Conscious Choice: Talkin’ ’Bout My Transpersonal Generation

July 2007 | Tune In

Talkin’ ’Bout My Transpersonal Generation

By Jeff Davis

“Woodstock is where the consciousness revolution began, man,” Michael, the lanky guy next to me, said to the group, “and I was right here when it happened in 1969.” The actor’s voice, along with the two lavender plumes tucked in his headband, quivered as he spoke. Woodstock, New York? Where it all started?

Twenty-six writers and artists had packed into a small bookstore’s “sacred space” for a workshop. Lloyd, the middle-aged contractor who sat arms folded on my other side, shook his head and rolled his eyes as Michael spoke.

“I’m of the school that we’ll be judged in the end,” Lloyd said, “not for our groovy visions but for our good acts. What good are all of these visions if we’re not doing something to help others?”

The room’s statues and tanghkas of Buddhist and Hindu deities remained neutral.

Although the workshop description promised we’d explore how to communicate transpersonal experiences in stories and paintings, the workshop leader forfeited trying to espouse any wisdom for writers and artists and instead opted to let a dialogue unfold.

The dialogue made me, gray-haired and bespectacled, wonder where I sit — between Michael, the zealous optimist of all-things visionary, and Lloyd, the practical skeptic who sees promise in taking action to help the poor and destitute. Where do the Michaels and Lloyds converge?

There’s a growing number of us — in our 20s to 50s and even older — who recognize the value of such extraordinary experiences, not just for ourselves, but also for our families, our communities, the planet. Call us the transpersonal poly-generation. Forewarned by the ’60s’ dangers of visionaries’ self-delusion and self-indulgence, we sense, I think, that mysticism doesn’t have to be something “other,” outside of our everyday waking experience or apart from social activism.

Is there room for a respectable, dare I say, middle-aged and mainstream mysticism or spirituality that is integrative, that includes the ecstatic as well as the everyday, that includes beatific vision and progressive action? If so, what holds back some of the Lloyds among us from understanding and embracing such a way?

Poets and mystics from St. Francis to Blake describe those moments when, if for three-and-a-half seconds or four hours, the ego self vanishes and physical boundaries seem to dissolve, allowing for a glimpse into something more, something grander. Unity with all that is. Call it Godhead. Jack Kerouac’s It. Higher Self. Wakan-Tanka.

Whatever you name it, two-thirds of Americans in 1993 claimed to have had at least one such experience. That, according to The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s national survey.

Two-thirds? 66 percent is a marked jump from the consistent 40-55 percent reported by Gallup polls since the 1960s. Dr. Jeff Levin, who writes about faith’s role in physical healing, suggests that with every generation, we Americans become increasingly more interested in such matters.

In 1902, William James rallied for his fellow psychologists to take seriously what he called “religious experiences.” Thanks to Abraham Maslow’s later humanistic focus on “peak experiences” and Stanislav Grof’s founding of transpersonal psychology, by the 1960s, kissing God or death merited study as much as, say, dreams about cigars in Fidel Castro’s mouth or obsessively cleaning the kitchen sink.

In 2007, college students now can become transpersonal psychologists who study subjective experiences, biogenetic structuralists who examine how genetics and environment shape altered states of consciousness, or transpersonal anthropologists who explore the ways in which cultural signs and norms influence our mystical flashes. They can even join the new wave of “neurotheologists” who try to find the “God spot” in the brain.

Yet many of us — whether inside or outside that “two-thirds” statistic — either don’t value such experiences or may not recognize how mystical our lives might already be. Part of the hang-up may lie in how we define “transpersonal” and “mystical” experiences.

No doubt, bliss sounds sexy, otherworldly. As Charlie Parker howls on midnight moon notes, his ego dissolves. As everglades cradle John Muir, time and space vanish. As Anais Nin entwines in a lover’s beating breath and hairy limbs, lover and lover become one.

This ecstatic otherworld tenor may be part of mysticism’s bad rap. Those vision-seekers lured by nirvana’s song can grow attached to the ecstasy and suffer miserably otherwise as the rest of life just doesn’t measure up. We can become spiritually arrogant, imagining we have a high priest’s access to the spirit world among minions. Practical skeptics such as Lloyd, then, might think that transpersonal experiences are reserved for raving poets, beachside ravers and privileged gray-haired adolescents chasing after glimpses of God on the peaks of Tibet. Mystics drop out of society, we may think, and skeptics check out of mysticism.

