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Rhea White quotes Tom Driver
[1991], who talks about
"confessional mode," "rituals as pathways,"
and "confessional performances." He offers a
specially powerful perspective of "ritualizing as the
making of these paths for behavior to follow." Most
of these ideas could be effectively explored or applied within a
study group focused on EHEs -- their significance in our lives
and ways to help each other to fully potentiate them, meaning to
bring to fruition their gifts. We do this through
what White calls the EHE
Process. She suggests
that ..
.. EHEs provide the nucleus for developing a personal
ritual, a way to create a path one can follow in living one's
life, a path that is both deeply satisfying and a source of
further revelation. Driver says that the societal
benefits of ritual are "order, community, and
transformation." ... [These] are the benefits of
the EHEs that spearhead one's life .... [They are] a means of
connecting with one's self, or of uniting one's many selves.
... [They connect] us to others, to our
community, and ultimately, to the planet. ... [And] when a
sufficient number of people experience those inner/outer
connections, we will have access to what we need to save the
planet*, which corresponds to Driver's transformation.
Driver next discusses ritual as a performance, an
acting out or living out. this corresponds to what I
have said about EHEs revealing one's path in life embodied in
a project
of transcendence. ... Driver has
sharpened my thinking on these matters. He refers to "confessional
performances," which are primarily concerned with
"identity and exposure," or owning EHEs, in the
special case in which we are interested. He also notes
that "mystery and awesomeness
accompany self-revelation," and that "the
confessional mode always has something of a religious quality,
even though many specific instances of it have nothing overt
to do with religious traditions."
This is a a bombshell for me. It
suggests that coming out has religious overtones -- mystery
and awe -- and puts one in touch with everything else.
What we must do is come out as regards EHEs! And this
coming out itself has potential as an EHE. If we
own them, they will guide others as well as ourselves, or
rather, as Driver says, we must not only "show and
tell" but "do and show."
He says the confessional mode has to to
with faith and it "needs a language capable of saying, 'I
believe. Help my unbelief'." He quotes
William Cantwell Smith, who says faith
"is an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to
one's neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of
seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles;
a capacity to live at a more than mundane level; to see, to
feel, to act in terms of a transcendent dimension.
Belief, on the other hand is the holding of certain
ideas."
... Much further into this powerful and lengthy article,
and more to the point about EHE study groups and their potential
for helping our collective transcendence that could indeed save our
planet and ourselves from our not-knowing, White continues the
discussion about the necessity to 'transcend' the constricted
and even scientifically recognized inaccurate and incomplete
idea of the seemingly "objective" / "out there" as the
pure domain of what it means to engage in the rigorous
discipline of [Western] Science. She continues:
[If]
we could conceptualize our activity as being both inside,
outside, as well as the experiment itself, then we could widen
the bridge between mind and matter as we experience it.
Or, as Stephanie Demetrakopoulos puts it: "The
Western polarization of the body and the soul can be softened
and modified." The eventual goal of course, would
be to do and show and know that subjective and objective are
one and the same. I suggest that what would be
experienced in this act of transcendence, which in effect is
an awareness of becoming more than we were when we began, is
the existence of a dynamic, which I have symbolized as a
catapult. Driver states: "Confession
always changes the relation between self and world. The
recognition of movement in the self enables, at a certain
point, discernment of a dynamic in the world. In the
awareness of a correlation between dynamic self and dynamic
world, the ethical mode of performance is born."
He points out that "confessional
performance is an early, necessary step in the liberation of
any oppressed people." and we, dear people, in a
very real sense are an oppressed group. [She is
speaking to and of parapsychologists, of whom many, like
White, are themselves EHEers who got into the field to better
understand their own such experiences.] People
who have had exceptional human experiences and even those who
purport to study them -- even if they do it in the most
correct, conservative, and pristinely objective way possible
-- are looked on by many as outcasts. As the members of
one oppressed group, we, on the other hand, have much to gain
if instead of tacitly or openly siding with our oppressors, we
were to stand with our exceptional experiences, privileging
them wherever possible. We must perform, as Driver puts
it, "acts in which people openly proclaim their identity
as members of an oppressed group, and confess loyalty to the
cause of liberation. The liberating power they call upon
... requires a manifestation of a people's loyalty, their
willingness to suffer for the cause of freedom, and their
expectation that deliverance will come."
