It strikes me you're getting a lot of advanced tutoring in real science.  Ideal science is done by completely rational people, nobly searching for the truth, with no biases of any sort, and certainly no "lower emotional processes" affecting the quality of their reasoning.  This makes being a scientist an extremely high prestige position, so naturally, since we are attached to our high prestige social positions, no one would want to admit that their practice of science is anything but that.

Then we come to real science, which is done by actual human beings.  Real human beings have emotional brains that operate faster than their rational brains, have needs to succeed and be accepted, fears that they won't succeed or be accepted, etc.  To varying degrees real scientists work to overcome their emotional problems (with various degrees of success) and biases, and, in the long run, the need for replication and reproducibility in science tends to filter out results which really are due to the bias of particular individual investigators.  But the "long run" can sometimes be generations or longer, not one journal issue to the next.

So yes, doing something parapsychological like ESP or PK involves using very delicate psychological faculties, and we don't know anywhere near enough to control all the angles.  Recognizing this is a step in maturity, knowing your own human qualities.

To give you an example of the human factor in science, one of my friends about 30 years ago was a graduate student in geology in a leading department.  Now you don't get a much "harder" science than geology, do you, all those hard, solid rocks?  But he and I had some discussions about the psychological phenomenon of projection, the very powerful human ability to see what you believe, with no idea that you're actually projecting your beliefs into something.  So I mentioned that my wife, who loves geology, would often, on our hikes, say that we were looking at such and such a formation – and I couldn't see it.  What was apparently clear to her was a lot of lines running every which-a-way to me.  She would regard me as ignorant, and I would tease her that maybe geologists were making all these things up.  So my friend mentioned to his geology professors that perhaps they should do some studies to see just how objective and reliable geological classifications were — and they practically threw him out of the department!  He learned to keep his mouth shut after that.

So, we tend to talk about the "hard" and "soft" sciences, physics versus sociology, e.g., but I prefer to talk about the hard and the easy sciences.  Things like physics, chemistry, etc. are the easy sciences.  It doesn't matter what you had for breakfast the morning before you come into the lab, your relationship with your partner, etc., the same old things reliably happen in your experiments.  Sciences like psychology or parapsychology are the really hard, difficult sciences because all these subtle things do matter, and, not only do we not know much about the specifics of that, we don't want to know because we still cling to our feeling that we are superior, objective beings, scientists!

Welcome to reality.  Tread carefully, especially around other human beings who are too invested in their objectivity.

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From that time on, to greatly oversimplify, you can talk about two main streams of Buddhist activity.  The heart of Buddhism is the monastic tradition, monks and nuns so dedicated to achieving enlightenment for their own sakes and for the sake of others that they devote their entire lives to living in ascetic conditions and practicing meditation and prayer.  The other main stream is the beliefs of the common people, in essence, that the Buddha was some kind of god, or at least had supernatural abilities, as the monks and nuns also do to various degrees.  These people were too busy trying to survive and  earn a living, and so could not meditate very much themselves, but they could earn merit, which would go toward improving their future lives, by worshiping the Buddha and by supporting the monks and nuns with alms and other donations.  I'm speaking very generally, of course, and you can find many variations on these themes.

As Buddhism moved into cultures that were radically different from the Indian culture Buddhism originated in, it often had to make various and sometimes major adaptations to fit into its new culture.  One of the major adaptations some teachers of Buddhism are making in bringing Buddhism to the modern world, particularly the West is to try to reconcile it with what we know from science and psychology.  This has interesting results, some of which will probably make Buddhism more effective in the long run, and others which can greatly undermine the historical form of Buddhism.  In terms of the latter, I'm especially thinking of the way science is so frequently equated with an overarching philosophy of materialism.  It's not essential to equate science with materialism, of course – see my "The End Of Materialism: How Evidence Of The Paranormal Is Bringing Science And Spirit Together" book-  but science has had, by far, its greatest successes in learning about the material world.  We all like success, so an attitude of materialism, only what is material – known physical objects and physical energies – is real, pervades most of modern life.

From this materialistic perspective, Buddhism may be psychologically effective in reducing individuals' suffering, ultimately through meditation's physiological effects on the brain.  But it carries an enormous amount of superstitious baggage with it.  There are no divine beings, Gautama Buddha is not some kind of god, e.g., or bodhisattvas may be real historical people who reduced their own suffering and helped others, but they have not become minor gods that are worth praying to, or worshiping the Buddha is a useless and misleading thing to do except insofar as it may psychologically sooth you – albeit at the cost of having a fundamentally wrong belief about the nature reality, which will probably lead to a variety of negative consequences.

Incidentally, I have nothing against materialism per se as a philosophical approach to the world.  What I object to is the shortsightedness and arrogance that allows too many believers of it to believe that all truth is encompassed by this view, and thus that there's no need to actually check in with reality to see how well this kind of explanation actually works.  Many things can be explained completely and controlled effectively by material means, and I'm all for progress continuing on these fronts, but many important things can't be.

