I saw the show and it was fascinating, although I think the great graphics tended to be wonderful visual entertainment rather than really explaining any of the science.  But much better for me, at least, than empty abstraction.  This is a series – try to catch the rest.

But what is "dark" energy and matter?  Does it really convey some sort of spiritual quality?  Or that certain truths are part of the mystery of God and forever veiled from us?  The necessary faith and confidence for doing science – or for living life, for that matter – is that we are smart and will be able to figure most things, if not all things, out.  When one's arrogance is high, we'll be able to figure it all out.  When we get stuck and frustrated we may admit that perhaps the human brain maybe can't work it all out, but can still do great things…..  This is necessary "faith," for if you start thinking "I and we aren't very bright, we probably can't learn anything," that is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  To quote, as I'm sure I have before, Henry Ford, "Those who think they can and those who think they can't are both right…..

"My colleague seemed to think that the postulating of dark matter and energy was a refutation of what I've described in The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together as scientism, the materialistic philosophy overwhelmingly dominant in most areas of science that says everything can and will eventually be explained in terms of physical matter and physical energy.  Because "dark" energy and matter are not matter as we know it?

But that's not the case.  Scientism is a philosophy of materialism, everything is made of matter and energy.  If we can't explain something now in terms of known forms of matter and energy, then it's an item of faith that, as we discover new forms of material matter and material energy, we will then be able to explain things in expanded materialistic terms.

As I'm sure I've said many times before, scientism is not science, although most people, including most scientists, think it is.  An essential part of a genuinely scientific theory is that it is capable of disproof, of making observations which are quite incompatible with the theory.  When scientism encounters something inexplicable in terms of current materialistic theories, though, it keeps the faith by saying someday we will explain it in physical terms, including a wider understanding of what "physical" means.  This is what philosophers long ago named promissory materialism, as you can't ever disprove that someday they won't explain it in terms of material entities and forces (or little green men or angels or devils or aliens or whatever you prefer). I try not to fall into scientism, even though it's a prestigious thing to do as it leads to more social acceptance.  If I had wanted to be very successful in conventional terms I would never have followed a career that kept looking into things that were taboo, that were heresy in materialistic terms.

Essential science – see again my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together book – always puts data, observations, experience first and foremost, and if your theories to explain them, materialistic, mathematical, socialistic, religious, whatever don't actually work, too bad for the theories and beliefs.  Study the data more closely, see what you can learn.

In our times, though, we spiritual beings – I think that's what we all essentially are – have our spirituality badly repressed and rejected because of scientism.  But we try to find some means to justify being more spiritual, justifying, rationalizing by trying to find scientific reasons to be more spiritual.  So we can take developments like dark energy and matter as pointing toward a mystery beyond human understanding, as pointing toward God or Spirit.  It's commonly done all the time in New Age, as well as other spiritual movements.  Quantum physics has been used this way for decades now.You can certainly take new scientific data and theory that way, and I sometimes do, but I don't think a "proof" of the existence of God because of our ignorance is very powerful.  "This is beyond our understanding, so there must be a God who understands."  I'm much more impressed by people's mystical experiences, not to mention all the scientific investigations surveyed in my book that show we humans sometimes do things we think spiritual beings would be able to.  By "spiritual" here I mean of a nature very different than contemporary physics and reasonable extensions of it allow to happen.  Telepathy as a possible "mechanism" for transmitting information and requests in prayer, as just one example.

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Violence is a big problem….and a big puzzle for me.
On the one hand, I take seriously what the mystics have reported to us, in all traditions, that, from their deepest experiences, God is Love, or Love is the basic principle of the universe.
On the other hand, my own religious and spiritual life has been deeply shaped in childhood by my Christian upbringing which says God created the world and created us in Her/His image.  Since She/He is supremely intelligent, that means we partake of Her/His Intelligence, and it would be a rejection and insulting not to use our intelligence as strongly and wisely as possible (modulated by other kinds of wisdom, of course).
So what's all this predation among animals and cruelty and evil among humans?  Is God or Spirit pretty amazing but not all that intelligent, so the world was created with flaws?  Maybe God is one hundred times smarter than us, but not infinitely smarter?  I have to consider that possibility.  The idea that God is infinitely intelligent is just something told me by people as human as I, and I couldn't judge whether some other creature is infinitely intelligent, with no flaws or lapses.
Do I fall into a traditional Good versus Evil paradigm and believe it's some sort of cosmic fight, and it's just my job to be on the Good side, whether I understand it or not?
I also have to recognize that while I much prefer harmony and want to be kind and helpful to animals and people, and try to live that way, I certainly have the potential for violence in me.  Hopefully it's all sublimated effectively by the occasional video game where I shoot the bad monsters…..but I'm sure that if my loved ones were being threatened with torture or death and I had a gun available, I would shoot the bad guys, and I'd aim well and feel a deep satisfaction in hitting them.  Afterwards I'd probably feel terrible, but my loved ones would come first…..
I also believe that knowing that I'm capable of great violence makes it less likely to irrationally take me over….
The working position I do hold is that animals do eat one another and humans can be awfully cruel, those are facts…and I just don't understand why.  I hope the mystics are right and at some deeper level it all works out as an expression of Love, but I don't know.  So I live with a Big Unanswered Question about this.
And I do hope that if I get a chance to talk with God, before or after I die, I can ask Her/Him about this and get a satisfactory answer!

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One of the list members, an ordained Christian minister, wrote that he had a difficult time understanding my mentality.  Where was I coming from?  What would I stake my life on?  I don't think I can satisfy his or similar persons' curiosity, but this seemed like a good time to do a quick review of my life's work, so I'll share the essence of my response here – the spiritual place I'm coming from, what science is, how it goes will with spirituality, etc.  It can only be a partial look, but an interesting one….

One of my favorite spiritual songs, from the CD Remembrance, by psychologist and spiritual seeker John Astin, goes

Why have you come to earth?

Do you remember?

Why have you, taken birth?

Why have you come?

The refrain is

To love, to serve and remember.

To love, to serve and remember.

This song always touches me deeply when I hear or sing it, intellectually because it summarizes my faint understandings of why I'm here so well, emotionally….because it just does, it touches me.

