Participatory Spirituality
Following is an excerpt from:
PARTICIPATORY SPIRITUALITY AND TRANSPERSONAL THEORY: A TEN-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE. by Jorge N. Ferrer, Ph.D. Berkeley, California
published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2011
AN OUTLINE OF PARTICIPATORY SPIRITUALITY
Developed over time, the participatory approach holds that human spirituality emerges from our cocreative participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery or generative power of life, the cosmos, and/or the spirit. More specifically, I argue that spiritual participatory events can engage the entire range of human epistemic faculties (e.g., rational, imaginal, somatic, vital, aesthetic, etc.) with the creative unfolding of reality or the mystery in the enactment—or ‘‘bringing forth’’—of ontologically rich religious worlds. In other words, the participatory approach presents an enactive understanding of the sacred that conceives spiritual phenomena, experiences, and insights as cocreated events. By locating the emergence of spiritual knowing at the interface of human multidimensional cognition, cultural context, and the creative power of the mystery, this account avoids both the secular post/modernist reduction of religion to cultural-linguistic artifact and, as discussed below, the religionist dogmatic privileging of a single tradition as paradigmatic. The rest of this section describes eight distinctive features of the participatory approach: spiritual cocreation, creative spirituality, spiritual individuation, participatory pluralism, relaxed spiritual universalism, participatory epistemology, the integral bodhisattva vow, and participatory spiritual practice.
Dimensions of Spiritual Cocreation
Spiritual cocreation has three interrelated dimensions—intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal.6 These dimensions respectively establish participatory spirituality as embodied (spirit within), relational (spirit in-between), and enactive (spirit beyond), discussed below. Intrapersonal cocreation consists of the collaborative participation of all human attributes—body, vital energy, heart, mind, and consciousness—in the enactment of spiritual phenomena. This dimension is grounded in the principle of equiprimacy, according to which no human attribute is intrinsically superioror more evolved than any other. As Romero and Albareda (2001) point out, the cognicentric (i.e., mind-centered) character of Western culture hinders the maturation of nonmental attributes, making it normally necessary to engage in intentional practices to bring these attributes up to the same developmental level the mind achieves through mainstream education. In principle, however, all human attributes can participate as equal partners in the creative unfolding of the spiritual path, are equally capable of sharing freely in the life of spirit here on earth, and can also be equally alienated from spirit. Intrapersonal cocreation affirms the importance of being rooted in spirit within (i.e., the immanent dimension of the mystery) and renders participatory spirituality essentially embodied Interpersonal cocreation emerges from cooperative relationships among human beings growing as peers in the spirit of solidarity, mutual respect, and constructive confrontation. It is grounded in the principle of equipotentiality, according to which ‘‘we are all teachers and students’’ insofar as we are superior and inferior to others in different regards. This principle does not entail that there is no value in working with spiritual teachers or mentors; it simply means that human beings cannot be ranked in their totality or according to a single developmental criterion, such as brainpower, emotional intelligence, or contemplative realization.
Although peer-to-peer human relationships are vital for spiritual growth, interpersonal cocreation can include contact with perceived nonhuman intelligences, such as subtle entities, natural powers, or archetypal forces that might be embedded in psyche, nature, or the cosmos. Interpersonal cocreation affirms the importance of communion with spirit inbetween (i.e., the situational dimension of the mystery) and makes participatory spirituality intrinsically relational. Transpersonal cocreation refers to dynamic interaction between embodied human beings and the mystery in the bringing forth of spiritual insights, practices, states, and worlds . This dimension is grounded in the principle of equiplurality, according to which there can potentially be multiple spiritual enactions that are nonetheless equally holistic and emancipatory. This principle frees participatory spirituality from dogmatic commitment to any single spiritual system and paves the way for a genuine, metaphysically and pragmatically-grounded, spiritual pluralism. Transpersonal cocreation affirms the importance of being open to spirit beyond (i.e., the transcendent dimension of the mystery) and makes participatory spirituality fundamentally inquiry-driven and enactive.
Although all three dimensions interact in multifaceted ways in the enactment of spiritual events, the creative link between intrapersonal and transpersonal cocreation deserves special mention. Whereas the mind and consciousness arguably serve as a natural bridge to subtle, transcendent spiritual forms already enacted in history that display more fixed forms and dynamics (e.g., cosmological motifs, archetypal configurations, mystical visions and states, etc.), attention to the body and its vital energies may give us a greater access to the more generative immanent power of life or the spirit. If we accept this approach, it follows that the greater the participation of embodied dimensions in religious inquiry, the more creative one’s spiritual life may become and a larger number of creative spiritual developments may emerge.
A Creative Spirituality
In the infancy of participatory spirituality in the 1990s, spiritual inquiry operated within certain constraints arguably inherited from traditional religion. As Eliade (1982) argued, many established religious practices and rituals are ‘‘re-enactive’’ in their attempt to replicate cosmogonic actions and events. Expanding this account, I have suggested that most religious traditions can be seen as reproductive insofar as their practices aim to not only ritually reenact mythical motives, but also replicate the enlightenment of their founder or attain the state of salvation or freedom described in allegedly revealed scriptures. Although disagreements about the exact
nature of such states and the most effective methods to attain them abound in the historical development of religious ideas and practices—naturally leading to rich creative developments within the traditions—spiritual inquiry was regulated (and arguably constrained) by such pregiven unequivocal goals. In contrast, Heron (1998) distinguished between experiential training within a traditional body of doctrine, and authentic experiential spiritual inquiry, both individual and cooperative.
