Transpersonal Studies

    he International Journal of

Volume 29(1), 2010

Editors’ Introduction—Glenn Hartelius  
An Investigation of the Relationships Among Self-Construal, Emotional Intelligence,
and Well-Being—Constance Mara, Teresa DeCicco, & Mirella Stroink
Koans and Levels of Consciousness—John Rowan

 SPECIAL TOPIC:
Relational Spirituality and Developmental Spirituality
Introduction to Special Topic Section—Glenn Hartelius & Maureen Harrahy
Consciousness and Society: Societal Aspects and Implications
of Transpersonal Psychology—Harry Hunt
Relational Spirituality, Part 1. Paradise Unbound:
Cosmic Hybridity and Spiritual Narcissism in the “One Truth”
of New Age Transpersonalism—Gregg Lahood
Relational Spirituality, Part 2. The Belief in Others as a Hindrance
to Enlightenment: Narcissism and the Denigration of Relationship
within Transpersonal Psychology and the New Age—Gregg Lahood
Transpersonal and Other Models of Spiritual Development
Harris Friedman, Stanley Krippner, Linda Riebel, & Chad Johnson
The Self and the Great Chain of Being: Interview with Robert Bolton
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Jacob Wrestles the Angel: A Psycho-Spiritual Analysis
Michael Abramsky
The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergency in Retrospect: Has it Stood
the Test of Time?—Darlene Viggiano & Stanley Krippner
The Gift of Life: Death As Teacher in the Aghori Sect—Rochelle Suri

Book Reviews—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos

 Transpersonal Studies
  he International Journal of

Volume 29(1), 2010

Table of Contents
Editors’ Introduction—Glenn Hartelius    iii  
An Investigation of the Relationships Among Self-Construal, Emotional Intelligence,
and Well-Being—Constance Mara, Teresa DeCicco, & Mirella Stroink  1
Koans and Levels of Consciousness—John Rowan 12

SPECIAL TOPIC:
Relational Spirituality and Developmental Spirituality
Introduction to Special Topic Section—Glenn Hartelius & Maureen Harrahy 17
Consciousness and Society: Societal Aspects and Implications
of Transpersonal Psychology—Harry Hunt 20
Relational Spirituality, Part 1. Paradise Unbound:
Cosmic Hybridity and Spiritual Narcissism in the “One Truth”
of New Age Transpersonalism—Gregg Lahood 31
Relational Spirituality, Part 2. The Belief in Others as a Hindrance
to Enlightenment: Narcissism and the Denigration of Relationship
within Transpersonal Psychology and the New Age—Gregg Lahood   58
Transpersonal and Other Models of Spiritual Development
Harris Friedman, Stanley Krippner, Linda Riebel, & Chad Johnson      79
The Self and the Great Chain of Being: Interview with Robert Bolton
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos  95
Jacob Wrestles the Angel: A Psycho-Spiritual Analysis
Michael Abramsky    106
The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergency in Retrospect: Has it Stood
the Test of Time?—Darlene Viggiano & Stanley Krippner    118
The Gift of Life: Death As Teacher in the Aghori Sect—Rochelle Suri     128
Book Reviews—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos     134

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 
 The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Volume 29, Issue 1, 2010

Editor Board of Editors

Glenn Hartelius
Manuel Almendro (Spain)
Senior Editor
Harris Friedman
Rosemarie Anderson (USA)
Liora Birnbaum (Israel)
Coordinating Editor
Laura Boggio Gilot (Italy)
Les Lancaster
Jacek Brewcz
Honorary Editor
ynski (USA)
Stanley Krippner
Søren Brier (Denmark)
Editors Emeriti
Elias Capriles (Venezuela)
Don Diespecker
Philippe Gross Michael Daniels (UK)
Douglas A. MacDonald John Davis (USA)
Sam Shapiro Wlodzislaw Duch (Poland)
Special Topic Editor James Fadiman (USA)
Maureen Harrahy Jorge N. Ferrer (Spain/USA)
Associate Managing Editors David Fontana (UK)
Charles Flores Joachim Galuska (Germany)
Cheryl Fracasso David Y. F. Ho (Hong Kong, China)
Christian Gaden Jensen
Daniel Holland (USA)
Adam Rock
Rochelle Suri Chad Johnson (USA)
Bruno G. Just (Australia)
Associate Circulation Editors
Adrian Andreescu Sean Kelly (USA)
Zayin Neumann Jeffrey Kuentzel (USA)
Editorial Assistant S. K. Kiran Kumar (India)
Courtenay Crouch Charles Laughlin (Canada/USA)
Publisher Olga Louchakova (USA)
Floraglades Foundation, Incorporated Vladimir Maykov (Russia)
1270 Tom Coker Road Axel A. Randrup (Denmark)
LaBelle, FL 33935 Vitor Rodriguez (Portugal)
Brent Dean Robbins (USA)
© 2010 by Floraglades Foundation, Inc.
Mario Simöes (Portugal)
All Rights Reserved
Charles Tart (USA)
ISSN (Print) 1321-0122 Rosanna Vitale (Canada)
ISSN (Electronic) 1942-3241 John Welwood (USA)

ii International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

 Editors’ Introduction
T he first 2010 issue of the International Journal of
Transpersonal Studies offers two articles of general
interest, as well as a special topic section titled, Relational
Spirituality and Developmental Spirituality (separately
introduced).
The first of our general papers is by Constance
Mara, Teresa DeCicco, & Mirella Stroink, entitled, An
Investigation of the Relationships Among Self-Construal,
Emotional Intelligence, and Well-Being. Self-construal
is a constructed concept of one’s self, and two of the
authors of the current paper published an earlier study
in this journal introducing a new, more transpersonally-
oriented type of self-construal (DeCicco & Stroink,
2007). The literature contained both an independent
self-construal, in which the self is firmly bounded
and relatively autonomous, and an interpersonal self-
construal, in which the self is molded by others and by
situations. DeCicco and Stroink proposed a third model, a
metapersonal self-construal in which the sense of identity
extends beyond the person to include broader aspects
of life, community, or world. They then constructed
and validated a scale to measure the metapersonal self-
construal. The current paper extends this work, showing
that a metapersonal self-construal predicts greater well-
being and higher emotional intelligence than either
the independent or the interdependent self-construals.
In other words, an understanding of one’s self that is
congruent with a more transpersonal view of personhood
appears to correlate with positively with well-being and
emotional intelligence.
A paper by John Rowan, entitled, Koans and
Levels of Consciousness, offers an insightful perspective
on the Buddhist practice of engaging with koans—those
enigmatic questions that seem to have no logical answer.
This appears to be their purpose: to push the student
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. iii-iv Journal of Transpersonal Studies
International
beyond logic, into deeper domains of consciousness. As
Rowan notes, there have been discussions on what the
“correct” response to certain koans might be. Rowan
proposes a different understanding, namely that the
answer one gives to a koan might reflect one’s level of
consciousness. Working within Ken Wilber’s model
of ascending levels of consciousness—mythic/magic,
mental ego, centaur, and so on—Rowan offers a series
of responses to several well known koans that might
characterize various of those levels.
In the preparation of this issue, the journal is
happy to welcome a number of new staff members. First
among these is the Special Topic Editor for this issue,
Maureen Harrahy. There are also five new Associate
Managing Editors, assisting with shepherding articles
through the review process: Charles Flores, Cheryl
Fracasso, Christian Gaden Jensen, Adam Rock, and
Rochelle Suri. In addition, Adrian Andreescu and
Zayin Neumann have served as Associate Circulation
Editors, supporting work in getting the journal indexed
in databases and visible to a larger audience. Following
is a short bio on each of these staff members:
Maureen Harrahy, MA, is a Ph.D. candidate at the
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology focusing on
teaching, education, and research. Currently, she is
working full time on her dissertation research regarding
the intersubjective impact of a traumatic event: cancer
diagnosis and treatment. She is also focusing on
developing her editorial skills as an associate managing
editor for this journal and as an editorial board intern
for The Qualitative Report. Her areas of interest
include participatory theory and philosophy, relational
psychologies, interpersonal development, social neuro­
science and interpersonal neurobiology.
iii
Charles I. Flores, PhD, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor
at California State University East Bay, and has taught
for John F. Kennedy University, and other universities. A
practicing National Certified Counselor in mental health
and Master Addiction Counselor with at-risk teenagers, he
has worked on issues of diversity, social activism, religious
studies, and integral psychology for twenty years. He has
recently co-written a chapter in the anthology Gurus
in Modern Yoga for Oxford University Press, entitled,
“Remembering Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.”
Cheryl Fracasso, MS, is currently pursuing a PhD in
Clinical Psychology at Saybrook University. She serves
as adjuct faculty member for the University of Phoenix;
Research Assistant at Saybrook University with Stanley
Krippner, PhD; and Associate Managing Editor of the
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. Her
main areas of research are in the fields of Near-Death
Experiences and Energy Medicine. Recent publications
with co-author Harris Friedman include: Near-Death
Experiences: Implications for Clinical Practice; Near-
Death Experiences Among a Small Sample of Iranian
Muslims; and Psychologists’ Knowledge and Attitudes
Toward Near-Death Experiences: Change Over Time and
Relation to Transpersonal Self-Concept. She currently
resides in the Seattle, Washington area.
Christian Gaden Jensen is a PhD candidate working at
the Neuroscience Centre at the Copenhagen University
Hospital, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is investigating
whether mindfulness training has a stronger effect on
certain individuals who are genetically predisposed to
have a stronger correlation than others between emotional
coping and health. On the side, he is conducting research
in parapsychological and transpersonal issues.
Adam Rock, PhD, is Head of Research and Development
at the Phoenix Institute of Australia. Dr. Rock is
also a Founding International Board Member of the
International Transpersonal Association, President of the
Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, an
Associate Editor of Anthropology of Consciousness, and
an Editorial Board member of the Australian Journal of
Parapsychology. He has published dozens of scholarly
articles in prestigious academic journals such as the Journal
of Scientific Exploration, Transpersonal Psychology
Review, and the Journal of Parapsychology. He has been
awarded over $200, 000 in research grants. In addition,
he has presented or co-presented over 30 papers or posters
iv International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
at national and international conferences. His research
interests include shamanism, altered states, mediumship
and psi.
Rochelle Suri, MFT, PhD, holds her doctoral degree
in East-West Psychology from the California Institute
of Integral Studies, where she is currently faculty. She
is also a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the
state of California and is the Agency Assistant Director
for Progress Foundation, a mental health organization
in San Francisco. Her areas of research and interest are
transpersonal psychology, anthropology, spirituality, and
psychopathology.
Adrian Andreescu is a Romanian independent researcher,
his primary academic interest focusing on the complex
relationship between culture, subjectivity, and health. As
Associate Circulation Editor Adrian has been instrumental
in getting IJTS indexed in a number of databases. He
encourages researchers to self-archive their published
papers in open repositories (please consult RoMEO
database for publisher’s policy) and to use networking
websitessuch as Academia.edu for cross fertilization of
ideas.
Zayin Neumann is an author, father, teacher, and student
of life. He has traveled around the country and internation­
ally presenting various pieces of his PhD dissertation which
he is completing in East-West Psychology at the California
Institute of Integral Studies. His most recent writing
on the dialogue between evolutionary and indigenous
epistemologies can be found in recent and upcoming
issues of the journal ReVision. Zayin has facilitated and
organized workshops and classes on Embodied Spiritual
Inquiry, African Indigenous Technologies, and Integral
Cosmology in and around the Bay Area, and is currently
working closely with Dagara elder, Malidoma Somé.
Glenn Hartelius, Editor
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Hartelius
 An Investigation of the Relationships
Among Self-Construal, Emotional Intelligence, and Well-Being
Constance A. Mara Teresa L. DeCicco
York University Trent University
Toronto, ON, Canada Peterborough, ON, Canada

Mirella L. Stroink
Lakehead University
Thunder Bay, ON, Canada

This study aims to further investigate the convergent validity of the recently-proposed
metapersonal model and measure of self-construal, and to emphasize the discriminant
validity of the metapersonal self-construal as a distinct construct, capturing a unique aspect
of self-construal separate from either interdependent or independent aspects. The study
looked at two questions: (1) Does the metapersonal self-construal predict higher emotional
intelligence? (2) Do those who have higher metapersonal self-construal scores also report
greater well-being? A group of 212 undergraduate students was assessed using a self-construal
scale that includes the new measure of metapersonal self-construal, along with scales
measuring emotional intelligence and well-being. The metapersonal self-construal predicted
higher emotional intelligence scores and greater well-being than either the independent or
interdependent self-construals.

Keywords: independent, interdependent, metapersonal self-construal, emotional intelligence

S
elf-construal refers to how an individual develops
and defines information about one’s relationship
with the self, with others, and between one’s self
and others (DeCicco & Stroink, 2007; Hardin, Varghese,
Tran & Carlson, 2006; Kashima et al., 1995; Markus
& Kitayama, 1991; Singelis, 1994). Early research on
self-construal outlined two types: the independent and
the interdependent self-construal, which arose from
cross-cultural research. Markus and Kitayama (1991)
found that Western, individualistic cultures tend to
create an independent construal of the self, in which
the individual values being unique, autonomous, stable,
separate, and focuses on internal attributes. In contrast,
Eastern, collectivist cultures tend to construe the self as
interdependent, where relationships, group harmony,
flexibility, belonging, and external features are important
in establishing and maintaining the self.
However, drawing on Markus and Kitayama’s
(1991) two-dimensional definition of self-construal, later
research found that these two types of self-construal do
not encompass the self-view of every individual (DeCicco
& Stroink, 2007), and that a multi-dimensional model of
self-construal was necessary (Hardin, 2006). Individuals
Self-Construal, EI, and Well-Being
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 1-11 Journal of Transpersonal Studies
International
that look beyond the personal and social aspects of
existence to find meaning in their lives and define the
self cannot be fully described by either the independent
or interdependent self-construals. These individuals
define a self that transcends the typical sense of identity
where the self is not ego-centered but understands that
the self is connected and influenced by things and beings
that exist beyond the personal and relational (e.g., I am
connected to all of humankind; I am part of a natural
order). In other words, the self includes a feeling of
connectedness to all things.
Thus, a third model and measure of self-
construal, the metapersonal, was recently proposed
(DeCicco & Stroink, 2007). The metapersonal self-
construal “is defined as a sense of one’s identity that
extends beyond the individual or personal to encompass
wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche, or the cosmos”
(p. 84). The focus of an individual with this self-
construal moves beyond personal and relational views
of the self to a more universal view. In other words, the
metapersonal self-construal is not simply defined by
personal attributes or social relations, but instead defines
the self as connected to all things. The metapersonal has

a universal focus that includes all life and nature into the
concept of the self.
Now that a measure of this third self-construal
has been developed, it is important that the validity of
this construct is examined. More specifically, convergent
validity with related constructs needs to be established,
as well as divergent validity from the independent and
interdependent self-construals. Related to these two
goals, it is important to understand if holding this
universal view of the self, in contrast to a relational or
personal view of the self, can predict real-world benefits.
Self-Construal and Well-Being
T here appears to be very little research linking self-
construal and well-being, especially studies that
involve the metapersonal self-construal. Well-being
refers to a person’s evaluation of his or her life as good
or bad (Reid, 2004). Well-being is related to happiness,
depression, health, personality, and size and quality
of social networks (Chamorro-Premuzic, Bennett,
& Furnham, 2007; Schutte, Malouff, Thorsteinsson,
Bhullar, & Rooke, 2007). Assessment of well-being
can come from either internal sources, such as self-
esteem, self-consistency, and emotional states; or
external sources, which include quality of relationships,
fulfilling social obligations, and maintaining harmony
within close relationships (Reid, 2004). Studies within
cultures have found that internal sources of assessment
are more important than external sources for well-being
in individualistic cultures, whereas internal and external
sources of assessment are equally important for well-being
in collectivist cultures. Specifically, for individualistic
cultures, well-being is based on positive self-evaluations.
For collectivist cultures, well-being depends on the social
context, as well as positive self-evaluations.
Marian and Kaushanskaya (2004) reported that
individualism, which is associated with the independent
self-construal, correlates positively with subjective well-
being and negatively with depression. Research by Cross,
Gore, and Morris (2003) showed that individuals with an
independent self-construal typically have higher levels of
well-being because these individuals are more consistent
in their self-view. In contrast, a recent study by Hardie,
Critchley, and Morris (2006) found that those with a
strong individual orientation reported poorer social and
psychological health.
According to a study by Reid (2004), both
the independent and the interdependent self-construal
can lead to greater well-being, but through different
 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
mechanisms. Self-esteem leads to greater well-being
in individuals with an independent self-construal, and
relationship harmony leads to greater well-being in
individuals with an interdependent self-construal.
Unpublished work linking metapersonal self-
construal with well-being has also found a positive
correlation. This research has also replicated findings
relating life satisfaction with the independent self-
construal. However, no relationship was found between
life satisfaction and the interdependent self-construal.
It appears that the metapersonal self-construal is
associated with increased well-being, but through
mechanisms distinct from either the independent or the
interdependent self-construals. For example, mindfulness
has been shown to increase well-being and is related to
the metapersonal self-construal but not the independent
or interdependent. However, variables common to both
the metapersonal and interdependent self-construals,
such as relationship harmony, can also lead to increased
well-being. Related to these findings, a study by DeCicco
and Stroink (2007) proposed that physical health and
metapersonal self-construal could be related. Given that
good physical health is related to increased well-being,
this could be another mechanism whereby metapersonal
self-construal leads to increased well-being. Finally,
DeCicco and Stroink also found that individuals with
higher metapersonal self-construal report lower anxiety
and lower depression. It is well known that well-being is
inversely related to depression and anxiety. This may be
yet another way in which the metapersonal self-construal
is related to increased well-being.
Although there has been previous research on the
link between well-being and self-construal, the results are
often contradictory, and there is no published research
examining whether those with higher metapersonal
self-construal have increased well-being over those with
a more independent or interdependent self-construal.
As such, the current study aims to replicate and clarify
previous research on the relationship between well-being
and independent and interdependent self-construals.
Additionally, the current study attempts to understand
whether having a metapersonal self-construal can lead to
greater well-being than either of the other self-construals,
as can only be indirectly implied from previous research.
Self-Construal and Emotional Intelligence
E motional intelligence can be defined as the adaptive
perception, expression, regulation, and control of
emotions in both the self and others (Brackett, Mayer,
Mara, DeCicco & Stroink
& Warner, 2004; Mayer & Salovey, 1995; Schutte et al.,
1998; Schutte et al., 2001). Emotional intelligence has
been negatively linked to depression (Schutte et al., 1998)
and positively linked to career-related success (Goleman,
1995), academic achievement (Parker et al., 2004),
and well-being (Warwick & Nettelbeck, 2004). Trait
models classify emotional intelligence in a broad sense,
encompassing traits, characteristics, and dispositions,
which can be assessed using self-report measures (Petrides
& Furnham, 2001).
In a study on emotional intelligence, Van
Rooy, Alonso, and Viswesvaran (2005) looked at
ethnic group differences in emotional intelligence and
found that minority groups (e.g., Hispanics, African
Americans) scored higher on emotional intelligence
tests than did majority groups (European Americans).
They hypothesized that perhaps the collectivist nature of
the Hispanic culture made them more attuned to their
own emotions, more effective at using them in everyday
situations, and more aware of others’ emotions. Given
that collectivist cultures tend to construe the self as
interdependent, it is reasonable to expect that individuals
with a more interdependent self-construal might be
more emotionally intelligent than individuals with the
independent Self-construal. Indeed, Cross and Madson
(1997) suggested that an individual’s self-construal will
influence the experience, expression, and perception of
emotions. In particular, this study found that individuals
with higher interdependent self-construal were superior at
decoding and expressing nonverbal cues of emotion than
are individuals with higher independent self-construal.
The emotional information that is assessed by
emotional intelligence measures tends to demonstrate a
person’s knowledge about their “relationships with the
world” (Mayer & Salovey, 1995, p. 197). This notion can
be directly linked with the previously described definitions
of the metapersonal self-construal. The metapersonal self-
construal can also be linked with emotional intelligence by
looking at individuals who are high in artistic creativity or
spirituality. Both of these groups of people have common
attributes: for example, a greater consciousness of relationships
with themselves, others, and the world around them, as
well as an understanding of deeper emotions experienced
in reaction to themselves, objects, the beliefs of others, and
the essence of the universal (Mayer & Salovey, 1995). This
has been referred to as a higher level of consciousness or a
“meta-experience of emotion” (p. 203). It can be argued that
people who tend to have higher metapersonal self-construal
Self-Construal, EI, and Well-Being
would be more likely to experience this meta-experience of
emotion. If this is true, it would be reasonable to expect that
those who have the metapersonal self-construal score higher
on measures of emotional intelligence than those with
either the interdependent self-construal or the independent
self-construal.
The Study
B ased on the previous literature, the current study
hypothesized that individuals with high inter­
dependent self-construal will score higher on emotional
intelligence than individuals with high independent self-
construal (Cross & Madson, 1997; Van Rooy et al., 2005),
and individuals with higher metapersonal self-construal
will score higher on emotional intelligence than both
individuals with high scores on the independent and
interdependent self-construals (Mayer & Salovey, 1995).
Further, individuals with high scores on the Independent
and the Metapersonal Self-Construals will have higher
scores of well-being as measured by the Satisfaction with
Life Scale (SWLS) than individuals with high scores on
the Interdependent Self-Construal (Cross et al., 2003;
DeCicco & Stroink, 2007; Marian & Kaushanskaya,
2004; Reid, 2004).
Method
The study was conducted by recruiting
undergraduate students to answer a package of
questionnaires representing three separate scales.
Participants
Participants in the present study consisted of 219
undergraduate students who completed the questionnaire
package via Trent University’s online recruitment tool
and individual classroom visits (with permission of the
instructor). Participants received bonus marks for their
participation as per their course outline. Of the 219
participants, seven were excluded from the analyses using
list-wise deletion for missing data on the measures. The
remaining 212 participants consisted of 183 females
and 28 males. One participant did not report gender.
Ninety-two percent of the participants were 25 years old
or younger (SD = 5.04), with ages ranging from 18 to 50
years old. The mean age of the participants was 21 years
old. Fifty-nine percent of the participants were in their
first year of university (N = 124). This sample is consistent
with the population in general for this particular liberal
arts university.
Procedure
All questionnaires were included in the same
package to be completed at the same time. Participants
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 
gave their informed consent in accordance with Trent
University’s Psychology Department Research Ethics
Committee. Upon completion of the questionnaire
package, participants were given a debriefing summary
of the study, and information regarding the goals of the
study.
Measures
Participants were assessed using three scales
designed to measure emotional intelligence, well-being,
and self-construal, respectively.
Trait Meta Mood Scale (TMMS).
The Trait Meta Mood Scale (TMMS) is a 30
item self-report scale developed by Salovey, Mayer,
Goldman, Turvey and Palfai in 1995. It is a widely
used measure of emotional intelligence. The original
scale contains 48 items. However, the authors strongly
recommended the use of the shorter, 30-item version.
Therefore, the shorter version was adopted in the current
study (Extremera & Fernández-Berrocal, 2005; Schutte
et al., 2007). The scale is a measure of perceived ability
to regulate and manage emotions or, in other words, an
individual’s perception of their emotional competencies
(Extremera & Fernández-Berrocal, 2005; Palmer,
Donaldson, & Stough, 2002; Salovey et al., 1995).
Participants rated their perceived ability on a five point
Likert scale, 1 for strongly disagree, and 5 for strongly
agree. The measure includes three subscales: Attention
to Feelings, which refers to how aware one is of one’s
moods; Clarity of Feelings, which refers to the ability
to differentiate mood states; and Mood Repair, which
refers to the ability to maintain good moods and repair
negative mood states (Thompson, Waltz, Croyle, &
Pepper, 2007). Items from the scale include: “I often
think about my feelings” (Attention to Feelings item), “I
try to think good thoughts no matter how badly I feel”
(Mood Repair item), and “I am rarely confused about
how I feel” (Clarity of Feelings item). The original study
reports an inter-item consistency (alpha) coefficient of
.82 for the entire scale, and alphas of .86, .88 and .82 for
the Attention, Clarity and Repair subscales, respectively
(Palmer et al., 2002; Salovey et al., 1995; Schutte et al.,
1998; Warwick & Nettelbeck, 2004). The current study
obtained an alpha of .89 for the entire scale, and alphas
of .86, .85, and .78 for the Attention, Clarity, and Repair
subscales, respectively.
Research has found that scores on the TMMS
correlate in the hypothesized manner with life satisfaction
(O’Conner & Little, 2003; Palmer et al., 2002),
 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
interpersonal functioning (Extremera & Fernández-
Berrocal, 2005), and health (Schutte et al., 2007). More
specifically, the Clarity and Repair subscales appear
to significantly predict life satisfaction (Extremera &
Fernández-Berrocal, 2005; O’Conner & Little, 2003;
Palmer et al., 2002). In addition, Schutte et al. (1998)
reported positive correlations between TMMS and
another measure of emotional intelligence, the Assessing
Emotions Scale. These results indicate that the TMMS
is a valid and reliable measure of perceived emotional
intelligence.
Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS).
The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) is a
self-report questionnaire that was developed by Diener,
Emmons, Larsen and Griffen (1985). There are five
items that assess judgments about life satisfaction, which
is a proxy for overall well-being. Participants rate their
answers on a seven point Likert scale, 1 for strongly
disagree to 7 for strongly agree. Scores can range from 5-
35, with higher scores indicating higher life satisfaction.
A sample item from this scale includes: “If I could live
my life over, I would change almost nothing.”
Diener et al. (1985) reported inter-item reliability
coefficients (alpha) ranging from .79 to .89. Two-month
test-retest reliability was .82. The current study obtained
an alpha of .87. Support for the validity of this measure
comes from reports of psychiatric patients, prisoners,
and abused women reporting low SWLS scores (Diener
et al., 1985; Schiaffino, 2003).
Self-Construal Scale (SCS).
The Self-Construal Scale (SCS) was developed
in 1994 by Singelis to measure the independent and
the interdependent self-construals and revised in
2007 by DeCicco and Stroink to add a measure of the
metapersonal self-construal. The scale consists of 40 self-
report items upon which participants rate their responses
on a 7 point Likert scale, ranging from 1 for strongly
disagree to 7 for strongly agree. The SCS includes 15
items measuring the Independent Self-Construal, 15
items measuring the Interdependent Self-Construal, and
10 items measuring the Metapersonal Self-Construal
with inter-item reliability coefficients (alphas) of .79,
.75, and .77 respectively (Arcknoy, Stroink, & DeCicco,
2007; DeCicco & Stroink, 2007; Singelis, 1994). Inter-
item reliability (alphas) for the current study was .76,
.75, and .83 for the Independent, Interdependent and
Metapersonal Self-Construals respectively. Items from
this scale include: “I do my own thing, regardless of
Mara, DeCicco & Stroink
what others think” (Independent Self-Construal item), “I
feel good when I cooperate with others” (Interdependent
Self-Construal item), and “My sense of inner peace is one
of the most important things to me” (Metapersonal Self-
Construal item).
Results
individuals were unable to leave questions blank,
participants answered all questions in nearly all cases.
For the few participants with missing data, it appeared
to be accidental, and these participants were removed
using list-wise deletion. For the participant who failed to
provide gender, this information was not removed.

T here was missing data on only seven participants.

Due to the fact that most of the participants
completed the questionnaires online, a format in which
Table 1
Descriptive Statistics for age, total TMMS, the three subscales
of the TMMS (Attention, Clarity, Repair), the SWLS, the
Independent self-construal, the Interdependent self-construal,
and the Metapersonal self-construal (N = 212)
Mean SD Range
Age 20.85 5.04 18 - 50
TMMS (total) 114.83 14.68 59 - 143
Repair  22.20 4.51 7 - 30
Attention    51.81  7.74 16 - 65
Clarity 40.82  7.13 20 - 55
SWLS 26.21 5.86 8 - 35
Independent SC 78.28 9.82 51 - 99
Interdependent SC   70.86 10.57 32 - 95
Metapersonal SC   48.59 8.74 21 - 69
Note. TMMS = Trait Meta Mode Scale; SWLS = Satisfaction with
Life Scale; SC = self-construal.
The mean, standard deviation, and the range
values for the variables of interest are presented in Table 1.
Males and females were recoded so that male = 1 and
female = 2. A summary of the correlations among
variables is presented in Table 2. Consistent with our
hypotheses, higher scores on the Metapersonal Self-
Construal are related to higher scores on the TMMS
and the SWLS.
In order to test the hypothesis that the
Metapersonal Self-Construal scale more strongly predicts
higher emotional intelligence than either the Independent
Self-Construal or the Interdependent Self-Construal, a
multiple regression analysis was performed using each
of the three self-construal subscales as predictors of total
emotional intelligence as measured by the TMMS. This
model was significant, F (3, 208) = 11.567, p < .001, with
the three self-construals accounting for 14.3% of the
overall variance in emotional intelligence scores on the
TMMS. Specifically, a one unit increase in Independent
Self-Construal significantly predicted a .241 increase
in total TMMS scores (p = .035), a one unit increase
in Metapersonal Self-Construal significant predicted a
.429 increase in total TMMS scores (p = .003). However,

Table 2
Intercorrelation matrix of TMMS, the three subscales of TMMS (Repair, Attention, Clarity), SWLS, Independent SC, Interdepen-
dent SC, and Metapersonal SC (N = 212).
Repair Attention Clarity SWLS Ind SC Inter SC Meta SC

TMMS .63** .80** .79** .43** .30** .19* .34**

Repair .29** .36** .56** .29** .30** .45**
Attention .37* .25* .14* .16* .24**
Clarity .25** .28** .03 .16*
SWLS .25* .31* .38*
Ind SC .17* .53**
Inter SC .48**
Note. TMMS = Trait Meta Mood Scale; SWLS = Satisfaction with Life Scale; Ind SC = Independent Self-Construal; Inter SC = Interdepen-
dent Self-Construal; Meta SC = Metapersonal Self-Construal.
*p. < .05
**p. < .01

Self-Construal, EI, and Well-Being International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 

the Interdependent Self-Construal was not a significant
predictor of emotional intelligence scores on the TMMS
(p = .709). Independent Self-Construal uniquely accounts
for 2.13% of the variance in emotional intelligence as
measured by the TMMS above and beyond the other
self-construals (i.e., the squared semi-partial correlation
is .0213). Metapersonal Self-Construal uniquely
accounts for 4.29% of the variance in TMMS scores
above and beyond the other self-construals. Finally, the
Interdependent Self-Construal only uniquely accounts
for .07% of the variance in TMMS scores above and
beyond the other self-construals. See Table 3 for a
summary of the results.
Table 3
Multiple Regression Analysis with the total TMMS scores as the
outcome and Independent, Interdependent and Metapersonal
self-construals as the predictors.
b Std. Err. beta t-value p-value sr²
Intercept
72.466 9.183 7.891 <.001
Ind SC .241 .113 .161 2.126 .035 .0213
Inter SC .037 .100 .027 .374 .709 .0001
Meta SC .429 .140 .256 3.059 .003 .0429
Note. F (3, 208) = 11.567; p < .001; R² = .143; Ind SC = Indepen-
den Self-Construal; Inter = Interdependent Self-Construal; Meta
= Metapersonal Self-Construal.
Given that the Metapersonal Self-Construal
and the Independent Self-Construal are both significant
predictors of overall emotional intelligence as indicated
by scores on the TMMS, understanding which aspects of
emotional intelligence (i.e., Attention to Feelings, Clarity
of Feelings, or Mood Repair) were related to which self-
construal was of interest. Thus, we conducted three
separate multiple regressions. The first included Attention
to Feelings as the outcome with the three self-construals
as the predictors. This model was significant, F (3, 208) =
4.606, p = .004, with self-construal accounting for 6.5% of
the overall variance in Attention to Feelings. Specifically,
only the Metapersonal Self-Construal scores significantly
predicted higher scores on the Attention to Feelings
subscale (b = .193, p = .013). Neither the Independent (b =
.017, p = .786) nor the Interdependent (b = .028, p = .607)
Self-Construals were significant predictors of Attention
to Feelings. The Metapersonal Self-Construal uniquely
accounted for 2.82% of the variance in Attention to
Feelings. See Table 4 for a summary of these results.
 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Table 4
Multiple Regression Analysis with the attention to feelings
subscale as the outcome and Independent, Interdependent and
Metapersonal self-construals as the predictors.
b Std. Err. beta t-value p-value sr²
Intercept 39.086 5.064 7.719 <.001
Ind SC .017 .063 .022 .272 .786 .0003
Inter SC .028 .055 .039 .515 .607 .0012
Meta SC .193 .077 .218 2.496 .013 .0282
Note. F (3, 208) = 4,606; p = .004; R² = .062; Ind SC = Indepen-
den Self-Construal; Inter = Interdependent Self-Construal; Meta
= Metapersonal Self-Construal.
Next, Clarity of Feelings was modeled as the
outcome, with the three self-construals as the predictors.
Again, this model was significant, F (3, 208) = 6.048, p =
.001, with self-construal accounting for 8% of the overall
variance in the Clarity of Feelings subscale. However,
in this case, only the Independent Self-Construal was
a significant predictor of Clarity of Feelings (b = .184, p
= .001). Neither the Interdependent (p = .439) nor the
Metapersonal (p = .465) self-construals were significant
predictors of Clarity of Feelings. See Table 5 for a
summary.
Table 5
Multiple Regression Analysis with the clarity of feelings subscale
as the outcome and Independent, Interdependent and Meta-
personal self-construals as the predictors.
b Std. Err. beta t-value p-value sr²
Intercept
26.686 4.621 5.775 <.001
Ind SC .184 .057 .253 3.222 .001 .0458
Inter SC -.039 .050 -.058 -.775 .439 .0027
Meta SC .052 .071 .063 .733 .465 .0024
Note. F (3, 208) = 6,048; p = .001; R² = .080; Ind SC = Indepen-
den Self-Construal; Inter = Interdependent Self-Construal; Meta
= Metapersonal Self-Construal.
Finally, the Mood Repair subscale of the TMMS
was entered as the outcome with the three self-construals
as predictors. This model was also significant, F (3,208)
= 19.527, p < .001, with self-construal accounting for
22% of the overall variance in Mood Repair. In this case,
only the Metapersonal Self-Construal was a significant
predictor of Mood Repair (b = .184, p < .001), uniquely
Mara, DeCicco & Stroink
accounting for 7.5% of the variance in Mood Repair increase in scores on the SWLS (p = .001). However,
above and beyond the other self-construals. Neither the Independent self-construal was not a significant predictor
Independent nor the Interdependent Self-Construals of SWLS scores (p = .291). Interdependent self-construal
were significant predictors of the Mood Repair subscale uniquely accounts for 2.25% of the variance in SWLS
of the TMMS (see Table 6). scores, after controlling for the other self-construals
and Metapersonal self-construal uniquely accounts
Table 6 for 5.06% of the variance in SWLS scores, above and
beyond the other self-construals. Only .53% of the
Multiple Regression Analysis with the mood repair subscale as
the outcome and Independent, Interdependent and Metaper- variance in SWLS scores can be uniquely accounted for
sonal self-construals as the predictors. by Independent self-construal, above and beyond the
other self-construals. See Table 7 for a summary of the
b Std. Err. beta t-value p-value sr²
results.
Intercept
6.694 2.694 2.485 .014 Discussion
Ind SC
Inter SC
.040 .033 .088 1.210
.048 .029 .112 1.638
.228
.103
.0055
.0100 I t was hypothesized that those with higher
Interdependent Self-Construal would score higher
on emotional intelligence measures than those with the
Meta SC .184 .041 .357 4.480 <.001 .0750
Note. F (3, 208) = 19.527; p < .001; R² = .220; Ind SC = Indepen- Independent Self-Construal based on previous research
den Self-Construal; Inter = Interdependent Self-Construal; Meta (Cross & Madson, 1997; Van Rooy et al., 2005).
= Metapersonal Self-Construal. However, this finding was not supported in the current
study. It was found that those with higher Independent
In order to test the hypothesis that the Self-Construal were more likely to have higher emotional
Metapersonal self-construal scale more strongly predicts intelligence scores than those with higher Interdependent
higher well-being scores (as measured by the SWLS) Self-Construal.
than either the Independent or Interdependent self- Likewise, it was hypothesized that those with
construals, a multiple regression was performed with higher Independent Self-Construal would have greater
all three self-construals entered as predictors of scores well-being, as measured by the SWLS, than those with
on the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). This model higher Interdependent Self-Construal (Cross et al., 2003;
DeCicco & Stroink, 2007; Marian & Kaushanskaya,
Table 7 2004; Reid, 2004). This finding was not supported
in the current study as higher Interdependent Self-
Multiple Regression Analysis with SWLS scores as the outcome
Construal predicted well-being scores. Also, although
and Independent, Interdependent and Metapersonal self-con-
struals as the predictors. the Independent Self-Construal had a small positive
correlation with the SWLS, it did not significantly
b Std. Err. beta t-value p-value sr²
predict well-being as measured by the SWLS in the
Intercept
7.531 3.608 2.087 .038 regression analyses. This is not completely surprising as
Ind SC .047 .045 .079 1.058 .291 .0053 some studies (e.g., Hardie et al., 2006) reported that those
Inter SC .086 .039 .155 2.185 .030 .0225 with higher Independent Self-Construal score poorly
Meta SC .183 .055 .273 3.326 .001 .0506 on measures of well-being. Reid (2004) suggested that
Note. F (3, 208) = 14.153; p < .001; R² = .170; Ind SC = Indepen-
well-being is mediated by different variables in different
den Self-Construal; Inter = Interdependent Self-Construal; Meta self-construal constructs, and, thus, the SWLS may be
= Metapersonal Self-Construal. tapping into aspects of well-being that are associated
with the Interdependent Self-Construal.
was significant, F = 14.153, p < .001, with self-construal The most relevant finding was in regard to the
accounting for 17% of the overall variance in well-being Metapersonal Self-Construal. Higher Metapersonal Self-
scores. Specifically, a one unit increase in Interdependent Construal scores predicted higher emotional intelligence
self-construal significantly predicts a .086 increase in scores, as measured by the TMMS, than either the
scores on the SWLS (p = .03), and a one unit increase in Independent Self-Construal or the Interdependent
Metapersonal self-construal significantly predicts a .183 Self-Construal. Additionally, higher Metapersonal Self-
Self-Construal, EI, and Well-Being International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 
Construal scores alone predicted higher scores on two
of the three subscales of the TMMS: Mood Repair and
Attention to Feelings, whereas only the Independent
Self-Construal predicted higher scores on the Clarity
of Feelings subscale. The Metapersonal Self-Construal
scale was also a stronger predictor of greater well-being,
as measured by the SWLS, than either Interdependent
Self-Construal or the Independent Self-Construal,
which was not a significant predictor of the SWLS in
this study. Thus, the Metapersonal Self-Construal was
meaningfully differentiated from the independent and
interdependent self-construals as a predictor of well-
being and emotional intelligence scores.
Implications
I t was hypothesized that higher Interdependent
Self-Construal, rather than the Independent Self-
Construal, would predict higher emotional intelligence
scores. However, the opposite was found. This hypothesis
was based on the assumption that emotional intelligence
measures place a greater emphasis on the ability to
understand others’ emotions and how others perceive
emotions, which, theoretically, is an aspect of the
Interdependent Self-Construal (Cross & Madson, 1997).
Instead, the tendency to define the self through unique
attributes and inner experiences (the Independent Self-
Construal) may enhance one’s capacity to be aware of
one’s own internal emotions. This conceptual awareness
of one’s own emotional life may then reveal a positive
association between Independent Self-Construal and
emotional intelligence. Indeed, this interpretation is
supported by the finding that the Independent Self-
Construal uniquely predicted the Clarity of Feelings
subscale of the TMMS. Defining the self on the basis
of unique and distinguishing inner attributes, skills, and
experiences may result in a greater conceptual familiarity,
distinction, and clarity among inner emotional states.
Perhaps the social aspect of emotional intelligence did
not come across strongly enough in the present study
to reveal a significant association between emotional
intelligence and the Interdependent Self-Construal.
The finding that the Metapersonal Self-
Construal significantly and uniquely predicted the
Attention to Feelings and Mood Repair subscales of the
TMMS was particularly interesting. While a focus on
the self as separate may generate a conceptual clarity
among inner emotional states, a definition of the self
as connected with all of life seems to have unique
implications for one’s attention to feelings as sources of
 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
information and on one’s capacity to regulate and repair
negative emotions. These findings are consistent with
our understanding of the metapersonal self-construal as
a more holistic view of the self inclusive of emotional
states. It is also consistent with our previous findings
of a relationship between metapersonal self-construal
and mindfulness (Stroink & Dupuis, 2007). A mindful
awareness of one’s emotional life may either support
the emergence of a metapersonal self-construal or be
an outcome of this self-construal. Further research
is required to examine the causal direction of this
relationship. The positive association between the
Metapersonal Self-Construal and the Mood Repair
subscale of the TMMS also suggests one mechanism
through which the metapersonal self-construal may
affect overall well-being. Specifically, if defining oneself
through connection with all of life supports the capacity
to repair negative moods, perhaps by placing them in a
broader perspective, it may ultimately underlie a deeper
sense of well-being. Again, further research is required
to better understand the mechanisms by which the
metapersonal self-construal strengthens overall well-
being.
Limitations and
Directions for Future Research
T here is much debate concerning emotional
intelligence definitions and the use of self-report
measures. It will be difficult to synthesize the information
collected on emotional intelligence without a consensus
on the appropriate measurement and the appropriate
definition. The trait model and the ability model
both seem to capture different aspects of emotional
intelligence, but both constructs have been developed
from the original Mayer and Salovey (1995) emotional
intelligence model (Mayer, DiPaolo, & Salovey, 1990).
The fact that they are operationally defined differently
does not exactly delineate the features of either model.
Thus, more research is necessary in order to clarify the
nature of emotional intelligence.
The reliability of the Self-Construal Scale is
another limitation. The inter-item reliability coefficients
for the SCS found in the past, as well as in the current
study, are fairly low (although still considered adequate).
This would imply that perhaps the items need to be
examined and revised to strengthen the reliability of
this scale.
Additional limitations, specific to the current
study, include the extremely uneven sample of men
Mara, DeCicco & Stroink
versus women which prevented analyses of gender
differences (although this is typically the case within
liberal arts university populations). Also, the sample
consisted of only young, undergraduate students. Studies
with different populations may yield different results.
Therefore, studies using community-based samples and
older samples would be worthwhile.
Further, research that includes the metapersonal
self-construal is needed in order to understand the
significance of this particular self-construal in individual
behavior. Most of the research on self-construal only takes
the independent and the interdependent self-construals
into consideration, though, as evidenced by the current
study, the metapersonal self-construal is a significant
factor influencing several of the constructs measured.
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About the Authors
Constance A. Mara, BSc, was a student at Trent Uni­
versity when the current research was conducted.
Currently, she is a graduate student at York University.
Her area of research is broadly encompassed within
social and personality psychology, with special interest
in quantitative methodology.
Teresa L. DeCicco, PhD, is an associate professor at
Trent University. Her research interests are in the areas
of personality, abnormal psychology and health. Her
research falls into the following categories: (a) personality,
Mara, DeCicco & Stroink
self-construal and adaptive coping; (b) the relationship
between trait measures of anxiety and adaptive coping;
(c) Perfectionism and motivation in relation to depression,
anxiety and performance; (d) self-construal and health
(physical and emotional); (e) dreams and health.

Mirella L. Stroink, PhD, is an assistant professor of

psychology at Lakehead University. She is a social
psychologist and her interests combine issues of culture,
community, social cognition, and personality. Her
research focuses on the broad question of how the
surrounding culture shapes the fundamental beliefs
and assumptions that individuals hold, and how these
assumptions in turn influence other aspects of cognition,
well-being, and behavior.

About the Journal

The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a

peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).

Self-Construal, EI, and Well-Being International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 11

 Koans and Levels of Consciousness
John Rowan
Independent Consultant
London, UK

This is a theoretical paper devoted to an examination of the phenomenon of the Zen

koan. First, the existing understanding of the koan will be outlined from a number of
sources. This will be followed by an examination of what the koan would look like from
a structural point of view. Ken Wilber’s outlook will then be used to look at the koan in a
fresh way so that one might see it as a kind of test of the level of consciousness exhibited
by each solution. The latter is related to recent thinking on models in general.
Keywords: levels of consciousness, Zen, koans, Wilber

Koans are fascinating things. Most readers have There are periods of intensive zazen during the year,
doubtless come across them quite frequently. Familiar such as rohatsu dai sesshin, when the monks must
examples include the sound of one hand clapping and the endure severe cold, make do with only two or three
goose in the glass bottle. Many people have discovered hours of sleep in the zazen position, and devote
the very useful introductory text by Philip Kapleau themselves entirely to finding a solution to the koan
(1967), which offered a good rundown and a number of they have been given. (p. 150)
examples. In a later book, Kapleau (2001) went deeply
However, in the West we do not have this culture, and so
into eleven classic koans and also made some interesting
we can stand back and look at the questions with greater
remarks on nirvana as an aim in Buddhism. He noted:
freedom.
Years ago early translators of Sanskrit, many of Even in Japan, though, there are some contrary
whom were not Buddhists at all, used the work in voices. According to Hoffman (1977):
a negative way. Since the root meaning of nirvana
The Kidogoroku is the final part of a controversial book
is ‘to blow out, to extinguish’, they took it to mean
first published in Japan in 1916. Entitled Gendai
that one becomes a kind of nothing. Well, it is a
Sojizen Hyoron [a critique of present-day pseudo-
nothing, but a Nothing that is Everything. And of
Zen] it was the work of a renegade Zen monk (whose
course to blow out, or extinguish our mind of ego, of
true identity may never be known) who set out to
our deforming passions, so that our true, unlimited
reform what he judged to be the moral corruption
Mind, the Mind which is not born and so never dies,
and overall ossification of institutionalised Zen in
may come into consciousness. Nirvana is a state of
Japan. (p. 13)
absolute freedom, without restriction. (Kapleau,
2001, p. 15) It was Hoffman who translated Gendai Sojizen Hyoron,
which contains what are considered correct answers
This then links with a number of other disciplines
to 281 koans. For example, the correct answer to the
such that the koan can be seen as one of a series of
koan Mu is for the postulant to face the roshi and shout
systematic approaches to the pursuit of nirvana, such
“Mu!” at the top of his voice. The correct answer to the
as those of Aurobindo, Vedanta, Sufism, Mahamudra,
koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is for
yoga, and so forth. Zen came from the Ch’an tradition in
the postulant to face the roshi and thrust out his hand
China where the koan was called the kung-an, or public
with force and confidence. This is, of course, somewhat
case, but it was in Japan that the koan reached its fullest
pointlesss even if it is a true record of what has been
expression—most fully in the Rinzai tradition, but also
done in practice. To think that one could learn such a
in the Soto discipline.
performance and produce it on demand has obviously
In the Japanese monasteries koans are taken very
no relation to any useful pursuit of one’s own truth or
seriously. Sato (1972) explained that:

12 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 12-16 Rowan
one’s own spiritual discoveries. Hoffman (1975) related
that this monk actually had studied in several different
monasteries and had grilled the monks on what had
happened in the past.
One of the curious features of Zen is the way
in which enlightenment is treated. It is common in
the Zen stories in such books as the Mumonkan (today
often known as the Wumenguan), the Shoyoroku (Book of
Equanimity), the Denkoroku (Book of the Transmission of
the Lamp) and the Hekinganroku (the Blue Cliff or Blue
Rock Record) to come across phrases such as “with this,
the monk gained enlightenment” (e.g., Mascetti, 1997).
However, it is not clear exactly what this means. The idea
of a once and for all total enlightenment does not seem
to correspond with the actual experience of advanced
meditators or of those who have studied the matter (Loy,
1988).
In this paper, I propose to look at the whole
question from a different angle. As is well known, there
is general ignorance and even prejudice in the area of
levels of consciousness. Most people just do not want
to know about the idea that there might be anything
like a hierarchy or even a holarchy in such matters. In
what follows, I simply set this aside and assume that it
does indeed make sense to regard consciousness in an
evolutionary light and as something that does fall into a
number of categories that are usefully distinguished.
Personally, I find Ken Wilber’s (2000) general
map a useful one. He has presented evidence from many
different sources showing that the same set of levels
appears in every serious attempt to outline spiritual
progress or process. What would happen, I thought, if
one approached a koan from each of the levels postulated
by Wilber? What would that look like, and what would
it reveal?
The first one I tried was Mu. This is the one in
which someone asks the great sage Joshu—“Does a dog
have Buddha-nature?” It is one of the basic koans used
in early teaching. Joshu (now often called Zhaozhou)
responded with the reply “Mu,” which is generally
regarded as a No--though there is also rather a large
amount of elaboration on what Mu might stand for in
Buddhist circles—almost to the extent of it becoming
meaningless. Yet, to say that a dog does not have Buddha
nature is regarded as controversial and even scandalous in
some Buddhist disciplines. There is a good discussion of
this in Cleary (1993). If one looks at this from each level
in turn, the results seem quite interesting (see Table 1).
Koans and Levels of Consciousness
Table 1
Approaches to the Koan, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?”
(Mu), from each of Wilber’s levels of consciousness.
Level Response
Magic/Mythic Joshu is clearly in touch with the super-
natural source of all knowledge. The
best thing is to follow Joshu and learn
from him. From now on, Joshu is my
great leader and teacher.
Mental Ego The Nirvana Sutra tells us that all sen-
tient beings have Buddha-nature, so
the answer is just wrong. Joshu made
a mistake.
Centaur To have Buddha-nature is to be con-
scious of being conscious. Therefore, a
man can have Buddha-nature but a
dog cannot. Joshu is correct. To have the
Buddha-nature is to be fully human—
that is to be authentic. There is no such
thing as an authentic dog.
Subtle I can communicate with trees, animals,
fairies, angels, gods and goddesses alike,
and I know that they all have Buddha-
nature. Joshu must have been forgetful
of all this.
Causal Not only all sentient beings but also all
things of whatever kind partake of the
Buddha-nature. There is only Buddha-
nature. The whole universe is Buddha-
nature from top to bottom. Joshu had
somehow lost sight of this.
Nondual To say Yes and to say No are equally
meaningless. Joshu was wicked and hu-
morous to pick one and not the other.
The point is to see the joke. The only
possible answer is to laugh. When we
laugh, we are standing toe to toe with
Joshu. You might just well ask to have a
great tree brought to you upside down
in a bucket.
It seems obvious that a koan can be regarded as
a test of levels of insight. Within Buddhism itself, Mu
has become something of a wild horse—used in all sorts
of ways to enhance the teaching of various teachers of
different persuasions and becoming quite disengaged
from its origins. Hence it is directed very much at the
area of individual consciousness—what Wilber (2006)
has called the Upper Left Quadrant. It has very little
relevance to the other three quadrants—the brain and
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 13
body, the social environment, or the social support system.
This is a very basic koan, and it has often been used as an
introduction to Zen Buddhism for new postulants. To
discover that it is useful as a test of levels of consciousness
is fascinating and gives a new way of looking at all the
koans. To test this out, consider another favorite koan:
“What was your original face before your parents were
born?” (Table 2).
Here is a much trickier question, which really
evades all the well-meaning attempts to deal with it.
Of course, this is obvious from the very nature of the
question as soon as one hears it. It is a tricky question
and bears its trickiness before it like a banner. Some
Table 2
Approaches to the Koan, “What was your original face,
before your parents were born?” from each of Wilber’s levels
of consciousness.
Level Response
Magic/Mythic You will reveal the answer to me when
you think I am ready to hear the truth,
but, for now, it is a holy truth that I am
not ready for.
Mental Ego This a stupid question, and I am of-
fended that you should even ask me
such a thing. How could anyone answer
this?
Centaur My original face must be my authentic
face, but I don’t see how I could be au-
thentic before being born. There is here
an attempt at mystification that I re-
ject. There is no existential meat in this
question.
Subtle My original face is beauty, and beauty
is larger than any one expression of it.
Beauty is in the world but not of it, and
my original face shares in that destiny.
That original beauty is still me.
Causal There is no original face, just as there
is no “my face” now. To assume that I
have a face now is to miss the point. My
no-face now is the same as my original
face then, pure emptiness.
Nondual You are joking again, you bad roshi!
You want me to go scraping around
looking for answers and for the right
answer, the answer that will please you.
Well, here is my answer! (Slaps the face
of the roshi and leaves the room.)
14 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
koans are like this. As soon as one looks at them, it is
clear that something extraordinary is going on. They
are exotic from the start. For some people, this makes
koans fascinating; for others, it is quite off-putting and
mystery mongering. Cleary (1993) has offered a very
patient approach to this. He has given lengthy and
elaborate commentaries on each koan as if it deserved
close attention, which, of course, it does.
What happens with another koan, one that
looks much more ordinary and answerable: “Who am
I?” (Table 3). This is frequently used on retreats and
training courses, and many highly esteemed people even
outside of Zen have used it. But one can see how really
tricky it is. It calls into question the very possibility of
finding the “I” at all. It undermines itself even in the
very act of asking it. If psychospiritual development
exists, and I believe it does, this is one of the questions
Table 3
Approaches to the Koan, “Who am I?” from each of Wilber’s
levels of consciousness.
Level Response
Magic/Mythic I am whatever the authorities tell me I
am. I need to look to higher authority
for answers like this.
Mental Ego I am my roles, the functions I perform.
I read myself off from the way in which
other people treat me. I can study my-
self scientifically through tests. I am a
true functionary.
Centaur I am me! I am the authentic person—
self found and self defined. I do not
need someone else to tell me who I am.
I know! I am!!
Subtle I am a divine being. I see myself in the
rocks, the trees, the rivers—all those
places where I can find myself and
hear myself. I am all the water in the
world—and the earth, the sky, the
roaring flame.
Causal I am the All-Self. I am the vast universe
outside and the vast self inside. I have
no limits. I am infinite.
Nondual Another of those daft questions, which
make me laugh. There is no end to ques-
tions like this. They all try to seduce us
into finding the one right answer. Not
not—who’s there?
Rowan
that most obviously relate to the twists and turns of the
growth process. Of course, not everyone is as respectful
as Cleary (1993), and at times a sense of humor comes
in with happy results. According to Hoffman (1975),
“Jonathan Swift could have made much of the little fact
that monks in Soto Zen monasteries must sleep on their
right sides, while those in Rinzai Zen monasteries must
sleep on their backs” (p. 9). Here is another example—
again often used in short retreats or workshops, and
quite popular in the West: “What is another?” (Table
4).
It is becoming clear, I hope, that there is great
similarity in the way each of these koans works. There is
another koan that is often used, and I think it brings out
the ways in which all these koans have a similar structure.
They usually take the form of a question—either a direct
question or a question about the interpretation of an act
or a saying from some esteemed source. They usually
sound reasonable. The last one I want to use is of this
nature.
The paradox that is neatly brought out by all
these answers is that the best answer is no answer. As
soon as one tries to find an answer, one is caught by the
question. In order to avoid being caught, one has to avoid
all attempts at answers. In order to bring out this point,
I invented a new koan myself: “There is a number which
is less than 3 and more than 5. What is it?” Anyone who
tries to answer this is simply falling for a fatal gambit.
However, if I were a famous spiritual leader, it would be
easy to find people to spend hours, days, or weeks trying
to find the answer.
The whole object of a koan, it seems to me,
is to draw in and then frustrate the intellect, thus
opening the way for something deeper to arise and be
recognized. In this way, it anticipates some of the latest
thinking about the nature of models and the very way
humans think about the world. Recent work in the field
of the transpersonal, for example, has cast severe doubt
on what it has called the Myth of the Given. This is
the view, widely held in the West, that the world has
pregiven features independent of any theory or process
of consciousness and that valid knowledge consists
in matching our thinking to this fixed world. This
perspective is now deeply challenged by constructivism,
constructionism, postmodernism, and the participatory
view of the world put forward by many thinkers.
Also, of course, it is challenged by Zen—the idea that
everything can be known in this external way is just
Koans and Levels of Consciousness
what one escapes from when we solve a koan. Suddenly,
it becomes possible to see the freedom in which such
fixed ideas cannot take hold. Such ideas “have been
severely undermined by contemporary developments
in the human sciences and hermeneutics, anthropology
Table 4
Approaches to the Koan, “What is another?” from each of
Wilber’s levels of consciousness.
Level Response
Magic/Mythic Another person is potentially threat-
ening. Only those very close can be
trusted. I shall be told whom to trust by
parents and elders.
Mental Ego Other people are defined by their roles.
I know how to treat someone if I know
what his or her role is in relation to
me.
Centaur I can relate to another person in an au-
thentic way. If the other person is ready
for this, I can be real and intimate with
them. I do not need all the defences and
can be genuinely nondefensive. But I
can also be discriminating and not just
a pushover. I know who I am and what
I am about.
Subtle Not only can I relate to another person
but also I can be that person. I can en-
ter fully into another’s world and make
it my world. We can meet soul to soul,
and our everyday boundaries can fade
away and be as nothing. There is a joy
and a healing quality about this. I can
have a heartfelt compassion for the
other person.
Causal My compassion is cool and steady. My
boundaries are now so far away that
they might as well not exist. I am open
because I am everywhere. The other
person just is, in the same way and in
the same place, which I am.
Nondual Another of these catch questions! But
then, all questions are catch questions.
They all invent distinctions and then
puzzle over how to link the two parts
they have just separated. There is no
need to separate them in the first place.
There is no need to invent them in the
first place. You might as well try to ride
an ostrich up the Matterhorn.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 15
and linguistics, the philosophy and sociology of science,
feminist and indigenous epistemologies, and modern
cognitive science, among other disciplines” (Ferrer,
2002, p.139). It is interesting that this last quotation
comes from a recent exponent of transpersonal theory
who is now catching up with the old Zen insights. Ferrer
(2002) is not alone in this. Wilber (2002) concurred in
his statement:
A constructive postmodern approach – taken up as
part of an integral approach (integrating premodern,
modern and postmodern) – can leave their [earlier
thinkers] important work and research just as it is,
but plug their problematic epistemologies into an
integral framework that gives them a fuller context.
Failing that, the myth of the given, chaining minds
to illusions, lives on in these endeavours, whose own
self-image claims liberation, and yet the myth of the
given creates the children of the lie. (p. 178)
Perhaps the Zen koan offers a means of rescue from this
potentially sad state of affairs.
Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (2006). Integral spirituality. Boston, MA:
Integral Books.
About the Author
John Rowan, PhD, has been studying the transpersonal
and meditating since 1982, and has published papers,
chapters and books on this subject a number of times
since then. His “training manual” on the ten ox-herding
pictures was published in 1993. He is a Fellow of the
British Psychological Society.
About the Journal
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).

References

Cleary, T. (1993). No barrier: Unlocking the Zen koan.

