettes, 1984; Berenbaum& Fuiita, 1994). Such views are consistent witha predominant right hemisphere decrement inschizotypicality and schizophrenia that could bereflected in vulnerabilities in self-awareness,metaphor, and spatial ability (Richardson,Mason, & Claridge, 1997).

The most striking deficiencies in spatial ori-entation have been found in balance and vestib-ular functioning in both adult and childhoodschizophrenia. Angyal and Blackman (1940)were the first to measure the extreme vestibulardysfunction that Schilder (1935) had suggestedas the heart of body image deletion in schizo-

224 HUNT

phrenia. They found essentially no nystagmuseye movement response to inner ear caloricstimulation in a group of chronic catatonicschizophrenics who also reported the syndromeof hallucinatory body image anomalies dis-cussed above. Their performance was entirelynonoverlapping with normal controls. Simi-larly, Ornitz and Ritvo (1968) found no nystag-mus response whatsoever in a group of autisticchildren, who also showed typical posturalanomalies, arm flapping and whirling, and aver-sion to elevators. Pollack and Krieger (1958)found the same radical diminishment of nystag-mus and postural orientation in a group of olderschizophrenic children. More recent researchwith adult schizophrenics, varying in terms ofsubtype and medication, gives a less clear pic-ture, showing more an irregularity in strength ofnystagmus rather than its absence (Levy,Holzman, & Proctor, 1983). Jones and Pivak(1983, 1985) also found decreased nystagmusvelocity and an inability to suppress inducednystagmus through voluntary visual fixation,consistent with organic syndromes with parietaland cerebellar damage, as well as with autopsyfindings of cerebellar deterioration in somechronic schizophrenics (Martin & Albers,1995).

A central vestibular-cerebellar deficit seemsalso to be involved in the anomalous smoothpursuit eye movement tracking widely repli-cated in schizophrenia, schizotypicality, and bi-polar psychosis (Holzman, Levy, & Proctor,1976; Sweeney et al., 1994; Chen et al., 1999).Tracking anomalies are seen by some research-ers as a biological marker for vulnerability toschizophrenia and schizoaffective psychosis(Holzman, Solomon, Levin, & Waternaux,1984; Lencer, Trillenberg-Krecker, Schwinger,& Arolt, 2003). Ross et al. (1996) and Siever etal. (1994) found these eye movement pursuitdeficits to be significantly greater in anhedonicand socially withdrawn (negative symptom) pa-tients. Yet the deficits are inversely related tothe perceptual aberration scale of “positiveschizotypy”, also considered as a correlate ofimaginative creativity (Brod, 1997) and positiveforms of absorption (Goulding, 2004; McCreery& Claridge, 2002). That the tracking deficit maybe more than simply genetic follows fromIrwin, Green, & Marsh’s (1999) findings in alarge normal sample of a significant relationbetween tracking deficits and reports of child-

hood trauma, suggesting a more general relationto the disintegrative side of absorption/openness.

Eye movements are determined both by at-tentional visual scanning functions, which arepredominantly frontal and prefrontal, and bycerebellar functions related to posture, bodymovement, and balance, with the extreme ofcerebellar predominance seen in the spinninginduced, automatic compensatory eye move-ments of the nystagmus reflex itself (Kolb &Whishaw, 1996; Pompanieno, 1974). Onewould expect constraints on the attentionalscanning component where an extra load hasbeen placed on the balance/postural componentof the body image, whether through a geneticbasis for schizophrenia itself, or a similarlydemonstrated (McCrae et al., 2001) genetic ba-sis for the more general personality dimensionof openness to experience when crossed by vul-nerability to trauma and/or destructive familialrelations. Indeed, Pivak, Bylsma, & Cooper(1988) found normal tracking velocities in bothschizophrenics and organic cerebellar patientsunder darkened stimulation conditions thateliminate peripheral attentional distractions.

The hypothesis that disturbances in the bodyimage with psychosis, and potentially withtrauma in general, would put an extra “load” onthe cerebellar component of eye movementsmay also make sense of certain therapeutic tech-niques common to both bioenergetic therapies(Reich, 1949) and the more recent Eye Move-ment Desensitization and Reprocessing(EMDR) (Shapiro, 1995). In both, deliberatelysustained large eye movements while re-experiencing traumatic memories are associatedwith a significant lessening of anxiety—andeven in some cases the sudden release of ex-pansive transpersonal states (Almaas, 1986;Parnell, 1996). A “catatonoid” freezing—alsoreferred to as tonic immobility (Gallup,1974)—is part of the most basic organismicresponse to unavoidable traumatic stress, a gen-eral avoidance response that often entails a fixedstaring (Stern, 1988). Accordingly, deliberateand sustained slow eye rolling, or the side toside movements of EMDR, would at least tem-porarily break the patterns of constrained eyemovements that have been imprinted on thelevel of an original postural freezing—and sorequiring an extra cerebellar contribution as partof that defense. The theoretical basis for these

225DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

eye movement therapies follows from Schilderon balance and posture as central to the embod-ied self and its defensive contraction.

A Mystical-Schizophrenic Continuum ofPresence and Neurocognitive Coherence

There is considerable evidence that mysticaland meditative practices, and schizophrenia andschizotypicality, are the extremes of a moregeneral continuum of presence and “feeling ofreality”, whose neurocognitive manifestationsare an enhancement versus diminution of corti-cal connectivity and EEG coherence. The abovereview of enhanced spatial abilities and balancein transpersonal states and dysfunction in psy-chosis gets its further context as part of thisbroader connectivity dimension.

