So why do trauma and turmoil have this amazing power to dissolve the mould of the normal psyche and shift people into a state of enlightenment? Why do intense stress, depression, disability and illness or encounters with death have the power to dissolve our normal identity and replace it with a higher state of being? How can such intensely negative experiences give rise to something so powerfully positive?
There seem to be two reasons for this, which normally work together. The first – and less important – reason is that when stress or anxiety are constant over a long period and build up to a high enough intensity, they can cause the normal structure of the psyche to dissolve away. The pressure becomes so intense that the structure can’t maintain itself. The stress or anxiety is like the tremor of an earthquake which causes the building of the ego to collapse. In most cases, this equates with a ‘psychotic break’ (or nervous breakdown) – the collapse of the psyche leaves a vacuum and the person feels defenceless and emotionally unstable, unable to cope. But for a few people, this isn’t a breakdown but a break-up – a new self emerges and fills the vacuum. The ‘butterfly self’ breaks free and becomes our normal self.
This was probably the main factor in Janice’s transformation – after her husband’s stroke, she had to care for him at the same time as looking after her children and working full-time. She found it impossible to cope and the stress was so great that, one day when she was walking on the beach, her normal psyche suddenly dissolved away. Similarly, Berta was in a state of intense anxiety for months after being diagnosed with MS, terrified at the prospect of losing her health and mobility.
Stress and anxiety seem to have been the main factors in Russel Williams’ and Eckhart Tolle’s transformations too. Russel went through a massive amount of stress because of his parents’ deaths and his wartime experiences, coupled with a great sense of frustration and anxiety at being out of contact with his true self and not being who he was supposed to be. Eventually, as he describes it, ‘The frustration was so great that my old self had to give way.’ Similarly, Eckhart suffered from constant anxiety and depression for years, until they intensified to the point that his normal psyche had to give way, bringing about what he describes as ‘a death of the sense of self which lived through identifications’. 1
In fact, this is probably a contributory factor in all SITEs. After all, practically all the shifters went through periods of intense stress and anxiety before their transformations. However, I believe that the main reason why suffering can lead to spiritual awakening is because it can bring about a state of detachment .
In order to understand this state, we first need to look at its opposite, the state of attachment.
Because our ego is so powerful and separate and feels a basic sense of insignificance and incompleteness, we feel a strong impulse to add things to it. As I mentioned in the last chapter, one way in which this manifests itself is the desire for wealth, and for status, success or power. Another way is the impulse to attach ourselves to external things. We grasp at external things to try to strengthen the ego, to bolster its fragile structure.
This process starts in our mid-teens, when we first begin to feel the separateness and incompleteness of the ego. That’s when we first begin to feel the need to ‘belong’, or to fit in. Because we feel incomplete, we need to attach ourselves to groups or gangs, to start following fashions or to attach ourselves to pop groups or football clubs by becoming their fans. And as we become adults we gain more and more attachments. We become attached to ambitions for the future (for example, the hope that we’re going to be a successful businessman or a famous pop star), beliefs about life and the world (for example, a religious belief system or political beliefs), to the knowledge we’ve gained, to our past achievements and to our image of ourselves as successful or attractive, and so on.
At the same time, there are more tangible attachments such as our possessions, jobs and careers, and our roles as mothers, fathers, husbands or wives. And of course, there are the people we’re attached to – the people on whom we depend for approval and attention, and without whom we feel insignificant or lost.
What about people we are attached to because we love them? you might ask. But real love exists without attachment. Attachment implies separation – there are two separate entities which become fixed together, like two objects stuck together with glue. But if you really love someone, there is no separation between the two of you, and so no attachment. Rather than being attached to them, you’re actually one with them.
Unfortunately, though, this kind of love is quite rare; most relationships contain some element of need or dependence. In fact, this is one of the major sources of conflict in relationships, when our partners aren’t able to give us what we need, or when they sense that we’re clinging to them and so feel weighed down by the responsibility.
