Lecture 4, Part 12 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: You’re getting at the balance between an experience that is being relatively directly created by what’s actually happening at the moment, and starting to superimpose concepts of what should be happening over it. Those concepts can be very intriguing, but they’re never quite the same as the actual experience. So you can go through life, in a sense, ruining your actually experience.

…..Okay, how do I want to say this…..?

One of my qualities that I’ve had to work with all my life is gluttony, to use an old-fashioned word for it. And for my particular personality type, gluttony manifests as, “Whatever experience is happening to me, it could be better!” Which means it’s never quite enough for what it is. For me to learn to simply accept experience as it is – which mindfulness practice is very good for – makes experience much more rewarding than constantly thinking, “This could be better!”

Knowing that you’ve turned your attention away from sensing what’s actually going on and are now investing in words about it or images about it – those are the main ways that concepts are done – allows you to not get so carried away by these things. But it’s so easy to get carried away.

An example came to mind while we were talking about it. There was a world religious leaders’ conference in Switzerland some years ago. One of the delegates there was a famous Zen teacher, who was quite old at the time. He looked so relaxed that everyone figured the old guy is dozing…

The person who was writing about it was describing an afternoon session. The delegates were all gathered around a long conference table in this beautiful room. The windows were open and someone was giving the most elegant lecture about the nature of spirituality and all that when a gust of wind blew in the window, took the speaker’s papers, and blew them down the table real fast.

While all these people caught up in their words did nothing at all, the Zen master simply reached out and caught the papers as they went by, because he hadn’t been caught up in the words.

Concepts, beliefs, ideas about reality vs reality….

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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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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 can say this person has an aggressive personality, or that person has a generous personality, and we mean that there is an overall pattern to the way they live their life, and it’s a unique enough pattern – or distinct enough pattern – that it’s useful to know that kind of thing.

And you can talk about states of consciousness, where the mind can operate in a particular way, and so we talk about an altered state like dreaming, we mean the mind is operating in a different kind of fashion. But then consciousness goes back to its usual baseline. Altered states are transitory things.

But a state of being – well, first off, the abbreviation is not good, right? Because you start talking about SOBs and it’s going to be hard to get research grants to work it out.

But there’s very little formal recognition that people might be at different qualities of being, but – well, I’m just adding to the confusion, so I’ll shut up.

Student: I think that what happens is that there is a default state of being for most people, which is their preconditioned, cultural, hypnotized beliefs about themselves and what they deserve, and who they are. That’s certainly my default state of being. So in practicing being there, what happens is that my life unfolds in a way in which that perpetuates.

But then when I become more aware of the deeper truth about myself, then I have more choice in what I am being. And so what I choose to be in this moment, in terms of how I feel or how I perceive the world, then manifests – then becomes real – as I move through the world, and my actions flow from that state of being.

CTT: I mean, suppose your state of being is indeed a peaceful one. Then you can be in situations where people are agitated and aggressive and angry and in a lot of conflict with each other and not overreact to it, and sometimes have a calming influence just by being there. Whereas if you don’t have a peaceful state of being – if your normal state of being is kind of excitable – then you go into a paranoid situation, you get paranoid too, and you get into an aggressive situation, you get aggressive too.

Developing a peaceful state of being is an important aspect of a lot of spiritual paths. Partly it’s a practical one. If you’re highly agitated, you’re not going to learn many spiritual skills. Your mind’s too jumpy and caught up in things. You’re not going to learn meditation or prayer, or any kind of practices that require focus. Partly it’s simply because most of the time we like to feel peaceful rather than agitated, although once in a while, feeling agitated is really neat! There are some built-in pleasures to that kind of thing.

So you can work on spiritual development techniques to develop peace, but there’s a tricky part here. You can overdo it. You can develop peacefulness when you really should get agitated by a situation. You can develop a kind of forced suppression of your feelings so that you feel calm and peaceful, but it’s really not appropriate to feel that way in a situation.

Recall the example I gave you the other day of John Lilly, being deeply hurt as a kid and so deciding he wasn’t going to feel any emotions, and managing to pull it off for another 20-30 years of his life. It made him very calm and able to handle a lot of stress in a calm way, but eventually he realized what a terrible price he’d paid for basically not feeling anything.

