1 Phenomenology and Psychodynamics of Transpersonal Experience

We begin with the development of phenomenologies and descriptive psychologies of mystical experience. The historical and cultural context for these concerns starts in the nineteenth century, where there appears a strong interest in a naturalistic philosophical understanding (Schleiermacher, Nietzsche) and social science (Tylor) of mystical and religious experience. All the great pioneers in the history of the social sciences, from James and Jung, early developmentalists like Hall and Baldwin, to Weber and Durkheim, were similarly preoccupied at the turn of the twentieth century with trying to define a spontaneous core of religiosity—and this as a fundamental task for the emerging human sciences. What we have, then, is a developing interest in the idea that there might be, quite apart from dogma and social custom, a felt experiential core to religion. This would be a cross-cultural universal of humanity, reappearing in every society and every era as the direct sense of something sacred or holy. Dogma would come in later, draped over this potentially renewable experiential core and sometimes almost erasing it. A key to these approaches is that this experiential core, whatever else it may involve, is a thoroughly human phenomenon and open to investigation as such. After all, this was the opening era of the new human sciences and the naturalistic phenomenology that was their accompaniment, and pursued by psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, not theologians. If there is an experiential core to religious experience as a human phenomenon, this allows putting to one side, or “bracketing,” the more traditional metaphysical questions of truth or falsity, as well as all those debates of science versus religion.