Andreasen, Paradiso, & O’Leary (1998) havesuggested that the core of schizophrenic pathol-ogy is a “dysmetric” failure of cortical connec-tivity, including cerebellar based coordinationand timing, which is certainly consistent withresearch on reduced blood flow/brain shrinkagein frontal, temporal, parietal, and cerebellar re-gions (Nierenberg et al., 2005; Phillips &Silverstein, 2003). Buchanan et al. (2004) founda pattern of decreased connection between pre-frontal areas and the heteromodal associationareas in the parietal and angular gyrus regions inschizophrenia. Heteromodal parietal areas arewidely seen as key to the cross modal integra-tion capacity basic not only to the human sym-bolic capacity in general (Geschwind, 1965;Taylor, 2003), but also to the integration ofhigher level visual and kinesthetic patterns thatare fundamental to the body image (Gallagher,2005; Schilder, 1935), and so also to socialmirroring. A right parietal diminution and/ordisconnection would be part of both the curiousform of anosognosia in schizophrenic patients,wherein they often lack any self awareness oftheir disorder as such (Gambini, Barbieri, &Scarone, 2004), and for widespread findings ofdeficit in “theory of mind” measures of under-standing of others’ cognitive processes (Brune,2005). Attesting to the multiple layers of apotentially integrated sense of self, a temporaryremission of organic anosognosia can be in-duced by stimulating lower level vestibularfunctioning (Bisiach, Rusconi, & Vallar, 1991;Storrie-Baker et al., 1997). It also seems rele-vant that artificial centrifugal spinning—

triggering extreme nystamus—was widely usedas a treatment for psychotic states in the early1800’s (Pain, 2006).

Meanwhile, research on meditative and ec-static states has shown specific involvements inthese same parietal areas (Azari et al., 2001;Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, & d’Aquili,2003; Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck, 2004).To the extent that these regions are basic to asymbolic system linking sense of self and otheras cognitive reciprocals of each other, as alsoseems implied by parietal correlates of out-of-body states (Blanke et al., 2004), findings ofenhanced parietal-frontal connectivity (Tononi,2005) are consistent with traditional mysticalaccounts of an accelerated “unselfing”, or lossof egocentrism, and an increased empathy andcompassion for others as coemergent with thedeeper sense of presence developed in thesepractices. The full semantic embodiment of eco-logical self would indeed have to include theseright parietal areas, along with the cerebellarroots of the body image, and so would entail arelated development of social mirroring.

Advanced meditation involves an attunementto a background field of consciousness, whoseincreased meditative access seems to be corre-lated with an unusually coherent EEG in thetheta bandwidth, across anterior and posteriorregions and left and right hemispheres (Travis& Pearson, 2000). Widespread EEG thetawould appear to be the level of activation whichaffords a maximized coherence across the wid-est possible neural areas, still lower levels pass-ing into unconsciousness and higher risking sei-zure (Fischer, 1975). We have already seen thattheta enhancement is also part of the neuralbackground for the individual difference dimen-sion variously defined as openness (Stroughet al., 2001) and psychoticism/creativity(Glicksohn & Naftuliev, 2005).

Widespread theta coherence as the setting fora maximum attunement to consciousness asfield operates on a level of central activation justshort of sleep onset, and indeed it takes longpractice before meditative witnessing can besustained and deepened at this level. This fitswell with the phenomenology of developingmystical realization, such that its expressivemetaphors of flow, luminosity, and radiatingdarkness become progressively more subtle andephemeral as the initial phases of intensive il-lumination are attenuated. Staying with this pro-

226 HUNT

cess will require an ever more subtle attunementat lower and lower levels of neural activationand potential higher coherence that are them-selves easily disrupted. Some such derailmentmust follow from remaining, perhaps hithertounconscious, fixations in sense of self that aredeeply imprinted at the postural balance andspatial orientation levels of the body image,pushing the meditator back out of the delicatelevel of psychophysiological attunement thatmight alone help to resolve them.

The ostensible disappearance of hitherto lib-erating expansions of presence that now requirethese more subtle levels of experience leavesthe spiritual seeker with an emerging, all tooobtrusive awareness of fixated levels of self thathad ostensibly already been transcended. Thiswill have much to do with the frustration andloss of meaning of the classical “dark night”.Only a correspondingly subtle level of opennesswill allow a reconnection with the still moresubtle expressions of unitive absorption—andso explain why they are so infrequent and soreadily interrupted by these metapathologies ofspirituality.2

Conclusions

The spiritual path of direct mystical/numi-nous experience can at some point entail a“metapathological” crisis of loss of meaning,nihilistic despair, and death of feeling that arealso part of the inner dynamics of the deletion ofpresence extending from the early onset phasesof schizophrenia to its chronic terminus in an-hedonia and social withdrawal. The patient ac-counts documented by Sass (1998, 2000) showa similar, but utterly more devastating versionof this dark night of the soul, since the latter isa radical loss of meaning still framed within thecontext of a previous enhancement of presence.The similarity in the inner phenomenology ofthis relative deletion of presence in penultimatemysticism to the devastating diminishment ofchronic psychosis shows why any directly ex-periential search for spiritual realization shouldnot be undertaken lightly.

