The Transpersonal Experience in Religion and Culture as a Response to the Challenges of Death

Abstract

The genesis of ideas about individual finiteness in Western philosophy is shown: death is an initiatory event, the meaning of which depends both on the state of human consciousness in each of the historical eras, and on the characteristics of individual consciousness. In the postmodern period, individualism, material values primacy, ignoring transcendental things, tabooing the problem of death, and the loss of meaning prevailed in everyday consciousness. The way out of the crisis is the individual attitude to the sacred secret of being, capable of filling a person's existence with meaning, significance, and happiness. The highest manifestation of spirituality is transpersonal experience, which initiates a person's approach to his essence through symbolic death and rebirth. The reality of the absolute, revealed in experience, is comprehended not rationally discursively, but intuitively contemplatively, through existential involvement.