98 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 The above passage contains not one, but several meaningful contexts, allowing the informant to interpret his experience. Here we see the cognitive meaningful context and the context of impossibility to articulate, which we have analyzed and illustrated above with respective fragments from interviews. A new type of meaningful context is the meaningful context of reward, and this is the only interview in which transpersonal experience is analyzed with the use of this meaningful context. It should be noted that the first experience described by the informant according to Stanislav Grof’s classification is the extension of consciousness within the borders of objective reality, while the second one is the extension of consciousness beyond the borders of objective reality. They belong to totally different groups, but that does not prevent the informant from using them to interpret one and the same meaningful context, particularly the meaningful context of reward. This reward can hardly be understood as a gift in the meaning ascribed to this phenomenon by Marcel Mauss, as the anthropological interpretation of the gift foresees that the gift must not only be taken but must be obligatorily returned (Mauss 1923–1924, 41–60). The gift obtained by our informant should hardly be returned. The eighth ideal-typical model of understanding transpersonal experience was named the compensatory meaningful context. Within the framework of this model, the fragments of narrations were united in which transpersonal experience was interpreted from the point of view of existential problems. We have singled out two subcategories of interpretation of transpersonal experiences within the framework of this ideal-typical model: 1) something that gave support in difficult times; 2) the answer to the question related to some problem. The cases when the transpersonal experience of an informant acquires compensatory meaning for another person, who was told of this experience, should be viewed separately [9]. One of our informants, who practices qigong, interprets her transpersonal experience in the compensatory meaningful context: It was so hard, my mother in March, my father in August [note: died]. Next year on 1th April B. came. My mother died in March and he came in April. If he hadn’t come… But he came and gave the task: until one o’clock in the night sit in a convenient position, put pillows round yourself, from 11 to 1 a.m. I will be sending you images. If you fall asleep during this time, and wake up again, keep sitting. I thought, well, Master, I should do that for sure. I put pillows around myself, sit and feel that I fell asleep. I wake up, few minutes past twelve, but he said ‘until one a.m.’ I keep sitting and see on my palm – darkness, it is still dark, no light, no glares, I have a luminous sphere on my palm, so bright green, some kind of leaves, and there is a bird on a bush or on a tree. It is bluish-yellow, so beautiful. All the colors so bright, and the only part that is on my palm is glowing. And complete darkness around. Wow, what a flight of imagination! Then it disappeared, that was short. We came to the class and then B. asks who saw what… Mostly everyone saw B. I felt ashamed to talk. [note: but B. told] ‘I was sending pictures of nature!’ – Oleksandra, 44 years old, direction encoded. It should be noted that the informant’s narration contains many transpersonal experiences, most of which are interpreted in a compensatory meaningful context. In other words, they have psychotherapeutic meaning for the informant. The transpersonal experience explained in the above narration fragment is not directly linked to the previous tragic events in the life of the informant – the death of their mother and father – but is only perceived in connection with this event. The essence of transpersonal experiences seems open to interpretation, but their compensatory role as positive, light, and harmonious experiences is evident. 5 Conclusion Let us summarize the results of the study. From the point of view of Schütz’s phenomenology, transpersonal experiences of our informants are not routine experiences obtained in the world of Eastern spiritual practices, which is a finite province of meaning with a specific cognitive style. However, we found that transpersonal experiences become a part of the everyday lives of individuals who practice Eastern spiritual practices. It is not surprising as Bernhard Waldenfels correctly noted that routine is formed as a consequence of the process of “routinization”, which is in turn constituted by an opposite process of “overcoming routine”. Therefore, the borders between routine and non-routine remain mobile and depend on place, time, and culture (Waldenfels 1991, 40). It could be assumed that the experience of the world of Eastern spiritual practice, however unusual it may be, is also subject to the process of “routinization” and is integrated into everyday life as its enclave through telling of this experience. We identified eight ideal-typical models of meaningful contexts of interpretation of transpersonal experience by individuals practicing Eastern spiritual practices: reasoning, adventure, cognitive, eudaimonic, a meaningful context of the impossibility of articulation, epiphenomenal, a meaningful context of a reward, and compensatory meaningful context.
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