What led me to these thoughts today is thinking about the idea that traditional Buddhist monasticism is tremendously threatened by an attitude of materialism.  If you're very rich, of course, it's no big deal to help to support a few monks or nuns.  But for the majority of people, why should they spend significant amounts of their very limited resources supporting people who sit around trying to get enlightened and pray, when prayer is one of those superstitions we need to discard?  From a materialistic point of view, praying is talking to yourself.  Perhaps psychologically the monks praying is good for them, even if it involves a major illusion about the nature of reality, but why should we give donations for them to pray for us?  Wouldn't it be better to spend our money on socially useful projects, building schools and hospitals, e.g., or on our own security and pleasure?

My own understanding, drawing from my 50+ years of knowledge of research within scientific parapsychology, is that we have very high quality, scientific evidence that, for example, our minds are more than just the material functioning of the brain, that some things like prayer and psychic healing can sometimes have real effects in the real world, or that telepathy could be a mechanism for prayer to have real effects beyond the person praying, and so materialism is only a partial view of what reality is, it's foolish and unscientific to discard everything spiritual in a wholesale manner.

All religions, including Buddhism, are undoubtedly full of superstitions that are factually wrong, but to totally throw them out, to assume that anything about the spiritual is inherently nonsensical, is a major mistake.  It's not only a mistake in scientific terms – you don't ignore or irrationally reject data just because it doesn't fit with your other beliefs – it's something that psychologically harms many people.  That's because many people have various kinds of spiritual experiences, and to then have scientific Authority Figures say this is all error and nonsense on their parts is to devalue and reject some of their most essential aspects of their lives.  I've spoken and corresponded with innumerable people who have had this happen to them.  It hurts!

I'm hardly the first person to notice that these two extremes of uncritical credulity for anything labeled spiritual on the one hand, and total rejection of spirituality for materialism on the other hand, are not very healthy for the human spirit.  Too many of our values are based in our spiritual and religious views, and to declare them  all superstition is to reduce us to the level of animals.  If we think we are nothing but animals, we are more likely to act that way, with the consequences of such actions.  The founders of the Society for Psychical research in England, more than 125 years ago, saw this problem and advocated that the methods of science could be used to start separating the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff in the sphere of religion.  I'm sad to say there has not been much progress yet.  We have slowly accumulated high quality, laboratory evidence of the reality of things like telepathy, so I have argued in my "The End Of Materialism" book, that it is scientifically invalid to simply throw out all spiritual and religious ideas without examination.  But there is so much more we need to know, so much more that research about the spiritual could clarify!

The basic theme running through my career has been to try to build bridges between the best of science and the best of spirituality.  Both these fields have much nonsense in them, although science has vital self-correcting mechanisms usually not found in religion and spirituality.  I have basically proposed that the testing methods of essential scientific inquiry be used to refine and clarify religious ideas, but I suspect that this proposal is too threatening to many people.  For those who have a strong investment in some religious or spiritual path, they may well see science as the enemy which has ridiculed their beliefs, and so want nothing to do with it.  Further, because spiritual beliefs are so important to our emotional well-being, the idea that some of them might be wrong, or that all are subject to examination by scientific method, might be very threatening to people.  Many scientists, on the other hand, have actively rejected religion in favor of a materialistic, but apparently scientific, worldview, and do not like the idea that they have been making a major mistake by not actually examining the phenomena of religion scientifically.  Or they have not so much made an active decision to ignore or reject the spiritual so much as this attitude has been conditioned into them by modern life and their conventional scientific education.

Coming back to traditional Buddhism, Western ideas, with their heavy materialistic bias, are spreading more and more over the world.  Traditional Buddhism, which supports monastics for the supposed benefit of their prayers, may go on for a long time in some parts of the world, but have little power to establish itself in the more modern world.  Personally I think this would be a great loss.  My best understanding of the parapsychological evidence to date is that monks and nuns praying for us may actually be doing something useful in reality, it's not simply a form of delusion.

As a scientist, that view is, of course, always subject to further test.  Some of what I believe along these lines may turn out to be correct, some research may produce further evidence supporting it, and, even more importantly, as we gain a better scientific understanding of what, for example, makes prayers (or psychic healing in general) more likely to be effective, we may be able to greatly increase the usefulness and efficacy of monastics (and us ordinary people) praying for the world.

Is there much chance of applying the essence of science, "essential science" as I called in my book, to improve our knowledge of and efficacy of spiritual work?  Good question!  I've worked to promote this idea in many rational ways, and I pray for it, in the hope that my prayers are somehow effective in reality, not just a psychological phenomena within me.  The chance of success?  Good question!

Finally I will note that my understanding of Gautama Buddha's ideas is that they were compatible with a basically scientific approach to reality.  In his Sutta to the Kalamas, for example, he constantly tells people to check ideas and beliefs against their experience, against what actually can be observed to work, rather than simply whether they are popular or supported by authorities (including himself), etc.  That's probably the most important part of essential science: all ideas must constantly be checked against observable, experiencable reality, and must be modified when new observations require us to go beyond the current conceptions.  Unfortunately I often get the impression that as Buddhism as became an established institution for many centuries, this call to check ideas against reality has been turned into a too fixed belief that Gautama Buddha's understandings were the last word on ultimate reality, he was omniscient, and so new observations and ideas are simply checked back for doctrinal compliance with what the Buddha thought about things, rather than against a wider observation of reality.  This is one of the things that I'm sure will have to change as Buddhism becomes more important in modern culture and tries to be more compatible with science.