Student: What was the price?

CTT: The price? Aliveness. Joy. If you’re starting to suppress all your feelings because you don’t trust the negative ones, it’s pretty hard to suppress just the negative ones and let the positive ones go. You tend to keep a damper on everything, and that means the positive ones don’t start either.

Student: Also you can’t really fully suppress them anyway. Because if I was always trying to be peaceful, and I was actually resentful or angry, then that would come out as passive aggression, and then that would manifest in my life.

CTT: That would be our particular Western psychological contribution to spiritual development, I think – that we know that when you suppress things like this, there’s going to be other kinds of prices paid for it, and things are going to come out in other ways.

It’s like in the early days of psychotherapy, when they discovered that hypnosis would cure hysteria. A hysteric would come in with a paralyzed arm or hysterical blindness or something like that, and with a hypnotic session or two, they get a complete cure. Then some new symptom would develop a week later. That was what led to the idea that if a person has a particular kind of symptom, that’s expressing a dynamic, a deeper process. They’re getting something out of that, and if you just cut it off, you may make this dynamic find some other kind of outlet.

Now I don’t think that turned out to be universally true, okay? I mean, the Freudians particularly carried this all the way. Every single thing you did carried tremendous psychodynamic meaning that needed to be ferreted out. But some things are relatively nothing when it comes to psychodynamics.

What was Freud’s famous saying? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s not a symbol for anything.

So are we focusing on being the way I'd like us to?

Student: Yeah. Thank you. I’m going to be in the bathroom.

CTT: Now that’s a state of being that requires a change!

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CTT

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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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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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 had the experience of relating to God-like teachers, and that was our parents. When we were infants and little children, our parents, by comparison, were so incredibly knowledgeable and powerful, and could give love or take it away. Freud was quite right in pointing out that this creates very deep, very primitive kinds of attitudes toward powerful figures like that and, without buying all of psychoanalysis, these things happen in later life, so you get transference reactions. Okay?

So these primitive feelings that you had toward your father or mother get transferred to some other living human being who, of course, isn’t your father or mother, and isn’t magical. But some parts of you regard them that way. And I’ve seen a lot of this happen in various spiritual teaching situations. When it first begins to happen, it’s wonderful for the person who experiences it.

You fall in love with your guru. They are so wonderful and what they do works. You have experiences. When you were a little kid and you hurt yourself you ran to mommy and she kissed the boo-boo and made it better. It works! The guru kisses the (psychological) boo-boo and makes it better, and that draws from and stimulates this deep transference kind of reaction in you.

The trouble is that this devotion and appreciation and energy toward following the guru is based on a fundamental error. This person is not your father or mother. You are not a little child. Whether they have any magic abilities or not is a wide open question, but you deep down feel that way. And of course, you rationalize it all as this is their spiritual ability coming through.

The problem with building on this foundation is that transferences can flip from positive to negative if the right circumstances come along. And all of a sudden, this wonderful emissary from God, who loved you and taught you everything you know, is a God damn fucking charlatan who’s been exploiting you the whole time, and you lose everything! All the effort you put in, all the skills you learned, you don’t want to have anything to do with it because it’s gone to a negative transference! All the things you hated about your parents suddenly become projected on to the relationship, smothering the positive projections.

As far as I can tell, most spiritual teachers have very little awareness of the phenomena of transference (or counter-transference, which swells up the ego of the spiritual teacher). And so they have a lot of problems with these sorts of things. They don’t know how to handle them.

One of the early groups I was in was led by Claudio Naranjo, when he was on a very spiritual “high.” And no, I don’t think he was “enlightened,” but he was in touch with something really important. He was also a psychiatrist, and he made his students write essays on their transference relationships with him every once in awhile.

Student: Wow.

CTT: Very unusual kind of approach, which some people, who I think had big transferences, said “This is our opportunity to tell him how much we know he really is God.”

(Laughter)

Scary. Scary.

Let me just finish one other item in this story. Maybe you’ve read about it in the book already; maybe you haven’t. When I ran a mindfulness training group along Gurdjieff lines for about a year and a half, two years, I tried to keep people aware of this transference dimension because I didn’t want that kind of psychological distortion confusing the skills people were learning to be more present.

