Billed as the most "up-to-date and comprehensive survey of near death studies," this anthology by... more Billed as the most "up-to-date and comprehensive survey of near death studies," this anthology by Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates marks the third collection of the near-death literature, succeeding Craig
I first came across the work of Joseph Jordania in a surprising way that was, as it turned out, c... more I first came across the work of Joseph Jordania in a surprising way that was, as it turned out, characteristic of this polymath. I was researching the altered states of ecstatic sacred warriors when I discovered the phenomenon of battle trance in Jordania's (2011) book on an apparently unrelated topic called Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution. Here, for the first time, I entered the interconnected worlds of Jordania's probing mind: polyphonic singing, hominid survival morphology, evolutionary and cross-cultural language development, and the co-evolution of humans and the big predator cats. A native of Georgia with degrees in music and ethnomusicology from Tbilisi State Conservatory, Tbilisi Theatrical Institute, and Kiev Conservatory, Jordania currently teaches in Australia at the University of Melbourne. In his latest book, The Human Story Behind Scientific Discovery, Jordania focused on the ardent inquiry that drives scientific progress-especially the courage to explore out-of-the-box, taboo subjects such as near-death experiences (NDEs). In my opinion, this book should be required reading for anyone considering a career in neardeath studies, paranormal phenomena, or transpersonal psychology. As his book title indicates, Jordania examined how human institutions and interactions influence-that is, generally hinder-the progress of science, a subject previously sketched intellectually by Karl Jenny Wade, PhD, is a professor specializing in the structuring of consciousness in the Integral and Transpersonal Psychology doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she teaches research methods, developmental psychology, and transpersonal leadership. She has recently published in the areas of prenatal consciousness, battle trance, awakening experiences, and altered states triggered by sexual activity.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2016
This study investigated the significance of first and second languages in the bilingual dreams of... more This study investigated the significance of first and second languages in the bilingual dreams of immigrant participants. A purposive sample of nine women and six men aged 20 to 71 whose first languages were Spanish, Thai, Italian, Tagalog, and French, and later acquired English, participated in semi-structured, open-ended interviews recalling a dream featuring both languages. Transcripts were thematically analyzed individually and across cases. The most important theme was the ambicultural self in the dream, referring to a culturally flexible dream figure able to speak the dreamer's first and second languages to bridge between the protagonist's two cultures to accomplish the dream task of somehow resolving cultural conflicts. The ambicultural self and dream tasks reflected challenges identified in Berry's acculturation model. Therapists can use bilingual dreams to help clients explore cultural identity conflicts and become more crossculturally competent.
One of the most universal yet under-researched human impulses when faced with seemingly unmanagea... more One of the most universal yet under-researched human impulses when faced with seemingly unmanageable conditions is to ask for Divine assistance to effect a change. The purpose of this qualitative study examined how 25 people aged 22–66 experienced grace as Divine assistance in making a positive change in their lives, especially what convinced them that the change had been the result of some Divine agency. Thematic analysis of in-depth interviews of experiences ranging from choosing a graduate school to the spontaneous recovery from a life-threatening illness revealed four common components of grace: mode of transmission, which includes intuition, other people, audition, vision, felt presence, and dreams; subjective impulse to change, which comprises guided movement, cessation, spontaneous surrender, and effortlessness; emotional experience, which includes enlivenment, surprise, and love; and external effects, comprising accelerated timeline, synchronicity, and positive impact on oth...
Transcendent Sex and the Prenatal Experience: Acting out the Scripts in Love
Prenatal events and the phenomena of the Birth-Perinatal Matrices identified by Grof are often re... more Prenatal events and the phenomena of the Birth-Perinatal Matrices identified by Grof are often re-enacted and re-accessed inadvertently during sex, propelling people into altered states similar to those he identified in his psychedelic and holotropic breath work research. Other prenatal research identifies how some prenatal complexes predispose people to altered-state sex, certain kinds of experiences, and certain kinds of love relationships
Review of the book Moral development reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt (4th ed.) by J. C. Gibbs
Journal of Near-Death Studies, 2020
Transcendent Sex: When Lovemaking Opens the Veil
Life before birth: A thematic analysis of memories of coming into life. Part 2: Recollections of fetal life and birth
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
This article examines a second set of data produced in a thematic analysis of 68 “earliest memory... more This 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.
