Participatory Turn and Relational Spirituality

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Source

A later version of this paper was published by The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 2010

For the first part of the excerpting, see: Relational Spirituality and other Heresies in New Age Transpersonalism


Further extracts

G. A. Lahood:


Recently, with what has been called the ‘participatory-turn’ (e.g. Ferrer 2002, Ferrer and Sherman 2008, Heron 2006, Lahood 2007) there has been a call for a more ‘relational spirituality’ in which human needs, interests, and identity — are the coin of the realm. 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 the New Age perennial overseer (e.g. Christ consciousness, I AM etc) or idealized non-dual Eastern religions that have long dominated transpersonalism heralds a major rebirth. This project is more than a ‘rebranding’ of transpersonalism; it is a reordering of the transpersonal cosmos, nearer to what Peter Berger called “cosmization” than a superficial face-lift. According to Berger, cosmization is the “enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established”(1967:25). In this case the older perennial cosmos is being contested with a participatory-cosmos. Before the ‘participatory-turn’ Brant Cortright is 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 non-dualism see the psychological healing and growth of this self as part of its journey toward realizing its identity with its spiritual source (1997, 230). Here, according to this statement, the axiomatic, fundamental, and first principle of transpersonal psychology is perennialism (although I think the theistic branch has had less airplay e.g. Washburn 1996). Transpersonal therapy and inquiry are bound to the idea that eventually we will come to know ‘the Real’, our ‘true self’ or, as the Zen Buddhist puts it, our ‘Original Face ... before we were born’. But if we bracket off this Original Face from the equation and replace it with a more relationship based spirituality, then we may well come to know new spiritual shores (ala Ferrer 2002)

Relational spirituality can be seen as an intervention in the non-relational trends in New Age-transpersonalism’s thinking and practices. Ironically, 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 and public of the psycho-technologies employed in the humanistic era, gestalt therapy, strongly embraced one of Buber’s central ideas—the contrast of what he called I-it relating and I-thou relating — “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” (Cortright 1997, 106).

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 sacredness of relationship” (Cortright 1997, 106) here (potentially at least) the trans/personal is in the interpersonal (Naranjo 1978). However, I think there is a big question as to whether Buber’s central tenet that “the realm of the Between or the interhuman” was ever really fully embraced by the transpersonal movement (Wilber for one ranks Buber’s spirituality beneath his Oriental non-dualism 199?). 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, 119). It seems to me that Buber’s relational ethos got a bit lost in the stampede for ‘higher consciousness’ and that the blending of the American Transcendental trinity in the‘psychedelic imagination’ coupled with humanistic psychology and that eventually brought the transpersonal psychology into being—which then gave rise to the Wilberian paradise to which the movement was bound for 20 years (see Lahood 2008). Indeed if we take a closer look at the early transpersonal movement’s commitments we will see that they were not particularly ‘relational’, rather, they tend to overtly devalue relationship.

The Marriage of Maslow and Zen

The 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—and a ‘you go your way I’ll go mine’ approach – as the so-called gestalt prayer attests: “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)xxvii It has been claimed that this kind of robust Nietzschean philosophy found an expression in the Mary Daley’s elitist feminist theology that urged self-sufficiency and a willingness to ditch obligations and commitments to others without feelings of guilt or emotional ambivalence (Morris 1994, 181). These rugged humanistic ideals would be coupled with the extreme individualism of Buddhism—compassionate, maybe, but not very relational, and this attitude I believe, is still a central (if not the central) foundation of transpersonalism and its New Age shadow. xxviii Let me give an example of Buddhism’s historically non-relational ethos: The psychoanalytic anthropologist Melford Spiro, who studied Buddhism on the ground in Burma, viewed Burmese Theravadan Buddhist religion as ‘culturally constituted’ psychological defense mechanisms (1987). In a discussion about Buddhist ‘goers forth’ (the men who leave home to join the fraternity of monks) he recounts 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 (279).[… 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 at no other cause; I must quiet this affection, and be calm.” Having achieved that insight, he was able to abandon his children. 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, he can only redoubled his efforts in the practice of 'tanha' (severing of bonds) and, having achieved his own serenity, he turns his back on his abused children (children who he put in harm’s way in the first place) diligently leaving to them to work out their own salvation. Spiro explains 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 writes

“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” (Klass 1995, 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, 152). Thus “son and wife, father and mother… and relatives [are] the different objects of desire” (Spiro 1987, 279) and therefore a hindrance to enlightenment. Spiro suggests that this attitude is also present in other Asian religions such as Taoism, but also Christianity:xxix Lu Hsiu Ching retired from the world to the mountains 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 (Spiro 1987, 279). The sage’s critically ill daughter was of no more interest to him than a transient stranger. Are these Buddhist and Taoist teachings and demonstrations really the ‘skillful means’ of the evolved or is it more like psychologically defensive behavior 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 began to, naturally enough, to ‘evolve’ away from secular humanistic psychology, away from interpersonal encounter toward a more impersonal discipline. Transpersonal - New Agism begins 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 experiences’ was joined at the hip with Eastern spiritual concepts—a marriage, of Maslow and Zen—or so it would appear.

