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The so-called 'modern' paradigm is a Cartesian/Newtonian mechanistic, atomistic, and objective world view with an accompanying yet disengaged, rational and instrumental ego, a 'correspondence theory of truth' and a sharp dualism of mind and matter. Rather than asserting a contrasting cosmology, the postmodern perspective is a methodology of deconstruction, exposing the historical, cultural, and linguistic factors as well as the strategies of power which have shaped successive paradigms. The postmodern view that the 'mind' does not simply mirror the order of reality but rather structures or constitutes it, goes all the way back to the late Enlightenment philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Kant decreed that the only possible subject of metaphysics (that field of philosophy that seeks to describe the fundamental nature and structure of Reality) is a study of the nature of the structure of human knowing itself, for the world as it actually is "in itself", the "thing-in-itself," is ultimately unknowable. The world that presents itself to us (for Kant, a Newtonian/mechanistic world disclosed through logical/empiricism) is a phenomenal construction of the 'a priori categories of the understanding,' structures that inhere in the mind of the perceiver and shape and condition that which one perceives. Prior to the view that the mind shapes the world it perceives, was the naive realist view that the mind, like a photographic plate, simply reflected what was 'out there' ~ of course, allowing for distortions of the particular perceptual apparatus. Despite Kant, this naive view remains the unchallenged cognitive bias at the heart of contemporary common sense experience, indicating that the postmodern epistemology has not yet saturated mainstream culture.
Though rejecting the metaphysical enterprise ~ in its most narrow rationalistic form ~ and fostering an intellectual diversity free of the hegemony of positivistic science, the postmodern perspective nevertheless perpetuates a subtle form of 'naturalism'. Admittedly, the postmodern approach elevates the hermeneutic or interpretative mode of knowing beyond the simple sensory empirical, but it has no place on which to ground the constitutive linguistic structures other than in the determinisms and contingencies of material nature. It simply identifies cultural and linguistic practices in addition to physics and biology as the ground of a now relativistic and free floating "truth". Implicit within trenchent postmodern critiques which expose the cultural and linguistic nature of all world views including, to a large extent, that of science, is a naturalistic denial of the metaperspective, a declaration of the impossibility of any overarching and integrative view. Admittedly, to attempt to understand the transcendent through the force of pure reason alone, to try to achieve the necessary meta-position by abstracting from time and history, will naturally end in failure. But this does not mean that the transcendent is either unintelligible or unreal! The prevailing postmodern ethos denies the possibility of a bird's eye view by denying the possibility of the sky because our conventional and narrow window of experience does not face toward the sky!
In disagreement with both Enlightenment objectivism and postmodern constructivism, I believe that it is the central challenge and opportunity of our age to develop large, synthesising, and inclusive models which are adequate to the diversity and multidimensional complexity of historical and current experience. Such models will include female as well as male perspectives; imaginative and meditative modes of cognition as well as reason; relationship and connection as well as will and action; altered states of consciousness as well as ordinary experience. Yet heeding the postmodern call, our present search is not for certainty, the irreducible and self evident ground, but for an overarching adequacy ~ the best story available. An integrative model is judged not by the criteria of truth and falsity but by its adequacy to coherently handle the multidimensional data with which we are so far acquainted.
Viewing historic paradigm succession from a meta-postmodern (i.e. transcendent) perspective, we see that the old paradigm is not false, it is incomplete. The new is not merely something else, some logically contradictory way of viewing things. The new includes and goes beyond the old; though certain features of the old will drop away. Apart from its most extreme self undermining implications, our postmodern framework is not simply another alternative view but actually constitutes an advance within a genuinely developmental sequence, since the old paradigm didn't know that it was a paradigm! Unlike the ultimate foundational and indubitable principles sought by traditional metaphysics, our principles or metaphors of explanation are not the rock bottom and certain foundation of all knowledge but the circumference of an ever evolving and expanding integrated sum of all experience and knowledge.
Rather than an investigation into the nature of specific candidates for a new paradigm, the "new paradigmatic" activity is an investigation into the nature of paradigm itself! To give up the need and search for a formulatable certainty, an unquestioned set of foundational axioms, is surely an increase in wisdom. This is not a loss of knowledge, but an evolutionary step into a new form of knowledge. Understanding that knowledge and truth are constituted by paradigmatic structure, we are concerned, not with which particular paradigm among the so-called incommensurables is the "truist", but with an overarching study of all paradigms in relation to the sorts of worlds and knowledge that they have generated. In our radical self consciousness, we are questioning the foundational nature of foundations themselves which are masquerading either as "facts" or as a priori principles (necessarily true or "analytic" propositions).
The quasi positivist and quasi mystical young Wittgenstein wrote: "That of which we cannot speak, let us remain silent." And in the familiar words of the Taoist philosopher Lao Tze: "He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak." Yet fortunately, as if in denial of this wisdom, the great metaphysicians of the ages ~ Patanjali, Shankara, Nagarjuna, Asvaghosha, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart ~ have interpreted the ineffable world revealed through their contemplative insights, producing the great metaphysical mappings of the path to the transcendent realm. But as Huston Smith, Ken Wilber and others have been at pains to point out, the experiential disclosures of these sages, though skillfully employing reason and language, imply access to a broader spectrum of cognitive dimensions than logical empiricism and its technologies.
