Today, a more comprehensive view of human nature is developing. It recognizes our personal uniqueness as well as a transpersonal dimension, something which is beyond our individual egos, and yet still is a part of us. Based on observations and practices from many cultures, the transpersonal perspective is informed by modern psychology, the humanities and human sciences, as well as contemporary spiritual disciplines and the wisdom traditions.

You can actively explore the transpersonal perspective by participating in the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, the leading organization devoted to the field. Through the activities and publications of the Association you can develop your personal, professional, and educational interests.

The transpersonal perspective is being applied in many fields from psychology and psychiatry to anthropology, sociology, medicine and business, education and ecology.

For additional perspectives and resources in the transpersonal field, please visit A Guide to the Religious and Spiritual Internet If you have suggestions of new links for our Guides to the Transpersonal, Spiritual, or Mental Health Internet, please send them to: info@atpweb.org.

Transpersonal Psychology addresses a wide range of subjects including:

• Psychology and psychotherapy
• Meditation, spiritual paths and practices
• Change and personal transformation
• Consciousness research
• Addiction and recovery
• Psychedelic and altered states of consciousness research
• Death, dying and near death experience (NDE)
• Self-realization and higher values
• The mind-body connection
• Mythology and Shamanism
• Exceptional Human Experience (EHE)

You can actively explore the transpersonal perspective by participating in the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. Here is a collection of excerpts from the Journal Of Transpersonal Psychology (JTP), representing a range of inspiriing thought over 30 years:

Transpersonal experiences may be defined as experiences in which the sense of identity of self extends beyond (trans) the individual or personal to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, psyche or cosmos.

-Roger Walsh & Frances Vaughan, "On Transpersonal Definitions", JTP,Vol. 25, #2, 1993.

Development is a process of continual transcendence...evolution is indeed, self-realization through self-transcendence.

-Ken Wilber, "A Developmental View of Consciousness", JTP, Vol.11, #1, 1979.

You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.

-Jack Engler, "Therapeutic Aims in Psychotherapy and Meditation", JTP, Vol. 16, #1, 1984

We have mapped transpersonal development beyond what was formerly considered the ceiling of human possibility and have found preliminary evidence of common psychological and spiritual developmental sequences across traditions.

-Roger Walsh,"On Transpersonal Definitions", JTP, Vol. 25, #2, 1993.

If a person is psychologically secure, they are able to shift from a personal focus to a universal focus. This is what I believe is meant in spiritual practice when people talk about "losing one's ego". I believe that if people have a level of personal maturity and ego integration, they can make the shift from "life is happening to me" to "life is happening". It is a happy shift, a shift from an inside-out, "me-focused" view to a cosmic or universal overview.

-Sylvia Boorstein, "Spiritual Issues in Psychotherapy", JTP, Vol. 26,#2, 1994