SPIRITUAL PRACTICE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

By Merv Dickinson, PhD – September 2015

This comprehensive, scholarly summary of MER, (The Mystical Experience of Reality) is as relevant a read today as it was in 2015.

---

For thousands of years our spiritual traditions have maintained that, with right practice, we can evolve beyond our usual and often fraught level of ego-consciousness to a quite different and more blissful state variously called moksha, nirvana, Samadhi, and the kingdom of heaven. More recently, this claim has found support from transpersonal psychologists who have documented the occurrence of “peak experiences” that can lead to a more or less enduring state of self-transcendence. This paper presents an overview of what we currently understand about this transpersonal potential and the positive perceptual and behavioural changes that typically accompany its realisation.

The core message of our spiritual traditions

The world’s great spiritual traditions share the same central idea – namely, that we are capable of developing, individually, to a more evolved state of consciousness than most of us ever attain. We grow naturally to a level of consciousness that delivers the world of experience we are all familiar with, replete with happiness and hurt, hope and disappointment, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, pride and shame, war and peace.

But there is potential within us, like a dormant seed awaiting the conditions conducive to its growth, another mode of consciousness that can transform our life by delivering a very different experience of who we are – a transformation so significant that it is said to be like awakening from sleep, or being freed from bondage, or being born anew. Unlike the maturing of ordinary consciousness, it does not simply develop of its own accord but requires our conscious participation in the transformative process.

This, indeed, is our raison d’être. This, according to all the world’s spiritual traditions, is our life’s primary purpose. To live only at the level of our ordinary consciousness is to remain unfinished, incomplete. Over millions of years, nature has explored many different kinds of metamorphosis, and we are such an experiment – not this time in the transformation of outer form, but in the transformation of consciousness itself.

In the Hindu, Jain and Sikh traditions, our ordinary state of self-awareness is called maya, which means “illusion” or “lacking true knowledge.” Hinduism sees the universe as an interplay of two dimensions – the time-bound and the eternal, the changing and the unchanging. Maya is our ordinary experience in the time-bound world of change and by itself does not reveal life’s hidden purpose. True knowledge belongs to the eternal dimension of Brahman-Atman. It is an inner knowing that Atman, the individual soul, is one with Brahman, the Supreme Soul. “In the search for self knowledge,” say the Upanishads, “maya is what obscures, confuses, and distracts an individual.” For Jains too, maya means the illusory appearances that prevent us from attaining a right understanding. And in the Sikh tradition, people are said to be trapped by five vices: lust, anger, greed, attachment, and ego. Maya empowers these vices and makes a person think the physical world is the only or primary reality. The goal of Sikhism is to rid the self of these vices, along with their accompanying illusion. The same idea is found in Buddhism and in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In Buddhism, the human mind in its ordinary state is said to generate dukkha – suffering or misery. And in Christian teaching, it is a state of separation or inner disconnection called “sin,” a word (ἁμαρτία in Greek) derived from the sport of archery that means “to miss the mark” – that is, to miss the whole point of our human existence.

Each of these traditions also describes the higher state to which we are meant to evolve, together with what is required to reach it. In Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism it is called moksha, meaning freedom or liberation. In Buddhism it is called nirvana – an imperturbable clarity of consciousness that arises when we transcend our usual attachments and, beyond our sense of being a separate self, discover our true identity in the emptiness that contains all things. And in the Christian tradition, this same state is variously called, in Matthew’s Gospel “the kingdom of heaven,” in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels “the kingdom of God,” and in John’s Gospel “eternal life.”

By whatever name, and with whatever cultural variations it is expressed, all these traditions point to the same truth – that, as we are, we are incomplete and capable of evolving to a higher level that is potential within us. As the oak tree is potential within the acorn, and the butterfly within the grub, so there is potential within us a quite different kind of consciousness that we may sometimes glimpse and which, with right practice, we can cultivate. That is the core message of all these traditions.

