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Gary Stogsdill is an Emeritus Faculty at Prescott College in Arizona.

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY GARY STOGSDILL

Participatory Knowing

Gary Stogsdill

In a recent essay, I discussed John Vervaeke and his approach to meaning in life, largely from a perspective that challenged his notion of humanity being in the grip of a meaning crisis. But I also expressed appreciation for his work in general. In this essay, I want to expand on Vervaeke's idea that humans engage in knowing through other valid ways than the familiar intellectual knowing of our rational mind. The following thoughts, while indebted to Vervaeke, are entirely my own and in no way intended to represent his teachings; he could easily disagree with everything I say here.

Vervaeke identifies four primary ways of knowing: procedural, perspectival, propositional, and participatory.

Procedural knowing results from learning how to do a process or skill like walk, talk, read, hold a fork, ride a bike, drive a car, play a musical instrument, operate a computer, and on and on. Procedural knowing makes it possible for us to function through almost every aspect of our daily lives. It's so implicit that most of us don't think at all about this way of knowing, unless as older adults we find ourselves trying to learn a new skill, and then we quickly realize how hard it can be to master procedural knowing.

Perspectival knowing refers to the unique understanding that arises by virtue of the role or viewpoint that one either assumes or automatically brings to the table, beginning with the fact that we are human and not, say, a porcupine. As humans, we all experience reality in a specific way that allows, shapes, and limits what we can perceive, think, and do. In addition, we each possess a somewhat unique temperament and set of life circumstances, which brings a subjective element to perspectival knowing and renders it individually valid but not necessarily valid for others. We also possess a malleable mind that allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else or to change or suspend some part of our belief system and thereby gain new insight. This last aspect of perspectival knowing is an important tool, perhaps especially for those who engage in political discourse and intellectual discourse in general, because without employing this often-neglected mental skill we too easily remain stuck within our own worldview and automatically dismiss those with differing views as being totally wrong or even the enemy.

Propositional knowing means exercising our rational mind to do all the things that an intelligent, educated person hopefully does: use accurate perception and critical thinking to gain, analyze, and evaluate information, and then to build logical structures through inductive, deductive, and inferential reasoning. Propositional knowing combines Ken Wilber's physical “eye of flesh” and intellectual “eye of mind;” it's the way of knowing that creates common sense, logic, mathematics, science, philosophy, and all forms of scholarship. The hallmark of propositional knowing is gaining new insight that allows us to grow in understanding of the world we live in, what it means to be human, and what is objectively true and not true. Many of us spend most of our time operating within propositional knowing. Obviously, this is a powerful way of knowing, but those who are masters of propositional knowing can easily end up enslaved by it to the point of denying that any other valid way of knowing can exist, especially the next one.

Participatory knowing begins with the fact that we humans, like other animals, are exquisitely attuned to belong to the world we live in. As such, participatory knowing may be a constant presence in our lives, even if we are most often unaware of it. Our conscious awareness of participatory knowing usually results from direct experiential engagement with life or with something bigger than ourselves. It can show up during many different human pursuits including relationship, communal events, being in nature, spirituality, and any endeavor that results in the experience of a “flow state.” The hallmark of participatory knowing is a feeling of connection, belonging, enhanced meaning, or inner transformation. I suspect that participatory knowing originates from a deep level of our mind, a level that is intimately connected to our physical body by virtue of being alive. This would make participatory knowing more ancient and completely distinct from the propositional knowing of our rational mind, which is a relatively recent acquisition of Homo sapiens. If propositional knowing is the flowering of the human mind, then participatory knowing may be the deep root of the mind.

Spirituality is a major human pursuit that operates by way of participatory knowing. Transpersonal psychologist Dr. Jorge Ferrer has written extensively about participatory knowing in this context and describes it this way: “Human spirituality emerges from our cocreative participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery or generative power of life, the cosmos, and/or the spirit” [1]. One reason we go to church, temple, mosque, synagogue, meditation nook, yoga mat, or tai chi practice is because such participation can open us to some manner of mystery or power that bestows a feeling of connection, belonging, enhanced meaning, or inner transformation [2]. This is why Integral World author and constant critic Brad Reynolds should be taken seriously when he admonishes other Integral World authors to “do the yoga” and then their understanding of spiritual matters will improve. By engaging in spiritual practice we enter a whole different way of knowing.