Get off the mountaintop and back in the marketplace: Leadership as transpersonal psychology’s highest calling
Transpersonal Psychology Review
Leadership since time immemorial has been considered a sacred calling, a spiritual and moral resp... more 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 wo...
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Battle trance, which evolved from instinctive defensive and offensive behaviors for close combat,... more 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. Res...
Mapping Thecourses of Heavenly Bodies: The Varieties of Transcendent Sexual Experience
The relationship between sex and spirituality is a controversial topic in transpersonal psycholog... more The relationship between sex and spirituality is a controversial topic in transpersonal psychology. This article presents a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of nonordinary, transcendent experiences reported during sex. Based on the results of 86 interviews with heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual men and women ranging in age from 26 to 70, this study focused on spontaneously occurring experiences in individuals who had no prior history of tantric or other "spiritual" sexual practices. A phenomenological cartography is presented, based on the taxonomy developed by Grof (1975,1988) and illustrated with numerous vignettes derived from the reports of the participants in this study. In conclusion, a vision of sex is considered that goes beyond more and better orgasms to genuine transcendence and integrated, embodied spirituality. One of the most controversial pairings in transpersonal studies is the relationship between sex and spirituality. Sex is an inborn drive to...
The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
This systematic review integrates the empirical evidence of spiritual experiences triggered by se... more 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 ...
Former Associate Partner with traditional organization consulting firm McKinsey & Company Frederi... more Former Associate Partner with traditional organization consulting firm McKinsey & Company Frederic Laloux has accomplished what many developmental psychologists have been eagerly awaiting: Identifying the next stage of social collectives, especially work organizations. Cultural and organizational theorists have previously sketched the evolution of collectives from small groups, such as hunter-gatherers, clanand tribal-based societies, to civilizations that provide law and order through hierarchy and social roles, a pattern reflected in most large organizations today. Beyond that, capitalistic societies or meritocracies, and socialistic-communistic societies or participatory organizations appeared. Theorists have posited that such collective forms reflect stages of individual development, but until now no one has identified a collective form parallel to Maslow’s self-actualized stage, the jumping-off point from ‘‘doingness’’ to ‘‘beingness’’ and from the personal to the transpersonal.
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2019
Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India a... more Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of godly castration emerge: divine dynastic conflicts involving castration; a powerful goddess paired with a weaker male devotee castrated because of his relationship with her; and magus gods whose castration demonstrates their superiority. Castration cults associated with some of these gods—and other gods whose sexuality was ambiguous, such as Jesus—some of them exis...
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 2016
Largely ignored in transpersonal studies to date, dark magic involves sociallytransgressive proce... more Largely ignored in transpersonal studies to date, dark magic involves sociallytransgressive processes called becoming-intense and becoming-animal that produce non-ordinary states useful in the arts, hunting, sex, and fighting. War magic, a form of dark magic that involves powers of destruction and invulnerability, is ubiquitous and universal, and one of its primary features is the production of helpful, nonordinary states in combat. Berserkergang (going berserk) is one such state, the latest documented in a long history of Indo-European ecstatic warrior cults. Berserkergang was the battle-trance of the elite consecrated warrior-shamans of Odin, god of magic, poetry, battle, and death. Distinguishing features of berserkergang include invulnerability to fire and bladed weapons, shapeshifting, superhuman strength, laughing at death, and transpersonal identification with comrades and Odin. Cross-cultural interpretations have tended to denigrate berserkergang, including modern arguments that attribute it to intoxication, genetic flaws, or pathology. Not only are such arguments inadequate to account for the data, but also 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 many spiritual traditions as well as on the battlefield.
This article presents 11 historical Native American near-death experiences from the 1600s to the ... more This article presents 11 historical Native American near-death experiences from the 1600s to the early 2 0 th century as they appeared in the accounts of early explorers, autobiographical records, and ethnographic accounts. It includes two stories from tribes around the Roanoke, Virginia area; two Chippewa accounts from the Mississippi Valley; a Chiricahua Apache account reported by Geronimo; two Zuni reports; two Saulteaux accounts from the Berens River area of what is now British Columbia; and two stories from the Oglala Sioux Black Elk. I explore commonalities among the accounts and comparisons with near-death experiences from other cultures.
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