Our transpersonal potential:

A not dissimilar idea is found in contemporary schools of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Throughout our childhood and adolescent years we pass normally and naturally through well-known stages of development that bring us to what most of us think of as “maturity” – that is, to a level of self-awareness or ego-consciousness characterised by our having fashioned a more or less stable sense of self, a mental construct called “me” that clothes who “I” am with a personal identity, linked to the groups with which we identify, and whatever self-esteem we have gleaned from our experience during these formative years.

Many of us assume that, having reached such maturity, that’s it! End of story! We have completed our developmental journey. With a strong ego and clear personal boundaries, we know and feel good about who we are. Life’s ensuing decades may present challenges and require adaptations, but the ego we have constructed should remain more or less intact. It may sometimes feel threatened, be subject to recurrent anxiety, and need repeated reinforcement, usually at the expense of those over whom it likes to feel superior, but hopefully it will remain strong enough to navigate life’s journey to the end without creating or suffering too much mayhem en route. This indeed is the view of conventional psychology, including psychoanalytic theory, which regards any dissolution of our ego-boundaries not as a transition to a higher transpersonal mode of consciousness but as a pathological regression to an infantile pre-personal state.

Many humanistic and transpersonal theorists see it differently. They contend that this stage of so-called maturity need not be the end of the story – that we are a work in progress, capable of evolving to a still higher state of consciousness called self-transcendence. William James (1842-1910), the father of modern psychology, was one of the first to recognise this. His famous study of “the varieties of religious experience,” published in 1902 in his book by that name, found that “our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” 1

Several decades later, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), the founder of humanistic psychology, expanded on this. In a 1943 article 2 and later in his landmark book, Motivation and Personality, 3 he proposed that we are motivated by a hierarchically arranged succession of needs – from basic survival needs, to security or safety needs, to love and belonging needs, to self-esteem needs, culminating in a need for self-actualisation. The levels up to and including our need for self-esteem are “deficiency needs” in the sense that they push us to find “out there” in the world whatever is required to satisfy them.

Each of these, moreover, is “pre-potent” in relation to the levels above it. So we can attend to our security needs only when our basic survival needs have been met, and to our love and belonging needs only when our security needs have been met, and so on. When these four levels of need have all been met – that is, when our physiological survival and continuing safety is reasonably assured, when we know where we belong and feel lovingly connected, and when we have enjoyed enough “wins” to feel strong and competent and good about who we are – when, in short, we have matured and our sense of self, our ego, has been well and truly formed – only then can we move to the topmost level of self-actualisation where our need is to realise our full potential, give satisfying expression to our unique talents and abilities, and so fulfil or actualise all that it is possible for us to be.

This is not a “deficiency need” that can be satisfied by the world; it involves a more inward focus on who I am, and how can I adequately express who I am, and what is the contribution I can make to the world. It represents the full-flowering of our self-awareness. And because it is reached only when deficiencies at the lower levels of need have been met, it is attained, Maslow found, only by a relatively small percentage of people, usually in the latter half of their life.

But then towards the end of his own life, Maslow began to doubt that humanistic psychology, as it stood, was adequate to explain transcendent states of consciousness. So, reaching for a transpersonal psychology more attuned to spiritual development, he added to his pyramid of needs a still higher level of motivation that he called self-transcendence – occupied, he said, by a still smaller fraction of people among those who were already healthy self-actualisers. Described first in an address that he gave in 1967 entitled “The Farther Reaches of Human Nature” and four years later in a posthumously published book by the same name, this mode of consciousness is characterised by frequent “peak experiences,” described by Maslow as “small mystical experiences.” 4 Although this, “in various cultures and in various eras takes on somewhat different coloration,” he wrote, “its essence is always recognizable – it is the same. It is always described as a loss of self or of ego, or sometimes as a transcendence of self. . . . There is universally reported a seeing of formerly hidden truth, a revelation in the strict sense, a stripping away of veils, and finally, almost always, the whole experience is experienced as bliss, ecstasy, rapture, exhilaration.” 5

