Exploring Consciousness: Old Habits and New Horizons 71experimentation” of the 1960s (Grof, 2008, p. 47). Transpersonal
psychology attempts to study “the entire spectrum of human experience,
including various non-ordinary states of consciousness” (Grof, 2008, p.
47).
An early contributor and anthropologist who conducted
groundbreaking fieldwork on shamanism, Harner (1980) suggests that
Western psychology suffers from both ethnocentric and cognicentric bias.
It is ethnocentric insofar as it relies heavily on scientific materialism, or a
self-fulfilling, reductionist belief that matter is primary in the universe,
with consciousness and intelligence arising as byproducts. Within the
materialist paradigm, spirituality is frequently dismissed as ignorant of
scientific facts and indicative of “superstition, child-like gullibility, self-
deception, and primitive magical thinking” (Grof, 2008, p. 47; Walsh,
1995). Similarly, the theories espoused by Western, mainstream
psychology suffer from cognicentric bias in that they are based solely on
observations of ordinary states of consciousness. Western psychology and
psychiatry “have systematically avoided or misinterpreted the evidence
from non-ordinary states,” including potentially paradigm-shifting data
from research on psychedelics, experiential therapies, meditation, and
related areas (Grof, 2008, p. 48).
“The issue of critical importance,” writes Grof (2008, p. 49), “is the
ontological nature of the spiritual experiences” in question. In other words,
many transpersonal experiences—such as the experience of cosmic or
unitive consciousness as described by mystics cross-culturally since time
immemorial (e.g., Otto, 1923; Kelly & Grosso, 2007; Huxley, 1995; Hunt,
2007; Smith, 1976, Walsh, 1995)—directly challenge the core assumptions
of scientific materialism. Based on Newtonian physics and Cartesian
dualism, modern science has entrenched Western psychology and,
arguably, the ontological purview of most human beings, in naïve realism.
Naïve realism (Ross & Ward, 1996) is a fundamental, common-sense
perspective or way of being that takes for granted the belief that the
universe is necessarily governed by predictable, physical laws and is as it
appears to be. Conversely, “Quantum-relativistic physics”—the basis of a
new scientific paradigm that has not yet diffused into mainstream