Transpersonal Cognition

I just came across this essay by Washburn that looks like worthwhile reading:

Transpersonal Cognition in Developmental Perspective

I think some of Washburn's formulations, particularly in The Ego and The Dynamic Ground, have been plagued by inconsistencies and pre/trans issues, but this essay (of which I've only read the first couple pages so far) looks like it might be more solidly grounded … and is in keeping with other themes explored here recently.

I'll comment further once I've read the full essay.

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I skimmed it and it looks good. I caught this part in the conclusion of the essay (on page 207):

Transpersonal cognition raises the following philosophical question: Is transpersonal cognition a means of accessing infallible knowledge of higher realities? It is important to ask this question because some recent authors writing on transpersonal cognition have advocated just such a rationalist-Platonic conception. Ken Wilber is the best-known exponent of this view.


Washburn goes on to quote Wilber from SES (1995) and Transformation of Consciousness (1986). Washburn then says:

In my opinion this rationalist-Platonic view of transpersonal cognition should be treated with suspicion. It is laden with epistemologlical and metaphysical commitments that are not only unnecessary but also of the most extreme (essentialist, rationalist, idealist) sort. It is entirely possible–and it seems to me much more likely–that transpersonal cognition, like all human cognition, is fallible and limited by personal and cultural factors.


Around the end of the last century Jorge Ferrer (in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory as well as in standalone papers) also criticized Wilber for having suspicious or questionable epistemological and metaphysical commitments at least implicit in his model. Today, of course, Wilber has responded to these criticisms–indirectly–by becoming an advocate of “post-metaphysical spirituality” and by saying some of the very same things about certain epistemologial and metaphysical commitments that Washburn and Ferrer said in their criticisms of him.

When glancing over Washburn's essay I also caught a passage near the beginning (page 185) where Washburn explains that in his essay he looks at three basic types of cognition from a developmental perspective and concludes:

(1) that the transition from perpersonal to personal stages is marked by a disappearance of imaginal intuition (based on concrete symbols), and (2) that the transition from personal to transpersonal stages is marked by a reemergence of imaginal intuition on a higher level.


I sense a parallel with Fowler's 5th Stage of Faith, “Conjunctive faith,” in which what Ricoeur called the “second naivete” develops. (The “first naivete” is akin to “imaginal intuition based on concrete symbols.”) (There is also a parallel with Huntington's concluding remarks in his book The Emptiness of Emptiness.)

I've read the two books by Washburn that you mention and agree with your assessment of them. I'll have to read the essay to see if Washburn addresses what in Fowler's developmental model is the 4th, demythologizing, disillusioning stage that must, by definition, precede any transition to “transpersonal stages.”

I look forward to reading Washburn's essay, thanks for posting a link to it. Looks like there are other essays in that book that may be of interest to too.

~ Jim

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Hey,
Two weeks ago today I graduated from being Late Middle Age to OLD. The fact that I have so little time left gives me license to cut to the chase and read The Conclusion first. I've read a lot of stuff through the advancement of my untold years, so I can experientially fill in the blanks and get a general idea toward which the author was navigating. If I deem The Conclusion worthy of my time, then I go back and see what the fellow had to say. This has been my practice since I was 18, but now I think it has some legitimacy.

I liked the last sentence of Washburn's piece. It meant one could fling the whole thing  into the nearest dumpster and never look back.

“…the epistemology and metaphysics of transpersonal cognition should I believe, be left undecided or put forward only as a matter of faith or interpretation.” El Fin!

Butter could not melt in Washburn's mouth.

He wrote of meditators and samhadi as if he never knew that anyone could go into the process from the other end and engage so fully with mud, pain, blood, joy, and the presence of immanent death that one can emerge, both fully ecstatic and totally grounded within themselves, like Whitman from a Civil War hospital tent, and know more than Buddha could dream of.

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Útpaladeva, the Shaivite who wondered the peaks of Kashmir around ca. 925,
cries to Shiva,  the ground of being, in one of his Stotras:

´While incessantly drinking in through the senses
  The heady wine of You
  From the overflowing goblet of all objects
  Let madness overtake me´…

In some time-warp tavern I´d like to invite him and Whitman to join Steven, and the rest of us who want to go beyond words, in a glass-breaking evening of toasting a-la-greca.  Fierce shattering will feel so much better than typing. 

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And when I can afford it, I'll buy a round for the whole house!

Cheers,
Mark

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Utpaladeva is indeed one who certainly does place an emphasis on “experience.”

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I too think that it is only necessary to read the conclusion. I'm no fan of Washburn and his overwrought hyper-imaginative systematic misreadings of “Patanjali” and Buddhaghosha. I wonder about when this article was written. Some of his comments in the conclusion appear to be directed at Wilber 3.141567, at a time when Wilber still held to the idea that there is such a thing as a transcendental Form.  Apart from the metaphysical comment, one epistemic point of Washburns appears to be that the intuition of a “form” is culture bound. But I think even Wilber incarnation # 3.141567 would have agreed to this.

