An Emersonian i Approach to Higher Education ii by Robert McDermott 1
Within the dominant academic paradigm, there is typically one source of knowledge variously referred to as intelligence, intellect, and rationality, the standard of which is science. Other claims to knowledge such as imagination, intuition, affective learning, and many non-ordinary states of consciousness, are typically regarded as opinion, emotion, exhortation, speculation, or imagination in the negative non -factual sense of the term, but not knowledge. The dichotomy between the dominant paradigm and its marginalized competitors represents an unquestioned assumption at the deepest level of Western thought and culture. This assumption and its source are largely lost in the origins of moderni sm. It cannot be examined with the same kind or level of thinking that created and sustains it. It perhaps could, however, be repaired by an Emersonian epistemology, or by other ways of knowing that avoid both philosophic-scientific naturalism and fundamentalist Christian
Biblical faith. This essay briefly summarizes and recommends some of the ways that accumulatively represent a third way to the dominant scientific (or what Huston Smith calls
“scientistic” iii ) paradigm and its fundamentalist counter force, Biblical faith.
The first section of this essay is a brief introduction to the California Instititute of Integral
Studies (San Francisco), usually referred to by its initials, CIIS.
iv As this institution has become increasingly well known v for its pioneering commitment not only to a multidisciplinary curriculum but to multiple ways of knowing, it would seem to deserve an historical description and an account of its current efforts on behalf of a new educational paradigm. The second section introduces some of the insights for higher education to be found in the classical American philosophical tradition, particularly in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (whose thought is at the core of this essay), William James, John Dewey, and the later thought of Alfred North
Whitehead (during his Harvard years, beginning in 1924).
1 Robert McDermott , Ph.D. in philosophy, Boston University (1969), is president emeritus and professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
He taught at Manhattanville
College (1964-71) and is professor emeritus and former chair of the department of philosophy at Baruch
College, CUNY (1971 90).
His publications include Radhakrishnan (1970), The Essential Aurobindo (1974) and The Essential
Steiner (1984), and the “Introduction” to William James, Essays in Psychical Research (Harvard
University Press, 1986). His essays have appeared in International Philosophical Quarterly, Cross
Currents, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Philosophy East and West.
His books,
Steiner and Anthroposophy and The New Essential Steiner will be published by SteinerBooks.
He was secretary of the American Academy of Religion (1968-71) and secretary-treasurer of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (1972-76). In 1975-76, he was a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the
Open University where he co-produced an OU-BBC film, Avatar: Concept and Example . In 1978-80 he was director of a National Endowment for the Humanities project for the review of audio-visual materials for the study of Hinduism and Buddhism.
With Arthur Zajonc he is co-founder of The Owen Barfield Graduate School of Sunbridge College and is the founding chair of the board of Sophia Project, two homes in Oakland, CA, for mothers and children at risk of homelessness.
His publications in Revision include: “From Mysticism to a Modern Spiritual Cognition” (Summer 1989),
“Rudolf Steiner and American Thought” (Spring and Summer 1991), “The Spiritual Mission of America”
(Summer 1993; reprinted Spring 2003).
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The third section discusses the potential implications for American higher education of several currents in late 20th and early 21st century, loosely grouped under the heading “new par adigm.” As there are many new paradigms competing with the dominant western scientific paradigm, some of which are subsets of others, what is often referred to as the new paradigm should more properly be referred to as a new paradigm. The several strands included under this heading cannot be considered at all definitive but happen to be significant in the CIIS culture which in turn is significant in the San Francisco Bay Area culture symbolized by individuals often referred to as new paradigm thinkers. Of these all of the following teach full-time or part-time at
CIIS: Brant Cortright, Jorge Ferrer, Susan Griffin, Stanislav Grof, Don Hanlon Johnson, Sean
Kelly, Joanna Macy, Ralph Metzner, Charlene Spretnak, Brian Swimme, and Richard Tarnas.
The outer circumference of CIIS includes Angeles Arrien,Thomas Berry, Duane Elgin , Michael
Harner, Michael Murphy, Ram Dass, and Huston Smith.
The new paradigmatic strands included in this essay are Romantic epistemology
(represented particularly by Ralph Waldo Emerson); mythology and archetypal studies; Asian spiritual wisdom (represented particularly by the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and Haridas
Chaudhuri, and the Tibetan Buddhism of His Holiness the Dalai Lama); and feminism and ecology, or ecofeminism. All of these developments share a reliance on imaginative thinking generally not emphasized or credited in mainstream thinking and education.
The point of this essay is tracable directly to Emerson’s insistence on “the active soul,” which he refers to as “the only one thing in the world of value.” vi The components of this essay —
CIIS, the classical American philosophical tradition, and strands in a new paradigm —are included because they exemplify “the active soul.” Their importance is due to their insights, methodological and theoretical, in their own right and equally because they indirectly stimulate alternatives to the scientific paradigm dominant in American thought, culture, and education. By so doing, these innovative paradigms encourage a response at a higher or deeper level of thinking than is usual.
I. The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
From its founding by Dr.Haridas Chaudhuri in 1968 until its accreditation in 1981, CIIS was called the California Institute of Asian Studies (CIAS). The school changed its name in response to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation visiting team that observed that the school was offering more courses in psychology than in Asian thought. CIAS was founded to provide an opportunity for adult students to study and to experience the spiritual teachings and practices of Asia and the West
—not only of Asia, but quite explicitely and deliberately of Asia and the West. Based on the Integral Yoga philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
(1872-1950), vii the mystic-philosopher and spiritual master who taught the integration of spiritual knowledge, spiritual action, and spiritual love, all in the context of the evolution of consciousness, CIIS has had as an essential part of its mission the intimate relationship between spiritual knowledge and spiritual practice. From its founding it was neither a graduate school committed to knowledge without regard to spiritual experience nor an ashram committed to contemplative practice without regard to academic disciplines. CIIS has sought to combine scholarship with transformation, and especially philosophy and psychology with spiritual practices such as meditation and yoga.
This essay does not particularly recommend that other institutions of higher education adopt the mission of CIIS, nor even strive to increase its offerings in Asian spiritual traditions.
Rather, it points to sources and examples of integral thinking and learnin —in this essay CIIS,
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the classical American philosophical tradition, and several components of a new paradigm.
