Embracing Ambiguity: Transpersonal Development and the Phenomenological Tradition

Abstract

This chapter addresses the growing field of Transpersonal Psychology and wishes to argue that this area of psychology requires more philosophical clarification at a foundational level if it is not to succumb to some of the limitations of a world-view that seeks predictable lawfulness and progression in matters transpersonal. It would be ironic if the field of Transpersonal Psychology were to begin by privileging developmental models which are mainly progressive, systematic, and essentialist in conception, and where the steps of psychological/spiritual growth are framed as a historical system that is closely allied to the ‘known’ and the ‘predictable’: little place for ‘grace’. This chapter attempts to clarify this concern by situating human identity within a broadly phenomenological-philosophical tradition. As such it wishes to articulate a vision of the development of human identity that ‘always already’ has a transpersonal dimension which functions in dynamic ways in our everyday lives. In this view, we cannot compartmentalise the ‘transpersonal’ as something that comes later, or as a stage to be achieved. Rather, the tension between the ‘personal’ and the ‘transpersonal’ is revealed from the beginning as constituting a fundamental existential ambiguity which is always calling. In this way, a more embodied understanding of transcendence that ‘lives’ may be articulated.