But it started happening, and I could see it happening. Somebody would ask me a question and I’d say “I don't know the answer to that.” And they’d get this look in their eye that this was a very profound answer on my part.

(Laughter)

And it wasn’t a profound answer. I just didn’t know! So I tried to explain that to them, you know? “Don’t act like that’s profound. I just don’t know.”

(Laughter)

And the look would get deeper.

(Laughter)

He’s very humble, as well as profound!

(Laughter)

I saw this starting to go out of control, so I ended the group, because I didn’t want that kind of crap happening. I didn’t know how to take people through that in a sensible sort of way. But it’s something to always watch out for in any spiritual path that somebody’s on. Transference and a countertransference.

You know I don't know how popular Freud is among clinicians nowadays, but that part of it you should be familiar with, because it’s a very real thing in spiritual circles. And especially because it’s not understood at all, by and large. That makes it all the more powerful. And it’s one of these things that, if you understand it, you have a chance to do something about it.

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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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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 give me at least one example?

I think my response to him is interesting to many….

In our culture most people would immediately think of the battle between those who interpret the Bible to mean the world was created some 5,000 years ago vs the scientific theory of evolution. Given the incredible levels of animus and politicization around that one, I'll pass. It also saddens me that profound teachings about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you can be demeaned down to such levels.
I'm a human, which means I have many, often contradictory aspects, but one of the roles I try to fill is that of scientist. To me that means I value truth, without claiming (to myself or others) that I have some sort of exclusive and final understanding of it. Rather I look at areas that interest me, see what happens (the data) and try to make sense of it – the theories. Sometimes my (and colleagues') theories make good apparent sense of the data and have strong predictive power, so will be useful for some time – until new data comes along that requires revision. Sometimes things don't make very good sense, so we keep collecting data, thinking about it, and hoping.
To me spiritual experience is data. Something happens to someone. Being human, we try to make sense of it. For some people, if it's apparently spiritual or religious in nature they say it's a Revelation, The Truth. It's very satisfying to feel you have The Truth about anything, of course, so this is an emotionally very appealing course. In my most rational moments, the theory I come up with about any spiritual data is simply the best sense I can make of it at the time, and it's subject to possible later revision. All religions, to my knowledge, say humility is a good thing, attachment to The Truth (except the particular ones espoused by ones particular religion….) is dangerous and blinding. I sometimes feel that, as a scientist, I have a great advantage over those known as spiritual or religious leaders: I can honestly say "I don't know" about a lot of things, instead of faking more knowledge than I actually have because religious leaders are supposed to know The Truth….
Now a particular example, which I will probably use in my Presidential address at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine) this June – our conference theme, incidentally, is "Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century," and was inspired by my book.
In Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism which I have some moderate knowledge of, the human realm is considered the most advantageous place to seek enlightenment from, it has the right balances of suffering, freedom, and intelligence. So, since it usually takes many reincarnations to progress, getting reincarnated as a human is highly desirable.
Unfortunately, the doctrine, as I have heard it, says it's extremely rare to be reincarnated directly as a human rather than in less favorable realms for many lifetimes. The analogy given is the probability of the world covered by one vast ocean, one 6 foot diameter hoop floating on it, and a turtle who surfaces for air once every thousand years. What are the odds it will come up in the hoop? Vanishingly small…..
The big exception is realized beings, saints and holy people, who have a much better chance of coming back human next time around, Tibetan tulkus, e.g.,
As a moral tale to motivate one to make good use of opportunities for spiritual growth while alive, I like it. But it's presented as truth, as the actual case of things.
OK, we can roughly (our first attempt) make that a testable scientific theory. If people could remember their previous incarnations, the immediately previous one would almost never be that of an ordinary human being.
Now the data. The great majority have no previous incarnation memories (because we discourage them?), but there are exceptions, and the laboratory at the University of Virginia, founded by the late psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, has about 4,000 cases of children remembering previous incarnations while still young. About 2,000 of these have been rated and coded into a data base to date.
Prediction from Tibetan theory: most of these folks would have been monks, nuns, yogis, dervishes, etc. in their immediately previous life, obviously holy persons, sincere seekers, to have made it back so soon.
Result: the folks who run the database have not examined it in detail for this, but in response to my query tell me that there were maybe half a dozen holy people in previous lives in their 2,000 cases. The rest all remember being ordinary people, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers. Some were not nice people.
This is an initial and crude attempt, but the best we can do at the moment. Yet it illustrates how we can get some empirical, scientific handles on pretty esoteric concepts like karma and reincarnation. And in this case, the traditional theory is quite lacking, it needs drastic revision or replacement by something better.
So I'm quite excited to be helping to launch the idea of evidence-based spirituality. Not that I think everything of importance in the spiritual can be handled with rational, scientific inquiry, but the more various kinds of knowledge fits together, the better. My big attempt in proposing that, incidentally, but which I think was way ahead of its time, was my proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences back in 1972 in Science (article is on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site).
Have I addressed your question well enough?
Sincerely,
Charles T. Tart