London, UK: Aquarian.
Ferrer, J. N. (2002). Revisioning transpersonal theory: A
participatory vision of human spirituality. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Hoffman, Y. (1975). The sound of the one hand: 281 Zen
koans with answers. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Hofffman, Y. (1977). Every end exposed: The 100 koans
of Master Kido with the answers of Hakuin-Zen.
Berkeley, CA: Autumn Press.
Kapleau, P. (1967). The three pillars of Zen: Teaching,
practice, enlightenment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Kapleau, P. (2001). Straight to the heart of Zen: Eleven
classic koans and their inner meaning. Boston, MA:
Shambhala.
Loy, D. (1988). Nonduality: A study in comparative
philosophy. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Mascetti, M. D. (1997). Koans: The lesson of Zen. London,
UK: Newleaf.
Sato, K. (1972). The Zen life. New York, NY:
Weatherhill.
Watts, A. W. (1962). The way of Zen. Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin.
Wilber, K. (2000). Integral psychology. Boston, MA:

16 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Rowan

 Relational Spirituality and Developmental Spirituality:
Introduction to Special Topic Section
Glenn Hartelius
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Palo Alto, CA, USA
Transpersonal psychology began with a primary
focus on beyond-ego psychology, one that examined
states, stages, and aspirations beyond conventional
ego consciousness and formal operational cognition
(Hartelius, Caplan, & Rardin, 2007). Yet the field has
consistently aspired to two additional themes—one
relational, one developmental. The relational refers
to a psychology of the situated individual, the person
embedded in community, culture, and cosmos. The
developmental indicates a psychology of transformation,
both individual and social, that seeks out the processes
and paths that lead to psychic integration, kindness, and
grace.
Much transpersonal literature still focuses on
non-ordinary states, whether spiritual, meditative, non-
ordinary, holotropic, drug-induced, or exceptional; a
great deal of the literature also now features transpersonal
perspectives on individual human development, the
most prominent being that of Ken Wilber. However, the
content area of the field is not limited to these. As a study
of the situated individual, it is becoming a psychology of
interconnectedness and participation in the world—one
that grapples with a psychology that is not just of the
brain but of the whole body, not just of the mind and
the emotions but of the felt sense, not just of the psyche
of the individual but of society, culture, ancestors, and
of the living systems in the natural world. Its philosophy
is no longer only one that offers eternal truth about
individual redemption, but also one informed by
International Journal
Introduction Topic SectionStudies, 29(1), 2010,
of Transpersonal
to Special pp. 17-19Journal of Transpersonal Studies 17
International
Maureen Harrahy
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Palo Alto, CA, USA
more contemporary approaches such as participatory
thought that emphasize the dynamics of embodied
interconnectedness more than those of singular
transcendence. From this perspective spirituality is also
a relational development, one that transcends ego not
by going up into higher states but outward into the self-
forgetful engagement of compassion, altruism, service,
and the practice and promotion of justice.
The first article in this section, Consciousness
and Society, by Harry Hunt, begins by observing that
non-ordinary states are not merely private, interior
experiences, but that in many cultures these realms of
consciousness have been understood as social experiences
that could be shared in group contexts. Rather than
aspects of an individual quest to rise above the world,
these states were often seen to have a more communal
function, a shared encounter with the numinous that
strengthened the sense of meaningful belonging-together.
“Western valuation of individualism and autonomy”
and the “negative face of group states of consciousness”
such as mob mentality (p. 114) tend to obscure this
sense. Paradoxically, Hunt proposes that the pursuit of
individual development may bring one deeper into states
of awareness of the nature of being and, in ultimate acts
of acceptance of the frailty and suffering of the human
condition, become aware of the collective and relational
nature of existence. This constitutes a movement toward
what he calls global spirituality, and offers a frame that
unifies both developmental and relational spirituality.
 This call to a more relationally informed
spirituality is also the theme of the two papers that
follow, both by Gregg Lahood. In these pieces, entitled
Paradise Unbound, and The Belief in Others as a
Hindrance to Enlightenment, Lahood unpacks the
lineage of perennial philosophy, nonduality, and New
Age streams of thought within the field and argues that
it carries an inspiring but self-centered and intolerant
brand of spirituality. Beginning in the latter 19th century
with the rise of theosophy, transcendentalism, and a
missionary-like promotion of cremation for the dead,
New England individualism blended with newly arrived
Eastern philosophies to form a hybrid spiritual cosmology
in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and
other contemporaries. This vision blended Hinduism,
Buddhism, and Christianity into something that claimed
to represent the eternal truth contained within these
traditions, though it was at the same time something
entirely new and quite different from any of them.
The writings of the transcendentalists had broad
and beneficent impact. For example, it was Thoreau’s tract
on Civil Disobedience that inspired Mohandas Gandhi to
use a non-violent approach against the British occupation
of India, a movement that led to India’s independence
in 1948. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King emulated
Gandhi in his approach to win civil rights for African
Americans. What began as an orientalist interpretation
of Eastern spirituality gave rise to a non-violent political
approach that has since been used by César Chávez
to win rights for Mexican farm laborers, and that has
played a prominent role in non-violent revolutions from
Czechoslovakia to the Philippines.
The hybrid spirituality of the transcendentalists
also provided direct inspiration for the Beat movement
of the 1950s and the Hippies of the 1960s, and
eventually served as template for the esoteric core
of the New Age. This, in turn, was the milieu out of
which transpersonal psychology emerged—a loose-knit
counterculture informed by a popularized vision of
individual transcendence through an eternally true path
that was imperfectly reflected in Eastern and Western
spiritual traditions. It was as the prophet of this New
Age version of transpersonalism that Ken Wilber rose to
prominence.
Inspiring as it is to imagine that all the different
streams of world spirituality have at last been distilled
into a unified truth that embraces all the cultures of the
world, this approach has a shadow side. For one thing,
New Age religion has a proclivity toward narcissistic self-
18 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
spirituality: it is a path that focuses on the transcendent
experience of the individual to the exclusion of mutuality
and sharing. For another, such hybrid spirituality tends
to see itself as superior to the traditions on which it draws,
even though it may involve no particular rigor of practice
or thought. As the carrier of an eternal truth that existed
long before such traditions came into being, New Age
truth proposes to achieve planet-wide unity through the
submission of all lesser, “partial truths” to its syncretistic
yet authoritative pick-and-mix One Truth.
New Age perennialism has been, more or less,
the philosophical backbone of transpersonal psychology
for the first 30 years of its history. Yet with the turn of
the millennium, the field also began to move toward a
more relational direction, first with the participatory
approach called for by Ferrer (2002), but now also
through the work of Heron (1992, 1998, 2006) and
Lahood (2007, 2008; Heron & Lahood, 2008). This call
is for a relational rebirth of transpersonal psychology, a
humbler field that draws more on Buber’s I-Thou than
on the New Age’s I AM. Such a relational spirituality
is not opposed to spiritual development, but situates
such development in relationship to the communities
of life rather than relative to some individual esoteric
achievement that provides power and status.
The remaining articles within the special topic
section deal with the theme of spirituality within a more
developmental frame. The first of these, Transpersonal
and Other Models of Spiritual Development, by Harris
Friedman, Stanley Krippner, Linda Riebel, and Chad
Johnson, considers spiritual development not as something
that can be reduced to a single and uniform phenomenon,
but as a way to refer to powerful human processes that
are too vital and multifaceted to be contained with
any one model. Their approach is to set forth some of
the diverse territory, considering traditional models of
spiritual development as found in indigenous, Western,
and Eastern communities; integrative-philosophical
models such as Wilber’s; psychological models such as
those offered by Allport, Kohut, Gilligan, and the field
of transpersonal psychology; and neurobiological models
that are still in their infancy. They conclude by invoking
Ferrer’s (2002) call for giving up on any attempt to
rank different traditions relative to ultimate criteria,
and suggesting that instead different paths be valued
by how effectively they release the individual from self-
centeredness and lead to fulfillment.
After this comes an interview with Robert
Bolton entitled, The Self and the Great Chain of Being,
Hartelius & Harrahy
conducted by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos. Bolton lays out
a perennialist position that is quite different from that of
Ken Wilber. Among the interesting facets of his exposition
is a position that the “Cogito” argument attributed to
Descartes can be traced back to the 4th-5th century
Christian theologian and church father, St. Augustine
of Hippo. Bolton hears in St. Augustine’s (1963) idea
that “every mind knows and is certain of itself ” (p. 308)
not only the precursor of Descartes’ famous cogito ergo
sum (I think, therefore I am) but also a key element in
the construction of the Western notion of personality,
which he considers to be an especially Christian concept.
Bolton reads as the essence of a well-tempered mind, one
that Bendeck Sotillos ably engages and brings forward.
Michael Abramsky’s piece, Jacob Wrestles the
Angel, is a psychospiritual analysis that offers a Jewish
engagement with the concept of spiritual development.
Abramsky draws on the tradition of Midrash, a traditional
rabbinical hermeneutical exploration of biblical
stories, and he weaves together scriptural narrative,
psychoanalytic theory, kabbalistic imagery, and Buddhist
doctrine into an informative and elucidating story of one
man’s struggle with releasing his life into the hands of
the divine. This is developmental spirituality revealed in
a relational context.
As Jacob discovered, the spiritual path is not
without its crises. The next paper, by Darlene Viggiano
and Stanley Krippner, examines The Grofs’ Model of
Spiritual Emergency in Retrospect, and asks whether
it has stood the test of time. The paper offers a helpful
review of the concept, tracing its roots to the work of
William James, Carl Jung, and Roberto Assagioli, and
its later development to Christina and Stan Grof as well
as David Lukoff. Included is an interview with Karen
Trueheart, former director of the Spiritual Emergence
Network, which explores the durability of this model
and asks whether there are ways in which it might need
revision.
The final paper, The Gift of Life, by Rochelle Suri,
is a call to engagement with death as a spiritual teacher,
illustrated by an account of the Aghori, a North Indian
sect that engages in a number of socially condemned
practices designed to highlight the nonduality of life and
death, pleasure and pain, good and bad. If death is part
of life, the author asks, then how can life be lived fully if
death is denied and repressed?
This diverse offering is a tribute to the creativity
and innovation that still flowers within the field of
transpersonal psychology, bringing forward thoughtful
Introduction to Special Topic Section
engagement from a wide variety of perspectives. It is an
aging and failing oak tree that is reduced to a simple
structure with few branches; a vital and vigorous oak
entwines itself in elegant and complex ways that defy
simple description.
Glenn Hartelius, Editor
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Maureen Harrahy, Special Topic Editor
Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
References
Augustine, S. (1963). The trinity (S. McKenna, Trans.).
Washington, DC: Catholic University of America.
Press. Ferrer, J. N. (2002). Revisioning transpersonal
theory: A participatory vision of human spirituality.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hartelius, G., Caplan, M, & Rardin, M. A. (2007).
Transpersonal psychology: Defining the past,
divining the future. The Humanist Psychologist,
35(2), 1-26.
Heron, J. (1992). Feeling and personhood: Psychology in
another key. London, UK: Sage Publications.
Heron, J. (1998). Sacred science: Person centered inquiry
into the spiritual and the subtle. Ross-On-Wye, UK:
PCCS Books.
Heron, J. (2006).
Heron, J., & Lahood, G. (2008) Charismatic inquiry in
concert: Action research in the realm of the between.
In P. Reason and H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of
Action Research (2nd edition; pp. 439–449). London,
UK: Sage Publications.
Lahood, G. (2007). The participatory turn and the
transpersonal movement: A brief introduction.
ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and Transforma­
tion, 29(3), 2–6. DOI 10.3200/REVN.29.3.2-6.
Lahood, G. (2008). Paradise bound: A perennial
philosophy or an unseen process of cosmological
hybridization. Anthropology of Consciousness, 19(2),
1- 57. DOI: 10.1111/j.1556-3537.2008.00008
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 19
 Consciousness and Society:
Societal Aspects and Implications of Transpersonal Psychology
Harry T. Hunt  1
Brock University
Ontario, Canada
Although transpersonal psychologies of self realization emphasize individual
development, earlier shamanic traditions also showed a central societal aspect and group based
consciousness. Indeed, many have understood the transpersonal movement as developing
towards an abstract globalized neo-shamanism. That altered states of consciousness, whether
as integrative realizations of the numinous or as dissociative “hypnoid” states, could be felt
and shared collectively was a familiar concept to the first generation of sociologists, who saw
all consciousness as social and dialogic in form. Durkheim, in particular, foresaw a globalized
spirituality of the future, his “cult of man,” in which modern individuation would progress
to the point where all we would have in common for the collective representations of
spiritual awareness would be our shared sense of human beingness. This view foreshadowed
De Chardin, and is presented explicitly or implicitly in Jung, Gurdjieff, Heidegger, Maslow,
and Almaas. The implications of a societal, collective face of transpersonalism for a future
planetary spirituality are pursued in terms of both a global ecological consciousness and
the potential transpersonal significance of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).
Keywords: collective consciousness, Durkheim’s “cult of man,” essential identity (Almaas),
experience of Being, Jung’s Red Book, SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence)

T
ranspersonal psychology has concentrated on
the inner development of the individual, as
evidenced by its focus on meditation, spiritual
aspects of psychosis, the phenomenology of higher states
of consciousness, and the conjoining of these states with
new paradigms in physics. Yet, for earlier generations of
sociologists and anthropologists these same higher states
were also understood as social and broadly shareable in a
group context. Their inherent social function was seen as
central to group cohesion and collective identity. The felt
qualities of numinous experience—in both their integrative
and distorted forms—were held to be the virtues and
values of a generalized humanity, and thus applicable as
much to groups as to individuals. We may tend to miss this
societal element in investigations of individually-oriented
transpersonal topics such as the solitary vision quest of
hunter-gatherer shamanism, forms of Eastern meditation,
or the individual impact of archetypal dreams and
research on their cognitive mediation (Hunt, 1995), but
for early sociologists of religion such as Emile Durkheim
(1912/1995), these phenomena involve the encounter
with collective representations that, once communicated,
become central to group identity.1
Since many understand the contemporary trans­
personal movement as moving toward a globalized,
abstract neo-shamanism it may be important to look at
these societal and cultural implications.
Transpersonalism as a Spiritual Movement:
Weber and Troeltsch
on This-Worldly Mysticism
T ranspersonalism, especially in its advocacy of self
realization and focus on the numinous felt core of
all religions (Smith, 1975; Otto, 1958), has some of the
elements of a contemporary spiritual movement. This
socio-cultural aspect of transpersonalism corresponds to
one of the German sociologist Max Weber’s (1922/1963)
four types of charismatic radical salvation movements,
which emerged in the major world civilizations in eras
of relative secularization and loss of collective meaning,
and with the potential to develop into established
religions. Weber distinguished between the outwardly
individualistic mysticisms, with their initial appeal to
the more educated and artistic classes, and the more
overtly communal propheticisms, emerging first in the
lower middle classes in response to social not individual
frustration. The latter have more immediate potential

20 International Journal of Transpersonal Hunt

StudiesJournal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 20-30
International
for mediating rapid social-economic change, as in early
Christianity, Islam, and the Protestant Reformation.
Weber (1922/1963) further divides the individual
and collective types into, on the one hand, other-
worldly forms, where mystics and prophets leave
mainstream society alone or in small communities, and
on the other hand, this-worldly forms, where renewed
access to the numinous is pursued within a larger
everyday society. Ernst Troeltsch (1931/1992) predicted
that the 20th century would see the advent of inner-
worldly mysticisms as the compensatory response of
the educated, steadily expanding middle classes to the
secularization of the more prophetical Judeo-Christian
tradition within a predominantly materialistic this-
worldly culture. Troeltsch referred to this movement
as “the secret religion of the educated classes,” which
corresponds to more recent terminologies of New Age
or spirituality vs. traditional religion. One could say,
along the lines of Weber (1905/1958), that just as the
development of 17th and 18th century capitalism
needed the support of a Protestant ethic of worldly
vocation, so in the 20th and 21st centuries our resulting
culture of hyper-individualism, which values autonomy
to the point of increasing isolation and alienation,
may not be fully liveable without the cultivation of
direct experiences of felt Being—at the core of the
numinous—for a movement incorporating Gurdjieff’s
view of self remembering, Heidegger’s authenticity of
Dasein, Jung’s Self, and Maslow and Almaas on the
transpersonal self realization of Being as higher sense of
identity (Hunt, 1995, 2003).
To the extent that economic globalization entails
the expansion of the educated middle classes, one could
predict a continuing development of such New Age or
transpersonal spiritualities, which are also the closest of
Weber’s (1922/1963) types to an originary shamanism
directly integrated into the social fabric of everyday
life (Hunt, 2003). Whereas De Chardin (1959) and
some modern transpersonalists foresee a this-worldly
spiritu­ality of the future as a quasi-biological or
evolutionary development of a planetary consciousness,
for Weber (1922/1963) and Troeltsch (1931/1992),
transpersonalism would be both the traditional form of
human spirituality favored by current social conditions,
and a historically unique movement rendered by an
unprecedented economic and cultural globalization
(Hunt, 2003). Accordingly we can ask what what might
be its future social and collective implications.
Consciousness and Society
Collective Consciousness
and its Transpersonal
and Dissociative Transformations
W e are a symbolic species and it would seem to
follow that all human consciousness is social and
dialogical in form (Hunt, 1995; Whitehead, 2008). It is
probably not accidental that the primary metaphors for
groups in Canetti’s (1966) Crowds and Power are the
same as for individual consciousness: streams, waves, and
ocean currents, fire, rain, forests and vegetative growth,
wind and storms. While higher states of consciousness
may be most easily researched in individual contexts,
these states are already social in their inner structure,
as in the classical dialogue of soul and God, Atman
and Brahman, and nondual merging. This makes these
higher states of consciousness intrinsically shareable,
with potential empowerment and charismatic effects for
the entire group. For early sociologists, what is now called
altered states of consciousness—whether as integrative
numinous experiences or as dissociative hypnoid states—
could be felt collectively. For Durkheim (1912/1995),
religion itself is based on an “effervescence” or exaltation
which can be experienced collectively when the intensity
of group life reaches a certain threshold (pp. 218-220).
Le Bon (1895/1969) and Tarde (in Shamdasani, 2003)
understood that crowds could induce collective hypnoid
states, and used the new psychology of the unconscious
to label social imitation itself as “somnambulistic.”2
More recently, both Charles Tart (1986) and Guy
Swanson (1978) speak literally of a “collective hypnosis
of everyday life,” or a shared “hypnotic trance” that
forms the experience of being a part of a social group.
In contrast to behavioral explanations of hypnosis, this
phenomenological approach locates a descriptive trance
or dissociative component in all intensely held social
roles. We say, speaking loosely, that Hitler “hypnotized”
the German people, but what if he really did? Certainly
films of the Nurembourg Rallies show both a secularized
ecstatic religiosity and a kind of group entrancement.
Durkheim’s concept of collective consciousness
means that there are society wide “states” and that these
are inducible. In effect, the more deeply we go down
and in to states of individual imaginative absorption, the
more we simultaneously go out and into implicitly shared
metaphors of the social field, or what Jung (1959/1969)
described as deeply shared archetypes. Thus, there
exists the potential for rapid societal impact by creative
visionaries who Jung (1963) credited with making
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 21
“conscious just those images...which compensate for the
general psychic distress” (p. 550). For both Jung and
Weber (1922/1963), when shared access to higher states
of consciousness declines in secularized eras, people feel
less connected to each other on a deep level. But this level
of commonality remains latent, as demonstrated in the
periodic resurgence of radical salvation movements. For
Durkheim, the fullest access to collective consciousness
comes through those states of consciousness now
regarded as subjective and private, but are actually
based on an attunement to what Durkheim (1912/1995)
called collective representations and which Jung saw as
synonymous with his archetypes.3
A reason the social side of consciousness tends to
be missed, aside from the extreme Western valuation of
individualism and autonomy, is the very negative face of
group states of consciousness that appears in mobs and
destructive crowds. Le Bon’s (1985/1969) early classic,
The Crowd, described the shared states of exaltation
in politically violent and/or lynch mobs, in which the
most disturbed individual members galvanize group
suggestibility. In the contemporary language of Almaas
(2004), these states of group hypnosis create experiences
of false essence—pathologically distorted and monolithic
forms of essential strength, will, and devotion lacking
the paradox of genuine numinous experience.
However, examples of group states of authentic
numinosity also exist. In the context of New Age
spirituality, there are the widely observed enhanced
effects of meditation in groups. Additionally, there are
reports of communal experiences during Grateful Dead
concerts from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s
that describe a shared, distinctly identifiable sense
of surrender, peace, and brilliant clarity mediated by
the hynotic effects of Garcia’s guitar (Pearson, 1987).
More recently, descriptions of neo-shamanic raves, the
Burning Man festival, and rainbow gatherings point to
similar numi­nous experiences, including shared states
of MMDA-aided communalism, euphoria, love, and a
temporary sense of an idealized planetary-wide utopia
(Hutson, 2000).
Most striking are the studies of shared numinous
states in small and large groups emerging in the imme­
diate aftermath of social disasters such as the San
Francisco earthquake of 1906 and Hurricane Katrina
(Solnit, 2009; Fritz, 1961). Horrific situations of mass
destruction and crisis can result in the spontaneous
emergence of temporary egalitarian communities based
22 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
on shared numinous states that have the ineffable and
paradoxical features of classical individual mysticism.
Horrific situations of mass destruction and crisis
can actually result in the spontaneous emergence of
temporary intensely egalitarian communities based
on shared numinous states that have the ineffable and
paradoxical features of classical individual mysticism.
Solnit’s recent A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) includes
people’s descriptions of a “magical reality” of “paradoxical
freedom,” “joy in sorrow,” and “euphoria infused
with grief ” that mediates the heroic levels of mutual
assistance required. In hindsight, survivors describe the
communalism of these periods as utopian. Much as with
Almaas (2004) and Laski (1961) on individual ecstatic
states, entire groups seem to enter the hole of catastrophe
and, where it is inescapable and fully felt, to emerge in
shared essential states of strength, will, and compassion.
Again, we may wish to know less of these states since
they can imply that we are only at our collective best in
the face of disaster, as also in the literally sacred bond of
strength, love, and compassion shared between soldiers in
the most horrific conditions of battle. On reflection, one
wonders if the group setting may not even be primary
over the individual one for the actual frequency, at least
on their access levels, of numinous states.
At the same time, it is important to avoid a
reduction of transpersonal experience to a sociologism
that would simply match psychoanalytic reductions
to infancy. For Durkheim (1912/1995), the shared
effervescence of communal ecstatic states was explained
as an attunement to the social bond itself. While religious
symbolism often contains projections of the economic
conditions of society (Weber, 1922/1963), Durkheim’s
reductionism would be a bit like the leaves on a tree
interpreting their shared movement in the breeze as
produced by their own simultaneity. Similarly recent
research from the perspective of attachment theory
correlating sudden conversion experiences (Kirkpatrick
& Shaver, 1990) and states of experiencing the physical
environment as humanly alive (Epley et al., 2007) with
variations in mother-infant attachment patterns, seem
less an explanation than part of a demonstration that
all symbolic experience, and not just higher states of
consciousness, begins developmentally with the early
mirroring bond. Its gradual internalization renders all
human consciousness in the form of an inner dialogue,
whether verbal or non verbal, with the latter including
the synesthetic embodiment of forms of nature—light,
Hunt
darkness, heights and depths, flow—that mediate
adult mystical experience (Hunt, 1995). Higher states
of consciousness are neither perceptions of society nor
reversions to infancy but later developmental recognitions
of the existential reality of both individual and collective
being. This constitutes more than a psycho-social
“process,” since our existence, and the experience of it,
may have the objective structure of a gift and a mystery
in which we all share, whether explicitly or not (Hunt,
2006).
Durkheim and Jung
on a Spirituality of the Future
I f spirituality is as social as it is individual, the question
arises, perhaps especially in a predominantly secular era,
of how this human potential for a directly-felt numinosity
could or would re-emerge as the potential inner face
of an outwardly globalizing world order. Durkheim
himself, in an important 1898 essay “Individualism
and the Intellectuals,” foresaw a spirituality of a future
humanity where modern individualism would progress
to the point where it is all we would have left in common
for the “collective representations” necessary for spiritual
awareness – in short as our sheer beingness as humans.
Durkheim called this a “cult of man,” very much
anticipating New Age spiritualities (Westley, 1978),
and DeChardin’s (1959) unitary “omega point” of a
future planetary consciousness, although for Durkheim,
these future states would be based on sociohistorical,
as opposed to evolutionary or biological, grounds. The
maximum realization of individuality, with its modern
values of justice, respect, and charity, would become
the basis for the renewed religious collectivity that
holds society together at its deepest levels. Durkheim
(1912/1995) said:
There remains nothing men love and honor apart
from man himself. This is why man has become
a god for man, and why he can no longer turn to
other gods without being untrue to himself. And
just as each of us embodies something of humanity,
so each individual mind has within it something of
the divine, and thereby finds itself . . . sacred and
inviolable to others. (p. 26)
At times Durkheim’s language is strikingly resonant
with both earlier Gnostic concepts of the Anthropos,
or Higher Adam, and Nietzsche’s “overman” as a higher
essence of humanity, both elevating the human as the
ultimate source of the sacred (Hunt, 2003). power . . . the star-like nature of the true self that simply
Consciousness and Society
Durkheim himself did not develop this under­
standing of individual being as a maxi­mally abstract
collectivity of the sacred, as the 20th century gave rise
to Heidegger’s Dasein, in which authentic identity is
based on a directly felt sense of Being, a transpersonal
psychology of self realization extending from Gurdjieff’s
self-remembering, Jung’s Self, and Maslow’s identity
of Being in peak experiences (Tiryakian, 1962). Most
recently, Almaas (2004) has distinguished between
two phases of the experience of individual identity as
presence or Being. First there is “personal essence” or
the “pearl,” which is the development of a personal
sense of beingness based on a spontaneous synthesis
of one’s capacities for autonomy and intimate contact,
independent of ordinary self image. Almaas’ discussion
of this point is reminiscent of Maslow’s (1971) being-
values in the process of self-actualization. Second, there
is the realization of “essential identity” or the “point.”
In this case, the sense of one’s true self, as the “point of
existence,” is sensed as Being itself, as a unique singularity
expressing the Being of all that is, and often mediated by
the image or metaphor of a “brilliant star.” 4 Essential
identity can also be understood as a further development
of Maslow’s (1962) sense of identity in peak or numinous
experience as pure presence. The question becomes
then, in the spirit of Durkheim, to what extent are these
realizations of individual transpersonal development also
possible as shared states of consciousness on a collective,
even planetary, level?
The early Jung clearly thought so. His recently
published Red Book (2009), the personal record
between 1913 and 1917 of his visionary crisis period
after his separation from Freud, contains material
strikingly reminiscent of Durkheim’s 1898 essay and
directly anticipating both Heidegger on Dasein and
Almaas on essential identity. Like Durkheim, Jung
laid out a post-Nietzschean spirituality for a future
globalized humanity, in which only an individual path
of “absolute singleness” can lead to a new “mutual love
in community,” a new closeness “as never before” (pp.
231, 245). In a more formal paper from 1916 he similarly
states, “The more individuality is accentuated, the more
it develops qualities fundamental to the collective notion
of humanity” (p. 285). Meanwhile, in the Red Book, like
both Heidegger and Almaas, the unifying quality of
human beings becomes the experience of Being as such.
Individuation means the “star god in you is gaining in
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 23
and singly is . . . thereby making Being eternal in each
moment.” Whoever sees this “becomes someone who is”
and this “stellar path will be one and the same for all
people” (pp. 349, 354- 356). One’s felt identity as Being
becomes both the self realization of the individual and
the basis of community for a future collective humanity.
Jung later sought to capture this inclusiveness with his
biological concept of a collective unconscious, but his
more personal and impressionistic Red Book seems more
consistent with Durkheim’s sociohistorical collective
consciousness.
Although Heidegger’s Dasein was so clearly
anticipated by the early Jung, with the authenticity of
an individual attunement to felt presence or Being,
Heidegger’s (1994) understanding of Being, as the core of
the numinous, is as social and collective as it is a matter of
individual experience. In his lectures of 1934, while sadly
still under the spell of National Socialism, Heidegger
(2009) understood this collectivity in terms of the world
historical potential of the German Volk, as expressed in
the ideal of the Aryan “superman.” In Almaas’ (2004)
terms, this would be a manifestation of a “false pearl,” a
regionalized and parochial version of personal essence, all
too narrowly fusing individual autonomy and duty to the
state.5 The later Heidegger (1977) more clearly understood
that a globalizing technology and the progressive and
inevitable loss of regional ethnic traditions had thrown
all of humanity together on a planetary and collective
level. Already in 1934, however, Heidegger (2009) said,
much as one finds in Jung (1959), that the extremes of
modern individualism were pushing us together in a new
stance, in terms of the planet itself, and forcing us to
ask, “Who are we in ourselves as the center of an actual
and possible humanity?” (Heidegger, 2009, pp. 41-42).
Heidegger stated that our beingness is felt equally from
the stance of “I,” “you and I,” and the “collective we.”
Our mode of being-in-the world, collectively as well as
individually, can be directly sensed in terms of qualities
of felt meaning, such as expansion, flow, and clarity, or
contraction, drift, and decay (Heidegger, 1995; Smith,
1986). Thus, to what extent is it plausible to conceive
of something like Heidegger’s Dasein, Jung’s Self, and
Almaas’ pearl and point as the future basis of a collective
planetary spirituality—as Durkheim’s cult of man?6
Globalization, Science,
and a Planetary Spirituality of the Future
C ertainly some such development of a new spiritually
mediated sense of collectivity may be needed for
24 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
humanity to meet the coming global crises of climate
change, and desertification, nuclear proliferation, over
population, and their attendant threats of mass starvations
and migrations. Recent research in social psychology
(Wohl & Branscombe, 2005), shows that suggesting an
identity with all of humanity to experimental participants
leads to higher levels of forgiveness for other groups
who have historically persecuted one’s own group. Yet,
to have the force of Durkheim’s (1912/1995) collective
spirituality, such an identity must be more than an idea
or sentiment, but also a directly felt, self-validating
numinous/charismatic state of consciousness.
Pragmatically speaking, there seem to be
several barriers to such a collective, planet-wide
realization of Durkheim’s cult of man. First, there is the
seeming necessity for any group identity to be defined
against contrasting outgroups in order to demark its
own boundaries and define its inner nature (Hornsey,
2008). What would be the outgroup to demark a
planetary humanity? Even in the above study by Wohl
and Branscombe (2005), the suggested identity with
humanity was juxtaposed against more traditional
outgroups. Historically, the false pearl identities of
Aryan superman and proletarian worker were always
pitted against demonized opposition groups. A
second potential barrier emerges from the apparent
necessity of transpersonal states of self realization to be
mediated by abstract physical metaphors and images
of light, spaciousness, darkness, radiance, depth,
and/or flow (Hunt, 1995). These spontaneously carry
accompanying transformations of individual identity
past humanity itself and into an anthropomorphized
nature (shamanism) or larger panpsychist universe
(transpersonal parallels with modern physics)—in other
words into expanded states of “cosmic consciousness”
(Hunt, 2003; Friedman, 1988). Such states bypass the
more intermediate level of Durkheim’s cult of man,
and any collective version of Jung’s Self and Almaas’
(2004) pearl or point, which would then need its own
specific imagery in order to be directly embodied and
synesthetically animated as its own numinous state and
expanded sense of identity.
However, given that the societal face of the
transpersonal movement corresponds to Weber’s
(1922/1963) inner-worldly mysticism and that this
form of New Age spirituality has always been defined
by a syncretism with the science of its day (Campbell,
1978; Hanagraaff, 1998), it seems relevant that certain
Hunt
developments in contemporary science may have
the potential to challenge both of these barriers to a
planetary spirituality of a common humanity. There
may be ways that scientific developments exteriorize
and support what would otherwise remain interior
transpersonal states.
First, what of the possibilities for a collective
version of what Almaas (2004) has called personal
essence? We have already seen that this state of personal
beingness, based on a spontaneous synthesis of autonomy
and empathic contactfulness, embodies something of the
more or less cross cultural ideals of Maslow’s being-values,
and that a group realization of this state can appear in the
wake of major environmental catastrophies (Solnit, 2009).
Meanwhile, in the 1950s both DeChardin (1959) and
Jung (1959) anticipated a future planetary emergence of
an expanded sense of identity. While Jung wrote, “Our
world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity
is one, with one psyche” (p. 410), De Chardin, perhaps
with more realism, saw such a spiritual planetization as
gradual, with an initial increase in regional, ethnic, and
traditional religious tensions, as is currently seen. Even
the growing planet-wide ecological crisis, which has the
ultimate potential to unify humanity in the face of a
common threat, is slow moving and initially regional in
its impact. as both essence of humanity and the most immediate
Almaas (2004), however, has suggested that a
globalizing environmental awareness has the potential to
integrate humanity and planet “as one unified pearl” (p.
473).7 Until recently there has been no unifying imagery
to support this collective sense as a specific shareable
state of consciousness, although Almaas points out that
spontaneous images of the Earth can mediate individual
realizations of personal essence. Such collective
imagery does emerge, however, from the experiences
and photography of astronauts and high-flying test
pilots. They see the actual curvature of the Earth and
experience this as simultaneously vastly beautiful yet
delicate, and utterly contrastive with the sociopolitical
realities on the planet below. The sheer facticity of the
widely shared photographs of Earth from space, now
hanging on walls everywhere, helps to make tangible
this sense of humanity and planet as one felt being. These
photographs may help to mediate a specific felt sense of
a collective pearl, with its contrastive boundary being
our separation from the surrounding coldness of outer
space, and with our sensed unity with the Earth eliciting
intimate compassion and concern for all who reside on
Consciousness and Society
the planet. More than just an intellectual awareness,
these photographic images convey a felt immediacy and
objectivity of beingness, or “that’s us.” A generation or
two growing up with these mediating images may help
to compensate for the regional tensions stirred up by
our progressive globalization, allowing more and more
of us the felt state of “citizens of the planet.”8
What then of the deeper level of self realization
that Almaas terms the point, or essential identity
as Being? Is a collective version of this state even
conceivable as a future planetary spirituality – especially
given the ostensible lack of mediating imagery and
contrastive outgroup? For Almaas, individual realization
of identity as Being is experienced as a unitary sense of
one’s true self as presence, and this as both the essence
of humanity and of the universe itself. There is a felt
“unique singularity,” intimately precious, ultimately
free, and located in the immediate experience of “I am.”
It is commonly mediated by metaphors of a “radiant
point of light” or “the image of a brilliant star” (Almaas,
1996). A potential collectivity of this state, consistent
with Durkheim (1912/1995) and Weber (1922/1963)
on the implicit sociology in all forms of spirituality, is
at least implied in the Indian Atman and the Gnostic
and Neo-Platonic Anthropos, historically understood
mirror and expression of the Absolute. In the modern
era, however, the origins of cosmology and the evolution
of life are no longer mediated by metaphors of a radiant
emanation from a spiritual absolute, but are instead
understood as only gradually emergent from primitive
and elemental roots. Lacking this supporting imagery of
Creation from a higher source, we find ourselves alone
in an ostensibly alien universe, no longer of unique and
singular significance as the mirror image of God.
Here again contemporary science, as the partial
creator of this materialist world view, may offer an opening
to a renewed collective identity as a specifically human
sense of Being. If and when human society receives a sign
or message from an extraterrestrial civilization through
the radio-telescope listening posts of SETI (Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), operative now for several
decades, I would suggest that essentially overnight we
could become aware of our collectively shared and
unitary beingness with a sharp objectivity. Then, we
would all have no choice but to experience all human
beings as one shared being, now finally defined against
an actually existing contrastive outgroup. The morning
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 25
following such an announcement we would all begin to
look at each other differently, with exactly this sense of
a collective singularity, definiteness, preciousness, and
unity that defines individual self realization. Indeed,
in his later writings, Jung (1959, 1975) suggested that
only such an encounter would allow us to see ourselves
objectively. Correspondingly it would be no accident that
Gurdjieff (1950) places the dialogues between Beelzebub
and his grandson, on the way to earth for a last try at our
collective spiritual awakening, on his imaginary spaceship
“Karnack.”
Given the vast distances involved, and the
immense time span required for any attempted reply
to such a signal, and even the possibility that this signal
would only be received by us after the demise of such
a civilization, its primary impact would rest, potentially
forever, on the sheer fact of its occurrence. It would be
the empirical knowledge of the existence of such an extra-
terrestrial civilization, quite possibly uncontaminated
with any detailed understanding of their similarities
and differences, that would mediate this transformed
experience of ourselves as one being. Considering
Almaas’ (1996) metaphor of a star-like point of light
mediating the individual experience of essential identity,
it seems significant that at the vast distances involved, our
primary experience of such beings would be as from star
to star. They would see us, if aware of us at all, as our sun,
and we would see them as their star. This could afford a
precise, collective image to match that of individual self
realization.9
Yet, it is also true, for Almaas (1996) and other
transpersonalists (Hunt, 2003; Hunt, Dougan, Grant,
& House, 2002), that every plausible higher state of
consciousness has its specific disintegrative, potentially
psychopathological, analogue or inversion. For Almaas
what inverts, blocks, and/or can be stirred up by the
development of the “point” is narcissism, with its
compensatory grandiosity, hypersensitivity to intrusion,
and vulnerability to shame and rage. On a corresponding
societal level, De Zavala, Cichocka, and Eidelson (2009)
located a collective narcissism of irrationally-inflated
views of one’s own group, with suspicion and dismissal
of other groups as ultimately threatening, all hiding an
implied sense of group insecurity and inadequacy. shame over our continuing destruction of our planet and
One can see the narcissistic inversion of the positive
social potential of a SETI reception in contemporary flying
saucer cults, which for Jung (1959) reflected a collective
compensation for anxiety concerning a shrinking planet.
26 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
We see a reactive paranoia, implying a defensive human
unity, in Wilheim Reich’s (1957) later belief that his
cloudbuster was repelling flying saucers, and in John
Lilly’s (1978) frantic ketamine-driven calls to the White
House warning of extraterrestrial invasion. More recent
developments of flying saucer scenarios as documented by
Mack (1994) move beyond sightings to more threatening
recalled experiences of abduction, invasive sexuality, and
bizarre cross-breeding. These seem like projections of our
worst fears about our own nature. Jung’s view that the
fascination with flying saucers represented the beginning
of a new spiritual movement is confirmed by the more
recent neoshamanic additions of out of body experiences,
archetypal dreams, and healing abilities and spiritual
teachings in many reported abduction accounts (Ring,
1989). Here, for small groups of believers, humanity is
implicitly unified, but in the form of a collective paranoia,
full of victimization and shame. Contemporary flying
saucer movements are the extreme narcissistic inversion
of Durkheim’s cult of man, and Jung’s (2009) collective
“stellar identity.” Their collective spiritual and transpersonal
potential seems minimal. This is very much in contrast
to the conjoined mirroring potential of SETI, offering
the hope of a mutual and collective sense of becoming
real and existentially present, as a planetary version of
Winnicott’s (1971) concept of shared mirroring between
mother and child, which allows the latter to become self
consciously present to itself, and is later internalized as the
inner dialogic structure of all human consciousness.10
Conclusion
T here is a final potential barrier to these conditional
social scientific predictions of a planetary spirituality
of the future modeled on transpersonal realization,
Weber’s this-worldly mysticism, and Durkheim’s cult of
man. Just as on the individual level it seems necessary
to fully accept actual feelings of deficiency and suffering
for the spontaneous emergence of transformative states
(Laski, 1962), and just as Solnit (2009) documents the
emergence of temporary utopian communities only
in the wake of unavoidable collective disasters, so any
future planetary spirituality, potentially in response to
an unambiguous SETI communication, would also
necessitate our fully feeling our collective and objective
exploitation of fellow humanity. That will be the face we
present, and so become more fully aware of in ourselves,
in event of a SETI communication. Only the genuine
acceptance of that shame could allow this undistorted
Hunt
emergence of the collective consciousness of our identity
as Being as envisioned by Durkheim, Heidegger, and
Jung. This collective unity could then become its own
secular and scientific form of a traditional religious
notion of original sin and the subsequent fall from grace.
It is the undeniability of history as our outward collective
face. Gurdjieff (1950) called this “objective conscience,”
and as in all consciousness, it can be individual or
collective. We have been inquiring here into its future
planetary potential.
Put most simply, a SETI “answer” will create a
newly specific and collective questioning about “us” in
our being and beingness, in our own unique singularity
as mirrored in “theirs”. And that will have spiritual or
transpersonal consequences related to Almaas on the
“point” and Jung on the Self—here as a collective seed
for a new planetary wide form of spirituality.
Notes
1. This paper was presented at a Plenary Session at
the 17th International Transpersonal Association
Conference in Moscow, Russia, on June 25, 2010.
The author thanks Linda Pidduck for editorial
assistance.
1.    A recent example is Jonathan Lear’s (2006) account
in Radical Hope of the young Crow Plenty Coup’s
vision quest dream of a chickadee, mythologically
significant for tribal elders in such a way as to lead the
hitherto warlike Crow to a policy of accommodation
to the U.S. cavalry that preserved their traditional
way of life to a degree lost by the other native tribes
of the region.
2.   Part of the usefulness of these earlier generations of
sociologists and anthropologists comes from their
primary valuation of phenomenological description,
an approach that fits best with the qualitative method­
ologies of contemporary transpersonal studies.
3.        In shamanistic societies, where higher states
of consciousness are encouraged and socially
important, parapsychological experiences are more
accepted and seem more frequent (Walsh, 2007;
Hunt, 2010); this is based, I would suggest, on
the shared archetypal imagery that is prominent
in, these states (Hunt, 1995). No one is surprised
when tulips appear in my yard on the same morning
they do across town. On a similar sociological basis
(as opposed to a psychological or botanical one),
Consciousness and Society
there might not be surprise at many instances
of spontaneous telepathy, including Ganzfeld
research where hit rates of imagery between senders
and receivers can exceed mathematical chance.
Westerlund, Parker, Dakvist, & Hodlaczky (2007)
found higher qualitative matches between receiver
imagery and the art prints not sent than even in
those randomly selected for sending, suggesting that
especially on these archetypal levels of imagination
human individuals are already far more joined
than is commonly realized—joined not in terms of
some special individual psychology of extra-sensory
perception, but in terms of a more general sociology
of consciousness as collective.
4.      For Almaas (1996), realization of the point is also the
beginning of openness to nondual, nonconceptual
transpersonal states.
5.     Other examples of 20th century false pearls include
“the proletarian worker” as the ideal of self-actuali­
zation in the Soviet tradition and “American Civil
Religion” (Bellah, Madsen, Sulivan, Swindler, &
Tipton, 1985), with its personal ideals based on
figures such as Lincoln and Jefferson, also somewhat
romanticized by Maslow (1971). These collective
versions of personal essence constitute circumscribed
societal paraphrases of Maslow’s self-actualization, but
all sharing a common narrowness through integrating
personal autonomy and social responsibility by
means of essentially regional values falsely held to
be ideals for all of humanity. Purporting to define
the ethics of a new humanity, the Fascist superman,
Marxist worker, and American civic individual were
secularized religious forms of a this-worldly, broadly
Judeo-Christian propheticism, with ever-present
temptations of a narrow fundamentalism. They
are ostensibly secular but actually utopian forms of
what Weber (1922/1963) termed “ethical prophecy,”
with its charismatically sanctioned “salvation”
through social action. Troeltsch, Durkheim, Jung,
and contemporary transpersonalism exemplify
the opposite tendency toward a this-worldly, often
secular, and more directly experiential mysticism.
6. It has come to my attention that this combination
of Durkheim, De Chardin, Heidegger, Jung, and
transpersonal psychology with a spirituality of
globalization bears a similarity to Leonardo Boff’s
“trans-cultural phenomenology” (Dawson, 2004).
7.  From the perspective of “deep ecology” (Fox, 1995),
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 27
 such a development would remain “anthropocentric,”
but it is difficult to see how human beings could ever
unite to stop environmental degradation on a planet-
wide basis from anything other than a raised and
expanded human identity, in which, with Heidegger,
our beingness “shepherds” the multiple dimensions
of natural being we impact. It is on this basis that
Zimmerman (1994) sees the later Heidegger as offering
the most fundamental philosophical voice that might
come to underlie the ecological movement.
8.  This would be an objective extension of American
“civic religion” (Bellah, Madsen, Sulivan, Swindler,
& Tipton, 1985), but with a planetary breadth of
the conjoined ethic of autonomy and responsibility
that would transcend its present “chosen people”
narcissism.
9.    Note that, consistent with the core facticity of modern
science, none of this analysis works as an experien­tial
thought experiment beyond its plausibility as a social
scientific hypothesis. It would have to be empirically
real to have this impact and to potentially unify us as a
single humanity, transcending all political, economic,
ethnic, and religious differences.
10. None of these predictions, combining Durkheim,
Weber, De Chardin, Heidegger, Jung, and Almaas
require what I would myself regard as some fantasy
of human perfectability. I have developed elsewhere
(Hunt, 2009) a cognitive-developmental theory of an
inherent and inevitable unbalance in human nature
based on the cross integrations between the ultimately
incommensurable domains of person knowing and
thing/tool intelligence. These domains, derived from
a reinterpretation of Kant on the sublime, and similar
to the approach of Mithen (1998) to human evolution,
can neither be fully and permanently synthesized, nor
fully separated, and so produce a permanent unbalance
of partial and ultimately unstable amalgams. These
also create our perpetual sense of novelty and sense
of the numinous, which is also the source of human
freedom and choice. On this model each culture
and civilization is a relatively long-term integration,
but never a final synthesis, of these logically separate
domains, with Weber’s periodic eras of secularization
as their re-separation and more overt collision.
Accordingly, the present extrapolations of a planetary
spirituality of the future are describing a potential
cultural integration of the spiritual and material that
might, with some luck, replace our secularized era, one
28 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
in which the tensions underlying all human culture
stand out more vividly than in the eras of relative
and longer term integration. Durkheim’s cult of man
would foresee such an emergent integrative culture in
the context of present globalization.
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30 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Hunt

 Relational Spirituality, Part 1
Paradise Unbound: Cosmic Hybridity and Spiritual Narcissism in
the “One Truth” of New Age Transpersonalism
Gregg Lahood
Northern Rivers Gestalt Institute
Lismore, NSW, Australia

Cosmological hybridization, a process in which spiritual paradises are bound together, is

highly active in American religious culture. Beginning with an early Christianized version of
the Buddha, this religious Creolization gathered speed after WWII and peaked during the
Vietnam War, leading to a complex spiritual revolution in which transcendence became an
all important orientation. This revolution set the scene for the emergence of a non-relational
transpersonal psychology in which Americanized nondualism gained ascendency. It is argued
here that popular New Age transpersonalism traps the spirit, breeding a self-serving, Self-
as-everything form of spiritual narcissism. Given that some are calling the New Age the
religion of global capitalism, a more relational spirituality may be a vital intervention into
transpersonalism‘s self-centeredness and a salve for a world in Creolization.
Keywords: cosmological hybridity, New Age religion, transpersonal psychology, spiritual
narcissism, relational spirituality

In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: The starting point of critical elaboration
is the consciousness of what one really is, and [this] knowing ‘thyself‘ as a
product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity
of traces without leaving an inventory... therefore it is imperative at the outset
to compile such an inventory
—Edward Said, 1979/1995, p. 25

A
s the corpse of Baron De Palm burst into
flames in the Presbyterian town of Washington,
Pennsylvania, 135 years ago, it was hailed as the
first ever cremation on American soil.1 But that was not all;
as the Austrian born Baron (and born again Theosophist)
went up in smoke that December morning, a triumphant
blow was struck by America’s nascent cremation
movement—a blow that signaled the overturning of
thousands of years of Christian burial custom.2 Early
Christianity had done away with the ancient Greek and
Roman practice of burning the dead on a funeral-pyre.
Reinforcing the Christian custom of burial was a belief in
the resurrection of the physical body, a belief that was at
odds with the practice of cremation (Prothero, 1997, pp.
94-95). Indeed, the rhetoric used against the cremationists
was that theirs was a “pagan custom” practiced only in
the “heathen” Orient (p. 95). Conversely, in resisting the
claims of the anti-cremationists, the fiery speeches of
the reformers claimed that Greek, Roman, and Hindu
peoples were “as intelligent, refined and worshipful” (p.
95) in their funerary practices as any American. Indeed
the cremationists sought to restore to America what they
saw as the grandeur that was Greece, Rome, and Asia.
While the new cremation was hailed as
thoroughly modern, scientific, and secular, the movement
envisioned itself as having spiritual import. It pressed its
cause with Pentecostal fervor, referring to its work as
“the gospel of incineration” and its labor as “missionary
work” (Prothero, 1997, p. 97). Women’s rights activists
were drawn to the burning movement, and cremationists
seem also to have carried the cultural “evolutionary”
sentiments of the time (p. 107) to the good fight, seeing
it as their sacred duty to raise the masses up to a “higher
level of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’” (p. 97). The site of
the cremation was the home of Dr. Francis Le Moyne, a
physician and committed abolitionist—a home that had
also served as a stop on the Underground Railroad (a
network to free black slaves). The rite was carried out by

