People are beings that seem to have, and to think about, spiritual, transcendent experiences. But some are psychologists who have historically found it very difficult to integrate their spiritual, yearning selves, or the spiritual selves of those they see. Psychologists may want to understand the processes involved in complex transcendent, spiritual, new-paradigm understanding, and how such thinking becomes part of the skills and experience of the normal, non-pathological developing human. Four sample hypotheses could test some relations between postformal cognition and high-level spiritual development: (1) individuals who report a unitative state of consciousness show postformal operations; those not reporting unitative states may or may not show postformal operations; (2) those reporting unitative states have highly efficient styles of processing large amounts of conflicting information and function better in the face of overload than those not reporting such states; (3) middle-aged and older persons are more likely to describe spiritual searches which link them with others and which operate to give a unity and meaning to their lives than younger persons; and (4) choice of exposure to life events or workshops or psychotherapy where one challenges the meaning of one's life or the grounds of one's life or the grounds of one's "self" are likely to allow the person to transition to both postformal thought and spiritual development. (ABL)