I think Ed will like lines 8-10 of conclusion.

And what is the significance of this kind of mystification:
“…ego opens itself to being transformed by forces deriving from beyond ego's own sphere…”
(God? Amitabha Buddha? the Collective?)

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Given that Washburn cites SES (as I note in my post), as well as something by Wilber from 1996, we know that he has in mind whatever “phase” Wilber was in at that time. (Washburn's bibliography for the article includes material published as late as 1998 and the book the article appears in was published in 2000.)

As for the significance of “this kind of mystification”:

“…ego opens itself to being transformed by forces deriving from beyond ego's own sphere…”

That kind of talk or mystification is straight out of Jungian psychology. Jung used the German term for “transpersonal” before changing the term to “collective unconscious,” a change he made supposedly (i.e., as I recall reading somewhere or other) because the feedback he was getting led him to conclude that the term “transpersonal” (uberpersonliche or however it's spelled) was too off-putting for some folks.

So Washburn is not referring to God (in any traditional theistic sense or in any ontological sense at all beyond an “ontology of the psyche” sense) or Amitabha Buddha (whatever that is - Pure Land???), but is most likely referring to what Jung first called the transpersonal unconscious and later called the collective unconscious.

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that everyone here already knows all about Jung's model of the psyche, but just in case, here it is in a nutshell:

The most superficial layer of the psyche is the persona, the mask we present to others.

Just behind the persona is the ego, which is still as superficial as it gets though it's a tad less superficial than the persona. The ego for Jung is what most folks think of as “me” or “I.” E.g., “I would like to take this woman home with me so I'll put on a mask or pretense of being interested in whatever she just said her career is.” There's the ego and the persona in action. (Trite stuff, I know, but I'm trying to explain “the significance of this kind of mystification.”)

Then comes deeper parts of the psyche. (Don't blame me for the reifying language, “the psyche,” etc. I'm just reporting.) First there is “the shadow” which consists for Jung of “the syzygy” (I think I spelled it right) of the animus and anima. (I asked my Alzheimer's stricken 85 year old mom not too long ago if she was ever a gun moll. I was just joking around with her. She said, “No, but I may have acted like one.” “How does a gun moll act?” I asked. She said, “You act like you know what's going on even if you don't.” That pretty much covers Jung's notion of the “animus-possessed woman.”)

For Jung, the shadow isn't only repressed stuff that is typically considered “bad” by society, for there is also a “bright shadow.” This is where we find convincing “phenomenal” experiences of benign visitors from other planets coming to Earth in flying saucers, angels, minor gods and goddesses, fairies, elves, and so on (Patrick Harpur covers the gamut).

Deeper still is what Jung, borrowing from Ramana Maharshi, called “the Self” (though in the original German and English translations Jung didn't capitalize “self” and thus used “self” in two senses, leaving it to readers to figure out which from the context). By “the Self” Jung did not mean anything that can be nailed down with a specific definition, and attempts to do that always miss the mark. I would say that he basically meant something as open-ended as Tillich's “ultimate concern,” which different people will “unpack” in different ways.

Unlike those who speak of “being one with the Self,” Jung said that there is a great danger in losing the ego, superficial though it is, in identification with the Self. We need the ego as Jung defined it to function in the world, and if it becomes identified with the Self we end up with “inflation,” and with characters like Franklin Jones as “The Great and Powerful Living Sat Guru,” et al. So for Jung it was important not to “become one with the Self” (e.g., as in One Taste, “I swallow the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp and breathe out a galaxy”) but to be in relationship to the Self.

Some interpret this to mean that Jung failed to take the further step of relating to the Self to realizing (becoming one with) the Self (by realizing that the Self and “I” are nondual or something like that). But another interpretation is that from a Jungian perspective, one must take a further step beyond “One Taste,” into a realtionship-to-the-Self that is neither a regression nor a step short of “enlightenment.” (Again, I'm just reporting; this way of talking sounds kind of quaint to me now, from a “neurophilosophical” perpective.) (Sorry for the verbosity; I'm for all intents and purposes running a little hospice in my home now and I feel on the verge of cracking up daily these days from basically being an on-call nurse 24/7. I realize that your “And what is the significance of this kind of mystification” may have been more a statement than a question, but writing this calmed me a bit…)

~ Jim

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Hi Jim,

I remember bringing something similar up with respect to (I think it was) Shapiro, but it may have been Washburn again — something about coming into contact with a mysterious “force” that transforms us, and I think capital letters were involved. (Ed probably remembers.) Given that Washburn also talks about grace in proximity to the present reference, I cant help but think that, though he probably has the collective unconscious in mind (referring to the Collective was an attempt at a funny by me: Borg andor the Unconscious), he seems also to be intimating at something vaguely theistic or at least divine. This is something I notice throughout this kind (transpersonal; perennialist, etc.) of literature — not-so-veiled references to the divine, usually indicated by capital letters. Said capitals appear to function as a kind of marker, a marker within discourse that indicates that one belongs to a certain group: Im a practitioner on a path who is not only not afraid to acknowledge the divine, but who is also willing to defend it.

