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International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

ISSN 1321-0122

54 papers in the library · 814 citations · publishing 2000-2024

Papers

Smokable "Vine of the Dead": Two Case Studies of Experiencers of Both Changa and Near-Death Experiences

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Pascal Michael, David Luke, Oliver Robinson 3 citations

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...

Reflections on Transpersonal Psychology ’s 40th Anniversary, Ecopsychology, Transpersonal Science, and Psychedelics: A Conversation Forum

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies January 1, 2009 Mark A. Schroll, Stanley Krippner, Miles A. Vich et al. 3 citations

Recollections of humanistic and transpersonal psychology's origin's morph into the pros and cons of humanistic/transpersonal oriented schools developing APA accredited clinical programs.This discussion dovetails with the question will ATP ever become an APA division, raising an interesting alternative for those of us considering a career in counseling: becoming a spiritual coach.Enter the issue...

Buddhism and Transpersonal Psychology

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 Elías Capriles 2 citations

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...

Divine kink: A consideration of the evidence for BDSM as spiritual ritual

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies September 1, 2019 S. Greenberg 2 citations

This paper reviews the limited empirical research supporting BDSM as a spiritual ritual that enables distinct altered states of consciousness. It expands upon Sagarin, Lee, and Klement’s (2015) preliminary comparison of BDSM to extreme ritual by suggesting that BDSM bears in common with spiritual ritual elements of pain or ordeal, spiritual meaning, and transformative potential. An increasing...

Intimations of a spiritual New Age: III. Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of numinous/Being experience and the "Other Beginning" of a futural planetary spirituality

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies September 1, 2019 Harry T. Hunt 2 citations

The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its...

Ketamine for Depression: A Mixed-Methods Study

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies July 1, 2014 Philip E. Wolfson 2 citations

Prior studies have reported variously on the presence or absence of dissociative effects at subanesthtetic doses of ketamine administered for treatment-resistant depression. This mixedmethods study emulated the protocol used for the studies in question, with IV administration of 0.5mg/kg over 40 minutes with eight experienced ketamine users. Quantitative measures were generally insignificant...

Dreams, Synchrony, and Synchronicity

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Terry Marks-Tarlow 1 citation

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...

Two Dimensions of a Bodhisattva

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 Douglas S. Duckworth 1 citation

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...

Nondual States Are Not a Thing: This Inspiring New Age Spiritual Idea is Neither Advaita Vedanta Nor Psychology

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 Glenn Hartelius 1 citation

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...

Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, and Crisis in Reich’s Bio-energetic Spiritual Psychology

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies September 1, 2018 Harry T. Hunt 1 citation

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and...

Bridging Transpersonal Ecosophical Concerns with the Hero’s Journey and Superheroes Through Comicbook Lore: Implications for Personal and Cultural Transformation

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies September 1, 2017 Mark A. Schroll, Claire Polansky 1 citation

This paper explores how mythical figures and comicbook superheroes can 1) inspire personal growth, social and planetary change, and 2) explicate aspects of the deep ecology movement and transpersonal ecosophy that invite further academic inquiry while at the same time 3) speak to concerns that ignite the interests of popular culture and personal mythology. Likewise the ecopsychological...

Ethnographic Accounts of Ketamine Explorations in Psychedelic Culture

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies July 1, 2014 Kenneth Ring, Ralph Metzner, Philip E. Wolfson 1 citation

Off-label use of ketamine as a mind-altering substance did not begin in the laboratory, but in the psychedelic culture that grew out of the 1960s counterculture movement. Whatever the risks and limitations of such experimentation, without them the remarkable therapeutic effects of the drug might well have gone unnoticed, and unresearched. The following personal accounts-both inspiring and...

What is Transpersonal Psychotherapy? A Conceptual Template

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Alef Trust, Gabriel Fernandez-Borsot

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...

The Role of Personality In Moving Encounters with Sacred Art

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Jacob Lang, Despina Stamatopoulou, Gerald C. Cupchik

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...

The Nondual Realization of Advaita Vedanta Does Not Support a Psychological Theory of Consciousness (Editor's Introduction)

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Glenn Hartelius

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...

Transpersonal Approaches to Clinical Supervision

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Harris L. Friedman

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...

Continuities of Consciousness, Life-Worlds, and Numinous Experience: Cognitive-Phenomenological Foundations for an Empirical Neo-Shamanism

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 Harry T. Hunt

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...

The path to enlightenment of sacred married home life: Grihasthya dharma as a guiding ideal for the transpersonal marriage therapist

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies September 1, 2019 Sovatsky, Stuart

This paper attempts to correct the unwitting reliance of much transpersonal psychology upon Indian texts that were indigenously specific to sannyasins (nonhouseholder, monastics). This includes teachings from advaita vedanta, yoga, and many Buddhist schools on releasement from desire, the diminishing role of the ego, guardedness toward “the mellow-drama” of “worldly” life (as Ram Dass famously...

Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies October 31, 2009 S. Beyer

In the Upper Amazon, mestizos are the Spanish-speaking descendants of Hispanic colonizers and the indigenous peoples of the jungle. Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the...

Childhood Trauma and the Emergence of Precognitive Abilities: A Correlational Study

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies December 31, 2024 Kirsten Cameron, Jenny Wade

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...

Cognitive Illusion, Lucid Dreaming, and the Psychology of Metaphor in Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen Contemplative Practices

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies February 20, 2024 Michael R. Sheehy

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...