Emergence Phenomena: Defined and Discussed
Emergence Phenomena: Opening the Dialogue
The experiences individuals have as a result of "spiritual emergence" are many and simple categories often miss the subtle differences that are important to acknowledge. Especially if someone is a clinician and needing to make an assessment, i.e. if a client/patient is in a process of spiritual emergence or not. Daniel Ingram, MD, MSPH, and Olivier Sandilands, M.Res., wrote an article attempting to articulate the underpinnings of issues in defining "emergent phenomena" related to "emergence". They also call for a new specialty to be formed. This is a valuable contribution to the dialogue for anyone interested in forwarding the field of spiritual emergence and emergency.
Emergence Phenomena: The abstract of this new article
"Meditation, psychedelics, and other similar practices or induction methods that can modulate conscious experience, are becoming increasingly popular in clinical and non-clinical settings. The phenomenology associated with such practices or modalities is vast. Many similar effects and experiences are also reported to occur spontaneously. We argue that this experiential range is still not fully described or understood in the contemporary literature, and that there is an ethical mandate to research it more extensively, starting with comprehensive documentation and definition. We review 50 recent clinical or scientific publications to assess the range of phenomena, experiences, effects, after-effects, and impacts associated with a broad variety of psychoactive compounds, meditative practices, and other modalities or events. This results in a large inventory synthesizing the reports of over 30,000 individual subjects. We then critically discuss various terms and concepts that have been used in recent literature to designate all or parts of the range this inventory covers. We make the case that specialized terminologies are needed to ground the nascent research field that is forming around this experiential domain. As a step in this direction, we propose the notion of “emergence” and some of its derivatives, such as “emergent phenomenology,” as possibly foundational candidates."
Title and Link: Open Access
Sandilands, O., & Ingram, D. M. Documenting and Defining Emergent Phenomenology: Theoretical Foundations for an Extensive Research Strategy. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1340335. Published July 9, 2024.https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1340335/fullFrontiers is a gold open access publisher. At the point of publication, all articles from their portfolio of journals are immediately and permanently accessible online free of charge. Frontiers articles are published under the CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and the source are credited.Integrative Mental Health University received a grant from E-Benefactors in 2022 that allowed us to hire qualified help in updating some of our courses and creating a Resource Archive. Daniel Ingram, MD, volunteers to lend organization, structure, administration, networking, vision, funding, incubation, and other forms of support to the EPRC, Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. He is also the founder and acting CEO and Board Chair of Emergence Benefactors, a charity dedicated to supporting the EPRC.