As for the mystification, what Im getting at here is a problem that was raised elsewhere concerning the mechanism behind transformation. It just seems that when the explanatory crunch comes, either it is admitted that we just dont know (as Wilber says), or some a kind of skyhook is appealed to. And if one is in the in group, one nods ones head approvingly — kind of like the higher power thing in an AA meeting (go Tommy Gavin!). Jung doesnt seem to be doing it so blatantly as some though.

Gun Moll: “You act like you know what's going on even if you don't.” That pretty much covers Jung's notion of the “animus-possessed woman.”)
Interesting. I can use that.

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I get the Tommy Gavin reference, as I watch and appreciate Rescue Me. He's long off the wagon though and drinking heavily again. I don't think he ever bought that higher power crap in the first place either.

Yes, I think it was the Shapiro thread but not sure where I brought up Washburn in relation to my “regression in service to the ego” thesis, quoting from The Ego and the Dynamic Ground. And in that I appreciate the Wash's basic premise but also questioned his seemingly romantically inflated notion of a “dynamic ground.” I've yet to read any of the article of the conclusion so no comments as yet.

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I never heard of Tommy Gavin or Rescue Me! But Edward's comment about Washburn's seemingly romantic notion of a dynamic ground is on mark.

If by “skyhook” you mean it in the sense in which Dennett uses the term (and after him Taner Edis et al), then that's not what Jung had in mind when he inspired the founder of AA. But if you just mean some mysterious “mechanism behind transformation,” then yeah.

I think I read recently about a pill that “cures” “alcoholism.” (I did read about this, and here's a recent article.) I've known people and heard of many more who claim to have been greatly helped by “the higher power thing.” But if a pill can have the same result, then some folks may have to rethink the “mechanism” (though of course some will say that the “Power greater than ourselves” that restored them “to sanity” involves a lot more “inner” change than merely no longer craving the substance).

I hate the use of capital letters used as you describe. I've quoted Batchelor ad nauseum on why it's just plain dumb to capitalize “emptiness.”

As for Jung:

It would be a regrettable mistake if anybody should take my observations as a kind of proof of the existence of God. They prove only the existence of an archetypal God-image, which to my mind is the most we can assert about God psychologically. - C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958

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I'm not entirely adverse to the notion of another or “deeper” self. But I'd like to see the idea unpacked by someone eventually, in a way that makes theoretical and scientific sense. There's a few themes that might be related to the idea, at least to the idea of multiple selves.

For one, there is the idea of the “sensed presence.” I had collected a substantial literature on the idea at one time, including Persinger's work with the magic hockey helmet (I guess he uses a motorcycle helmet now).

Then there is the “third man factor.” Here is a review of the Third Man Factor.

Crowley talked about a “guradian angel” in relation to the Sacred Magic of Abremelin the Mage. Apparently, when he invoked his “angel” it turned out to be a demon. Oh well. I remember reading an equation somewhere back in the 80's in one of those Yoga=Kabbalah=Jung books (I think it was Occult Psychology) that said something like that the guardian angel is the “higher self”; or maybe it was in Crowley's own Book of the Law: (Do what Thou wilt shall be the whole of the law).

Then there is Socrates “daemon” that doesn't tell him what to do, only what not to do. Sounds a bit like a lucky leprechaun.

Then there is the Julian Jaynes thesis in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (What a title — it appears to be one of those books from the 80's that was designed specifically to get you brownie points with the babes when you referred to its title… “ooo … 'bicameral'… can you say that again, big boy, only softly and real slowly this time, with the lights out…) 

Then there is the whole business of multiple personalities. The best book I've read on this is Ian Hacking's. He really goes after the idea that “psychic trauma” is some sort of generic “cause” for all problems psychological.

I hope I'm distracting you sufficiently, Jim. ;-)

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I'm not entirely adverse to the notion of another or “deeper” self. But I'd like to see the idea unpacked by someone eventually, in a way that makes theoretical and scientific sense.

Then you obviously haven't been keeping up on my attempts at this in numerous posts on various threads!

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It's taking a lot to sufficiently distract me these days, but thanks for trying.

I'm not sure which or whose notion of  a “'deeper' self” you say you're not adverse (averse?) to, but I too would like to see notions of that order unpacked in ways that make theoretical and scientific sense.

This passage jumped out at me in the review of The Third Man Factor that you posted a link to:

Geiger cites Michael Murphy as claiming that many of these experiences “defy easy explanation,” by which he means naturalistic scientific explanations. Geiger also briefly falls into this casual sophistry describing the physiologist Pugh’s explanations as dismissive. Why commentators so often consider scientific explanations “easy” or “dismissive” has never been clear to me; especially when I then read of Murphy claiming that these experiences are evidence that “humans can indeed perceive disembodied entities” (p. 78). Now that strikes me as an easy explanation.


I think I read somewhere that Jaynes' bicameralism thesis influenced the portrayal of characters in the movie Troy. Whenever Brad Pitt as Achilles listens to the voices of the gods, he pauses and looks upwards as if introspectively attending to an hallucination of a commanding voice.

