This article considers the psychology of meditation and other introverted forms of mystical development from a neo-Piagetian perspective, which has commonalities with biogenetic structuralist and neurotheological approaches. Evidence is found that lines of meditative development unfold through Patañjali’s stages at different rates in an echo of the unfolding of lines of cognitive development through Piaget’s stages at different rates. Similar factors predicting the degree of independence of development apply to both conventional cognitive and meditative contents. As the same brain and (...) the same nervous system are involved in both cognitive developmental psychology and meditation there are likely to be commonalities between conventional psychological and transpersonal development. Neo-Piagetian transpersonal psychology predicts a variable landscape of spiritual development across traditions and individuals, in line with variability in the cultural learning environment. (shrink)

This article concentrates on the latest international trends in the research on psychological development of adults, and especially on the development of cognition. The field of research has been very fragmented, and researchers have kept creating new models one after another to describe their own lines of thought and also seeking for empirical evidence for their models. This has created a rather equivocal picture of the phenomenon itself. The present article attempts to identify the historical roots of the field, and (...) introduces descriptive factors that could conceptually determine the gist of the phenomenon. In this context we will discuss, mainly, research going back to Piaget and Perry, epistemic development, integration of emotion and cognition, plus diverse research in the fields of wisdom and spirituality. The main claim is that these models follow similar a tendency towards holism and progress towards integrative thinking on various domains and fields of human psyche. (shrink)