In part one of this series, I discussed how psychedelics can sometimes have psychomimetic effects. "Psychomimetic" (from psycho-, meaning mind, and -mimetic, meaning imitation) literally means "mind-mimicking." It describes substances or drugs that produce effects which imitate the symptoms of psychosis, such as hallucinations, delusions, or disorganised thinking, without necessarily being caused by an underlying psychiatric illness. These effects are usually temporary and tend to occur only in the context of drug use or experimentation.
I explained a possible mechanism behind this: essentially, too much shadow material erupting into consciousness suddenly, which, on the extreme end of the spectrum, can result in what resembles a psychotic break. While instances of psychedelic use instigating psychotic-like symptoms can be truly pathological, this article concentrates instead on how such experiences, for some, can be attempts by the psyche to heal that have gone awry, as part of a greater process of individuation.
Spiritual Emergence vs Spiritual Emergency
"One of the most important implications of the research of holotropic states is the realisation that many of the conditions, which are currently diagnosed as psychotic and indiscriminately treated by suppressive medication, are actually difficult stages of a radical personality transformation and of spiritual opening. If they are correctly understood and supported, these psychospiritual crises can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, remarkable psychological changes, and consciousness evolution." – Stanislav Grof
A "spiritual emergence" is a spiritual awakening that is gradual, manageable, and assimilable into daily life, generally leading to a greater sense of wellbeing, understanding, and wholeness. A "spiritual emergency," by contrast, is a spiritual awakening that is intense, tumultuous, and disorientating, in its extreme forms resembling psychosis. In his PhD thesis, Michael Collins succinctly defines spiritual emergence as "psycho-spiritual development that coexists with ego functioning" and spiritual emergency as a "transformational crisis affecting ego functioning."
The term "spiritual emergency" was coined by Stanislav and Christina Grof, pioneers in the field of transpersonal psychology. It became popularised through their 1989 book Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis. The concept is not a formal psychiatric diagnosis used in mainstream medicine; it belongs more to the realm of transpersonal psychology. Its key idea is that while these experiences can be immensely destabilising, with appropriate support and skilful navigation, they can serve as part of a greater process of psychological transformation.
As mentioned above, while some experiences could fall under the definition of a spiritual emergency, others can be more accurately linked to genuine psychiatric conditions that require medical intervention. Mainstream mental health professionals generally recognise that powerful spiritual experiences can occur, and that careful assessment is needed, since genuine psychiatric conditions can often overlap with them in their presentation.
Grof argued this himself. While he believed that many instances of what would be considered psychosis by the mainstream medical model could actually be part of a greater transformative process, he did not consider all instances of these experiences to be so. He acknowledged that some people have organic brain disorders, neurological illnesses, infections, or other maladies as the underlying cause, and that these should be ruled out before considering the possibility of a spiritual emergency.
His main argument, however, was that modern psychiatry tends to interpret almost all non-ordinary or unusual states of consciousness as pathology, overlooking the possibility that some crises are actually the psyche's attempt to heal itself or grow, albeit in a chaotic manner. His concern was that medication and hospitalisation, while sometimes necessary, could prematurely suppress a process that might otherwise resolve constructively under the right conditions.
While any type of experience can be a catalyst for transformation and growth, there is a general view that a spiritual emergency carries more potential for psychological healing and growth than an actual psychotic break does. Grof's point was that psychiatry lacked a category for people undergoing intense transformative experiences without an underlying disease process.
He identified several features that, in his view, distinguished spiritual emergency from psychotic disorders. He contrasted psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, where functioning may deteriorate over time and reality testing may remain chronically impaired, with spiritual emergency, where there are often periods of clarity, a desire to understand the experience, symbolic or mythic themes arising in its course, and the possibility of recovery and psychological growth through integration of the experience.
For the rest of this article, I will concentrate on that last feature: how the mythic and symbolic themes that can arise during a spiritual emergency can be the psyche's attempt to individuate, and how this can mirror an inner form of the "hero's journey" archetype.
The Hero's Journey: Campbell's Monomyth
"Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging." – Joseph Campbell
The Hero's Journey is a storytelling framework describing a pattern found across myths, novels, films, and other narratives. It was popularised by Joseph Campbell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he argued that many cultures tell variations of the same fundamental story. He referred to this as the “monomyth”.
The basic pattern of the monomyth is that the hero leaves ordinary life, faces trials in an unfamiliar world, is changed by the experience, and returns transformed. This pattern appears in the lives of religious figures such as Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and in characters such as Neo in The Matrix, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
The hero's journey comprises three main stages:
- Departure – the hero leaves their ordinary life and enters the unknown.
- Initiation – the hero faces trials, learns lessons, and changes.
- Return – the hero comes home transformed, often with something valuable to share.
Scott Hill's Psychedelic Crisis
"To my amazement... the imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological Hero's Journey." – Joseph Campbell
In his book Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth Psychology and Psychedelic Experience, Scott Hill recounts his experience of spiritual emergency following the use of psychedelics.