Some modern teachers promote an atheistic kind of Buddhism.  Meditation practices have effects on your brain which make you happier.  I am all for anything which makes people happier in a healthy way – but if you reduce the effects of meditation to brain functioning then, as a scientifically inclined Westerner, my response is fine, the drug companies should be able to develop a pill to produce the same happiness, I hope they develop it soon as all that meditation can be pretty tedious……  But all I know, my "best estimate" as a widely-informed scientist, is that there's more to spirituality than nothing but particular electro-chemical patterns in the brain, and we need to understand that "more" to really benefit others and ourselves…..

(added 1-28-12)

A while after posting the above, I had a "vision" (small v, image arising, rather than big V, Vision from Above) of where Buddhism without any reality to the spiritual, Materialistic Buddhism, could go with the right research.  It's a sarcastic, critical vision in some ways, as well as humorous – but insofar as it could reduce human suffering, I'm all for it!  As long as it doesn't further distract us from the vitally needed research on what's real about the spiritual and how to optimally live with it…..

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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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Let's start with that word "miracle."  The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary's first definition is:

miracle /0ˈmɪrək(ə)l/ noun & verb. ME.

[ORIGIN Old French & Modern French from Latin miraculum object of wonder, from mirari, -are look at, wonder, from mirus wonderful.]

1 A marvellous event not ascribable to human or natural agency, and therefore attributed to the intervention of a supernatural agent, esp. (in Christian belief) God; spec. an act demonstrating control over nature, serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or divinely favoured.

I believe this is the way most people use the word "miracle," a supernatural agent has demonstrated His/Her/Its control over nature, and it makes no sense given what we humans understand about nature and nature's laws.

Let's consider something very simple which I think we all believe science has established beyond any reasonable doubt.  If you take two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen and heat them enough, they turn into water.  Always.

A "miracle" would then be that you repeat the above and it doesn't turn into water, as such an outcome is not ascribable to what we know on "natural agency."  If someone credits God or the gods with fixing it so no water is formed, that's the basic stuff of a "miracle."

Putting such a result into more neutral language, you have some observations, in this case a zillion of them, that two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, heated to some specified temperature, always turns into the stuff we call water.  We have also developed a conceptual system, chemistry, which makes this observation logically plausible and fits it in with a much wider collection of observations, the body of chemistry.

Ideal Science and Scientists and Reality:

Now I could describe the "ideal" scientist as always curious and not overly attached to any concepts, and to some degree some scientists tend to be like that (I hope I'm that way).  But coming back to ordinary human reality, we all tend to get attached to things that work practically and to things that make sense and so make us feel smart.  Who doesn't like to feel that they are smart, understand how the world works, and can control it at least fairly well?

So probably most actual human scientists, faced with the observation of no water formed when there should have been water formed, jump to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the experiment, not that what they believe are basic laws of chemistry were violated, that there was a "miracle."  And since we humans do make mistakes, it's not a bad first conclusion, we could indeed have screwed up the experiment.

So we do the experiment over and over and the "miraculous outcome" keeps happening, no water, even though we've carefully examined our apparatus, etc.

Well a lot of scientist will simply dismiss the anomalous results at this point rather than question their knowledge: it still must be some error even if they can't figure out what that error is yet.  We will figure it out some day, of course.  This someday belief, applied to being unable to come up with a convincing physical explanation for something, is what philosophers long ago named "promissory materialism."  Someday we will understand this and everything else in proper material terms.  The problem is that this is not science, this is "faith," in the worst connotation of "faith."  A principal requirement for something to be a scientific theory, according to many philosophers of science, is that a theory must be capable of being disproven.  Well you can never prove that X won't be proven in the terms you prefer – chemistry, God, devils, little green UFOs, what have you – someday.

A practical example of this is the evidence for ESP.  Hundreds and hundreds of experiments show ESP manifesting, so the pseudo-skeptics then claim that ESP really means Error Some Place rather than Extrasensory Perception.

A very few scientists will find the failure of an experiment to conform to what we think are the laws to be really exciting and want to research it – like us parapsychologists.  After all, any parapsychology experiment comes down to setting up a situation where, given what we think we know about the physical world, nothing can happen.  Put two people in isolated rooms miles apart, have one look at a randomized deck of cards every minute while the person in the other writes down what she thinks the card is each time.  Given all we know about the physical world, you'll get chance level scores, say 50% correct if the task is to guess red or black with ordinary playing cards.  Then some people average more than that, say 53%, long enough to be statistically significant, and we have evidence for ESP.  Yes, 50% of the time the receiving person is just guessing, but every once in a while they know what the correct card is…..very interesting.

Now if you call this a "miracle" in the sense of "A marvellous event not ascribable to human or natural agency, and therefore attributed to the intervention of a supernatural agent," you've brought your attempts to understand what's happening to an end, you've defined it as something beyond human understanding, so what's the point of trying?  And by not trying to understand further, you don't understand further….