Beyond, yet inclusive of the abstract concerns of the intellect per se and beyond the specifically soteriological needs of the individual, the field which dares to approach transcendence in an entirely new way appropriate for our postmodern era is transpersonal psychology. Touching many fields, the transpersonal perspective goes beyond the postmodern deconstruction of the 'received view', the underlying rational/empiricist and objectivist paradigm which has shaped our age. A natural developmental step forward beyond humanistic psychology and an expansion beyond the rational-empirical mind space, transpersonal psychology is unique in that it approaches and engages realms of human experience which have been marginalized, or at least ontologically devalued by the rational-scientific world view.
Transpersonal theory (which includes transpersonal psychology) is a multidisciplinary approach to the questions of the nature and development of human consciousness and the larger philosophical, social, political, ethical, and spiritual implications of experiential dimensions which lie outside the "privileged" matrix of "every day" consciousness. But it neither engages the big philosophical problems in the strictly theoretical spirit and terms in which they have generally been framed, nor does it approach these questions in the linguistic, pragmatic, quasi-naturalistic and relativistic fashion of postmodern thought. Going beyond the postmodern investigation of the cultural and linguistic structures which have been implicated with the various historical paradigms, transpersonal theory affirms and articulates certain deep and universal structures or constitutive principles which lie deeper and behind the developments of language and culture.
Although agreeing that the old objectivist cosmology is inadequate to account for twentieth century scientific and psychological discoveries, the essential difference between the contemporary postmodern perspective and the transpersonal is that transpersonalism is willing to take a stand within the shifting sands of endless meaning contexts. Foundational to the transpersonalist stand is the contention that the experiences and reports of mystics and advanced practitioners of certain trans-rational and trans-linguistic cognitive modes reveal a non-mediated Reality which includes, yet goes beyond, all previously "constructed" worlds. Naturally, arguments rage between, on the one hand, the perennialist, archetypal, and universalist view and, on the other, the multicultural, perspectival and linguistically mediated view.
Despite a serious non-reductive, non-naturalistic addressing of mystical and transcendent dimensions and a positing of trans-historical (not ahistorical) and trans-cultural universal principles, the ambitious models of transpersonal theory cannot simply be equated with ancient speculative and rationalistic metaphysics. Transpersonalism's fundamental commitment to an overarching universalism is not a reactionary return to a "totalizing" a priori. Rather than opposing the relativistic perspectival school, transpersonalism most effectively embraces this crumbling of certainty, this wandering among the dizzifying halls of contextual illusions, as the necessary and transitional clearing for a possible entry into the realms of the transpersonal. From its earliest existential prophets to its later linguistic and constructivist sophisticates, the voice of the postmodern is our most appropriate wisdom. Any rejection of its radically decentering message in order to embrace a premature intellectuallized promise of transcendence would constitute a metaphysical retrogression. Just as Milarepa was bidden first to build and then destroy before he could 'realize', so the historically necessary and inevitable Promethean project of the building of the ego ~ an ego standing so powerfully yet so dangerously outside of Nature ~ must now come to face its denouement before a truly new process can begin to possibly unfold.
Based on empirical evidence from non-ordinary states of consciousness and theoretical arguments engaging complex East/West philosophical issues, transpersonal theory declares a cross cultural universality beyond the 'totalizing' vision which postmodern thought understandably eschews. Transpersonalism is not guilty of what postmodern critics assert to be the pretension of traditional thought to attain universal Truth beyond culturally mediated experience; not guilty of that intellectual imperialism which subsumes all diversity from a particular cultural historic perspective which falsely claims objectivity. It is not guilty because it jumps outside of the limited cognitive context or framework which gave rise to both modernism and postmodernism in the first place! It becomes an ever expanding and inclusive conversation taking place in a cognitive space - larger, yet inclusive of, the modern scientific/rational and postmodern historical-cultural-linguistic space. Transpersonalism accomplishes this through a grounding in the larger spectrum of experience, the full range of experiential states which underlie the production of world views. From a globally inclusive approach to history, science, philosophy and religion, it can take its stand in the universality of human experience beyond diversity; the diversity of creation, pointing to a higher Unity, rather than resulting in a relativistic levelling.
In our time, the apparent substantial materiality of a mechanistic nature gave way under the new physics and the holistic concepts of systems theory. Similarly, the substantiality of the ego is now seen as ultimately 'illusory', or both are seen at least as non ultimate perspectives. In light of the new science and the increasingly irrefutable and veridical nature of paranormal, transpersonal and mystical experience which calls into question the adequacy of any of the old views (i.e. rationalist, materialist, dualist, original Romantic and metaphysical idealist views as such), the question remains ~ "How do we construct a coherent all-embracing and overarching picture which is adequate to our present knowledge, even while admitting the necessarily open ended nature of this conversation"?
