Transpersonal psychology developed from earlier schools of psychology including psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanistic psychology. Transpersonal psychology attempts to describe and integrate the experience of mysticism within modern psychological theory. Types of mystical experience examined vary greatly but include religious conversion, altered states of consciousness, trance and other spiritual practices.

Most of us experience moments of intuition and deep knowing, when "something within" speaks clearly. In these moments, the chatter of normal self-talk gives way to deeper inner wisdom. With transpersonal pychology, the goal of self-development is to improve one's ability to listen, to shift habitual attention from the chatter to the wisdom within.

The path inward can take many different forms such as spiritual practices like meditation and prayer, yoga, martial arts, psychotherapy, life experiences, or relationships. All are useful as we create our own peak experiences and re-create our being.

Transpersonal psychology examines the self-transcendent aspects of the human experience. A definition from Lajoie and Shapiro (1992) in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology suggests that transpersonal psychology "is concerned with the study of humanity’s highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness" (p.91).

Other concerns of transpersonal psychology include spiritual self-development, peak experiences, mystical experiences, systemic trance and other metaphysical experiences of living.

While there are a number of theorists associated with transpersonal psychology, including Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and Roberto Assagioli, one of the first is William James. His book The Varieties of Religious Experience, originally published in 1902, is considered to be one of the first works that address the underpinnings of transpersonal psychology.

Quote from William James

The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one's self to understand a lover's state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.

According to Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan (1993), "One discovery in particular was to have an enormous impact and eventually give birth to transpersonal psychology. Exceptionally psychologically healthy people tend to have “peak experiences”: brief but extremely intense, blissful, meaningful, and beneficial experiences of expanded identity and union with the universe. Similar experiences have been recognized across history and have been called mystical, spiritual, and unitive experience, or in the East, samadhi and satori." (p. 3).

Transpersonal psychology was developed in part to explore the characteristics of such experiences. In a public lecture in 1962, Abraham H. Maslow (1962) described the features of peak experiences: "These moments were of pure, positive happiness, when all doubts, all fears, all inhibitions, all tensions, all weaknesses, were left behind. Now self consciousness was lost. All separateness and distance from the world disappeared as they felt one with the world, fused with it, really belonging to it, instead of being outside, looking in." (p. 9)

One of the chief aims of transpersonal psychology is to examine the characteristics of exceptional human experience. Rosemarie Anderson (1998).explained the scope of this inquiry as follows: "Whenever possible, transpersonal psychology seeks to delve deeply into the most profound aspects of human experience, such as mystical and unitive experiences, personal transformation, meditative awareness, experiences of wonder and ecstasy, and alternative and expansive states of consciousness." (p. xxi)

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