The Transpersonal

Spirituality in Psychotherapy and Counselling

John Rowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317836957
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

In this new edition of The Transpersonal, John Rowan takes account of the growing interest in spirituality, assessing the many new developments in the field and providing an essential overview of the multitude of guides now available on the subject.

By providing a clear and highly readable introduction to the realm of the transpersonal, this book eliminates many of the misunderstandings that plague this area. It relates the transpersonal to everyday life as well as to professional concerns and the various schools of therapy. Divided into three parts, Being, Doing and Knowing, it encourages the reader to explore the levels of consciousness, the techniques involved in transpersonal work and the underlying theory. The unique relationship between the therapist and client is examined in detail, as are the imagined and imaginal world, personal mythology and transcultural work. An entirely new section is included on the ways in which the transpersonal therapist can use the concept of subpersonalities.

This fully updated and revised version of John Rowan's original pioneering text provides a highly practical guide which will be useful to anyone working with the growing number of people with spiritual concerns.

Chapter 1 Some pioneers

DOI: 10.4324/9781315825137-2

Let us look now at where this field has come from. This will help in getting our bearings by reference to some familiar landmarks. If we try to understand these experiences, we are in good company. Over the years, many eminent people have made contributions to our understanding of what they are all about.

William James

One of the earliest and most important of these was William James. He made a special study of the freedom of the will, and came to the conclusion that two steps were important: firstly acknowledging that our own choices are creative; and secondly acknowledging equally that sometimes we have to surrender our will. For the first, consider this quotation:

Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust.

(James 1896, p.59)

That is at the level of the personal. But now James moves on to the transpersonal, and here he tells us that there are rare times when instead of striving to strengthen will, we must be prepared to put it aside, to surrender it. When we want to go further in our own development, particularly in the transpersonal area, we cannot do it by an act of will. The intention to go onwards has to be there – ‘Walk on!’, as the Zen Buddhists say – and this can bring us close to the complete unification aspired after, but ‘it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of our own will’ (James 1896, p.170).

James recognised the existence of a spiritual self, as well as a material self and a social self. He saw it as more inner, more subjective, more dynamic. He experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a way of opening up his consciousness, and spoke of ‘the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination’ (James 1969, p.359). But although drugs like this can open up a sense of the mystical, this sense often fades away again. It takes more than that to make such experiences a real possession and a real part of our identity. We saw earlier that the right set and setting can make a big difference to this. But James went on to achieve his own mystical experiences, and eventually came to the conclusion that: ‘there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir’ (James in Murphy and Ballou 1960, p.324).

He spoke of the higher self (what we are calling the transpersonal self), and said: ‘He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck’ (James 1896, p.384). So he was always interested in the practical aspects of spiritual experience, and how it actually worked in daily life. However, he never used the actual term ‘transpersonal’.

Dane Rudhyar

Not well known outside his own circle, Dane Rudhyar was a writer, philosopher and astrologer who specialized in a more spiritual approach, using many of Jung’s ideas and contributing much of his own.

‘Instead of impersonal’, writes Rudhyar, who started using the term in 1929, ‘let us use another word more telling – transpersonal. A personal type of behaviour (or feeling, or thought) is one rooted in the substantive and conditioned form of the personality. A transpersonal form of behaviour is one starting from the universal unconditioned Self in Man and using the personality merely as an instrument’ (Rudhyar 1975, p.117).

Elsewhere Rudhyar speaks of his own use of the word in contradistinction to the usage of some others. They use it to mean any state of being or consciousness beyond the personal level. He does not. His own view is this:

I have used the term since 1930 to represent action which takes place through a person, but which originates in a centre of activity existing beyond the level of personhood. Such action makes use of human individuals to bring to focus currents of spiritual energy, supramental ideas, or realizations for the purpose of bringing about, assisting, or guiding transformative processes.

(Rudhyar 1983, p.219)

This is very close to what we today mean by the word, and so we have to say that Rudhyar is an exemplar of what we most want to talk about here.

Carl Gustav Jung

Jung and those who followed after him have made an enormous contribution to this field, particularly in the area of myths and symbols. Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious enabled him to tune in to the mythopoetic level inside himself and other people, and to see connections which other people had never suspected. He made respectable, so to speak, a whole range of experience which had been excluded as being crazy or weird. And he drew attention to the existence of symbol systems (such as alchemy, astrology and the Tarot) not as freakish survivals from a superstitious past, but as accurate portrayals of our inner life today. He trusted very much to his own experience and followed it, and Radmila Moacanin reminds us that:

All of Jung’s discoveries were accompanied by dreams or synchronistic events that either pointed the way or gave him confirmation that he was proceeding in the right direction.

(Moacanin 1986, p.39)

This gives all his work, no matter how apparently abstract, a personal quality which we now see as very valuable.