But like all human fields, transpersonalism has generated its own dualisms and differences. Different models of consciousness are derived from paradigmatically different ways of viewing the relation of the transcendent to the immanent, the transpersonal to the personal and prepersonal dimensions, and of course, the relation of 'matter' (nature) to 'psyche'. Romantic, idealist, Eastern, Western, evolutionary, Jungian and post-Jungian, perennialist and developmental perspectives interweave, coincide, and clash.
But rather than seeing these two contrary views locked in an inevitable either/or battle for supremacy on the field of Truth, they can be reconciled in a larger encompassing grand narrative. Most inspiringly, Tarnas (1998) presents us with a vision to guide our quest.
There is something about both of these deep historical perspectives, these myths...that resonate with the reality of our situation. Each is correct in a certain way, but they are both only partial readings of a larger, deeper, and complex story. Not only are they simultaneously true, I believe they actually constitute each other, they are embedded in each other's truth in the way that the gestalt image of two black faces in profile can also be seen as a white vase....our history can be seen as a long evolutionary dialectical development in which there has been a painstaking forging of an autonomous rational and moral self, differentiating it out of the whole, out of the matrix of being, but...this autonomy has come at a great cost. Gain and loss have been simultaneously working with each other until, in our own time, this dialectic has reached an almost climactic moment of transfiguration...We may now be able to see that inherent in this bipolar movement is the possibility of a new synthesis, gradually emerging out of the dialectical tensions of our own time.
Within the interdisciplinary field of transpersonalism a number of grand theories or models stand out, each one embodying some combination of these two ways of holding human history and the development of consciousness. Any adequate theory must address the paradox of the simultaneous developmental 'gains' and 'losses' (or, if one prefers, evolutionary unfoldings and pathologies) particularly obvious in our contemporary situation.
Wilber will have nothing to do with views which explain contemporary pathologies as the loss of an earlier state of harmony with nature, with the anima mundi; a state of sacred Unity which we must recapture in order to realize the spiritual level of Integration. Rather, he explains the obvious contemporary pathologies in a number of ways. For one thing, the more complex a stage or level of development, the more complex are the problems which inevitably accompany that stage; as he puts it, "atoms don't get cancer; dogs do". For another, rather than making the rational ego the bad guy, many of the existent problems indicate a failure, as yet, of a sufficiently large number of people to move beyond the more primitive level of mythic ethnocentrism to the space of 'universal reason' ~ our Enlightenment heritage. This is contrary to the outlook, associated with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century view of Romanticism, that Enlightenment reason is responsible for the final disenchantment of nature and the schism between subject and object, self and other, thinking and feeling.
Yet Wilber does acknowledge that things 'went wrong' in that what constituted a 'natural' development of the capacity for universal reason became distorted, so that science and objectivity ~ fine in themselves concerned as they are with the exterior domain ~ came to dominate 'interior' domains of value, morality, art and religion. His theory recognizes that successive evolutionary developments, from nature's beginnings all the way up to contemporary humans, unfold as a sequence of differentiations followed optimally by new and higher level integrations, producing higher more complex structures, each level holarchically enfolding the previous 'subordinate' levels. But if, following a differentiation, there is a failure to successfully integrate, there may occur either a pathological regression to a previous level or a condition of repression where one emergent dimension represses the other. In this way, science has indeed come to dominate the rich interiors of human subjectivity which should now be given an equal value. But, for Wilber, the higher integration called for ~ a goal in apparent agreement with the perspective expressed by Tarnas ~ by no means implies a going back, previous to the differentiations of the Enlightenment, to a unity that we once knew but have now lost. According to Wilber, it is not the subject/object differentiation which is at fault; but what happened afterward which stands to be corrected before we can further evolve.
As reasonable as Wilber's transpersonal progressive view may appear ~ and my brief paraphrase hardly does it justice ~ it is questionable whether it goes deep enough to engage the dialectical processes which have driven both the development of the individual and the grand sweep of history. If Wilber's account inclines strongly to the progressive view ~ albeit a view which embraces interiority and the goal of the transcendent ~ then the psychological developmental account of the transpersonal theorist Michael Washburn (1994, 1995) inclines toward the opposite pole, though offering a possible integration of both views in the above spirit of Tarnas. Washburn recognizes the development of the rational mental-ego as indeed a developmental step forward, but a step necessarily involving a primal division or separation, a primal repression of the matrix ~ in his terms, the 'dynamic ground' at the core of things. In order to move beyond the subject/object split, beyond the limitations of rational egoity with all its accompanying limitations and existential angst, we must reconnect with the matrix. But such a rejoining occurs at a higher and more developed level than primal participation mystique, a more complexified level of consciousness where the relatively autonomous egoic self is seen as a developmental advance even though consciousness finds its greatest fulfillment only through an ultimate unity with the 'dynamic ground'.