Jenny Wade is a contemporary transpersonal psychologist who, like Maslow, describes a developmental sequence of stages or levels of consciousness from Reactive, to Naïve, to Egocentric, to Conformist, to Achievement and/or Affiliative, to Authentic consciousness. “Authentic consciousness,” she says, “represents the height of most conventional developmental theory. It is familiarly known as Maslow’s Self-Actualization.” 6 And just as, for Maslow, “peak experiences” occurring at the stage of self-actualisation may prompt a transition to self-transcendence, so what Wade calls “transcendent events . . . subjectively experienced as transcending the ‘normal’ boundaries of self” 7 begin to appear during the Authentic stage and can initiate a destabilising transition to what she calls Transcendent consciousness. “Personal development at this stage,” she says, “becomes a spiritual quest to escape the objectification of the ego,” 8 which, if successful, may lead to the still more rare and attenuated state of Unity consciousness.

Kern Wilber (born 1949) is another leading exponent of transpersonal psychology. His spectrum-model of human development describes three broad developmental stages – the pre-personal, personal, and transpersonal. Although we normally reach maturity by moving naturally through the first two of these stages, each of which is further defined by three sub-levels, it is possible to suffer developmental arrest at any of these levels if the tasks required for its successful navigation are not properly met. Transition to the final stage, the transpersonal, is achieved only by a small percentage of people. It too is subdivided into sub-levels – the psychic, subtle, causal, and non-dual. “Each of these,” wrote Wilber, “has its own type of mysticism, namely nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and non-dual mysticism.” 9 The last of these are reached only by rare individuals who represent the growing tip of humanity.

One final example will suffice to illustrate the main thrust of contemporary transpersonal theories. In an article published in 2003, Michael Washburn proposed a “spiral dynamic” model that differs slightly from Wilber’s spectrum model in seeing the path of our development as spiral-like rather than as a ladder-like upward progression. 10 Like Wilber, he posits a pre-personal stage of development when we are still in touch with the deep unconscious Ground of our being. From about the age of five, this connection begins to weaken as we enter more and more into the personal phase of development en route to egoic maturity. Then, later in life, we may or may not make a kind of U-turn and re-connect with our Ground in a final transpersonal stage of development. This final transition, if it occurs at all, is far from easy. The mental ego does not welcome its dissolution. As more and more it is disrupted by “incursions from the Ground,” however, it may eventually let go its claim to be who we really are.

Washburn described it this way: Finally, the mental ego has no energy left with which to avoid the truth. Reaching this juncture, the mental ego at last quits its denials and submits itself to the inevitable: it accepts its ‘nothingness’ and guilt. And, in doing this, the mental ego undergoes a radical conversion. It yields its own (false) ground and reaches out for (genuine) support. It lays down its precious autonomy and prays for guidance. It relinquishes its last defense and bares itself to power from beyond. Or, in our terms, it lets go the false support of original repression and thereby opens itself to the Dynamic Ground. 11

Such is the essential view of humanistic and transpersonal theorists regarding a possible inner transformation to a quite different state of consciousness that lies potential within us. It is as if life carries us on a trajectory through levels of increasing ego-differentiation until, at a certain point, if and when the construction of a strong and healthy ego is complete, life invites us to change direction and turn inwards to reconnect with the Dynamic Ground or Transcendent One to which we belong. This turning, and the transformation to which it can lead, is initiated and reinforced by “peak experiences” (Maslow), “transcendent events” (Wade),“spontaneous spiritual awakenings” (Wilber), “incursions from the Ground” (Washburn), or what I prefer simply to call “moments of connection.”