There surely are other significant examples that could be cited. These world views are offered as meaningful exceptions, as well as oppositional currents, to the dominant paradigm of
American thought and culture, and consequently of American higher education. In effect, this essay says to the dominant assumption, ‘something is missing, almost certainly due to the limits of intellect, or due to the neglect of of imagination, and recommends Emerson’s ‘active soul’ and several broad and complex sources for “active soul” thinking and “active soul” education.
CIIS has two schools: School of Professional Psychology, which offers a PsyD. degree and a masters degree in counseling psychology with four specialized programs: Integral
Counseling, Drama Therapy, Somatics, and Expressive Arts. Its other school, Consciousness and Transformation, includes six programs: Asian and Comparative Studies, Social and Cultural
Anthropology, EastWest Psychology, Women’s Spirituality, Integrative Health, and Philosophy,
Cosmology, and Consciousness. Approximately half of CIIS’s one thousand students are working for masters degrees and half for doctorates.
Just how successful has CIIS been in realizing its original mission to affirm —and particularly, and less likely of success, to integrate —knowledge, action, and love, the three yogas of the Bhagavad Gita and of Sri Aurobindo? Relatedly, how successful has it been in integrating Asian and western philosophical, psychological, and spiritual traditions? The answer is, partially successful, and the reason for this limited success would seem to be that such a mission is extremely difficult to realize, and some departments, for various reasons, seem minimally committed to this difficult ideal. Such a mission would be daunting for even a small group of committed individuals simply studying and practicing together; it appears virtually impossible for an accredited graduate school. With an enrollment of approximately one thousand students and nearly fifty core faculty CIIS could not expect to remain viable with a mission devoted exclusively to East-West spiritual-philosophical studies. During the past twentyfive years, CIIS rather imperceptibly, and no doubt inevitably, revised its mission: it replaced its emphases on the integration of Asian-Western traditions as well as its commitment to three yogas (knowledge, action, devotion) by another ‘integral,’ the integration of body, mind, and spirit. This too is a difficult mission but one with a wider appeal, especially from an academic perspective.
In its nearly forty year history, there has always been a CIIS department committed primarily to teaching Asian spiritual traditions as well as several departments devoted to the integration of East andWest intellectual and spiritual teachings. Some departments, however, have no such emphasis. It has always been possible to earn a degree at CIIS without studying any Asian spiritual teachings and to miss completely the thought of Haridas Chaudhuri and his spiritual teacher, Sri Aurobindo. While the process of westernization of the faculty and curriculum represents a definite loss with respect to the institution’s original East-West mission, it is possible that despite appearances the essential aim, or at least an essential aim, has been preserved, namely, the implicit but quite real fostering of the ‘active soul.’
As can be gleaned from early CIIS bulletins and the extensive writings of Chaudhuri, the purpose of the original mission of the California Institute of Asian Studies was to teach Asian and western thought and spirituality together with the intent of providing precisely what seemed most lacking in mainstream higher education, namely an emphasis on individual transformation, spiritual journeying, and soul actualization. As he recognized the complementary strengths of the Asian and Western conceptions of self, Chaudhuri proposed a program, Integral Counseling
Psychology, precisely to teach the integration of Asian and Western modes of transformation based on these complementary world views. He placed both of these traditions, and this
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academic program, within the context of the evolution of consciousness so thoroughly developed by Sri Aurobindo. For three decades this academic program, referred to as ICP, has been the largest program in CIIS , one of the programs closest to the core of the CIIS mission, and the program in an ideal position to broaden the field of psychology.
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An emphasis on spiritual depth and transformation is obviously at the core of Asian spiritual traditions, but it can be achieved by other traditions as well, and particularly by the juxtaposition of traditions. As Emerson recognized, much of his thought is continuous with the
Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, with Buddha and Lao Tse, but also with Plato and
Neoplatonism, Boehme, Goethe, and Swedenborg, and with any thought tradition that advocates and assists in the development of the active soul. Following Goethe in this regard,
Emerson finds that the opportunity for spiritual wakefulness emerges with every polarity.
ix The dynamic interaction of Asian and Western spiritual traditions would seem to be among the richest of polarities for soul activation.
While it is unclear and contested whether there are elements in Asian philosophical and religious traditions not to be found in their Western counterparts, and vice versa, it seems entirely clear that a full and active experience of either tradition is intensified by an experience of its polar counterpart. The interplay of similarities and differences can be counted on to activate the soul. It is exciting and revealing to read the Gita or Buddhist texts and then return to
Emerson and the Transcendentalists or to William James for insights on the spiritual journey or transformative religious experience. It is also stimulating to travel in the opposite direction.
Repeated journeys between these traditions do not lose the power to enlighten and to deepen.
Great teachings in each tradition can be difficult to see until illumined by contrast. As Plato noted, “Thinking begins when conflicting perceptions arise.” x
One of the great contributions of CIIS to higher education, in addition to advancing greater understanding of Asian and western traditions by means of many disciplines, would seem to be its ability to activate the soul, to encourage its faculty and students to journey toward transformation and wakefulness. (Buddha means “he who awoke.”) The more recent mission of
CIIS, the integration of mind, body, and spirit, amounts t o a redefinition of “Integral” from the one intended by Aurobindo and Chaudhuri, but not inconsistent with theirs. It is not too difficult to think of mind in terms of knowledge, body in terms of action, and spirit in terms of love. In the mainstream, particularly in graduate schools, it would be most unusual to find a program, and probably impossible to find an entire institution, committed to all three elements of this mission statement, and further, to their integration, such that thinking is intended to include action (the physical body) as well as spirit and love. The strength of the commitment to this mission, like the commitment to its original East-West mission, might be that it fosters wakefulnes of the mind, body, and spirit and their disciplined integration.
An obvious question, and one not easily answered, concerns the extent to which faculty and students actually embody thinking, whether they exemplify the integration of body with mind, and spirit. It would be easy to affirm that the CIIS curriculum is rather thoroughly interdisciplinary, and especially so for a graduate program. The integration of the body in this
CIIS curriculum is the special focus of some of the masters programs but certainly not all. The body is the primary focus of Somatic Psychology and Integrative Health and plays an important role in the curricula of Expressive Arts Therapy, Drama Therapy, Women’s Spirituality, Social and Cultural Anthropology, East-West Psychology (especially those taught by Jorge Ferrer), and by Charlene Spretnak in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. The rest of the curriculum of this school can be said to lack a significant focus on the body. This is neither surprising nor easily remedied.
