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Transformative, Noetic, and Transpersonal Experiences During Personal Development Workshops
Get PDFThe global personal development market was valued at $38.28 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow an additional 5% from 2020 to 2027. Many of these workshops promise to be transformational. This secondary analysis study examined transformative, transpersonal, and noetic aspects of personal development workshops. We found that 74% of post-survey records endorsed that participants experienced a moment of clarity or profound insight during their workshop. In addition, 66% endorsed that participants had experienced at least one noetic experience, and 84% endorsed at least one transpersonal experience. These analyses provide preliminary evidence for the transformational potential of personal development workshops and the common occurrence of transpersonal and noetic experiences across various workshop types
Unexpected Side Effects: A Cautionary Note on Challenges of Persistent Self-Transcendence
Get PDFSelf-transcendence is an ambiguous construct without consensual meaning, yet many claim that it relates to, or even causes, beneficial outcomes. Few discuss its potential deleterious side effects, choosing to focus primarily on positive effects. However, anything with sufficient potency to heal may have unintended side effects, especially when it leads beyond a transitory state to becoming an enduring trait, such as when self-transcendence (ST) becomes persistent self-transcendence (PST). With PST, evidence is overviewed here, along with two illustrative case reports, that people can suffer emotional difficulties, motivation changes, loss of self-reflexivity, anhedonia, dissociation, depersonalization, memory problems, and other psychological concerns. This is discussed in terms of the disruption of the sense of self, which ordinarily serves as an integrative center for the person that conveys a sense of agency. Possible neurobiological and sociocultural effects of PST are also discussed, with a focus on its role on narrative memory as the construction of self-concept. Evidence has also been accumulating on problematic side effects of meditation and mindfulness, techniques commonly presented as paths to PST. Given that PST is often presented as a pinnacle of human development and spiritual attainment, seekers of PST, psychologists, and other mental health professionals are urged to become informed about its possible side effects, and view this phenomenon in a more balanced way
How Perception Meets Hermeneutics: An Empirical Investigation of Tasseography
Get PDFTasseography is a divination method to provide insight about the seeker’s past, present, or future life by interpreting patterns in the dregs of a liquid. Although it has been practiced with coffee throughout Europe and Middle East, particularly among women, no known studies exist on the seer’s perceptual process of the ambiguous patterns or how the roles of the seeker and seer, symbols, ritual, and cultural epistemology shape the divinatory hermeneutics. This study focused on the Armenian coffee divination ritual, asking what are the processes and conditions that enable experienced cup readers to obtain divinatory insight in tasseography? Two seekers each produced one cup, photographed and presented virtually to roughly half of a sample of 17 female seers through video-recorded virtual sessions. Seers were interviewed about their experiences of providing reading, data triangulated with their reading data and the two seekers’ reflections on the readings. Thematic analysis revealed that tasseographic interpretation is a psychodynamic embodied process, influenced by the seer’s subjective world and informed by intuitive sources, that engenders empathetic attunement with the seeker. Readings revealed significant thematic convergence and relevance to each seeker’s central query, and reflected the seekers’ life at the time the cup was produced rather than at the time of reading. Interpretation convergence occurred independent of perceptual variation, suggesting that the seers’ semiotic processes involve transpersonal states and sources
Going Berserk, Running Amok, and the Extraordinary Capabilities and Invulnerability of Battle Trance
Get PDFBattle trance, which evolved from instinctive defensive and offensive behaviors for close combat, involves socially transgressive processes like becoming-intense and becoming-animal that produce non-ordinary psychophysical states useful in fighting. Berserkergang (going berserk) is one of the best attested types of battle trance and the latest in a long history of Indo-European ecstatic warrior cults, but the state has been identified cross-culturally in consecrated holy amok warriors and in juramentado. Colonial interpretations for centuries have tended to denigrate such fighting styles, even though they involve discipline, spiritual dedication, and altruistic self-sacrifice, especially by falsely attributing such states to intoxication or insanity. The features of berserkergang are considered signs of spiritual attainment in various traditions up to the present day, and the techniques for achieving berserkergang remain in use in battle, spiritual disciplines, and martial arts. Research is validating even some of the most extraordinary features of battle trance, pointing to unrealized potentials with promising benefits for human performance and healing
