In transpersonal psychology, the pre-personal, the personal and the transpersonal are broad stages: before a mature sense of self, a healthy adult self, and beyond the self. Therapeutic Shamanism adapts the model to mean the child, the true Adult and the ElderElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this or shaman, and here the pre-trans fallacy is mistaking a child’s wishful, magical thinking for genuine spirituality: we cannot transcend the personal until we have a personal to transcend.
Where do these terms come from? #
The words come from transpersonal psychology and are associated especially with the writer Ken Wilber. “Pre-personal” refers to the ways of thinking that come before a mature, personal sense of self, such as a young child’s magical thinking. “Personal” refers to a healthy, adult self. “Transpersonal” refers to experience that goes beyond the limited self. The “pre-trans fallacy” is the mistake of confusing the pre-personal with the transpersonal, because both lie outside ordinary adult thinking.
Therapeutic Shamanism uses one of these ideas in its own way.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use the three stages? #
The three stages are an adaptation of one model from Ken Wilber, without any endorsement of Wilber’s work as a whole. The pre-personal is the child: magical thinking and an inflated sense of our own power and importance. The personal is the healthy, true Adult. The transpersonal is the Elder, or the shaman: less identified with the self. The same three can be named simply as child, adult and elder.
For the move from child to adult, he credits Abraham Maslow‘s idea of healthy shaming, which “basically helps us to learn that we’re not gods and the universe doesn’t revolve around us, all the people matter, and that we need to get over ourselves.”
What is the pre-trans fallacy, and why does it matter? #
Put simply: “You can’t transcend the personal until you have a personal to transcend… Trying to skip that process is what [causes] the pre/trans fallacy.”
He offers it as a practical tool: “The pre/trans fallacy… it’s like a b/s detector, if you like, for spirituality. Is this actually transpersonal, or does it have all the hallmarks of child thinking, essentially wishful, magical thinking?” His published books cover related ground in their own words, as the sections below show.
What does “transpersonal” mean in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Shamanic practice itself. Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer practices are both “transpersonal and transcendent”. Both are outside the limitations of the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, and both “take us far beyond the ego and its limited concerns and understanding, and allow us instead to re-make our self/ego in such a way as to be of service in the world, and to express the sacred within it.”1
Transpersonal psychotherapies do reach beyond the human, in that they bring in what is, from a shamanic perspective, the Upper-World. What is almost always missing from them is nature: the other Peoples, the Lower-World, and Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.2
What is the ego, or middle-world self? #
The middle-world part of us is the ego, or middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer: “a part that we construct to be able to live and operate in the middle-world”, a complex thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this woven from the stories we tell ourselves, the introjectsIntroject. A foreign belief, message or story swallowed whole (often in childhood) and lodged inside as if it were our own; a type of intrusion. More about this we take on, the beliefs we adopt, the masks we wear and the roles we play.3
Some spiritualities say the ego simply needs to be “transcended”. That is true up to a point: “The ego does need to be reined in, as an ego out of control is indeed a monster.” But focusing only on the Upper-World Spirit can result in “a top-heavy, disembodied and ungrounded spirituality”. Instead, “shamanism shows us that we need to rise, but rise rooted.”4
What has growing up got to do with it? #
Hunter-gatherer initiation ceremonies were “designed to shock the initiate out of childhood thinking and help them step up to become a true Adult”. In these animist cultures, being an Adult meant far more than just taking on middle-world adult responsibilities in the tribe: it meant being connected to your true Soul. Today we no longer perform these ceremonies, and true Adults are extremely rare: “we live in a society not of Adults but of adults; a society of children in adult-sized bodies.”5
A true Adult is, amongst other things, grounded, present and embodied; reality-orientated; and “willing to face the truth and see the world as it is (rather than how they would like it to be, or how they think it ‘should’ be)”.6
See What does it mean to become a true Adult?
How does this connect with spiritual bypassing? #
Closely. The psychologist John Welwood‘s term “spiritual bypassing” “describes using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings and unresolved psychological wounds.”7
Amongst its symptoms the psychologist John Welwood includes an unhealthy degree of detachment, being ungrounded, emotional repression and projecting one’s repressed emotions onto others. Welwood’s analysis is sound on a psychological level, but it shows the characteristic limitations of Fallen thinking, in that it is entirely focused on, and limited to, human concerns. See What is spiritual bypassing, and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?8