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Most scholarship in liberal arts comes disembodied. It takes, or would take, a new consciousness and a new approach to knowledge, to embody either mainstream knowledge or new paradigm learning. This endeavor is clearly in the earliest stage of development, and can be expected to take decades of research and experimentation for a fuller realization; it might well be the next great step forward in integral education.
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The integration of mind and spirit in the CIIS curriculum would seem to be more fully developed than the integration of either with the body. In several departments in both schools many courses apparently include an affirmation, if not an explicit focus, on the relationship between, on the one side, mind, knowledge, or thinking, and on the other, soul and spirit. For many courses, myth provides a way to generate knowledge not limited by the dominant western paradigm. In general, myth seems to be regarded as a mode of consciousness that precedes and continues to resist the split of mind and soul or spirit.
xii The case for myth as a third way between mind and spirit has been made forcefully, and at great length by Joseph Campbell.
This essay is proposing another third way, the cognitive power of Emersonian imagination.
While affirmative of myth, Emersonian (and Romantic) imagination calls for a method of knowing that is positive toward science and history. Emersonian imagination not only avoids the mind/spirit, intellect/faith and similar dichotomies, it also transforms them. For Emerson, imagination elevates both intellect and faith, philosophy and religion. In contrast to some mythologists xiii , Emerson offers a knowledge of spirit that is not limited to an atemporal, perennial wisdom. It provides insight into “today.” As Emerson wrote: “Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” xiv And with them in emergence, he often insists that the ugent and perennial question be, “Then what to do?”
The curriculum and research projects in both CIIS schools offer a wide variety of ways of knowing not reducible to either faith (of which there seems to be little of traditional religious varieties among CIIS students or faculty) or to the usual range and methodologies of intellect. A review of faculty publications as well as doctoral dissertations and masters theses shows that
CIIS has been a laboratory for the production of research affirmative of multiple ways of knowing. These ways include myth, shaminism, intuition, meditation, entheogenic experience, archetypal studies, soul journeying and soul therapies, arts and aesthetic experience, movement, chant, and many others. Such methodologies pursued on their own and mixed with other methods of knowing, both standard and on the edge of academic legitimacy, stand out as a significant effort on behalf of the integral ideal in higher education
—in this case the integration of standard and non-standard modes of knowing.
The integration of body, mind, and spirit, and the wakefulness it fosters, is also a prominent and enduring characteristic of the classical American philosophical tradition. This tradition could effectively complement the integration of body, mind, and spirit that CIIS values, but it has been almost entirely absent in the CIIS curriculum.
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II. Emerson and the Classical American Philosophical Tradition
Since the intense intellectual conflicts between Calvinists at Yale and Unitarians at Harvard in the early 19 th century, higher education in the United States has been a battle of paradigms.
Though no longer a Calvinist, Ralph Waldo Emerson led a group of thinkers in the Boston area whose commonality was their opposition to the dominant Unitarian theological paradigm at Harvard.
Emerson himself was shunned by Harvard for thirty years as a result of his “Divinity School
Address” (1837) in which he proposed to replace the revelation propounded by institutional
Christianity by a radically singular revelation to each individual active soul. Emerson stated:
“Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.” xvi
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As Emerson was subsequently acclaimed as A merica’s foremost sage, in 1866 he was invited back to Harvard, once again to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa address. In 1871 he was invited to deliver a series of lectures which were published as The Natural History of Intellect , his last work. This recogniti on did not establish his philosophical and theological ideal of the ‘active soul,’ nor to his preference for a non-denominational spiritual approach to thinking. His critique of 19 th century
Calvinism and its claim for the inerrancy of the Bible, and of Unitarianism (a rational Christian denomination profoundly influenced by Scottish Common Sense Realism), proved effective for barely a generation or two: by the end of the 19 th century Emersonian spiritual philosophy was no longer a prominent part of the academic paradigm. By early 20 th century a major portion of academic thinking had turned naturalistic and positivist, and thoroughly anti-Emersonian.
The failure of the Christian faculty of Harvard to agree to the validity of Emerson’s critique of institutional Christianity and of his proposal for an intensely individualized form of spiritual experience represents a point in a direct line from the conflict between the competing claims for faith and reason in the late Middle Ages to the culture wars of the United States at the present time. In the course of a dramatic and significant process begun perhaps inadvertently by Thomas Aquinas who held faith and reason to be distinct and complementary, the Christian ministers on the faculty of
Harvard who rebuffed Emerson’s religion of the active soul widened and intensified the split, subsequently to become the opposition, between faith and reason. Whereas Aquinas distinguished faith and reason, and brilliantly developed both in their respective spheres but maintained their compatibility and continuity, at the end of the 18 th century, Immanuel Kant, one of the key figures in this development, separated faith from reason and religion from philosophy. This separation did not proceed as Kant intended: once separate from philosophy and science, faith and religion were unable to compete with academic disciplines that claimed to rely on reason alone. Faith and religion continued to receive adherence among Christian believers but the academy progressively eliminated them from intellectual orthodoxy.
What Emerson tried to unite in a creative synthesis, higher education in America continued to pull asunder. From the beginning of the 20 th century, the academic world had made the Kantian dichotomy of faith and reason an established presupposition of academic thought. An increasingly small minority sided with faith over reason while the expanding majority sided with reason over faith.
Throughout the 20 th century, the proportion of those siding with faith has dwindled until such adherents can be found almost exclusively in institutions of higher learning dedicated to precisely a commitment to faith in Christian revelation in general and Biblical inerrancy in particular. The dichotomy established by Emerson’s Christian opponents, and their successors who opposed both
Emerson and his opponents, has been widened and assumed as fact for the past century and a half. The current domination of faith-based politics and cultural values notwithstanding, the current university curriculum paradigm is characterized by the almost total domination of science over religion and intellect over imagination. Following Emerson, James and Whitehead tried to rebalance the relationship of science and religion. Whitehead, for example, wrote:
The conflict between science and religion is a slight matter which has been unduly emphasized.... Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena; whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values. On the one side there is the law of gravitation, and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of wholeness. What one side sees, the other misses; and vice versa.