Hill had had a series of "rapturous" trips that convinced him LSD was "the key to a full and happy life." He recalls intense beauty, happiness, warmth toward other people, and a profound appreciation of nature. These early trips set the stage for the later crash, because they convinced him that the psychedelic world was spiritually meaningful and trustworthy.
In 1967, aged 19, Hill took a tab, crossed a bridge, and climbed into a canyon expecting a beautiful day. Instead, he fell into what felt to him like a hell of madness. This was the start of a string of terrifying trips in which he couldn't tell if he'd gone insane or stumbled onto a deeply disturbing spiritual truth about life. The experiences carried an unwanted call to escape what felt like an absurd and unreal world – through suicide. They unfolded within an overwhelming sense of a vast, sacred stillness that called his entire life into question and, despite no prior religious inclination, seemed to demand self-sacrifice in order to reach God in Heaven.
On a later occasion, the night before moving out of a rental home, Hill took some LSD. Overwhelmed by everything he had to do for the move, and thinking about the kindness of his landlords toward him, he was suddenly seized by guilt at the notion that he would be leaving the house in a mess. As he stood looking down at a pile of old newspapers, he had a vision of himself standing before the heavenly judges at the Last Judgement. Though never religious, he was overcome by an irredeemable sense of guilt, not only for his own failings but for the sinful nature of humanity, and became convinced that life on Earth was nothing but folly.
That same night, standing on the beach, he felt the ocean pulling him toward death and toward God, and he fought desperately to stay in the world, a world he believed to be Hell. He and a friend later drove to a cliff and threw their unwanted belongings into the surf. As he flung a box into the dark, he felt he was evil incarnate. A few months later, on his next LSD trip, he attempted to honour what he believed to be God's command to kill himself, so that he could free his soul from Hell.
Decades later, he attended Burning Man as a member of the MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) psychedelic emergency response team. While at the festival, he spoke to a man about the trauma-related flashbacks he was still experiencing as a result of his earlier LSD experiences. The man told him he had helped many people through adverse reactions to psychedelics and suggested trying MDMA-assisted therapy to address the trauma of those trips.
After careful deliberation, and taking into account that the setting itself was novel and chaotic, Hill chose to go ahead. The session started well; however, partway through, as he recalled the particularly traumatic LSD trip in which he had attempted to sacrifice his own life, he suddenly perceived a man observing the session as Satan. He then perceived his MDMA therapist and the therapist's assistant as Satan's demonic helpers.
A Jungian Explanation of Hill's Visions: The Personal and Archetypal Shadow
"The necessary and needful reaction from the collective unconscious expresses itself in archetypally formed ideas. The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow." – Carl Jung
As is evident, the content of Hill's psychedelic experiences was rife with myth, symbol, meaning, and archetypal content. In an attempt to make sense of his experiences, he drew heavily on the work of Carl Jung, particularly Jung's concepts of the shadow and "a lowering of the threshold of consciousness”.
Psychedelics can weaken the ego's normal grip on attention, letting unconscious contents flood in through the "opened side-sluices." Jung and Grof both saw psychedelics as "non-specific amplifiers," in that they don't create content, but rather intensify whatever is already present in the unconscious. Hill's own synthesis adds that trauma supplies the specific content that floods in once the threshold drops, shaped by the psychedelic user's prior lifetime experience.
Hill traces his bad trips back to a real childhood trauma: third-degree burns suffered at age two. He suggests his LSD visions were essentially a nineteen-year-old's flashback to what a two-year-old experienced during emergency medical treatment, with the repressed terror and anger from that event resurfacing as demonic, persecutory imagery.
But he is also careful to say that this isn't the whole story. The imagery and symbols in his trips (Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, the Last Judgement, death, salvation, sacrifice) stopped being solely about his personal biography and became mythic and cosmic. He reads this as an encounter with what Jung called the dark side of the Self: the numinous, "wholly other" quality of the collective unconscious breaking through, an encounter with "absolute evil" as opposed to merely one's own relative faults.
Hill frames his cliff, beach, and Last Judgement night as "a confrontation with the personal and archetypal levels of the shadow" simultaneously: his private guilt and childhood wound fused with a transpersonal, mythic confrontation. Jung's model holds that these two layers are not sealed off from each other. A personal complex can "hook into," or activate, an archetype that structures it from underneath. When that happens, the complex stops feeling like a private issue and starts feeling like it's plugged into something vastly larger: a pattern that belongs to everyone, everywhere, across history. In Jungian terms, this is the signature of a personal complex making contact with a collective archetype beneath it. The specific content is still the individual's own, but the form it takes has been picked up by something universal, which is what gives it the cosmic, "this concerns all of humanity" quality, rather than an ordinary personal insight.
The trip was no longer just about "me and my problems"; it became about universal patterns of death, evil, redemption, and transformation that seemed to exceed ordinary psychology. When the boundary between the personal and the collective breaks down, personal material doesn't stay personal; it is experienced as if it were the universal pattern itself, not merely an instance of it.
