To get at reality first hand is nearly impossible, given the epistemological and ontological paradigms within which we collectively and individually operate.  Yet we have earned some degree of understanding that we generally resonate with and hold as valid.  This writing assumes the reader stands alongside the objectives for spiritual work outlined by much of Mariana Caplan’s work and others like hers.  (Otherwise this will be a very long read!)  Knowing that the field of transpersonal psychology has its critics and that there are even shortfalls in the numerous definitions of the term, I’ll offer my own rudimentary definition as a classification of the spiritual work I aspire toward and that this writing encompasses.  The work, or as is often referred to as “the path,” in a transpersonal framework is understood by the core etymology of trans (beyond and/or in this case, change or transfer) and personal (about and between people).  Transpersonal* engages in the personal everyday aspects of the individual (person), and furthermore, the soul and/or spiritual aspects.  Experiences and understandings in both facets of the psychological dynamics of being human are taken into consideration for a more whole and continuous approach. The primary source for this writing is taken from the highly accredited writer on the subject of spiritual work, Mariana Caplan (2009).  With the majority of quotations selected from her most recent book, Eyes Wide Open – Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, which I highly recommend.

The foremost objective of this type of work is awareness.  “When we can truly appreciate that we are unconscious because this is the very condition of being human, rather than because we have done something wrong, we become increasingly interested in the endless road to become ever more conscious.  We know that our capacity to bring healing to ourselves, those we love, and our world is directly proportionate to our degree of awareness (p. 48).”  “As we unearth new levels of our consciousness, we inevitably also uncover that which is unwhole and unhealed within us at personal, familial, cultural, and historical levels. This is not a problem to be feared or a wrong to be righted, but a necessary and healthy aspect of spiritual unfolding that must be met with increasingly potent and effective discernment (p. xxvii).”  And so our psychological work will be done with the damaged part of our psyche, typically the work of therapy and the liberating awareness brought about through integrating the spiritual side of our nature.

“’Here is where psychological work might serve as an ally to spiritual practice,’ writes John Welwood, ‘by helping to shine the light of awareness into all the hidden nooks and crannies of our conditioned personality, so that it becomes more porous, more permeable to the larger being that is its ground (p. 224).’”  “Psychology addresses our personal, individual makeup.  It helps us understand the unconscious ‘stories’ that live within us and repeat themselves in limiting and sometimes self-destructive patterns.  It assists us in unraveling the defensive structures we formed in childhood that once kept us safe and helped us survive emotionally in our environment but that now block us from further development or from opening to deeper potentials.  Spirituality, on the other hand, helps us discover the nature of mind itself – what Hindu and Buddhist traditions refer to as nonduality.  It allows us to access something that is larger than our own story – to open to the perennial truths that mystics from all traditions have always known (p. 226).”

“Many people do a great deal of psychological work, and the resulting insights and changes are so profound they assume this is what spiritual transformation is all about: they have never had experiential contact with nonduality and thus remain unaware of deeper spiritual possibilities.  On the other end of the spectrum are those who do a lot of meditation and spiritual practice and assume they have transcended their psychological dynamics – at least until repeated failures in relationships, parenting, and working with their own emotions remind them that they have not (p. 226).”  Caplan cautions: “We cannot assume that simply because we have had profound experiences of spiritual illumination or enduring insights, all aspects of our psychology have been touched by our awareness.  It is a great temptation to imagine this, but it is rarely the case.  Our increased awareness can certainly impact our psychological dynamics, offering us wider perspective on our conditioning or giving us courage to go deeper into that which is still unilluminated within us.  But rarely does heightened awareness take the place of the necessary and humbling task of learning to feel and digest our psychological pain, or of the gritty challenges of dealing with human relationship, self-hatred, shame, sexuality, and intimacy with others (p. 116).”

Bottom line: “When we have not learned to manage our psychology, our psychology will manage us…Many of us have unconsciously come to the spiritual life as a way to transcend the painful suffering that remains from our childhood conditioning…But there is a very fine line between practicing the necessary process of nonattachment and falling prey to a neurotic detachment from life that is more a protective mechanism based on fear than an expression of spiritual clarity (p. 117).”  Ironically honest spiritual work will produce the opposite.  “In fact, immersing ourselves in the purifying power of spiritual practice often surfaces our wounds more readily, and with greater intensity, than maintaining a life filled with psychological buffers and staying within the confines of conventional paradigms of mainstream culture (p. 139).”