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[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 we think about some aspects of this.

Even a spiritual teacher like His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) often advises people that if you want to be selfish, be wisely selfish. Being nice to others builds up good will, which will have an overall positive effect on how others treat you. That's a straightforward statement of what, if we want to be fancier, we could call the operation of the law of karma in everyday life. HHDL believes karma goes on from lifetime to lifetime, of course, but let's stay focused on this life for now.

I like to think of this level of niceness as “business karma” or “investment karma,” or “wise self-interest karma.” As far as it goes, it business. You can't keep all the people happy about you all the time, but if you keep your customer base generally happy, your business is likely to thrive. This is a generally sensible strategy for living life.

So let's say I'm a Dismissive Materialist, as discussed in The End of Materialism. That is, I think everything in the universe is material stuff and forces, it all just happened, there's no purpose or plan, no Creator, no goal. Let those atoms bang against each other for a few zillion years and you get us, but it doesn't mean anything other than what we care to imagine about it. Then we die and consciousness is done, poof! Gone. Any idea of a possible reality to the spiritual is dismissed a priori. It can't be true, so don't even bother to look at any evidence there might be for it.

So I look at you and see you have something I very much want and you're not likely to give or sell it to me, given my limited resources. Ah, but I see there's a way I can force you to give it to me, even though you won't like me. That might be worth the fight if my gain is big enough… Ah, better yet, here's a way I can trick you out of it, and neither you nor anybody else will realize I've done anything reprehensible. Way to go! I'm richer and happier! My customer base is still fine.

So you hurt from your loss.

What's hurt?

Just chemical reactions in a complex biological system with no inherent meaning….. As long as my biochemical reactions don't make me feel hurt, what's the problem? Your biochemical reactions are in your body, not mine. They are all gone when death comes anyway.

Now suppose I have a religious or spiritual belief that I shouldn't hurt others to advance myself?

From the logic of Dismissive Materialism, all that means is that my social feelings, based on my (inherently meaningless) biology, have been conditioned through evolution or personal enculturation conditioning to make inhibit my ability to put myself first if it involves hurting other. This may involve intellectual/emotional beliefs about what we might term retributive karma, that either the lawful nature of the universe or some divine being will know what I've been up to and punish me, either in this life or a future one. Business decision again, from the Dismissive Materialism point of view. Is the cost of suppressing the unhappiness caused by this feeling less than what I'll gain from taking advantage of you? If yes, go for it!

Lots of people who've had what we call deep mystical experiences, though, tell us that the separation between one person and another is only a part of the story, that we really are all intimately connected at a deep spiritual level, and so there really is no true happiness for any one person without the happiness of all others. They tell us this is not an intellectual idea, it's the deepest kind of realization they've ever had. They usually try to live in accordance with this understanding, although they admit it's not easy to do.

If they are right, then intelligent self-interest is fine as far as it goes, but the reason for, the need for, being nice to others is way, way deeper, it goes down to the very core of existence. If I think I can be happy while others suffer, especially if they are suffering as a result of my actions, I'm deeply deluded.

