Perform a feat considered impossible.
Ask the further question not yet asked.
Act with valor, heroism and daring to better the existing situation.
Breaking of boundaries and going beyond limitations.
Open up new areas of expression not before noticed or believed possible for the individual.
Display possibilities of awareness and achievement that might have otherwise gone unknown.
As J. R. R. Tolkein (1977) said in The Silmarillion: “In every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past” (p. 18).
People frightened of themselves. Unfortunately, most individuals are unaware of their normal creative capacity to expand or surpass their usual biopsychosocial functioning because they focus so narrowly and rigidly upon waking work-a-day concerns and three-dimensional time-space events. Intrusions of a creative nature, such as unusual sensations, ideas, memories, mental images, bodily feelings, or impulses that originate from other layers of actuality may be frightening, considered to be alien or “not-self” and dangerous, perhaps even signs of mental disturbances and thus are automatically shut out by the familiar ego-directed portions of the personality. Such communications from the more marginal, subliminal realms of consciousness are permitted only during sleep, in dreams or in instances in creative inspiration.
Creativity as it is generally known represents but a small portion of far more extensive capacities….the individual being aware of only that ability that the mind can understand…Most individuals therefore do not contend with larger portions of their own reality. (Butts, 2003b, p. 240)
Transpersonal psychology serves to give notice about those transformative creative abilities and capacities that lie latent but active within each person, and that connect the known and “unknown” realities in which we dwell.
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Transpersonal Psychology:
A New Approach to Religious Issues
Transpersonal psychology’s relationship to religion. The question of transpersonal psychology’s relation to religion is an important one. Fundamental Christians have criticized transpersonal psychology because it has been affiliated with the New Age movement and as offering an alternative faith system to vulnerable youths who turn their backs on organized religion (Adeney, 1988; Lewis & Melton, 1992). Are all transpersonal experiences religious experiences? Are all religious experiences transpersonal? How does transpersonal psychology approach experiences of the sacred? Does transpersonal psychology require particular religious convictions or can transpersonal experiences be interpreted nonreligiously? What distinguishes transpersonal psychology from the psychology of religion?
Figure 1-5 lists ten ways in which transpersonal psychology represents a new approach to the understanding of religious issues.
Figure 1-5. Transpersonal Psychology as an Approach to Religious Issues
1. Esoteric Spirituality vs. Exoteric Religion. Unlike the focus of inquiry that characterizes traditional research approaches in the psychology of religion, transpersonal psychology is less concerned with the “surface structure” of religion (i.e., its “exoteric,” formal, dogmatic aspects), and more concerned with its “deep structure” (i.e., its “esoteric,” mystical, experiential aspects). The deep structure of religions may be viewed as the more immediate source of formal religious faith and practice and the origin of that natural spiritual feeling that gives the organism the optimism, the joy, and the ever-abundant energy to grow (Wilber, 1983).
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