The intrinsic orientation of our symbolic re-combinatory intelligence toward novelty, and soour openness to continuous creative expressionsof felt meaning, will also require a related pro-cess of ongoing “semantic satiation” throughwhich previous realizations of meaning undergo

inevitable loss of significance through repeti-tion. The emergence of the new will depend onthe simultaneous deletion of the old. With re-spect to the metaphoric or “presentational” in-telligences of the arts and spirituality, thesecycles of meaning emergence and satiation oc-cur both within the individual as well as on acollective cultural level. With respect to thelatter, the sociologists Weber (1963) andSorokin (1957) have independently tracedthrough multiple civilizations the cycles of re-ligious secularization and periodic visionary re-newals, the latter based on reformulations ofnuminous experience in ways more congruentwith current social reality. Weber and Sorokinfollowed Nietzsche (1886) in the suggestingthat the modern West had been in a long periodof secularization of traditional Judaio-Christianspirituality—and we can see both propheticalfundamentalisms and “new age” mysticisms ascontemporary signs of these attempted renew-als. Certainly the stormy “psychoticism” of con-temporary forms of creativity and the meta-pathologies of directly engaged spiritualitiesshow the relative fragility of the cultural feltmeanings that seek to create, preserve, and re-create the realizations of presence that give asense of ground and meaning to our personaland social existence.

The economic and cultural conditions in themodern materialist West that will predisposeespecially those higher on absorption-opennesstoward renewals of a primary spirituality, espe-cially in its more “new age” or “this worldly”forms (see also Hunt, 2003), will often entail aprolonged and painful transition. In effect, thesearch for a sense of presence beneath ordinary

2 Such neurocognitive accounts of processes mediatingmystical experience have appeared to some to call intoquestion any phenomenology of a direct contact with animmediate presence and Being. For Metzinger (2003), iftranspersonal states are based on the semantic expression ofthe complex neural processes underlying the body schema,they automatically lose any claim to a direct, “unmediated”reality. However, if the metaphoric vehicles of ecstaticstates are higher cognitive elaborations of the ecological selfand surrounding array, which for Gibson are in direct res-onance to the changing physical environment, then thesemantic realization of presence-openness does have itsown claim to reality status. Put otherwise, since we actuallydo exist, the Being experiences of mysticism are not “mod-els” or “representations” of “something else”. Being expe-rience is not a model of itself, it is itself—our humanattunement to the existential reality of being alive.

227DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

social-personal reality, while living day to dayin a secular society that must continually rein-voke the ordinary sense of self which has alsobeen “seen through” as unreal and illusory, willbring about a sort of experiential or aesthetic“crucifixion” to parallel the more traditionalChristian ethical one. This will be more like a“long gray night of the soul”, blocking anydeeper shift into the unitive realization of open-ness and surrender of the classical “otherworldly” mysticisms. The more subtle media-tions of presence that might reground and re-connect will then appear more as emptiness andnonexistence—covered over and blocked bythe relatively “noisy” defenses still possibleagainst further loss.

Curiously, as also pointed out in the “negativetheology” of Altizer (2003), the vague sense ofalienation that characterizes much of contempo-rary secular culture is an understated spiritual ni-hilism aligned with the sense of absence at theheart of the classical “dark night”. It is uncon-sciously attuned toward just the more subtle, ifoccluded, levels of numinous experience that canreestablish the semantic embodiment of the eco-logical self and a renewed sense of the presence/Being that has grounded traditional cultures. Thiscollective suspension in a “gray night of the soul,”and its “metapathological” anhedonias, is alreadyreflected in major visionary figures of the recentpast—in Nietzsche’s later loneliness and despair,Thoreau’s final withdrawn malaise, the olderJung’s painful isolation and existential uncer-tainty, and Heidegger’s own struggle with “thenothing” (Hunt, 2003). Even a radically secular-ized culture will not escape the implicit categoriesof spirituality as the form of intuitive-imagisticintelligence whose function is precisely the strug-gle for a unitive sense of meaning and purpose.

References

Alexander, C., Davies, J., Dixon, C., Dillbeck, M.,Oetzel, K., Muehlman, J., et al. (1990). Higherstages of consciousness beyond formal operations:The Vedic psychology of human development. InC. N. Alexander and E. J. Langer (Eds.), Higherstages of human development: Adult growth be-yond formal operations (pp. 286–341). New York:Oxford University Press.

Almaas, A. H. (1986). The void: A psychodynamicinvestigation of the relationship between mind andspace. Berkeley: Diamond Books.

Almaas, A. H. (1988). The pearl beyond price: Inte-gration of personality into Being: An object-relations approach. Berkeley: Diamond Books.

Altizer, T., (2003). Godhead and the nothing. Al-bany, NY: SUNY Press.

Andreasen, N., Paradiso, S., & O’Leary, D. (1998).“Cognitive dysmetria” as an integrative theory ofschizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 24, 203–218.

Angyal, A. (1935). The perceptual basis of somaticdelusions in a case of schizophrenia. Archives ofNeurology and Psychiatry, 34, 270–279.

Angyal, A. (1936). The experience of the body-self inschizophrenia. Archives of Neurology and Psychi-atry, 25, 1029–1053.

Angyal, A. (1937). Disturbances of activity in a caseof schizophrenia. Archives of Neurology and Psy-chiatry, 38, 1047–1054.

Angyal, A. (1941). Disgust and related aversions.Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 36,393–412.

Angyal, A., & Blackman, N. (1940). Vestibular re-activity in schizophrenia. Archives of Neurologyand Psychiatry, 44, 611–20.

Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.

Ayers, L., Beaton, S., & Hunt, H. (1999). The sig-nificance of transpersonal experiences, emotionalconflict, and cognitive abilities in creativity. Em-pirical Studies of the Arts, 17, 73–82.

Aylward, E., Walker, E., & Bettes, B. (1984). Intel-ligence in schizophrenia: Meta-analysis of the re-search. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 10, 430–459.

Azari, N., Nickel, J., Wunderlich, G., Niedeggen, M.,Heffer, H., Tellmann, L., et al. (2001). Neuralcorrelates of religious experience. European Jour-nal of Neuroscience, 13, 1649–1652.