It may be difficult to imagine, but all of your attachments are really nothing to do with you . Your ambitions, beliefs, knowledge, past achievements, success, career, roles and possessions are not you – they’re only accoutrements you’ve added to yourself, in the same way that the clothes you put on your body are not the body itself. You can gain an inkling of this by asking yourself, ‘Where are my achievements, my knowledge, my ambitions, my wealth, my success or my beliefs right at this moment?’ None of them are a part of the present moment – they’re all just abstractions, mental concepts which you have to think into existence. All you are and all you have at this present moment is your awareness – of your own being and of your surroundings.
Perhaps there was a time in your life when you took on certain beliefs. Perhaps you were reading about some ideas that made sense to you and suddenly it occurred to you that this meant you were a socialist, an atheist, a Christian or a Muslim. And somehow the very fact of attaching these beliefs and that label to yourself made you feel more defined as a person, somehow stronger. You might have experienced something similar with ambitions or hopes. Perhaps there was a time when you were depressed and frustrated, and in response your mind created pipe dreams for you to cling to – the hope that you were going to win the lottery, or meet the man or woman of your dreams, or save up some money and go to live abroad, or be a famous pop star or actor. Again, with these hopes to cling to, suddenly you felt stronger and your predicament seemed more bearable.
Perhaps you can recognize this with your job or profession, compared to when you were a student. Back then you probably felt a little unsure of yourself, as if you didn’t have a strong sense of identity. But now you know exactly who you are: you’re a teacher or lawyer, a journalist or IT manager, as well as a husband or wife and father or mother – and these roles have given you a more solid sense of identity, a stronger sense of self.
These attachments are the building blocks of the ego. They make us feel stronger and more secure. They make us feel significant, that we’re ‘someone’ and that our life has value. And the more of them we have, the stronger the ego becomes, and the more important we feel.
However, every so often, these attachments are broken. This is always painful at first, of course, but after a while you may become aware of a liberating effect.
Think about what happens when your hopes or beliefs are dashed, for example – when you don’t get the promotion you were hoping for, or even when you lose your job, when you realize that you’re not going to make it as a singer or actor after all, or when you realize that the religious beliefs you took for granted don’t have any foundation. After a few days or weeks, your initial disappointment and disillusionment may give way to a feeling of inner strength, as if the part of yourself which you gave away to these attachments is given back to you. Or this might happen at the end of a relationship – after a few weeks, the turmoil and pain may subside and give way to a new sense of freedom and wholeness, as if you have ‘come back to yourself’. After giving so much of your life and your being to the other person and depending on them for your happiness and security, you realize that you’re strong enough to cope on your own after all, that in a sense you don’t need your ex-partner or anyone else. Or you might have this feeling after giving up a mild addiction, like smoking, coffee or junk food. After the initial struggle, you might feel yourself become stronger and more whole – as if, again, you were giving a part of yourself away to the addiction and that part has now been given back to you.
One story which illustrates the positive effects of detachment very graphically was given to me by a man who lost all his possessions. A few years ago, he moved to Barcelona to begin a contract job, but within minutes of arriving at the airport all his luggage was stolen, including his wallet, with his money and the contact details for his job in it. At first he was in a state of panic, wondering how he was going to survive. He didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know anyone in the city. At first, he approached people at the airport, telling them what had happened and asking for money, but no one believed him. He went to the police, but they were unhelpful too. For the first few nights he slept rough on the streets, or on the beach, and stole food from finished plates outside restaurants.
However, once the initial panic and fear faded away, he felt a strange sense of well-being. One night, after about two weeks of being homeless, he fell asleep on the beach with a feeling of liberation inside him and a sense of being – in his words – ‘in tune’ with a deeper part of himself. As a Buddhist, he recognized that this was a spiritual feeling, connected to ‘letting go of my normal identity and status’. From this point, his perceptions seemed different too – his surroundings seemed more real and beautiful. Eventually he went to the British Embassy, who loaned him the money for a return flight, but he felt no hurry to go back home – in fact, he waited another week before buying a ticket.
The American author Henry Miller had a similar experience. In his early thirties, he was living in New York, newly married and working as an employment manager for a telegraph company. However, he’d always had a burning desire to be a writer and decided to give everything up and go to Europe. He went to Paris and lived in squalor there for over a year. He had no money, often slept rough and sometimes went without food for whole days. His wife was supposed to join him there and kept promising to send him money to keep him afloat until she arrived, but neither she nor the money ever came.
