TRANSPERSONAL VIEW ON CONSCIOUSNESS' EVOLUTION

Contemporary transpersonal approache promotes complete, fully functioning human beings, including body, emotions, intellect, values and spirituality. This approach considers the currently prevalent types of consciousness as a temporary stage, which can be surpassed in the course of evolution. It claims that there is enormous human potential in consciousness development yet to be realised, and sees itself as an instrument to this realisation. It strongly embraces optimistic approaches (like Maslow and Rogers) as well as less optimistic ones (as Rollo May, Kirk Schneider or Alvin Mahrer), but in general, it holds a deeply positive view of human nature. Yet, as John Rowan put it, humanistic psychology both is and is not optimistic, because it considers growth possible if the right choices are made, but not at all guaranteed. Another emphasis of humanistic psychology is on knowledge-in-action or situational know-ledge rather than abstract theorising.
The umbrella of the humanistic approach covers various practices, such as Gestalt psychology, Reichian bodywork, encounter groups, psychodrama, psychosynthesis, or neurofeedback. They all appear as divergent and, with their specific practices, all target different aspects of the human being, aiming at its development and integration into the whole of the personality. Yet, all these different methods seem to pursue a shared target of assembling the full human individual out of different parts. They are reminiscent of Rig Veda’s myth about Purusha, the first man-cosmos, who was torn into different parts that became separate cosmic realities, like people, gods, plants, animals, and stars. Now, various humanistic approaches try to do something opposite – to ‘reassemble the primary Purusha’, i.e. to build an integral human personality into full potential. Someone might criticise it as yet another Tower of Babylon, but its proud view of human nature seems justified to me. It claims that deep down all people are all right, and all our instincts are not animal-like but already human, thus they do not need to be ‘tamed’ or suppressed to make us cultural beings, and we just need an adequate realisation of the creative, constructive potential of instincts.
Thus, the humanistic and transpersonal approaches are not so much about curing people as about assisting in psychospiritual growth, which can solve the pathologies of one stage by advancing a person to another. Thus, in contrast to other psychological schools, the humanistic approach does not aim for superficial adjustment or for reduction of anxiety, but at profound personality transformation, in bringing to consciousness all deeper suppressed feelings, liberating the person  from dependencies, fears and superficial boundaries. Thus, rather than therapy, its goals can be better characterised as liberation and upbringing. A humanistic psychologist sees his/her mission not in being a doctor, but rather in what in the East was traditionally ascribed to a spiritual teacher or guru, guiding a client to self-actualisation. As a result, as a part of their vocation to continuously work towards personal growth, humanistic psychologists also use these techniques on themselves. Therefore, the training of a humanistic psychologist includes being a client and a participant of different encounter groups, and this reinforces the similarity with guru-adept relations.
The humanistic approach differs from trends like behaviourism or cognitive psychology in its ontological assumptions: it is anti-reductionist, regarding people not as objects like computers, but as existence, i.e. as living, unique centres of consciousness, irreducible to anything external, like a thing or an object. This is incompatible, for instance, with the behaviourist’s view of people’s actions as following a pattern of stimulus and response and with the Freudian approach, which sees all cultural behaviour as derived from suppressed sexual instincts.
One of the greatest recent breakthroughs in integral knowledge on human evolution is presented in Ken Wilber’s (born in 1949 in Oklahoma City) integral theory. Aiming at a conceptual synthesis of Western and Eastern psychology, he outlined a map of consciousness evolution, providing an interpretation of which structure of consciousness stands behind self-actualisation, which he called Centaur. Wilber divides the whole evolution of consciousness into two great realms: the personal and the transpersonal. This, as recognised by him, is identical to Assagioli’s division into personal psychoanalysis, spiritual psychoanalysis and to Jung’s division into the personal and collective unconscious. The transpersonal stage of evolution logically follows the personal stage, in the sense that it resolves the greatest problem of the personal stage: essential and basic anxiety caused by the existence of the separate self. This problem is basically solved at the transpersonal stage by means of giving up the sense of a separate self.