Just as Wilber draws heavily on the work of numerous developmentalists (Piaget, Loevinger, Kohlberg, Habermas etc.), so too does Washburn, but with a greater emphasis placed on social and psychological dialectical processes. Washburn draws mainly on object relations theory with its emphasis on the developmentally formative early mother-child dynamics and enframes his account in terms of the interplay of Jungian archetypal polarities and the depth psychological perspective. The logical infrastructure of Washburn's model then, by his own admission, renders it paradigmatically incommensurable with the model of Wilber. This becomes especially apparent in the profoundly different ways each of them models the structural and dynamic relationships among prepersonal, personal and transpersonal dimensions. Strongly opposed by Wilber, Washburn's account clearly belongs to that consensus which describes the nature and development of the consciousness/world process as an evolutionary movement unfolding from an original state of pre-differentiated unconscious fusion through an increasingly differentiated, distinct and dualistic sense of egoic self experiencing alienation from an ultimately unknowable world. There then follows, as an individual and a collective possibility, a process of reuniting with the original 'ground' or totality ~ but now in full all-embracing consciousness where all previous dualities and conflicts have become reconciled and resolved.
Washburn's view comes under attack by Wilber who considers such thinking 'retro-regressive'. By that, he means that such an account confuses infantile or primitive unconscious fusion with higher conscious integration ~ a different thing altogether. The level of non-dual consciousness preceding the self consciousness of the mental-ego and the level of non-dual consciousness transcending self consciousness are distinct, but have become confused in much of the Western psychological literature since the pre-personal and the trans-personal are both non-personal, non-rational, and non-linguistic. Here is Wilber's by now famous 'pre-trans distinction' which establishes a pivotal separation between prepersonal and transpersonal levels. Such confusion, he terms the 'pre-trans fallacy' committed both by reductionists and those of a romantically mystical persuasion.
Most traditional psychologists, Freud included, were guilty of the reductionist error. On the reductionist side, the fallacy manifests as an explaining away of the higher in terms of the lower such as the explanation of art as sublimated sexuality or of mystical experience as a mere reliving of the intrauterine state, if not as some form of schizophrenia. It is present in its mystic form in the thought of the humanistic 'body-wisdom' school (e.g. Reich, Brown, Watts) and in the Gaia/Goddess deep eco perspective. Here is an exalting of the lower, simply released from the oppression of mental culture, as the higher. This form of the 'fallacy' believes that some degree of transcendent purity existed in the historic past and as the spontaneous innocence of young children, but is a state of being and knowing which has been repressed rather than nurtured by a dualistic and pathological society. In this ostensibly 'regressive' view, the transpersonal state is attainable through a releasing of the natural pre-existing ecstacy/wisdom of the body from the oppressive and negative distortions of social conditioning. It remains debatable whether Wilber's pre-trans distinction is, or is not, an overly rigid demarcation. On the face of it, Wilber's logic is seen as tacitly disparaging indigenous spirituality as a more primitive mode of knowing than the modern urbanized ego, or as a rare level attained only by the most advanced shamanic members of the tribe. Similarly, it tends to judge the earlier Goddess religions as more primitive than the scientific and patriarchal mind which followed.
Although confined to individual development, Washburn's account engages the grand polarities at the core of the dialectical interplay of consciousness and unconsciousness more adequately than does Wilber. Although I feel that Washburn's precise formulation of the foundational dialectic is not quite logically adequate and actually leaves him open to some of Wilber's criticisms, a more adequate model would incorporate a foundational dialectic resonant to Washburn's general object-relations and Jungian orientation, and would be in broad agreement with him as to the necessity of some sort of primal division of polarities involving a 'primal repression' (or foundational schism) upon which the mental-ego is based ~ precisely a mapping of the simultaneous gain and loss to which Tarnas is referring.
Associated with the intrauterine state and the sequential stages of the birth process, there appear to be four essential deep structures of the unconscious which Grof calls the perinatal matrices. The matrices function as deep archetypal structures which constellate whole classes of pre-personal, personal, collective, and transpersonal experiences in a non reductive, multidimensional, and interpenetrating cosmic nexus.
Briefly, the sequence goes like this: From an original state of undifferentiated unity in the womb (Basic Perinatal Matrix I, or BPM I for short), the birth process begins with the first uterine spasms with as yet 'no way out' (BPM II). Then, with the dilation of the cervix, the fetus is gradually propelled through the birth canal (BPM III) and the child is eventually born (BPM IV). The experiences and disturbances at any stage of the intrauterine and birth process have been established by Grof as corresponding to certain generic existential conditions and psychopathological categories. The dissolution of boundaries in BPM I constellates experiences of cosmic and mystical unity but also such pathologies as paranoia, hypochondriasis and a confusion of day dreams with reality. BPM II is an experience of cosmic engulfment, of no exit or hell, and connects with depression, inferiority, guilt and so on. BPM III is characterized by a death-rebirth struggle with sadomasochistic, titanic and scatological themes leading to the moment of birth. BPM IV, which is the moment of birth, is a sudden release and relaxation from the build up of tension; the termination and resolution of the death-rebirth struggle and is associated in terms of the therapeutic encounter, with experiences of spiritual liberation, redemption, and salvation following the experience of total annihilation and of 'hitting the cosmic bottom'. Complex modes of human experience and behaviour, both 'normal' and pathological can, then, be understood and therapeutically influenced by relating them to these foundational structures; not simply in a cause/effect biographical fashion, but most interestingly, by approaching them as critical access points to the complex dimensionality of the psyche.