Participatory enaction entails a model of spiritual engagement that does not simply reproduce certain tropes according to a given historical a priori, but rather embarks upon the adventure of openness to the novelty and creativity of nature or spirit. Grounded on current moral intuitions and cognitive competences, for instance, participatory spiritual inquiry can not only undertake the critical revision and actualization of prior religious forms, but also the cocreation of novel spiritual understandings, practices, and even expanded states of freedom.
Spiritual Individuation
This emphasis in creativity is central to spiritual individuation, that is, the process through which a person gradually develops and embodies his or her unique spiritual identity and wholeness. Religious traditions tend to promote the homogenization of essential features of the inner and outer lives of their practitioners, for example, encouraging them to seek the same spiritual states and liberation, to become like Christ or the Buddha, or to wear the same clothes (in the case of monks). These aspirations may have been historically legitimate, but after the emergence of the modern self, our current predicament (at least in the West) arguably calls for a bold integration of spiritual maturation and psychological individuation that will likely lead to a richer diversity of spiritual expressions. In other words, the participatory approach aims at the emergence of a human community formed by spiritually differentiated individuals. It is important to sharply distinguish between the modern hyper-individualistic mental ego and the participatory selfhood forged in the sacred fire of spiritual individuation. Whereas the disembodied modern self is plagued by alienation, dissociation, and narcissism, a spiritually individuated person has an embodied, integrated, connected, and permeable identity whose high degree of differentiation, far from being isolating, actually allows him or her to enter into a deeply conscious communion with others, nature, and the multidimensional cosmos. A key difference between modern individualism and spiritual individuation is thus the integration of radical relatedness in the later. Similarly, Almaas (1988, 1996) distinguished between an essential personhood that integrates autonomy and relatedness, and the narcissistic ego of modern individualism.
Participatory Pluralism
The participatory approach embraces a pluralistic vision of spirituality that accepts the formative role of contextual and linguistic factors in religious phenomena, while simultaneously recognizing the importance of nonlinguistic variables (e.g., somatic, imaginal, energetic, archetypal, etc.) in shaping religious experiences and meanings, and affirming the ontological value and creative impact of spiritual worlds. Participatory pluralism allows the conception of a multiplicity of not only spiritual paths, but also spiritual liberations and even spiritual ultimates. On the one hand, besides affirming the historical existence of multiple spiritual goals or ‘‘salvations’’, the increased embodied openness to immanent spiritual life and the spirit-in-between fostered by the participatory approach may naturally engender a number of novel holistic spiritual realizations that cannot be reduced to traditional states of enlightenment or liberation. If we regard human beings as truly unique embodiments of the mystery, would it not be plausible to consider that as we spiritually individuate, our spiritual realizations might also be distinct even if potentially overlapping and aligned with each other? On the other hand, participatory pluralism proposes that different spiritual ultimates can be enacted through intentional or spontaneous participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery, spiritual power, and/or generative force of life or reality.9 The participatory perspective does not contend that there are two, three, or any limited quantity of pregiven spiritual ultimates, but rather that the radical openness, interrelatedness, and creativity of the mystery and/or the cosmos allows for the participatory cocreation of an indefinite number of ultimate self-disclosures of reality and corresponding religious worlds. Participatory approaches, that is, seek to enact with body, mind, heart, and consciousness a creative spirituality that lets a thousand spiritual flowers bloom.
A More Relaxed Spiritual Universalism
The pluralistic spirit of the participatory approach should not eclipse its ‘‘more relaxed’’ spiritual universalism—although eschewing dubious equations among spiritual ultimates (e.g., the Tao is God or Buddhist emptiness is structurally equivalent to the Hindu Brahman), the participatory approach affirms an underlying undetermined mystery or creative spiritual power as the generative source of all spiritual enactions. This shared spiritual dynamism should be distinguished from any Kantian-like noumenon or ‘‘thing-in-itself’’ endowed with inscrutable qualities and from which all spiritual ultimates are always incomplete, culturally conditioned, or cognitively constrained phenomenal manifestations (e.g., Hick, 1992). In contrast, the enactive epistemology of the participatory approach does away with the Kantian ‘‘two worlds’’ dualism by refusing to conceive of the mystery as having objectifiable pregiven attributes (such as personal, impersonal, dual, or nondual) and by affirming the radical identity of the manifold spiritual ultimates and the mystery, even if the former do not exhaust the ontological possibilities of the latter. Put simply, the mystery cocreatively unfolds in multiple ontological directions. Moreover, the relationship between pluralism and universalism cannot be consistently characterized in a hierarchical fashion, because while there are ‘‘lower’’ and ‘‘higher’’ forms of both universalism and pluralism (i.e., more or less rigid, sophisticated, encompassing, explanatory, etc.), ‘‘the dialectic between universalism and pluralism, between the One and the Many, displays what it may well be the deepest dynamics of the self-disclosing of the mystery’’ In a similar vein, Puhakka (2008) offered some important reflections on the dialectic between ‘‘unity vs. diversity’’ in the context of the historical evolution of transpersonal discourse, with which I fully concur.