Note that lots of people think this, so, if it's delusion, it's “normal” delusion… ;-(

Are the mystics right, or are they deluded, a malfunctioning of the matter and material energies in their brains?

So when a mystic feels deeply at one with all other life, is it just a failure of the boundary defining mechanisms in her brain, or, knowing, as discussed in The End of Materialism , that clairvoyance and telepathy work sometimes and there are no known limits to what we might become in contact with, is the experience of deep connection with all life a clairvoyant contact?

Things to think about….

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It's easy to think of "spiritual" implying all the good virtues – generosity, faithfulness, control of negative emotions, a reverence for life, etc., and "non-spirituality" as implying nothing but greed, cynicism, evil, immorality, etc. Certainly many people who label themselves "spiritual" claim they represent all that's good and everybody else is evil.

But let's step back a bit.

First, the way a person is conventionally labeled can sometimes be useful, especially when your dealing with general characteristics of large numbers of them. "Short people don't make winning pro basketball players" is a useful generalization when you're putting together a team, but not absolutely true. So some of the nastiest people may label themselves "spiritual" and fool others into buying into that label – we humans are good at deception – and some who call themselves "atheists" may be among the nicest people around.

Second, let's remember that having a philosophy or belief system about the world that you derive the "spiritual" and "non-spiritual labels" from is an intriguing and often fun intellectual activity, to usually be engaged in when times are easy. But when you're under stress and things get tough, intellectual philosophies may go out the window, without you even noticing, and you are run by instincts (psycho-biological programs built into the human bio-computer) and emotions. On the one hand, we have the saying from some general that there are no atheists in foxholes. On the other, many a person has gone from a sweet idea of a benevolent God to a "Fuck you, God, you don't even exist, you phony!" attitude when a loved one dies of cancer or the like.

Indeed I'd argue that if we were good at self-observation, we would probably notice our position on "spiritual" vs "non-spiritual" changing many times per day with mood and circumstances.

Third, let's also remember that there are many variations in the beliefs associated with words like “spiritual,” “materialist,” “atheist,” etc.

So in a group, general sense, then, when I'm talking about "spiritual" versus "non-spiritual" people or belief systems, I'm making generalizations that have to be modified in individual cases. If I say someone is a “materialist,” e.g., of the kind I discuss in The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, I'm talking in general about people whose intellectual philosophy is that everything is made up of material objects, moved only by material forces, and that there's no logical place to talk about “ideals,” “morals” or the like except as biological outcomes of mindless and purposeless physical forces operating over billions of years since the (meaningless, it just happened) Big Bang. If, as I discuss in the book, you truly believe this, then looking out for your material welfare is certainly the most sensible thing to do: it's all you have, really. All those emotions, satisfactions, hopes, fear, loves, etc. are biological byproducts and are totally dependent on your physical well being.

If I describe someone as “spiritual” or spiritually inclined, on the other hand, I'm describing someone whose intellectual philosophy (and perhaps some deeper experiences) is that there is some other kind of real level of existence than the material, and the goals and values stemming from contact with this “higher” level are much more important than mere material ones. When Canadian physician R. M. Bucke, e.g., whose Cosmic Consciousness experience is described in The End of Materialism says

“Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain…”

we may be deeply touched, especially if we think of ourselves as “spiritual.” If we are logically materialists, though, our only sensible conclusion is that Bucke experienced some sort of seizure where his brain malfunctioned, for the cosmos is dead, man has no soul, and the universe has no care whatsoever he we live or how our lives come out.

Dr. Alan Smith, whose Cosmic Consciousness experience is described later in the book, was an agnostic before his experience, now he's quite spiritually inclined. That's an illustration of what I briefly alluded to above, that our “philosophy” may be created by much more than intellectual speculation about life.

So a person may be an “atheist” and a very nice person – they can blame in on the human firmware, the biological instincts they inherited. Or a person may strive to be good because of what they believe and seek about the “spiritual.” Or a person may be good or bad as the result of enormous social and psychological pressures in their upbringing. Or, or, or….