But if you don't use that word "miracle," with it's implication that we humans can't understand, but describe it as an anomalous event, simply something that doesn't make sense in terms of what we already know, that doesn't say it didn't happen, and it invites us to try to expand our understanding.  So for a few scientists like me, "miracles" are an incentive to look deeper and further.  Indeed things that we're sure happen but don't make sense in terms of conventional knowledge might mean an error some place, but might very well mean the next major breakthrough in science if we apply ourselves.

How Far Can We Understand?

Now it could turn out that no matter how much further and deeper we look, we never get beyond verifying that these things occur, but just won't make sense to us.  I'm willing to consider that outcome as possibility, although my preference is for it to make sense, and I am confident that, with further study, these kinds of events will indeed make a lot more sense than they do now.  Whether they will make any kind of "ultimate sense," I don't know.

But Miracles Prove My Religion is the True One!

I also have no objection to religious and spiritual people pointing to apparent miracles – paranormal phenomena in my more neutral description – as evidence that there is a reality to the spiritual.  Indeed that's the whole thrust of my "The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together" book.  Many, many people have had their spiritual and religious lives inhibited or squelched by followers of Scientism (Materialism pretending to be all of science) claiming that all spirituality is unreal, nonsense, imaginary, and who wants to be thought dumb and deluded?   The overview of evidence for the paranormal – for "miracles" if we were forced to use that terminology – that I give in the book is to support my conclusion that the followers of Scientism who have told spiritual people they are stupid are not only harming those people, they are misleading them, because real science, actually working with all the data of parapsychology, shows that humans sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect spiritual beings to have.  So it's reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in ones approach to life.

On the other hand, I think one of the reasons for irrational opposition to parapsychological research from religious people is that the evidence is now clear that no particular religion can claim superiority over any other because it can point to paranormal events, "miracles" among its followers.  Looking at the catalogs of these events in various religions they all have pretty much the same basic parapsychological phenomena occurring.

I personally take that as a sign that God/Spirit, whatever you want to call it, is happy to give such little boosts to people's faith as long as it's any faith that helps people become wiser and more compassionate.  I can't "prove" that incidentally, I can't point to extensive surveys that show, e.g., that "nice" religions have more paranormal events happen that "not nice" religions, this is just my personal feeling, my best guess at this early stage of our knowledge. And perhaps my bias that I may need to overcome some day.

It would be very interesting to catalog the kinds of "miracles," paranormal events reported in various spiritual traditions though.  At first glance they are all pretty much the same, but differences might be very revealing.  For example, in Tibetan Buddhism there is a tradition, based on reports of people who claim to have witnessed this, of very spiritually advanced people passing into "rainbow body" when they die.  These are people who ask that their body be undisturbed, in a closed room, after they die.  Observers report seeing all sorts of rainbow like light leaking out of the room, and when it is opened at the end of the traditional seven days there is no body left in the room except for fingernails, hair, and clothing.  Or in some cases a very shrunken body.  I've never heard of anything similar in other traditions.

Do Miracles Destroy Science?

Coming back to the central issue, yes, I think considering any events as "miracles" does tend to destroy science.  There's little point in doing science if some supernatural being suddenly and inexplicably changes the way the world works.  My belief – can't prove it, but it's what I operate from – is that Spirit or God or whatever is basically benign and won't sabotage our intelligence this way.  But in terms of the way most scientists feel, yes, the possibility of supernatural beings arbitrarily changing reality does gut science.  A simple way to not worry about that is to deny all spiritual reality…..No non-physical, "supernatural" (another word that causes a lot of trouble), then nobody to mess up our experiments and undermine the advance of our knowledge.  No "miracles," no worry.

Lots of interesting psychological questions developing from all this speculation, no time to go into it now….

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Dear Shinzen,

Here's an opening/interesting thought.  I've always cited the Sutta to the Kalamas (a translation I use is below for convenience) as showing that the Buddha was basically scientific in his attitude.  Don't take anything on Authority or apparent logic, keep testing it against experience, only adopt it (subject to change later if the right data comes along) if the ideas/concepts keep agreeing with reality/experience.  It's my idea of how basic science is done, data first, always, theory second.

Mentioned it on one of my discussion lists a couple of days ago, with the addendum that while lip service was paid to it, Buddhism as I had come across it, often didn't seem to honor it.  The actual rule seemed to be think about something until you come to the same conclusions the Buddha is reputed to have come to, then you can stop thinking.  Since the Buddha knew everything, now you are right.  Authority Forever!!!

A Buddhist scholar on the list complimented me on my attitude, it was certainly me, but perhaps I had it wrong, perhaps Gautama Buddha's actual intention, and/or the intention of later Buddhists, might indeed have been to get you thinking only until you agreed with the Buddha.  Thus your faith was strengthened, etc.  Wow!  The Buddha doing a little mind fucking, even if for my and everybody's good?  Well maybe…..I did tell my kids about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, with the best of intentions and it worked out pretty well…..

So my mind is more open, but not comfortable, it's a slippery slope misleading people for their own good…..I generally don't want to start down that slope at all since it's so tricky……And absolute honesty is essential to doing real science…..