My best guess, as of today, as to "where" we come from is that some kind of reincarnation process is at work, and the karma driving it, the lawful causality, is partly straightforward consequences of what we have done and become in previous existences, and partly conscious choice.  Buddhists say that if you want to know what your past lives were like, look at your present life.  If you want to know what your future lives will be like, look at your present life.  Sounds reasonable to me.  Well I still have a lot, lot more to learn about love, although I'm not completely ignorant about it, I believe the work I do in helping us understand our minds and souls better is a service to all humanity, and I would like to have deeper contact with our spiritual roots, to remember….

I say my "best guess," as I know how little I know and how much a desire for certainty, and/or the forces of hope and fear, can fool me into thinking I know more than I do.  That I am here to love, serve and remember as primary goals is my best guess – but I don't Know in any final sense, even though I'd like to know more deeply.  And my regular prayer to Whatever/Whoever is the Highest is that I may grow in wisdom and compassion and be of greater service.  And any guidance in whatever form is much appreciated!  Meanwhile, knowing how easily I can get caught up in my hopes, fear and delusions, it's most honest to talk about my best guesses, my best theories of how things are.

I am, of course, intellectually taking and hopefully living a basically spiritual view of life, a belief that there is Spirit (or whatever you want to call it), that life is more than just this material existence, that the Universe/Spirit is basically benevolent, and that I'd like to contribute to this benevolence and evolution, as well as reducing human suffering.  To put it more beautifully than I can phrase it, here is what R. M. Bucke, describing his Cosmic Consciousness experience, said:

Among other things … 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.

Note carefully that I take a basically "spiritual" view of life, rather than a "religious" view.  I differentiate spiritual experience as those personal experiences where one is touched by Spirit in some deep way.  I have been blessed with some light touches in my life, and am very grateful for this.  Others have many and more profound touches, and part of my own understanding is based on their reports and ideas about their experiences.

In almost all cases, I and others are seldom able to just accept spiritual experience for what it is/was, partly/mainly because human nature is such that we have a deep desire to "understand" things, to make "sense" of them.  Given the radically different nature of much spiritual experience such that it does not express well in ordinary language, the attempts to understand, to create explanations and theories that "explain" the experiences can be very frustrating.  My favorite Kurt Vonnegut poem expresses this latter point so well:

Tiger got to hunt.

Bird got to fly.

Man got to ask himself

Why?  Why?  Why?

Tiger got to sleep.

Bird got to land.

Man got to tell himself

He understand….

So individuals have spiritual experiences, they try to understand.  They try to communicate the basic experiences and their understandings to others.  They may be so desperate to seem to understand in an explanatory framework, usually a framework (religion, philosophy) society has given us, that they gradually twist and distort their memories of the actual experiences to make them apparently fit.  We then further move into the social side of humanity, and after a while stories about the experiences or ideas about them have become religious tenets, dogmas, and those tenets pressure and shape future individuals' experiences.

As a young man I tended to uniformly condemn this distortion process, but as I've gotten older I realize we need social expressions of the spiritual, religious rites and rituals to make society run more smoothly.  But I'm still quite suspicious of the way organized religions distort what we know of the basic spiritual experiences and, indeed, often suppress further direct religious experience of individuals in order to maintain the authority of the religion and its leaders.  I have heard innumerable horror stories of people who had profound spiritual experiences as children and were beaten and brainwashed to make them conform….

Science and Spirituality:

Now, please put all your knowledge about science and religion on hold for a bit.  Many of us have had our spiritual lives badly twisted and invalidated by what we think of as science, so we have to work to stay genuinely calm about this…..

Yes, religion, especially in the form of the Roman Catholic Church suppressed exploration and creation of new knowledge badly for a long time.  Science, as it was arising, had to fight badly for its freedom, there's a heritage of a lot of bad blood.  Today scholars point out that we tend to have less overt conflict because most organized religions have ceded the territory of physical reality to science to avoid conflict.  Declare that science can't deal with the spiritual and religious, then ignore science.  This isolation is fine with most scientists who were educated to believe religion was all nonsense anyway.

My training as a scientist, a psychologist, fits well with my basic personality and my basic spiritual orientation.  On the one hand I am curious about all sorts of things and open to all sorts of ideas.  On the other, I've never liked to be fooled – by others or by myself.  Basic science thrives on and encourages curiosity about, in principle, everything.  Yes, there are fashions and taboos about what it is "proper" for science to look at, but in principle essential science (see my more lengthy and detailed descriptions of what essential science, as opposed to scientism, is, in my The End of Materialism book).  Essential science is also very aware of how we fool ourselves and each other and has built-in procedures for minimizing this.

Discussing the above as a spiritual seeker strongly (but not exclusively) working to serve in the role of scientist, I would characterize individuals' spiritual experiences as data, as facts, as experiential realities.  The interpretation of these experiences, though, is theory, belief.  The typical near-death experience report, e.g., of meeting a Being of Light who telepathically communicates with one and unconditionally accepts one is data, that's what was experienced.  To say that means the Being of Light is God or Jesus or a Spirit that exists independently of the experiencer is a theory, an interpretation of the experience.

The beauty and power of essential science is its recognition that we love theories, we love to feel we are smart and understand.  "Man got to tell himself he understand."  But that feeling of understanding, even if it fits with currently fashionable beliefs and wins social approval, is not sufficient for essential science.  We recognize what I have called a universal principle of rationalization.  We clever humans can take any set of facts, observations, experiences, whatsoever, and create a plausible sounding theory as to why they are as we believe.

There's an apt parallel in mathematics, a theorem (can't recall the name off-hand) which says you can take a sequence of truly randomly generated  numbers of any length (dozens, millions, billions) and figure out an algorithm, a mechanical formula, which will generate that sequence.  So that means the sequence is not really random but the lawful consequence of that algorithm?  No, for if you turn on your random number generator again, the algorithm will not predict the next numbers in the sequence beyond chance accuracy.

(Note I am talking about true random generators here.  There are pseudo-random number generator programs which do indeed work on an algorithm, but those are not our concern here.)