At first Miller was lonely and despondent, but slowly he began to feel that he was undergoing a kind of purgation, a process of – in his words – ‘picking himself clean’. He came to realize that ‘there was nothing to hope for … all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders’. He decided that from now on – like shifters such as Kevin, Michael and Irene – he was no longer going to try to make things happen in his life, but would ‘let myself drift with the tide … make not the slightest resistance to fate’. 2 At this point, he is ‘naked as a savage … a skeleton’. 3
In other words, Miller went through a process of detachment. The squalor and desolation he experienced broke his psychological attachments – to his wife, his possessions, his money, his future, his status and his identity as a professional, cultured person. He reduced himself to a skeleton to find a wholeness and serenity at the core of his being. As he writes, ‘I have no money, no resources. No hopes. I am the happiest man alive.’ 4 (In view of the connection between suffering and creativity, it’s perhaps not surprising that this period of detachment was also when Miller found himself as a writer and began to write Tropic of Cancer .)
Another acquaintance told me how, after many years of unhappiness, she finally began to feel a sense of well-being in her late forties, when she went into her menopause. Part of the reason for this was, she believes, because she lost her attachment to her appearance. As a younger woman, she had always been beautiful and had a lot of attention from men. As a result, her sense of identity had been bound up with her appearance; she’d always made an effort to look as good as possible, wearing a lot of make-up and spending a lot of time shopping for clothes. Being thought of as beautiful made her feel special.
At first, when she realized that her beauty was fading and that men were no longer as attracted to her, she felt a sense of loss. But soon this switched to a sense of liberation, as she began to realize that she didn’t actually need the attention. She began to let go of her attachment to her appearance and realized that, by placing so much emphasis on it, she’d lost touch with her true identity. She began to feel more authentic and much happier, finding a deeper source of well-being inside herself.
In fact, it’s quite common for a process of detachment to occur as people approach old age. In addition to losing our attachment to our appearance, we often lose our attachment to hopes and ambitions. We realize that we don’t have much time left and stop imagining alternative futures for ourselves. We stop striving to become something else and begin to accept ourselves and our lives as they are. When we retire, we also give up our attachment to our career, along with the status and identity that gives us. And now that our children have left home, we lose our role as parents too.
Some people don’t accept the loss of these things: they become bitter in their old age, wishing they were still young and attractive, that they still had their job to make them feel valued and important, or that their life had turned out differently. But as a result of this process of detachment, many older people become more contented. Research on the happiness of different age groups in the UK has found – surprisingly, it might seem at first – that the happiest age group is the over-sixties. Happiness levels are quite high in the twenties, then dip through the thirties and reach their lowest point in the mid-forties. But after 50, they start to rise, and continue rising through the sixties, when they become even higher than young people’s. 5
Similarly, a recent worldwide survey found that, so long as they are in fairly good health, 70-year-olds throughout the world are on average as happy and mentally healthy as 20-year-olds. One of the researchers, Andrew Oswald, hinted at the importance of detachment in this by suggesting that one of the reasons for old people’s contentment was that ‘individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations’. 6
These examples are a glimpse of the positive effects of letting go of psychological attachments. And in cases when all – or at least most of – our psychological attachments are suddenly and dramatically broken, these effects are intensified, and cause the psychological transformation we’ve been examining throughout this book.
At first, of course, the negative effects are intensified too. When all your attachments dissolve, the whole structure of the ego collapses and you feel desperate and devastated. You’ve lost the things you depended on for your well-being and security, everything that told you that you were important and significant, everything that defined you as a human being. You realize that your ambitions and hopes were illusions, that your beliefs were false, that your achievements are meaningless. Your career, your role in society, your status and wealth have been taken away, destroying your self-image as a successful person. The people whose love or friendship you need have rejected you. As a result, you’re broken, empty, devastated. Your whole identity has been destroyed.
All of the shifters experienced major loss of this kind, or at least were threatened with major loss through encountering death. Cheryl recognized that the main reason for her depression was not being able to work, which took away her status and self-worth. Jamie lost her husband, her house and savings, and then her daughter (who went to live with her ex-husband). Stephanie lost her baby when she was 25 and then, after a long series of other misfortunes, lost a partner she thought was her soulmate. Glyn also suffered the loss of bereavement and then the loss of her business and her savings. In addition, she went through two years of intense stress and anxiety after her daughter’s death.
