The speaker noted that both traditional and modern psychological models of spiritual emergency often rely on overly broad, fixed categories that fail to capture the subtle, multivalent, and contextual aspects of many spiritual emergencies. Within Asian traditions, terms like “karma” or “zen sickness” are sometimes used as catch-all labels to explain a wide variety of difficult experiences, from intense affective states to perceptual anomalies to adverse interpersonal dynamics. In contemporary psychiatric discourse, diagnostic categories like depersonalization, derealization, psychosis, or mania are applied to the domain of contemplative practice in a way that can create a similarly reductive and pathologizing lens.

The speaker argued that this lack of conceptual and descriptive granularity obscures important distinctions and meanings that have profound implications for how these states unfold and resolve. Experiences that may share some superficial characteristics, such as a sense of self-dissolution, intense energy currents, or expanded perception, can differ greatly in their felt texture, significance, and potential based on factors like the practitioner’s framework, teacher, social field, and unique contemplative trajectory. By lumping them together under a single heading, we lose sight of the fluid and contingent nature of these experiences.

For example, a state of depersonalization could be a manifestation of a spiritual opening that has outpaced one’s capacity to integrate, or a sign of dissociative shutdown in the face of overwhelming trauma. A sense of nondual awareness could reflect a genuine shift in the locus of identity beyond the self-structure, or a temporary altered state that will fade without skillful pointing out and stabilization. Unusual somatic experiences could be a purification process that is unblocking stagnant energies, or a sign of neurological or physiological imbalance that requires grounded intervention.

Therefore, the speaker emphasized the value of cultivating more precise, phenomenologically rich and experience-near language to evoke the felt sense of spiritual emergencies in all their complexity and dynamism. By collaborating across disciplines and contemplative traditions to develop new terminology, metaphors, and maps of these states, we can empower practitioners, teachers and clinicians to discern meaningful choice points and conjunctions within them and respond with greater wisdom and care.

Instead of falling back on preconceived notions and one-size-fits-all interventions, we can learn to appreciate the unique trajectory of each person’s unfolding and tailor our approach accordingly. Naming and discussing these experiences more accurately and vividly can itself serve a transformative function, by creating a shared field of understanding and a more expansive sense of what is possible.