The point is to recognize the power of rationalization.  We humans are very creative, we can create apparent reasons, but they may have no relation to reality.  Thus the cardinal rule of science.  It's wonderful if your theory accounts for all the data to date, is elegant, obviously true, etc.  But you have to then predict what will happen in new circumstances, and then actually test your predictions in those new circumstances.

If your theory predicts correctly, good, keep working with it, refine it, expand it, etc.  But if it doesn't predict what actually, observably happens next, the theory is wrong, and either should be discarded or reworked.  It doesn't matter how much you or others believed it, the test of prediction in new circumstances is the gold standard of evaluation.

Spiritual Experiences as Data, Spiritual and Religious Beliefs as Theories

I regard individual spiritual experiences as the data of spirituality, and spiritual or religious beliefs as theories about what that data means.

In the physical sciences, in the last few hundred years, following this procedure of essential science – observe, theorize, predict from the logic of the theory, see if the predictions work, refine, revise or replace as needed – all the physical sciences have made immense progress.  Our theories account for and predict more and more observables more and more precisely.  Where theories haven't kept working, they have led to the creation of new theories that work better than the old ones.  That's progress: our conceptual understanding of reality explains and predicts it more and more accurately.

So, has there been any progress in spirituality or religion in the last few hundred years?

Are the basic theories/beliefs of spirituality and religion more precise and refined than they were in the past?  Do they account for actual observables better?

We know the answer, particularly with the hardened positions of organized religions.  You're not supposed to "test" religious beliefs, you're supposed to believe them.  Or else!

Me and the "Spiritual Leaders" Group: Why and How?

So bringing this all back to me and the group of spiritual leaders I have belonged to for several years – why and how am I here?

The simplest why is because the group's founder asked me to join, and I greatly respect him and his work.  I did argue with him about it, the group was for "spiritual leaders," why was he asking me?  I'm not a spiritual leader.  More deeply, I spend most of my professional time talking to other psychologists and scientists, which is nice, but it's a somewhat narrow range of humanity.  The prospect that I could listen to and converse with people who were "spiritual leaders," was very interesting.  I could be exposed to and learn from whole new points of view, data and theories of people whose primary orientation/allegiance was to the spiritual, and that would be (and has been!) most interesting.  Hopefully this would enlarge my own view, and suggest practices that would increase my own devotion and understanding, which in turn would increase my ability to be of service in my main task of bridging the best of the spiritual and scientific worlds.

As to the "how" am I here: I read the various exchanges on our listserv and my mind tends to automatically divide them into two types.  The first are what I consider "data posts," sharing of personal spiritual experiences.  The second, and by far more numerous category, are "theory" posts.  At their best, the theory posts are on the order of "My tradition thinks that such-and-such experiences mean so-and-so, the strength of this theory/belief is A, B and C, the lacks and weaknesses are D, E and F."  At their worst, the theory posts are relatively rigid statements of theories that have turned into dogmas.  Instead of "This is the best way we can think of to make sense of this" it's "This is The Truth."

The ratio of the two kinds of posts varies from time to time.  When it's too much in the dogma direction, I notice people get more argumentative and/or tend to drop out of the list.  I've certainly been tempted to drop out at times when I think we've had too much of the "My Truth is better than your truth" stuff.  Can rigid belief and the virtue of humility exist together?  Doesn't seem like it……    ;-(

My initial  hope in joining the group was that there would be a lot of "data posts," forming a deeper bond among us than just an intellectual one, and, even more importantly, that this kind of data and the intelligence and good will of my fellow group members would then see the creation of new theories, of new ways of thinking about spiritual experience that might lead to some new (and ultimately testable) predictions/understandings about Spirit, and, hopefully, more effective ways of helping people have primary spiritual experiences themselves.  I'm afraid there's been very little of this theory progress and an awful lot of attempting to squeeze everything back into the old theories, the Sacred Beliefs That-Must-Not-Be-Questioned, that various members already have…..

And Yet….

I've learned a lot from reading the posts of group members talking with each other.  One great mystery (to me) is still just as mysterious after all these years, though.  Given how very powerful scientific thought is in our times, and given how much there's a general perception that science has shown spirituality and religion are all nonsense – why does there seem to be such a lack of interest on the part of these spiritual leaders, the progressive and liberal wing of religion and spirituality to my way of thinking, in my beginning attempts to show that it is reasonable to be both spiritual and scientific, that there is excellent scientific evidence for this position?

In terms of seeing my life's work as building bridges between the best of science and the best of spirituality, it's like I've built a small bridge – but hardly anyone seems interested in crossing back and forth…..????  Note I'm not lost in my own ego here, brooding over why don't you read my articles, my books, I'm referring to general attempts to bridge the best of science and the best of spirituality.

I think I've got a few on the scientific (not the scientistic) side feeling that it's OK to be interested in spirituality and pursue it.  I'm not sure I've affected anyone on the official spiritual or religious side to see how science and spirituality can work together for more knowledge and effectiveness.  I guess I was hoping this latter process would happen with my group  membership…now I'm not sure it will.

So, that's why and how I'm here in this group as of this time.  I've written a lot, probably too much, violating the guideline I'm always giving others than short posts are more likely to be actually read.  Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful.

Now I have to stop participating in this interesting discussion for a while and turn to the course material on mindfulness training I'm preparing.

