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Experience Is Not Enough: Allan Combs and the Developmental Conditions of Integration
No full textAllan Leslie Combs occupies a distinctive position in consciousness studies through his sustained attention to the relationship between experience, interpretation, and development. This article examines Combs’s enduring contribution by focusing on his insistence that extraordinary or altered states of consciousness are neither self-interpreting nor inherently developmental. Drawing primarily on Consciousness Explained Better and related works, the paper argues that Combs’s central insight lies in viewing interpretation as a function of one’s developmental stage rather than treating it as a reflective process applied after experience. This perspective is articulated most explicitly through the Wilber–Combs lattice, which correlates states of consciousness with developmental stages without collapsing one into the other. By framing developmental stage as an interpretive lens, Combs offers a way to take phenomenologically powerful experiences seriously without falling into spiritual inflation, developmental elitism, or reductionist dismissal. The article situates this contribution within Combs’s broader body of work and argues that his emphasis on integration, stabilization, and epistemic restraint remains especially relevant in contemporary discussions of transformation. Combs’s legacy, it concludes, is not a closed model of consciousness but an open framework that anchors how claims about transformation are interpreted, integrated, and sustained over time.
Keywords: Allan Combs, consciousness studies, developmental structure, interpretation, integration, Wilber–Combs lattic
Debating Member-Checks of Exceptional Human Experiences
No full textThis integrative essay reflects on member-checking and engaged research approaches in the study of exceptional human experiences (EHEs)—subjective accounts that often challenge conventional views of consciousness and physical reality. Member-checking, or inviting research participants to review data or interpretations, can improve credibility by aligning research with their lived experience. While benefits include transparency and insight, risks include confirmatory bias, emotional distress, power asymmetries, and logistical complexity. The evolving nature of EHEs further complicates participant validation. We therefore advocate a six-level fit-for-purpose system to balance rigor with ethical care and responsiveness. We also explore digital, asynchronous, and AI-assisted strategies to enhance accessibility and scale while raising new ethical considerations. Finally, we situate member-checking within broader qualitative and mixed-methods frameworks, offering practical strategies to bridge subjective narratives and empirical inquiry. Our suggested approach aims to affirm participant agency, deepens narrative authenticity, and strengthens the interpretive depth of EHE research
How Widely Are Near-Death Experiences Recognized in Indian Society and Health Care? A Preliminary Survey
No full textPatients who have had near-death experiences are often profoundly changed by the event, and they and their families can find these phenomena bewildering or even distubing. Despite this, awareness of near-death experiences appears to be minimal among health care providers in India. This cross-sectional study was conducted with 100 individuals who attend patients at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, Kerala, India, and with 100 physicians at the same institution. Acquaintance with the phenomenon of near-death experiences was found to be quite low among both samples—lower than rates seen in Western societies. Almost half of the physicians who claimed adequate knowledge about these experiences did not think that they were medically important. These findings point to a need for education about neardeath experiences for health care providers in India, and possibly in other developing societies as well
Debating Member-Checks of Exceptional Human Experiences
No full textThis integrative essay reflects on member-checking and engaged research approaches in the study of exceptional human experiences (EHEs)—subjective accounts that often challenge conventional views of consciousness and physical reality. Member-checking, or inviting research participants to review data or interpretations, can improve credibility by aligning research with their lived experience. While benefits include transparency and insight, risks include confirmatory bias, emotional distress, power asymmetries, and logistical complexity. The evolving nature of EHEs further complicates participant validation. We therefore advocate a six-level fit-for-purpose system to balance rigor with ethical care and responsiveness. We also explore digital, asynchronous, and AI-assisted strategies to enhance accessibility and scale while raising new ethical considerations. Finally, we situate member-checking within broader qualitative and mixed-methods frameworks, offering practical strategies to bridge subjective narratives and empirical inquiry. Our suggested approach aims to affirm participant agency, deepens narrative authenticity, and strengthens the interpretive depth of EHE research
At Stake in Each Other’s Company: A Systems View of Compassion Fatigue in Mental Health Work
No full textTraditional research on the phenomenon of compassion fatigue (CF) in mental health work tends to include recommendations for workers to build skills in psychological detachment and self-care. This puts the burden of coping with vicarious trauma on the individual caregiver, not on the systems they operate within. Alternatively, a transformative systemic perspective suggests that Western cultural assumptions about care-giving and individual resilience need to be reassessed. By broadening the exploration of CF and comparing it with human reactions to overwhelming crises across fields and disciplines, new questions can be asked, and new solutions can be proposed. This essay details how mental health workers—and anyone facing overwhelming, existential crises—can learn to enter into relationships of mutual care and an expansion of empathy through the experience of communal grief. An actively humble look at human interconnectedness—the complex enmeshment with other people and systems—redirects focus away from individual responsibility and avoidance of discomfort toward participation in relationships of healing.
Keywords: compassion fatigue, burnout, mental health, vicarious trauma, systems theory, transdisciplinarity, detachment, self-car
Holding Space for Complexity: Remembering Leslie Combs
No full textThis tribute reflects on the teaching legacy of Allan Leslie Combs, focusing on his capacity to hold space for complexity during intimate online salons conducted with students and colleagues. Drawing from my experience as a participant in these gatherings, the essay highlights Leslie’s emphasis on relational, creative inquiry over rigid theory. Rather than positioning development as linear progress or achievement, these conversations were experienced as an ongoing, reflective inquiry into consciousness itself. Leslie’s mentorship fostered deep personal reflection and affirmed lived experience as a valid and generative source of knowing. His legacy endures not only through his scholarship, but also through the relational space he cultivated, where ambiguity was welcomed and meaning emerged through attentive presence.
