CZ: What do you mean by "humans are essentially spiritual beings?"

Transcription

1 Jan Holden, Coordinator, Counseling Program, University of North Texas Interviewed by Carlos P. Zalaquett, Ph.D., L.M.H.C Department of Psychological & Social Foundations University of South Florida, Tampa CZ: What defines you as a person and as a professional? JH: Probably most fundamentally, what defines me as a person and a professional is my core belief that humans are essentially spiritual beings having a physical experience. Out of this belief arises my belief that the purpose of human life is for each person, including myself, to grow in the capacity to love. Love manifests in many ways; for me, a primary manifestation is my intention to serve, such that the greatest well-being occurs for the greatest number of people. I strive to remain mindful of this intention and succeed to varying degrees at various times! CZ: What do you mean by "humans are essentially spiritual beings?" JH: That the essence of each human is a non-material consciousness that existed in some form prior to physical birth and exists after physical death. Physical existence is only part of a larger spiritual existence. CZ: What led you to become the person you are? JH: Ultimately, a sense of spiritual purpose, but practically speaking, so many influences! I believe that whatever intelligences I possess conceptual, emotional, social, moral, spiritual are the manifestations of hereditary inheritance from my parents and the familial and extrafamilial physical and social experiences of my life, especially my youth. Even my own innate intention to actualize my full potential could not be realized without the support of heredity and environment. I believe that all these factors have interacted in my life and all people's lives to provide me the optimal opportunity for the development of my soul that I believe existed prior to this life and will continue to exist after it. CZ: Can you share some important experiences in your journey to find your spiritual purpose? JH: One experience was reading the book, The Great Soul Trial. My father was reading it around

2 the time I was a college freshman. It's the true story of a reclusive miner who disappeared around 1960; when the State of Arizona opened his safe deposit box, they found several hundred thousand dollars and a note saying he wanted the money used for research on the survival of the human soul. When Arizona posted notice of the will and money, they had so many petitioners that they had to hold a trial in which each petitioner testified how they would conduct such research. I consider that book the single most influential of my life, because it introduced me to ideas about doing scientific research on the nature of consciousness at death. Other experiences have included anxiety and dissatisfaction. At the time I experienced them, I didn't always know their source, but in retrospect, once I found my way through and past them, I discovered the distressing feelings were inner signals indicating to me that I was "off target" in my life direction at the time. Once I made a course correction, I felt better. Yet other experiences involved the paranormal and mystical domains from experiences of déjàvu to experiences of communion with an all-knowing, all-loving Light from which I have felt transformed and that I have continued to consider beacons in my life direction. CZ: What is your area of expertise? JH: My area of expertise is the transpersonal perspective in counseling the perspective that includes not only personal development but also development beyond the goal of surviving and thriving in the world. This latter transpersonal development involves experiences that transcend the usual limits of space and/or time and their manifestations in relatively permanent shifts in individual and collective functioning characterized by enhanced abilities and resources beyond those that are space/time limited. Personal, space/time limited abilities/resources are, essentially, sensing and reasoning. Transpersonal resources are contemplative, transrational; they both include and transcend sensory and rational processes. They include intuitive, paranormal, and mystical resources. My focus on the transpersonal domain is related to the emergence of attention to spirituality in counseling; the transpersonal includes but transcends spirituality. People often, but not always, describe their transcendent experiences as spiritual, but they always acknowledge that these experiences transcended space and/or time. Thus, in the interest of inclusivity, I prefer the term transpersonal to the term spiritual. Whether or not a person describes a transcendent experience as spiritual, they are equally likely to encounter difficulty with personal and social understanding, acceptance, and integration of the experience. This difficulty is why I believe the counseling profession, if it hopes to serve the broadest constituency, must embrace not just a spiritual, but, more broadly, a transpersonal perspective. CZ: What are your major contributions to the counseling profession? JH: In a sense, the stance I just described is my major contribution to the counseling profession. Specific contributions include publications and presentations in which I apply Ken Wilber's Integral Theory to counseling; development of a graduate course on the Transpersonal Perspective in Counseling; presentation and publication on transpersonal experiences such as after-death communication, reincarnation, and especially near-death experiences; service on the