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Emerson’s standing as America’s sage remains unchallenged and singular but the influence of his core teachings has not prevailed in American culture. The explosion of New England genius in the mid-19th century, which rivals the period of the Founding Fathers as one of two xviii periods of
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great genius in the history of American thought and culture, includes three figures in addition to
Emerson whose influence could be inestimably valuable to American higher education: We can find the presence of but not the imitation or extension of Walt Whitman, America’s archetypal poet,
H erman Melville, America’s archetypal novelist, Abraham Lincoln, America’s archetypal political leader. America has never exhibited sufficient passion for philosophy to have an archetypal philosopher, but if it were to do so, the obvious choice would be William James (1842-1910). In
1880, when James was appointed assistant professor of philosophy (following seven years during which he taught anatomy and physiology), the paradigm struggle between Christian belief and mechanistic-materialistic science that Emerson tried unsuccessfully to resolve, was still in full force.
Emerson, with the help of Goethe and Coleridge and his own philosophical mysticism (or mystical philosophizing), recognized the possibility —and need--to unite consciously and faithfully with what he referred to as the Self, a concept which he wrote with an initial capital ‘s’ as a way of indicating a reality deeper and more enduring than the empirical self. In the tradition of the Upanishads in India and the German Idealist tradition in the West, Emerson’s Self is what one essentially is, the Absolute without which one would not be. Emerson urges his readers and hearers to commit to the imaginative effort by which to awaken to the reality and the effects of oneself realized as Soul or Spirit. Emerson was too much the artist and rhetorician--student of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Coleridge--to allow 18 th century
Enlightenment philosophy to set limits to his vocation as the prophet of self-reliant ethical individualism in the context of the Absolute Self. Except for the idealist philosophy of Josiah
Royce, James’s younger colleague, this concept of the Absolute Self did not survive in classic
American philosophy. Participatory epistemology, of a Romantic bent, survived in the thought of
William James and, to limited extent in Whitehead and Dewey, but without the Idealist conception of the Self found in Emerson. In summary fashion, Emerson and Royce both developed a rich account of the self in relation, with one relation, the ultimate relation, being the
Absolute Self; James and Whitehead developed the self in relation an unbounded relational context but without reference to an Absolute Self.
William James was too much the student of his father (Henry James, Sr., a prominent spiritual thinker of a Swedenborgian bent), of Emerson, of New England religious revivals, of the psychology of individual (and particularly Protestant) religious experience, of psychical researchand of his own rich psychological history, to limit his inquiries to one mode of knowing.
For James, knowing is in the flow of consciousness, in felt relations, in the interstices, in subliminal states of consciousness, as well as in the usual interplay of percept and concept.
Like Emerson (who was a friend of James’s father,), James sought, with as little success, to establish a middle-way between materialistic science and philosophy(which increasingly adapted to the criterion of science) and religious belief. James’s solution, as relevant for higher education in 21st century America as Emerson’s, restores authority to what Emerson calls the active soul, and to what James himself refers to as a person’s vision:
Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him…. A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.
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Emerson’s attempt, and the Emersonian tradition, which significantly includes William James, has proven unable to create a distinctive middle-position between scientific and philosophic reason on the one side —the side that until recently was thought to have won decisively--and confident (fundamentalist) Bible-based Christian belief which continues to claim adherence (and recently significant political power) outside the dominant academic paradigm.
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According to both Emerson and James, mechanistic philosophy and biblical faith are, or should be considered, equally antithetical to the active soul and a personal vision. Explicitly and profoundly in the tradition of Emerson and James, John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, the two most influential philosophers advancing the classic American philosophical tradition in the first half of the 20th century, give brilliant expression to the value of personal effort, affective and aesthetic knowing, spontaneous relations, and other values which accumulatively establish a philosophy of education that holds the middle between, and in the process reconceives, science and religion.
Unfortunately, the Emerson-James-Dewey-Whitehead approach to imaginative, speculative thinking has not prevailed in religion and faith or in science and philosophy and consequently not in higher education. The Emersonian tradition finds one of its most vivid expressions in the opening pages of
Whitehead’s Aims of Education :
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and human feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed [person] is the most useless bore on God’s earth. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.
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This essay is recommending the tradition, whether generally Romantic or more specifically
Emersonian, that seeks to create a middle position between the science-based epistemology dating from Hume and Kant and the non-philosophical, faith-only, fundamentalist Christian position which seemed, until the start of the 21 st century, to have disappeared from serious academic discussion.
Without a knowledge of the history of this conflict, it would be difficult to be aware of the assumptions, and specifically the limitations, that inform and shape the contemporary sciencebased paradigm and the fundamentalist Christian position that desperately opposes it. The dominant western paradigm that separates knowledge from valued dimensions of experience —and the fundamentalist Christian position that separates faith from the strictures and contribution of rationality--tend to be so deeply held that its key assumptions most often go unnoticed.
As even an occasional participation on a site (campus) visit of an accreditation visiting team will immediately reveal, higher education in the United States includes a rich pluralism of specialized fields and approaches to learning. Unfortunately, higher education, and particularly at the graduate schools of research universities, is quite vigorously (not to say dogmatically) dominated by the view that knowledge should approximate the methodology and criteria of science, and that religious experience, affect, sentiment, and aesthetics fall outside the non-cognitive. Because of their insistence that Biblical revelation is unerring, religious (specifically Christian) believers are understandably, forced to remain outside the realm of legitimate academic knowledge, but there remain many modes of knowing, including the ones espoused in the classical American philosophical tradition and the ones included in this essay under the heading “new paradigm,” which deserve to be counted as productive of significant cognitive results.
The dichotomies at the core of American academic culture, including reason/faith, intellect/value, and intellect/intuition, also affect reforms that strive to improve, and to humanize, higher education. Because they issue from the same split consciousness, reformulations and reforms tend to deepen rather than diminish the dichotomies they are intended to break. The major thinkers in the classical American philosophical tradition --
Emerson, Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey, and Whitehead-- tried to heal these dichotomies by teaching the cognitive content of all experience, including religious and aesthetic experience. Unfortunately, this endeavor has proven largely unsuccessful, as the current war of values clearly indicates.