Barron, F. (1969). Creative person and creative pro-cess. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Belicki, K. (1992). Nightmare frequency versusnightmare distress: Relation to psychopathologyand cognitive style. Journal of Abnormal Psychol-ogy, 101, 592–597.

Berenbaum, H., & Fuiita, F. (1994). Schizophreniaand personality: Exploring the boundaries and con-nection between vulnerability and outcome. Jour-nal of Abnormal Psychology, 103, 148–158.

Bernstein, E. M., & Putnam, F. W. (1986). Develop-ment, reliability, and validity of a dissociationscale. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,174, 727–735.

Bett, H. (1964). Johannes Scotus Erigena: A study inmediaeval philosophy. New York: Russell & Rus-sell.

Bisiach, E., Rusconi, M., & Vallar, G. (1991). Re-mission of somatoparaphrenic delusion throughvestibular stimulation. Neuropsychologia, 29,1029–1031.

228 HUNT

Blakemore, S., Bristow, D., Bird, G., Frith, C., &Ward, J. (2005). Somatosensory activations duringthe observation of touch and a case of vision-touchsynesthesia. Brain, 128, 1571–1583.

Blanke, O., Landis, T., Spinelli, L., & Seeck, M.(2004). Out-of-body experience and autoscopy ofneurological origin. Brain, 127, 243–258.

Blofeld, J. (Ed.) (1962). The Zen teaching of Hui Hai.London: Rider.

Boisen, A. (1936). The exploration of the innerworld. New York: Harper.

Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands“feel” touch that eyes see. Nature, 391, 756.

Bowers, M. (1974). Retreat from sanity. New York:Human Sciences Press.

Boyer, P. (1994). The naturalness of religious ideas:A cognitive theory of religion. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press.

Bresnick, T., & Levin, R. (2004). Phenomenal qual-ities of Ayahuasca ingestion and its relation tofringe consciousness and personality. Journal ofConsciousness Studies, 13(9), 5–24.

Brett, C. (2002). Psychotic and mystical states ofbeing: Connections and distinctions. Philosophy,Psychiatry, and Psychology, 9, 321–341.

Brod, J. (1997). Creativity and schizotypy. In G.Claridge (Ed.), Schizotypy (pp. 274–298). Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Brune, M. (2005). “Theory of mind” in schizophre-nia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 31, 21–42.

Buchanan, R., Francis, A., Arango, C., Miller, K.,Lefkowitz, D., McMahan, R., et al. (2004). Mor-phometric assessment of the heteromodal associa-tion cortex in Schizophrenia. American Journal ofPsychiatry, 161, 322–331.

Bucke, R. (1901). Cosmic consciousness. New York:University Books.

Butterworth, G. (1995). An ecological perspective onthe origins of self. In J. Bermudez, A. Marcel, &N. Eilan (Eds.). The body and the self (pp. 87–110). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cann, D., & Donderi, D. (1986). Jungian personalitytypology and the recall of everyday and archetypaldreams. Journal of Personality and Social Psy-chology, 50, 1021–1030.

Chapman, L., Chapman, J., Kwapil, T., Eckblad, M.,& Zinser, M. (1994). Putatively psychosis-pronesubjects 10 years later. Journal of Abnormal Psy-chology, 103, 171–183.

Chapman, L., Chapman, J., & Raulin, M. (1976).Scales for physical and social anhedonia. Journalof Abnormal Psychology, 85, 374–382.

Chapman, L., Chapman, J., & Raulin, M. (1978).Body-image aberration in schizophrenia. Journalof Abnormal Psychology, 87, 399–407.

Chen, Y., Levy, D., Nakayama, K., Matthysse, S.,Palafox, G., & Holzman, P. (1999). Dependence ofimpaired eye tracking on deficient velocity dis-

crimination in schizophrenia. Archives of GeneralPsychiatry, 56, 155–161.

Claridge, G. (1987). “The schizophrenias as nervoustypes” revisited. British Journal of Psychiatry,151, 735–743.

Claridge, G., Clark, K., & Davis, C. (1997). Night-mares, dreams, and schizotypy. British Journal ofClinical Psychology, 36, 377–386.

Cook, A., & Irwin, H. (1983). Visuospatial skills andthe out-of-body experience. Journal of Parapsy-chology, 47, 23–35.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error. New York:Putnam.

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens.San Diego: Harcourt.

Day, S., & Peters, E. (1999). The incidence of schizo-typy in new religious movements. Personality andIndividual Differences, 27, 55–67.

DeYoung, C., Peterson, J., & Higgins, D. (2005).Sources of openness/intellect: Cognitive and neu-ropsychological correlates of the fifth factor ofpersonality. Journal of Personality, 73, 825–858.

Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism. New York: Pantheon.Emerson, R. W. (1836). Nature. In R. W. Emerson,

Nature, the conduct of life, and other essays (pp.1–38), London: Dent, 1963.

Emerson, R. W. (1844). Experience. In R. W. Emerson,Selections (pp. 254–74), Cambridge, MA: RiversidePress, 1957.

Epstein, M. (1998). Going to pieces without fallingapart: A Buddhist perspective on wholeness. NewYork: Broadway Books.

Erigena (9th century). Periphyseon: On the divisionof nature. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Eysenck, H. (1995). Genius: The natural history ofcreativity. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Fischer, R. (1975). Cartography of inner space. In R.Siegel and J. West (Eds.), Hallucinations: Behav-ior, experience, and theory (pp. 197–239). NewYork: Wiley.

Flavell, J., & Draguns, J. (1957). A microgeneticapproach to perception and thought. PsychologicalBulletin, 54, 197–217.

Foulkes, D. (1982). Children’s dreams: Longitudinalstudies. New York: Wiley.

