I have been involved in a discussion on a professional list of “spiritual leaders” about the evidence for reincarnation and, more generally whether science has any value in casting light on spirituality and religion. One of the list members, an ordained Christian minister, wrote that he had a difficult time understanding my mentality. Where was [...]
Continue reading about Science and Spirit: Where I’m Coming From and How I’m Doing It:
One of the folks on a discussion list I’m on was talking about her difficulties in accepting the reality of death as she got older, and asked how other people coped with death, especially hoping to hear how personal experience cast some light on the issue. I thought I’d share here what I wrote her. [...]
Recently my colleague Ed Kelly circulated a set of bullet points summarizing some consensus arising from the Esalen invitational Sursem conferences on the possibility of postmortem survival. The focus at these conferences had slowly widened from how do we scientifically investigate the possibility of postmortem survival per se to questions about the ultimate nature of [...]
Continue reading about What I Understand about Mind and Reality – 50 Year Perspective
My wife Judy and I have just completed a 6-day retreat on Dzogchen approaches to liberation with lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche, held at Mt. Madonna Conference Center. Now it’s a couple of days of camping in a redwood park to cool down, before jumping fully back into ordinary life, but I’ve been reflecting a lot and [...]
Some interesting correspondence on world views, altered states, animism, materialism, suppression of the bright shadow, Dismissive Materialism, etc. that, with Matt Colborn’s permission, I’m sharing. 3-17-11 Hi Charles – I’ve just been doing some corrections to the manuscript of my book Pluralism and the Mind and as a result been thinking a lot about different [...]
Continue reading about World Views, Animism, Dismissive Materialism
Many of you know that one of my primary interests is building bridges between first-class science and first-class spirituality, so they can stimulate each other. My The End of Materialism book in 2009 was a major effort in this direction, arguing that, given scientific evidence, it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in [...]
Continue reading about Toward An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century
I will be offering a basic parapsychology class online for the first time at ITP in the Winter quarter of 2011. For those who are interested in a good reading list on parapsychology or an idea of what my course is like, I have included a shortened (leaving out stuff about writing standards for student [...]
Continue reading about Parapsychology Class at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology
Lately I’m finding it useful to think of myself (and others) as “intention fields,” intermeshed sets of intentions, some reinforcing, some contradictory, that certainly control the way my mind functions, including the way I perceive reality and perhaps, to some extent, the very functioning of external reality itself. I was recently stimulated to try to [...]
Continue reading about Assumptions, Intentions, Experiments, Bias
My wife Judy and I are at a 10-day Tibetan Buddhist retreat in San Diego this week (November 26 through December 6, 2010), run by Lama Sogyal Rinpoche and his Rigpa Fellowship organization. We’ve been coming to these retreats for more than 20 years, and I have enormous respect for Rinpoche’s knowledge and compassion. But [...]
At the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP), where I teach, we usually open our faculty meetings with some sort of brief experiential exercise, designed to, to put it in simple terms, put us in a good and harmonious place or, to put it in fancier terms, remind us of our transpersonal/spiritual nature to smooth our [...]