But what Reynolds and others may not have realized is that participatory knowing, like perspectival knowing, operates primarily on the subjective, individual level [3], not the objective, collective level as exemplified in the propositional knowing of science, logic, or mathematics. Ferrer's “cocreative participation” of spiritual engagement may, and probably will, end up being different to some degree for each one of us [4], which suggests that the experiences and insights of participatory knowing are valid for only the individual, as opposed to the all-of-humanity validity of science, logic, or mathematics. This would mean that it's an overreach for one person to try to tell anyone else what the end result or goal of spiritual engagement has to be or what anyone's spiritual path or experience needs to conform to. Yes, the pundits and promoters of every religion and spiritual path do exactly that, but if we exercise our propositional knowing even a tiny bit, we realize they can't all be correct in an objective sense. What the pundits and promoters teach is definitely real for them, perhaps spectacularly so, but it may not be real for very many others. Of course, what the big guns like Ken Wilber do is tell the rest of us that their experience of participatory knowing is Ultimate Reality itself, which the rest of us will finally reach if we just grow up enough and do the right participatory practices for long enough. And this is why integral theorist and Wilber critic David Long considers Wilber's version of integral theory to be reductionist: because the ultimate attainment for all of us in Wilber's system is reduced to the nondual awareness of Wilber's own participatory experience.

Let's look at specific examples of the participatory knowing made possible by spiritual engagement. One would be devotion to a saint, sage, guru, or philosopher [5]. This practice actually establishes an inner presence of the chosen saint, sage, guru, or philosopher, a presence that offers knowing in the form of guidance and/or solace. Sure, we can stay safely embedded in the propositional knowing of our intellectual mind and laughingly dismiss this participatory knowing as either delusion or an imaginary product of one's own subconscious mind, but the guidance and/or solace is very real to the individual's experience and is something that was not available prior to the spiritual practice. It is new knowing that enriches a person's life in an obviously individual-specific way.

Another example would be prayer, which likewise offers individual-specific knowing in the form of guidance and/or solace. Prayer may further show that Ferrer's use of the word “cocreative” indicates that the participatory knowing process can actually change a larger reality beyond what occurs inside the heart and mind of the one engaged in participatory practice, as the following story suggests. Fifty years ago, I worked in a large university business office where I encountered the unfortunate situation of an immediate supervisor who decided that she hated me and therefore treated me horribly, even making false, harmful statements about me to our mutual higher supervisor, who then admonished me for behavior I had not done. Being fairly new to my spiritual path and still fresh with idealism and enthusiasm for it, I chose not to defend myself but instead to handle the situation spiritually through a creative kind of prayer. Every morning and evening at the end of my meditation period I would visualize my immediate supervisor and make the effort to send her loving energy. This was really hard to do, especially in the beginning, but I stayed with it until I genuinely felt love for this person. As soon as that inner transformation occurred for me, which was about two weeks into the practice, something extraordinary happened.

I was already present in my work area that morning when I saw this person walk through the large array of front office doors. She caught my eye, lit up like she was seeing a long-lost friend, and actually came running to me. I stood speechless as she excitedly said: “Gary, I had the most beautiful dream about you last night. You were leading me through an enchanted meadow teaching me about the wonderful lifeforms we encountered there and about the love that connects everything. I just feel so much love for you now. May I give you a hug?” Mind you, I had not made any attempt over these two weeks to talk with or interact with this person in any different way than before; I had only engaged in the secret practice of loving prayer twice a day. Our relationship did a complete 180 as of that moment and only due to one discernable cause: prayer.

Of course, all of us likely engage in other expressions of participatory knowing beyond spirituality. Close relationship is a primary example that obviously can bestow a feeling of connection, belonging, enhanced meaning, or inner transformation. Another example occurs whenever we “enter the flow” while participating in some activity so fulfilling or powerful that we become totally absorbed in it and experience “effortless effort.” Many of us have surely experienced the exhilaration of entering into a flow state, and some of us will have noticed that while in this state we can seem to automatically know things that neither our procedural mind nor our propositional mind knows. I experienced a flow state consistently when I foolishly engaged in free solo rock climbing in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona while in my early twenties. On a few occasions I became totally stuck on the side of a cliff, and when my terrified rational mind finally shut off, my body-mind automatically knew what to do in order to climb through the impasse.

