Ken Wilber’s Three “Eyes” of Knowledge Transpersonal theorist, Ken Wilber (1990) identifies three key features of the scientific method, and then generalizes these features to create what can be termed a “generalized empirical method of spiritual experience.”
Step 1. Instrumental injunction. The first key feature of Wilber’s (1990) generalized empirical method of spiritual experience refers to the set of instructions, procedures, exercises, activities, techniques, method, praxis, or experimental designs necessary to produce a direct experience or apprehension of spiritual Reality. Instrumental injunctions are always in the form: “If you want to know this, you must do this.” For instance, if you want to see a cell, you must look through a microscope. If you want to know Spanish, you need to learn the language. If you want to know the truth of the Central Limit theorem, then you must learn statistics. If you want to know enlightenment, you must practice meditation.
In order to “see” the “eye” must be trained. The “instrumental injunction” (Wilber’s phrase) implies that for whatever type of knowledge (sensory-empirical, cognitive-rational, transpersonal-spiritual), the appropriate “eye” must be trained (eye of flesh, eye of mind, eye of contemplation) until it is adequate (adequatio) to the illumination. Learning to read ushers us into a world that is not immediately given to the physical senses alone. Learning Buddhist meditation or Christian interior prayer discloses insights that cannot be perceived with physical senses or the reasoning mind alone.
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“If you want to know this, then do this.” What the founders of the major world religions gave to their disciples was not a series of dogmatic beliefs but a series of practices or prescriptions: If you want to know God, you must do this. For Christians, this may take the form: “Do this in remembrance of me,” “If anyone loves me, he will keep my commandments,” and so forth. For Jews, this may take the form: “If you want to know God, you must pray, keep holy the Sabbath, and obey the ten commandments.” These directions were aimed to reproduce in the apostles and disciples the spiritual experiences or data of the founder. Transpersonal psychologist Roger Walsh’s (1999) book, Essential Spirituality: The Seven Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind, for instance, is filled with simple, powerful exercises aimed to produce a direct experience or apprehension of the holy in those willing to devote the time and effort to their practice.
Step 2. Direct apprehension. The second key feature of Wilber’s (1990) generalized empirical method of spiritual experience refers to the insight, experience, illumination, data, or cognitive content disclosed, evoked, elicited, or produced by carrying out the injunction (procedure, method, practice). The injunction leads to a direct disclosing of data, and these data are a crucial ground of genuine knowledge. All the founders of ancient spiritual traditions and their disciples underwent a series of profound spiritual experiences and direct apprehensions of what William James called “the higher part of the universe” (James, 1936, p. 507).
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Phenomenological accounts of direct illumination. The writings of Christian contemplatives, mystics, and saints (e.g., St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila, Lady Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, St. Augustine, Catherine of Siena, Origen) and non-Christian contemplatives, mystics, and saints (e.g., Sri Ramakrishna who died in 1886, Ramana Maharshi who died in 1950, and Paramahansa Yogananda who died in 1952) provide excellent descriptive accounts of individual illumination, enlightenment, and direct apprehension of insights during mystical states of consciousness. Other accounts include the following:
Evelyn Underhill’s (1961) Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness
William James’s (1936) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature
Rudolf Otto’s (1923) Idea of the Holy
Paramahansa Yogananda’s (1946/1974) Autobiography of a Yogi
Lex Hixon’s (1978/1989) Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions
Piero Ferrucci’s (1990) Inevitable Grace: Breakthroughs in the Lives of Great Men and Women
Anonymous (1961) The Cloud of Unknowing
Bernadette Roberts’s (1985) The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center
Ralph Waldo Trine’s (1897) In Tune With the Infinite
Richard Maurice Bucke’s (1901/1969) Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind
Richard D. Mann’s (1984) The Light of Consciousness
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Mystical consciousness. Transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber (1985) presents a description of mystical consciousness disclosed to him based on his 25 years of practicing Eastern forms of meditation:
In the mystical consciousness, Reality is apprehended directly and immediately, meaning without any mediation, any symbolic elaboration, any conceptualization, or any abstractions; subject and object become one in a timeless and spaceless act that is beyond any and all forms of mediation…. contacting reality in its ‘suchness,’ its ‘isness,’ its ‘thatness,’ without any intermediaries; beyond words, symbols, names, thoughts, images. (Wilber, 1985, p. 7)
