Psychospiritual Technologies

     "It seems like our culture is totally asleep. Hidden behind conventional rituals of religion, is a contemplative core constituted of a technology, a mind-training set of practices for cultivating the same states of mind that the founders of the major religions had realized. This spiritual technology is accompanied by road maps, psychologies and philosophies which describe the worldviews, insights and discoveries that emerged as one did these practices. These traditions contain a gold mine, a reservoir of human kinds deepest accumulated wisdom.
     For the first time in history, we have all the world's spiritual traditions available to us, all of the contemplative practices, plus a psychology (transpersonal psychology) that recognizes altered states of consciousness and transpersonal developmental stages. So that for the first time in the West we have a psychology that is adequate to an understanding of the great spiritual traditions and doesn't reduce them to pathology or some problematic status. Now there's a way of understanding these spiritual traditions as psychospiritual technologies producing altered and higher states of consciousness, for cultivating postconventional, transpersonal developmental stages, and for cultivating the great virtues - love, compassion, wisdom, empathy, which the great traditions have held as ideals across the millenia."                                       Roger Walsh

Roger Walsh MD, PhD - keynote address