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Why has it been so difficult to overcome these dichotom ies? It can't be because this task has received insufficient attention. Rather, the ideals recommended by classical
American philosophers, from Emerson to the later Whitehead, would seem to be too difficult to implement. It seems likely that the attention and solutions these philosophers have offered require a strenuous and sustained effort to replace the fundamental epistemological posture of the reductionist implications of modernity and postmodernity: these thinkers, and others of a religious (but not dogmatic or fundamentalist) persuasion, agree in requiring a participatory approach to thinking and learning. Whereas the dominant epistemology is observational, and purportedly objective, the American pragmatic tradition, at one with many contemporary spiritual teachers, calls for a participatory approach to thinking and learning.
Even Dewey, not ordinarily included in a list of Romantic thinkers, can be so included by virtue of the value he placed on the pedagogical import of all experience, including perso nal, subjective, and aesthetic experience.
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One of the obvious implications of the dominant western (and particularly American) worldview is a split in higher education between liberal arts and professional training. Liberal arts without social and professional experience can fall into solipsism and self-indulgence, and professional training without liberal arts can lack vision and originality. This split between liberal arts and professional training, as well as the split between the epistemologies of high culture and social concerns, characterize the current state of higher education. They both work against coherent learning and a healthy culture.
It is time to broaden the dominant paradigm by fostering multiple ways of knowing, including imaginative thinking. All of the dualisms in this wide-ranging debate--whether of high culture/social concerns, liberal arts/professional training, value/fact, or science and philosophy/religious and artistic experience--can all be refigured, and even reunited, by thinking that is imaginative, intuitive, and participatory. At their deepest level, as shown by Goethe,
Coleridge, Emerson, Steiner, and Barfield, science and art issue equally from these modes of consciousness. By significantly adding intuition to intellect, the artistic to the scientific, the imaginal to perceptual, higher education and the culture of which it is a creation and a source of renewal could experience a reunification at its most fundamental level. Imagination and intuition, or participatory thinking, could succeed where Emerson and James strove but failed, namely, in the creation of a middle position between Biblical and scientific fundamentalism. The successful completion of the Emersonian-Jamesian position would require a fundamental shift i n thinking from what Owen Barfield refers to as “dashboard knowledge” xxii to a multi-leveled, conscious and affective thinking process.
Dewey advocated an approach to education at all levels for all citizens that would affirm every person’s capacity to turn the experiences of daily life into artistic experience. In a
Deweyan world, all experience would have the same qualities as the creation and creative apprehension of works of art. To maximize the possibilities that the average person could "have an experience" in his Art as Experience xxiii sense of the term, Dewey focused on the schools, from kindergarten through high school, as a way of putting each person confidently and creatively in charge of his or her own experience. It was Dewey's primary purpose to help teachers and parents learn what they needed to know in order to enable children to learn to problemsolve artistically. Continuous with Goethe and other Romantic thinkers, Dewey’s emphasis on imagination and aesthetic experience is not in a separate realm from science proper (i.e., from the method of intelligence, or from science not reductionistically understood), but is rather characteristic of science, the very guarantee of scientific and philosophic thinking.
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Dewey wanted to enable children to learn in freedom before the science/art, fact/value split limited their learning.
Dewey’s philosophy does not explicitly affirm Emerson’s “Oversoul,” or James’s
“‘Something More’ through which saving experiences come,” xxiv but he does follow their affirmation of multiple ways of knowing. He does not include among those ways religious knowing but he is brilliant in his affirmation of affective experience. It would not be difficult to construct an Emersonian or Jamesian worldview on top of Dewey’s epistemology; one would only need to add to Dewey’s aesthetic worldview a positive account of religious experience, one free from the kind of religious dogmatism that prevented Dewey from seeing any merit in religious experience. As a vigorous opponent of religious intolerance and privileged claims,
Dewey affirmed Kant's restrictions on pure reason, and specifically on any kind of a priori
Cartesian innate ideas, in favor of practical knowledge of the democratic individual and the science of everyday life, both of which represented for Dewey a repudiation of privileged knowing. Dewey’s entire philosophy is intended to replace the exclusivist liberal arts ideal prized by entitled professors in elite environments holding to a remove from social and practical concerns. One of the most representative, and original, insights of Jamesian and Deweyan pragmatism is that ideas and beliefs become true to the extent that they contribute positively to community life, and that the truth of an idea consists entirely in that contribution.
Who among contemporary American writers, thinkers, or artists has an influence on
American culture comparable to the influence on their respective cultures of Plutarch and Cicero on Rome, Shakespeare on England, Montaigne on France, Goethe on Germany, or Emerson and Whitman on America? James, until his death in 1910, and Dewey until his death in 1950, exercised a profound influence on American culture, but is there a thinker who has exercised such influence throughout the second half of the 20 th century or at the dawn of the 21 st century?
At least part of the significance of these great intellectual figures, whether Emerson, James, or
Dewey, would seem to be due to their having dealt with themes and problems at once immediate and transcendent, and having done so in a way that is constructive as well as artistic and insightful. American culture has an affinity for application, for know-how over theoretical knowledge, and consequently it excels at technology over science and in applied philosophy
(e.g., in morality and education) over epistemology or metaphysics. Turn of the century pragmatic philosophers such as Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey combined philosophic systems with an eye for practical applications.
xxv Whitehead writes:
Now wisdom is the way in which knowledge is held. It concerns the handling of knowledge, its selection for the determination of relevant issues, it employment to add value to our immediate experience.
xxvi
It is this complementarity of visionary and practical, intuitive and intellectual, a as well as participatory and “dashboard” knowledge that is essential for philosophy and higher education. It is also a relationship which is both pragmatically justified and exemplified by the paradigmatic figures of the pragmatic tradition, most notably James and Dewey. James's Romantic epistemology remained open to the widest possibilities, as evidenced by his classic study of the varieties of religious experience and the neglected results of his thirty-year study of psychical experience.
xxvii Dewey experimented with F. Alexander, teacher of somatic therapy, but was unable to convince his colleagues of the effects of this experience. Scholarship on Dewey, except for the 1991 study by Steven C. Rockefeller xxviii , has ignored the influence on Dewey of the Alexander technique.
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Who are the late twentieth century successors to these paradigmatic American thinkers?
Are there philosophers, or teachers of vast knowledge and vision, who have spoken in the second half of the century to and for American culture while at the same time transcending parochial American interests? Every year many thousands of students take courses taught by professors of philosophy, but who among these philosophers is creating an epistemology and metaphysics, as well as philosophy of art, history, religion, and education influenced by the great challenges of the day —feminism, ecology, and the wisdom of Asian and Native traditions?