Intimations of a Spiritual New Age. V. Socio-Cultural Bases of a Globalizing Neo-Shamanism and its Relation to Climate Crisis: Possibilities, Inevitabilities, Barriers
Get PDFExtending this series of papers on a futural spirituality, and considering the numinous as an inherent human capacity for an awe that confers a sense of all-inclusive meaning, communality, and humility, the question arises whether, in the face of a secularization of traditional world religions, globalization of a techno/capitalist economy of perpetual commodification of planet and person, and a widening sense of loss of meaning and higher purpose, some collective re-newal of the sense of the sacred might be possible – or not. While Jung, Toynbee, and Sorokin regarded such a movement as inevitable, bringing forward to the degree possible the full spectrum of the numinous in an originary ur-shamanism, Bourguignon, Weber, and the later Heidegger foresaw its necessary blockage by the unique complexity and hyper-rationalism of a globalizing materialist economy. The further question becomes whether any such renewal would be constrained to the more “adjustive” movements of Stoicism/Neoplatonism and much of current New Age spirituality – as mainly mirroring the hyper-individualism of Rome and modernity. Or, might it open toward the more revolutionary impact of an early Christianity, and in the present as the futural neo-shamanism variously anticipated by Jung, Reich, Toynbee, and Heidegger? Could such a neo-shamanism, especially as energized by the collective use of now widely available entheogens, re-sacralize planet and nature in time to address this looming crisis of a human generated climate change and help to inspire its containment
Meditation-Induced After Death Communication: A Contemporary Modality for Grief Therapy
Get PDFMeditation-induced after death communication (MI-ADC) was introduced as a potential modality for grief therapy. Traditional and contemporary approaches were compared in order to evaluate effective paradigms and theories of bereavement. The Continuing Bonds theory of attachment emerged as an adaptive framework for grief therapy, especially with attention to meaning-making and the strength of continued bonds. Considerations were implemented from research in psychomanteum, mediumship, and induced after death communication. Specifically, visual stimuli and timing of after death communications were emphasized. The discussion was encouraging for the conceptualization of MI-ADC as an effective construct and as an inquiry for empirical research
Empirical Research on Transpersonal Topics from Around the World During the Pandemic, 2020–2023
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Exceptional Human Experiences Among Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago: A Study of Self-Reported Experiences and Transformative Aftereffects
Get PDFThe Camino de Santiago pilgrimage is an extraordinary endeavour that tends to trigger exceptional human experiences. Following our previous investigation of this topic, we conducted an online survey of 501 pilgrims in order to assess the frequency of different exceptional experiences (EEs) on the pilgrimage and their transformative aftereffects (TAs) in everyday life afterwards. More than 70% of the respondents reported improvement in terms of self-confidence, personal relationships and letting go of emotional “baggage”. The results show strong correlations between the observed EEs and the (consequent) TAs. We contend that walking the Camino de Santiago often produces exceptional experiences that lead to positive long-term psychosocial effects
Life Before Birth: A Thematic Analysis of Memories of Coming into Life Part 2: Recollections of Fetal Life and Birth
Get PDFThis article examines a second set of data produced in a thematic analysis of 68 “earliest memory” narratives submitted to an independent website to explore the question: what do people who claim to remember how they came into the world say about their experience prior to and including birth? Part 1 examined the first and largest subset of the data, narratives of an otherworldly existence consistent with Western reincarnation intermission stage 2 experiences, near-death experience accounts and mythic traditions. This article thematically analyzes descriptions of life in the womb, birth, and apparently veridical out-of-body and other paranormal impressions of events surrounding birth, congruent with pre- and peri-natal psychology, especially early trauma. Surfacing and resolving such early memories may have greater potential for healing than treating later life events