Transcendence and its Implications PDF

Transcendence and its Implications Transcendence refers to a state of consciousness superior to ordinary existence. It is often associated with spiritual, mystical, or peak experiences that are described as moments of exceptional psychological well-being and altered perception. Synonyms for Transc...

Transcendence and its Implications Transcendence refers to a state of consciousness superior to ordinary existence. It is often associated with spiritual, mystical, or peak experiences that are described as moments of exceptional psychological well-being and altered perception. Synonyms for Transcendence: Enlightenment Awakening Cosmic consciousness Mystical experiences Implications for Psychotherapy: Transcendent experiences can impact psychological well-being, normality, and psychopathology. Understanding transcendent states is important for psychotherapy, particularly in treating individuals experiencing profound psychological states or seeking greater self-awareness. Types of Transcendent Experiences 1. Flow: ○ A state of immersion in an activity where one's skills match the task's difficulty. ○ Characteristics include loss of self-consciousness and lowered activity in the default mode network (DMN). ○ Individuals are deeply absorbed in the object of attention. 2. Peak Experiences: ○ Some of the most profound and wonderful experiences in one's life. ○ Descriptions often include intense emotions like joy, bliss, love, and peace. ○ Lifetime incidence is about 1%. 3. Mystical Experiences: ○ Profound, often ineffable experiences that can lead to altered perceptions of reality. ○ Descriptions often include bliss beyond bliss, a sense of connection with the universe, and deep peace. Personal Accounts of Transcendent Experiences  John Wren-Lewis: ○ Poisoned by morphine, described a "magical darkness" behind everything, a persistent state of consciousness, and a loss of the hyperactive survival state. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: ○ Promoted Transcendental Meditation (TM), involving the repetition of a mantra for 20 minutes to achieve a transcendent state. State of Consciousness Participants are first introduced to the concept by instructions such as: "Please just sit quietly for the next minute... then click the arrow button to proceed." Followed by the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory: ○ A measure of 14 dimensions of consciousness across 53 items. Neurophysiology of Focused Attention Meditation 1. Focused Awareness: ○ Directing attention towards a particular seed (object or thought). 2. Mind Wandering: ○ Occasional distraction of focus away from the seed. 3. Awareness of Mind Wandering: ○ Recognizing when attention drifts and then restoring focus on the seed. Spirit Tech and Technological Advances in Spirituality Spirit Tech Entrepreneurs: ○ Aim to translate ancient religious traditions into contemporary culture using technology. ○ Advances in neurophysiology have enabled the identification of brain states associated with mystical experiences. ○ The technology of spiritual experiences is being brought to the market, transforming the religious landscape. Brain Stimulation for Transcendent States Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Stimulation (tFUS):  ○ A technique used to remove roadblocks to enlightenment by enhancing brain states linked to mystical experiences. ○ Experimentations with Shinzen Young and other advanced meditation practitioners have shown increased equanimity through brain stimulation. Muse: Neurofeedback for Meditation Muse Headband: ○ A wearable device with 7 EEG sensors that measures brain activity. ○ It is linked to a phone app for neurofeedback, helping users optimize their meditation experience. Explanations of Transcendent States 1. Reductionism: ○ The belief that transcendent states can be fully explained through neurophysiology. 2. Constructivism: ○ The view that transcendent states are subjective experiences that vary based on individual perceptions and cultural contexts. 3. Television Analogy: ○ A metaphor to explain how our brains filter and process sensory stimuli in transcendent states, similar to how a television receives and displays signals. 4. Exception Function: ○ Transcendent experiences may not be typical, but rather represent exceptional states of function, offering unique insights into the nature of consciousness. 5. Perennial Philosophy: ○ The concept that certain transcendent truths are universal across all cultures and time periods, suggesting an underlying unity in human spiritual experiences. 