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WHAT IS TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY Part Seven: Afterword
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Department of Psychology Metropolitan State College of Denver |
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As I was finishing writing this article, the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, occurred. Fourteen students and one teacher were killed by two other students with an arsenal of guns and home-made bombs. This was a terribly shocking event, and we took several days in my classes to focus on the shooting and its aftermath. Its relevance to the content of the classes did not matter; we were in shock and grieving, and we had to respond to each other as human beings. I feel that transpersonal psychology must respond to such suffering if it is to have any value or credibility. Thus, it is not surprising that Michael Franklin's article in this issue reflects on the Littleton shooting, too. I want to relate here how we dealt with this event in my Transpersonal Psychology class because it illustrates a concrete application of this approach within the school setting. After an invitation to participate, which all the students accepted, we brought our chairs together in a circle, council-style (Zimmerman and Coyle, 1996). These students were familiar with this practice from earlier in the semester. We expressed our grief, fear, and outrage, and we listened deeply to each other. Naturally, we sought explanations and solutions; sometimes this helped and gave us new insights into human nature, and other times it fell flat as we grappled with the unthinkable. These were good, deep sessions of grieving and healing. Yet, I felt we had an opportunity to go deeper. Bringing in the theme of nonduality, we began to recognize that, in a way, we were related to all of the individuals involved. For a number of us, these reflections went from empathy to identification. Beyond understanding the victims, the bereaved, or the shooters because we had felt something similar, we realized that, in a deeper sense, we were all those involved with our own reservoirs of pain, helplessness, rage, alienation, and confusion. We embraced the personal and then shifted to a transpersonal focus. Our feelings did not go away, but they became more meaningful and easier to bear. Transpersonal psychology does not exclude the personal; it integrates it and reveals it as only a small part of a much bigger whole. We began to find in our grief a doorway to compassion, and in our helplessness an impetus to serve. We discovered that working to heal ourselves and others is the whole healing itself. This tragedy became an opportunity for service in a genuinely transpersonal sense. Responding to it became a reflexive outflow of compassion and aliveness, and in giving space for our responses, we discovered our deeper sources of wisdom a bit more. I summed up our council discussions by reading a poem by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh (1987, p. 63-64), which expresses the transpersonal vision as it relates to violence and compassion. Here are excerpts. Try http://www.earthlight.org/earthsaint26.html for the full text of this poem. |
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I am the frog swimming happily in the clear water of a
pond, I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, Please call me by my true names, Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, |
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This page was updated on March 31, 2000. |