Courses
PRES5401
Proseminar in Social and Community Process: Culture and Consciousness
This course integrates two perspectives on the social aspects of the person: social psychology, i.e. the behavioral perspective – and cultural psychology, i.e. the constructivist, consciousness oriented perspective. Integration of these two approaches creates a bridge between the socio-cultural view on human self and the explorations of the mind beyond the ego, both essential for transpersonal psychology. The potential creative alliance between social psychology and transpersonal psychology will also be explored.
The course will address theory and research on social and cultural processes, structures, and issues as they create the context for the individual mind. Students will examine the ways in which culture and mind (from both a neurobiological and consciousness oriented perspective), and more specifically, culture and self, mutually constitute one another. This mutual making of culture and self has implications for cross-culturally diverse patterns in cognition, emotion, motivation, moral reasoning, and psychopathology. Students will be encouraged to examine cultural meaning systems, emerging structures of awareness, and cultural practices as seminal for understanding of the higher- level mental processes, as well as for understanding human psychospiritual development. Students will be also learning how these internal and subjective psychospiritual processes establish, reproduce, and transform cultural systems. The course will contrast Eurocentric psychological perspectives with those of non-western societies. Though non-western societies will not be fully represented, the comparison still will give an idea of tensions and creative possibilities in the process of globalization.
The experiential part will include techniques of self - inquiry into one’s personal relationship with culture and social environment, and assignments which will heighten awareness of one’s own cultural heritage and identity.
Social and cultural psychology, integrated with the transpersonal perspective, point to the closeness of spiritual, social and cultural realms within the psyche. The impetus is for transpersonal psychology to become a more inclusive, potentially global inquiry into human consciousness that has the flexibility to generate appropriate constructs for the specific ways cultures and ethnicities shape psyches. Students will be expected to evaluate their own stance in the field of diversity in transpersonal psychology, and develop suggestions for future research in the cultural dimension of transpersonal studies.
PRES6068
Advanced Topics in Transpersonal Psychology:
Introduction to Phenomenological Method (3 units)
The class introduces the discipline of phenomenology and phenomenological research methods in psychology. It also addresses the spiritual dimension of phenomenology, such as Christian theological and Islamic epistemology, and that of personal spiritual practice. Course contents include foundations of psychological phenomenology, transpersonal psychological epistemology and spiritual phenomenology, and training both in the use of the phenomenological research method, and phenomenological method as personal spiritual/transformative practice.
The focus will be a) on developing research procedures, such as obtaining valid interview material, and descriptive analyses, including the method of imaginary variations; b) on developing of personal spiritual phenomenology-based practice.
PRES6298
Research group
Meditation and Yoga / Concentrative Spiritual Practices: Self-Experiments with EEG and Cognitive Testing (6 units)
The course examines the effects of body-oriented concentrative spiritual practices which can effectively cause transformation of personality, character, and constitution. These practices can be potentially used as interventions in clinical work. The course is based on instructor’s research and traditional teaching of spiritual practice involving bodily forms of awareness and concentrative meditation. This includes practice in Kundalini Yoga, Taoist alchemy, Buddhist Tantra, and a cluster of practices from embodied forms of Sufism and Hesychasm.
While meditation research has advanced significantly over the years, effects of concentrative spiritual practices have not been well researched. However there is a significant unpublished body of findings in oral traditions indicating tangible effects of concentration body-oriented spiritual practices. One of the reasons why these practices remained outside the scope of research may be that due to strong effects on personality and constitution they were traditionally hidden from the uninitiated, or disclosed only through teacher-disciple relationship.
The course is, in fact, a working research group. It consists of training in practices and self-experimentation as well as training in EEG measurements, cognitive testing and data collection, and literature search and review. The analysis of data, interpretation and theory building will be continued outside of the course as a research project, open for formal and informal participation to all students in the course. The focus of the study will be on a) the phenomenologically identified psychospiritual mechanisms of the practices, b) testing the cognitive effects of practices, and c) brain-waves analysis in different meditation states.