I touched on this some in an interview with Vince Horne of the Buddhist Geeks program last week.  Vipassana, I opined (following your ideas), is a great invention, it's a microscope you can use to discover the fine and otherwise implicit structure of your own mind, then maybe change it intelligently.  But if you get a microscope, you don't just wave it around at random, you may be given certain slides (and not others) to look at, and those slides have been prepared in certain ways, selecting materials, stains, etc.  Nothing wrong with this tool as long as you realize you're using it within certain limits and you constantly seek to understand these limits and how they might slant your observations.  If you forget these limits and think you're seeing Unlimited Truth, though, you may get quite deluded….

Any thoughts?

Charley, who might be a little less deluded because he now knows another way in which he might be deluded about being deluded…..     

Gautama Buddha's Sutta to the Kalamas

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

(from Gates, 1989).

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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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→       Mainstream physicalist/reductionist science cannot account for well-documented mental and psychophysiological  phenomena of the sorts catalogued in Irreducible Mind (and elsewhere), and must give way to something larger.  [Irreducible Mind by Edward F. Kelly (Author), Emily Williams Kelly (Author), Adam Crabtree (Author), Alan Gauld(Author), Michael Grosso (Author), Bruce Greyson (Author) is the best reference around for these points.]

→        The ontological doctrine of classical physicalism must be rejected when it is claimed to be a complete description of reality, and instead seen as a special case of a larger reality.

→        Science itself, however, is inherently more adaptable and must not be rejected; it can and must be expanded to a form more nearly commensurate with the dimensions of our subject matter. This is not to say, of course, that science is all-powerful and can explain everything.  And it is vitally important to discriminate science as a method of investigating and understanding from scientism, a “psychological hardening of the conceptual arteries,” a common kind of pathology of cognition.

→        Reliable data from science and human experience demand that we consider that both the world we experience and our experience itself emerge out of some sort of hidden background that under normal conditions is not accessible to most of us – at least not consciously.  This background can be investigated to a degree to be determined by our efforts.

→        At the psychological level, a filter-type theory of the Myers-James-Bergson-Irreducible Mind type, that we screen out most non-local information from wider Mind for the sake of concentrating on local information relevant to our biological survival, seems to be headed in the right direction – and that theory can certainly be developed further – but we must also strive to identify a coherent ontology that complements and supports it.  Note too  that the concept of “filter” often seems rather passive, though, a filter just sits there and screens out predefined material.  The actual psychological “filtering” may be an active process, filtering/construction, though, creating a virtual world of experience normally best adapted to dealing with the physical world.  I’ve written about how it’s useful to conceive of us as living in a biological-psychological virtual reality in several articles on www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/.

→        High quality scientific data. as well as human experience. make it clear that some kinds of psi are real, and. while interpretation of the data are complex, there is excellent evidence for some kind(s) of post-mortem survival and reincarnation, so these should be treated as facts of nature, and an empirically adequate metaphysics must somehow accommodate them.  As to the kinds of psi that are real or maybe real, see the distinctions I’ve made between the Big Five (telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and psychic healing) and the Many Maybes in my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together.

→        Existing data and theorizing suggest it would be worth while to postulate that reality is, at bottom, in some sense, “mental” in character, and the inescapable everyday phenomenal distinction between mind and matter vanishes at some level beneath or beyond that of everyday appearances.  Investigations conducted from this premise will probably be very fruitful.

→        It is classical, Newtonian physics that seems to say psi phenomena can’t happen, but in some versions of quantum theory, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, consciousness is an inherent part of reality and psi, in some versions, either is possible or, indeed, is required.

→        Ordinary consciousness, a semi-arbitrary construction emerging from the brain and the ultimate nature of mind, is very useful in myriad ways but may not be capable of some kinds of needed understandings.  Thus observations and ideas obtained from investigation in various altered states of consciousness (ASCs) need to be refined, expanded and tested for their usefulness in further understanding the nature of mind and reality, along the lines of creating state-specific sciences, as proposed by me in Science in 1972 (article available on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site.

→        Research on mystical experience, and on the known means of systematically producing it such as meditation and the major psychedelics, seems of the highest priority, scientifically speaking.

→        Scientists, religious scholars, and scholar-practitioners can work together productively on these matters, and they should!

→        Contrary to the recent spate of anti-religious polemics by mainstream scientists, which are based on distorted and culturally limited ideas of human spiritual experience, meaningful reconciliation of science and religion – i.e., a reconciliation that is both comprehensive and theoretically satisfying – constitutes the most humanly urgent and potentially consequential task of the present era.

Thanks again for Dr. Kelly for stimulating me this way!

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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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All seriousness aside, however, sometimes we need to have a little fun with Dismissive Materialism.

Back in 1992, Tom Greening, psychotherapist, poet and editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology sent me one of his poems, A Single Case Study, that played with Dismissive Materialism (although I hadn’t coined that term yet) in an amusing way, and which inspired me to write a poem in return.  Greening’s poem and my I Am Stuff response were discovered by me a couple of days ago during an archeological dig.  (Archeological dig is a high-class way of saying my wife was making me clean up my office)  Greening gave me permission to publish his poem here, although he did add the condition that after I made the first million dollars from it we would then split the second million dollars equally…..     