Moments of connection:

These “moments of connection” are characterised above all by an absence of our usual sense of bounded separateness that prevails in ordinary ego-consciousness. They are fleeting glimpses into a quite different domain of consciousness in which the subject-object split – the inner sense of “I” as subject being separate from the world as object – vanishes. In an instant, we find ourselves joyously at-one with everything, and know, directly and intuitively, that we are inseparably connected to the Whole. “The most fascinating aspect of such experiences,” wrote Ken Wilber, “is that the individual comes to feel, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he is fundamentally one with the entire universe… His sense of identity expands far beyond the narrow confines of his mind and body… It’s almost as if that familiar yet ultimately mysterious phenomenon we call consciousness were a spectrum, a rainbow-like affair composed of numerous bands or levels of self-identity.” 12

Spiritual teacher and former Harvard psychology professor, Ram Dass (born 1931), put it this way: “You and I do have moments when we seem to be at the doorway to another state of being, moments when we sense a greater intuitive harmony in the universe. What is so provocative about these moments is that we are out of personal control, and yet all seems harmonious and all right. In these experiences we sense, though usually cannot articulate, a more profound meaning to our lives.” 13

It is difficult to describe this state because language itself, and all our language-based thinking, is structured in terms of a subject and an object. It arises out of the subject-object split. So the moment we reflect upon or speak of our experience, we are in the domain of ego-consciousness. Which is why these “small mystical experiences,” as Maslow called them, are ineffable. They can never be captured in words. In fact, none of the usual mental processes of thinking and interpreting are taking place. We are vividly aware of our experience, intensely absorbed in whatever is occurring, without any mental associations to it whatsoever. But as soon as we think or speak about it, we are once again in the realm of ego-consciousness.

For the same reason, time does not exist in this state. Linear time is a dimension of our ordinary consciousness. It derives from our mind’s comparing each present experience with memory images and future expectancies. When this mental activity ceases, so does our experience of time. Here in this domain of consciousness there is neither remembering nor anticipating, neither past nor future. All that exists is Now. We are totally absorbed in the present moment. “Almost randomly, moments come on each of us which are out of time,” wrote psychologist Robert Ornstein (born 1942). “They are moments in which there is no future, no past, merely an immediate present.” 14

When we are fully present in this way, what we experience can only be described as Presence. We are in every sense aware of our world – far more vividly aware than in our ordinary state – but the separate objects that normally comprise our world become transparent to a Presence that fills and unites them all. If I am looking at a tree, I no longer objectively consider it as a separate object among others. “It” becomes what Martin Buber calls “thou.” 15 Like Moses’ burning bush, it is aflame with the same Presence that infuses everything. When I stand in relation to it, there is always separation. But when I stand in relation to thou, there is no separation – only Presence – and the place whereon I stand is holy ground.

For the same reason too, there is nothing we can do to initiate this state of unity consciousness. The very act of trying, which implies some future state we want to enter, keeps us locked in our ordinary consciousness of linear time. So this blissful experience of Presence always comes to us unbidden. It feels like a gift. We can receive it, but we can neither choose it nor hang on to it. Any intrusion of desire or any attempt on our part to control it banishes us again to the realm of separateness.

Yet another feature of this altered state of consciousness is its apparent connection with the heart. When the gap between “I” and the world dissolves and we are immersed in Presence, in that instant we may feel an almost physical sensation of something opening or softening at the heart of who we are – as if some inner contraction that normally maintains our sense of separateness has suddenly let go, leaving us more open and present to our world. “The mind thinks of the self as separate, the heart knows better,” wrote psychologist and Buddhist monk Jack Kornfield (born 1945). “As one great Indian master, Sri Nisargadatta, put it, ‘The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.’” 16 The mind, in other words, is the locus of our ordinary consciousness and the servant of our ego. It creates and maintains our sense of being a separate self.

But the “heart” that crosses the abyss cannot be so easily defined. Many traditions speak of its importance. Kundalini yoga speaks of the opening of the heart chakra. Hindu literature speaks of the Hridayam or “heart cave” in which we are urged to dwell. And John Wesley (1703-1791), the 18th century founder of Methodism, said of his conversion experience in Aldersgate Chapel that his heart was “strangely warmed.” None of which, of course, explains anything. These are only words with which to clothe the inexplicable. The reality to which they point remains a mystery.

