The Creative Nature of Transpersonal Experiences and Behaviors
Transpersonal experiences and values are an intrinsic part of human nature. Arthur Hastings, former President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, in his 1991 book, With the Tongues of Men and Angels: A Study of Channeling, describes the importance and significance that transpersonal experiences and values have for our understanding of the nature of human beings, and indeed of the universe itself.
Transpersonal experiences and values appear to be an intrinsic part of human nature. It is becoming evident that they can be studied objectively as a psychology of consciousness and human development. Transpersonal experiences are often interpreted as religious and can occur spontaneously or through meditation, prayer, experiencing natural beauty, sexuality, and other experiences. They include inspirational or peak experiences in which the universe is perceived as harmonious and unified. Opposites are transcended, and qualities of goodness, beauty, and meaning are experienced directly. They may give direct contact with what is described as the consciousness of God or the divine. (Hastings, 1991, p. 182)
Epistemic content of transpersonal experiences is important. Jorge N. Ferrer in his 2002 book, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, points out that “What makes transpersonal phenomena distinctly ‘transpersonal’ (as well as interesting, provocative, and transforming) is not their nonordinary or occasional ecstatic character, but the character of the knowledge they provide during an expansion of individual consciousness” (Ferrer, 2002, p. 9). Arthur Hastings makes a similar point when he states:
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Psychologist Abraham Maslow (1964) found that from such experiences, and with growth toward self-actualization, the person becomes motivated by higher values, which he called metavalues. Examples of these are wholeness, truth, beauty, aliveness, goodness, order, harmony, uniqueness, justice, and playfulness. Also, at these transpersonal levels of the self, one can experience primary energy qualities such as compassion, power, sexuality, intelligence, love, wisdom, and creation. Like the archetypes, these transpersonal principles and experiences are [experienced as] part of a larger reality of which the individual is a part. (Hastings, 1991, p. 182)
Transpersonal experiences involve a transcendence of body, self, world, time, and others. Abraham H. Maslow, co-founder of modern transpersonal psychology, identified 35 overlapping meanings of the word “transcendence” when talking about the “Psychology of Being,” or what later came to be called “Transpersonal Psychology” (Maslow, 1969b, pp. 56-66; Maslow, 1971, chapter 21). These meanings are presented in Figure 1-4.
Figure 1-4. Various Meanings of Transcendence
“Transcendence,” in these terms, includes both an expansion or opening up and a exceeding or going beyond what is ordinarily given or presented in one’s usual experience of body, self, time, world, and others. Each of Maslow’s definitions of transcendence reflects a particular personality characteristic of “transcending self-actualizers” who provided the empirical basis for his “Theory Z” and who suggested to him the possibility of a psychology “beyond self-actualization” (Maslow, 1971, chap. 22). Maslow (1971) summarized his list of 32 overlapping definitions with a “condensed” definition of transcendence:
Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than as means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos. (Maslow, 1971, p. 279)
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