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WHAT IS TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY Part Two: Introduction
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Department of Psychology Metropolitan State College of Denver |
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I first heard of transpersonal psychology in 1972 when I was in graduate school on a National Science Foundation fellowship to study experimental psychology. While the term had been around since Abraham Maslow, Stan Grof, Victor Frankl, and others coined it in the late 1960s, it was new to me. I found myself drawn to its integration of spirituality and psychology, and I appreciated the opportunity to explore questions of higher states of consciousness and optimal mental health through a psychological and phenomenological, rather than a religious, framework. I felt this approach offered powerful ways of exploring and understanding these phenomena. I still do. This field is moving into a maturity in which it has a great deal to offer counsellors, teachers, therapists, and researchers interested in psychological health and the full development of human potential. In this article, I will offer a personal context as well as an overview of the field in order to introduce transpersonal psychology and examine some of its applications in education and counselling. My graduate studies focused initially on cognitive factors in classical conditioning (Davis, 1974). I felt this research had implications for the self-regulation of dysfunctional conditioned responses and stress-related problems. Later, I looked at it with a broader view and saw it as a study on mindfulness and automaticity. How can we free ourselves from awareness-limiting automatized behaviors and perceptions? One answer is to bring mindfulness to our conditioned responses and witness them in a non-reactive way. Essentially, this research led me to the perennial insights of meditation teachers and toward transpersonal psychology. At the same time, I became strongly interested in various consciousness-raising techniques as part of my own personal growth. I participated in encounter groups, meditation, massage therapy, EST, rock-climbing, and various means of altering consciousness, including hypnosis, psychoactive drugs, and biofeedback. Each of these gave me important new ways of knowing myself and the world. However, it was as if I were walking in several worlds in my graduate work in experimental and clinical psychology and in my personal search. These came together for me in the psychology of consciousness and transpersonal psychology. I was able to study information processing, attention, and cognitive psychology (my experimental psychology world); biofeedback, stress management, and psychotherapy (my clinical psychology world); and altered states of consciousness, meditation, and self-realization (my transpersonal psychology world). My dissertation (Davis, 1977) reflected the blend of these perspectives. Using guided imagery to induce emotional states, I found evidence for state dependent learning with moods. This has implications for working with clients' intense feeling states and inaccessible memories. More important to me, however, was what this research said about the nature of identity. As our emotional states change, the information we can readily access changes, bringing subtle (and not-so-subtle) shifts in identity. Our identities are not stable, enduring entities but fluid processes shifting with our physiological and emotional states. Rather than being a rock in the middle of a stream of experience, the self looks more like a standing wave, always changing although with some common patterns. As with my MA thesis research, what had started as conventional psychological research had taken me into one of the fundamental teachings of most spiritual and transpersonal systems. These insights came home to me as I practiced mindfulness meditation, sensory awareness techniques, ritual, and other transpersonal methods. Transpersonal psychology was giving me means and encouragement to encounter these realms. In 1975, I found the work of Hameed Ali. He was just beginning to teach what he later developed into the Diamond Approach and has described in books using the pen-name, A. H. Almaas (e.g., Almaas, 1986, 1990, 1999). For me, it was intensely personal work, and, for many years, I hesitated to approach it too theoretically or abstractly. Only some time later did I begin to understand the depth and precision of this path. The Diamond Approach is now being recognized as important to the larger project of discovering the role of psychological development in spiritual realization (Cortright, 1997; Wilber, 1997), and I have described it in a recent book (Davis, 1999a). It is, I feel, the best example we have yet of a genuine integration of spirituality and psychology. After completing graduate school, I began teaching undergraduate psychology and practicing psychotherapy. I set my professional interests in transpersonal psychology aside, although I pursued them intensely outside of my teaching and therapy practice. I was unsure how to talk about such unconventional topics as meditation, altered states of consciousness, and mysticism in an academic context, and I was splitting my personal life from my professional life. The worlds I had been integrating in graduate school were becoming increasingly separate again. That is, until I stumbled onto a "vision fast," a wilderness-based rite of passage and reconnection. This form, involving a week-long wilderness trip with a three-day solo fast in the middle, was based on the work of Steven Foster and Meredith Little (1988, 1997; Davis, 1989). It reflects the nearly-universal three-stage rites of passage model: (1) disidentification from one's previous life stage and outdated self-images and roles (severance), (2) a period of solitude, fasting, and exposure to the natural world offering a chance to test and confirm one's fitness and willingness to move on to a new life stage (threshold), and (3) a return to one's life, work, relationships, and community (reincorporation). The wilderness setting, along with the guidance of these stages and the support of ritual, is important to fostering openness to self-realization, initiation, and healing. This practice is at once physical, psychological, interpersonal, and transpersonal. Foster and Little have been at the center of bringing it into the modern Western culture; their article in this issue illustrates their work in the multiracial culture of South Africa. My own vision fast sixteen years ago, along with my work with Almaas and the Diamond Approach, began to heal the split in my life between my personal and professional lives, and I came away with both new understanding and the courage to express my commitment to transpersonal growth in my teaching as well as my personal life. From this experience, I developed a college course in transpersonal psychology which I have taught nearly every semester since. The course's Web site provides more information, including a syllabus, course notes, and relevant links (Davis, 1999b). Transpersonal psychology has found its way into all of my other classes and professional interests (without being forced), including my courses on research methods (Davis, 1996), environmental psychology (Davis, in press), and health psychology (Davis, Lockwood, and Wright, 1991), as well as my private practice. My ongoing studies of transpersonal psychology, the Diamond Approach, and wilderness-based rites of passage and healing continue to hold, challenge, and reveal my deeper nature and its expression. |
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