And what I've come to understand is that this is a very common part of the spiritual path. It might not be as extreme as some of the statements in the lives of the saints, but for everyone who seriously embarks on a spiritual path there are times of walking through the desert, as well as times of great reward. Well, of course there can be times of soul searching, times of doubt. But when you talk about spiritual crises, often there's a physical component to this. Well, I like to talk about both spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency.
Spiritual emergency is something else.
This is spiritual crisis. This is a time when the experiences, when the physical states that you mentioned, when the insights come very rapidly, and a person sometimes in that situation has trouble coping with their everyday life, and for a while may even need to step away from some of their daily responsibilities to give attention to this inner process that's become very overwhelming. Well, this is true. There's a whole energetic phenomenon associated with it. In the Hindu tradition it's sometimes referred to as the rising of the kundalini, the coiled serpent energy at the base of the spine that rises up and activates the chakras, or various centers of psychic awareness, along the way.