A SINGLE CASE STUDY

I am an anomalous surge,

A bioelectromagnetic burst.

Study me with EEG topographic mapping

(a great advance over phrenology),

ferret out my subtle energies,

record the markers of my emotion,

sift my positive and negative ions

for signs of virtue,

and measure the build-up and collapse

of my electric dipoles

while I indulge my mood swings.

I'll gulp down any placebo,

ignorant as I am of

psychoneuroimmunology.

When you've done with

the biofeedback stress profiling

please give me copies of the charts and graphs

to frame and hang over the fireplace

so on cold nights when my current flickers

I can remember who I am.

Tom Greening

What came to me was the following:

I AM STUFF

In case I get lonely

Or too spectral, too wispy

I can believe in my brain,

Bio-computer extraordinary.

I've never actually seen my brain, of course,

But they – we know what authorities they are –

Say they know all about it.

Lonely?  Just a little serosomething imbalance

Between the thingamabob nucleus

And the ascending reticular tract.

A few little molecules can fix that up.

Sad?  Nothing to it, really.

No existential angst,

No psychodynamic dramas,

Nothing to face or fight or philosophize about,

When a little applied electric current

Can whisk all that grief away!

Meaning?  Purpose?  Lack of purpose?

All states of the neurons,

Organized by speeding chemical messengers.

Give them a few more years of R and D,

And we'll have meaning states brewed to order.

Me lonely?  Come, come now.  Can a hemisphere be lonely?

A caudate nucleus?  A rhinencephalon?  A hippocampus?

Me?

Me, my self, my soul?

All out of fashion now, gone away

Into a cold, solid, material universe.

Unfeeling stuff, really, when you get down to basics.

Out of fashion?

Try a shot of neuro-humero-physio-enkephalon brew.

You'll feel all right!

While entropy breaks me – stuff – "me" – down

And we fade into the unfeeling night.

Charles T. Tart

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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 worldviews; specifically between the difference between materialist worldviews and animist ones. And it struck me — are there altered states that are associated with a particular world-view? Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?

Now, I'm sure these thoughts are not original; in fact, if you could direct me to any author who's had similar thoughts (including yourself), I'd be very grateful. But the main reason I wonder it is from personal experience. When I was a kid — up to the age of about eleven or twelve — I lived in what I'd now call a thoroughly animistic reality. I remember, for example, accepting ghosts as real but somehow continuous with the rest of nature, if scary. I remember experiencing nature as alive and immanent. And whilst I still experience similar feelings, they're very muted compared to before.  It's as if what I experience now is a mere dream or fragment of a former reality (although meditation can enhance them). I suppose lots of adults feel this way!

Anyway — I have also realized that analytical, intellectual thought can kill these feelings, or at least mute them; and I wonder whether the main difference between 'believers' and 'skeptics' is essentially that they really do live in different worlds from one another. When I go into town and watch shoppers, too, I wonder whether consumerism doesn't require/generate a particular state of (un)consciousness.

Sadly, I had to excise the chapter on altered states due to space, but once I've finally handed in this book, I wish to write a paper on just this topic: the Link between altered states and worldviews. I would be grateful if you could direct me to any reference you think may be useful.

Sorry if this seems a little rambling — these ideas are in the formative stage, and so are not rigorous!

BTW: I recently bought, read and enjoyed your book, The end of materialism. I especially enjoyed the bit on the Western Creed. I must admit to have found it a little depressing to plough through so many neuroscientific papers that just seem to reinforce materialism.

One book in particular annoyed me a little — Thomas Metzinger's ego tunnel. In this, he used recent work on the neural mechanisms of OBEs as evidence for a materialist view of the self. He totally ignored evidence for psi functioning in OBEs! Have you read this book?

Finally, I thought you might enjoy my new blog on consciousness. I plan to put a review of your book on it in the near future.

http://mattonconsciousness.blogspot.com/

Many thanks for your attention,

Yours,

Matt Colborn.

My response:

Dear Matt,               Date Composed: March 18, 2011

>– are there altered states that are associated with a particular world-view? Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?<

That's more difficult to answer than I would like.  On the one hand, I could note that drug-induced states with a substance like ayahuasca are reported to be full of snakes and panthers and other jungle animals, in god-like intensity, so that would conduce to animism.  On the other hand, that particular drug. mostly taken by people as part of their religious ceremonies, live in jungle covered countries…..

When I extensively researched hypnosis years ago, it was clear that I could probably induce almost any kind of experience with great reality, perhaps even greater than normal reality, but I felt it would be unethical to do this with spiritual experiences, so did not.  But it was an example of how an altered state of consciousness (ASC), and perhaps most altered states, can be programmed or biased to produce particular experiences, so you could in general (a) take people dissatisfied with the comprehensiveness of their ordinary world view, (b) give them some kind of altered state which would appear through novelty alone, as well as whatever inherent properties the state had, to (c) be a "higher" view of reality, and thus (d) give pseudo-validation to whatever beliefs you wanted.

I make this point a lot in my States of Consciousness book (not my Altered States of Consciousness book), describing my systems approach to ASCs and their induction.  It's not enough to know the particular, overt procedures and suggestions in inducing an ASC, you've got to know the covert expectations and demands that further shape the state.

