“Experiential Approach
Emphasis on the “experiential” and “empirical” The emphasis upon the “experiential” character of transpersonal phenomena is understandable in terms of the original humanistic origins of the transpersonal orientation in peak experiences and studies of self-actualization. It is also understandable in terms of the discipline’s efforts to bolster the validity of transpersonal knowledge claims in the attempt to appear “empirical” and thus scientific.
Limitations of a purely intrasubjective “experiential” approach Transpersonal psychology’s emphasis upon the “experiential” and “empirical”, if taken to extremes, however, can become limiting and counterproductive, (Ferrer, 2002). Understanding transpersonal and spiritual phenomena solely in terms of individual inner experiences, according to Ferrer, perpetuates the Cartesian split between a subject “having” an experience of a separate spiritual “event.” Once this split is affirmed in theory, then it automatically raises the problem of correspondence between “my” experiences, on the one hand, and the “event” on the other. My mystical experience (as primarily the inner, subjective representation of an externally, independent and objective world) now requires that my knowledge claim be justified by matching it against a pregiven world that exists “already out there now real” (Lonergan’s phrase) independently of human cognition.
Giving up this dualism calls us to move beyond objectivism and subjectivism toward the recognition of the simultaneously interpretive and immediate nature of human knowledge (Ferrer, 2002, p. 142)…No pre-given ultimate reality exists… Different spiritual realities can be enacted through intentional or spontaneous creative participation in an indeterminate spiritual power or Mystery (Ferrer, 2002, p. 151)… Different mystical traditions enact and disclose different spiritual universes. (Ferrer, 2002, p. 148)
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Emphasis on the “experiential.” By confining spirituality to the subjective world of the individual, however, the phenomena becomes reduced, limited, selective to only one pole of the phenomena (the subject, the noesis). This has the effect of ultimately marginalizing spirituality to the realm of the private and subjective, instead of expanding it to the objective and intersubjective (Ferrer, 2002). All human phenomena have subjective and objective, individual and collective dimensions (Wilber, 1990, 1997, 1998, 2000a).
The criteria… of spiritual knowing can no longer be simply dependent on the picture of the reality disclosed…but on the kind of transformation of self, community, and world facilitated by their enaction and expression..[and] their capability to free individuals, communities, and cultures from gross and subtle forms of narcissism, egocentricism, and self-centeredness. (Ferrer, 2002, p. 167-168)
Ferrer (2002) argues that we need to extend our understanding of spirituality out of the merely interior and individual. Transpersonal experiences are not merely inner experiences. Spirituality should not to be reduced merely to the subjective world of the individual. Transpersonal experiences, by definition, extend the subjective outward as when “self-identity expands and encompasses other aspects of the psyche, life, and cosmos” (Walsh & Vaughn, 1993a).
Transpersonal events do not exist solely within the experience of an individual but are essentially “non-local events,” and can occur also in relationships, communities, collective identities, and places. “Their confinement to the realm of individual inner experience is both inadequate and erroneous” (Ferrer, 2002, p.124). To argue otherwise, is to overlook the “trans-human sources of spiritual creativity” (Ferrer, 2002, p. 126).
Vision of a participatory spirituality. “What is called a transpersonal experience is better understood as the participation of an individual in a transpersonal event” (Ferrer, 2002, p. 126). Ferrer (2002) is not denying that there is a world out there apart from human ideation. There is something out there, but the features of that “something” are plastic, malleable, dynamic, not independent nor fixed, but depend upon the perceptive mechanisms and subjective focus operative at the time.
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