Gill Hicks had to face the loss of her limbs and the other types of loss this entailed – the loss of her mobility and independence and activities she had enjoyed. Michael Hutchison suffered the most severe loss of anyone in this book – first of all, the loss of practically all his possessions (including his manuscripts) when his house burnt down and then the loss of the use of all his limbs, leading to the loss of almost every activity he enjoyed, including writing, reading, talking and making love. (At the same time, like Glyn, Michael suffered from intense depression and frustration after his accident, particularly from not being able to do anything except stare at the ceiling.)
Kevin lost almost everything because of his alcoholism – his family, his house, his money and his job. Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was in a similar state when every external kind of support – relationships, status, hopes and illusions – had dissolved away, destroyed by his addiction, so that he was completely desolate. In the words of the psychologist Stan Grof – speaking generally of addicts who reach ‘rock bottom’ – ‘the person is left naked, with nothing but the core of his or her being’. 7
But at this point of devastation and desolation, you are, paradoxically, close to a state of liberation. You’re now in a state of de tachment. The building blocks of the ego have been torn away and the structure of the normal psyche has dissolved. And this state of emptiness allows a new self to be born.
Sometimes this is only temporary. In some cases, the old self is just in abeyance, dormant rather than actually dead. Its structure has dissolved, but its mould still exists, so that it can re-emerge and re-form. This is what happens in temporary awakening experiences, such as those we looked at in Chapter 1 .
But in many other cases – those where suffering has been very intense over a longer period – the mould of the old self does dissolve completely. The new higher self crystallizes, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. What Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim called the ‘ego-shell’ is broken down and ‘true being’ is able to flow through. Sometimes this new self forms slowly, emerging over months and years as the mould of the normal psyche gradually fades away. (We looked at examples of this ‘post-traumatic growth’ in Chapter 1 , including Cheryl’s, Iris’s and Carrie’s stories.) But as we’ve seen, in most cases the shift is instantaneous. The ego-shell breaks open suddenly, giving birth to a new self straight away.
The shift can also be interpreted in terms of energy. As I mentioned at the beginning of the last chapter, our normal ego – including all of the psychological attachments that bolster it – uses up a massive amount of energy, both in its activity (mainly through its constant thought-chatter) and as a structure. And so, when psychological attachments dissolve and the normal ego itself fades away, there is a massive intensification of our life-energy. All the energy that is normally dissipated is collected inside us; the ‘powers of the soul’ are given back to us. As a result, we have a sudden feeling of inner wholeness and strength, a new clarity and openness. And if the normal ego dissolves permanently, this state of intensified energy also becomes permanent. We shift into a permanent ISLE state, a state of intensified and stilled life-energy, and therefore a permanent state of spiritual experience.
In a sense this self isn’t wholly new – it was always there, as our deepest, truest nature, beneath the maze of our psychological attachments and the turbulence of our thoughts and emotions. But now that deeper self becomes our normal self.
If the breaking of psychological attachments is normally a painful process, when – and how – does it switch to a state of liberation and transformation?
The important concept here is acceptance . Detachment becomes a positive, transformational state when it is accepted . If you resist it, fight it and try to push it away, then you’ll keep feeling the pain of your broken psychological attachments. But eventually you might reach a point where you’re too tired to carry on fighting, or where you realize that resistance is futile anyway, or where you just accept your predicament as fate or the will of God – and that’s the point where transformation takes place.
If this transformation is seen as a ‘spiritual alchemy’, then acceptance is the chemical agent that brings it about. As Eckhart Tolle puts it:
Whenever any disaster strikes, or something goes seriously ‘wrong’ – illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, break-up of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death – know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transformation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender. 8
For many of the shifters, there was a single identifiable point where they surrendered to their predicament in this way. Jamie’s transformation occurred after she had decided that her situation was hopeless and that she should just accept it and expect nothing better. In a very similar way, Stephanie’s transformation occurred when she ‘gave up’ and decided there was no point striving for anything else in her life. Berta’s happened after she had begun to accept her illness and integrate it into her life, while Michael’s took place when, after months of frustration, he heard a voice inside his head say, ‘Let go.’ For Kevin, it was when he realized that his drinking problem was too big for him to deal with and ‘handed it over’ to a higher power.
