I keep thinking of the first line of a Mary Oliver poem, a poignant impossibility on this bright spring day of renewal and veriditas:

"when death comes…"

Maybe no one told you this lately, but we are all going to die. We will, each of us, breathe out a last breath, take a last step, see the sunrise for a last time, touch the cheek and hand of our most intimate, and depart this living world.

"when death comes…" 

Much of Western education serves to organize us into logical and rational thinking participants of society. In this linear model, square walls, desks, cubicles, mortgages, and contracts are proffered, make sense, are norm. Psychological (e.g., cognitive and behaviorist approaches) and economic theories suggest that each of us are, in this four-walled worldview, rational actors.

There was and still very much is, in such an encultured and nearly invisible system of projection, a massive tradeoff. Or, perhaps more accurately said, there was an operationalized division suggested and established, and the dominant mode of connection became, by necessity in trade, a transactional model of knowing the world.

I don't think I need to articulate examples of this division because I trust that each of us know it clearly, especially those moments when we felt that we didn't belong because of _____ (insert specific social construction here, there are so many):

am I too loud

is my grief too much

am I too sensitive

too visionary

ask too many questions

will they lock me up

will they hurt me

I should just be silent

I should just stay small

I should hide

are they right?

The internalization of such painful, transactional models often show up as inner doubt, self-silencing and self-bullying, and departing from our inner truth and empathic way of knowing self and other.

I write here not from some removed place, some tidy perfect setting, but rather from inside the unconscious and encultured traumas that bruised me, physically and psychologically. I write from a place of deep empathy for all those oppressed by such a system, and for all those I oppressed by unconsciously and consciously enacting my privilege and power within such a system.

And the refrain echoes on: "when death comes."

The linear world view of Western civilization has created so much dissatisfaction. Yes, there are amazing technological improvements, medical innovations, and so forth. I refute the argument which cannot separate the two, that does not allow for nuance to both appreciate the gifts and speak to the tragedies. I do not recognize externalities and human exceptionalism as necessary frameworks, and organizational systems built from that privileged position which suggest humans as more important than each Earthlings right to exist, innately. Such projection emerges from a transactional model, is limiting, and damaging to all of us Earth beings.

I believe that each of us (human and more-than-human) has an innate right to be, an unconditional right to exist in, on, with, and because of this vast lifeworld called Earth that created us just as we are.

So what does this have to do with transpersonal psychology?

Transpersonal psychology emerged from humanistic psychology to address the need for broadening and including a more comprehensive and greater range of human experiences, with specific emphasis on exploring spiritual, mystical, intuitive, and otherwise non-ordinary states of consciousness (Daniels, 2005, p. 12). Etymologically, trans- denotes a moving beyond, an expansion, a crossing of the personal and normal sense of self and into an expanded sense of awareness, a connection with something vaster, greater, and perhaps mysterious (p. 11). When that something includes the wilder-than-human world, this becomes transpersonal ecopsychology.

As a field, what is both brilliant and potent about transpersonal psychology is the return to a way of knowing and exploring our human-animal psyche with and within the more-than-human world which moves beyond limiting perspectives and frameworks, and acknowledges that we, as a species, are not simply rational actors operating according to linear and logical principles.

As the world burns, extinction rates ramp up, and corals die, recovering a more holistic understanding of the interdependence of human animals with and in this lifeworld is not simply good psychology, it is essential for turning from our trendline toward annihilation. The cultivation of knowing our self not only as an individual identity but also as an interconnected aspect of life, a larger identity which transcends separateness, is at the core of a transpersonal psychological orientation. This whole-person approach to understanding a person is a central tenet of transpersonal psychology (Hartelius et al., 2013).

In this, death might be seen as the most transpersonal experience possible, an exacting and vast transformational process that is as much a mystery as it is a certainty.

And the refrain goes on, poetry winding its way deeper into me.

There are many models for engaging with and opening toward what a transpersonal experience might look like, both during life and beyond. In the Tibetan Buddha dharma, for example, one such model for understanding death is the idea of the child luminosity (each of us) returning to the mother luminosity (Chodron, 2022). Certainly other major world traditions have their own mythos also.

Therefore, answers may be false end points, mirages which distract us from the vast and mysteriousness of existence and impermanence. In this absence of knowledge emergs something raw and real, a new/old way, where questions can take us into exploration and discussion, into prayer and openness, into the paradox of spring and autumn and this great cycle of life always being born and always dying. Death and inquiry into that vast transformative process, then, can actually serve to reorient us toward life, toward openness and not-knowing-ness.

How then can we live into such questions, stay in the paradox, and cultivate meaning here and now?

That is the essence of a transpersonal way of knowing the world, an epistemology of curiosity where nothing doesn’t belong and symbiosis, sympoeisis, and symbiogenesis are the de facto way of being (Haraway, 2016). 

References

Chodron, P. (2022). How we live is how we die. Shambhala.

Daniels, M. (2005). Shadow, self, spirit: Essays in transpersonal psychology. Imprint Academic.

Davis, J. V. & Canty, J. M. (2013). Ecopsychology and transpersonal psychology. In H. L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology (pp. 597-611).  Wiley & Sons.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press

Hartelius, G., Rothe, G., & Roy, P. J. (2013). A brand for the burning: Defining transpersonal psychology. In H. L. Friedman & G. Hartelius (Eds.). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology (pp. 3-22). Wiley & Sons.