Customer Reviews

Revisioning Transpersonal Theory : A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)

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This was a difficult book for the first reading because I was not familiar with much of the information cited by Ferrer. It is not because the book is poorly written, just because it was new. There are many things to think about while reading the book. This is not a Washburn or Wilber spin off but something entirely different. Ferrer does a great job in presenting an original perspective in transpersonal theory. A must have book for the transpersonal theorist.

When I first read this book I hated it, but I have read and studied it for 2 years and find it one of the best books ever written on transpersonal psychology. Be sure that you get the reference book Ferrer references because his thesis will make much more sense. You may not agree with everything he states, but is a very significant book for those who question their own beliefs. A must read.

My readings in Transpersonal Psych seem really flat so far, even though I thought I was the target audience. This book appears to be an attempt to grab the helm of discourse and steer away from totalizing visions such as I found in my previous toe-dip into the field, Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition. But it makes very little headway for my money.

Amongst Ferrer's biggest bogeymen, which he sees as leading T_Psych astray, are 'experientialism' (the idea of spirituality as experience which he wants to replace with the idea of 'participation'), and 'perennialism' (the idea that all religions worldwide are in some way examples of a common underlying truth.) I agree these valuable ideas have been overdone, but Ferrer offers little to replace them.

On 'experientialism', not only are we not about to lose it, we most certainly should not. I happened to open Greer's Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings today and was hit by: "Magical practitioners will not need convincing that supernatural forces and entities exist -- anyone who has done six months or more of systematic training with traditional magical disciplines knows that already, from direct personal experience...", which is right. There's nothing wrong with such a viewpoint. What is 'non-participatory' about encountering entities, working with energies, healing, shamanic journeying, visions of gaia or the cosmos as unified, etc.? Or the huge numbers of interesting states studied by Grof? Nothing is what. I hope and believe 'spiritual experience' is here to stay.

Ferrer seems to be saying 'experientialism' is an isolated and non-participatory viewpoint. Rubbish. Of course, he may well be correct within the field that 'inner experience' has been made to bear an empirical weight to which it's unsuited, and his remarks on the overuse of a scientific paradigm are good, but experientialism itself is hardly to blame. If it is the new idea he seems to think, it's one of the best ideas we've had as a species. (Most of what he says is, I think, aimed at defusing some of Wilber's egotistical theoretical dominance of the field -- fine, but trying to fight bad theory with more bad theory is hardly the answer.)

On 'perennialism', again, whilst Ferrer is certainly right that it has been taken way too far by authors like Wilber, not everyone overdoes similarities between paths that way. Procedural and technical similarities, in terms of meditation and energy techniques, underlying mystical _methods_, not just scholastic theories, interest every psychologist with transpersonal leanings. What about theories like Assagioli's which are so easy to fit into any tradition because they see something that usefully underlies human experience? This is not 'perennialism' as Ferrer argues against it; it ought to be part of the solution, but instead we go too far the other direction, into a relativism which strikes me as more or less a copout.

He is great at analyzing different types of perennialism (pp. 76-80); why make it into the bad guy? Surely the actual problem is simply that people are treating perennialism as an established fact rather than an interesting idea? As the latter, it has really been useful in Grof's work. Some like to jump from similarities amongst religions and spiritualities, noticing a trope here and a technique there, to suddenly making 'complete' models which already claim to know everything about all spiritual paths (!), when the actual work of real comparison has not even vaguely begun to be done, and I agree, that's silly. It is merely what happens when you lean on a hard, absolutist perennialism as an a priori theoretical fact, rather than investigating it (yes, empirically) as a theory.

What we need is a 'soft perennialism', less concerned with 'ultimate realities' and with endlessly ranking religions according to achievement ladders like some hopeless new labour league table (which Wilber does, I admit) and more concerned with _actually_ comparing paths and results, to one another and to our understandings of psychology. In other words, doing the actual practical work rather than endlessly making mental models from reading. I thought that was what T_Psych was supposed to be about! Ferrer's woolly notions of 'participatory spirituality' don't go much of the way towards it. He wants to make T_Psych into a kind of interfaith religious discussion manqué! I can imagine nothing less useful.

