Several substantial critiques remain a source of fractionalizing debate within transpersonal psychology, including the weakness of its definition, whether it is redundant with Wilber’s integral psychology, whether it is a scientific field, whether it is too metaphysical, whether it neglects the problem of evil, and what contribution can it make to mainstream psychology. This article explicates these and related areas of critique and provides a response that identifies the essential challenges and future prospects of transpersonal psychology. The article also emphasizes (...) the field’s unique role as a potential bridge connecting psychological science with the transpersonal psyche in a way that can more fully recognize the importance of the latter. (shrink)

In the spirit of William James, we present a process view of human consciousness. Our approach, however, follows upon Charles Tart’s original systems theory analysis of states of consciousness, although it differs in its reliance on the modern sciences of complexity, especially dynamical systems theory and its emphasis on process and evolution. We argue that consciousness experience is constructive in the sense that it is the result of ongoing self-organizing and self-creating processes in the mind and body. These processes follow (...) a broad developmental agenda already described by psychologists such as Jean Piaget. Similar constructive transformations of consciousness appear to have occurred across the course of human history. In this sense, phylogeny indeed recapitulates ontogeny. Finally, modern developmental research suggests that the most advanced levels of human growth transform consciousness in the direction of increasing selflessness and spirituality, rather than simply toward greater intelligence. (shrink)

Many individuals have experienced a transformation of their spirituality after a near-death experience (NDE). Some of these near-death experiencers (NDErs) have reported an incongruous spiritual experience (ISE) during their NDEs. An incongruous spiritual experience occurs when NDErs perceive certain communications and/or visions that are incompatible or inconsistent with their previous religious/spiritual beliefs. In the present study the researcher examined NDE and ISE-related phenomena utilizing the qualitative techniques of heuristic analysis. An initial pool of 84 survey participants completed Greyson's NDE Scale (...) and a questionnaire developed by the researcher to measure various elements of an incongruous spiritual experience. Subsequently, eight participants were interviewed utilizing Moustakas's heuristic analysis to investigate their NDE/ISE-related experiences. The results indicated that each participant altered or changed their religious/spiritual beliefs after coping with varying intensities of cognitive dissonance. Therefore, it was concluded that the participants' reports of incongruous elements during their NDEs were spiritually transformative. (shrink)

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain (...) will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind-brain relation. (shrink)

Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic commonly used by US physicians, has recently been shown to be a powerful anti-depressant and is also capable of eliciting transpersonal experiences that can be transformative. Although currently approved in the US only for use as an anesthetic, physicians there can legally prescribe it off-label to treat various psychological/ psychiatric problems and it has been used for these non-anesthetic purposes in Argentina, Iran, Mexico, Russia, and the UK, as well as in the US. The literature on (...) using ketamine psychotherapeutically is reviewed and two case studies using ketamine-enhanced psychotherapy for treating death anxiety in terminally-ill people are reported. The potential importance of beginning formal research on using KEP during end-of-life for those suffering death anxiety is emphasized. (shrink)

Essay Review: Medicine To Make You Mad Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Henry H. Bauer Essay Review: Apparitions of the Living: The Views of William H. Harrison and Gabriel Delanne Spirits Before Our Eyes by William H. Harrison Les Apparitions Matérialisées des Vivants & des Morts. Vol. 1: Les Fantômes de Vivants [Materialized Apparitions of the Living and of the Dead. Vol. 1: Phantoms of the (...) Living] by Gabriel Delanne Carlos S. Alvarado Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore Bryan J. Williams Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci Constantin Cranganu Nonsense on Stilts: How To Tell Science from Bunk by Massimo Pigliucci Hannah Jenkins The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics by David Harriman Michael Davidson Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture by Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker Mark Rodeghier Loch Ness, Nessie, & Me: The Truth Revealed by Tony Harmsworth Karl P. N. Shuker Conscious Connections: About Parapsychology and Holistic Biology by Göran Brusewitz Michael Nahm Science & Spirit by Hernani Guimarães Andrade Wellington Zangari & Fatima Regina Machado The Sixth Sense Reader edited by David Howes Patric Giesler. (shrink)