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Hi Jim,
Forget the deep self comment; it now strikes me as “essentializing” one of my many fragments as somehow “more real” than all the rest.

Dinner with Ken. hmmm. Did you ever have dinner at Ken's sub specie aeternitatis loft that looks down over Boulder (I'm at the, sub specie aeternitatis, looking, down on creation) under the auspices of his fawning, and where the babes are concerned, pawing admirers? That would be a treat.

The exerpt you mention is interesting. I'm reminded of Hufford's “neutral” phenomenological treatment of sleep-paralysis “entities” that in the end comes very close to saying “their real.”     ooooo. scary.

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While I did dine with Ken at his Boulder home several times, along with about 30 others (these were during II-Art meetings and he was truly a most generous and gracious host), he did not join the group when we went out on the town. One of his personal assistants told me that Ken doesn't go out much (that was 2000; maybe that's changed). Ken did not have a loft in Denver at that time.

The Carpenters and John Candy as Hitchcock, ha ha!

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Washburn has a later book out called Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World (SUNY Press, 2003)  but there is no free Google book preview. I did find this review of it though, which gives the general outlines of the Wash’s approach. Of special note is the cognitive research into the two sub-systems of implicational and propositional ways of knowing.

This is a book about “human development”, from birth to fulfilment, written from a psychoanalytic, transpersonal perspective. For readers who, like myself, might come to the book from a different tradition, this very notion of human development will raise questions. Can there be a single theory of spiritual development, applicable to all cultures and all religious traditions (and to those with no religious tradition)? Is the account given supposed to be typical, recounting features that fit the greatest number of instances, or normative, describing the path on which one might most wish to travel? What is the evidence for the generality of what is proposed? The text gives few clues. So, after grappling with my questions for a while, I relaxed and enjoyed the story. 

And I must admit that it’s a good story: often resonating with my own experience, often illuminating other spiritual teachings. His central metaphor for the spiritual path is the spiral (not, he stresses, to be confused with the different metaphorical use in the “spiral dynamics” adopted in recent years by Wilber). Its trajectory initially leads from the oceanic, comparatively undifferentiated mental state of the newborn baby, through the classic psychoanalytic transformative stages of repression, ego development and reconstruction to, hopefully, mature functioning in the ordinary social world. Here a person might stop and live out the rest of their life. But alternatively, they might find themselves at a crossroads leading to a second phase, one which curves in a helix to encounter phases similar in some ways to those that had been earlier left behind, but which are now encountered in a new way and with the experience of maturity, so that “the home to which we return at the end of the spiral path turns out to be the very home from which we first set out, now experienced on a higher level.” The Ground, or dynamic core of their existence, with which conscious contact was lost beyond the age of around 5, is rediscovered, seen as a psychic underworld or sea, and progressively realised as illuminating Spirit. The polarisation of experience into good and evil, which dominated life around 3 years, producing splitting and repression,  is re-encountered later at the spiritual level as the angelic and demonic. Washburn explores this echoing of the early stages, as well as the fundamental differences between early and later stages, through a sequence of chapters which trace the path from the perspective of each in turn of the components that make up human experience: the Ground,  its energy, the Ego, the Other, the body and the world.

As with all spiritual teaching, the characteristics of the approach are most clearly revealed in its more advanced stages. For Washburn the dominant image there is not the vertical take-off to heaven, but the return after enlightenment to the market-place of everyday society. “We are inherently corporeal beings,” he writes, “and our corporeality is inherently a spiritual corporeality.” Our final return is to a world that is perceived in a state of integration, in which “the unqualified sacredness of the world is revealed in a wholly transparent way.” He goes on to stress that this is indeed the “real” world (scare-quotes in the original). “It is not a world that has been fabricated or has been given a false sheen by the experiencing subject.” This vision then naturally leads Washburn to stress the way in which this world “of exquisite beauty, sacred value” calls us to exercise our responsibility of care for the world.

If the book’s start aroused my doubts, this ending aroused my enthusiasm. Here, surely, is a vision that can be shared by spiritual explorers from a much wider field than the psychoanalytic, provided they can tread the path of integration, whether their methodology is shamanic, meditative, or the immersion in the reality of nature that has been described by the eco-spiritual writer David Abram. It calls also to a variety of philosophical and scientific methodologies. For instance, Washburn is strongly influenced by phenomenology: he adopts Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt, he often quotes the later Heidegger, and at many points his account is reminiscent of Varela. And yet his concept of the World often sits uneasily between realist and constructivist views. There is room here for a deeper engagement with the modern resurgence of phenomenology.