Yet again, as with other documents of the school, there's no understanding of Taoism (which appears only as a bit-part) and no mention of Hermetics, let alone something like Wicca. All the documents adduced are in Hindu, Buddhist and Christian traditions. There's a depressing sense of returning to these religious texts as paradigmatic, rather than foregrounding spiritual and psychological techniques, theories and experiences, thus ending the useful addressing of spontaneous spiritual phenomena that had been so welcome in the field.

I can't understand what has happened to the T_Psych school. Where's the discovering enterprise of a Grof, the universal depth of an Assagioli, the energetic genius of a Reich, the erudition of a Jung? Where is the psychology that can understand spiritual experiences, have techniques to generate them (without 'ranking' everything), making the transpersonal an intriguing option for the unreligious but also interfacing with and informing religion (without trying to one-up it) etc.? I really am so disappointed with what is being done. If this school needs to write such books as this in order to reject Wilber, well fine I guess, but could you wake me up when it's over? This is such dull stuff! It's a sort of tractatus philosophico-politicus whose job is more ecumenical than theoretical, let alone actually psychological. I plan to read more in Psychosynthesis, and more Grof for certain, but other than that, will hesitate at T-Psych from now on.

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EDIT: Having learned more, I now understand more 'what has happened to the T-Psych school'. I think it has lost the roots that supported it in the Humanistic Psychology tradition, and in actually treating patients.

The 'peak experience' was central in Maslow, central to individual healing and the worth of the world. If you throw away spiritual experience, you throw away the peak experience, and you throw away Maslow. You throw away that whole era and all its achievements in what Maslow called 'Taoistic Therapy', in other words, allowing people to become what it was in them to become. You throw away the genius of Milton Erickson in bringing out the unconscious and having it spontaneously show the way of growth. You throw away Carl Rogers. Etc.

Everything transpersonal has always depended, too, on being able to say, "I treated patients and this approach *worked*." That was what Jung did, or Assagioli. Erickson's cure record was phenomenal. This success with patients, from the mildly neurotic to the massively psychotic, validated everything these workers said about theory. When they said something was true about the human mind, you tended to listen as a result!

There seems so little of this here. In this book Ferrer tries to remove the over-prescriptiveness of Wilber, but little seems left of the inspiration from which T_Psych sprang. Very little about human beings being transformed by spiritual experiences, or being led to unfold in creative ways. Not much psychology, science, healing, human actualisation... and those were the foundations I believe. They are still what matter to me personally.

Grof has kept alive the spirit of the earlier workers. One other who did bring forward the Maslow spirit to the transpersonal was Glenn Morris. I strongly recommend a read of his Path Notes because the spirit is still alive and inspiring there.

Let me first say that Jorge F. Ferrer's book "Revisioning transpersonal theory" isn't bad. Quite the contrary. It's one of the more interesting and well-written books on spirituality I've come across. That being said, I nevertheless disagree with the author.

Ferrer belongs to the current known as transpersonal psychology, a more explicitly spiritual version of humanistic psychology. Transpersonal psychology is often considered a part of the New Age milieu. Ferrer's book is a criticism of both "official" transpersonal studies and Ken Wilber's more recent version (Integral Theory). By implication, Ferrer also criticizes the broader New Age scene.

The author believes that transpersonal psychology has become too obsessed with subjective and ostensibly spiritual "experiences", a viewpoint he dubs "experientialism". This has led to a weird dualism between inner and outer worlds, where the inner experiences are seen as privileged. Downright narcissism in spiritual matters is another consequence. Ferrer also attacks something he calls "the empiricist colonization of spirituality", the attempt to "prove" spirituality in general and mysticism in particular by appeals to a methodology similar to that of science. In Ferrer's opinion, this is misguided. The spiritual sphere of existence cannot be accessed or judged by methods from a completely different and unrelated sphere.