A more vivid example of this participatory-intuitive knowing occurred for me when I was in my mid-twenties and had moved to Indiana to live secluded in the woods on farm property owned by my uncles along both sides of a remote country road. I knew that a pack of wild dogs was roaming the area because one of my uncles had recently lost two six-month-old calves due to predation from these dogs. Six-month-old Hereford calves can easily weigh 400 pounds, which was three times my weight at that time. Naively ignoring this danger, I couldn't resist going out for a run on a beautiful full-moon night. All was well for most of the run because the road was fully illuminated by moonlight, but my return home passed through a long stretch of driveway where dense tree cover completely blocked out the moonlight. That's where the dogs were waiting in ambush. In an instant I became aware of a large dog leaping toward my throat from directly in front of me. Simultaneously, I knew that a second dog was attacking from behind while a third and fourth were lunging at me from each side. Some part of me seemed to leave my body and watch what unfolded in slow motion from a vantage point above and slightly behind my body [6]. To my astonishment I saw my body enact a dazzling martial arts dance of dodging/turning/whirling/blocking/kicking/punching/elbowing that landed multiple blows in what could not have lasted more than a few seconds. I heard ribs cracking, dogs yelping, and as instantly as it all began the dogs vanished into the night. I received no injuries at all. Much of the astonishment I felt while watching was due to the fact that I know nothing about martial arts and have never been in an actual fight in my entire life. I believe this experience illustrates the essence of participatory knowing: our body-mind can know things instantly, like how to respond to a life-threatening situation, in ways that leave our rational mind sitting on the sidelines clueless.

This could mean that intuition is an aspect of participatory knowing and would explain why intuition is often experienced as a visceral feeling: because it is an ability of the deeply rooted mind that is intimately connected to our body. Whereas propositional knowing, as stated earlier, is a more recent development that expresses rational thinking, intuition may be a primal way of knowing that automatically accompanies the fact of being alive.

Remarkably, John Vervaeke appears to not accept that an ability as commonly experienced as intuition actually exists. Rather, he describes intuition in a watered-down sense of something like “street smarts,” where we can evaluate a situation skillfully, in part by implicitly picking up patterns within the environment, and thereby anticipate an outcome [7]. For example, in episode two of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Vervaeke acknowledges the importance of shamanism in the development of our indigenous ancestors, but claims that the intuitive knowledge shamans retrieve from what they call “the spirit world” results from, as a specific example, the shaman doing a deer dance that enables the shaman to more accurately deduce where the deer are likely to be at that time so the tribes' hunt has a better chance of being successful. This is not what intuition means.

The Oxford Reference website tells us exactly what intuition means: “Immediate understanding, knowledge, or awareness, derived neither from perception nor from reasoning.” I suspect that every one of us reading this essay has experienced an intuitive knowing that cannot be explained by Verveake's deer-dance hypothesis. The following story is one example that I can offer. The year I turned 19, the last draft lottery occurred for the Vietnam War. It was all the talk among my friends at the University of Florida, because no one wanted to leave their college studies and go fight in that disgrace of a war. The day of the lottery draw, I woke up with the certain knowing that my birthday would receive draft number 2. I told my friends about this, and they all said I was just imagining things and would be fine because the strong odds were that my birthday would receive a number high enough to avoid the draft [8]. Of course, when the lottery draw happened later that day, I got number 2. No amount of deer-dancing can explain this intuition. The reality is that we live in a world where our minds can know things instantly in ways that rational, propositional knowing cannot explain.

By acknowledging the validity of participatory knowing, we may be able to avoid much of the tension that arises between science and spirituality. Science is made possible by a highly refined use of propositional knowing that gives us precise insight into the nature of objective, material reality [9]. Spirituality is made possible by a cocreative process of participatory knowing that gives us access to a subjective, intuitive realm beyond material reality. They are completely different ways of knowing that explore completely different domains. The rules of one way of knowing do not apply to the other way of knowing any more than the rules of checkers apply to chess.

