The Possibility of Enhanced Well-Being Beyond the Ego (Part 7)
In entry 7 in our series on ego dissolution (pulled from my graduate research on the phenomenon) we continue exploring why counselors and mental health professionals should care about ego dissolution, focusing on how ego dissolution seems to offer unique vistas of psychological well-being.
As mentioned, transpersonal psychology has long been concerned with “beyond-ego” development, or the stages of growth that occur after a person loses identification with the ego. Though the field of transpersonal psychology has not been received by the psychological community for a number of reasons (Wade, 2019), their findings are worth considering. Specifically, counselors should take a special interest in research about how ego dissolution may open the door to new vistas of well-being.
Though the participants in the Tzu, Bannerman, and Griffith’s study (2015) on spiritual teachers noted that distress and terror were components of their spiritual awakenings, they also found that overall positive development was the final outcome. Besides momentary experiences of bliss, the movement beyond identification with the ego opened the participants up to new dimensions of being which entailed a sense of “ultimate freedom” (Tzu, Bannerman, & Griffith, 2015). This is far from the only study to convey this result. Taylor (2013) found that all 25 participants who experienced spiritual awakening reported enhanced well-being or positive states, an enduring new state of being, and an increased ability to live in the present. Similar findings were observed in related qualitative studies (McCormink, 2010; Costeines, 2009). The vast majority of them also experienced a new sense of connectedness, reduction in the fear of death, reduced interest in materialism, reduced identification with thoughts and overall cognitive activity, and a decreased sense of the need for group belonging (Taylor, 2013). In other words, their awakening experiences brought new opportunities for enhanced well-being.
Perhaps the lack of attention that these types of findings have received is evidence of academic psychology’s dominant biases and preferences. Imagine if the findings above had been reported for a new pharmaceutical intervention; it’s safe to assume that quantitative researchers would have been tripping over themselves to replicate and confirm these findings, and that would make sense, given how desirable these outcomes are. It follows that we should lend the same amount of interest to this domain of research that we would lend to any other that uncovered new opportunities for enhanced well-being. If Taylor’s (2013) and Tzu et al.’s (2015) research subjects are representative of the greater population, then it could be the case that ego dissolution opens the door to new experiences of well-being that popular models of development do not account for.
In the next entry, we will begin examining how modern research has explained ego death.
