What constitutes a transpersonal approach to healing, balancing, and transformation?, Joseph Dillard (original) (raw)
TRANSLATE THIS ARTICLE
Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber
Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel.
SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD
Joseph Dillard
What is a transpersonal approach to a therapy, coaching, or yoga? The basic elements that make an approach transpersonal are 1) multi-perspectivalism, 2) disidentification, 3) interviewing, 4) phenomenalism, 5) yoga, 6) dream yoga, 7) the integration of learning, work, and play, 8) transrationality, and 9) clear ethical intent and behavior.
Let's take these one at a time, comparing and contrasting them with therapies, coaching, and yogas.
What is “transpersonal?”
Transpersonal approaches heal because they drop waking filters and open us to emerging potentials and the priorities of our innate life compass.
“Transpersonal” means “beyond the personal,” or beyond who you think you are, your priorities, beliefs, assumptions, preferences, and worldview. “Transpersonal” is often used synonymously with “spiritual,” but there are important differences.
“Spiritual” can refer to a stage of development which is beyond “self-centered” or “secular.” The transpersonal is also a stage of development, one that includes prepersonal and personal stages, but it is not beyond the secular. Instead, it is objective toward both the secular and spiritual.
“Spiritual” can also refer to an ultimate state of enlightenment, like Buddha realization or “cosmic consciousness,” or “oneness with God.” The transpersonal makes no such claims about its degree of enlightenment.
“Spiritual” can also refer to feelings and experiences of awe, thankfulness, compassion, beauty, oneness, and transcendence. While a transpersonal perspective can include these, it can also include their opposites, such as suffering. This is something many who seek spiritual solutions from therapy, coaching, or yogas are attempting to avoid.
“Spiritual” can also refer to the ethical or moral dimension of life, when, for example, it is assumed that spiritual people are compassionate. Transpersonal perspectives recognize that people, groups, religions, and institutions that are thoroughly convinced that they are moral or ethical and even compassionate, may be abusive, exploitative, disrespectful, non-reciprocating, untrustworthy, and non-empathetic from the perspective of outgroups. “Outgroups” are those who do not share our assumptions or worldview and in fact may be in fundamental disagreement with us.
The transpersonal is a perspective on life that is a combination of objectivity and empathy that may or may not be spiritual. It may or may not involve a stage, an ultimate destination of humanity, a feeling, or assumptions about morality.
Why these distinctions matter is that they signal different intentions to the listener or reader. “Spiritual” can signal any or all of the above definitions. But which ones? “Transpersonal” is an attempt to avoid not only this ambiguity, but the assumptions of perspectival and moral exceptionalism that “spiritual” commonly implies. It assumes that by such attempts at avoidance, a therapy, coaching, or yoga is less likely to project meanings onto clients, which is disrespectful, or to promise more than it can deliver.
What is multi-perspectivalism?
When a therapist or coach adapts tools, techniques, and methodologies to the level of development of the client or a particular diagnosis, they are practicing multi-perspectivalism. For example, children require different approaches from adults. When a guru recommends different yogas (Hatha, karma, kundalini, Jnana, raja, Integral, Bhakti) based on the needs of the individual, they are taking a multi-perspectival approach.
Transpersonal approaches are multi-perspectival in a broader sense. They decentralize the worldview, tools, and interpretations of both the therapist and the client, guru and chela, in order to access and learn from both externally objective sources, like teachers and AI, and subjective sources of objectivity, like dream characters and the personifications of important life issues.
Therapies, coaching, and yogas can be more or less multi-perspectival. Most approaches are either “authority centered” or “client centered,” meaning that either the therapist, coach or guru determines treatment, or the client does. The limitations of authority-centered approaches are that authorities, whether secular or spiritual, are not you and the model they project onto you may or may not work for you. The limitations of client-centered approaches are that clients are stuck and blind. If they had the knowledge and objectivity to see how and where they were stuck, what to do about it, and the ability to follow through, they wouldn't be stuck.
Transpersonal approaches to multi-perspectivalism deal with the limitations of both authoritative and client-centered approaches to therapy, coaching, and yogas by accessing innate emerging potentials and the authority of one's own unique life compass. It combines those perspectives with those of authority and the client.
What is “disidentification?”
Disidentification is the ability to let go of control by your normal, waking sense of who you are, the person who is reading these words. This includes the ability and willingness to stop interpreting, assuming, and filtering what you experience. Transpersonal approaches practice this when they ask us to surrender ourselves in order to look at the world and speak as this or that imaginal perspective. The flip side of disidentification is a willingness and ability to adopt, take on, and identify with some other perspective as the center of your sense of who you are. This is empathy combined with dissociation, which can also be called “empathetic multi-perspectivalism.” It is empathetic because you are taking on the perspective of the other. While we often think we are empathetic, the only way to know is to get feedback from the other that yes, they are understood, recognized, respected.