Composer and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published a fascinating and delightful book entitled Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time (Slonimsky 1965). The book is a collection of what Slonimsky called “biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgments” (p. 3) about famous composers and their works. We find, for example, the Gazette Musicale de Paris on August 1, 1847, saying of Verdi, “there has not yet been an Italian composer more incapable of producing what is commonly called (...) a melody.” And this publication stuck to its guns. On May 22, 1853, it said of Rigoletto that it “lacks melody. This opera has hardly any chance to be kept in the repertoire.” The May 1804 issue of Zeitung für die Elegente Welt proclaimed Beethoven’s Second Symphony is a crass monster, a hideously writhing wounded dragon, that refuses to expire, and though bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect................ (shrink)

The aim of this study was to determine the degree of occurrence of certain unusual perceptual experiences in hospital settings often related by nurses and carers. Three hundred forty four nurses were recruited from 36 hospitals and health centers in Buenos Aires, who were grouped 235 experiencers and 109 nonexperiencers. The most common experiences are sense of presence and/or apparitions, hearing noises, voices or dialogues, crying or complaining, intuitions and extrasensory experiences and as listerners of experiences of their patients, such (...) as near death experiences, religious interventions, and many anomalous experiences in relation with children. The rationale of the present study is confirm the early findings for work stress and absorption with a bigger sample of nurses (Parra & Gimenez Amarilla, 2017) and additionally, schizotypy proneness and empathy skills. Nurses who report anomalous experiences tended to score higher on work stress was not confirmed, however depersonalization factor scored higher than nonexperiencers. Nurses reporting these experiences tended to report higher scores of absorption and higher scores of proneness to schizotypy, mainly “positive” schizotypy (Unusual experiences) and tended to report higher cognitive empathy and emotional comprehension than non experiencers. (shrink)

Existing reports of Anomalous/Paranormal Experiences (APE) by nurses in the hospital/Health centers settings. The aim of this research project is carry out of descriptive analysis and quantitative/qualitative study of near-death and out of body experience, sense of "presence", an apparition, floating lights, luminescence, or unexplained object movements, hearing strange noises, voices or dialogues, crying or moaning, seeing energy fields, lights or "electric shock" around an inpatient have had an extrasensory experience, malfunction of equipment or medical intrumental in certain patients, and/or (...) spiritual/paranormal form of intervention. The structure of the nursing study closely follow concurrent research taking place with three of 8 hospitals. The main aim are to determine the extent of occurrence of certain types of APEs in hospitals and their relationship to job stress and psychological absorption, to assess the frequency of certain unusual APEs in hospital, to assess the level of psychological absorption of people experiencing these perceptions, and to compare experiences nurses without experience in their degree of job stress and absorption. The recruited sample (up to December 20th.) consisted of 39 nurses (Experiencers) who reported paranormal experiences in hospitals and 61 nurses as control group (Non-experiencers). All of them filled four instruments: The Anomalous/Paranormal Experiences in Nurse & Health Workers (which measures frequency of paranormal/anomalous experiencies), the Maslach Burnout Inventory which leading measure of burnout, the Hallucinations Experiences Questionnaire, and Tellegen Absorption Scale and an open, non-structured interview based on questions of the first instrument. Non parametric statistics was used to test the hypotheses, and the analysis were transformed into a zs (one-tailed). The results showed that nurses reporting these experiences tended to experience greater job stress is not confirmed, however, nurses who reported a combination of perceptual experiences and psychological absorption (high level), tended to score higher work stress compared to those who do not report such experiences. Nurses reporting these experiences tended to report greater psychological absorption, and also tended to report greater proneness to hallucinate. The best predictor was psychological absorption in nurses with APE experiences [β = 0.33, df = 3, p = 0.005; R2 = 0.12] compared to the group nurses no-experiencers. (shrink)