In summary: “In an ideal circumstance, spirituality and psychology would not be viewed separately; they in fact need each other to provide an integrated model of human development… (p. 88).”  And so in my less nuanced presentation of this path framed by transpersonal psychology: the human is seen on a continuum from spiritual to material, continually delving psychologically into the unconscious and spiritual realms, resulting in a broader platform from which to heal oneself and then the world at large.

Life is rarely neutral, and we must determine if we are more toward the end of the continuum of healing/growing, or we are hurting/extinguishing.  “As E.J. Gold said, ‘At some point you need to decide to live your life so you don’t have a trail of accidents behind you – one of which is yourself (p. 104).’”  “Each progressive level of falsity unearths a deeper level of clarity and spiritual maturity that allows us to move ever closer to the truth of our experience with unswerving integrity and groundedness (p. 108).”  To those who persevere on this path the results are of great depth and richness.  “As we become able to experience the reality of groundlessness, making space within ourselves to allow for continual creation and dissolution, we become more fluid and spacious.  We recognize that we live in a universe without walls, and from this spaciousness arises a wellspring of creative potential that knows no bounds.  The domain of our discernment widens, as we must not only discern between variables and choices that are known to us, but also include in our awareness the continual presence of the unknown (pp. 154-155).”  (More on these differing uses of ground and groundlessness below.)

This path requires courage: “We all resist seeing the ways in which we deceive ourselves on the spiritual path.  It is an embarrassment to ego, though not to who we really are, to look in the mirror and see ourselves dressed in spiritual drag.  Yet we allow ourselves to be exposed for the sake of greater freedom and to become more expansive through recognizing how we are limiting ourselves in the name of spirituality (p. 110).”  “Many of us are afraid to honestly see ourselves – to look deeply, without buffers, at our self-deception and lies.  We are unwilling because we feel so bad about ourselves, so essentially unlovable, and we are so full of self-criticism that we fear we’ll crack under the vision of ourselves as we actually are.  Full of self-hatred, self-doubt, and existential insecurity, most people operate only on the surface of their life experience.  We prefer fiction to truth, and many of us lose the opportunity to know who we truly are.  But just as the person we fear we are is a lie, the person we think we are is also a lie.  We are neither.  We are something different, and greater, than either of these.  What that is can only be discovered in an authentic way through a long, dedicated process of soul-searching (p. 69)”

Additionally the path requires a relentless search for the truth.  “The intensity of the purification process often, though not always, correlates with the degree of our conscious and unconscious commitment to the spiritual path (p. 148).”  “Each spiral of growth involves moving through and addressing another level of obstruction so that more of our inner light can be known. It seems that the deeper our exposure to the light, the more intensely we experience our estrangement from it (pp. 148-149).”  This estrangement when viscerally experienced results in a feeling of groundlessness.  Our perception of reality can be no less stark.  “Whatever term we use to describe it, when the great intelligence of the universe responds to our soul’s deepest yearning by taking away from us rather than giving to us, what keeps us going forward?  Can we still believe in the Divine, ourselves, and life?  Can we go deep within and travel on a hairsbreadth of faith that what is occurring is somehow part of the path rather than a betrayal by the path?  If not, can we simply endure, staying in place long enough to allow the process to do its work on us (pp. 149-150)?”

At this crossroad the very ground of understanding we operate from can vanish.  “…many circumstances of life-accidents, psychological crises, severe illness, the very real dangers of terrorism and global warming-confront us with the reality of groundlessness and impermanence, and one of the functions of spiritual practice is to help us learn to stay present and open in the face of the reality of uncertainty (p 154).”  But: “When we are unafraid of groundlessness, we can make bold, radiant, and clear choices about our lives.  ‘Reality is groundlessness,’ says Lee Lozowick, ‘and the only place to stand is in groundlessness.’  Human beings need organizing principles around which to develop their lives.  We build houses, families, and retirement accounts.  We work; make lists and schedules; create routines, goals, and projects.  We construct identities, meanings, experiences of continuity, obsessions, addictions, and even problems in order to create a sense of safety, protection, and ground beneath our feet, to feel that we exist and that life has meaning.  Yet, the greater truth is that there is no final security, nothing that is fully known, no ultimately solid ground, nothing that will not fade (pp. 150-151).”  This is my definition of faith.  It is not, when standing in this sort of brazen acceptance of Reality, on the order of belief, i.e. an acceding to a set of dogmas.  It is rather not of my doing, by either acceding or even trusting, it is a knowing.  An interior intuitive, (ironically) understanding, that what is, is, and I’m part and parcel of it all.  Furthermore, so I’m told, when I’m with this understanding, this awareness, all is as it should be.  All of it!

