To my conscious knowledge, two major forces brought me into parapsychology.  The earliest was my childhood religion, Lutheranism.  My parents weren’t religious but my maternal grandmother, who lived in the apartment downstairs from us, was very much so.  Grandmothers, as so many of you personally know, are sources of unconditional love, so she took me to Sunday School and church, and what was good enough for her was good enough for me!  I was quite devout as a child and early teenager.

The second major force was science.  As early as I can remember I loved everything connected with science, and by the time I was a teenager I was very widely read, including a lot of “adult” books.  I had my basement chemical and electrical laboratory, became a radio ham and built my own equipment, and wanted to be a scientist or engineer.  Studying electronics and radio on my own, I was able to pass government tests and get a First Class Radiotelephone license, empowering me to operate commercial radio stations.

The teenage years are a time of starting to question what you’ve been taught and to think for yourself.  I became aware, as most idealistic teens do, of the seeming hypocrisy of adults, those church people were not living what they preached!  Worse yet, I now enough science to realize that most, if not all, religious ideas and beliefs were quite nonsensical from the point of view of science, just old superstitions.  How could I reconcile this with the deep religious feelings that had began in my childhood?

From an adult perspective, I know many teenagers go through similar conflicts between science and religion.  A common “resolution” is to go to one extreme or the other: religion is all nonsense and materialistic science is right, or religion is the ultimate truth and science can be ignored when it’s inconvenient.  I put “resolution” in quotes, for as a psychologist I see this extremism as usually an incomplete and often psychologically costly way of dealing with the conflict, too much suppression of parts of our nature are involved.

Luckily my extensive reading – the Trenton city library was my second “home” – had included many older books on psychical research and parapsychology.  I realized that many intelligent people had gone through conflicts similar to mine, and the founders of the Society for Psychical Research had come up with a brilliant idea.  Instead of a wholesale rejection of all religion and spirituality and adoption of Materialism in whatever form was then scientifically fashionable, why not apply the methods of science,  the insistence on accurate data collection, logical theorizing, testing of theories, and full and honest sharing of data and theory, to the phenomena of religion and spirituality?  Why not examine and refine the data and devise more adequate theories?  I was inspired by this idea, and it has been the central theme of my professional work and personal life ever since.  Look at the data of spirituality (my preference is for individual spirituality rather than the group psychology of religion), see how to observe it more accurately, create and test theories about it, share these with colleagues, and slowly work our way toward a spirituality based on observable facts.

My first formal parapsychological experiment was a study of hypnotic suggestion as a (hoped for) way of producing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while I was a sophomore at MIT, studying electrical engineering.  Looking back it wasn’t bad for a teenager, although I didn’t have an objective way of evaluating the data (nor did the field as a whole).  I didn’t formally write the results up until many years later Tart, C., 1998, Six studies of out-of-the-body experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 17, No. 2, 73-99), by which time I had carried out five others studies of OBEs.

While at MIT I met other students interested in parapsychology and we formed a student club to talk about it and ask speakers to lecture us.  One of those speaker was Andrija Puharich, whom Eileen Garrett, world-famous medium and head of the Parapsychology Foundation, had told me about.  Here was a physician researcher who not only claimed to have a way of making telepathy work better or to shield it, he was doing it with electrical devices, Faraday Cages.  What could be more intriguing to students of electrical engineering and physics?

Some of us visited Puharich’s laboratory in Maine and thought his work seemed basically sound.  He gave a lecture on his findings at MIT for our club, and I was intrigued enough – and needed the money! – to ask him for a summer job.  So I saw some of his research up close for three months in 1957.

I was young and naïve, so didn’t fully realize that, in spite of being rejected by mainstream science, the few parapsychologists around did not all band together in a friendly way to present a united front. There was a parapsychological establishment, centered in J. B. Rhine’s laboratory at Duke, and Puharich was definitely not part of that establishment: he was a “bad boy.”  I had already met Rhine when he came to lecture in Boston several times and corresponded with him.  I wanted to switch from electrical engineering to psychology, to prepare for a career in parapsychology.  MIT had no psychology programs, but Rhine helped me transfer to Duke as a psychology major, and he had indicated he would find a part-time job for me in his laboratory.  Once I spent the summer working for Puharich, though, Rhine decided I did not have sufficient discrimination to make a scientific parapsychologist.  The promised job disappeared: indeed, I was, a friend told me, put on the list of people to be discouraged from visiting Rhine’s lab.  I was a “bad boy” now myself, in a very minor way.

Here’s a photo of me at Puharich’s Maine laboratory, the Round Table Foundation.

Still an idealistic young man, I was naturally miffed over this treatment, although, as I matured, I realized I would have acted the same way as Rhine in a similar situation.  If I had devoted my life to making a case for my field based on very careful, methodologically sophisticated research, I would discourage wild young people from getting involved and undermining my work with questionable work of their own.

On the other hand, J. B. Rhine had given a talk to the entering Freshman women and invited any of them who were interested in parapsychology to visit his lab.  So there I was looking at books in the Parapsychology Laboratory’s library (I did not accept Rhine’s ban) when this beautiful young woman came in and asked if I believed in ESP.  More than 50 years of marriage later, Judy tells me I still use the same response I did with her way back then, that’s it’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence…  So Rhine was the proximate cause of far more happiness than unhappiness for me, and he did decide after another 20 years or so that I had enough discrimination to make a parapsychologist….and the next 50 years were quite interesting….

And just to put a cap on these beginning threads, Puharich became even more of a “bad boy” to the parapsychological establishment by getting involved with things like UFO studies, while I became a part of that establishment.  Puharich eventually got too far out for me, but it’s a shame that his basic findings that Faraday cages may amplify or shield psi have been ignored, as they may be a key to a major advance in getting reliable psi in our work.  As far as I know, I’m the only one who did even a partial replication study of his work (Tart, C., 1988, Effects of electrical shielding on GESP performance. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,  82, 129-146).

Just a beginning . … lots more since then on psychology, altered states, etc., to be written about some day….

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There are many points that I could respond to in these interesting and important comments on my interview….but, for lack of time, I can just touch on a few….Hopefully I do this in the Buddhist spirit we share of less attachment to opinions and ideas, and more accurate perception of reality….

Classical Buddhism, as I understand it, is about lessening and, hopefully, completely ending one’s suffering.  I believe we all think this is a desirable goal.  A major question for our times would then become “How effective are various aspects of Buddhist practice in doing this in today’s world?”  Reincarnation, gods and goddesses, spirits, etc., were an accepted part of most people’s reality in the Buddha’s time, e.g., but if they are not literally true – we won’t deal with their psychological functions here – then they can be big obstacles to effective practice for many of us moderns, distracting or confusing us.  Can we have a completely materialist or physicalist Buddhism that is an effective way of lessening or ending suffering?