Empathetic multi-perspectivalism is best explained by contrasting it with cognitive multi-perspectivalism. In cognitive multi-perspectivalism we have a worldview that includes and honors other worldviews. We have a cognitive map of various approaches to treatment, coaching, and reality. Ken Wilber's Integral AQAL (all quadrants, lines, stages, states) is an example of a cognitive multi-perspectivalism. In empathetic multi-perspectivalism we lay down our cognitive maps and our identity in order to internalize and embody the perspective, maps, preferences, and interpretations of some relatively autonomous other and answer questions from its perspective. That relatively autonomous other may be another person or it may be a dream character, the personification of a life issue, a figure from history, current events, a mystical or near death experience or a serendipitous one. The difference is in who or what organizes and interprets experience. In cognitive multi-perspectivalism that is done by your waking identity, your sense of who you are. In empathetic multi-perspectivalism, that is done by some relatively autonomous other while in a state of therapeutic dissociation. Consciously accessing states of relative discontrol allows creative innate potentials and solutions to emerge.
Therapies generally shy away from disidentification because it is associated with dissociation, which is typically considered the opposite of the central aim of therapy: the integration of the self. Transpersonal approaches may or may not assume integration of the self as the objective of treatment or coaching. Instead, they listen to what this or that interviewed perspective considers to be important and then tests those assumptions by daily application as a yoga in waking and dream life.
What is interviewing?
Interviewing, or asking questions, is a central transpersonal methodology because it generates objectivity toward both self and Self. While meditation generates abstract, empty, or causal objectivity independent of moral grounding, interviewing generates concrete, life issue specific, and actionable objectivity that can be effectively morally critiqued because it does not claim to speak from a realm of Absolute Truth. Transpersonal approaches cultivate both abstract and concrete forms of objectivity. Interviewing generates concrete objectivity by practicing detachment, disidentification, and identification regarding specific dreaming and waking life contexts.
Approaches that consider themselves transpersonal do not have to include interviewing. If they do not, then how do they access interior sources of objectivity? Prayer? Meditation? Conscience? Intuition? Knowingness? Mystical experiences? If so, how do advocates know that they are not simply using these to validate their own belief systems? Transpersonal approaches answer this dilemma by operationalizing recommendations made by interviewed perspectives in order to empirically test them in daily practice.
What is phenomenalism?
A phenomenological approach surfaces and tables assumptions that filter or block listening in a deep and integral way to whomever or whatever is being interviewed. Assuming that the objective of treatment or coaching is the integration of the self is an example of one such assumption to be tabled.
All interventions are inevitably based on multiple assumptions. The difference is in whether those assumptions are recognized and carefully thought through or not. Assumptions involving spirituality, morality, the unconscious, archetypes, self-aspects, karma, souls, energy, vibration, quantum, God, level of development, reality, good or bad, right and wrong, and self-integration, are all interpretive filters that determine what we hear and value as well as what we ignore or dismiss. Such filters are often useful and important. In the interest of listening in a deep and integral way, transpersonal approaches surface and table such assumptions during the interviewing of alternative perspectives and pick them up again afterwards, as the interpretations of the interviewed subject and the interviewer.
Transpersonal approaches definitely make assumptions. For example, its assumptions may include multi-perspectivalism, disidentification, interviewing, phenomenalism, yoga, dream yoga, the integration of learning, work, and play, transrationality, and clear ethical intent and behavior. The difference is that transpersonal approaches surface and table such assumptions during interviewing and subject them to critique and challenge by subjective sources of objectivity, as well as by waking testing, in order to practice a thorough-going phenomenalism.
What are yogas and integral life practices?
“Yoga” refers to a sacred discipline and integral life practice. Yogas are intended to break down barriers to the sacred and produce deepening states of oneness. They may utilize sensory awareness, energy, contemplation, devotion, work, meditation, or altered states to access states of oneness. Yogas are disciplines in that they are life practices rather than breakthrough experiences or temporary “coursework.” Yogas are sacred in that they focus on experiencing the preciousness of life and living beings while generating heightened awareness of interconnection with everyone and everything. Integral life practices focus on self-integration or, if they are done in a transpersonal context, on Self-integration, meaning organization around a transpersonal sense of self. However, all transpersonal approaches do not focus on realization of and integration with a Self. Thoroughly multi-perspectival integral life practices integrate with multiple perspectives, not with some over-arching Self, or singular, all-encompassing identity. The reason why is that integration with Self necessarily implies the non-integration of not-Self. But not-Self, or that which is not included in our self-definition at any one point, regardless of our degree of development, is forever a legitimate object of transpersonal recognition.
What are dream yogas?
Dream yogas either focus on becoming awake during dreaming, called lucid dreaming, or on becoming awake during waking and dreaming by integrating dream and waking realities. While dream yogas can focus on both, most dream yogas focus on becoming awake or lucid while dreaming. While lucid dreaming can provide an excellent arena for desensitization and the development of self-confidence, it is also a form of waking colonialism: we are occupying dream space with our waking priorities, expectations, assumptions, and preferences instead of practicing deep listening in an integral way. Lucid dreaming is generally not about empathetic multi-perspectivalism, although it can be.
A thoroughly transpersonal approach to a dream yoga focuses on waking up out of identification with the assumptions, dramas, filters, preferences, and interpretations of our waking identity in any state, waking and dreaming included. It therefore practices disidentification with the self and identification with other perspectives in dreams as well as in waking life. What is then becoming lucid is that other perspective, not our own.