6. Analogies from Color Perception: ○ Just as we perceive color through a combination of wavelengths, transcendent states might result from the integration of various cognitive and emotional processes. - Textbook Transcendence - Mystical experiences are a type of transcendence in that a person is in a state of being that is in some sense superior to ordinary existence Variety of transcendent experiences - Some of the greatest achievements of transcendence have occurred in the context of human suffering - Variety of ways in which exceptional human function has been characterized - Flow, peak experiences and mystical experiences Flow - One of the things that can improve the quality of a person's experience is to be faced with challenges that are more demanding than everyday living - When a person's skills match the difficulties of the challenges, a state of consciousness that Csikszentmihalyi called flow can occur in which there is joyous and creative “total involvement with life” - 5 components of flow when participants in a study were asked “to describe how it felt when their lives were at their fullest, when what they do was most enjoyable - First component is a narrowing of attention to the stimuli that are relevant for the ongoing activity to take place in such a way that there is complete but effortless focus - Second, action and awareness can merge so that only those events that are relevant to the on going activity remain in subjective consciousness 2 - Third a person may lose track of time - Fourth, there can be a loss of self consciousness, in the sense of losing a reflective stance toward one's actions and potentially feeling that one has merged with the environment or others participants with who one is engaged with in the activity - Fifth, an individuals has a sense of control - There are 3 additional conditions needed for flow, the first which have been addressed, is the proper balance between the challenge one faces and the skills necessary to succeed - The second is the setting of clear, proximal goals - The third is the presence of feedback that allows a person to know how well they are doing as the activity proceeds - Flow is a state of being and not an escape from ones engagement in the world but rather, optimally function within it Peak Experiences - Maslow characterized the changes to cognition and self-identity that can occur during these peak experiences - He found, for example, that sometimes peak experiences were felt to be perfect, complete, self-sufficient, self validating, intrinsically, valuable, and a source of justification for ones life - Loss of self-awareness and temporary fusion with that which is not oneself can occur in peak experiences to the point of complete absorption in the object of one's attention so that it appears as if it were all there was in the universe - Time may seem to be simultaneously both moving rapidly and standing still - Affect can change, with a loss of fear and hesitation and an expression of greater love, compassion, and acceptance of the world Mystical experiences - The first characteristic of a mystical experience is that of unity, which can be either internal, if the subject-object dichotomy is transcended within a person, or external, if transcendence occurs “between the usual self and the external world of sense impressions - Internal unity occurs when normal sense impressions and the usual sense of individuality fall away so that one is left with the pure consciousness, whereas external unity involves increased awareness of particular sense impressions until one's identity merges with the sensory world in the recognition of underlying oneness - The second characteristic identified by Pahnke is that of noetic quality, whereby one has direct insight into the nature of being that is accompanied by the certainty that such knowledge is truly real and not a subjective delusion - Third is the transcendence of space and time, although spatial transcendence may only be partial in external unity - Fourth is a sense of sacredness, “defined as a nonrational, intuitive, hushed, palpitant response in the presence of inspiring realities - Fifth is a deeply felt positive mood that can include feelings of joy, lve, blessedness, and peace - Six is paradoxicality, the characteristic that significant aspects of mystical consciousness are felt by the experiencer to be true spite of violating normal logical principles - An example of paradoxicality would be the claim that ones has experienced an empty unity that at the same time contains all reality - Seventh is the alleged ineffability of mystical experiences, the inability to adequately express transcendent events in words - Eighth is transiency, the transient nature of mystical experiences relative to the permanence of everyday consciousness - The ninth characteristic of mystical experiences is the positive change in attitude or behavior that can engender, at least insofar as self reports of such changes are accurate - Efforts have been made to determine the frequency of mystical experiences in the general population by conducting surveys in which questions have been asked about having had such experiences - The content of these questions of affirmative responses, resulting in a range of about 20 to 74% of the population claiming to have had some sort of significant mystical experience - About 35 % of person sampled affirm sme intense spiritual experience - Other studies found that 47% of respondents claimed to have had an experience that could be best described as a transcendent or mystical experience - However in one study in which 34% of 305 participants agreed that they had been close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift them outside of themselves, analysis of the participants more detailed reports indicated that only 1 percent actually met the criteria for having had mystical experiences Examples of Transcendent Experiences  - Edgar Mitchell - Heading back from the moon, with spacecraft functioning perfectly and not requiring his