For me the most interesting of these wider challenges is in connection with modern experimental psychology. Washburn’s account of the way the spiral path echoes the earlier stages of development suggests that the same human faculty is engaged in each phase, but is less engaged in the intermediate phase – a suggestion that perfectly matches the analysis of the mind made by Teasdale and Barnard (1993) on the basis of painstaking cognitive research. Their conclusion is that our cognition is integrated not by a single master-system, but by two subsystems, with separate processing functions and memory stores, that normally work seamlessly together. One (the “propositional” subsystem) is rationally and verbally based, the other (the “implicational” subsystem) is sensorily and relationally based. Extensive clinical application (e.g. Clarke, 2001) has led to the identification of the roles of these systems in opening and closing to numinous or “transliminal” experience. In the light of this, the characteristics of the life-path indicated by Washburn fit exactly with a move from implicational dominance, to propositional dominance, back to a recovery of the implicational, and finally to an integration where both are fully engaged.

This is a stimulating book whose final vision deserves widespread examination beyond the confines of psychoanalytic theory.

References

Teasdale, J D and Barnard, P J (1993) Affect, Cognition and Change, Lawrence Erlbaum.

Clarke, I (ed.) (2001) Psychosis and Spirituality: exploring the new frontier, Whurr Publishers Ltd       

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Something strikes me: Is Washburn challenging the very basis of the the pre/trans distinction? Sometimes it sounds like he is, like when he goes after Wilber's distinction between archetypes and Forms. Or is he saying that the one is the other but now seen from another perspective?

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See the free Google book preview of Ken Wilber in Dialogue (Quest, 1998), Wash’s Chapter 4 “The pre/trans fallacy reconsidered.”

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Tommy Gavin

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Oh yeah, Denis Leary as an Irish fireman in NYC; I've seen ads for the show. Being an Irish-mutt from Queens, I've had more than enough of that stuff. What's the difference between Lace Curtain Irish and Shanty Irish? The Lace Curtain Irish take the dishes out of the sink before pissing in it. My primary Irish forebears were 100% Shanty Irish from County Cork.

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So are you revealing to us the way you wash your dishes?

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“So are you revealing to us the way you wash your dishes?”

I have a bit more class than that but not much. After several days of II meetings at Wilber's home in 2000, he treated the participants to dinner at a Boulder restaurant. To my right sat a Famous Art Critic. When I asked her whose silverware was whose, she rolled her eyes and said, “Haven't you dined out before?” I hope I didn't use the wrong fork!

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I find some similarity between Washburn and Gebser. Hence this review of Embodied Spirituality by Georg Feuerstein, one of Gebser’s principal American interpreters, might be of interest. Unfortunately Feuerstein doesn’t go into this apparent relationship between Gebser’s “ever-present origin” and Washburn’s “dynamic ground.” Nor does he discuss the apparent similarities of their integration process of previous structures. C'est dommage.

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From Chapter 3 of Transpersonal Theory by Gerry Goddard at his site:

Washburn's view comes under attack by Wilber who considers such thinking 'retro-regressive'. By that, Wilber means that such an account confuses infantile or primitive unconscious fusion with higher conscious integration—a different thing altogether. According to Wilber, the level of non-dual consciousness preceding the self consciousness of the mental-ego and the level of non-dual consciousness transcending self consciousness are distinct, but have become confused in much of the Western psychological literature since the pre-personal and the trans-personal are both non-personal, non-rational, and non-linguistic. Here is Wilber's by now famous 'pre-trans distinction' which establishes a pivotal separation between prepersonal and transpersonal levels. Such confusion he terms the 'pre-trans fallacy', committed both by reductionists and those of a romantically mystical persuasion.
 
Most traditional psychologists, Freud included, were guilty of the reductionist error. On the reductionist side, the fallacy manifests as an explaining away of the higher in terms of the lower such as the explanation of art as sublimated sexuality or of mystical experience as a mere reliving of the intrauterine state, if not as some form of schizophrenia. In its mystic form it is allegedly present in the thought of humanistic 'body-wisdom' practitioners such as Reich, Brown, Rogers, Watts and Laing, in the Gaia/Goddess deep eco perspective, and certain perspectives in cultural history by such authors as Richard Tarnas (1991) and Morris Berman (1981.1989). According to Wilber, the mystical pre-trans error constitutes an exalting of the 'lower' (the bodily, instinctual, emotional), simply released from the oppression of mental culture, as the higher. Those guilty of this 'fallacy' (Tarnas's second story) believe that some degree of transcendent purity existed in the historic past and as the spontaneous innocence of young children; but this purer state of being has been lost and repressed rather than nurtured by a dualistic and pathological society.
 