These moments of connection are easily interpreted in religious terms. But they need not be. In his most recent book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion (2014), outspoken atheist Sam Harris (born 1967), who, with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens, is renowned as one of the “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism,” describes one of his own experiences of transcendence. “I was feeling boundless love,” he reports. “It was an epiphany about the universality of love. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.” It was for Harris, as for all who experience such transcendence, an occasion of profound knowing, quite different from that which stems from rational enquiry. “Such experiences of ‘self-transcendence’,” he concludes, “represent a clearer understanding of the way things are.” 17

Collating the results of studies by a number of different writers, Jenny Wade summarily described such altered states as “characterized by the following experiential elements:” 18

• Ecstatic unity with no separation between subject and object.
• Transcendence of time and space. There is a subjective sense of timelessness, and the sensation of the self is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere.
• Sense of the numinous. The oneness of all phenomena is perceived as sacredness.
• Realness. Mystical states carry a sense of intrinsic authority.
• Ineffability. Words cannot convey the full meaning and subjective impact of the experience.

In all these respects this state of consciousness is clearly a non-ordinary state. But that does not mean it is unusual. Rare and fleeting perhaps, but the experience nonetheless of most people at some time. “The potential for mystical experience,” said transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof (born 1931), “is the birthright of all humans.” 19 When, for reasons we can never understand, what William James called the “filmiest of screens” dissolves and we are granted entrée into this domain, it comes as both gift and blessing. It comes to lead us out, however fleetingly, from our anxious preoccupation with our separate self. It reminds us that we are inseparably one with a reality infinitely greater than ourselves and fills us with a joy and an assurance of meaning unknown in our ordinary state.

Living at the intersection:

These two domains of consciousness can be represented by two lines – two planes or dimensions – that intersect at right angles. The horizontal plane represents our ordinary, everyday, time-and-space-bound consciousness that enables us to make cause-and-effect sense of, and so navigate, the external world delivered to us by our five senses. This is the domain of self-awareness or ego-consciousness. Here we each experience ourselves as a distinct and describable self, a separate centre of awareness and agency, a “me” with which “I” am clothed, a self of which I am aware, that stands in relation to other selves in the ongoing stream of events that constitute our life. The vertical plane represents what we have been describing as self-transcendence or unity consciousness in which the boundaries of the separate self with which we ordinarily identify dissolve and, to our astonishment, we find ourselves in a timeless realm in which we are one with a transcendent Unity that embraces the whole of existence.

The horizontal plane is the time-line on which we live our everyday life, moving from our past into whatever future awaits us. It is intersected in every “now” moment by the vertical plane of Depth-and-Transcendence – the Dynamic Ground of our being and the Transcendent One to which we all belong. On the horizontal plane we experience ourselves as spatially separate individuals; on the vertical plane we know ourselves to be one with the Whole; at the point of intersection the Many are transparent to the One. The horizontal plane is the dimension of time; the vertical is the dimension of eternity; the point of intersection is the eternal Now. The horizontal plane is determined by causality; the vertical is free; the point of intersection is the instant of Creativity.

The emergence of self-awareness and the development of a stable ego-construct occur on the time-bound horizontal plane, making it possible to navigate this world of separate things and causally related events. It may be the only world we ever experience. But it may be too that at some point in time we find ourselves wholly present in the Now, at the point of intersection of these two dimensions, and in that instant, in that moment of connection, the boundaries of our separate self dissolve and we glimpse what can never be described – the boundless Depth of our own being and the Transcendent One shining through the Many. And in that tiny moment we are transformed.

When the reality of the vertical dimension first dawns upon us, or if we have only heard of it rather than experienced it, it is easy to imagine that this transcendent reality is another world, a supernatural realm “up there,” somewhere above this earthly realm. But these are not two worlds or separate realities. They are, as Jenny Wade describes it, “two dimensions of the same Reality in a non-dual whole.” Like physicist David Bohm’s implicate and explicate orders, “their conjunction is like the two ‘sides’ of a Moebius ring, where locally the implicate and explicate may appear to be fundamentally different, but in reality are one seamless whole” (italics added). 20