Relational Spirituality,
International Journal of Part 1
Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 31-57 Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31
International
none other than Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who a year
earlier had co-founded Theosophy with Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky, the famous Russian occultist.3
The newly converted De Palm had befriended
Olcott (and Theosophy) and had instructed him to
arrange a funeral befitting his new and novel faith.
Specifically, he requested that it be performed “in a
fashion that would illustrate the Eastern notions of death
and immortality” (Prothero, 1997, p. 99), and that his
body be cremated. Theosophists believed that cremation
could liberate the spirit and “loosen the astral body” from
the so-called “grossness of matter” and the “irksome”
body (p. 108). The ideas that reduce the human body
to a prison in which the spirit is trapped are ancient and
most likely inherited from Christianity, Hinduism, and
the Greek traditions. Thus De Palm’s death was shrouded
in a cloth cut from Western spiritualism, Theosophy, and
Christian and Asian spiritualities.
Olcott collected De Palm’s ashes in what
the New York Times called a “‘Hindoo cremation
urn… decorated with Hindoo characters and devices”
(Prothero, 1997, p. 104) and is said to have taken the
ashes to the Theosophical Society Headquarters in New
York. Later, before departing for his new life in India, he
scattered his friend’s ashes over the waters of that city’s
harbor during a simple ceremony (p. 102). Soon after he
would migrate to India and become the first American
to formally convert to Buddhism on Asian soil (p. 99).
Cremation has of course, to echo the words of
one early cremationist, “taken perennial root” in America
(Protheo, 1997, p. 106)—a claim given credence, perhaps,
in the funerary ceremonies of the ‘60s countercultural
icon Jerry Garcia. When Garcia, the founder of the famed
San Francisco band The Grateful Dead died in 1995, half
of his ashes were spread under the Golden Gate Bridge,
while the rest were transported to India and poured into
the River Ganges on the Buddha’s birthday (Fields, 1996).
The Dead Buddhists of America (an allusion to his band
which had been strongly associated with psychedelics
such as LSD in the 1960s and after) held a meditation for
him, that of Chenrezi, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. In
the middle of the meditation everyone was instructed to
see Jerry as the bodhisattva, “merging with the lights of
the Buddhamind in the journey through the bardos” (pp.
46-47).
The head Dead’s funerary services seems to have
an intriguing resonance with that of the theosophically
oriented De Palm: they both embraced the religions that
32 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
flowed from the River Ganges (on whose banks are the
burning funeral ghats). They both had their ashes poured
onto water, and each played his part in the social and
cultural revolutions of their day—but they may share in
something even more intriguing than the flames of the
funeral pyre or a coincidental embrace of Asian religion.
Robert Orsi (1997) claimed that De Palm’s cremation
proves once again how creative and wildly innovative
religion is in America, but also noted that Stephen
Prothero’s study showed the rite to be neither Christian
nor secular but something else, something related to the
ambiguities of religious hybridity—a process for which a
whole new language would need to be invented (p. 11).
The scattering of Jerry Garcia’s ashes on two continents—
Asia and America—is something related not only to the
afterlife but to this life and a globalizing
fusion of East and West—a symbolic spiritual and
cultural process that has been occurring in America for
well over 150 years. In death, Garcia—the acid-rock-
country-bluegrass-bluesman of the Grateful Dead—has
a foot in two continents—one Christian, the other
Hindu-Buddhist.
The Way of the Hybrid
I n terms of Orsi’s new language, words such as
Creolization, Orientalization, Easternization, African­
ization, crossover, and cosmological hybridization are
being employed to understand what happens when
cultures meet in war and peace, trade or migration,
colonization, and globalization (cf. Lahood, 2008).
Hybridity concerns the ambiguous mixture of things,
processes, and phenomena that are thought to be unlike,
different, separate, disparate, and unequal—into novel
cultural and religious forms. Entering social science
under the guise of syncretism in the anthropology of
religion (Pieterse, 2004, p. 90), hybridity suggests the
“fusion of religious forms” often functioning as a mask
“behind which non-Christian forms of worship are
practiced” (p. 72).
However, in his study of the trial of Seberina
Candelaria, a young woman priestess accused of
witchcraft in early 19th century Philippines, Gregg
Bankoff (1999) noted that the symbols of Christianity
could also be “appropriated and incorporated” into a
new and seemingly bizarre religious formation, the result
of which “was neither wholly indigenous nor wholly
exotic but the formation of a hybrid cosmology” (p. 49).
Thus religious hybridizations can occur when beliefs
Christian and secular or “Christian and native” are
Lahood
merged, engendering a sort of “third religion” (Pieterse
2004, p. 73)—and the same is true of non-Christian
hybridizations such as those created in the global
propagations of Buddhism and Islam. For example,
with the spread of Greek culture into India through
the military conquests of Alexander the Great statues
of the Buddha were carved in the gesture of peripatetic
philosophers wearing togas and adorned with the sacred
grapes of the sacrificial demi-god Dionysus.
I argue here that transpersonal psychology also
came to be a kind of third religion, an Orientalized hybrid
cosmology, and it began to crystallize in San Francisco in
the heyday of the psychedelic ‘60s along with Garcia and
The Grateful Dead, the Vietnam War, and a widespread
religious awakening that involved communal living,
changes in clothing, values, music, drugs, psychotherapy,
and a host of other counter-cultural innovations. More
importantly, transpersonalism’s search for a presumed
inner truth may well be the skeletal structure around
which the New Age has clothed itself—with a hybrid
paradise.
Central to this project was a series of strange
marriages, amalgamations, juxtapositions, and cultural
borrowings largely between the mysticism of the East
and the psychology of West—between America and
Asia.4 These included, the American Transcendentalists’
embrace of the Vedas, Mahatma Gandhi with Henry
David Thoreau, Nashida Kitaro with William James, D.
T. Suzuki’s Zen with Romantic Nature worship, Aldous
Huxley with Vedanta, Allan Watts with the Tao, Zen,
Advaita Vedanta, the Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Alan
Ginsburg, and Gary Snyder with Buddhism and Peyote,
Timothy Leary with LSD and Tibetan Buddhism,
Ram Dass with Hinduism, the Beatles with LSD and
with the Maharishi, George Harrison with the Hari
Krishna Movement, John Lennon with Yoko Ono, Fritz
Perls’ Gestalt therapy with Mahayana Buddhism, Eric
Fromm’s psychoanalysis and Abraham Maslow’s human
potential with Zen Buddhism, and Stanislav Grof with
psychoanalysis, LSD, and Kashmir Shaivism. This long
cultural procession of religious blending is the fertile
cultural mélange out of which Ken Wilber’s influential
ladder of consciousness grew: a hybrid cosmos of Neo-
Platonism and Neo-Advaita Vedanta (which as will be
shown is also the backbone of the New Age movement).
The characteristic blend of Buddhism, Hinduism,
and Christianity, and the dominating spiritual hierarchy
that runs through Wilber’s worldview (and the New Age)
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
are due in large part to the strange force of hybridity
long alive in the religious imagination of America. I
have suggested elsewhere (Lahood, 2008)5 that Wilber’s
Orientalized cosmology is the inevitable outcome of
religious globalization and the civil strife occurring in
the 1960s in which religions of the East and West were
brought together in America in a psychedelically informed
subaltern resistance culture. The religious symbolism of
this culture and its postulated cosmic consciousness reveal
not some ultimate perennial postulate beyond culture,
nor yet a One Truth coming from all directions, but a
hybridized postulate springing from the complex matrix
of a culture embroiled in war in South East Asia and an
internal civil revolution, and gripped by an effervescent
religious outpouring bent on the creation of a zealously
enacted counter-reality.
This paper will further explore the procession
of cosmological hybridizations that came together in the
American context and show how this amalgamation of
religious flavors began to favor a somewhat disembodied,
non-relational, patriarchal and authoritarian One-
Truth religion—one that came to overvalue individual
transcendence at the expense of relationship. It is my
belief that relational spirituality is the key to undoing the
associated spiritual narcissism that plagues contemporary
Western spiritual culture (cf. Ferrer 2002, 2009).
Transcendentalism’s Holy Trinity
O ne can pick up the threads of the hybridizing
process with the American Transcendentalists.
They are the ancestor of a blending religious style that
will eventually blossom in the religious counter-culture of
the 1960s. Rebellious and ruggedly individualistic, this
group of New England intellectuals, artists, writers, and
poets began as a reform movement within the Christian
Unitarian Church, seeking to exchange empirical
knowledge and bone dry tradition for direct spiritual
intuition, the emotions stirred by nature, and mystical
contact with an indwelling god. Emerson (1849), the
most influential of this group, claimed that Unitarian
theology and ritual was a “corpse cold”:
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation
to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry
and philosophy of insight and not tradition, and a
religion by revelation to us, and not the history of
theirs? (p. 1)
Why not indeed! Yet Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Henry James Senior
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 33
and Henry David Thoreau, were well versed in the sacred
texts of various religious traditions (Heelas, 1996, p. 55)
and regularly bathed their lofty minds in the Indic Vedas.
Emerson, in a creative response to Eastern thought,
especially the Bhagavad Gita, penned such poems as
Brahma and Maya (Pagalia, 2003, p. 9). He also met
with one Swami Jogut Sangooly, a “real live Brahmin,
brought up a priest to Kreeshna,” in 1858, according
to his daughter (Prince, 1974, p. 258). Henry David
Thoreau (1849/2008) authored Civil Disobedience, a tract
which inspired Mahatma Gandhi to oppose Britain’s
brutal colonialism in India with non-violence (and
which would come around again with complex ferocity
in the 1960s)—a curious two-way religious borrowing
between India and America synonymous with religious
globalization.
Thoreau’s (1854/1899) Walden, or Life in the
Woods, a journal of his experiment in monastic living in
the woods near Boston in which the writer/sage developed
an almost St. Francis-like relationship to animals and
nature, became a canonical text for the hippies of the
1960s (nor should one forget that natureloving St. Francis
is the patron saint of San Francisco). In the words of
Thoreau:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous
and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta,…
in comparison with which our modern world and its
literature seem puny and trivial…. I lay down the
book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I
meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma
and Vishnu and Indra who still sits in his temple on
the Ganges reading the Vedas.... I meet his servant
come to draw water for his master, and our buckets
as it were grate together in the same well. The pure
Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of
the Ganges. (p. 209)
One can see in the last line of Thoreau’s mystical prose
yet another curious mixing—in this overlapping of two
discrete things (a device common to poets): the waters
of two different continents, one Christian the other
Hindu, are carefully mingled creating a liminal, third
space (cf. Bhabha, 1994), an American blend reminiscent
of Garcia’s hybridizing funeral ceremony which also
overlapped the waters of Ganges with those of the San
Francisco Bay.
Anthropologist Fredrick Turner (1987) noted that
Thoreau stood at a point when, “through immigration,
34 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
economic expansion, the influence of Europe and forces
inherent in its own constitution, the narrow Puritanism
of New England had given way among the intellectuals
to a variety of lofty theisms” (p. 85). In fact the mystical
writings of Swedenborg (who, in a mystical awakening,
was commanded by God to pen a heavenly doctrine
with which to revive Christianity), pantheism, monism,
and Emerson and Whitman’s Romantic nature worship
were mixed with Eastern constellations (cf. Prince,
1974; Paglia, 2003). The Hindu gharba (luminous
cosmic womb) was somehow joined with the Buddhist
sunyata (void) which had been imported into America
by early Hindu and Buddhist missionaries coupled with
a hundred years of South East Asian migrant laborers,
and later, with returning soldiers from wars with Japan,
Korea, and Vietnam (Damon, 1996, p. 144).
This movement not only pre-figured the beats’
and hippies’ interests in Hinduism, Buddhism, social
experimentation/community living, ethnic freedom,
civil rights, vegetarianism, and nature-worship, but also
the blending of religion and cosmology visible in Walt
Whitman’s (1855/2008) “The Song of Myself”—the
poem itself a site of religious globalization:
My faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of
faiths.
Enclosing worship ancient and modern and all
between ancient and modern,
Believing I shall come again upon the earth after
five thousand years,
Waiting response from oracles, honoring the gods,
saluting the sun,
Making a fetish of the first rock or stump, pow­
wowing with sticks
in the circle of obis,
Helping the Lama or Brahman as he trims the
lamps of the idols,
Dancing through the streets in a phallic procession,
rapt and austere,
in the woods a gymnosophist,
Drinking mead from the skull cap, to Shastas and
Vedas admirant,
Minding the Koran…
(p. 55)
The poet’s character clothed in a single coat of many
colors—religious bricolage. The synthesizing and
Orientalizing spirit here is undeniable. Yet for Emerson
and his contempories Buddhism was a little too alien
Lahood
and their deepest Oriental influence and appreciation
was in Advaita Vedanta (Hanegraaff, 1996, p. 460).
According to Rick Fields, in his study of
Buddhism in America, it was through Edwin Arnold’s
(1879/1885) The Light of Asia, “more than any other book
that Americans first learned the story and the teachings
of the Buddha” (Fields, 1992, p. 69). Poet Oliver Wendell
Homes was “wildly enthusiastic” about the work lauding
the poem as being “so lofty that there is nothing with
which to compare it but the New Testament” (p. 68; a
potent East/West juxtaposition). The book was immensely
popular, with 80 editions and sales up to a million
copies. In it the story of the Buddha was poetically retold
as something of a Romantic hero and it popularized an
attractive version of nirvana—perhaps a re-telling more
palatable for Western/Christian tastes:
He is one with life
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be
OM MANI PADME, OM! The Dewdrop
slips
Into the shining sea!
(Arnold, 1879/1885, p. 275)
Here one sees a cultural and religious phenomenon
crucial to the formation of New Age transpersonalism;
Fields (1992) was careful to point out that this imagery
of a dew drop slipping into the shining sea does not really
fit with traditional Buddhism, with its concept of anatta
and nirvana as extinction; rather, he said, it sounds more
like a mixture of Hinduism and Christianity, with the
atman or soul reuniting with its eternal Godhead (p.
69).
Indeed both Orientalist scholars and devout
Christians were uneasy with the subtle hybridizing
of Shakyamuni Buddha with Jesus of Nazareth—as
Robert Young (1995) wrote, hybrids create “unsettling
perplexities generated out of their ‘disjunctive liminal
space’” (p. 23). It is important to note, however, that in
the mind-worlds and belief systems of many 19th century
Americans the Holy Trinity of Hinduism, Christianity,
and Buddhism were beginning to blend, their boundaries
blurring—and this blasphemous breaking, joining,
and blending of cosmologies in the American religious
imagination, as will be shown, will eventually become
the so-called esoteric core of the transpersonal movement
and the New Age.
However, before the formal birth of the
transpersonal movement the Transcendentalists’ flair
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
for spontaneous mystical intuitions would powerfully
reproduce in the informal consciousness-expanding
movement that preceded it—as would this curious Holy
Trinity of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity—as
would the Romantic emphasis on the sacralisation of self,
the sacralisation of nature, the sacralisation of human
kindness, and the celebration of life (Heelas, 1996, p.
42). The Transcendentalists’ individualist and rebellious
spirit would echo resoundingly in the religious and
cultural revolution that defined the 1960s and 1970s.
The Neo-Transcendentalists
T he hybridizing ancestry seen in the American
Romantic movement would gain huge popularity
with Aldous Huxley’s (1946) The Perennial Philosophy,
in which he claimed perennialism as “immemorial and
universal” (p. 9). In this book the novelist was a bit lean
on theological discrimination but not on poetic license.
As Brian Morris (2006) pointed out, “Aldous Huxley’s
famous study of mysticism... includes many references
to the Buddha”; he also noted that the early Buddhist
translator Edward Conze, “opens his discussion with the
statement that Buddhism is a form of spirituality that
is identical with other mystical teachings,” a statement
which Morris claimed is “extremely misleading” because
Buddhism “fits uneasily into a theistic definition” (p.
45).
Nevertheless Huxley’s (1946) little book has
been hugely influential. A devout pacifist, he had
immigrated to America just before WWII and published
The Perennial Philosophy just at the end of that global
conflict—which ended in the atomic bombing of Zen
Buddhist Japan. His reputation as a sophisticated
modern novelist gave impetus to widespread interest
in his perennializing breakthrough. Perhaps it offered
hope for a brave new world of spirit and a new dawn
of human realization, after the prolonged darkness and
horrors of war. Be that as it might, the universalizing
seed in Huxley’s vision fell onto ground well tilled by
the Transcendentalists—and on either account the book
became very popular and the idea of transcendental unity
of religious traditions (including atheistic Buddhism)
gained further impetus.
Huxley was one of two figures who stood out
as seminal architects of what anthropologist Raymond
Prince (1974) called “Neo-Transcendentalism” (p.
261); the other was another Englishman and émigré,
theologian Allen Watts. These two mystical intellectuals
had set themselves a religious task that was “one of
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 35
synthesis and assimilation,” to quote eco-psychologist
Theodore Roszak (1968, p. 157). Roszak wrote that,
In much the same spirit in which Freud had set out
to reclaim the dream as a form of evidence that could
bear the weight of scientific speculation, Watts and
Huxley wanted to recapture the value of neglected
cultural traditions for which no disciplined method
of study existed. The method they proposed was
the systematic cultivation of states of abnormal
consciousness that approached these traditions
by outflanking the discursive, and logic chopping
intellect. (p. 158)6
It is in the slippery occult space between these “neglected
cultural traditions” and the states of consciousness that
“approached these traditions” (p. 158) where I believe one
will find the strange hybridities that beget transpersonal
psychology’s so-called esoteric core. From its educated,
academic, and mainstream beginnings this was an effort
to out-contextualize the West’s rationalism but it soon
became synonymous with a wider grass-roots spiritual/
psychedelic movement that was also something of a
cultural critique of Cartesian dualism and a rejection of
mainstream materialistic American culture (cf. Lahood,
2008). At its center it was an individual therapeutic
project that became a widespread consciousness
expanding movement—and it spread like wildfire.
The consciousness expanding movement
overlapped with the Beats. Beatniks (from the expression,
beatific vision, the ecstatic Christian vision of God
after death) were an alternative, artistic, underground
movement simmering in the ‘50s that would pre-figure
the ‘60s counter-culture in several important ways.
With roots in the Bohemians of the 1920s some of its
important literary heroes such as Allan Ginsberg, Jack
Kerouac, and Gary Snyder were influenced by the New
England Romantics (Transcendentalists), with Ginsberg
even evoking the Oriental style of Whitman’s (2008)
epic poem, “Leaves of Grass,” in his own poem “Howl”
(1956/2000; Pagalia 2003). The Beats were concerned
with pushing the limits of consciousness with a blend
of Buddhism and rebellion that become known as Beat
Zen. As an example of this brew, the title of one of Gary
Snyder’s (1957) books was Earth House Hold: Technical
Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries.
Influenced by the somewhat non-traditional Zen
of émigré D.T. Suzuki (cf. Lahood, 2008; Cunningham,
2004) Ginsberg had wanted to create a form of
36 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
“American compassion” as part of a “Western sadhana
or ‘way’” (Heelas, 1996, p. 50). While they certainly
carried forward the syncretistic Orientalizing tradition
of their Transcendentalist ancestors the Beatniks added
an important botanical dimension to potentate their
road—the use of the entheogenic peyote cactus to
catalyze their beatific visions. What these neo-Bohemians
pursued through peyote was a form of psychedelic Neo-
Transcendental-Bodhi-shamanism. But theirs was also an
attempt to restore a relationship with “the great unknown
and undiscovered peoples” (Philips, 1996, p. 28) and
cannabis smoking became a way of life for many, a practice
originally drawn from Afro-American jazz and blues
musicians who had their own history of hybridizations
such as Vodou, involving French Catholicism and African
religion. In the words of Turner (1987):
For the first time since the Renaissance, when the
societies of pagan antiquity had come to serve as
models in the initiation of the elite, the West had
grasped alien cultures as being possibly exemplary
or superior to its own. The profound Orientalizing
of our poetry, architecture, religion, and cuisine and
our attempt to imitate imagined Amerindian virtues
in our personal relations, dress and recreation, is a
consequence of this remarkable nineteenth-century
movement [Transcendentalism]. Castaneda’s Don
Juan has New England ancestry. (p. 86, emphasis
supplied).
The Beat was a wanderer who eschewed family and work,
one who had dropped out of life for the tentative life
on the road (think Kerouac); a “dharma bum” (Prince,
1974, p. 264), he lived in poverty claiming the right not
to raise a family. Both Hinduism and Buddhism offered
the Neo-transcendentalist (the Beat and later the Hippie)
not only a religiosity based in so-called direct experience,
but also something of a social model for protest and civil
disobedience:
Buddhist teachings always held the potential to
inspire an inner quest for salvation, rejecting in
principle the legitimacy of social constraints on
individual action and replacing them with the
discipline of the monk’s life outside the jurisdiction
of political institutions” (Mabbett, 1998, p. 19).
Also imported into the Californian psyche was
the image of the unfettered Hindu sadhu, the “wandering
holy man (sannyasin) who lives in complete freedom from
Lahood
the normal claims of society, was fundamental to Indian
religious thought” (Mabbett, 1998, p. 27). Allen Ginsberg
and Ram Dass, both of Jewish heritage, donned Hindu
robes and prayer beads, with the later calling himself a
Hinjew—there is perhaps by now small need to point out
that this linguistic carnavilesque and magical hybridity
(cf. Bakhtin, 1981) is a sacrilegious blending of two
hopelessly disparate religions in the American context.
According to philosopher Donald Rothberg,
psychedelic substances have played a pivotal role in
the recent renewal of spirituality in North America
and Western Europe—but this role has gone largely
unacknowledged (1993, p. 109). These substances with
extremely powerful psychotropic properties were only
discovered recently by the Western world and released
into a somewhat virginal Western psyche. They were
to spread rapidly into the seventy-million-strong Baby
Boom generation affecting music, dress-style, psychology,
and religious values at a time when the American psyche
was bogged down in a highly (one might say devoutly)
contested war in South East Asia. This unusual situation
promoted what Robert Bellah (1976) described as a
complex cultural and religious revolution (p. 78). In the
words of Beatle John Lennon:
You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world....
You say you’ll change a constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
(Lennon & McCartney, 1968, as quoted in
Aldridge, 1969, p. 104)
Freeing your mind became the mantra for this inner
revolution and was an allusion to Western understandings
of Eastern religious ideas of transcendence, sacramental
drug use, and the imperative of attaining so-called higher
or cosmic consciousness (equated with peace and love as
opposed to violent revolution—for which the time was
also ripe according to the Rolling Stones (cf. Wyman &
Coleman, 1990). It was here in the fiery crucible between
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
1963 when America entered the war in Vietnam, and
1974 when that war ended in America’s defeat, that New
Age transpersonalism was shaped. In the protesting
counter-culture one finds a dizzying level of cosmological
hybridization, juxtaposition, intermixing, adhesion,
linkage, and the tactical blurring of boundaries between
the psychotropic drug experience with multiple conjoined
religious liberations (cf. Lahood, 2008).
What began simply enough with Aldous
Huxley’s (1954/2009) blending of mescaline with
Christianity— “all I am suggesting is that the mescalin
experience is what Catholic theologians call a ‘gratuitous
grace’” (p. 73)—would become a frenzy of religious
syncretism and hybridization. The counter-culture
would affect the transgressive reality shaping act of
fusing not two, but multiple cosmologies together and
this, I would argue, ended up as American nondualism
or, in other words, Wilber’s (1976) perennial postulate.
Robert Elwood (1973), in his classic study of magic and
the occult in modern America, confirmed that while
they drew from archaic symbols, the charismatic leaders
in the psychedelic movement described an “innovative
constellation with a life of its own” (p. 18).
James Slotkin (1956/1975) in his conversion to
the Native American Church, a religion that fused ritual
peyote eating with a blend of Aztec and Christian elements
(Burkholder, 1974) claimed, “This concept of salvation by
knowledge, to be achieved through revelation … through
Peyote … is a doctrine similar to that of early Middle
Eastern Gnosticism” (p. 100). Slotkin wrote that peyote
was a sacrament that could induce mystical awareness for
hours rather than moments. His early work was glowingly
incorporated into Huxley’s (1954) The Doors of Perception,
in which Huxley blended the mescaline experience with
the cosmological postulate dharmakaya—the void of
Tibetan Buddhism—and Christian Grace.
In 1957 Life magazine printed a 17-page
promotion of the visionary magic mushroom called by
the Aztecs teonanacatl (Flesh of the Gods) hinting that
the visions of poet William Blake would become available
to one and all. Theologian Allan Watts in his 1962 work
Joyous Cosmology, specifically related the suspension of the
subject/object dichotomy in LSD use with the immediate
awareness promoted in Zen Buddhism, considering it
commensurate with the Buddhist void (p. 91) and with
Richard Bucke’s notion of cosmic consciousness (p. 17).
Richard Bucke in 1901 had published his influential
study of comparative mysticism, Cosmic Consciousness:
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 37
A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, in which
he held that Christ, Buddha, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart,
Muhammad, and William Blake shared the same
pinnacle of consciousness. Timothy Leary (1963) in The
Psychedelic Experience categorically equated the peak of
the drug experience to the Clear Light or the Void of
Tibetan Buddhism.
Gestalt psychologists were also involved in
psychedelic work, among them Claudio Naranjo (1973).
California had seen a gestalt boom in the ‘50s and
‘60s and the Esalen Institute became the seat of the
counter-culture’s global therapeutic project. It is widely
acknowledged that gestalt was strongly influenced by
Buddhism in the form of Zen (Clarkson, 1989, p. 12).
The ultimate goal of Zen (connected to the doctrine of
no-self) was joined with the gestalt aim of integration
of the whole personality (which again, is not really a
very Zen pursuit). Buddhist terms such as emptiness,
the fertile or pregnant void, and satori were appropriated
and blended with gestalt practice (cf. Perls, Hefferline, &
Goodman 1951, pp. 358-359; Van Dusen, 1975, p. 90).
Stanislav Grof (1998), an émigré and
psychoanalyst from Czechoslovakia and one of the co-
founders of transpersonal psychology along with Maslow,
strongly paralleled his LSD cosmology and ontology with
Kashmir Shaivism and evoked the Hindu concept of the
satchitananda (p. 117) to describe what he also called
the void, absolute consciousness, and the pregnant void.
Grof (1977) also linked his cosmology to Maslow’s peak
experience (p. 158). Maslow’s (1964) self-actualization
theory emerged in tandem with psychedelics and he made
several references to LSD and psilocybin as useful for
people who could not have a peak experience otherwise
(pp. 27, 80). In Be Here Now, a best-selling book by
Tim Leary’s collaborator and Hindu convert, Ram
Dass (1971b) claimed access to cosmic consciousness as
commensurate with the Christian idea of the kingdom
of God, the Hindu notion of satchitananda, and the
Buddhist notion of the void (p. 16).
Again, what is present in all this is a unique form
of cosmic hybridity, the almost impossible joining and
mixing together of diverse and divergent cosmological
postulates in America brought into being largely in the
American religious counter-culture. This hybridization
of various religious postulates with the drug experience
has a history that begins roughly in the late 1950s, and
this appears to be the invisible hand that shaped what
20 years later would come to be called the New Age. As
38 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
the author of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American
Dream, Jay Stevens (1987) had it:
Certainly the variety of interests that groups itself
under the rubric “the New Age” is largely an
outgrowth of the psychedelic movement, although
just as an oak is much more than the seed it springs
from, the New Age is far more complex and
impressive than anyone could have guessed back in
1967, when the hippies thought they were creating a
new world with nothing more than Love and LSD.
(p. 495)
The transpersonal movement, it is to be remembered,
sprang from that very same seed, as did religious or
spiritual feminism (Spretnak, 1982, p. xii).7
The notion of consciousness evolution was
also a familiar and positive trope in the religious
counterculture. To quote Stevens (1987) again,
we are doomed unless a way can be found to speed up
evolution, to consciously push the smart monkey to a
higher level, to renew the assault on the gods, which
was the secret purpose of all religions. But can we
consciously evolve ourselves? LSD... was the hippie
sacrament, a consciousness-expander, a tool that
would push us up the evolutionary ladder.” (p. 5)
The rhetoric of evolution is still very much a central
trope in what religious historian Wouter Hanegraaff
(1996) called “New Age perennialism” (p. 329), and
in Ken Wilber’s evolutionary ladder-of-consciousness
transpersonalism.8
New Age-Transpersonalism
T he transpersonal movement has substantially
changed the religious menu of the Western world.
Furthermore, the counter-cultural psychologies of the
humanistic and transpersonal movements were “a key
influence in the emergence of New Age as a social
phenomena” (Morris, 2006, p. 305). But even more
importantly the New Age’s mystical occultism has been
called the religion of postmodern globalization—which
is to say that transpersonalism is either tacitly informing
the religion of globalization or it is the unseen religion
of global capitalism.
The New Age is mostly a religion for white
people (Hanegraaff, 2003, p. 23) and has been called “the
secret religion of the educated class” (Heelas, 1996, p.
124). It is so secret in fact that many a person apparently
has no idea that he or she is part of it. Indeed many a
Lahood
soul engaged in the widespread channeling phenomena,
many a person practicing shamanism, many a yoga
teacher and her students, many a religious tourist on his
pilgrimage, or many a Western tantric practitioner, may
be completely unaware that they are part of a globalizing
religion with roots in the ‘60s consciousness-expanding
movement. Often an examination of the belief systems
of people who do not identify themselves with the New
Age reveals deposits of New Age transpersonalism in
their psychic inventories. Furthermore, and this is the
thesis of the present paper, the New Age may well be
contributing to the great spiritual malady of our times—
spiritual narcissism.
But just what beliefs do have currency in New
Age transpersonalism? This is a very difficult question
to answer, but very briefly, two anthropologists David
Young and Jean-Guy Goulet (1994), suggested that the
New Age is a religion and it tends to “view reality in
terms of different dimensions, and enlightenment as a
movement to ever higher dimensions [of consciousness],
either in this life or in lives to come” (p. 8). “Reality,
according to the perennial philosophy” wrote Ken Wilber
(1997), “is composed of several different but continuous
dimensions” (p. 39).
New Age religion joins psychology with religion
and with a millenarian impulse (the coming of: a
New Age of Aquarius, Total Bliss, the Cosmic Christ,
twentytwelve, etc.) and an evolutionary design—
the result is a self-oriented spirituality in which the
transformation of, or the attainment of, a higher inner
self is of paramount importance. Furthermore, for many,
the action of expanding one’s consciousness is deemed
an activity that can save the planet (this means of course
that everyone on the planet must participate in the
consciousness-raising). New Age religion advocates a
perennial philosophy stressing the transcendent unity of
all religions although it expresses a religious metaphysic
that reflects a Hindu/Gnostic, impersonal, nondual
transcendentalism (Cortright, 1997).
Likewise the transpersonal psychology move­
ment has been called “an openly religionist psychology”
(Hanegraaff, 1996, p. 51) because it has the perennial
philosophy—that is, esoteric unity—as its foundation
(Wulff 2000). The perennial construct is imagined as
a universal spiritual reality that “strikingly resembles
the Neo-Platonic Godhead or Advaitin Brahman”
(Ferrer, 2002, p. 89). Like the New Age, transpersonal
psychology’s interests are defined by a mingling of
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
psychology and religion. Interest in peak experiences
and expanded consciousness resulted in a strong focus
on self-spirituality—the sacralisation of the inner self
(Heelas, 1996). For roughly 20 years transpersonalism
was dominated by, and conflated with, the religious and
psychological worldview of Ken Wilber. Wilber joined
the perennial philosophy with an evolutionary telos and
a ladder of consciousness design with Hindu/Gnostic
impersonal nondualism as end-state enlightenment.
Thus the New Age and Wilber’s transpersonalism
deeply mirror each other in basic structure. The basic
metaphysic structuring its beliefs and practices is
Eastern/Gnostic in flavor in that it holds everything
is God without beginning or end, and the ultimate
purpose of life is to transcend the individual self and
merge with the Divine (Hollick, 2006). The Upanishads
and the Vedic writings of ancient India conceive of
Brahman as an impersonal world-spirit, sustaining but
beyond the phenomenal world. The individual soul or
atman is considered a manifestation of Brahman—and
the Vedantic system of Shankara developed the concept
of liberation (moksha) from the world.
An organic hybridity can easily occur between
the East and West through Gnosticism and Vedanta.
Morris (2006) has pointed out that Oriental religious
traditions are generally seen to be different from
Christianity and Occidental thought; however, the
Upanishadic doctrine has close affinities with early
Gnostic doctrines (p. 119). Gnostic Christians held an
“absolute division between an evil material world and a
good spiritual realm” (Tarnas, 1991, p. 141). Man could
escape his entrapment in the gross material world through
an esoteric knowledge gleaned from spiritual intuition.
But, wrote Morris (2006), “in its stress on the concept of
salvation by knowledge (Greek gnosis), in its devaluation
of the mundane world as a realm of “unreality,” and in
its advocacy of mystical union between the individual
(soul) and this transcendental realm the Upanishadic
doctrine... resembles that of Gnostic religion” (p. 119).
I would take this insight a step further and say
these two religions (Western esoteric Christianity and
Eastern Vedantic mysticism) have found hybridized
expression in the New Age, and that this is mirrored in
Wilber’s transpersonalism; indeed, Jorge Ferrer (2002)
claimed Wilber’s transpersonal psychology is “a hybrid
of Neo-Platonism and Neo-Advaita” (p. 65). Thus it
can be said that the New Age and transpersonalism
have historically tended to value Eastern/Gnostic ideals
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 39
of transcendence over a devalued phenomenal world
for identification with a metaphysical Big Self. Such
identification is traditionally based on the yogic impulse
to yoke the soul to the spirit by cutting the bonds and
severing the ties to the world, severing the so-called
limiting desires that connect one to the world—and
severing the bonds that sustain and renew relationship.
The human potential and transpersonal
movements (e.g., Perls, Maslow) have also been
important foundations in the materialization and
affirmation of what has been called self-spirituality,
an internalized form of religiosity (Heelas, 1996). The
touchstones of self-spirituality were about getting in
touch with inner divinity and self actualization through
consciousness-expanding techniques that could deliver
a peak experience and enable the aspirant to attain
higher levels of consciousness—this was favorably seen
as consciousness evolution (Heelas, 1996; Hanegraaff,
1996; Morris, 2006). However, it is this very program
that brings us inevitably to self-spirituality’s inherent
problem—and what is perhaps the foundation of a
growing spiritual malady in these globalizing times—
that New Age transpersonalism is prone to breeding an
overt focus on only one half of what could be a more
relational spirituality. Put crudely, its concern is with a
highly individual self and not with the Other.
New Age Narcissism
T he foundations of this self-oriented spirituality in
transpersonal psychology were laid by its founding
father Abraham Maslow, who brought together Western
psychology and mystical states (the term he favored
was “peak-experiences”; cf. Maslow, 1964, 1968, 1969).
In terms of psychology, Maslow wanted freedom from
the Freudian obsession with psychopathology and
a new focus on maximized psychological health or
selfactualization. In terms of religion, Maslow believed
that traditional religious contexts obscured or retarded
a universal core experience and skewed the potential of
the peak experiences, and he wanted to “dissociate such
[peak states] from their traditional religious contexts”
(Wulff, 2000, pp. 422-423). Maslow is undoubtedly an
important pioneer—but there is a danger here because
in Maslow’s peak experiences the emphasis was on “the
individual’s experience over, if not to the exclusion of,
the reality that is encountered” (Wulff, 2000, p. 397).
This sounds quite similar to Donald Evans’ (1993)
description of monistic subjectivity as a narcissistic mode
of consciousness: “In general, everything outside of me
40 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
has significance only in relation to me; what concerns
me is not this or that reality but my experience of it” (p.
42). In a discussion of justice in Maslow’s motivational
model, Anthony Taylor (2006) pointed out that “the
state of self actualization or psychological perfection
that Maslow outlined, was supremely self-centered” (p.
184):
Maslow described self-actualization in “ethereal
terms, showing a benign indifference to the outer
world of reality while fostering internally a state
of Nirvana of sublime spirituality... such a state
of existential withdrawal... cannot be construed
has anything but a major symptom of avoidance,
inadequacy, and selfishness that is uncharacteristic
in mature people. (2006, p. 185)9
Self-spirituality emerged in Western culture where the
ego is historically “constructed dissociatively from nature,
community, ancestors” (Kremer, 1996, p. 46) and, as
such, is an ego already prone to rigid dualism, isolation,
solipsism, and self-centeredness. Self-spirituality
coupled with the logic of “individual competitiveness
and consumer capitalism” can result in what is called
“spiritual narcissism” (Ferrer, 2002, pp. 34-36)—in
other words, extreme egocentrism spiritualized.
The New Age has been described as spiritual
consumerism (Arweck, 2002) in a pick-and-mix spiritual
marketplace (Roof, 1999). Once counter-cultural,
the New Age sanctifies capitalism (Heelas, 1996) and
promulgates a search or journey for prosperity and a
means to wealth (Morris, 2006). Spirituality has in a
sense become a commodity, a fetish linked to purchasing
power and economically based self-esteem. Lavish
spending on spiritual commodities (e.g., expensive New
Age group events, spiritual tourism, or showy donations
to Gurus buy prestige and participation mystique, without
the transmutative suffering required to reduce narcissistic
alienation). This kind of conspicuous consumption may
also be intended to create envy in others; there is perhaps
nothing of more value to the spiritual egoist than the
envy of others.
Using Donald Evans’ (1993) account of
spirituality as “a basic transformative process in which
we uncover and let go of our narcissism so as to surrender
into the Mystery out of which everything continually
arises” (p. 4), Ferrer (2002) argued that “narcissistic
modes of consciousness... preclude a genuine availability
to others” (p. 36). To quote Evans (1993), “Where love
Lahood
inclines and enables us to engage in the mutual giving
and receiving of ‘I-Thou’ encounters with other human
beings, narcissism’s self-enclosure precludes such intimate
encounters” (p. 207).
The problem is self-centeredness, and the
inability to care about the other—but the paradox here
is that immersion in self-spirituality can fail to transform
these dynamic defenses and spiritual growth simply
becomes another narcissistic activity. Inner spiritual
experiences and practices (sought for therapeutic ends)
are easily appropriated by the ego in a form of narcissistic
survival (Ferrer, 2002) in what has been called spiritual
materialism (cf. Cortright, 1997). Here the person dons
the spiritual garb and talks the spiritual language but
ducks the appropriate transmutitive suffering—her self-
serving continues—a wolf in lamb’s clothing. Ultimately,
this means her self-denial and suffering are prolonged
rather than transformed because the spiritual aspirant
mistakes “spiritualized self-gratification” for authentic
self-fulfillment (Battista, 1996, p. 255) which is the
opposite of authentic spirituality.10
Narcissistic spirituality, then, is the use of
an inflated spiritual persona which claims itself to be
spiritually developed (evolved, advanced, or higher) as
a means of constraining, controlling, and exploiting
other persons (Battista, 1996), a dynamic which others
naturally feel as oppressive and in my opinion should
rightly oppose with healthy human anger.11 Adherents
of the New Age claim they are overcoming “attachment
to self” for altruistic purposes, but this “defense allows
an apologist for ‘higher consciousness’” (p. 255) with its
implicit claim to psychological superiority. The New Age
votary, self-elevated in this way, has trouble recognizing,
owning, and working through her subtly manipulative,
deceptive, and dominating side. Another related defense
is spiritual bypass or transpersonal rationalization
wherein the person reframes his compulsive self-serving
behaviors in spiritual terms (Cortright, 1997). A similar
strategy is to invent a spiritual facade, and cleave to it, in
the hope of annihilating inner suffering.
The New Ager’s psychological narcissism (a
result of primal repression [cf. Washburn, 1995] or lack of
mirroring [cf. Kohut, 1971]) is accentuated through: (1)
perennialism: the notion of an inner esoteric core truth
(Self, essence, etc.) that resides at the heart of all religions—
a hybridity that allows the New Ager to claim spiritual
authority for herself; (2) New Age ethnocentrism—a
conviction of cultural superiority; and closely related (3)
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
religious narcissism—religious traditions almost always
raise their aspired states over other systems, and this is
adapted into a form of narcissism where the New Ager
mimics the authoritarianism within myriad traditions
by elevating his cult, group, guru, tradition, or practice
as higher up the chain of consciousness than others. This
threefold structuring builds a spiritual facade trapping
the authentic person and participatory consciousness
itself within an alienating, self-separating shell.12 In the
following section I explore how the New Age spiritual
ego comes into being.13
Cosmological Détente14
According to Christopher Lasch (1978) in his well known
work, The Culture of Narcissism, increasing hopelessness
in the face of the global disasters of our times has
produced a form of narcissistic selfpreoccupation (Ferrer,
2002, p. 35). During the past 100 years the Western
“trust in human progress, as a way toward universal
peace and happiness, was progressively abandoned due
to its empirical disconfirmation by a number of bloody
wars” (Introvigne, 2003, p. 65). If two world wars,
ongoing wars against communism and now terrorism,
and the shadow of a horrific third world war destroyed
the notion of a utopian paradise of universal peace and
prosperity through progress, it also gave birth to a more
individualized, personalized, and privatized utopia.
After WWI it was held that positive thinking might still
win the day through the attainment of a “higher state
of peace” (p. 65). Massimo Introvigne pointed out that
while all this could be easily be construed as wishful
thinking, a convergence of Christian New Thought
and secular positive thinking coalesced in the work, The
Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale
(1952), which turned out to be one of the best-sellers of
the 20th century—and positive thinking is now a central
dogma of the New Age.
For the 1960s religious counter-culture the
American Dream, messianic and unchallenged as it
was (Bellah, 1976), had dissipated into an apocalyptic
nightmare of Biblical proportions. For many the wisdom
of putting blind faith or trust in dualistic science and
exclusivist Christianity had also been disconfirmed in an
atmosphere of moral turmoil, rampant materialism, and
violence both internal and external. According to the
eminent sociologist Robert Bellah (1976), the “counter
cultural criticism of American society is related to a
belief in nondualism” (p. 347, emphasis supplied). As one
researcher into the emerging new religious consciousness
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 41
put it, “previous beliefs had not worked; people were
searching for a spiritual absolute that would lead them
beyond war, strife and chaos” (Johnson, 1976, p. 34,
emphasis supplied).15
If the counter-public of America (and beyond)
could find this spiritual absolute, then a New Age
of peace and love might dawn, but only if the people
could awaken from their dualistic dream—a seemingly
commendable desire. The coming New Age would be
a psychological one arriving through the “transformed
consciousness of millions of people” (Johnson, 1976,
p. 34). Thus, if the counter-culture was unified at all,
it was in an “obsession with personal experience... each
individual was urged to pursue freely a personal state of
ecstasy” (p. 42), and this program would, so the dual
logic went, end the war and save the planet. Yet this
cherished spiritual absolute would have to be found in
an amalgamating inclusivity, a hybrid—One absolute
Truth—to avoid the chimera of exclusivism that was
and is central to Christianity. It would somehow have to
be inclusive of all truths, and this amalgamation would
be billed as arriving through consciousness evolution. In
this one arrives at the basic formula of the New Age:
The two main tenets of “classic” New Age were,
firstly, that a golden age of higher consciousness was
manifesting itself on Planet earth; and secondly,
that it was possible to co-operate with this happy
manifestation without the need for a dogmatic creed
or formal structures. (Introvigne, 2003, p. 60)
Or as Paul Heelas (1996) put it:
New Agers are averse to traditions, with their dogmas,
doctrines and moralities. Yet New Agers continually
draw on traditions—shamanic to Buddhist. The
solution to this seeming paradox lies in the fact that
New Agers are perennialists. Before explaining this
apparent paradox, let us dwell for a moment on the
perennialized nature of the New Age. Unity firmly
prevails over diversity. Having little or no faith in the
external realm of traditional belief, New Agers can
ignore apparently significant differences between
religious traditions, dismissing them as due to
historical contingencies and ego-operations. But they
do have faith in that wisdom which is experienced
as lying at the heart of the religious domain as a
whole. From the detraditionalized stance of the New
Age what matters is the “arcane,” the “esoteric,” the
42 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
“hidden wisdom,” the “inner or secret tradition,” the
“ancient wisdom.” And, it can be added, New Agers
attach equal importance—because it is an aspect
of the spiritual realm as a whole—to the essential
unity of the human species, scorning nationality or
ethnically differentiated modes of being. (p. 27)
Now it is possible to return to Abraham Maslow the
founding father of the self-spirituality movements
(humanistic and transpersonal) for the similarities:
Among humanistic perspectives on mystical
experience, no others are as well known as Maslow’s
(1964, 1968). In the course of his famous studies
of self-actualizing persons, Maslow noticed that it
was common for these exceptional individuals to
report having had mystical experiences.... Maslow
called them peak experiences, a term that other
psychologists have adopted as well. In describing
peak experiences, Maslow reiterated the ecstatic
feelings of egoless fusion with the world, of wholeness
and integration, and of effortless existence in the
here and now.... Eager to make such experiences
and their putative benefits widely available in an
increasingly secular world, Maslow argued (1964)
that the traditional religious contextualizations of
this intrinsic core of experience serve not only to
distort and suppress it but also to create divisiveness
where otherwise there might be profound accord.
According to Maslow, by studying and promoting
this core outside of its traditional contexts,
humanistic psychology could revolutionize human
existence by making the peak experience and its
values the ultimate goals of education, if not of
every other social institution as well. (Wulff 2000,
422-423, emphasis supplied).
For Maslow religious traditions created divisiveness,
even war—it is to be remembered that some of Maslow’s
most influential works (e.g., 1964, 1968, 1971) were
created during the Vietnam War years; in fact Maslow
(1908-1970) published throughout WWII, the Korean
War, and the Vietnam War. At the Esalen Institute in
California during a seminar there Maslow declared that
he had “‘the feeling of historical urgency... that there’s
a fire that we have to put out. The world is burning.
It’s literally possible there [will be] atom bombs next
week’” (Hoffman, 1988, p. 293). Maslow (1964) urged
his readers toward an individual, inner, privatized
Lahood
religious experience that went beyond, but included, all
traditions—in his words,
this private religious experience is shared by all
the great world religious traditions including the
atheistic ones like Buddhism, Taoism, Humanism,
or Confucianism. (p. 28)
Ferrer (2002) in his important deconstruction of subtle
Cartesian dualism in transpersonal theory (specifically
Maslow’s perennialism) wrote: “To lump together these
different awarenesses into one spiritual liberation or
referent reachable by all traditions may be profoundly
distorting” (p. 148, emphasis supplied). Ferrer’s
argument ostensibly has to do with Buddhism but it is
very much applicable to the more pertinent theme he is
tackling—the validity of Maslow’s presumed core. From
a contextual position (e.g., Katz, 1978) this conflation
is profoundly distorting, on one level, but this term
“lump together,” while certainly not very elegant, points
to a much stranger, trickster-like cultural and religious
process in the American context—one of hybridization
and amalgamation—which, I believe, had an egalitarian,
anti-racist, anti-hegemonic, anti-essentialist intention.
It is a conflation based on respect for other traditions
and a desire to join with them. I believe this amalgam/
hybridity was originally used as an occult fetish with
which to democratize religious traditions. The process
of hybridization, wrote Nestor Garcia Canclini (2005),
“can serve to work democratically with differences, so
that history is not reduced to wars between cultures....
We can choose to live in a state of war or in a state of
hybridization” (p. xxxi).
American One-Truthism, in reality an
unrecognized and complex religious hybridization
glossed as perennialism (Lahood, 2008), gained
acceptance and popularity because, at face value, it
was a defense (by amalgamation) against the force of
religious exclusivism, ideological domination, and what
Ferrer (2002) has called spiritual ranking (pp. 159-162):
the way religious traditions, groups, or creeds subtly
belittle one-another by placing their aspired ultimate
states above others. According to Ferrer (2009), the
elevation of “one’s favored tradition or spiritual choice
as superior” is itself a form of “spiritual narcissism”
(p. 140) and which appears to be inculcated into
religious cultures as ethnocentrism (a cultural version
of egocentrism). Americanized One-Truthism was/is
cherished by hippies, transpersonalists, New Agers,
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
and contemporary, grass-roots Western Buddhists alike
because it was also seen as a simple solution to spiritual
competition and one-up-manship (cf. Cortright, 1997,
p. 31). If it is believed (and performed) that all religions
are inherently the same—that all religions are rivers
running into the same transcendental ocean—then this
promotes the relaxing and easing of tensions between
competing groups or even warring religions (Lahood,
2008).
Eternal Fascism
T here are many examples of this subversive credo,
for example, Roman Catholic Trappist monk and
anti-war peace activist Thomas Merton, who nicknamed
himself Rabbi Vedanta (another Hinjew hybrid), “argued
that Zen meditation shatters the false self and restores us
to our paradisiacal innocence which preceded the fall of
man” (Lipski, 1985, p. 243). The terror of deconstructive
agency is apparent in Merton’s speech act—it is a form
of sorcery (or shamanism), the term Rabbi Vedanta
itself an impossible mix, discombobulating yet joining
Catholicism, Judaism, and Hinduism—his person
becomes the bi-polar trickster, the disjunctive, liminal,
shamanistic space.
To take another example, here again is
theologian Alan Watts (1961) in Psychotherapy East and
West:
Ideally and theoretically the church as the Body
of Christ is the entire universe, and because in
Christ “there is neither Greek nor Jew, bond nor
free” [Galatians 3:28], membership in Christ could
mean liberation from maya and its categories. It
could mean that one’s conventional definition and
classification is not one’s real self, that “I live, yet no
longer I; but Christ lives in me.” (p. 12)
This is a Christian-Hinduism which erases and assimi­
lates the “Greek” and the “Jew” while exploding the
borders of Hinduism and Christianity by forcing/
marrying them together. Underlying these subversive
and universalizing tactics, were, I believe, sincere
attempts at a kind of mystical democratization, a
leveler of the spiritual playing field, and a disavowal of
privileged, namely Christian, religious perspectives. On
these grounds there seems to be something inherently
well intentioned behind the unifying mind. However, if
tilted toward the direction of one absolute or universal
spiritual strand, then it may also point to the resurgence
of spiritual ethnocentrism, essentialism, narcissism, and
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 43
totalitarianism seemingly inherent in human beings
and their religious traditions or formulations.
The statements above by Merton and Watts
deserve careful scrutiny because buried within their
hybridity may be the seeds of what semiotician and
anthropologist Umberto Eco (1995) has called Eternal
Fascism. Taking Merton’s example: Zen meditation
returns his readers to the state of prelapsarian purity (cf.
Lahood, 2008) in a Catholic-Zen hybrid cosmology— the
marriage of Zen practice with Christian soteriology. In
a sense this throws traditional Zen—with its emptiness,
void, nirvana, sunyata—and Catholicism—with its
theistic cosmos, eternal soul, and triune godhead—into
disarray, yet binds the two traditions as if they were one.
It is this kind of joining toward which Eco expressed
suspicion. He wrote:
In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference
between various historical forms of fascism, I think
it is possible to outline a list of features that are
typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or
Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized
into a system; many of them contradict each other,
and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or
fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be
present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
Traditionalism is of course much older
than fascism. Not only was it typical of
counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the
French revolution, but is was born in the late
Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek
rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of
different religions (most of the faiths indulgently
accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming
of a revelation received at the dawn of human history.
This revelation, according to the traditionalist
mystique, had remained for a long time concealed
under the veil of forgotten languages— in Egyptian
hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the
little-known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic.
Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the
combination of different forms of belief or practice;”
such a combination must tolerate contradictions.
Each of the original messages contains a sliver of
wisdom, and although they seem to say different
or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless
alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
44 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
As a consequence, there can be no advancement
of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once
and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its
obscure message.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American
bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find
there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know,
was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine
and Stonehenge—that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
(pp. 57-59)
The question is this: in their attempts to
combine and join these religions together do Watts,
Merton, and Ram Dass, with the help of many others,
unwittingly plant the seed of spiritual fascism? New
Age perennialism flourishes because it is a source of
visible and invisible hybridization—a process that can
exhaust the authoritative voice within each tradition
by a complex process of joining and cancellation. But
each hybrid also carries the forces of totalitarianism,
essentialism, and resistance—and power configurations
arise, assimilate, and re-assert. For example, A Course in
Miracles (Anonymous, 1976/1992), something of a New
Age gospel or Bible (rightly appraised as Christianized
Vedanta and a form of nondual perennialism) extolled
a blatant assimilation/colonization process with all
the arrogance and gusto of 19th century Christian
missionaries:
The Name of Jesus Christ as such is but a symbol.
But it stands for love that it is not of this world. It
is a symbol that is safely used as a replacement for
the many names of all the gods to which you pray.
(Manual for Teachers, p. 59, emphasis supplied)
One can only wonder how the Muslim or Buddhist
populations would respond to this teaching. This appears
to be a thinly disguised form of spiritual totalitarianism
and New Age imperialism, carefully removing itself from
its culturally relative context and human responsibility
by claiming metaphysical authority, while brutally
effacing all other gods—the term “safely” brimming
with conceit and subterfuge.
The Course’s spiritual imperialism is anticipated
in Rudolf Steiner (2010), who, in a public lecture on July
13, 1914, said of his self-proclaimed spiritual science:
Thus it becomes clear to us through spiritual
science that the being whom we call Christ is to
be recognized as the center of life on earth, that
Lahood
 the Christian religion is the ultimate religion for Uncooked Seeds
the earth’s whole future. Spiritual science shows
us particularly that the pre-Christian religions
outgrow their one-sidedness and come together in
U ltimately, with Eastern nondualism occupying the
top rung of consciousness evolution according to
Ken Wilber and the New Age, one ends up with a very
the Christian faith. (n.p.) conservative religion which eradicates the many spiritual
tastes in the name of the One—a religion that smothers
Or as Wilber would have it—all religions will eventually
diversity, ceases to evolve or change, and a religious
outgrow themselves and alight at the station of neo-
vision which is already prescribed by world-denying
Advaitin nondualism. Or as the Dalai Lama would have
Eastern mystics (Lahood, 2008; Hanegraaff, 2003;
it—emptiness, sunyata, or final spiritual enlightenment
Heron, 1998). As Hanegraaff (2003) concluded, the
can only be attained within his dGe lugs school of Tibetan
New Age begins to look like a replica of the exclusivist,
Buddhism (D’Costa, 2000)—“a view that he believes
dominating, one-way Christian religion it was trying to
all other Buddhists and religious people will eventually
escape (2003). Again, the seeds of this psycho-spiritual
accept” (Ferrer, 2009, p. 140).
malady were sown in the religious counter culture that
Nestor Canclini (1995/2005) observed that
gave birth to transpersonal psychology and the New
in the vertigo inducing worlds of hybridization the
Age. Let me present here a small case study of one of the
human imagination becomes “afraid of losing itself” and
most beloved sons of this movement and an important
historical movements, both hegemonic and subaltern,
proponent of naive universalism: Baba Ram Dass.
“time and again institute essentializations of a particular
Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) had been a teacher
state of hybridization” (p. xxii). This leads inevitably to
of psychology at Harvard and along with Dr. Timothy
Ken Wilber’s ethnocentric paradise, and may explain
Leary began research into psychedelics there in 1961.
Wilber’s break from the more relaxed universalism of
After being relieved of his post there he eventually
Huxley, Watts, Maslow, Grof, Ram Dass, and others in
travelled to India in 1967 and came under the tutelage of
early psychedelic/transpersonal movement, to his more
a Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, after which he wrote
essentialized, hierarchical hybrid in which he ranked
a best-selling book Be Here Now (1971b). In this book
his nondualism above the other contenders. Malcolm
the term cosmic consciousness joined Christianity’s
Hollick in his Science of Oneness (2006) explained:
kingdom of heaven with the satchitananda of Hinduism
The perennial philosophy claims to be tolerant and and the void of Buddhism as something that could be
inclusive of all religions. Yet it establishes a single realized through various catalysts or practices:
spiritual truth against which all traditions are judged.
Unless you start again, become that trusting, open
Those that do not match its criteria are rejected as
surrendered being the energy can’t come in, that is
inauthentic, merely exoteric, or as representing lower
in the Kingdom of Heaven. The Energy, it is the
levels of spiritual insight. For instance, according
same thing—Cosmic Consciousness…its all the
to Ken Wilber’s influential ladder of consciousness
same trip, its all the same and any trip you want to
development, the Eastern concept of nonduality is
take leads to the same place…you can get there by
the highest form of spirituality, whereas the Sufi and
tuning in…you can get there by turning on…you
Christian traditions of union with an impersonal
can get there by having baby. (p. 16)
One come a rung lower at the Causal level. Platonic
archetypes and Christian gnosis are a further rung Ram Dass was not only an important
down at the Subtle level, while the mystery religions charismatic leader in the American psychedelic
and many indigenous faiths are relegated to the movement, he was an early contributor to the
Psychic. (p. 341) transpersonal psychology movement, and he can be
seen to represent the Easternizing spirit of America in
It is because of this tilt toward assimilationist and
these times—he has been credited as “one of the most
totalitarian one-truthism that I suggest the One-Truth of
influential spiritual teachers of our time” (Walsh &
New Age transpersonalism and its spiritual ego be gently
Grob, 2005, p. 207). Here is Ram Dass (1974) as he
but firmly consigned to the funeral pyre in the hope that
spoke of his religious evolution and the emergence of
from the ashes a more relational cosmos will emerge.
what appears to be a curious universal amalgam—an

Relational Spirituality, Part 1 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 45

amalgam that, seemingly, will become the problematic
esoteric core of the New Age:
I am not a Hindu. I am a Western, Jewish boy from
Boston who has studied Hinduism. I also find the
same thing in the Greek Orthodox Christians and
in the Hasidic movement in Judaism. I find it in all
mystical traditions: in the Sufi, in the Egyptian, and
certainly in St. Teresa and St. John and so on. So
that, I find it is in a way the amalgam of all this stuff
that is allowing me to be what I am doing right at
this moment. (p. 54, emphasis supplied)
One hears an echo of Whitman’s joyous poet (in the
woods, trimming the lamps, shatas admirant... minding
the Koran). However, it is important to note carefully
that with Ram Dass’s globalizing statements and the
subtle marriage of Judaism with Hinduism, with Greek
Orthodoxy, Sufism, Egyptian, Christian mysticism,
and Buddhism, that a third space of enunciation (cf.
Bhabha, 1994) is articulated in the form of an esoteric
amalgam. Ram Dass’ simple synopsis was presented
at the Menninger Foundation in 1970 during talks on
LSD and spirituality. These talks were published in early
volumes of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (1970,
1971a). Later they were published in a book, The Only
Dance There Is (1974), with an image of the Dancing
Shiva Nataraj on the front cover. Two editors wrote in
an opening statement:
Historically, one spiritual system after another
has been assimilated in another culture in such
a way as to modify the form of discipline without
diminishing its essence. In this respect, Ram Dass
has been especially effective in helping Americans
and other Westerners feel “at home” in what has
been considered a “foreign” tradition. (Sutich &
Fadiman, 1974)
If I understand this statement correctly, Americans
(nominally Judeo-Christians) and other Westerners
are to be assimilated into Hinduism—or is it an
Americanization/Christianization of Hinduism? Slippery
stuff this hybridity. Nevertheless, out of all of these
religions—monistic, theistic and atheistic—Ram Dass
is adamant that “higher consciousness is a state of unity”
(p. 8), and that this unity must be nondual: “The goal
of these efforts [practices] is a nondualistic state. That
is, the place you are reaching for is a state where there is
only one. Not one versus anything else; just one. It all is.
46 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
It’s one. A nondualistic state” (p. 31). This seems
to be the cherished spiritual absolute sought by the
counterculture—One Truthism.
Certainly with Ram Dass one senses a great
appreciation of the other culture’s mysticism and a respect
and celebratory approach to non-Western cultures. Yet
this very act can suggest an appropriation, assimilation,
and colonization (Lahood, 2008; Hanegraaff, 2003).
In the following passage Ram Dass spoke in his open
hearted and enthusiastic way of a cultural joining
between hippies and Hopi Indians:
I went as a representative of the hippie community of
San Francisco to meet the Hopi Indian elders to arrange
a Hopi-Hippie Be-In in Grand Canyon. We wanted to
honor their tradition and affirm our common respect
for the land. As you can guess, this was during the
sixties. (Ram Dass & Gorman, 2005, p. 7)
He then wrote that the Hopi did not want to be honored
by them and, according to the Berkeley Barb, “the
Indians were not impressed and the tribal spokesman
brushed them off” (Matusow, 1984, p. 298).
Scholar of Native North American religions
Luan Fautaek Makes Marks (2007) pointed out in
her discussion of the Mysterious Wakan Tanka and its
conflation with a Western concept the Great Spirit,
that “perennialist scholars seized on the opportunity
to emphasize Wakan Tanka as monolithic Great Spirit.
This provided more respectability for the Lakota religion,
but conflated the manifold mysterious into the One” (p.
34). This is exactly the problem that besets the New Age:
by perennializing their cosmos and consciousness (one
truth, essential-self, etc.) the world’s colorful religious
cultures are co-opted into one monolithic nondual
ocean—drowning the many multi-hued mysteries in
a spiritually imperialistic One-ness. It is little wonder
that the Hopi would not join with the Hippie and that
the Lakota Indians published a declaration of war on
the New Age in 1993 for disrespecting its traditions
(Hanegraaff, 2003, pp. 22-23).
Thus it would seem that dedicated and
intelligent therapists, spiritual healers, and important
charismatic spokesmen for the transpersonal psychology
movement such as Ram Dass or Stanislav Grof seem to
be convinced that unity is to be preferred over diversity.16
Here is an example of perennialist Grof chastising Ken
Wilber for what he appeared to perceive as the mistake
of cultural specificity:
Lahood
 In his account of cosmogenesis or consciousness
involution, Ken closely follows the highly
culturespecific archetypal map from the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, Bardo Thodol (Evans & Wentz,
1960), rather than creating a more general and
universal description that would be applicable in any
cultural and historical context. (Grof, 1998, p. 90)
Grof seems wholly correct in criticizing
Wilber for his attempt to reduce the world’s religions
to Tibetan culture’s view of cosmogenesis and to
privilege it above others. But he then makes a plea
for a universal cosmic schemata, one that can
cover, as it were, the whole of the world’s religious
history—and here Grof falls into the trap of subtle
universalism because while such a scheme eradicates
Wilber’s spiritual ranking and undermines his basic
culturecentric claim (which holds up Tibetan culture
as a model for all cultures), it at the same time ends up
calling for yet another species of ethnocentrism and
another form of totalitarianism.
New Age Authoritarianism
O ne inherent problem with the universalizing
tactic is that it feeds spiritual narcissism and
New Age ethnocentrism: it sets up the New Ager to
feel as if she has evolved beyond the older traditions.
Thus, Hanegraaff (1996) wrote that the New Ager can
“reject all exoteric religions... because they fall short of
universal esoteric wisdom” (p. 328). In doing so she
sees herself, paradoxically, as more advanced than
traditional religions by laying claim to a superior vision
of spiritual wholeness (see Lahood, 2008; Hanegraaff,
2003). This can create for the New Age global villager
a somewhat ethnocentric and conceited spiritual
outlook. Sociologist Paul Heelas (1996) has observed:
So, what has perennialization to do with how New
Agers treat religious traditions? The perennialized
viewpoint involves going beyond traditions as
normally conceived, going beyond differences to
find—by way of experience—the inner, esoteric
core. This means that New Agers can “draw”
on tradition whilst bypassing their explicit,
authoritative doctrines and dogmas, and moral
codes. Instead, in detraditionalized fashion, they
can discern—by way of their own experience, their
gnosis or experiential knowledge—those spiritual
truths that lie at the heart of, say, Vedanta or
shamanism. And although these truths—by virtue
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
of their intrinsic nature—exercise authority, they
do not curtail the authority of the New Ager’s Self:
the truths within the “traditions” and within the
New Ager are the same. (p. 28)17
Participatory theorist John Heron (1998,
2006) has placed careful and useful emphasis on
what he calls authoritarian religion and its correlate,
spiritual projection (onto external authority/s) within
religious traditions. However, Heron does not attend
specifically to the non-traditional New Age spiritual
ego and its unique brand of religious authoritarianism.
Heron’s (1998) claim, for example, that the current
(perennialist) Hindu-Buddhist cosmology is nothing
beyond a “revelation only relevant to its original
context” (p. 12) does not seem to recognize the
emergence of a novel and complex religious formation
(Lahood, 2008 p. 166). No doubt many in the New
Age run spiritual projections on traditions, or cults,
or leading lights (e.g., the Dalai Lama, Rajneesh,
or Eckhart Tolle) as suggested in Heron’s thesis.
However New Agers typically do not stay long in
authoritarian or traditional groups—and a central
aspect of the New Age and contemporary spirituality its
antiauthoritarian stance (Morris, 2006; Heelas, 1996;
Hanegraaff, 1996).18 Indeed, according to sociologist
Donald Stone (1976) in times of rapid change such as
the current globalization, people join these religious
groups in a maneuver that enables them to assume the
“special status” of a “member of the elect” (p. 114)—in
the New Age it is thus perhaps less a case of spiritual
projection than it is a form of spiritual elitism.19
There is nothing unusual, said Stone (1976),
for people to seek a new authority to compensate when
their worlds are dislocated—a term often used to
describe the effect of globalization. What is new, and
perhaps crucial, is the reliance on an “authoritative
basis of direct experience” without reference to
an outside power (p. 113). This trend is an epochal
revolutionary movement away from conformity to
an external higher truth toward what is instead held
to be a subjective turn (Heelas & Woodhead, 2005).
Thus the New Ager does not really go in for tradition.
Hanegraaff (1996) stated for example that
Although New Age adherents tend to have a
positive view of enlightened “masters” or gurus
who impart insights to their pupils, the idea of
being dependent of somebody else (rather than on
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 47
 one’s own inner self ) for spiritual illumination
is not congenial to New Age individualism. (p.
400)
As Heelas (1996) has pointed out, the New Ager largely
bypasses tradition (p. 28) giving herself an unassailable
position of spiritual authority and superiority by
drawing on the religious capital within each so-named
ancient tradition while at the same time disavowing
traditional authority. This means the New Ager does not
project onto religious authority—he is the authority. He
will not claim membership with religious institutions
but rather with “Shelley’s ‘white radiance’, which
transmitted through ‘the dome of many-colored glass’
expresses itself in the world in the multifarious imagery
of the institutionalized religions” (Prince, 1974, p.
256). Nevertheless, this white person’s light supposedly
shining through all religions is still a culturally relative
position brought about by globalization, and, as has been
seen, it was not only the light that gained ascendency
in transpersonal New Ageism but a particular species
of Easternized nondualism. Thomas Dean (1984),
reviewing the perennialist position wrote:
A transcendent referent nondualistically conceived
(with the help of language drawn from Hindu,
Buddhist, or mystical traditions), in which
all culturally derived religious differences are
ultimately transcended.... This transcendent
reality is what is already and always there, and our
knowing of it, which involves a mode of thinking
that transcends our ordinary mode of cognition,
is similarly a knowledge (gnosis) that is “already
there.” Knowing is primarily a matter of clarifying,
of “removing the veil of darkness that obscures,”
this primordial truth. (p. 213)
The dichotomy between light and darkness can very
easily translate into New Age hubris. If I do not locate
myself in what might be called a dissociated nirvanic
defense, if I refuse to pay cult to the esoteric light
of New Age Oneness/nondualism, or if I am critical
thereof, then I can be swiftly relegated to some dark/
samsaric/unawakened realm—such is the nature of
interpersonal one-upping.
This hybrid esoteric core garners some of its
emotional power and authoritative force by proclaiming
that its One Truth is a pure, pre-existing or given truth,
a truth always already there—in life and presumably in
48 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
death—awaiting our evolutionary arrival. Charismatic
authority is also secured through the idea that it is a truth
that blows in from every direction, that it represents the
world’s great wisdom traditions (Hammer, 2003). By
way of example, consider the following proclamation
by perennialist philosopher Georg Feuerstein in a work
on Tantric yoga:
As the great spiritual traditions of the world
affirm, truth is always one, though there are many
pathways to it. Truth is Reality, which is singular,
what is relative are our angles of perception and
comprehension (Feuerstein 1998, 42-43).20
Affirmations of this perspectivist version of perennialism
(Ferrer 2002) are numerous among New Agers
and transpersonalists. Feuerstein’s perspective, like
Shelley’s, is nevertheless relative to its context which
is, inescapably, a product of globalization. Feuerstein’s
claim on the nature of Truth gains authoritative power
not only from its proclaimed source in the juxtaposition
of great wisdom traditions, but also in the subtle
promotion that this One-Truth reality comes from all
around the globe.
A consideration of the religious theme of life
after death can serve to outline how perennialism
comes into being. Adopting a contextualist position
(cf. Katz, 1978), Olav Hammer (2003) noted that
the more one looks at “the structures, interpretations,
ideological uses and narrative details of the various
speculations on life after death the more they appear
to be unique. Hindu reincarnation is not the same
as kabbalistic reincarnation” (p. 52), and so on.21
“However,” he continued, “for a synthesizing mind
intent on finding a perennial philosophy underlying
the divergent traditions, there is ample material from
which to synthesize, and every opportunity to claim
that the divergences are insignificant details” (p. 52).
This act also leads to the disembedding of the wisdom
traditions:
Bits and pieces of non-Western traditions are
disembedded from their original religious contexts.
Through an incessant bricolage carried out by
leading religious virtuosi, these fragments are
reembedded in a modern, Western esoteric religious
setting. The principal mechanism of doing this, is
by forcing these exotic elements into a fairly rigid,
pre-existing interpretive mould. Thereby, to the
Lahood
 believer, the same message does indeed seem to
come from everywhere. (p. 56)
This act of forcing together is cosmological
hybridization. In the writings of Ken Wilber (1996), whom
many see as the leading transpersonal-perennialnondual
virtuoso, one finds exactly this procedure:
This is the phenomenon of transcendence—or
enlightenment, or liberation, or moskha, or wu or
satori. This is what Plato meant by stepping out of
the cave of shadows and finding the Light of Being;
for Einstein’s ‘‘escaping the delusion of separateness.”
This is the aim of Buddhist meditation, of Hindu
Yoga and Christian mystical contemplation.... there
is nothing spooky, occult or strange in any of this—
and this is the perennial philosophy. (p. 9)
If Wilber’s perennial philosophy is a site for disembedded
and re-embedded spiritual objects (cf. Giddens, 1991), it
is also a product of what Hammer called synonymization,
a process which lends the writer a mask of authority.
Synonymization is linked to a psychological process in
which one is invited to “return to the trust in experts”
(Hammer, 2003, p. 55). The crafty use of exotic words
(e.g., moksha, wu, satori) in English texts expresses
a double meaning and gives an “air of authenticity”
hinting that the author is “cognizant with the writings
of an exotic culture” (or many cultures) or at the least a
grasp of “specialized and arcane vocabulary” (p. 55) not
accessible to the layperson. Hammer pointed out that
the sheer incomprehensibility and untranslatability of
the terminology ensures that the reader will have little
choice but to accept the interpretations of the writer.
To what extent is it reasonable to claim that mana
equals prana? The average reader has little possibility
to evaluate the author’s claims” (pp. 55-56).
This all goes to the securing of charismatic, religious,
and esoteric authority.
The supposed esoteric core of perennialist
transpersonal psychology is thus exposed as more of
a trick of the light or sleight of hand than an eternal
truth—a religious globalization, a One-Truthism that
has more in common with authoritarian religion than
it does with an envisioned New Age paradise. Yet
even if perennialism is thrown onto the philosophical
funeral pyre, this cultural tradition of cosmological
hybridization runs deep in America’s cultural psyche (and
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
beyond), and many remain bound to it. Nevertheless,
with New Age transpersonalism’s paradise unbound,
spiritual alternatives become available to the grassroots
contemporary spiritual community which are perhaps
closer to the original New Age values that existed
before the upsurge of its more narcissistic or totalitarian
elaborations—values such as collaboration, healing, and
participation in divinity. The recovery of Martin Buber’s
relational spirituality becomes a possible alternative—
perhaps even a crucial one.
The Participatory Turn
and Relational Spirituality
Recently, with what has been called the participatoryturn
in transpersonal psychology (e.g., Ferrer 2002; Ferrer &
Sherman, 2008; Heron, 1992, 1998, 2006; Lahood,
2007), there has been a call for a more relational
spirituality in transpersonalism in which human needs,
interests, and identity—is the linga franca.
Prior to this proposed participatory turn
Brant Cortright (1997) was straightforward about the
transpersonal cosmos:
The fundamental assumption of transpersonal
psychology is that our true identity is more than a
psychological ego or self but a spiritual being. This
spiritual context, founded on the two perennial
traditions of theism and nondualism see the
psychological healing and growth of this self as part
of its journey toward realizing its identity with its
spiritual source. (p. 230)
Here, according to this statement, the axiomatic,
fundamental, and first principle of transpersonal
psychology is perennialism—even though the theistic
branch has received less emphasis (e.g., Washburn, 1996).
Much of current transpersonal therapy and inquiry are
bound to the idea that eventually one will come to know
the Real, our True Self, or, as the Zen Buddhist puts it,
our Original Face... before we were born.
The scope of this turn should not be
underestimated, as it stands to change the original
face of transpersonal theory—and potentially New
Age thinking—beyond recognition. This radical
restructuring of relationships and spirituality without
fealty to the assumptions inherent in a New Age
perennial overseer or idealized nondual Eastern religions
heralds a major rebirth. Such a project is more than a
rebranding of transpersonalism; it is a reordering of
the transpersonal cosmos, nearer to what Peter Berger
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 49
(1967) called “cosmization,” which is the “enterprise by
which a sacred cosmos is established” (p. 25). In this
case the older perennial cosmos is being contested by
a participatory cosmos, one that may lead to genuinely
new spiritual shores (cf. Ferrer, 2002). This thesis is
discussed more fully in “Relational Spirituality, Part 2.
The Belief in Others as a Hindrance to Enlightenment:
Narcissism and the Denigration of Relationship within
Transpersonal Psychology and the New Age” (in this
issue).
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International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 53
 Notes
1.  Prothero (1997) noted that this is in fact not true–
various American Indian tribes had practiced
cremation.
2.  I am much indebted to Prothero’s (1997) excellent
study entitled, “Lived Religion and the Dead: the
Cremation Movement in Gilded Age America.”
3. Olcott and Blavatsky constructed a lineage of mul­
tiple sources, an early example of the Western
esoteric tradition as a “locus of massive globalization”
(Hammer, 2001, p. 50).
4. This paper is not an attempt to theorize hybridity (see
Lahood, 2008) nor is it an attempt at an exhaustive
account of the hybridities blending on the ground in
the transpersonal and New Age imagination; because
of space limitations I will focus on the blend of Asian
and Christian religion in America as it pertains to
transpersonal psychology. Left out of this version is
the important African-American hybrid cosmology
that grew from slavery, Christianity, and African
religion, which bred a powerful religious ethos
with resilience and resistance at its heart (Akinyele,
2003)—an ethos in many ways adopted by the
counter-culture. Another important cosmological
hybrid (also to be elaborated on at a later date) is the
peyote religion with its blend of Aztec, Christian,
and sacred (psychotropic) plant elements. This
religion spread rapidly in the 1890s and came to
exert a profound influence in the world view and
religious imagination of the 1960s counterculture.
It is perhaps no surprise that young Americans of
the time, in their resistance of materialist America,
found their patterns of religion and psychedelic drug
taking from two peoples oppressed by European
colonization: African Americans and American
Indians.
5. Author’s Note: Paradise Bound was published with
several mistakes made during the typesetting phase
of publication. The publishers agreed to reset a
version without the mistakes and this can be found
at www. relationalspirit.com
6. In Huxley and Watts one can see what are perhaps
the first sprouts of the discipline that came to be
the transpersonal movement and eventually the
New Age; indeed Anthony Sutich (1969) defined
the transpersonal movement some years later as “a
group... who are interested in those ultimate human
54 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
capacities and potentialities that have no systematic
place in positivistic or behaviorist theory” (p.
15, emphasis in original). The description of the
transpersonal movement’s interests that followed has
been called “one of the earliest descriptions of what
would later become the New Age” (Drury, 1989,
pp. 38-39); this description listed, among others,
the following topics: “individual and species-wide
metaneeds, ultimate values, unitive consciousness,
peak experiences, B-values, ecstasy, mystical
experiences, awe, being, self-actualization, essence,
bliss, wonder, ultimate meaning, transcendence of
self, spirit, oneness, cosmic awareness... maximum
interpersonal encounter” (Sutich, 1969, p. 16).
7. Here are Spretnak’s (1982) observations:
From the overtly political dimension of the
sixties, we carried forth an awareness of power
dynamics and structures of dominance within
religious and other institutions. From the
counterculture dimension of the sixties came
additional political challenges to deeply held
assumptions. A range of exploratory experiences
had peeled back the tightly proscribed
“normalcy” to reveal unimagined richness
and depth of being. A number of experiential
awakenings lingered well into the seventies:
the honoring of the body; the revelation of an
expansive spirituality; the realization of human
embeddednesss in nature and in the dynamics of
the cosmos; the liberty of nonrigid, egalitarian
social forms; and the confidence to create such
forms and practices according to personal and
communal needs, dreams and desires. (p. xii)
8.   In my opinion notions of higher or evolved
consciousness are easily adopted (introjected) and
become spiritual defenses.
9.    This will be here referred to as the nirvanic defense.
10.  A nother popular perennial system, Hameed Ali’s
diamond approach (1996), requires some comment
on the subject of narcissism and perennialism.
It is an Americanized hybrid blend of Western
object relations with Sufism and gestalt awareness
(Cortright, 1997, p. 91). Interestingly, Heron (1998)
has identified Hameed Ali’s work as Western
Buddhism (p. 109). This perhaps points to the slippery
nature of hybridity. According to Cortright (1997),
the founder of the approach “positions himself in
Lahood
 the nondual tradition with its accompanying biases
and accepts the Buddhist notion of no self, yet speaks
of essence as something that mediates between
the individual and the Absolute” (p. 94). Thus his
praxis appears to be a version of Americanized One-
Truthism (which as I am suggesting here as deep
implications in the creation of narcissistic modes of
consciousness).
Narcissism is the dominant leitmotif in this system
but, according to Heron (1998), there is a problem
here relating to
the Western Buddhist’s definition of narcissism
as contraction upon the separate self and
alienation from the presence of Being (Almaas,
1996). If a person is defined in theory and
represented in spiritual practice as nothing but
a separate self, then... it is an open question
as to what degree the various forms of higher
narcissism—supposedly a reaction to spiritual
transformation... are themselves the product of
the restrictive nature of the definition and the
practice.... To raise the question certainly not
to deny the pronounced tendency of a person to
contract into an egoic and separate self-sense (p.
109).
With nondual traditions everything but the Atman-
Brahman or Buddha-mind is defined as nothing but
egoic clinging—which means that any attachment
to the world would be deemed narcissistic including
the person’s relationships. Indeed Cortright (1997)
noted that in Hameed Ali’s practice “the focus on
inner states neglects the reality of interpersonal
relationships [and] keeping an intra-psychic focus
downplays the importance of the inter-subjective
field” (p. 94)—another non-relational, one-sided self
spirituality.
Grof’s holotropic breathwork also falls into this
category. It is practiced under a nondual perennial
umbrella within what Jorge Ferrer (2002) has called
perspectivist perennialism (p. 81). According to
Ferrer, Grof’s transpersonalism is a brand of neo-
Vedanta and he has pointed out that Grof’s writings
repeatedly devalues the “material world as ilusory,
imperfect or even defiled (p. 82). Almost 20 years
ago Richard Tarnas (1991) placed Grof’s findings
into a more participatory framework, yet a strong
perennial message is still foundational in Grof’s
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
transpersonal training, coupled and with a strong
emphasis on inner states and individually-focused
vertical spirituality. For all its merits (see Lahood,
2008), Grof’s holotropic breathwork—lying on a
mat couch with eyes closed, or at times used as an
adjunct to Buddhist vipassana meditation (sitting
with no eye contact)—is a non-relational practice.
Breathwork can also be conducted in a more
collaborative/action research approach which
can also serve to bypass the subtle Oriental
authoritarianism inherent in perennial/evolutionary
schemes. Heron (1998) has pointed out that Grof’s
work is not entirely free from Oriental authority. I
recently attended two Grof transpersonal training
and noted that the head trainer on both occasions
recommended the approach of Buddhist teacher
Tsultrim Allione (2008) which advocates a strong
disembodied nondual message. She wrote for
example that the value of her practice comes from
“dissolving our own bodies... and the experience of
non-dual meditative awareness that occurs in the
final step of this process” (Lahood, 2008, p. 7).
11. Interestingly, Maslow appears to have been either
confused or conflicted about the nature of or validity
of personhood and in his writings he swings from
person-centered views to cosmos-centric views of
personhood and reality (Taylor, 2006). According
to Maslow (1968) in the healthier person “anger
is reactive (to a present situation) rather than a
characterological reservoir from the past... it is realistic
effective response to something real in the present,
for instance to injustice, exploitation or attack,
it takes the form of decisiveness, selfaffirmation,
self-protection, justified indignation, fighting
against evil or the like” (p. 62). Evil, according to
Evans (1993), amounts to self-deceptive “hidden
narcissism” (p. 200); thus when someone enacts
the New Age nirvanic or yogic defense, that is, the
self inflating claim to higher consciousness, they
are in my opinion, more often than not, trafficking
in something akin to evil. In my opinion it is right
and proper in the immediate present experience to
confront and oppose this narcissistic spirituality
with healthy human anger. However, nirvanic
defenders will then claim that this simply shows
them how unevolved the angry respondent really
is because spiritual people do not get angry (cf.
Batista 1996). This partly because spiritual defenses
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 55
 justify and constrain parts of the self including
healthy feelings and affect. It is also in part due
to the fact that many of the mindfulness practices
characteristic of the New Age and/or contemporary
Western spirituality derive from Buddhism, and
according to Robert Masters, there has been an
unfortunate and unquestioned adoption of Buddhist
views in the development of a Western spirituality
that is uncomfortable with anger (2000). The term,
anger, is often conflated with such terms as hostile,
vicious, nasty, hateful, and malicious without any
real discrimination. In Buddhism anger is generally
conceived as an unwholesome and afflicted state
devoid of morality and skill (Nhat Hanh, 1998,
p. 92). Masters (2000) has pointed out that the
predominate way anger is handled is to unskilfully
push it into a subterranean realm where it really does
become malignant and rank (2000). This congealed
excrement in the basement then pushes the spiritual
nose too high air (cf. Heron, 1992) again promoting
a form of spiritual narcissism fuelled by unprocessed
distress.
12. Support is not generally given to the inflated shell
with its self-entitlement but to the authentic person
imprisoned inside it who felt unlovable and unworthy
and erected the shell in the first place: “This does not
mean protecting the person from disappointment
by supporting the outer compensatory self
(Battista, 1996, p. 258). The outer shell needs
“disconfirmations... which manage to break in and
poke holes in one’s inflated system” (Rosenthal,
1987, p. 312) until the structure dissipates and the
person opens to more authentic relational modes
of being. Collaborative inquiry (see Lahood, 2010,
the second part of the current paper, in this issue)
could certainly be used as a process to reduce
narcissism, with some important caveats: personal
psychodynamics can be so entwined with her false
spiritual persona that it can be difficult for her to
participate relationally. It is difficult to confront
such a person about her entitlement because this is
met with deep hurt, rage, and withdrawal—if not
en-guard the whole inquiry runs the risk of being
tilted toward a private therapy session—still focused
on her. Secondly, cooperative inquiry is not to be
mistaken for psychotherapy for while some skill
in co-handling unfinished business stirred in the
inquiry is important and warranted (Heron, 1998),
56 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
fundamentally collaborative inquiry is a series of
inquiry cycles oriented toward transformation,
self-transfiguration, and the co-creation of a social/
spiritual event; it is categorically not psychotherapy,
although it does have transfiguring power for those
who are fortunate enough to get beyond the breakers
of self-centeredness. In such a situation the helpful
thing to do is sensitively suggest that she or he seek
some solid psychotherapy, but of course this is to risk
upsetting the whole applecart even further. Chakra
balancing, tantric sex, and singing in Aramaic,
while potentially enjoyable New Age pastimes, are
not quite the same as those processes that can break
down and reduce self-centeredness.
13.   I do not mean to imply that it is only New Agers who
traffic in spiritual ethnocentricy and narcissism.
14.  Détente is a French word meaning to relax or ease
tensions between rivals, a term that came into vogue
in the 1970s with Cold War diplomacy.
15. With the failure of Western religion and secular
materialism, some drew a parallel with what Hindu
religion described as the age of Kali-yuga (not to be
confused with the destructive dance of the Goddess
Kali). The Kali-Yuga is the last of four millennium
cycles or yugas (a cosmic saga in complexity and
temporal scope which dwarfed Christianity) in
which civilization and spiritually were held to
degenerate into a Dark Age in which people would
turn away from God, and eventually the world
would be enveloped in a fire that would destroy all
evil and give birth to a new age.
16. However, for sociologists, there is a problem with
this position. As Heelas (1996) has pointed out, in
New Age religion unity firmly prevails over diversity.
Wouter Hanegraaff (2003) has argued that this
creates an underlying incoherence in New Age
perennialism (wholeness/unity/one-truthism) which
has serious implications for other cultures and the
state of mind of the New Ager herself. New Age
Unity, he said, must inevitably translate into a
form of spiritual totalitarianism. He argued that
New Age spirituality is more appropriately seen as
an aspect of the global Americanization. American
values of democracy and religious freedom are
intimately linked with the New Age phenomenon
of a spiritual supermarket. According to Hanegraaff
the problem lies at the heart of the primary New
Age mission: that of healing the world from global
Lahood
 fragmentation which the New Age envisions as a
movement toward global wholeness, and to “bring
the cultures and religions of the world together by
overcoming dogmatic differences and emphasizing
universal wisdom traditions common to all of them”
(p. 16). But this in itself, while an understandable and
commendable sentiment, is a form of ethnocentrism,
which while attempting to go beyond the dualism
and exclusivism of Christianity falls into the same
trap. The logic is simple but usually unquestioned by
New Agers who tend to think that thinking itself,
particularly critical thinking, is seen as negative and
therefore part of the problem.
17.   Shamanism, now an important part of the New Age,
is another area that can potentially breed spiritual
narcissism.
18. Commenting on an earlier draft of this paper,
Heron believed his spiritual projection theory could,
in principle, apply to the New Age scenario and
argued that “New Agers have culturally soaked up
Orientalized nondualism with its authoritarianism
and projected their innate spiritual authority onto
their internalized beliefs—resulting in the unaware
giving away of their spiritual autonomy” (personal
communication, December 17, 2010).
However, I do not think it is common to project
onto unconsciously internalized beliefs. Rather, I hold
these as introjections—which is to say, unawarely
internalized cultural beliefs and fantasies, along with
the authority, meaning, and charisma that they have
come to embody and which they pass on to others
in speech acts. Examining these internalized beliefs
to find out where they help or hinder one’s spiritual
development is the important issue. But here readers
must discern for themselves.
19. Persons claiming elite membership in globalizing
religious groups with the special status apportioned
to Oriental enlightenment (in the form of masters and
gurus) can, in my observation, use this membership
as a source of narcissistic supply.
20. Just as the afterlife is imagined differently, so do
the ultimate mystical goals of different cultures and
traditions differ. Wulff (2000) here summed up the
contextualist position:
The Jewish “preexperiential” or “conditioning
pattern,” Katz pointed out in illustration,
includes the teaching that experiences of unity
Relational Spirituality, Part 1
with the divine do not happen, given the
Jewish conception of God as radically Other
and the principles traditionally recommended
for reaching the mystic goal. The result is that
ecstatic, self-forgetting moments of unity, of
absorption into God, are rare among Jewish
mystics, who are far more likely to experience
“the Divine Throne, or the angel Metatron, or
aspects of the Sefiroth [Divine Emanations], or
the heavenly court and palaces, or the Hidden
Torah, or God’s secret Names” (Katz, 1978, p.
34). The complex Buddhist preconditioning,
in contrast, prepares the Buddhist mystic for
a rather different experience, nirvana, a state
not of relationship but apparently of selfless
tranquility. (p. 426; italics in original).
21.    Ken Ring (2000) has noted in Religious Wars in the
NDE Movement, the attempt by various religious
groups including A Course in Miracles, Theosophists,
Anthroposophists, and certain Tibetan Buddhists,
among others, to annex and co-opt the near-
death experience (NDE) territory. Soteriologically
speaking, each religion offers different perspectives on
the afterlife. To unify religion with a transcendental
unity is again to relax these tensions.
About the Author
Gregg Lahood, PhD, is an anthropologist, psychotherapist
and educator in private practice in Australia. He teaches
and practices Relationship Based Spiritual Inquiry in
Australia and internationally. Dr Lahood is the co-
director of the Centre of Relational Spirituality, Byron
Bay and can be contacted at info@gregglahood.com
About the Journal
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 57
 Relational Spirituality, Part 2
The Belief in Others as a Hindrance to Enlightenment:
Narcissism and the Denigration of Relationship
within Transpersonal Psychology and the New Age
Gregg Lahood
Northern Rivers Gestalt Institute
Lismore, NSW, Australia