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My closest personal brush with death happened a few years ago when I took a new medication for my atrial fibrillation.  I started feeling funny, but had an appointment with my cardiologist – who took and EKG and then personally rushed me in a wheel chair into the Emergency Room for my heart to be shocked, as I was in ventricular fibrillation, a condition that can be fatal fairly quickly!
What amazed me was how calm I was.  I talked intelligently with the doctors and nurses as they were preparing me for the shock, asking about the procedure, made sure my wife knew I was in the ER, etc., being a pleasant fellow to have around, while knowing that this could be it, I could be dead in a few minutes.  Then they drugged me with a short acting thing (Brevitol) that made me stupid and unconscious for a few minutes, during which time they shocked me.
In retrospect I marveled that I was so calm about it!  Maybe just dumb luck, but my best guess was it came from two factors. One, years of vipassana meditation practice with Shinzen Young, teaching me to be open and clear about the moment, with equanimity, coupled with Gurdjieffian self-remembering practice of staying in the moment, and two, a good intellectual knowledge of the scientific evidence about survival of the spirit after death.  I summarize that evidence in one of the chapters of my recent "The End of Materialism" book, where I put it in the Many Maybes category, psychic stuff where there is so much evidence for its reality that it would be stupid to ignore that evidence, but enough questions on interpreting the evidence that I wouldn't feel comfortable saying it's "proven" that we survive death.  One of my thoughts in the ER was that I was personally going to find out if I survived death!
If I didn't survive death, of course, I would never suffer the embarrassment of knowing I was wrong in expecting to survive.  Along with that, I don't believe in any kind of hell, no God that I believe in would be that cruel.  Difficult afterlife periods perhaps, but no eternal damnation nonsense.
I would like to think I now am guaranteed to have a peaceful and spiritual death, but I know things can change too……
I hope that's at least a little helpful.  Meanwhile my wife and I do the practical stuff, like updating our Advance Directives (we don't want to be kept alive as vegetables), leaving info for our kids about our stuff, etc., and I continue my work to try to bring genuine science and genuine spirituality a little closer.

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One afternoon Rinpoche invited a few of us to meet with him privately and discuss what we saw as important obstacles to the introduction and growth of Vajrayana Buddhism in our Western culture.  Since he had touched, in passing, on the fact that Western science equates consciousness with brain functioning in an earlier teaching session, I focused on that, as building bridges between genuine science and genuine spirituality has been the focus of my half-century of scientific and personal work.

I have long been concerned that the prejudicial rejection of any reality to spirituality in orthodox science not only distorts the scientific understanding of our nature, it also seriously injures many people who have spiritual yearnings or who have been touched by personal spiritual experiences,  because They, The Authorities, those scientists who know what reality is, have "proven" that the spiritual is all illusion.  I and some of us know this attitude – I call it Dismissive Materialism, as it dismisses and invalidates the spiritual without going through the necessity in proper science to examine actual evidence – has hurt these people, for instead of feeling touched by Spirit and starting to grow, they think they must be stupid or a little crazy, and so squelch their budding spirituality.

Vajrayana Buddhism, like all the world's major spiritual systems, is heavily based on giving reality, as much reality as the material world has, if not more, to a "spiritual" realm.  The idea of the Siddhartha Gautama, the  historical Buddha, or various Buddhas since that time, or bodhisattvas continuing after their physical death as real beings, real "mind streams" that can help us and bless us in our own spiritual search, is central to Vajrayana, as are acceptance of various god-like, non-material beings, dakas, dakinis, yidams, protectors, karma, reincarnation, etc.  In Christianity, comparably, we have God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, various angels, saints, all existing in a non-material way and able to help us.

Dismissive Materialism says all this is superstitious nonsense, of course.  Mind is nothing but a product of the physical functioning of the brain.  When the brain is badly injured or dies, that's the end of consciousness.  So  Siddhartha  Buddha was a smart fellow who lived 2500 years ago and figured out some psychological techniques to reduce human suffering by altering attitudes and beliefs about who you are and the nature of reality.  But the Buddha's “mind stream” ceased with the death of his brain.  The psychological techniques he created, like meditation, are still useful for reducing personal suffering.  Indeed they are especially useful to scientists studying brain functioning, as trained meditators can keep their minds still and focused much better than ordinary folks, which makes tracing brain circuits easier.  The result of such brain research, from the perspective of Dismissive Materialism, will be that eventually we will know exactly what brain circuits reduce suffering and produce feelings of happiness, enlightenment, etc., and then we will go on and discover more effective ways to activate those circuits, such as designer drugs, and we will no longer have to spend years and years meditating and doing other superstitious processes like Vajrayana rituals which are not guaranteed to work anyway, even within Buddhism.  We will have the Materialist version of Buddhism, drug X, Nirvanathene © which reduces your suffering.

If Buddhism or other imported spiritual systems follow the same historical path as Christianity and Judaism have followed in Western culture, what will probably happen is that spiritual systems will cede more and more territory to material science while claiming a certain mystery and exclusive territory, the territory of ethics, meaning, values, etc., that cannot be directly approached by materialistic science.  Christianity and Judaism have thus been marginalized in many ways as to contributing to our understanding of the world, although many social scientists will admit that research shows that belonging to a religion is good for your health.  It doesn't matter that your core beliefs are false and nonsensical – God, heaven, hell, salvation, Buddhas, enlightenment, all that sort of stuff – belonging to any tight-knit social group gives you support mechanisms that are good for your ordinary health.

I believe that if Buddhism does not directly confront this invalidation from Dismissive Materialism, it will become like our home-grown religions.  There will be a few small groups of people who manage to have a lot of faith and get along largely ignoring this invalidation, and many, many people who have half-hearted religious and spiritual lives.

In the few minutes I had to mention this point with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I gave a quick version of the above and added, again much too briefly, that when science is done properly – an emphasis of dealing rationally with all the data, not just that which fits what you want to believe – we find that there is actually plenty of high-quality scientific evidence that people sometimes manifest the kinds of qualities which we would expect genuinely spiritual beings to have. Telepathy may be a mechanism of prayer, e.g., or clairvoyance and remote viewing examples of psychic/spiritual interconnectedness of being.

I have written about the findings of scientific parapsychology (not New Age, unscientific beliefs calling themselves parapsychology) constituting a scientific basis for taking Transpersonal Psychology as the study of a real spiritual nature of humans.  My recent book The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together is an overview of the scientific evidence and conclusions I have come to about this from my own and others' research.  I will be sending a copy to Tsoknyi Rinpoche, although I tend to doubt he will have much time to read in it, given the enormous amount of responsibilities he and other lamas have in preserving and spreading Tibetan Buddhism since the Chinese conquest of Tibet.

This is part of a general problem I see.  Western religious and spiritual leaders have taken quite a beating from materialistic science for a long time.  Often this was deserved – a lot of factually false or psychologically harmful ideas have been presented as religious truths.  But now the tendency is for spiritual leaders to pretty much ignore science, unless a particular, isolated finding happens to agree with their belief system, thus apparently lessening conflict.  But this does not solve the fundamental problem: Dismissive Materialism is one of the most powerful psychological, social and economic forces in the world and steadily undermines many genuinely spiritual aspirations and attempts at development.