Let us begin to examine the elements of this path.  At first: “We are profoundly touched by the possibilities of our mundane lives being converted into something extraordinary of finding relief from our suffering and responses to our soul’s questions that we dared not ask for fear there were no answers.  We are told that much of spiritual life involves a continual shedding of ideas and ideals about the path as well as limiting self-concepts, illusions, and identities.  It all sounds adventurous, liberating, and meaningful, and we are anxious to get to the heart of things.  We begin to practice, often with great passion and zeal (p. 144).” We are on the path desiring to utilize discernment; it is too costly to invest in this journey without it.  Fortunately some begets more. “If our aim is to discover truth, the path will bring to the surface all that is untrue within us.  We are tempered and refined through spiritual practice and through our own lives, and in this way, spiritual discernment dawns (p. 142).”

Humbly:  “We have to admit that we do not know what is going on.  We have not intentionally deceived ourselves, nor have we been deceived.  We simply do not know ourselves, and we must accept this fact before we can begin to discover who we truly are.  In this simple recognition and admission begins the great journey to understand the mechanism of egoic functioning, to discover how our psyche functions and how to work with our emotions, and to gradually perceive the karmic and greater cosmic laws and learn how to function intelligently within their realm (p. 65).”  “While we are endlessly caught up in and carried along by the unruly stream of our thought patterns, identities, ideas, and opinions, assuming always that they are ‘our own’ new and original thoughts and perceptions, we are, according to Gurdjieff and other mystics, a machine.  This machine comprises countless unconscious programs that endlessly and mechanically repeat themselves throughout our lives.  To become conscious is to learn to observe this repetition and know intimately the stories we tell ourselves, which obscure the radiant and objective creativity in our lives (p. 77).”

“However, to understand experientially that thoughts think themselves can be a revelatory occurrence for human beings: to become convinced, if only temporarily, that ‘we’ — whoever we imagine ourselves to be – are not the ones thinking our thoughts, but that our minds are endlessly repeating habitual thought forms that result from familial, cultural, and karmic conditioning.  Our thoughts largely comprise things we have read, heard, or been told or that others around us think or believe (p. 78).”  “Ego is this identification with the mechanical loop of thought-emotion-manifestation.  Very few individuals even know that such circuitry exists or that there is a possibility of living outside of its confines (p. 79).”  “The moment we are convinced, ‘This is me.  I know who I am,’ we have confined ourselves to a false limited identity.  The identity is not the problem – the identification is how human beings function.  Rather, it is the conviction that we are what we identify with that confines our existence.  ‘Until you become an unbeliever in your own self, you cannot become a believer in God,’ said Sheikh Abu-Said Abil-Khair (p. 79).”

“It is important to remember that the ego itself is not a problem.  It is part and parcel of the human condition.  It is our relationship to ego that brings us so much suffering (p. 87).” “…the ego is programmed for survival, and it constellates itself during childhood into a series of defense mechanisms to protect us from circumstances, feelings, and aspects of reality that are too overwhelming to bear during that stage of our development.  The ego’s job is to maintain the stasis of the false self; from its perspective, authentic transformation equals death.  What dies is not the physical body but limited belief structures about who we are.  The ego, however, does not understand this, and interprets the transformation that comes from facing the shadow as actual death.  Failing to realize that we cannot access our light without accessing our darkness, most of us make the fundamental mistake of keeping the lid on the box closed, thereby succumbing to lives of mediocrity in which our greatest potentials remain unrealized (p. 183).”   Again: “…the ego itself cannot and does not die.  It is the identification with whom we believe ourselves to be that will be revealed as deceptive and false, while the ego itself remains, bearing witness to the dismantling of the false self.  There is tremendous grief and fear involved in this loss (p. 156).”  “It is common in spiritual circles to hear the claim that you have to have an ego before you can lose it.  I think it is more accurate to say that the ego must be simultaneously strengthened and disidentified with (p. 82).”  In fact it is this acknowledgement and working with the whole realm of self that is taught in the broader endeavor of tantric spirituality.  (Tantric spirituality is a  much richer and broader teaching than the distorted teachings in New Age circles regarding tantric sex.)

