The trascendental experience

Instead of the degradation ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it (in psychiatric terminology often those who are about to go into a schizophrenic breakdown), an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back again. Psychiatrically, this would appear as ex-patients helping future patients to go mad. What is entailed then is:

(i) a voyage from outer to inner,
(ii) from life to a kind of death,
(iii) from going forward to a going back,
(iv) from temporal movement to temporal standstill,
(v) from mundane time to aeonic time,
(vi) from the ego to the self
(vii) from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth)

and then subsequently a return voyage from

(1) inner to outer,
(2) from death to life
(3) from the movement back to a movement once more forward,
(4) from immortality back to mortality,
(5) from eternity back to time,
(6) from self to a new ego,
(7) from a cosmic foetalization to an existenctial rebirth.

I shall leave it to those who wish to translate the above elements of this perfectly natural and necessary process into the jargon of psychopatology and clinical psychiatry. This process may be one that all of us need, in one form or another. This process could have a central function in a truly sane society.

R. D. Laing. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Penguin, 1970. p.106-7