By materialist, I mean a basic belief that nothing fundamentally exists but physical objects and forces of the type we are familiar with, stuff and forces that can be sensed with our physical senses or instrumental extensions of our senses.  For the complete materialist, our minds, our consciousness, our experience arises solely from the operation of physical forces in your brain, and cease when the brain ceases to function.  Your understanding of what you’re reading now, e.g., or any of your experiences, is, in principle, totally reducible to the electrical and chemical configuration of your brain.  Any suffering you have is an unsatisfactory configuration of your brain’s electrochemical state, any satisfaction is another electrochemical configuration of your brain.  Basic Buddhism, with it’s admonitions to live a moral life and practice meditation, is then a psychological method designed to lessen or eliminate unsatisfactory brain states and increase satisfactory ones.  I’m oversimplifying greatly, of course, but that’s the essence, as I see it, of Buddhism from the point of view of complete materialism.

Note I said “complete” materialism.  There are philosophical positions that admit the importance of the physical without assuming that only the physical is ultimately real.  They assume, as I do as a working, scientifically testable hypothesis, that there is something real we loosely call “mind” that is of a different nature than the physical  brain, but which can effect the brain and body.  This approach does not necessarily mean, as many committed complete materialists seem to assume, that the universe can’t really be understood because “mind” is some kind of “supernatural,” inherently non-understandable phenomena.  You can let “mind” be of a different nature and nevertheless assume it has its own properties and regularities, “laws,” that we can discover and use.  Classical Buddhism of course assumes this position: it knew nothing of brains, but felt it knew a lot about minds and minds’ effects, such that suffering could be lessened or eliminated.  Personally I think that knowing the properties and laws of both mind and brain will allow more effective functioning than knowing only one set, so I’m all for appropriate research on both.

By analogy, I am the “mind” as far as this computer I am typing on is concerned, but the real physical action and outcome is a set of electrical configurations in the material substrate of the computer – which ultimately convey my mind’s meaning to your mind via your computer.  That’s a dualist position.

Materialist Buddhism:

We could, then, have a completely materialistic adaptation of Buddhism.  No minds, spirits, gods or goddesses, psychic stuff, etc., just brain states and meditation practices to optimize our brain functioning, less suffering, more happiness.  “Mind” or “mental practices” are just semantically convenient ways of referring to processes that are actually physical processes in the brain.

Interestingly, I initially mistyped “meditation” in the previous paragraph as “medication,” so it read “medication practices,” my fingers (or unconscious mind or whatever) anticipating the point I’ll now make.  If complete materialism is true, then probably all this meditation stuff, taking so many years and not working well for so many people, will eventually be replaced as Big Pharma develops the drugs to optimize our brain states.  Then you have to wonder: how fast will Big Pharma get there?  How bad is my personal suffering?  Shall I put in all this time meditating, even though it may not work for me, before I die but it might, and so less suffering might happen before Big Pharma develops Nirvana®?  Or shall I spend all this time doing what pleasures me and bet that Big Pharma will ultimately eliminate all my suffering in time with Nirvana®?

Charles T. Tart

[the website says my comment is too long, so above is part 1, next will be Part 2.]

Part 2:

What I’m For and Against:

Understand clearly that I am not opposed to anyone having a completely materialist philosophy of life – as long as they admit that it’s a philosophy, a belief system.  Nor am I at all opposed to Big Pharma developing drugs that will lessen human suffering!  We’ll have to watch out for the side effects, and maybe they won’t work, but I’m all for trying things that lessen human suffering.

What I am opposed to is anyone claiming that (a) materialism is science or (b) that science has “proven” that all spirituality is nonsense.  I discuss the reasons for these positions at length in my recent “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book, but I want to sketch them here as these issues are very important for Buddhists.  To put it one way, are you spending/wasting a lot of your time sitting on a little black cushion when you could be enjoying life and waiting for Nirvana®?  Or are you on to something deeper?  Or?

(The last “or” is to recognize how much oversimplifying I’m forced to do in this limited space….)

So, is materialism the same thing as science?

Jayarava, in this discussion, e.g., puts a lot of emphasis on publication in high-prestige, peer-reviewed science journals like Science and Nature as giving us the best factual, scientific information.  OK, I’ve had major – many pages long, not one page reports – articles published in both Science and Nature, as well as dozens of other papers in peer-reviewed journals, so if there’s a mantle of scientific authority to wear, I don it now….    

(This is fun: I’ve never played Authority before…..)

My Science article (many of my articles, including this one, are available on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site) started with a detailed discussion of the nature of science, emphasizing that being scientific is primarily being factual, coming back to observables.  Theory, no matter how mathematical, elegant, fashionable, logical, etc., is always secondary in the sense that it must account for all known relevant data, and theory IS ALWAYS SUBJECT TO FURTHER TEST.  Always.  And if new facts don’t fit the old theory, it’s got to be modified or rejected, irregardless of its elegance, etc.

The rest of that Science article proposed the creation of state-specific sciences, a drastically new idea for that time (and still so).  I didn’t push it, but I was really proposing a scientific basis for both testing and expanding spiritual disciplines like Buddhism, arguing that altered states techniques like meditation could be used to advance our scientific knowledge of the world and self.

I got lots of criticism from older scientists on the idea that we might do science in altered states of consciousness, how dare I suggest that!  Only our ordinary conscious was a rational state you could do science in!  Younger scientists thought it was a great idea and wanted to get on with it.  Those older scientists would see Buddhist meditation as basically crazy-making.  As practitioners of Buddhism, of course, we’ve heard a lot, and probably confirmed in our personal observations, that ordinary consciousness is largely a state of samsara, illusion, attachment.

But in the decades since publishing that Science article, no scientist has declared that I don’t understand the basic nature of science, so I wear my mantle of Authority on what science is comfortably.

So Is Materialism The Same Thing As Science?

No.  Materialism is a preference for explaining observations in terms of known material objects and forces.  Done rigidly, it’s a samsaric attachment.  Since science as organized activity has focused almost exclusively on the material world, surprise, this has worked very well!  But it’s a leap of faith to believe that material explanations will work to explain spiritual phenomena, especially when in the vast majority of cases where the “science has explained spirituality away” mantra is invoked, there has never been any actual observation of or experimentation with the spiritual phenomena.  We see attachment and samsara in operation.  The belief system I am attached to – materialism – says there are no spiritual phenomena (reincarnation, e.g., or psychic healing) to explain, so I don’t have to bother to look for evidence, much less examine it in a reasonable, fair way.  So, not having looked and so not having seen any evidence that contradicts my belief system of materialism, I then go on and say there is no contradictory evidence!

Psychologically this is all very circular and understandable, it’s one of the irrational things we humans do, it’s samsara, but it’s not science.  That a lot of people professionally identified as “scientists” do this is a reminder that scientists live in a state of samsara too.  They may be quite rational within the limits of their specialty, but can be quite attached and irrational outside it, “scientists” within their specialty, “believers” outside it.

[conclusion in Part 3]

Part 3:

There Is No Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?