Detachment is also the major reason why encounters with death can lead to transformation. Death breaks psychological attachments in a more powerful and dramatic way than any other event – which is precisely why it has such a powerful awakening effect.
At the same time, this is why confronting death can be such a terrifying experience – it threatens to take everything away from us. If you know you only have a certain amount of time left to live, the future closes down, dissolving all your hopes and ambitions. You’re stripped of every externality, every accoutrement, everything that defined your identity or gave you security and well-being. You’re literally reduced to nothing.
Many people who face death don’t go beyond this, and die in a state of bitterness and disappointment. But again, once this state is accepted , transformation occurs.
Imminent death is more likely to generate acceptance than any other type of trauma or turmoil, simply because if you know that you’re going to die soon, you’re forced to accept it. With any other kind of loss, there’s usually some opportunity to persuade yourself that things are going to get better. There are always hopes or beliefs to hold on to. But with death this isn’t possible: everything your ego clings to will be stripped away, whether you like it or not.
Usually the acceptance of imminent death develops gradually. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneering death researcher whose work led to the hospice movement, suggested that people who know they are going to die go through five stages of grief: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. 9 Most of the shifters who transformed through encountering death – for example, Iris, Dennis Potter, Val, Hugh Martin, Treya Killam Wilber and William Murtha – seem to have been through a similar process, with long periods of bitterness and depression gradually giving way to acceptance – and, as a consequence, a state of liberation.
In other cases, however, the acceptance of death was a sudden event. For Winifred Holtby, it occurred at the point where she heard a voice inside her head say, ‘Having nothing, yet possessing all things.’ At that moment, all of the sadness and bitterness she had felt at her imminent death disappeared, and never came back. For Irene, it happened straightaway, as soon as she was diagnosed with cancer, and so she underwent transformation straightaway too.
Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim noted that the cases of transformation he came across during the Second World War occurred when the soldiers, concentration camp inmates and refugees accepted their predicament, including the fact that they were probably going to die. As he described it:
Many of us have experienced the nearness of death – in air raids, illness, or at other times of mortal danger – and have found that if, at the very moment when terror engulfs us and our inner resistance collapses, we can somehow submit and accept … we are suddenly calm, our fears are instantly forgotten, and we have the certainty that there is something in us that death and destruction cannot touch… We are suddenly, inexplicably conscious of a new and invincible strength. We do not know its source or its purpose – we only know that we are standing in it, that it encloses us utterly. This is a sign that Being has touched us, and been able to penetrate our innermost being, because the shell we had fashioned for ourselves – and that cuts us off from it – has been atomized. 10
This discussion helps us to understand one of the most puzzling aspects of SITEs: why do they happen to some people but not others? Why do some people just suffer, whereas for others suffering leads to liberation? Is there, for example, a particular kind of person who is more likely to have a SITE?
One important factor is the degree to which a person directly faces their predicament. Understandably, many people who go through turmoil and trauma – especially people who are seriously ill and/or going to die – try to avoid contemplating their situation. This is their way of trying to cope with it – they try to block it out of their mind, to distract themselves from it. Or they might be in denial about their illness, deluding themselves that it isn’t as serious as it seems.
This is natural, of course, but it seems that this avoidance reduces the potential for transformation. The psychologists Les Lancaster and Jason Palframan investigated a number of people’s responses to traumatic events such as illness, alcoholism and domestic abuse. They found that people who tended to avoid thinking or talking about their problem were less likely to experience post-traumatic growth. People who did face up to their situation and accept it, however, did develop in a positive way. They described themselves as being more serene and at ease with themselves, and feeling as though there was more meaning and purpose in their life. 11
This suggests that two personal qualities which increase the likelihood of transformation are courage and realism . People who are more courageous are more likely to face up to their predicament, with all the anxiety and horror that may entail (at least initially). At the same time, people who are more realistic are less likely to delude themselves with false hopes. The kind of people who – for example – have a habit of romanticizing their past, daydreaming about alternative life situations or idyllic futures are more likely to use escapism as a way of trying to cope with trauma and turmoil.
