The Transpersonal Domains

Wilber's View

Having spent several chapters carefully tracing the archaic, magic, and mythic structures that "religion" ordinarily gets identified with, Wilber's move here is to insist that genuine contemplative development is precisely not that — it's a further unfolding, beyond the mature rational-ego, into what he calls the transpersonal ("personal plus," not "personal minus," to head off the common New Age misunderstanding that transcending ego means regressing behind it — see pre-trans-fallacy). His case for taking transpersonal claims seriously as knowledge rather than mere private feeling is structural: he argues any legitimate domain of knowledge, from mathematics to literary interpretation to physical science, rests on three components — an injunction ("if you want to know this, do this"), an illumination or direct apprehension that the injunction discloses, and communal confirmation by a community of others who have performed the same injunction. Since contemplative traditions come "first and foremost with a set of injunctions in hand" (zazen, vipassana, contemplative prayer) that reliably disclose data checked by a community of the similarly trained, Wilber argues they satisfy the same three-strand test any other reconstructive science does — they just aren't empirical science, because their data lie on the interior, Left-Hand side of the four-quadrants rather than the exterior Right-Hand side that empirical method is built to access.

He then works through the standard objections and, in each case, tries to show they prove too much: if "private and unverifiable" disqualifies mystical experience, it disqualifies mathematics too (nobody has ever seen the square root of negative one "out there"); if "can't be put into words" disqualifies it, that disqualifies sex, sunsets, and Bach as well. This is Wilber at his most rhetorically confident, and the parallel to mathematics is genuinely clever — but it also glosses over an obvious disanalogy critics would press: mathematical communities can produce formal proofs that settle disputes in ways no comparable mechanism exists for adjudicating between rival contemplative traditions that report different metaphysical conclusions. Wilber's own answer — that surface disagreements mask a convergent deep structure, evidenced by the psychic/subtle/causal/nondual sequence he goes on to reconstruct — is where the real weight of the argument ends up resting; see [[psychic-subtle-causal-nondual|The Psychic, Subtle, Causal, and Nondual]] for that payoff.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

…we have sketched the evolution of the exterior of individual holons up to the complex triune-brained organisms… But then something happened that transformed hominids… into true humans… we are here beginning to pass out of the noosphere and into the theosphere, into the transpersonal domains, the domains not just of the self-conscious but of the superconscious.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

Their teachings, and their contemplative endeavors, were (and are) transrational through and through. That is, although all of the contemplative traditions aim at going within and beyond reason, they all start with reason, start with the notion that truth is to be established by evidence, that truth is the result of experimental methods, that truth is to be tested in the laboratory of personal experience.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

The most typical objection is that these mystical states are private and interior and cannot be publicly validated; they are "merely subjective." This is simply not true; or rather, if it is true, then it applies to any and all nonempirical endeavors, from mathematics to literature to linguistics to psychoanalysis to historical interpretation.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature" (section "Objections to the Transpersonal")

The various injunctions, in other words, lead to or disclose or open up the possibility of an illumination, an apprehension, an intuition, or a direct experiencing of the domain addressed by the injunction… But you could be mistaken, and thus you check your results, your data, with others who have completed the first two strands… And this is the third strand, communal confirmation (or refutation).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

The contemplative traditions, on the other hand, have always come first and foremost with a set of injunctions in hand. They are, above all else, a set of practices, practices that require years to master.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

…the deep structures of worldspaces (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and transpersonal) show cross-cultural and largely invariant features at a deep level of abstraction, whereas the surface structures… are naturally and appropriately quite different from culture to culture.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 7, "The Farther Reaches of Human Nature"

See Also

• The Psychic, Subtle, Causal, and Nondual — the four stages this argument sets up
• pre-trans-fallacy — the confusion ("personal minus" instead of "personal plus") this page's opening distinction is meant to head off
• four-quadrants — the Left-Hand/Right-Hand distinction behind why transpersonal data need a different validity test than empirical science
• great-chain-of-being — the transpersonal domains are the Great Chain's territory beyond mind
• waves-and-streams — the transpersonal as further waves, not a different kind of thing