attention, apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell had a chance to reflect on his journey - He fell into a quiet reverie as he looked out the window at the earth and the heavens from the vantage point of space - He began to feel a sense of harmony and interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding the spacecraft - He was shaken to the core by the silent authority of his feeling of connectedness to an intelligent “natural process” - Mitchell has been convinced that what he felt “always will be an ineffable experience” - As his journey continued, he found himself moving between the euphoric transcendent state and dysphoric realization of human misery - Upon returning to earth mitchell changed the course of his career and “became a full time student of the totality of consciousness”, founding the institute of noetic sciences for its multidisciplinary study, in mitchells epiphany we can see the characteristics of external unity-noetic quality, alleged ineffability, transiency, and positive changes in behavior associated with mystical experiences John Wren Lewis - When he was 60 years of age in 1983, he was traveling by bus with his wife in thailand, when he was poisoned after eating candy, apparently laced with morphine, which had been given to him by a thief - It was some hours after awakening from his coma when it occurred that Wren Lewis began to wonder why it was that the ‘rather shoddy hospital room seemed transcendentally beautiful - At first he wondered whether his changed perception was the result of the morphine with which he had been told he had probably been poisoned, but then he thought that the drug effects should have worn off - Then he wondered if he had a near death experience - So he relaxed and tried to take himself back in his imagination to point in time just before he had awakened from the coma - What came to mind was that he had emerged from “a deep but dazzling darkness” that was still there behind his ordinary consciousness - Once recognized, the darkness that Wren-Lewis experienced was not a vague impression but so palpable that he kept checking the back of his skull as it seemed to have been sawn off, exposing his brain - He felt as though he were looking through everything very sharply from an immense distance yet at the same time he had the uncanny sense he actually was each thing perceiving itself - Unlike his personal consciousness the darkness was impersonal consciousness , seems to know everything from the inside and from which everything around his arose anew at each moment - The presence of the darkness was accompanied by a sense of supresied satisfaction, peace, love, bliss, and joy beyond joy  - However, once in a while, everyday, Wren-Lewis would find that he would slip out of the mystical state for minutes or even hours - Whose conception of reality is correct, our interpretation that wren lewis endarkenment is an altered state of consciousness, or his realization that our ordinary constricted condition is an altered state of consciousness? Just as our ordinary consciousness seems self-evidently real to us, so his ordinary consciousness seemed self-evidently real to him - Wren-Lewis proposed the hypothesis that transcendent consciousness is blocked by hyperactivity of a psychological survival mechanism within each of is - Coming close to death breaks the “spell because the survival mechanism gives up at this point:, sometimes giving a person access to knowledge of “what consciousness really is Franklin Wolff - He became convinced of the probable existence of a transcendent mode of consciousness that could not be comprehended within the limits of our ordinary forms of knowledge - Our ordinary forms of knowledge consist of sensory impressions and rational thinking, which do not allow is to know anything other than the “appearance of things” - In 1936, after 24 years of effort, Wolff realized that he did not need to silence his thinking as he had been attempting to do in meditation, but simply to isolate “the subjective pole of consciousness - He conceptualized consciousness metaphorically as primarily streaming from the subject to the object, thereby creating the phenomenal world of one's experience - Wolff claimed to have been able to do has been create “a separation in the flow of consciousness” and to redirect part of the stream back towards the subject - When that has happened, the objects of consciousness have become dimmed and lost much of their relevance, while “the reverse flow toward the subject has been like a light highly intensified - Wolff likened the resultant intensification of consciousness “to the rising of another sun so bright as to dull forever thereafter the light of the physical sun - For Wolff, turning the outgoing stream of consciousness through 180 degrees led to a transcendent state of consciousness in which the subject-object duality characteristic of ordinary thinking was replaced by consciousness-without-an-abject-and without-a-subject - Appearance in the ordinary waking state of consciousness had given way to reality in the transcendent state - Wolff conceptualized a continuous relationship between the everyday and mystical states - Wolff, ‘reality is inversely proportional to appearance, so that the more that something can be conceptually