The mechanism that pushes buried material to the surface is enantiodromia, Jung's term for how an extreme, one-sided psychological state eventually gives way to its opposite, reflecting the psyche's drive toward equilibrium and wholeness. Jung himself put it this way: "Say you have been very one sided and lived in a two-dimensional world only, behind walls, thinking that you are perfectly safe; then suddenly the sea breaks in: you are inundated by an archetypal world and you are in complete confusion."
Unpacked, the "two-dimensional world" and "walls" describe a life narrowed down to conscious identity: job, beliefs, routines, rational control, defended against ambiguity, emotion, mystery, or anything that challenges one's worldview. The "two-dimensional world" is a metaphor for a life that is flat and limited; the "walls" are the psychological defences and assumptions that make a person feel secure. The "sea" is Jung's recurring symbol for the unconscious: vast, deep, and uncontrollable. It is destabilising precisely because the old mental maps stop explaining what is happening, and the unconscious compensates by breaking in with overwhelming symbols.
In other words, when the unconscious breaks through very suddenly and violently, it does not arrive as neat, clear thought, but rather as a ferocious and confusing set of images, emotions, symbols, and narratives that try to compensate for the one-sided ego. When archetypal material floods consciousness in this way, it can feel so absolute that the person experiences the mythic inner material as literally real.
Hill's Journey Through the Three Stages
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." – Joseph Campbell
Two of Jung's core archetypes are relevant here: the Hero (representing self-discovery, struggle, and transformation) and the Shadow (the repressed or unconscious material the ego denies, both personal and archetypal). Hill frames the ego's struggle against the shadow as literally the mythic hero's plot: the "battle for deliverance" from unconsciousness is "portrayed symbolically as the mythical hero's struggle against evil powers." Just as the hero must face the dragon to obtain the treasure, the ego must encounter the shadow to move toward wholeness.
For Hill, the departure began with "a call to adventure" in the form of ingesting LSD: a crossing of the threshold from ordinary waking consciousness into an altered state. He left behind the two-dimensional, walled-off ordinary consciousness Jung describes, and the sea of the unconscious was allowed to break in.
Hill's initiation was his confrontation with both personal and archetypal unconscious content: the Last Judgement, a God who both summons and terrifies him, the Devil and his "demonic assistants", and the command to take his own life.
Finally, his return stage manifests as the years-long, drawn-out process of psychological integration through reflection and Jungian study, which retroactively transforms the ordeal into a meaningful journey. The "boon" he brings back is knowledge itself: a framework for healing that turns what had, for years, been an unintegrated catastrophe into both a greater understanding of himself and also a way of helping others make sense of their own difficult psychedelic experiences.
The Hero's Journey as a Blueprint for Shadow Integration
"It is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon." – Carl Jung
As we've seen, the hero's journey can serve as an archetypal, mythic representation of shadow integration, a process that leads toward individuation and a greater sense of wholeness. Where classical myth typically involves a long initiation followed by a quick return, spiritual emergency tends to invert this timeline: the initiation, the acute crisis itself, can be sudden and brief, while the return, the process of integrating and making sense of it, can take years or even decades, as it did for Hill. Despite this inversion, the underlying framework still applies well.
On the surface, myth may look like it's about heroes, dragons, and quests set in an external world. But in the case of spiritual emergency with archetypal visions, that same terrain maps just as well onto the inner psyche. Through reflection, interpretation, and integration, myth can be used as a working vocabulary to make sense of the information that archetypal visions actually contain. The images that surface again and again for people having such experiences, despite vast differences in location and culture, suggest that the themes involved are not simply arbitrary. They are the raw material the mind reaches for whenever it needs to represent its own depths. That's why the visions and symbols that show up during an episode like this so often echo the visions and symbols found in ancient stories: one is a fictional stand-in for a psychological passage, and the other is that passage actually happening in real time.
John Weir Perry, in his book The Far Side of Madness, argued this very point. He described acute psychosis as the mind reaching down into its own deepest layer for material it wouldn't normally have access to, borrowing that layer's imagery and charge in an effort to mend a self that has come apart. What looks like collapse from the outside, Perry suggested, can be understood instead as a symbolic cycle: an ending, a period of disintegration, and then some form of renewal, the individual working, however chaotically, to remake themselves from the inside out. The experience can be a highly turbulent expedition into unfamiliar mythic ground, disorientating and frightening, but can also carry the possibility of coming out the other side changed for the better.
Closing Synthesis
This article was written with the intention of being a source of hope and clarity for those facing their own inner hero's journey. However, I do not want to glorify this process. I truly believe the types of experiences discussed here are among the most extreme experiences a human can go through, and where possible, should be mitigated as much as possible through careful attention to safe set and setting. Safe setting also includes firmly vetting the competence and experience of those guiding you.
That said, if someone does find themselves navigating the tumultuous terrain described in this article, I hope Hill's account, along with the accounts of many others who have successfully navigated their own inner hero's journey, can serve as a map to help a struggling person find their way back to themselves, and perhaps toward a life of greater meaning, purpose, joy and fulfilment too. Hill's return suggests that with the right support and skilful navigation, even the most disorienting descents into myth and madness can become the foundation for a more integrated life.