What are transcendent experiences?

Types of transcendent experiences 

Transpersonal psychology has sought to integrate transcendent (often spiritual) experiences within modern psychological theories.

These experiences include peak experiences and flow states. Whereas the former are caused by external events and entail a high level of stimulation or euphoria, the latter are internal mental states that occur when we’re so completely immersed in an activity that we’re not conscious of time or anything else.

These experiences can include mystical experiences and emotions, such as awe and love.

Transcendent experiences also involve altered states of consciousness that are significantly different from normal waking states. They can be induced in various ways whether spontaneously; physically and physiologically, such as through fasting; psychologically through music, meditation and hypnosis; pathologically through brain damage; or pharmacologically. Altered states of consciousness can include sensory hallucinations, especially visual and auditory ones. In synaesthesia, different senses become blurred, such as ‘sound to image’ hallucinations where what we see appears to correspond and move to the sounds or music we can hear.

New scientific interest in transcendence psychology 

There has tended to be be a focus on negative transcendent experiences, such as those involved in mental illness; for example, psychosis where thoughts and emotion become severely separated, involving delusion, paranoia and even hearing voices. However, there is a renewed scientific interest in understanding transcendent experiences and the positive role they can play mental health and human flourishing. The focus is not on the beliefs and values associated with these experiences but their phenomenology- what they feel like.

Transcendent experiences are psychological states characterised by two experiences:

• decreased self-salience where the bodily sense of self and its boundaries feel like they are fading or dissolving;
• increased feelings of connection to something or people beyond the self.

The former is possibly mediated by the superior and inferior parietal cortices that are responsible for modelling bodily and self-boundaries. The latter is associated with the activity of neuropeptides, such as oxytocin and arginine vasopressin, although it may also involve changes to the activity of the vagus nerve that controls parasympathetic aspects of the autonomic nervous system, as well as regions of the brain related to social cognitive processes.