Freud, S. (1911). Psycho-analytic notes upon an au-tobiographical account of a case of paranoia. InCollected Papers, Vol. 3, Trans. A. & J. Strachey,(pp. 387–470). New York: Basic Books, 1959.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. In Collected pa-pers, Vol. 4, Trans. J. Riviere (pp. 98–136). NewYork: Basic Books, 1959.

Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. Trans. J.Strachey. London: Hogarth.

Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psy-cho-analysis, Trans. W. J. Sprott. New York: Nor-ton.

229DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

Frith, C. (2005). The self in action: Lessons fromdelusions of control. Consciousness and Cogni-tion, 14, 752–770.

Fuchs, T. (2005). Corporealized and disembodiedminds: A phenomenological view of the body inmelancholia and schizophrenia. Philosophy, Psy-chiatry, and Psychology, 12, 95–107.

Gackenbach, J., & Snyder, T. (1988). Individual dif-ferences associated with lucid dreaming. In J.Gackenbach & S. La Berge (Eds.), Consciousmind, sleeping brain: Perspectives on LucidDreaming (pp. 221–259). New York: PlenumPress.

Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind.Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gallup, G. (1974). Animal hypnosis: Factual status ofa fictional concept. Psychological Bulletin, 81,36–53.

Gambini, O., Barbieri, Y., & Scarone, S. (2004).Theory of mind in schizophrenia: First person vs.third person perspective. Consciousness and Cog-nition, 13, 39–46.

Geschwind, N. (1965). Disconnection syndromes inanimals and man. Brain, 88, 237–294, 585–644.

Gibson, J. (1966). The senses considered as percep-tual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visualperception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gillihan, S., & Farah, M. (2005). Is self special? Acritical review of evidence from experimental psy-chology and cognitive neuroscience. Psychologi-cal Bulletin, 131, 76–97.

Glicksohn, J., & Naffuliev, Y. (2005). In search of anelectrophysiological index for psychoticism. Per-sonality and Individual Differences, 39, 1083–1092.

Glicksohn, J., Salinger, O., & Roychman, A. (1992).An exploratory study of syncretic experience: Ei-detics, synesthesia, and absorption. Perception, 21,637–642.

Godemann, F., Koffroth, C., Neu, P., & Heusser, I.(2004). Why does vertigo become chronic afterneuropathia vestibularis? Psychosomatic Medi-cine, 66, 783–787.

Goldstein, K. (1963). Human nature in the light ofpsychopathology. New York: Schocken.

Goodman, F. (1986). Body posture and the religiousaltered state of consciousness: An experimentalinvestigation. Journal of Humanistic Psychol-ogy, 26, 81–118.

Goulding, A. (2004). Schizotypy models in relationto subjective health and paranormal beliefs andexperiences. Personality and Individual Differ-ences, 37, 157–167.

Green, C. (1968). Out-of-body experiences. NewYork: Ballantine Books.

Guenther, H. (1984). Matrix of mystery: Scientificand humanistic aspects of rDzogs-chen thought.Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

Guenther, H. (1989). From reductionism to creativ-ity: RDzogs-chen and the new sciences of mind.Boston: Shambhala.

Guralnik, O., Schmeidler, J., & Simeon, D. (2000).Feeling unreal: Cognitive processes in depersonal-ization. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157,103–109.

Gusnard, D. (2005). Being a self: Considerationsfrom functional imaging. Consciousness and Cog-nition, 14, 679–697.

Happold, F. (1963). Mysticism: A study and an an-thology. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

Heidegger, M. (1927). Being and time. Trans. J.Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York: Harper andRow, 1962.

Heidegger, M. (1962). On time and being, Trans. J.Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Heidegger, M. (1993). Basic Concepts. Trans. G.Aylesworth. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

Hilgard, E. (1968). The experience of hypnosis. NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Hilgard, J. (1974). Personality and hypnosis: A studyof imaginative involvement. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.

Holzman, P., Levy, D., & Proctor, L. (1976). Smoothpursuit eye movements, attention, and schizophre-nia. Archives of General Psychiatry, 33, 1415–1420.

Holzman, P., Solomon, C., Levin, S., & Waternaux,C. (1984). Pursuit eye movement dysfunction inschizophrenia: Family evidence for specificity. Ar-chives of General Psychiatry, 41, 136–139.

Hood, R. (1975). The construction and preliminaryvalidation of a measure of reported mystical expe-rience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Reli-gion, 14, 29–41.

Hood, R., Ghorbani, N., Watson, P., Ghramaleki, A.,Bing, M., & Davison, H. (2001). Dimensions ofthe mysticism scale. Journal for the ScientificStudy of Religion, 40, 691–705.

Hunt, H. (1986). A cognitive reinterpretation of clas-sical introspectionism: The relation between intro-spection and altered states of consciousness andtheir mutual relevance for a cognitive psychologyof metaphor and felt meaning (with commentariesby D. Bakan, R. Evans, & P. Swartz, and re-sponse). Annals of Theoretical Psychology, 4,245–313.

Hunt, H. (1989). The multiplicity of dreams: Mem-ory, imagination, and consciousness. New Haven:Yale University Press.

Hunt, H. (1991). Lucid dreaming as a meditativestate: Some evidence from long-term mediators. InJ. Gackenbach and A. Sheikh. Eds., Dream im-

230 HUNT

ages: A call to mental arms. (pp. 265–285). Ami-tyville, NY: Baywood Publishing.

Hunt, H. (1995). On the nature of consciousness:Cognitive, phenomenological, and transpersonalperspectives. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hunt, H. (2003). Lives in spirit: Precursors anddilemmas of a secular Western mysticism. Albany,NY: SUNY Press.