The aim of this paper is to tease out from the New Age religion and religious transpersonal
psychology a more relational spirituality. Humanistic and transpersonal psychologies were
important forces in the emergence of the social phenomenon of the New Age. New Age
transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical
affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality, which is central to
the emerging participatory paradigm, swims against strong and popular currents in New
Age transpersonal thinking which tend to see spirituality as an individual, personal, inner
pursuit, often into Eastern/Oriental nondualism. Whatever the merits of impersonal Advaita
Vedanta or Buddhism—and there are of course merits—these are categorically not relational
spiritualities.
Keywords: cosmological hybridity, New Age religion, transpersonal psychology, spiritual
narcissism, relational spirituality

In India we find perhaps the most radical of all versions of world rejection,
culminating in the great image of the Buddha, and the world is a burning
house and man‘s urgent need is a way to escape it.
—Robert Bellah, 1972, p. 264
While the transpersonal movement has been informed and inspired by peak
experiences of virtually all religious traditions, it not surprisingly has drawn
most comfortably from Buddhist theory and practice.
—Robert McDermott, 1993, p. 208

H
orizontal or relational spirituality can be seen as
an intervention in overly vertical, non-relational
trends in New Age-transpersonalism’s thinking
and practices. This paper continues the points made in
“Relational Spirituality, Part 1: Paradise Unbound:
Cosmic Hybridity, and Spiritual Narcissism in the ‘One
Truth’ of New Age-Transpersonalism” (Lahood, 2010,
in this issue), demonstrating how a relational approach
can surmount many of the difficulties that inure to
New Age-transpersonalism. Ironically, Martin Buber’s
relational ethos was also present in both the humanist
and transpersonal movements in the form of Gestalt
therapy which had assimilated Buber’s ideas to its canon
(although Buber argued that true mutuality could not
be achieved in the therapeutic relationship). Perhaps the
most central of the psycho-technologies employed in the
humanistic era, along with the encounter group, gestalt
therapy strongly embraced one of Buber’s central ideas—
the contrast of what he called I-it relating and I-thou
relating. In the words of Brant Cortright (1997):
I-it relating is normal, secular relating in which the
other is a seen as an object, a thing to be used, a
means to an end. I-thou relating, on the other hand,
brought a person into a sacred relationship in which
the other is viewed as an end in itself (p. 106).1
It was this appreciation of the authentic, the inter-
subjective and the call for equality that could potentially
push Buber’s I-thou intention to “its highest culmination
in a transpersonal perspective which truly embraces the

58 International Journal of Transpersonal Lahood

Studies Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp.
International 58-78
sacredness of relationship” (p. 106). Here, potentially,
the transpersonal is in the interpersonal (Naranjo, 1978).
However, there is a serious question as to whether this
central tenet of Buber’s was ever really fully embraced
by the transpersonal movement. Wilber (1999), for
example, ranks Buber’s spirituality beneath his Oriental
non-dualism. For Buber the true estate of authentic
spiritual realization was not based in an individual’s inner
experience but in this realm of the Between, a realm to
which he gave ontological status (Ferrer, 2002, p. 119).
It seems to me that Buber’s relational ethos was
lost in the stampede for higher consciousness. The blending
of the American Transcendentalist trinity (Christianity,
Buddhism, and Advaita; Lahood, 2010—this issue) in
the psychedelic imagination, coupled with humanistic
psychology, brought transpersonal psychology into
being—which in turn gave rise to a Wilberian paradise
to which the movement was bound for at least 20 years
(Lahood, 2008, 2010). Indeed, a close look at the early
transpersonal movement’s commitments shows that they
were not particularly relational, but tended instead to
overtly devalue relationship.
The Marriage of Maslow and Zen
T he affirmation of self was a central aspect of
humanistic psychology, central to the self realization
or self actualization espoused by Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls,
and Abraham Maslow. It called for a kind of autonomy
and independence that suggested not needing other
people—a sort of, you go your way I’ll go mine, approach
that is attested to by the so-called gestalt prayer:
I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your
expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to
mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we
find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped (Fritz Perls, 1969).
It has been claimed that this kind of robust
Nietzschean philosophy found an expression in Mary
Daley’s elitist feminist theology that urged self-
sufficiency and a willingness to abandon obligations
and commitments to others without feelings of guilt or
emotional ambivalence (Morris, 1994, p. 181).2 These
rugged humanistic ideals would be coupled with the
extreme individualism of Buddhism—compassionate,
maybe, but not very relational; this attitude still appears
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
to be a central foundation of transpersonalism and its
New Age shadow.3
Here is an example of Buddhism’s historically
non-relational ethos: The psychoanalytic anthropologist
Melford Spiro (1987), who studied Buddhism on the
ground in Burma, viewed Burmese Theravadan Buddhist
religion as a culturally constituted psychological defense
mechanism. In a discussion about Buddhist “goers forth,”
the men who leave home to join the fraternity of monks,
he recounted a famous Buddhist teaching story about an
earlier incarnation of the Buddha who leaves his children
with dubious caregivers as he sets out on his quest for
enlightenment:
Beginning with the Buddha himself, “leaving home”
has meant abandoning not only parents, but also—
since some “goers forth” have been married when
embarking upon their quest for enlightenment—
wives and children as well [the classic locus of this
story] is the Vessentara Jakata, the most famous
Buddhist myth in Theravada Buddhist societies
(The Jakata 1957: vol. 6). The Prince Vessantara,
abandoned his beloved wife and children in order
to seek Enlightenment. To attain his quest he gave
his children as servants to a cruel Brahmin, and
his wife to yet another. When his children, beaten
and oppressed by the Brahmin, managed to escape
and find their way back to Vessentara, he was filled
with “dire grief”—his heart palpitated, his mouth
panted, blood fell from his eyes—until he arrived at
the insight that “All this pain comes from affection
and no other cause; I must quiet this affection, and
be calm.” Having achieved that insight, he was able
to abandon his children. (p. 279)
Thus when faced with the parental responsibility that
comes with procreative relationship the hallowed Buddha-
to-be had no raft of emotional skills or interpersonal
competencies to draw on, and could only redouble
his efforts in the practice of tanha (severing of bonds).
Having achieved his own serenity, he turned his back on
his abused children, children whom he put in harm’s way
in the first place, diligently leaving to them to work out
their own salvation.
Spiro explained that the primary responsibility
for the Buddhist is his attempt to attain nirvana,
relationships with parents, beloveds, wives, and children
not­withstanding. Reflecting on the cosmological design
of the Buddha, anthropologist Morton Klass (1995)
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 59
wrote, “Nothing really exists in the universe but desire
and the manifestation of desire, since all of these offer
nothing but continued suffering, each person should
strive to relinquish desire in all its forms and by doing
so achieve nirvana, which, for the Buddhist, means the
blessedness of nonexistence” (p. 52). Once he or she has
a “comprehension of the true characteristics of existence
viz., impermanence, suffering, and the absence of ego.
This comprehension, in turn, is believed to lead to the
severance of all desire for, and cathexis of, the world”
(Spiro, 1987, p. 152). “Son and wife, father and mother…
and relatives [are] the different objects of desire” (p. 279),
and therefore a hindrance to enlightenment.
Spiro wrote that this attitude is also present not
only in other Asian religions such as Taoism, but also in
Christianity: 4
Lu Hsiu Ching retired from the world to the mountains
where he studied. He left the mountains for a while
to look for some medicine. When he passed through
his native place he stayed at his home for a few days.
At that time his daughter began to run a fever all
of the sudden and fell into a critical condition. The
family pleaded with him to cure her. But Hsiu Ching
left, saying: “having abandoned my family, I am in
the midst of training. The house I stopped by is no
different from an inn to me.” (p. 279)
The sage’s critically ill daughter and distressed family
were of no more interest to him than a transient stranger
in a bar. Are these Buddhist and Taoist teachings and
demonstrations really the skillful means of the highly
evolved or are they more like psychologically defensive
behaviors aggrandized as high spirituality?
As the human-potential movement became
enamored with deterritorialized, detraditionalized, and
idealized Eastern religion—particularly Hindu Advaita,
Tibetan Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism—it naturally
enough began to evolve away from secular humanistic
psychology, away from interpersonal encounter, and
toward a more impersonal discipline.5 Transpersonal
New Agism began to take shape in a milieu that brought
together the very powerful ego-burning experiential
therapies of the human potential movement (e.g., the
encounter group, neo-Reichian/gestalt techniques) and
the psychedelic experience of the consciousness expanding
movement with the Eastern liberations espoused in the
languages of Hinduism and Buddhism. In one very real
sense, Western humanistic psychology with its peak
60 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
experiences was joined at the hip with Eastern spiritual
concepts—a marriage of Maslow and Zen.
Mahayana Zen Buddhism was the most
important influence on the counterculture with its
philosophy of emptiness (Sanskrit, sunyata; Japanese ku;
Glock & Bellah, 1976, p. 2). As transpersonal philosopher
Michael Washburn (1995) had it, “In the early years
transpersonal theory was predominantly humanistic in
its psychology and Eastern in its religion, a synthesis of
Maslow and Buddhism (primarily Zen)” (p. 3, emphasis
supplied). The term Zen here may be a misnomer, since
what came to be popular American Zen was not very Zen
at all.6 Washburn’s term “synthesis” is therefore worthy of
scrutiny. In understanding the marriage of Maslow and
Zen in the young American mind-world of the 1960s,
one finds an important key to understanding New Age
transpersonalism, the marriage of East and West, self-
spirituality, and the phenomenon that is given a superficial
gloss as the perennial philosophy.
The philosophical fly-in-the-ointment for early
transpersonal psychology may well have been the
Buddhist concept of anatta (no-self; Morris, 1994, p. 66).
While Buddhism shares many doctrines with Hinduism,
what really separates Buddhism from Hinduism is this
radical doctrine—a doctrine that belongs wholly unto
Buddhism. The crucial difference between Buddhism’s
anatta (and its correlates: sunyata, void, nirvana) and the
godheads found in Brahmanic Hinduism (e.g., Advaita
Vedanta, Kashmiri Shaivism) and Mahivarian Jainism
is that Buddhist Nirvana has no ontological status
(Bharati, 1965, pp. 26-27). When the Buddha denies the
Hindu’s atman he also denies his eternal Brahman. As
feminist Rita Gross (1994) has written, “Philosophically,
the teachings about ego-less-ness deny that there is any
permanent, abiding, unchanging essence that is the ‘real
person,’ whether the essence denied is the Hindu atman…
or the more familiar Christian personal and eternal soul”
(p. 159).
Nevertheless, there is still an overlap between
Buddhism and Hinduism in that the personal self fares
no better in Hindu traditions than it does in Buddhism,
for in Hinduism it is only talked about long enough to
denigrate it and reject its ontological and empirical status.
The self (in contrast with the Self) is at best assimilated
to a theological construct; in other words, the person is
identified with a metaphysical Self (capital), with no self
(lower case) remaining (Bharati, 1985, p. 89). This is
also the Wilberian position, as Washburn (1995) wrote,
Lahood
“On this point Wilber and the structural-hierarchical
paradigm concur with the principle Eastern view espoused
by Buddhism and nondualistic Advaita Vedanta: the
individual self, although seemingly real, is ultimately an
illusion” (p. 35). In Buddhism the Big Self of the Vedantist
also disappears—there is no satchitananda, no sentient
cosmos awash with absolute being, consciousness, and
bliss—only the blessed release from existence, the flame
blown out.
Morris (1994) has pointed out the “the great pains” to
which transpersonal theorists have gone in their attempts
to “reinterpret Buddhism and make the doctrine of anatta
less disturbing, and more in harmony with Western
conceptions of the self” (p. 66). He showed how various
writers in the field (Mokusen Miyuki, Claire Owens, the
Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, and later Ken Wilber) have
conflated and overlapped or hybridized Zen Buddhism
with what appear to be Hindu/Gnostic descriptions of Self
and the process of merging with the divine. These efforts
are reminiscent of the Romantic version of Buddhism
offered by Arnold (1879/1885), which envisioned Buddhist
extinction as a dewdrop that “slips into the shining sea”
(p. 275). This blend was mixed in with a liberal helping of
Carl Jung’s analytical psychology and his self realization
project:
Whereas Buddha questioned the reality of the self...
contemporary transpersonal psychologists, influ­
enced by Jung, find a “deep” self in the unconscious
and see “self realization” as the “merging” of this ego
or self with some Universal Consciousness or Mind
(equated with the void [sunyata] as the ultimate
reality). (Morris, 1994, p. 66).
Whatever this construction might be—to return to
Washburn’s comment for a moment—it “ain’t” very Zen.
It appears that the transpersonal way around
Buddhism’s thorny crown of anatta/no-self was to blend
Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism—a process long
alive in the hybridizing American religious imagination
(Lahood, 2010, in this issue). This is no mean feat because
Vedanta, according to Shankara, claims its nondualism
as the final and highest order of consciousness—that
is, asserts it to be above Buddhism (Morris, 1994). In
constrast, Nagarjuna, the important reformer of middle
way Buddhism,
trenchantly criticized, following Buddha’s example,
the Upanishad and Vedanta doctrine that Brahman
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
(absolute spirit) was the sole reality in the word. There
was no “ground” or creator of the phenomenal world,
and no “soul” within the human subject, identical
with Brahman. (p. 65)
Nagarjuna along with the Buddha claimed that the
famous central tenant of Hinduism, tat tvam asi (thou
art that), was nothing but an illusion. Thus it would
seem that the spiritual ulimates found in Vedanta and
Buddhism are not comfortable bedfellows.
Nevertheless, observe the bewitching way in
which Grof (1998) easily joined Hindu and Buddhist
postulates together from data gathered from persons with
hybridizing minds amplified in psychedelic states:
On several occasions, people who experienced both
the Absolute Consciousness and the Void had the
insight that these two states are essentially identical
and interchangeable, in spite of the fact that they
can be experientially distinguished from each other
and they might appear conceptually and logically
incompatible. (p. 32)
Grof’s apparent forcing together of two competing
systems guts the authority within each system through
a crafty amalgamation and does away with the inherent
dualism of competing truth claims, and the dualism of
Us and Them, but in doing so he creates a new and more
slippery authority, a third liminal space (cf. Bhabha, 1995;
Young, 1995)—the so-called esoteric core of the perennial
philosophy. With it came the rhetoric that beyond the taint
of doctrinal difference, beyond the Buddha, Nagarjuna,
and Shankara, beyond the stain of culture and language,
and beyond the colorful clothing of religion, was the
transcendental unity of all religions; for the faithful,
One Pure Truth—undefiled by the gross relational world
in which humans live and breathe. To perennialize the
religious universe—to claim a transcendent unity of all
religions—is to both appropriate Buddhism and to put
it on an even footing with the liberations of the other
religions. Morris (1994) is adamant, however, that this
conflation of the Absolute deity of Vedanta with the no-
self of Buddhism is “woefully misleading” and warns that
Buddhism can be simply “twisted” to “serve the needs of
the adherents of religious mysticism” (p. 69).
Be that as it might, between 1963 and 1974 the
motivation behind the intense desire of young people
to experience and perform another reality through
“chemical Nirvanas” (Furst & Schafer, 1996, p. 507)
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 61
was agonizingly bound to America’s war on Vietnam and
a felt loss of innocence. The world is indeed a burning
house and the Buddha’s salvific, if solitary message is
that suffering ends when one relinquishes all attachment
to the world (in the Buddha’s day there was no napalm,
mechanized warfare, or nuclear weaponry, nor the threat
of WWIII). Oppressed by the power and policies of the
Christian American nation state many turned from the
horrors of man-made war and politics and sought refuge,
release, and revitalized spiritual power in the alternatives
proffered by the East. A unique and highly culturally-
relative spiritual response was sought to counter the war.
The following paragraph is a description of that culture’s
psychotropic quest, in the words of anthropologist
Raymond Prince (1974):
The individual’s ego regresses to earlier levels of
adaptation in an attempt to discover an alternate
solution…the mystical descent is to the earliest level
of experience, before the creation of the world as it
were, in the primal chaos, long before self and other
have become differentiated, before space and time,
before language…the mystic state is a “flashback” of
that experience. The mystic returns from his descent
with the perennial mystical message: at the root of
things all is one, all is good, the universe may be
trusted; salvation lies in simplification, in the de-
institutionalization, and above all in love. (p. 257)
According to sociologist Donald Stone (1976), members
of the religious counter-culture of that time sought to
“transcend the oppressiveness of the culture by transforming
themselves as individuals” (p. 93). It is this action, this
social imperative to transform the self (self-spirituality),
that prepares the way for New Age transpersonalism. This
early movement had at its core what Stone called “gestalt
consciousness” (p. 94), a form of awareness training (as
noted with a foot in Zen Buddhism) that advocated a
non-judgmental attitude to the contents of attention and
an emphasis on the awareness of the present moment.
The gestalt attitude was the basic foundation
of human potential groups and practices as it enabled
both bodily awareness and personal insight (Stone,
1976). Exquisite phenomenological attention to present
experience could also apparently result in a so-called
satori—appropriating a Japanese Zen Buddhist term—a
non-dual experience, an awakening, and a seeing-though
of illusion. Thus, its powerful techniques were capable
of opening one to transpersonal awareness; with this
62 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
the secular human potential movement soon evolved
toward a more mystical orientation. Stone also pointed
out that the descriptions of consciousness pervading this
movement were similar to psychedelic experiences on
which the early innovators had conducted research. He
wrote:
Participants in these “transpersonal” disciplines
report experiences of tapping into cosmic energy,
of being at one with the universe, or of realizing
the true Self… to the extent that this movement
increasingly provides experiences of transcendence,
cosmic consciousness, the Self beyond the self, or
of nothingness, it may be considered religious. (pp.
104-105)
Hence comes a religious transpersonalism.
It seems evident that what one sees in this
evolution from the gestalt attitude (which carried with
it the promise of Buber’s I-thou relational spirituality)
to a more transpersonal orientation toward cosmic
consciousness (cf. Ram Dass, 1971) is an evolution that
seems to prefer the liberations favored by specific nondual
Eastern religions. As Stone (1976) observed, “the self-
transcendence of merging with infinite cosmic energy or
the ground of all being” (p. 96) had become the coin of
that realm. Buber and his appreciation of the Between and
the attention to relationship as a potential transpersonal
domain of praxis, seems to have become a lover left at the
altar in favor of realizing one’s Original Face, Essence,
or True Self—an impersonal nondual eradication of the
many in favor of the One. In this way the transpersonal
movement lost touch with its relational foundation,
prefigured in the human potential movement and the
more relational commune culture.
According to the new discipline’s founding
father, Abraham Maslow, transpersonal psychology—a
term coined for the movement by Stanislav Grof (2008)—
was to be “centered in the cosmos rather than in human
needs and interests, going beyond humanness, identity and
self-actualization” (Maslow, 1968, iii, emphasis supplied).
Maslow’s ideas were to become elaborate and pervasive.
Seven years later in a popular text, Transpersonal
Psychologies (Tart, 1975) Claire Owens (1975) claimed
Zen Buddhism as a “psychology of self realization”
and wrote that the Buddha’s purpose for man was that
he “awaken his original mind that has been covered
by the dust of intellection and delusions of the relative
world” (p. 165). “The individual’s unconsciousness (self)
Lahood
merges with Pure Consciousness or Formless Self”—the
dewdrop slips into the shining sea—this Zen, as Morris
(1994, p. 66) has pointed out, is not very Zen. One can
see that the stage has been set for transpersonalism to
become a largely impersonal, non-relational, cosmo-
centric psychology—the motivation for its social actors:
transcendence, detachment, dissociation, merging with
the One. It was at this same moment in time, just after
the end of the Vietnam war, that Ken Wilber’s star rose
as the virtuoso of the movement’s neo-perennial epoch.
Some two decades later a book focused on
transpersonal psychotherapy (Cortright, 1997) claimed
that transpersonalism was coming of age and that its
bourgeoning worldview was to be found reflected in all
manner of media—books, workshops, and psychotherapy
trainings, and so forth. That same book observed that Ken
Wilber was without doubt “the most widely known and
influential writer in the field of transpersonal psychology
today” and that Wilber’s “historical importance should
not be underestimated” (pp. 64-65). However, Wilber’s
perennialism has come under sustained criticism from
within the transpersonal movement (Capriles, 2009;
Ferrer, 2002; Heron, 1998; Lahood, 2008; Rothberg &
Kelly, 1998; Wright, 1996) among others.
Satsang and Internalized Self-Rejection
O ne of the claims of critics is that Wilber’s system
over-privileges patriarchal, world-denying religions
such as the Gnosticism of Plotinus, the Buddhism
of Gautama Siddhartha, and the Advaita Vedanta of
Shankara. These religions, as suggested above, historically
tended to devalue the phenomenal world, the human
body, womb, women, world, sex, and relationship (cf.
Laughlin, 1990): Buddhism with its doctrine of no-self
and its desire to sever ties from the world; Gnosticism
with its rigid divide between the material world and
spirit; and the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara with his well
known modern follower, Ramana Maharshi, who made
it very clear “that the Self is in no way related to the
body but is identified with an impersonal deity” (Morris,
2006, p. 120).
Wilber held out Maharshi as “an exemplar of
nondual realization” (Cortright, 1997, p. 73), However,
Heron (1998) was less impressed with Wilber’s nonduality,
writing that the “return of the one to the one, the absolute
realization of the identity of ineffable formlessness and
the infinitude of forms, is simply a pneumatic illusion,
the final most impressive defense against coming to
terms with embodiment” (p. 85). Nor was he inspired by
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
Maharshi’s lifestyle or the implication (by Wilber) that
it could be a model for the “future spiritual development
of mankind” (p. 85). Heron wrote:
Ramana Maharshi, often proclaimed as a supreme
modern exemplar of nondual attainment, achieved this
state by a massive rejection of his own embodiment.
At age, 17, while perfectly healthy, he had a sudden
pathological fear of death, fell on the floor and
simulated being dead, and so awoke, he believed, to
the self as spirit. He sustained this state by going off to
sit in a dirty pit, attending to the One, while neglecting
and abusing his life. He let his unwashed body rot,
attacked by bugs and covered in sores, leaving it to
others to provide some minimal care. Such sustained
abuse of his body led to life-long asthma and arthritic
rheumatism. While being consumed with terminal
cancer, he said “The body itself is a disease”.... He
achieved an intense state of spiritual consciousness
at the cost of a sustained, repressive constriction of
immanent spiritual life. (p. 85)
The following description of a practitioner’s
experience with a contemporary Advaita Vedanta teacher
speaks to the disembodiment validated in satsang
practices:
Papaji’s words were heard but there was no one left
to whom he could address them. The speaking and
the hearing were occurring as one single, impersonal
event. (Blackstone, 2006, p. 27)
“No one left,” just a single impersonal event… the One...
it is hard to have a relationship when someone else is busy
being an impersonal event. In this sort of experience there
does not appear to be the distinction or differentiation
needed to give and receive in relationship. To be clear, if
one is predisposed to follow the Advaitin way and this
spiritual realization, then all well and good; but if one
values relationship and embodiment then an orientation
to impersonal nondualism will not be useful.
As an example of impersonal nondualism in
action, consider the following: The one-time wife of an
American Advaita Vedantan guru told me when I was
doing a small anthropological project on New Age beliefs
and childbirth (Lahood, 2009) that she had confronted
her guru husband about his repeated infidelities, asking
him, “did you have sex with such and such.” The satsang
leader’s response was to say, “I neither fucked her or not
fucked her.” The apparent rationale for this statement
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 63
was that this relating embodied world is simply maya
(illusion). Psychologically this posture functioned
as a massive psychological defense parading as high
spirituality, based on the notion that the relating world is
not really here—exemplifying the casual, crazy-making
indifference and superiority of the nirvanic defense (see
Lahood, 2010).
Another example occurred when I attended a
transpersonal conference sponsored by a university in
England. At one stage in the proceedings a well-know
transpersonalist, a follower of Wilber and a champion of
nondualism, took a workshop. The elderly gent invited
people in the audience who had had a non-dual experience
to join him in an inner circle and talk with each other
about their experience; the rest of us were not allowed to
speak unless we had a nondual event, and our place was
to look on as they compared notes together their backs
to us. After this rather privileging exclusive/inclusive
exercise the older gentleman asked for questions from the
rest of the audience, and a woman sitting next to me in
her mid 40s asked him, “but what about relationship?”
He snapped at her rather brusquely, “Oh you don’t need
all that shit.” As an anthropologist among the New Age
transpersonal tribe I am not yet convinced that popular
transpersonalism has truly embraced or felt the embrace
of sacred I-thou relationship.
A[n] (Americanized) Course
in (Vedanticized) Miracles
A recent volume of the International Journal of
Transpersonal Studies (2006) included a special
topic section on syncretism in transpersonal theory.
Among other papers it featured an attempt to blend
Gebser’s integral conceptions of consciousness—Gebser
was a powerful influence on Ken Wilber’s nondual
perennialism—with A Course in Miracles (ACIM;
Holland & MacDonald, 2006). While it is vitally
important to explore transpersonal theory for its
syncretism, or hybridity, the authors seemed unaware
that transpersonal psychology and ACIM are themselves
hybridizations of hybrids of hybrids.
The authors wrote, “Christian in statement but
expressing the wisdom of the perennial philosophy [ACIM]
interweaves an intricate non-dualistic metaphysics” (Holland
& MacDonald, 2006, p. 70). The bit further on they stated,
“The basic premise of ACIM is that reality is spirit. The
system is founded upon a nondualistic metaphysics which
views the physical universe, including the body, as an
illusory fabrication of consciousness” (p. 74).
64 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
In the canon of ACIM and its various offshoots
the world and body simply disappear—a pattern found
in Advaita Vedanta, in which the world is relegated to
“dreamlike maya” (Loy, 1988, p. 30). This is a pattern
similar to that enacted by Jesus of Nazareth when he
“discarded his physical vessel in exchange for a spiritual
one” (Muesse, 1999, pp. 391).7 According to Hanegraaff
(1996), of all the New Age movements none come
close to the “uncompromising world-rejection found
in the Course” (p. 115)—a world rejection that reflects
the spread of Vedantic thought in America. In other
words, the Course represents a reproduction of Hindu
thought.
The Vedantist Ramakrishna has been cited by
Richard Bache (2001) as saying, “For the avatara, there
is no karma, no limiting or binding impressions from
the history of personal and collective embodiment…
including both individual and collective ego centricity,
including as well the very nature of a substantive
universe” (p. 296)—in other words, the universe
disappears. It was Swami Vivekananda, the principle
disciple of Ramakrishna, who was the key figure in the
dissemination of Advaita Vedanta in the America of the
1890s. Speaking in private and public forums including
clubs and universities on lecture tours, he also organized
centers throughout the United States. Historian Hal
Bridges (1969) wrote,
The Vedanta taught in the American centers
embraces... Vedantic nondualism of Shankara
(Advaita Vedanta) and the Yoga of Patanjali. It
conceives of the world of time and space as maya,
lacking ultimate reality, and of the one God
as being at once transcendent (Brahman) and
immanent as the divine Self (Atman) within every
man. It teaches that man’s goal in life is to overcome
desire, which binds him to a weary round of karma-
fettered reincarnation, and to realize that his true,
indwelling Self is one with God— ‘That thou art,”
in the profoundly simple Vedic phrase Tat tvam asi.
(p. 341)
Yet Advita Vedanta has a history going back beyond
Vivekananda to Emerson and the New England
Transcendentalists (see Lahood, 2010). What ACIM
draws on, then, is a deeply-embedded deposit of Vedantic
thought in the American psyche.
A Course in Miracles (Anonymous, 1992) is an
important if not canonical text for the New Age: two
Lahood
American academics living and teaching in New York
were involved in channeling and transcribing messages
ostensibly from Jesus Christ during the years 1965-
1972. This was in the middle years of America’s War on
Vietnam (1963-1974), a timing that is vastly important
to the cultural shaping of ACIM. Helen Schucman
received the messages and William Thetford scribed
them. Interestingly, both parties claim to be spiritually
naive and unexposed to spiritual teaching and doctrine.
Schucman, in true Carlos Castaneda style, claimed to be
a well educated atheist psychologist working at a New
York university with absolutely no knowledge of things
spiritual when she received the purported lessons.
But Schucman’s claim of spiritual naivety does
not quite ring true in that her nanny was Catholic
and her mother was committed to Theosophy—a
movement that blends Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and
Western esotericism in the mind-worlds of it believers. I
would argue that ACIM is yet another hybrid cultural
system—an expression of American blending in which
Christian symbolism meets Vedantic philosophy meets
spiritualist channelling. Theosophy’s founder Madame
Blatavasky claimed to have received a secret doctrine
(not unlike Emmanuel Swedenborg) through automatic
writing from supposedly ascended masters—a kind
of channeling—that is reproduced in the scribing of
ACIM. Furthermore, according to Journey Without
Distance (Skutch, 1996), William Thetford’s parents
were Christian Scientists. Mary Baker Eddy (1917),
who founded Christian Science, claimed a doctrine in
which “Sin, sickness and death must be deemed as being
devoid of reality” (p. 525) a theme copiously reproduced
in ACIM.
Thetford had worked under the important
humanistic psychologist and therapist Carl Rogers and
was very much taken with Roger’s powerful affirmation
of unconditional love. He was also familiar with the
mystical and esoteric writing of Edgar Cayce. Cayce,
a world renowned psychic, would lie on a couch and
enter a kind of trance state. Then, provided with the
name of an individual from someone somewhere in
the world he would speak in a normal voice and give
answers to questions about that person. These answers,
which came to be called readings, were written down by
a stenogra­­pher. Thetford (1996) was also familiar with
the worldview of Theosophy; in fact he claimed ACIM
was “closely related to the teachings of a nondualistic
Vedanta form of Hinduism… he realized that basic
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
spiritual teachings of both [ACIM and Vedanta] had
many striking similarities to each other, and that the
main difference between them was that The Course
was stating the perennial philosophy of eternal truths
in Christian terminology” (p. 72). This is a sophisticated
religious analysis from one who claimed spiritual
naivety.
The authors’ claims to spiritual naivety, along
with the repetitious denial of the reality of guilt and
the incessant theme of forgiveness and an overt need
to return to innocence, become stark when set against
the backdrop of the extreme chaos and civil strife in
America during those times.8 Student revolts and anti-
war protests were common and included highly charged
events such as the gunning down of several students at
Kent State University by national guardsmen. Several
Buddhist monks, followed by Christian pacifists,
committed ritual suicide by self-immolation as protest
against the war. During this time Eastern religious ideas
were embraced by the outraged American youth culture
in an attempt to deal with the horrors of the Vietnam
War.
As noted the explanation for this intense desire
has something to do with a loss of innocence:
But something else was going on in the same decade.
There developed a burgeoning interest, mainly among
young people, and not only in the United States,
in exploring “inner worlds” and “alternate realities”
through the use of psychedelic substances…It was
in the 60s, at a time when, coincidentally, America
was losing an innocence it may never have possessed
but which many people bought into, by involving
itself in what was to become its most divisive and
unpopular war, that the inner journey and the search
for instant chemical nirvanas became a growth
industry (Schaefer & Furst, 1996, p. 507).
It seems unlikely to me that Schucman, given her position
as a university professor was unaware or unaffected by
the intense religious climate of her times. However, I
would suggest her claims of naivety are maintained to
reinforce the other worldly authority of the Course—
the miraculous power of charisma bestowed by
God; knowledge beyond culture—of innocence and
transcendence.
It is a familiar and often repeated trope that
the channel is unwittingly selected by the purportedly
channeled identity—whatever else it may be, it is also
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 65
narcissistic capital to be the special chosen recipient and
mouthpiece of Jesus Christ or various other otherworldly
entities.9 The authority of the message is vouchsafed by the
mystery on high disentangled from politics, dissociated
from the stain of culture or society—an allegedly holy
message of truth, purity, and innocence. Yet all around
Schucman, in her family, her mother, her students, her
culture one could see that powerful and strange religious
forces were at play on the ground—against the backdrop
of the very real nightmare of war in the supposedly unreal
world.
Perhaps equally pertinent in the success of
ACIM is the fact that from the 1920s the Cartesian
universe—alienated, dualistic, and materialistic—had
been rendered partially unreal by Western theoretical
physicists who described a strange new world of light,
time, and space. Some among their numbers used Hindu
and Buddhist religious imagery to describe their new
quantum universe (see Lahood, 2007; Capra, 1975). This
re-ordering of the Western materialistic universe into a
whirling dervish of a universe, a misbehaving dancing
quantum cosmos tinged with an Eastern gloss, would
drip down into the American psyche and beyond, and
become an important feature of early transpersonalism.
In short, a quantum universe robed in Eastern
mystical imagery was a radical cosmological rebirth out
of the dualistic Cartesian epoch. Fritjof Capra’s (1975)
hugely popular book The Tao of Physics specifically
hybridised the new physics with Eastern mysticism. In
this book Eastern religious imagery of the Buddha, the
yin yang symbol and the Shiva Nataraj among others,
were overlaid with mathematical equations, waves, and
particles of light as if the whole pan-Hindu pantheon
had been discovered in an atom smasher.10
The parallels to modern physics appear not only
in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in
the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of
Heraclitus, the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or the Teachings
of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan (p. 19).
Capra claimed that the ingestion of sacred plants
(psychedelics) had aided him in his intuition of this
radical Eastern/quantum worldview. Capra’s work,
emerging the same year as ACIM—in 1975, exactly one
year after the end of the war, oddly paralleling Huxley’s
post-WWII perennializing effort which appeared in
1946—was profoundly influential on both the New Age
and the transpersonal movements. All of this points to
66 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
a gradual Orientalization of the Western image of the
universe, and the Easternization of America’s collective
cultural unconscious.
A Course in Miracles, at one important level—is
a cultural artifact of religious themes relative and peculiar
to the American religious situation. It is not a tablet writ
in adamantine and handed down from heavens high to
a new Christ, but rather a sign of cultures in collision.
It is, to borrow from Baba Ram Dass, something of a
Hinjew, a blend of Judeo-Christianity with Hinduism—
a product of globalization. As such ACIM can be read as
a cultural text, a performance of the American psyche
in its attempt to assimilate (and perhaps, undermine,
appropriate, and dominate—as is the way of the hybrid)
the power of Eastern nondualism (including its doctrine
of an illusionary world) with very patriarchal Christian
symbols. The associated channelling performance is,
I believe, more akin to a shamanistic emergency—a
performance wherein the shaman assimilates, interprets,
and tames alien cultural forces creating strange hybrid
religious cosmologies (for some interesting cases of
cosmological hybridization see Bankoff, 2003; Akinyele,
2000; Lahood, 2008, 2009).
Perhaps the impact of pan-Hindu thinking
seeping into the American mind created for Schucman an
emergency of sorts, triggered by the war. This performance
is to maintain the shaman’s ability to manipulate the
universe—to claim, negate, and appropriate the symbols
of the alien Other to herself—and it is here in the hustle
and bustle of life, on the ground-floor where religions
meet, mix, and mingle, that hybrid cosmologies are
forged. Schucman and Thetford’s ACIM is just such a
form of religious Orientalization and one of a tradition
of East-West meshes, among them Rajneesh’s globalizing
religion, that emerges in the late 1960s. A blend of
Indian Guru-worship and so-called tantra with Esalen’s
human potential therapies, it has attracted legions of
Euro-Americans who appropriated the term sannyasin
for themselves—and is another Maslow-Zen, East-
West hybridization.11 The ACIM phenomenon begs the
question: how much if any of it was actually hyper-world
wisdom from a supra-ordinate celestial being such as
Jesus Christ, and how much issued from the personal and
cultural unconscious of Schucman and Thetford in their
attempt to bind Eastern thought to Christian symbols
and come to terms with the religious traces deposited in
their psychic inventories by their parents’ involvement in
Theosophy and Christian Science?
Lahood
 Some 30 years later the writings of Eckhart Tolle Relational Spirituality
would become very popular. Tolle (2003), too, presents a
hybrid image: a Western quasi-Christian/Vedantic guru
spreading an evolutionary, message:
I n no way do I feel anything like an expert in inter­
personal skills nor the field of relational spirituality,
but I am committed to the inquiry. With that caveat in
place, I will suggest that relationship-based spirituality
Your inner most sense of self, of who you are, is
affirms a real person in a world, in a subjective-objective
inseparable from stillness. This is the
reality, and in a one-many divine disclosure. Relational
I AM that is deeper than name and form.
spirituality is therefore categorically not a secular
(p. 3)
practice—it is a transpersonal practice and it starts
Tolle’s teaching is loaded with the normative assump­tions with the premise that we are presences approaching and
of popular New Age spirituality, citing Meister Eckhart, encountering other presences as divine disclosures or
ACIM, Ramana Maharshi, and Advaita as influences. theophanies (cf. Corbin, 1969). Relational spirituality is
For Tolle, your inner self is who you really are beyond about exploring and liberating that encounter from past
name and form (Sanskrit, nama and rupa: illusory body wounds, everyday narcissism, and present fears. It then
and person)—there is no separation, you are the I AM. has the potential to become a practice in which we abide
The problem, from a relational point of view, is that in sacred relationship. In the words of Fewster (2000),
the distinct and potentially divine human presence is health exists
conflated with the distressed ego, and the person and her
when a person experiences Self as an integrated
world reduced to illusion. This dovetails with the work of
whole that encompasses the body, the emotions, the
another popular Western teacher of nondualism, Byron
mind and the spirit. This state of health experienced
Katie (2003), who has claimed that there is not really a
as a pervasive sense of well-being can only occur
thing such as interpersonal love: “in the apparent world
through connection with other Selves—“without
of duality people are going to see it [love] as a you and a
you there can be no me.” To become whole the Self
me but in reality there is only one” (p. 64). If there is no
needs to be experienced and expressed from the
personal, embodied self, then the bonds and bounds of
inside and recognised from the outside. Hence the
personal relationship are illusory.
critical context for both health and healing is the
The problem with this end-state enlightenment
interpersonal (Self-Other) relationship. (pp. 1-2)
that Tolle and others have put out as the pinnacle of
evolution has been pinpointed by Heron (1998): Heron (1992, 1998, 2006) has offered a vision
of relational spirituality and the enaction of situational
In the final stage, since there is no self of any
spirit as the “realm of the between” (cf. Buber, 1970,
sort left, no further development is possible, the
who coined the term). Heron and Lahood (2008) have
absolute limit of human unfoldment is reached,
also outlined how action research can be construed
the human is the one and only divine [rather than
as a relational spiritual practice; Ferrer (2002) has
the many divinities within a unifying divinity].
developed a theoretical account to reframe transpersonal
This throws out the baby with the bathwater, by
phenomena as “multilocal participatory events” (pp. 116-
conflating the distinctness-within-cosmic unity
117) that arise in different loci, such as an individual,
of the person, with the separate, fear-numbed,
a relationship, or a community. Within this frame
contracted ego. In elevating the human to the
I propose that co-active-relationship-based spiritual
absolute, it ignores the asymmetrical relation
inquiry with its particular attenance to recognizing
between the finite divine and the infinite divine.
and letting go of spiritual narcissism, divine encounter
To overlook this asymmetry and insist there is
between persons-as-theophany, attending collaboratively
no distinction of any sort between finite human
to the seven pivoting relationships, and abiding in sacred
awareness and infinite divine awareness is, in my
relationship, is very much a relational spiritual practice.
scheme of things, an illusory state of spiritual
The basis for my understanding of relational
inflation (p. 79)
spirituality comes from my participation in a 12-year peer
Whether it be spiritual inflation or narcissism, it certainly inquiry group initiated by John Heron in New Zealand
sells well in the marketplace of popular ideas. (Heron & Lahood, 2008).12 Concurrent with that group I

