The Transpersonal Experience in Religion and Culture as a Response to the Challenges of Death
Advances in bioinformatics and biomedical engineering book series October 4, 2024 DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3693-9364-2.ch008 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Transpersonal psychology Psychoanalysis |
| Key points | Argues that the crisis of meaning in the postmodern period can be resolved through an individual attitude toward the sacred secret of being and transpersonal experience involving symbolic death and rebirth. |
Abstract
The genesis of ideas about individual finiteness in Western philosophy is shown: death is an initiatory event, the meaning of which depends both on the state of human consciousness in each of the historical eras, and on the characteristics of individual consciousness. In the postmodern period, individualism, material values primacy, ignoring transcendental things, tabooing the problem of death, and the loss of meaning prevailed in everyday consciousness. The way out of the crisis is the individual attitude to the sacred secret of being, capable of filling a person's existence with meaning, significance, and happiness. The highest manifestation of spirituality is transpersonal experience, which initiates a person's approach to his essence through symbolic death and rebirth. The reality of the absolute, revealed in experience, is comprehended not rationally discursively, but intuitively contemplatively, through existential involvement.