For cultural historian and 're-enchantment' theorist Morris Berman, in his Coming to Our Senses, the alleged pre-trans fallacy is his identification of the natural wisdom of the body as the source of spiritual ascent, a process which has been hampered by the conceptual developments of the last four thousand years. Thus, culture since the Greeks is generally understood as an attempt to fill an inner void, to try—though unsuccessfully—to overcome the primal mind/body split. In his allegedly 'regressive' view, like that of Wilhelm Reich, Norman O Brown and others, the transpersonal state is attainable through a releasing of the natural pre-existing ecstacy/wisdom of the body from the oppressive and negative distortions of social conditioning. There is much of interest in Berman's work, but despite his embrace of deep transformational and transpersonal experience, he lacks a coherent transpersonal theory which a paradigmatically compatible account like Washburn's might provide. According to Wilber, Richard Tarnas in his inspired Passion of the Western Mind is also guilty of the pre-trans infraction in that he 'attempts' to explain the deep structures of history in terms of Stanislav Grof's categorial account of the birth process, a process allegedly confined to the lower, primal and biological levels of the Great Chain. (This important issue is addressed below and later in this work). On the face of it, Wilber's logic is seen by his critics as tacitly disparaging indigenous spirituality as a more primitive mode of knowing than the modern urbanized ego, or as a rare level attained only by the most advanced shamanic members of the tribe rather than the collective level of consciousness reached by the tribe—an all-pervading spiritual attunement wiped out by later developments (patriarchy, excessively left-brained reason, industrialization, urbanization) and then recaptured later at trans-egoic levels. Similarly, Wilber's logic tends to judge the earlier Goddess religions as more primitive than the scientific and patriarchal mind which followed. (By 2006 in response to such problems, Wilber has modified his views through a model called the Wilber-Combs lattice that acknowledges that transpersonal states can be accessed from any developmental level but not transpersonal stage-structures. See appendix 2.) It remains debatable whether Wilber's pre-trans distinction is, or is not, an overly rigid demarcation. Resonant to Washburn's conception are the words of Morris Berman (1981):

[T]he triumphs of the Cartesian paradigm…over the metaphysics of participating consciousness was not a scientific but a political process; participating consciousness was rejected, not refuted….It is quite clear that the history of increasing ego-development in the West is also the history of increasing repression and erotic deprivation…Ego-development is not only purchased at the expense of sensual enjoyment…more significantly, it has repression…as a condition necessary…for its development…(p.135, 164)  

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Balder, this section below evidences your belief that Washburn successfully avoids the pre/trans error, and, to me, it fits very well with my thoughts about the meanings of the biblical myths of garden, tree of knowledge … , and tree of life, in which the garden is the prepersonal stage where imanginal processes are predominant, the tree of the knowledge … is the personal stage in which the imaginal processes are suppressed, and the transpersonal stage is the tree of life in which the imaginal processes are reunited with the rational process to allow intuition and reason to work together in a higher integrated mentality. 

Here is the excerpt I retyped from the introduction: 

“Transpersonal Cognition in Developmental Perspective by Michael Washburn begins by distinguishing three basic types of cognition:  agentic (ego-intitiated, sequential) cognition and two types of intuitive (spontaneous, holistic) cognition: imaginal intuition and mental intuition. Pursuing a developmental perspective, he traces the prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal forms of these three types of cognition. According to Washburn, the transition from prpersonal to personal stages is marked by a disappearance of imaginal intuition (based on concrete symbols) , and the transition from personal to to transpersonal stages is marked by a reemergence of imaginal intuition on a higher level. He proposes that the development of transpersonal cognition can be understood as a progressive integration of  reawakened imaginal intuition with the agentic cognition ( especially formal operational thinking) and mental-intutive cognition (understanding of conceptual meanings and postoperational intuition of higher holistic patterns) of personal stages…”
The tree of life/transpersonal stage of collective mind is not confused with the garden/prepersonal. Imagination and reason seem to be seen as good marriage partners in which a productive synergy occurs at the tree of life/transpersonal stage. I propose that we will (or are already beginning to) see the individual as a component in an energy-like feild (like a component of a radio), rather than an idividual which is merely a part, or is apart from the whole. Neither a part or apart, but a component so involved in interaction that it doesn't make much sense to think of it as a separate individual thing or being any more. The age of the individual is passing, as is the age of the institution which served the individual. Even the “institution” of marriage becomes a dynamic process of mutual challenge and growth, no longer an “institution”. 
Darrell

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Regarding the dynamic ground Washburn says this in his counter-reply to Wilber in KW in Dialogue: 

Why must spiritual power…be an all-embracing reality? Cannot spiritual power be truly spiritual without being cosmic in stature? 

He [Wilber] seems not to know that, in my books, I have repeatedly stressed that we cannot know for sure whether the source of spiritual energy—which I call the Dynamic Ground—is an ontological ground or cosmic being of some sort or only an underlying basis of the psyche (376).

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

There's an interview with Washburn, called Life's Three Stages, in which Washburn makes a similar remark:

PB: You always put the term “Dynamic Ground” in capital letters. Does that mean it includes – or stands for – God?

