Psychosis and the Mystic Path*

The connection between madness and the mystic state has always been with us, a fact of human history, and is important to rediscover. Even though any study of this relationship must risk idealizing one or pathologizing the other, it may still be possible to find a basic common ground. Both are experiences that begin with a nonordinary state of consciousness, where discursive, analytic thinking has lost its dominance—the starting point of all mystic disciplines. They are deeply felt, personal events about which there has always been much confusion because of the functional inability of language to truly communicate with any but the already experienced. The universal significance of both these states is in the attempt to advance beyond the existing conditioned personality; that has always been the meaning of healing in its most fundamental sense.

The study of mystic states in the form of tribal shamanism uniquely points to an intrinsic relationship among altered states of consciousness, insanity, and mystic healing. In his study of shamanism, Eliade6 refers to the “archaic techniques of ecstasy” by which the tribal healer emerges through the triumphant endurance of ecstatic states. These states are equivalent to a psychic illness of initiation involving suffering, death, and resurrection and are the outcome of particular disciplines and practices orally transmitted across generations. The experiences of ecstasy, transformation involving bodily disintegration, death, and return take place within altered states. These states and their characteristic contents became distinctive aspects of the shaman's specialized role in his tribal community. The history of shamanism also reveals that the ecstatic sufferer-healer