A couple of days ago I saw a beautiful and inspiring post on dying on a discussion list I am on of folks interested in trans-traditional spirituality. The author, Don Parchuta, is a physician (Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases) who has recently become a priest as part of his spiritual quest and service. I asked [...]
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 13 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: I was thinking about something. I guess it actually ties in all the stuff we’ve been talking about in states of being, and I have an interesting [...]
My wife Judy and I have just completed a 6-day retreat on Dzogchen approaches to liberation with lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche, held at Mt. Madonna Conference Center. Now it’s a couple of days of camping in a redwood park to cool down, before jumping fully back into ordinary life, but I’ve been reflecting a lot and [...]
Some interesting correspondence on world views, altered states, animism, materialism, suppression of the bright shadow, Dismissive Materialism, etc. that, with Matt Colborn’s permission, I’m sharing. 3-17-11 Hi Charles – I’ve just been doing some corrections to the manuscript of my book Pluralism and the Mind and as a result been thinking a lot about different [...]
Continue reading about World Views, Animism, Dismissive Materialism
Much of my research and writing about parapsychological subjects is somewhat abstract, dealing with laboratory experiments and what they might mean. I’m just finishing teaching a course on basic Parapsychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and trying to give students some personal feel for the material and its importance in human life, not just [...]
Continue reading about Real People, Parapsychology, Broken Hearts, Survival
Many of you know that one of my primary interests is building bridges between first-class science and first-class spirituality, so they can stimulate each other. My The End of Materialism book in 2009 was a major effort in this direction, arguing that, given scientific evidence, it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in [...]
Continue reading about Toward An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century
After a long meditation retreat last month, my curiousity about one aspect of my meditation exprience led me to write the following little query about images. I’ve submitted it to the Journal of Consciousness Studies Online site, and if they accept it I may get some “expert” reflections on it, or I may get some [...]
Continue reading about Where Do All Those Images and Dreamlets Come From?
I will be offering a basic parapsychology class online for the first time at ITP in the Winter quarter of 2011. For those who are interested in a good reading list on parapsychology or an idea of what my course is like, I have included a shortened (leaving out stuff about writing standards for student [...]
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My main regret about this blog is that I have so many irons in the fire, so many things I want and need to write about, that I seldom have time to respond to your comments. So many of your comments are really good, showing deep thought and bringing relevant experience to expanding various topics [...]
Lately I’m finding it useful to think of myself (and others) as “intention fields,” intermeshed sets of intentions, some reinforcing, some contradictory, that certainly control the way my mind functions, including the way I perceive reality and perhaps, to some extent, the very functioning of external reality itself. I was recently stimulated to try to [...]
Continue reading about Assumptions, Intentions, Experiments, Bias