Will Buddhism, or any other imported spiritual system, do any better than Christianity and Judaism have done in confronting Dismissive Materialism head on, instead of trying to pretend there is no problem?  I don't know.

What I think would be very helpful will be for progressive spiritual leaders to be aware of the kind of high quality scientific evidence I talk about in The End of Materialism, and when attacked by Dismissive Materialists presenting themselves as "scientists," be able to ask them if they are speaking as scientists, if they have actually studied this evidence?  Almost none of them have!  If they will honestly admit they haven't, then they should logically admit that their dismissal of the spiritual is a personal conviction, but does not carry the prestige of Science.  Better yet, religious and spiritual systems should explore positive ways to join with open-minded sciences like parapsychology and Transpersonal Psychology to begin discriminating different qualities of knowledge in these areas, exploring how to more effectively encourage and aid healthy spiritual lives, etc.

I fear, though, that once spiritual leaders have fallen back on the "just have faith" defense, they themselves don't want to associate with genuine science, as genuine science can question anything as part of refining knowledge, and that may mean some parts of spiritual systems will be found to be factually or theoretically inadequate and need to be replaced with better understandings and practices……This opens a whole area of how open minded science and the practice of humility can create progress in spirituality which I can’t go into here…..

And so these thoughts taper off in a quite unsatisfactory manner, no certain answers, lots of possibilities, and the human spirit being the most important thing in the world…..

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I’ve changed names and altered some irrelevant details to preserve the privacy of my correspondent.

Dear Dr. Tart,

My son, Billy,  died last Spring from a cancerous tumor (unrelated to his genetic disorder) at the age of 23.  I have been obsessed in trying to find a connection with what is real (in regards to God and the afterlife) since his death.  Billy was 21 years post bone marrow transplant for a rare genetic disorder …  and spent six months in the hospital having a lifesaving bone marrow transplant when he was baby at which time he actually died and was revived, and he has had countless surgeries and much pain in his short life.  IF I could only get a sign from him, then I would be able to enjoy the rest of my life (knowing we would be reunited again some day).  The only way can finish out my life in peace is to know that I will be reunited with Billy in the afterlife.  I'm trying to convince myself- that there is an afterlife.   I would be in the classification of "those who want to believe in God and who has gone to church for years–and who hasn't gone to  church in years because I don't think the bible is God's word but, rather, man's word.

Is Victor Stenger's statement in his  book "The New Atheism" false?  He states, "In the Tart experiment, we found that the number was visible in its reflection from a wall clock."  I am curious as to why you didn't do the experiment again with the clock covered this time.  Will you please answer that question for me.

After all your years of research, what do you think about God, death, and the afterlife?  I am hoping you will respond and that your response will give me the peace and courage to go forward in my life.  I don't know if I will ever be able to enjoy life again without my little guy, but it sure would be easier if i knew we would be reunited in the end.

I do hope to hear back from you.

Sincerely,

Marion Smith

Belvedere, New Jersey

'BE KINDER THAN NECESSARY. EVERYONE IS FIGHTING SOME KIND OF BATTLE '

My response, hopefully helpful, very inadequate by the standards of my heart…

Dear Marion Smith,

I am struck by the motto at the end of your email, “BE KINDER THAN NECESSARY. EVERYONE IS FIGHTING SOME KIND OF BATTLE.”  I can’t imagine any better advice for almost all situations.  I know from your letter that you are fighting some powerful battles – I hope you apply your good advice to yourself….

As a fellow human, I wish I could simply reassure you that there is a God and She is beneficent, that your son has survived death and you will indeed be reunited some day.  But while I would like to be kind in that way, I have to be as accurate as I can be, for what little authority I have in giving advice comes from my role as scientist, which requires absolute honesty.  At least ideally – too many scientists do not seem to have such high ideals nowadays.

> After all your years of research, what do you think about God, death, and the afterlife?  I am hoping you will respond and that your response will give me the peace and courage to go forward in my life. <

As a scientist, I refer you to my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, for the detailed answers on what I think about these topics.  Meanwhile I can give an inadequate summary by saying the question of some kind of survival after death is in the category of the book I call the Many Maybes.  There is enough good evidence arguing for some kind of survival that it would be foolish to just ignore it.  But some of the evidence is of questionable quality, some is open to various other interpretations, so I, and most scientific colleagues who have specialized in parapsychology (there are very few of us, though), would not feel able to say survival is proven.  You would like certainty, something I want too as a human, but as a scientist and as a human being I’ve had to learn that for many, if not most things, I can have good evidence for or against them, but not certainty.  Or rather certainty as a psychological state can happen, but only by shutting down parts of my mind that would continue to evaluate evidence.

Personally, rather than as a scientist, I think it’s likely my mind will continue in some fashion after death, and then I’ll know in a more absolute way.  The main theme of my above mentioned book is that it is logical and reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in one’s outlook to life, and personally I spend a lot of my time trying to grow spiritually.  I’m happy, life is interesting even without certainty, and I have had deep losses too, but that’s how life is on this planet….. I’ve also studied the way our minds work, and one of the things I’ve learned is that while there are important truths in our emotions, they all lie in one way.  Every emotion says “I’m forever.”  Not true, emotions change over time – unless you hold very tightly on to them.

> Is Victor Stenger's statement in his  book "The New Atheism" false?  He states, "In the Tart experiment, we found that the number was visible in its reflection from a wall clock."  I am curious as to why you didn't do the experiment again with the clock covered this time.  <

Here I can be specific.  I haven’t read his book, and don’t plan to read books like that, as there are a large number of books which either ignore the findings of parapsychology or present them in badly distorted fashion in order to support militant atheism positions.  Assuming you’ve quoted Stenger correctly above, e.g., he says “…we found.”  Makes it sound like with his or his colleagues perspicacity he discovered some obvious flaw that I was blind to.  But if you read my actual report, “Psychophysiological Study of Out-of-the-Body Experiences in a Selected Subject,” available in the Articles library of my http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site, you will see that, in the first place, this was not an attempt to “prove” anything, you don’t do that with a single experiment, but to demonstrate that an unusual experience like an out-of-body experience could be studied with the precision of laboratory conditions, which the study demonstrated.  I am sensitive on this point as so many of the criticism of the pseudo-skeptics, the materialists determined to debunk the study, make a big deal about how it doesn’t “prove” anything, but I’m the one who said that.  That’s a standard part of scientific caution of not making too much of a single experiment – and you criticize any possible shortcoming in your own experiment so that future experimenters can do an even better job.

