I went along with my film crew to a Satsang the other night; below I’ve posted a video that shows a small part of it (I’m the one reading the words as it’s all pretty new to me). There is a bit of confusion and misinterpretation about what Satsang is in the mainstream, which I interpret as the pre/trans fallacy, so here goes a bit of a blog pitching some philosophy to clarify.
Ken Wilber, a leading American philosopher who has written extensively about many subjects, human development being one of them, coined the phrase “pre/trans fallacy.” Ken Wilber purports that many claims about non-rational states make a mistake he calls the pre/trans fallacy. According to Wilber, the non-rational stages of consciousness (what Wilber calls “pre-rational” and “trans-rational” stages) can be easily confused with one another. I have to agree that the pre/trans fallacy is one of the hardest things to get your head around – especially when looking at it from a rational level (which can be generalized to include the mainstream western mind).
Check out the video below, which is a chant from this May 2010 Satsang that I attended – if you’re on my list you will get an email when the whole thing is online (it’ll be free for members and makes for another consciousness expanding tool you can add to your box). It’s about 90 minutes and includes meditation, call and response/devotional chants and some philosophy.
I had never done a Satsang until Ram – the guy playing the harmonium and leading it - set the yoga center up in town here in 2008. (Yeap, that is 10 plus years for me without knowing about this vital aspect of yoga!) Now that I have a better understanding of developmental psychology and growth I get the whys and the benefits that it can provide.
Ok, so “non-rational” states… what are they? To understand this you need to understand about Growth as it relates to the human experience. Here is a video post on Yoga and Growth which gives a part of the picture.
Eastern and Western Developmental growth models all tend to look at growth as something that happens by and through “stages.” Whether growth be viewed through the lens of the Chakras, the Koshas (Annamaya kosha, Pranamaya kosha, Manamaya kosha, Vijnanamaya kosha, Anandamaya kosha )or the western developmental growth models, for example, Jean Gebser (who looks at growth through the archaic, magic, mythical and mental structures, and into the integral stage) and many, many others. Here’s a chart of many philosophers mapping lines of development through levels, or stages, of consciousness that will give you an idea.
Levels of Growth
Many of us can get stuck at certain levels, which is totally cool if that is what you want to be doing. At lower levels of mind it can be turbulent (with fear, anger, anxiety, etc) making sense of your own consciousness. So what is consciousness? For thousands of years this question has perplexed some of the world’s greatest hearts and minds—entire generations of philosophers, yogis, mystics and scientists have spent many an hour laying awake at night wondering. So it is cool to feel OK about not knowing. But it makes sense to work up the chain of growth where you can be more at peace with yourself. The chain has many levels and lines so it can be mind boggling to think about it.
So how does this relate to Satsang? Let’s look at Satsang from a few different levels:
Here we are in the moment and we may take a literal meaning in the chants, many of which tell stories in myth form to help us grow at this level by giving us something to sense that is beyond us (note that this stage is neither good nor bad, for there is a lot of learning that happens as we grow through this stage… so it just IS. We are all at the level that we are at; but the idea is that everyone grows through this stage, as opposed to becoming stuck at it).
This could look like some crazy religion. What are all these English speaking people doing chanting in a foreign language?? Is this some cult or what? JackTM over at YT asked me if I was a Hindu? LOL although I have nothing against it and encourage all authentic spiritual practice, but no I’m not Hindu.
Here you have an understanding about States and Stages of consciousness and what directs one towards higher being. You understand that certain practices, Satsang being one of them, can move you to other states of consciousness and that this can help you slowly understand your mind more deeply while helping you to develop a greater capacity for care, comprehension and compassion.
A & C are both NON rational – but both look different. So if you do not have the philosophical framework to interpret what is going on, you can be experiencing the pre/trans fallacy where you interpret it as A when IMHO, in this instance, it is C. I have known Ram for a couple of years and he is a switched on guy that understands development. But be careful as this can also go the other way around. In another setting, that looked very similar, you could perceive it as C when it was A – in this situation a mythical experience is elevated to a trans-rational experience.
This (being Satsang) is just one situational example that can be transposed into many other areas of life. The point is that we tend to jump in from the level we personally perceive things at and judge situations as non-rational, rational or trans-rational… but because we are perceiving things from our own standpoint, we are often left open to error of judgment if we don’t fully understand what it is we are seeing or experiencing. And this error of judgment often elevates the mythical, or the pre-rational, and demotes the integral, or the post-rational – herein lies the pre/trans fallacy and consequently a lot of confusion.
Anyway, that just a super condensed overview in relation to one topic. Pick up one of Ken Wilber’s books like “Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World” or take a look at that big fat book “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution” if you wanted to explore this more: understanding this at a political level would go a long way to balancing the current world situation.
