“…T he impulse to understand human spirituality, and to reach for a grasp of what different individuals and diverse communities may share in common or contribute from their unique location, is a worthy one-and it is only one of various things that a transpersonal approach may aspire to study. For such work there are a number of avenues available other than metaphysics or pattern reading or authoritarian claims: scientific methods (Friedman, 2002(Friedman, , 2015 that include transpersonally-informed anthropology (Laughlin, 2013), phenomenology and other qualitative methods (Anderson & Braud, 2011), and participatory research approaches (Ferrer, 2014), to name a few. Going forward, some of these might usefully be paired with neuroscience in ways that may bring fresh perspectives to the latter; given the extraordinary sensitivity of neural measurement techniques, it should be possible to gain valuable insights into how the body reflects complex states, and to determine how spiritual achievements in one tradition are different from or similar to those gained through practice in a different tradition.…”