Check whether an experience includes reason or bypasses it

Ask of a non-rational experience whether it still has room for your reasoning, or only works when reasoning is switched off.

Pourquoi ça marche

Wilber’s core claim is that the prerational and the transrational are both non-rational, so they can feel alike from the inside. What separates them in his account is their relation to the middle term: the prerational comes before the capacity to reason has developed, while the transrational comes after it — the difference, as one summary of his view puts it, between being embedded in something and being one with it. Asking whether an experience can coexist with your ability to reflect, question and explain gives that distinction a concrete test you can run on yourself.

Comment faire

1. Write down the experience in plain, concrete words: what happened, what it felt like, what it seemed to show you.
2. Ask: when I look back at it with full reasoning, does the experience survive the look, or does it only feel true while I am not looking?
3. Ask: did it ask me to give up something I can already do — weigh evidence, keep commitments, consider other people’s view — or did it leave those intact and add something?
4. Note your answer as a tentative lean, not a verdict, and date it so you can revisit it.

Données probantes

The pre-X, X, trans-X sequence and the claim that pre-X and trans-X may appear "similar, even identical" to the untutored eye are set out in Wilber’s 1982 paper (abstract). Jakonen (2009) summarizes Wilber’s distinction between being embedded in something, as an infant is, and being one with it. The self-check is an application of that distinction; it has not been studied as an intervention. (mechanistic)

This is a conceptual test from one theorist’s developmental model. Whether trans-rational states exist as a distinct developmental level is itself disputed, and a person’s own read of an experience can be mistaken in either direction.

Sources

• Wilber, K. (1982). The Pre/Trans Fallacy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 22(2), 5–43.
• Jakonen, J. P. (2009). Beyond postmodern spirituality: Ken Wilber and the Integral approach. Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 21, 92–109.

Erreur fréquente

Deciding the answer from how intense or blissful the experience was. Intensity tells you nothing about which side of reason it falls on; both pre- and trans-rational states can be overwhelming.