Opening to the vertical dimension yields a mode of consciousness that some people never experience, that most people sometimes experience, and that a very few people have been able to cultivate such that their lives on the horizontal plane are lived always against the backdrop of what they know to be true on the vertical plane. They live at or close to that point where the horizontal and vertical planes intersect in every “now” moment, where the temporal and the eternal meet, where life in this everyday world is continuously informed and transformed by the profound Depth of who we are and the unspeakable Transcendence with which we are one. “The world which appears to you in this way is unreliable,” wrote Martin Buber, “for it comes even when it is not summoned, and vanishes even when it is tightly held. Through the graciousness of its comings and the solemn sadness of its goings it leads you away to the Thou. It does not help to sustain you in life; it only helps you to glimpse eternity.” 21

Is it possible that the domain of unity consciousness to which these fleeting “peak experiences” introduce us could became a more enduring state of being? What if we could realise more and more our oneness with the whole? Is it possible that our transcendent moments of connection are a kind of sneak preview of our intended destiny – glimpses of reality in its unbroken unity and of an all-embracing love that lies potential within us? Could our experiences of unity consciousness, however fleeting, be lead indicators of what we might become through some continuing process of individual evolution? The universal wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions – what Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) called “the perennial philosophy” – maintains that this is so. Every spiritual master pointed to the possibility of such ego-transcendence. Indeed, they embodied it in their own lives.

This does not mean destroying ego. Despite the bad press it has received, there is nothing wrong with ego. On the contrary, our self-awareness is to be celebrated. Evolution has laboured long and hard to bring it to birth. But potential within us is the possibility of transcending ego, of seeing our ego for what it is – a mental construct – and wearing it lightly. Few, if any, of us are able to live only in unity consciousness. It would utterly consume us. Ego boundaries seem to be essential for our survival in this world. But if we live only in ego-consciousness, our lives are no less consumed by the fear and emptiness and insatiable hunger that it spawns. Many of us are simply lost in ego-consciousness and pay the price in terms of all the “suffering” that the Buddha rightly said belongs to it. Others of us swing between these two domains of consciousness – our often-disconnected lives redeemed by what, in transcendent moments, we have seen and known to be true. But a few seem able to live simultaneously in both realms – living their separate individuality always and consciously against the backdrop of the One to which they belong.

That is the reported experience of the great mystics, whatever their tradition, from Shankara to al-Hallaj to St. Teresa of Avila. But other, more ordinary folk report the same thing. Bernadette Roberts (born 1931) is an American mother and housewife for whom such an experience became an enduring state of consciousness. “I was standing on a windy hillside looking down over the ocean when a seagull came into view, gliding, dipping, playing with the wind,” she wrote. “I watched it as I’d never watched anything before in my life. I almost seemed to be mesmerized; it was as if I was watching myself flying, for there was not the usual division between us. Yet, something more was there than just a lack of separateness, ‘something’ truly beautiful and unknowable. Finally I turned my eyes to the pine-covered hills and still there was no division, only something ‘there’ that was flowing with and through every vista and object of vision.” For her, it was to become an enduring state of consciousness. “What I had [at first] taken as a trick of the mind,” she concludes, “was to become a permanent way of seeing and knowing. I was never to revert back to the usual relative way of seeing separateness or individuality.” 22

John Wren-Lewis (1923-2006) was another for whom this became an enduring state of mind. A physicist, humanist psychologist, and distinctly irreverent sceptic, he had always regarded mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy until, in 1983, he had a near-death experience. That experience had none of the usually reported features such as hurtling down a tunnel towards a heavenly light or encounters with celestial beings. But, on awakening from his coma, he discovered to his astonishment that he was in a quite different state – one that, to the end of his life, remained an ever-present state that he called “eternity consciousness.”

