Existential Analysis 23.

1: January 2012

Existentialism and the Transpersonal

John Rowan
Abstract
An attempt to comment on the low level of attention to the transpersonal in
the journal Existential Analysis. In view of the eminent existentialists who
have expressed a personal interest in the spiritual realms, this seems odd.
Some possible lines of enquiry are pursued.

Key words
Existentialists, transpersonal, meditation

Transpersonal psychology has been developing since the 1960s, and is now
well established, through learned journals like the Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology and the BPS Transpersonal Psychology Review.
It was named by Maslow and Sutich as an alternative to the word
spirituality, which had become too wide and general and used in a variety
of ways, some respectable, some less so. The great advantage of using the
term transpersonal is that it is quite clear and explicit, referring to a stage
of psychospiritual development that is not to be confused with the prepersonal (pre-rational, pre-conventional, etc.) and the personal (everyday
life, the consensus trance, the they, the mental ego, or whatever label
we find useful). It includes the authentic (Wade, 1996), and also the further
stages postulated in various systems, such as the Soul Path of many
mystics and the Impersonal Divine described by others (Cortright, 1997).
In recent years it has been subjected to the critiques of Ferrer (2002) and
others, but this gets very academic and wordy, and we need not follow all
these controversies in what follows.
Looking through back issues of Existential Analysis, I find there are very
few references to the transpersonal. Just to remind everyone, the
transpersonal is the more acceptable name for spirituality, because it makes
it clear that while spirituality can take pre-personal (fundamentalist),
personal (conventional) and transpersonal forms, the transpersonal has
only one meaning. It is clearly transconventional, transrational (in the
sense of going beyond formal logic), transintellectual and so forth.
Similarly, we do not use the word God because, as with spirituality, there
can be all sorts of limited or undesirable definitions of God, sometimes
leading even to terrorism.
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It is true that, even in the more restricted, and in some sense scientific,
realm of the transpersonal, there are conflicting voices. Perhaps the bestknown division is between Wilber and Washburn (see Rothberg & Kelly
(1998) for a good account of several of these controversies), although here
I think Washburn lost this particular battle (Thomas et al, 1993). In the
light of all this, it seems simpler for the purposes of this essay to take for
the moment the map provided by Ken Wilber, which is at least clear and
unambiguous.
What Wilber says is that within the transpersonal realm, there are two
great divisions; the Subtle and the Causal (Wilber, 2000). The former is the
realm of symbols and images, of archetypes and other concrete
representations of the divine. It is basically polytheistic (Miller, 1981). The
latter is the realm of the infinite, of ultimate concerns (Tillich, 1958), of the
Absolute, or the One, the All, or the None.
Sometimes, reading article after article about Heidegger (who, after all,
was quite religious [Letunovsky, 2006]), I miss the names of all those who
were firmly existential but also fully aware of the transpersonal path of
personal development. Keirkegaard was one of the pioneers of the
existential outlook, but he always spoke in terms of a transpersonal
dimension to life. Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Rudolph
Bultmann, Nicholas Berdyaev, Miguel de Unamuno, Rollo May all of
these had a place for the transpersonal within and because of their
existentialism.
In more recent times, Kirk Schneider has contributed some very valuable
thoughts in this area (Schneider, 2008; Schneider & Krug, 2010), which
very carefully outline both the advantages and the possible pitfalls
involved in a transpersonal approach.
What difference does it make whether an existentialist writer and thinker
accepts the transpersonal argument or not? Either way, he or she may
experience being thrown into a world which can be confusing or
problematical. But the difference is that the transpersonalist feels wonder
at all this, while the person who steers clear of the transpersonal is more
likely to feel despair, absurdity or futility. Neither of these responses is true
or false they are just different. And I know which I prefer.
There was an old prejudice against existentialism that it was atheistic
and narrow. This may have come from a set of images, which include
Sartre, the Left Bank, students dressed in black in smoky cafes, and so
forth, but if we look at the names above we see very clearly that there is a
very wide range of existentialists, with a broad variety of opinions about
the transpersonal. So why is the transpersonal so seldom mentioned in the
Journal? I am puzzled.

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Existentialism and the Transpersonal

Emmy van Deurzen

Someone who has addressed this problem is Emmy van Deurzen. She has
postulated a fourth region of experience beyond the Umwelt, the Mitwelt
and the Eigenwelt, which she calls the Uberwelt. However, having
introduced the possibility of talking about the transpersonal, she has done
very little with it. Even in her book on the pursuit of happiness it gets a
quite fulsome mention, but nothing much in the way of content. It is more
like a place set for a guest who never actually appears.
For example, she says elsewhere: Existential exploration addresses a
more spiritual dimension of insecurity as it is directly about the finding of
meaning. It provides a focus on life issues, with which many people these
days have difficulties. It addresses moral issues head on and it allows
people to come to grips with meaning (van Deurzen, 1997: p124). But
there is no attempt to explore this spiritual dimension for its own sake, and
so the opportunity to go somewhere with this insight is missed.
Where might she go? One example would be the direction taken by
Martin Buber: A life that does not seek to realise what the living person,
in the ground of his self-awareness, understands or glimpses as the right is
not merely unworthy of the spirit: it is also unworthy of life (Buber, 1958:
p40). Here is someone who has fully embraced the life of spirit, instead of
touching it gingerly, as if with tongs.