III. Imagination in New Paradigm World Views
A. Romantic, Mythic, Archetypal, and Transpersonal
One reason for the poverty of philosophy would seem to be the level from which it springs. As C. G. Jung created a depth psychology, xxix there is need for a depth philosophy, i.e., for philosophy at a level deeper than the one that produced the current impasse.
xxx Students who are looking for such depth typically turn not to philosophers but to the psychology of Jung, to the mythology of Campbell, and to wisdom traditions--Asian, Western, and shamanic. The defining characteristic of such a philosophic effort would be the positive and cultivated influence of the unconscious and the imagination, of the feminine and the ecological, the artistic as well as the rational. A partial list of thinkers espousing a paradigmatic shift are archetypal and transpersonal thinkers roughly grouped as follows: Rudolf Steiner, xxxi Owen Barfield, xxxii and
Georg Kuhlewind xxxiii ; Stanislav Grof, xxxiv James Hillman, xxxv Richard Tarnas, xxxvi Christopher
Bache, xxxvii and Jorge Ferrer; xxxviii Ken Wilber, xxxix Roger Walsh, xl and Frances Vaughan xli ; and A.
H. Almaas. xlii The spiritual epistemologies of all of these thinkers are represented in the curriculum and research at CIIS.
The meaning of imagination has been very effectively developed by Owen Barfield.
Imagination in his sense refers to the free creation of real images. It is the opposite of what
Coleridge calls "fancy” xliii : it is rooted in reality. It functions between, and in contrast to, both fiction and literalness. It also functions equally at the root of liberal arts and the professions-when practiced with the creativity that all human activity invites. Such creative activity requires the participation of the full human being, a participation that brings about the mutual interplay between subject and world necessary for knowledge and value. This participatory epistemology overcomes such dichotomies as fact and value, knowledge and affect, rational and imaginative, conscious and unconscious, practical and ideal.
According to both Romantic and transpersonal epistemologies, creativity, irrespective of discipline or medium, is typically rooted in imagination and the unconscious. By these approaches to knowledge, the truest and most creative expressions of science and art, liberal studies and professional training, graduate level research as well as kindergarten play, require the work of imagination. It is a sure sign of cultural illness that imagination in contemporary
American culture is associated almost exclusively with the arts, which in turn are considered non-cognitive, luxurious, and dispensable. Trained or disciplined (non-self-indulgent) imagination is a source of wisdom for individuals and . The training of imagination is the primary work of schooling and of living--with ideally little to separate the two.
The major change in the American intellectual and cultural situation of the last quarter of the 20th century might prove to be the influence of thinkers, therapists, and artists who are revisioning disciplines by which to explore transformative experience and altered states of consciousness--approximately the states of consciousness which William James researched at the turn of the century and described so brilliantly in his Varieties of Religious Experience .
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Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections , written a half-century after James's death, indicates the distance as well as the continuity from Jamesian psychology to Jungian depth/archetypal psychology. If the influence of the depth tradition were to spread and deepen, it could have significant implications for higher education. Perhaps the most obvious differences would be that psychologists and philosophers would recognize that their accounts of human experience must include, at a minimum, the experiences of Asian, feminist, shamanic, mythic, and ecological cultures, all of which attest to the wisdom of imagination and the unconscious.
xliv
B. Asian: Hindu-Buddhist
S. Radhakrishnan, the foremost 20 th century interpreter of Indian philosophy and religion, and creator of an original synthesis of classical Indian thought and Hegelian idealism, was fond of including in his writings on comparative philosophy the simple statement that until and unless a person knows two things it is impossible for that person to know one.
xlv This economical claim could have a significant application to western thought in general and in particular as an approach to higher education: unless Western thinkers force themselves, or more likely are forced by historical circumstance, to think by means of a paradigm different from the dominant thought pattern of Western science, it will continue to be virtually impossible for the West to know the distinctive character and limitations of its dominant paradigm. The entire history of Indian thought is characterized by the inseparability of religious and philosophical methodologies. The Upanishads, for example, offers a subtle monism that is at once philosophical and mystical; the Bhagavadgita blends philosophical Sankhya with the triumph of several yogas, including devotion to the god Krishna. Consequently, Indian philosophical and religious traditions offer a significant alternative to Western thought and culture, and therefore to
Western higher education.
Sri Aurobindo, who can be regarded as the 20 th century expression of Krishna of the
Bhagavad Gita, has formulated a metaphysics created equally of Upanishadic mysticism, the yogas of the Bhagavad Gita, and his own reworking of Hegelian idealism . Both his Synthesis of
Yoga, Sri Aurobindo’s two volume treatise on spiritual practice, and The Life Divine , his systematic metaphysics, imply each other. The chapters in Synthesis of Yoga on the yogas of the Gita, presuppose and aim at the attainment of a divine consciousness articulated in
Aurobindo’s The Life Divine which in turn requires the effective practice of yoga. Sri Aurobindo’s entire corpus, thirty large volumes, including Savitri
—A Legend and a Symbol
, the longest poem in the English language, thoroughly Miltonic in influence and intent —constitutes one of the most significant contributions of the last century to a spiritual philosophy, i.e., a philosophy issuing from and sustained by a level of knowledge which is intuitive, mystical, and available only by an extremely atypical capacity for higher knowledge.
The teaching of Buddha aimed at wisdom by means of a spiritual psychology: if one overcomes the claims of, and for, the empirical (ordinary, commonsense) self, the result will be a bliss not otherwise knowable or attainable. The whole of Buddhism issues from this nonordinary knowing, a knowing which is prevented by the standard stubborn conviction of the reality of the empirical self. It is only by overcoming, however fleetingly, the grip of that self, that
“me” that I think I am and that I cling to, that it is possible to see reality not limited by my fear, hatred, and delusion. The experience of non-self, and the continuing realization that that experience shows a reality in its true light (the enlightened view, or simply Enlightenment), and the compassion that follows from letting go of the hindering commitment to the empirical
(ordinary and misleading) self, i.e., to my “I,” “me,” and “my” constitutes the precondition for wisdom. Buddhism is a complete yoga: it is a path of self-extinction in service of true
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knowledge, and all that follows from true knowledge (of the non-self), namely, true action and true love.
