A Radical Re-visioning of Psycho-spiritual 'Breakdown to Breakthrough'

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”

- R.D. Laing

Joe Bartholomew, a non-binary, pluralistic integral transpersonal psychotherapist, event organiser, networker, activist, class warrior, feminist, musician, poet, mystic, visionary, revolutionary, freedom fighter, researcher, editor, writer, creative arts critic, 'demi-god' and scholar, critically examines a radical paradigm shifting critical perspective, with what is regarded as a psycho-spiritual 'breakdown to breakthrough' consciousness-based experiential process. This includes a pioneering and innovative re-visioning of what Joe has defined as 'an aesthetics of Britishness' according to imperialist and colonialist identities within political and social contexts, in contrast to, 'an aesthetics of internationalism', which draws upon what Joe has defined as ontologies of 'the accident' and 'the sublime', which can deconstruct, dismantle, liberate, regenerate, and transform, what it means to be human. This is what Joe has described as a 'non-hierarchical' based transpersonal metaphysics, which proposes, what Joe regards as epoch making seminal ideas stated as a hermeneutic-phenomenology(ies) of 'being' and 'becoming' in-the-world. This includes creating a new language for the 21st century, and for the topics of science, consciousness, and spirituality, within the relevant fields of research, scholarship, and the creative arts. Joe describes this in an original and pioneer language, which resonates and expands upon Bergsonian metaphysics and Jamesian radical empiricism, in several ways that implies what can be regarded as a template for an integral consciousness-based spiritual science as method. If time permits Joe will provide an outline of a 'phenomenology of petrification', 'a phenomenology of alienation', 'a phenomenology of congruence', and 'a phenomenology of liberation/alchemy/transformation'. Consequently demonstrating how a free spirit in a human form, as a true and untimely philosopher, may during a critical act, of defiance and resistance, to external and internal violence and oppression, experience the emergence, discovery, and/or construction of new insights, ideas, sensations, and feelings, as a crystallizing alchemy of meaning and understanding, on how a spiritual-aspirant or cosmonaut can deconstruct and dismantle, their own externally conditioned and superimposed philosophical worldview or belief/values system of what it means to be 'human', which when this does occur, it can be described by western-centric UK-US conventional traditionalist/conservative thinkers as 'erratic' or as 'manic'. Something abominable, distasteful, uncivilised, unmanly, and ''plebian'' or in current English usage as a culturally informed language described as 'chavy'. Alternatively, the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire, in his seminal work ''The Flowers of Evil'' defined this phenomenon more expansively, with greater aesthetic and sensual appeal as ''the spleen''', this is in contrast to what he termed as, ''the ideal''. In other words, Baudelaire, the father of modernist poetry in the western world, and one of the leaders of French symbolism, in the creative arts -who in the 20th century western popular music and creative arts tradition owe a debt to- this is due to Baudelaire as a revolutionary established -an epoch-making movement- as a shift in his artistic creative vision of aesthetics as 'romantic idealism'' to ''cynical modernism''. Why? Baudelaire believed that the so-called ''realism'' of romantic idealism was inauthentic, lifeless, sterile, banal, and expressive overall of what can be regarded as delusive phenomena. In my view, this is what it means on an individual and psycho-spiritual level. On the other hand, what this means on a collective and systemic societal/institutional level, is that the western-centric British imperialist and colonialist cultural national identity, of nationalism, and of nationhood, is that it advocates the aesthetics of ''Britishness'' by appropriating, and re-appropriating the necessary social and political agendas, to promote an aesthetic culture, which reinforces the dominant political and social ideology, while representing and reconstructing the notion of British national identity. What has been epitomised through the illuminating title of a biopic film documentary, of the life and work, of the revolutionary British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who the British actor David Tennent played ''Ronnie'' Laing in ''mad to normal''.