This article is an extended commentary inspired by Alan Drengson's paper “Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary Person” (Drengson 2011). In this article Susan Greenwood and I echo Drengson's criticism that Euro-American science is incomplete, having committed what Thomas Roberts calls “The Singlestate Fallacy: the erroneous assumption that all worthwhile abilities reside in our normal, awake mindbody state” (Roberts 2006:105). This singlestate fallacy is vividly portrayed in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, whose critique of Euro-American science is revisited in this article. (...) Alternatively, Greenwood and I suggest that what is needed is a multimodel framework “that allows for in-depth analysis of the different modes of consciousness.” Roberts refers to this alternative attitude toward science as the Multistate Paradigm. An awareness of the transformational character of shamanism is also explored in this article as a means to overcome the oppositions between the technocratic and person planetary perspective, and their related gender associations. (shrink)

Calling for an expanded framework of EuroAmerican science's methodology whose perspective acknowledges both quantitative/etic and qualitative/emic orientations is the broad focus of this article. More specifically this article argues that our understanding of shamanic and/or other related states of consciousness has been greatly enhanced through ethnographic methods, yet in their present form these methods fail to provide the means to fully comprehend these states. They fail, or are limited, because this approach is only a “cognitive interpretation” or “metanarrative” of the (...) actual experience and not the experience itself. Consequently this perspective is also limited because the researcher continues to assess his or her data through the lens of their symbolic constructs, thereby preventing them from truly experiencing shamanic and psi/spirit approaches to knowing since the data collection process does not “in and of itself” affect the observer. We, therefore, need expanded ethnographic methods that include within their approaches an understanding of methods and techniques to experientially encounter these states of consciousness—and become transformed by them. Our becoming transformed and then recollecting our ethnoautobiographical experiences is the means toward a new kind of science and its methods of inquiry that this article seeks to encourage. (shrink)

Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology’s origin’s morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs. This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach. Enter the issue of psychedelic therapy and the Supreme Courts decision to allow ayahuasca as a sacrament by the Uniao Do Vegetal Church, and the importance of why humanistic (...) and transpersonal psychology need to clearly map out the territories and sub-divisions of science and religion. Finally this conversation raises a concern, that Maslow’s call for a “trans-human” psychology sought to encourage creating what we now call ecopsychology. (shrink)

Focusing on the question of how to be in the world, ontological religion often comes in forms that look very little like our standard expectations for religious institutions. Intuitive, experiential, and often taking a mystical bent, this direct kind of religious practice nevertheless needs guideposts for its participants. The literature of fly fishing serves as one such guidepost, offering a forum for a kind of spiritual public consciousness that can be drawn upon at will by those who seek it. This (...) article explores the parallels between fly fishing, its literature, and the kinds of spiritual statements that are regularly found among religious practitioners who are most concerned with questions about how to live. I am arguing here that fly fishing literature forms an implicit repository for a religious form of consciousness and a religious way of being in the world. (shrink)