“It was as if I’d emerged freshly made (complete with all the memories that constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness that was somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness or ‘pure consciousness’ that had no separation within it… It was like having had a cataract taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and myself properly for the first time – for that lovely dark radiance seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy… Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn’t feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural that personal consciousness should be aware of its own Ground, while my first fifty-nine years of so-called ‘normal’ consciousness, in ignorance of that Ground, now seems like a kind of waking dream. It was as if I’d been entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate individuals struggling in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction and significance.” 23

What’s the difference?:

Granted that our experience of transcendence cannot adequately be described in the subject-object language of ego-consciousness, those who make the effort can be cut some slack if their reference to indefinable concepts such as “Dynamic Ground” or “Transcendent One” sound strange, if not suspect, to our ears. But accepting their descriptions as a kind of poetry, we are justified in asking what difference these fine-sounding “moments of connection” actually make in our day-to-day lives. Certainly those who have never had such blissful and meaning-filled experiences, and who perhaps feel a twinge of envy upon hearing what folk like Bernadette Roberts and John Wren-Lewis describe, can likewise be forgiven for thinking “So what! Give me some evidence, please, to indicate that this presumed transformation of consciousness is anything more than a passing neurological anomaly. Does it actually make any lasting difference to how we live on this horizontal plane?”

According those who have done the research, the answer is an unqualified “Yes.” In a 1969 article, Maslow clarified what distinguished healthy self-actualizers from those whom he was by then calling transcenders. “I have recently found it useful,” he wrote, “to differentiate between two degrees of self-actualizing people, those who were clearly healthy, but with little or no experience of transcendence, and those in whom transcendent experiencing was important and even central… [The latter] may be said to be living at the level of Being, to have unitive consciousness, and to have had peak experiences (mystic, sacral, ecstatic) with illuminations or insights or cognitions which changed their view of the world and of themselves.” 24 In the same article, he then went on to list twenty-four such changes.

Jenny Wade has done something similar. In chapters on Transcendent and Unity Consciousness, she gathers together the findings of major scholars in the field and then lists in summary fashion the distinguishing characteristics of these states. 25 All agree that the stability and durability of these features of enlightenment depend on the frequency and impact of the subject’s peak experiences. With practice, these transcendent occasions can be experienced more frequently, for longer periods of time, and so become more continuous with ordinary consciousness. While the quality of the experience itself does not vary, there are differences in the degree of personal change that ensues.

If we collate the findings of Maslow and Wade, the changes that typify this enlightened self-transcendent state include the following: One fundamental change underlies all the others. “Transcendence brings with it,” said Maslow, “the transpersonal loss of ego” 26 – and if not outright loss, then at least the dawning recognition that who we are, our essential being, transcends the mental ego-construct with which we have hitherto identified.

As Ram Dass put it: “The ego thins like clouds until only a transparent layer remains.” 27 Like healthy self-actualisers, transcenders know what they want, what they are good at, and what is theirs to contribute – but they wear their ego-identity lightly. They know it is not who they are.

The peak experiences that initiate this awakening are seen as life-changing. Even fleeting and occasional glimpses of this self-transcendent state yield an increasing love for it and a quest to more and more liberate this latent state of consciousness.

Recognising the ego to be a mental construct, motivation is directed toward transcending it in order to experience directly this other dimension of reality. Personal development becomes a spiritual quest to escape the objectification of the ego. Because the ego does not easily self-destruct, this typically involves struggle, resistance, and directed effort through some disciplined practice that focuses the mind.

Because peak experiences cannot adequately be described in the subject-object terms of ordinary converse, they are often spoken of in a language akin to that of mystics and poets. They see sacredness in all things. Living at, or close to, the point of intersection where the dimension of It becomes transparent to the dimension of Thou (to use Buber’s terms), they are attuned to the eternal in each moment, and aware of the transcendent One that interpenetrates the multiplicity of form. Their understanding of the nature of reality is permanently altered. It no longer consists simply of things and events separated in time and connected by causal laws; it is a unity that includes the knower. This new understanding, beyond all words or concepts, seems to dwarf all previous comprehension.

While valuing evidence-based knowledge, they have a reverence for the mystery that everywhere surrounds them. Acknowledging the limitations of purely rational thought, they have a tolerance, even a preference, for ambiguity, uncertainty and paradox.

