Do Transpersonal Research Methods Reveal Actual Transpersonal Realities?
While being regarded as psychologically legitimate experience, transpersonal psychologists differ in their judgments about whether transpersonal or mystical experiences do actually reveal direct knowledge about the objective existence of extra mental transcendental realities.
On one side of the issue are those who would argue for “ontological neutrality” and a neo-Kantian agnostic epistemology regarding the existence of the object (noema) to which transpersonal experience (noesis) refers. Nothing is to be said about the nature of the reality that makes a particular mystical or spiritual experience possible. Carl Jung, Peter Nelson, and Harris Friedman are representative of this point of view.
On the other side of the issue are those who would argue that splitting ontology and epistemology into two pieces does not do justice to the validity and legitimacy of spiritual experiences as states of knowledge. To assert the validity of transpersonal experiences without acknowledge the existence of the referent to which these experiences refer is epistemologically suspect and spiritually alienating. Aldous Huxley and Ken Wilber are representatives of this point of view.
“Ontological neutrality” C. G. Jung declared himself agnostic on this issue. The interconnection between psychological experience and metaphysical realities is uncertain.
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The fact that metaphysical ideas exist and are believed in does nothing to prove the actual existence of their content or of the object they refer to (Jung, 1968, p. 34)…. Psychology treats all metaphysical claims as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure that derive ultimately from certain unconscious dispositions (Jung, 1992, pp. 48-49)…..Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of the archetypes. (Jung, 1935, p. 218)
Transpersonal psychologist Peter Nelson (1990) argues for an agnostic position in the name of radical empiricism concerning the nature of that which is experienced during moments of transcendental experience.
Ontological assumptions (such as the objective empirical reality of science or the divine of many religions) often force the direction of the research and thus pre-draw conclusions. In effect, neutrality requires that we suspend…as far as possible, all assumptions vis-à-vis the ultimate nature of the thing and events of our world and return to the empiricism of our direct experience (Nelson, 1990, p. 36).
The assumptions about the nature of reality, the “self,” ultimate values, human motivation, and the like, that underlie all of the various approaches to transpersonal psychology (from biological to environmental to cognitive to psychodynamic to phenomenological) function as cognitive schema that shape selective attention, perception, memory and interpretation. A priori assumptions, presuppositions, and cognitive commitments may set up a barrier to a more pluralistic understanding of spiritual knowledge, and a can lead to a failure to “honor the diversity of ways in which the sense of the sacred can be cultivated, honored, and lived,” and overlooks the possibility that “spiritual traditions [may] cultivate, enact, and express, in interaction with a dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power, potentially overlapping but independent spiritual ultimates” (Ferrer, 2002, p. 4).
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In some cases, these presuppositions have reduced cognitive flexibility and the openness to new experiences necessary for proposing more adequate theories about the nature of transpersonal events and the human psyche that manifests them. Strictly biological and environmental approaches, for instance, have tended to dismiss the entire interior dimension of soul and spirit in their explanations of transpersonal events.
The field of transpersonal studies continues to evolve and while the physical and metaphysical assumptions that underlie the six perspectives may be valid, but partial truths, they all have a status of working hypotheses in the field and “their validity should be researched and assessed rather than presupposed” (Walsh & Vaughn, 1993b, p. 202).
Harris Friedman in his article “Transpersonal Psychology as a Scientific Field” likewise recommends a Neo-Kantian agnostic epistemology regarding spiritual or mystical claims of the extrapsychic status of metaphysical realities (Friedman, 2002).
I think it wise, from a scientific perspective, to remain agnostic about the transcendent, even as to whether it can be meaningfully said to exist since it is beyond any categories, even the most fundamental ones of existence and nonexistence. Abandoning all direct speculation about the transcendent would be a productive scientific strategy. Those who operate under the banner of transpersonal psychology while engaging in speculation about the transcendent or, worse, endorsing one system or another that allegedly develops transcendent qualities as part of their professional practice should be regarded as outside the domain of the field…. No religious or spiritual approaches to the transcendent need to be questioned as long as they are not promoted as part of the field of transpersonal psychology. (Friedman, 2002, p. 183)
Peter Nelson (1990) believes that there is need to develop models of altered states of consciousness that do not imply or presuppose any metaphysical framework or that require a religious or quasi-religious interpretation in order to make sense of the experience. “Our need is to conceptualize transpersonal experiences in a manner which begins to approach ontological neutrality, leaving interpretation to the individual reader” (Nelson, 1990, p. 36).