“Ecstasy” means to “step out of what is.” Hence, one common definition of a transpersonal experience is one in which you feel “out” of yourself, “out” of the world, “out” of conventional time and space. But there’s more to mysticism than ecstasis. Gary Snyder’s poem “What a Poet Needs” suggests we need “the wild freedom of the dance extasy” and the “silent solitary illumination enstasy.” Enstasy moves us deep within the subtle body instead of out of it. What a poet needs, perhaps, so too an active visionary.

Labels similarly limit our perception. Psychologist Rhea White suggests that since we in Western culture typically view these experiences as “anomalous” or “non-ordinary,” then many of us won’t take them seriously in our daily lives. Instead White refers to them as “exceptional human experiences,” in order not to marginalize them.

Maybe these tastes of deep connection are simply another variety of potentially ordinary experiences. Transpersonal might refer to, then, not moving out of one’s self but rather expanding one’s sense of self.

Bliss is not exclusive. According to transpersonal psychologist William Braud, repeated and consistent evidence bears out that these experiences cut across class, race, as well as religious beliefs and practices.

Perhaps a sustainable mysticism or spirituality of visionary be-ers and doers is integrative and inclusive. Some of us may continue to seek peak experience after peak experience, while others may cultivate a continuous, integrated feeling of joy, well-being and connectedness, what Abraham Maslow described as a “plateau experience.”

A transpersonal life might focus less on getting “out” of one’s self and perhaps more on expanding one’s sense of self. Encounters with those we regard as others — the disgruntled neighbor with opposing political views, the manager of Office Depot, or your lover — become opportunities for connection. We might find ways to connect with food, with plants, with animals. I think of the poet Lucille Clifton, who while cutting collards and kale in her kitchen, suddenly and unexpectedly tastes in her “natural appetite/the bond of live things everywhere.” I think of autistic author Temple Grandin’s heightened sensory perceptions that allow her to feel what cows and sheep feel.

A transpersonal life might consist of translating visions into action. Huichol shaman and author of Plant Spirit Medicine Elliot Cowan hears how plants vibrate and sing, and he communicates with their spirits; his experiences have helped uncover ancient ways to heal people’s maladies. Grandin’s intuitive experiences with farm animals led her to design special handling facilities enjoyed now by a third of U.S. cattle. Long-time business consultant Gay Hendricks suggests that many CEOs are “corporate mystics” who approach business solutions with states of consciousness radically different from the consciousness that created the problems.

Aware of what ails the planet — from suffering local economies to dying bees and frogs to strained human relationships — these transpersonal visionaries, I suspect, hunger to tune in, turn on, and drop deeply, actively, consciously in.

Living this way, as with any practice, is not easy. There are no 7 steps or 9 principles that will guarantee that this transpersonal momentum will continue or manifest into any kind of quantum global awakening by 2012 — or 2112.

After all, of the 79 percent (256 participants) in one study who said they had had a peak experience, half of them said they had been reluctant to tell anyone. The reason? Fear (of course) muted these daily mystics, according to the study published in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1991. These days, discussing such experiences may not get us branded as an exiled heretic, as happened to 18th-century scientist-turned-prophetic mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. But you might be safer, after all, to bore your friends with your weirdest dream than to divulge that you actually saw Joan of Arc this morning on your subway commute.

The Woodstock group at times did feel like a “Mystics Anonymous Meeting.” Hi, I’m Ivan. I’ve been talking with spirits for thirty years in my bathroom. On the other hand, I felt at home in this room of odd ducks who talked about everything from embodying Christ in the Garden of Gethsamene to seeing angels in tall grasses.

We conversed. And to “converse,” after all, suggests a “turning with.” One turns with the other. Although conversation likely once referred to a monastic mode of life devoted to conversations with God, out of the monastery our daily conversations can let us hear how “all that is” speaks through strangers and lovers. “The yogi’s everyday speech becomes a mantra,” so claims a passage from the Shiva-Sutras, a text that describes ways to be with all that is.

To further our journey toward a life that couples vision and progressive action, some of us can practice hearing the languages of pizza twirlers and grandfathers, of stones and sidewalks, and letting these multiple tongues enfold into us, and us into them.

“Voices. Voices,” Rilke writes, “Listen, my heart, as only/saints have listened” (trans. Stephen Mitchell). The wandering poet spent a lifetime trying to do so. Maybe some active visionaries have a head start.

Jeff Davis, author of The Journey from the Center to the Page (Penguin), teaches the discipline of yoga with writing around the U.S. He is converting his farmhouse and barn near Woodstock, NY, into a simple place where active visionaries can gather.

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