If you accept that the Buddhist approach to ending suffering is based on the 8-fold path, not just exotic meditation techniques, then Right Speech, accuracy, is important.  I would like to ask that we use right speech when we discuss the evidence for psychic phenomena (like reincarnation or telepathy), which imply possible spiritual realities.  This evidence and its implications is what my “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book is all about, and my book in turn refers to many other scientifically accurate books and articles on this area.

Right speech would not allow a statement that there is no evidence for psychic phenomena.

Right speech would allow statements like the following:

“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities and so neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”

“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities, I look for articles and books which support my view and neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”

“I apply my critical faculties extensively to look for flaws in arguments whose conclusions I don’t like but am quite uncritical and accepting of arguments whose conclusions I want to believe.”

These are honest statements which would be accurate representations of many people’s views.

Most of us could probably also accurately state:

“My beliefs and feelings about psychic and spiritual possibilities are largely the result of my cultural conditioning and person history rather than a result of rational investigation and thought.”

A commitment to Right speech would also note that if you want to make accurate and authoritative statements about this area, scientifically accurate statements, you have a lot of studying to do!  I got actively involved in parapsychological research, e.g., in the early 60s, and subscribed and read practically all the scholarly and research reports in the four refereed specialty journals for that field since then.  At two to five articles per issue, four issues per year, that’s a rough estimate of 50 years, 32 to 80 articles per year, that’s a total of 1,600 to 4,000 articles.  Plus many books, of course.  And there were hundreds of experimental articles published before I came into the field.

I could go on, but I’ve gone on at probably too much length already.  So I’ll just conclude with the basic theme of “The End of Materialism."  When you actually apply basic scientific method, you find humans occasionally demonstrating psychic abilities which are the sorts of things you would expect a spiritual being to have, so it’s reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in your approach to life.

Can you still gain something valuable as a materialistic Buddhist?  Probably.  Should you believe everything labeled “spiritual” or “Buddhist?”  Of course not, there’s lot of nonsense under these labels….as there are in all areas of life.  Develop your sensitivity, discrimination, ethical character, meditative skill, and your logical abilities – we’re moving in an interesting direction!

Charles T. Tart

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One of you mentioned the God of the Gaps notion.  Materialists use this term to mean that if there is any area of reality that physical science can’t explain adequately, gaps in our knowledge structure, then religionists cite these as proofs of the existence of God.  The term is understandably derogatory as used by materialists, with its implications of worshiping ignorance and covering up the gap with an unsolvable mystery.

My argument – I call my position Pragmatic Interactive Dualism – is not at all like this.

To begin, I don’t personally believe in the God usually implied by Western religionists.  That God, call him Jehovah as so many do, is a bearded old man of great powers but has, to my way of thinking, considerable psychological problems: He’s jealous of the valuing of anything but Himself, demands constant reassurance of how wonderful He is, that’s He’s Number One, and rather capriciously and cruelly punishes those who don’t worship Him properly.  From the view of those of us who like and value science, Jehovah is the Great Spoiler, a powerful yet incomprehensible being who can unpredictably violate the lawful universe we’ve tried to map out at will.

Two qualifications before I go to the crux of my comparison of the God of the Gaps concept and my Pragmatic Interactive Dualism position.

Note that I said this is my personal belief.  I don’t know in any ultimate sense whether there are one or more such superior, powerful beings, and it would be nothing but logical fallacy and huge arrogance on my part to declare that no being superior to me could exist.  So logically I am agnostic about the truth value of whether such beings exist.  I also don’t like the idea of powerful, superior, outside-the-law-as-I-can-know-it beings, so I have negative emotional pressures affecting my ostensibly logical views, and they may distort my otherwise logical views.

Note too that in most arguments I have read over a lifetime about science and God’s existence or non-existence, it has looked to me like “spirituality” has been narrowly equated with this Judeo-Christian Jehovah concept, without recognition that the whole range of human spiritual experience is much, much bigger than this.  To put it another way, a lot of Westerners don’t believe in and/or are angry at and rejecting of Jehovah, but they really shouldn’t confuse this with humanities spiritual side in general.

Now back to the God of the Gaps.

The existence of gaps in any theory is, of course, a sensible reason to wonder if the theory is really comprehensive.  How much faith you then manifest that the theory will eventually fill those gaps on its own terms is highly variable.  At one end, you can have little or no faith it will work out, and call for new kinds of research.  At the other you can have total faith that it will, no matter how bad the gaps look – that’s a faith similar to religious faith, easily leading to the Dismissive syndrome, where you automatically and unscientifically dismiss any evidence contradicting what you want to believe.  In between you can compromise, both calling for new kinds of research that may lead to a totally new theory and calling for more research within the existing theory that may fill the gaps.  I think of myself as toward the middle of this spectrum, although transient emotions may push me in one direction or the other at times.  That’s what the pragmatism in my Pragmatic Interactive Dualism approach is – what works usefully?

I argue in The End of Materialism that there are serious gaps in current materialistic attempts to understand psi in particular – the emphasis in the book – and consciousness and various altered states of consciousness in general.

I do not, like the religionists, then insist that the gaps be filled with “non-material” mysteries, religious beliefs that we poor mortals can never understand.  Aside from my quarrel with the logic of that, it’s not fun, there’s no more science game to be played any more if you say “Don’t look at area X, you’ll never understand.”

What I do advocate is that we try to develop other ways of researching these gaps, psi phenomena, that, hopefully, will lead to greater understanding.  The criteria for understanding will be, as is usual in science, prediction and control.

I do not advocate giving up attempts to explain the psi gaps in material terms.  For all my inclination to suspect there is a “non-material” something that we need to understand, I’m a pragmatist.  The first paper I will be presenting at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine) this coming Friday, e.g., will not be my presidential address about the need to create an evidence-based spirituality but a research paper about a possible physical method of increasing or decreasing telepathy, viz. Puharich’s Faraday cage work and my partial replication of it.

OK, this has been a long, perhaps too long, request to not lump my approach in with those tiresome Western arguments between science as nothing  but materialism (science is bigger than that) and clinging to the existence of Jehovah.  We need a much more sophisticated and differentiated approach to the “science and spirituality” topic.

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At one level, I took this as a compliment.  At least one person found it valuable enough to go to a lot of work to scan that big book in so others could read it!

At the more important level, I was quite upset, not so much for myself as for authors in general.  Publishers depend on selling at least several thousand copies of books to break even, much less make a profit, and if a book is pirated like this shortly after publication it is much less likely to sell enough copies to justify publishing it in the first place.  I wrote to the pirate site, reminding them this was stolen property they were distributing and asking them to take it down, and I wrote to my publisher and the Authors Guild asking what could be done.  Apparently nothing can be done.  The Harry Potter books have been pirated the same way.  My book is a drop in the ocean compared to that, and if they can’t stop it for Harry Potter…..

