1996 Professional Seminar: Peak and Other Exceptional Experiences During the GATEWAY VOYAGE (Todd J. Masluk)

1996 Professional Seminar: Peak and Other Exceptional Experiences During the GATEWAY VOYAGE (Todd J. Masluk) (Transcript) NOTE: This is a raw transcript – it is exactly as created by otter.ai. 00:11 It's time for the second session of the morning. And I'm always amazed when I put together the program ahead of time how things flow naturally one to the other. Once we get into the seminar week, there are a lot of questions this morning about how does one investigator cooperate with us, he brought all the data together. And I'll tell you one more thing. Besides putting in a lot of work on this presentation that you're gonna hear, as far as I'm concerned, one of Todd's major qualifications for being here is that he's a great swing dancer together, and he's going to come to the party this year. So thank you, Todd. And Todd Masluk 00:58 thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. One thing that surely didn't tell you about and she's also an excellent dancer as well. I'm really honored to be here today, I've had the distinct privilege of being able to conduct my dissertation research institute. I spent the last few years conducting research with the gateway program. And I've examined the kinds of experiences that people report. I've done this with 11 Gateway groups. Last year, I presented tentative and preliminary findings are this my purpose here today is basically threefold. One, I'd like to clarify findings presented last year. Two, I'd like to present new and additional findings. And three, I'd like to convey to you a sense of a challenge difficulties. In the words of conducting this kind of research. This is still researching progress, I'm still analyzing quite a bit of data. However, the good news is the end is in sight. And I'm sure my mother would be glad about that as well. coded and tried to make sense of literally hundreds of pages of data, and have tried to do it in a way which best represents and retains the depth, richness, complexity, power, and even magnificence of what participants have reported to me, socially, what I've tried to do is to just be a good reporter. I'm curious to know how many of you here have not taken the gateway program? Can I see a show of hands perhaps looks like most of you have what's terrific. Most of you should have be able to have an insider's appreciation of what I'll be speaking about. And you know, I will try to make my presentation, hopefully meaningful and interesting, if need be entertaining for everyone here really shows me that you're a very interesting and supportive group, which I'm very glad about how many, how many educators and therapists to suddenly Oh, that's, that's quite a number. Great, you might especially enjoy what I have to, to present about how my subjects integrated and were transformed by the experiences and perhaps you could use some of that information and apply it to your own work with clients and students. 03:49 It was really helpful for me to speak here last year. been very much involved with kind of conquering small bits of territory at this point and just involve her in the details of my research. And I haven't had an opportunity to kind of stand back from everything and see the big picture are more or less see the forest for the trees in speeding last year gave me an opportunity to kind of do that. There was also very helpful was participants in the audience came to my presentation in the same face was kind of fresh eyes and were able to provide me with insights and connections and see patterns in the data that I hadn't even noticed. And it was just tremendously helpful to me. I'm, you know, obviously I'm new authors. I'm kind of the new kid on the block. I'm a neophyte, and most of you if not all of you have been at this a lot longer than I have. So I can judge if it's anything like it was last year either watch away from you, and I look forward to your questions and comments at the end. Before we get started, I have a number of handouts here, they could probably be passed around the room on the table there. 05:32 This video the handouts are optional, you don't really want given my presentation. If you want, you could either look at the first page, there's an outline, and you can follow my presentation if you'd like. Right now, will one be handouts so no page numbers in the handout, I thought that might be a bit confusing, because I've included a copy of my peak experience questionnaire, and that's numbered already. And if I hadn't added further numbers, they would have just added to the confusion. So in other words, they're not numbered. And I'll let you know where you are during the presentation. And the different parts of the handout are fairly distinct. So you should be able to tell which I'm referring to also brought along 10 copies of my classification system, it's the the large document on the tables 234 page document. You're welcome to keep, please feel free, the the large documents I need back and we would probably pass them forward or I could rely on collecting them at the end. 07:01 Okay, let me say a bit on on the kind of the background and the research and my reasons for undertaking it. I moved here from California a number of years ago, to come here to do a 750 hour internship. At that time, I was interested in near death experiences. And my understanding was that the Monterey Institute was having those kinds of experiences under laboratory conditions. And I was just, I was just really intrigued by that in my past and work with cancer patients in hospitals program, and the NFL, Jesus would be new to actually study this phenomenon under controlled conditions. So I, to make a long story short, I wound up getting in touch with Scooter renting mcmoneagle At the time, and I came here for an interview, and it wound up flying in and