Mahayana Zen Buddhism was the most important influence on the counterculture with its philosophy of ‘emptiness’ (Sanskrit: sunyata; Japanese ku) (Glock and Bellah 1976, 2). As transpersonal philosopher Michael Washburn tells 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) (Washburn 1995, 3). I think the term ‘Zen’ here may be a misnomer. Perhaps a nearer truth is that what came to be popular ‘American Zen’ wasn’t really very Zen at all.xxxi Washburn’s term ‘synthesis’ is therefore worthy of scrutiny. I believe in understanding the marriage of Maslow and Zen in the young American mind-world of the 1960s we are given the keys 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, 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 correlates sunyata, void, Nirvana) and the Godheads found in Brahmanical Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta, Kashmiri Shaivism) and Mahivarian Jainism is that Buddhist Nirvana has no ontological status (Bharati 1965, 26-27). When the Buddha denies the Hindu’s atman he also denies his eternal Brahman. As feminist Rita Gross writes, “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 (Gross 1994, 159). Nevertheless, there is still an overlap between Buddhism and Hinduism in that the self (small s) fares no better in Hindu traditions than it does in Buddhist, where it is only talked about long enough to denigrate it and reject its ontological and empirical status. The self (small s) is at best assimilated to a theological construct, or in other words, the person is identified with a metaphysical Self (big S) with no self (small s) remaining (Bharati 1985, 89). And this is the Wilberian position, as Washburn writes, “On this point Wilber and the structural-hierarchical paradigm concur with the principle Eastern view espoused by Buddhism and non-dualistic Advaita Vedanta: the individual self, although seemingly real, is ultimately an illusion” (1995, 35). Nevertheless with Buddhism the big S of the Vedantist is also seen as non-existent - in Buddhism the Big Self of 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 has pointed out the “the great pains” transpersonal theorists have gone to in their attempts to “reinterpret Buddhism and make the doctrine of anatta less disturbing, and morein harmony with Western conceptions of the self” (1994, 66). He shows how various writers in the field (Mokusen Miyuki, Claire Owens, the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki and later Ken Wilber) have conflated and overlapped (hybridized) Zen Buddhism with what appear to be very Hindu/Gnostic descriptions of Self and the process of ‘merging with the divine’ (reminiscent I think, of the ‘dewdrop slipping into the shining sea) 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, influenced 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, 66). So whatever it is—to return to Washburn’s comment for a moment—it ain’t very Zen. It appears that the way around Buddhism’s thorny crown (anatta/no-self) for transpersonalism was to blend Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism (a process, as suggested, long alive in the hybridizing American religious imagination). This is no mean feat because Vedanta (ala Shankara) claims its non-dualism as the final and highest order of consciousness (above Buddhism) whereas Nagarjuna, the important reformer of ‘middle way’ Buddhism, “trenchantly criticized the Upanishad and Vedanta doctrine that Brahman (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.” Nagarjuna along with Buddha claimed that the famous central tenant of Hinduism ‘tat tvam asi’ (thou art that) was nothing but an illusion. Thus it would appear that the spiritual ulimates found in Vedanta and Buddhism are not comfortable bedfellows, but observe the bewitching way in which Grof easily joins 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 (Grof 1998, 32).

Grof’s ‘forcing together’ of two competing systems guts the authority within each system through a crafty amalgamation and does away with the inherent dualism of the ‘Us and Them’ - but in doing so creates a new and more slippery authority (a third liminal space)—the so-called ‘esoteric core’ of the perennial philosophy—and with it 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 relating world in which we live and breathe. To perennialize their religious universe—to claim a transcendent unity of all religions—is to both appropriate Buddhism for itself and to put it on an even footing with the liberations of the other religions. Morris 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” (1994, 69). Perhaps, but between 1963 and 1974 the motivation behind the intense desire of the young people to experience (and perform) another reality through “chemical Nirvanas” was agonizingly bound to America’s war on Vietnam and a felt loss of innocence (Furst and Schafer 1996). And the world is indeed a ‘burning house’ and the Buddha’s salvific, if solitary message, is that suffering ends when we relinquish all attachment to the world (in the Buddha’s day there was nothing like napalm, mechanized warfare or nuclear weaponry, or 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 this culture’s psychotropic quest by anthropologist Raymond Prince; “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 the his descent with the perennial mystical message at the root of things all is one, all is good, the universe maybe trusted; salvation lies in simplification, in the de-institutionalization, and above all in love” (1974: 257).

