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According to transpersonal psychiatrist, Roger Walsh (1984):
Our task, then, is to realize the transpersonal vision for ourselves through practicing a transpersonal discipline; to test and refine this vision through study, reflection and critical thinking; to embody and express it in our lives; to share and communicate it where we can; to use it to help the healing of our world; and to let it use us as willing servants for the awakening and welfare of all. (Walsh, 1993, p. 136)
Unanswered questions and unquestioned answers. The answers are not all it; all the questions have not yet been asked – questions that can lead us to seek a greater framework than conventional, standardized psychology currently operates from. The only certainty is that transpersonal and spiritual phenomena are enormously complex. That is why we must remain open to various approaches to the “truth” about ordinary and nonordinary experiences and behaviors and be willing to wait for more facts before reaching conclusions. It is through following these facts and remaining open to all avenues of fruitful speculation and intuitive possibilities that our greatest understanding of who and what we are will be achieved in the coming century. As William James (1936) put the matter, when he concluded his ground-breaking account of the varieties of religious experiences:
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in (p. 509)… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question – for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness… At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts of reality. (p. 379)
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Section Summary
1. What is transpersonal psychology? Transpersonal psychology is concerned with the study of exceptional human experiences and behaviors, transformative capacities, and acts of creativity that surpass commonly accepted ideas of basic human limitations to reveal possibilities of personality action not easily accounted for by traditional psychoanalytic, behaviorist, and humanistic schools of thought.
2. What does transpersonal psychology study? Transpersonal phenomena covers a multitude of extraordinary experiences and behaviors produced by spontaneous or induced altered states of consciousness, impulses toward higher states of being, and spiritual practices. Transpersonal phenomena include (but are not limited to) meditative experiences, dreaming, drug-induced psychedelia, peak experiences, cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, mysticism, out-of-body experiences, trance channeling, near-death experiences, reincarnational memories, extrasensory awareness, archetypal phenomena, accelerated learning, exceptional states of health and well-being, mind-body healing, and miraculous cures. Parapsychological phenomena have important implications for bridging science and spirit.
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3. What is transpersonal psychology’s relation to religion? Transpersonal psychology represents a new approach to religious issues that have been closed to psychologists this far. Transpersonal psychology affirms the legitimacy and significance of spiritual experiences as bona fide psychological phenomena in the spirit of post-1890 Jamesian psychology. It proposes the existence of multidimensional realities proportionate to that transpersonal knowing. It recognizes the correlative existence of an innate, dynamic impulse toward those transcendental realities as contributing to the evolution of the individual and the species.
4. What is the transpersonal vision? The expansive, alternative framework of the transpersonal vision opens up new possibilities of experience, understanding, and judgment that not only enhance evolution of the individual but also of the species.
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What Are the Origins of Transpersonal Psychology?
THE ORIGINS
OF TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
The Probable Histories of Transpersonal Psychology.
Transpersonal psychology has many probable histories. The particular history that is written will depend upon what aspects are emphasized and considered to be important in its identity in the present.
Lived experience. If the role of lived experience is emphasized in its modern identity, then the roots of transpersonal psychology can be traced back to Brentano’s Act Psychology of consciousness, through the philosophy of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Heidegger’s inquires into Being, and James’s doctrine of radical empiricism and studies of mysticism.
Eastern influences. If Eastern influences are emphasized in transpersonal psychology’s current identity, then its modern roots can be traced to D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts who popularized Zen philosophy, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Hindu influence, Chogyam Trungpa’s founding of the Buddhist Naropa Institute, and extension of the Theravada vipassana movement by Asian-trained American teachers, such as Kornfield and Goldstein, and beyond.
Idealism and panpsychism. If its idealism (i.e., idea as reality) and ontology of mind in matter is emphasized, then transperspersonal psychology’s panpsychic lineage may be traced back to Thales, Pythagoras, through Plato’s metaphysics and contemplative ideals down through Plotinus and Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (Cobb & Griffin, 1977).
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Unconscious and superconscious. If the role of the dynamic unconscious and superconscious in transpersonal experience is emphasized, then transpersonal psychology’s evolution may be traced from first accounts of primitive healing to hypnotism to dissociation to Freud’s formulation of the unconscious to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the individuation process, and finally to Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis.
One probable history of a psychology with a soul. If transpersonal psychology’s hypothesis of the existence of an inner, transpersonal self or the soul is emphasized, then the roots of transpersonal psychology might be traced back to the wide-ranging literature of Western and Eastern spiritual traditions of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Christian mysticism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Muslim Sufism. The origins of the notion of an inner, spiritual self might be traced to the ideas of ancient Greece and the philosophical writings of Plato and Plotinus. Bynum (1992) would trace the history of the idea of an inner, spiritual self or soul even further back in time before the Greeks to the valley systems of Kemetic Egypt and Nubia. The idea of a “soul” can also be found inspiring the art of so-called primitive civilizations, the rituals of shamanism, the music of preliterate African societies, and the writings of Western and Eastern literature and folklore.
Linguistic roots of the word “soul.” Or the linguistic roots of the English word soul might be explored - its relationship to the German word seele which means both “psyche” as well as “soul,” and its relationship to the Greek word psyche which means mind or soul (as well as “butterfly”) and refers to the animating force or spirit in the body (Jung, 1960). Transpersonal psych-ology, in these terms, would be the study of the human soul or spirit, and the hypothesis that
that soul has substance, is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent within it that builds up the body, sustains its life, heals its ills and enables the soul to live independently of the body; that there are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates; and that beyond our empirical present there is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world. (Jung, 1960, p.341)
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