Wilber presented the evolution of consciousness using the logic of Chinese boxes: each subsequent box is of a larger size than the previous one, so that one box fits into the other, and they both fit inside the next box, and so on. Wilber’s ‘Chinese box’ of consciousness evolution follows this scheme, in which the integration of the conscious persona with a shadow makes the emergence of an adequate self-image or total ego possible. As Wilber puts it: ‘persona + shadow = ego’. This is the stage of the Mental Ego, which is most prevalent and therefore considered normal in contemporary civilisation.
The Mental Ego separates itself from its own body, and tries to control it as an external force. From this follows the recurrent image of the mind as the body’s controller, as was also expressed in ancient philosophy, including Plato’s. In contrast to this duality, the following stage is where the body and mind form one unity: Centaur. Wilber appeals to the mythological image of half-man half-horse to reflect the quality of unity between the psychic and the physical, achieved at this stage. It is the same stage as that which Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’, only Wilber provides a greater insight into its dynamics, structure and contradictions. He dissolved the illusion of some previous approaches by showing that the Centaur stage is neither the final stage in the line of evolution, nor free from pathologies of its own. Maslow has described some characteristics of self-actualising people, while Wilber provides a vision of what it is that constitutes the Centaur stage.
The Centaur stage can be attained when the tasks of the ego are fulfilled: the contents of the unconscious are realised and the body is integrated with the mind. In Wilber’s formula, ‘ego + body = centaur’. The jump to this new form of consciousness appears via the symbols of transformation, such as intentionality, body-mind union exercises, or vision-image. As Wilber says, the evolution to Centaur happens either via an individual’s exceptional talents, or sometimes because of some dramatic situation of personal loss, or due to assistance, such as humanistic/transpersonal psychologists or a spiritual Master. One of the greatest internal obstacles to Centaur, as Maslow has already mentioned, is the fear of being too intense, of becoming fully open and realising one’s true potential, in which the fear of death coincides with the fear of life.
Unlike Maslow, who believed self-actualisation to be the state of optimal psychological health, Wilber considers no single stage, except for Ultimate Enlightenment, to be free from pathology. Thus, Centaur forms no exception to this rule, and it also has its specific illusions and pathologies, by no means deserving glorification or worship. Wilber also mentions that autonomy, tangible at the Centaur stage, is in reality only
‘an exaggerated attempt of the separate subject to remain a separate subject – playing out its isolated tendencies, puffing up its limited potentials, assuming in its temporal character to be the Omnipotent and Autonomous God, taking aseity unto itself…’ .

            Wilber’s discovery of the developmental stages beyond Centaur, which becomes a passing stage, makes it possible to locate Divine Humanity on his map of evolution. In his Atman Project Wilber gives the fullest account of the ‘regions’ where one can undergo transpersonal experiences, regions that are at the same time identical with the levels of consciousness. It begins with Pleroma (most primitive, no desires yet), and then goes to Oeroboros (first subject-object differentiation, early sensory-motor stage, primitive urge to survive), Typhonic Body Ego (later sensory-motor stage, elementary emotions), Membership Self (autistic language, mythic thinking, membership cognition), and Mental Ego (verbal-dialogue thinking, ego and consciousness distinguished from the body). Mental Ego is contemporary most frequent level of consciousness, after which follows the stage of Centaur (transverbal vision-image, total body-mind being, creativity, autonomy). After Centaur the higher stages follow, about which we know less: Lower Subtle (astral psychic, out of body experiences), Higher Subtle (high religious and artistic inspiration), Lower Causal (perception of final God, source of all archetypes), Higher Causal (Samadhi or voidness, coalescence of human and divine, I and the Father are one) and Ultimate (Unity-Emptiness, Nothing and all things). This interpetation of consciousness evolution might appear speculative, yet, according to Wilber and Rowan, it is based on the experiences of mystics. 
The description of the stages beyond Centaur tends to become vague and abstract, probably because they are remote from today’s prevalent consciousness. Only few historical personalities have experienced them. Out of these stages Lower and Higher Causal attract attention because they seem to answer the consciousness of Christ, as well as to the writings on Divine Humanity by Russian Silver Age thinkers, as Solov’ëv, Berdâev, Frank and Bulgakov.
‘…At the low Causal, that deity Archetype itself condenses and dissolves into final God, …one’s own Self is here shown to be that final-God, and consciousness itself thus transforms upward into a higher order identity with that Radiance. Such, in brief, is the low-causal, the ultimate revelation of final-God in Perfect Radiance and Release’.