grasped, the less it is real, whereas the more something is tenuous, the closed it is to reality - The turning of the light of consciousness upon itself revealed that which is real using a third way of knowing, which Wolff named introception, whereby knowledge results from  identity with that which is known. This is reminiscent of Wren-Lewis sense of knowing from the inside - From the outside, which is to say, from the perspective of everyday consciousness, such knowledge is so abstract and universal that it is barely discernible as being of noetic character - In a like manner, by examining the events that occurred for him, Wolff has elaborated on some of the other characteristics of mystical experiences that we enumerated previously - For example, Wolff has discussed both the nature of unity as well as the sense in which it was permanent - He has said that transcendence brought with it a change of self-identity so that he felt as though “the roots of his consciousness’ had been forcibly removed from the domain of everyday existence and instantaneously transplanted into a supernal region in which he was identified with “that which supports this universe” Just as in the case of Wren-Lewis, Wolff has maintained that the change of self-identity has not only been permanent but seems to be “a much more normal state of emplacement than ever the old rooting had been - Each time we moved in and out of transcendent state, he noted a discontinuity so that one consciousness blacks out and immediately another consciousness takes over - Wolff said that he has deliberately passed up and down, trying to maintain continuity of consciousness during the transition but that “it could not be done” - He has used the term escalating self to refer to the identity of the self that can move between the two states of consciousness - In fact to suggest the value of this transcendental state of consciousness requires concepts of the most intensive possible connotation and the modes of expression that indicate the most superlative value art can devise Meditation - Refers to the mental strategies whose purpose is to effect transcendent states of consciousness, although the word is frequently restricted to those strategies that have been practiced in Asia and to their reformulations in western cultures - Well, even such a broad definition gives perhaps undue coherence to the variety of practices with different aims and methods that have been subsumed under the rubric of meditation - One way to think about it is to conceptualize the mind as the gateway to transcendent states of consciousness - The ordinary functioning of the mind blocks transcendent states from occurring, so we need some metal techniques to remove the obstructive aspects of the mind - Meditation is the name given to those techniques Brief History of Meditation - Mainly concerned with transcendental meditation, a type of meditation that was introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi upon his arrival in north america in 1959 - The basic technique, as I understand it, consists of repeating a word that appears to have no meaning over and over again silently to oneself while sitting with eyes closed for about 20 minutes - Whenever one finds oneself thinking about anything other than that word, one redirects attention to the word and resumes its repetition - The word called a mantra, is one of a number of words derived from “standard Sanskrit sources” that have been assigned in the past to a person by ™ instructors on the basis of their age group - Charles Tart reported his “personal experience of doing ™ for one year” he could that he became a more relaxed person with an increased ability to still his mind - He found initially that both recent and remote memories of unprocessed psychological material would occur during meditation tapering off and giving way to current events material, over the course of the year - Contrary to claims of its benefits by members of the ™ organization, Tart did not experience a joyful, oceanic feeling and loss of all sense of self - There were such apparent physiological changes in that he found that, while meditating, he had increased resistance to cold, and his enjoyment of alcohol decreased, in part because he began to get headaches after drinking more than small amount of alcohol - Individuals experiences in meditation can be quite different from one another, and it is not clear from case studies to what extent - In the early 1970s, Herbert Benson and his colleagues began to report the results of physiological studies of ™ practitioners - They found a pattern of decreased bodily arousal during the time of mediation that Benson called the relaxation response - Further research found that the relaxation response could be induced in various ways other than ™, including a technique devised by Benson in which the word one played a role similar to that of the mantra in ™, - The relaxation response and some forms of mediation have been beneficial in the treatment of hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, headaches, pain, premenstrual syndrome, insomnia, infertility, anxiety, depression, hostility, and stress - Relaxation does not always arise from meditation - RElaxation itself a homogenous state but rather a diverse array of mental states and behaviors