While addressing global problems including conflict and violence is a common human agenda, they are human-caused: They are created and sustained through our thoughts. Though external causes and conditions cannot be ignored, the most fundamental problem is an epistemological one—our way of knowing and viewing the world. As the shape of the global conditions relies on our thoughts or ways of thinking, it is imperative to make a critical analysis of our mind. This paper explores how the Buddhist philosophy of (...) human mind develops a model of global mind to achieve a peaceful future. Firstly, the analysis offers the concept of “the conditioned mind”—mind shaped by socially constructed frame of reference and examines how it becomes a cause of trouble. Secondly, it proposes the concept of “the unconditioned mind”—mind-state transcendent of an attachment to any form of frame of reference as an antidote to the potential danger of the conditioned state. Then, global mind is explored. It is characterized as the mixture of the conditioned and the unconditioned mind with the practice of multiple functions of mind—mindful practice, dialectical philosophical contemplation, and compassionate mind. The appreciation and enacting of both the conditioned mind and the unconditioned mind underpinned by the multiple functions of mind empowers us to touch universal humanity and inherent dignity of all human beings and to co-create new values, norms, and visions with those having different frames of reference to embody interdependent and interconnected human relationships. (shrink)

Several substantial critiques remain a source of fractionalizing debate within transpersonal psychology, including the weakness of its definition, whether it is redundant with Wilber’s integral psychology, whether it is a scientific field, whether it is too metaphysical, whether it neglects the problem of evil, and what contribution can it make to mainstream psychology. This article explicates these and related areas of critique and provides a response that identifies the essential challenges and future prospects of transpersonal psychology. The article also emphasizes (...) the field’s unique role as a potential bridge connecting psychological science with the transpersonal psyche in a way that can more fully recognize the importance of the latter. (shrink)

The article proposes an analogue of conceptual change in the context of comprehensive or deep emotional change and growth, and explores some aspects of its logic in that context. This is not to reduce emotions to concepts, but to say that concepts express the sense that is already inherent in experience and reality. When emotional states change so thoroughly that their applicable concepts become completely different, they shift from one logical structure to another. At the moment or phase when one (...) conceptual structure transforms into another, two logically incompatible descriptions both apply to the same state at the same time. As a result, the correct description of this moment and its development involves conceptual confusion, non sequitur, and logical contradiction. In these contexts, the sense itself of the emotional experience and process is partly characterized by what are otherwise violations of sense. Failure of sense is part of how these experiences make sense. The article explores some of the consequences of this paradox of sense for the nature and experience of deep emotional change and for the meaning of change itself in this context. (shrink)