We may be moving quickly toward the end of publishing as we know it, with fewer and fewer people being able to make a living as an author, and so fewer and fewer books being published, no matter how valuable their content might be to some people.  Book pirating is rapidly becoming widespread with no clear way to stop it.  The same thing happened a few years ago with music, with the rational of the pirates that it gave new bands exposure they would not otherwise get thru the big record companies and they would earn a living thru people thus coming to their concerts.  I don’t see that model as applicable to book publishing: when was the last time you spent money to hear a book author speak?

Well I don’t want to go glooming and dooming, the world is changing and it’s going to be ….. interesting?  Better?  Worse?  We’ll see.

The interesting development is I just got an email today.  My publisher has found that The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together is not actually available at the pirate web site – but you can catch a virus by going there!  A strange manifestation of the end of materialism, you try to save some money by stealing and you catch a virus that trashes your computer?

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> I am on a Quixotic quest for a definition of the non-material. Seems like consciousness itself, everyone seems to recognize it when they see it but have no clue what it is?<

I think some folks would find my response interesting…..

That makes consciousness just like pornography, yes?  What famous Supreme Court justice said he couldn't really define pornography but he knew it when he saw it?  

So for some fun off the top of my head, without going to any authorities like the Oxford English Dictionary….

I like to look at what is implicit or assumed in questions and ideas, so let's start with the assumption that we ought to be able to "define" the "non-material."

At one extreme we can get into a rigid kind of arrogance, we humans are the smartest things in the universe and we can define everything!  We can make everything make sense in our human conceptual systems!  With the usually unvoiced corollary, that if we can't satisfactorily define it, it doesn't exist and/or isn't important, so lets ignore or suppress it….

I'm all for assuming we're that smart and giving things a good try – but also think it's a good idea to practice a little humility and remember that we may not be smart enough to figure everything out.  And/or maybe we're just temporarily stuck and a new approach will arise later, or a new tool be developed to work on the problem.  But I won't be surprised if we run into some things we never make any progress in explaining properly.

At the opposite extreme, I have no interest in the ideas of those who claim a priori that we cannot know about X and must not try.  That's an uninteresting recipe for failure.

So we may not be smart enough to ever "define" the "immaterial," or maybe just not smart enough to do it now – but we're pretty sure there's something there of interest and importance.

Now "define."  To me that means come up with a verbal (or special language, like math) formulation about a phenomenon X that makes "sense," that makes it fit "logically" into the rest of our (valued) knowledge base.  As with the implicit aspects above, there's an implicit assumption that we ought to be able to do this and that our current knowledge base is correct enough and expansible enough to handle X.  Same maybes as above.

I get a lot of headaches, e.g., and I'm also good at using language fairly precisely, but if you ask me to exactly define what or where my headaches are…..well, damn it, they move around, some qualities change, and lots of qualities I just can't find satisfactory words for!  Yet I know it when I have a headache, it's certainly real – and it's not like pornography!

So if I say something is "non-material,:

- I am not making any absolute or final statement, I'm making a pragmatic one given what we/I know now or reasonable extensions of that knowledge.  That statement is subject to change if the right new data comes along.

As an example, I would say that psi is "immaterial" with respect to our knowledge of electricity, it just doesn't show the kinds of qualities electricity does.  Translating that into pragmatic decisions, I would say, e.g., that if someone says they want to take all of what little money currently supports psi research and put it into buying more sensitive radio receivers to detect psi, "That's a waste of time, you can't have the money."

- When I say psi is "immaterial" in the larger sense of the term "material," I'm saying that what we currently know about the physical world and reasonable extensions of it does not offer any satisfactory explanations of psi.  My criteria of "satisfactory" would be both that the physical theory of psi make conceptual sense in terms of our physics data base AND allows someone to build a material gadget, working according to known physical principles, which would significantly amplify psi.  The old-fashioned prediction and control criteria for judging scientific theories.

At present we have some odd and occasional correlations of psi with physical variables (LST, e.g., geomagnetic weather, possible Faraday cage effect) but they don't really make "sense" of it as far as I can see.

Note that I don't buy into promissory materialism here either, I'm not much for untestable faith that someday they will explain psi in terms of physical principles.  Maybe, but that's faith, not science.

Note too that by saying psi is "non-material" by present knowledge standards, I'm not saying it does not obey any laws or that we can't figure out how it works or what it means someday.  That is I have no "supernatural" element of a non-understandable god meddling to change things sometimes – although I'm not arrogant enough to say that I'm so smart myself that I can declare there are no beings more intelligent or powerful than me….

The pragmatic bottom line for me is that I'm not saying don't look for physical correlates or explanations of psi – I love those attempts, I'm a nerd! – but I am saying don't sit back and fail to investigate what the actual characteristics of psi are because you assume "they" will explain it all someday in terms of physics.  To use my earlier example, investigate what electricity does and think about it, rather than assume Newtonian mechanics will eventually explain it.

This is exactly the same position I have about consciousness in general.  Yes, the brain is involved, but don't ignore those characteristics of consciousness that don't readily fit into a neurological model, get on with investigating them on their own terms.

So "immaterial" means real phenomena that do not follow known physical laws and which should be investigated in a variety of ways until we find some that make a new kind of sense out of them.

(Which might involve the development of state-specific sciences, but let's not go off on that track now!)

And of course it's more complicated than this, but enough!

See how you've overstimulated my brain/mind first thing in the morning?   

With best wishes,

Charley

Oh, and just to check in with Authority, the Shorter OED, the essence of each rather than the whole thing,

material:

► A adjective.

1 Of or pertaining to matter or substance; formed or consisting of matter; corporeal.

immaterial:

► A adjective.

1 Not material; not consisting of matter; spiritual. LME.

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One of the things that stayed with me on this reading was her insistence that while there is enough commonality in the experience that we can talk about NDEs, there is not a “standard” NDE for all people. Rather the particulars of the NDE seem to be tailored to the individual. If someone's basic view and faith are OK, e.g., they are likely to have a wonderful mystical experience that reinforces and empowers their basic approach to life. If they need to be shaken up, they are liable to have one of the rarer “negative” NDEs – whose long-term effect on them is positive.

This is one of those things I want to believe. That is, I'm happy to think some smarter, more spiritual, more advanced “beings,” I'll call them Helpers, are watching over us and guiding our experience to maximize our growth, even if it involves some apparent suffering at times. I know it's not fashionable in academic and intellectual circles to think like this: after all, we, humanity, are the peak of life, and there aren't any spiritual beings anyway, right? But I have long followed, as best I can, a policy of being honest with myself and as honest as possible with everybody else, so yes, there's this side of me – this “childish” side – that wants to believe in helping, superior beings. I may well be wrong about the reality of this, but that's the way I feel….And maybe there's a quite realistic quality to this belief to, even if it appeals to the child in me.

While thinking about this off and on the past couple of weeks, I got an email from a colleague I hadn't heard from in years, asking if I would like to hear about his transpersonal experience – on the condition that I keep it confidential while he is alive. As he's a respected brain surgeon, and the surgical community is known for its hard-headed and skeptical attitudes, I understood this, and was happy to promise confidentiality.