MW: It could, but I don't know. I don't really know what the sources of our spiritual life are. It may well be that what I call the power of the Ground, which we experience within the context of our own psyche, has its ultimate source beyond the psyche. The power of the Ground may in fact be the spirit of God, as we experience it within the intimacy of the soul, and within the intimacy of our relationships with other people. But I don't know whether it originates outside the psyche. I suspend judgment on its ultimate source because a judgment on that isn't needed, as far as the theoretical position I'm trying to formulate is concerned.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Well that's heartening. I'll withhold judgement on Washburn for now. He seems to have much more acumen and erudition where psychology is concerned than hew does in the explication of Sanskrit and Pali sources.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

See this post in the Rheomode thread as a prelude to the below:
 
In Washburn’s chapter in Transpersonal Knowing he discussed 3 basic types of cognition: agentic (egoic) and 2 types of intuitive, imaginal and mental. Imaginal intuition is based on concrete symbols and disappears in the developmental transition from per-personal to personal, but reappears in the transition from personal to transpersonal. Hence W proposes that transpersonal cognition is the integration of re-awakened imaginal intuition with egoic-rationality and the mental-intuitive (“understanding of conceptual meanings and postoperational intuition of higher holistic patterns”). This integrative, “transpersonal” cognition is also known as, in W’s own words, vision-logic, a kind of mental intuition. 
 
Even though the imaginal intuition is lost in the transition to the personal stage (known as primal repression) the latter is considered an advance nonetheless: 

For if general meanings are to be understood in the full scope of their generality, and if operational thinking is to achieve the full range of its power, it is necessary that general meanings be freed from embodied particularity, no matter how richly symbolic that particularity might be. We must wean ourselves from dependence on the imagination if we are to learn how to think abstractly (190). 

As Wittgenstein helped us to see, conceptual understanding does not presuppose any subjective contents or events; all it presupposes is the ability to use language correctly when acting in the world (192). 

In my opinion this rationalist-Platonic conception…should be treated with suspicion. It is laden with epistemological and metaphysical commitments that are not only unnecessary but also of the most extreme (essentialist, rationalist, idealist) sort. It is entirely possible…that transpersonal cognition, like all human cognition, is fallible and limited by personal and cultural factors (208).
 

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Great summary & amplification, Ed.  Regarding the missing element of meditative praxis, I accept that if it's meant (as I think it is) in a general, non-formal sense.  Although traditional forms can be very helpful, I don't think they're necessary.  I mention this, in part, because I was thinking this morning about Krishnamurti's purported awakening experiences, which in some ways mirror the processes Washburn describes – regression in the service of transcendence/integration, the lifting of primal repression, the 'flooding' of egoic consciousness with previously repressed imaginal/autosymbolic forms of cognition, etc.  For K, his transformation appears to have been precipitated by intense suffering, and 'staying with' that suffering, rather than any formal practice.  After undergoing a sort of awakening following his brother's death – in which, at first, he thought he'd been 'fully transformed' (something Washburn points out is common when primal repression is first lifted) – he then went through a number of near-psychotic, regressive and dissociative episodes, before he came to better integrate the new intuitive resources that had surfaced. 

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Good point. “Meditation” can come in different shapes, sizes and colors and doesn't necessarily require traditional training to be “authentic.” And conversely traditional training will include a lot of baggage that might have to be left behind, IF one wants to to postmeta. Plus there's still the open question if traditions can be sufficiently recontextualized in the first place to allow such postmeta views without destroying them in the process.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Speaking of different forms of reawakening and integrating the imaginal, I participated in such an experience tonight watching one of my favorite shows, So You Think You Can Dance. Participating in aesthetic expression, even as an audience member, combines all the elements of Washburn's cognition in an integrative whole. Part of the experience is the appreciation of the technique, the level of difficulty, skill and athleticism required to pull off such routines. But that aspect is no different than sport and sport doesn't make me cry like I did tonight. For dance also contains emotional content that contacts a deep part of me beyond articulation, very primodial and powerful, very ecstatic and sorrowful. I end up laughing and crying out loud, shouting for joy and being awestruck at superb performance, of which there were more than a few tonight. And this is part of what art does, both in the performers and the audience: it provides such a bodily and emotional catharsis within a cerebral frame. We really don't need no stinking meditative tradition with “entertainment” such as this around.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

And a toast to you as well my friend…

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

This makes me think: Are there any psychologistoic, ok, I'll be exact “psychoanalytically informed,” and yet “transpersonally sensitive” accounts of mystical bios like that of Milarepa? I remember Bruce mentioning that there is a genre of that kind in Tibet. It seems to me that such accounts may be valuable for this kind of analysis.

The other thing I'm beginning to think is that it might be useful to have someone acquainted with Lacanian analysis on board.

Neo!

Re: How the self is socially-dialectically-Freudianingly constructed, or whatever the hell the point is.

[What the hell was Lacan's message anyway, for he's considered a sage and “masterthinker” in France, of the order of Kojeve (who I've read and understood) and Heidegger (who I think is original but who suffers from Sat-guru inflation), and there are others, like Merleau Ponty, who sat in on, and took notes at, Kojeve's lectures, and who I personally think completely outstrips the meagre Sartre, the trendy bohemian, b]ut because they say at the feet of the former, are not of the same calibre…]

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Jack Kornfield's bio. Here's an article by him on combining psychotherapy and meditation but I haven't seen him provide the type of intricate explanation Washburn does.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Rob Preece offers a modern depth psychological reading of tantra:  The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra.  (My sister got me the book for Christmas, but I haven't had time to look at it much yet.)

