Transpersonal Psychology Quotes

“The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s, made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration.”
― Stanislav Grof

“The mind is brought into harmony with the spirit and includes the body, achieving an organic, harmonious unity of all aspects of the person's being, what we might call 'bio-psychosynthesis'. This is true spiritual alchemy”
― Roberto Assagioli, Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis

“The removing of the 'tangles'is a process of liberation from our complexes and illusions and from the way in which we identify with the roles we play in life, with the masks within us and with our idols, etc. It is a 'release' according to the etymology of the word, a liberation and awakening of hidden potential.”
― Roberto Assagioli, Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis

“The Spirit is that element of transcendence, superiority, permanence, power, liberty, inner reality, creativity, harmony and synthesis in every manifestation, both individual and social. In people, therefore, the term ‘spiritual’ (to varying degrees) can be attributed to everything that compels them to transcend their selfish exclusiveness, fears, inertia and love of pleasure; everything that urges them to discipline, control and direct those untamed forces, instincts and emotions that seethe within; everything that induces the recognition of a greater, superior reality, social or ideal in nature, and to become one with it, extending the limits of the personality.”
― Roberto Assagioli, Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond Psychosynthesis

“Entheogens (or psychedelics, to be more historically correct) have now been recognized as the mother of our Western ecology and conservation movements, as well as the entire field of transpersonal psychology and our apparent desire to return to some firsthand spiritual and/or mystical understanding of G/d (rather than blindly accepting traditional religious dogma without an experiential basis.”
― James Oroc, Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad

“Fire, after all, does not consume. It transmutes.”
― Kaia Anderson, Trial by Fire: A Personal Journey of Consciousness, Power & Freedom

“Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and “normal” people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls “peak experiences”); and examination of peak experiences has led Maslow to conclude that the evolutionary drive (which is so clear in art and philosophy) is as basic a part of human psychology as the Freudian libido or the Adlerian will to self-assertion.

— Colin Wilson, “‘Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time‘: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard” (1965)

(Wilson C. “Six Thousand Feet Above Men and Time”: Remarks on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard // Stanley C. (Ed.). Colin Wilson: Collected Essays on Philosophers. — Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Pp. 110–111.)”
― Colin Wilson

“Although one of the points of an Integral approach to any problem is to language that issue in a s large a number of levels as possible (Magic, Mythic, Rational, Pluralistic, Integral, and Super-Integral—and this includes the “conveyor belt” of spirituality), this doesn’t mean to cavalierly overlook Integral itself. The Integral level is a prerequisite for “Integral We” practices (although anybody can be invited to those practices; but realize that an “Integral” depth of the “We” will not be achieved in any group the majority of whose individuals are not themselves at Integral).”
― Ken Wilber, The Fourth Turning: Imagining the Evolution of an Integral Buddhism

“He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.

Psalm 147:3”
― Broadstreet Publishing Group LLC

“We are all of us indebted to a vast host of anonymous persons without whom some necessity would not have been available, some good which came to us, we would have missed. It is not too farfetched to say that living is itself an act of interdependence. . .However self-sufficient we are, our strength is always being supplied by others unknown to us whose paths led them down our street or by our house at the moment that we needed the light they could give. . . It is the way of life; it is one of the means by which God activates Himself in the texture of human life and human experience.”
― Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

“There is a hidden beauty in all suffering that leads to catharsis and transformation.”
― Ray Catania, You Are Still Alive, Now Act Like It: Empower, Elevate, and Enlighten Your Consciousness