Transpersonal Psychology (Briefly) Explained
What is transpersonal psychology, really?
Transpersonal psychology is marketed as an esoteric or mystical field of psychology, one focused on the spiritual awakening of individuals in group settings.
In reality, transpersonal psychology is a sophisticated mask for cult psychology, used to produce atypical religious beliefs in individuals and groups. As a practice, transpersonal psychology was manufactured by religious groups with a history of working collectively to force transformation into the lives of its members using methods of illusion, simulating the influence of God. The outer form of religious behavior does not matter in transpersonal psychology, and the victim’s fundamental quality of life is not given high priority—what matters is that their nature and (more particularly) their behaviors are changed by episodes of crisis leading to manufactured resolution.
Consequently, adopting any new type of religious practice or identity—from satanism, shamanism, Catholicism, Protestantism or Judaism or Islam or Sufism, Huna or Kabbalah, Freemasonry or Scientology, and virtually any other type of spiritual association or identity—is equivalent to adopting no religious identity at all. What matters is that negative behaviors change (negative as perceived by the transpersonal community). The particular religious label itself is almost meaningless, because truth is perceived as an individual and culturally relative, an accident of time and space.
Because truth is relative, good and evil are likewise relative values, and therefore flexible. Transgressive behaviors are very common for transpersonal practicioners who have “reconciled with their shadow halves” and such. Any behavior, of any kind, is acceptable to them in creating new faith and behavior patterns and beliefs in their client-victims. This is how they accomplish the process of soul reformation. By any means necessary. Or convenient.
Transpersonalists—and their antecedent groups, which include esoteric collectives like Swedenborgians, but also influential groups like Freemasons and Jungians—have often used traditional religious myths and spiritual symbols to manufacture new religious movements (like Huna, theosophy, or Gardnerian Wicca). In the transpersonal tradition, religions are cultural accidents of history, artifacts that may be treated as base or mundane; there is nothing inherently sacred about any authentic religion that cannot be profaned, no boundary that cannot be crossed for profit, pleasure, or the acquisition of personal power. One man’s evil is another man’s good, is the logic. So somehow, evil is good; truth is falsehood.
This is the power of transpersonal nondualism: good and evil are the same; truth and lies are one reality, because all truth is culturally contextual; “God” is as responsible for falsehood and evil as truth and goodness. So believe what you want. Each person “lives their own dream.” Moral reality is neither shared or absolute, because “you are the universe happening right now”—you alone are the center of the universe; you alone determine your truth.
Financial or personal profit is almost always an essential motivational factor for those who practice transpersonal psychology. However, some transpersonalists are motivated to manipulate the souls of newcomers by something other than money; they practice the Craft following the dictates of their own own trauma, bent sense of justice, absent conscience, or personal narcissism. They may be convinced that—by doing abhorrently evil things—orchestrating manslaughter, suicidal ideation or desperation, the loss of pets, the destruction of marriages, the amplification of addictions, by committing real acts of physical or psychological torture, theft, extreme forms of ongoing harassment—they are acting for the greater good of humankind, or creating karma of their own design in the lives of lesser humans: all the world is a stage, and they are writing scripts for other people.
There are many small transpersonal practices or clinics that offer introductory sessions to people interested in psychic manifestations, chakra energy clearings, angel readings, and similar New Age services. This is how many professionals get their foot in the door of your life, and how cynics meet people with a tendency towards credulity.
Real, effective, and persistent transpersonal psychology is practiced in very large but discrete group settings—or networks—where those involved do not fully disclose themselves, their intentions, or their methods. Many people who work to transform (or “transmute”) an individual might never meet that individual; victims are seen as a file, an incident report, a packet of information, a profile on a website they frequently check up on—one more object dropped into a system to be manipulated. Not a person with a family that will be harmed by their collective efforts. No drop of water feels responsible for the flood.
Transpersonal professionals and volunteers in these networks of influence usually work discretely with a range or cluster of partners. They go to significant lengths to signal their participation in the culture without saying the words explicitly—they use special signs and shapes, secret handshakes (literal. secret. handshakes. yes.), speak in subtexts. They often maintain multiple professional identities, sometimes using different legal names, and maintain memberships in larger groups, lodges, temples, or spiritual communities. Some of them maintain elaborate double-identities or cover identities—voluntarily—as if living a fantasy life inspired by the comics. Their private joy comes from living inside elaborate deceptions like 007, Batman, or Robin Hood, as if their were a paralegal arm of the CIA or FBI with a secret Impossible Mission.
