Overview

Glenn Hartelius has emerged as a central figure in contemporary transpersonal psychology, particularly through his editorial stewardship of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies and his sustained critical engagement with the field’s foundational assumptions. His work addresses a persistent tension in transpersonal psychology: the desire to honor subjective, transformative experience while maintaining scientific rigor and avoiding metaphysical overreach. Rather than resolving this tension through compromise, Hartelius has argued for a reconceptualization of what rigorous, whole-person psychology can be, one that embraces empirical investigation, acknowledges the limits of current measurement tools, and remains epistemologically honest about the difference between phenomenological description and metaphysical claim.

His contributions span three interconnected domains: the historiography and sociology of transpersonal psychology as a field; critical analysis of conceptual and metaphysical errors in transpersonal theory; and methodological innovation in how transpersonal research can be conducted with greater precision and inclusivity. Across these domains, he has consistently advocated for what he terms a “whole person” or “all person” approach, one that integrates diverse epistemologies, cultural perspectives, and ways of knowing without collapsing them into a single metaphysical framework.

Life and career

Hartelius has held faculty positions at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a leading center for transpersonal and integral studies in San Francisco. His career has been defined by editorial and curatorial work within the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, where he has served as editor and authored numerous editorial introductions that frame the field’s evolving concerns and methodological standards.

His editorial tenure has been marked by a deliberate effort to expand the journal’s scope and rigor. Beginning in the late 2000s, Hartelius introduced special topic sections on quantitative research methods, transpersonal psychotherapy, spirituality, relational and developmental spirituality, parapsychology, transpersonal measures, and diversity in transpersonal approaches. Each of these sections was accompanied by an editorial introduction that articulated the rationale for the topic and the standards of evidence and argumentation the journal would apply. This curatorial approach transformed the journal from a venue primarily for theoretical and phenomenological work into a platform for empirical investigation, critical philosophy, and cross-cultural dialog.

In 2008, Hartelius collaborated with Stanislav Grof, Harris Friedman, and David Lukoff on a historical review of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA), documenting the organization’s founding in 1978, its dissolution in 2004, and efforts toward its reactivation and revitalization.⁷ This work positioned him as a historian of the transpersonal movement and a steward of its institutional memory.

Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Hartelius has published a series of critical papers addressing conceptual confusion in transpersonal theory. These works target specific ideas that have gained currency in New Age and transpersonal circles but do not withstand scrutiny when examined against their original sources or against standards of psychological precision. His approach has been scholarly rather than dismissive, he engages deeply with the traditions (Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, perennialism) that transpersonal psychology has attempted to integrate, and he documents precisely where and why the transpersonal appropriations diverge from or misrepresent the source material.

Research and editorial leadership

Empirical trends in transpersonal psychology

In 2021, Hartelius published a comprehensive analysis of empirical research trends in transpersonal psychology over the field’s first five decades. Drawing on a systematic review of articles published in the two flagship journals, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, he documented the role and growth of empirical work in the field’s literature. His findings revealed that empirical research has constituted a small though gradually growing proportion of the field’s published output, and that the field has made substantive progress in correcting early gender imbalances in authorship, though gender disparity in transpersonal psychology remains somewhat greater than in broader psychology.¹ The analysis also tracked geographical distribution of authorship, showing continued growth in international contributions but noting that growth in North American authorship has outpaced international expansion.

This work established Hartelius as a quantitative analyst of the field itself, someone capable of stepping back from theoretical debates to examine the empirical patterns in how transpersonal psychology is actually conducted and published. The study provided a baseline for assessing the field’s progress toward greater empirical rigor and diversity.

Conceptual and metaphysical critique

Beginning in the mid-2010s, Hartelius undertook a sustained critical examination of specific concepts that have become influential in transpersonal and New Age thought. In 2017, he published a detailed analysis of perennialism, the idea that all spiritual traditions, despite surface differences, point toward a single universal consciousness or ultimate reality. He argued that perennialist models, including those developed by Ken Wilber and others, rely fundamentally on circular reasoning: they identify patterns in spiritual experience reports, use these patterns as the basis for perennialist premises, and then offer the same patterns as evidence for those premises. This logical circularity, he contended, does not constitute valid support for perennialism as a psychological or metaphysical theory.³

In subsequent work, Hartelius examined the concept of “nondual states”, a term increasingly used in transpersonal and New Age contexts to describe states of consciousness in which the sense of self is softened or expanded. He demonstrated that this usage is incompatible with lineage-based Advaita Vedanta teachings, inadequately precise to serve as a psychological construct, and inappropriate as an insertion of metaphysical notions into psychological discourse.⁸ More recently, he extended this critique, arguing that nondual realization as understood in Advaita Vedanta does not support the psychological theories of consciousness that have been constructed around it.⁹

In 2011, Hartelius and Ira Berkhin published a paper examining how Buddhist terminology has been employed in transpersonal psychology. They argued that transpersonal appropriations of Buddhist concepts, particularly the equation of Buddhist terms with a shared universal consciousness, misrepresent Buddhist doctrine, which explicitly rejects such notions. They emphasized that Buddhist practices are focused on the achievement of particular knowledge and capacities, not on the attainment of altered states or contact with universal consciousness.⁴

These critical papers serve a specific function within transpersonal discourse: they establish boundaries between rigorous psychological and philosophical work and metaphysical speculation. By grounding his critiques in careful textual analysis and logical argumentation, Hartelius has modeled a form of internal critique that strengthens rather than dismisses the field.

