Search

Battle 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.

This systematic review integrates the empirical evidence of spiritual experiences triggered by sexual activity, including studies by 10 authors. Despite venerable sexual meditative traditions of embodied spiritual practices, such as Hindu Tantra, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Taoism, empirical studies of sexual spiritual experiences are in their infancy. This review presents the range of sexual altered states experiences identified to date and how they qualify as spiritual experiences phenomenologically and in terms of their lifechanging effects. Seventeen distinct sexual-spiritual states have been identified across authors, with 4 others identified at significant levels in qualitative studies by individual authors. As an emergent area of scholarly interest, research on this topic remains scattered across disciplines and is characterized by small studies, many advanced by doctoral students conducting dissertation research. This article integrates the empirical research and situates it in a larger, diverse theoretical, historical, and anecdotal literature, to critically assess consensus on the topic. Deliberate practices, adventitious conditions, human physiology, and other dynamics that conduce to sexual spiritual experiences are discussed.

Autobiographic memories prior to birth remain controversial in psychology because such memories are traditionally believed to begin much later when some sense of self is formed. Prenatal sentience, including fetal learning, occurs in species from arthropods to humans, and evidence for autobiographic memories from pre- and neo-natal humans has typically come from clinical case histories of altered-state regression techniques eliciting records from adults or clinical case histories of children in normal states. This thematic analysis examined 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? The findings produced two distinct data sets. This article, Part 1, analyzes the majority of the data, narratives that described prenatal existence in an otherworldly realm. The results are consistent with and elaborate findings in established but controversial fields, notably reincarnation research, especially the intermission research, some of it veridical, and near-death experience research. Part 2, a separate article, analyzes a second subset of records that were narratives of fetal experiences, birth, and apparently veridical paranormal perinatal impressions, consistent with the clinical literature on pre- and peri-natal psychology and some of the intermission experience literature.

Leadership since time immemorial has been considered a sacred calling, a spiritual and moral responsibility that attracted great thinkers from East and West. Only with the realpolitik of Macchiavelli, followed by industrialisation, did leadership theory become secular and transactional, a trend that lasted until the late 20th century. About the time transpersonal psychology emerged, sacred leadership was reclaimed and has dominated the past 50 years of the organisation behaviour and psychology literature. Four dominant models of spiritually–oriented leadership have emerged – servant leadership, transformational leadership, authentic leadership, and ethical leadership – with more proliferating every day. Despite William James’s and Abraham Maslow’s pointing the way for transpersonal psychology to engage with leadership as the fulcrum for social change, the field has yet to embrace this responsibility. The current state of leadership theory and research and the current state of the world represent great potential for transpersonal psychology, if the field is to remain relevant and make a vital contribution to the greater good.

Historically the exclusive purview of contemplative religious paths, awakening into nonduality was considered the pinnacle of human attainment, even if, in some traditions, it proved to be the threshold to even more sublime states. Awakening was traditionally available only to dedicated elite seekers, usually renunciates who practiced for years in monastic communities, their progress directed by the authorities of their lineage. Today technologies for creating the electroencephalographic signatures of advanced meditators are available for purchase, and esoteric religious practices like Zen meditation and asana yoga have been secularized as stress-reduction techniques and physical exercise, respectively. Increased numbers of teachers of nonduality not aligned with any religious lineage and requiring no religious belief are in the business of helping people awaken, i.e., achieve a discrete shift in awareness, in which the consensual, apparently manifest reality of normal waking, adult sensory experience is perceived to derive from a singular unmanifest source in a seamless whole. This study investigated whether people who awakened with the help of nonaligned teachers, usually after working with lineage teachers, considered their awakening to be a spiritual experience, and why? This qualitative study examined the awakening experiences of 26 adults of varying religious backgrounds to see how they interpreted them. Findings suggest that spiritual experiences involve non- or extraordinary features, in contrast to awakening and ongoing nonduality, considered to be the essence of ordinariness despite their being unlike consensual sensory reality. Awakening was not always easy or smooth, and the ramifications of its secularization outside a spiritual context are many.

This study examined the overall psychological effects of inebriation facilitated by the naturally-occurring plant hallucinogen Salvia divinorum using a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Thirty healthy individuals self-administered Salvia divinorum via combustion and inhalation in a quiet, comfortable research setting. Experimental sessions, post-session interviews, and 8-week follow-up meetings were audio recorded and transcribed to provide the primary qualitative material analyzed here. Additionally, post-session responses to the Hallucinogen Rating Scale provided a quantitative groundwork for mixed-methods discussion. Qualitative data underwent thematic content analysis, being coded independently by three researchers before being collaboratively integrated to provide the final results. Three main themes and 10 subthemes of acute intoxication emerged, encompassing the qualities of the experience, perceptual alterations, and cognitive-affective shifts. The experience was described as having rapid onset and being intense and unique. Participants reported marked changes in auditory, visual, and interoceptive sensory input; losing normal awareness of themselves and their surroundings; and an assortment of delusional phenomena. Additionally, the abuse potential of Salvia divinorum was examined post hoc. These findings are discussed in light of previous research, and provide an initial framework for greater understanding of the subjective effects of Salvia divinorum, an emerging drug of abuse.

Veridical evidence of a physically transcendent source of consciousness comes from both extremes of the life span when central nervous system functioning is compromised, suggesting that some form of personhood can exist independently of known cellular processes associated with the body. In pre- and perinatal accounts, veridical memories have surfaced of events in the first two trimesters, long before the central nervous system is fully functional, continuing through the third trimester, when measurable brain activity begins, until just after birth. In the empirically verifiable out-of-body phase of near-death experience (NDE) accounts, a source of consciousness has been shown to record events when measurable metabolic processes, including brain activity, have ceased altogether. These two states have similar phenomenologies, suggesting that a physically transcendent source representing individual consciousness predates physical life at the moment of conception and survives it after death, and that its maturity and functioning do not directly reflect the level of central nervous system functioning in the body.

Although past-life regression therapy has not been shown to be the re-experiencing of a verifiable previous biological existence, therapists have noted similarities between the phenomenology of post-death awareness reported by regressed subjects and the phenomenology of near-death expe- riences (NDEs). This paper reports the results of a pilot study exploring those similarities as far as the therapeutic modality normally accommodates post-death phenomena. Similarities and differences between NDEs and post- death regression phenomena suggest new avenues of research. "Past-life regression" in Western usage describes the emergence of impressions, images and sensations that seem to be memories of an earlier existence, usually occurring during special, evocative circum- stances, such as psychotherapy. The term has evolved from a tech- nology originated by Albert de Rochas, a French hypnotherapist at the turn of the century (Christie-Murray, 1981). Although the spon- taneous recollection of apparent past-life memories by children is well documented in cultures that accept reincarnation (Stevenson, 1975-80, 1980, 1987), most Western literature concerns recollections produced by adults in altered states of consciousness. The largest body comes from therapeutic modalities involving the deeper layers of the psyche, such as traditional psychoanalysis; Rolfing, accupres- sure and other body work; rebirthing; sensory isolation; controlled drug therapy; and hypnosis (Bache, 1990). Like age regression ther

Letter from Jenny Wade to the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies on the topic "Religious Wars in the NDE Movement."