He – let's call him Dr. Bill, not his real name, but reading better than Dr. Anonymous – sent the experience along, and I was quite impressed by it. I've heard hundreds of psychic experience stories in the 50+ years of my career, but this had a specificity to it, and it fit right in with my thinking about Helpers, so I'm going to share his story, altered a little bit in irrelevant details to maintain his and the other folks' anonymity.

Alex Smith (not his real name) was a kindly, round faced, retired airline mechanic of sparse receding gray hair. His lively hazel-blue eyes mirrored, to Dr. Bill, both mirth and a warm compassionate humility. Mutual friends had told Dr. Bill that Alex was quite psychic, and while Dr. Bill didn't believe in that kind of nonsense, he thought he should meet Alex and see for himself.

Dr. Bill wrote me,

“On a warm March evening in 1971, Alex relaxed in his easy chair as we sat across from each other in his modest Southern California home. I'd given him my wrist watch and he leaned back with eyes closed as he idly fingered it. Then he spoke haltingly, describing various visions and impressions which danced before his mind's eye. Among other things I clearly recall him saying, "You're going to meet a man named John. He will have had an injury to his left leg. He'll be working not in the military but associated with the military…. I hear the name Monmouth."

“At the time I did not yet know Alex well but I knew that some psychic persons claimed to sense things about people by handling their personal belongings. Being a product of years of medical and surgical training and with some fifteen years of surgical practice, I was dubious. This background preempted my placing any credence at all in such uttering. Though I'd no inkling of it then, this and subsequent impossible events were to secure a dynamic restructuring in my own comprehension of what nature and life are all about.”

“Some three weeks having passed, I stirred one morning from my normally sound sleep to a half awake, fugue state. It was still dark out. A strange thought-voice was seemingly speaking right inside my mind, 'He needs to make a telephone call.' A separate part of me seemed to hear my own mind thinking the reply, 'Okay give me the number.' Having then come fully awake, I switched on the bed lamp. What possessed me I still don't know, but I hastily scribbled ten digits across the face of the telephone book on my night table.”

“Being unsure of the first area code digit I penned both 201 and 401.”

“During odd moments throughout the day the thought, 'He needs to make a telephone call,' kept popping into my mind in the same way that a catchy tune sometimes annoys one by repeatedly surfacing and resurfacing. Since it was utterly ridiculous I, of course, kept rejecting the whole thing and putting it out of my mind.”

“By the following afternoon things were different. By then I'd done some rationalizing. It would cost only a dollar fifty or so to place the call, and it would put my mind at ease. At that price the remedy was cheap and then I'd know for sure that the whole thing was as silly as it seemed.”

“I telephoned.”

“Upon twice dialing 401 and the additional seven digits, there was only the automatic non-operative number signal and I heaved half hearted sigh of relief. Probably I'd simply had an odd dream.”

“Then I tried the same number but with the 201 prefix – and my well ordered cause and effect scientific world tumbled.”

“Having previously rehearsed what I might say, I quickly introduced myself as a physician researching psychic matters when a surprised male voice answered. That voice belonged to one John P. Crumbaugh. The name "John" caused Alex Smith's prediction to explode in my mind.”

“Yes, Mr. Crumbaugh had had an injury to his left leg, but it didn't bother him. It was true that he didn't work in the military but his job did involve elaborate checking of electronic gear purchased by the military.”

“As for "Monmouth," he worked at Fort Monmouth, N.J.”

“Through our subsequent correspondence, Mr. Crumbaugh and I discovered that we had common interests both in problems of electronic guidance for aircraft and in the question of the biological effects of radio energy. The latter is electromagnetic energy and should not be confused with the toxic energy problems of X-ray devices or atomic reactors. In short, we seemed to be kindred souls.”

“The correspondence further deepened the mystery.”

“His telephone number was doubly unlisted. Having been installed privately by Mr. Crumbaugh, this particular telephone was unlisted at the telephone company and wasn't even listed inside the plant where he worked. Had he not been in his office when I dialed, it would have gone unanswered.”

“Alex Smith's prediction that I'd meet a man named John was fulfilled when a medical colleague and I subsequently visited Mr. Crumbaugh in New Jersey. Our far ranging discussion held us long into the night.”

“Signal events sometimes change lives and these happenings certainly had precisely such an effect upon mine. Having matriculated in the orderly time sequenced cause and effect world of physics and chemistry, I was confident that the nature of biological energy processes would be equally orderly. Having dissected brains as a medical student and actively practiced surgery for many years, I knew something of the mind's perceptive possibilities. By such standards these events couldn't happen. Ever!”

“Researchers often become truly disturbed by phenomena which cannot be fitted into known scientific dogma, but a scientist never discards his evidence. Rather, the conscientious worker pays a homage to science by cataloging all results and, where necessary, elaborating new more inclusive theories. But the events related here were just too much.”

“Was I to believe that an inert wrist watch could perform as a radio in sending messages? No way! Watches told the time of day and nothing more. Even then you had to look at them.”

“Furthermore, if it did send messages like a radio, where was the radio receiver? And where was my neat time ordered cause and effect scientific world if the inert watch somehow enabled tuning into events lying yet in the future? This would be like watching the Superbowl struggle on TV three weeks before the game was even played. Impossible!”

It is amusing to watch Dr. Bill's mind struggle to make the uncanny go away….

“A more comfortable argument is that Alex simply guessed that a man named John (a common enough name) with an old left leg injury (not an uncommon complaint) worked in a paramilitary group (lots of them around) at a place called Monmouth (England has a county so named), and that I'd meet him.”

“The argument feels spurious. It rings hollow and is unconvincing. But even if this premise were to be accepted, still further difficulties lie ahead. From where in creation and by what process was this particular John's doubly unlisted telephone number conveyed into the awareness of my half asleep mind? It is certain that the most complex prognostication of contemporary neurophysiology can provide no comprehensible mechanism whereby I might have perceived these ten digits. On the other hand, my having written them down proved that I did perceive them.”

“Furthermore, the deepening dilemma would not be resolved even if the perceptive aspect of this enigma were to be explained. We remain in deeply troubled water because of a still more perplexing mystery.”

“Who sent the messages?”

Coincidence? Possible, I suppose, but, as Dr. Bill discusses, trying to write this off to coincidence feels like an act of irrational materialistic faith rather than sound reasoning. Helpers? I'd like to think so, whether it's true or not.

If Helpers, why?

Sometimes I think Helpers or whoever/whatever they may be, just want to stimulate us. “There's a nice lady or guy down there, lots of potential, but stuck in a mental belief rut, let's make some sort of thing happen which won't fit at all and so might awaken her or his curiosity a little…..”