3 International Association for Near-Death Studies board of directors, including three years as president; publication of an index to the complete professional periodical literature on near-death experiences that serves as a singular resource for researchers, healthcare professionals, and educators; mentoring of doctoral students who conducted their dissertation research on some aspect of transpersonal counseling; and organization of a conference in 2006 at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center on "Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Research" resulting in a book, projected to be published in 2008, providing a comprehensive, critical review of all scholarly inquiry into near-death experiences from the first major publication on the phenomenon in 1975 through CZ: What's the title of the upcoming book? JH: The working title at this moment is Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Scholarly Inquiry. CZ: Can you give us an example of how you apply Wilber's theory to counseling? JH: Wilber's theory encompasses the same developmental sequences found in traditional developmental psychology what Wilber calls the prepersonal (prior to and leading up to a consolidated sense of self) and personal (elaborating on a consolidated sense of self) domains. His model also includes some non-traditional developmental sequences: transpersonal stages of development. In these stages, the person retains sensory (prepersonal) and rational (personal) processes, and also increasingly develops and uses contemplation as a resource, with its associated trans-rational processes. So when a client tells me she sat for an hour during the previous week communing with a tree, and that she came away from the experience feeling a sweet, deep connection with nature like nothing she ever experienced before, I am not limited to understand her non-rational experience as prepersonal/regressive; if she retains her ability to reason and function, and the experience seems to be enriching and deepening her sense of meaning in life, I can see it as transrational and join her in exploring and "mining" it, so to speak, for its life-enhancing potential. In other words, I am not limited to understanding her experience as an expression of pathology but as a possible source of greater wellness beyond "normal" health. I can respond similarly to people who have any of a number of spontaneous transpersonal experiences, as well as those who seek such experiences to find a greater sense of meaning and purpose in life. CZ: Did you have any mentors or role models that helped you become the transpersonal counselor you are? JH: For sure! My father talked rather often of cosmology, and he had recurring dreams he was convinced were from a past life in Paris. I think also of my Lutheran minister when I was growing up, Pastor Peterson; through his sermons, he guided me in reflection and religious devotion. Dr. Tom Roberts and Northern Illinois University taught a course entitled "Transpersonal Perspective in Education and Counseling" that introduced me to the transpersonal literature. And Dr. Betty Bosdell at NIU introduced me to psychosynthesis, a transpersonally oriented counseling approach, and to the courage to direct dissertations on

4 nontraditional transpersonal topics as they relate to counseling. I've been deeply influenced by so many transpersonal thinkers and researchers too many to list here! CZ: What challenges did you face in your path towards becoming the person you are and what helped you make it through those challenges? JH: As I consider the various challenges I've faced, they all are a manifestation of the theme of my goal to be and become whom I intended, being met with internal or external obstacles. What helped me make it through those challenges was a combination of my willingness and ability to seek and use personal, social, and spiritual resources that enabled me to find alternatives: sometimes a different path, sometimes an expanded perspective that enabled me to pursue the same path from a different psychospiritual position. CZ: What led to an awareness of the multicultural and social justice movements? JH: As I deepened my knowledge of the transpersonal domain, I realized that this domain represents a major area of multiculturalism and social justice. It is multicultural in that dominant U.S. culture is primarily based philosophically in materialism, and transmaterial experiences and beliefs are widely discounted, even though a substantial minority of people have and hold them. It is a social justice issue because people who have such experiences and hold such beliefs have tended to be disbelieved, discounted, demonized, or pathologized. It is my mission to educate about the transpersonal domain and, thus, hopefully, to expand understanding, acceptance, and support of transpersonal experiences and development. CZ: What challenges did you face when you encountered the multicultural/social justice movement? JH: Specifically as it relates to the transpersonal domain, I have encountered, and continue to encounter, individuals and institutions who misunderstand that domain out of insufficient information and/or reject it out of either their own entrenchment in material philosophy or fear of retribution from the dominant culture that is so entrenched. A concrete personal example is someone who demonized a transpersonal experience that, for the experiencer, had enhanced her mental health and sense of constructive spiritual purpose. A concrete institutional example is an institution of higher education that denied funding of a research project for fear that the institution would lose federal funding if their support of transpersonally-oriented research became known to federal funders. CZ: Who and what helped you in the process of becoming a multiculturally oriented professional aware and active in the social justice movement? JH: Again, specifically related to the transpersonal domain, what helped most was my commitment to see the transpersonal domain understood and embraced by dominant culture to enfranchise people who have been disenfranchised. Out of that commitment, I rallied personal, social, and spiritual resources to persevere in my goal.

