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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materialist Buddhism:

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

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

Charles T. Tart

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

Part 2:

What I’m For and Against:

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

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

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

So, is materialism the same thing as science?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Is Materialism The Same Thing As Science?

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

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

[conclusion in Part 3]

Part 3:

There Is No Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?

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

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

Right speech would allow statements like the following:

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

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

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

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

Most of us could probably also accurately state:

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

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

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

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

Charles T. Tart

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now back to the God of the Gaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I recently received a most surprising email from a young man from abroad, I'll call him Aaron, regarding my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. He wanted my permission to pirate it! Here's his email, and my response. Interesting….

name: Aaron email: topic: Piracy comments: Dear Dr. Tart, My name is Aaron. I'm a 23 yr old student of whatever from a small island nation. May I scan my copy of "End of Materialism" (or nick it from Google books somehow) and release it on the internet? Usually I won't ask but out of immense respect to you I felt I had to.

Do you feel you have made more money than you deserve for writing the book? because only then, i think, will you be content in knowing that your book has been pirated.

People still would buy the book. We love to hold a book in our hands when we read it, do we not? eBooks just don't do that for us, thus the invention of whatsitcalled.. er.. the Kindle and stuff alike.

Where do you stand on Piracy?

I know this is a contradictory subject. So you may not reply and I will assume your answer is "No, you may not pirate my book, thank you". Thank you for your time, Aaron

P.S. Weird eMail I agree too… sorry if I insulted you in any way… That was not my intention :

( I felt moved to repond: Dear Aaron,

> Weird eMail I agree too… sorry if I insulted you in any way… That was not my intention

Yes, certainly one of the most unusual emails I've ever gotten – and I get a lot of them from people who want to tell me about their unusual experiences. Because you seem sincere and are unsure about pirating my book, I think we share enough values that it’s worthwhile to share some thoughts with you.

> Do you feel you have made more money than you deserve for writing the book? because only then, i think, will you be content in knowing that your book has been pirated.<

What a complicated question! Who knows how much I "deserve?" Or anyone? I hope I am never put in a position of having to decide what someone does and doesn’t deserve. When I was young the “good” guys and the “bad” guys were quite distinct, now I have some appreciation for how complex we all are.

As an academic book writer, I have been far more successful in terms of sales than 90% of academic writers – but if I figured out how much I made in terms of the hours I spent doing the writing, not even counting the many years of relative poverty as a student that I put in preparing myself so I would have something to write about, I would guess I earn something like a dollar an hour from my book sales.

Of course I think the path I have followed in my career of research and teaching has been a good one, and will hopefully be of help to people. I think, e.g., that we are spiritual beings in some real sense and the too widespread denial of this in Materialism is harmful to people. Hopefully the book will help people recognize what is really spiritual in them. Readers have already written me that the book has helped them, that’s very rewarding.

Now the bigger question than what I deserve personally. Do authors deserve to make a reasonable living as authors?

Almost all books commercially published are financial failures – they don't earn enough money for the publisher to pay for the costs of publishing, and the author is only getting a fraction of that. You never hear about these books, of course, only about the best sellers, which makes being an author sound lucrative. Less than one percent of authors have best sellers, the rest, going by a survey the Authors Guild did a few years ago, can't earn enough to make a living, they have to depend on working at another job or a working spouse to get by. The consequence of this on the publishing industry is that they are less and less inclined to publish a book simply because it has valuable information: if it's not likely to appeal to mass tastes and become a best seller, they don't want it. You can't get statistics on what doesn't happen, but more and more books that would be of great value to some readers never get published since they won't be popular best sellers.

Now add in pirating. If a publisher thinks he may only sell a thousand copies before a book is pirated, and he needs five thousand sales to recoup his expenses, he's not going to publish the book.

Personally, at the money level, I don't care too much if my books are pirated. I can live on my retirement income from my years of teaching. I care very much for authors trying to earn a living, though, as pirating is going to kill the publishing industry, and so many good authors are never going to publish.

I felt like telling you the above as I don't think people who are starting to pirate books realize they are going to kill book publishing. I've heard the argument for pirating music, it give bands exposure they would never get otherwise and they make money from people who come to their concerts. When was the last time, if ever, you paid to hear an author speak, though? I’m a good speaker and occasionally get paid to speak, but I’m one of the very few authors who does – and I couldn’t make a living and support my family even if I added speaking fees and book royalties together.

> May I scan my copy of "End of Materialism" (or nick it from Google books somehow) and release it on the internet?<

It's very courteous of you in a strange way to ask for my permission, but no, I won't give it. Indeed my publisher would probably sue me if I did! If I'm ever held up at gunpoint, though, I hope the robber is as courteous…. I’m also pleased that you find “The End of Materialism" worthwhile enough to want to share it with others, even if I can’t approve of the way you plan to do it.

Charles T. Tart

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Bill wrote me,

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I telephoned.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The correspondence further deepened the mystery.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who sent the messages?”

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

If Helpers, why?

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

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

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

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

Scientists fear ghosts!

Pull up covers, hide, hide, hide!

Away damned psi, away, away!