Liberation, that is, acceptance, is what
all ... who have exceptional human experiences want. The
process, I submit, starts with themselves. One has to be
loyal to, come down upon the side of, that which requires
liberation. there is nothing to lose! For as the
oppressed we are already outside the pale. To be
exceptional and not own it is to be nowhere. One
conforms to a dead reality that one's very experience
belies.
White then gives a brilliant, succinct, totally 'nekkid'
description of how, sadly, parapsychology has, all irony
intended, sold its soul to the devil -- not in an accusatory
way, but to say that was a great mistake. And her platform
geared toward shifting this is always presented from the
perspective of honoring the experiencer, the experience, the
meaning of the matter -- and not the 'matter' of the meaning that
empiricism is fixated upon. I hope to facilitate
seeing this article and many other works by Rhea White being
made more accessible online soon. Back to Rhea:
...
One has to put one's I where one's mouth is. Or one's
mouth where one's I is. I have had exceptional human
experiences. They have transported me -- catapulted me
-- to the other shore. From that shore the
meaninglessness of experiments is evident. I want to
explore that new shore, but surely one can only do so by being
there. In a way, it is like
the process of conversion in which one makes a leap of
faith and identifies with the tenets of a particular
religion. One makes that leap of faith after which,
looking back, all the world is seen anew. I think what
we are seeing in the rise of reports of EHEs and the
large-scale popular interest in them is the return of the
sacred in the midst of daily life. Each one is a call to
transcendence, a call to perform a new identity. We are
called, at one time or another, to "do"
transcendence, to accept our transcendent identity, and by the
very act of doing it, to begin seeing things in a new way, and
it is that new vision that may save our planet and
legitimate parapsychology without a shot being fired or an
experiment being run. It only
costs "not less than everything." But whatever
that "everything" is to you, it will be given back a
hundredfold.
As examples of the liberating quality of
the confessional mode, Driver instances Alcoholics Anonymous,
the gay and lesbian rights movement, the black movement,
women's liberation, and the Native American movement. In
each case, liberation is experienced not by overthrowing the
oppressors but by a process of performing what one is by
confessing it, by being loyal to it and by privileging it.
Karlis Osis
provides support for this view in a review of Ring's Omega
Project [regarding the fact that parapsychologists privilege
'evidence over personal meaning' in their investigative
strategies.] He notes that in his experience, "experients
... bristle at our equal treatment of trivial events and those
that had impact on their lives. Ring clearly sides with
them. He notes that when he teaches [about] NDEs to
undergraduates, whatever data he presents to them does not
change their reserve and skepticism, but when experients
witness to the class, 'most of them from that point on don't
need any further evidence that NDEs are real.'
Kenneth Kramer
has gone even further by developing a text wherein the
students do not see any presentation of parapsychological
evidence, but instead they are required to go through many
experiential practices throughout the semester. Teachers
have told me that the text is much loved and highly
effective."
It would seem that new agers are already involved in such a
process, but they tend to fall back on theories such as
"vibes" and "auras" to make sense of their
experience. In a sense, perhaps it doesn't matter how
one explains it at the individual level, as long as it works
for that person. But as the group of people who have
chosen (or been chosen) to investigate psychic experiences,
[we] cannot fall back on that. At the least, we
need to conceptualize our subject matter in ways that are
consonant with the ongoing conversation of Western
civilization concerning the nature of reality, and this is by
no means limited to empirical studies ... Just as
black are exploring all the ways black is beautiful, we should
be exploring all the ways in which psi could possibly manifest
as well as the dangers and pitfalls that may be involved in
such a project, so we can assist persons who are just becoming
aware of psi in their lives to understand what is happening to
them and how they can best respond to it. Our ability do
to this rests on firsthand so-called subjective knowledge
first and foremost. For we ourselves are the subject of
the experiment we are.
