Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision (New Consciousness Reader) - Softcover

Walsh, Roger; Vaughan, Frances

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874776783 ISBN 13: 9780874776782

Publisher: TarcherPerigee, 1993

Synopsis

This book is a clarion call for an expanded vision of human possibilities. In it, many of the best thinkers of our day ask us to renew the perennial search for self-knowledge and to discover the deeper meaning of our lives.

For this, they offer the transpersonal perspective -- which extends beyond consciousness in its myriad forms, including altered states, yoga, dreams, and contemplation. This marriage of psychology and science with the spiritual traditions has borne ripe fruit: the transpersonal vision, which offers a uniquely generous and encompassing view of human nature.

The fifty essays that make up Paths Beyond Ego apply transpersonal thinking to individual growth, psychotherapy, meditation, dreams, psychedelics, science, ethics, philosophy, ecology, and service. The result is an integrated and comprehensive overview of the many dimensions of human experience.

In clear, accessible writing, the contributors suggest that our potential for enhancing human abilities is much greater than previously suspected and that our tools for this grand undertaking are widely available today. The transpersonal vision offers great hope for the future -- and links us to the timeless wisdom of the ages.

About this title

About the Author

Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.is professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology at the University of California at Irvine. He has published over a hundred articles and twelve books on science, philosophy, religion, and ecological issues, and his work has received over a dozen national and international awards.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword

John E. Mack, M.D.

We are witnessing a battle for the human soul between two opposing ontologies. In one view, the physical or material world is the ultimate, if not the only, reality, and the behaviors and experiences of living organisms, including ourselves, can be understood within the framework of potentially identifiable mechanisms. In this worldview consciousness is a function of the human brain, and its farthest reaches and greatest depths are, in theory, fathomable through the researches of neuroscience and psychodynamic formulations. In this view, life, in James Carse's words, is a finite game.

In the transpersonal view, the physical world and all its laws represent only one of an indeterminable number of possible realities whose qualities we can only begin to apprehend through the evolution of our consciousness. In this view, consciousness pervades all realities and is the primary source or creative principle of existence, including the energy-matter of the physical world. Until recently, Western philosophy and science, including psychology, have been dominated by the first view. The transpersonal vision is opening our minds, hearts, and spirits to the second. In this view, life is an infinite game.

Each worldview, the materialist and the transpersonal, has its accompanying epistemology (way of acquiring knowledge), and each has its consequences for human well-being and the fate of the earth. In the materialist universe we know the world at a distance, through our senses and the machines and instruments through which we can extend their reach, and by reasoned analysis of the observations that our empirical enterprises yield. We take pride in the objectivity that this way of knowing reflects, and we are suspicious of subjectivity and emotion, which are thought to distort the truth. In this framework, we rely on ordinary consciousness for information about ourselves and the surrounding environment and regard nonordinary states principally as exotic, pathological, or interesting for recreational purposes.

In the transpersonal universe or universes, we seek to know our worlds close up, relying on feeling and contemplation, as well as observation and reason, to gain information about a range of possible realities. In this universe we take subjectivity for granted and depend on direct experience, intuition, and imagination for discoveries about the inner and outer worlds. A transpersonal epistemology appreciates the necessity of ordinary states of consciousness for mapping the terrain of the physical universe, but nonordinary states are seen as powerful means of extending our knowledge beyond the four dimensions of the Newtonian/Einsteinian universe.

The consequences of the materialist worldview are all too familiar. By restricting the scope of reality and the domain of personal fulfillment to the physical world, while excluding from consciousness the power of spiritual realms, human beings are ravishing the earth and massacring one another with instruments of ever greater technological sophistication in the quest for power, dominance, and material satisfaction. The outcome of the continued enactment of this view will be the breakdown of the earth's living systems and the termination of human life as we know it. Psychology, in this paradigm, has limited its healing potential by following a therapeutic model in which one person treats the illness or problems of another, separate, individual, whose relevant world is confined to a few principle relationships.