Hunt, H. (2005). Synesthesia, metaphor, and con-sciousness. Journal of Consciousness Stud-ies, 12, 12, 26–45.

Hunt, H. (2006). The truth value of mystical experi-ence. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, 12,5–43.

Hunt, H., & Cherfurka, C. (1976). A test of thepsychedelic model of consciousness. Archives ofGeneral Psychiatry, 33, 867–876.

Hunt, H., Dougan, S., Grant, K., & House, M. (2002).Growth enhancing versus dissociative states ofconsciousness. Journal of Humanistic Psychol-ogy, 42, 90–106.

Hunt, H., Gervais, A., Shearing-Johns, S., & Travis,F. (1992). Transpersonal experiences in childhood:An exploratory empirical study of selected adultgroups. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 75, 1135–1153.

Hunt, H., & Popham, C. (1987). Metaphor and statesof consciousness: A preliminary correlationalstudy of presentational thinking. Journal of MentalImagery, 11, 83–100.

Irwin, H. (2001). The relationship between dissocia-tive tendencies and schizotypy: An artifact ofchildhood trauma? Journal of Clinical Psychol-ogy, 57, 331–342.

Irwin, H., Green, M., & Marsh, P. (1999). Dysfunc-tion in smooth pursuit eye movements and historyof childhood trauma. Perceptual and MotorSkills, 89, 1230–1236.

Jacob, R., Furman, J., Durrant, J., & Turner, S.(1996). Panic, agoraphobia, and vestibular dys-function. American Journal of Psychiatry, 153,503–512.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. NewYork: Dover.

James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experi-ence. Garden City, NJ: Dolphin Books.

Jones, A., & Pivak, R. (1983). Abnormal visual-vestibular interaction in psychosis. Biological Psy-chiatry, 18, 45–61.

Jones, A., & Pivak, R. (1985). Vestibular activation,smooth pursuit tracking, and psychosis. PsychiatryResearch, 14, 291–308.

Jung, C. G. (1955). Mysterium Coniunctionis (Vol.14), Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Ed. G. Adlerand Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Kapleau, P. (1967). The three pillars of zen: Teach-ing, practice, and enlightenment. Boston: BeaconPress.

Katz, S., Ed. (1978). Mysticism and philosophicalanalysis. New York: Oxford University Press.

King, D., Burke, M., & Lucas, R. (1995). Antipsy-chotic drug-induced dysphoria. British Journal ofPsychiatry, 167, 480–482.

Kolb, B., & Whishaw, I. (1996). Fundamentals ofHuman Neuropsychology. New York: Freeman.

Krishna, G. (1967). Kundalini. New Delhi:Ramadhar and Hopman.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in theflesh. New York: Basic Books.

Landis, C. (1964). Varieties of psychopathologicalexperience. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Win-ston.

Laski, M. (1961). Ecstasy. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press.

Lencer, R., Trillenberg-Krecker, K., Schwinger, E.,& Arolt, V. (2003). Schizophrenia spectrum dis-orders and eye tracking dysfunction in singletonand multiplex schizophrenia families. Schizophre-nia Research, 60, 33–45.

Levin, R., & Raulin, M. (1991). Preliminary evidencefor the proposed relationship between frequentnightmares and schizotypal symptomatology.Journal of Personality Disorders, 5, 8–14.

Levin, R., Sirof, B., Simeon, D., & Guralnick, O.(2004). Role of fantasy proneness, imaginative in-volvement, and psychological absorption in deper-sonalization disorder. Journal of Nervous andMental Disease, 192, 69–71.

Levy, D., Holzman, P., & Proctor, L. (1983). Vestib-ular dysfunction and psychopathology. Schizo-phrenia Bulletin, 9, 383–438.

Linton, H., & Langs, R. (1964). Empirical dimen-sions of LSD-25 reactions. Archives of GeneralPsychiatry, 10, 469–485.

Lukoff, D. (1985). The diagnosis of mystical expe-riences with psychotic features. Journal ofTranspersonal Psychology, 17, 155–181.

Luria, A. R. (1972). The man with the shatteredworld, Trans. L. Solotaroff. New York: BasicBooks.

Lynn, S., & Rhue, J. (1988). Fantasy proneness.American Psychologist, 43, 35–44.

MacDonald, D. (2000). Spirituality: Description,measurement, and relation to the five factor modelof personality. Journal of Personality, 68, 1, 153–197.

Marks, L. (1978). The unity of the senses. New York:Academic Press.

Martin, P., & Albers, M. (1995). Cerebellum andschizophrenia: A selective review. SchizophreniaBulletin, 21, 241–250.

Maslow, A. (1971). The farther reaches of humannature. New York: Viking.

231DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

McClure, E., & Lilienfeld, S. (2002). The dark sideof absorption: Empirical associations between anexperiential response style and hypochondriacalconcerns. Journal of Research in Personality, 36,573–579.

McCrae, R. (1993). Openness to experience as abasic dimension of personality. Imagination, Cog-nition, and Personality, 13, 39–55.

McCrae, R., Jang, K., Livesley, J., Riemann, R., &Angleitner, A. (2001). Sources of structure: Ge-netic, environmental, and artifactual influences onthe covariation of personality traits. Journal ofPersonality, 69, 511–535.

McCreery, C., & Claridge, G. (2002). Healthyschizotypy: The case of out-of-body experiences.Personality and Individual Differences, 32, 141–154.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Mellor, C. (1970). First rank symptoms of schizohre-nia. British Journal of Psychiatry, 117, 15–23.