I therefore suggest that we conceive of
what we are doing in terms of studying psi, not
investigating it. The latter implies that we are working
only with what is "out there," when in reality it is
both inside and outside simultaneously. I think the term
study is preferable, because to study something
involves looking at all sides, pondering it, holding it in
one's gaze as one studies the face of one's beloved. In
essence, it involves letting oneself be moved toward
one's subject matter and letting oneself be moved by one's
subject matter, and one knows one is making progress in
understanding when one can't tell whether what is happening is
taking place inside our outside. The boundary between
self and world either has disappeared or has become
deliciously blurred. [**For
our purposes here, again, think also in terms of 'EHE study groups.']
...
Instead of staying at the level of the old paradigm that
divides by setting one part of the population off from others,
the battle is moved to another level where one expresses and
even celebrates the authenticity of one's experience, knowing
its truth and therefore experiencing its liberation beyond
anything the oppressors can do. EHEs are
exceptional. Once one takes the leap and confesses one's
loyalty to them and acknowledges their existence in one's
life, the question asked at the conservative level no longer
matter. Even if every EHE has a sensory base --
even a delusional base -- it would not diminish their
performity if believed in. Regardless of how they may be
explained away, something exists where once there was nothing,
and that something can change one's life in ways that hundreds
of experiments do not. Performity is what changes
lives. And the essence of life is change. We all
need to become more than we are, and the way to do it is by
performing our individual projects [of transcendence].
Wherever you see White addressing parapsychologists and how they
might apply these ideas to their work, we can just as well
imagine how we might meet similar needs in similar ways within
the context of just-you-and-me folks in EHE-type study groups,
which White finally addresses directly below.
Parapsychologists' project is psychic experience. They
need not be psychic to study their project, but one has to be moved
to engage in any project, whether it be beekeeping or hang
gliding. What EHEs do for us is signal to us where we
should move next. Because parapsychology is a group
movement, then we should be those people in the world who work
together by sharing their separate visions to discern the ways
in which the field should be moving.
An example of the way I suggest we should be doing this is the
consciousness-raising groups held by women in the 1960s and
1970s. They were liberating and enlightening.
Nelle Morton points out that women engaged in "hearing
each other [in]to speech."
In [Montague] Ullman's dream-sharing
groups, people listen each other's dreams into reality.
What we
need are hundreds of grassroots EHE groups that would provide
the opportunity for EHEs to be heard into reality, dwelt upon,
heeded, permitted to change the experiencer's life and those
of others as well. This is how what we call reality
recreates itself in everyone, but we have to live it out.
White talks about how the modern world [having gone through over
350 years with
deterministic Western science] has long thought "Everything
was considered to be mechanical and therefore ultimately
predictable," and "You can't change human
nature." As we grew into and through adulthood, we
were thought to grow set in our ways along a societally
determined / accepted path that was pretty cut and dried, the
objective being "the good life," which is
materialistic. The changing of self in the process and as a
product of that process was thought to diminish steadily over
the span of one's life. But she
continues,
In the postmodern view, everyone is in process, whether one
knows it or not, but it is best to know it.
We are not
here primarily to find contentment but to connect with what
William James referred to as the "more" in human
experience, to become connected to the more that we are.
And that is where Driver's confessional performance comes
in.
The time has come for the exceptional human experiencers of
the world to unite.
They have nothing to lose but their
stigma. Exceptional indicates they are already
privileged. While others are seeking the pot at the end
of the rainbow, they are already in the rainbow.
According to Driver, says White, confessional performance is
about "self -actualization through self-recognition,
world-recognition, and self-proclamation. And one might
add: "world-proclamation." "[In] the
confessional mode," White continues to quote Driver,
"selfhood is both personal and communal. It is performance
that insures that the confession does not refer solely, or even
mainly, to the individual self. As performance, the
confession finds or perhaps makes, its community, so that the
situation of the individual comes to be seen as something that
the community shares, and the community is legitimated as the
necessary complement of the individual."
[White:] This is the road to take to legitimate psychic
experiences, not the road of experiments. Here we
actually use and live what appears to be psi, not just
distancing it "out there" so we can try to
manipulate it. It must manipulate us!
