The very idea of a descending line comes from the concept that spirit descends from the heavens to the earth, which is the wrong direction according to the major patriarchal religions. Heaven is good, and earth is bad. Heaven is good; body is bad. When...
In his early work, Wilber contrasted various paths of personal and spiritual development as of which he termed the ascending line. He created graphs comparing the work of Piaget, Aurobindo, Grof, Buddhism, Kohlberg, Maslow, Vedanta, the chakra system, and others (note: all lines developed by...
In the early days of transpersonal psychology the works of Ken Wilbur, in particular The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) and No Boundary (1979), were considered basic texts, and the concepts they offered were novel and inspiring. Wilber is a genius at synthetization, and these books...
In his early works Ken Wilber created a schema of personal and spiritual development in which all psychological and spiritual paths were placed into either an ascending or descending current, later named “vectors” by Daniels (2005), and ranked by Wilber in terms of his assessment...
Charles Tart (2008) offers his view that if transpersonal psychologists want to understand various esoteric systems and altered states of consciousness, it is “helpful but not enough” (p. 137) to study their books and traditions. These systems were created as state-specific knowledge bases, and as...
When looking at mysticism this week, Jorge Ferrer reminds us in his video interview that there are many types of mysticism, that they are not all describing the same states, and that all should be respected. Newberg (2018) has identified four core components at the...
Early feminist theorists posited that the main difference in female psychology from male is its emphasis on relationality and the interconnectedness of human experience. Brooks (2013) writes about the differences in the experiences of women being vastly underrepresented in transpersonal as well as mainstream psychology,...
Ketamine clinics have sprung up like mushrooms in major cities across America, especially after a nasal spray delivery method was approved by the FDA in 2019 (Grinspoon, 2022). In Los Angeles, ketamine clinics incessantly remind consumers of their existence by sponsoring litter removal on the...
John Welwood (1984) introduced the term spiritual bypassing, and it has become a concept used not only within the field of transpersonal psychology, but within the popular field of personal and spiritual growth seekers as well. The term is generally believed to mean when an...
Shweder (1991) points out that the field of psychology in general operates from the myth of “psychic unity,” that is, that all people are basically alike underneath, meaning in practice, that we believe that all people of the world are basically like white, educated Americans....