Finally, Ferrer criticizes perennialism. (He calls Wilber's opinions neo-perennial.) There are at least two problems with perennialism, according to Ferrer. First, it simply isn't true that all or most spiritual traditions are similar. Mystics don't have similar experiences, the author argues. Second, perennialism - while claiming to be universalist and inclusive - actually ranks spiritual traditions, usually with those similar to Advaita Vedanta at the top, with more theistic systems ranked lower.

So far, I think Ferrer has raised many interesting points, and his scholarly erudition is considerable (this guy could have been a professor at a "respectable" institution, rather than at the somewhat obscure California Institute for Integral Studies).

My problem is with his alternative, which he calls "participatory epistemology". Ferrer believes that the spiritual or divine realm, which he calls the Mystery, is somehow created or co-created by human beings. The Mystery can take many different forms, depending on how different religious traditions "enact" it. Ferrer is at pains to distinguish this perspective from that of Advaita, by claiming that while the Advaita Vedantins believe in an ontologically objective impersonal reality that seemingly takes different forms depending on how it's approached, participatory epistemology doesn't believe in an ontologically objective reality in the first place. If we choose to enact a Catholic reality, the Mystery to that extent actually becomes Catholic, if we choose Advaita, it becomes Advaitin, etc.

But isn't this just another form of crazy subjectivism? What about enacting the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn? Ferrer believes that his position transcends the subject-object dualism and hence isn't a new form of new agey sollipsism. First, he emphasizes the communal dimension of spirituality. Second, he believes that there are *some* objective constraints on how the Mystery can possibly be enacted. Thirdly, Ferrer actually ranks different traditions himself (!), by saying that there is an objective moral criterion involved. The best traditions are those that open us up to the Mystery by simultaneously diminishing our selfishness, greed and narcissism. Presumably, Satanists and Crowleyans need not apply.

In my opinion, Ferrer's position is at bottom simply another form of Advaita Vedanta. Had Ferrer stopped at the claim that the Mystery is somehow created by humans, he would have been no different from an atheist, a kind of non-materialist atheist perhaps. Note also that the more tangible reality studied by natural science *isn't* enacted or co-created in this manner. However, by taking the whole reasoning a step further by introducing objective constraints and even objective moral criteria for the Mystery, Ferrer lands exactly at the spot he claims to have avoided.

At bottom, Jorge N. Ferrer has simply revisioned Advaita Vedanta.

Ramakrishna Mission, anyone?

this book is verry helpful to help you to ask yourself some good questions regarding your inner journey. It hilights many potential pittfals encountered in the transpersonal practices and anchor them in a tentative new encompassing approach.

The most important point for me, after two years of practice of holotropic breathwork, was the dangers of an approach too exclusively experiential, which is common in the transpersonal field. That is the belief that experiences in themselves contain healing potential and spriritual progress. the emphasis on experience was necessary for a time for the transpersonal field to be accepted by the scientific community as the study of non ordinary state of consciousness. but the quest for experience can easily turn into an addiction to temporary high spiritual states without being intergrated into the daily life, but not without inflation of the ego... as in the case of many psychonautes exclusively using psychedelic substance. traditionnaly, experiences are only one of the many ingredients nessary for a fruitful spiritual practice, which come along with intelectual studies, respect of ethic principles, relationships in a shangha or group of practicionner and with a teacher of master.

another interesting point is the new and refreshing ways to account for the diversity of spiritual systems. contrary to Wilber who is caught in an objectivist view where he posit a hierarchy between the different system, and hence a definit objective abolute truth about the ultimate, Ferrer argue for a diversity of ways of unfolding the truth of the universe, which are neither hierarchically organised, neither reductible to each other. This is a very healthy view that gives theorical grounding to a real respect but also curiosity as a basic attitude for the relationships between poeple beloging to different spiritual schools.

This is a book to read for anybody involved in the modern sprititual quest where one often mixes many different practices : a lot of buddhist meditation, a good deal of hata yoga, some christian devotion, without forgetting the nessesary participation to shamanic entheogenic rituals... it is a very useful tools to clarify one's own goals in the practice.

but it is definitely a scholar book which speaks of philosophical controverseries and need some efforts to be read.