Grof's clinical and experiential regression of thousands of subjects back to their actual birth experiences and beyond the 'perinatal' doorway to transpersonal and deeply transformational dimensions, has revealed a powerful sequence of stages and structures which, rather than being reducible to a biological birth trauma, reveal an underlying archetypal and developmental structure with religious, philosophical, and psychological implications. Richard Tarnas (1991) describes, in terms of his own overarching transpersonal historical narrative, the archetypal process implied by Grof's findings:
...the archetypal sequence that governed the perinatal phenomena from womb through birth canal to birth was experienced above all as a powerful dialectic -- moving from an initial state of undifferentiated unity to a problematic state of constriction, conflict, and contradiction, with an accompanying sense of separation, duality, and alienation; and finally moving through a stage of complete annihilation to an unexpected redemptive liberation that overcame and fulfilled the intervening alienated state -- restoring the initial unity but on a new level that preserved the achievement of the whole trajectory...In psychological terms, the experience was one of movement from an initial condition of undifferentiated pre-egoic consciousness to a state of increasing individuation and separation between self and world, increasing existential alienation, and finally an experience of ego death followed by psychological rebirth; this was often complexly associated with the biographical experience of moving from the womb of childhood through the labor of life and the contraction of aging to the encounter with death....On the philosophical level, the experience was comprehensible in what might be called Neoplatonic-Hegelian-Nietzschean terms as a dialectical evolution from an archetypally structured primordial Unity, through an emanation into matter with increasing complexity, multiplicity, and individuation, through a state of absolute alienation ~ the death of God in both Hegel's and Nietzsche's sense ~ followed by a dramatic Aufhebung, a synthesis and reunification with self-subsistent Being that both annihilates and fulfills the individual trajectory. (pp 429,430)
..it is essential to distinguish the process of transition from one developmental stage to another from the birth trauma and other events that endanger the survival of the organism. The latter experiences are of a different logical type and are in a meta-position in relation to the processes that Wilber includes under the description of thanatos. They endanger the existence of the organism as an individual entity without regard to the level of its development. Thus, a critical survival threat can occur during embryonic existence, in any stage of the birth process, or at any age, without regard to the level of consciousness evolution. A vital threat during prenatal existence or in the process of childbirth actually seems to be instrumental in creating a sense of separateness and isolation, rather than destroying it, as Wilber suggests. (p 136-137)And third: while Wilber's pre-trans distinction is valid in one sense, transcendence of the ego level actually implies a re-encounter with the original ground unconscious. Transformation beyond the dualistic mental-ego lies through a re-encounter with the original matrix, which is not so in Wilber's model. Grof's findings in particular suggest that there is no sharp distinction between these dimensions and that the transformational encounter with the unconscious is not restricted to the personal biographical level 'this side' of the transpersonal level. According to Grof (1985), Wilber's emphasis on linearity and on the radical difference between pre-phenomena and trans-phenomena is too absolute a distinction. He writes,
The psyche has a multidimensional, holographic nature, and using a linear model to describe it will produce distortions and inaccuracies...My own observations suggest that, as consciousness evolution proceeds from the centauric to the subtle realms and beyond, it does not follow a linear trajectory, but in a sense enfolds into itself. In this process, the individual returns to earlier stages of development, but evaluates them from the point of view of a mature adult. At the same time, he or she becomes consciously aware of certain aspects and qualities of these stages that were implicit, but unrecognized when confronted in the context of linear evolution. Thus, the distinction between pre- and trans- has a paradoxical nature; they are neither identical, nor are they completely different from each other. When this understanding is then applied to the problems of psychopathalogy, the distinction between evolutionary and pathological states may lie more in the context, the style of approaching them and the ability to integrate them into everyday life than in the intrinsic nature of the experiences involved (p. 137)Any adequate synthesis of Grof's and Wilber's perspectives must certainly incorporate this more holographic and wrap around nature of consciousness within the grand spectrum. As Tarnas (1991) puts it,
...this archetypal dialectic was often experienced simultaneously on both an individual level and, often more powerfully, a collective level, so that the movement from primordial unity through alienation to liberating resolution was experienced in terms of the evolution of an entire culture, for example, or of humankind as a whole -- the birth of homosapiens out of nature no less than the birth of the individual child from the mother. Here personal and transpersonal were equally present, inextricably fused, so that ontogeny not only recapitulated phylogeny but in some sense opened into it. (p.429)A synthesizing model must provide precisely such a nonlinear, holographic and personal/transpersonal interpenetrating structure while at the same time preserving, albeit in modified form, the essential insights of holarchical perennialism. It is this idea of the necessary re-encounter with the ground unconscious that constitutes the first levels of the transpersonal domain which is also the main feature of Michael Washburn's model. Such a synthesizing framework needs to be articulated in terms of Wilber's general perennialist holarchical scheme, and at the same time incorporating the dynamic/dialectical depth dimension of Washburn while mapping Grof's matrices as implicit (pre-manifest) within the picture. I believe that the nature of the fundamental dialectic; namely, the ego/ground and conscious/unconscious relation, can be more adequately pictured than by Washburn (cum Jung/Neumann) and in this way can reconcile the deepest insights of Wilber, Washburn, Grof, and Tarnas.