Having the courage and realism to face up to our predicament is the first stage of acceptance – which, as we’ve seen, is the most important factor of all. Not everyone moves from facing up to acceptance, though. Whether a person is able to do so may depend, again, on their personality. People who have a strong need to be ‘in control’ – people who like to be decisive and powerful and feel that they are consciously directing the course of their life – are less likely to accept loss or illness and so less likely to experience transformation.
Kevin Hinchcliffe is very aware of this in his work counselling cancer patients. He regularly comes across patients who aren’t prepared to let go and who therefore become bitter and depressed. As he told me:
There’s a type of person we call ‘the controllers’. You can see them straightaway. It’s reflected in their jobs – they’re often head teachers, solicitors, heads of organizations in powerful positions. They are very used to control; they need it for their own security. Cancer comes along and because they have no control over it, they fall apart. It asks them to look at life differently, but some of them will not relinquish control. They fight it and it’s the resistance that causes the anguish.
You can see this reflected in their well-being and ultimately in their illness. In my experience, people who are willing to let go are more likely to recover.
In other words, people who are more easy-going and unassuming and less domineering are more likely to experience transformation, because they’re more likely to relinquish control and to develop an attitude of acceptance.
These concepts of facing up and acceptance are closely linked to Kübler-Ross’ five stages of dealing with imminent death. Some people don’t move beyond the first two stages of anger and denial, but if they do, they progress to the stages of bargaining and then depression. At the latter stage, their depression stems from facing up to their predicament and becoming aware of the enormity and finality of death. Many people don’t move beyond this point either, but if they do, they progress to the final stage of acceptance.
Another aspect of personality which seems to affect people’s potential to have a SITE is whether they are left- or right-brain oriented. Shifters tend to be right-brain oriented. They’re more likely to be creative and sensitive people, the kind of people who make decisions intuitively rather than logically and who have ‘hunches’ or ideas which seem to come out of nowhere.
Some evidence for this was provided by William Miller and Janet C’de Baca, who interviewed over 50 people who believed they had undergone a sudden spiritual transformation. Miller and C’de Baca also become very aware of SITEs: more than half of the transformations they examined happened in response to intense unhappiness or in the midst of tragedy – for example, people who were suffering from the post-traumatic effects of childhood abuse, who were seriously ill, deeply depressed or addicted to alcohol or drugs. (The other cases were apparently the result of a long period of spiritual practice or had no apparent cause at all.) But most significantly, Miller and C’de Baca asked the ‘quantum changers’ to complete a personality test, which found that around two-thirds of them had a predominantly ‘intuitive’ personality. 12
An early American psychologist named Professor George Coe reached a similar conclusion about religious conversion. After interviewing 77 people who had undergone conversion, he found it was more likely to happen to people who had, in his words, an ‘active subliminal self’ – that is, people who had more access to their subconscious mind. Converts were usually highly emotional people who could be hypnotized easily and often had strange impulses, strong intuitive feelings and the ability to do automatic writing or speech. 13 In other words, they were people whose conscious mind had more labile boundaries and so was open to information and impulses from other parts of the psyche. I’ve suggested that there are important differences between SITEs and religious conversion, but I think that this personality type is probably one of the similarities.
Perhaps, however, both of these characteristics – a less controlling personality and a more right-brain orientation – are expressions of the same underlying factor: a less powerful ego. After all, the desire for control and power is closely associated with a strong ego structure. A strong ego structure means a strong sense of separation and incompleteness, which creates a strong need for reinforcement through status and power. Similarly, having a more ‘labile’ conscious mind – and therefore being more open to emotion, intuition and creativity – is equivalent to having a weaker ego structure.
The ego is also linked to the left side of the brain. That’s where it seems to live, and typical left-brain characteristics such as logic, practicality, literalness and scepticism towards the new can be seen as aspects of the ego’s functioning. So a more right-brain-oriented person is likely to have a weaker ego.
So perhaps what we should say is that SITEs are more likely to happen to people whose egos are weaker. And this is completely logical, of course: the weaker the ego, the more easily it will be dislodged by turmoil and trauma. A person with a strong ego is less likely to ‘cave in’ to the pressure of suffering – they’ll keep trying to control their predicament and feel depressed and frustrated because they can’t. At the same time, because of their strong ego boundaries, they’ll be less open to energies and impulses from outside their conscious mind. On the other hand, a weaker ego is more likely to dissolve, in the same way that a flimsy building is more likely to collapse in a hurricane than a sturdy, reinforced structure.