associated in various ways with relaxation response - Meditation in Asia has been the cultivation of radical transformations of consciousness to resolve existential issues, it has found a place in the West as a tool for the enhancement of physical and psychological well-being, with particular emphasis on the reduction of blood pressure and stress - In a study done online, Cassandra and he colleagues, of 1120 mediation practitioners solicited through online resources, aspects of mystical experiences, such as positive mood, ineffability, and transcendence, were frequently endorsed - The majority of respondents claimed to have also had unusual experience - For instance, 30 percent of respondents reported having experienced clairvoyance or telepathy “many times or always, and 31 reported having had the experience of objects moving or changing without apparent physical cause Styles of Meditation - Most mediation have two structural components: support and content - Support refers to the psychological process that are required to maintain the meditation, whereas content is what the mediation is about - Support itself has at least three components, attention, monitoring and volition - Attention refers to the act of attending to specific contents, monitoring refers to introspective tracker of what is happening during meditation, and volition is the ability to change what is happening, including redirecting attention - Content has at least three mental tracks to which we can attend: thoughts, words, and images - Thoughts refer to concepts that we can have in our minds, words refers to silent self talk, and images refers to pictures that we can have in our minds that are separate from actual sensory perceptions - There are three main patterns of deployment of these psychological processes, which we will label as concentrative, witnessing, and reflexive styles of meditation - In concentrative meditation, sometimes also called focused attention meditation, one seeks to confine attention to a single object of thought, sometimes called a seed - There is a great variety of way in which that is done, even within specific traditions - A meditator focuses on the repetition of a word - Buddhist mediators may seek to imagine a visual representation of the Buddha - Western forms of concentrative meditation can include keeping one's mind on particular theme, such as love for one's fellow human beings - What typically happens, given what we known about thinking, is that spontaneous thoughts arise that are unrelated to the chosen topic - When that happens, as done in ™, one can simply return ones attention to the object of meditation - However, controlling one's thoughts means that one needs to introspect so as to monitor their contents and to exercise one's will in order to redirect the stream of consciousness back to the object of meditation as well as to persist in ones taks - From a cognitive point of view, concentrative meditation can be regarded as a vigilance task in which we are waiting to detect the occurrence of mind wandering, at which time we respond by returning the stream of thinking to the seed - As one succeeds in resting one's thoughts on the seed of meditation, boredom can esure - The idea is that it is precisely at the point that persistence is necessary to break the hold of the mind on one's consciousness - Deeper meanings associated with the seed might be precipitated into one's consciousness - Or the subject mergers with the object of meditation so that only the object remains - Or merging with the object leads to the collapse of intentionality, the subject-object structure of the mind, resulting in nonduality - Second style of meditation is witnessing meditation, sometimes also called open monitoring meditation in which the idea is not to control objects of attention but to simply watch the mind wander in an effort to understand its nature - Teacher example, the idea was to sit with open eyes and a straight back and to pay attention to whatever sensations, feelings, and thoughts occurred for us - As mental events took place, we were to label and dismiss them without judgment - If judgment occurred, they were to be regarded as just more mental events and perfunctorily labeled and dismissed - If our minds wandered, upon realizing that they had wandered, we were to label and dismiss that realization as well - The point was to witness what had transpired in the mind rather than try to suppress or change it - The process of attending to, labeling, and dismissing mental events is known as mindfulness - The teacher sat with his legs crossed, after time he said they began to ache - Thus, my meditation practice consisted of noticing and labeling the pain in my legs - After a half hour or so, we would stop sitting meditation and practice walking meditation for a while - In walking meditation the idea was to pay attention to the kinesthetic sensations that were present as we walked - Another example during sitting meditation, one could pay attention only yo sensations in the left half of the body, Another variation is not to label mental event s ut just to register them - After walking we would practice more sitting meditation - As another change of pace, someone would read aloud for a while from a buddhist text - Attention is directed to the objects of