As to the “….we found that the number was visible in its reflection from a wall clock,” Stenger leaves out the important qualification of that statement that I (not the ambiguous “we”) made, viz.

“…she might have seen the number reflected in the surface of the case of the clock which was mounted on the wall above it. This was the only reflecting surface in the room placed in such a way that this might have been possible. Both Dr. Hastings and I spent some time in the dimly lit room to dark-adapt our eyes, and tried to read a number from the subject's position on the bed, as reflected on the surface of the clock. As the room was dimly lit and the surface of the clock was black plastic, we could not see anything of the number. However, when we shone a flashlight directly on the number (increasing its brightness by a factor somewhere between several hundred and several thousand) we could just make out what the number was in the much brighter reflection. Thus, although it seems unlikely, one could argue that the number constituted a "subliminal" stimulus in its reflection off the clock surface. Therefore, Miss Z's reading of the target number cannot be considered as providing conclusive evidence for a parapsychological effect.”

Again, as standard scientific procedure, I reported a possible, even if highly unlikely flaw.

As to why not repeat the experiment, Stenger fails to note that I reported that Miss Z was moving across the country, as per earlier plans, and left after this laboratory night.  In a more ideal world I would have sent a few of my extensive cadre of trained assistants to continue studying her.  Since it’s almost impossible to get support to do this kind of research anyway, that was the end.  There were no assistants.  My hope was that the published report would encourage others to do similar studies, not to argue endless and irrationally over a demonstration that showed you could study this in the lab, and that I might have had a strong parapsychological result.

I have answered this point at length to alert you to the fact that there are very active people denouncing and trying to debunk serious research in this area, so you need to be cautious in evaluating what is said, even from people who have scientific credentials, but may not be all scientific in their approach to this area.

I also find militant atheists rather amusing.  I personally don’t have the chutzpah to say, in effect, “I am so smart that I can declare that there are no other creatures in the universe smarter than me!”

I hope this information is helpful.  Time can heal, and we may indeed survive death in some form.  Meanwhile, like most of humanity through most of history, we do the best we can even if we don’t have certainty.

Charles T. Tart

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Lecture 4, Part 16 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: What if that would test for enlightenment.

CTT: Pardon?

Student: What about a test to measure enlightenment?

CTT: Yes. What about it?

Student: Is there anything like that available for people?

(Laughter)

Is it possible to create something like that?

CTT: Well I know of one test created by the wife of a friend of mine, and that is if you want to know if somebody’s enlightened, you ask their spouse.

(Laughter)

That’s a tough test. I don’t think many people would rate as enlightened that way.

(Laughter)

Student: That’s like (name unclear) was supposedly enlightened; and could levitate and move objects by his will, do all this fancy stuff. And his wife didn’t think he was enlightened.

CTT: Who?

Student: (answer unclear).

CTT: Yeah.

Student: His wife didn’t know for years and years and years, and she used to nag him and admonish him. And then one day she was admonishing him about something and he just disappeared. (Snaps fingers) (Laughter) And then she was like well –

CTT: Was this enlightenment or just avoiding confrontation?

Student: Yeah. (Laughter)

CTT: You know, it would be wonderful if some day we had a test of enlightenment. We don’t have anything near that. And enlightenment traditions would claim that we probably never would because it’s not something that can be inferred from the kinds of things we could ask on tests. But who knows, you know?

One of the things we have to remember about Transpersonal Psychology is this is a very young field. It’s what, 30, 35 years at most since some people got serious about the idea of let’s take spiritual realities seriously, but then apply scholarly and scientific methods to try to find out what does work and what doesn’t work and what’s just a cultural relic and what’s really applicable and so forth. And we don’t know much yet.

We’ve borrowed from all sorts of traditions.

I don’t think I told you folks yet, but usually I welcome the new first-year students and tell them we are going to teach them all sorts of really vital spiritually important truths — and at least 50 percent of what we teach is bullshit and we, the faculty, don’t know which 50 percent!

(Laughter)

When I’m in a more transpersonal mood, I call it unicorn shit rather than bullshit.

(Laughter)

We’ve borrowed an awful lot from a whole variety of spiritual traditions, and we think that it has value for at least some people, but we don’t have much discriminating wisdom yet. You guys are all in the experimental group and there is no control group.

(Laughter)

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I was very intrigued when I saw the heading on your email, “Ghost Dream and More,” as I’d been thinking about you and your dreams off and on for a week or so.  Remember you once told me years ago over a lunch downtown that  you had a lot of nightmares, and I elicited from you that you often watched horror movies at bedtime?

That’s not a rigorous experimental design, but it was hard not to infer cause-effect connections……   

Now one of the things that’s always fascinated me is why are horror movies so popular?  Why would any intelligent person want to frighten themselves?  Aren’t there enough real-world perils if we want to worry about something?  I’m sure the answer is multi-faceted, but my guess is that part of it has to do with the fact that most horror movies involve “supernatural” elements.

(In my scientific parapsychologist role I hate that word supernatural, as it says we can’t figure out what’s going on, by definition, some non-understandable being just interferes unpredictably, and reality is hard enough to figure out without talking ourselves out of it in advance).

So here we are in an intellectual culture that’s quite materialistic, no God, gods, goddesses, etc., people who think about them are frowned upon or institutionalized, just dismissed as “believers,” etc.  Yet so many people love these horror shows.  A sneaky way to indulge a feeling toward the spiritual, a disguised way?  If there are devils there must be angels, and then on to…..  ???  I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered about your and other people’s fascination with horror movies.  I hate them myself!

Anyway….

> I am pleased we are both still on the same side of thegreat divide. I am at the age when my friends are starting to disappear.<

Ain’t it the pits?