Relational Spirituality, Part 2 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 67

initiated a small inquiry group that ran for five or six years
which came to be called the Buddhas’ Bakery because of
the resonance between charismatic collaborative inquiry
and cooking. I also initiated a dozen or more five-day
inquiry trainings; some of these were highly structured,
Apollonian-deliberate excursions, while others were free-
wheeling, Dionysian-spontaneous inquiries in which the
group came together only with a vague agenda around
creative explorations into charismatic being (see Heron,
1992). In more formal introductions we would combine
a more participatory, embodying version of breathwork
(Lahood, 2008) as a way of disrupting compulsive
patterns, processing stirred-up inquiry transference, and
widening the horizon of participatory feeling.
In the following section I will set some context
for this sort of relation-based inquiry, then report
retrospectively on the salient points of a two-day relational
inquiry initiated in England last year, part of a series of
back to back inquiries over several weeks. The tone of
this reporting is less formal; “we” in this context will
refer to the participants, who will at appropriate times
be identified by first name, or first name and initial. A
full discussion of validity and extended epistemology in
cooperative inquiry can be found in Heron (1996, 1998)
and Heron and Reason (2007); see Heron and Lahood
(2008) for a discussion of collaborative inquiry as a
spiritual practice.
The Lahood Model of Relational Inquiry
I n my model of relational inquiry there are at least seven
overlapping relationships to manage and these should
pivot among co-inquirers. Petruska Clarkson’s (2003)
well known five-relationship model in psychotherapy can
serve as a jumping-off point—but because it is located in
various therapeutic universes it is somewhat unserviceable.
The obvious difference is that Clarkson was writing as a
therapist, with its inevitable and unending power divide,
and not as a co-researcher. The relationships are not
static nor are they roles taken rigidly; they are shared,
they change and pivot from one person or sub group to
another…they are mercurial, holonomic, and shifting.
The group will periodically stop and explore these roles
to determine whether they are in some way co-opting the
validity of the inquiry. The inquiry, especially if it takes
place over time, will give these relationships a chance to
find a healthy balance. These relationships do not follow
any kind of sequential or linear pattern but emerge with
the (transpersonal) gestalt of the group. Here are the
seven relationships as currently formulated:
68 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
1) The initiator/initiate relationship is moving toward
and eventually becoming peers in a power sharing
collegiality.
2) The anticipated relationship is an interfering,
transferential and counter-transferential, uncon­
sciously unfinished relationship, it is obstructive
and defensive, untrue, wounded, and compulsive.
3) The reparative relationship is the other side of
the anticipated relationship—it is one that is
developmentally needed and requires holding,
empowerment through new roles, learning to trust
in one’s own authority, testing new behaviors,
seeking support, seeking greater contact, and re-
embedding in new positive constellations.
4) The collaborative relationship is where we take
shared charge of the working alliance, of creating
a secure base (in terms of attachment) build
foundations through cooperation explore roles
of co-designer/co-decision maker/ co-enactor/co-
reflector, a collegial cosmic citizenry (cf. Heron,
1998, p. 122)
5) The I–Thou relationship is where collaboration
seems to create a greater sense of peerdom, equality
and person to person relating; Buber’s I-thou can
begin to flourish (this leads to the transpersonal
relationship), leading to pleasure and participation
in present time and space, authentic, open-hearted
relationship.
6) The erotic relationship is where my feeling for the
world is erotic, in meeting and encountering the
group, presences, the occasion, the location; there
is Eros: the world and all that is embraced erotically
through love, union, and communion. Some
examples are Washburn’s (1995) polymorphous
eroticism and the Sufi approach to the beloved as a
lover.
7) The divine relationship or the angelic/theophanic
relationship is the one open to the dynamic ground;
we participate with relish in the local and situated
spirit as the expression of divinity, both distinct and
unified—the world is revealed as a divine participatory
disclosure in which we are embedded as unique divine
presences. This is a relatively free and autonomous
person in relationship with others, in touch with her
own unique indigenous relationship with all that is.
Experiences of vertical or transcendent spirituality are
civilized, grounded and horizontalized in the court of
charismatic relationship.
Lahood
 This model presupposes a reasonably healthy
autonomous self capable of reflexivity: an understanding
that beliefs, feelings, thoughts are inherently biased. It
assumes a creative self-authoring person who is willing
to participate in co-decision making: a person who
can balance surrender to group needs with a healthy
sense of self-determination. Underlying this is the
assumption that adult persons are sovereign beings and
make choices that they are responsible for. It assumes
that the core of personhood is both relational and
autonomous. One must be able to say an honest  yes,
and an honest no; nevertheless the inquiry process itself
can reveal where our decision making is hampered by  social and somatic openness, and authentic participation
familial, cultural, or spiritual introjects which will give
an opportunity for further chewing over our attitudes
and beliefs.
The following thoughts are based on my
own participant-observation (the stock in trade of
anthropological research—which has a near neighbor in
collaborative inquiry: a balance of attention with which
a person does research on herself while participating
with others in a relational context. I would define a
cornerstone of relational spirituality as the intentional
practice of mutuality and co-responsibility: care for each-
other and for nurturing along the outcome. This way
of relational being and practice, according to Kenneth
Gergen,
places special significance of the process of co-action,
the mutual creation of meaning. In particular, when
our actions contribute to the continuous generation
of meaning—to coordination rather alienation—we
are engaged in a sacred practice. Through positive
coordination we engage in the very processes from
which issue, meaning, value, and the continued
sustenance of the sacred. Holiness is neither state of
heaven nor mind, but may be realized in our next
moment together (2009, p. 393).
It is generally held that Buber believed mutuality
could not be achieved in a therapeutic relationship
because the care-giving and concern for outcome is
largely one-sided—the therapist is in a care-giving role
the client is there for healing. Intentional “ceremonies of
mutual care” such as the Australian Aboriginal practice
of dadirri (intentional respectful listening; Atkinson,
2008, p. 10) suggest an attitude of co-responsibility,
relational obligation, and collaboration in which all
persons must be willing to become other-attuned.13
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
Spiritual narcissism, as noted, is fundamentally
a failure in the ability to authentically care or attune
to others—an attitude that closes the door on any
authentic collaborative venture. In contrast, maturing
human care coupled with a certain canniness and
willingness to confront distressed interactions such as
authoritarian plays, defensive ploys, and narcissistic self
entitlement, emerges from the integrating person as that
person becomes more other-attuned. This basic attitude
toward others when coupled with collaborative research
principles and skills, among them critical subjectivity
(Heron, 1998) opens the door on true collaboration,
in ritual life. With due attention to the political economy
of the group a co-creative spiritual event can unfold,
marked by what anthropologists call communitas or
flow (cf. Turner, 1979); I will refer to this latter as a
charismatic event.
Relational rebirth
The whole collaborative inquiry process can be
construed as a relational spirituality practice (see Heron
& Lahood, 2008) which, when it works well, enables a
profound kind of spiritual rebirth:
This rebirthing is relational—consequent upon
the co-creative resonance among us all. And it
empowers us to come into the presence between.
In short: immanent spirit becomes manifest,
through collaborative action, as relational and
situational sacred presence. Participation in this
presence engenders a liberating wholeness, a
personal regeneration—which is given expression
amidst the practicalities of everyday life and work,
empowering whole relations with others. (Heron &
Lahood, 2008)
While this reads simply enough there are
some interesting problems that can beset such an
endeavor, making participatory research with others
infinitely complex. We have learned that personal
psychodynamics are often neatly woven into a
person’s spiritual persona including spiritual defenses.
Participants can bring with them introjected collective
and cultural beliefs that are prevalent in New Age
transpersonalism such as spiritual ranking, spiritual
authoritarianism or One-truthism, or a belief that all
spirituality is about not being here, undermining their
own ability to collaborate and produce the tasty fruits
that can accompany the relational process. Furthermore
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 69
New Age transpersonalism tends to uphold an inner
transformation outside of the everyday sphere:
One difficulty in construing action research itself
as a spiritual practice is the subtle Cartesianism of
recent transpersonal studies. This tacitly assumes
that spirituality is a subjective experience, within a
nonspatial individual consciousness, of transpersonal
objects which transcend the everyday public space of
social interactions (Ferrer, 2002). (Heron & Lahood,
2008, p. 440)
This can mean for New Age transpersonalists
that the everyday public space and social relations are
deemed, ipso facto, devoid of any spiritual relevance. By
relational spirituality we refer to a more horizontally
oriented immanent spirituality grounded in the every
day, the public space and social interactions. Relational
spirituality conceives personhood itself coupled with a
“transfigured embodiment” (Heron, 1998, p. 77) as an
end in itself. Rather than seeking Eastern non-dualism
we cultivate a charismatic person, a being-in-a-world
relatively skilled at unfettering herself and others from
past wounds and committed to relate relatively free of
the need to compete with, over-power, manipulate, or
capitalize on the other—but rather to cooperate with
each other in co-creating a charismatic relational spiritual
event (Heron & Lahood, 2008). Following is an account
of such a co-constructed event.
Living the dead:
A relationship based spiritual inquiry
The inquiry began with a synchronicity. My
partner Jacqueline and I were in England, Jac for the
first time, and she was reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess
of the d’Urbervilles purchased in a nearby store. I had
been taught the book in secondary school when I was
around 15 and it had made a lasting impression on me.
I recalled talking to her about a passage that had stuck
in my imagination, a scene in which Tess, carrying a
basket on her head after a night’s dancing in the village,
was heading home when a jar full of treacle broke and
trickled down the heroine’s back. Jacqueline got to the
page and read it out loud and fleshed out my memories
of the moment.
Oddly enough our host had departed for a few days’
hiking and had cleaned out his cupboards the night before
leaving. There was a can of treacle left on the bench in
the kitchen. He left and we cleaned up the kitchen but
did not know what to do about the treacle so we left it
70 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
there for a few nights. We awoke one morning to find a
strange sculpture—somehow the can had been knocked
over and the treacle had emptied out into the plastic
container it was sitting in along with a bottle; the whole
effect was very strange. I come from New Zealand, Jac
from Australia, and we have no relationship at all to the
word, treacle. It seemed to us that the treacle flowing
in the book and in our minds was now flowing in our
world, and we marvelled at the timing and the content
and it all seemed like something very magical had gotten
loose indeed.
The group gathered the next morning there
were six of us and we introduced the “miracle of the
treacle” by placing the sculpture in the middle of the
table and set about for a while chatting and talking
and marvelling about the whole business—the way
synchronicities seem to explode rational notions of time,
space, and causality. Jac said that Tess’s motivation had
been to take the treacle to her grandmother. This led
to a spontaneous check-in round in which we all spoke
about our relationship with our grandmothers. Someone
suggested that we put out an offering for our ancestors.
This was met with general agreement and excitement
and a flat bowl with water and flowers was placed in the
center of the space next to what we had come to call “the
miracle.” I recall that James S. said something like that
when we disinhibit ourselves into embodied charisma it
was like making ourselves as angel food—sweet to the
taste. Angels come to feed! Certainly the charismatic
barometer seems to rise when such countercultural
statements are made and lived. We then made a chair
available for the spirit of our grandmothers and each had
a turn a evoking her presence. Each of the invocations
has a charismatic effect in what felt like a form of
theurgy and for a while after everyone had spoken we
quietly bathed in the communitas of shared intimacies,
and the imaginal presence of our beloved grannies. Jane.
S noted that we seem to have missed out the grandpas
so we repeated the round after a discussion about the
invocation of ancestors who might have been abusive or
interpersonally oppressive. The group decided, after a
declaration by Maggie. B, that our transpersonal theater
was created with the reality shaping intention that it was
strictly for our highest good and that we only welcomed
energies, powers, and presences that were benign.
This meant that we acknowledged the basic pattern of
goodness of the deceased person and decreed that their
distress-laden patterns be left at the door of our temple
Lahood
(at this point we appeared to want to greet the dead to
revere them and love them). It is hard to explain how
profoundly powerful, in terms of feeling tones, that this
encounter with the dead had on us individually and
collectively. We were sitting in a richly open sonorous
space that seemed to carry an echo of eternity when
Jane. S said she had an image of a water-well. It seemed
to me, retrospectively, that we had begun a spontaneous
inquiry cycle, a perception I shared with the group.
Since we seemed to be already in the wake of
something, it was suggested by Jc that we might come
up with a retrospective launching statement. This phase
was marked by much collaborative effort (and gentle
chaos)—an idea that we could, so to speak, go inside
and wait for a statement or an image to bubble up got
some traction, and we did this. Next we took turns to
write out statements on a whiteboard and then we all
engaged in a collective sifting process in which words
and phrases were mixed and matched, dropped and
rearranged until we arrived at a launching statement
that seem to suit everyone—that was made and shaped
by everyone. The statement was: What is it to bathe
in the well of our ancestors? We had removed at the
last minute, “drink from,” and changed it to “bathe
in,” because the feeling post-granny invocation had
been one of bathing in a delightful, heart warming,
reverential presence. I should mention too that I had
buried and cremated three beloved family members
in the past three years: my grandmother, father, and
brother. I did not mind one bit in co-creating a funerary
ceremony of respect and connection with our ancestors
and those who had joined the realm of our ancestors,
since in many cultures it is the afterlife where we come
from. Two women on the group were also faced with
impending death. Jacqueline’s mother had for some
three years been battling with cancer and Zana’s brother
was ill. At times, as a group, we seemed to open to a
sense of grief and love and a kind of solidarity, and it was
my personal observation that the invocation of death,
or imaginaly living beyond death—this sitting with the
ancestors—drew from the well some very potent feeling
tones, shared resonances, and meaning.
The next critical step was planning a ritual
of intensification. We agreed first of all to make a
procession out into the back garden, which backed
onto some beautiful foothills in Cumbria. We dressed
ourselves in brightly colored scarves and sarongs, hats
and sunglasses and made our way silently in a line out of
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
the front door to the back garden. Here we had planned
to charismatically disinhibit through waving, toning,
rattling, and drumming (cf. Heron & Lahood, 2008). We
had decided to become (identify with imaginaly/psycho-
dramatically) the ancestor as we disinhibited ourselves.
We were then to pass a Tibetan bowl from one to the
other and when we were in possession of the bowl each of
us (as the forebear) would give the generations to come a
gift. This was performed differently by each person, some
made silent miming gestures, others intoned evocations,
some moved and gestured signalling to our offspring’s
offspring down through the generations the feelings
of courage, love and respect. Once everyone had made
their private invocation or declaration, then in unison,
we toned and disinhibited again, this time creating a
seemingly deeper more creative opening. After a time
of silence we then began to move back toward the house
and as we went we began to shed our ancestral garb.
On entering the room, which had been prepared with
candles, we became the children, heirs, and descendants
of the ancestors and we ceremoniously brought forth
the bowl/well of our ancestors. At this point the bowl
was passed around and each of us drank deeply of its
dark mysterious gifts. We then fell into a silent reverie
for some time, simply breathing in the participatory
goodness and bathing in and receiving the well wishes of
our ancestors while simultaneously opening and giving
it up to our imaginal future generations. I experienced
this as a mystical relational event of collective shaping,
action, and reflection of some fecundity. A sense of
having participated with the dead, of having reframed
and gifted our beloved children and their children while
at the same time participating in, and enlivening the
dead. To put it plainly, I was inestimably grateful to the
dead for their lived lives.
Jacqueline’s mother and Zana’s brother died
within days of the event. I understand that there are
many ways to make meaning, interpret, analyze, and
no doubt pathologize our experience. For some this
endeavor might seem incomprehensibly quaint, deluded,
ignorant or fanciful. For myself, I have a deep respect for
situational spirituality and the spontaneous erotic life,
the co-production of spiritual knowledge and creative
participation in hybridized ritual (see Heron & Lahood,
2008) that seems to arise from rubbing shoulders with
real people and the dead in our post-modern, New Age
era. I also find a resonance in the following account by
Ogbu Kalu (2001) of an African ritual:
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 71
 In the Owu Festival of riverine communities of the
Niger Delta, the masqueraders arrive in canoes and
wear masks depicting various kinds of fishes. The
community dances to the waterfront, welcomes
them as a chorus into the village, and the celebration
begins. At dusk, the masqueraders are led back to
the beach; as they paddle off, the people wave and
cry for the departing ancestors. This is the crux of
the cultural form: the masqueraders are ancestors;
they are the gods coming as guests to the human
world. With their arrival, the seen and the unseen
worlds meet; the living and the living-dead reunite,
even if only for a brief period. (p. 229)
On a healing level, traditional Eurocentric stage models
of grief and loss that encourage decathexis (a severing
of bonds, subject to prescribed stages) have, in recent
years, been challenged by the healthier notion that the
mourner maintains an ongoing relationship with the
deceased (Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996). It could
be said that attuning to these ancestral presences, at one
level, is such a means of maintaining relationship, which
is creatively and religiously held in the social life of the
group.
Theologian Robert Avens wrote that two
important figures in contemporary psychology, James
Hillman and Jacques Lacan, both affirmed that much of
the human suffering in modern Western culture arises
from our refusal to remember the dead. Taking Freud’s
statement that neurosis is related to the incomplete
mourning of “the unburied dead,” Lacan argued that
“therapy has as its major task the repairing of the
relationship people have, not with other people, but with
the dead” (p. 299). While the French analyst pushes
the point too far for me, since I privilege the living, I
certainly think the province of death, creative and ritual
mourning, and the existence of discarnate but relational
spirits is an important field of inquiry. Avens (1984) also
pointed out that for Hillman, “the aim of archetypal
psychology is to enable us to live in the company of
ghosts… ancestors, guides—the populace of the metaxy”
(p. 299).14
Erik Erikson believed that in human beings,
the desire for relationship was inherent. In his model
of human development there is in human beings “a
succession of tendencies to relate to other human beings
mutually and creatively” (Evans, 1993, p. 298). However,
“If the natural tendency to become involved with others
72 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
is frustrated in childhood, it is repressed. Narcissistic
self-sufficiency then becomes dominant over the natural
yearning to relate” (p. 298). The actualization of different
relational tendencies occurs at different stages of a
person’s life so that for instance in adulthood there can
be the “intimate mutual love between husband and wife
and a deep parental concern for the next generation”
(p. 298). It seems to me that our inquiry was toying
with a little-known form of love—a para-generational
form of relational knowing. The extending of love
down through the coming generations seems a natural
extension of non-narcissistic modes of being; it is in fact
akin to cosmic love. It is this kind of love perhaps that
is a motivation behind the ecology movements as the
human community seeks to preserve something of our
planet’s ecological diversity for our children and their
children. An inquiry into ancestors, those who have lived
and who now inhabit the realm of the dead, cycles into
the reverence for those gathered, and the gentle worship
of those yet to come and is thus an extension of love into
an unlived future.
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Notes
1. According to Raymond Saner (1989) there is an
overlooked American cultural bias operating in much
of U.S. gestalt practice. Saner referred to ‘“Gestalt
Therapy Made-in-the-USA,” in particular a bias of
“over-done individualism” and a
super valuing of taking care of myself, of
individual identity, of emotional independence
and what he calls a “calculative involvement with
organizations”.… Saner in this important paper,
stresses the need for a corrective, away from …
the “I am who I am and if you do not like it,
fuck off” ideology which has characterized some
Gestalt therapy and writing. Saner’s assumption
is that is that most members of the American
Gestalt therapy movement have overstressed “I”-
ness because they are unaware of their cultural
disposition toward individualism with its
corollary, aversion or avoidance” (Parlett 1991,
p. 69).
Gestalt therapy and field theory raise intriguing issues
that are very difficult to research because Gestalt
therapy itself may not be really open to examining
its own sets of assumptions, authority, therapeutic
power, the authenticity of an I-Thou established in
a power relationship with economic stakes holders
as Parlett suggested; truly collaborative research
methods such as co-operative inquiry might be
necessary to do the research.
2.  Spiritual feminism and its related synonyms
(religious, spiritualist, ecological, goddess, and
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
cultural feminism) also got a kick-start in the 1960s.
Stressing interpersonal encounter, community, and
ecological concerns, it shares a group of related
concerns with the natural health movement which
includes a religious attitude of purity and pollution
toward healing, food/eating and childbirth; this
religious/consumer movement also got a powerful
push in the 1960s. The central thesis of these papers is
that self-spirituality is implicated in the structuring
of spiritual narcissism, but, given that spiritual
feminism has such relational values (encounter,
community, ecological, non-patriarchal ethos), one
would think that neo-pagan Goddess worshipping
feminists would be free of spiritual narcissism, ego-
inflation, grandiosity, and authoritarianism. My
personal observations as an anthropologist and
insider of New Age culture, is that this is far from
true. Some Kali and Goddess worshipping feminists
or feminist-tantric-New Agers seem to exhibit their
own set of cultural conceits, ethnocentricities, and
hubris, not to mention the offensive and defensive
use of spiritually, capitalistic competitiveness, and
the malady of spiritual narcissism. An examination
of the hybridity of Western religious feminism with
Eastern tantra is beyond the scope of this paper.
Suffice to say that spiritual feminism’s historical
gestation and emergence from the self-spiritual
milieu in which individual thoughts and feelings
are held to be authoritative, even sacrosanct, can be
problematic.To be clear, in no way am I suggesting
the equation that spiritual feminism equals
narcissism. What I am saying is that for a person
with narcissistic wounds or a rigid fundamentalist
disposition the inferior/superior ideology of
Goddess religion may further inflate the false-self
erected to cope with a diminished sense of self. In
the end such defenses keep one from true holistic
participation with others—the analysis offered here
is but a cautionary observation.
3. Japanese Zen Buddhism, contrary to popular belief,
was an imperial religion and actively promoted war
in the Pacific.
4. In a footnote to this story Spiro (1987) wrote,
That the pursuit of the religious life requires
the rejection of family ties is, of course, not
restricted to the salvation religions of Asia.
Early Christianity (as the attitude of Jesus, both
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 75
 through his ties with his own family, as well as A pattern also observed in the Mohammed’s Night
to family ties in general revealed) required an of the Mirage where the Prophet was dismembered
equally powerful rejection. (p. 279) and purified by angels and flown through hell
and up through layered heavens into a final self-
5.   This was partly because of burn-out and economics–
annihilating encounter with the Throne of Allah
interpersonal encounter is both time consuming and
(see Armstrong, 1991, pp. 138-141).
exhausting (especially during the time of the sexual
The Heaven’s Gate suicide cult have reproduced
revolution when the boundaries of sexual behavior
an extreme form of up and out religiosity in their
had changed dramatically); burn-out was common
enactment of death. Their dis-attachment from
for leaders in the encounter movement and there was
the world would remove them to a promised land
a swing toward more internal, less relational forms of
peopled by extra-terrestrials The leader of the group
practice such as Eastern meditation in which larger
and some of his male followers had their penises
numbers could participate making the workshop
surgically removed so that their attachment to the
more economically viable and reducing burn-out
world would be lessened and make their departure
among facilitators.
easier. The idea of their sacrificial death was that
6.  D. T. Suzuki was a major transmitter of Zen to
they would then be able to join a space-craft on “the
the West and a powerful influence on the nascent
next level above human”. The “starship in the comet’s
transpersonal movement. A charismatic Zen
wake [Hale-Bopp] would rescue the faithful from
missionary, he was, according to Morris (1994),
Planet earth. Yet the members of Heaven’s gate saw
something of a non-traditional Buddhist, likening
themselves as following the same pattern established
his Zen to Meister Eckhart’s non-traditional
2,000 years ago, when Jesus of Nazareth discarded
Christian mysticism. But Suzuki’s Zen also has an
his physical vessel in exchange for a spiritual one”
almost Romantic nature-worshiping element to it.
(Muesse, 1999, p. 391). Indeed the cult’s presumed
He “contrasted Eastern and Western aesthetics and
Kingdom of Heaven would provide “boundless care
attitudes toward nature” suggesting that whereas
and nurturing” (http://www.wave.net/upg/gate/
Buddhists might, for example, behold or commune
intro.htm—the cult’s still-active website). According
with a flower, Western medicalized science would
to the cult’s leader “the Anti-Christ” was equivalent
rip the plant apart in the analytical manner of
to “those propagators of sustained faithfulness to
vivisection (Lock & Scheper-Hughes, 1987, p. 13).
mammalian humanism.”
In The Awakening of Zen (1980) Suzuki described
8.           Interestingly, Michael Washburn (1995) noted that
Zen in terms of, “I see the flower and the flower
the flight from guilt is a feature of narcissism, either
sees me” (p. 24), which seems to suggest a more
from insufficient mirroring (cf. Kohut, 1971) or
eco-friendly enlightenment. Reputedly a pacifist,
failure in the “identity project,” the narcissist puts
Suzuki, the romantic nature-worshiping, Christian,
on “attention-getting performances” and becomes
Buddhist sage is perhaps the template for the new
“excessively self-centered” (p. 115).
religious consciousness.
9.    The channeling phenomenon has not escaped the
7.  Not limited to Asiatic religions, world-denial can
scrutiny of transpersonal psychologists or clinical
also be found in Abrahamic traditions. According
theologians in relation to spiritual emergency, that
to religious scholar Steven Katz (1978),
extremely shaky and psychologically challenging
the Jewish mystic performs his special mystical time in a person’s development. Some channelers,
devotions and meditations…[concentrative through a process of unaware spiritual projection
prayers were known as kavvanah] in order to cast their disowned and disembodied spiritual
purify his soul, i.e. to remove the soul from wisdom onto other-world beings or entities which
its entrapment in the material world in order in turn can become a source of spiritual inspiration;
to liberate it for its upward spiritual ascent however this is also problematic. According to John
culminating in devekuth [clinging to God].” (p. Klimo (1988), a well known and non-reductionist
38) researcher sympathetic to the channeling phenomena,
up to 85 percent of so-called channeled material

76 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Lahood

 actually comes from personal unconscious of the
individual effected. This can suggest a mishandled
attempt to cope with a spiritual emergency in which
the individual affected by the channel emergency
engages in a kind of subtle splitting from their own
wisdom. According to Stanislav Grof (2000), a
preeminent researcher into the realms of the human
unconscious:
Spirit guides are usually perceived as advanced
spiritual beings on a high level of consciousness
evolution, who are endowed with superior
intelligence and extraordinary moral integrity.
This can lead to highly problematic ego inflation
in the channeler, who might feel chosen for a
special mission and see it as a proof of his or her
own superiority. (p. 164)
Where a cult is based on channeling from some
discarnate entity (e.g., Seth, Lazarus, Ramtha,
Jesus), the status of the entity (and by association
the channel or their works and books, e.g., A Course
in Miracles, Anonymous, 1992; Conversations with
God, Walsh, 1996; The Disappearance of the Universe,
Renard, 2003) will become the screen for unaware
projections, rather than a focus of critical scrutiny
(Heron, 2006). The isolated spiritual ego is often
inflated with a kind of fundamentalist certitude
claiming, for example, that the “course” has come
from “beyond,” a claim which gives its followers their
authoritative warrant and participation mystique
which bolsters self esteem. However, this claim of
beyond-ism requires critical scrutiny—in most cases
the disavowal of the human and cultural context
betokens a mystification of one’s own ideals and will
to power.
10.  This quantum/Oriental blend has taken root in New
Ageism. Watch here how the new physics of David
Bohm (first quote) are overlapped by a well known
Buddhist teacher in the West (second quote):
Just as the vast “sea’” of energy in space is
present to our perception as a sense of emptiness
or nothingness so the vast “unconscious”
background of explicit consciousness with all its
implications is present in a similar way (Bohm,
1980, p. 210).
If Buddhism is a science of the mind, then for
me Dzogchen and the bardo teachings represent
Relational Spirituality, Part 2
the heart essence of that science…David Bohm
has conceived a new scientific approach to
reality based, as the bardo teachings are, on
an understanding of the totality of oneness of
existence as an unbroken and seamless whole
(Sogyal Rinpoche, 1992, pp. 352-353).
11.   In some nondual religious orientations such as
Advaita Vedanta the phenomenological world is
depicted as a dream, maya, and illusion and there­
fore relationships, morality, and ethics are secondary
to realizing the illusion of the worldly. Let me give
a brief example of what I am talking about from
a discourse titled, “The Buddha’s Inner Orgasm,”
by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1976; who later
rebranding himself as Osho). The reader might note
a relationship between religious globalization and
the world becoming a dream. The guru spoke:
In this age systems have become very heavy and
confused. The whole point is lost, for so many
reasons. One is—because it has never been so
before—each system lived in its own world: a
Jain was born Jain, lived Jain, died Jain. He will
not study Hindu scriptures, it was prohibited.
He will not go to the mosque or the church, it
was a sin. He will live [with]in the walls of his
system. Nothing alien will penetrate ever in his
mind, no confusion will be there.
But now all that is destroyed. Everyone
is acquainted with everyone else. Hindus are
reading Koran and Mohammedans are reading
Gita and Christians are moving to the East and
the East is moving to the West.... Jumbled up
everything has penetrated your mind. Jesus is
not alone there, Krishna has also penetrated,
Muhammad has also penetrated. And they
have contradicted each other within you. Now
nothing is certain. The Bible says this, the Gita
says exactly the contrary. Muhammad says
this, Mahavir is just the opposite. They have
contradicted. You are no more anywhere; you
don’t belong.... Jesus goes on speaking, Krishna
goes on speaking; Mahavir goes on speaking—
and Krishnamurti also enters. Your mind
becomes the Tower of Babel—so many tongues
and you cannot understand what is happening.
You just feel crazy. (pp. 270-71)
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 77
 Rajneesh was certainly skilled at capitalizing on About the Author
this form of craziness (a condition which has to do,
according to him, with not being “anywhere” and Gregg Lahood, PhD, is an anthropologist, psychotherapist
not “belonging”—conditions, I would argue, as and educator in private practice in Australia. He teaches
many have, that are synonymous with globalization. and practices Relationship Based Spiritual Inquiry in
Rajneesh’s answer to these globalizing problems and Australia and internationally. Dr Lahood is the co-
others is to reduce the world and human existence to a director of the Centre of Relational Spirituality, Byron
Bay and can be contacted at info@gregglahood.com
dream. This approach, true to form in Oriental visions
of Enlightenment and spiritual salvation (including A
About the Journal
Course in Miracles), promote and elevate the nondual
to the highest spiritual estate (Heron, 1998), which, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
to follow David Loy (1988) in his careful study of peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
nondualism in Taoism, Buddhism, and Vedanta, published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
relegates the phenomenal world to “dream-like maya” official publication of the International Transpersonal
(p. 30)— in other words the world is unreal. The guru Association. The journal is available online at www.
spoke: transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).
If you come to realize this point—that the
soul cannot be destroyed—then the whole life
becomes a play, a fiction, a drama. And if the
whole life becomes a drama, even murder and
suicide become a drama to you. Not just in
thinking, you realize the fact that everything is
just a dream. Death too will make you a witness,
and that witnessing will become transcendence.
You will transcend the world. The whole world
becomes dream—there is nothing good, nothing
bad, just a dream. You need not worry about it.
(Rajneesh, 1976, p. 273).
12. I have also been involved in various open encounter,
gestalt based scenarios, tranings, and communities,
over many years, and have on-going interest in a hybrid
form combining action research, gestalt practice, and
re-evaluated transpersonal psychology that I think of
as relational inquiry.
13.    I do not mean here self-psychology’s “constant
empathetic response à la Kohut” which is an “attempt
to establish and maintain ‘atunement’ with a client”
(Resnick, 1995, p. 6, emphasis supplied) because (a)
this collaborative inquiry is a peer group and there
are no clients and (b) self psychology’s empathy and
attunement is formulaic and rote—the therapist has
to be empathetic which, in a sense, is not to be there
at all.
14. Metaxy, from the Greek meaning a middle ground
between the human and the divine—what Corbin
(1969) called the mundus imaginalis or the alam al
mithal.

78 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Lahood

 Transpersonal and Other Models
of Spiritual Development1
Harris Friedman Stanley Krippner
Walden University Saybrook University
Minneapolis, MN, USA San Francisco, CA, USA

Linda Riebel Chad Johnson

Saybrook University University of Oklahoma
San Francisco, CA, USA Norman, OK, USA

This chapter focuses on exploring various models of spiritual development. It first addresses
philosophical dilemmas underpinning the concept of spiritual development by questioning
whether these can be addressed without metaphysical assumptions embedded in religious
worldviews and thus understood in any consensual way across different historical and
cultural contexts. Traditional models of spiritual development are then reviewed, drawing
from indigenous, Eastern, and Western cultures. Integrative-philosophical and scientific
models, including those from the psychology of religion, transpersonal psychology, and
neurobiology, are then presented. The chapter concludes by noting the complexities involved
in understanding spiritual development accompanied by suggestions on future directions
for these models by highlighting their commonalities and differences and by providing some
evaluative perspectives for thinking critically about them.

Keywords: spiritual development, transpersonal, religious psychology, neurobiology

I
n the Biblical book of Genesis, Jacob, one of the
patriarchs of Judaism, dreamed that he saw a ladder
that reached from earth to heaven, on which angels
were ascending and descending. Such vertical models,
which imply ascending to a higher or descending to
a lower realm, have been frequently used to describe
spiritual development. Implicit in all vertical models is
a hierarchical belief that some stages of development,
or rungs on the ladder, are higher or lower than others.
Other models of spiritual development avoid value-
laden imagery. For example, spiritual development
can be seen as going in many directions, which makes
comparing and ranking various states unnecessary
(Ferrer, 2009). Spiritual development can also be
seen as expanding in a horizontal, rather than vertical,
direction, such that there is no higher or lower, but
only different patterns of expansiveness (Friedman,
1983). In this chapter, we attempt to describe these
and several other models of spiritual development.
It is beyond the scope of a chapter to set forth and com-
pare all of the many approaches to spiritual development
stemming from the myriad of religious traditions, each of
which may contain more than one model of spiritual de-
velopment. Instead, we sample a few models we consider
representative from indigenous, Eastern, and Western
cultures. Then we discuss philosophical models of spiri-
tual development and end with scientific approaches. We
hope to provoke thought about these models by high-
lighting their commonalities and differences, as well as
by providing some evaluative perspectives for thinking
critically about them. In light of the many variant uses
of the three key terms in our title, spirituality, model, and
development are defined in some detail below.
Spirituality
A s a concept, spirituality has been increasingly differ-
entiated from religiosity (Bartoli, 2007). Religiosity
is now frequently seen as pertaining to an organized
system of beliefs about the sacred, along with rituals,
rules, and other requirements of a belief system en-
dorsed by a group (Fuller, 2001; Pargament, 1997). Such

International
Models of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010,
JournalDevelopment
of Spiritual pp. 79-94 Journal of Transpersonal Studies 79
International
connotations have implicit social and cultural mean-
ings, referring to something external to the individual
(although these may be internalized).
Religious institutions, while supporting positive
values such as community and life-structuring rituals,
tend to be flawed in one major way: certainty about
the truths of one’s own religion sometimes leads people
to become intolerant. Taken to extremes, this leads to
dire consequences, such as genocides (Harris, 2004).
Superstition, sexism, dogmatism, and fanaticism appear
in many religions, including indigenous, Eastern, and
Western, and crusades, genocides, jihads, and holy wars
have led many in the West to reject formal religion,
propelling books voicing antireligious sentiments to
best-seller status (e.g., Dawkins, 2006; Dennett, 2006).
By contrast, spirituality is increasingly seen
as an inner process of connectedness with the sacred, a
psychological process internal to the individual (Gallup
& Jones, 2000; Sperry & Shafranske, 2005). Of course,
there is significant overlap between the two terms, as
spirituality historically has been experienced through
religion. But a person engaged in a religious group may
or may not have had spiritual experiences per se, and a
person who has had spiritual experiences may or may not
be part of a religious group (Friedman & Pappas, 2007).
This distinction between spirituality and religiosity
apparently is growing more salient in modern industrial
cultures (Miller & Thoresen, 2003).
Spirituality, even when distinguished from
religiosity, has been variously defined: that which
“infuses human beings with inspiration (from in-‘spirit’),
creativity, and connection with others” (Fukuyama &
Sevig, 1999, p. 4), involves a “presence or absence of an
individual’s focus on higher, broader, and deeper life
meanings that transcend ordinary existence” (Krippner
& Welch, 1992, p. 122), and the “human quest for
personal meaning and mutually fulfilling relationships
among people, the nonhuman environment, and for
some, God” (Canda, 1988, p. 243), to name just a few.
Spirituality has been viewed as cognitive or affective,
related to transcendence or to everyday life, to enhanced
ego development or regression to infantile states, and
to devotion to diverse transformational paths (Porter,
1995).
Clearly, spirituality is a diffuse and multifaceted
construct. MacDonald (2000) analyzed a number
of spirituality measures based on varying underlying
concepts of spirituality and found five factors: cognitive,
80 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
experien­tial/phenomenological, existential well-being,
paranormal beliefs, and religiousness. MacDonald
also identified several outlying factors that did not fit
well with his five-factor model (e.g., self-expansiveness;
Friedman, 1983). Lately, spirituality has been somewhat
commodified based on its presumed tangible benefits,
such as higher levels of mental and physical health
(Elmer, MacDonald, & Friedman, 2003; Gartner,
1996). However, spirituality can also be related to
harmful occurrences, such as psychopathology (Johnson
& Friedman, 2008), poor health (Magyar-Russell &
Pargament, 2006), vulnerability to the seduction of
cults, neglect of practical concerns, and exploitation of
followers (Kornfield, 1993). Climbing Jacob’s ladder
of spiritual development can lead to many outcomes,
both ascending and descending—and some may not be
pleasant destinations.
One example of difficulties associated with
spiritual development is conversion, the adoption of new
religious beliefs that differ significantly from previous
beliefs, which plays a crucial role in some people’s
spiritual development. This poses a real conundrum
regarding spiritual development. An adherent of the new
faith may view converts as advancing in development
by discovering the “true” faith, while a member of the
previous faith may see them as guilty of one of the
worst sins, apostasy. A convert takes on not only a
new religious identity, but also a new set of values and
behaviors. Insofar as conversion is often part of spiritual
development, it illustrates the relativism that seems
inherent in any model of spiritual development.
The difficulties in assessing spiritual
development are illustrated by the case of Mother Mary
Theresa of Calcutta who, in 1946, claimed that Jesus
Christ had spoken to her on a train trip to Darjeeling,
urging her to leave her teaching position in order to
work with the disadvantaged. How do we reconcile
this with the discovery that she later lived for decades
feeling abandoned by her God? Less than three months
before receiving the Nobel prize, she had written to a
spiritual confidant, “The…emptiness is so great–that I
look and do not see–listen and do not hear” (van Biema,
2007, p. 35). Her published letters revealed that, except
for one brief interlude, she had not felt the presence of
God for the last five decades of her life (Kolodiejchuk,
2001). This loss of contact apparently started when she
began tending the poor in Calcutta and eventually
became so severe that she began to doubt the existence
Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson
of heaven and even of God. This loss of contact was,
to her, a painful and unwanted descent for which she
never found an explanation, yet she continued her service
and never publicly disavowed her faith. How would we
evaluate these contradictory accounts? Did her loss of
faith represent a descent (with many years of tireless
devotion to the poor simply a compensation) or an ascent
(demonstrated by her capacity to persevere in many good
works even in the absence of inspiration)?
Model
W e look at the various conjectures about spirituality
as models, which we define as follows: “a model
matches the reality that it describes in some important
ways” and “a model is simpler than that reality” (Rodgers,
2010, p. 5). There are many ways to examine models of
spiritual development. For example, one could compare
models from different cultural vantages, such as breaking
them down into broad categories such as indigenous,
Eastern, or Western (although cultural diffusion has
cross-fertilized these in numerous ways so they are not
“pure” categories). Or one could compare the basis on
which truth claims are made: faith-based (religious),
logical or other systematic approaches to inquiry not
based on empiricism (philosophical), and empirical
approaches (scientific).
In addition, spiritual development models vary
considerably in form. Some are described verbally as in
myths or theories, mathematically as in numerological or
modern dynamic systems approaches, graphically as in
maps or cartographies, or in other ways. Representations
may be relatively straightforward and logical (in the
sense of following defined rules for relating symbols) or
appear quite alogical or even paradoxical (apparently not
following any form of logic or even intending to defy
logical grasp, as in Zen Buddhist koans and the parables
of Jesus that attempt to point beyond the limitations of
logic). Some models rely heavily on metaphor and we
note that metaphors hold value not only in the study of
spiritual matters (Metzner, 1998), but also have been
widely used in science throughout its history (Leary,
1990). In this chapter, we are guided by the metaphor of
Jacob’s ladder.
Some approaches to spiritual development do
more than merely describe: they attempt to explain how
spirituality might evolve. They may employ conventional
mechanisms (such as biological, social, psychological,
and cultural factors), or supernatural mechanisms (such
as karma and grace). Those that link variables together in
Models of Spiritual Development
an attempt to explain how a process unfolds over time
can be properly referred to as “theories.” Those theories
amenable to empirical scrutiny (e.g., falsification) may
be seen as scientific, while those that adhere to criteria of
logic (e.g., being internally consistent) without demanding
empirical support might be deemed philosophical.
We do not claim that any model (or type
of model) is necessarily better for understanding
or facilitating spiritual development. As Western
psychologists operating within the scientific tradition, we
acknowledge that some readers might find our approach
to spiritual development woefully lacking in light of their
own traditions, but we hope we are not disrespectful in
our attempt to understand and classify them.
Development
D evelopment usually implies a process of growth
across time. It is often assumed that such growth
is desirable (as in the idea of maturation), and a failure
to develop at a proper rate or to an expected destination
(as in developmental delay) is undesirable. As we shall
see, even a process that is generally deemed favorable
may include real or apparent reverses. Discontinuity
between stages of development is often assumed, but
some thinkers advocate viewing spiritual development
more as a continual process (Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger,
& Gorsuch, 1996), rather than a process of moving from
one discrete stage to another.
Spiritual development, in some models,
allows for influences that transcend the physical, such
as contact with a divine entity or a sense of profound
interconnectedness with the universe. Until recently,
Western psychology has generally adhered to the
prevailing materialistic paradigm of most sciences,
but this situation may be changing (Brydon-Miller &
Tolman, 1997; Polkinghorne, 1983).
Spiritual development can be seen primarily
as intrapersonal (as changes residing within the
individual) or interpersonal (residing among individuals
in relationship to community). For example, one divide
among Buddhists is between the Theravadan and
Mahayanan lineages, the former focusing more on the
enlightenment of individuals, while the latter more
emphasizing collective enlightenment. Development
can also be transpersonal, in the sense of pointing to
something beyond the individual as an isolated being
and that interconnects the individual to the sacred or
cosmos in which, inextricably, one is always embedded
(Friedman, 1983).
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 81
 Some traditions posit a teleology or defined
end purpose, such as ending dukkha (suffering, or
attachment to the impermanent, within Buddhism) or
attaining salvation (the attainment of blessed eternal
life, within Christianity). In other models, there is no
defined terminus and one’s spiritual development may be
seen as continually unfolding, becoming richer and more
profound until death and, according to some traditions,
even continuing after death across multiple lifetimes.
In some models, spiritual development
may be seen as unexpectedly sudden, as in a rapid
conversion (e.g., that of the Christian apostle, Paul) or
enlightenment (the immediacy of some Zen Buddhist
attainments of samadhi). Bucke (1901/1969) asserted that
cosmic consciousness comes suddenly and unbidden.
In other systems, change is seen as gradual, requiring
painstaking effort (years of deprivation and suffering),
whereas in yet others it may be seen as unattainable by
any effort (contingent on passively receiving grace or
subject to karma from previous incarnations). In some
models, spiritual development is seen as unidirectionally
progressive (always upwards toward a defined goal),
whereas in others it is seen as consisting of both ascents
and descents, intermixed in various ways. Spiritual
development has also been viewed as both widely variant
across individuals and invariant in which everyone
progresses through the same stages at roughly the same
rate. The very notion of spiritual development over time is
not universal. At least one thinker (Tolle, 1999) disputed
the importance of time itself, stating that dwelling on it
is actually a spiritual obstacle.
There have been many attempts to organize
spiritual beliefs. One typology was proposed by
Rawlinson (1997), who characterized them on two
dimensions: hot versus cool and structured versus
unstructured. Hot traditions emphasize relationship to a
personal spiritual being, while cool traditions emphasize
inner growth. Structured traditions emphasize the
need to follow specific methods, while unstructured
traditions emphasize no specific path. Given the sheer
number of approaches and their possible permutations
for understanding spiritual development, any summary,
including ours, is necessarily limited.
Philosophical Questions
T hese numerous models of spiritual development
vary in basic philosophical ways, which require
examination. For example, does spiritual development
necessarily imply some underlying reality apart from the
82 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
material plane or are people’s beliefs (not withstanding
whether or not they relate to anything substantial in any
veridical manner) worthy of study in and of themselves?
As psychologists, we write from the latter perspective
without taking a position on the metaphysical
assumption in the former. Spiritual development may
be conceptualized as aimed toward a hypothetical end-
point (or range of end-points) seen as more “real” than
the ordinary world. Those traditions that see ordinary
reality as illusory (e.g., as a veil of illusion or maya) may
be quite different from those that would use empirical
tests (e.g., the scientific tradition) to understand spiritual
development. For instance, many forms of meditative
practice, which generally involve the self-regulation of
attention and concentration, use a model of development
to describe the process of deepening the meditative
experience itself, rather than necessarily conceptualizing
it as a pathway to any sort of spiritual terminus. In these
models, such end-points may be welcome as a positive
side-effect of meditation but may not necessarily be
fundamental to the regimen itself. In other models,
a metaphysical terminus, such as eternal salvation or
enlightenment, may be the only desired end-point and all
salutary benefits at the more mundane level on the way
to achieving this spiritual outcome is seen as secondary
or even superfluous.
Regardless, any model of spiritual development
implies that change can be recognized. Some traditions
use specific tests, such as “passing” Zen koans by receiving
a teacher’s approval of one’s answer, to demonstrate
progressive spiritual attainment, whereas others are less
clear in defining progress. These considerations illustrate
some of the perplexing epistemological questions
involved in this inquiry.
Traditional Models
of Spiritual Development
T here are many traditional models of spiritual
development. We, of course, do not attempt to
provide an overview of all but, instead, provide a few
representative examples. We use the broad categories
of indigenous, Eastern, and Western to organize this
presentation, noting that the order of their presentation
is unrelated to any belief in the primacy or superiority of
any of the traditions discussed.
Indigenous models of spiritual development
There are many indigenous models of spiritual
development. Eliade (1951/2004) subsumed many of
these under the term shamanism, which he believed
Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson
typically focused on reinstating a sacred balance that had
been disrupted. He proposed that experiences of death
and resurrection (which occur during rituals such as
fasting, torture, or use of psychedelic substances) form
a universal core element of spiritual development in the
shaman (a development not shared by members of his or
her community). The spiritual development of the shaman
requires repeated visits to the spirit worlds (often requiring
multiple “deaths and rebirths”) and reaps progressively
increasing powers; the shaman can eventually at will
ascend to higher realms or descend to lower realms, often
described metaphorically as through climbing a tree (a
metaphor comparable to Jacob’s ladder).
Aspirants for the title of sangoma, a spiritual
practitioner and healer among the Zulu tribe in southern
Africa, for example, undergo trials congruent with
this model (Watson, 1982). Other shamanic traditions
around the world have well-developed sequences of
tasks or skills that aspirants must successfully complete
or acquire. Typically, they involve services to their
community and clients, such as guarding against sorcery,
treating pain and disease, interpreting dreams, resolving
family and clan disputes, finding lost objects, locating
game during hunting seasons, and arranging ceremonies
for such transitions as childbirth, adolescence, marriage,
menopause, and death (Krippner, 2002; Walsh, 2007).
Thus, the shamanic path to spiritual development
is not primarily one of individual self-improvement or
enlightenment, but rather a path of community service.
As the shaman’s skills and knowledge increase, his or her
success in helping the community is the gauge of his or
her spiritual development.
Western models of spiritual development
Spirituality in Western culture has been
dominated by the Abrahamic (Judeo-Christian-Islamic)
tradition for over two millennia. However, it should be
noted that many other rich traditions were suppressed
or totally eliminated, such as the mystery schools of the
ancient Mediterranean (Burkert, 1987) and the Celtic
priesthood (Anderson, 1998), and there are residual
traces even today of these formerly vibrant traditions.
Within Judaism, spiritual development has long
been judged through being well versed in the Bible and
its associated books, as depth of knowledge in these
sacred texts was the mark of understanding the will of
God. Learning was not restricted to simple ritualistic
recitation of the laws, but to the capacity to apply them
in daily life and live according to God’s plan. The
Models of Spiritual Development
spiritually developed individual demonstrates wisdom
and compassion through righteously applying the law,
as well as balancing justice and forgiveness within his
community. Esoteric mystical traditions within Judaism
included the act of blessings with the literal process of
the breath (as in the Jewish patriarchs breathing upon
their successors in bestowing their blessings).
In Hassidism, one variant of mystical
Judaism, the very person of a righteous one is seen as
the embodiment of wisdom and compassion, while in
Kabbalistic Judaism, spiritual development grows in
levels from focus on the individual to focus on others,
and eventually to focus on God (Berke & Schneider,
2006). According to these authors, the first level focuses
on obeying rituals, such as the dietary laws, without a
deeper appreciation of their meaning; this stage is seen as
that of the animal soul. The next level involves emergence
of complex interpersonal understandings, dealing
with concepts such as justice; this is seen as the wind
soul. The subsequent level develops into a relationship
with God, which involves the further actualization of
righteousness (putting the will of God into practice);
this is seen as the breath soul. The next levels involve
experiencing spirituality as disconnected from the body
and, eventually, a unitive experience may be attained.
Mystical schools within the Muslim tradition
also focus on realizing their relationship to Allah,
using methods such as contemplation, movements,
and storytelling. Whirling dervishes, members of one
Muslim Sufi order, twirl in circles to alter consciousness
in order to grow closer to Allah. Members of another
Muslim sect, the Druze, hold that spiritual development
occurs over several lifetimes; a concept of reincarnation
that is otherwise little known in contemporary
Western tradi­tions (but was part of early Christianity);
reincarnation beliefs are also found in some strands of
mystical Judaism, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and
many Eastern traditions (Chari, 1967). According
to Rafea, Rafea, and Rafea (2005), Islamic spiritual
development is judged through matching worldly affairs
with the will of Allah, aligning the secular with the
sacred in accord with Allah’s laws. This is broken into
steps: conviction (through a combination of faith and
will) that Allah alone is supreme; submission to Allah;
ability to distinguish between what Allah does and does
not will; and finally, completely identifying with Allah’s
will, harmonizing not just with the sacred but with the
entire world.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 83
 In the Christian tradition, the Biblical New
Testament (John 2:12-14) provides a dichotomous model
of spiritual development by emphasizing three stages
of growth paralleling physical maturation: childhood,
young adulthood, and mature adulthood, each with its
spiritual characteristics. There is also a long tradition
of celebrated Christian saints, such as Thomas Aquinas
and Saint John of the Cross, who were recognized for
their profound spiritual development based on their
attainments. Aquinas proposed stages of spirituality,
such as dividing charity into three parts, starting with
“beginners” who need encouragement, the “proficient”
who need to strengthen their capacity to love, and the
“perfect,” who are at union with God (Torrell, 2003).
Saint John of the Cross (2003) described the soul’s 10-
step journey climbing a ladder of love (like Jacob’s ladder),
progressing from body concerns to union with God and,
most famously, passing through the “dark night of the
soul.” The rungs (stages) are as follows: languishing with
love for God and the loss of desire for all things other
than God; ceaseless preoccupation with finding God;
perseverance in the face of obstacles, accompanied by a
sense of worthlessness in comparison to magnitude of
the task; gratitude for all that God has already granted
and acceptance that no more can be asked; impatience
and longing to unite with God; increased charity and
purity, as well as repeated contact with God; vehemence
in asking for God’s love; holding tightly onto God;
perfection sensed as sweetness; and finally, being totally
merged with God. Noteworthy, this tenth stage was not
expected to be achieved within a human’s lifetime.
Some modern Protestant communities, while
not offering an explicit developmental path, honor
certain signs of spiritual development. For example, in
some Pentecostal churches, handling venomous snakes
with impunity and engaging in glossolalia (speaking
in tongues) are seen as evidence of high spiritual
development. Another widespread and influential
spiritual movement in the contemporary US, which is
anchored in Christianity, is the twelve-step approach
in which spiritual goals and practices are promoted as
tools for mastering behavioral and substance addictions
(Krippner, 2005). Twelve-step programs are emphatically
stage-based and skipping a stage is seen as possibly leading
to relapse (Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001).
Eastern religious models of spiritual development
There are many Eastern religious models of
spiritual development, including those of Hinduism,
84 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, Sikhism,
and Shintoism. If any generalizations can be made
validly across their great diversity, they seem, in contrast
to the Western traditions, to more explicitly contain
self-experiments and encourage critical and reflective
thinking on the part of the seeker to appraise his or
her spiritual development. These include millennia-
old systematic change processes that require cognitive
control, disciplined effort, and self-reflective awareness
that could take decades to master, such as formal
meditation practices.
In the West, religion has been viewed as
primarily theocentric, emphasizing a relationship
to a personal divine figure; by contrast the Eastern
traditions, for example, Buddhism and Taoism, often
emphasize non-duality and an impersonal divine
(Cortwright, 1997). However, some Eastern traditions
are theocentric, including Shintoism, which boasts
a pantheon of divinities. Eastern religions have been
sometimes presumed to be “more spiritual” than those
religions from the West by Westerners under the sway of
romanticism (Friedman, 2005), but Eastern traditions
also have their outer trappings and inner constraints.
For example, although Buddhism is often characterized
as not being a religion (and sometimes is characterized
as a philosophy or even a psychology), Buddhist beliefs
include faith assumptions, such as Buddha’s alleged
“enlightenment” in which supposedly he became free
of karma, a concept inextricably linked to a doctrine
of reincarnation. Furthermore, the basic appeal of this
religion is on the faith that, since Buddha obtained
liberation from karma, others who might follow in His
path can also obtain the same result. This and many
other tenets of Buddhism (and most religions) are
empirically untestable and thus non-scientific, although
many attempt to misclassify Buddhism as a psychological
science (Friedman, 2009).
One sophisticated Eastern model for spiritual
development is the Yogasutras, attributed to the scholar
Patanjali in the second century BCE; its eight “limbs”
or steps laid the basis for Ashtong Yoga, one of many
disciplines purported to “quiet the mind,” transcend
one’s usual identity, and “know God” (Yati, 2009).
This yoga system proposes many tools for spiritual
development: meditation and mindfulness: postures and
breathing practices; moderation in lifestyle; and positive
virtues such as honesty and not injuring others. Spiritual
development is seen as related to attainment of these
Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson
qualities. The outer forms of yoga (physical strength and
flexibility in hatha yoga) are easier to evaluate than the
more subtle aspects of this path.
The Buddha’s “eightfold path” includes aspiring
toward right (or complete) perspective, right intention,
right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort,
right awareness, and right concentration. The first two
are said to produce wisdom, the next four to change
conduct, and the final two to improve meditation.
These eight aspects of the path are not necessarily
sequential, like the rungs of Jacob’s ladder, but are to be
developed simultaneously, each supporting the others
(Sangharakshita, 2007; Snelling, 1991).
One symbolic representation of spiritual
development from the Zen Buddhist tradition is the
Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (Suzuki, 1960), which depict
stages in finding and taming a lost bull, an allegory for
the search for enlightenment. It starts with searching
for the lost bull (realizing there is something more to
life), followed by discovery of its footprints (recognizing
a spiritual path). Then the bull is glimpsed (the goal
of enlightenment is perceived), followed by catching
it in a struggle (disciplined effort). The bull is finally
tamed (practice becomes more natural), and is ridden
home, accompanied by joy. Then the bull is forgotten
(transcended); finally, self and bull are both forgotten
(all is experienced as emptiness). The source of oneness is
reached and the seeker returns to the community to share
the fruits of spiritual development with others. One’s
place on this allegory indicates one’s level of spiritual
maturity, according to this Buddhist model.
Another approach within Hindu and Buddhist
traditions is based on chakras, Sanskrit for “turning
wheels,” purported focal points in one’s “etheric body”
(or “subtle energy body”). Although some traditions
speak of five, six, eight, or even twelve chakras, the
best-known versions define seven: the root, sacral, solar
plexus, heart, brow, and crown chakras. The chakra
levels where one’s supposed energy mostly resides, as
well as the relative balance among chakra energy,
can be used to assess spiritual development (e.g., one
whose energy is primarily in the base chakra, related
to survival, would be seen as less developed than one
whose heart chakra predominates). In this sense, the
human body and its supposed energy systems are like
Jacob’s ladder, with each chakra being like a rung.
The level of one’s overall chakra energy indicates one’s
spiritual development.
Models of Spiritual Development
In some yogic traditions, as seekers develop
spiritually a type of energy (kundalini) is said to rise
upward like a serpent from the root to the crown,
terminating if discipline has been sufficiently rigorous in
a unitive experience (Avalon, 1919; Goswami, 1980). This
developmental sequence may take years of meditative
work and is not without risk. One well-known seeker,
Krishna (1971), awakened his kundalini “serpent”
without supervision, resulting in disequilibrium that
took years to resolve.
Spiritual development through activation of the
chakras has taken somewhat different forms in Tantra,
Shakta, Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and
Himalayan Bonpo, among others, and in the more recent
writings of Aurobindo (1962) and Bhatnagar (Bhatnagar
& Lassey, 2009). The latter adept has incorporated
Western psychological principles into his developmental
model and has prescribed detailed exercises, such as the
visualization of various chakras to facilitate spiritual
growth.
Taoist paths to spiritual development also
emphasize working with one’s subtle body (the sheath
that allegedly envelops the physical body and extends
beyond it), often through internal alchemy, visualization
exercises, or ritualized movement such as qigong,
thought to promote mental and physical health (Chia,
1993). These practices interact with traditional Chinese
medicine and the purported circulation of qi energy
through its alleged network of some 265 acupuncture
points and the dozen or so meridians that are thought
to connect them. Healthy regimens are prescribed
to balance one’s yin and yang propensities (i.e., one’s
receptive and expressive propensities). Here, spiritual
development takes an embodied approach. However, qi
is not seen as merely physical, although there are alleged
practical benefits for the practitioner’s physical, mental,
emotional, and sexual health by unblocking energy
channels and increasing energy balance (Mayer, 2003;
Meech, 2007).
Integrative-Philosophical Models
of Spiritual Development
U nderhill (1911/1961) was one of the first scholars
to look across various traditions and provide an
organizing scheme of spiritual development. She proposed
that 5 stages lead toward the ultimate goal of mystical
spirituality, the merging of the individual soul with
God or the Absolute. The first is “awakening,” in which
one becomes conscious of the divinity, followed by the
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 85
second, “purgation,” in which one struggles to eliminate
personal imperfections. The third stage of “illumination”
is often mistaken as the last stage, as it is accompanied
by a glimpse of “transcendence.” Extraordinary mystics,
however, go through a fourth stage, which St. John of
the Cross called “the dark night of the soul,” a profound
sense of abandonment by God. Then if surrender to
God’s will occurs, there is a final stage with complete
loss of the individual self and a permanent union with
the absolute. By organizing descriptions of people’s
experiences, Underhill used a philosophical, rather than
faith-based, approach and her integration resembles
Jacob’s ladder in terms of a vertical hierarchy of spiritual
states with development consisting of passing from each
state to the next, “higher” one.
More recently, Wilber (1980, 1997, 2000,
2004) organized a massive amount of material into a
coherent framework of spiritual development.2 Taking
a cultural-historical approach, Wilber (1980) described
four fundamental phases in the evolution of human
consciousness. In Wilber’s earliest era, the sense of
self was wholly identified with physical being and the
primordial forces of nature. Consciousness later became
separated from the physiological life of the body, but it
had not advanced beyond a childlike sense of magically
mingling in this world. In this second era, the myths
structuring this reality were still bound to the body, but
an external world was recognized and responsibility for
events was magically assigned to it. In the third era, with
the advent of more complex forms of language some
12,000 years ago, the verbal mind climbed out of the
body and into a world of extended time. The physical
world could now be represented, manipulated, and
narrated through mental symbols, making it possible to
use complex shared symbols to understand and control
one’s impulses and world. However, the cognitive abilities
necessary for self-reflection were not yet well developed
and so the individual’s emerging sense of self drew from
images of the culture’s mythology. As the capacities for
self-reflection evolved and the individual’s assumptions
could be tested through deductive reasoning, emerging
perhaps some 3,000 years ago in different parts of the
world, a self-observing aspect of the psyche came into
being. This marked the beginning of Wilber’s fourth
era, characterized by the differentiation of the separate
personal ego, the capacity to step back and observe
oneself. The current era, Wilber’s fourth, is dominated by
the rational, self-reflecting, individual ego. In primordial
86 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
times meaning was lodged in the group; today it is
primarily centered in the individual.
Wilber (2000) also created a model of spiritual
development based on his examination of Western and
Eastern reports of mystical development. One can,
Wilber asserted, progress from “gross level mysticism”
to the “causal,” “subtle,” and “integral” stages. The last
of these represents the resolution of one’s conflicts and
imbalances in favor of a unity of thought, feeling, and
action. Wilber contended that children do not have ready
access to the higher spiritual realms. He did not dispute
the claim that children were capable of having some
sort of spiritual experiences, only that they cannot skip
developmental stages. He argued that children’s absence
of strong ego-boundaries means they cannot differentiate
between themselves and the environment, a capacity that
characterizes higher-level mystical experiences. According
to Wilber (1980, 2000), pre-egoic spirituality differs from
“trans-egoic” spirituality and to equate them is to commit
a “pre/trans fallacy.” Wilber’s model is probably the most
impressive modern example of a vertical model similar to
Jacob’s ladder.
However, Wilber’s model has been questioned
by many, including Washburn (2003) and Taylor (2009).
Washburn’s model is less hierarchical, allowing for
alternating ascents and descents. Taylor conceptualized
spiritual experiences as occurring at many different levels
of intensity and reports of the spirituality of children
meet his criteria for being authentic spiritual experiences,
albeit at lower intensity levels. Taylor’s model describes
five levels that may occur developmentally or may be
encompassed within a single experience:
1. A heightening of physical perception; the world
seems brighter, more colorful, and more intricate.
2. A sense of the “aliveness” of ordinarily inanimate
phenomena; the world comes alive.
3. A sense of meaning, harmony, and benevolence
pervading one’s surroundings or the world as a
whole.
4. A sense of inner well-being, peace, bliss, or joy.
5. An awareness of spirit in the world—what Christian
mystics call deification, what some Buddhist traditions
refer to as nirvikalpa samadhi.
These experiences can occur in a solitary context
or in a communal context, such as group sporting
activities, lovemaking, or in a group artistic performance
(including among members of the audience at such
a performance). Taylor (2009) found support for his
Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson
position from Loevinger’s (1976) speculation that a child’s
openness to experience is reduced during maturation, but
might be regained at higher levels of ego development.
Taylor concluded that spiritual experiences are accessible
to individuals at both Wilber’s pre-egoic and trans-egoic
levels, but that certain aspects of “trans-egoic” spiritual
experiences are not a part of the pre-egoic experiences,
for example the realization that one’s “ego-self” is not
one’s “true self.” This debate about childhood spirituality
is also reflected in Hay and Nye’s (1998) notion of
“relational consciousness,” which is proposed as a non-
cognitive spiritual construct that presumably bypasses
linear cognitive development constraints and allows
for the equal validity of childhood and adult spiritual
experiences.  must face the conceptual conundra we have pointed
Philosophical models of spiritual development
use various classification schemes, but in general they
use concepts not easily amenable to empirical testing or
they have not subjected their speculations to empirical
tests, although they may have integrated empirical
data into a theoretical edifice. What separates them
from scientific approaches is this lack of being open
to empirical examination, although the boundaries
between philosophy and science are not always clearly
delineated.
Psychological Models
of Spiritual Development
M any psychologists have proposed stage theories of
spiritual development within the scientific tradi­
tion, which calls for some form of empiricism, using sensory
perception to gain information to support or disconfirm
a theory. For example, Roehlkepartain, Benson, and
King (2005) presented an overview of various theories
of spiritual development in childhood and adolescence.
In the quantitative traditions of research, measurement
is essential and there is a robust literature using measures
relevant to this topic. There is also an abundance of
tools designed to assess spirituality, including over 100
identified constructs related to spirituality and the
transpersonal (MacDonald, et al., 1995; MacDonald,
Kuenztel, & Friedman, 1999; MacDonald, Friedman,
& Kuentzel, 1999). Many additional measures have
been developed since these review papers, evidencing a
growing research tradition (MacDonald & Friedman,
2002). There is also a strong qualitative research tradition
in studying spiritual development, as well as a variety
of emerging mixed-method approaches (Robbins &
Friedman, 2009).
Models of Spiritual Development
Psychology of religion
One of the earliest psychologists of religion,
Allport (1969) distinguished between immature and
mature religious sentiments. Immature religion uses less
developed thought processes, which are concrete and
magical (as in accepting sacred scriptures literally), while
mature religion uses more developed thought processes
(as in seeing sacred scriptures metaphorically). His ideas
developed into related concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic
religion, which can be seen as a stage delineation,
albeit with only two stages. Allport’s work generated a
tremendous amount of empirical research (see Hood,
Spilka, Hunsberger,& Gorsuch,1996), placing it in the
realm of science. However, even a scientific approach
out. For instance, some religious traditions hold that
accepting scripture literally demonstrates a higher level
of spiritual development, whereas other traditions may
see uncritical literalism as a relatively undeveloped stage
of spirituality.
Morality is the focus of another widely used
psychological approach to spiritual development.
Kohlberg (1971) was influenced by the well-know
Piagetian stages of cognitive development, as he
created a model of moral reasoning consisting of six
stages. Individuals at presumed different stages of
moral development provide different justifications or
condemnations of actors in given vignettes. Kohlberg
postulated three main stages: a “preconventional”
approach based on self-interest without concern for
another, a “conventional” approach based on prevailing
moral values, and a “postconventional” approach that
sometimes contradicted prevailing moral values in
service of a higher good. He saw his stages as universal,
but progression through the stages occurring at different
rates in different cultures. Of particular interest to this
discussion is Kohlberg’s belief that some people regressed
into earlier stages, depending on life circumstances (just
as the angels both ascended and descended Jacob’s ladder).
Kohlberg also sometimes speculated about a seventh
stage of cosmic and transcendental morality.
If moral decision-making represents an aspect
of spirituality, one’s primary form of moral reasoning
can be seen as an indicator of spiritual development.
Interestingly, some spiritual traditions explicitly defy
notions of morality and encourage adherents to break
extant taboos. For example, Jesus admonished his
followers to shirk the day-to-day responsibilities of family
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 87
and other conventional ties in order to follow Him, such
as to ignore Sabbath rules in order to help others,3 while
some Hindu tantric practices encourage violating social
norms, such as codes of sexual conduct, in order to gain
liberation. Thus moral criteria cannot form a uniform
approach to understanding spiritual development, since
morality itself is so variable. In addition, as religions
ossify, the fundamental moral messages of their founders,
which often were quite radical, frequently become
distorted into instruments of social control benefiting
the status quo.
The Freudian approach attempted to build a
scientific theory of development devoid of reliance on
any vestiges of religion and spirituality (i.e., considering
religion and spirituality as prima facie signs of failure
to mature). However, several followers of this approach
created revisions and extensions of Freudian theory that
did encompass spiritual development. Erikson (1980)
extended Freud’s theories across the entire lifespan into
an 8-stage model of development. Although each stage
can be linked to spiritual development, perhaps most
salient to this discussion is Erikson’s last stage, integrity
versus despair. Erikson argued that, at the end of life,
the developmental crisis needing resolution is finding
meaning with life itself, including its inevitable end in
death. To the extent that this successful resolution requires
facing at least existential, if not spiritual, concerns,
achieving it can be a mark of spiritual development.
Gilligan (1982) took exception to Kohlberg
and Erikson, pointing out that their models were male-
centered and hierarchical. Her interviews with women
indicated that, when faced with moral decisions, they
thought more about caring and connection than about
abstract rules. Gilligan interpreted the fact that females
tended to score lower on Kohlberg’s measures of moral
development as an artifact of the model, rather than a
demonstration that the moral development of women
is in some way inferior to that of men. Her critique
exemplifies the dilemma of imposing any uniformly
vertical model of spiritual development, as these may
not only be culturally and historically limited, but also
gender biased.
Perhaps the best-known stage theory of spiritual
development is based on both cognitive (Piagetian) and
affective (Freudian and Eriksonian) precursors. Fowler
(1981) envisioned spiritual development as a sequence of
seven universal stages: “Primal or Undifferentiated” faith
during the first two years (focused on security issues and not
88 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
on faith per se), “Intuitive-Projective” faith in preschoolers
(focused on unconscious material and magical beliefs),
“Mythic-Literal” faith in grade-school pre-adolescents
(focused on following rules, such as in adhering to
conventional justice), “Synthetic-Conventional” faith
in adolescence (focused on conformity), “Individuative-
Reflective” faith in early adulthood (focused on struggles
to find personal meaning), “Conjunctive” faith in middle
adulthood (focused on achieving reconciliation of
paradoxes), and last a “Universalizing” faith, similar to
other models of transcendence. As a scientific theory, this
developed into a robust research tradition (Leak, 2008).
The psychology of religion, as an empirical
scientific tradition, has provided many avenues to
understanding spiritual development, typically involving
the use of measures and surveys. However, much of this
research has been based on a Judeo-Christian approach
to spirituality and, as mentioned, may not be very
universally applicable.
Transpersonal psychology
The word “transpersonal” was first introduced
into psychology by William James in a 1905 lecture
and used in 1942 by Carl Jung as the German term,
überpersonlich, which his English translators rendered
as “transpersonal” (Vich, 1988). A few years later, this
term was also used by Murphy (1949) and then in the
1960s others picked up the term (Sutich, 1976) as a type
of unifying framework. Friedman (1983) applied the
term “transpersonal self-expansiveness” to experiences in
which one’s sense of identity extends beyond its ordinary
limits to encompass wider, broader, and deeper aspects
of the cosmos. Friedman (2002) later argued that the
transpersonal perspective allows a scientific approach to
understanding such phenomena that can benefit from the
wisdom of religious traditions and spiritual experiences
without being bound by their underlying assumptions, a
point to which we will return in our conclusion.
In contrast to the psychological study of
religion from a more or less “objective” position (such as
exploring demographic patterns related to phenomena),
transpersonal psychology also embraces the “subjective”
study of the experiential aspects of spirituality. Today
the distinction between transpersonal psychology and
the psychology of religion is fading, as there is a call to
broaden the psychology of religion by renaming it the
“psychology of religion and spirituality” (Emmons &
Paloutzian, 2003). Some scientific research has come
out of the transpersonal psychology tradition (e.g.,
Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson
Tart, 2009), but most of the work has been experiential.
One example of a transpersonal scientific research
tradition stems from the Self-Expansiveness Level Form
(SELF), a self-report test measuring transpersonal self-
expansiveness, defined as “the amount of True Self
which is contained within the boundary demarcating
self from not-self through the process of self-conception”
(Friedman, 1983, p. 38). The SELF measures three levels
of self-expansiveness derived through using a spatial-
temporal cartography in which there is a personal level of
the here-and-now, a transpersonal level in which identity
expands beyond present place and time such that self
dissolves as a separate entity, and a middle level between
the personal and transpersonal. In this regard, the SELF
was specifically designed not to measure a vertically
hierarchical level of spiritual development, but rather
a horizontal expansion of the self-concept across space
and time. This approach has also resulted in an empirical
research tradition, placing it within the realm of science
(Pappas & Friedman, 2007).
Neurobiological Models
of Spiritual Development
T he neurobiological approach to spiritual develop­
ment, now in its infancy, uses emerging technologies
(fMRI, QEEG, etc.) that can measure the physical
expressions or concomitants of spiritual variables. For
instance, activation of certain brain states (theta and
perhaps gamma brain waves) or the development of
certain brain areas (following years of meditation) lend
themselves to neurobiological study. Spiritual traditions
have long discussed physical factors, such as breath and
alleged “subtle energies” (qi or prana), in relationship
to spiritual development. A convergence of interest
in traditional spiritual issues and these new scientific
methods has begun to occur, such as by Krishna (1971)
who held several seminars with scientists, attempting
to elicit their cooperation in verifying the existence of
“kundalini energy,” which he felt held the key not only
to spiritual development but also to human genius and
creativity. Motoyama (1971, 2009) claimed to have
invented a technology for measuring acupuncture points,
meridians, and chakras, asserting that his data validate
the existence of these ancient constructs, and called for
independent replication of his studies. Alper (2001)
and McNamara (2009) have linked the neurobiology
of spirituality to human evolution and the latter author
has proposed that religion was a primary force in the
evolution of self-awareness.
Models of Spiritual Development
The neurobiology of spirituality is therefore
emerging as a distinct discipline, with studies of
meditation, near-death experiences, dissolving of ego
boundaries, and other phenomena taking place with
rigorous methodologies. In this regard, accounts
of extraordinary experiences studied through the
tools of neuroscience are attracting the attention of
scholars (Cardena, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Krippner
& Friedman, 2010). It is even conceivable that one
day spiritual development might be assessed by
neurobiological indicators (e.g., the overall ratio of theta
to beta brain waves produced during meditation, the
activation of certain areas in the left temporal lobe of
the brain, etc.). This would not necessarily be an exercise
in reductionism, but rather an acknowledgement of
neurobiological concomitants to spiritual life.
Conclusion
T his chapter began with the metaphor of Jacob’s
Ladder as a starting point for discussing models of
spiritual development, but there is another lesson to be
learned from this Biblical account. Once Jacob reached
the top of the ladder, Jehovah was said to have given Jacob
and his descendents dominion over all the land that they
could see. This promise could represent the rewards of
spiritual development (Maslow, 1968). But when it is
interpreted literally, as by some of Jacob’s descendents
who base their claims to political and economic control
of Judea and Samaria on this story, it causes no end of
turmoil, bloodshed, and warfare. This illustrates some
of the very real challenges for understanding spiritual
development, for taking a sacred text literally can have
high costs to humanity and the earth. We believe that
more deeply understanding and being able to facilitate
spiritual development could benefit people in important
ways. The models we have described serve as one set of
tools to explore this possibility.
Another approach is to recognize barriers
to spiritual development. These can be microsocial
(as in conformity pressures from other individuals),
macrosocial (as in pressures from collective structures
such as laws), or individual, as in character flaws. For
instance, Trungpa (1973) defined “spiritual materialism”
as a pursuit of enlightenment driven by egoistic needs.
Clearly, this whole area is one of great challenges and
potential rewards, as well as one where the costs can be
high if no integration is found.
Ferrer (2009) has argued for a participatory
approach to spirituality and its development. He
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 89
proposed abandoning any predetermined ultimate
criteria for evaluating spiritual development, as they can
soon collapse into dogmatic formulations. He argued
that this does not mean abandoning discernment,
but that we simply recognize that spiritual truth
claims cannot be argued in terms of ontology, as their
multiplicity is both a natural and essential expression
of a mystery to be celebrated. He maintained that this
is not an abdication of the obligation to evaluate the
differential worth of various paths, but that we need
other grounds to evaluate competing truth claims. He
was especially averse to the use of any predetermined
doctrines (spiritual hierarchies) and instead suggested
the consequences of different paths be used to evaluate
them. Specifically, he proposed two guidelines: an
assessment of how a path might liberate practitioners
from self-centeredness, and another assessment of how a
path might lead to a person’s fulfillment. These proposals
recall the pragmatic solution proposed by James (1890)
for resolving conflicts between positions (such as belief
in free will versus determinism) by looking at their fruits.
In this way, different paths to spiritual development may
not be universally inferior or superior, just different—
and spiritual development may not be subsumable
within any one system of understanding or measured in
any unidimensional way.
Future Directions
W e have attempted to capture some of the many
complexities involved in understanding models
of spiritual development and hope we have supplied
readers with some useful concepts to aid their study
of this important and provocative avenue of human
inquiry. Whether readers see Jacob’s Ladder of spiritual
development as vertical, horizontal, circular, or something
else, we wish them well in their quest. Finally, we hope
that the panoply of models of spiritual development
does not obscure the goal of so many individuals and
traditions to further spiritual development, whether it is
seen as salvation, enlightenment, or plain healthy living
in a fully embodied state of the here and now.
_
_____________________________________ ________________________
Questions presenting future directions for the field,
difficult problems to be solved, or topics that remain
to be addressed:
1. How might spiritual development be significantly
influenced by historical and cultural context?
90 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
2.  Can spiritual development ever be understood in a
universal way across all cultures and all times?
3. Can there be models of spiritual development that do
not rely on untestable metaphysical assumptions?
4.  Can a unifying scientific model of spiritual develop­
ment be constructed that appropriately addresses the
complexity and multidimensionality of this area?
5.  What empirical research methods (or mixed meth­
ods) might best address the complexity of spiritual
development?
6.       What innovative or new methods might be created
or utilized to study spiritual development?
7.  What are possible genetic components of spiritual
development?
8.   How might spiritual development models better
integrate the body, embodiment, and/or somatic
phenomenology?
9.   How might neuroscience inform, modify, or guide
spiritual development models?
10.  How might current research with psychedelics and/
or pharmaceuticals enhance our understanding of
spiritual development?
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Notes
1.  Reproduced (with minor changes) with permis­
sion from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook
of Psychology and Spirituality (2011), edited by
Lisa Miller.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 93
2. Any summation of Wilber’s complex thoughts
might be criticized as inadequate, as Wilber
has produced multiple revisions of his various
positions—see MacDonald (2007).
3.   Jesus frequently quoted the law by juxtaposing
one command with another—making the
relativistic case that one law carried higher
importance than another, which could also be
seen as not necessarily an admonition to ignore
the law per se but, rather, an interpretation about
a point of law based on a notion of a higher
good.
About the Authors
Harris L. Friedman, PhD, is Research Professor of
Psychology (Retired) at University of Florida and
Professor Emeritus at Saybrook University, as well as a
Florida licensed psychologist. He also teaches part-time
at a number of universities, including Walden University,
where he was formerly Chair of the Clinical Psychology
Program when this paper was conceived. He is interested
in transpersonal perspectives to psychology, especially
as they pertain to environmental sustainability and
social justice issues. He is both a clinical psychologist
and frequent organizational consultant. He has more
than 100 professional publications; in 2010, he co-edited
(with Stanley Krippner) Debating Psychic Experience and
Mysterious Minds.
group psychotherapy, and Humanistic/Existential/
Transpersonal studies. He is particularly interested in
applications of community based participatory research
(CBPR) to address social injustices and facilitate social
change. His publications span the following areas:
spirituality and psychotherapy, social justice and CBPR,
group psychotherapy, and mindfulness meditation. He
received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in
Counseling Psychology and has practiced psychotherapy
in the public schools, private practice, college counseling
centers, and VA hospital settings.
Linda Riebel received her PhD from Saybrook University
(then called the Humanistic Psychology Institute) in
1981, and maintained a psychotherapy practice until
2007. She is on the faculty of Saybrook University,
currently working on social transformation issues,
especially environment, food, and sustainability. Her
forthcoming book is The Green Foodprint: Food Choices
for Healthy People and Planet.
About the Journal
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).