consciousness, that it to say, to the thoughts themselves - In teachers case, I was thinking about my aching legs, however the focus of the meditation is really on the introspective process whereby one recognizes which thoughts one is having, with the will being used to sustain that mindfulness - In concentrative meditation, the point is to attend to a chosen object, in witness mediation, the focus is on monitoring the contents of the experiential stream - In contrast both, when reflexive mediation is practiced, attention is placed on the subject of consciousness, the one who does the monitoring and willing and or whom there are objects of consciousness - In meditation we can stretch the intentional structure of the mind to identify with the self or to identify with the objects - But to actually turn one's attention so as to perceive the subject as an object..nope - Eventually the intentional structure of the mind breaks, so that the subject object distinction disappears and a person is left in a state of nonduality - Another way of saying that is that a person's consciousness is usually psychologically trapped in such a way that all experience is structured by subject object duality until that structure collapse Mathematical YOGA - According the Wolff the strength of western cultures has been the development of theoretical thinking, which can be used in the effort to attain transcendent states of consciousness - There is a continuum ranging from a determinate pole, represented by science and mathematics, to an indeterminate pole, the “transcendent ground of knowledge” - Concepts that are concerned with physical objects can be said to be perceptually thick but perceptually thin - Such concepts belong toward the determinate pole of the theoretic continuum - On the other hand, abstract concepts, such as mathematical constructions, lie close to the indeterminate pole and can be said to be perceptually thin but perceptually thick - For Wolff, determinate-indeterminate concepts are not important of themselves - Rather, their value lies in their use as vessels for the transcendent - Because mathematical constructions are perhaps the most abstract concept in western cultures, mathematics is the most faithful representation of perceptual knowledge and thus becomes the route by which we can approach transcendent states of consciousness most directly, most freely - According the Wolff there are three aspects to mathematical yoga, the use of mathematics as an approach to transcendent states of consciousness - The first is engagement with mathematics so that one's thinking tends towards determinate-indeterminate concepts - The second is the cultivation of meaning so that mathematical constructions are not regarded as vacuous arrays of symbols but embraced within one's meaningful understanding of reality - Third aspect of mathematical approach to transcendent consciousness is complete emptying to transcendent consciousness is complete emptying of oneself, in other words, surrender Finder Course - Jeffery Martin sought out, interviewed, and gathered quantitative data from about 60 people from around the world who appeared to be living in an ongoing transcendent state of consciousness, which he called persistent non symbolic experience - Upon his data he found that he could place people into one of a number of locations, namely, location 1, location 2, and so on, with increasing numbers indicating greater degrees of subjective well-being - According to Martin, the primary characteristic associated with increasing locations and the sense of well being is the attenuation of the narrative self, a part of the psyche that constructs stories about who one is, what is happening, and so on - A individuals emotions become increasingly skewed toward positive emotions so that, by locations 3, negative emotions such as anger, sadness, and anxiety, including existential anxiety, are gone, and a single positive emotion remains that is a blend of love, joy, and peace - By location 4, the positive emotions along with the negative ones have disappeared  - Martin asked his participants what they had done that they thought had allowed them to shift into persistent non symbolic experience - There were about half dozen techniques that they had used - So Martin created an 18 week online course, the finders course, starting with positive psychology exercises to create a positive tone followed by variations on the different meditation techniques that had been reported to him - He collected self report psychological data to determine what changes were taking place, after running the course nine times, Martin claimed that 73 to 74 of participants who complete it transition to one of the locations on the continuum - Teacher, asked participants to sit quietly with eyes open for 1 minute, after which time we asked that they fill out the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory - 55 participants completed the entire survey - They were spread across locations, including six who had not transitioned to a location and nine who were beyond location 4 - The score on a cluster of items that included life satisfaction, joy, and the experience of nonduality increased overall with location - Anger, sadness, and fear, as measured by the PCI, flattened to xero by location 2 and remained