Regarding the other references I made, Kela, yes, I'll see if I can get some links to them once I get home.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Yes, nicely written, Ed, though, if I may, as a matter of style, and please don't take this as a critique (the gentile canuck here), at times I have to wonder whether you have written something yourself or if you are quoting someone else, and the important point here is, I don't want to miss something that you have written, 'cause, when yer on, yer on, and yer on here, so… let me know.
:-)

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Did you miss this?

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Here are some reviews by such psychoanalytically informed practitioners as Batchelor and Epstein. Looks promising:

“… one of the most illuminating unpackings of Tibetan tantra yet to emerge in the English language.” – Mark Epstein, author, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra succeeds in clarifying the nature of tantric practice.” – Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

It does look promising. Here's a link to the pdf of Batchelor's short and sweet forword to the book:

http://www.snowlionpub.com/samples/PSBUTA_Foreword.pdf

And here's a link to Snow Lion's web page on the book, which has links to more material from the book (and I'll add that Amazon's page for the book has a “look inside” feature):

http://www.snowlionpub.com/html/product_8940.html

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

I'm wondering if Washburn thinks that re-connecing with our imaginal intuition though his integrative process allows us direct and undiluted access and understanding to our unconscious? He obviously doen't think that such integration allows access to the Real. But given our discussion of the lifeworld background over in the postmeta2 thread I'm wondering to what degree we are conscious of the infinitude of our own bodies-contexts-environments. How do we consciously intregrate something of which we are unaware?

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Washburn sometimes refers to the Dynamic Ground as the 'physicodynamic' dimensions of the psyche, which he regards as unfathomable and never fully knowable.  He seems to imagine a sort of 'sacred wedding,' in which the ego allows itself to be joined with and infused by the potentials of the Dynamic Ground, but never fully in control of them – more of a condition of living in an open state of receptivity.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

I'm off to scrub some class rooms now. Ya'll got one helluva bingo game goin' on there!

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

So is it like Unbounded Wholeness (Anne Klein et al., Oxford UP, 2006)?

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

There are some similarities, though I hadn't made that connection before.  Washburn seems more strongly to emphasize the physical, embodied nature of this 'unfathomable' dimension.

I'm glad you found Klein's book in the Google preview, by the way.  I had thought you might be interested in this book, particularly Chapter 2.

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Indeed, chapter 2 does provide fodder for this and the postmeta 2 thread. Some selected excerpts follow, with comments in a later post:

What is explicit is that this wholeness, which cannot be totalized or bounded, is thoroughly compatible with diversity. Indeed, diversity, though ordinarily considered the antithesis of unity, is here offered as proof that unbounded wholeness exists. Being so diverse, and constantly changing besides, means that unbounded wholeness admits of no defining characteristic or stable identity; in this sense it is indefinite and unspeakable (54). 

…that unbounded wholeness is both impermanent and permanent slips away from the confines of the classical tetralemma, structured as it is around the binary contradictories of self and other, both and neither. Definite and indefinite, for example, here turn out to not be a mutually exclusive binary (56). 

With such indefiniteness, the issue of first principles, so crucial in Western philosophy, virtually dissolves. Within this kind of mythic imaginaire there are no natural objects….abstraction…stands against the specificity and incoherent multiplicities of myth—that is, against uncertainty and undecidability (58). 

The planks of reasoning and the water on which they float are mutually interactive. Unless one understands this, it can be confusing to find an authorial voice moving so swiftly between logos and mythos (59). 

Such a conflation of mythic and philosophical is particularly comfortable in a cultural ambit that has never, at least until very recently, undergone the multiple moves of objectification, disenchantment, and distancing from traditional religious perspectives. It was largely on account of these moves in Western culture that mythos came to be seen “not as a relevant presentation of the world”…. Yet the logic of myth is crucial to wholeness and the indefiniteness that accompanies it (59).

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

Just a quick comment here. While the first passages were chosen more for the postmeta2 thread, the last 3 paragraphs are of particular interest to Washburn's return of the imaginal intuition that is lost with the development of “reason.” Here Klein is more generally calling it mythic Imaginaire or mythos, and this is what gives us our connection to unbounded wholeness.

While is the west this might be more of a re-connection, in the east it apparently was never differentiated to begin with, at least until recently. This might account for my criticism in the “letting daylight into magic” thread that Tibetan culture seems shot through with such a mixture of magico-mythical reason. So while the east might not need to re-establish with mythos because it was never lost, perhaps they need to differentiate it from reason? Whereas we in the west must re-establish the link to mythos. And then perhaps we can both “float the boat” of an interactive logos/mythos?

Re: Transpersonal Cognition

On the other hand, perhaps the east, not having gone fully rational with its mix-and-match of mythos and logos (i.e., mythic-rational), has not yet taken the necessary step into full-on egoic-rationality? If Washburn is right, then that step requires a temporary repression of the imaginal intuition. Without that step taken, perhaps this unbounded wholeness, still stuck in a pre-fully-egoic-rationality, is not the same as the after-egoic-rational re-enchanted integration? Perhaps there really is a pre-trans fallacy involved here in the east?