In addition to cultivating dream lucidity, Tibetan Dream Yoga integrates waking and dream realities in higher, more objective states of objectivity by practicing disidentifying with self and identifying with personifications of compassion (Avalokiteshvara), absolute wisdom (Manjusri), and others. However, Tibetan Dream Yoga only practices identifying with “divine” beings while asserting there is no benefit from becoming secular and profane beings and elements like goats and toilet bowls. The result is that, while remaining an important and valuable pathway into the transpersonal, it is neither fully multi-perspectival, non-dual, nor objective.
What does it mean to integrate play, learning, and work?
Play is most transformative when it is educational and persistent, requiring effort over time. Learning is most transformative when it is fun and also involves disciplined effort over time. Work is most transformative when it is playful and involves learning. When these three life realms are accessed and utilized together, healing, balancing, and transformation become not only more likely, but more likely to become an ongoing part of who we are. Therefore, a mindful incorporation of all three of these core life elements is central not only to integral therapies, coaching, and yogas, but to transpersonal ones.
Transrationality
On its surface, transrationality often looks absurd, meaningless, and irrational. For example, who would want to consult spit regarding life issues of central importance to them? Why would anyone expect that anything meaningful or significant would arise out of an interview with some random imaginary image from a dream or one's own fantasies? Why indeed? Purposelessness is not an option for humans. Purpose is a cognitive bias hard-wired into our genetic inheritance. Anything and everything can be a pathway to the sacred, to healing, balancing and transformation.
If that is the case, then why is interviewing not arbitrary? Why choose one dream image over another or one personification of one life issue over another to interview? The answer has to do with the nature of interdependence. If you choose an element, like your spouse, with whom you have strong emotional bonds and have developed time-worn assumptions about, it can be more difficult to keep your waking preferences and interpretations from coloring what your “spouse” has to say. On the other hand, if you choose an element that has no affinity whatsoever with your issue, like the Jack of Diamonds or some planet in a distant constellation, the lack of affinity may block full identification with it and generate a perspective of general disinterest and disengagement.
Interviewing obviously imaginary, secular, and for you, meaningless elements takes some getting used to for those of us who have been taught to stay in control and to be rational. However, before we developed rationality we expanded our identity by pretending to be all sorts of characters. Therefore, doing so is not only innate, but works independently of rationality.
How do we know that an interviewed perspective is transrational instead of pre-rational? The amazing thing is that practicing transpersonal transrationality ends up making a great deal of sense, although we may not understand how or why. Because the transrational contains the rational as well as the pre-rational, the sense that it makes includes and then transcends both.
What is clear ethical intent and behavior?
While we intend to be moral, we can think of times in our lives when our behavior did not live up to our intentions. Why not? If we are only accountable to our intentions we will be confused, or worse, when the world views us as immoral. The key is to allow ourselves to be held accountable not merely by our own intentions, but by outgroups - collectives that don't share our worldview or approaches to therapy or coaching. These outgroups need to be both external, like teachers of other modalities, members of other religions, political parties, ethnicities, or actions, and internal, like dream characters and the personifications of life issues. How respectful do they judge us to be? In their opinion, do we reciprocate? Are we trustworthy in ways that matter to them? How empathetic do they judge us to be? Do they think we understand their position and perspective whether or not we agree with them?
Transpersonal morality makes itself accountable to outgroups. It doesn't simply profess an ethical intent, it seeks out the determination of outgroups as to whether or not our behavior matches our professed intent. For example, Western democracies generally consider themselves ethical and moral in their behavior while outgroups, such as Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and Palestinians, on the whole, do not share that conclusion. Of course the same holds for outgroups: they have a responsibility to take into account the interests of their outgroups. This is called reciprocity, a fundamental ethical concept of world religions, spirituality, and morality. Transpersonal approaches take both ingroup and outgroup perspectives into account when arriving at estimations of morality. While this is important for success in life in general, it is essential for authentic transpersonal approaches.
Conclusion
Transpersonal approaches heal because they drop waking filters and open us to emerging potentials and the priorities of our innate life compass. Transpersonal approaches balance because they complement what we know and who we are with what we do not know and who we are not. Transpersonal approaches transform because they generate chaotic spaces that allow creative reframings and realignments to occur. When transpersonal approaches are undertaken as yogas, or integral life practices, healing, balancing, and transformation is much more likely to become fully integrative and expanding, thinning who we are.
While interviewing is a central transpersonal methodology for accessing concrete forms of objectivity, it needs to be applied to three core aspects of healing (life scripting, toxic drama and toxic thinking), balancing (goal setting, assertiveness, and problem-solving), and transformation (meditation, pranayama, and intention). Everyone makes assumptions about how each of these areas need to be navigated. Transpersonal approaches supplement those assumptions with both external authority, like AI, and the input of subjective sources of objectivity, accessed through interviewing. Approaches that call themselves “transpersonal” do not have to include any of these elements. If they do not, then it is wise to ask, “why not?”