An autoethnography of spiritual development in an Afrikaner cultural context : a Wilberian perspective

Abstract

Research has shown that people have increasingly begun to disidentify with organised and traditional religion, and have instead embraced a more personalised spiritual path. The same trend has been seen in the traditional Afrikaner Christian churches, which have seen their numbers of congregants drop in recent years. The implications for the seeker of spirituality is that such personalised paths, in the absence of formal theological guidance and structure, may lead to a sense of loss, confusion, a loss of self-identity and even what Grof and Grof termed ‘spiritual emergencies’. Such seekers may turn to psychologists for help to process and integrate these psychospiritual challenges. Psychologists may need an in-depth understanding of the possible varieties of such spiritual challenges, and of the psychological growth and transformation it may require without pathologising the experiences or the client. To add to the knowledge of how psychology and spirituality intersect in practice, I explored and described a spiritual development process based on my personal experience and from a transpersonal psychological perspective. I also described how spiritual development is influenced or hampered by societal and cultural contextual factors. In search of a theoretical underpinning of this development process, I contextualised and explained spiritual development in terms of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. According to Wilber, spiritual development is a development line similar to, for example, cognitive, moral, and ego development. Using a qualitative approach and an autoethnographical research methodology, I wrote my story about the search for spiritual meaning and growth. I used self-reflection and self-analysis and linked my personal experiences with a wider cultural context of the Afrikaner to illustrate the possible tensions between conventional, conformist societal structures and a personalised post conventional spiritual path. To inform my own perspective and to add to the rigour of this study, I formally interviewed three members of the Afrikaner community, and informally interviewed several family and friends, and have used their insights as part of my story. Using Wilber’s stages and states of consciousness, I showed that spiritual development can be traced and explained in terms of a stage-like progression, from first-tier structures to second tier structures, and to rare third-tier structures of consciousness. I found through my own personal experiences that such third-tier post-post conventional structures may exist. I also found evidence for Wilber’s subtle/meta-mind structure of consciousness. While no claims about generalisability are made, my reflections and analysis may provide other transpersonal psychologists and seekers of spirituality with a deeper insight into the personal spiritual development process. I further provide guidelines for psychologists on the integration of spirituality into practice.