Test an insight by what it does in ordinary life
Judge a non-rational insight by its effects on your conduct and relationships over months, not by how it felt at the time.
Why it works
Neither the feeling of an experience nor a theory of its origin can settle whether it was pre- or trans-rational. William James argued that discerning religious experience always came down in the end to an empirical criterion — "by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots" — and named immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness as the available tests. Watching what an insight does over time gives you evidence that the moment itself cannot.
How to do it
- Write down the insight in one sentence and what you expected it to change.
- Pick two or three observable signs: how you treat a specific person, how you handle a recurring stress, what you do with your time.
- Check those signs monthly for three to six months, in writing, without editing the earlier entries.
- Ask someone close to you whether they have noticed any change — and take a "no" as information, not as a verdict on the experience.
Evidence
The fruits criterion and the three tests (immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, moral helpfulness) are from Lecture I of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which credits Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on Religious Affections with working out the same thesis. It is a philosophical criterion with a long history in spiritual direction, not a tested procedure. (anecdotal)
Fruits take time and are shaped by many things besides one experience. A lack of visible change does not prove an experience was empty, and change can come from the effort of tracking itself.
Sources
Common mistake
Grading the fruits by how much you now talk about the insight. Telling the story often is not the same as living differently, and the two are easy to confuse.
Practice this with IX Coach
More practices for Ken Wilber’s Pre/Trans Fallacy, Made Practical
- 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.
- Audit for elevationism
Check whether something you call spiritual is a pre-rational comfort that has been given a higher name.
- Audit for reductionism
Check whether you are dismissing an experience only because it does not fit rational explanation.
- Get a second view from someone who knows both sides
Talk the experience through with someone who can reason carefully and who also has real contemplative experience.
- Name the X before you judge
Work out which capacity an experience is "pre" or "trans" to, so the question becomes concrete.
- Consider the spiral reading before calling it regression
Before deciding that resurfacing early feelings mean you are going backwards, weigh Washburn’s view that growth can loop back through them.
Related concepts
- Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory (AQAL), Made Practical
Five elements for catching what your view of a situation leaves out, held as a map rather than a truth
- Non-Dual Awareness, Made Practical
Effortless mindfulness and the recognition of open, aware presence
- Holons, Holarchy and “Transcend and Include”, Made Practical
Growing past who you were without throwing away what that person could do
- The Dark Night of the Soul: John of the Cross
John of the Cross’s map of spiritual desolation and the practices that navigate it
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