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Ontological neutrality is an attitude toward our research in which we admit that we do not yet know what is “ultimately” real. In other words, we assume an open view towards making any final ascriptions of “meaning” and “truth” because we realize that not all the “data” is in yet, nor is it likely ever to be. (Nelson, 1990, p. 45)
Nelson (1990) proposes that any awareness, perception or state that is experienced be understood in terms of three dimensions: the “mind body psychotechnologies” that produced them (e.g., breathwork, psychedelics, self-hypnosis, meditation, etc.), the personality characteristics of the participant, and the phenomenological attributes of the experience itself. By focusing on the experiential methods that “cause” the transpersonal experience, the detailed phenomenological description of the experience, and personality facts (e.g., absorption, affectivity, arousal, social orientation), transpersonal psychologists will be better able to understand the experience in itself without reference to “reductionist” metaphysical explanations.
By conceiving personality factors as the background “set” of the experience (moderator variable), psychotechology “setting” as the triggering mechanism (independent variable), and phenomenological report as providing the picture of the experiential quality of the experience (dependent variable), the researcher has a “matrix” that can be understood as “both creating and defining any awareness, perception, and state experienced or known and thus can be understood as both cause and description of that experiential state (Nelson, 1990, p. 37).
[This] three-dimensional, three-type model allows investigators to create an operationalized definition of experiential states which do not depend for their explanation on an ontological source outside the experiential data base itself…The qualitative description of the experience taken together with “set” and “setting” characteristics becomes a total definition of the experience without requiring any external references…[and] without having to solve the problem of epistemological referents either in relation to the empirical world (objective world) or in relation to the supposed experiential “container” of consciousness (subjective world). (Nelson, 1990, p. 44-45)
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Many transpersonal psychologists would regard the call for “ontological neutrality” and a neo-Kantian agnostic epistemology as an extreme cautionary position concerning the nature of that which is experienced during moments of mysticism and transcendence.
Phenomenologically speaking, consciousness always has an object, except perhaps in those “higher” absolute states of consciousness described by Eastern religions in which “consciousness without an object” is believed to occur (Merrell-Wolff, 1973). Phenomenological psychology asserts that every act of experiencing (noesis) has a corresponding content (noema) that is inextricably interconnected together. There is a radical interpenetration between the act of knowing and what is known, between the cognizing self and the cognized world. “Noesis” and “noema” are of one piece. Psychology has too long been burdened by the theory that its so-called facts exist in isolation from the subjectivity that gives those facts meaning. The experiencing and the experienced are participatory in nature, co-created. Every experience requires a “hook” to hang its projections upon.
We cannot ignore, overlook, or deny the metaphysical import of spiritual knowledge and cannot remain silent about the ontological and metaphysical implications of mystical events. As Ferrer (2002, p. 127) points out:
In this account, William James’ (1902/1936) often quoted words are quite pertinent: “Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are state of insight into depths of truths unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full if significance and importance” (p. 300). Or as Bolle (1968) puts it in his minor classic book on the study of religion: “More than ‘mere’ experience, the mystic experience is knowledge” (p. 113). (quoted in Ferrer, 2002, p. 127)
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Unless one believes that there is no epistemic validity to transpersonal or spiritual experiences, that there is no valid cognitive content to the act of cognition that occurs in transpersonal experiences, that there is no transpersonal knowing, then one cannot side-step the issue that transpersonal experiences may reveal valid and legitimate aspects of reality. Just as it is impossible to propose a cognitive psychology without simultaneously assuming some implicit theory of personality who has these cognitions, so also is it impossible to assume that transpersonal or spiritual experiences are legitimate and valid without also presupposing something about the reality that make such experiences or events possible. As soon as one make a statement of fact concerning a mystical experience, one automatically makes some cognitive or ontological commitment to a particular worldview or notion about reality or about the self whose subjectivity gives that statement of fact meaning. To assert the validity of transpersonal experiences without acknowledging the existence of the referent to which these experiences refer is to give only half the story.
Most modern interpreters of Eastern religions assert that the transcendental realities apprehended in certain mystical states do actually exist independent of the participant, that these realities can be empirically and experimentally verified and validated through personal practice and experience and through intersubjective verification or refutation (Huxley, 1970).
Virtually all contemplative traditions have claimed that objects of mystical insight such as Buddha Nature, God or Brahman are realities that exist independently of any human experience; they have also held that these objective realities can be apprehended through particular experiences (or data) that can be confirmed by the contemplative’s mentor or fellow seeker. On this they are, broadly speaking, empirical. (Murphy, 1992, p. 11)
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