"The Endurance of Burning" or, The Art of Spiritual Crisis

I was initiated to my spiritual path by a severe illness that erupted overnight and persisted for seven years. There was no prior warning that my life was about to take a sharp and painful detour inward. Months would pass before I could fully grasp that a genuine spiritual crisis had begun and was irreversible. It would take even longer to embrace it, and let the crazy wisdom of the affliction begin to lead me toward a new way of life. Like the mythical Phoenix, I had to burn off my former being to become a new one.

While I think that everyone has an interior spiritual process, not everyone is aware of it. For some, it’s just not what their life is likely to be focused on, and they may be fortunate in that regard. The ordinary challenges of life can be enough to handle without the dramatic emergence of a mystical drive from within.

For others, the spiritual impulse may be dimly felt, but resisted by letting other drives and preoccupations take its place. These substitutes can include the drive for material wealth or professional success, the longing for perfect love, social acceptance or fame, or even the religious quest for “salvation.” This resistance can last for years, even as substitutes fail to deliver any real transformation. But the alternative, the process of “spiritual awakening,” is seldom if ever an entirely blissful experience.

In fact, such an awakening often involves a sharp and sometimes prolonged state of crisis. A spiritual crisis can involve one or more profound and difficult experiences including:

These four broad categories encompass an infinite variety of potential spiritual crises, each of which will be as unique as the individual experiencing it. But what they all share is the involuntary surfacing of one’s inner wholeness. Confronting and coming to terms with that wholeness is a paradoxical process of integrating many shades of self-awareness — including what we might be used to discriminating between as "good" vs. "evil." As the depth psychologist Carl Jung suggestively opined, "I would rather be whole than good."

That said, the results of a genuine spiritual crisis are profoundly positive and continuous. Gradually we become wiser, kinder, less fearful, more tolerant, and truly happier human beings. But in the short term, there can be hell to pay — because the normal makeup of the self-defensive human ego resists the emergence of something greater than itself. In all its diverse forms, the spiritual crisis represents a kind of burning-up of the ego, or limited self. That inner conflagration often feels like dying because, in a very real sense, it is the death of who we think we are, in favor of becoming someone we can’t imagine.

What I’d call “the art of the spiritual crisis” is learning just how to let that burning proceed at its optimum pace — without choking on all the smoke that arises from combustion of the ego.

Chief among the skills that have to be developed for this spiritual art is faith. This is not a faith in any conventional gods or religious beliefs, but a faith that the inner process of mystical emergence can be trusted to deliver us to a new and healthier “human condition” than we have known before. One also gradually grows the courage to enter unstable transformative states and let them remake us. At every step into the unknown, we learn to trust more and more in an intuitive openness that doesn’t deny rational thought and logic, but includes them in a larger set of skills of consciousness.

It’s a brave choice to allow the spark of one’s own inner longing grow into the flames of genuine transformation — and even braver to endure the burning that magnifies our inner light. And that's because theburning never really stops. If there is such a thing as "enlightenment" it is the state of being completely consumed by the inner flames of spiritual process. That means achieving a happiness that encompasses suffering, rather than trying to eliminate it — and it means living the kind of faith that respects the recurrence of fear and doubt, rather than attempting to abolish them.

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First trained as an investigative journalist, D. PATRICK MILLER began writing about spirituality, human potential, and creativity after a seven-year illness initiated his spiritual path. Since that time he has intensively studied A Course in Miracles, the Enneagram system of personality, Jungian depth psychology, shamanism, and related fields of contemporary spirituality. He has also applied spiritual principles and disciplines intensively in his own life, and written about the results. He is the author of a dozen print titles and many more e-books. As a magazine and online journalist, Patrick has written over 200 articles for Yoga Journal, THE SUN, Elephant Journal online, and this website. He is also the founder of Fearless Books and Literary Services.