csf 001 TOWARD A HUMANISTIC-TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION by Peter A. Campbell Thesis presented to the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Ottawa as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ^ «<o% BIBUOTHEQUES * ^^BlBi; 'T: Ottawa LlBRAKicS \ Vsily oi <P Ottawa, Canada, 1972 Peter A. Campbell, Ottawa 1972. UMI Number: DC53628 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI® UMI Microform DC53628 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Jean-Marie Beniskos, Ph.D., of the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, for his helpful direction of this dissertation. My heartfelt thanks are also due to Edwin M. McMahon, my close collabora­ tor and companion whose constructive criticism and steady encouragement have been a continued source of support through­ out this research project. CURRICULUM STUDIORUM Peter A. Campbell was born January 21, 1935, in San Francisco, California. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1957 and the Master of Arts degree and Licentiate in Philosophy in 1959 from Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington. The title of his thesis was The Marxian Concept of Individual Freedom in Society. He received the S.T.M. and Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Department of Theology, University of Santa Clara, California in 1966. He is the co-author of three books: Becoming a Person in the Whole Christ, (1967) ; The In- Between: Evolution in Christian Faith, (1969) ; and Please Touch, (1969), published by Sheed & Ward, Inc., New York. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter page I.- GENESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT 1 1. Initial Areas of Interest 4 a) Methodology in the Psychology of Religion 5 b) Humanistic-Transpersonal Psychology 19 c) The Seminar on Mysticism and Psychology 35 2. The Thesis Hypothesis and Related Questions 57 a) General Objectives 57 b) The Specific Goals Unitive Religious Consciousness and the Fully Functioning Person—Congruence vs Simple Deautomatization of Perception 59 II.- RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNITIVE EXPERIENCE: A COMPOSITE DRAWN FROM SELECTED LITERATURE .... 69 1. Unity as the Core Mystic Experience 70 a) Unity and Orthodoxy--The Question of Pantheism 75 2. Some Contemporary Explanations of Unitive Consciousness 79 a) The Sense of Self as Organism- Environment 80 b) Field Theory and Unitive Consciousness 88 c) The Experience of Individual Reality 101 3. Progression in Unitive Consciousness-- The Mystic Way 116 a) The Awakening 124 b) Purification 126 c) Illumination 129 d) The Unitive Life 131 e) A Final Note on Progression in Unitive Consciousness and the Problem of Language 132 III.- THE PRODUCTION OF UNITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS .... 139 1. The Production of Altered States of Consciousness 145 2. Deautomatization and Unitive Consciousness 153 a) Contemplative Meditation 170 b) Renunciation 183 c) Chemical Ecstasy 195 TABLE OF CONTENTS v Chapter page IV.- UNITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE FULLY FUNCTIONING PERSON--A STUDY OF CONGRUENCE WITH THE EXPERIENCING PROCESS 205 Humanistic Reflections on the Nature of Man--A Prenote on Development of Values 211 1. Congruence and Fuller Human Functioning 2 25 a) The Meaning of Fuller Human Functioning 225 b) The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Constructive Personality Change 236 c) Congruence and Incongruence 245 d) Characteristics of the Experiencing Process 250 e) A Process Conception of Human Growth and Unitive Consciousness—Viewed within a Client-Centered Framework 259 2. The Experiencing Process and Constructive Personality Change 291 a) Implicit Experiencing within the Feeling Process 298 b) Focusing 303 c) Emotions vs the Experiencing Process — The Question of Religious Revivalism 312 d) The Personal Relationship and a Structure- Bound Manner of Experiencing 317 3. A Critique of Deautomatization of Perception as a Method for Achieving Unitive Conscious­ ness in View of Research on Congruence with the Experiencing Process 329 a) Deautomatization and the Extreme Structure-Bound Manner of Experiencing 329 b) The Unowned Quality of Structure-Bound Experiencing 336 c) Deautomatization, the Loss of Self, and the Incongruent Person 340 V.- RESEARCH CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE PROJECTS .... 344 Some Future Research Projects 365 BIBLIOGRAPHY 377 Appendix 1. ABSTRACT OF Toward a Humanistic-Transpersonal Psychology of Religion . ". '. '. 