According to sociologist Donald Stone, the members of religious counter-culture of these times “seek to transcend the oppressiveness of the culture by transforming themselves as individuals” (1976, 93). And it is this action; this social imperative to transform the self (self-spirituality) that prepares the way of the New Age-transpersonalism. This early movement had at its core what Stone calls “gestalt consciousness”- 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. Exquisite phenomenological attention to present experience could also (apparently) result in a so-called ‘satori’ (Japanese) non-dual experience, an awakening, a seeing-though of illusion. Thus, its powerful techniques were capable of opening to transpersonal awareness and 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 that the early innovators had conducted research on. He writes: “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” (Stone 1976, 104-105)—religious transpersonalism. It seems evident that what we are seeing in this evolution from the gestalt attitude(which remember carried with it the promise of Buber’s I-thou relational spirituality) to a more ‘transpersonal’ orientation toward ‘cosmic consciousness’— is an evolution that seems to favour the liberations favoured by Eastern religions. As Stone observes, “the self-transcendence of merging with infinite cosmic energy or the ground of all being” (96) had become the coin of that realm. Buber and his appreciation of ‘the Between’ and the attention to relationship as a potential trans/personal domain of praxis, seems to have become a lover left at the altar in favour of: realizing one’s Original Face, Essence, or ‘True Self’ -impersonal non-dual eradication of the many ... thus the transpersonal movement looks to me to have lost touch with its relational foundation prefigured in the human-potential 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) was to be “centered in the cosmos rather than in human needs and interests, going beyond humanness, identity and self-actualization” [my emphasis] (Maslow 1968, iii).

Maslow’s ideas were to become elaborate and pervasive. Seven years later in a popular text Transpersonal Psychologies (Tart ed.1975) Claire Owens claimed Zen Buddhism as a ‘psychology of self realization’ and writes 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 [relating] world” (1975, 165). The individual’s unconsciousness (self) merges with Pure Consciousness or Formless Self [my emphasis] (1975, 165 -175). The dewdrop slips into the shining sea…and this, as Morris points out, is not a very Zen, Zen. We 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. A few short years after the war - Stage right: (and with a motivation more difficult to assess)enter the rising star of the movement’s neo-perennial epoch—the virtuoso—Ken Wilber. Two decades later (1997) it was claimed, in a book focused on transpersonal psychotherapy, that transpersonalism was coming of age and that its burgeoning worldview was to be found reflected in all manner of media—books, workshops, and psychotherapy trainings etc. 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” (Cortright 1997, 64-65). However, the so-called ‘wisdom traditions’ and perennialism ala Wilber have come under sustained criticism from within the transpersonal movement (Rothberg 1986, Rothberg and Kelly 1998, Heron 1998, Ferrer 2002, Lahood 2008).

Satsang and Internalized self rejection

One of their claims 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 (see 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 - his well known modern follower, Ramana Maharshi, made it very clear “that the Self is in no way related to the body but is identified with an impersonal deity” (Morris 2006, 120).

Wilber holds out Maharshi as “an exemplar of non-dual realization” (Cortright 1997, 73), However, Heron is not so impressed with non-duality 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 defence against coming to terms with embodiment” (1998, 85). Nor is he inspired by Maharshi’s lifestyle or the implication (in Wilber) that it could be a model for the “future spiritual development of mankind” Heron writes; “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” (Heron 1998, 85). The following description of a practitioner's experience with a contemporary Advaita Vedanta teacher, speaks to the disembodiment validated in satsang practices: [His] 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 (Blackstone2006, 27). ‘No one left’ just a single impersonal event … the One ... hard to have a relationship when someone else is busy being an impersonal event - there does not appear to be the distinction or differentiation to give and receive in relationship. To be clear, if we are predisposed to follow the Advaitin way and this spiritual realization - then all well and good - but if we value relationship and embodiment then continually orienting oneself to ‘impersonal’ nondualism may not be useful."

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