Approaches to Transpersonal Epistemology

This is another post taken almost directly from my independent study schoolwork. Like yesterday's post, it assumes familiarity with the field, but I'm still very happy to take questions! Also like yesterday: Approaches to Transpersonal Epistemology © 2025 by Kimberly Israel is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Heriot-Maitland et al., 2023: Transpersonal Experiences Questionnaire

Optimism about the future of transpersonal psychology is supported by an article in a mainstream psychology journal describing the development of an instrument for assessing the range of transpersonal experience in individuals. Heriot-Maitland et al. (2023) report a growing awareness of “psychotic-like experience” in the non-clinical population and a need to measure it on a continuum. Although the experiences in question may resemble psychotic symptoms, terms such as “anomalous experience” and “transpersonal experience” are used to de-stigmatize and de-pathologize them in a non-clinical context.

 

Heriot-Maitland et al. developed their Transpersonal Experience Questionnaire beginning with an unpublished set of 57 Likert-scale items from one of the authors and using established methods to reduce it to 19 binary (yes or no) items. Unlike many similar instruments, the questions refer only to the past seven days, allowing for use with a single individual at different timepoints.

 

 Factor analysis indicated that all items on the questionnaire load to a single underlying factor, though responses to several items correlated significantly with either age or level of education. The population sample that participated in testing of the instrument was disproportionately white, female, and young. Although the authors found no correlations between responses and gender or ethnicity, further research would be needed to validate the instrument for a more diverse population, and the correlations with age and education need to be considered for any practical application.

 

The authors point out that the most “pathological” items on the questionnaire, those relating to hallucinations or delusions, were not the most discriminatory, suggesting that transpersonal experience is indeed different from clinical psychosis.  

 

Cunningham, 2023: Ontology of Spiritual Knowledge

           

Despite an encouraging contribution to mainstream psychology, the transpersonal field also continues to struggle with questions of epistemology. Cunningham (2023) addresses the felt sense of reality that accompanies many exceptional human experiences. Not only do the experiences feel real in the sense of seeming to be actual relational encounters, but they may include a sense of epistemological validity, of being “states of knowledge” that are self-validating to the experiencer.

 

Cunningham argues that "the very antiquity and universality of certain exceptional human experiences adds to rather than detracts from the plausibility of their possible ontological reality" (Cunningham, 2023). Although the ontological reality of such experiences is unquestionable in the sense that people do have them, their ubiquity alone does not mean that the experiences imply an additional, unseen ontological reality. After all, the brightness contrast visual illusion (an illusion in which colored regions that reflect the same wavelengths of light are perceived as different colors based on the brightness and contrast of the surrounding field) applies to urban Westerners and to rural Africans (Kroupin et al., 2025), despite the different cultural influences. More emotionally salient forms of non-ontological meaning-making may also apply across cultures.

 

Cunningham echoes Wilber (1990) in arguing that “spiritual knowledge claims are no more ‘private’ than mathematical knowledge claims” due to the fact that spiritual knowledge can be taught and that people can learn methods to access it and compare experiences. The degree of pluralism in spirituality, however, is quite different from that in mathematics.

 

Creativity leads to new insights and opens up “new realm[s] of human discourse” (Cunningham, 2023) in both spirituality and mathematics, but the degree of personal, subjective expression in spirituality might be more akin to that of art than mathematics. Spirituality can be similar to mathematics, however, in that it can permeate all aspects of an individual life and provide coherence, much like mathematics can relate phenomena in the natural world through underlying patterns that may not be immediately obvious.

Image credit: Dodek

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gradient-optical-illusion.svg

References

Cunningham, P.F. (2023). An empirically controlled metaphysics in a science of spirituality - is something real happening? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 43(2), 90-107.

Heriot-Maitland, C., Vitoratou, S., Peters, E., Hermans, K., Wykes, T., & Brett, C. (2023). Detecting anomalous experiences in the community: the Transpersonal Experiences Questionnaire (TEQ). Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 96, 383-398.

Kroupin, I., Davis, H. E., Lopes, A. J. P., Konkle, T., & Muthukrishna, M. (2025, February 13). Visual illusions reveal wide range of cross-cultural differences in visual perception. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gxzcp_v2.

Wilber, K. (1990). Eye to eye: the quest for the new paradigm. Shambhala.