As shown brilliantly by the Dalai Lama, the path of the Buddha is really a double path, equally wisdom and compassion, such that compassion is as necessary for the attainment of wisdom as wisdom is for the attainment of compassion. When the Dalai Lama was studying for his doctorate in Tibetan Buddhism, he not only memorized hundreds of pages of sacred texts, he also meditated and chanted for several hours a day, and learned to argue truthfully, quickly, and clearly, all as a schooling in the integration of wisdom and compassion. In his life as spiritual teacher to the entire world except the Chinese government and its adherents, the Dalai
Lama continues to explore his own experience of advanced meditative states and their relationship to modes of consciousness explored by contemporary western scientific epistemology.
For both Sri Aurobindo and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, surely two of the wisest and spiritually most accomplished contemporary teachers, meditation is generative of real insight, of a level and mode of knowing that is a correction to and advance on intellect. In some respects, their methods are different but their results confirm the unity of spiritual practice and insight. Sri
Aurobindo wrote systematic studies on integral yoga and integral philosophy in a sequestered situation with references to texts in the Indian spiritual tradition but without references to past thinkers, whether Indian or western, and without entering into dialogue with contemporary thinkers. In addition to research in isolation, the Dalai Lama carries on extensive dialogues with experts in philosophy and the sciences sponsored by Mind and Life Conferences, the latest of which is published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama .
xlvi The
Dalai Lama also dialogues with spiritual practitioners of other religious traditions. In The Good
Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus , xlvii for example, he demonstrates his ability to understand at the highest level of insight eight mystical passages from the New
Testament selected for his commentary by a group of Roman Catholic contemplative monks and nuns.
C. Feminist and Ecological
Feminist and ecological insights are an urgent advance on all epistemologies which do not include gender and the Earth as key components
—and that means on virtually all epistemological positions developed prior to the last quarter of the 20 th century. All philosophies will have to be rewritten so as to balance gender perspectives and to include the intimate and necessary relationship between human experience and the Earth. When either of these revisions is undertaken, the other comes with it: it is now established that modern Western thought and culture, of which the United States is the most powerful representative, systematically and simultaneously violates women and nature, and does so with permission of a world view that is dualistic and materialist. Dualist in this context refers to the separation of self and world, of person and nature; materialist refers to the denial of possible knowledge of the non-material, followed by the denial of its value, and finally by denial of its existence. Such a world view is the opposite of participatory and Romantic epistemology, the very antithesis of the thought of Emerson for whom the soul and nature are distinguishable but absolutely not separable.
American pragmatism can be a useful method for showing the negative implications of epistemological and metaphysical dualism, and for showing the urgency of the several the philosophical problems that must be addressed in the coming years. Among the most urgent of these is the task of creating an eco-feminist philosophy. The pragmatic and process
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philosophies developed by James, Dewey, and Whitehead will help to reveal the ways in which current thinking and values are injurious for large segments of the human population and are working against the survival of humanity, against all extant species, and against the Earth itself.
The idea of sustainability has become true in the sense of James’s pragmatic criterion of truth, namely, that “truth is what happens to an idea.” xlviii Sustainability will remain true so long as overpopulation, global warming, and species extinction are the necessary byproducts of disenchanted minds separated from disenchanted bodies living in a disenchanted universe.
All of the values needed to support the now unassailable need for global sustainability are on the feminine side of consciousness by any definition or set of characteristics likely to be agreed upon. Gender characterization is a risky venture, but it should be no longer doubtful that the lack of ecological awareness and the rush to global devastation follow directly from the values generated and executed by and on behalf of males. Vigorous and sustained opposition to those values would seem to be exactly what is needed if the Earth, humanity, and tens of thousands of species increasingly at risk xlix are in fact to survive.
In this generation, a philosophical position or perspective uninformed by ecological and feminist values has become pragmatically unsustainable. An adequate epistemology and set of cultural ideals must issue from the deepest affectionate relationship between the individual human being, the complete human community--especially the underrepresented--and all other sentient beings.
l Adolescents and young adults certainly seem to sense this to be so but are frequently taught to unlearn it. If their parents and teachers do not learn it, teach it, and act on it, the schools will in effect be little more than gathering places from which to observe and analyze the rapid waning of human civilization and the Earth.
If we are to realize the deeper possibilities of higher education, Western humanity, and particularly educators in America, will need to solve the fundamental fissure at the base of the modern western paradigm. The people of the West, and particularly those in higher education in the United States, will need to do their part to save humanity and the Earth from human folly by nothing less than deep liberal-artistic reimagination of all disciplines and professions, including first and foremost, teaching. li i This essay could have been titled “A Romantic Approach to Higher Education.” Emerson is so central to Romanticism, particularly in its American expression, and so central to this essay, however, that the substitution of “Emerson” for “Romantic” involves no loss of meaning and a gain in specificity. In this essay I use Romantic (with initial capit al ‘R’) to indicate the movement of thought and culture of which Emerson is the foremost American expression. For a comprehensive account of Romanticism, see the class study by M. H. Abrams, Natural
Supernaturlaism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (NY: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1971) and Robeert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and
Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); for a brief, clear, and expansive account of Romanticism, see A. N. Whitehead, (NY: The Macmillan Company,
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1925), Ch. 5: “The Romantic Reaction,” and Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind
(New York: Harmony, 1995), pp. 366-94.
