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.Psychosis and Spirituality: The Discontinuity Model105Successful living requires a sufficient range of constructs to be able to deal withmost situations encountered with relative ease, but with enough flexibility to be ableto assimilate the novel situation.When encountering a new situation, the personneeds to loosen their construct system sufficiently to accommodate the new material,thereby expanding the system.It is important that this should be followed bya consolidation phase where the constructs are tightened again, or the person will beunable to make valid predictions.Thus, Kelly’s conceptualisation contains within ita natural rhythm of expansion and tightening of constructs, very like breathing.According to this analogy, expansion of the system is compared with breathing out,and consolidation, to breathing in.A well-functioning construct system is adaptiveas it helps the individual to operate successfully in the world.According to the construct theory model of thought processes, the state of reveriecould be viewed as the ‘breathing out’ part of the metaphor used above.Thisrepresents the suspension or loosening of construing appropriate, both when therewas no particular need to make any predictions (as on the beach), or when theexisting constructs had led up a blind alley (as in problem solving).The trickieractivity of entering a truly meditative or prayerful state I would suggest requires(temporary) suspension of, or moving beyond the construct system.In this state,boundaries dissolve and anomalous experiences become accessible.The relationship between the world as perceived through the ‘filter’ of theindividual’s construct system and a postulated ‘reality’ behind this filter, is aninteresting philosophical issue, already touched upon.One construct theorist,MacWilliams (1983) has tackled it, suggesting a model of successive approximationstending towards a final goal of identity between construct system and ‘reality’, whichsuggests an ultimate fading away of the construct system.This is in line with the sortof perspective adopted by Laing (1967), and the Buddhist influenced Deikman(1982), as well as the generality of transpersonal psychologists, that the unmediated‘reality’, that is not filtered by constructs, is somehow superior.According to thistype of model, the constructs become a sort of temporary scaffolding that willultimately be dismantled, and things will be both tidier and more glorious with theirpassing.I would dispute this assumption of superiority of ‘unfiltered’ reality.It takes us, once again, into the linguistic realm of hierarchies, and is therefore incompatiblewith true comparison between spiritual states and psychosis.I reject such distinc-tions as a fudge, and suggest instead that both reality filtered by the constructs, andthe experience outside the construct system are necessary and valid aspects of beinghuman – each in its place, and each necessarily partial.Such is the human condition.These arguments are explored more fully in Clarke (2008).The Mystical Side of PsychosisPeter Chadwick’s account in Chapter 6 brings the experience of moving beyond theconstruct system vividly to life.Such a journey entails moving away from the safetynet of construction that the individual has created to operate effectively in the world.106Psychosis and SpiritualityIt means moving into the unknown.More challengingly, according to this model, asmy understanding of the self is essentially a construction, I lose touch with this whenI pass beyond the horizon, along with other constructs, and thereby lose the meansof making predictions.Laing (1967) writes about this: ‘The “ego” is the instrumentfor living in this world.If the “ego” is broken up, or destroyed.then the person may be exposed to other worlds, “real” in different ways from the more familiar territoryof dreams, imagination, perception or phantasy’.Some Neuro-Psychological GroundingThe argument that there are two states of experiencing, distinct at the margins, yetmerging and weaving between each other in normal life requires grounding in thehardware – what we know about the operation of our brains, and which aspects ofthis might explain the existence and mechanism of the threshold (limen).Kelly’ssystem is intuitively plausible, but lacks empirical verification at that level.Chapters 2and 3 explore this topic in more detail.I am currently concerned with the operationof the threshold that allows access to both spiritual states and anomalous experi-ences, in the context of our incomplete understanding of the relationship betweenneurophysiology and actual experience.Following on from Kelly, it does appear that transliminal experience is mediatedby a loosening of boundaries and greater connectedness within the brain, whereasfocused cognition relies on inhibition of extraneous influences.One of the earliestauthorities here, Frith (1979), cites variability in cognitive inhibition, leading tofailure in the system of limiting contents of consciousness in people experiencingpsychosis, and to the experimental studies which have backed this model up.Cognitive inhibition and limitation of contents of consciousness essentially describethe operation of the construct system, which directs and focuses, and hence limits,attention
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