Chapter 4: Prolegomena To A Spiritualresearch Paradigm

It is important for us to inquire into the meaning of the spiritual from the outset. We need to know what we are talking about—our subject matter—before we can talk about establishing a SRP (spiritual research paradigm). We the authors acknowledge that there are, as to be expected, multiple meanings of the spiritual (Sheldrake, 2013). In fact, we could create a spectrum of meaning with one end connoting the transcendental reality more or less separate from human reality, lying beyond ordinary human cognition. The spiritual here could be external to humanity in origin and function. This is the transcendental conception of the spiritual. The other end of this spectrum would point to the spiritual as being immanent in human reality and experience. We locate our own work on SRP closer to this second end of the spectrum, although we acknowledge that human reality, and what is possible for humans to experience, is an open-ended or emergent phenomenon, and thus, in that sense it can be understood as transcendental.