As a teaching: “at its core, the tantric approach offers a philosophy and a method by which one might become an integrated, unified human being.  It does this by teaching us how to relate to all experiences as fertile ground for uncompromised spiritual transformation.  Through this approach, we learn to perceive and consciously engage the potent energies that weave through all aspects of life – from the most mundane, challenging, and dense levels of our lives to the powerful force of emotion at the core of our psychology and relationships with other people, to the subtle, often imperceptible energies of mystical perceptions and experience (p. 160).”  “The tantric perspective challenges the dichotomies of spiritual/unspiritual, sacred/mundane, pious/profane.  It calls upon us to learn to respond appropriately, effectively, and with deeply informed integrity in all circumstances (p. 170).”

“Tantric practice reveals the hidden gifts within what we perceive to be our weaknesses.  If we are greedy, we do not stop wanting things, but we become greedy for knowledge, wisdom, or opportunities to serve.  Our anger becomes an intense motivation to address our own ignorance and we see clearly the ways we hurt others unconsciously; our sorrow becomes empathy and compassion for those who suffer as much or more than we do.  Our fear becomes awe of the majesty of the divine process; our loneliness is converted to longing; our joy and gratitude give rise to the need to share our good fortune with others.  Our attention is always absorbed in something.  The question is, ‘What do we choose to be engaged in?’  The tantric principle instructs us in how to shift our self-absorption in such a way that we become absorbed in increasingly more encompassing levels of reality, transformation, and service.  It is our capacity for discernment that determines whether something is poison or medicine (p. 169).”  “…’John Welwood affirms: ‘…Realizing this frees us up to move fluidly between engaging with our experience and discovering its spacious indefinable nature, without regarding either side as more real than the other (p. 164).’”  It is:  “through tantric practice, we learn to engage potent energies within ourselves and harness them in order to access deeper layers of experience (p. 172).”  “Our capacity to digest our experience becomes refined such that we do not have to close ourselves off from any aspect of life.  We trust ourselves to be able to handle the circumstances life brings in a way that always results in growth, even if such growth at times feels very uncomfortable (p. 170).”

“The challenge we face is acknowledging that a whole human being comprises both his or her higher and lower natures.  To access our totality as human beings, we must come to know both.  As we free the vital and emotional energy that is locked up in our shadows, we gain access to a wellspring of creativity, release the shame and self-denial we have kept locked away, and connect with our personal and sexual power (p. 187).” “We resist our darkness because we fear that looking at it will shatter us, but the opposite is true: when we look at it, it shatters only our false identification with it, leaving us more authentic and whole (p. 183).”

“From a tantric perspective, our personality itself is not a limitation – it’s our refusal to keep growing beyond our personality that is the problem (p. 168).” “Like Pandora, we are endowed with the gift of curiosity to know ourselves.  It is our divine birthright (p. 183).” “Through this work, we find that the dark and frightening inner material we have been so afraid to feel is ‘dark’ not because it is objectively evil or destructive, but because it has not been met with the light of our conscious awareness and acceptance (p. 187).”  “The more fully we are able to face what is true of us and take responsibility for it, the brighter and lighter we become (p. 187).”  “It is therefore important to ask ourselves whether the greater sin lies within our darkness and shadow or in the act of repressing it (p. 194).”

“Learning to fully accept and become one with all aspects of our experience – to become fully conscious of everything – is an alchemical process in which each of the imagined evils within us gradually becomes transformed into beneficial attributes: heartbreak becomes longing, fear becomes awe, greed becomes a tool used to acquire knowledge and pursue transformation, anger becomes organic empowerment, lust becomes a passionate relationship to all of life, sorrow becomes empathic compassion.  Through the tantric principle, conventional morality leads to the expression of universal ethics, and neurosis transforms itself into a creative vehicle by which we express our unique gifts (p. 194).”

