The Transpersonal Psycho-Phenomenology of Self & Soul: Meditators and Multiples speak

Abstract

A research project has been undertaken to explore the phenomenology of self. The goal has been to elicit from participants explicit expressions of their implicit understanding of the nature of their self. More specifically, the focus has been on the sense of self as 'nonlocal.' The term nonlocal has been defined as: beyond the conventional understanding of time, space, material reality, and causation, i.e. with respect to self, concerned with dimensions beyond the Newtonian-Cartesian understanding of the body-mind-sense complex. The focus on nonlocality of self brings this project into the arena of what Ron Valle has termed transpersonal phenomenological psychology (Anderson et al., 1996).