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For years I've been part of a private discussion group of scientific parapsychologists, mostly experimentalists. Recently we heard from one of our members, Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel prize winning physicist, that he and another physicist had been dis-invited from participation in a small physics conference this summer because the organizers learned he was interested in parapsychology. He was not scheduled to speak on it, knowing he was interested in it was enough to condemn him.  [NOTE: This is a corrected version, I left out the "not" in the previous sentence the first time I posted.]

I found this insulting and unusually blatant – there is lots of prejudice against people who even show an interest in psi phenomena, but it usually manifest behind the scenes rather than a blatant “We don't want to associate with heretics” kind of style.

Professor Josephson wrote a apt haiku about it on his website (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/articles/uninvite.html )(the dis-invitation letters are there too), which I won't quote as I haven't had time to get his permission*, but he did inspire me to my own effort:

Scientists fear ghosts!

Pull up covers, hide, hide, hide!

Away damned psi, away, away!

I figure it's better to have a little fun with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (Shakespeare gets the credit on that phrase….) than just worry about it…. But it does illustrate, too well, as I've discussed in The End of Materialism, how much irrationality and unconscious emotion goes into supposedly scientific discussion of the paranormal…

* I've since gotten Professor Josephson's permission, here's his haiku:

Madness season is here
Scientists waxing furious
To what end?

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Too many times I'm so busy producing new material that I forget to tell people that it exists. Since my aim is to communicate material that may interest people, that kind of defeats the purpose if they don't know of it…..

I'm also shy about seeming to “promote myself,” seems like an egotistical thing to do, but that's kind of silly when you want to communicate.

Anyway, I have now produced ten 10-minute videos, going up on YouTube, with the series title “Questions of Consciousness.” My initial motivation was to simultaneously share some information and questions about the nature of our minds and parapsychology, and also to promote the forthcoming June 24-28 2010 meetings of ISSSEEM, the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, in Colorado (website info at www.issseem.org) I'm honored to be the President of ISSSEEM this year, and setting the theme of the conference – Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21^st Century – has been a privilege. I'll center my Presidential Address on that and our keynote presenters will also touch on that theme.

Think about the possibilities – a practical spirituality that works for most people, based on scientific and scholarly research to separate the wheat from the chaff, rather than “You better believe this or you'll go to Hell!” traditional kind of approach. Ambitious? Yes! Possible? Maybe, it's certainly worth a try. The sad reality is that traditional spirituality and religion don't work very well for far too many people.

Four of these videos are up on YouTube already (just go to YouTube and search for Charles Tart), six more will be posted soon, maybe all at once, maybe over the next six weeks.

Response has been enthusiastic so far, so after the June meeting I may continue producing videos to stimulate thought about consciousness.

In many ways I'm old-fashioned and come from a time when slow, thoughtful readings of sophisticated text was the way to communicate, but I know video is much more useful for a lot of people now.

Anyway, enjoy them and, if you find them useful, tell your friends about them. You might also want to come to the ISSSEEM meeting in June!

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"Are you suggesting that even someone with anomalous perceptions can contribute to a scientific study of such experiences as a scientist and not simply as a “lab rat” to be studied?"

I think you're worried about the problem of bias here, and it's reasonable to think about it.  One of the great strengths of science is the commitment to be as objective as possible and to report the facts, the data, and keep your interpretations of the data logically close to the facts, rather than distorted by personal preferences and beliefs.

But how far do we want to take this?  Should we say that only blind people can study vision because sighted people may be biased?  That only deaf people can study hearing since hearing people may be biased?

You could argue that sighted and deaf people will have insights into the stuff being studied that are great advantages.

They still have to watch out for their personal biases.  For example, I have a dear friend of many years who has made her living as a psychic, but I have never formally studied her, interesting as that might be, because I know I might well be too biased and unable to compensate for that bias.

Questioning your own experiences?  Sounds like exactly what I would expect of a scientist.  A "believer" would say "My experiences are sacred and prove Doctrine X, it would be heresy to question them!"  A scientist would think, "Here's my data, what I saw/experienced, it's interesting to interpret it by theory A, also interesting to see if from the point of view of theory B, maybe there's another theory that will work even better, I'll tentatively say theory D works best for now, let's go on and see what happens…."

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Identity, Self, Karma, Buddhism, Survival of Death, Etc….

Buddhism, as I understand it (and I’m not a scholar, just a beginning but serious student and on-again, off-again practitioner/experimenter and “fooler-arounder”) is a body of knowledge, concepts, and practices about human experience.  Direct experience is the fundamental data of Buddhism, although a lot of Buddhism seems to say, in a way that’s debatable to me, that what is true about experience is true for all of reality.  An interesting idea, but….  As a general expectation (subject to checking and future experience, of course) I suspect most of what Buddhism says about experience is likely to be some of the best “truth” we have about it.  When it comes to the external, physical world, though, I generally expect modern physical science to be more accurate.  “Accurate” or “true” in the sense of a good fit between concept and observable data.  If I need to cross a bridge over a deep chasm, I hope it was designed by a mechanical engineer rather than a (advanced or not) Buddhist meditator…

Gautama Buddha was concerned, like Indian yogis before him, with human suffering and escaping from it.  Traditional yoga taught its adepts how to enter into very deep altered states of consciousness (ASCs), jhanas, in which, among other things, all ordinary suffering (pain, thirst, hunger, worry, etc.) disappeared for the duration of the ASC.  The Buddha mastered these absorptive states but felt they were not enough, because when you came out of them, the troubles you had left behind were still there.  So, as Shinzen Young has pointed out, the Buddha made a great discovery.  If you used the greatly enhanced concentrative and focusing abilities developed to study and examine the basic nature of all mental phenomena, all experience, vipassana meditation, you could see the roots of suffering, and then “tear out” these roots and so end suffering permanently, rather than just having temporary “vacations” in jhana states.  (Although we should note that achievement of any of the jhana states is an amazing accomplishment in itself!)

Buddha insisted things had to be personally discovered, using meditative investigation and examination, not simply believed as some kind of doctrine.

Three of the most basic and necessary (to end suffering) discoveries to be made were anicca, anatta, and dukkha.

The Pali word anicca literally means "inconstant", and refers to the absence of permanence and continuity.  Everything (except perhaps the ultimate nature of awareness- this is a tricky and subtle idea) is in a state of flux, changing as a result of multitudinous causes.  Some things may change rapidly, like our thoughts and feelings, some usually slowly, like a rock, but there are no eternal, unchanging things, totally solid stuffs, everything is actually ongoing process.

The Pali word anatta (or anatman) refers to the absence of any permanent self.  What we usually take to be the self is, like everything else, a series of changing, ongoing processes, causally affected by many other things.  It’s opposed to the Hindu idea of the atman, a permanent, immortal core or soul of a person.

Dukkha refers to the discovery, through deep meditation, as well as ordinary reflection, of the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all factors of ordinary existence.  Facets of dukkha can be expressed with words like suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration.

So who/what am I, then?  And how can I end my suffering?

