While reviewing some correspondence with my friend and colleague, Etzel Cardena, Professor at Lund University in Sweden and now one of the leading investigators of altered states of consciousness, I found he had asked me to write a little about how I got into parapsychologial research. As I don’t know if what I wrote [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 4, Part 7 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
CTT: Now this point you bring up about state of being is really a very important one, and it’s very hard to talk about adequately. We can talk about, say, personality. We [...]
My recent interview on the Buddhist Geeks web radio show (www.buddhistgeeks.com), noting scientific evidence for a Buddhist idea like reincarnation, has resulted in some spirited comments on their website. I think my response to these, dealing with the nature of science and whether there is really scientific evidence for something like reincarnation or whether [...]
Continue reading about Buddhism, Reincarnation, Science, Parapsychology
I have been having a discussion with some parapsychologist colleagues about whether or not the existence of psi argues for a duality of existence in the world, a “spiritual” level or reality as I argue in my recent The End of Materialism book. Some argue that materialism will eventually explain psi, while I call [...]
Continue reading about Promissory Materialism, “God of the Gaps,” and Pragmatic Interactive Dualism
For the past week I have been reading a ms. (the current working title is Straight Talk) sent me by P. M. H. Atwater, what is to be her final (and very big!) book on her years of investigations of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Atwater is a leading independent scholar in this area, and I’ve [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 4, Part 17 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
CTT: But let’s throw in one more factor here that’s important, especially since so many of us are going to become clinicians, and that’s projection and transference reactions. Every one of us has [...]
Continue reading about Transference and countertransference, or How I came to love my teacher
I don’t seem to be able to make this come up as a response to the comment about whether a person with unusual experiences can also study them as a scientist, so I’ll add it as a new post here…
“Are you suggesting that even someone with anomalous perceptions can contribute to a scientific study of [...]
Continue reading about Scientists with Personal Experience of What They Study
Recently I received an email from a scholar who will be reviewing my The End of Materialism book for a journal. He noted that:
In the book you say: “….genuine science [shows] that a wide variety of traditional religious views about reality are factually wrong; they just don’t stand up to empirical tests.” Can you [...]
Continue reading about Science and Religion, Fit and Non-Fit
Several of you have pointed out that a person doesn’t have to have “spiritual” reasons for being nice to others, and that’s true.
[I'm putting quotes around “spiritual” to remind us it's a tricky word, we'll have to try to make clearer one of these days]
So let me stir the pot a little as [...]
Sandy raises a point that comes up a lot. When you write about “spiritual” versus “non-spiritual” people, our mind tends to immediately think in extremes – often helped by the extremeness we have experienced with those two classes of people!
It’s easy to think of “spiritual” implying all the good virtues – generosity, faithfulness, control [...]
Continue reading about Explorations on the Spiritual Side – 2 – The “Problem” of Nice Atheists