nationally moving to Virginia to the right internship. What you did on your evil tutelage of Dr. Rita Warren. Anyway, I did that for about a year. And as part of my internship experience, I was invited to take the gateway program, which I did over Easter weekend. And during the program I had, for me what I call a peak experience, and it was just incredible. It was one of the most profound experiences I've ever had in my life. Really, to tell you just a bit about myself. Normally, I'm an INTJ, and a very introverted person. This guy who was really difficult for me, normally I'm just kind of very shy and timid. Anyway, this peak experience during the very program, and it lasted for days, it was very protracted. For one of the few times in my life, I seem to come out of my shell and I was interacting with people and the world just seemed to work for me. And I started to have an experiential grasp of what the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, even you were talking about when you're referred to self actualization or individuation. Just just being fully functioning individual. So I had a real firsthand grasp of that. It changed my life. I will say, that experience and fascinated by it from the personal and also academic students, that I decided, gee, this would be a neat idea to do dissertation research on in a whole host of empirical questions arose out of my personal experience from a more academic or object To find viewpoint, I thought it would be a good idea to conduct my research. here because we've had enough of methodological advantage of what I've reviewed in the research literature, in that people's experiences here could be studied and examined, shorter after they had them. What I read in the research literature was that most researchers examining peak experiences tended to look at people's past, if they would ask people to recall peak experiences, or perhaps when they were in adolescence, you know, going back quite a few years would be a problem of memory distortion, or here the advantage was that I can look at people's experiences, you know, from a fresh point of view. 11:00 Okay, so what about the purposes of my research, there are really two primary purposes. One is to examine the qualitative nature of participants peak in other powerful experiences. And the second major purpose was to study selected characteristics that possibly differentiate people who had these kinds of experiences for people who don't know other specific questions which grew out of those two main purposes. And I'll refer to them later on when we get into the statistical tables and I share some of my findings with you. 11:47 Okay, primary, three measurement instruments. My investigation of the first you can see a copy of it in your handout, if you want to look at it. It's the peak experience with PT experience questionnaire, which I developed when I decided to do that, because most of the questions that I needed to ask related directly to the Gateway program. And other questionnaires, which are reviewed in the literature about examine peak and similar types of experiences, lack the kind of item specificity that are needed to relate to people's daily experiences. So I decided to create an experience questionnaire of my own. I did some pilot testing with P question are eight former gateway participants. And I did some basic model analyses with the questionnaire, things like looking at Question clarity, variants and response rate and use of whitespace just real basic things did to make sure that people could understand the nature of the questions and make sure that I get the kind of rich data, which I was hoping to gather. I learned that we have 14 useful items on the peak experience questionnaire, part one, and 19 useful items on peak, the peak questionnaire part two, six of six other questions on a second part are actually repeated twice. I probably should point out my aim wasn't to develop a measurement instrument, but rather to just develop a questionnaire which would would be able to elicit useful data for me. So I was essentially just trying to ask the participants a set of focused questions and get the kind of data which I wanted. Part one of the peak experience questionnaire was used to collect retrospective self reports of people's recent peak and other personal meaningful, powerful experiences during the gateway program. I had initially set out to to look at just paid experiences. What I learned from doing the pilot testing with a former gateway participants was that not only did I initially get paid experiences I, I got a whole range of experiences. So I decided to expand the question on the peak question here to ask participants not only to peak experiences the way I defined it, but also to share any kind of other powerful experiences which they had. I didn't want to kind of reel off the full range of experiences. 14:52 Part two of the peak experience questionnaire was developed to explore the impact of early experiences on people's lives. also to examine the cognitive processes involved in integrating the experiences. Okay, that's all I had to say at this point about my peak questionnaire. questionnaires. Okay, I'm gonna mention that in just a few minutes when I get to here research procedures that fast, it's a good question, I will bring it up. The other inventory I used towards Myers Briggs, Crusher, I'd see a show of hands, how many are familiar with that history? And yeah, it was just about everyone. Last year, I'd be here at a party, I need to explain that. The other instrument I used was the Herman brain dominance instrument, which you could actually see how the screen here we're actually it's a, it's a model of wave just back up in just a second. The Herman brain dominance, dominance in Australia is a self report inventory. To assess people's thinking styles with cognitive style. It's based on metaphorical model of the human