As with stage magic, the real work of transpersonal psychology takes place while you are not looking, while you are distracted by a primary performer and their assistants making a scene in front of you, while several helpers or partners place false signs and wonders into the environment around you, without your knowledge, to cause episodes of fear, wonder, shock, and awe, to emulate divine providence and coincidence. In some cases, these invisible partners may contact your friends or family, or even befriend them, to learn more about you discretely, and influence their thinking about you in crisis situations. (Imagine a circle of white men and women dressed as native shamans, dancing in a circle with drums and rattles and pretend to care about your spirit animals, while accomplices in Portland, Melbourne, and London write shitty revenge porn books about your wife and wait for you to discover The Great Mystery—now you understand Carlos Castaneda).
Reverse psychology, doublespeak (or code-speaking), and collective gaslighting are the basic tools of the transpersonal trade; the rise of internet data-harvesting at transpersonally-funded data-centers has compounded the effectiveness of this practice in recent decades; transpersonal universities now offer degrees in website building, coding, and digital systems security. Why? What does that have to do with spiritual awakening? The data graduates can gather with these tools is essential to producing intimate, soul-crushing illusions. With these tools, transpersonal practitioners rely on a mixed network of professionals and volunteers to create situations of shock, shame, and fear in the lives and minds of their subjects.
These practices—honed over centuries and escalated with AI driven tools just now seeing the light of day—can lead victim to escalating levels of psychological confusion and harm, through complex stages of manipulation in which they are harmed at different psychological and spiritual levels with tactics of surprise and shock, betrayal and trauma bondage. Once a group or network begins to pressure a victim caught between collaborators, they experience a steady rise in emotional tension that often leads to dramatic collapse (represented to them as awakening or ego death, in the Jungian tradition). Surrounded by religious images and authorities that know how to leverage their inner fears and fantasies, victims are often led to perpetually increasing levels of obedience and compliance. Gradually or even suddenly, they experience a radical transformation of personality under the influence of a group pressure they associate with divinity: their new life.
During their a spiral of crisis, victims are pressured to offer up increasingly vulnerable disclosures, theatrically endorse cheap acts of forgiveness, to accept cataclysmic life changes that fit a group agenda.
People change careers, drop out of schools, begin new sexual practices, have affairs, divorce spouses, move to new cities, states, or countries, disown children, even transition to new genders. In many cases, the transpersonal collective may discretely fund their movements away from friends and family, further isolating them. This too is a signature move also among cult leaders and cult groups.
These experiences of radical crisis and transformation are explained on the open market as organic “spiritual emergencies”—natural disasters of the soul, guided by benevolent “spiritual emergence” gurus, experts willing to help individuals through intense personal changes. In reality, this is the tip of a larger network that startles, shocks, pushes and pulls forces clients into radically different psychospiritual conditions of personality.
Those who discover the deep, hidden nature of transpersonal psychology are usually in a state of shock.
They are easily persuaded to either partake of the cheap rewards of compliance, or to flee silently, even when they know what has happened is wrong.
It is normal for a gaslighting victim to doubt their own clear judgment, especially when they are targeted by multiple gaslighters in an undisclosed social grouping that cannot be easily identified or held accountable. Threats or acts of violence and exposure are one of several methods which may be used to keep a victim from speaking out.
But threats may not always be necessary. This is especially true when those gaslighters are leveraging every sacred symbol to imitate the divine providence of God, and recognize no moral or spiritual boundary. If the illusion is successful, a victim may believe—for many years, or longer—that God orchestrated their life-crisis, and not a subpar conscienceless group of self appointed “secret satans” acting as the left hand of God (I mean people who believe they are God’s punishers, with permission to do evil in God’s name, having themselves a transpersonal affiliation to boot).
Social invisibility is the most important part of shocking newcomers into compliance and silence about their experience of transpersonal soul transformation. Transpersonal practitioners of many types go to great lengths to confuse and deceive both their victims and the general public about their purpose, or even about their very existence: “You may lie,” as in The Giver.
When a victim is targeted for soul reformation (again, “transmutation” is the older term) using extreme trauma, multiple groups with overlapping affiliations may work independently using parallel methods—as if heaven and hell are coordinating against a soul to kill the sin in them. Often, unless they are directly collaborating with a specific local crew or private network, transpersonal volunteers conceal their own plans from other people affiliated with the transpersonal community—as if their should be no crossover between the angels and demons swarming the real human victims with fantasies of their own grandiosity. But pragmatically, this also limits the legal and emotional culpability of each participant, in each spiritual emergency they collectively create. Again: no drop of rain feels personally responsible for the flood of transpersonal destruction.