Whole-person and participatory approaches

Hartelius has articulated a vision of transpersonal psychology as fundamentally a “whole person” or “all person” approach, one that integrates diverse ways of knowing, cultural perspectives, and epistemologies without reducing them to a single metaphysical framework.² This framing allows transpersonal psychology to honor subjective experience, cultural specificity, and embodied knowledge while maintaining commitment to empirical investigation and logical rigor.

In 2019, he published a paper exploring whether “participatory empiricism” could serve as a methodological bridge between the subjective, relational nature of transpersonal experience and the requirements of scientific evidence. Participatory empiricism, as he describes it, acknowledges that the observer and the observed are not entirely separable in consciousness research, and that rigorous investigation must account for this participatory dimension rather than pretending to a false objectivity.⁵

In 2020, he and Crouch published a paper arguing against the use of quantum physics as a foundation for theories of consciousness. They contended that while quantum phenomena are genuinely counterintuitive, invoking quantum indeterminacy or wave-function collapse does not explain consciousness and represents a category error, an attempt to ground psychological phenomena in subatomic physics without adequate theoretical justification.¹⁰ Notably, in a related 2022 paper, Hartelius distinguished between the skepticism appropriate to physics (one driven by the need for sound evidence) and the skepticism sometimes applied in psychology, which he argued often rests on cultural notions of plausibility rather than on evidence. He proposed that psychology would benefit from adopting the evidence-driven skepticism modeled in quantum physics, which accepts phenomena that contradict common sense when the evidence warrants.⁶

Empirical investigations

In addition to theoretical and critical work, Hartelius has contributed to empirical research. In 2020, he and Gregory Smith published a pilot study investigating the efficacy of a mindfulness-based intervention for needle phobia. The study tested whether a single session of a dissociated ego state (DES) trauma release intervention could reduce needle phobia. All but one of the six participants reported reduced subjective distress after the intervention, with reductions of 61% post-test, 71% at three-month follow-up, and 70% at six-month follow-up. Results at six-month follow-up were statistically significant despite the small sample size, and the authors called for larger-scale investigations with diverse populations and multiple facilitators.¹¹

Hartelius has also participated in collaborative parapsychology research. In 2021, he was among an international team of researchers who conducted two replication studies of a time-reversed (psi) priming task originally developed by Daryl Bem. The experiments tested whether response times to incongruent stimuli would be longer than response times to congruent stimuli even though the prime had not yet appeared when participants recorded their judgments. The preregistered confirmatory hypothesis was not supported in Experiment 1, though exploratory analyses indicated that participants who completed the English-language version showed a significant effect consistent with the original study. Experiment 2, which tested whether pro-psi and anti-psi statements would modulate the effect, did not support the primary psi hypothesis, though mixed results emerged in exploratory analyses.¹²

Editorial vision and field development

Through his editorial introductions, Hartelius has articulated a sustained vision for transpersonal psychology. In 2016, he introduced the concept of transpersonal psychology as a “whole person psychology,” emphasizing integration of diverse perspectives and ways of knowing.² In 2017, he introduced the concept of “participatory transpersonalism,” distinguishing between transpersonal psychology as a study of transformative relational processes and metaphysical claims about the structure of ultimate reality.¹³ In 2018, he and colleagues published a paper on rigor in multicultural psychology of the whole person, arguing that embracing cultural diversity and multiple epistemologies strengthens rather than weakens scientific rigor.¹⁴

In 2023, he examined the concept of “spiritual awakening” as a psychological construct, raising critical questions about whether this term can be operationalized in ways that allow for rigorous empirical investigation and cross-cultural comparison.¹⁵ In 2024, he and Manas Da explored different ontological frameworks (metaphysical foundationalist versus existentialist) for approaching research on psychological energy, arguing that existentialist ontologies offer more fruitful starting points for empirical investigation than foundationalist approaches.¹⁶

In 2022, Hartelius published a comprehensive review of empirical research on transpersonal topics conducted during the pandemic years 2020–2023, documenting the field’s continued productivity and the range of methodologies being applied to transpersonal questions.¹⁷ That same year, he also published a paper examining quantum tunneling as a model for how skepticism should function in psychology, evidence-driven rather than culturally determined.⁶

Influence and reception

Hartelius’s influence operates primarily through his editorial leadership of the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies and through his critical interventions in transpersonal theory. His editorial work has shaped the journal’s standards for evidence, argumentation, and inclusivity. By introducing special topic sections on quantitative methods, parapsychology, and diversity, he has expanded the range of work the journal publishes and the audiences it reaches.

His critical papers have generated substantive engagement within transpersonal psychology. By targeting specific conceptual errors, the misuse of Buddhist terminology, the circular reasoning in perennialism, the conflation of nondual states with Advaita Vedanta realization, he has raised the bar for theoretical precision in the field. His work demonstrates that internal critique can strengthen rather than undermine a field, and that rigorous engagement with source traditions (Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta) is both possible and necessary.

His advocacy for participatory empiricism and whole-person approaches has provided an alternative to the false choice between either abandoning empirical rigor in favor of subjective authenticity or adopting a narrow positivism that excludes first-person experience. This framing has resonated with researchers seeking to investigate consciousness and exceptional human capacities without either metaphysical overreach or methodological reductionism.

Hartelius’s work also reflects and contributes to broader shifts in transpersonal psychology toward greater empirical investigation, international collaboration, and gender diversity. His documentation of these trends through systematic analysis provides both a baseline for assessing progress and a framework for understanding what further work remains.

Within parapsychology, his participation in the international replication studies of Bem’s psi priming task positions transpersonal psychology as engaged with rigorous, collaborative investigation of anomalous cognition. His willingness to report null or mixed results, and to explore the role of language and expectancy in shaping outcomes, models the kind of transparent, evidence-driven approach that strengthens the credibility of psi research.