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The biological perspective focuses on neurobiological processes (genetic factors, neurotransmitters, neuro-mechanisms, brain wave states, psychopharmacology) assumed to underlie exceptional human experiences and behaviors, and relates to all transpersonal events to genetic, electrical, chemical, biological activity inside the body.
The environmental perspective focuses on the external conditions and circumstances (ecological context and social situations, structures, and systems) assumed to act on individuals and condition their behavior, and relates all transpersonal events to observable environmental stimuli and behavioral responses.
The cognitive perspective focuses on the mental processes (e.g., attending, perceiving, remembering, believing, expecting, intending, valuing, reasoning, planning, and judging) assumed to underlie transpersonal experience and behavior, and relates all transpersonal events to underlying mental processes and contents.
The psychodynamic perspective focuses on subconscious-unconscious processes assumed to underlie all transpersonal experiences and behavior and relates all transpersonal events to underlying forces (e.g., ideas and memories, fears and desires, needs and drives) of which a person is unaware but nevertheless influence behavior and experience.
The phenomenological perspective focuses on the individuals’ subjective experience and intersubjective social cognitions of transpersonal events, how these experiences are represented in conscious awareness and culture, and how these abstract representations of subjective experience, communal meanings, and shared values guide behavior. All transpersonal events are related to the conscious, subjective and intersubjective representations that people actively construct.
The integral perspective focuses broadly on the biological, environmental, cognitive, psychodynamic, and phenomenological aspects of transpersonal events and integrates the information obtained by these disparate approaches into a comprehensive, interrelated, logically coherent, multi-layered overview of transpersonal development.
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Integral perspective is commonly used. Given the multidisciplinary character of transpersonal studies, a broadly integrative approach that spans multiple perspectives is commonly used among transpersonal psychologist.
Multiple perspectives provide the most inclusive viewpoint. Because each of the six perspectives focuses on a different aspect or dimension of transpersonal events, each provides a unique and valuable viewpoint about how transpersonal events occur and what they mean. The six approaches may appear mutually exclusive and incompatible with one another when viewed in isolation or when individual perspectives are taken to extremes. Our understanding of transpersonal events, however, can always benefit from the inclusiveness provided by multiple perspectives to any given phenomenon.
Any single perspective is likely to be partial, limited, perhaps even distorted. The extraordinarily complex, many-layered, multi-dimensional phenomena of consciousness almost certainly require a pluralistic, multi-perspective approach if anything like an adequate understanding of transpersonal phenomena is to be obtained. Any event or action that we physically perceive is only a portion of the true dimensionality of that event simply because our sensory receptors do not allow us to tune into their full range of actuality, being or reality (“bottom-up” processing). Moreover, the meaning that any phenomenon has for the observer will depend upon the context or framework of knowledge within which the phenomenon viewed (“top-down” processing). Because any given event is never fully disclosed in one perception, and for any perception, other perceptions are possible, “any single perspective is likely to be partial, limited, perhaps even distorted, and only by honoring multiple perspectives and multiple contexts can the knowledge quest be fruitfully advanced” (Wilber, 2000a, p. 167).
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