I have convinced myself that there’s good evidence that they are not really gone, just “transitioned” to another kind of consciousness – but that’s rather abstract, and meanwhile they are gone…..      ;-(

> I think the reconnection with you is giving me the willies.

Should you thank me or be pissed?  I know there’s a very humorous piece about the willies, I think it’s a short story by James Thurber, worth looking for.  Got to learn to distinguish the willies from the heebie-jeebies, the shakes, etc.      

A few years back I took a new drug for my atrial fibrillation and it threw my heart into ventricular fibrillation, which can kill you pretty quick.  Luckily I was seeing my cardiologist at the time – he took a listen, pushed me into a wheel chair and personally rushed me into the ER at Kaiser Hospital.  All these doctors and nurses appear from nowhere, electrodes taped on, IVs attached, they give me a short-acting drug (can’t think of the name at the moment – oh, I think it was Brevitol) which knocks you out without depressing respiration, and then they are using the paddles to shock my heart.  I’m out for a few minutes, didn’t feel the shocks, then in a stupid state for a few minutes, knowing I was stupid, but glad to be alive.

Now here’s the funny thing.  Until they injected me with the stupid drug, I was wide awake, cheerful, engaging the docs in nice technical conversations about what they were doing, even though I knew that I might be dead in a few minutes.  The part of me that self-monitors was quite impressed, as a big part of me was repeating, “Hey, Charley, if you want to freak out, you couldn’t find a more appropriate time to freak out than now!!!”

In retrospect I put it down partly to knowing of all the evidence that we survive death in some form, not enough to convince me in any absolute sense, but enough to make me think the next few minutes might have been quite interesting if I died, rather than just eternal blankness.  And that was a safe and useful position, of course, for if there is eternal nothingness after death I’d never be embarrassed by knowing I had the wrong idea!    

And those years of meditation training and Aikido, staying calm in difficult situations, had to have helped.

“So,” I say to myself, mentally stepping back, “why am I telling you all this?”

Partly as reassurance.  Yes, our friends are dropping like flies and we’ll go too one of these days, but it might indeed by quite interesting afterwards.  I’m not worried about Hell.  Insofar as I think there’s a God, this God must be better than me, and I’m not so cruel or stupid as to punish anyone for all eternity.

Partly as continuing some conversations we had years ago, and which I suspect are of more interest to you now as death comes closer.  If you want my best thinking on this whole area, try my book of last year (2009), The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, which is my attempt to make sense of it all and to show people why it’s rational to be both scientific and spiritual in orientation.

Partly maybe as I just need to write a lot of this kind of stuff, I think I have another book in me which is going to be about how an honest, intellectual scientist struggles with the “spiritual path.” without the comfort of simple faith, and maybe, or maybe not, gets somewhere….

Or maybe partly I’ll put some of this musing on my blog, disguising your identity, as this writing may be practice for that future book…..

Or maybe……???

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There are a couple of obvious reasons, such as an establishment of priests (human being with their own hopes and fears) not wanting possible competition from people directly dealing with spiritual and paranormal things, or an absolute either/or attitude: Our religion is The Truth and anything else is Heresy!

This opposition still seems strange to me, for, as I argue in my last book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, the reality of paranormal phenomena shown by rigorous, scientific parapsychological research provides a solid, empirical basis for taking spiritual possibilities seriously, rather than dismissing all science and religion as inherent nonsense, as dominant scientistic attitudes do.  Yet spiritual people show almost no interest in my argument.

But where could we go if we developed a positive use of genuine, essential science to clarify spiritual ideas?

I’ve contributed the following to my discussion group, and I’ll share it here.

As to tolerance among religions, I take, among other attitudes, what I think is a sensible and scientific attitude toward the beliefs of all religions.

-    People have transpersonal, spiritual experiences.
-    Such experiences are usually overwhelmingly important to the experiencers.
-    We humans are designed to "make sense" out of everything we experience, so
-    People create spiritual and religious beliefs to "explain" their experiences and help them deal with them.
-    I treat these experiences as "data" in a scientific sense, and the beliefs as "theories" to make sense of the data.
-    Since the "data" is very complex, hard to remember, hard to describe, sometimes just plain ineffable, the theories, the religious beliefs are pretty crude at this stage of the game.
-    Refinement of these theories, as would happen in ordinary science through testing predictions from theories and obtaining more data is seldom done, because our intense human need for help and comfort makes us get to attached to our initial theories – they become "sacred truths" rather than theories to be tested and refined.  Not to mention prohibitions against examination from those who have become powerful in the existing belief system…..
All of those gets quite distorted by our hopes and fears, needs for safety, power seeking, social adaptation, etc.
But as a transpersonal psychologist and parapsychologist, I think we can study and refine the original data, the experiences, learning to produce them now instead of just relying on accounts from long ago that have been worked over for doctrinal compliance, and thus slowly develop a spirituality that is much more in accord with the rest of what we know about reality, that works better for living people, and that is less distorted by ordinary human needs.  That hope is why the theme of the rest of my life's work is going to be working toward an evidence-based spirituality.

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Deikman asked, “Who are you going to convince?  It seems to me that those who believe in a system just do so whether its materialism or acupuncture, and then go on to prove to their own satisfaction or something.   I think that the materialists will remain materialists even if god came down and showed them (it would be considered a hallucination) so why bother?  So then what proof would you consider incontrovertible?”

My reply:

Now, your response to my paper is classic Deikman: it seems like a simple response, but actually raises very deep questions!  You’re a sly devil – probably part of what makes you a good therapist!  It’s good for me to think about this, thank you!

> who are you going to convince<

Let me start with the highest level of egotism and fantasy.  The whole world will pick up on that paper and I’ll be feted for bringing in a whole new level of authentic and effective spirituality that will save the world!  No, we can go even higher, God Herself will drop by to give me a pat on the back and tell me how well I’ve done!

OK, now back to reality…..     

