The disaster of modern psychology. Psychological science cannot partition one cause off to theology (e.g., final causes), another to philosophy (e.g., formal causes), another to biology and chemistry (e.g., material cause), and another to physics (e.g., efficient causes) and expect to obtain anything like an integrative picture of the true reality of life, mind, and consciousness. Unfortunately, this “divide and conquer” approach has guided the history of science since the Enlightenment. We end up with a fragmented and dissociated body of knowledge that like Humpty Dumpty in the children’s nursery rhyme takes “all the kings horses and all the kings men” to put together again. We end up with a discipline that is in a “crisis of disunity” (Staats, 1991) characterized by theoretical and methodological fractionation, insularity among the “specialities,” scattered psychological associations and university departments, narrowly focused research agendas, conflicting professional priorities, and bits and pieces of knowledge without an organizing theme (Bevan, 1991; Kimble, 1994; Koch, 1993).
Transpersonal psychology seeks knowledge through all causes. As an interdisciplinary discipline, transpersonal psychology seeks knowledge through all causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) because all four kinds of causes are important for an accurate and complete understanding of any phenomena. Transpersonal psychology is an integral psychology that addresses questions pertaining to all aspects, dimensions, levels of being human, not only the material and efficient (e.g., biological and environmental) causes of experience and behavior.
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Empiricism includes the experiential. If transpersonal psychology is to obtain valid and significant knowledge of transpersonal phenomena through all four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final), then the word “empirical” has to be expanded to include experience. Once we understand that “empirical” in the broadest sense does not have to be confined to sensory experience alone, then it will become possible to accept the scientific canon that “genuine knowledge must be ultimately grounded in experience, in data, in evidence” without failing to see that, in addition to sensory experience, there is (a) the psychological (mental) experience of logic, mathematics, phenomenology, and hermeneutics and (b) the spiritual (psychic) experience of mysticism, cosmic consciousness, satori, gnosis, revelation, and meditation. It will then be easier to understand how the spirit of scientific inquiry can be carried into the interior domain of spirituality to disclose and produce an empirical science of spirituality.
“Empirical” and “sensory” are not the same things. Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber (1990) in his book Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm points out that it is a fallacy to think that the “empiricism” of the scientific method should refer narrowly to sensory experience alone. Sensory experience is only one of several different but equally legitimate types of empiricism. Webster’s (Merriam, 1961) New Collegiate Dictionary, for instance, defines the noun “empiric” (derived from the Greek, empiricus, meaning “experienced”) as “one who relies upon practical experience.” The adjective “empirical” is defined as “depending on experience or observation alone…pertaining to or founded upon, experiment or experience.” The noun “experience” is defined as “The actual living through an event or events; …hence, the effect upon the judgment or feelings produced by personal and direct impressions.” “Empiricism,” in other words, in its broadest sense means experiential and includes direct, interior, immediate, psychological experience in general.
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