Stanley Krippner, PhD, is Professor of Psychology

and Humanistic Studies at Saybrook University. He
is a prolific writer and internationally-known scholar.
With Harris Friedman, he recently co-edited Debating
Psychic Experience and Mysterious Minds. Among his
many accomplishments, he is a former president of
the Association for Humanistic Psychology and the
International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Chad Johnson is Assistant Professor of Human Relations,

Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, and Project
Director in the Center of Applied Research for Nonprofit
Organizations at the University of Oklahoma, Schuster­
man Center. His scholarship and clinical interests include
the interface of spirituality and psychology (including
mindfulness meditation), social justice (e.g., addressing
oppression among marginalized groups in communities),

94 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Friedman, Krippner, Riebel, & Johnson

 The Self and the Great Chain of Being:
Interview with Robert Bolton
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Family and Children Services
San Jose, CA, USA

R
obert Bolton (b. 1941) was educated in the sciences,
and developed a strong interest in Traditional
metaphysics, obtaining from Exeter University the
degrees of M.Phil. and Ph.D, with a special interest in the
areas of free will, personal identity and the soul. Dr. Bolton
has published several books on these and other themes of
the perennial philosophy. He was an early contributor to
the English journal Studies in Comparative Religion and
is also a regular contributor to the journal Sacred Web.
While Robert Bolton affiliates himself with the perspective
of the perennial philosophy, some of his views differ from
the seminal writers of this school, mainly because he does
not agree that the great religious traditions are all equally
adequate revelations, even though he believes they are all
revealed by God. Neither does he accept that monism is the
key to their message, on the grounds that one cannot hope
to enclose all spiritual reality in one system or one school of
philosophy, when there is a lack of direct evidence for it in
the traditions. A combination of Christianity and Platonism
is the basis of his interpretation of other religions.
Besides being a learned philosopher of the Western
intellectual tradition, he is a practitioner of the Christian
tradition which adds a unique outlook to this interview. As
Robert Bolton has retired from his academic position, he
dedicates plentiful time to writing and continues to live in
Exeter, United Kingdom, where he has lived since 1977.  much that I quite forgot to go to bed that night, a very
This interview sets out to clarify and expand upon
the integral metaphysics and cosmology of the perennial
philosophy as expounded by what has become known as
the “Traditionalist” or “Perennialist” school of comparative
religion, subject to the differences referred to above. While
both transpersonal and arguably humanistic psychology
recognize the perennial philosophy as one of their central
theoretical tenets (Bendeck Sotillos, 2009; 2010), there is
still much work to be done to clarify the role of modern
psychology (behaviorism, psychoanalysis, humanistic and
transpersonal) in relationship to the spiritual traditions
of the world. Long before the emergence of the modern or
postmodern era, the sapiential traditions of both East and
West acknowledged that the human microcosm is made
Interview withJournal
International RobertofBolton International
Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010,
pp. 95-105
up of Spirit/Intellect, soul and body. Thus it is imperative
that the human psyche or the empirical ego realign itself
with the spiritual domain in order to assimilate itself into
what is higher than itself, what is supra-human or supra-
individual. Human identity, including psychological health
and well-being is then inseparable from what is Divine and
Transcendent which the perennial philosophy unequivocally
affirms.
The interview presented here was conceived and
conducted by electronic correspondence during April,
2010.
SBS: Perhaps we could begin with how you first learned
about the philosophia perennis and the “Traditionalist”
or “Perennialist” school of comparative religion
and its authors (i.e. René Guénon, Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon), including how
this played a seminal role in shaping the intellectual
vision that underscores all your work?
RB: I first got a glimpse of this at the age of eighteen,
from reading Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy
(1944/1970), but the real beginning was two years later,
when I found a copy of Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity
(1945/2001) in a public library. This book was to me
clearly in a class of its own, and it held my attention so
rare occurrence for me. A great many things for a long
time half-suspected and half-uttered all came together in
my mind at once.
At that time, I was already well acquainted with
philosophy, including Platonism, but even then I saw
the best-known modern philosophers as either trivial
or perverse. During the following years, my spare time
was increasingly occupied with books by Guénon and
Schuon, though not so as to wholly replace philosophy.
This order of events is important, because the things I
wrote at that time show that for me the traditional wisdom
did not mean parting ways with conceptual thinking. At
that time such an option was not even conceivable as
far as I was concerned. That was to have consequences
Journal of Transpersonal Studies 95
for my attitude to Nondualism later on, once I realized
what it meant. The idea that higher levels of reality must
mean higher degrees of simplicity, as though simplicity
and complexity were ultimately separable, struck me as
clearly untrue.
So it appeared that the reality of the esoteric
must mean the existence of an esoteric philosophy, and
not the rejection of philosophy professed by Guénon.
For those of us who tend to see things in black and
white, the only other traditionalist option looks like a
fundamentalism for intellectuals, which soon enough
turns the esoteric into a hyped-up exoteric. The rejection
of philosophy means the rejection of an activity of the
spirit which is necessary for making the truth one’s own,
and its usual outcome is just bad philosophy, rather than
something of a higher nature.
I am lastingly indebted to the famous modern
traditionalists for all the traditional wisdom they
have brought together in their writings, and for their
resounding vindication of the reality of metaphysical
knowledge in the teeth of a culture designed to suppress
it, and that remains true despite the fact that I do not
accept their dogma that all traditional wisdom consists
of so many expressions of monism. Although Guénon
professed a rejection of all systems, he nevertheless
attempted by means of monism to force all traditions
into a single system, or Procrustean bed, regardless of
probability and scholarship. Those who think otherwise
must ask whether they can believe that all ancient wisdom
is the fruit of a system of monism which did not exist
before the mid-Eighth Century A.D., when Shankara
originated it in India. Why should traditionalists, of all
people, take so seriously a conception from so relatively
late in history, and one so localized?1
Traditionalism deserves to be a major spiritual
force in the modern world, but I fear it is not, and
that that is mainly because of this way in which it has
identified itself with just one kind of metaphysics. The
best thing for it would be a return to the more realistic
and open approach to tradition exemplified in Fabre
D’Olivet’s The Golden Verses of Pythagoras (1813/1975),
and I hope that my writings will encourage others to
think on the same lines.
SBS: A central element in your work is focused on
personal identity which you have explored at length
in both your books Person, Soul and Identity (1994)
and Self and Spirit (2005). With this said, what are
the essential differences between the Self articulated in
96 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
the spiritual traditions of the perennial philosophy and
that of modern psychology? And is the Self of the latter
two “ forces” of modern psychology (humanistic and
transpersonal) the same as the Self that the traditions
address?
RB: For me, the Self of spiritual tradition is very largely
identified with what it is for the Neoplatonists and Saint
Augustine. It therefore differs form modern psychology
by virtue of an “immanent transcendence” in the person,
about which other faculties and properties are arranged in
various degrees of subordination. This is not considered
scientific because it assumes a supernatural reality in
us, but I do not see why it should be any less rational
to include the supernatural a priori than to exclude it
in the same manner. I therefore do not accept views of
the Self which are taken to be scientific on account of
being solely a combination of phenomena, which would
exclude any basis for its capacity for salvation.
The traditional idea of the Self as I understand
it is a spiritual soul which is active between the opposite
poles of its intellectual faculty and the body and
sensation. We are thus beings who comprise many levels
of being or reality, and who have the capacity for creating
voluntary identifications from among these levels of
being. That is the basis for the idea of self-creation. The
issue involved in this concerns the possibilities which
become predominant in us. In his book The Greatness
of the Soul, Ch. 35, St. Augustine (1964) distinguishes
seven different levels of the soul, and even at the highest
level it continues to be a soul. On that point he is in
agreement with the great Neoplatonists.
Modern psychology has departed from this
position because it is expected to follow scientific
standards which are better suited to external things.
Thus there is a great elaboration of mental states and
functions without much regard for what exactly they
inhere in. That can end by making moral responsibility
unintelligible, whereas I adhere to the common sense
idea of self-as-agent, which I have argued for in my
writings, as in Person, Soul, and Identity, Ch. 1. Another
reason why I have reservations about the value of modern
psychology is owing to the fact that modern minds suffer
from a kind of extraversion which can apparently grasp
anything but the essential. This is an effect of the modern
political order, with its determination to create more and
more equality of opportunity. Every time that sort of
equality is extended, there is a corresponding increase in
the amount of competition for all kinds of employment.
Bendeck Sotillos
That results in innumerable minds whose powers are
largely adapted to the demands of jungle warfare, and
that is no basis for understanding the Self.
SBS: You make a distinction between the authentic and
the inauthentic person. This understanding differs from
modern psychology’s (behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and
some schools and/or exponents within humanistic and
transpersonal psychology) criteria of personal identity
that is rooted in the identification with the empirical ego
often seeking to establish a “ healthy ego” or “ego strength”
rather than transcendence. Could you please elaborate
on this and also is the existence of ego necessary?
RB: To deal with the last point first, the ego is necessary as
a consequence of our being individual persons, as we must
be according to the imago dei. The ego is also inseparable
from our being embodied beings, not accidentally, but
according to our essence. The human state is unique in
combining all levels of being in a single nature, which is
what we mean by the microcosm. All conscious beings
below our own level belong to the animal kingdom, all
those above us are pure spirits, while our state combines
the properties of both animal and spirit, and is at the
center of the Great Chain of Being.
Because of this, man could be in some respects
something more than God, and this issue is answered
by the Christian doctrine that God became man. This is
why the ego is not to be done away with or escaped, but
ultimately redeemed, just as Christ’s risen humanity is
with God in eternity. Thus the ego enters by grace into
transcendence in accordance with its nature and not in
defiance of it, or by the elimination of it.
Such is the orthodox position which sets the
direction of my thought about the person. Those who
think the ego should be eliminated are attempting to
undo the Great Chain of Being, and are equating the
ego with its fallen state out of contact with any effective
means of salvation. I would add that all this is inseparable
from a conception of our central place in the universe
which is unaffected by Copernican and Darwinian views
of it.
My conception of the authentic person is closely
connected with the above ideas, because it depends on
a hierarchy of faculties within the individual person
which reflects the whole of which he is a part. This has
been expressed by Fabre D’Olivet in a vitalized and
dynamic development of Plato’s tripartite conception
of the soul which I have discussed in Self and Spirit
(2005). According to this conception, the development
Interview with Robert Bolton
of a person from birth proceeds from instincts alone into
instincts and sentiments or emotions, and from thence
into reason and intellect as well. The development of
each of these “spheres” triggers that of the next higher
one when it has reached a certain extent.
This pattern of development is universal,
and does not amount by itself to an authentic person,
because the levels of personal being have to be in the
right relation to one another, as well as being individually
developed. Instinct alone is enough to produce action,
but sentiment can also do so, and with no necessary
dependence on instinct. This is important because the
contents of the mental or intellectual sphere have no
power of their own to initiate action, but can only do
so by arousing sentiments in harmony with them, and
for that one needs intelligent emotions. Without them,
all one’s thoughts and ideas will have no power over
one’s behavior, which will then be dictated only by the
impact of external impressions on one’s sentiments and
instincts.
Conversely, in authentic persons, their ideas,
ideals, and values always arouse the related feelings,
while these control behavior and action, and so they are
governed primarily from within and not by externals.
In this way the person is effectively a unity, either for
good or ill. This is because authenticity by itself does not
make anyone either a saint or a genius, even though one
cannot become a saint or a genius without it. It can only
be a force for good when the person’s ideas and ideals
include the most universal ones, such as are taught by
the religions. To fail in that condition is to drift into
the demonic. One of the worst things about the modern
world is its proliferation of unspiritual authentic persons
who have transcended mediocrity and assume that they
have a right to the role of prophets and leaders.
Spiritual authenticity will naturally appear as
“ego strength,” but it is not of the kind which ignores
self-transcendence. The unspiritual ego can also be
strong on a level with does not include any effective
input from the intellectual level, but that is the opposite
of what I am describing here. The legitimate ego is the
one in effective contact with all the soul’s levels of being,
and the strength it has is not a result of making strength
its primary objective.
SBS: You make an interesting case that traces the
“Cogito argument” 2 to St. Augustine rather than
Descartes. Contrary to attempting to prove the existence
of the individual as the final aim of human endeavor,
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 97
St. Augustine was emphasizing the a priori reality of
metaphysical certitude. Could you please expand on
this?
RB: Besides being a source of metaphysical certitude, the
Cogito argument is a vital element in the discovery of
personality which is especially Christian. Many thinkers
have thought beyond Plato in relative matters, but St.
Augustine is one of the very few who have thought
beyond him on something of fundamental importance,
such as personality. It is therefore of equal importance for
both philosophy and spirituality, and so exemplifies the
spiritual role of philosophy for those who wish to see it.
This certainty based on self-reflection is what would be
expected of a being who belongs to the order of spirits,
because it effects something outside the possibilities
of natural causality. In the latter case, one thing acts
on another through a coincidence of any number of
corresponding parts, but in the self-reflective act the
whole being acts on itself without mediation. Proclus
discusses this property of spiritual being at length in the
Elements of Theology, where he says the soul is “converted
to itself” or “reverts upon itself.” What he says about this
“reversion” is very relevant to the Cogito conception, and
should get more attention. conclusion should know itself to be identical with the
Sources for the idea are to be found in Augustine’s
(1963) The Trinity, Book X, Ch.10, and Book XV Ch.12.
In Book X, 10, one finds the crucial idea that “every mind
knows and is certain concerning itself” (p. 308). From this
it follows that there can be no conclusions more certain
than the ones which follow from the mind’s knowledge of
its own operations. Nearly all cases of error occur where
one has tried to explain external matters by reasoning
on inadequate evidence. There is no such problem in the
mind’s relation to itself, whence the Cogito argument is
valid in both Augustinian and Cartesian forms.
Its opponents have had to affect to deny the very
existence of the mind in order to get rid of this source
of certainty, and such thinkers are best answered with
a counter-challenge that there is no such thing as sense
perception either. They must either accept that or prove
its existence by means which make no use of it.
Augustine’s version of the Cogito makes full
use of life as well as knowledge and existence: “And no
one doubts that no one understands who does not live,
and that no one lives who is not” (Bk. X, Ch10, p. 307).
Likewise the ability to will depends on both existing and
on being alive. Doubt is not relevant here, for one must
be alive in order to doubt as well as to either know or be
98 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
deceived; doubt and deception themselves imply life and
existence and the knowledge of them. If we know that we
live, we must know that we know that we live, so that we
thus know two things instead of one, and that makes a
third thing. Self-reflective thought can thus generate any
number of true conclusions from its own operations, as
in Bk. XV, Ch.12.
Between the times of St. Augustine and
Descartes, the faculty manifest in the Cogito argument
was recognized in India by Madhva and the Dvaita
Vedanta tradition, where it was used as an argument
against Shankara’s monism. (I have written about this in
The One and the Many, 2008). The self-reflective power
involved in this is not the kind of thing which is open
to monistic or pantheistic sublation, rather as the self-
generative nature of God is not open to sublation in
relation to the universe.
There are some who see a problem in the
affirmation of the “I” who thinks and exists, because
they think that experience allows only “there is thinking”
and “there is existence.” But the Cogito argument, like
any other, goes through different steps, and its status
as an argument requires that the ego which draws the
ego which stated the premise. Without this continuous
conscious identity there is no argument of any kind, and
this identity is the “I.” This is one of the reasons why
I have argued elsewhere that thought only takes place
subject to the mental agency exerted by the “I,” even
though this may be taken for an uncritical acceptance of
common sense. In fact it can stand up to criticism. 
For Descartes, the Cogito argument was an answer
to a particular kind of sceptical attack on knowledge, one
which denied that there were any valid arguments on the
grounds that argument is always incomplete. The essence
of argument is a two-step process, namely, the affirmation
of a proposition and a rational connection between it and
another proposition which is either known to be true or
is widely accepted. Normally, the thing argued for and
its supportive criterion are quite separate, so that there
is always the possibility of having to argue in turn for
the truth of the criterion. However, for Descartes, the
“I am” and the “I think” which supported it were so
closely related as to be inseparable. On that basis, he had
an argument which was not open to the objection that
the criterion needed separate proof, and this agrees with
Augustine’s conception of the deep union between being,
knowing, and living.
Bendeck Sotillos
 Today, it is widely believed that the Cogito
argument is invalid, all too often by people who neither
know nor care why it was accepted as true in the first place.
This attitude, with its lack of interest in the philosophy
involved, results from a politically-inspired movement in
favor of relativism and spiritual horizontalism, among
other things. People who know that they know something
are not welcome in a culture where people are expected
to conform to norms which are socially imposed. That
situation reveals a shift of power from the individual to
the collective which is all the more remarkable in that
it has arisen without needing to be imposed by decrees
from dictators.
SBS: In your book Person, Soul and Identity (1994)
you write about “Existentialism and the Self ” which
explicitly states that existentialism is not compatible
with an integral psychology addressing the whole
person, nor with the perennial philosophy. You write:
“Existentialism has been carried along with a general
historical movement toward the disintegration of
the individual” (p. xiv), and elsewhere: “Existential
philosophies share a negative attitude to metaphysics,
that is, to the idea that man can make non-empirical
reality intelligible to himself ” (p.xiv). Many practi­
tioners and theorists within both humanistic and
transpersonal psychology would argue the contrary,
especially those within humanistic as it is sometimes
termed “existential-humanistic” psychology. What are
the fundamental incompatibilities between existen­
tialism and the philosophia perennis, given that the
existential facets of human existence are valid and real,
yet the perennial philosophy does not reduce the human
individual to the psycho-physical order? 3
RB: I hope my observations do not sound prejudiced,
although I was not thinking about an “existential-
humanistic” psychology, but was simply thinking of
existentialism as part of an anti-intellectual tendency,
where a phenomenal reality, existence in this case, is
substituted for the intellect. Existence, life, and intellect
are fundamental realities, but existence and life as such
are objects in relation to intellect, and not vice-versa.
In making negative remarks about existentialism, I was
thinking primarily about its historical development
from Kierkegaard, who defended the reality of the
individual person against the monistic metaphysics of
the Hegelians.
With the passage of time, it seems to me, the
emphasis shifted from the individual person to the
Interview with Robert Bolton
quantum of existence which the individual possesses,
possibly so as to detach it from its Christian origin and
get at something supposedly more universal. This could
easily lend itself to reductionism, and that in turn would
leave one open to a return to the Hegelian position.
The belief that reductionism will lead us to the hidden
essence of things is widely held, in theology as well as in
philosophy, but it is liable to involve question-begging
judgements as to what is inessential.
The possibility of some such betrayal can be seen
in the fact that Sartre was also a Marxist, although the
individual person as such was no more a reality for Marx
than for Hegel. Where the question of giving existence
precedence over intelligence is concerned, Hegel himself
led the way in going down this path. According to
Popper, much of Hegel’s thought was intended to destroy
the distinction between facts and values, or between
Forms and instantiations as Platonists would put it. Such
thinking serves to justify the belief that the end justifies
the means, and that political and military success are a
guarantee of truth and value. The truth would then be
whatever happened to win.
Such thinking would rule out the necessary
duality between cognition and its environmental condi­
tions of existence, and that is why those who want to
reduce truth to an ideology are so hostile to dualism.
The relation of this to tradition can be seen from the fact
that the independence of reason has always been part
of traditional thought, because tradition by definition is
an expression of the full range of human potentialities.
However, it may be that existentialism has moved on
in recent times, in ways which are truer to its original
inspiration, but even so, there is much in modern forms
of it which is too well adapted to the anti-personalism
which I was arguing against in Person, Soul, and
Identity (1994). Traditional thought gives first place to
the intellect, and not to any of its conditions, however
important.
SBS: The perennial philosophy acknowledges the
doctrine of the “multiple states of being” that perceives
gradations of consciousness that exist within the human
individual, which directly correlate with the traditional
understanding of the Self. How would you explain
the distinctions between the “multiple states of being”
as articulated by the philosophia perennis (Guénon,
1932/2001) in contrast with “altered” or “non-ordinary
states of consciousness” found in both humanistic and
transpersonal psychology?
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 99
RB: With regard to the multiple states of being, my ideas
are shaped by Plotinus’ idea of man as a microcosm with
a center of volition and consciousness which can relate to
all levels of being from within. Because of its total range
of possibilities, the soul is able to form its own unique
representation of the world, having something in its own
makeup corresponding to all it can experience. This
is what could be called paradoxically the “immanent
transcendent” in us, which shows the human soul to be
of the spiritual order, unlike the souls of animals; spirit
relates to the totality of things.
The broadest divisions among these states
or levels of being are the gross-material, the subtle or
psychical, and the noetic; their boundary is a state of pure
unity. The gross level is essentially multiple, with patterns
of unity imposed on it by the archetypal Forms. The
psychical level is also multiple, but not spatially divided
as such, only temporally. The noetic level is primarily a
unity with internal diversity, as intellectual experience
discerns diverse things within an overall unity.
These broad divisions I think should be related to
the seven levels of the soul described by Saint Augustine
(1964) in his dialogue The Greatness of the Soul, Chs.
33-35. Here, the first level is that of the formative agent
of the body’s unity and of its absorption of nourishment,
similarly to vegetative growth. At the seventh level,
all things are known in their highest essences and the
mysteries of religion are directly experienced.
For Augustine, the progression through these
levels of being was conditioned by asceticism and religious
practice. His negative attitude to the sex instinct had a
positive side inasmuch as he saw such asceticism not so
much as denial as a means whereby the natural was to
be spiritualized. The earlier states were not taken to be
bad as such, but rather as stages towards a higher unity
which comprehended them without divisions. Similarly
with Plato, he thought that our moral state affects the
kinds of reality that our minds are best able to grasp.
He was only interested in altered states of consciousness
insofar as they could be included in a hierarchy of being
with God at its head.
SBS: Could you please describe how your own spiritual
affiliation with the Christian tradition informs your
understanding of human identity in the light of imago
Dei or “the image of God” illustrating the sacredness of
the human body?
RB: My Christian beliefs and the idea of man as a
microcosm are closely related. This relatedness is the
100 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
key to the uniqueness of mankind in the order of beings
and that of the individual person within mankind, and
involves a combination of religious orthodoxy with a
traditional metaphysical view of the world with many
levels of being. The animal creation is wholly immanent
in the material universe, even though it is ensouled and
combines three levels of being, namely, those of matter,
life, and consciousness. Human beings share those levels,
along with reason and self-awareness as well.
This self-aware intelligence places man in the
order of spirits, even though he exists on a material level.
Thus man uniquely combines in himself the material and
spiritual orders of creation, which compensates for his
being the lowest member of the spiritual order. None of
the higher orders of spiritual beings has this union with
the material creation, and neither has God as such, since
He too is pure spirit. The Divine Logos became incarnate
and lived as a man so that the human microcosm could
be taken up into the Second Person of the Trinity and
live for ever as the eternal archetype of the human state.
Without this, man’s duality of natures and his capacity
for self-sacrifice would have been something for which
God would have had no equivalent.
The human face and body are therefore in a
sense sacred because they manifest on the material level
both the central state among the hierarchy of beings and
the Divine archetype at the same time. The uniqueness
of the individual person follows from this because a
supposed race of standard or cloned human beings
would manifest only quantity, and not the uniqueness
of their Creator and archetype. Just as the whole can be
manifest in the part, the whole of things, spiritual and
material, is manifest in the person.
I think it is not an accident, therefore, that the
meaning and reality of personality should be a Christian
discovery, even though the importance of the individual
had already been discovered in pre-Christian times in
Greek philosophy and in the moral teachings of the
Jewish prophetic tradition. What makes an individual a
person in the fullest sense is something which can only
be seen in the light of the personal and Trinitarian idea
of God. In regard to salvation, this is the kind of being
who can reasonably be thought of as being designed for
it.
This idea of a personal identity which is created
and willed by God, and is the instantiation of a Form
whether we are conscious of it or not, is a complete contrast
to the view of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta whereby
Bendeck Sotillos
our identities would result solely from the activities of
our mental faculties, those activities themselves resulting
only from the habits of our own lives and of countless
previous generations. That view of the self is really a
nightmare, which few of those who profess it follow with
full consistency.
However, these ideas still leave us with the
problem that what we essentially are does not appear
to be connected with the things we do, nor are the two
to be confused, even though identity is often defined in
terms of one’s prevailing activities. The sinner is not the
same thing as the sin, but there is still a great difficulty in
explaining how two such different ideas of identity can
combine and interact. I think the answer lies in the many
different levels of being which we combine in ourselves,
which give rise to endless possibilities which are very
unequal in value.
SBS: How can the observance and practice of the tradi­
tional doctrines and methods of the philosophia perennis
offset the present-day disintegration, which is ever-
widening and ever-multifaceted and yet compounded
within the core quandary, where all other crises are a
derivative of the spiritual crisis of today? 4
RB: The present-day disintegration you speak of comes
from a very widespread inversion of our true sense of
identity, a huge mental and moral extraversion. There is
pressure to identify with countless things in the outside
world which may in any case be completely unrelated to
one another, and to identify with practically everything
except the experiencing self on whom all these depend
qua experience. Modern society breathes a sense of
urgency and insecurity on everyone, until living one’s life
is felt to be a matter of dealing with one long emergency.
To be mentally imprisoned in this way of thinking can
rightly be called the “cosmic illusion,” experienced by
a self which cannot connect with its own essence and
which may have lost even the will to do so.
Nevertheless, it remains true that the doctrine
and practice of the philosophia perennis, in a form such
as Platonism for example, is able to reach the deepest
levels of our spiritual problem, but the way forward is
much hindered by a paradox. It has been pointed out
that even to choose to abide by reason in the direction
of one’s life is a choice which cannot come from reason
itself, because in a pre-rational state, the choice of reason
must come from an impulse which is not rational as
such, even though reason may be implicit in it. (Those
who think that we do not need religion because reason
Interview with Robert Bolton
alone is enough are blind to the fact that we cannot
accept even the dictates of reason without grace.)
Similarly with the deeper forms of wisdom:
the initial problem is simply to realize that something
is very wrong and that one’s deepest need is for a way
of knowing and loving which illuminates the self and
its world at the same time. This disposition may not
be effectual unless it is strong and recurrent, and is
never neglected, and is always fed with the appropriate
nourishment when it is consciously present. This is not
as bad as being unable to take a medicine until one
has already taken it, but something of that paradox is
there.
Somehow, there has to be a sense of danger
and a spirit of resistance, which are made very difficult
by modern education, which is so largely a program of
socialization. I say “socialization” in a generic sense of
the word, but it is increasingly present in the political
sense of the word as well, and in the Christian West,
there are many who seem to be unaware of the difference
between Christianity and socialism, let alone the fact
that socialism was devised by philosophers for the
purpose of eliminating Christianity.
The political side of modern life cannot be
ignored in this context, simply because it is becoming
ever more intrusive in supposedly free countries. It has
a hold on education which could never look normal to
those for whom politics and religion are fundamentally
different. However, this sociological loss of the
distinction between them is a direct manifestation of
the process of entropic collapse which I wrote about in
The Order of the Ages (2008). It is inseparable from the
reduction in the qualitative content of the world of our
experience under present world conditions.
These remarks point to a different evaluation
of individualism than is usually made today. Instead
of seeing it as something negative as such, we should
recognize that it can come in good and bad forms like
anything else. Not only that, but despite its potential for
evil, it is above all through the individual that the spirit
is manifest, although there is a widespread reluctance to
admit this fact. Instead, there is a sinister coincidence
between the attitudes of so-called politically correct
thinking in the secular culture and of some orientalizing
kinds of spirituality in regard to the individual and
individualism. Spiritual awakenings are least of all likely
in those who have a habit of imitating other people who
are imitating other people.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 101
SBS: In your book The Order of the Ages (2008) which
illustrates the cosmologia perennis, you have written
the following words: “the sphere of consciousness always
contracts with the passage of time” (p. 128). This statement
is in fundamental contrast to evolutionary theory and
the modern notion of “progress,” which also conflicts
with the theories of humanistic and transpersonal
psychology—emphasizing “consciousness evolution” as
proclaimed by Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, and
more recently Ken Wilber (cf. Bolton, 2009; Stoddart,
2008). Could you speak to this?
RB: The idea that the sphere of consciousness contracts
with the passage of time does sound like a complete
paradox in today’s world, where information about
nearly all subjects is expanding at an enormous rate,
but we need to distinguish firstly between the sphere
of potential objects of consciousness, and the sphere
of actual consciousness in most people today. The
accumulation of knowledge gives no indication as to the
extent of our mental grasp of it. In any case, intelligence
in today’s world is confined to the rational level, while
its intellectual form is made marginal or eliminated.
That alone, by absolute standards, means a contraction
in the scope of intelligence.
One way of explaining this is by reference to the
cyclic principles on which The Order of the Ages (2008)
is based. A slow contraction in the average awareness
is predicted on this basis because (a) each state of the
world is the effect of the last one and the cause of the
one after it, while the causal power is always rather less
in the effect than in the cause, and (b) the range of
instantiation of the Forms in the material world is by no
means a fixed quantity of realities. With the passage of
time, the number of Forms instantiated, their durations
on the phenomenal level are all steadily diminished,
so that the material world is made more material by
default. This perspective is in accordance with the
ancient wisdom traditions, which see the world moving
away from a divinely-governed origin.
In the same book, I sought to justify the
apparent paradox of generally contracting consciousness
by reference to a property of time which is very difficult
to understand adequately, but which would also explain
why the higher faculties should become increasingly
slow to develop. Successive measurable time-intervals
do not necessarily contain the same amount of temporal
duration, even though other temporal changes can be
seen to be going on in a constant proportion to them.
102 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Take, for example, two persons both born in 1920 and
who die at the age of eighty in 2000. Here, both common
sense and philosophy of time agree that they have both
had the same total duration or time on earth. However,
if we now compare the lifetimes of two persons, one of
whom lived from 1920 to 2000, and one who lived from
1820 to 1900, it does not follow logically that these two
have both had the same amount of time, even though
common sense says they have had.
This common sense conviction assumes an idea
of time which was made into a dogma by Isaac Newton,
for whom time was an independent reality which
transcended everything that took place in it, and had a
uniform and invariable motion of its own. There is no
proof for that, nor is there likely to be, especially in the
wake of the Theory of Relativity. There is no necessity
for time to advance by increments which are all the
same: they may progressively change in quantity.
Between eternity and time as we know it is
aevum or endless time, and the flow of time in this world
proceeds through states which are increasingly removed
from the absolute duration of aevum. Human life can
thus be growing longer in relation to other temporal
phenomena which are affected by the same temporal
contraction. To measure a human lifespan in this way
would be like measuring a contracting object with a
ruler which is contracting at a slightly faster rate.
Now if it is the case that human life is growing
shorter on an absolute scale, it will be the most slowly-
developing faculty, that of intellect, which will be the
most adversely affected by this. This idea of temporal
contraction is an aspect of the cyclic changes already
referred to, but it is a subject which does not directly
depend on traditional conceptions of time and history,
and some may prefer that kind of alternative.
SBS: In your work Keys of Gnosis (2004) you write an
interesting observation: “The transcendent dimension
of everyday consciousness is evidenced by unmistakable
signs if one knows how to look for them” (p. 55). This
is a direct testimony of the ever-present reality that is
generally unnoticed in our highly complex and secular
epoch that does not give priority to contemplation over
action, perhaps you could elaborate on the meaning
of this statement? Would you mind also speaking to
the implications that this understanding has on the
seemingly paradoxical recognition of being-in-the-
world and yet being essentially “not of this world”?
RB: This is a subject which has seemed important to me
Bendeck Sotillos
for a long time. Spiritual vision can begin much lower
down the scale of experiences than most people realize,
a fact which I was first made aware of by C. S. Lewis’
Miracles (1947). Here he explains how the supernatural
begins with reason. Reason and nature form a duality
because no matter how close they may be, reason is never
reducible to the natural. When thought and behavior are
governed by natural causes alone, one is moved by a self-
generative linkage of feelings, sensations and images.
This kind of linkage requires nothing more than
the function of association, and it acts like an object
drifting on the sea. The presence of reason does not
abolish this kind of process, but directs it for purposes
which give it unity and meaning. Its effect on the merely
natural comes from the fact, as I understand it, that
reason is present in nature while not being part of it,
but rather transcending it. This is the traditional idea of
the divinity of reason which modern thought has turned
against in the interests of a kind of unity and wholeness
which is deeply unintelligent and unspiritual.
Something similar can be seen in theology,
where the excuse for it is a supposed need to be rid of
everything which seems to come from Greek sources, as
if intelligence could do nothing but conceal the truth.
Nevertheless, reason is as it were the ground floor of
vision, despite the fact that reason alone has no power to
confer spirituality on purposes which are deluded, even
though its operation is supernatural in itself.
On the next level above the purely rational, the
objective reality of the higher values is always manifest,
even in precisely the things which seem to exclude or
refute them in the outside world. This is because one can
only have adverse reactions to such things as injustice,
fraud, ugliness, and so forth because justice, truth, and
beauty are realities eternally constitutive of our own
minds and of the universe. Such is the basis for being
able to see God in everything.
Direct manifestations of the Forms in clear
instances and in their physical negations are thus
equally revelations of the same truth in two different
modes. Besides that, there is the Divine illumination of
mind which, as I indicated at the end of Keys of Gnosis
(2004), can be found even in the normal workings of
the mind. This is because all one’s efforts to understand
things have no coercive power, however welcome that
would be. In reality, effort is made in the direction of
some object, and the understanding may discover the
connections involved in it or not, a fact which Plato
Interview with Robert Bolton
explained on the basis that the Form of the Good, which
transcends all the other Forms, is the unifying light
which connects the Forms in one’s understanding. This
idea was also taken up by St. Augustine, whose idea of
Divine illumination means that one’s use of intelligence
can amount to a conversation with God, well short of
mystical experience.
Although the natural and the supernatural
are profoundly different, they are not separate, but
interpenetrate in the “naturally supernatural” as
Schuon (1948/1953; 1988/1990; 1995/1997; 1961/1998;
1990/2002; 1965/2005; 1986/2005; 1979/2006;
1953/2007; 1981/2008; 1970/2009) called it. Such
things may be ignored by those whose attention is on the
highest forms of vision, but too much emphasis on that
level of experience may cause people to see God’s world
as just a desert or a rubbish dump, and seeing things in
that light is no preparation for the deepest spirituality.
These observations are also the kind of answer I would
offer to questions concerning man’s involvement with
both transcendence and immanence, and concerning
the question of being in the world without being part of
it in a solely immanent manner.
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Schuon, F. (1953). The transcendent unity of religions
(P. N. Townsend, Trans.). London, UK: Faber &
Faber. (Original work published 1948 [French])
104 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Schuon, F. (1995). Orthodoxy and intellectuality. In
Stations of wisdom (G.E.H. Palmer, Trans.; pp.
14-15). Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books.
(Original work published 1958 [French])
Schuon, F. (1999). Gnosis, language of the self. In
Language of the self (pp. 201-217). Bloomington, IN:
World Wisdom Books. (Original work published
1959)
Schuon, F. (1975). Letter on existentialism. Studies in
Comparative Religion, 9(2), 66-69.
Schuon, F. (1990). To have a center. Bloomington, IN:
World Wisdom Books. (Original work published
1988 {French})
Schuon, F. (1997). The eye of the heart: Metaphysics,
cosmology, spiritual life. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom Books. (Original work published 1995
[French])
Schuon, F. (1998). Understanding Islam (D. M. Matheson,
Trans.). Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books.
(Original work published 1961 [French])
Schuon, F. (2002). Roots of the human condition.
Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books. (Original
work published 1990 [French])
Schuon, F. (2005). Light on the ancient worlds (D. Casey,
Ed.). Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. (Original
work published 1965)
Schuon, F. (2005). The essential Frithjof Schuon (S. H.
Nasr, Ed.). Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom
Books. (Original work published 1986)
Schuon, F. (2006). Sufism: Veil and quintessence: A new
translation with selected letters (M. Perry, J. Pierre
Lafouge, & J. S. Cutsinger, Trans.). Bloomington,
IN: World Wisdom Books. (Original work published
1979 [French])
Schuon, F. (2007). In J. S. Cutsinger (Ed.), Spiritual
perspectives and human facts: A new translation with
selected letters. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom
Books. Original work published 1953 [French])
Schuon, F. (2008). Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on
esoteric ecumenism (M. Perry, J. P. Lafouge, & J.
S. Cutsinger, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom Books. (Original work published 1981
[French])
Schuon, F. (2009). Logic and transcendence: A new
translation with selected letters (M. Perry, J. P.
Lafouge, & J. S. Cutsinger, Trans.). Bloomington,
IN: World Wisdom Books. (Original work published
1970 [French])
Bendeck Sotillos
Shah-Kazemi, R. (2006). Paths to transcendence:
According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister
Eckhart. Bloom­ington, IN: World Wisdom Books.
Soares de Azevedo, M. (Ed.). (2005). Introduction. In
Ye shall know the truth: Christianity and the perennial
philosophy (pp. xiii-xxi). Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom Books.
Smith, H. (1993). Introduction to the revised edition.
In The transcendent unity of religions (pp. ix-xxvii).
Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. (Original work
published 1948 [French])
Smith, W. (2009). Christian gnosis: From Saint Paul to
Meister Eckhart. San Rafael, CA: Sophia Perennis.
Stoddart, W. (2008). The flaws of the evolutionist
hypothesis. In Remembering in a world of forgetting:
Thoughts on tradition and postmodernism. (M. Soares
de Azevedo & A. Vasconcellos Queiroz, Eds.; pp.
33-34). Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books.
Upton, C. (2008). On Christianity, Hinduism, Islam,
and non-dualism: A dialogue between Charles
Upton and Robert Bolton. In Knowings: In the arts
of metaphysics, cosmology, and the spiritual path (pp.
19-95). San Rafael, CA: Sophia Perennis.
Other Books by Dr. Robert Bolton:
Bolton, R. (2010). Foundations of free will. San Rafael,
CA: Sophia Perennis.
Bolton, R. (2001). The order of the ages: World history in
the light of a universal cosmogony. (1st ed.), Hillsdale,
NY: Sophia Perennis. (2nd ed., 2008, San Rafael,
CA: Sophia Perennis)
Bolton, R. (1996). The logic of spiritual values. London,
UK: Minerva Press.
4.    For a thorough presentation of this subject see
Guénon, 1996.
About the Author
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, MA, CPRP, MHRS, has
received graduate degrees in Education and in Psychology
and has undergone extensive training in various
psychological orientations. He has travelled throughout
the world to visit sacred sites, and had contact with
noted spiritual authorities. He is a Board Affiliate of the
Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) and has
published in numerous journals and magazines such as:
Parabola: Myth, Tradition, and the Search for Meaning;
Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies; Sacred Web:
A Journal of Tradition and Modernity; Temenos Academy
Review. He is currently editing an issue of Studies in
Comparative Religion devoted to Psychology and the
Perennial Philosophy. He currently works as a mental
health clinician in northern California.
About the Journal
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).

Notes

1.   See Bolton & Upton, 2006; Upton, 2008. Also of

interest to this discussion are A Monk of the West,
2004; Oldmeadow, 2004, 2008, 2010; Osborne,
1959/2009; Schuon, 1959/1999; Shah-Kazemi, 2006;
Soares de Azevedo, 2005; Smith, H., 1948/1993;
Smith, W., 2009.
2.   For an informative overview on the Cartesian
formula—Cogito ergo sum—as understood by
key representatives of the perennial philosophy see
Schuon, 1995.
3.  For a valuable articulation of this subject see Schuon,
1975.

Interview with Robert Bolton International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 105

 Jacob Wrestles the Angel:
A Study in Psychoanalytic Midrash
Michael Abramsky
University of Detroit Mercy
Detroit, MI, USA

This essay is a study in psychoanalytic Midrash: a literary and psychological meditation on the
Biblical story of Jacob. The Hebrew verbal root from which the term Midrash derives means to
investigate or explore. It is a genre of Biblical scholarship used to interpret the Bible in symbolic
and inspirational terms. This essay examines Jacob as he moves from a character dominated by
self-defeating neurosis through his transformation into a spiritual being and exemplar of principled
leadership. Insights from Freudian and Jungian psychologies, mythology, and literary traditions are
used to describe and explain Jacob’s character metamorphosis.