at zero for all higher locations - Love and joy peaked at location 3 and dropped for higher locations - They found similar patterns for the PCI scores a year later in a second survey with 16 participants - Overall subject to the limitations of self report data from our limited samples, our data confirm the psychological profile of fingers course alumni found by martin Neurophysiology of Meditation - Moving away from attributing cognitive functions to specific anatomical structure, the so called modular approach, to assigning them to networks of anatomical structures, a network approach - DMN, overall, is an “integrated system for autobiographical, self monitoring and social cognitive functions - 2 additional networks called the central executive network and the salience network - The central executive network is considered to be engaged in cognitive regulation, including attention, working memory and self control - The salience network is associated with assigning meaning to incoming stimuli and regulating the balance of DMN and CEN - In a brain-imaging study in which participants pushed a button when they found that their thoughts had strayed, those cognitive activities were found to map onto the expected neural networks - In particular, initial focused awareness corresponds to activation of the CEN, mind wandering was associated with DMN, awareness of mind wandering coincided with SN, and shifting back to focused attention engaged the CEN Reductionist Theories  - Activity in the DMN is lower during flow states, so we could say that a shift in brain activity is the cause of the phenomenal experience of absorption in ones task - The analogy of a television program can be use to illustrate the difference between physicalism and transcendentalist beliefs - All I can see when I watch a hockey game on television are images moving across a screen - If I did not know any better I would be misled into believing that the hockey game was taking place inside the television set - I could erroneously prove to myself that the television was the source of the hockey game by playing a digital file of another hockey game and seeing the same sorts of images on the screen - Inherent in efforts to reduce mystical experiences to underlying physiological activity is the assumption that religious attributions by those having the experiences are actually misattributions, in that neurophysiological activity gets misinterpreted in noetic terms - There are many variations on the explanation of mysticism as erroneous attribution - Frued, for example, postulated that feelings of unity are recollections from ones infancy of unity, perhaps with one's mother, to which religious beliefs get attached - According to this viewpoint, two errors are involved in mystical experiences: an erroneous belief in the existence of God, and the erroneous interpretation of regressive experiences as evidence of union with GOD - One observation often made regarding mystical experiences is that they have common characteristics, be they physiological or phenomenological, that are independent of one's interpretation of them Transcendence as Exceptional Functioning - One of the problems with contextual approach to mystical experiences is that some such experiences appear to have had unexpected features that had not been predicted within the experiencers frame of reference - An example, with the christian contemplative Bernadetter Roberts, who said that she “had fallen outside her own, as well as the traditional frame of reference, when she came upon a path that seemed to begin where the writers on the contemplative life had left off - In 1986 consciousness survey by Robert Moore and the teacher, the claim that one's ideas about like have changed dramatically in the past was correlated with claims of having had transcendent or mystical experiences - While such a correlation does not establish causality, it is consistent with the reports of epiphanies in transcendent states of consciousness - The antithesis of the contextual position is that of the perennial philosophy, whereby mystical experiences are conceptualized as transcultural events interpreted according to the categories, beliefs, and language that are brought to them - According to Bucke, while the capacity for seeing in color has become widespread, the relative frequency of color-blindness attests to its evolutionary recency - Bucker believed, was a relatively new faculty that had been seen in only a handful of the best specimens of the race - We continue to understand transcendent states and create practices and technologies to shift people into them as martin has done, will transcendent states become the ordinary waking state for most of humanity as they already are for many of the individuals who have completed the finders course - Allan smith, who has experienced a profound spontaneous transcendent state, he said that the difference between ordinary consciousness and cosmic consciousness was like the difference between seeing in black and white and seeing in color - Allan smith has conceptualized knowledge resulting from cosmic consciousness has been to liken it to seeing a new color while in a non ordinary state of consciousness and subsequently being able to visualize the new color at will in an ordinary state of consciousness