Advaita Vedanta is seen as something of an authoritative source for nondual philosophies and theories of consciousness that postulate a pure featureless awareness at the base of mental experience. These approaches deviate from both the lineage-based teachings of Advaita Vedanta and the necessary standards of science, constructing compromises that fall short of traditional fidelity and...
protocols are designed to integrate and harness the full range of ketamine's intrinsic properties, ketamine therapies can realize their full potentials [3], possibly leading to improved outcomes in broader patient populations. Our first paper, "The Montreal model: An integrative biomedical-psychedelic approach to ketamine for severe treatment-resistant depression," takes this path toward...
The term “nondual states” has gained some currency as applied to states of mind in which the sense of self is softened, expanded, or shifted from conventional experience. Nonduality is a metaphysical concept about the nature of reality, commonly associated with the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian religion. New Age religious thought has applied the term “nondual” to states of consciousness that...
This study is focused on the novel concept of the origin or seat of the attentional spotlight, the bodily location at which the attended information is felt to impinge. Existing research on the seat of attention, also described as self-location or egocenter, shows that it can be situated in various ways within the experienced body space (Hanley et al., 2020), and that differences in its...
A number of scholars well known within transpersonal psychology appear to be converging on open scientific naturalism as a philosophically and methodologically fruitful framework for transpersonal and related fields. This builds on the nascent open naturalism evidenced in the early years of transpersonal psychology, before it entered its metaphysical phase (ca. 1975 to 2000). Since it is...
Prior research on the role of empirical research in transpersonal psychology is updated, along with trends in gender diversity and geographical distribution of authorships. Data was compiled from a review of articles published in the two main journals of the field, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, over the first five decades of the...
Strategically timed trauma- and attachment-informed psychotherapy to address underlying emotional wounds, paired with ketamine administered in precision-calibrated doses to ensure high-entropy brain states, may be key to improving the quality and duration of ketamine’s therapeutic efficacy for treatment-resistant depression. This approach optimizes the opportunities for change created by...
Research on definitions of the field of psychology and themes in the literature of the field over a period of 20 years inform this description: Transpersonal psychology is a transformative psychology of the whole person embedded within a diverse, interconnected, and evolving world that pays particular attention to states of consciousness and developmental models reflecting expansion beyond...
This study provides evidence supporting the operation of a novel cognitive process of a somatic seat of attention, or ego-center, whose somatic location is under voluntary control and that provides access to differential emotional resources. Attention has typically been studied in terms of what it is directed toward, but it can also be associated with a localized representation in the body...
Research over the last two decades has established ketamine as a safe, effective, fast-acting, and sustained antidepressant that significantly reduces adverse symptoms associated with depression, even in patients who are treatment resistant. Much of this research has evolved within the framework of several independent branches of scientific inquiry: in addition to the study of ketamine is a...
Ketamine therapy with culturally attuned trauma-informed psychotherapy in a collaborative cross-cultural partnership may provide a critical step in the operationalization and optimization of treatment effectiveness in diverse populations and may provide a foundation for an improved quality of life for Indigenous people. Decolonizing Indigenous health and wellbeing is long overdue, requiring an...
Two experiments involving an international collaboration of experimenters sought to replicate and extend a previously published psi experiment on precognition by Daryl Bem that has been the focus of extensive research. The experiment reverses the usual cause–effect sequence of a standard psychology experiment using priming and reaction times. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis is that...
A novel understanding and therapeutic approach to the treatment of PTSD-related flashback triggers are described. Triggered responses are conceptualized as the result of latent dissociative structures of neural organization and psychodynamic functioning activated by current events. The dissociative structure - here described as a dissociated ego state (DES) - reflects a fracturing of executive...
Efforts to present valid evidence for perennialist models do not withstand critical scrutiny.One strategy common to most versions of perennialism points to perceived patterns in reports of spiritual experiences, whether from traditional, clinical, or phenomenological accounts as evidence for such an approach; the shortcoming is that these same patterns are the basis for perennialist...
In a recent paper Taylor has suggested that perennialist models are or should be resurgent within transpersonal psychology.However, perennialist models such as those of Wilber and Taylor are metaphysical philosophies of spirituality typical of New Age religions; while such systems may be studied by a psychology that considers human spirituality, they are not and should not be proffered as...
Taylor has responded to critiques of his soft perennialism model in relationship to what he has called awakening experiences.The fact that some individuals have this type of experience away from the context of religion or spirituality, according to soft perennialism, is explained by a sort of landscape of experience representing the diverse ways in which one may engage with and experience this...
Abstract Transpersonal psychology (TP) emerged in the United States during the 1960s, a turbulent time when psychedelic experimentation and the rediscovery of mysticism, primarily from Eastern and indigenous traditions, caused much deep reflection. It grew from the growing discontent by some humanistic psychologists who questioned the limitations of a solely human‐based psychology that paid...
The International Transpersonal Association (ITA) was formed in 1978 for the purposes of promoting education and research in transpersonal subjects, as well as sponsoring global conferences for the international transpersonal community.The association was subsequently dissolved in 2004, but is now in the process of being reactivated and revitalized.As background for this development, this paper...
Retrospective analysis of definitions published 35 years suggests the major subject areas of the field can be summed up in three themes: beyond-ego psychology, integrative/holistic psychology, and psychology of transformation. Theme frequency analysis reveals that early emphasis on alternative states of consciousness has moderated into a broader approach to human transcendence, wholeness, and...
Transpersonal psychology has at times employed Buddhist terminology in ways that do not reflect distinctions that underlie these tightly defined terms. From a Buddhist perspective, attempts to equate Buddhist terms with language from other traditions are misdirected, and produce results that no longer represent Buddhism. For example, it is an error to translate certain Buddhist terms as...