Keywords: psychoanalysis, midrash, transpersonal, Jacob, spirituality, religion, Jung

T
his paper examines the Biblical figure of Jacob
and his transformation through the lens of
Midrash. It employs tools from developmental
psychoanalysis, transpersonal psychology, Jewish
Kabbalah, and literary analysis to explore, amplify, and
develop the major psychological themes inherent in this
legend.
The essay’s structure reflects the integrative work
of Ken Wilber (2000). He has argued that systems that
are diverse on the surface share the same underlying
metaphysical structure. All such systems see man as
moving through a series of stages beginning with the
primitive sensory motor stage of action, through the
more interiorized and mentalist stages of thought/feeling,
to the ultimate stage of spiritual presence and soul. The
number and description of the stages differ somewhat
from system to system, but all share these common
parameters describing a matter-to-spirit axis and man
evolving along that axis.
The Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, began as an oral
tradition. It wove together legends, folktales, poetry,
and ethical imperatives and passed this wisdom from
generation to generation. These words were incorporated
into the fabric of Hebrew culture as guidelines for both
ethical and spiritual practice. That culture was torn
asunder in 586 BCE by the invasion of the Babylonian
empire and the subsequent exile of the Jews to Babylon
for 70 years.
When the Jews returned to Israel, they began
to commit the Torah and other holy books to writing.
106 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
International
Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 106-117
Perhaps, given their experience, they knew their time as
an insulated and coherent culture had come to an end.
The holy books would provide the cohesion that their
homeland no longer could afford them. The compilation
process continued for over 500 years until a unified
canon was formed called the Tanakh, or, to Christians,
the Old Testament (Robinson, 2000).
Soon after the canon was created, commentaries
on that canon began. The commentaries on the moral,
ethical, and legal codes were called Midrash Halakah.
Midrash means to investigate or explore. These commen­
taries largely interpreted the broad principles of the 613
mitzvot (God’s commandments) and applied them to
concrete situations, much as our contemporary courts
do today with congressional laws.
The commentaries on the legends, poetry, and
folktales were labeled Midrash Aggada. These commen­
taries took a different form and were designed for a
different purpose. The purpose of Midrash Aggada was
for homiletic preaching, using such tales in sermons
or teachings to inspire and inform. Midrash Halakah
appealed to the rational aspects of the mind while
Midrash Aggada related more to the emotive, creative,
and archetypal. Midrash Aggada used stories to fill in
gaps in the Biblical narrative, but it also interpreted
Biblical stories in a mythopoeia narrative. This provoked
the emotions and personal inspiration through tales
of faith, morality, and social compassion and offered
hope, guidance, and personal transformation to the
beleaguered.
Abramsky
 Strack and Stemberger (1996) have written
extensively on the history of this form of commentary
and analysis. Midrash Aggada is a literary, rather than
legal, form of exegesis, “freer and more characterized
by a playful element” (p. 238). In contrast to the legal/
rationalist style of Midrash Halakah, Midrash Aggada
begins its analysis with holes in the Biblical narrative,
cryptic passages, or a problem suggested by inconsistency
or incomplete thought. This Biblical problem is then
answered through reference to other sources, sometimes
a single source or sometimes like a nested Russian doll
each reference leads to another reference in a process most
similar to free association. In the initial Midrashim the
interpretation often occurred through direct references
to other passages from the Bible. For example, the
book of Chronicles was seen as a type of Midrash on
the books of Samuel and Kings. However, over time
Midrashic exegesis has evolved. Beginning with Biblical
narrative, Midrashim began to interpret these themes
through elaborate exposition, often only loosely tied to
the original text and laced with maxims and parables. In
its later incarnations, Midrashim began to take Biblical
narrative, characters, and themes and explicate them
through numerous non-Biblical forms such as secular
literature and psychoanalysis.
The growth of clinical psychoanalysis in the
20th century gave birth to numerous psychodynamic
interpretations of the Bible. A number of psychoanalytic
writers focused on Biblical narrative, psychobiography
of Biblical characters, and psychological exposition of
traditional Biblical themes (e.g., Ellen & Rollins, 2004;
Freud, 1955; Jung, 2010; Rank, 2008; Zeligs, 1974).
Jacob, the third patriarch of the Old Testament,
became the focus of numerous psychoanalytic exegeses.
Zeligs (1974) offered a psychoanalytic explanation
of Jacob’s striving, his efforts to free himself from the
bonds of sibling rivalry, and the Oedipal dynamics of
his family. Wiesel (1976) focused on the mysterious
encounter between Jacob and the angel, which
transformed Jacob from an isolate to a patriarch who
fathered the people of Israel. Wink (2004) translated
Jacob’s struggle to an intrapsychic plane, seeing this
protagonist as facing and struggling with personal fear
and his “abyss of pain” (p. 12). Sanford (1981), utilizing
a Jungian perspective, analyzed God’s force in Jacob’s
personal-spiritual growth. Kille (2004) examined the
Jacob myth in its actual historical context as well as
Jacob’s individuation process, from self-preoccupation
Jacob Wrestles the Angel
to God’s prophet. Finally, Zornberg (1995) combined
psychoanalytic concepts, literary allusions, and Biblical
exegesis to examine Jacob’s story. She saw Jacob as an
inauthentic character, a trickster, an unformed creature
alienated from God. She described his evolution as a
movement to authenticity and sincerity, qualities that
bring him within the spirit of God and evolve him to
patriarchal status.
Pre-Liminal Stage
T he anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) developed a
tripartite system to outline the stages of growth in
heroic myths and anthropological studies of institutional
and personal transformation. In a somewhat more com­
plex scheme, Joseph Campbell (1949) has outlined similar
stages in his hero mythology. According to their schema,
Jacob, as the Biblical story opens, is in a pre-liminal stage.
He is a man of the mundane world subject to the usual
desires of power, greed, ignorance, and lust.
The pre-liminal stage finds Jacob as an ordinary
man, imbued with conflicts. Jacob’s birth establishes
the earthly conflict he faces. Jacob was a twin, and his
brother Esau was born first: “then his brother came
out, his hand grasping Esau’s heel, and they called him
Jacob” (Alter, 2004, p. 30).
The metaphor of grasping the heel defines
Jacob’s most primitive, neurotic struggle. The heel (akev
in Hebrew, which is one of the etymological hooks for
the Hebrew Ya’akov or Jacob) is the back of the foot.
Zornberg (1995) drew nuanced meaning from
this metaphor. To attack the heel is to come from behind,
to be sneaky, to get one’s way through deception or
trickery. This modus operandi, according to Zornberg,
reflects Jacob’s lack of an inherent identity, a missing
essential self-image due to being born second. Without
such an inherent identity, which his brother Esau has by
virtue of being the first-born and heir to the kingdom,
Jacob defines himself only through his rivalry with his
well-defined sibling. Jacob is dominated by envy. Envy
is a regressive psychological state where one covets what
another has and resents those who have what is desired.
It is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments and
a source of psychic imbalance dominated by hostility
toward others, paired with a compulsive dissatisfaction
and degradation for one’s own accomplishments or
status. Interpersonally, it manifests itself in conflicts
with the envied person and a competitive desire to have
what others are entitled to by virtue of birth or hard
work.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 107
 The theme of envy repeats itself in two more
vignettes from Jacob’s life. In the first, Esau a hunter
comes home famished. Jacob bribes the slow-witted Esau
with a bowl of lentils in exchange for Esau’s birthright.
If Jacob was not chosen to be the primary son, he would
trick his way into it. Later when their father Isaac, now
blind, orders his son Esau to hunt game and to use it
to make a feast for him, a second manifestation of envy
occurs. Jacob comes to his father pretending to be Esau
and tricks his father into giving him the blessing meant
for his brother.
Rebekah, Jacob’s mother, fosters the sibling
rivalry, by conniving to ensure that Jacob gets the
blessings. She promotes manipulation by urging
Jacob to take Esau’s rightful heritage. In doing so,
she encourages triangulation by setting Jacob against
his father and brother. Jacob’s self-image is promoted
through these Oedipal dynamics, underscoring the
character traits of rivalry and deception. Victory means
defeating the brother and taking the place of his own
father.
Jacob’s early life is thus dominated by efforts
to usurp his brother and to move into a place of
primogenitor. The law of primogenitor ruled in the
Middle East (Plaut, 2005), meaning that the first-born
son, Esau, would receive all properties and goods and
would become head of the family with the younger sibling
getting nothing. Such conflicts foster the development
of a deceptive personal core. He envies Esau’s first-born
status and the material and psychological rewards it
brings. Guided by envy, he uses trickery to achieve his
ends.
The British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (2002)
conceptualized envy as a psychological phenomenon.
According to Klein, the potential for envy develops at
one of the early psychosocial stages and is often fed by
sibling rivalry. Among siblings, a triangle will develop
with these siblings competing for the praise and affection
of the parent. The natural competitive atmosphere often
lends itself to the development of envy on the part of
the later-born sibling with deep antagonisms toward
the favorite and efforts to get adulation from a parent.
Jungian psychology views conflicts such as
Jacob’s through an archetypal lens. Jacob’s behavior is a
manifestation of the trickster, an immature masculine
archetype of the shadow system (Moore & Gillette,
1990). Singer (1994) called the shadow the inferior part
of the personality, which cannot be expressed directly.
108 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
The repression of the shadow into the unconscious causes
it to be splintered off and then manifested in action. The
complement to this shadow is the “precocious child” or
“a boy” (Moore & Gillette, 1990, p. 27).
The mature masculine archetype of this
dynamic is the magician, the archetype of awareness
and insight, knowledge of the hidden and the magical
(Moore & Gillette, 1990). The function of this
archetypal wisdom is to disentangle the subtle, the
unconscious, and mysterious in order to make necessary
life decisions. Whether these life decisions are positive
and whether they reach out to others constructively
depends on resolving the shadow complex. The mature
qualities of the magician archetype are those profound
insights into the hidden nature of the world, clarity
as to one’s own motives, and the ability to access life
energy in the service of growth. However, when the
shadow component dominates, these powers are used
to manipulate, place obstacles in the paths of others,
and are destructive to self and others.
The trickster dominates Jacob. He is cerebral,
clever, and goal directed. He is aware of the frailties
of others. Whether he will use his power in a positive
or negative way is still an open question. Whether
he moves from the boy psychology of the primitive
trickster to the man psychology of the wise magician is
unsettled during the first phase of the Biblical narrative
of Jacob.
Zornberg (1995), utilizing a more traditional
Biblical analysis, underscored that at this stage Jacob is
inauthentic. She noted in addition to the etymological
connection to heel, the name Ya’akov also relates
to akov, meaning crooked or indirect, suggesting a
position equivalent to an idol worshiper: someone who
is unconnected with an authentic God, a pretender
who is not grounded in true spiritual beliefs and who is
self deceptive, and therefore alienated from his creator
as well as his authentic soul. She described Jacob as
having an identity crisis and being torn between his
own uncontrollable desires, which manifest themselves
in deception for gain, and God’s ratzon or ultimate
purpose for him. His actions alienate him from God.
Rather than accepting who he has been chosen to be,
a reflection of God’s will, and using his considerable
skills to be the best he can be, he tries to be what he is
not. Thus, his actions do not elevate his soul and bring
him closer to God but reinforce evil, the yetzer ha’ra
(evil inclination) putting distance between him and his
Abramsky
God. God is hidden from Jacob as Jacob’s egoic needs
control his actions, effectively blotting out God’s light
or purpose for him.
The Yiddish concept of b’shert or predestination
(fate) amplifies this perspective on God’s will as manifested
in man. The Hebrew literature uses this concept of fate
differently than it is used in the Greek literature. The
Greeks cast fate as the tragic end. Ultimately, fate lures
the characters of Greek classics toward self-destruction
(Schwartz & Kaplan, 2004). In the Jewish liturgy,
b’shert involves bringing the will or ratzon (desire, life
energy) into line with the ratzon of God (obedience,
submission; Zornberg, 1995). Each man is created with
God’s purpose. Through his own choices and mistakes,
he ultimately learns that purpose. The conflicts of the
lower stages block God’s light according to Kabbalistic
thought and thus block man from recognizing his God-
given purpose. However, conflicts and even tragedy may
eventually open a man’s heart to the ultimate vision of
who he is and who God has chosen him to be. This is
climbing the ladder from the darkness of egoic conflicts
to the realm of purpose and meaning. This is the
evolution of the soul.
Traditional Kabbalistic imagery uses a Tree
of Life to describe this process. The Tree reaches from
heaven to earth. God’s light shines down touching
the upper branches first, and these branches represent
our highest soul traits (midot): those traits closest
to God. At the earthly site dense vegetative layers of
unconscious conflicts, ignorance, emotional complexes
and socialization, those ego processes farthest away from
God’s enlightenment, block His light (Halevi, 1986). It
is only through the freeing of these earthly and personal
concerns that man ascends the tree of life to transpersonal
realms and ultimately to devukut or cleaving to God.
Such is not yet the case for Jacob. All developmental
systems, regardless of idiom, see him, by virtue of his
emotional conflict, at the lowest stage of psychological
and spiritual evolution.
Liminal Stage
T he liminal stage refers to a threshold. It is the rite
of passage where the protagonist must struggle
with who he is and who he may become. At this point,
his world (the pre-liminal) has collapsed. His sense
of identity has dissolved. His life is ambiguous and
indeterminate. However, the point of crisis has also
made him psychologically open, open to a new identity.
Typically, this stage is fluid, filled with difficulties, small
Jacob Wrestles the Angel
successes and failures. Ambiguity reigns until resolution
occurs.
Jacob’s transformation begins, as it does in
most hero myths, with a journey (Campbell, 1949).
The journey is a passage toward transformation, a rite
of passage. passage. After deceiving his brother Esau,
the hunter, fearing for his life, Jacob flees abandoning
community and family. He journeys to his Uncle Laban
in an attempt to escape Esau’s murderous wrath. On
this physical journey, he stops to rest for the night. He
places his head on a stone for a headrest. In his sleep,
he experiences a dream: “lo—a ladder was set on the
ground, with its top reaching to heaven, and lo—angels
of God going up and down on it” (Plaut, 2005, p. 195;
Genesis 28:10).
The dream sets the stage for transformation.
First, it makes Jacob aware of choice. Just as the
messengers of God travel up and down, so Jacob too
can ascend to the highest of heights or remain mired
in the earthly deceits, which have characterized his
development. God shows Jacob possibilities. He may
become a landowner and his seed will father a nation, a
promise God also made to Abraham in Genesis 15:4-5,
or he can fail to take his place in his historic lineage.
The dream also reflects the twin dynamics
of ascent and descent, with the complementary
processes of moving upward with our material lives and
transforming into God’s aspirations and God’s light
moving downward to enlighten us. It reflects movement
from our lower self to our higher self, from our conflicted
ego qualities to midot, those soul qualities closest to the
divine (Morinis, 2007).
The Mussar tradition, a rationalist Jewish
psychological perspective sees man as moving toward
wholeness (sh’ lemut), which is synonymous with the
concept of holiness. According to this tradition, God has
only planted seeds or potential. Man is born incomplete
and must complete the work of his own creation. The
great Mussar teacher, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato (as
cited in Morinis, 2007) elaborated:
God is certainly capable of making people, and
all creation, absolutely complete. Furthermore, it
would have made much more sense for Him to have
done so, because insofar as He himself is perfect in
every way, it is fitting that His works should also be
perfect. But in his great wisdom he ruled it better
to leave to people the completion of their own
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 109

creation. So he cut short His own trait of perfection
and out of His greatness and goodness withheld
Himself from His greatness in these creations and
made creations incomplete. This was the way He
wanted them made, according to his sublime plan.
(p. 14)
The symbolism of the ladder with messengers of
God running up and down reveals the choices Jacob can
make. God offers the possibilities (up or down), but the
direction of Jacob’s evolution is chosen by the actions he
takes. He may elevate himself through righteous intent
(yetzer ha’tov) or sink down under the weight of the
yetzer ha ’ra, the inherent evil instinct. The liminal stage
is characterized by the dialectical interchange between
these two forces. At this point, the winner is unclear.
The glimpse of the divine, which sets up Jacob’s
choice, is also allegorized in numerous Midrashim.
Schwartz (2004) has compiled Jewish myths, derived
from several ancient Midrashim which center on the
dream incident (Rashi on Genesis 28:11, Genesis Rabbah
68:10, Midrash Tehillim 91:7). All share the vision that
Jacob’s dream emanated from a sacred place. One drash
(abbreviation for Midrash) states that the place of the
dream was Mount Mariah, where Abraham took Isaac
to be sacrificed (the ultimate allegory of complete faith
in the divine) and the future site of the Temple Mount
in Jerusalem. Another states that Jacob saw the fiery face
of God at the top of the ladder—yet another that Jacob’s
vision entailed the birth of the future sacred Temple.
The Temple was filled with God’s earthly presence, the
Shekhinah, a mirrored reflection of God’s holy Temple
in heaven (Schwartz, 2004). All reflect Jacob’s first
moment of enlightenment to his spiritual and historical
possibilities. “Indeed, the Lord is in this place, and I did
not know… how fearsome is this place! This can be but
the house of God and this is the gate of the heavens”
(Genesis 28:17).
Kille (2004), writing from a Jungian perspective,
saw Jacob’s flight as the first step in the individuation
process. He is cut off from the known world of family
and community and finds himself in the wilderness. The
sacred place of the dream is a boundary, geographical
and psychological. To cross that boundary, a protective
figure and guide is necessary. God provides this womb
of incubation and insight. The dream is an ascent into
heaven, a vision and alternative state of consciousness
necessary to make his life transition. For Jungians,
110 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
it represents the birth of the Self, the transpersonal
consciousness, which may evolve out of the ego, the
individual and personal consciousness. The ladder dream
shows possible growth or decline based on what choices
Jacob may make (Stevens, 1983).
The interface between spiritual evolution and
individuation is reflected in some of the archetypal
symbolism associated with the dream-place. The Torah
emphasizes that prior to the dream Jacob sleeps resting
his head on a stone that he gathered. Subsequent to the
dream, he consecrates the stones with oil to mark it as
holy place (Genesis 28:18). Von Franz (1964) has pointed
out that stones were often used to mark places of worship
due to their permanence and solidity. Thus, the placing
and consecrating of the stone suggests a beginning: the
beginning of the foundation of God’s temple and the
beginning of Jacob’s transformation.
Stones, however, are also a symbol for the Self,
which in Jungian psychology is the transformational
aspect of personality (von Franz, 1964). In Jungian
psychology, there is a differentiation between the ego
and the Self. The ego is the “I,” the purely personal. It
is generated by our unique biological inheritance and
individual socialization experiences. The ego is the stuff
from which Freudian psychology is made. The Self is
the bridge between the personal and transpersonal. In
addition to personal history, it is formed by our collective
and universal history as a species and a people. The Self
is dominated by purpose, as well as by collective and
universal meaning. The Self, as an experience, is capable
of higher levels of consciousness, which are universal:
dreams, symbols, meditative states, and complete ego
loss.
The Self has the potential to guide us into our
higher levels of being. In viewing the Self as one of several
stages through which psychological and transpersonal
development ensues (Wilber, 1986, 2000), the lowest level
of Self entails both personal and transpersonal elements.
It grows out of the ego, and egoic elements remain at
this lowest level. These may manifest themselves in
meditative states or in intensive prayer, which require the
ego functions of will and practice to enter. Once there,
we transcend ego-self. Our ordinary ego surrenders at
least momentarily, and we touch a more egoless domain.
We move toward becoming pure observation, and non-
reactivity (Engler, 2003). The next level is that of the
transpersonal. Wilber (2000) divided the transpersonal
stage into both soul and spirit. Both of these subdivisions
Abramsky
represent a further loosening between the subject-object
relationship and a graduated movement away from ego
functions. The lower level of soul is best represented in
dreams, but also in literary symbols and characters such
as those, like Jacob, who populate the Torah. In Jewish
mystical thought the sefirot of Kabbalah are transcendent
qualities given literary expression in Torah (Addison,
2001). This is the archetypal level, which Jung thought
contained universal symbols or pure forms. Wilber
(2000) theorized that the highest transpersonal level is
that of spirit, of ego-less-ness or the presence of subject
but no object. It is formless. It is the realm of no self.
This state is manifest in deep sleep but also represented
in the mystical traditions: nirvana in the Vedic tradition
and Keter or Ayin (concealed no-thingness) in Kabbalah
(Weiss, 2005). In contrast to the ego (the “I”), the Self
bridges the axis between man and God, between person
and other, between personal and transpersonal, between
the mentally mundane and the spirit (Wilber, 2000).
In Jungian psychology, as well as spiritual
traditions (Morinis, 2007), the focus on ego or “I” is
an impediment to spiritual evolution. The more our ego
identifies with a situation (e.g., I am jealous over what
Esau has) the less energy we have toward the development
of spirit. Spiritual development focuses on touching the
larger and universal aspects of our life and our unique
purpose in this schema.
At this dream point, Jacob also gains a
perspective on the covenant, the contract with God that
appears with other patriarchs—Abraham and Moses—
and that signifies the fundamental interactive nature of
Judaism. It means a questioning dialogue between man
and God or, from a psychological perspective, man’s
internal dialogue, which aims for clarity of purpose.
God, in fulfilling his part of the covenant, has promised
generativity to Jacob, through a marriage, through
children, through becoming a patriarch, and ultimately
in fathering the nation of Israel. It is unclear what Jacob
must do for God as his part of the contract. This has
not yet been revealed. Man must struggle with God—
God in him, God outside—to see his chosen path or
purpose and to align his ratzon with that of God or he
will remain alienated.
In the sacred hero’s journey, Campbell (1949)
referred to events such as Jacob’s dream as the crossing
of a threshold, a nascent movement to a new phase. In
this case, it represents a religious transformation with
Jacob’s stone setting the foundation for the Hebrew
Jacob Wrestles the Angel
Temple and a personal transformation from an egoic to
a transpersonal state.
After the prophetic dream, Jacob returns to the
mundane world and is challenged by his own desires.
He approaches the home of his Uncle Laban and sees
Laban’s second daughter, Rachel, bringing sheep to the
water. They instantly fall in love, and Jacob asks for
her hand in marriage. Laban appears overjoyed. In a
visionary statement, characterized by a double entendre,
which foreshadows later mutual deceptions, he tells
Jacob, “Indeed, you are my bone and flesh” (Genesis
29:14). Jacob agrees to work for Laban for seven years
in exchange for Rachel’s hand. When his labor is over,
Laban instead gives Jacob his oldest daughter, Leah, as
his bride. The trickster has been tricked. Laban and Jacob
are truly both of the same bone and flesh of chicanery.
Jacob works another seven years to secure
Rachel and marries her, but she is barren and cannot
provide him with children. Leah is fertile and provides
him with six children. Jacob is despondent. He loves
Rachel but desires the children Leah gives him. There
is also a rivalry between Leah and Rachel. Leah feels
unloved and is desperate for Jacob’s love. ­ Rachel is loved
but denied the gift of enabling her husband to fulfill the
command to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28).
Each is denied their desire, each envious of what the other
has. Jacob is caught in the middle feeling helpless.
Finally, Jacob decides to leaves the house of
Laban and become independent. He takes his wives and
children, livestock, and retinue with him. He barters with
Laban for final payment, his well-deserved share of the
herds, and his wives. By now, he had worked for Laban
for 20 years. However, he tricks Laban to maximize his
personal gain through an act of chicanery, and thus, he
gains wealth but has fallen back into the world of deceit,
drawing anger and opprobrium from Laban’s family.
Despite suffering due to his past deceptions, Jacob
remains the archetypal trickster. Where has his insight
gone? Has he fallen off the ladder into the depths?
These themes—deception, sibling rivalry, and
refusal to accept the rules of primogenitor—create
intergenerational conflict and resonate from earlier
times. To mix cultural contexts, they represent a karmic
principle. Jacob’s early deceptions now resonate for him.
He is caught in a web of his own making. What comes
around goes around.
In summarizing ancient Buddhist texts Koller
and Koller, (1991, pp. 233-239) saw dependent origination
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 111
as meaning all actions have a cause, and all causes have
consequences. For some acts we pay in the present, for
some we pay in the future, for some acts we pay in other
lives, but our life always reflects our choices. Jacob must
pay for his deceptions; and unless he transforms himself,
he will remain on the great wheel of life with the same
themes recurring.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, Freud
(2009) discussed the repetition compulsion. According
to psychoanalytic theory, fixations or unresolved
conflicts from earlier stages repeat themselves in future
interactions. For Jacob, these themes originally generated
in his nuclear family come back to rob him of happiness.
His own deceptions with brother and father are turned
back on him by Laban’s deception. His inability to
follow the rules concerning the rights and duties of the
first born with Esau repeat with Rachel and Leah. His
sibling rivalry with Esau resonates in the sibling rivalry
between Leah and Rachel. Still he does not learn and
instead responds to Laban’s deceit with deceiving Laban
about the division of the herd.
Once a psychological dynamic becomes
entrenched, it repeats itself ad infinitum. Buddhists refer
to this principle as dukka or being stuck on the great
wheel of life, which carries us round and round in circles.
Psychoanalysis sees the repetition compulsion. Spiritual
psychologies such as that of Jung see such conflicts as
fixations compromising our evolution to higher states of
promise and potential. Kabbalists see such venal actions
as interfering with God’s light and thus our own upward
movement in respect to the highest evolution of the
neshamah, the pure and holy soul (Weiss, 2005).
Like an actor from Greek tragedy, Jacob’s
strivings lead to his own destruction. Schwartz and
Kaplan (2004) commented that the Freudian view is
colored by Greek tragedy, a view of man self-destructing
with no redemption. While true, the theoretical schema
outlined in this paper suggests that such dynamics only
dominate the lower worlds of man’s existence. In these
worlds, life patterns are circular and repetitive. There is
no exit. One cannot escape by repeating old patterns.
One can only escape by entering a new world, by
transcendence, by leaving the egoic world behind, and
entering the world of non-egoic purpose.
The transpersonal world is the world of higher
purpose and meaning. In Judaism, reaching into this
world is translated into ratzon, bringing one’s purpose
in line with God’s. For Jacob to escape this wheel of
112 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
repetition, he must not simply become more clever, but
he must enter a different realm of consciousness and
existence.
This liminal stage is represented by a series of
trials and tribulations. Typically, the hero tries to grow
by using his wiles or simply becoming more perfect in
the way he expresses his flaws, but in doing so, he is
doomed to repeat his life tragedies. The grasping of the
ego continues, with the same themes of failure repeating.
However, learning does occur gradually, and the hero
starts to give up the old ways and to surrender to a new
realm of meaning.
Jacob takes his wives and 11 children and flees.
He tries another escape, exiting the community to resolve
his problems, another failed attempt to deal with issues
by running. By this time, Esau has become a powerful
ruler of the kingdom. He is looking for Jacob to exact
revenge. Jacob is ordered by God to return to Haran, the
scene of his crimes, where Esau is now King. Jacob tries
to placate Esau by offering part of his wealth while still
holding back part. A trickle of deception still occurs.
However, there is a subtle change manifesting.
In the Torah text, Jacob begins to refer to himself as
Esau’s servant (Genesis 32:18-20) and Esau as “Lord
Esau” (v. 4). He is beginning to accept his role as the
second son without resentment. This acceptance is
predicated on the fact that Jacob, through struggle and
conflict, is on the brink of a true spiritual awakening. He
is on the cusp of superiority in his personal development.
Through struggle he has transcended the earthly laws of
primogenitor and the cluster of envy and competition
that goes with it. The significance is unmistakable. It
was God’s will that Esau be the first-born, the societal
laws of primogenitor reinforced this. However, Jacob
would not accept the place God had chosen for him. He
attempted to best his brother in a deceptive way, to deny
his own place and, thus, God’s will. Now, he begins
to align his will with that of God. He accepts God’s
command to return. In spite of personal danger, he
shows faith by obeying and trusting God. He ventures
into his destiny to be first, but he does so by both his
spiritual evolution and through honest forthright action.
His destiny was to be superior, to be first in his spiritual
evolution, not in the earthly structure of near-Eastern
society. He is becoming his own person fulfilling his
unique life purpose.
Esau marshals 400 men against Jacob. Jacob
crosses the river to meet Esau, and this Rubicon
Abramsky
crossing marks the final transition into the post-liminal
stage. Spending the dark night of his soul waiting to
see whether Esau will forgive him or destroy him, he
is approached by a man, and they wrestle until dawn.
They wrestle to a draw; and as the light enters, the man
states he must leave. Jacob will not let go until the man
blesses him. The stranger, an angel or emissary of God,
does this by changing Jacob’s named to Israel, which
means, he who struggles with God. Thus, Jacob finally
transitions from a deceiver to holy man who will father
the people of Israel and their perpetual struggle with
their relationship with God. The stranger is an angel,
God’s emissary, representing God’s will (Schwartz,
2004).
Jacob’s struggle with the angel provides
the ultimate transformation. It is one of the richest
metaphors of the Bible. It entails numerous levels
of meanings, all echoing transformation. The act of
wrestling is an undoing and a transformation of Jacob’s
past relationship to Esau. At one level of meaning the
angel represents Esau. Jacob’s defeats of Esau have been
accomplished in the past through chicanery. Now Jacob
commits to face Esau/angel squarely—to enter into
manly combat and to become Esau’s equal legitimately.
Jacob has shed deception as a way to handle his desires.
He has realized both his own strength and the integrity
of winning on merit. Defeating the angel through
direct combat is a reworking of his earlier battles with
Esau, done with Jacob’s newfound power and sense of
integrity.
Jacob also obtains a blessing from his opponent
through will and determination, undoing the blessing
through deception he got from his own father. Jacob uses
his strength, talents, and tenacity to obtain legitimately
what he got before through deception. This is genuine
transformation, not the pseudo transformation gained
through guile.
Jacob faces his fate through faith. He follows
God’s wish to return to Haran, alone to face Esau’s
wrath and his 400 soldiers. “God of my father Abraham
and God of my father Isaac! Lord who has said to me,
‘Return to your land and your birthplace and I will deal
well with you’” (Genesis 32:10). He joins the same faith
in God’s wisdom as the other patriarchs. Personal fear
is transcended by seeing purpose and meaning through
following God.
Psychoanalysis speaks of object relationships
(Fairbairn, 1981). This refers to our intra-psychic
Jacob Wrestles the Angel
organization. Our mind contains images of self, others,
and of the relationship between self and others. Thus,
we do not really relate to another person. According to
analytic theory, we relate to the mental representation of
that person, which is called an object. Wrestling with the
angel changes these intra-psychic object relations. It is
equivalent to a profound insight in psychoanalysis, which
transforms and creates a new psychological dynamic.
Jacob truly becomes an adult, one who can face obstacles
squarely and confront the difficulties in a forthright
manner. The inner relationship with Esau becomes one
of equals–peers–each with a unique set of skills. Envy
is thwarted by Jacob becoming his own person. He has
his own unique qualities to cherish and develop. Envy
and acquisition by deception are replaced with internal
strength, direction, and personal integrity.
Wink (2004), echoing depth psychology, also
saw the wrestling as an internalized dynamic. He saw
Jacob wrestling with his shadow, the repressed and
negative side of his character. The shadow side must
be made manifest and acknowledged in order to be
conquered and integrated into the personality. Jacob
faces his own treachery, deceit, and dishonesty; and
in doing so, he conquers this split-off side to become
whole. Jacob overcomes his fear of Esau, which is the
motive root of his deceptive behavior.
Resolution of the personal neurosis of envy
opens the door to a spiritual transformation. The major
spiritual transformative vehicle in Judaic thought is
repentance or teshuvah. Luz (1987) has pointed out that
teshuvah has two complementary meanings. It derives
from the verb to return or to going back to the straight
path, to one’s origin, or to an authentic way of life after a
period of absence. The second meaning derives from the
verb to reply: a response to a call originating outside of
one’s self. Teshuvah embraces both meanings: a return
to one’s source or essence and a divine call. It is central
in Judaic thought, which sees the relationship between
man and God as ethical in nature, a partnership where
both God and man have a role in bringing the world to
perfection (tikkun olam).
When there is an ethical break and the covenant
between God and man is shattered, teshuva repairs it.
From the perspective of Biblical history, it creates a
return to the ideal state—the Garden of Eden—that
only existed prior to sin. Kabbalists speak of tikkun
olam or repair of the world. Ethical breaches shatter the
spiritual world, and teshuvah restores it. Through the
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 113
act of teshuvah, there is individual repair and a return
to the spirit of God as manifested in the ideals of the
Jewish community. Jacob’s story could be the template
for the process of teshuvah.
Practically, teshuvah entails three processes (Luz,
1987). The first is insight or recognition of wrongdoing.
Jacob had to recognize that his actions toward Esau were
wrong. This involved insight and action, knowing and
doing. Rather than simply finding a more refined means
of deception or a continued effort to get what Esau has,
Jacob acknowledges the God-given relationship and his
own assigned role in it. This is constructive repentance,
entailing real change.
Teshuvah also is the recognition that we have
broken our covenant with God. Egoic actions block
God’s light, and we fall from His grace. Repentance
entails recognition that there are higher and lower worlds.
Our inauthentic actions mean we have been living at
the lowest level. Teshuvah opens us up to God’s higher
mission for us, to our true authenticity. The second step
is compensation. Undoing the wrong means making the
victim whole. Obviously one cannot reverse a temporal
action, but compensation, both psychological and
material, can be made. Jacob both apologizes to Esau
and attempts to give him a portion of the wealth he has
accumulated.
Thirdly, the offender must loose the desire, the
seed, which began the destructive process. Learning must
occur, so that the same actions do not repeat. Sometimes
this learning occurs as a peak experience (Maslow,
1998), but more often it entails a series of practices
that counter the yetzer ha ’ra. For Jacob, this meant
both the acceptance of Esau as his father’s heir and the
establishment of his own unique identity as a patriarch.
For example, in the Mussar tradition meditation, prayer,
creative visualization, chanting, and other techniques
are utilized to develop counter-habits which neutralize
and then transform dysfunctional desires.
In respect to the narrative, Jacob compensates
Esau, humbles himself before Esau’s might: “bowed to
the ground seven times” (Genesis 33.3). He faces possible
death from Esau and his army but finally meets him
face to face. Reconciliation takes place. Each brother
recognizes their differences but is content with who
they are. Each has a different life mission, but both are
carrying out their unique Godly purpose.
The universal meaning of this transformative
process is mapped and illustrated in the Jewish Kabbalah.
114 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Kabbalah (to receive) sees the world as the recipient of
God’s light. As people, we are the containers, the vessels
of that light. While God is infinite, we are not, so we
must contain and channel his divine light.
The Kabbalistic developmental ladder is
called the Tree of Life. It is the lattice on which the
soul ascends like ivy growing up a trellis. The Tree has
10 branches, which are not wood or fiber but points
or wheels of light called the sefirot. Each sefirah is a
contained manifestation of God’s light or essence.
They are God’s attributes through which He conducts
the world. God’s light is strongest at the top, which
represents the highest human values, those closest to
God, such as Wisdom. The lower branches are closest
to earth and farthest from Godly infusion. These are
the incarnate action patterns. Spiritual development
involves the integration of the lower branches with
the upper branches. The complete man functions on
all planes with each branch forming a supportive and
cooperative relationship with all others.
The ten sefirot are in three groupings. The
supernal triangle consists of those qualities closest to
God, the esoteric teachings. The lowest triad is the
practical sefirot of action, God’s expression in the way
we behave, the earthly emanations. The middle triad,
divine emotion, includes those human qualities of the
heart, which express God’s perfections in thought and
feeling (Halevi, 1986).
The middle sphere of divine emotion is
represented by the three patriarchal archetypes of the
Bible. Abraham is the archetype of compassion. His
son Isaac is the archetype of justice. Jacob is the perfect
balance, integrating justice and compassion, and called
Tiferet, which is usually translated as beauty (Addison,
2001).
Structurally, Tiferet is the bridge between God’s
manifestation in the earthly world and His heavenly
domain. Therefore, Jacob represents the transition
between our manifest actions and the higher realms,
those closest to God’s light. When there is perfect
balance, God’s light reaches down and guides our
earthly actions, and our earthly actions reach up to the
divine (such as our day-to-day actions being guided by
God’s wisdom). Jacob is thus the transformative figure,
a gatekeeper to allow the integration of higher and lower
worlds. This is a Kabbalistic meaning of wrestling.
According to Ariel (2006), the transformative
nature of Jacob “creates souls” and then transmits these
Abramsky
souls to the sefirah of Malkhut (earthly manifestation)
bringing them forth into the world. Jacob represents the
transition between the earthly manifestation of man and
the development of his soul, imbuing earthly pursuits
with spiritual purpose and transforming spiritual energy
into our daily actions.
Jungian psychology regards man’s development
through what Hillman (1999) called the acorn theory.
The acorn carries within it the blueprint for the oak tree.
A pattern of development is inherent in man’s nature
and its sequence is unvarying. The stages of man’s
development are each archetypal, a pure form, but
the particular expression of the form will differ from
individual to individual. The four archetypal stages of
man’s development are the primitive man, the romantic,
the keeper of the word, and the embodiment of wisdom
(van Franz, 1964). The movement from stage to stage
is temporally facilitated by conflicts. Jacob’s odyssey
begins as the primitive man and moves through the
romantic or questing phase, where he attempts to anchor
his earthly life. He then becomes a father, businessman,
and leader of his own clan. The struggle with the angel
transports him into a man of wisdom, who then carries
within him the seed to foster a new nation built upon
the covenant with God.
Jung (1960) might have viewed the struggle
with the angel as dream phenomena. Jung saw dreams
as prophetic, as arcane puzzles which had to be
deciphered, but once solved, as vehicles of inspiration
that reveal the life purpose to the dreamer. His view
of dreams was teleological. Jung’s dream theory is in
this way similar to the way dreams are portrayed in the
Bible, such as Joseph’s dreams predicting his brothers’
murderous envy toward him and the famine that was
lurking in Egypt’s future. Freudian dream psychology
is reductionist, relating dreams to unresolved childhood
conflicts. Jung felt dreams revealed our cosmic purpose.
Jacob’s struggle points to his life mission. It is a symbol
of transformation, from one who is preoccupied with
the mundane aspects of life to one who carries the torch
of spirituality. It shows a willingness to engage with
God, to question and struggle to find his place in the
pantheon where man and God merge in devekut.
Jacob’s wrestling match can be viewed through
numerous idioms: traditional Hebraic, Jungian, and
transpersonal. All, however, stress the structural
transformation from ego-centered conflict to higher
states of universal purpose and meaning.
Jacob Wrestles the Angel
Post-Liminal Stage
T he post-liminal stage refers to a new level of
integration. It represents the synthesis and incor­
poration of previous conflicts into a new, more adaptive
dynamic. As with all stage theories (Erikson, 1980;
Turner, 1967; Wilber, 1986) this incorporative stage
represents a higher level of hierarchic integration, where
older conflicts are resolved and transformed into a more
flexible and evolved way of organizing one’s world.
In transpersonal psychology there in a
general evolution from ego dominated stage(s) to the
transpersonal stage. In respect to the story of Jacob the
hero evolves from a character dominated by neurotic
envy to a transpersonal stage wherein he recognizes
and accepts God’s purpose for him; he moves from
an ego dominated stage characterized by anxiety fed
deception to one of faith where he trusts God’s wishes
and His protective hand. Through facing conflicts and
the resolution of such conflicts, the individual obtains a
higher level of spiritual and psychological being. Jacob’s
story is a paradigm of this dialectical evolution.
Jacob became one of the great patriarchs of the
Bible. His 12 sons became the 12 tribes of Israel, the
foundation of the Jewish state. His narrative eventually
led the Jews to Egypt through his youngest son Joseph.
This is where the central historical and religious motifs
of Judaism—oppression and exodus—were born. These
motifs have resonated throughout the life of that people.
His path is exemplary of how God’s chosen ones grow in
understanding of the divine element in their lives (Plaut,
2005).
Although the other patriarchs, Abraham and
Isaac, had their personal struggles, Jacob’s conflicts were
more complex and arduous. He had to learn and earn his
basic life purpose through struggle and adversity. God,
from Jacobs’s birth on, determined that Jacob would be
the patriarch of the Hebrew people, not Esau. However,
Jacob had to discover his place. He had to transform
before he could understand the mission God had chosen
for him:
Two peoples are in your belly,
Two nations shall branch off from each other
As they emerge from your womb.
One people shall prevail over the other,
The elder shall serve the younger
(Plaut, 2005, p. 173, Genesis 25:22).
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 115
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About the Author

Michael Abramsky has both an MA and PhD in Clinical

Psychology. He is a Diplomate of the American Board
of Professional Psychology in both Forensic and Clinical
Psychology. He has authored over twenty papers on
psychology and the law and clinical pathology. He is also
a published poet. Currently he is completing an MA in
religious studies with a concentration in Comparative
Religions. He maintains an active clinical practice in
Birmingham, Michigan.

About the Journal

The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a

peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
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Jacob Wrestles the Angel International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 117

 The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergency in Retrospect:
Has it Stood the Test of Time?
Darlene B. Viggiano & Stanley Krippner
Saybrook University
San Francisco, CA, USA

The purpose of this essay is to review the Grofs’ model of spiritual emergencies. The authors
ask: Has the model been useful for identifying and treating psycho-spiritual distress? Should
it be amended? Spiritual emergency can be defined as a crisis involving religious, transpersonal,
and/or spiritual issues that provides opportunities for growth. Spiritual emergence, meanwhile,
lends itself to gentler transformation. The research methods include an archival literature
review triangulated with an authoritative interview. The findings are that the Grofs’ model
of spiritual emergencies was ahead of its time and that the medical establishment needs to
catch up. Adaptations and revisions that expand and refine it could help bring acceptance
and further application of this useful model to people in psycho-spiritual crises.
Keywords: Grof, spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency, spiritual crisis, transformation

I
n this essay, the authors offer a review of the
theoretical, empirical, and historically relevant
literature on Stanislav and Christina Grof ’s
(1989) model of spiritual emergencies, organized in a
presentation that explores two basic questions: Has
the model been useful for identifying and treating
emotionally distressed people? Does it need to be
amended or revised?
At the onset of this inquiry it is important to
provide the Grofs’ definition of spiritual emergency,
which is “both a crisis and an opportunity of rising to a
new level of awareness” (Grof & Grof, 1989, p. x). The
Grofs coined the term spiritual emergency based on their
so-called holotropic model that focuses on the alleged
human tendency to move toward wholeness, which they
consider to be the essence of inner healing and identity
(Davidson & Grof, 2008).
The Grofs were intentionally using a “play
on words” (1989, p. x) when they named the spiritual
emergency phenomenon, since the word emergency (i.e.,
crisis) is based on the word emergence (i.e., arising),
which works with the idea that both processes typically
are concurrent. The Grofs then differentiated between
emergency and emergence in terms of the intensity
and duration of the processes. Unfortunately, this
differentiation makes for a possible confusion between
their original usage of the term emergency and their later
differentiated usage. An example of this is their table
(1990) offering guidance as to when a medical model or
a spiritual emergence model is more likely appropriate
for use with a patient. This table seems to be focused
on distinguishing psychoses from spiritual emergencies,
and not on the full spectrum of spiritual emergence
phenomena.
Indeed, Grof and Grof (1990) tabulated
15 distinctions between spiritual emergency and
spiritual emergence (see Figure A). In general, spiritual
emergences are less disruptive than are spiritual
emergencies, although emergences can also be cause for
therapy designed to help integrate new, concomitant
experiences (Grof, 1993). As Lukoff, Lu, and Turner
(1998) further noted, “In spiritual emergence…there is a
gradual unfoldment of spiritual potential with minimal
disruption… whereas in spiritual emergency there is
significant abrupt disruption in psychological/social/
occupational functioning” (p. 38). To further complicate
matters, the phrase spiritual emergence is often used to
cover the spectrum of both emergence and emergency
experiences. Lukoff (2005) explained:
The term spiritual emergence is used to describe the
whole range of phenomena associated with spiritual
experiences and development from those (probably
the vast majority) which are not problematic, do
not disrupt psychological/social/occupational func­
tioning and do not involve psychotherapy or any
contact with the mental health system, to spiritual
emergences that are full-blown crises requiring

118 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 118-127 Viggiano & Krippner
 24-hour care. (Emergence versus Emergency A Brief Historical Literature Review
section, para. 6)
Thus, an acute spiritual emergence may look like an
T he ideas of such luminaries as William James in
his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/1997),
Carl Jung (e.g., 1961), and Roberto Assagioli (e.g., 1965,
emergency if the individual’s well-being is upset during
1991) seem to have paved the way for the Grofs’ model of
the process of the emergence.
spiritual emergencies within the context of transpersonal
The propositions of this essay are that the
psychotherapies. Contemporaries of Grof, such as Maslow
Grofs’ model of spiritual emergency (1) allows for built-
(1970), Laing (1960, 1983), Perry (1999), Lukoff (1988,
in revisions based on the state of the art, such as its later
1991, 1998, 2007), Krippner (2002; Krippner, Jaeger, &
inclusion of spiritual emergence, and (2) may be ahead
Faith, 2001), and Wilber (1993b) seem to have paralleled
of its time. For example, the model is rarely used outside
or echoed Grof’s model in their own findings, whether
of a small circle of transpersonal psychologists, and has
clinical or theoretical. Briefly surveying this historical
made little apparent impact on mainstream psychology or
lineage is helpful in interpreting the place of the Grofs’
psychiatry. It has made a small inroad into developmental
spiritual emergencies model as well as its contemporary
psychology, however, as shown in Fukuyama and Sevig’s
relevance in the psychotherapy arena.
(1999) brief review of the concept.
The Grofs’ lineage can be traced back to
As an example of built-in adaptations and
William James (1902/1997), who wrote: “To pass a
revisions, Lukoff et al. (1998) noted that the Grofs’
spiritual judgment upon these [hypnoid] states, we must
typology of spiritual emergencies increased from 8
not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but
initially to approximately 12, inclusive of overlapping
inquire into their fruits for life” (p. 324). James’ non-
categories. The Grofs’ (1990) main types of spiritual
reductionist way of thinking seems to fit well with
emergencies (shamanic crisis, psychic opening, possession
the Grofs’ pragmatic approach to psycho-spiritual
states, kundalini awakening, unitive experiences, near-
phenomena.
death experiences, channeling, UFO encounters, past life
After James, Jung was the next to consider the
reports, and “renewal through return to the center”) each
phenomenon of spiritual emergency, as witnessed in
have their own particular characteristics as well. The model
his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which
may be ahead of its time because the American Psychiatric
Jung described his own spiritual emergency. While
Association added the category of “Religious or Spiritual
“Jung has often been criticized for the interest he took
Problem” to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)
in such scientifically suspect subjects” as visions and
partly in response to the work of Grof (Lukoff, 1998).
dreams (Hall & Nordby, 1973, p. 25), it seems that the
However, we feel that the category needs further revision
work of the Grofs and others have corroborated Jung’s
and clarification to cover more of the emergency aspects of
discoveries in regard to spiritual emergencies. Grof
the model rather than simply the emergence aspects.
appeared to acknowledge Jung in terms of reference to
These propositions support the two research
the Self, individuation, and the inner healer, as well as
questions by tying them together, in that adaptation
to the mandala as a symbol of wholeness (Davidson &
and revision are what allow the model to accommodate
Grof, 2008). Interestingly, Jung’s Red Book (2009) may
more varieties of psycho-spiritual distress while waiting
be considered a prime example of a spiritual emergency
for the psychotherapeutic establishment to catch up. For
processed in imagery and narrative.
example, the Religious or Spiritual Problem diagnostic
Continuing the lineage, Assagioli (1991) wrote:
category was introduced into the DSM under the rubric
of cultural competence, an accepted concept in the field Spiritual development in a person is a long and
of mainstream psychiatry. Furthermore, Lukoff built arduous adventure, a journey through strange lands,
a website devoted to issues of spiritual competence to full of wonders, but also beset with difficulties and
help the concept of spiritual emergency gain recognition dangers….Disturbances that are spiritual in origin
within the psychotherapeutic field. Adaptation is an are becoming more and more frequent today because
important aspect of the model, since data from other the number of people troubled by spiritual needs,
cultures may require fluidity and flexibility in definitions whether consciously or unconsciously, is increasing.
and diagnoses. Furthermore, because of the greater complexity of

The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergencies International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 119
 modern man and in particular the complexity of
the obstacles put up by his critical mind, spiritual
development has become a more difficult and
complicated inner process. It is therefore useful to
take an overall look at the nervous and psychological
disturbances that can occur at the various
stages of spiritual development, throughout the
transformation process, and to give some guidelines
on the most appropriate and effective ways of curing
them. (p. 116)
Assagioli emphasized the growing need for a psychological
and physiological understanding of the process of
spiritual development, and thus securely located the
problem of spiritual emergency within the medical and
psychotherapeutic realms.
Lukoff, a psychotherapist, appears to have
been the main torchbearer for several aspects of the
Grofs’ model. For example, Lukoff et al. (1998) wrote
of the Religious or Spiritual Problem that came to be a
diagnostic category (Code V62.89) in the DSM, Fourth
Edition (APA, 1994). Lukoff, along with Lu and Turner
(1996), helped promulgate aspects of the problem,
highlighting areas that begged attention at the time.
These included gaps in training for a psychospiritual
assessment competency, a void in the medical literature
regarding psychospiritual issues, and the lack of initiative
by mainstream psychology to fill such omissions.
Lukoff et al. (1998) acknowledged the relevance
of the Grofs’ model when he wrote, “Lending further
credibility to the existence of spiritual emergency as a valid
clinical phenomenon, there is considerable overlap among
the criteria proposed by different authors for making
the differential diagnosis between psychopathology and
spiritual emergencies” (pp. 39-40).
Moreover, Lukoff et al. (1998) noted the evidential
basis for the applicability of a model of spiritual emergency:
These criteria have been validated in numerous
outcome studies from psychotic episodes… and
would probably also identify individuals who are in
the midst of a spiritual emergency with psychotic
features that has a high likelihood of a positive
outcome. (p. 40)
The importance of distinguishing spiritual emergencies
from psychotic episodes is emphasized here, as proper
diagnosis helps to insure the best possible outcome for
an individual.
120 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Meanwhile, Krippner (2002) acknowledged the
work of both the Grofs and Lukoff when he wrote:
Cultural competence is a relatively new concept
for the helping professions… The fourth edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders… has attempted to enhance its universal
validity not only with a brief mention of dissociative
trance disorder but with a supplemental category of
religious or spiritual problem and a glossary of culture-
bound syndromes. (p. 972)
By referring to the inclusion of the concept of spiritual
emergency within the major diagnostic manual used by
psychologists, Krippner emphasized the importance of
the Grofs’ work and the successful effort by Lukoff to
gain general recognition for, at the very least, the cultural
legitimacy of spiritual emergency.
Wilber, who debated with Stanislav Grof on some
of Grof’s philosophical points (Wilber, 1993a; Daniels,
2004), nonetheless affirmed the Grofs’ model when he
wrote that
too many people identified as psychotic are obviously
experiencing a spiritual emergency, with the particulars
of these crises urgently requiring more exploration,
including their correlation with addictions, anxieties,
depressions, and the like. (Wilber, 1993b, p. 260)
Despite any disagreements Wilber may have had with
the theoretical foundations of the Grofs’ model, Wilber
clearly took the pragmatic route in assessing the utility
and necessity of a distinction between psychosis and
spiritual emergency.
On his Citizen Initiative web site, Shepherd
(2009), a lay critic, claimed that “the Grof theme of
‘spiritual emergency’ is a red herring” for a commercial
enterprise that produces negative results (Critical Remarks
on Holotropic Breathwork and the MAPS Strategy,
Guide to Contents section). However, Shepherd provided
no precise support for his claim regarding the purported
“negative results.” Thus, the Grofs’ model, while
therapeutically relevant and forward thinking, may still
be too controversial to readily integrate into the Western
medical/medicinal model.
For instance, Wain (2005) wrote of “spiritual
emergence(y)” as a “transformational process” that “can
include powerful experiences likely to be pathologized
by mainstream psychiatry” (p. 43). Fukuyama and
Sevig (1999) noted: “Because psychologists are steeped
Viggiano & Krippner
in Western scientific rationalism, these experiences are to manage is trying to come through, and for this
difficult to explain since they are outside the five senses and reason it seems appropriate to consider creative
logic, and traditionally have been relegated to the category flooding a spiritual emergency. (p. 91)
of mental illness” (p. 98). Witness also the anti-psychiatry
Meek (2005) suggested that creative flooding be included
movement (in the tradition of R. D. Laing) that came
under the code for Religious or Spiritual Problem in
about precisely due to the over-reliance on pharmacological
the upcoming iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical
means for attending to seemingly psychotic symptoms,
Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), due to
in part because of the unfortunate side effects of such
it being “both a physical and a spiritual experience” (p.
treatments. Lukoff (1985, 1988) has provided studies
102). Meek noted that both Van Gogh and Sylvia Plath
that tend to support the spiritual emergencies model and
would be examples of people who likely experienced
transpersonal psychotherapies, even in those patients with
creative flooding, but whose demise may have been
diagnosed psychotic disorders. Additionally, Viggiano
brought about by the lack of supportive structures to help
(2010) addressed similar cases in her doctoral dissertation
midwife their processes.
on the model.
Interview with Karen Trueheart,
Although the Grofs’ work has been influential,
an Authority in the Field
there is still room for refinement and reconsideration of
the concepts integral to the spiritual emergency model.
Several researchers have studied spontaneous occurrences
K aren E. Trueheart directed and co-directed the
Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) early in 2000
and trained students at the California Institute of Integral
of spiritual emergence processes and found that the
Studies (CIIS) to work with the spiritual emergence
typologies listed in the Grofs’ work may need to be
and emergency population. She was interviewed for
expanded. For instance, Wade (2000) studied reportedly
the purpose of triangulating the resulting data with the
spontaneous and transcendent experiences during sexual
results of the literature review.
activity using Stanislav Grof’s taxonomy. The 86 interviews
Methodology
Wade conducted revealed phenomena consistent with
Kvale (1996), in the book InterViews, offered a
varieties of spiritual emergencies such as kundalini, past
full chapter on the analysis of interviews, including six
life reports, out-of-body experiences, possession, psychic
possible steps. In the case of the interview with Truheart
openings, forms of unitive experiences, in addition to
below, the first four steps were taken: 1. The participant
several others. Wade’s (2004) later phenomenological
describes the topic; 2. The participant discovers
study of 91 participants, based in part on her previous
something about the topic; 3. The interviewer “condenses
research, found spiritual awakening to be a major theme
and interprets” information within the interview process
in those who claimed to have had a so-called transcendent
(p. 189); 4. The “transcribed interview is interpreted by
sexual experience. These findings seem to verify and
the interviewer” for structuring, clarification and analysis
extend the Grofs’ model by including potential spiritual
itself (p. 189). Of significant note was Step 2, in which
emergencies not previously categorized.
Trueheart discovered that she agreed with the hypothesis
Additionally, Meek (2005) wrote: “Rather than
that the Grofs’ model was ahead of its time.
perpetuating the practice of Western science, which
Interview
merely pathologizes symptoms and then attempts to
1. What did you find as SEN Director and then
medicate them away, this work proposes that creative
co-director in 2000 about the relevance and applicability
flooding can be understood as a subset of experiences
of the spiritual emergency model? In using the spiritual
which Grof (1990) calls spiritual emergencies” (p. iv).
emergency model developed by the Grofs and Lukoff,
Creative flooding is described as a situation in which
we found that we were able to differentiate people who
an “increase in creative flow becomes overwhelming, no
were in a growth process that could be supported without
longer manageable” (p. iv). Moreover, Meek observed,
medicine or hospitalization and those who were not. It
A spiritual emergence/emergency also can lead to helped us to discern their level of functioning and their
increased creativity, though the effect may become internal capacity to hold the experience. David Lukoff
creative flooding. In these circumstances, too much has continually used and supported the model and
of spirit or too much creativity for the individual has not significantly altered it from the Grof’s original

The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergencies International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 121
formulation. Robert Turner and Stuart Sovatsky also
integrated the model into their work. As far as the
DSM, Lukoff, Turner, and Francis Lu were responsible
for getting the model included. It really doesn’t address
anything more than alerting mental health professionals
to the fact that using spiritual language to describe an
experience doesn’t make a person psychotic.
We weren’t using an instrument in our work at
SEN. David and I did some workshops together where we
used the model for the workshops. Diagnosis is ongoing
in this model. Emma Bragdon’s book was also a reference.
We listened for inner capacity, outer function, and support
systems, which are good markers of whether the person can
work with the experience. It’s of interest which category,
kundalini or dark night, the experience fits into, but of
greater interest was the language the clients were using
to describe where they were in the process. Saints and
Madmen by Russell Shorto is based on how the culture
supports psychosis: if those who have spiritual emergencies
are told that they’re crazy, they lose their support system
and may lose their stability. John Nelson’s book is a good
reference called Healing the Split. It talks about the need for
integration of spirituality in the mental health profession.
Nelson includes in his book case studies that distinguish
the differences between psychosis and spiritual emergence.
2. Were there any indications of how useful it was to
train California Institute of Integral Studies students in this
model? The model was applied and so it was more expansive
than the Grofs’, and we found it a useful model, and the
students responded to the information. There was some
follow up at the Center for Psychological and Spiritual
Health where we worked with clients, and the students
found it useful. By 2000, we were really aware of the
mental health resistance to the whole idea of spirituality.
We were aware that 70 percent of people in the United
States had a belief in God and had spiritual experiences,
but in the mental health professions it was a much lower
percentage. The skepticism was clear and the question
was coming up: How much of a barrier was spiritual
emergence language to mental health professionals when
there was religious content? Many times, we would get
the response that this was the first time someone could
hold the experience and not be critical, and there would
be gratefulness. Their other experiences included being
shunned or being sent to a professional where then there
was a traumatic experience.
Spirit Rock Meditation Center had a series
of events, and in a short time, we got several calls from
122 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
people who had intense experiences while there. We then
formed a committee with the staff at Spirit Rock to set up
protocols for who they should accept for long-term retreats
and how to deal with disruptions, not behaviorally, but
how to determine if the experience is a psychotic break,
heart attack, or intense spiritual practice. Spirit Rock had
to train the teachers to recognize the precursors to crises
and to call a psychiatric emergency when appropriate, so
it became more formalized.
3. Is there anything you would revise about the model
today based on what you learned in your work? The Spirit
Rock experience is an example of what I would revise, and
the model is in an ongoing state of revision. Spiritual growth
holds potential for spiritual maturity. Sovatsky referred to
what happens in kundalini awakening as similar to the
chaos between childhood and adolescence, and yet our
culture recognizes that tumultuous behavior as a profound
time. Spiritual growth can have equally tumultuous
consequences, but because our culture doesn’t understand
them, those consequences can be exacerbated. And what
the Grofs and the transpersonal psychologists did was to
bring structure to this stage in human growth. If we want
to encourage the culture to be more understanding, one
of our responsibilities is to communicate and encourage
integration. Respecting differences in culture is fine and
it was successful for getting the model into the DSM.
Dan Goleman’s The Meditative Mind was based on his
discoveries in India and came out in a time when there
was a lack of knowledge about spiritual emergence as a
profound stage in human development. The Grofs’ model
made it possible to address it, and Lukoff’s work did too.
In mental health, we’re often looking at social supports,
asking, What are your inner resources in dealing with
any particular crisis? Dealing with particular crises is not
a leap for mental health professionals. There’s a gateway
for the spiritual emergence processes—to be able to hold
your experience—and that comes out of development and
spiritual growth.
SEN is no longer a physical place to go for this
work. It has been a challenge to integrate spiritual life in
the scientific community, but fortunately, things have
changed since the network was first created. The mind
science revolution is turning to the effects of meditation
in helping to bring scientific understanding to a model
that is in dire need. Inner investigation is valid as scientific
investigation, and continued recognition of this validity
will help people and professionals to understand that
healthy brains have unitive experiences, and that other
Viggiano & Krippner
elements of spiritual life bring about, as Sovatsky says, a
“spiritual development” process that is similar to the shift
from childhood to adolescence. It’s a good and hopeful
hypothesis and more useful than the alternatives.
The Grofs’ model gives us another tool based
on the promotion of health, and positive psychology can
fit in with that perspective and help to further it. The
characteristics of health and spiritual growth that are so
important in positive psychology fit the spiritual emergence
model nicely: empathy, cooperation, satisfaction, resiliency,
and thinking clearly. We’ll see how our culture learns to
hold it.
Results of the
Triangulation Process
I n interpreting the interview, it appears that Trueheart
believed that the Grofs’ model could be expanded and
intertwined with various transpersonal psychotherapies
to make it practicable in a day clinic. According to the
current Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) web site,
“Our National Referral Directory of licensed mental
health professionals now includes over 180 professionals
in 31 states. Since 1980, our Information and Referral
Service has received thousands of calls. Over the past 27
years we have found that there is an increasing need for
our services.”
SEN presently deals with the following issues,
which includes and expands the Grofs’ typologies for
spiritual emergencies: Kundalini, Unitive Consciousness,
Near-Death Experience, Shamanic, UFO/Alien,
Possession/Channeling, Past Life, Renewal through
Return to the Center, Psychic Opening, Addiction
Recovery, Existential Crisis, Loss/Change of Faith,
Spiritual By-pass, and others. The book list on their web
site is organized into seven general categories and their
links include four broad areas, with each category and
area divided into numerous sub-listings.
It also seems important to look at some of the
resources on which Trueheart relied. These included
Goleman (1988), who agreed that
the true context of meditation is spiritual life. At
their height, the states of consciousness described
in the classic sources can lift one out of the small-
mindedness bred by daily pursuits as well as
transform ordinary awareness. Such transcendental
states seem to be the seeds of spiritual life, and they
have been experienced by the founders and early
followers of every world religion. (p. xxiii)
The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergencies
This concordance of thinking is relevant because one of
the types of spiritual emergencies the Grofs cited is based
on crises that arise out of spiritual practices. Following
such threads helped to triangulate and corroborate the
historical literature review and the findings from the
recent research summarized above. The Grofs connected
the model with its practical application and helped place
it in the context of transpersonal psychotherapy.
Archival Investigation
A rchival investigation is “both the science and the
art of interpreting primary documents in the
description, reconstruction, and corroboration of a
subject” (Taylor, 1999, p. 91). The subject in this case is
the Grofs’ model of spiritual emergencies. The analytic
procedure used here is a qualitative method of research
appropriate for social sciences (p. 92). The evidentiary
material in this essay comes from the historical literature
review and from research findings as well as from the
interview above. The following is a summary of the data
gleaned from the documentary evidence.
The Grofs’ (1990) tabulated medical indicators
and psychological indicators to help suggest whether a
case might be more amenable to a medical rather than a
spiritual emergency strategy. Medical indicators include
positive or negative detection of a disease or impairment
based, in part, on laboratory tests, status of intellect and
memory, and ability to communicate and cooperate
appropriately. Examples of psychological indicators
include level of social adjustment, cognitive and verbal
coherence, relational factors, intra-psychic awareness,
behavioral issues, and pre-episodic functioning. There
are cases when both medical and spiritual emergency
strategies would be appropriate, but the Grofs’ original
model was meant as a first step toward helping to
distinguish the two approaches since their “central
theme” (1989, p. x) was that certain states that had been
diagnosed as psychiatric conditions could instead be
conceptualized as spiritual emergencies.
Lukoff et al. (1998) noted that discernment is
necessary in order to distinguish between psychotic and
spiritual emergency episodes since the two share similar
characterstics:
Making the differential diagnosis between spiritual
emergencies and psychopathology can be difficult
because the unusual experiences, behaviors and
visual, auditory, olfactory or kinesthetic perceptions
characteristic of spiritual emergencies can appear
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 123

as the symptoms of mental disorders: delusions,
loosening of associations, markedly illogical thinking,
or grossly disorganized behavior. (p. 39)
Psychotic and spiritual emergency crises can both
be characterized by these cognitive and behavioral
indices, which may point to a similarity between the
transformational processes associated with either.
Indeed, the Grofs’ model was based on “the
idea that some of the dramatic experiences and unusual
states of mind that traditional psychiatry diagnoses and
treats as mental diseases are actually crises of personal
transformation” (1989, p. x). In contradistinction,
spiritual emergence would not be as dramatic or as easily
confused with a mental disorder. The Grofs made clear
that in spiritual emergence, intellect and memory are
qualitatively changed but remain intact, consciousness
is usually clear, and there is a “good basic orientation”
(Grof & Grof, 1990. pp. 254-255). However, they
asserted that none of these characteristics are observed
in most examples of psychosis. For this reason, the Grofs
were careful to provide these guidelines for determining
the appropriateness of medical versus spiritual emergency
approaches.
Additionally, Johnson and Friedman (2008)
offered 12 valuable insights and recommendations
in regards to distinguishing spiritual emergency and
psychosis. One recommendation was that there be
clinical acceptance of experiences than can be referred to
as “spiritual” or “transpersonal.” Johnson and Friedman
also advised taking a thorough psychospiritual history,
using a holistic approach in assessment, checking
for adaptive functioning and openness, checking for
excesses and overemphasis of certain beliefs or practices
versus a wholesome approach to self and others,
noting idiosyncrasy versus normativeness within one’s
community, determining the nature of the problem in
terms of spiritual versus disordered factors, differentiating
between spiritual emergence and emergency, monitoring
levels of terror and decompensation, checking for hyper-
religiosity, checking for intra-psychic conflict, and using
assessment scales and tools.
For example, if “voices” were urging the sacrifice
of someone’s daughter to a deity, it would be necessary to
check for further distinguishing factors such as whether
the person is functional or disordered, comes from a social
group that condones the belief in sacrifice, has practiced
some form of sacrifice or would be willing to perform
124 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
sacrifice, hears voices that seem terrifying or defensive,
and is aware of which inner conflicts might have given rise
to such commands. In the Grofs’ model, persecutory
voices distinguish psychiatric disorder from spiritual
emergence.
Discussion
D uring the research procedure, the question as to
whether the Grofs’ model of spiritual emergencies
was useful and/or should be revised also included the
issues of whether this model was actually ahead of its
time and whether the medical establishment needs to
catch up with it.
At first, the longevity of the Grofs’ model was
questioned because original resources, such as the
Soteria and Diabasis clinics, which provided structural
containment and support for people undergoing spiritual
emergencies, had closed down. Yet these closures did not
reflect the fact that spiritual problems had now entered the
diagnostic categories of the DSM-IV (APA, 1994) or with
the virtual explosion of inquiries into and information
on the categories that the Grofs included in their model.
On the AltaVista advanced search engine, of 120,000
matches for the term “spiritual emergency,” 109,000 are
from within the last year alone. Additionally, the same
term search produces 28 videos using the Google search
engine. However, on PsycNET there are only 30 matches,
with just 2 in the PubMed psychiatric literature, which
may indicate that the scientific and medical communities
are not keeping up with the public demand that is
suggested by the Internet presence of such resources.
The only way that seemed available to
accommodate the new spiritual emergence/emergency
material was to couch it in terms of diversity issues, in
which spirituality became a matter of cultural competence
for psychotherapists (see, for instance, American
Psychological Association website texts and videos on
spiritual diversity at www.apa.org, as well as Lukoff’s web-
site, www.spiritualcompetency.com). A prime example of
this accommodation is the work of Fukuyama and Sevig
(1999), particularly their chapter on “positive and negative
expressions of spirituality” (p. 83), and most specifically
their subsection on “what distinguishes between healthy
and unhealthy spirituality?” (p. 95).
More recently, however, Johnson and Friedman
(2008) recognized the need for both culturally sensitive
and psychometric methods of differentiating spiritual
emergencies from psychotic episodes. Such literature
lends credence to the idea that Grof’s model has taken
Viggiano & Krippner
root, especially in humanistic and transpersonal
psychotherapy, and that continued revision of diagnostic
criteria will further solidify it. For example, Viggiano
(2010) presented data suggesting that it is possible for
a spiritual emergency approach to be combined with
psychopharmacology and to be beneficial even in bona
fide cases of schizophrenia. As mentioned above, both
a medical and a spiritual emergency approach may be
indicated in certain cases.
An indicator of the Grofs’ model being ahead
of its time was its treatment by Khouzam (2007), who
revised Grofs’ model to include “meditation-related
problems,” “breaking away from a spiritual leader,” and
“illness seen as punishment” (pp. 573-574), although most
of these were previously recognized in different terms
by the Grofs, Lukoff, and others. Lukoff (2007) would
likely support at least the first revision, since he wrote
that meditation “has triggered many reported spiritual
emergencies” (p. 639). Incidentally, neither the Grofs nor
Lukoff are cited in Khouzam’s article, despite Khouzam,
Grof, and Lukoff all having taught in the San Francisco
Bay Area and likely knowing of each other’s work.
In summary, to ask if the Grofs’ model of spiritual
emergencies has been useful is tantamount to questioning
whether transpersonal psychotherapy has been useful.
After all, “Transpersonal psychiatry… attempts to
preserve the transformative potential of psychosis during
the acute phase by allowing for expression of symptoms
rather than squelching them as is practiced in mainstream
medical-model approaches” (Lukoff, 1996, p. 280). If
the medical establishment were to answer no to either
question, then it may be due to reductionist thinking
or, for example, a lack of familiarity with transperosnal
research case studies, since the spiritual emergency model
seems relevant for certain patient populations. The anti-
psychiatry movement may be considered a response by so-
called psychiatric surivivors to the pathologically-oriented
diagnoses and treatments favored in a medical model. In
the Grofs’ model, an acceptance of spiritual emergency as
acute but not always harmful in its outcome is one reason
to consider the Grofs’ work as ahead of its time.
Suggestions
for Further Systematic Inquiry
C ombs and Krippner (2003) reported that in the
field of “modern developmental research…the
most advanced levels of human growth transform
consciousness in the direction of increasing selflessness
and spirituality, rather than simply toward greater
The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergencies
intelligence” (p. 47). Moreover, they argued, “In
accord with this view, virtually all major theoretical
models of psychological growth increasingly emphasize
selflessness if not explicit spirituality at the highest levels
of development” (p. 54). Thus, developmental research
might contribute to the dialog, and may be combined
with cognitive models in order to present a multi-varied
approach to the developmental process.
For example, Fowler (1981) recognized that a
spiritual crisis can be part of the transition between any
of the Stages of Faith as put forward by the developmental
theories of Piaget and Kohlberg. He wrote that
“transitions from one… stage level to another are often
protracted, painful, dislocating and/or abortive” (p.
274). Furthermore, Love (2002) suggested that: “Given
the focus on meaning-making, there are many ways in
which theories of spiritual development and cognitive
development overlap and are mutually informing” (p.
369). Love concluded that Fowler’s work, among others,
“has reinforced the relationship of spiritual development
theories and traditional developmental theories,
especially cognitive-structural theories” (p. 372). It is
statements such as these that indicate the Grofs’ model
was a pioneering discovery that has come into its own
as patients are identified who cannot be diagnosed or
treated as effectively with other models.
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About the Authors
Darlene B. Viggiano, PhD, is a California licensed Marriage
and Family Therapist (MFT) at Kaiser Permanente
South Valley Centre. She serves on Kaiser’s Regional
Best Practices committees for Dual Diagnosis and Case
Management, and facilitates Adults Molested as Children,
Dual Diagnosis, and Life Skills groups, in addition to
carrying a caseload. She also has facilitated Mindfulness
The Grofs’ Model of Spiritual Emergencies
Movement classes, and has served on the Domestic
Violence and Quality Assurance committees at Kaiser.
Her honors include an Outstanding Service Award from
Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Viggiano’s dissertation topic was
the role of dreams and dream-like experiences in spiritual
emergence processes. She has authored several articles
and book-reviews, as well as the unpublished manuscript,
Carrying On: A Workbook for Women Who’ve Lost
a Pregnancy. She has presented papers and workshops
at Saybrook’s Residential Conferences, the Society for
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Kaiser Permanente,
the Older Adult Resource Consortium, San Jose Unified
School District, and the Society for the Anthropology of
Consciousness. She is in charge of Continuing Education
Units for MFTs and Licensed Clinical Social Workers at
Kaiser South Valley Centre.
Stanley Krippner, PhD, is Alan Watts Professor of Psy-
chology, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Cen-
ter, San Francisco, California. In 2002, the American
Psychological Association presented him its Award for
Distinguished Contributions to the Advancement of In-
ternational Psychology. His award speech, “Conflicting
perspectives on shamans and shamanism: Point and coun-
terpoints,” was the first article on shamanism to be pub-
lished in the American Psychologist. In 2007, he gave an
invited address, “Learning from the Spirits,” at the Ameri-
can Anthropological Association, reviewing his fieldwork
in Brazil’s spiritistic religions. He is a former president of
the International Association for the Study of Dreams and
a Fellow in several professional organizations including the
Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and the Soci-
ety for the Scientific Study of Religion.
About the Journal
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 127
 The Gift of Life:
Death As Teacher in the Aghori Sect
Rochelle Suri
California Institute of Integral Studies
San Francisco, CA, USA
Daniel B. Pitchford
Saybrook University
San Francisco, CA, USA

This article utilizes the example of the Aghori, with their radical and unique perspective on death,
as a challenge to the Western world to live an authentic, present life by maintaining awareness of
mortality. Specifically, three main themes are explored: first, a theoretical engagement of the concept
of death based on the (Western) philosophy of existentialism, second, a review of the historical
origins and philosophy of the Aghori sect, and third, a depiction of the Aghoris as a living example
of vigorously accepting death as an inevitability of life. On this basis a brief comparison of Western
and Eastern attitudes towards life and death will be offered.