Given all the above I see little to object to in pursuing this way of framing of the path.  Simply put, it is no denial, all awareness.  But Caplan does discern the traps that are set for many of us prior to and during the journey.  First off:  “Many of us come to the path and say that we want to be free of our illusions, yet these illusions make up most of our reality (p. 156).” One of these illusions is that if we are “spiritual” we are something other-than, but in this case we are in actuality a spiritualized ego.  “Judith Lief…describes spiritual materialism this way: ‘Spiritual materialism is an attachment to the spiritual path as a solid accomplishment or possession.  It is said that spiritual materialism is the hardest to overcome (p. 111).’”  “I have been struck by the way in which our spiritual views [seemingly often are] comprising a confused and immature relationship to complex spiritual principles… (p. 28).”  The argument Caplan is making is that even as, or especially when, one sees themselves as spiritual there is even a need for discernment. “Rather than holding on to an imagined concept of enlightenment as a product that can be attained, it may be more helpful to consider spiritual awakening as an endless process of progressively deeper levels of integration. If we can effectively revision our ideas of enlightenment in this manner, we can be spared the experience of falling into many otherwise unavoidable traps on the spiritual path… (pp.19-20).”  “Although it may initially be very disappointing to realize we are not as wise as we secretly thought, or as near to an imagined goal of spiritual life as we hoped we were, we also become more humble and more real when we let go of the goal-focused outlook (p. 20).”

“Although our desire to grow is genuine and pure, it often gets mixed with lesser motivations, including the wish to be loved, the desire to belong, the need to fill our internal emptiness, the belief that the spiritual path will remove our suffering, and the spiritual ambition — the wish to be special, to be better than, to be ‘the one’ (p. 33).” These motivations that may lesson our disease with relating to our life are natural.  “Spiritual dis-ease is not ‘bad’: it simply a broken thread in the greater fabric of our deeper possibilities and potentials (p. 31).”

We may have even experienced this in spiritual teachers who require an allegiance to their “guru” instruction or an “anointed” minister’s dogma and yet we have some suspicion that all is not well with them or the situation.  As such we have already utilized spiritual discernment when we have not blindly followed these types.  Caplan has a whole other book devoted to the need for teachers and gurus on the spiritual path. “Whereas mystical and nondual experiences may have a profound impact on us — perhaps the greatest of which is to initiate us into a lifelong commitment to the spiritual path and a life of service — it is clear that for most people accessing nondual states of consciousness is not the same as integrating them (p. 34).”  We all have to deal with the traffic on the way home from the meditation center.

The more challenging task will be ourselves.  “We must be willing to face illusions and limited ideas upon which we have hung our whole identity, to look at the many things within ourselves we would rather not see, to make consistent efforts, and to lose face and suffer the loss of our identities and dreams to whatever degree is required by the path.  These great internal tasks can only be achieved through clear discernment with relationship to all aspects of our experience (p. 256).”  “The path is infinite, and human integration is an awesome and laborious task (p. xxviii).”

Addendum:  I’ve gleaned Caplan’s thoughts from two other sources regarding the spiritual journey.  To have inserted them in the above text would have been needlessly redundant at the time.  I cite them here because sometimes another wording of a point can be more taken to heart or possibly more clarifying.  This first section is from her interview on Insights at the Edge (http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/transcripts/mariana-caplan.html) with Sounds True interviewer Tami Simon regarding Caplan’s newest book, Eyes Wide Open – Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path, which I quoted exclusively above.

Caplan states almost at the outset, “So I know a lot of people in spiritual things say it is all simple, and I think it is pretty complex, really. I am sure that there is some level at which it is simple, but I think for most of us a lot of the time, it is advantageous to appreciate the complexity of it.”  “And this question comes up over and over again because we have to open our hearts and we have to give or trust, at least to a certain degree, to receive the benefit. And we want to do that wisely.”

“So I think that part of the discernment is being able to know what we are dealing with externally but that the greater capacities come when we are really willing to be revealed to ourselves and be raw. And that the kind of capacity for seeing that often comes through being broken down and broken open and from the harder lessons and not just the shining dharmic diamonds showering on us. But what happens after the diamond shower and we’ve gone home and screwed up in our relationship with our partner one more time? Or been rude in a way that we know is totally dissonant with what we believe in? That is a lot of what forges discernment—if we are really willing to meet that and look at ourselves clearly.”

“And it is so easy for people on the spiritual path for people to try to be humble or act humble or talk humble, but then when the process and the path knock you down or life knocks you down in that way, then a softer relationship to all of this seems to emerge.”

“So a lot of the attention in this particular book is devoted to psychology and its importance to bear on the spiritual path for western practitioners.”  “Not as an end point, but as a necessary and indispensable tool and part of the path, especially if we are going to be working with the bigger fires, the spiritual teachers and communities.”  “And I want to underscore the quality of self-honesty and continued self-investigation that is required.”

