As a transpersonal gerontologist with more than 25 years of professional experience in the fields of aging, dementia, gerontopsychiatric care and adult education, I conduct research into the similarities between dementia and spiritual awakening. After an extraordinary experience of consciousness, an experience of ‘nothingness’, I experienced the often-described challenging consequences of a radical spiritual transformation experience with symptoms very similar to, if not the same as, dementia symptoms, during a process that lasted several years. As a dementia expert and scientist, I was able to document these years as phenomenological research, whereby I was simultaneously the subject and the object of the research. The findings from this research suggest that dementia and spiritual awakening are based on the same phenomenological experience: the dissolution of the self, and that dementia could be a misunderstood and therefore unintegrated spiritual development process that leads to an unconscious rather than conscious dissolution of the self. This not only shows the importance of spirituality for the ageing process, but also suggests that spiritual development and spiritual awakening represent the evolutionary potential of ageing: gero-transcendence into the transpersonal and conscious rather than unconscious dissolution of the self.