Non-Ordinary Mental Expressions include a group of ostensibly odd experiences and procedures able to elicit them, including near-death experiences, memories of previous lives, synesthesia, synchronicity, mystical experiences, and superior states of consciousness on the way to the Self and spiritual development. The latter includes meditation, hypnosis, incubation, and lucid dreaming, valuable introspective techniques with their potential for healing, metacognition, and Self-knowledge.
In the past they have been misunderstood and mainly considered as dysfunctional phenomena from the ruling mechanist-reductionist perspectives of medicine. Instead, they are meaningful phenomena to be properly comprehended, a problem endowed with huge cultural and epistemological implications. Actually, their deviation is from the Western dry rationalist and materialist world view, rather than from mind-brain normal functioning. These intriguing, still little-understood phenomena have been appraised from a scientific transdisciplinary approach and a metaphilosophical perspective in search for their proper interpretation, a fact endowed with relevant implications in clinical practice as well as in psychology, philosophy, anthropology and real life.
