On Transpersonal Philosophy Practice

Most of our life “problems” have their origin in our interaction with others. Our culture shapes the scenarios in which our psychic experience on this Earth will unfold. The personal and social relationships that derive from that particular social structure will determine our livelihood and our growth, our values and expectations, and in these contexts the person who enjoys and suffers the fascinating experience of life will be constructed. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in this experience is the individual inability to make a balanced evaluation of the problems and well-being that affect us. This inability also occurs at the social level, since cultural self-absorption prevents the breadth of perspectives necessary to understand human movement as a whole. In the same way that we cannot form a complete or adequate image of a city if we always remain inside it and do not know what is outside it, we cannot satisfactorily understand the identity of a culture by forming only an endogenous image. This simple principle, which enjoys a memorable theorem of Logic-Mathematics developed by Alfred Tarski, obeys in epistemological terms to the basic epistemological conditions of rational thinking.

The rest of the problems suffered by humans and historical communities are caused by psycho-physiological dysfunctions that at a historical level are presented as ecological failures of the social organism. We can find more or less satisfactory explanations in sociological, philosophical, religious or spiritual psychology terms, but such explanations are still conceptual images that extend the problem they seek to explain to various dimensions of the human soul. In cases of severe psycho-social dysfunctions, in crises and civilizational catastrophes, it is particularly evident that the conceptual images of the problem are part of the same problem. Therefore, we can only aspire to establish frames of reference that inscribe these dysfunctions in a broader horizon of the human condition and movements of life, that is, to return to our experience the cosmic emotion that our ancestors felt.

The two types of problems mentioned, those of group interaction and psycho-physiological dysfunctions, occur simultaneously and interact with each other, forming a complex ontological, psychological and economic framework (in the broadest sense of this word). However, let me insist that most of our problems and our experiences are in the realm of everyday social actions, of the Lebenswelt or life world. They are mostly uncritical social actions that admit a high degree of verbalization, of conceptual representation, although their roots are in a world broader than that of human life, since the scope of human experience is that of life as a whole. Our mental constructions are something that happens after other movements in life took place, they are a reflection of something broader and more complex.

Traditional European psychological analysis shows deficiencies in the integration of economic action and psychological action, and especially the determination of the continuity between both and the more general movements of life is missing. The problem of emotions in relation to the intellect, and of both with respect to the processes of symbolization, is just beginning to be posed from the limited but lucid proposal of Affective Neuroscience in which rationality is presented as a process that is inscribed in a continuum of emotional survival protocols. However, modern neuroscience per se is incapable of establishing the integrated perspective of the psychological problems of group integration, since the semanticity of human symbolization goes beyond the scope of mere survival in its complexity.

Up to this point I have talked about psychological “problems” in order to establish a connection with the scientific orientation that prevails in modern psychology. For science, the entire world is a problem to be solved, in the same way that for the hammer the universe consists in nails of different sizes and shapes. However, human existence is not a problem to be solved, but the experience of the infinite variety of forces that unfold in life. The action of solving problems, heuristics, conditions the process and result of life experience in accordance with the logical principle of contradiction, but nothing anywhere guarantees that life is simply a rational process. Quite the contrary, the mental universe gives us a contradictory image as soon as we leave the narrow frameworks of technological rationality. Psychological therapies may continue indefinitely for years, trapped in the vicious circle of healing and solving problems that always lead to other problems in an endless evolutionary race that continually takes us out of life here and now. It is not about healing-resolving the conceptions that humanity and the individual have had about themselves, about all the mental pain and frustration that our species has felt and feels, but about understanding our life in a broader, transpersonal way, where meaning is finally revealed to intuition. Here is where Philosophy comes in help of Psychology: the realm of meaning. The goal is simple: the advancement of self-understanding as individuals and as group so we can have a life full of meaning.

Transpersonal philosophy as a practice is then a process of understanding. Not a merely intellectual understanding, but an emotional and volitional one, a process of self-transformation that dissolves a good number of uncritically inherited phantoms of thinking-feeling-wanting. The practice of Transpersonal Philosophy uses creative imagination and emotional and volitional inspiration as much as logic. Myth and Art are not only an oracular source of the individual and collective psyche but also an alchemical demiurgic tool that takes our development beyond any identity mask or narrative. Not only do we change the assessment of what we consider to be our problem, but the life experience itself that we called "problem" generates a new psychological identity full of meaning.