Something that contributes to the tension between science and spirituality is the fact that public discourse requires the propositional expressions of intellectual thinking/speaking/writing in order to communicate ideas. This leaves the participatory knower at a significant disadvantage because trying to convey an experience or insight of participatory knowing through propositional expressions is like trying to understand life by killing and dissecting a frog: you will never quite be able to capture the most important aspects of what you are trying to convey or understand [10]. The science-minded scholar will always be able to win a debate and “disprove” spirituality through the tools and rules of propositional knowing. But these are the wrong tools and rules for critiquing participatory knowing [11]; there's virtually no overlap between what goes on in propositional knowing versus what goes on in participatory knowing, just as there's virtually no overlap between playing checkers and playing chess.

Of these two prominent ways of knowing, science and spirituality, the more powerful on a societal level is definitely the propositional knowing of science. But the more powerful on a personal level is definitely the participatory knowing of spirituality. This is why science-minded critics of spirituality, even with the best propositional arguments, seldom convince anyone to give up their spiritual convictions: because the felt experience of participatory knowing is more powerful than logic. This is also why the brilliant medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas entirely ended his propositional writing later in life after an intense participatory experience left him saying: “All that I have written seems like straw to me” (Thomas Aquinas).

My hope is that more of us will make a conscious effort to respect and cultivate both ways of knowing. This might allow us to realize the futility of using propositional tools to try to debunk anyone else's spiritual convictions that are rooted in the direct experience of participatory knowing. It might also allow us to realize that our own participatory knowing, far from being an ultimate spiritual revelation for the ages, may not even apply to anyone else. Each of these realizations would help to instill humility, a much-needed virtue for both the brilliant science-minded skeptic and the spiritual enthusiast with unshakable faith due to participatory experience.

NOTES

[1] Participatory Spirituality and Transpersonal Theory: A Ten-Year Retrospective. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2011, Vol. 43, No. 1.

[2] Some of us go to nature for the same reason.

[3] Obviously, participatory knowing can occur within group contexts such as religious service, chanting Sanskrit, or attending a concert, but the enhanced meaning or inner transformation is an individual affair.

[4] Ferrer put it this way: “A multiplicity of not only spiritual paths, but also spiritual liberations and even spiritual ultimates” may exist (endnote 1).

[5] John Vervaeke teaches a similar practice called “internalizing the sage;” however, he considers it to be perspectival knowing, perhaps to stay within the boundaries of his naturalistic worldview.

[6] The intellectual-propositional mind will say this is not possible because no part of us can leave our body and because it was too dark to physically see much of anything. My own intellectual mind agrees with that, but I also know what I experienced. Something that propositional knowing dismisses as impossible can be real and true within participatory knowing.

[7] As with endnote 5, this may be an effort by Vervaeke to stay within the boundaries of his naturalistic worldview. The problem with unwavering allegiance to any specific ontological position is that sooner or later it will prevent us from experiencing reality as it actually is.

[8] The Selective Service System would draft the lowest lottery draws up to the number that brought in the needed recruits at the time. That year the lottery only drafted through number 95, so I had a 74% chance of not being drafted.

[9] Of course, I'm referring to natural science here. This is only partially true for social science.

[10] For this very reason, the preferred way to communicate ideas for the participatory knower is often through stories or poetry, which is why indigenous people pass down their wisdom through stories, and why Rumi and other mystics write poetry.

[11] There are definitely valid ways to use logic and rational analysis regarding participatory knowing. A good example is comparative religious studies, which is what allowed me to state earlier in this essay: “If we exercise our propositional knowing even a tiny bit, we realize [that the pundits and promoters of every religion and spiritual path] can't all be correct in an objective sense [when they try to tell others what the end result or goal of spiritual engagement has to be or what anyone's spiritual path or experience needs to conform to].” What I'm suggesting here in this portion of the essay is that it's an overreach for science-minded scholars to try to disprove anyone's spiritual experiences or insights by using the tools and rules of logic and/or science, just as it would be an absurd overreach for a checkers player to use the rules of checkers to try to disprove what a chess player is doing. And yes, the shoe goes on the other foot as well; it's also an overreach for spiritual enthusiasts to claim that their participatory experiences or insights are scientifically valid. When that happens, it's fair game to use the tools and rules of logic and/or science to disprove such claims, because now we are in the domain of propositional knowing. Everyone just needs to stay in their lane.