Does this mean we are forever stuck in our subjectivity and cultural conditioning, even in altered states?  I don't think so, as we can apply the methods of essential science (not scientism with its commitment to materialism) to see what is an artifact, what is more basic.  We certainly haven't done that yet, of course.

> Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?<

Yes, that's a good way of expressing it.  "Ordinary" consciousness “contains” and/or creates a world view.  It's accurate enough most of the time that we survive and prosper, but it can distort perception, thought and feeling quite a bit too…..

> But the main reason I wonder it is from personal experience. When I was a kid — up to the age of about eleven or twelve — I lived in what I'd now call a thoroughly animistic reality. I remember, for example, accepting ghosts as real but somehow continuous with the rest of nature, if scary. I remember experiencing nature as alive and immanent. And whilst I still experience similar feelings, they're very muted compared to before.<

One of my students, Craig Schlarb, did his dissertation at ITP a few years ago on the suppression of the "bright shadow."  Not shadow in the sense of Jung's idea of the nasty parts of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge, but some kids have fabulous mystical experiences – and no cultural support for them but, more likely, cultural antagonism against them, so they have to suppress a major part of themselves.  Sad, probably a lot more common than we think, and similar to what you report.

> Anyway — I have also realized that analytical, intellectual thought can kill these feelings, or at least mute them; and I wonder whether the main difference between 'believers' and 'skeptics' is essentially that they really do live in different worlds from one another. When I go into town and watch shoppers, too, I wonde whether consumerism doesn't require/generate a particular state of (un)consciousness.<

Indeed!  I usually conceptualize it now that we live in a biological-psychological virtual reality (see paper on my website) which is partly a useful reflection of the actual world around us and strongly a set of habits on how things are to be perceived and interpreted…..Although we are so used to it that it seems “natural,” we are working away all the time constructing, adjusting, and reinforcing this virtual reality.

> In this, he used recent work on the neural mechanisms of OBEs as evidence for a materialist view of the self. He totally ignored evidence for psi functioning in OBEs! Have you read this book?<

No, and I won't waste my time reading it.  These folks, these fervent materialists, drive my crazy!  They take one or two aspects of OBEs or NDEs, act as if they are the whole, and thus have explained them AWAY!  Like somebody has a weird, distorted body image when their brain is stimulated and they say this is THE explanation of OBEs…..It would be like my claiming that I understand how high air pressure inflates tires, and so I now know EVERYTHING of importance about automobiles…     ;-(

> Finally, I thought you might enjoy my new blog on consciousness. I plan to put a review of your book on it in the near future.<

Thanks.  If you do review The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, though, remember it is not a technical philosophical book about the philosophy of materialism, it's about the psychological syndrome of what I call (but forgot to put in the book by this catchy name) Dismissive Materialism, an emotional as well as intellectual commitment that justifies just ignoring or explaining away with fallacious logic any spiritual stuff that makes Believers in Dismissive Materialism uncomfortable….

Very thought provoking ideas you've put out here.  Do you mind if I quote you and my responses in my blog?  Would you prefer anonymity, or can I use your real name?

Good luck on your book!

Charles T. Tart

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I’ve just finished editing* a video of me giving the ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine) 2010 Presidential Address, Toward An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21^st Century, which can serve as a summary of that book as well as stimulation for directions I hope people will study in the future, as well as giving a more personal look at me for those who want more than words.

It’s on YouTube in four parts, as follows:

Part 1 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9CBYisAa1o

Part 2 -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdxQkMLLn24

Part 3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRTreTfThbw

Part 4 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf3_LbxgyLc

It’s about an hour and a half altogether.

* Editing means the camera person kept swinging the camera back and forth between me and the slides in spite of my instruction to keep it on me, I planned to use a video editing program to add in the slides later.  I have now done that, which makes for much more readable slides and, by overriding most of the camera swings, less dizzying pans.  Excuse minor technical glitches in this, I’m just an amateur.

Interestingly, my son David Tart is very skilled at animation and has been the animation director of a number of films.  He looked at earlier efforts of mine and gave me good advice – stop trying to get better and better at video editing Dad!  With some obvious crudity, my stuff is a amateur job but a good one, to be admired.  If it gets even better, people will start looking at it as if it were done by a professional, and then get distracted because it’s quite flawed by professional standards.

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I'll also create short video about aspects of parapsychology on YouTube from time to time.  I expect to put the first one up later today and will post a second note about the URL when it's up.

Syllabus, ITP PRES2073, Basic Parapsychology

Professor Tart

Copyright Charles T. Tart 2011

Winter 2011, ONLINE

- Shortened Version for non-ITP student readers -

Prerequisites: None for ITP students

Schedule: Asynchronous Online: Papers due Mondays,  online discussion rest of week

POSSIBLE CHANGES: As this is my first course taught on Angel Learning Systems, I may have to make some changes in this syllabus, but I hope not…..   -[some small modifications were made on 12/22/10]-

Every culture and every person within a culture is a “philosopher,” a “scientist,” a “theorist,” in that she has a worldview, a set of (hopefully somewhat integrated) beliefs as to what the world is like.  The “world” includes the physical world, their own selves, other people, and “otherworldly” aspects of reality. Your personal and cultural worldview automatically and habitually affects/constructs your thinking (and perception) in important ways, including what kinds of values and goals make "sense" and how you perceive things.  Some actions or ideas are not even seriously thought about, e.g., as they are “obviously” impossible.  And if “impossible’ events happen, considerable conflict may be experienced.