Driver says this can bring about " a heightened level of
awareness ... a more existential type of performance ... in
which members of human communities make known to each other,
as best they can, the often veiled truths of their
existence." Certainly the truths about EHEs are
little understood. By confessing them to one another we
may grow in understanding them. To an extent, he says by
this means we do even more than simply unveil truths. We
create the reality we require as we go. That is how
new things grow under the sun. Driver emphasizes
this. He says: "We are pressed to recognize
here something even more intensive: The performance of
confessional truth is not only its disclosure but also its
formation. Confessional truth is not simply a known
truth performed but also the transformation of a partial truth
into a truth more fully formed. Prior to its confession,
such truth is not entirely true, only potentially true. It
becomes 'true' in the act of disclosure [italics added (by
White)]. I am not what I am except insofar as I am what
I say I am. If I di not mean what I say, I am less than
what I am. If I do not mean to be what I do, I am less
than nothing."
And that, I submit, is why parapsychology [or any of
us!] has stayed ona plateau for 50 years. It lacks
legitimation because it has not owned its experiences. I
deliberately did not say 'phenomena.' What phenomena may
publicly exist cannot be determined until we first legitimate
ourselves. Until we achieve the confessional mode, we
cannot make the sort of determinations required to ask such a
question. We may find such questions cannot be
profitably asked. Or maybe they can. The thing is
-- from the near side of the chasm, such questions have no
meaning. When we go where the meaning is, such questions
may no longer be needed. It is too early to say.
Thus, by entering the process the process changes us and our
very circumstances. ... We are not simply playing
games with our ritual confessional performance. Through
our 'play' a new reality is being constructed and
shared. Many years ago Ira
Progoff
depicted just how this process could work regarding psi.
He attributed the increase in the reported incidence of psi
experiences in the preceding 50 years to a change in the
social atmosphere:
It
activates the psychoid level with beliefs and expectations
and provides a permissive atmosphere in which increasingly
it has become socially acceptable for individuals to report
their parapsychic experiences.
In
previous decades, not only the reports but the experiences
themselves were repressed. Now the social atmosphere
draws forth these experiences and is creating a cultural
openness in which specifically parapsychic phenomena as well
as the larger realm of synchronistic events as a whole can
more freely be experienced, observed, and reported. In
this atmosphere also the capacity for this larger range of
experience can be cultivated by specific techniques of
training, as well as by an affirmative orientation to the
experiences themselves. By means of this, the quality
of awareness in our culture as a whole will steadily be
enlarged. ...
Driver's view underwrites Progoff's vision by indicating how a
billiard-ball effect can be initiated by people who are
willing to share and perform their EHEs. It is time to
go inside the process. Once we do, we will have
the key to whatever we need to do next. It seems to me
that a major approach ... would be the development and
production of rituals appropriate to our subject
matter.
Germane to the idea of EHE study groups, there is a wealth of
people and groups doing exactly this. For example, John
Heron's
Sacred Science: His work as a transpersonal
psychologist is a sumptuous compliment to White's EHE
process.
He is actively doing all that White has been conceptualizing in
a more academic way and is a wizard at incorporating
imagination, vast personal EHEerly familiarity, and ritual toward this
very purpose. Although each in their own inimitable way,
the same thing could be said of David
Spangler,
one of the most remarkable seers / mystics / deeply wise human
beings of our time. So, "EHE study groups" are
all over the planet and of course have been in one form or
another for our
entire human tenure on this Earth. Any group or movement
that has deeply engaged in furthering our understanding of these
exceptional experiences, the nurturing of the EHE Process
in essence have been pursuing what Rhea White has long
envisioned as EHE study groups.
But what stands out about Rhea White's work is her special
emphasis on our collective acknowledgement of 'all things
EHE' as a timely and powerful universalizing of our mutual
regard and awareness of this phenomenon and its implications for
helping us to, as she puts it, "turn the corner"
together, as a species, into
a broadening and deepening of the ever-expanding potential of
what it means to be Human.
~~~~~~~~
*
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Title
of the above article: Exceptional Human Experiences
as Vehicles of Grace: Parapsychology, Faith, and the
Outlier Mentality, IN: Exceptional Human
Experience: Background Papers: I (The Exceptional Human Experience
Network, Dix Hills, NY, 1994).
~~~~~~~~
*
~~~~~~~~
Note:
Color
highlights are R. Rocamora's, both for
emphasis [usually rose pink]
and to clarify who is talking [R.
White -- orange;
occasionally others she quotes in various colors; R. Rocamora --
green]
***
Also see:
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