Meditative concentration practices teach me to focus and stabilize my mind, so I can then examine it.  Without concentration and stabilization, it’s like trying to examine a fine-detailed painting when all you have by way of light is a sputtering, weak-flamed candle.  As you develop concentration the light of your mental candle, following the analogy, gets bright and steady, so now you can make out details.  You can practice not just concentrative meditation (shamatha) but insight meditation, vipassana.

I have been doing vipassana in various ways for more than 20 years now.  I would never describe myself as an “advanced” or “accomplished” meditator, but I have gotten better at it and so seen some things about the nature of my experience (and presumably about experience in general, ignoring real possibilities of significant individual differences).

-        You can get better at concentration and insight with practice, although it’s taken me a lot of practice!  I started out with a really restless mind, my candle flame flickered wildly in thought gales, but I can steady it moderately well now some of the time.  At other times, the usual thought storms are raging away!

-        Anicca, impermanence, is a good description of my experience, the closer I look the more I see it constantly changing, morphing, flowing, things pop up, stay a bit, alter, disappear, etc., etc., etc.  Even with my conscious, deliberate talking mind being relatively calm, there’s a steady stream of thoughts and thoughtlets, sensations, emotions going on.

-        Anatta, absence of any permanent self, is also a good description of the fact that I can’t find a “watcher” of all these mental phenomena.  Yet “I” obviously “watch” on many occasions.  To believe I have some sort of permanent self is thus a belief with no data to support it in my experience.  Yet I’m obviously here, writing this, “I” exist, so it makes no sense to believe in some sort of nihilism or non-existence.  Practically, I tend to follow Sogyal Rinpoche’s advice here, accept that “I” obviously exist, but don’t take it too seriously or project all sorts of eternal concepts on to that ongoing, changing experience.

(Putting quotes around words like “I” and “watch” is my way of reminding myself and readers to be careful and not take these words literally, they are tricky.)

-        Of courses there is my physical body and brain.  I understand from what we know scientifically that they are processes rather than permanent things, and also know from experience that body sensations change all the time.  Even what appear to be steady ones, if you look closely, are constantly morphing in various ways.  I also understand from simple common sense and instinct that we need to take good care of our physical bodies.  We’ll regret it if we don’t, and even then, my body will ultimately die.

-        In spite of the insistence on anatta, the absence of any permanent self in Buddhism, there is an implicit implication that the ultimate nature of mind, rigpa, is a permanent “thing”/”process” that goes on from life to reincarnate life, as well as being behind all changing experience in this life.  Since I think there’s good (albeit not overwhelming) empirical evidence for the reality of reincarnation for at least some people, I’m willing to accept anatta as just one of the “mysteries,” something we can’t understand with ordinary logic.  It look’s like that’s just how it is, whether we understand it or not.  Buddhist attempts to insist on no permanent self but then have “your” karma go from life to your reincarnate  life always strike me as straining logic, so I don’t worry too much about them.  Twenty-five hundred years of scholars straining to make everything consistent… as a scholar myself, I understand how scholars can get somewhat distant from the actual data while fooling themselves with oh-so-elegant words….

-        My everyday experience of my mind functioning, ordinary or meditative, is obviously an emergent product of whatever the ultimate (life-spanning) core of myself (rigpa plus karma plus ???) is, intimately interacting with the physical and sensory-encoded qualities of my body-based psychology….  I mean “emergent” here in the sense of systems theory, that the whole is more than a simple addition of the parts.

And so…..

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This is a stimulating and interesting venture to me.  I prefer to think of myself as an old-school exponent of the well-crafted written word, that readers take in slowly and mindfully….but I have noticed that video is big nowadays!     

The first of these videos, now up on the web, is about what we mean by “subtle energies.” ISSSEEM expects to post a new video about every two weeks up to, and possibly beyond our late June conference.

The second video will discuss the confusion between genuine science (friendly to subtle energies and spirituality) versus the too prevalent scientism (automatically dismisses subtle energies and spirituality as nonsense, without actually examining them).  This is the theme of my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, which shows that it is actually reasonable and healthy, based on scientific evidence, to be both scientifically oriented and spiritually oriented.

My third video discusses evidence for psychic or subtle energies induced healing, and how we can begin building an evidence-based spirituality for the 21^st century, the theme of ISSSEEM’s June conference.  Suggesting one direction we could go in, the fourth video is an emotionally moving author’s reading from my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together on the experience of Cosmic Consciousness, a description by the originator of the term, Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke.

More videos are in preparation, and ISSSEEM will send out an announcement to its members (and I to this list) as each goes on line, approximately every second week.  As these videos are of wide interest, feel free to pass this announcement or subsequent ones on to friends and colleagues.  As I argue in my book, multitudes of people are psychologically and spiritually damaged – in a useless way – because Scientism, Scientistic Materialism, Dismissive Materialism, arrogantly dismisses their spiritual urges and experiences as nonsense.  As people realize that, while of course you need to be discriminating, genuine science and genuine spirituality are very compatible and can aid each other, this suffering can be reduced and the world can benefit.

[In case anyone doesn’t know me, here’s the description sent to ISSSEEM.

Professor Tart is an internationally known researcher, writer, lecturer and educator.  His classic Altered States of Consciousness book in 1969 was largely responsible for legitimatizing the study of altered states in psychology and psychiatry, and his Transpersonal Psychologies book in 1975 helped found the field of that name.  He has contributed more than 200 research and scholarly articles in refereed journals, but is known for his friendly, understandable, relaxed-but-stimulating style of lecturing.]

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A few hours ago my wife and I caught a door-to-door shuttle from the San Francisco Airport to our home, along with a couple of other passengers, one already on the van. We were returning from the annual meeting of IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies, held this year in San Diego. You can learn more about this wonderful organization at http://www.iands.org/. This was a powerful and moving weekend: you can be moved by reading about near-death experiences (NDEs), but the psychological impact of hearing an NDEr tell about their experience in person is special.

My wife had told me several times during the meeting that I should write something about it for my friends and my mailing lists, and I kept muttering yes, that was a good idea, but I didn’t know if I could find any time…

So what was the first stop of the shuttle? The Marriot Hotel in Oakland. What’s special about that? We’ve only been to that hotel once in our lives, thirteen years ago. What for? To attend, for the first time, and for me to speak at, the annual IANDS conference, held in Oakland that year….

Hmmm……

I guess I’m supposed to find the time whether I think I have it or not and write something!

IANDS was founded in 1978 to provide support, both intellectual and emotional, to people who were NDErs and to researchers studying the NDE. Besides many local groups, IANDS holds an annual conference where people can share their NDEs and researchers can report on their latest findings. They also publish the professional scientific journal, the Journal of Near-Death Studies. The support function is very important, for while NDEs are much better known today than they were back in the 70s, people who have NDEs (and there are a lot of them!) usually feel very isolated and often rejected. People who haven’t had the experience can’t understand them, and they are struggling with changing their lives, often against the forces of mainstream culture and of their friends and loved ones, to incorporate the profound epiphanies about love and spirit that they brought back from their NDEs. I don’t have the words to convey this vital function of the meetings very well, so I’ll focus on my small part. Fortunately my wife Judy wrote a description of the conference for my grandson Aidan, who has just entered college and is quite interested in things like this, so I’ll append it for a fuller look. One of my ITP colleagues, Ryan Rominger, also presented a fascinating account of his research on how just hearing about NDEs can strongly affect people, and an article on his findings will appear in the Journal of Near-Death Studies soon.

