Spirituality and Aging

5 Transpersonal Sociology and Serving from Spirit

This chapter deals with two questions: How would social organizations look if they were populated, organized, and managed by people with a transpersonal viewpoint and philosophy of life? and, What is spiritually centered service to the community and how does it differ from other kinds of service? For these questions, the existing literature is of little help. Although organizational management and service are familiar topics in the literature of various religious traditions, in American culture nearly all of this discussion takes a Western, instrumental view of these as practical rather than spiritual concerns. Our literature pays scant attention to the spiritual development of the people in the spiritual community and how it might affect the values of the community, how people are organized to promote those values, the processes spiritually developed people use to approach goals, and how their processes might differ from conventionally organized spiritual communities. For twenty years I taught organizational management, first for thirteen years in a mainstream academic environment and later for seven years in a university community that aimed to prepare students to approach their work from a contemplative perspective. Because I believe that to teach a subject, one needs experience in the field as well as familiarity with the literature, I did extended field placements and made many site visits to a wide variety of types of organization, particularly professional organizations and service organizations in the field of aging. These experiences provided me with an experiential base I could use to understand how organizations with a critical mass of people with a transpersonal viewpoint differ from organizations that take the hierarchical, competitive approach to organizational life widely used in American culture. c h a p t e r f i v e     Transpersonal Sociology and Serving from Spirit  s p i r i t ua l j o u r n e y i n g This chapter attempts to present what I have learned about this topic—the ideas I have developed about how organizations and communities can successfully operate using principles of transpersonal sociology. It is necessarily sketchy, and it is filled with conclusions that need to be verified by other investigators . But I think this is an important topic, and I offer this discussion as a starting point, as food for thought, and as a stimulus for future research. In my experience, organizations that operate using principles of transpersonal sociology are much more elder-friendly than are traditional top-down organizations. what is transpersonal sociology? The word trans is of Latin origin and means beyond, on the other side. The term transpersonal first came into use to describe an approach to psychology that acknowledges and incorporates the transcendent, or spiritual, aspects of the human mind, which can be joined with cognitive and developmental psychology to create a more holistic approach (Walsh and Vaughan 1993). Transpersonal consciousness transcends personal awareness and leads to a nonpersonal realm within awareness. Transpersonal psychology acknowledges that there are multiple states and levels of consciousness, that psychological development tends toward higher or ultimate human potential, that higher levels of consciousness are nonpersonal or transpersonal in that they are beyond ego-centered consciousness, and that higher levels of consciousness are transcendent and spiritual. Transpersonal sociology asks how social psychology, interpersonal relationships , and group dynamics are affected by the presence in a group, organization , community, or society of large proportions of people whose consciousness is at a transpersonal level. In The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley (1944) surveyed the wisdom of sages from a variety of spiritual traditions and wrote that most traditions contain the idea that beyond the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness there is a manifestation in consciousness of what he called “the ground of all being within.” The Quakers say, “There is that of God within everyone.” The Bible says people are “made in God’s image,” and this can be taken to mean that God is within us, waiting to be manifested. The Koran says that God pervades everything, including us. Buddhists believe that we all contain a great emptiness or space and that if we dwell in that space, we transcend ego. Huxley goes on to say that not only can we know the ground of being by t r a n s p e r s o n a l s o c i o l o g y a n d s...