Bottom line in my writing: I'd like to do a bit to make the world a little better place, I think generally (not exclusively) having “spiritual” values leads people in that direction more effectively than having just “material” values. My concern in The End of Materialism was to help people who have been denying their spiritual aspects because they think science had “proved” that spirituality was all nonsense. The next book, Explorations on the Spiritual Side, will be to share some ideas and reflections about getting on with developing our spiritual side in modern times….

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This is a possible introduction to my next book, which has the tentative working title Explorations on the Spiritual Side…  I'm going to experiment with posting sections as I'm inspired to write them and see what it does….

I am a modern man person trying to cope with life.  There is a vast maw of materialistic greed and indulgence to sink into if I had the money or power, on the one hand. But I also have a deep feeling that if I try to live with no values other than those of a pig, maximizing my material gratifications, that I will not only be at a major disadvantage in seeking happiness, I will have missed the main point of being alive.

So what about all those “spiritual” values and goals I’ve heard about?

The problem is that it’s not like it was for almost all people for all time, there’s one religion available in my village, I never travel more than a few miles from home, so if I can make some connection with that True Religion – and the priests tell me it is The True Religion – all will be well.  My struggles will be narrow, how to balance my animal desires with what The Divine Rules of my village religion are.

The problem is much more complicated today, though.  On the one hand, I have traveled many miles from home, I’ve been exposed to the religions and spiritual practices of the world.  Each almost always claims it is the best or the only really right one, and I’ll be damned if I don’t choose and follow it.  How do I make a choice? Should I make a choice?

Worse yet, the most powerful knowledge system on the planet, modern science, apparently says all this religious and spiritual stuff is total nonsense, I should reject it all….

I have bright friends and colleagues who have made various of these choices and can justify them brilliantly. And who can also brilliantly and convincingly explain why the others have made a mistake…

It's a sign of my intelligence that I feel confused!

I'm not too bothered by science's apparent denial of any spiritual reality now. After more than half a century of professional scientific and personal exploration, I have recognized that the so-called scientific denial of all spirituality is actually a scientistic denial, just one more powerful, fundamentalist belief system attacking its rivals. I've written about that in detail in my recent The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together book, where I've shown how it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritually inclined. Yes, there is lots of nonsense under the labels “religious” and “spiritual,” as there is under all areas of human life, but there's too much solid evidence that we possess qualities we would expect genuine spiritual beings to have to throw out, wholesale, any possibilities of spiritual realities. Indeed it's pathological, it's psychologically costly, to totally deny our spiritual side.

So if there's some reality to the spiritual, how can we start to discriminate the useful from the useless, the deeply true from the superstitions of the centuries, the psychologically healthy from the psychopathological? How can I and you, we, add genuine spiritual aspects to our life, making it more harmonious and improving our relations with each other, with all life, with the planet? We've clearly got to have something like this, for if all we have is pig-in-the-trough we'll just use up our resources, ruin the planet, and continue to be at each others' throats over material resources., thinking they are all we have of value…

As a scientist I can call for more research, and that is a vital part of the answer. But meanwhile, how do we live? How do we make intelligent and productive choices in the spiritual bazaar? We've got decisions and choices to make today, tomorrow, we can't wait for extensive and careful research programs to give us better answers in fifty years. Not to mention that it's not at all clear that we will be intelligent enough to actually research spiritual issues…

This book is some explorations, some ideas and experiences, I've had about this in a varied career and life.

I would like to say that there is deep spiritual wisdom in what I write, that my prayers and practices over the years have led me to deep knowledge and wisdom. Ah, what a dream! I can say I'm reasonably intelligent and I try very hard to be honest with myself and others. That means acknowledging that no matter how highly I'd like to think of myself, I have to recognize the biases, hopes, fears, ignorances, and weirdnesses lying behind some of my ideas. When I actually recognize any of these, I try to compensate for them: I am interested in getting at a better understanding of truth, not just being comfortable in a bloated self-image. And I have to accept that I probably know little or nothing about many of them, so I can only warn you, dear reader: take what I say as stimulation, but evaluate all of it carefully in terms of your own knowledge. I know a lot compared to some people, I know almost nothing compared to others, and I am not some Spiritual Authority! If we both work on being honest on what we know and don't know, on what we hope and fear, with mutual respect, we can learn a lot from each other.

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