The transpersonal vision offers the possibility of a different future for humankind and other living creatures. Through a deeper exploration of ourselves and the worlds in which we participate, transpersonal psychology enables human beings to discover their inseparability from all life and their appropriate place in the great chain of being. Central to this unfolding awareness is the rediscovery of the power of ancient methods of achieving altered states of consciousness, such as meditation, yoga, shamanic journeys, and the judicious use of psychedelic plants. New methods of self-exploration, such as the Grof holotropic breathwork method and modified forms of hypnosis, enable many people to experience realms of the unconscious and the mythic and spiritual universes from which we have cut ourselves off. Transpersonal psychology certainly has therapeutic applications. But its greater focus is upon healing, transformation, personal growth, and spiritual opening.

The poet Rilke once wrote that the senses by which we could grasp the spirit world have atrophied. The transpersonal vision, as set forth by its pioneers in this book, shows the way that these senses might be reawakened and opened to domains of being of which we have perhaps never before been conscious. If and when this occurs, we may again discover the sacred in ourselves and nature. It will then become unthinkable to foul the earth-nest of creation that has been mysteriously lent to each of us for such a brief time. For as we explore the multiple dimensions of universes of unlimited possibility, we may at the same time learn to participate in a harmonious relationship with our fellow human beings and other living species through a consciousness that is forever evolving.
Preface

When in the late 1970s we began preparing Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology, our goal was to provide the first comprehensive overview of the exciting new field of transpersonal psychology. One of our challenges was to find enough review articles. Our challenge in editing a new overview for the nineties and the twenty-first century has been quite different: both easier and more difficult. It has been easier in the sense that the transpersonal field has expanded dramatically and good papers are abundant; it has been harder in that selecting among them is more challenging.

It rapidly became clear that transpersonal exploration has expanded far beyond its foundation discipline of psychology to encompass fields such as transpersonal psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and ecology, thereby creating a multidisciplinary, transpersonal movement. It also became clear that in order to reflect this dramatic growth, more than a new edition of Beyond Ego was required; what was called for was a new book. The result is this book: Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision.

In preparing Paths Beyond Ego we had several aims. First, we wanted to provide an easily readable introduction. Transpersonal studies are of potential interest to an exceptionally wide range of people, from medical and mental health practitioners, researchers, and clinicians to social scientists, philosophers, theologians, and spiritual practitioners. We therefore wanted to provide a clear introduction to the field that required a minimum of specialized knowledge and would be accessible to readers from diverse backgrounds.

Within the available space we sought to provide as comprehensive an overview as possible. Therefore, we tried to include outstanding reviews of all the major transpersonal areas. In order to include as many areas and articles as possible, articles have been edited and condensed. Readers who want more detailed discussions of particular topics can consult the original articles as well as the recommended reading list.

We certainly hoped to convey a sense of the excitement of cutting-edge work in this field. We therefore sought articles that build on the foundation of earlier work and also point to fascinating emerging possibilities.

In addition to an introduction and overview, we also wanted to provide an integration of the field. We therefore chose articles of broad integrative scope and attempted to write introductions that point to connections and common themes wherever possible. Such an attempt seems particularly important for a field that stands at the crossroads of an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines and points to the interconnection and interdependence of all things.
Introduction

We are astoundingly ingenious creatures. We have gone to the moon, split the atom, unraveled the genetic code, and probed the birth of the universe. Indeed, modern civilization stands as a monument to the boundless creativity of the human intellect.

Yet, while evidence of our intellectual and technological genius is all around us, there is growing concern that in other ways we have seriously underestimated ourselves. In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs, we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought outside for answers that can only be found within, denied the subjective and the sacred, overlooked latent capacities of mind, imperiled our planet, and lived in a collective trance--a contracted, distorted state of mind that goes unrecognized because we share it and take it to be "normality."

There exist within us, however, latent but unexplored creative capacities, depths of psyche, states of consciousness, and stages of development undreamed of by most people. Transpersonal disciplines have emerged to explore these possibilities, and they emerged first in psychology.

The Evolution of Psychology
Western psychology was born from two distinct sources: the laboratory and experimental science on one hand, and hospitals and clinical concerns on the other. In its practitioners' efforts to establish it as a legitimate science, they modeled experimental psychology on physics, focused on observable, measurable behavior, and shied away from the unobservable world of inner experience. Experimental psychology became dominated by behaviorism.

Clinical psychology and psychiatry, on the other hand, were born of a concern for treating pathology. Since much suffering stems from unconscious forces, clinical work focused on the subjective and the unconscious. Clinical psychiatry and psychology became dominated by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and behaviorism thus laid the foundations of clinical and experimental psychology, which they dominated for most of the first half of the twentieth century, becoming known as the first and second forces of Western psychology.

