I’ve recently been in correspondence with a young graduate student who has been dismayed to find out how much subjectivity can occur in her life when she is supposed to be a scientist, training in a hard, respected physical science. I think many people in general, who are overly impressed by science, as well as [...]
Continue reading about Ideal science and Real Science: Don’t You Dare Question My Objectivity!
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 5, Part 9 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: How are people doing in your attempts to practice self-remembering when you’re out in the world? And we’ll allow the world to include ITP outside this particular [...]
I have been intellectually impressed for years with G. I. Gurdjieff’s claim that we have three distinct types of “intelligence,” namely our intellectual mind, what we usually think of as intelligence, our emotional mind, and our bodily-instinctive mind. I say intellectually impressed, because for many years this was primarily a set of ideas for me, [...]
Continue reading about Emotional Intelligence versus Emotional Seizures
Once in a while I stop to think about what my spiritual practices are and where they might be going. Not that my conceptions about it are anything final, but just as a guideline to myself, at the moment, and possibly of use to others. So on the Rigpa Fellowship retreat last week, I was [...]
At my San Diego Rigpa Fellowship retreat last week, lama Sogyal Rinpoche, in teaching about the nature of the unenlightened, ordinary mind (sem in Tibetan), mentioned how perception can be distorted, especially by strong emotions like anger. Naturally if you can’t perceive the world accurately, you’re going to do things that will have unintended and [...]
I wrote the following (do they still call it blank verse, or has poetry changed since I was in high school a zillion years ago?) while on a 10-day retreat last week with Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan lama who wrote the best-selling Tibetan Book of Living and Dying a few years ago. My wife and [...]
Dr. Charles Tart Mindfulness Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 5, Part 1 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: Any kind of habit you can set up at the early learning stages of becoming more mindful is a good habit. Do watch for the point where [...]
Continue reading about Consciousness Dynamics, Living in Illusion
There is a beautiful film in the works, scheduled to come out next February, about activities centered around Esalen Institute for building bridges between science and spirituality. I just got the info on it this morning from the producer, and it’s reproduced below. Feel free to pass it on. I found watching this trailer very [...]
Some years ago I spoke, as did a number of my friends and colleagues, at a parapsychology related conference in one of our beautiful but wild Northwest states. I was reminded this morning of an amusing incident at this conference. One of the speakers, a local and, I guess, probably politically influential Rancher, talked about [...]
A few days ago I had the good fortune to attend a workshop by noted Buddhist scholar Steven Goodman, a professor of Asian Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Mixed in with excellent overviews of Buddhism’s view of the human condition (unenlightened and full of suffering!) were questions and ideas [...]
Continue reading about Personality, Buddhism, Enlightenment, Attraction, Aversion, Ignorance