The experience of transcendence yields what Buber called “the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. Meaning is assured. The question about the meaning of life is no longer there. You do not know how to exhibit and define the meaning of life, you have no formula or picture for it, and yet it has more certitude for you than the perceptions of your senses.” 28

• They prefer simplicity to the accumulation of wealth, possessions, and privilege.
• They are usually interested in a cause beyond themselves, and easily fuse work and play.
• They easily transcend win-lose competitiveness.
• They also easily transcend cultural and tribal attachments to things like “the national interest” or to sectarian religious or ideological groups. There is a sense of oneness with the whole human family and an honouring of all life as a manifestation of the Absolute.

Peak experiences leave a residue of positive affect that more and more pervades their everyday state of consciousness. These include feelings of gratitude, generosity, and loving kindness. Compassion becomes effortless.

• They are unselfish and altruistic, treating others with impartiality. Their love is more like an unqualified acceptance than the mix of love and hate that characterises our usual experience of friendship and intimate relationships.
• They possess a greater degree of serenity. While remaining eminently practical, they greet all circumstances with a new-found equanimity.
• Their joy is often tempered by a kind of cosmic sadness over the blindness, enmity and cruelty of which we humans are capable.

The transcendence of ego and diminished identification with the body changes the meaning of death. It is now regarded as unimportant, or even as an opportunity to realise a greater unity.
At the highest levels of what Wade calls Unity Consciousness, the desire for transcendence is itself transcended. Desire, attachment, and self-interest die as all egoism is extinguished in the nirvana of Buddhism, the Samadhi of yoga, the satori of Zen, the fana of Sufism, the shema of the Kabbalah, and the kingdom of heaven of Christianity.

Conclusion:

If, as our spiritual traditions have long maintained and as current studies in transpersonal psychology seem to confirm, it is possible to develop beyond our usual level of ego-consciousness to a state described as self-transcendence, and if such transformational changes as are summarised above typically accompany this transition, then clearly there is value in exploring, from both a personal and a research point of view, whatever practices may in fact facilitate this transition – including those that for so long have comprised the heart of the world’s great spiritual traditions. At the very least, we would do well in this secular post-modern age, when so many of us are distancing ourselves from the apparent absurdities of organised religion, not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, but perchance to rediscover what the spiritual Masters have for so long been trying to tell us.

---

References:

1. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958).
2. Abraham Maslow, “A theory of human motivation”. Psychological Review 50 (4): 370–396.
3. Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954).
4. Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p 48.
5. Ibid, p 62.
6. Jenny Wade, Changes of Mind: A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Consciousness (Albany, NY: State
   University of New York Press, 1996), p 159.
7. Ibid, p 170.
8. Ibid, p 177.
9. Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1996), p 146.
10. Michael Washburn, “Transpersonal Dialogue: A New Direction”. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,
    2003, Vol. 35, No. 1.
11. Michael Washburn, The Ego and the Dynamic Ground: A transpersonal theory of human development
    (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), p 170.
12. Ken Wilber, No Boundary (Boston: Shambhala, 1981), pp. 3-9.
13. Ram Dass, “Foreword” in Daniel Goleman, The Meditative Mind (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,1988), x
14. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1972), pp. 88-89.
15. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
16. Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 50.
17. Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.(London: Bantam Press, 2014), pp 4-5, 9.
18. Jenny Wade, op. cit., p 183.
19. Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), p 16.
20. Jenny Wade, op. cit., p 201.
21. Martin Buber, op. cit. pp 32-33.
22. Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1984), p. 30.
23. John Wren-Lewis, “The Dazzling Dark,” What is Enlightenment, 1995.
24. Abraham Maslow, “Theory Z,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1969, 1(2), pp 31-47, and reprinted
    in his posthumously published book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, op. cit.
25. Jenny Wade, op. cit., pp 175-222.
26. Abraham Maslow, “Theory Z,” op. cit.
27. Ram Dass, Remember, Be Here Now (San Cristobal, NM: The Lama Foundation, 1971), p 76.
28. Martin Buber, op. cit., p 110.