The collective psyche seems to be in a grip of a powerful archetypal dynamic in which the long-alienated modern mind is breaking through, out of the contractions of its birth process, out of what Blake called its "mind-forg'd manacles," to rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos. And so we can recognize a multiplicity of these archetypal sequences, with each scientific revolution, each change of world view; yet perhaps we can also recognize one overall archetypal dialectic in the evolution of human consciousness that subsumes all of these smaller sequences, one long metatrajectory, beginning with the primordial participation mystique and, in a sense, culminating before our eyes.....The masculinity of the Western mind has been pervasive and fundamental, in both men and women, affecting every aspect of Western thought, determining its most basic conception of the human being and the human role in the world...This masculine predisposition in the evolution of the Western mind, though largely unconscious, has been not only characteristic of that evolution, but essential to it. For the evolution of the Western mind has been driven by a heroic impulse to forge an autonomous rational human self by separating it from the primordial unity of nature.... the evolution of the Western mind has been founded on the repression of the feminine -- on the repression of undifferentiated unitary consciouness, of the participation mystique with nature: a progressive denial of the anima mundi, of the soul of the world, of the community of being, of the all pervading, of mystery and ambiguity, of imagination, emotion, instinct, body, nature, woman. But this separation necessarily calls forth a longing for a reunion with that which has been lost....For the deepest passion of the Western mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life: to differentiate itself from but then rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul.....The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmos in a mature participation mystique... (p.440-444).This view of a primal separation impelled by a Promethean impulse toward a heroic egoic self but accompanied by the pain of separation and alienation, inspiring an urge toward a fully conscious reunion with the ground of Being, indeed enjoys an experiential confirmation in the work of Stanislav Grof and a deep philosophical resonance with the work of Jung, Neumann and the transpersonal theorist Michael Washburn. But is this view in its general features a philosophically adequate account? Wilber thinks not and mounts some pretty formidable arguments compelling us ~ if we are to forge a more adequate synthesis of the two perspectives ~ toward more nuanced definitions of such terms as 'primordial unity', original separation, re-connection, a 'higher' level of participation mystique, and masculine and feminine.
In Wilber's view, the condition of experiential Unity with the Absolute which the mystics report is not a recapturing of anything which lies in our collective past. In terms of time and history, the advent of the universe at the Big Bang constitutes an involutionary fall of the Absolute into unconsciousness as matter. Harking back to thinkers from Plotinus to Hegel to Aurobindo, the universe is seen as sleeping Spirit in a long slow process of evolutionary awakening all the way up to human forms. The self-conscious ego that we know only too well is a step along this path, and the transpersonal realms where Spirit will eventually awaken to itself as Spirit lies in our collective possible future even if presaged by a number of advanced individuals such as the Buddha or Jesus. Wilber also describes the foundational involutionary/evolutionary interplay as occuring across the interface of life and death, the domains of the Bardo where the soul briefly experiences an unfolding to the highest level, then unable to sustain the experience in accordance with the actual level to which it unfolded in life, once more falls back into a new incarnation to experience another chapter in its long evolutionary journey back to fully awakened Spirit. There is then, no archaic condition, no original matrix in nature to return to, either in the past of the child or in the past of the species; least of all with which to recognize its original Unity as a mystical Realization. Original unity lies ontologically and historically prior to time/space. Of course, in terms of personal growth, there is the challenge of integrating the conscious self sense with the personal unconscious, recovering disconnected fragments from one's biographical past which need to be integrated; but the taking back of projections, attaining a more realistic self sense, derepressing emotions and memories ~ all lie 'this side' of the transpersonal. What the mystics are speaking of as the "farther reaches of human nature", lie in higher domains beyond this.
There is a general agreement between these paradigms that higher level mystical Realizations presuppose the development of some sort of autonomous self sense. Even the post-Jungian view ~ if we can call it that ~ is not saying that the Realizations of mystics are literally a straightforward reliving of previous levels of consciousness which had become lost. What then is the 'post-Jungian' view actually claiming; or, more exactly, what is it precisely that it is entitled to claim such that Wilber's accusation of the pre-trans fallacy does not apply? To put it another way, what is the post-Jungian view trying to articulate that is clearly not being addressed in Wilber's level by level, stage by stage evolutionary model ~ the model which Washburn refers to as the linear 'ladder paradigm'?