Meltzoff, A., & Moore, M. (1995). Infants’ under-standing of people and things: From body imita-tion to folk psychology. In J. Bermudez, A.Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self(pp. 43–69). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of per-ception. (C. Smith, Trans.) London: RoutledgePress.

Metzinger, T. (2003). Being no one. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

Minkowski, E. (1970). Lived time. Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press.

Mishlove, M., & Chapman, L. (1985). Social anhe-donia in the prediction of psychosis proneness.Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 94, 384–396.

Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and reality. San Fran-cisco: Freeman.

Neisser, U. (1988). Five kinds of self-knowledge.Philosophical Psychology, 1, 35–59.

Newberg, A., Pourdehnad, M., Alavi, A., & d’Aquili,E. (2003). Cerebral blood flow during meditativeprayer. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97, 625–630.

Nielsen, T. (1993). Changes in the kinesthetic contentof dreams following somatosensory stimulation ofleg muscles during REM sleep. Dreaming, 3, 99–113.

Nierenberg, J., Salisbury, D., Levitt, J., David, E.,McCarley, R., & Shenton, M. (2005). Reduced leftangular gyrus volume in first-episode schizophre-nia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 1539–1541.

Nietzsche, F. (1886). Beyond good and evil. In Thephilosophy of Nietzsche, Trans. H. Zimmern. NewYork: Modern Library, 1954.

Ogama, T. (1998). Qi and phenomenology of wind.Continental Philosophy Review, 31, 321–335.

Ornitz, E., & Ritvo, E. (1968). Perceptual incon-stancy in early autism. Archives of General Psy-chiatry, 18, 78–98.

Otto, R. (1923). The idea of the holy. New York:Galaxy Books.

Pain, S. (2006). The human centrifuge. New Scien-tist, 11, 54–55.

Pariak, D., Hunt, H., & Belicki, K. (June, 1992).Dreams of humanities and science majors. Associ-ation for the Study of Dreams, Santa Cruz, CA.

Parnas, J., & Handest, P. (2003). Phenomenology ofanomalous self-experience in early schizophrenia.Comprehensive Psychiatry, 44, 121–134.

Parnas, J., & Sass, L. (2001). Self, solipsism, andschizophrenic delusions. Philosophy, Psychiatry,and Psychology, 8, 101–120.

Parnell, L. (1996). Eye movement desensitizationand reprocessing (EMDR) and spiritual unfolding.Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 28, 129–153.

Phillips, W., & Silverstein, S. (2003). Convergenceof biological and psychological perspectives oncognitive coordination in schizophrenia. Behav-ioural and Brain Sciences, 26, 65–138.

Pivak, R., Bylsma, F., & Cooper, P. (1988). Darkcondition normalization of smooth pursuit track-ing: Evidence of cerebellar dysfunction in psycho-sis. European Archives of Psychiatry and Neuro-logical Sciences, 237, 334–342.

Pollack, M., & Krieger, H. (1958). Oculomotor andpostural patterns in schizophrenic children. Ar-chives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 79, 720–726.

Pompanieno, O. (1974). Vestibular influences duringsleep. In H. Kornhuber (Ed.) Vestibular system,Part I: Basic mechanisms. (pp. 583–622). Berlin:Springer-Verlag.

Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chim-panzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral andBrain Sciences, 4, 515–526.

Ratcliffe, M. (2005). The feeling of being. Journal ofConsciousness Studies, 12, 43–60.

Reich, W. (1949). Character analysis. New York:Noonday Press.

Richardson, A., Mason, O., & Claridge, G. (1997).Schizotypy and cerebral lateralization. In G. Clar-idge (Ed.), Schizotypy. (pp. 145–168). Oxford: Ox-ford University Press.

Roberts, B. (1993). The experience of no-self. Al-bany, NY: SUNY Press.

Ross, D., Thaker, G., Buchanan, R., Lahti, A.,Medoff, D., Bartko, J., et al. (1996). Association ofabnormal smooth pursuit eye movements with thedeficit syndrome in schizophrenic patients. Amer-ican Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 1158–1165.

Sacks, O. (1987). The man who mistook his wife fora hat. New York: Harper and Row.

Sass, L. (1992). Madness and modernism. New York:Basic Books.

232 HUNT

Sass, L. (1998). Schizophrenia, self-consciousness,and the modern mind. Journal of ConsciousnessStudies, 5, 543–565.

Sass, L. (2000). Schizophrenia, self-experience, andthe so-called “negative symptoms”. In D. Zahavi(Ed.), Exploring the self (pp. 149–182). Amster-dam: John Benjamins.

Saxe, R., & Wexler, A. (2005). Making sense ofanother mind: The role of the right temporo-parietal junction. Neuropsychologia, 43, 1391–1399.

Schilder, P. (1928). Brain and personality. NewYork: International Universities Press.

Schilder, P. (1935). The image and appearance of thehuman body. New York: Wiley.

Schilder, P. (1942). Mind: Perception and thought intheir constructive aspects. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Schilder, P. (1953). Medical Psychology. New York:International Universities Press.

Schneider, K. (1959). Clinical Psychopathology.New York: Grune & Stratton.

Schreber, D. (1903). Memoirs of my nervous illness.London: Dawson.

Searles, H. (1965). The differentiation between con-crete and metaphorical thinking in the recoveringschizophrenic patient. In H. Searles, Collected pa-pers on schizophrenia and related subjects (pp.560–583). New York: International UniversitiesPress.

Sechehaye, M. (1951). Autobiography of a schizo-phrenic girl. New York: Grune & Stratton.

Shapiro, F. (1995). Eye movement desensitizationand reprocessing. New York: Guilford Press.

Siegel, R. (1979). Dizziness as an altered state ofconsciousness. Journal of Altered States of Con-sciousness, 5, 87–107.