But by the sixties there was growing concern that along with the many contributions made by these schools of thought, there were also significant restrictions and distortions. Increasingly it appeared that they could not do justice to the full range of human experience. They focused on psychopathology or generalized from simple laboratory-controlled conditions to the complexities of daily life, and they ignored crucial dimensions of human experience, such as consciousness and exceptional psychological well-being.

In addition, they sometimes pathologized vital transpersonal experiences. For example, Freud interpreted such experiences as reflections of infantile helplessness, while other psychoanalysts dismissed them as "regressions to union with the breast," or "narcissistic neuroses." As the philosopher Jacob Needleman put it, "Freudianism institutionalized the underestimation of human possibility."1

Humanistic psychology emerged in response to these concerns. In the words of Abraham Maslow, a founding father of both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, "This point of view in no way denies the usual Freudian picture, but it does add to it and supplement it. To oversimplify the matter somewhat, it is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology, and we must now fill it out with the healthy half. Perhaps this health psychology will give us more possibility of controlling and improving our lives and for making ourselves better people."2

Humanistic psychologists wanted to study human experience and what was most central to life and well-being, rather than what was easily measured in the laboratory. One discovery in particular was to have an enormous impact and eventually give birth to transpersonal psychology. Exceptionally psychologically healthy people tend to have "peak experiences": brief but extremely intense, blissful, meaningful, and beneficial experiences of expanded identity and union with the universe. Similar experiences have been recognized across history and have been called mystical, spiritual, and unitive experiences, or in the East, samadhi and satori.

Eventually researchers recognized that various Eastern traditions describe whole families of peak experiences, and claim to have methods for inducing them at will. It soon became apparent that peak experiences have been highly valued throughout history, are the focus of several Asian disciplines, and yet seem to have been significantly underestimated--even pathologized--in the modern Western world. Transpersonal psychology arose in part to explore these experiences.

Of course, humanistic and transpersonal studies did not arise in a cultural vacuum. Rather, they both reflected and fed the dramatic changes occurring during the sixties within the culture at large. These included the birth of the human potential movement and the questioning of the materialistic dream, both of which led some people to look within for the enduring satisfaction that external success and acquisitions had seductively promised, but failed to provide.

Psychedelics also had a powerful impact and unleashed an unprecedented range and intensity of experiences on a society ill equipped to assimilate them. For the first time in history, a significant proportion of the culture experienced alternate states of consciousness. Some of these were clearly painful and problematic. Yet others were transcendent states that demonstrated to an unsuspecting world the plasticity of consciousness, the broad range of its potential states, the limitations and distortions of our usual state, and the possibility of more desirable ones.

At the same time, the introduction of Asian meditative disciplines offered ways of reaching similar states and insights through non-drug means. Suddenly, experiences that for centuries had appeared to many Westerners as nonsensical or pathological became valid and valued in the lives of a sizable minority. Western culture has never been the same since.

The many social effects included interest in Asian cultures and traditions and in spiritual practices as diverse as yoga, shamanism, and Christian contemplation. Dissatisfaction with conventional values led to alternate life-styles such as voluntary simplicity and ecological sensitivity, which flourished to express and support the new perspectives. Within universities new research fields explored topics such as meditation, biofeedback, psychedelics, and states of consciousness. Yesterday's cultural curiosity had become today's mainstream research. Transpersonal psychologists sought to integrate these novel findings into a new discipline, and they were soon joined by researchers in psychiatry, anthropology, sociology, and ecology.

Definition and Description
What, then, is the transpersonal?

Transpersonal experiences may be defined as experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche, and cosmos.

Transpersonal disciplines study transpersonal experiences and related phenomena. Practitioners seek to expand the scope of their disciplines to include the study of transpersonal phenomena and to bring their particular disciplinary expertise to this study.3

Transpersonal psychology is the psychological study of transpersonal experiences and their correlates. These correlates include the nature, varieties, causes, and effects of transpersonal experiences and development, as well as the psychologies, philosophies, disciplines, arts, cultures, lifestyles, reactions, and religions that are ...

Edition details

• Publisher: TarcherPerigee
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0874776783
• ISBN 13: 9780874776782
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320