This relates to another significant point about SITEs: women seem to be more likely to have them than men. Of the 33 people I interviewed for this book, only ten were men. In particular, women seem to be much more likely to have a transformational experience triggered by illness, stress, upheaval, bereavement and disability. In Chapters 2 to 4 , I describe ten of these experiences and only feature one man, Michael. (I actually interviewed two other women who had SITEs after intense stress and depression, but didn’t include them in the book.)
This makes sense in terms of the explanation I’ve just put forward. Generally speaking, women have a weaker ego structure than men. This is why women tend to be more empathic than men, and why men tend to have a more ‘systematizing brain’. Research has shown, for example, than women are better at reading emotions from people’s expressions than men and have a more supportive and empathic conversational style. 14
In The Fall I suggest two reasons why, in our psychological development as a species, women’s egos never became as strong as men’s. First, women’s strong bond with their children may have stopped their egos becoming too strong and separate, because they had to keep a strong psychological connection to their children. Secondly, women’s more active biology may have worked against a strong ego. Male biology is fairly quiescent; apart from hunger and sex and the occasional illness, men don’t need to pay much attention to their body and so it’s easy to become ‘split off’ from it and disappear into the mental realm of the ego. But women’s more powerful biological processes – including the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and lactation – mean that they are more rooted in their body.
For these reasons, in The Fall I suggest that women are closer to an ‘unfallen’ state than men. Similarly, Eckhart Tolle suggests that because of this, women are naturally ‘closer to enlightenment’ than men. As he told me when I interviewed him for this book, ‘The egoic shell in women is not quite as rigid as in men. The ego is a little bit less entrenched; there is a little less mind-identification. Women are more in touch with their body, with their feelings.’
I don’t want to draw up any hard and fast rules about who can have SITEs and who can’t, though. It’s important to remember that although a weaker ego structure might make a SITE more likely, it can still happen to anyone . When turmoil and trauma are especially intense, a SITE can dissolve even the strongest ego, just as a powerful hurricane can destroy the sturdiest building in a town. After all, several of the shifters we’ve heard from were fairly materialistic and ambitious people and do seem to have had a ‘controlling’ nature to some degree. For example, Carrie was a successful TV writer who liked to spend her money on her house, while Irene was a high-achieving IT manager and Tony was a successful businessman.
At the same time, there are some ways in which SITEs don’t seem to follow any regular pattern. For example, you might assume that since they’re a form of spiritual transformation, they would be more likely to happen to people who were already ‘spiritual’ to some degree, people who were already meditating, doing yoga or following other spiritual paths. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. The only person I interviewed who had a clear interest in spirituality before his transformation is Michael, who was the author of books on science and spirituality. None of the other shifters had any real knowledge of spirituality and some of them had even tended to be a little disparaging towards it. (Janice told me, ‘I used to think it was all self-indulgent rubbish for people who couldn’t think rationally.’)
You might also think that physical pain would make SITEs less likely to occur. How could someone possibly experience a state of liberation when their body was damaged by illness or injury and as a result they were in acute pain or discomfort? Surely, you might think, that could only happen at an early stage of an illness like cancer, before the pain and other physical problems become serious, or later, during remission. But this isn’t the case either. Several of the shifters were in real pain when they had their SITE. For example, Cheryl was seriously ill with ME and Gill Hicks was struggling with the pain of losing her limbs. The best example of this is Michael Hutchison, who still suffers from acute neuralgic pain now, due to the damage to his vertebrae. He has learned to ‘drop into’ a state of pure consciousness to manage his pain and, as I noted earlier, is so successful at this that he has refused his doctors’ offer of a permanent morphine drip in his spine.
It seems that pain isn’t a barrier to transformation. In fact, there are no barriers to the experience. As long as you have an ego, and as long as that ego is supported by psychological attachments, it’s possible that at some point trauma and turmoil will come your way and tear those attachments away, reducing you to nothing and, at the same time, shifting you into a higher state of being.