The term psychosis was introduced in the 1800s as an alternative to the stigmatised labels of madness and insanity, due to its lineage of asylums, lobotomies, straitjackets, and forced medication. Its history is persecution, ridicule, and incarceration, and its enduring legacy is illness, a break from reality, something less than sanity. But is this true? Or is psychosis misunderstood spiritual awakening, from a lineage of shamans, mystics, visionaries, and prophets, something more than sanity?
My relationship to synchronicity has evolved across three stages. Initially, on rare occurrences of coincidence, I’d be dismissive and mildly freaked out. I was “scientifically-minded,” atheistic, and intellectual. If coincidences were shared (suggesting a song a friend was about to play was eerily common on car journeys), we’d pause, hold bemused eye contact, we’d say, “that’s weird,” forget about it, and move on with our lives.
Below is an edited transcript of my responses to questions during the panel discussion with Bernie Beitman and Joanna Bauer-Savage. The full discussion is available on YouTube all popular podcast platforms.
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I’m in awe of the poetic intelligence of the psyche’s deepest aspects. That’s quite a phrase, isn’t it, poetic intelligence? What does it mean? Isabel Clarke introduced me to the transliminal dimension (“beyond threshold”), which operates more like poetry than logic. Transliminality is a psychological term for content moving past the unconscious/conscious threshold. The higher this tendency, the more creative someone is likely to be.
People with high transliminality access to dimensions the majority don’t find so easily. The deeper you go, the more poetic the dimension becomes, leaving behind the familiar ground of logic and reason, entering the symbolic and the mythical. Poets and mystics return from this dimension, people we view as mad get lost. Poetic intelligence, then, is the ability to discern, interpret and engage with this dimension.