Many astronauts have experienced altered states of consciousness during prolonged space flight under conditions of zero gravity. Their experiences, as they describe them, sound very much like a transcendent state or peak experience.¹⁹

Theodore X. Barber, who is an authority on hypnosis and altered states of consciousness, has found a group of people who live in an altered state all of the time. He refers to this group of natural visionaries as FPPs (fantasy-prone personalities). They comprise about four percent of the population and are mostly female. They are in a state of consciousness that others must use hypnosis, yoga, meditation or drugs to achieve. They are vivid dreamers and are extremely hypnotizable.²⁰...The FPP experiences clairvoyant dreams, precognitions, past life regressions, psychic healings, out-of-body experiences and other paranormal adventures. Barber has not concluded yet whether these experiences are pure fantasy or whether these people are perceiving other realities.²¹...None of these psychic experiences have yet been validated by science.

While some altered states of consciousness are clearly pathological, others are quite the opposite, and these latter provide valuable insights into the nature of self and society.²²...Barbara Brown has indicated that the benefits which can be derived would include the perfection of performance, increased body awareness and creative flashes of insight.²³

Stanislav Grof, psychiatrist and scientist, has also categorized various types of transpersonal experiences that he generally defines as the "experiential expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of the body-ego and beyond the limitations of time and space." He also introduces two new terms, hylotropic and holotropic modes of consciousness.

Hylotropic consciousness is the normal, everyday ordinary state that is matter-oriented. We experience only a limited segment of the phenomenal world or consensus reality from one moment to another, which is based on perceptions derived through sensory organs. It has resulted in our Newtonian understanding of space and time.

Holotropic consciousness refers to non-ordinary states that mediate access to all other aspects of existence, and includes meditative, mystical or psychedelic experiences. Specific examples include the reliving of infantile or childhood experiences; biological birth; fetal development; conception; and ancestral, karmic and phylogenetic history. This requires the transcendence of linear time and space.²⁴

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