Jung seems to have been the first person to have used the word ‘transpersonal’, though what he meant by it is not quite what we mean today. In his essay ‘The Structure of the Unconscious’, published in France in 1916, Jung says:

the collective psyche comprises … that portion [of the mental functions] which is firmly established, is acquired by heredity, and exists everywhere; whose activity is, as it were, automatic; and which is in consequence transpersonal or impersonal.

(Jung, CW, Vol.7, par.454)

It is clear that here he is identifying the transpersonal with the collective unconscious. This becomes even clearer in the fifth edition, published in 1943 (he revised this essay several times), where he says:

We have to distinguish between a personal unconscious and an impersonal or transpersonal unconscious. We speak of the latter also as the collective unconscious, because it is detached from anything personal and is entirely universal.

(Jung, CW, Vol.7, par.103)

From this we can see that although Jung was the first to use it, he was not the first to create its present meaning.

It must be said that Jung has made huge contributions to our understanding of the whole transpersonal area, particularly on the question of symbols. But it also has to be said that he cruelly limited himself by his insistence that he was an empirical scientist, and that everything he talked about could be contained within psychology. This meant that he had to cram everything spiritual somehow into the collective unconscious. This is a kind of reductionism, where Jung is forced by his own logic into saying that the spiritual is nothing but the psychological.

As Demaris Wehr points out, this has the curious effect of turning Jungian psychology into a religion, while at the same time denying that it is any such thing.

With the archetype as the governing concept, analytical psychology is a religion that transcends and embraces the religions of the world … Jung founded his psychoreligion on the authority of experience, which in his case and that of his patients was numinous and transformative.

(Wehr 1988, pp.94–5)

Jung is confusing different levels within the spiritual realm, and reducing them all to different aspects of the collective unconscious.

Later Jungians are clearer about this, and James Hillman in particular has come out strongly in favour of the idea that Jungians should stick to the soul, and steer clear of the spirit. He will talk happily about gods, because they belong to the level of soul, being multiple, like all symbols; but he will not talk about God in the monotheistic sense, regarding that as beyond his concerns.

Within the affliction is a complex, within the complex an archetype, which in turn refers to a God.

(Hillman 1975, p.104)

Note that he says ‘a God’ not ‘God’, as Jung might have done. Hillman has a polytheistic vision, which is very much a part of the transpersonal level as it is understood today.

Polytheistic psychology does not focus upon such constructs as identity, unity, centeredness, integration – terms that have entered psychology from its monotheistic background. Instead, a polytheistic psychology favours differentiating, elaborating, particularizing, complicating, affirming and preserving. The emphasis is less upon changing what is there into something better (transformation and improvement) and more on deepening what is there into itself (individualizing and soul-making).

(Hillman 1981, p.124)

But this is considerably different from what Jung himself was saying. Jung was monotheistic in Hillman’s sense of the word. And as such, he never really understood Eastern philosophy or Eastern religion. As Coward (1985) noted, Jung never really understood or embraced Yoga, and refused to talk about the top two chakras. He never understood or accepted the concept of samadhi, still less the idea that there were several different levels of samadhi to be experienced.

This means that we shall have to disagree in part with the following statement of Jolande Jacobi:

Jungian psychotherapy is not an analytical procedure in the usual sense of the term, although it adheres strictly to the relevant findings of science and medicine. It is a Heilsweg in the two-fold sense of the German word: a way of healing and a way of salvation … It has all the instruments needed to relieve the trifling psychic disturbances that may be the starting-point of a neurosis, or to deal successfully with the gravest and most complicated developments of psychic disease. But in addition it knows the way and has the means to lead the individual to his ‘salvation’, to the knowledge and fulfilment of his own personality, which have always been the aim of spiritual striving.

(Jacobi 1962, p.59)

We can now see that she is right in saying that Jungian psychotherapy is a way of healing as well as a therapy in the ordinary sense – this is part of what the transpersonal level involves and entails. She is wrong, however, in saying that it is a path to salvation. That is more to do with the world of spirit, the monotheistic level, which the Jungian approach cannot deal with. Nor can some of the transpersonal methods we shall be meeting in this book lead to salvation.

We cannot leave a discussion of Jung without remarking on his racism and sexism. Both of these were of course very common, almost universal, at the time when Jung started his career, but they are serious stumbling blocks for the student today. Farhad Dalal says:

He explicitly equates: (1) The modern black with the prehistoric human; (2) The modern black conscious with the white unconscious; and (3) The modern black adult with the white child.

(Dalal 1988, p.263)

This is of course offensive to people of colour, who find it hard to overlook such consistent and strongly expressed prejudice, put over in the light of theory and clinical validity. Jung thought that black people were inferior, not just different.

Similarly, Demaris Wehr shows how Jung’s idea of women is ho...