5 CZ: What are your reflections about the status of multiculturalism/social justice in our field today? JH: I believe humanity is in the process of development toward greater inclusivity and justice. I also believe that the nature of that process can, rarely, involve sudden transformation but almost always involves a slow, gradual, "1.1 step forward, 1 step back" dynamic. CZ: Where will the area of multicultural counseling/social justice go in the future? JH: In the usually painfully slow growth, sometimes sudden transformative leap, toward greater inclusivity and justice. CZ: What advice do you have for professionals who want to increase their multicultural/social justice competences? JH: Set a goal that is based in love which I define as the intention to value and promote the greatest well-being for the target entity, and with the intention to achieve that goal, seek out and use the personal, social, and spiritual resources available. Hold the vision of the goal, and make your purpose the process of striving toward that goal rather than necessarily its final achievement. Whether or not you realize the final goal, your greatest satisfaction can come from knowing you did what you could to promote its realization. Where this intention exists, increase of competences will follow. CZ: Why are you passionate about the transpersonal perspective in counseling? JH: Because it involves a domain of human experience that our culture does not currently do a very good job of preparing people to experience or understand. People who have had transpersonal experiences have tended to be disenfranchised from the social support of information and understanding. Thus, these experiences that usually hold constructive developmental potential instead become a source of suffering. CZ: What is the current status of transpersonal counseling today? JH: It certainly has not yet become mainstream. A few institutions of higher education specialize in it, such as the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in California, and others have individual scholars who represent the transpersonal perspective, like me at the University of North Texas. I believe our culture is very, very gradually becoming more open to the transpersonal perspective, as indicated by increasingly common references to phenomena like near-death experiences and after-death communication. And as our culture becomes more open, the way is clearer for our profession to be more open to and affirming of the transpersonal domain. In my experience, a lot of counselors are closet transpersonalists: They know the transpersonal domain but are very cautious about disclosing that knowledge. And rightly so, because these phenomena do still run counter to philosophical materialism that still dominates our culture. So, in summary, the current status is some open practice of transpersonal counseling and a good deal of covert adherence to transpersonal beliefs. Optimistically, I see the latter as an indication of the potential for the transpersonal perspective in counseling to grow.

6 CZ: What advice do you have for professionals who want to become transpersonal counselors? JH: If they haven't yet earned their master's degrees, find a master's program that includes attention to the transpersonal domain; the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology has a "Listing of Schools and Programs" that are transpersonally oriented. If they have their master's, find higher education and other resources literature, audiovisual material such as Jeffrey Mishlove's "Thinking Allowed" series and videos from the annual "Science and Consciousness" conference in Albuquerque, as well as experiential workshops and trainings such as those at The Crossings in Austin, TX, and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY that include attention to the transpersonal. And, of course, be ethical by identifying unproven techniques as such and practicing new techniques under supervision. At various times, I have participated in peer supervision groups when learning new transpersonal techniques; these have served as a valuable professional community in my development as a transpersonal counselor, so I certainly endorse finding and/or creating a transpersonally oriented professional community. CZ: What are your reflections about the status of the counseling field today? JH: Counseling is progressing as a profession that is continuing to be more widely known and valued. CZ: What do you see as needing change or supplementation? JH: Of course, I would like to see more attention paid to the entire transpersonal domain. I believe this process of incorporating the transpersonal domain is likely to be and may need to be low, that is, taken in small bites that can be digested, so to speak until such time as a major paradigm transformation becomes essential and/or inevitable. CZ: What would you like to see happening in the future for the profession? JH: An expansion of attention to the transpersonal domain of human experience and development. CZ: What advice do you have for professionals as they face the next 20 years of counseling and psychotherapy practice or teaching? JH: Hold the vision of a counseling profession and world in which the transpersonal domain of human experience and development is understood and embraced and, therefore, in which each individual's transpersonal capacity and experience is honored and supported for its constructive developmental potential. CZ: Thank you! JH: Thank YOU for this wonderful opportunity and your great questions!

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