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

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

Madness season is here
Scientists waxing furious
To what end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmmm……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, Universe, have I written enough for now?

Judy Tart’s Impressions for Our Grandson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope this is helpful…

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Every once in a while I hear from someone who has apparently precognitive dreams, what they dream about happens later in ordinary reality, and it's not something that could be rationally predicted. Dreaming that some public figure will be exposed as involved in a scandal involving sex or money, for example, is way too likely, we'll never think of that as paranormal. Highly specific stuff that's unpredictable and turns out to be right is what gets our attention, like a highway crash the next day involving three red trucks and one crashed airplane – not your everyday event.

It's not the paranormality or lack of it that concerns me here, that's a judgment call in real life events. My concern here is the people who dream of disasters, it looks precognitive, and they start to worry: "Did I just know about that in advance, or did I somehow make it happen? Am I just a reporter, or an agent of destruction?"?" To most of us this worry may seem somewhat silly: we see reports of catastrophes on the news all the time – floods, famines, explosions, etc., but we don't feel responsible for them. But some people really worry over this.

I would not absolutely rule out the possibility of psychic abilities being used, perhaps unconsciously, to bring ill into the world, and most people have believed that throughout all known history. That's folklore: we few parapsychologists tend to be very nice people and we don't do experiments to see if paranormal cursing really works. My best guess – and certainly my desire – is that it's very unlikely that someone who dreams of catastrophes in advance has anything to do with bringing them about.

Indeed as a psychologist, my concern for such people is to hope they would undertake various psychological and psychotherapeutic and spiritual growth exercises to figure out why they are attracted to the idea that they might be agents of catastrophe. That is not the same thing as saying I know they are "sick" and need to work on themselves! I know nothing of these individuals' psychology. But in general I think we benefit from self-knowledge.

So if I talk to someone with this concern I can tell them that, using what scientific knowledge we have (too little, really, but it's all we have), they should not worry about it. Whether this is really helpful to anyone, I don't know. When, like me, you like to be helpful to people, but don't know if you're actually doing any good, that's frustrating – but it's the way reality works most of the time, so you do what you can and hope and pray for the best.

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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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Here's an interesting question from someone responding to my blog, a young woman graduate student/scientist who has a lot of psychic and transpersonal experiences, but often just wants them to go away so she can be "normal" and a "scientist."  I could try a theoretical response, but how would you real clinicians answer this?  I'll pass the answer's on, and hopefully they will be educational to many.    —-  Charley

So how do transpersonal psychologists know what to tell someone who has come in for counseling? I have a counselor that believes my weird experiences are OK. But he doesn't seem to know what I need to do to be OK about them. He was much better at helping me with a problem I was having as a TA dealing with an unreasonable instructor. That was something he had seen before and it was easy for him to help me do what I needed to do to deal with that problem. But when I show up crying because I've seen the ghost of a student who committed suicide, he doesn't know what to tell me.

I think this is an interesting question for a lot of people, so I'll share the responses I've gotten here. First,

As to what "we clinicians" might do with this young woman:  The first thing I would do is listen to what the she is saying.  She is communicating that these experiences are "weird" and from your comments she is saying that these experience somehow challenge her "scientific" self.  I would start by asking her what does she mean by "weird" and "scientific" self.  Sometimes clients have experiences that they are frightened mean that they are becoming psychotic or losing control.  Of course they ARE losing control of their ego's ability to keep things status quo, but I wouldn't say this at this point. This process of exploring could take several months to move through before I would in anyway begin to normalize her experience.  During this time I would listen carefully for any "benefit" she might communicate to me either consciously or unconsciously and I would reflect/explore that with her.  I would encourage her to use the "scientific" method and explore hypotheses about these experience.  At some point clients usually ask me if other people or if I have had these experiences.  This is then an opening for educating them and moving toward normalization.  If you try to make these experiences "OK" right away you de-rail an initiatory  and transformative process that is probably emerging within the client in a healthy way.  Anyway, this is a very quick and simplistic answer to an excellent question raised by this young woman.  Hope it helps.

More later.

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The most exciting paper to me was one by leading parapsychologist Dean Radin (see his webpage at www.deanradin.com), “Consciousness and the Quantum Wave Function: Experiments with an Optical Double-Slit System, “done with colleagues Paul Wendland and Robert Rickenbach. You have probably all heard of the classical double-slit experiment in physics which helped create modern quantum theory. You fire a stream of subatomic particles (light, electrons, etc.) through a very narrow slit with detectors behind it. Sometimes, depending on the final observation conditions of the experiment, they come through as if they were individual particles, sometimes as if they were a wave. This led to the idea that observation, consciousness is critical at the quantum level, and that until phenomena are observed they exist only as a cloud of probabilities rather than something definite. I can't explain it well, but it's a fundamental experiment in physics.

So with all this fuss made over the role of consciousness in terms of how the experimental outcome is observed, what happens if you deliberately put more consciousness into the system by having people think about the slit?

A massive shift in the outcome occurs…..

I hope Radin can overcome the prejudice against parapsychology and get this published in a mainstream physics journal, as it's revolutionary.

Don't ask me to explain it more clearly, I know how little physics I know!

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