Jyoti Nanda
A frequent contributor to the journal Existential Analysis is Jyoti Nanda,
who definitely embraces the transpersonal in what she writes. She has
written very well, for example, on mindfulness. Mindfulness is a form of
meditation, and as such may lead the practitioner into the realm of the
transpersonal very readily. Of course, coming mainly from a Buddhist
orientation, Nanda emphasises the Causal and says very little about the
Subtle. The Buddhists do have a word for the Subtle they call it the
Sambhogakaya to distinguish it from the Dharmakaya, which is the Causal
realm in terms of the distinctions made above. But to recognise the Causal
and have a way to talk about it is much better than leaving the
transpersonal alone altogether.
What she understands, for example in her research study on mindfulness
(Nanda, 2005), is that there are states of consciousness other than our
everyday level. One of her co-researchers says: When I go into a
meditative state, I go into the small, clear state of quiet awareness. I just
come from a much stiller place; less influenced by my personal agendas.
So I tend to be much calmer, much more understanding, much less
reactive. This is a level of consciousness which I would label as the
Causal. In other research this does not come out so clearly (Aggs &
Bambling, 2010), because the researchers do not construct their research in
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a way that would enable such material to emerge. But at this level of
consciousness participants really get the existential message, allowing the
co-researcher to think of change, impermanence, and death, though
terrifying, as a given of existence, which cannot be got rid of, and allowing
the co-researcher to stay with the clients suffering with compassion
(Nanda, 2005: p331).
What I think is important, however, is that the compassion we are
referring to here is a very particular form of compassion. Everyday
compassion, as we often hear, can suffer from fatigue. But this kind of
compassion, which I would label as some form of spiritual compassion,
does not suffer from fatigue. Whether it is existential compassion, or
Subtle compassion, or Causal compassion, it goes beyond the everyday
level of Das Man, which can be so slippery or shaky. Once we get the
concept of levels firmly held in our minds, all sorts of issues look very
different. As I said in an essay on meaning and meaninglessness (2004),
we get away from the awful dominance of saying We think this, or We
do that. There is no We, in the sense of uniform unreconstructed
individuals who all think the same.
And psychotherapy is one place where many of us experience that sense
of moving from one level to another. As Les Todres said:
Even deeper than this sense of personal agency, is the achievement of
a more complex experience of their own personal identity, and this
complexity constitutes the sense of freedom that they were referring
to when responding to the research question. The sense of freedom is
an experience of being more than Being more than what I had
previously thought and felt; Being more than what I had said up till
now; Being more than any premature judgment of myself good or
bad; Being more than any thing or self-enclosed entity that reacts
to forces and causes.
(Todres 2002, p.103)
This is well said, and my own experience of meditating every morning
since 1982 certainly chimes in with this way of putting it.
Todres goes on to say: So the study revealed that, paradoxically, in
returning clients to the concrete details of their lives, psychotherapy is a
work of un-specialisation, or de-role-ing, a sense of complexity of
personal identity that is more than any definition can capture. (Todres,
2002; p104). This clearly moves into the transpersonal realm, and reminds
us that therapy is not just about fixing problems.

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Jan Sheppard
Which brings us to Jan Sheppard, who contributed a sparkling essay on
Gelassenheit, no-mind and psychotherapy. He explains that the term
Gelassenheit, as used by Heidegger, means releasement, but also
calmness, detachment, serenity, composure or concern or, more crudely,
letting-be (Sheppard, 2003: p253). He argues that Heidegger appears to
be using the term Gelassenheit as a synonym for meditative thinking,
contrasted with the calculative thinking that is generally encouraged in our
culture. By characterising releasement as a kind of waiting which simply
waits, Heidegger conveys a sense of holding oneself open without having
anything in mind, with an alertness to each moment Releasement means
becoming aware of our openness (ibid: p255). This is a good description
of the kind of meditation that is cultivated in mindfulness, as described in
the quotations above. Sheppard argues that this is the same as the Zen
doctrine of no-mind. As in releasement, when defeated, the [Zen] initiate
sees that he, the agent, does not act, there is just acting or just thinking. It is
happening, but neither to anyone nor from anyone, as for Heidegger it is
let in (ibid: p256). What is being described here is what in the
transpersonal field is called the Causal level of consciousness. As outlined
at the beginning of this essay, the Causal level is the level where the
meditator lets go of ordinary consciousness and even of Subtle
consciousness, and basks in the great openness, the being without limits.
We do not need to speak of the heiteres Gelassenheit to understand this,
but it is important to make the link with Heidegger, and so to show that
such notions are no stranger to existential thinking. In cultivating
mindfulness in psychotherapy we are doing something profoundly
existential, in my opinion. The fact that such methods are also embraced by
the behaviourists is neither here nor there.

Conclusion
This is not the place to go much further. We can indeed tease out the
distinction between the Causal and the Nondual, and I have done this
elsewhere (Rowan, 2007), but for the present purpose this is not necessary.
I simply wanted to register that the existential approach is by no means
hostile to the transpersonal, and has indeed made contributions to it.
Of course, in this brief essay I have not dealt with all the ramifications of
the mystical realm, which itself has an enormous literature (e.g. Harmless,
2008), and in recent years Jorge Ferrer has contributed some stirring
arguments critiquing the whole idea of the perennial philosophy which is
so prevalent in this field. Enough for now.

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John Rowan is author of The Transpersonal: Spirituality in

Psychotherapy and Counselling and is on the editorial board of the BPS
Transpersonal Psychology Review.
Contact: 70 Kings Head Hill, London E4 7LY.
Email: johnrowan@aol.com

References
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Wade, J. (1996). Changes of Mind: A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution

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