International Journal of Transpersonal Studies Volume 35 | Issue 1 Article 2 1-1-2016 Participatory Transpersonalism: Transformative Relational Process, Not the Structure of Ultimate Reality Glenn Hartelius California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA, USA Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/ijts-transpersonalstudies Part of the Philosophy Commons, Psychology Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Hartelius, G. (2016). Hartelius, G. (2016). Participatory transpersonalism: Transformative relational process, not the structure of ultimate reality. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 35 (1). http://dx.doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2016.35.1.iii This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This Preliminary is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals and Newsletters at Digital Commons @ CIIS. It has been accepted for inclusion in International Journal of Transpersonal Studies by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ CIIS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Participatory Transpersonalism: Transformative Relational Process, Not the Structure of Ultimate Reality Editor’s Introduction t may be a luminous interlude with a beloved, a woman against a dark background, with shadow on part moment of radiant silence, or ecstatic union with a of her face. It looks like she is wearing a pearl necklace.” phrase of music or the wide open world—something A hundred people might look at the same painting and Ilarger and more alive than anything imaginable. Time be able to agree, more or less, with this description. stops, grace descends as a lucent mist, and something This is what generally counts as objective within you feels the heart of the world. These moments, knowledge—descriptions of things that pretty much however fleeting, sustain the soul; they inspire and help anyone could agree on. This assumes that the world is to make life worth living. Yet what do they mean? Perhaps made of objects, of things that can appear roughly the these are merely the side effect of some happenstance same to many observers. Yet diaphanous glimpses that chemical event in the brain (cf. Persinger, 2001), and seem to lift out of ordinary experience are not concrete maybe cultural stories of mystical experiences and things, so they are quietly demoted to the status of exceptional capacities are just tales made up to explain subjective daydreams and imagination. Given their suggestion and neural noise. power within human experience, however, it seems While it oversimplifies, this dismissiveness is negligent to dismiss their legitimacy so simply. close to much conventional academic stance toward Standing in the museum there is a sense in which such reports, whether in religious studies or psychology. you are here, as observer, and the painting is there, on the This attitude is understandable given the difficulty of wall, as an object. In objective knowledge, your personal obtaining empirical evidence for the cognitive value of hereness and your relationship with the painting is more such experiences. Counter to this position are claims or less taken for granted, based on the assumptions that that these experiences open the door to a hidden inner standing in front of a painting is the right way to relate dimension that science and psychology must either to it and that anyone who was here would see much the dismiss or accept on faith, which takes the topic out of same thing. If you were a postmodernist, you might the sphere of scientific inquiry altogether (Friedman, challenge these assumptions by thinking of all the other 2002). Yet there may be a way to consider these ephemeral ways you could be in relationship with the painting: moments with an evidence-based science that neither you might invert it or view it through a kaleidoscope, accepts nor rejects uncritically. To fashion this is a task you might take a photo of it, turn the colors wild and that a transpersonal approach to psychology may be able alive, cut the image into slices and rearrange them in to take up (cf. Hartelius, 2014a)—and it is to this end a way that evokes a throbbing animate force. Or, you that a careful focus on philosophy is necessary. might consider that a person not oriented to fine arts Imagine you are standing across from a painting might think a “Rembrandt” was a new kind of digital at a museum. You might describe it in ways that someone printer, or that a newborn might see only vague patterns standing next to you could affirm as accurate, or perhaps of dark and light. All of this play can lead to fresh and supplement with slightly different words: “That is a creative approaches to the world, and can also be used Rembrandt, a painting showing the bust of a young to deconstruct or reconstruct any piece of information, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 35(1), 2016,International pp. iii-ix Journal of Transpersonal Studies iii leaving no effective consensus and no reliable knowledge particular culturally situated vision fosters transformative (e.g., Rorty, 1979). While postmodern approaches can development of individuals and communities, and thus challenge existing orthodoxies and resulting false cultivates compassion, respect, and symmetrical paradoxes, they are less helpful in developing productive relationship. It invites an approach to knowledge that ways of understanding experiences that are already holds inclusiveness and diversity not only as preferable marginalized and poorly understood. and socially moral, but as imperative and indispensable It is for this conundrum that participatory for effective knowledge creation (Hartelius, 2014b). thought within transpersonal psychology (Ferrer, 2002), Efforts to reframe participatory thought as yet another drawing deeply on feminist thought, seems to offer a way iteration of a perennial philosophy, which asserts forward. From this standpoint, reality is not objective in privileged knowledge about the objective nature of the conventional sense that it is separate from me or that ultimate reality (e.g., Abramson, 2015), fail to grasp the I can stand back from it and take it in like a painting on nature of a participatory stance toward the ontological the wall, and yet it is not merely subjective in the sense status of any and all visions of ultimacy. that it is just something made up in the mind. Reality The early field of transpersonal psychology sought is actual, real, but you and I are part of it, immersed to add to humanistic psychology by considering not only in it, not observers who can stand back from it and the primacy of human experience and relationship, but give an objective account; the public space is woven of also the “farther reaches of human nature” (Maslow, relationships rather than constructed of separate objects 1969, p. 1), including peak experience, transcendent (cf. Thayer-Bacon, 2003, 2010). Reality is beingon the experience, ultimate verities, and transcendent values. canvas and in the painting, and my relational perspective Shortly after the inception of the field, Ken Wilber is necessarily colored by my location (cf. Harding, 1991, (1975) proposed that all of these aspirations might point 2004). toward a transcendent nondual ultimate dimension To apply this to the metaphor of a Rembrandt beyond the dualities of human sense experience—an painting, even if I am able to see the whole painting, it ultimate that was the ontological source and goal of all is from the standpoint of a particular location within human spirituality. the painting. If I am situated in what an art historian This perennialist philosophy gained wide might describe as the dark background color typical acceptance within the transpersonal community and of Rembrandt’s work, then the area around me may remained as a dominant viewpoint (Rothberg, 1986) seem dark, with lighter areas visible elsewhere; if I am until challenges by Ferrer (1998, 2002, 2009, 2011a) located in one of the painted pearls, I might describe the and others (Hartelius, 2015a; Hartelius & Ferrer, foreground as bright and lustrous, surrounded by dark 2013; Rothberg & Kelly, 1998; Schneider, 1987, areas farther out. My situatedness on the painting means 1989), and the development of participatory thought I cannot escape the fact that my experience is limited by as an alternate (Ferrer, 2002; Ferrer & Sherman, 2008), location, nor the fact that universal knowledge—which gained considerable influence (Ferrer, 2011b). Critiques implies knowledge either from no specific location of Wilber’s (e.g., 2000, 2006) integral theory include (Nagel, 1989) or from a detached location deemed concerns that it is metaphysical in the sense that no authoritative—is impossible for anyone to attain; independent evidence can be mustered to support the however, I can expand my understanding through primacy of the structure of reality that Wilber asserts, dialogue and relationship. In fact, the same locatedness and hierarchical in the sense that ultimate truth claims that makes universal knowledge unreachable makes for one version of reality reduces the status of all other relationship both necessary and possible. For this reason versions; furthermore, it fails to resolve the Cartesian a participatory approach foregrounds the values that tension that, in a modernist context, devalues mystical, inform relationship, and holds interest in speculations spiritual, and other exceptional experiences as merely about universals