It is, I believe, the intuition that something of great value that we once experienced, however dimly, has been lost. Furthermore, it had to become lost for us to take the next developmental step which brings us to our present condition. Then to move on from here, we must reclaim what we have lost and integrate with it. But such an integration is not merely some modification of the ego and its drive to greater self actualization, but a radical transformation which accesses the transpersonal dimensions. The bringing together, or reconciliation of two fundamental polarities constitutes an opening into the trans-egoic domains.
I feel that both these broad views are correct in certain essential respects and can be reconciled. The key to such a reconciliation is the understanding of 'reality' ~ psyche and nature ~ in radically archetypal terms; that is, in terms of those foundational principles necessarily posited as informing and constituting such 'structures (themselves reified concepts) as the ego/self and the ground/matrix. I believe we are logically compelled to establish a multivalent archetypal polarity as ontologically central and foundational. If we understand the development of consciousness as informed by a dynamic interplay of archetypal bi-polar principles ~ part and whole, agency and communion, individual and society, masculine and feminine ~ then we can begin to understand the process which moves from a primal and interpenetrating balance toward an increasing distinction, and because of that polar distinction, to move through a state of severe imbalance, thence to move along to a new level, but now a repolarized integrative balancing of the principles. Such a process can be pictured as the awakening of consciousness at successively higher levels of a perennialist Great Chain; described by Wilber ~ adequately enough in its most broad strokes ~ as the levels of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit.
Hence, we are not speaking of a 'something' separating from something else and then rejoining it at a higher level. But we are certainly acknowledging a process of distinction and separation which eventually and optimally, at a new and higher level, leads to a reconnection, a higher level integration than original fusion. We are not positing some retroregressive return to primal levels which were allegedly more 'spiritual' than the mental-egoic level. Furthermore, this higher level integration is not something entirely different and distinct from original fusion as Wilber would have it, but is a higher level manifestation of the same archetypal dynamic which informed the original fusion!
Every psyche 'contains', or is centrally constituted by, an archetypal interplay of two poles; namely, a need for autonomous assertion and a need for connective relationship. While both these needs and ways of experiencing are originally intertwined or predifferentiated, as consciousness develops (i.e. as the conscious self), one or other of the poles (it can't be both at the same time) tends to act as the primary structural nucleus of consciousness. This fundamental polarity of agency and communion, autonomy and connection, dictates, according to socio-cultural expression arising from the situation of mother as primary nurturer (Chodorow etc.), that consciousness will constellate around one pole more than the other pole which will remain relatively unconscious. (This polarity will be expressed as a proportion rather than all or nothing). Where 'agency' constitutes the nucleus of differentiating consciousness as it does historically in most males, the experience of separation and distinction, the self as the self/not-self structure (the boy, being male is not-mother, and hence, not-other) is central. But where 'communion', the experience of relationship and connection, constitutes the nucleus of differentiating consciousness as it does historically in most females, the nature of the self is structured by a 'self/self' identity.
In this more encompassing dialectical interplay, as consciousness increases it is the male way of knowing and experiencing which achieves dominance over the female way of knowing and experiencing. It is the interplay of these gender differentiated epistemologies which constitutes the formative force of development, not the adventures of an agentic self which separates from matrix and then finds its way back ~ the story which tends to colour and skew the post-Jungian story of development. Only in relative unconsciousness, or in super-consciousness, can an archetypal polarity manifest as anything other than a state of relative division and imbalance. It is in the nature of archetypal polar logic ~ e.g. the two faces-one vase gestalt picture ~ to appear in various degrees of 'either/or' unfolding between the 'both/and' ends of unconsciousness and superconsciousness.
The notion that the trajectory of history ~ the development of consciousness ~ has up to now been an archetypally Promethean and 'masculine' project and that such autonomy and separation has been a necessary and inevitable step in a farther reaching teleological unfolding is of central significance in the working out of our transpersonal model. Such a state of imbalance and division ~ self and other, subject and object, male and female ~ needs to be understood more profoundly, not exactly as a condition of separation from a matrix which expresses only the male half of the picture, but as a dialectical interplay of two polar and fundamental ways of knowing and experiencing which have been generally aligned (and culturally reinforced) with the male and female perspectives. Both genders undergo a process of differentiation of conscious selfhood from the primal matrix as nature and mother. However, the nature of this generic differentiation process has been different for males and females (though these modes will not be as polarized under later historical post-patriarchal family constellations). If the male's differentiation from the mother is that of separation producing distinction, the female's process of differentiation is that of emergence producing relationship.
But the male understands relationship ~ the communal pole ~ only as the primal fusion with the mother against which he had to struggle in order to establish his autonomous identity, in order to accomplish the primal differentiation which all selves ~ male and female ~ must accomplish. The female does not fail to establish a self, or succeed only in establishing a weaker self because of her remaining more fused with mother. But she does not establish the kind of separative and assertive self as primary. It is the agentic self which has become paradigmatic for self or ego, unfolding according to the traditional mythology of the hero, while the female self has constituted the absolutely foundational and necessary, yet devalued infrastructure of all male achievements. Historically, femaleness has funtioned as the relational glue which maintains fundamental social cohesion which has allowed individualistic male heroics.