Keywords: existentialism, Aghori, authenticity, self, spirituality, death

D
eath presents an unknown element that speaks
of a certain but unknown future, yet remains
an untouchable predicament in the present.
The future is and always will be an unknown experience,
a reality that will not be known until it is made present,
yet it guides the force of intentionality. For example, a
person works to resolve financial obligations over time.
They have a “plan” on how to pay off their balances,
but reality of such a payoff is in the future. It is unclear
whether they will achieve their goal, but they are guided
in hope to meet their intentions. Death holds this sort
of sway over the present moment: people know it exists;
an inevitable, ethereal experience—the final act. Yet,
rather than living each waking moment as if it were the
last, many try to avoid confronting “a way of being for
which [they] are never prepared” (Bugental, 2008, p.
334). The present moment is all that exists and to live
fully, the awareness of each moment is a true gift.
American culture is a culture of death repression
(May, 1996, 1981/1999). People seem to exist in a
constant state of apparent deception around the reality
of death. According to May, people continually repress
death to avoid the fear and anxiety that accompanies it.
The fear of death affects the very experience of living,
of emotions and relationships. Even more, American
culture has learned to use mortuary rituals as a means
to “celebrate” the experience, or lack thereof, of death
(Metcalfe & Huntington, 1991). Fear, then, takes form
as it allows death to be something that remains “out
there,” while people utilize mortuary systems to tend
to the deceased so that the living can avoid existing
with the dead. People make deliberate efforts to avoid
engaging the emotions and realities surrounding death,
such as focusing on looking younger. Yet avoiding the
emotional content that often arises around the topic
of death creates an inauthentic way of being, a sort of
repression. If Westerners allowed themselves to recognize
death as a natural part of existence, a fuller encounter
of life might be experienced (May, 1981/1999; Yalom,
1980).
In contrast to the American or Western
perspective, there exist several other paradigms of death
that draw from philosophical and spiritual traditions.
Such paradigms offer a radical conception of death;
it provides the human being with a more nuanced
perspective on the significance of death in one’s life. Such
a perspective may be found in the Eastern paradigm of
death, particularly in India.
India alone is home to thousands of spiritual
teachers, traditions, and sects, all of which present
diverse views on life and death. However, one particular
sect that offers a revolutionary idea of death is the Aghori
sect of North India. This sect provides a remarkable
glimpse of what it means to live in the present moment,
in the here and now, revering death as a spiritual teacher
instead of a subject that should be avoided.
The focus of this article is three-fold: (a) a
theoretical engagement with the concept of death based
on the (Western) philosophy of existentialism; (b) a
brief review of the historical origins and philosophy

128 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

Studies, 29(1), 2010, pp. 128-134 Suri
of the Aghori sect; and (c) a depiction of the Aghoris
as a living example of vigorously accepting death as an
inevitability of life. It is hoped that a review of these
subjects will provide the reader an overview of some
of the broad cultural and philosophical differences in
Western and Eastern notions of death, as well as shed
light on the Aghoris, a sect that is rarely discussed in
modern India.
Existentialism and Death
L ife is full of anxiety, which is a significant part of
being human. Death is an anxious reality of life
that Western individuals commonly try to avoid facing
(Becker, 1973/1997; Kubler-Ross, 1997; Yalom, 1980).
Many people focus on living in a way that is as comfort­
able as possible, and tend to try to avoid the various
anxieties that may come with being alive (e.g., sense of
uneasiness; see May, 1950/1996). However, to attempt
to avoid or escape anxiety is futile. Life is a terminal
experience. It is a journey to which each person who
lives it knows that a definite result will come forth: We
cease to be.
The complexity of facing one’s own mortality
should not be confused with loss and grief. People
experience loss uniquely and, for most, to experience
the death of a loved one may prove difficult for others
to relate to, especially if they have not experienced a loss
themselves (Bonnano & Kaltman, 2001). This is not
to say people cannot be empathic or even sympathetic
with those who are grieving, but that it is difficult to
relate to the pain of loss if it has never been experienced.
One’s own death, however, is an experience that cannot
be compared or shared with others. It is an individual
experience that is endured on the utmost lonely path of
exiting an anxious, living being.
If there is no escaping death, why do so many
people try to exist superficially without acknowledging
its presence? The interest in discovering more behind
death and its impact upon existence is deeply rooted in
the desire to understand how being authentic in the world
and accepting the mortality of life are complementary.
Death is unavoidable, yet it seems that if people are not
accepting of their transience, the ensuing anxiety of
death will and can impair an authentic way of being.
It is important to know about death in this fashion
because it is an ingrained part of life that permeates the
soul. Wisdom comes in the humility of understanding
(Sternberg, 1990). Understanding death then requires
conceptualizing how death impacts a person’s authentic
Death as Teacher in Aghori Sect
way of being. Specifically, it requires awareness about
the human potential for how an individual may remain
genuine in his or her sense of self while accepting his or
her own mortality.
Death is a reality that cannot be ignored as it
is a now or a present moment concept. Death is always
present and can strike anyone at any time. So to defer or
deny its reality is a damaging event upon the authenticity
of an individual. Denying something that is an authentic
aspect to living can degrade the individual’s ability to be
and become fully alive. This is because the individual
works so hard to avoid experiencing the phenomena
associated with with the concept of death. When it
comes to death, people do not just have anxiety about
the concept itself, rather, they dread the fact that they
“are and are not”—the verity of finitude (Barrett, 1958,
p. 227).
Imagine for a moment what life might be like if
peace were experienced each time the thought of death
crossed into awareness. What would this experience
look and feel like? People tend to avoid the thoughts
and feelings associated with death because of the
terror that can arise from the awareness that death is
inevitable (Kastenbaum, 2000; Kubler-Ross, 1997; May,
1981/1999; Tomer, 1994; Yalom, 1980). Confronting
death takes a considerable amount of energy from
an individual. For those who endure life and avoid
recognizing death—avoid topics, conversations, live
so busily as to not think about it—the energy placed
in avoidance can deplete fuller living potentials and
discoveries (Becker, 1973/1997). This is not to say
that recognizing an individual’s own mortality is an
insurmountable task, but that it takes courage to accept.
In doing so, people may become freer to live alongside
the nature of a mortal world. This freedom allows them
to be open to making different choices they may not
otherwise consider—being more available to friends
who lost loved ones, taking risks such as flying—thus
potentially unlocking greater depth in living. If one
were to examine those individuals who try to avoid
recognizing death’s existence through their behaviors,
what would be found? Avoiding thoughts and feelings
that are associated with death can build barriers which
may create for people not just a type of anxiety about
dying, but also an anxiety about living (Scull, 1989).
The Aghoris would not embrace a lifestyle
that avoided recognition of death’s existence. Rather,
they would fully emphasize in their daily lives that
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 129
acknowledging and respecting death is one of the
fundamental principles of living an authentic life.
Consider the following overview of the Aghori traditions
and philosophical orientations toward life and death.
Historical Origins of the Aghori
N estled on the banks of the Ganges River in North
India is one of the holiest and renowned places
for pilgrimage: Varanasi or Benares. Benares has been
considered the cultural, spiritual and religious metropolis
of northern India for centuries. Delving into the history
of Benares, the city was referred to as Kasi or Kashi, “the
luminous one” in a symbolic appreciation of the city’s
prominence for the arts and culture. It is also believed
that Lord Shiva, the destroyer of the universe in Hindu
cosmology, created the city, therefore making Benares
the most religious hub of India. Barrett (2002), in his
description of Benares, stated:
Indeed, more than a million pilgrims a year visit
Benares for the same reason that they bathe in the
Ganga: to purify themselves of pollution and sin
so as to attain a better standard of living and/or
liberation for themselves and their families in this
life and the next. (p. 87)
Benares is also the home and birthplace of the
Aghori sect. Although Benares is a city of purification
for millions of visitors who bathe in the Ganges, it is
also considered the city of pollution and defilement, as
observed from the practices and rituals of the Aghoris.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that in the broader picture
of Hinduism and Hindu cosmology and philosophy,
Benares is considered the city of polarities, where
materialism and spirituality encounter each other in a
way that cannot be explained, only experienced.
It is within this context that the philosophy and
history of the Aghori sect can be brought to light. Aghori
ascetics belong to the Aghora discipline and consider
themselves devotees of the Hindu god Shiva. Hence, the
main center of the Aghori culture is Benares. The main
ashram or spiritual community of the Aghoris is situated
in Benares, where Kina Ram Aghori’s samadhi (final
resting place) resides—an important place for Aghori
pilgrimages. Kina Ram was an ascetic who is said to
have lived to approximately 150 years of age during the
second half of the eighteenth century, and recognized as
an incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva.
Going further back into the history of the
Aghori sect, it is believed that that the northern Indian
130 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Kapalika sects were the founding fathers of the Aghoris.
These religious groups appeared between the 7th and
12th centuries and utilized antinomian practices as a
means toward spiritual liberation (Barrett, 2002). The
term Kapalika is derived from the word kapalin or one
who carries a skull. Lorenzen (1991) described kapalin
as an individual “with a skull and staff, living on alms,
announcing his deed (as he begs), and eating little food”
(p. 13).
Having few possessions and living a solitary life,
it is of no wonder that the Kaplaikas did not belong to a
structured organization. Hence, their lineage or ancestry
continues to be a mystery, leaving historians speculating
on the origins and nature of this religious sect. With their
religious and philosophical roots in Advaita Vedanta, the
Aghoris follow a monist way of life. Advaita is the non-
dualistic school of Vedanta philosophy that affirms the
oneness of the individual soul, God, and the universe.
In other words, the essence of Advaita philosophy is
the acceptance of Brahman (creator) and atman (soul)
as a single identity. According to Advaita philosophy,
there is no difference between God and man, self and
other, good and bad, or purity and impurity. They are all
Brahman. This world is a mere illusory projection upon
the one Reality (Parthasarathy, 2001). A renowned guru
of India, Sathya Sai Baba (2002) succinctly described the
basis of Advaita philosophy: “Though the appearances
may be different and there may be varieties of experience,
it is asserted that in all these, there is one thing present,
namely, the unifying spirit” (p. 30).
Defining Aghori
T he word “Aghora” implies several meanings: deeper
than deep, illumined, or the absence of darkness.
From a spiritual and transpersonal perspective, the word
Aghora is the transformation of darkness into light; a
transformation of the finite human consciousness into
the effulgence of the Absolute Reality or the Whole.
Aghora is the apotheosis of Tantra, the Indian religion
whose Supreme Deity is the Mother Goddess (Svaboda,
1986).
The dictionary definition of the Hindi term
Aghori according to Chaturvedi and Tiwari (1989, as
cited in Gupta, 1993) is: “A filthy, uncouth and unclean
(man); detestable; one who engages in indiscriminate
eating; a member of the order of mendicants called
‘aghor panth’” (p. 16).
In general, the Aghori sect is comprised of men
who are considered to follow the lineage of Lord Shiva.
Suri
It is seldom that women are consecrated into the sect.
A vernacular understanding of the term Aghori is often
ascribed to ideas of Aghoris as being satanic worshippers,
or followers of an extremely sadistic cult, with very little
attention paid to the religious or spiritual components of
the Aghori sect. More often than not, within an urban
setting, Aghoris have been perceived as individuals with
mental illness.
Contrary to the above descriptions, Gupta
(1993) described her encounters with the Aghoris as
conventional in their appearance and manner, being
well groomed and mild mannered by local standards.
This description stands in stark contrast to the popular
beliefs about the Aghoris as being either clad in black
robes or even half naked, their body being exposed to the
elements.
The Aghoris have been a relatively secretive
sect in India, drawing attention from curious outsiders
and spectators because of their understandably aberrant
and inappropriate behaviors and rituals. Consumption
of intoxicants such as alcohol and marijuana, intake of
human and animal flesh and secretions (which is more
ritualistic), meditating upon corpses, the adorning of
skulls and bones and ill-clad bodies are some of the
explicit characteristics of the Aghori.
To the common person such activities and
rituals are offensive and may be considered to be of
very little spiritual and transformative value. If the
essence of Indian spirituality is to detach oneself from
the physical and material enticements of the world, the
consumption of intoxicants appears to hardly justify the
basis for spirituality. However, understood from a more
esoteric perspective, the Aghoris do in fact exemplify a
devotion to the numinous. The words of Svoboda (1986)
illuminate this idea:
When an Aghori takes a lot of intoxicants he feels
like going to the smashan and being alone with his
thoughts…. He feels like telling everyone he meets,
“Leave me alone!” And if he covers himself with
ashes and remains naked and shouts obscenities, no
one is likely to come near, and he can be in his mood
all day long. This is one of the reasons Aghoris act
the way they do. (p. 173)
The central feature that pronounces the Aghori’s
practice to be spiritual in nature is the monistic or
non-dualistic approach to life. The Aghora discipline
promotes the abolition of all thoughts of duality. For
Death as Teacher in Aghori Sect
the Aghori, just as it is in Advaita philosophy, there is
only one Reality; it is vital to eliminate all perceptions
of duality: good and bad, pleasurable and painful, and
more. The Aghori makes no discrimination against these
dualities. Similarly, he makes no distinction between life
and death.
A brief description of the ashram may provide
some insight into the Aghori’s beliefs and attitudes
towards life and death. The ashram continues to be the
headquarters for the Aghoris and Aghori devotees. The
dhuni, or sacred fire, perpetually burns, symbolizing
the metaphoric relationship to the funeral pyre of the
smashan or cremation grounds. The ash from the fire
is considered to be very sacred and distributed to the
devotees, a reminder of the concrete and liberating
nature of death.
According to Svaboda (1986), the funeral pyre is
the ultimate reality; a continual reminder that everyone
has to die. Death is personified and even deified. Aghoris
are not concerned with the physical death, but yearn
for the annihilation of the limitations of their physical
being. There is no fear of death because everything we
possess and wish to possess is impermanent. Death is
in reality the release from the physical shackles, which
the Aghoris break free from when they embrace or adopt
death as the only medium of transcendence. The entire
world is a smashan for the Aghori because every single
individual is born to die.
It is fascinating that the Aghoris have developed
and employ rituals as a means of embracing death, with
the ferocious desire to transcend the world of illusion
(Svaboda, 1986). The ritual practices, although seemingly
bizarre, are symbols of the Aghoris’ non-dualistic
beliefs. For instance, the corpse upon which the Aghori
meditates is a symbol of his own body and the corpse
devouring ritual is a symbol of the transcendence of his
lower self and a realization of the greater, all pervading
Self. Cannabalism is also closely associated with Aghori
rituals. Eating human flesh is yet another reminder
to the Aghori that there exists no distinction between
good or bad, human or animal flesh. Such distinctions
are only delusive, and seldom serve any purpose in the
spiritual development of the human soul. As Gupta
(1993) illuminated the above point, she stated:
It is important to keep in mind that whether or
not one has actually eaten human flesh is not the
point. It is the act of subscribing to the idea of eating
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 131
 human flesh (and other revolting substances) that is In contrast to people from Western cultures, the
important. (p. 82) Aghoris can be described as exemplars of the authentic
acceptance of death as a vehicle of transcendence and
In the same vein, the use of skulls is not an
transformation of the “self.” The Aghoris demonstrate
unusual feature in the ritualistic practices of the Aghori.
that there is no distinction between life and death. The
Gupta (1993) recounted her encounter with an Aghori
philosophy of non-duality is of prime significance. For
who described the use of skulls in great detail:
the Aghori ascetic, the concept of death is honored for it
It is believed that after death, in the top of the skull is the only transformer of the limited human personality
there clings a minute particle or prana, or life force into the divine or the Absolute personality. Hence,
of the deceased. Using mantras and certain offerings, according to the Aghori philosophy, what prevents us
especially alcohol, an aghor sadhna summons the from living authentically is the fear of death, the final
spirit to return to the body, and gaining control over breath of life. If we can embrace death as a teacher, like
it, harnesses its services. (p. 83) the Aghoris do, we are freer to live in the present moment
and perhaps have a greater appreciation for life.
Through these rituals the Aghori comes to realize
Death: What Can It Teach?
the elusive nature of all phenomena and the ultimate truth
of selflessness. It could be said then, that the Aghoris use
their rituals symbolically to transform the prosaic mind
K nowing more about how death impacts people’s
way of living can provide an understanding to the
possibility of living more freely and fully. The hope here
into one that is only concerned with the divine.
is to know more about the fear and dread people have
Aghori and Western Cultures:
about death. It seems that people live inauthentic lives
A Comparison
because the fear of death has a compelling grip on people
D eath has a way of forcing people to confront the
finiteness of living. There is great fear in having to
confront mortality in Western cultures. When people
and most choose to avoid engaging its impact. They live
in denial to a fact that is unavoidable and yet can provide
a meaningful path to living a more full life. To deny
engage the notion that they will die, they must endure
the fact of death in existence is a deliberate act of being
the fear that they will cease to be. This fear of death
inauthentic to self (May, 1996, 1981/1999). According
scares people at their core being because it symbolizes
to May, the self is the “who I am” that people are in
the end of existence. The fear of no longer being can
every experience, as living and dying beings. In order to
have an overwhelming impact upon living (discussed
be authentic to the self, people must acknowledge the
later on; also see Kubler-Ross, 1997).
fact of mortality or increased fear and anxiety might
On the other hand, the confrontation with
consume their ability to be authentic (e.g., avoiding
death, as exemplified by the Aghoris, forces people to
confrontation with death; Tomer, 1994; Yalom, 1980).
examine the inevitability that life will end. Confronting
For most part, the conceptual framework
death allows people to live fuller, authentic lives. If
of death has been strictly defined by and relegated to
people choose to avoid or deny the reality of death,
Western interpretation. With their monistic philosophy
they continue to live in false comfort and inauthenticity
and their passionate reverence of death, the Aghoris
(May, 1981/1999; Yalom, 1980). Authentic living is the
bring to light a completely different interpretation of
ability to live in congruence and in accordance with
death, based on an Eastern philosophy. In the Eastern
the realities of life. For example, if people accept that
way of life, the concept of death is not regarded as
one day they will die, then they have begun to live
something to be feared but to be embraced for what it
authentically. There are forces in life that cannot be
is: the great transformer; the incinerator of limitations.
controlled by people, but rather require a level of respect
Grof (2000) summarized this by describing the attitudes
and acknowledgement about their presence. Death is a
of the Western industrial civilization in comparison to
force that cannot be controlled. Living authentically
the Eastern civilization:
means that people must be able to face their own death
and acknowledge that death will occur with or without Their cosmologies, philosophies, mythologies, as well
their permission. In doing this, people can live fuller, as spiritual and ritual life, contain a clear message
more meaningfully authentic lives. that death is not the absolute and irrevocable end

132 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Suri

 of everything. They provide assurance for the dying
that life or existence continues in some form beyond
that biological demise…. For a Westerner, a visit to
a place like Benares where this attitude is expressed
in its extreme form can be a profoundly shattering
experience. (p. 223-224)
The concept of death needs to be continually
engaged through existential philosophy. Existentialism
attempts to confront and bring forth experiences
(through looking at themes, such as death), which impact
and form people’s way of engaging life. People have been
reinforced by their own views and societal influence to
acknowledge that death occurs, but not to embrace its
reality. To embrace the reality of death means that people
must face the fear of terminal end that accompanies
living. This downplays the significance death has upon
existence. Complementary to this notion of death’s
significance are the specifiable psychological conditions
of which people should be aware. For example, people
endure losing someone they know to death at some point
in their lives. People who attempt to avoid the emotions
and thoughts that accompany the death are susceptible
to experiencing psychological distress (e.g., depression).
To exist as if death is not going to “affect me,” is to
live inauthentically and create psychological disarray.
Living in such an inauthentic way has major traumatic
implications for future survival.
Consider the case of the attack of September 11,
2001 (Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2002). Some
of the people, who were exposed to the events firsthand
developed symptoms of depression, posttraumatic stress
disorder, and various other psychological conditions.
On the other hand, there were people who personally
experienced the attacks and had little to no experiences of
psychological distress. This lack of distress was attributed
to the fact that these certain individuals were aware that
death is natural, unavoidable, and that it may happen
at any moment in life. They had allowed themselves to
experience the loss, immense sorrow, pain, and sadness
that were evoked from the terrorists’ attacks. They were
able to take the experiences and hopefully move forward
with living.
The dark fear of death can plague people
throughout their lives. To live authentically, one has to
traverse the path of ghora (darkness) and emerge into
Aghora (light). Death’s talons disturb the waters of
life for each person in a unique way. Some may not be
Death as Teacher in Aghori Sect
impacted by its reality, yet others might be paralyzed by
the overwhelming anxiety it may arouse.
People live each waking day bombarded with
a myriad of experiences that may or may not provoke
anxious reactions. Both Yalom and Becker (1973/1997)
emphasized how the anxiety about death influences how
people live their daily lives. Yet, when people are closer
to death and have little to distract them from attending
to its nature, some may begin to live even more fully.
Yalom (2008) poignantly highlighted an experience
of how death was slowly stealing a dear friend to the
darkness of dementia, and discovered that “when one
loses everything, there remains the pleasure of sheer
being” (p. 291). People who face death, even in extreme
circumstances, often gain a deep sense of appreciation for
life once faced with the prospect of dying, thus creating
an anxiety that fuels the potential for deeper living (May,
1996/1950; Scull, 1989). Regardless of one’s views on
mortality and the anxiety it provokes in existence, death
still has a profound impact upon how people choose how
to live (or not).
References
Barrett, R. L. (2002). Aghor medicine: Pollution,
power, and healing in Banaras, Northern India .
Dissertation Abstracts International, 63(07). (UMI
No. AAT3058994)
Barrett, W. (1958). Irrational man: A study in existential
philosophy. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday.
Becker, E. (1997). The denial of death. New York, NY:
Free Press. (Original work published in 1973)
Bonanno, G. A., & Kaltman, S. (2001). The varieties
of grief experience. Clinical Psychology Review, 21,
705-734.
Bugental, E. K. (2008). Swimming together in a sea of
loss: A group process for elders. In K. J. Schneider
(Ed.), Existential-integrative psychotherapy: Guide­
posts to the core of practice (pp. 333-341). New York,
NY: Routledge.
Chaturvedi, M., & Tiwari, B. (1989). A practical Hindi-
English dictionary. 17th edition. New Delhi, India:
National Publishing House.
Gupta, R. P. (1993). The politics of heterodoxy and
the Kina Rami ascetics of Banaras.  Dissertation
Abstracts International, 54(08). (UMI No. AAT94
09681)
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 133
Kastenbaum, R. (2000). Death attitudes and aging in towards integrating Western psychology and Eastern
the 21st century. In A. Tomer (Ed.), Death attitudes spirituality and providing a holistic approach toward
and the older adult (pp. 257-280). Philadelphia, PA: healing.
Brunner-Routledge.
Kubler-Ross, E. (1997). On death and dying. New York, Daniel B. Pitchford, PhD, is faculty at Saybrook
NY: Scribner. University’s Graduate College of Psychology and
Lorenzen, D. (1989). New data on the Kaplaikas. In A. Humanistic Studies and Graduate College of Mind-
Hiltebeital (Ed.), Criminal gods and demon devotees: Body Medicine, is the editor-in-chief for the San
Essays on the guardians of popular Hinduism. New Francisco Psychological Association, and the consulting
Delhi, India: Manohar Publishers. board member for the Existential-Humanistic Institute.
May, R. (1996). The meaning of anxiety. New York, NY: His clinical and research interests are in suicide, trauma,
W. W. Norton. (Original work published in 1950) death, culture and mythology, existentialism, and
May, R. (1999). Freedom and destiny. New York, NY: personal transformation.
Peter Smith. (Original work published in 1981)
Metcalfe, P., & Huntington, R. (1991). Celebrations of About the Journal
death: The anthropology of mortuary ritual (2nd ed.).
Cambridge, MA: University Press. The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies is a
Parthasarathy, A. (1995). Vedanta treatise. Malabar Hill, peer-reviewed academic journal in print since 1981. It is
Mumbai, India: Vedanta Life Institute. published by Floraglades Foundation, and serves as the
Pyszczynski, T. A., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2002). official publication of the International Transpersonal
Association. The journal is available online at www.
In the wake of 9/11: The psychology of terror. Washing­
transpersonalstudies.org, and in print through www.
ton, DC: American Psychological Association.
lulu.com (search for IJTS).
Sai Baba, S. (1972). Summer course in spirituality and
Indian culture. Prasanthi Nilayam, India: Sri Sathya
Sai Books and Publications Trust.
Scull, C. (1989). Existential themes in interviews with
Vietnam veterans. Unpublished Dissertation. Menlo
Park, CA: Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Wisdom: Its nature, origins, and
development. Cambridge, MA: University Press.
Svoboda, R. (1986). Aghora: At the left hand of God. Las
Vegas, NV: Brotherhood of Life.
Tomer, A.(1994). Death anxiety in adult life—Theoretical
perspectives. In R. A. Neimeyer (Ed.), Death anxiety
handbook: Research, instrumentation, application (pp.
3-28). Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis.
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York,
NY: Basic Books.
Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming
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283-297.

About the Authors

Rochelle Suri, PhD, MFT, is faculty at the California

Institute of Integral Studies and the Agency Assistant
Director at Progress Foundation in San Francisco. She
is also in private clinical practice, where she is dedicated

134 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Suri

 Book Reviews
Christian Gnosis: From St. Paul to Meister Eckhart
by Wolfgang Smith (Sophia Perennis, 2008). $19.95,
ISBN 978-1-59731-092-5
Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
“Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key
of gnosis: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that
were entering in ye hindered.” – Luke 11:52
A distinctive mark of the contemporary era,
it can be said, is the utter absence of doctrinal gnosis,
which has its contingent expressions in all of the world’s
spiritual traditions, yet is distinctively articulated, in
the Christian tradition. This recent publication by Dr.
Wolfgang Smith has been hailed as the magnum opus
of his life’s work—he remains true to the perennial
philosophy as he does not seek to create a “new” theory,
but adheres rigorously to the traditional authoritative
sources on the subject at hand. Former professor of MIT
and UCLA, Dr. Smith brings a unique perspective as an
accomplished scientist and mathematician as well as a
committed Christian.
Christian Gnosis contains seven chapters with
compelling themes of uncommon wisdom not readily
found in other present-day works: I. Gnosis and Nascent
Christianity, II. Cosmology in the Face of Gnosis, III.
Transcending the Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Kabbalisitic
Exegesis, IV. The Wisdom of Christian Kabbalah,
V. The Gnosis of Jacob Boehme, VI. Meister Eckhart
on Creation, VII. Eckhart’s Trinitarian Nondualism,
including a Postscript by the author.
This book covers the broad spectrum of doctrinal
gnosis pertaining to the Christian tradition—“from
Saint Paul to Meister Eckhart”—including its analogous
currents found in the Kabbalah exemplifying the esoteric
tradition of Judaism. The term gnosis has been abused and
deserves caution; especially with New Age proponents
taking siege of it in order to substantiate their subjective
notions. In return the misuse of the term has caused many
to confuse gnosis as a deviation of orthodox religion,
not to be confused with fundamentalism, but rather
understood as “right thinking”. The author categorically
clears the air on the topic when responding to a point
made by Clement of Alexandria: “Authentic gnosis, then,
Book Reviews
is something divine, something that belongs, not to a
man, but to God himself.”
Readers can also note that nondualism is an
essential theme presented throughout the entire work
and can be found in every authentic sapiential tradition.
Although nondualism is often associated with the esoteric
or “inner” dimensions of religion, it is correspondingly
inseparable from exoterism or its “outer” dimensions: “in
fact, the first finds its consummation in the second.” In
Dr. Smith’s illustration of the distinct facets of gnosis
he does so by allowing each tradition to remain integral
and distinctively its own in divinis and not a Vedāntic
rendition of these traditions. That many seekers in the
contemporary era have found their way to the spiritual
path via the Eastern doctrines is striking, yet how can
the West come to recognize the analogous wisdom of its
own traditions?
The author points out that Meister Eckhart,
who Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (1887-1947) key
perennialist author regarded as “the greatest European
ever born”, is not another great Master among other
Masters, but a paragon of the Christian religion, a
jivanmukta. “One must bear in mind that Eckhart stands
at the end of ‘golden age’: on the brink of the very ‘fall’
which gave rise, in rapid succession, the Renaissance,
the Enlightenment, and the modern world.” When
Eckhart affirms the negatio negationis—“a negation of a
negation”—paradoxical as it may appear to the discursive
mind—it is through the negatio negationis that the
supreme affirmation of the Divine or Absolute becomes
intelligible: “The One is a negation of negation.” The
negatio negationis is not comparable with the popular
notions of “God beyond God” theology nor does this
signify that Eckhart was not orthodox in his exposition
of the Christian tradition.
This recent publication Christian Gnosis: From
St. Paul to Meister Eckhart provides a definitive work on
the subject of gnosis in the Christian West, adding an
implicit dimension to integral interfaith dialogue that is
fundamental in a rapid and ever increasing globalizing
era. This work will provide for deeper reflection on the
Christian tradition and at the same time contextualizes
this presentation within what has been termed the
“transcendent unity of religions”. Dr. Smith concludes
his opus with the following disclosure dedicating its
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 135
merits to the much needed restoration of the Christian
tradition: “there is need today for teachings of Eckhart,
the Master who—better perhaps than any other—can
help to restore ‘the key of gnosis’ to its rightful place
within the Church.”
Hinduism and Its Spiritual Masters, by William
Stoddart (Fons Vitae, 2006). 136 pp., $15.95,
Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Lead me from the unreal to the Real;
Lead me from darkness to Light;
Lead me from death to Immortality.
- Brihadâranyaka Upanishad, I, 3, 27.
It is regrettable that, amidst the mammoth
surplus of competing titles, such a vital work as this—
a veritable “hidden treasure”—has gone virtually
unnoticed. It is a characteristic of the contemporary
milieu that it repeatedly favors quantity at the expense of
quality. Yet, this phenomenon becomes graspable when
treated and viewed in relationship to a much larger
symptom that is interconnected with the systematic
obscuration of spirituality or “intellectual regress” of
the historical cycle known in the Hindu tradition as
the Kali-Yuga or “Dark Age”—underscoring the very
quintessence of the “signs of the times”.
In terms of etymology, religion is that which binds,
specifically, that which binds man to God…. In
the first place, religion is a doctrine of unity…. In
the second place, religion is a method of union….
Whatever they may be called, these two components
are always present…. Doctrine, or theory, concerns
the mind; method, or practice, concerns the will.
Religion, to be itself, must always engage both mind
and will.
The most important single point about religion
is that it is not man-made. Religion is not invented
by man, but revealed by God. Divine revelation is
a sine quâ non; without it, there is no religion, only
man-made ideology, in which no sacramental or
salvational element is present.
This present work by Dr. William Stoddart
is imbued by what has become known as his signature
method as—“a master of synthesis”—succeeding in
illuminating the rudiments of whatever topic he is drawing
136 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
upon, always utilizing as few words as possible, to present
the essential keys needed to adequately comprehend the
subject at hand. This signature method or modus operandi
is fittingly contextualized alongside the numerous
years studying the philosophia perennis or the perennial
philosophy that illuminates the universal metaphysics at
the heart of each revealed and orthodox (doctrinal purity
or right understanding) spiritual tradition—“Sages call
the One Reality by many names.” (Rig Veda, I, 164, 46.)
It is thus relevant to illustrate that amid the oldest living
esotericism, the Hindu tradition and the youngest living
esotericism within Islam known as Sufism there is an
identical underlying metaphysic: “The science of Sufism
and the science of Vedânta are one.” declared Dârâ
Shukûh, the son of the Mughal emperor Shâh Jahân.
It is improbable and perhaps rightfully so that
a book cannot de facto capture the breadth and depth of
an entire tradition, yet even while acknowledging the
apophatic quality of the ineffable nature of the Absolute,
this book regardless, does just that byway of elucidating
what is indispensable to the Hindu tradition or sanâtana
dharma. This book is a new and revised edition of the
formerly titled book: Outline of Hinduism (Oakton, VA:
The Foundation for Traditional Studies, 1993) that has
been out of print for sometime. In this work readers will
be guided through the multifaceted anthropology of the
Hindu dharma articulating its mythology, metaphysics,
cosmology and spirituality. The author expounds upon
matters that will challenge the very edifice of the modern
and postmodern mind in order to clarify the lost sense
of the transpersonal that was traditionally a norm:
The Place of Hinduism Amongst the Religions of the
World, Hindu Pantheon, The Incarnations (Avatâras) of
Vishnu, Masculine (Purusha) and Feminine (Prakriti)
Principles, The Five Levels of Reality, The Four Castes
(varna), The Three Spiritual Ways (mârgas), Yoga and Its
Branches, The Hindu Scriptures, The Six Points of View
(darshanas), The Four Ages (yugas), The Four Stages
in Life (âshramas), Transmigration or Reincarnation,
Classical Sages and Saints, Modern Sages and Saints and
Holy Cities, Holy Rivers, Pilgrimage Points.
Contrary to the Zeitgeist the import of the caste
system (varna dharma) is not an apparatus to impose
a collective tyranny or exploitation for the indulgence
of the brahmins or elite nor is it an outdated mode of
government or temporal power. With this said, it needs
to be remembered that traditionally the temporal power
was always subject to the spiritual authority.
Book Reviews
 The Universal Man or Purusha embodies the
four main castes (varna) as articulated in Purusha-Sûkta,
Rig-Veda, X, 90.:
The Brahmin was his mouth;
(Brâhmana)
From his arms was made the Ruler;
(Râjanya)
his thighs were the Industrious;
(Vaishya)
from his feet was born the Servant.
(Shûdra)
The caste system (varna dharma) rather contains
the integral principles which provide social harmony par
excellence not only extrinsic but intrinsic that is inseparable
from the spiritual domain itself for it nourishes the
tripartite human microcosm of Spirit, soul and body. The
impact of colonialism in India cannot be downplayed,
especially since at present time there is more “material
prosperity” and this is often posed as a justification for
the abuses undergone, yet what has been sacrificed at
this gain is immeasurable. Likewise colonialism had a
devastating effect upon this ancient civilization and the
understanding of its sacred traditions:
[R]eligion originates in revelation, is handed
down by tradition, and is preserved by orthodoxy.
In Hinduism, the principal means whereby the
revelation (both in it timeless essence and in its many
outward branches) is handed down and preserved is
intimately linked with the social institution known
as the case system. It is ironic that it is this, more
than almost anything else, that is misunderstood
and abhorred in the modern [and postmodern]
West; nothing is more vigorously anathematized
by sociologists and journalists alike. Yet besides its
function of preservation and transmission, the case
system is the very principle of Hindu social harmony.
Caste and traditional Hindu society are virtually one
and the same thing.
Albeit the previous statements have been put
forward in defense of the caste system (varna dharma),
it would be unrealistic not to underscore the present-
day abuses of the caste system (varna dharma) that take
place within the Indian culture itself that are nonetheless
examples of the prevailing ignorance (avidyā) in light of
the sanâtana dharma (the “Perennial Law” or “Primordial
Norm”). Copious cases have made the international
Book Reviews
headlines of the mass media stressing the oppressive
apparatus of the caste system (varna dharma) that has
been enmeshed with the role of women in Indian culture
which are thought to be inherently discriminated against,
treated unfairly or degraded. Hitherto, the different
human vocations existed because there are fundamental
distinctions among human individuals themselves (i.e.
their makeup of the three gunas “cosmic tendencies”
or “qualities” of sattva, rajas and tamas that determine
individual attitude and propensity). These different
vocations, for example, pertaining to the role of women
or sub-divisions of caste (jātis) are not meant to be
interpreted as arbitrary inequity yet they have come to
be identified as such due to the militant secularism of the
times. There are also allegations that Hindu scriptures
(śāstras) look down upon women because they cannot
perform their spiritual rites or sacrifices without their
husbands’ presence. Yet the same is conferred to men,
who also cannot perform their spiritual rites without their
wives being present. Regarding marriage (saha-dharma-
cārinī-samprayoga) in the Hindu tradition, it needs to
be remembered that it is perceived as a spiritual union
for the practice of dharma and all the extravagances
that have become a norm in the present era do not hold
legitimacy according to the Hindu scriptures (śāstras).
This is also the case with the physical brutality causing
many fatalities regarding the custom of dowry. However
this is not permitted by the spiritual authorities that have
been custodians of this sacred transmission, tracing its
origins to time immemorial, who remind us that these are
modern perversions that radically attack and are contrary
to this way of life that implicitly honors human diversity,
freedom of difference and subjective reality in divinis. In
order to emphasize the auspicious role of women in the
Hindu tradition, consider the following words from the
Mânava-Dharma-Shâstra, II, 145.: “One mother is more
venerable than a thousand fathers.” And one cannot fail to
notice the integral femininity that is disclosed through
the significance of Mahâshakti or the Divine Essence
and correspondingly Shakti who presides over universal
manifestation appearing under Her different forms such
as Lakshmî, Durgâ, Kali, etc.1
In contradistinction to the caste system (varna
dharma) there is a systematic disintegration under the
guise of scientism, secularism, democracy, and progress.
The perennial wisdom of the ages or yugas is contained
in the following passage from the Vishnu Purâna dating
back to the 3rd century A.D. that outlines verbatim
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 137
the desacralized epoch of today, with an impressive Hinduism and Its Spiritual Masters offers readers an
precision: invaluable tool in order to wade through the vast and
complex dimensions of the Hindu dharma. As the doyen
Riches and piety will diminish daily, until the world
authority on the World Religions, Professor Huston
will be completely corrupted. In those days it will be
Smith, said in his endorsement of this book: “In this
wealth that confers distinction, passion will be the
book we find an astonishing amount of information
sole reason for union between the sexes, lies will be
compressed into an incredibly small compass. Reading it
the only method for success in business, and women
made me regretful that I retired for a second time—this
will be merely the objects of sensual gratification. The
time from the University of California—at the close of
earth will be valued only for its mineral treasures,
1992. This volume would have made a nice supplement
dishonesty will be the universal means of subsistence,
to the readings I usually assign.” We concord completely
a simple ablution will be regarded as sufficient
with the above observations regarding this book which
purification….
will provide pointers to what is both the transcendent
The observance of castes, laws, and institutions
and immanent in the unanimous sapiential tradition—
will no longer be in force in the Dark Age, and
“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17: 21)—“I
the ceremonies prescribed by the Vedas will be
am seated in the hearts of all.” (Bhagavad-Gîtâ, XV, 15.)
neglected. Women will obey only their whims and
will be infatuated with pleasure…. Men of all kinds Notes

will presumptuously regard themselves as the equals
1. For a traditional and orthodox point of view (darshana)
of brahmins…. The vaishyas will abandon agriculture
of the caste system (varna dharma) and Hindu tradition
and commerce and will earn their living by servitude
altogether see the following work by a providential
or by the exercise of mechanical professions…. The
representative of the sanâtana dharma, Jagadguru
path of the Vedas having been abandoned, and man
His Holiness Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi
having been led astray from orthodoxy, iniquity will
Swamigal, Sankaracharya of Kanchi, Introduction to
prevail and the length of human life will diminish
Hindu Dharma: Illustrated, ed. Michael Oren Fitzgerald
in consequence…. Then men will cease worshiping
(Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2008); See also
Vishnu, the Lord of sacrifice, Creator and Lord of all
Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (Calcuta: Advaita
things, and they will say: “Of what authority are the
Ashrama, 1989); Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, “Book
Vedas? Who are the Gods and the brahmins? What
Review: Introduction to Hindu Dharma”, Sophia: The
use is purification with water?” The dominant caste
Journal of Traditional Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer
will be that of shûdras…. Man, deprived of reason
2009), pp. 151-158; Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, “Book
and subject to every infirmity of body and mind,
Review: Introduction to Hindu Dharma”, Studies in
will daily commit sins: everything which is impure,
Comparative Religion, (2009 - Web Edition) available
vicious, and calculated to afflict the human race will
online at: http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.
make its appearance in the Dark Age.
com/Public/articles/review_of-Introduction_to_
Yet, not all is lost during the epochs of forgetfulness for Hindu_Dharma_Illustrated.aspx
the mercy and dispensations of the Absolute are never
absent; restorers of the Primordial Tradition and the Frithjof Schuon and the perennial philosophy, by
One-and-Only Truth are sent in every age as described Harry Oldmeadow. Forward by William Stoddart.
in the Bhagavad-Gâtâ, IV, 7-8: (World Wisdom, 2010). 376 pp. Softbound, $22.95.
ISBN 9781935493099.
Whenever the Law is forgotten,
Whenever anarchy prevails, Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
I incarnate Myself.
“It has been said more than once that total Truth is
In every age I come back; inscribed in an eternal script in the very substance of our
to deliver the righteous, spirit; what the different Revelations do is to ‘crystallize’
to destroy the wicked, and ‘actualize’, in differing degrees according to the case,
to establish the Law. a nucleus of certitudes.” – Frithjof Schuon

138 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Book Reviews

 The axial influence of the perennial philosophy
or philosophia perennis upon the foundations of
transpersonal psychology and its central tenants is
extensively recognized by those in the field (Bendeck
Sotillos, 2009) and yet fewer individuals are familiar with
the ensuing role that Frithjof Schuon (1953, 1968, 1981,
1997, 1998, 2005, 2009) has played both directly and
indirectly within what has been termed the “forth force”
in modern psychology (Adams, 2006; Anthony, Ecker
& Wilber, 1987; Ferrer, 2002, 2002; Ferrer & Sherman,
2008; Gibbs, 2005; Grof, 1998; Murphy, 1992; Paulson,
2008; Rothberg, 1986; Rothberg & Kelly, 1998; Walsh,
1999a, 1999b, 2007; Walsh & Shapiro, 1983; Walsh &
Vaughan, 1993; Wilber, Engler & Brown, 1986; Wilber,
1975, 1977, 1980, 1981a, 1981b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a,
1983b, 1984a, 1984b, 1991, 1998, 1999a, 1999b,
1999c, 2000a, 2000b, 2001; Wittine, 1989; Woodhouse,
1996).
Albeit Ken Wilber has since distanced himself
from the philosophia perennis, including transpersonal
psychology itself,1 he interestingly began his work in the
field quite the contrary. Wilber quoted from Frithjof
Schuon to inaugurate what has been acclaimed as a
ground-breaking work within the field of transpersonal
psychology: “There is no science of the soul without a
metaphysical basis to it and without spiritual remedies
at its disposal” (Wilber, 1977, p. 11). Wilber then
continued by way of disclosure, “One might say that the
entire aim of this volume [The Spectrum of Consciousness]
is simply to support and document this statement of
Frithjof Schuon, a statement that the siddhas, sages and
masters of everywhere and everywhen have eloquently
embodied” (Wilber, 1977, p. 11).2 In addition one could
also propose Schuon’s role in the “third force” of modern
psychology per the following allusion: “I am in agreement
with the thrust of his [Wilber’s (1977)] thesis…that
Western psychologies are but parts of a much greater
spectrum of consciousness” (Schneider, 1987, p. 197).
Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) is the pre-eminent
exponent of the traditionalist or perennialist school of
comparative religion along with other significant members
such as René Guénon (1886-1951), Ananda Kentish
Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), Titus Burckhardt (1908-
1984) including a more contemporary exponent Seyyed
Hossein Nasr (b. 1933)3—a good number of whom have
also been widely referenced throughout publications on
transpersonal psychology.
Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy,
Book Reviews
by Harry Oldmeadow, is intended to be a companion
volume and complement to a biography and hitherto
unpublished writings of Frithjof Schuon (Fitzgerald,
2010). While this work, as Oldmeadow confirmed, is
an introductory guide to Schuon’s work, it nonetheless
demonstrates itself to be a luminous contribution to not
only the Schuonian opus, but the perennialist canon in
toto.
The book is divided into five parts capturing the
breadth and depth of this word-renowned philosopher: I
Frithjof Schuon and Perennialism; II Timeless Truths and
Immutable Principles; III Religious Forms and Sacred
Symbols; IV Signs of the Times and V The Spiritual Life.
Included in this elucidation is an overview of integral
metaphysics—the “transcendent unity of religions”—a
presentation of spirituality East and West including
the spiritual heritage of the American Indians, Schuon’s
critique of modernism, his paintings and poetry and
insights into prayer and virtue on the spiritual path which
are all contextualized within the philosophia perennis in
its plenary expression.
While no single study can present the fullness
of Schuon’s work, this book will unquestionably provide
those yearning for the essential keys abiding at the heart of
the world’s spiritual traditions and correspondingly their
integral spiritual psychologies in divinis. It hardly needs to
be restated the decisive role that the perennial philosophy
has upon the roots of transpersonal psychology, for those
willing to recall what might be called the essential truths,
will clearly benefit from this work.
References
Adams, W. W. (2006). William Blake’s integral
sychology: Reading Blake and Ken Wilber together.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 38(1), 55-72.
Anthony, D., Ecker, B. & Wilber, K. (Eds.). (1987).
Spiritual choices: The problem of recognizing authentic
paths to inner transformation. New York, NY: Paragon
House Publishers.
Bendeck Sotillos, S. (2009). Book Review: The underlying
religion: An introduction to the perennial philosophy.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 41(1), 108-112.
Bendeck Sotillos, S. (2010). Book Review: The return
of the perennial philosophy: The supreme vision
of western esotericism. Sacred Web: A Journal of
Tradition and Modernity, 25, 175-184.
Ferrer, J. N. (2000). The perennial philosophy revisited.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 32(1), 7-30.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 139
Ferrer, J. N. (2002). Revisioning transpersonal theory: A
participatory vision of human spirituality. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Ferrer, J. N. & Sherman, J. H. (Eds.). (2008). The
participatory turn: Spirituality, mysticism, religious
studies. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press.
Fitzgerald, M. O. (2010). Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of
the perennial philosophy. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom.
Gibbs, S. (2005). Islam and Islamic extremism: An
existential analysis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
45(2), 156-203.
Grof, S. (1998). The cosmic game: Explorations of the
frontiers of human consciousness. Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press.
Murphy, M. (1992). The future of the body: Explorations
into the further evolution of human nature. Los
Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
Oldmeadow, H. (2010). Frithjof Schuon and the perennial
philosophy. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
Paulson, D. (2008). Wilber’s integral philosophy: A
summary and critique. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, 48(3), 364-388.
Reynolds, B. (2004). Embracing reality: The integral
vision of Ken Wilber: A historical survey and chapter-
by-chapter guide to Wilber’s major works. New York:
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Rothberg, D. (1986). Philosophical foundations of
transpersonal psychology: An introduction to some
basic issues. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,
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Rothberg, D. & Kelly, S. (Eds.). (1998). Ken Wilber in
dialogue: Conversations with leading transpersonal
thinkers. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
Schneider, K.J. (1987). The deified self: A “centaur”
response to Wilber and the transpersonal movement.
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 27(2), 196-216.
Schuon, F. (2005). The essential Frithjof Schuon, ed.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom.
Schuon, F. (1997). The eye of the heart: Metaphysics,
cosmology, spiritual life. Bloomington, IN: World
Wisdom Books.
Schuon, F. (1981). Esoterism as principle and as way, trans.
William Stoddart. London: Perennial Books.
Schuon, F. (1968). In the tracks of Buddhism, trans. Marco
Pallis. London: George Allen & Unwin.
140 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Schuon, F. (2009). Logic and transcendence: A new
translation with selected letters, trans. Mark Perry,
Jean-Pierre Lafouge and James S. Cutsinger.
Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
Schuon, F. (1953). The transcendent unity of religions,
trans. Peter N. Townsend. London: Faber & Faber.
Schuon, F. (1998). Understanding Islam, trans. D.M.
Matheson. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom.
Visser, F. (2003). Ken Wilber: Though as passion. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Walsh, R. N. (1999a). Asian contemplative disciplines:
Common practices, clinical applications, and
research findings. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,
31(2), 83-107.
Walsh, R. N. (1999b). Essential spirituality: The 7 central
practices to awaken heart and mind. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
Walsh, R. N. (2007). The world of shamanism: New views
of an ancient tradition. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn
Worldwide.
Walsh, R. N., & Shapiro, D. H. (Eds.). (1983). Beyond
health and normality: Explorations of exceptional
psychological well-being. New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold.
Walsh, R. N., & Vaughan, F. E. (Eds.). (1993). Paths
beyond ego: The transpersonal vision. New York:
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Wilber, K. (1983a). A sociable god: Toward a new
understanding of religion. New York, NY: New
Press/McGraw-Hill.
Wilber, K. (2001). A theory of everything: An integral
vision for business, politics, science, and spirituality.
Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1999a). Introduction. The collected works of
Ken Wilber: Vol. 2. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1999b). Introduction. The collected works of
Ken Wilber: Vol. 4. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1999c). Introduction. The collected works of
Ken Wilber: Vol. 8. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1980). The atman project: A transpersonal view
of human development. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
Wilber, K. (1984a). The developmental spectrum
and psychopathology: Part I, stages and types of
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75-118.
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paradigm. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/
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Book Reviews
Wilber, K. (1991). Grace and grit: Spirituality and healing
in the life and death of Traya Killam Wilber. Boston,
MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1982a). The holographic paradigm and other
paradoxes: Exploring the leading edge of science. Boston,
MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (2007). Integral spirituality: A startling new
role for religion in the modern and postmodern world.
Boston, MA: Integral Books.
Wilber, K. (2000a). Integral psychology: Consciousness,
spirit, psychology, therapy. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1998). The marriage of sense and soul: Integration
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Wilber, K. (1992). The neo-perennial philosophy. The
Quest, 5(3), 16-21.Wilber, K. (1981a). No boundary:
Eastern and western approaches to personal growth.
Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1982b). Odyssey: A personal inquiry into
humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Journal of
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Wilber, K. (1975). Psychologia perennis: The spectrum
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7(2), 105-132.
Wilber, K. (1984b). Quantum questions: Mystical writings of
the world’s great physicists. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber R, K. (2000b). Sex, ecology, spirituality: The spirit
of evolution. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Wilber, K. (1977). The spectrum of consciousness. Wheaton,
IL: Quest Books.
Wilber, K. (1981b). Up from Eden: A transpersonal view
of human evolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/
Doubleday.
Wilber, K., Engler, J. & Brown, D. P. (Eds.). (1986).
Transformations of consciousness: Conventional and
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MA: Shambhala.
Wittine, B., (1989). Basic postulates for a transpersonal
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Notes
1 Shambhala: Do you consider yourself part of the
transpersonal movement today? KW: No, I don’t.
Shambhala: Tell us about that. KW: Well, the basic
Book Reviews
difficulty is that transpersonal psychology, to its
great credit, was the first major school of present-
day psychology to take spirituality seriously. Yet
because there is a great deal of disagreement as to
what actually constitutes spirituality itself, there
is a great deal of disagreement as what constitutes
transpersonal psychology. These are not minor
inner tensions as one might find in, say, the various
schools of psychoanalysis or Jungian psychology.
They are instead major internal divisions and barbed
disagreements as to the nature, scope, and role of
transpersonal psychology itself. This makes the
field more rife with political schisms and warring
ideologies. This is why, I believe, that in three decades,
and aside from one or two specific theorists, the
actual school of transpersonal psychology has had
no major impact outside of the Bay Area, and it is
today, many people agree, in an irreversible, terminal
decline. What’s left of the four forces (behavioristic,
psychoanalytic, humanistic, transpersonal) will
survive, if they survive at all, only by being taken up
and into a fully integral approach [see “A Summary
of My Psychological Model,” section “The Death of
Psychology and the Birth of the Integral,” posted
on this site.] Ken Wilber, “Part I: The Demise of
Transpersonal Psychology” in “On Critics, Integral
Institute, My Recent Writing, and Other Matters
of Little Consequence: A Shambhala Interview
with Ken Wilber”, available online at: http://wilber.
shambhala.com/html/interviews/interview1220.
cfm/; In response to the above declaration made by
Wilber, one might add the following: “To the extent
that ‘integral psychology’ requires the adoption
of a specifically Wilberian paradigm, it essentially
precludes alternative perspectives and, consequently,
open, critical debate and it will, therefore, alienate
many people. Integral psychology, then, is in
danger of becoming a dogma and most independent
thinkers in the field will, I predict, refuse to have
anything much to do with it.” [Michael Daniels,
“Whither Transpersonal Psychology?” in Shadow,
Self, Spirit: Essays in Transpersonal Psychology (Exeter,
UK: Imprint Academic, 2005), p. 264]
2 Wilber and his colleagues acknowledge The
Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) as “Romantic” or
“Wilber/Phase-1” that emphasizes the “integration
of [modern] Western psychology with Eastern
mysticism, focusing primarily on individual interior
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 141
 consciousness (Upper-Left quadrant), yet without a
complete pre/trans developmental understanding.”
(Reynolds, 2004, p. 76) The latest development
of Wilber’s theoretical succession is “Integral
Post-Metaphysics” or “Wilber/Phase-5” which
has expanded his quadrant theory or known as
AQAL—“all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states,
all types”—expressed in such terms as: “the Integral
Approach involves the cultivation of body, mind,
and spirit in self, culture, and nature” (Wilber,
2007, p. 26). Readers can thus connect the dots for
themselves to see that although Wilber first situated
all of his work within the philosophia perennis
during “Wilber/Phase-1” he has along his evolving
theoretical trajectory attempted to appropriate the
perennial philosophy all together under the guise
of “The Neo-Perennial Philosophy” (Wilber, 1992).
In à la “Wilber/Phase-3” he paradoxically appears
to be abandoning the perennial philosophy entirely
via his “Integral Post-Metaphysics”, but in turn he
resurrects his own parody of the “transcendent unity
of religions” void of its “metaphysical baggage”. That
is not only misleading but fundamentally erroneous
on the level of the spiritual principles which are not
contingent on subjective speculation or theory nor
should they need to prove themselves to the modern
or postmodern mindset. As Wilber (2007) points
out: “modernity and postmodernity might be wrong
in this instance” (p. 233) and we could not agree
more. Although Wilber shared much ground with
the traditionalist or perennialist authors we cannot
consider him to have ever belonged to this school as
some have attempted to suggest (Rothberg & Kelly,
1998; Visser, 2003; Woodhouse, 1996). Due to the
many seductions of modern thought that Wilber
has not been able to renounce, the most evident
being evolutionism not to mention syncretism, he
is not qualified to be considered a traditionalist
or perennialist de facto. We cannot be too vigilant
in making this clear enough as this very trend of
mixing truth with error is a sign of the times which
Wilber himself is a consummate example.
3 Others associated or strongly influenced by the
traditionalist or perennialist school are Martin
Lings (1909-2005), Marco Pallis (1895-1989),
Whitall N. Perry (1920-2005), Lord Northbourne
(1896-1982), Joseph Epes Brown (1920-2000), Leo
Schaya (1916-1985), Victor Danner (1926-1990),
142 International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
William Stoddart (b. 1925), Gai Eaton (1921-2010),
E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977), Huston Smith (b.
1919), William Chittick (b. 1943), Kathleen Raine
(1908-2003), Philip Sherrard (1922-1995), Keith
Critchlow (b. 1933), Mircea Eliade (1907-1986),
Henry Corbin (1903-1978), Wendell Berry (b.
1934), Charles Upton (b. 1948), M. Ali Lakhani
(b. 1955), Reza Shah-Kazemi, Mateus Soares de
Azevedo (b. 1959), Algis Uždavinys (1962-2010),
Rama P. Coomaraswamy (1929-2006), Robert
Bolton (b. 1941), Marty Glass (b. 1938), Wolfgang
Smith (b. 1930), among others.
About the Author
Harry Oldmeadow is Coordinator of Religious Studies in
the Department of Arts, La Trobe University, Bendigo,
Australia. He studied history, politics, and literature at
the Australian National University, obtaining a First Class
Honors degree in history. In 1971 a Commonwealth
Overseas Research Scholarship led to further studies
at Oxford University. In 1980 Oldmeadow completed
a Masters dissertation on the “perennialist” or
“traditionalist” school of comparative religious thought.
This study was awarded the University of Sydney Medal
for excellence in research and was later published under
the title, Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the
Perennial Philosophy (2000).
His latest works include Journeys East: 20th
Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious
Traditions (2004), The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on
the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity (2005), Light from
the East: Eastern Wisdom for the Modern West (2007),
A Christian Pilgrim in India: The Spiritual Journey of
Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) (2008), all published
by World Wisdom, and Mediations: Essays on Religious
Pluralism and the Perennial Philosophy (2008). He has
published extensively in such journals as Sophia, Sacred
Web, Vincit Omnia Veritas, Eye of the Heart, and Studies
in Comparative Religion. He currently resides with his
wife on a small property outside Bendigo.
About the Reviewer
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos has received graduate degrees in
Education and in Psychology. He has traveled throughout
the world to visit sacred sites, and had contact with noted
spiritual authorities. He currently works as a mental
health clinician in Northern California.
Book Reviews