Siever, L., Friedman, L., Moskowitz, J., Mitropoulou,V., Keefe, R., Roitman, S., et al. (1994). Eye move-ment impairment and schizotypal psychopathology.American Journal of Psychiatry, 151, 1209–1215.

Slater, J., & Hunt, H. (1997). Postural-vestibular in-tegration and forms of dreaming. Perceptual andMotor Skills, 85, 97–98.

Smith, H. (1976). Forgotten truth: The primordialtradition. New York: Harper Colophon.

Smith, Q. (1986). The felt meanings of the world.West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Sorokin, P. (1957). Social and cultural dynamics.Boston: Porter Sargent.

Spadafora, A., & Hunt, H. (1990). The multiplicity ofdreams: Cognitive-affective correlates of lucid, ar-chetypal, and nightmare dreaming. Perceptual andMotor Skills, 71, 627–644.

Stace, W. (1987). Mysticism and philosophy. LosAngeles: Tarcher.

Stanghellini, G. (2004). Disembodied spirits and de-animated bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stern, M. (1988). Repetition and trauma. Hillsdale,NJ: Analytic Press.

Storrie-Baker, H., Segalowitz, S., Black, S., McLean,J., & Sullivan, N. (1997). Improvement of hemis-patial neglect with cold-water calorics: An electro-physiological test of the arousal hypothesis of ne-glect. Journal of the International Neuropsycho-logical Society, 3, 394–402.

Stough, C., Donaldson, C., Scarlata, B., & Ciorciari,J. (2001). Psychophysiological correlates of theNEO PI-R openness, agreeableness, and conscien-tiousness. International Journal of Psychophysiol-ogy, 41, 87–91.

Studstill, R. (2005). The unity of mystical traditions:The transformation of consciousness in Tibetanand German mysticism. Leiden: Brill.

Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory ofpsychiatry. New York: Norton.

Swartz, P., & Seginer, L. (1981). Response to bodyrotation and tendency to mystical experience. Per-ceptual and Motor Skills, 53, 683–688.

Sweeney, J., Clementz, B., Escobar, M., Drake, K., &Frances, A. (1994). Eye tracking dysfunction inschizophrenia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology,103, 222–230.

Taylor, J. (2003). The central role of the parietallobes in consciousness. Consciousness and Cogni-tion, 10, 379–417.

Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness toabsorbing and self altering experiences (“absorp-tion”), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility.Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 83, 268–277.

Thalbourne, M., Houran, J., Alias, A., & Brugger, P.(2001). Transliminality, brain function, and synes-thesia. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,189, 190–192.

Tononi, G. (2005). Consciousness, information inte-gration, and the brain. Progress in Brain Research,150, 109–126.

Travis, F., Arenander, A., & DuBois, D. (2004).Psychological and physiological characteristics ofa proposed object-referral/self-referral continuumof self-awareness. Consciousness and Cogni-tion, 13, 401–420.

Travis, F., & Pearson, C. (2000). Pure consciousness:Distinct phenomenological and physiological cor-relates of “consciousness itself”. InternationalJournal of Neuroscience, 100, 1–4.

Tulku, T. (1973). Calm and clear. Berkeley: Dharma.Tustin, F. (1986). Autistic barriers in neurotic pa-

tients. New Haven: Yale University Press.Underhill, E. (1955). Mysticism. New York: Meridian.Vaitl, D., Gruzelier, J., Lehmann, D., Ott, U.,

Sammer, G., Strehl, U., et al. (2005). Psychobiol-ogy of altered states of consciousness. Psycholog-ical Bulletin, 131, 98–127.

VanDusen, W. (1972). The natural depth in man.New York: Harper and Row.

233DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL

Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). Theembodied mind: Cognitive science and human ex-perience. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Voruganti, L., Heslegrave, R., & Awad, A. (1997).Neuroleptic dysphoria may be the missing linkbetween schizophrenia and substance abuse. Jour-nal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 185, 463–465.

Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought and language. Trans.E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Waldo, T., & Merritt, R. (2000). Fantasy proneness,dissociation, and DSM–IV axis II symptomatology.Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109, 555–558.

Walsh, R. (1977). Initial meditative experiences.Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 9, 151–192.

Weber, M. (1963). The sociology of religion. Trans.E. Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press.

Werner, H., & Kaplan, B. (1963). Symbol formation.New York: Wiley.

Wickramasekera, I., & Szlyk, J. (2003). Could em-pathy be a predictor of hypnotic ability? Interna-tional Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hyp-nosis, 51, 390–399.

Widiger, T., & Trull, J. (1992). Personality and psy-chopathology. Journal of Personality, 60, 363–393.

Wilber, K. (1984). The developmental spectrum andpsychopathology: Part I. Stages and types of pa-thology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16,75–118.

Wild, T., Kuiken, D., & Schopflocher, D. (1995). Therole of absorption in experiential involvement.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69,569–579.

Winkelman, M. (2000). Shamanism: The neuralecology of consciousness and healing. Westport,CT: Bergin and Garvey.

Winnicott, D. W. (1962). Ego integration in childdevelopment. In D. W. Winnicott, The Matura-tional processes and the facilitating environment(pp. 56–63). New York: International UniversitiesPress, 1965.

Witkin, H., & Goodenough, D. (1981). Cognitivestyles: Field dependence and field independence.New York: International Universities Press.

Yardley, L. (1994). Contribution of symptoms andbeliefs to handicap in people with vertigo. BritishJournal of Clinical Psychology, 33, 101–113.

Received July 20, 2006Revision received January 10, 2007

Accepted February 5, 2007 �

234 HUNT