Transpersonal experiences may be held as frightening, painful, overwhelming, or shattering to some people, and thus affect their lives in negative ways. Anyone who naively believes “there is no such thing as a bad trip” has never been on a locked psychiatric ward observing people...
Transpersonal sexual experiences are an overlooked phenomena (Woodward et al., 2009). They can happen to people by surprise (Wade, 2015) and to people with no spiritual practice or awareness, as well as to people who consciously cultivate such experiences (Effers, 2009). In their overview of...
Ancient yoga and meditative practices in Hinduism were technologies designed to induce transpersonal experiences. A practitioner was expected to meditate and perform exercises daily for years in order to be able to enter these states at will. However, as pointed out by Feuerstein (1989)Through intense...
Psychedelic plants and medicines have been part of the human experience for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years (Walsh & Grob, 2015). As noted in the section on Indigenous cultures above, these substances were used for healing purposes. Walsh and Grob also state...
Tibetan spirituality developed techniques for inducing altered states and using them to improve health, encourage long-life, and evolve spiritually; the top three purposes according to Jacoby (2015). These techniques included mantras, ritual, dance, yantras, and mudras (Bernbaum, 1974) as well as sexual practices (Allione, 2000).Tibetan...
Bynum (1992) presents the African lineage as an example of a highly developed spirituality that grew and flourished under a non-white, non-hierarchical tradition going back to at least the beginnings of the Egyptian civilization, also known as Kemet. African traditions developed before the discipline of...
According to Barratt (2013, p. 13), “Every known Indigenous culture has shamanic practitioners.” His definition of shamanism is “a set of methodologies involving the use of altered states of consciousness for healing and spiritual and emotional growth.” Shamans have been found around the globe: North...
Transpersonal experiences are pathologized in the West because, as Grof (2015) points out, their existence questions the basic philosophical assumptions of Western science such as materialism and reductionism. Roberts & Winkelman (2015) talk about the Western single-state assumptions being challenged by the multistate view of...
The majority of the world’s cultures are polyphasic (Fadiman, 2015) and recognize that different states of consciousness contribute to the consensus reality. Lawlis (2015) statesOne of the most ancient of healing methods is entering a different level of consciousness in order to find a new...
Jenny Wade (2000) states that transpersonal experiences have the potential for immense healing, life enhancement, personal transformation, and spiritual realizations. Stan Grof, who conducted thousands of studies on the transformational potentials of LSD, talks about the healing, transformative, and evolutionary potentials of nonordinary states of...