Organic Inquiry, Spiritual Science, and New Possibilities for Research Methodologies

Although Rudolf Steiner characterized spiritual science as a participatory “path of knowledge,” he did not present it as a research methodology, nor do any of the foundational texts of anthroposophy elaborate processes that researchers can follow to formulate research questions or methodically gather, interpret, and communicate data. This fact alone makes it difficult for spiritual scientists to conduct research within institutions, especially universities.

This paper proposes that organic inquiry, a research methodology founded in the late 1990s by a team of transpersonal psychologists who wanted to integrate the sacred into their work (Clements, Ettling, Jenett, and Shields, 1999,) is a suitable methodology for spiritual scientists. Organic Inquiry is a participatory, qualitative research methodology closely related transformational theory (Mezirow, 2000), wholeness science (Braud and Anderson, 1998), and other holistic paradigms that intentionally works with spiritual influences, emphasizes the interwovenness of researcher, participants, and reader, and values transformation over information. 

This paper will provide an overview with visual aids that compares the key features, ontology, epistemology, methodology, and guiding questions of spiritual-compatible research methodologies, with an emphasis on organic inquiry and spiritual science. Then it will compare axiomatic overviews of those research methodologies with those of the positivist paradigm.

Having established these overviews, this paper will then explore one of the most challenging aspects of conducting qualitative research in the dominant positivist paradigm, especially for organic inquiry researchers and spiritual scientists: the question of validity. This paper aims to make three main contributions in this realm. First, it will lay out how organic inquiry and other wholeness science paradigms establish validity. Second, it will take a novel evolutionary perspective on qualitative research methodologies and how assumptions about validity have changed over time. Finally, it will offer suggestions for expanded axioms in research.