26 Apr What Is it about Transpersonal Experiences that may be Healing?
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 consciousness (2015). Hartelius (2015, p. 11) believes exceptional human experiences can be understood as “markers of transformational process.” Roberts and Winkelman (2015) assert “The mystical, peak experience is in itself psychotherapeutic.” (p. 471)
Transpersonal experiences, whether they happen by surprise or through disciplined effort, take us away from our normal consensual reality. During that time, whether a brief moment or longer, people report being in relationship with a higher reality or order that puts new perspective on their ordinary concerns. Aurobindo (Cortright, 2015) believed that the purpose of higher consciousness, which is another term for what people feel during transpersonal experience, is to transform ordinary experience, the person, and the world in a spiritual direction.
Cortright, B. (2015). Integral Psychology. In Friedman, H. L., & Hartelius, G., (eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology. Wiley Blackwell.
Hartelius, G., Rothe, G. & Roy, P. J. (2015). A brand from the burning: defining transpersonal psychology. In Friedman, H. L., & Hartelius, G., (eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology. Wiley Blackwell.
Roberts, T. B. & Winkelman, M. J. (2015). Psychedelic induced transpersonal experiences, therapies, and their implications for transpersonal psychology. Friedman, H. L., & Hartelius, G., (eds.). (2015). The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of transpersonal psychology. Wiley Blackwell.
Wade, J. (2000). Mapping the courses of heavenly bodies: The varieties of transcendent sexual experience. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 32(2), 103-122.
© 2023 Catherine Auman
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