Keywords: Allan Leslie Combs, relational inquiry, mentorshi
Love Will Get You Further: Allan Leslie Combs and the Legacy of Radiance
No full textIn this reflective tribute, I draw on a November 2025 remembrance gathering for Allan Leslie Combs to explore how his scholarship on consciousness lived through his presence, pedagogy, and relationships. The article weaves reflections from students, colleagues, friends, and family to show how Leslie treated consciousness as a living, radiant field and knowledge as participatory. Speakers describe a mentor who walked beside their work, welcoming spiritual, creative, and embodied ways of knowing, while trusting love, humor, and trickster-mischief as legitimate modes of inquiry.
I then turn to my own dissertation research on play consciousness (PlayCS) as a tangible extension of this legacy, tracing how Leslie’s support of poetic and playful writing helped me recognize play as an important way consciousness moves and knows in relationship. In this way, PlayCS functions as a small inheritance from Leslie’s “playground”: an effort to articulate how scholarship might honor the play of consciousness without diluting rigor. I close by framing Leslie’s legacy as an ongoing charge: to tend the luminous field he helped cultivate, where multiple ways of knowing can converse, radiance is practiced as a relational ethic, and each faithfully told story contributes to the larger mystery of which all are a part.
Keywords: consciousness studies, pedagogy, play consciousness (PlayCS), participatory inquiry, integral scholarshi
What is Transpersonal Psychotherapy? A Conceptual Template
Full text linkTranspersonal psychotherapy (TPT) lacks systematization, as it lacks a model that characterizes what qualifies a psychotherapy as transpersonal. Due to this situation, TPT has been developed in a state of fragmentation, through a multiplicity of idiosyncratic approaches. This idiosyncratic fragmentation jeopardizes the theoretical development of the field, undermines the possibilities of obtaining a wider recognition, and hinders the training and the research. To remedy this, this paper proposes a model of five components which characterize TPT: (1) purposeful use of states of consciousness, (2) transpersonal therapeutic framework, (3) transpersonal techniques, (4) focus on spirituality and/or existential meaning, and (5) suitable phenomenology and therapeutic demands/goals. Given that each component admits varied implementations, the model serves as a conceptual template able to cover the rich variet
Hope in Queer Spiritual and Religious Landscapes
No full textPanel Summary:
This panel delves into the intersection of queerness and religious/spiritual perspectives, exploring themes such as queer animality and eco-spirituality in biblical interpretation, queering kinship with a focus on disability and ecology, envisioning queer possibilities within the Chthulucene, radical hope and futurity in queer religiosity, and collective rituals in more-than-human worlds.
Dr. Ken Stone: “‘Like Fish Caught in a Terrible Net’: Queer Animality, Ecospirituality, and Biblical Interpretation”
Presenter bio: Ken Stone is Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of, among other books, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (Stanford University Press, 2018) and Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2005) and co-editor with Teresa Hornsby of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2011). In recent years his teaching and research interests have turned in the direction of Queer Eco-Spiritualities, with particular attention to the roles that animals and animalities, and queer biblical interpretation, can play in such eco-spiritualities.
Dr. Julia Watts Belser: “Queering Kinship: Disability, Ecology, and the Elemental World”
Presenter bio: Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies program, as well as a rabbi and longtime activist for disability, LGBTQ, and gender justice. Her research brings classical Jewish texts into conversation with disability studies, feminist and queer theory, and environmental justice. She is the author of several scholarly books, including Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018). She also directs Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project, a project that partners with grassroots disability leaders to document the way that disability communities are responding to climate change. Her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023), won a National Jewish Book Award. She’s an avid wheelchair hiker, a devoted gardener, and a lover of wild places.
Dr. Laurel Schneider: “When the Spirit is Dirt: Queer Imagining in the Chthulucene”
Laurel C. Schneider is Professor of Religious Studies and the Graduate Department of Religion, as well as affiliated faculty in the Gender & Sexuality Studies department at Vanderbilt University. She received her BA from Dartmouth College, her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University. She currently serves as Vice President and member of the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Religion. Among other scholarly books and publications, she is the author of multiple essays in queer theologies and of two monographs, including Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (Routledge, 2007). Most recently, she co-wrote Queer Soul, Queer Theology: Redemption in Real Life with Thelathia Nikki Young (Routledge 2021). She works on queer theories of multiplicity and Christian theologies from a postcolonial, anti-racist and liberationist perspective, and is a student of Native American religious and philosophical traditions. When she can be there, she shares her home with Emilie Townes and Winnie the dog on Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.
Emily Stevens: Queering Religion: Radical Hope, Futurity, & Queer Witches
Presenter bio: Emily is a doctoral student (Candidate, by the time of the summit) in Human Sexuality at California Institute of Integral Studies. She received her bachelor\u27s and master\u27s degrees each in psychology and gender studies and has published research on the topics of queer health and intimacy, queer family formations, and queer religiosity. Much of Emily\u27s work in psychology, gender studies, and sexuality, have led her to an interdisciplinary overlap where religious studies have often come into play. Emily’s current research asks how queer religiosity may inform broader cultures and psychological worlds in order to provide more effective healing modalities for queer populations. Her work is informed by intersectional feminism, crip theory, queer theory, critical sexuality studies, and decolonial contexts.
Moderator: Erin Vigil, PhD Student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at CII