395 CHAPTER I GENESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT I have often been struck by the way research con­ clusions always mean more to me when I can situate them within the lived context of their author's initial, often somewhat confused attempt to be faithful to the original flash of intuition or basic questions that got him started in the first place. Because I feel we need to learn respect for our hunches and precious first glimmerings of potentially fruitful insight, I should like to spend a short time out­ lining how I arrived at the point where I am today in a re­ search project which, as far as I am concerned, stretches far beyond the last page of this dissertation. If I have been able to allow the generation of any novel perceptions or original hypotheses within myself, I feel certain that the crucial ingredients of fascination, commitment, toler­ ance of ambiguity and the synthetic falling into place or connectedness that I feel has characterized various stages of my research, all lie tucked into the folds of my earlier, rather disorganized groping for significant pattern in the incredibly diffuse mass of data which confronted me. In general, I feel that part of the faith of science is that if serious people earnestly work at a problem over a long period of time with little or no success, the cause of GENESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT 2 their failure lies not in the insolubility of the problem but in asking the wrong questions about it. If we truly desire new knowledge we need an entirely new set of ques­ tions that can open up unusual vistas on the subject of research and hopefully unleash radically different percep­ tions in the investigator that may lead to novel and crea­ tive solutions. To seemingly overstate a point (at least for the moment) it is almost as though the fruitful outcome and mind-shaking breakthroughs of scientific investigation are less the product of refined methods to get at the struc­ ture of reality, and more the generation of novel percep­ tions and daring hypotheses in the researcher. While I don't pretend that the questions and hypo­ theses forming the backbone of this dissertation are partic­ ularly 'daring', I do believe they represent an original formulation of how Humanistic-Transpersonal psychology can make a significant contribution to the study of primary GENESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT 3 religious experience. In this sense I feel they expand the frontiers of knowledge on a worthwhile and important subject, 1 Religious experience covers such a wide range of highly individualized attitudes and responses, both healthy and pathological, that it would be hopeless to attempt dis­ cussing the subject globally. Some limiting or qualifying adjective is necessary in order to narrow the range of exper­ ience covered. I am mainly concerned with a type of inner, subjective, personal experience that ordinarily is not directly dependent upon particular church-affiliation or a pre-estab­ lished set of dogmatic overbeliefs which a person may hold. Moreover, as my presentation develops, it will become clear that a further limitation I place on the phrase religious ex­ perience is that I am primarily interested in the integrating experiences that lead toward a life of healthy growth, and fuller human functioning as this has been described by various psychologists who have chosen to emphasize this orientation rather than a study of pathology. I use the term primary of religious experience in the same sense that Dr. Walter Houston Clark has described it in his work on The Psychology of Religion: "... the inner.experience of the individual when he senses a Beyond, especially as evidenced by the effect of this experience on his behavior when he actively attempts to harmonize his life with the Beyond." (Walter Houston Clark, The Psychology of Religion, New York, MacMillan, 1968, p. 27) My concern is not with a theistic or non-theistic interpretation of the "Beyond". I understand this word as being comparable to the "More" of William James in the con­ clusion to The Varieties of Religious Experience. It would also seem to parallel the "All" of J. F. T. Bugental in The Search for Authenticity and of Evelyn Underhill in Mysticism, and the "divine Ground1, of Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy. Secondary religious experience and behavior may best be described as a chosen mode of being and acting after one has had a primary experience- e.g. after an intense con­ version experience (primary) a person may then join a church and present himself for worship services every Sunday for the remainder of his life (secondary). Tertiary religious experience and behavior has no primary element connected with it. It refers to the exper­ ience of a person for whom religion is a matter of routine or convention, accepted on the authority of another. GENESIS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT 4 one that is receiving increased attention today because of its intimate connection with popular interest in various forms of meditation and altered states of consciousness.