Foundational Paradigms
When navigating intense, non-ordinary experiences, having a foundational paradigm is crucial. It provides a consistent framework for making sense of what you've encountered, helping you avoid the confusion that comes from trying to hold conflicting worldviews at once. It’s the ground you stand on when the world seems to have shifted beneath your feet.
The goal is not to prove one paradigm is more "true" than the others. The objective is to help a person choose a framework that feels the most empowering and stabilising for them. The right foundation allows you to navigate intense experiences with courage, transforming fear into curiosity and chaos into a narrative you can live with.
The Psychological Paradigm: Grounded in Self
The Psychological Paradigm offers a solid foundation by asserting that all content within an intense experience, including any perceived "entities," originates from within the self. In this model, these encounters are viewed as personifications of internal psychological material, such as repressed rage or suppressed trauma.
This framework is empowering because it places the locus of control squarely with the individual. Healing becomes a process of integration—understanding, dialoguing with, and ultimately assimilating these parts of the self. For many, this offers a rational and familiar way to work with their experiences, transforming chaos into a coherent narrative they can manage.
The Shamanic Paradigm: Connected to a Larger World
A second foundational perspective is the Shamanic Paradigm. This unique worldview suggests that the individual psyche is highly permeable and intimately connected to a much larger, spirit-filled reality that extends far beyond ordinary, everyday experience.
Within this rich framework, "entities" are understood as independent, external beings that possess their own distinct agency, consciousness, and purposes. For many people who resonate with this model, it can be incredibly validating and deeply comforting, providing a profound sense of connection to a vast, mystical world that transcends the familiar boundaries of daily life.
However, for those who lack a supportive cultural background, community, or shared belief system, this perspective can often feel disorienting and quite challenging to navigate. Without proper guidance or a shared context, adopting this framework may lead to feelings of vulnerability, confusion, and a diminished sense of personal agency, since the power to heal or influence one’s experience is perceived to reside outside of the self rather than within.
The Religious Paradigm: Divine Order and Community
The Religion Paradigm can be a powerful foundational paradigm. It offers a distinct way of making sense of the world and one's place within it. Experiences are not just psychological events or random occurrences; they're seen as divine encounters, spiritual tests, or revelations from a higher power. An entity might be interpreted as a saint offering guidance or a demon testing one's faith.
This framework provides a moral and ethical context, suggesting that the experience isn't just a mystical event but one that carries moral weight, requiring a response rooted in faith, prayer, or specific rituals. It also provides a ready-made community and a structure of authority (e.g., priests, imams, or rabbis) to help interpret and integrate the experience.
This can be deeply grounding, as the individual isn't left alone to grapple with the experience but is supported by a long-standing tradition. However, a strict religious framework may dismiss experiences that fall outside of its approved doctrines, potentially leading to guilt or shame if an experience is seen as "unholy."
The Yogic Paradigm: The Foundation of Wholeness
Finally, the Yogic Paradigm is founded on the profound and timeless principle that your true nature is already whole, perfect, and complete. From this perspective, intense inner experiences—including intriguing and sometimes puzzling encounters with so-called "entities"—are not seen as fragmented parts of yourself that need fixing or healing. Instead, they are recognised as temporary manifestations or passing expressions of consciousness that naturally arise and eventually dissolve back into the vast field of awareness.
The essential teaching here is that you are not these fleeting phenomena; rather, you are the vast, unchanging awareness in which all these experiences simply appear and disappear. The ultimate goal of yogic practice is to skillfully transform all seeming separateness—whether perceived as an external “other” or an internal thought or sensation—into this deeply felt experience of complete, unchanging wholeness.
This paradigm is deeply empowering in its simplicity and profound truth. It shifts the focus away from the endless and often exhausting striving to fix or change something about yourself, and instead gently guides you toward the profound realisation that the wholeness you seek has always been present within you.
In this light, fear is understood as nothing more than a temporary misidentification with a passing thought, emotion, or bodily sensation, rather than a reflection of any fundamental or lasting threat. The yogic work, then, is not about adding to or removing anything from yourself but about gently directing your attention back to your true, complete Self—the ever-present awareness that underlies and permeates all experience, quietly witnessing everything without judgement or attachment.
Note:
For some, the science of psychology has become a new religion, where research is the new god.
This can lead to a dogmatic belief that every experience must have a purely psychological explanation, dismissing anything that falls outside of this framework. While this paradigm is incredibly powerful and empowering, it’s essential to question its assumptions. Is the mind truly contained? Could consciousness be more interconnected than modern science currently acknowledges? Critically examining the limitations of any single paradigm helps you avoid simply trading one rigid belief system for another.
