Many of us grow up in environments shaped by science, rationalism, or secular worldviews, where only the measurable is considered real. Everything else is labeled as imagination, exaggeration, or illusion.

And yet, something else often stirs—inside us and around us—something that does not fit the definition of “real” offered by modern culture. From early on, we may sense energies moving through the body, experience vivid dreams, moments of knowing, or inner guidance that feels undeniable. No one may have taught us about spirit, and yet we somehow know how to pray, how to ask for help, and how to listen.

What is happening in such moments is not metaphorical. It is a real call to transformation, pulling us toward something larger, ancient, and mysterious.

But the world around us rarely knows what that means—including ourselves. When such experiences intensify, the response we receive is often concern rather than curiosity: What’s wrong with them? Families and societies tend to pathologize the unfamiliar, searching for what is broken instead of asking what might be emerging.

Without a cultural framework for spiritual processes, even well-meaning people may shame, dismiss, or attempt to control the very experiences that signal the possibility of realization. Change is frightening—especially the kind we do not understand.

When the Culture Doesn’t Recognize the Call

In many traditional cultures, visions, energetic sensitivity, or communication with the unseen were not dismissed as illness. They were recognized as thresholds into sacred roles. What today might be labeled neurodivergence, hypersensitivity, or even psychosis was once understood as connection with forces beyond the ordinary.

Such people were supported, not silenced. They were seen as bridges between worlds, carrying perceptions that could help their communities navigate necessary change. Their struggle was not a breakdown but the beginning of lifelong initiation.

Emerging on the other side, they became communicators between realms—translating dreams, visions, and symbols into guidance for the collective. Their role was essential: keeping the channel open so life could continue evolving in constructive directions.

Initiation Is Not a Concept—It’s an Experience

Spiritual initiation rarely resembles tidy rituals. It is raw, messy, and often overwhelming. The energy coursing through us dismantles old structures of self. We are not simply shifting perspective—we are broken open and reassembled from the inside out. Across cultures, this has been described as symbolic death and rebirth, often with imagery of dismemberment and reconstruction.

From the outside, this process can look identical to psychosis or breakdown. Visions, sleeplessness, emotional collapse, seizures, sudden shifts in perception—symptoms pathologized by modern medicine—were once recognized as signs of spiritual transformation.

These moments are thresholds. Misunderstood and feared, they can collapse into trauma and fragmentation. Met with recognition and care, they reveal themselves as profound healing. They become the path toward wholeness—and for some, a path of initiation into guiding others through similar terrain.

This forgetting—that breakdown can hold the seeds of breakthrough—is a form of cultural amnesia. We have lost sight of the fact that consciousness sometimes stretches itself through us toward something larger, something transpersonal.

When someone surrenders to such passages and makes it through, they emerge changed. They embody a kind of knowledge that cannot be learned from books but only lived through the body. They become living maps, proof that this intense and often daunting realm of consciousness can be “survived” and integrated.

The invitation is not to dramatize these experiences as grand initiations, nor to reduce them to pathology, but to recognize them as natural thresholds of transformation. Thresholds that move stagnant energies, open new ways of seeing, and reconnect us with deeper currents of life. Seen this way, they no longer need to be hidden or stigmatized—they simply become part of the human journey.

What We Need to Remember

Not every transformation is pathology. Just because we cannot fully explain what is happening does not mean something is broken.

What we need most is safe space. Space to go through change without shame, without pressure to justify it, and without fear of rejection. At the most basic level, we need permission:

• Permission to unravel.
• Permission not to have all the answers.
• Permission to trust what moves within us, even when words fail.

We need elders again—not only in age, but in depth. People who have endured their own fires and emerged with compassion, steadiness, and transpersonal humility. People who can sit with intensity without trying to control it. People who recognize that not every crisis is a problem to be fixed, but sometimes a passage to be traversed.

We also need language that can reach beyond the rational mind—images, metaphors, and symbols that touch our essence and remind us that life is larger than the material world alone. Transformation unfolds in the dimensions of consciousness, dream, and collective awareness—realities that cannot be measured but can be deeply felt and experienced.

Most importantly, we must remember:
We are not broken.
We are not too much.
We are not failing in those moments.

What looks like falling apart may be the beginning of a deeper integration—a moment that calls us to remember who we truly are beyond the protective identities we cling to.

This Isn’t About the Past—It’s About Now

Transformation doesn’t only happen in remote caves or on mountaintops. It can happen right in the middle of everyday life—in the city, on a crowded train, in a café, or even in the heat of conflict. It may arrive suddenly in an alley behind a grocery store, when we least expect it, unbound to monasteries or sacred sites. The sacred does not wait for perfect conditions; it seeks only to create the tension or experiences that will break us open or change our perspective.

Without guidance, these moments can feel disorienting, like personal failure. But they are not.

We are not broken. We are not alone.

Many of us are quietly moving through such thresholds, finding our way, remembering piece by piece. This may be the moment to stop hiding, to speak it aloud, and to rediscover one another.

We have not lost who we are. We are still here. And together, we can begin to rebuild the kind of culture that remembers.

For more background information you can find the following link in our resources:

THE MAKING OF A SHAMAN: CALLING, TRAINING, AND CULMINATION By ROGER WALSH