Honestly?
Hidden angels?
Secret satans?
Idiot humans working together inside hidden heavens and hells on earth to damage newcomers and harvest them into God’s elitist kingdom of where no one confesses the truth and you can hear only the silence of the lambs?
It’s all meant to sound crazy; it is common to hide the practice of transpersonal psychology behind open jokes about conspiracy theories, Illuminati, and incidents of personal insanity and psychosis—all while driving victims into an episode of visible “mental fracture” that will discredit and shame them. This self-referential joking is a type of hiding in plain sight, according to the maxim that the best lies contain truth.
This is one of the reasons it is safe or fair to call transpersonal psychology objectively “evil;” the Craft relies on a group of conspirators using staged spiritual practices to create experiences of “mystical psychosis” in victim after victim—by literally mocking and shaming them into a spiral of personal crisis leading to mental fracture. In the aftermath they become suggestible and compliant, and remain powerless and silent about their abuse, or confused about its nature and scope—which allows the abuse to continue for victim after victim.
Transpersonal psychology is part of an archaic culture—developed out of centuries of practice—which creates “secret satans” who give themselves permission to shamelessly exploit any moral boundary and any religious tradition in order to appear socially, morally, and intellectually respectable.
Many participants compound their own perversion by posing as angels; they convince themselves that they are angelic because they refrain from direct evil, and only participate in the evil indirectly, by looking the other way while the “bad” transpersonals do the very bad things. “No, I have no idea who was driving the bus that ran over your dog and killed your wife. Blessed Be.”
Transpersonal psychology is manufactured out of a global stew of religious traditions and spiritual practices, so it may be marketed to people of all faiths, and to people without traditional faith.
Transpersonal practicioners prey on religious and spiritual hope most of all. People who want to believe firmly in “more” than the physical world can be easily deceived by stage magic when the magician is wearing priestly robes. And people will sell anything for a profit, even their souls. In fact, revealing the deceptive nature of the transpersonal act—finally showing a believer that their transformation was accomplished by deception, betrayals of faith and trust, and illusion—is a common method of destroying the faith system of a victim who was already deceived by mystical stage magic, and led into some new form of faith after their original tradition.
Where does transpersonal psychology come from?
The Masonic tradition is largely responsible for the transmission of alchemical psychology across the generations across centuries of history. But no single lodge or temple is responsible for masking the Craft as a new spiritual discipline instead of the usual occult.
Before the influence of the Lodge was at all relevant, the High Church tradition was largely responsible for aggregating the secrets of the ancients alchemists—and eventually produced the transpersonal underground. So no single religious tradition is responsible for the invention of transpersonal psychology. It was, and always has been, a group effort, a cooperation between polar influences.
No single religious denomination is above or free from the influence of transpersonal psychology as it is practiced in the public sphere today, as groups playing “God” in society seeks to imitate the metaphysics of divine consciousness and the laws of karma.
The content here (when I get around to it) is generally focused on discussing the methods, motives, practices, groups, subgroups, goals, intentions, and culture of transpersonal psychology as it is known currently, in this century and decade—including its manufacture, history, public figures, and artifacts of culture which it has produced since “transpersonal psychology” was introduced in the 1960s on the back of Jungian theory. But I am also interested in the antecedents of transpersonal psychology, the precursors to the “official” production as it is known today: theosophy, transcendentalism, Jungianism, transhumanism, Freemasonry, alchemy, Swedenborgianism, interreligious groups associated with the Oxford Group and the Oxford Movement, and so on. There are hundreds of years between the planting of the seeds, and the contemporary fruits of the tree. And all that is separate from the mystical religious traditions which solo practitioners mined and integrated into their alchemical group practices—all worthy of investigation.
If you would like to dig into the roots of transpersonal psychology for yourself, you may want to pick up The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (2004), The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Change by Don Miguel Ruiz (1997), A Course in Miracles (1975) by Helen Shucman, The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (1963) by Alan Watts, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions (1958) by Anonymous, The Secret Science Behind Miracles (1948) by Max Freedom Long, Psychology and Alchemy (1944) by Carl Jung, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928) by Manly P. Hall, or even Heaven and Hell by Emanuel Swedenborg (1758), and The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz by Johann Valentin Andreae (1616). Official texts on the practice of transpersonal psychology like The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology (2015) may also be useful, if particular attention is paid to subtext and implication in application.
