Patients who have had near-death experiences are often profoundly changed by the event, and they and their families can find these phenomena bewildering or even distubing. Despite this, awareness of near-death experiences appears to be minimal among health care providers in India. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 100 individuals who attend patients at the Amrita Institute of Medical...
Introduction: Virtually no studies have looked at psychopharmacological combinations as models of the near-death experience (NDE), which is inadequate given the evidently complex neurochemistry occurring near- or at death. An example of such a combination is "changa," a smoked mixture of the psychedelic N,N-DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI)-containing plants, and as such has been...
This essay presents the dreams of a long-term patient over the course of treatment in order to explore the transpersonal potential of the relational unconscious—those open channels of unconscious communication between people. At a key moment, the patient brings in the therapist’s own childhood dream, serving to break a period of impasse and reset the therapy. Dreams and their interpretation...
Transpersonal psychotherapy (TPT) lacks systematization, as it lacks a model that characterizes what qualifies a psychotherapy as transpersonal. Due to this situation, TPT has been developed in a state of fragmentation, through a multiplicity of idiosyncratic approaches. This idiosyncratic fragmentation jeopardizes the theoretical development of the field, undermines the possibilities of...
Transpersonal psychology can provide unique approaches to clinical supervision by offering an interconnected self-expansive view of the self across time and space, as well as can provide a secular avenue to consider the importance of spirituality without relying on supernatural assumptions. Transpersonal supervisors can challenge conventional notions about what and how supervisees know, and...
In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the material world is understood to contain access points to the transcendent. An icon may move the awestruck believer to emotional engagement and reflection on moral and religious themes. Personality dispositions potentiating the experience of being moved in religious aesthetic contexts have not been thoroughly studied. The present article...
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...
This paper illustrates transpersonal psychoanalytic psychotherapy through a detailed clinical example. A creative synthesis of Voice Dialogue work and Dreamtending, applied through storytelling and active imagination, is presented with a patient who is about to be married. Areas such as the therapeutic relationship including skills, techniques, clinical decisions, goals, interventions and the...
This study addresses the scientific tendency to misattribute the higher levels of belief in extrasensory perception (ESP) of adult survivors of childhood trauma to cognitive errors when they may be a result of actual experience with ESP. Dissociative tendencies may contribute to precognition, which would be an adaptive skill for children living in unpredictable and traumatic environments. This...
Contemporary Buddhism has been fashioned from cross-cultural interactions between a long history of Asian traditions and the expansionist drive of modernity. As part of this engagement, Buddhism, particularly in the West, has developed a close relation with transpersonal psychology. This essay forms an introduction to the special issue of articles approaching this relation between Buddhism and...
In the debate between Freud and Romain Rolland the latter asserted the infants’ oceanic feeling to be saner than the adults’ limited sense of self, and that mystics recover the oceanic feeling without losing the learning achieved during socialization. Freud retorted that the oceanic feeling involved a sense of shelterlessness, and whoever went through derealization was psychotic and needed to...
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 paper presents two dimensions of a bodhisattva, the ideal of Maha- ya- na Buddhism. One dimension involves contemplative practices that disclose a pure nature that is always already present; this reality is unveiled after the obscurations that cloud it are removed. I refer to this as a “top-down” approach because it is based on qualities of awakening that are already there, yet lie beyond...
Numinous experience—as the felt sense of the sacred—evokes feelings of allone unity, communality, humility, and healing. Its schematization in the absolutes of traditional religion can also be seen as all-encompassing symbolic unifications of an otherwise fragmented human life-world—as more analytically depicted in the life-world phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. In both feeling and...
A classic set of eight similes of illusion (sgyu ma’i dpe brgyad) are employed recurrently throughout Indian and Tibetan Buddhist literature to illustrate the operations of cognition, its correlative perceptions, and experiences that emerge. To illustrate a Buddhist psychology of metaphor, the fourteenth century Tibetan scholar and synthesizer of the Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) or Great Perfection...
Mindfulness meditation can provide salutary therapeutic benefits, as well as lead advanced practitioners to states of calm and equanimity. In this paper, we argue that such forms of meditation may subtly entrap practitioners in circular, self-reflexive feedback loops. Because these meditation traps fail to clearly discern the operations of mind, they offer a temporary oasis of peace within an...
This participatory team science project extended Laythe and Houran’s (2022) prior application of a famous probabilistic argument known as the "Drake equation" to the question of postmortem survival. Specifically, we evaluated effect sizes from peer-reviewed, empirical studies to determine the maximum average percentage effect that ostensibly supports (i.e., "anomalous effects") or refutes...
The continued investigations of the paranormal facilitated the development of novel theories and methodologies. Psi functioning of the living and the deceased in survival phenomena suggested the living agent psi (LAP) and discarnate psi hypotheses, but neither has demonstrated sufficient explanatory power to claim superiority in explaining survival data. Mediumship studies cannot determine...
The application of the Drake-S equation to the aggregated data suggestive of survival found 30.3% of unexplained variance in the data when other factors were applied to the dataset (including living agent psi, LAP). A number of points are raised in this commentary. These include 1. the aggregated estimate for LAP should factor in implicit psi studies (among others); 2. it is difficult to...
We used a multiteam system approach (MTS) to map the critical and constructive feedback from four invited Commentaries on Rock et al.’s (2023) probabilistic analysis of purported evidence for postmortem survival. The goal was to mine actionable insights to guide future research with the potential for important learnings or breakthroughs about the nature or limits of human consciousness and...
Rock et al. (this issue) used a Drake-like equation to provide an estimate of the mathematical likelihood of survival of consciousness after death based on combining a number of probability guestimates. Although it is refreshing to see a mathematical paper within transpersonal psychology, as this subdiscipline of psychology suffers from a shortage of quantitative research, it is uncertain...
Self-transcendence is an ambiguous construct without consensual meaning, yet many claim that it relates to, or even causes, beneficial outcomes. Few discuss its potential deleterious side effects, choosing to focus primarily on positive effects. However, anything with sufficient potency to heal may have unintended side effects, especially when it leads beyond a transitory state to becoming an...
This paper describes “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” an immersive Dhrupad-based dance installation designed to elicit feelings of awe in the spectators, in a real-life artistic context. This study used a mixed-methods approach in order to explore spectators’ awe experience (N=45), using specific scales and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Results suggested that “Kalos, eîdos, skopeîn,” with...
Ram Dass, the iconic, countercultural, spiritual seeker, brought the wisdom of the East to those of us in the West through his many books and frequent, charismatic dharma talks. This view of his spiritual journey describes the transformation of Richard Alpert, clinical psychologist and product of the Western milieu’s often-shackling conventional expectations, into Ram Dass, the free, embodied...