Illumination of the soul. Transpersonal psychologist Thomas Yeomans (1992), in a monograph titled, Spiritual Psychology: An Introduction, describes his direct apprehension of the “soul” as disclosed through the practice of the techniques and exercises of Psychosynthesis:
When touched directly, it [the soul] is experienced as a pure beingness that is connected as well to all other beings and to an experience of larger Life, Great Spirit, or God. …Though there is no specific content to this experience, there is a profound aliveness and connectedness, a freedom from the fear of death, and acceptance of one’s life as it is being lived in its uniqueness now, and an infusion of joy and gratitude for Life as a whole. …. Sometimes the soul is experienced as that which gives meaning to life, or a sense of destiny and purpose. At other times it is experienced as that which guides and sustains a life. At still others it is experienced as that which goes beyond life and death, a principle of eternity and infinity that pervades and infuses mortal life. In still other traditions it is described as being no-thing, or emptiness, or a void, that which has no specific content, but which is in, and of, itself most alive and connected to all Life. And always it is seen as central and valued in human existence, sought for, discovered, and cultivated and then lived as fully as possible within the confines of ordinary daily existence. (pp. 13-14)
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Not all experiences of the sacred epiphanies. Not all experiences of the numinous are of the extraordinary variety (Sinetar, 1986). “For many ordinary believers, religious experience will be in a lower key, mediated through sacrament, prayer, silence, and obedience” (Polkinghorne, 1998, p. 119).
When transpersonal experiences transform ordinary lives. Psychologists William Miller and Janet C’de Baca (2001) describe contemporary examples of epiphanies and sudden insights that result in “vivid, surprising, benevolent, and enduring personal changes” (p. 4), some of which possess the characteristics of conventional mystical experience (i.e., ineffability, noetic quality, transience, passivity, unity, transcendence, awe, positivity, distinctiveness) (Chapter 10). Spontaneous experiences of the numinous are apparently more common than usually supposed, but can be cultivated by deliberately working to retrain habits of thought and behavior along more spiritual lines by long-term contemplative practice (Ferrucci, 1990; Hixon, 1989).
Step 3. Communal confirmation (or rejection). The third key feature of Wilber’s generalized empirical method of spiritual experience refers to the checking of results (the data, the evidence) with others who have appropriately completed or adequately performed the injunction. This is the intersubjective realm of shared knowing, the process of consensually proving and validating personal, interior knowledge with the personal, interior knowledge of others. This implies that if other competent individuals faithfully repeat the injunction or procedure (“Practice interior prayer”), then they will experience generally similar data (“Knowledge of God”).
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The knowledge gained in any intuitive apprehension is considered valid only if it is confirmed by other individuals who have gone through the injunction and apprehension stages in each specific domain of experience. And vice versa, if these claims are not consensually established, they can be regarded as empirically falsified and refuted. (Ferrer, 2002, pp. 47-48)
Checking one’s direct illumination with someone else who is adequately trained. Any particular individual’s apprehension may be “mistaken,” and therefore at every stage, she or he has recourse to checking and obtaining confirmation (or refutation) by others who are adequately trained in the injunction. For Wilber, checking one’s direct illumination with the spiritual director is like checking math problems with the teacher when one is first learning geometry. If a person refuses to train the particular “inner senses” then we are justified in disregarding that person’s opinions as to communal proof. Someone who refuses to learn Christian meditation, for instance cannot be allowed to vote on the truth of the Holy Spirit, just as someone who has not examined the psi literature first-hand is inadequate to form a reasonable judgment about it.
Verbal reports as data. Some may object that spiritual knowledge is basically private and is not subject to verification. If that were the case, then all phenomenological accounts or self-reports of subjective experience would be suspect and none could be used as legitimate data in psychological experiments or clinical practice. Yet the fact of the matter is that protocol analysis – or the use of the subject’s own verbal reports as data – is frequently used to probe the individual’s internal states and to gain verifiable information about the course, structure, and content of an individual’s cognitive processes, past experiences, and current knowledge base. Verbal reports as data is a legitimate method of obtaining empirically verifiable data in a wide variety of areas in experimental psychology, including, psychophysics, perception, attention and reaction time, conditioning and learning, remembering and forgetting, thinking and problem solving, intelligence and personality (see Ericsson & Simon, 1984, for a theoretical and empirical review of the major issues surrounding the use and validity of verbal reports as data).
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