So the fundamental division at the core of the mental-egoic deep structure is not separation from the matrix (the particular male issue) but the archetypally inevitable division of agency and communion, autonomy and connection. It is important to understand that connection and relationship do not bridge the foundational gap as some believe who hold the feminine principle itself to be the corrective new paradigm of holism; rather, it is one of the poles. In order to map a more adequate picture of the structure and development of consciousness, we must understand the nature of the psycho-social gender polarity and trace the way that the fundamental androcentric distortion has skewed the perspectives of twentieth century psychology and even found its way into the transpersonal perspectives we are engaging here. Most systems of psychology still carry the male agentic and separative bias. Even Jung who penetrated to the archetypal and polar nature of animus and anima, did so with an insidiously sexist twist. Michael Washburn has been at pains to incorporate the feminist perspective of such theorists as Chodorow and Dinnerstein into his work. He has exposed the sexism in Jung's otherwise valid archetypal rendering of the anima/animus polarity while offering a more adequate interpretation of both the animus/anima and the psychoanalytic concept of the Oedipal dynamics. Our model will need to engage this and bring in other viewpoints such as Gilligan and Belenky.
The foundational division within mental-egoic consciousness is not the male self/not-self division specifically, but the division that exists in all of us between the agency and communion poles of our being. This is reflected in the still dominant Promethean Agency of the collective. For the male dominant or Promethean society, this means that the masculine must now reclaim the marginalized and forcefully repressed feminine. Specifically, this means that men must now contact and awaken their communion while women must contact and develop their agency. The generic division between agency and communion within the essential polarity of men and women has a different characteristic because agency dominates over communion and not vice versa. Agency forcefully rejects and represses communion whereas from the communion pole, agency simply remains relatively unidifferentiated or, through male oppression, forbidden for females to develop. The course of history can be characterized as masculine because the assertive masculine epistemology has inevitably dominated over the relational feminine.
But the story of increasing gender polarity from birth onward is grounded in a prior and deeper ontological and epistemological dynamic polar structure which is precisely that level addressed by Grof's schema and Tarnas's philosophical interpretations of the perinatal realm. This foundational dialectical polarity is completely pre- and trans- gender. It is nothing other than the nature of embodied consciousness itself! Grof's model from BPM I to BPM IV is the story of the nine-month interface of disembodied consciousness and embodied consciousness. (Addressed by Wade but put into a truncating developmental hierarchical sequence by Wilber).
This story, clothed in the unconscious past to be again opened only on the Return path of the transpersonal domain, is indeed the story of primary separation from the matrix on a purely biological, physical and sensory level. Here is nothing other than the life/death boundary, another play of archetypal principles which cannot be properly mapped as a developmental sequence as does Wilber. The particular epistemological situatedness of embodied consciousness, of every biological organism in relation to its environment, establishes the foundational perceptual subject/object distinction long before Descartes. The direction of development of embodied consciousness 'up' to the boundary of transpersonal development, is skewed toward an increasing dominance of the archetypal individual Agentic pole over the Communal pole. The uniquely male experience of distinctive separation from the mother-matrix through what Mahler termed the dyadic individuation-rapprochement crisis onto the triadic Oedipal resolution (See Washburn's important revision of the Oedipal theory), meshes most naturally with the primary pre-gender archetypal bias toward the Agency pole. For this reason, the two levels of the story of separation become conflated in theories which are still not adequate in their mapping of the relationship of prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal dimensions.
Such a model would identify certain constitutive principles or foundational metaphors of explanation, understood as underlying, generating and informing the deep self/world and individual/collective structures at all levels of evolutionary unfolding. The perennialist-dialectical model would be based on the principle of a dynamic bi-polarity, resonant to the Taoist metaphysical concept of the yin and yang; a dialectical interplay of archetypal bi-polar principles informing the successive stages and structures of the development and evolution of consciousness. It would be a particular mapping of the relation of self and not-self, psyche and world, agency and communion, individual and collective, male and female ~ different valencies of the foundational dialectic which drives development.
Consciousness/world is an inseparable bi-polar structure so that when we speak of ego, we are simultaneously speaking of the context within which the ego exists. An adequate new paradigmatic model will need to map the totality of psyche and world, self and other, at each stage rather than focussing on the figure and leaving the background in shade. In fact, in his later work Wilber himself, articulates the primal polarity of agency and communion, but this concept is not adequately combined with his differentiation/integration process. Engaging the Wilber/Grof/Tarnas/Washburn conversation, I have elsewhere suggested some of the features of such a synthesising model (1997) and have also suggested an epistemological and ontological reconception of Wilber's four quadrant model (1998) so as to open up the logical room for both the holarchical perennialist and bi-polar dialectical perspectives.
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Goddard, Gerry (1998) "Ken Wilber's Four-Quadrant Model; toward a reframing." (unpublished paper)
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