Wiktionary
a. (context psychology English) That transcends the personal or individual
Wikipedia
The transpersonal is a term used by different schools of philosophy and psychology in order to describe experiences and worldviews that extend beyond the personal level of the psyche, and beyond mundane worldly events. It has been defined as experiences "in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos". The field of Transpersonal Psychiatry has defined the term as "development beyond conventional, personal or individual levels." It is related to the terminology of peak experience, altered states of consciousness, and spiritual experiences
The term has an early precedent in the writing of philosopher William James, but the origin of the term is mostly associated with the human potential movement of the 1960s, and the founders of the field of Transpersonal Psychology: Anthony Sutich, Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof. In 1968 the term was selected by the founding editors of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, in order to represent a new area of psychological inquiry. According to Powers the term “transpersonal” starts to show up in academic journals from 1970 and onwards.
Stanislav Grof has defined transpersonal states of awareness as such: "The common denominator of this otherwise rich and ramified group of phenomena is the feeling of the individual that his consciousness expanded beyond the usual ego boundaries and the limitations of time and space."
The term is also associated with psychedelic work, and psychotechnologies, that includes research with psychedelic plants and chemicals such as LSD, ibogaine, ketamine, peyote, ayahuasca and the vast variety of substances available to all human cultures throughout history.
The philosophy of William James, the school of Psychosynthesis (founded by Roberto Assagioli), and the Analytical school of C.G Jung are often considered to be forerunners to the establishment of transpersonal theory. Academic schools that are associated with a transpersonal perspective include Humanistic psychology, Transpersonal psychology, Transpersonal anthropology and Near-Death Studies.
Usage examples of "transpersonal".
The superconscious is reduced to the subconscious, the transpersonal is collapsed to the prepersonal, the emergence of the higher is reinterpreted as an irruption from the lower.
There are collective prepersonal, collective personal, and collective transpersonal structures, just as we all collectively inherit ten toes, two lungs, etc.
Habermas maintains, but each of those domains can be divided into prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal components.
This is a useful and interesting book, precisely because it shows what happens when the transpersonal dimensions are left out, and the prepersonal and personal are forced to do double duty: a strain that finally breaks them both.
Rather, in this state one gains a transcultural and transpersonal realization of the nature of consciousness.
I would like to emphasize is that the higher stages of transpersonal development are stages that are taken from those who have actually developed into those stages and who display palpable, discernible, and repeatable characteristics of that development.
Thus, the self-system in the early stages is pre-egoic, in the middle stages egoic, and in the transpersonal stages trans-egoic, where it converges on the Self, which opens into pure Emptiness.
If we take formop as the reference point, then the higher stages are simply postrational, or transrational, or transpersonal.
For we are here beginning to pass out of the noosphere and into the theosphere, into the transpersonal domains, the domains not just of the self-conscious but of the superconscious.
Habermas maintains, but each of those domains can be divided into prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal components.
However, using my map, if typical individuals at the ordinary ego indeed begin to regress, this map would predict the same general sequence as the Grof map: it would predict ego, Freudian, birth, transpersonal.
Campbell, however, is quite right that a very, very few individuals, during the magic and mythic and rational eras, were indeed able to go beyond magic, beyond mythic, and beyond rationalinto the transrational and transpersonal domains.
Put differently: no yoga, no contemplative practices, no meditative paradigms, no experimental methodology to reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights of its founders.
The superconscious is reduced to the subconscious, the transpersonal is collapsed to the prepersonal, the emergence of the higher is reinterpreted as an irruption from the lower.
But in order to fully understand them, we need first to look carefully at the prerational structures, so we will know, if nothing else than by a process of subtraction, what the transpersonal states are like.