The spiritual path requires study, yes, and also the personal self-examination.  “It is reading and learning about what we are looking for and what to watch out for on a spiritual level. I think another huge area of discernment, for any of us in the Western world, is the psychological and I believe that we need a deep psychological education. And not by going to grad school and studying counseling but through really investigating our own psychological process in depth.”

Though Caplan thinks there are extremely rare instances of enlightened and fully integrated teachers, and that the pragmatic daily labor of spiritual/psychological integration is where we need to invest, she notes these attributes of said persons.  An enlightened person “could possibly be a human being that has a consistent access to an objective awareness of reality, and then that that awareness really has come to bear on the different structures of their lives with the kind of consistency that makes that person genuinely useful and effective in a way that is uncommon.”  In essence the spiritually alive and fully integrated person we aim toward being.

But for the rest of us there is this: “We all love the divine. We’ve all perceived the spark of truth. And here we are as companions on the path many years later. And I find myself in great company, and I don’t need people to be extra enlightened in order to feel that they are diligently proceeding along the path. And with discernment, increasing discernment, we become more effective and more refined and more capable in our service or in our work, whatever that is.”

“I think we are integrating that part of us that is touched by that great spark. I mean anyone who is reading the books from Sounds True or listening to something like this might evolve or be touched, and then there is our entire psyche and psychological reality. There is our cultural reality. There are our karmic lineages.”  “But in between is just really meeting life raw, as we are, with our greatest ideals and capacities and our weakest links and engaging our process from there.”

“But I don’t think it is something that is cultivated in a certain period of time and then you are done cultivating it and then you are set. I think it is just a process of increasing refinement without end, really.”  “And it just seems from everything I have learned, because although my views are sometimes, well not cynical, but although they are very pragmatic, I am desperately passionate about practice and expansion and the path and endless growth. And I think it is just that. It is like there doesn’t need to be an end. And wherever that end is, it is not where our concepts of that end are going to be.”  “There is no end. No end to our growth. No end to integration. There is no end to enlightenment. So the idea of having arrived seems kind of childish and limiting.”

I conclude with these excerpts from ReVision Magazine Spring, 2001 (http://www.realspirituality.com/pages/pdf/ReVision.pdf).

“Mystical experiences do have their place in spiritual development, particularly in a culture that is skeptical of anything outside the borders of our conditioned cognitive capacity. Still, in most cases our spiritual triumphs fall into the category of ‘An Experience I Once Had.’  When mystical experiences become our obsession, and we run from workshop to teacher to fancy esoteric tradition looking for the next high, we have taken a great detour from the needs of our culture—a culture that is obsessed with boldness but devalues subtlety; that is infatuated with excess but scorns simplicity; that honors selfishness while mumbling about service. It is a culture in great need of those individuals who, in spite of all odds, yearn to re-enliven Western soil with the energy of Truth—individuals who are willing to live simply, make necessary sacrifices, and go against the coarse grain of spiritual materialism.”

“The great Persian mystic Hafiz wrote that suffering and despair ferment the soul like few human or divine ingredients can.  Only when we finally admit to our own failure — to our own hopelessness, in the language of the Buddhists — does any significant possibility for something new and real emerge.  When we allow ourselves to become deeply disillusioned by our spiritual progress (or lack of it) while somehow not sacrificing our passion for God or Truth or Life, then perhaps we are getting somewhere.”  “We peel off layer after layer of the unreal and keep going deeper. If we are willing to be ruthless enough with ourselves to begin to see that which we have refused to see; to recognize still another lie in the story we have created out of our lives; to bear witness to the deceitful nature of ego while making a stand for our basic goodness, we will have the fortitude to die with dignity to the unreal and allow the real to be revealed. This is an extraordinary possibility of human evolution.”

*1: extending or going beyond the personal or individual  2: of, relating to, or being psychology or psychotherapy concerned especially with esoteric mental experiences (as mysticism and altered states of consciousness) beyond the usual limits of ego and personality

Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transpersonal)

References:

Caplan, M. (2009). Eyes wide open: cultivating discernment on the spiritual path. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc.

Caplan, M. (2009). From Insights at the Edge interview. Retrieved February 12, 2010 from http://www.soundstrue.com/podcast/transcripts/mariana-caplan.html.

Caplan, M. (2001). From Where are we going?  The fate and failings of contemporary spirituality.  Retrieved February 12, 2010 from http://www.realspirituality.com/pages/pdf/ReVision.pdf.

Joel Jacobs, 2010, All Rights Reserved