Incorporating alchemy into contemporary theories of transformation: Transpersonal embodiment through the coniunctio

This twenty-first century demonstrates the need for a transformation that can only occur with a consciousness shift. Growing personal and planetary imbalances mandate going to the internal roots of contemporary dilemmas and engaging a process that leads to transpersonal consciousness. Following Carl Gustav Jung, this dissertation offers alchemy, the science of transmutation, and its central framework of the coniunctio, as a map for personal transformation.;The dominant Western paradigm's perspectives---scientific, rational, linear, materialistic, and archetypally "masculine"---have come to hinder balanced growth. Propagated through institutional structures affecting personal to global systems, this paradigm conditions many on this planet. Because mental patterns are interwoven in the body, the shift from personal to transpersonal consciousness entails an internal "alchemical" process of disembedding from outworn conditioning and reorganizing in a larger domain of consciousness.;Modern Western transpersonal theorists have generally neglected the internal process for transforming patterns of mind as manifested in and influenced by the body. To truly integrate the transpersonal, an alchemical process is essential in navigating the topography of the psyche.;Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung's last main work, provides an interpretation of a centuries-old framework for an internal alchemical process: the coniunctio as delineated by sixteenth-century alchemist Gerhard Dorn. The coniunctio provides a roadmap for the psychophysical transformation needed for individuals to cleanse conditioning, embody transpersonal dimensions, and integrate a larger holistic vision.;We can apply the coniunctio to the stages of consciousness identified as Authentic and Transcendent Consciousness (Jenny Wade) or Vision-Logic and Psychic (Ken Wilber), and beyond. Incorporating alchemical processes into both Wade's and Wilber's models expands them by describing a process of embodying the transpersonal stages.;Relying on the methodology of intuitive inquiry, this theoretical dissertation incorporates elements of the heuristic method and organic research. One of its contributions to transpersonal theory lies in presenting the coniunctio as a process that can be engaged to actualize higher-order developmental stages. By combining theoretical research and explication with an internal inquiry and growth process, this dissertation offers a map for exploring the territory leading from the personal to the transpersonal.