ii Although I am not a scholar of the history or philosophy of higher education I can claim intimate knowledge of the schools in which I have been a professor and administrator, namely
Manhattanville College (1964-71), Baruch College, C.U.N.Y (1971-90), and California Institute of Integral Studies (1990-present). I read widely in the fields covered in this essay, namely
American thought, Asian religious thought, and new paradigm thinking. This essay is indebted to the writings of Douglas Sloan, who is a historian of American higher education, a friend of several decades, a former editor of Teachers College Record , and author of Insight-Imagination:
The Emancipation of Thought and the Modern World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), and Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). iii Huston Smith, Beyond the Postmodern Mind (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1989), p. 146. iv I was president of The California Institution of Integral Studies from 1990-99, and has been a member of its core faculty since 2000. With Haridas Chaudhuri, who founded CIIS in 1968, I co-edited a special issue of International Philosophy Quarterly (June 1972) devoted to the thought of Sri Aurobindo . v CIIS President Joseph Subbiondo and Academic Vice President Judie Wexler, both of whom have essays in this special issue of ReVision , have brought the distinctive mission and curriculum of CIIS to the attention of members of the American Association of Colleges and
Universities, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and the Fetzer Institute. vi Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Essays and Lectures , The Library of America
(NY: Penguin Putnam, 1983), p. 57. vii For an introduction to the writings of Sri Aurobindo, see Robert McDermott, ed., The Essential
Aurobindo (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 1987). viii See particularly the writings of Brant Cortright: Psychotherapy and Spirit: Theory and Practice in Transpersonal Psychotherapy (NY: State University of New York Press, 1997) and Integral
Psychtherapy: Meeting of East and West (forthcoming). ix For Goethe on polarity, see Astrida Orle Tantillo, The Will to Create: Goethe’s Philosophy of
Nature (Pittsburg, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 2002). x Republic, 7: 523. xi For writings on the place of the body in learning and therapy, see especially the writings of
Don Hanlon Johnson, the founder of the CIIS masters program in somatic psychology, especially: The Body: Recovering Our Sensual Wisdom (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books,
1983). xii For effective therapeutic use of myth see the writings of Tanya Wilkinson, professor in the
CIIS School of Professional Psychology: Persephone Returns: Victims, Heroes and the journey from the Underworld (Berkeley, CA: Page Mill Press, 1996), and Medea’s Folly: Women,
Relationships, and the Search for Intimacy (Berkeley, CA: Page Mill Press, 1998). xiii Campbell attends to the cultural source of a myth but not particularly to its time —i.e.,
Campbell, like Eliade, excels at showing the symbolic but not particularly the historical significance of various mythic images and stories. xiv Emerson, “Nature ,” in Essays and Lecture , p. 7 xv It was in response to this absence that I developed a course called “The Spiritual Mission of
America,” and introduced the thought of Emerson to several courses, including “History of
Western World Views” and “Western Spiritual Masters.” See my essay, “The Spiritual Mission of
America,” ReVision (Summer 1993), 15-25; reprinted ReVision (Spring 2003), 12-23. xvi See Emerson, “Divinity School Address,”
Essays and Lectures , pp. 80-81. xvii A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (NY: Free Press, 1925), p. 185.
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xviii If a third such cluster of genius were to be cited, it would be the Harvard philosophy department during the tenure of William James, 1890-1910, which included Josiah Royce,
George Santayana, and intermittently, the erratic genius, Charles Sanders Peirce. See Bruce
Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1925 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). xix William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 20 xx Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (NY: Macmillan/Free Press, 1929), pp. 1-2. xxi See John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in John J. McDermott, ed.,
The Philosophy of John
Dewey , Vol. II: The Lived Experience ,” and the whole of Chapter VI: “Experience is
Pedagogical.” xxii Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (NY: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1957), p. 134. xxiii John Dewey, “Having an Experience,” Art as Experience (NY: Capricorn, 1959), pp. 35-57. xxiv William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985), p. 405. xxv See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Study of Ideas in America (NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001). xxvi Whitehead, Aims of Education , p. 30. xxvii Robert McDermott, “Introduction,” William James, Essays in Psychical Research
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). xxviii Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 334-44. xxix Jung called his psychology is “Analytic” but it could more accurately be called Mythpsychology, or as introduced by James Hillman, “Archetypal Psychology,” for which, see: James
Hillman, Archetypal Psychology (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2004 (Uniform Edition), p.1. xxx Both Rudolf Steiner and Sri Aurobindo wrote philosophy books at a higher or deeper level of intuitive insight. Many readers find these works challenging because the reading requires a shift in the level of thinking in order to think the thoughts being expressed. See Rudolf Steiner,
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 1996), previously published as Philosophy of Freedom and Philosophy as Spiritual Activity , and Sri Aurobindo,
The Life Divine (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972/Centenary Edition), vols. 18 and 19. xxxi For Rudolf Steiner see Robert McDermott, ed., The Essential Steiner (Great Barrington, MA:
Anthroposophic Press, 1986) and forthcoming from SteinerBooks: The New Essential Steiner and Steiner and Anthroposophy.
xxxii For Owen Barfield see G. B. Tennyson, A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of
Owen Barfield (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). xxxiii For Georg Kuhlewind, see From Normal to Healthy: Paths to the Liberation of
Consciousnes (West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1988). xxxiv For Stanislav Grof, see The Future of Psychology (NY: State University of New York Press,
2000). xxxv For James Hillman, see Revisioning Psychology (NY: Harper Perennial, 1992). xxxvi For Richard Tarnas, see Passion of the Western Mind (NY: Harmony Books, 1991). xxxvii For Christopher M. Bache, Da rk Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). xxxviii For Jorge Ferrer, see Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human
Spirituality (State University of New York Press, 2002). xxxix For Ken Wilber, see Donald Rothberg and Sean Kelly, eds., Ken Wilber in Dialogue:
Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing
House, 1998)
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xl For Roger Walsh, see his essays in Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan, eds., Paths Beyond
Ego (Los Angeles, CA: Tarcher, 1993). This book is an indispensable collection of writings by prominent proponents of the transpersonal world view. xli For Frances Vaughan, see Awakening Intuition (NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1979). xlii For Barfield on imagination, see especially, Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays
(Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), especially Part Two: “Meaning, Language and Imagination.” xliii For S. T. Coleridge, see Owen Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1971), especially chapters 6 and 7: “Imagination and Fancy.” xliv All of these innovations have been explored at meetings of the International Transpersonal
Association, founded and guided for more than 20 years by Stanislav and Christina Grof. xlv See S. Radhakrishnan, “Fragments of a Confession,” in Robert McDermott, ed.,
Radhakrishnan: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion, and Culture (NY: E. P. Dutton,
1970). xlvi Arthur Zajonc, editor and narrator, The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the
Dalai Lama (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004).
xlvii His Holiness the Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of
Jesus (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1996). xlviii Wiliam James, Pragmatism (NY: Meridian Books, 1955), pp.42 and 127. xlix See the website of CIIS faculty member, David Ulansey: massextinction.net
l Compare the bodhisattva vow spoken frequently by His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “For as long as space endures, For as long as living beings remain, Until then may I, too, abide, To soothe the sufferings of those who live.” li For careful reading and suggestions for improvement of this essay, I am grateful to Ray
McDermott, Larry Edwards, Anne Teich, and Kathy Ann Woodruff.
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