Simple answer: readers of Subtle Energies, who are already “believers” in spiritual realities, will pick up a few interesting tidbits to reinforce their existing position.  That’s probably the most realistic prediction of what will have happened from my having delivered that paper as my Presidential Address at this year’s ISSSEEM conference and it’s later publication in their journal.  My hope, of course, is that it will go further with this audience and really inspire some of the younger listeners and readers to go out and work on developing Evidence-Based Spirituality.  I have little idea how probable this is.  It’s more probable than if I had lectured to a mainstream psychologist or psychiatrist group, of course, as they are, as you noted, already locked into materialism.  But many ISSSEEM members are locked into, for largely irrational reasons, some sort of spiritual belief system and will not be interested in – indeed, may be threatened by – the idea that all spiritual beliefs are subject to test, rejection, or refinement.

More complex answer: publication in Subtle Energies is just a step in my focus for the rest of my career in promoting the idea of Evidence-Based Spirituality.  So this article is mainly practice, in front of a friendly audience, for, I hope, more sophisticated presentations later, perhaps as articles, perhaps as a book.  This is all iffy, of course, for, given the vagaries of aging, I don’t know if my career is going to extend for weeks or years….

I think my idea is scientifically sound.  Whether it is spiritually sound, whether more spiritually evolved beings (I hope and pray they exist, but don’t really know) want to help promote the idea in whatever way they work, I don’t know.  I do pray often that my work and actions will promote spiritual growth and welfare for our world.  Are my prayers answered?  Well not in any obvious way, God has not dropped by to give me that pat on the back or hug, but life in general has gone pretty well for me, so it’s more useful for me to assume my hopes and work are in harmony with the spiritual side of things than assume the contrary….

What might realistically happen?  I don’t expect the idea of Evidence-Based Spirituality to catch on much in my lifetime, although I hope it will.  But in science in general, people make specific contributions, they add their bricks to the pile available for constructing some future grand and useful building, to use an analogy.  As the bricks pile up, it becomes possible to build things from them.  Lots of those bricks never get used.  Some are used in ways quite different from what the brick maker expected, but they are there to be used, and so contribute.  So, as you’ve so nicely put it in your own writings, you do your work as well as you can simply because it’s right to do it that way, and what happens later – whether anybody appreciates that the underside of the chair is nicely finished, to use one of your analogies – is what will be…..

> It seems to me that those who believe in a system just do so whether it’s materialism or acupuncture, and then go on to prove to their own satisfaction or something.   I think that the materialists will remain materialists even if god came down and showed them (it would be considered a hallucination) so why bother?  So then what proof would you consider incontrovertible ? <

Right.  We are attached to our belief systems with deep, often unrecognized emotions, and we don’t like people who raise questions.  I don’t know what would be incontrovertible proof of anything, for as you say, our rationalization ability to twist things around is so enormous.  But I think there are people out there who are conflicted, the materialist versus the spiritual, to oversimplify, and some of them could be influenced by evidence.  That was what “The End of Materialism"  was for, those people who cared about the spiritual but couldn’t move toward it because they thought Big Science had proven the spiritual was all nonsense and stupidity.  Hopefully for some of them I’ve introduced them to the evidence that it’s reasonable to be both spiritual and scientific, and this will make a difference for them…..

I know there are people who believe deeply that they are divinely guided in what they do.  Some, I’m sure, are deluded and emotionally attached to the need for certainty, others may well be divinely guided.  I’d love to be (I think) divinely guided, but that’s not the person I am.  So I do what I think will advance knowledge and welfare in the areas I have some knowledge in, pray that I do the right thing, try to do what I do as well as I know how (without getting obsessive about it), and try to learn from what happens, whether what happens is what I’d hoped for or not.

Thank you again for asking me such a deep question.  It’s been useful to me to think about it, and I hope these thoughts are useful to you…..actually I think we are rather alike in all this, doing our best, hoping for the best….

Warmly,

Charley

———-

Dear Arthur,                             Date Composed: September 11, 2010

An important PS to my earlier email to you today.

I sounded so rational, reasonable, and together.  And it’s mostly true.

But sitting here just before bedtime this evening, listening to the sort of music that evokes faint memories and hints of the Sacred for me – I realize that if a Call came from on High, all that rationality would melt away in an instant as my heart opened to God……   I know that at times but tend to forget as I get all wrapped up in my work, in my rational and sensible approach…..

Now how to have an evidence-based spirituality when I remember that…..

Charley

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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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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 15 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: What if that would test for enlightenment.

CTT: Pardon.

Student: What about a test to measure enlightenment?

CTT: Yes. What about it?

Student: Is there anything like that available for people?

(Laughter)

Is it possible to create something like that?

CTT: Well I know of one test created by the wife of a friend of mine and that is if you want to know if somebody’s enlightened, you ask their spouse.

(Laughter)

That’s a tough test. I don’t think many people would rate as enlightened that way.

(Laughter)

Student: That’s like (name unclear) was supposedly enlightened; and could levitate and move objects by his will, do all this fancy stuff. And his wife didn’t think he was enlightened.

CTT: Who?

Student: (answer unclear).

CTT: Yeah.

Student: His wife didn’t know for years and years and years, and she used to nag him and admonish him. And then one day she was admonishing him about something and he just disappeared. (Snaps fingers) (Laughter) And then she was like well –

CTT: Was this enlightenment or just avoiding confrontation?

Student: Yeah. (Laughter)

CTT: You know, it would be wonderful if some day we had a test of enlightenment. We don’t have anything near that. And enlightenment traditions would claim that we probably never would because it’s not something that can be inferred from the kinds of things we could ask on tests. But who knows, you know?

One of the things we have to remember about Transpersonal Psychology is this is a very young field. It’s what, 30, 35 years at most since some people got serious about the idea of let’s take spiritual realities seriously, but then apply scholarly and scientific methods to try to find out what does work and what doesn’t work and what’s just a cultural relic and what’s really applicable and so forth. And we don’t know much yet.

We’ve borrowed from all sorts of traditions. I don’t think I told you folks yet, but usually I welcome the new first-year students and tell them we are going to teach them all sorts of really vital spiritually important truths — and at least 50 percent of what we teach is bullshit and we don’t know which 50 percent!

(Laughter)

When I’m in a more transpersonal mood, I call it unicorn shit rather than bullshit.

(Laughter)

We’ve borrowed an awful lot from a whole variety of spiritual traditions, and we think that it has value for at least some people, but we don’t have much discriminating wisdom yet. You guys are all in the experimental group and there is no control group.

(Laughter)

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