When I spoke at the Oakland IANDS conference 13 years ago I was tremendously moved by the stories of various NDErs, but professionally it wasn’t too hard to give my talk, as I functioned in my persona of research scientist. I reported on half a dozen studies of out-of-body experiences (OBEs), a common component of NDEs, that I had conducted over the years. This invited address was very different from any I have every given, though, and I worked on it for months before the talk and kept changing it right up to the last minute. The conference organizers wanted me to talk about meaning, to talk about the hope of an evidence-based spirituality for the twenty-first century, an idea I had opened up in my recent The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together book. I needed to talk as a human being, as a spiritual seeker, not just in my scientist role.

What concerned me even more, and made me anticipate that this would be the most “difficult” audience I had every spoken for, was that I knew at least half the people at the meeting would be NDErs. NDEs almost always involve meeting and communicating with a high spiritual being, often identified by the NDEr as God, and receiving the deepest possible answers to their questions about their purposes and missions in life. What in the world could I, a mere human being, say to people who had already, as it were, “talked to God?”

I can’t attempt to reproduce my hour’s talk, but fortunately I and the audience was pleased with it, despite my limitations. They were wonderful, rather than “difficult!” A major theme I shared was that the too common dismissal of NDEs as nothing but brain malfunctions, as illusions and hallucinations, by people identified as “scientists” was, in point of fact, not real science but scientism, a dogmatic commitment to a philosophy of materialism that did not actually deal with the data of various human faculties, especially psi abilities and NDEs. Psi abilities show that we have qualities that are what we would expect spiritual beings to have. This is the major theme of The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. So it’s not dumb or neurotic or “unscientific” to be interested in or have experiences of the spiritual, it’s perfectly reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual. Sure, there’s lot of nonsense under the labels “spiritual” and “scientific,” and we need to keep sharpening our discrimination and expanding our knowledge, but there’s nothing per se wrong with concern with the spiritual as something real and important.

The other major theme was based on the fact that we were all idealists, wanting to make the world a better place, but while having an NDE or other deep spiritual experience was usually enough to convince the experiencer of the vital importance of living with kindness and love, and making the world a better place, personal experience was not enough. NDErs and others with deep spiritual experience know too well that trying to share that experience with others may just make them defensive and hostile, rather than open them up, for example. More is needed than having personal spiritual experiences, and a major part of that more is finding ways to have genuine science (as opposed to scientism) and genuine spirituality (as opposed to rigid and dogmatic religions) work together to not only improve our understanding of realty, but to test and refine traditional spiritual practices, such as meditation, so that they work more effectively for people today, thus leading to more direct personal spiritual experience of the sort that makes people wiser and kinder. That is, we not only need to stop the damage scientism does to too many people, by wrongly invalidating their spiritual longings and experiences, we need to move on to greater spiritual knowledge and effectiveness, a multi-pronged approach to opening people up to and helping them with their genuine spiritual sides.

A call for a huge undertaking? Yes. A necessary task? Yes! We are ruining our planet and our lives, and while it’s fine to tell people they should be kinder and wiser and care more, that kind of intellectual exhortation too often doesn’t have much weight compared to factors like greed, fear, and insecurity. But when people have the kind of deep spiritual experiences that NDErs and some other people have had, working to be kinder, wiser, and more useful to others does not remain just one of those good things we ought, but somehow fail, to do, it becomes a natural way of living.

A huge undertaking to make this practical on a planetary scale, but we’d better do it.

For most, if not all, of the IANDS conference attendees, my talk was just one part of the conference, and it was rather abstract compared to the sharing of NDEs by participants, but I hope that I planted a small seed which will help….

OK, Universe, have I written enough for now?

Judy Tart’s Impressions for Our Grandson:

Aidan, you asked me to tell you about the Near-Death Conference.  If there is something more or different you want to know about it, tell me and I will try to answer.

Around 150 people attended this weekend conference in San Diego on the topic of near-death experiences, put on by IANDS (International Association for Near Death Studies).  At least 2/3 of them were people who had personally gone through the near-death experience, and there were a couple of panels where several people talked about what had happened to them and how it changed their lives.  There were some other speakers, mostly researchers who have been studying this experience and trying to understand it.  Charley was one of the speakers and the title of his talk was "Evidence-based Spirituality for the 21st Century."

Skeptics tend to dismiss this experience as "just some funny happenings in the brain" which are brought on by anoxia, drugs that may have been given to the person, or even "the god area" of the brain which is set up to give us a shot of endorphins and good feelings when we're dying to make us happier.  And of course, these skeptics claim that none of this could happen if the person were really, really dead, and so the experiencer must be just hallucinating or re-framing what happened while they were losing consciousness as something that happened later in the resuscitation process when, from all possible clinical and scientific measurements, they are really dead.

More and more meticulous studies and reports are showing these skeptics' theories to be completely inadequate.  All the evidence collected from numerous accounts of doctors and patients who have been successfully resuscitated points toward the idea that each of us has a conscious awareness that is not dependant on a functioning brain in order to perceive and remember events.  Though our consciousness, brain, and body are usually tightly bound together, the NDE shows that our consciousness is ultimately separate from it.  This is why people who have had this experience no longer fear death – in fact, most of them did not want to return to their body and felt even more alive when separated from it.

So what is the experience they have?  In general, following a horrendous accident, heart attack, drowning, overwhelming illness – the victim finds himself floating above his body (which seems to no longer be very important), then being drawn toward an overwhelming light, possibly through a tunnel.  They may meet long-dead relatives, or beings of light who seem incredibly loving and full of transcendent knowledge – or the light itself may radiate this overwhelming love, comfort, and wisdom.  They usually want to stay with this light or these beings forever.  Usually they are told they have a choice as to whether to go back to their body or not – or they may remember that they have young children or someone dependant on them – or they may be told that they have a task on earth that is yet to be accomplished.  Obviously the ones who make the choice to come back are the ones we are hearing from.

Usually their lives are profoundly transformed by this event – in general, they become more loving, try to find some way to be of service to others, no longer regard the usual goals of material life to be very important, become more spiritual – often resulting in a complete upheaval of their relationships with spouses and other people who can't deal with the deep changes that happen to them.  It isn't easy for them, and it make take years for them to come to terms with what has happened to them, especially in a society which is not welcoming of this kind of experience.  That's why this organization is so important to them as a source of support.

I found being around these people to have a deep effect on me – I felt more centered, more aware, more open and loving.

Hope this is helpful…

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