Wednesday, April 22, 2009

(3) The Transpersonal

Again I fed from a large buffet of psychological schools when it came
to my research of the Transpersonal. But for starters there was the
Association of Transpersonal Psychology, which helped any novice
to move rapidly into this expanding field. The range of Transpersonal
Psychology had historical antecedents that Included the psychology
of William James, who though taking a practical approach mostly, did
tap into the spirituality of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Unitarian minister,
Emerson was an important figure in the Transcendentalism Movement
in the 19th century. And, naturally, it followed that Carl Jung's
deliberations about the Archetype would be included in this Trans-
personal buffet of psychologies.

Later, the Humanistic psychologies of Abraham Maslow and Roberto
Assagioli, along with many others, were included in the menagerie
embraced by Transpersonal Psychology. These later psychologists
extended the Transpersonal to include not only the peak experience,
but a myriad of religio-spiritual experiences that included visions,
new levels of consciousness, etc. They later related some of these new
approaches to new perspectives when it came to human and spiritual
development theories.

Interestingly, probably because of the Humanist input into
Transpersonal Psychology, there seemed a noticeable shift from
the more stock religious experience(s) unto a special experience
that involved a unity with Creation rather than with God. There were
reports that some people could be hiking, standing near the top of a
mountain, looking out onto valleys, and suddenly feeling literally a
part of the landscape that they were viewing.

Again, it would seem that *perspective* colors the study of the peak
experience. So one has to question more traditional approaches
that saw everything from a religious or a more rigid spiritual outlook.
Hence, moving into this massive psychological field, I had to consider
exactly what the Transpersonal might mean for me.

Well--the word "exactly" was nearly an impossibility. The more I
studied the sense of the Transpersonal, the spectrum of Such
widened. Heaven and the World blended together, when it came
to God's way of communing with us. We no longer saw our
relationship with the Logos-Pneuma from a strictly dichotomous
perspective. God, like our own soaring human minds, was both
Without and Within!

No comments:

Post a Comment