Transpersonal psychology was created partially as a reaction to the dominant worldview of our times, scientistic materialism.  [Note the differences between science and scientism, the words "scientific" and "scientistic"]  Scientism, more accurately described as an automated world view rather than a formal philosophy, as a psychological syndrome of Dismissive Materialism, affects all of us in many ways, even when we think we don’t believe it, or think we are in rebellion to it,  or think we have a firm grounding in some spiritual practice.  Dismissive Materialism sees human consciousness as nothing but the resultant of electrical and chemical interactions within the brain and nervous system.  So consciousness is not only exclusively generated and controlled by the brain and physical environment, it perishes absolutely when the brain dies.  From the dominant view of scientistic materialism, Dismissive Materialism, most of the ideas and experiences of concern to transpersonal psychologists are pre-scientific nonsense, primitive beliefs based on fear of injury and death, outmoded and nonsensical beliefs about “souls” and “spirits” and “energy” and similar things that any “rational” person dismisses.

One of the reasons for creating transpersonal psychology was the psychological observation that a completely materialistic worldview is not very satisfying to the human “spirit:” indeed many seem to sicken when they are caught within the materialistic world view.  But in being transpersonal psychologists, are we desperately hanging on to superstition and nonsense just to make ourselves feel better?  Good feelings first, to hell with truth?  A modern, (transpersonal) "opiate of the masses," as Marx characterized religion?  Rejecting the truths of modern science out of fear they will undermine a comfortable belief system?  These are important questions each of us must personally answer, as well as deal with rationally and scientifically as transpersonally oriented professionals.

The central contentions of this course will be that, [a] using the best kind of rigorous science (scientific parapsychology, which must be distinguished from the vast mass of sloppy beliefs popularly put under the "parapsychology" and "New Age" labels), a total reduction of all human functioning to nothing but material brain function is factually wrong; that [b] no genuinely scientific theory that claims to be comprehensive can ignore facts it can’t account for; and [c] high quality scientific data gives support to a scientifically based view of consciousness that points in the direction of “spiritual” or transpersonal realities.  But, and this is a very important "but," simply believing either in a materialistic or transpersonal worldview because of habit or feelings or cultural conditionings is common,  unscientific, contrary to many spiritual aspirations, and is a major disservice to the world and to our profession.  Some of what is labeled by such terms as “psychic,” or “spiritual” is indeed factually nonsensical and wrong, but there are vital realities mixed in.  Learning how to discriminate and how to wisely use what we know is essential.  No ITP graduate should be a fuzzy philosopher who doesn’t think clearly and rigorously, a sloppy scientist who doesn’t actually test her beliefs, or a slipshod theorist about reality who doesn’t recognize and deal with difficulties and contradictions.  And "believer" is not a positive term among the influential people in our society.

Two primary texts will be used, as well as possible occasional assigned readings, viz. Charles Tart's The End of Materialism) and Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena[1]. Both authors are leading parapsychologists.  The course will consist of various micro-lectures by the instructor, extensive reading in the two textbooks, and online discussions based on the readings and on students’ personal knowledge and experience. Because of the large amount of material we need to survey to get an adequate conceptual and scientific overview, there will be little, if any, experiential work.  The reading and paper assignments are given below.  Further, multiple commenting on student papers in a collegial way will increase the intensity of the learning experience.

Lectures and Discussion:

A typical undergraduate class combines a textbook about the subject with lectures from the instructor on the subject.  Since I’m the author of our primary textbook in this course, The End of Materialism, that book is my systematic set of lectures on the material.  I will give many “micro-lectures” expanding on various aspects of parapsychology during the course of the class, especially in discussing various issues brought up in student papers.  We’re a graduate school, of course, so as is typical of the best graduate schools, the student is assumed to be self-disciplined to keep up with the reading and so bring informed discussions/writings to the class.

Paper Assignments: A 500-1,000 word paper dealing with (a) the reading materials for the week, and/or (b) previous class discussion is due each week, beginning with the second week.  NOTE I WILL BE PUTTING SELECTIONS FROM THESE PAPERS INTO OUR GROUP DISCUSSION SPACE, INVITING COMMENTS, SO DON’T WRITE ABOUT PERSONAL MATERIAL YOU WOULD NOT WANT YOUR OTHER CLASSMATES TO KNOW ABOUT.  But note also that by taking the class, you agree that the contents of students’ papers and comments on them ARE CONFIDENTIAL within the class and instructor.  DO NOT quote from these papers or abstract of summarize in enough detail that a person might be identified to any place or persons outside the class without first getting written permission from each writer involved.  You practice professional level confidentiality here as if you were a counselor or therapist.  See later material in this syllabus about confidentiality and courtesy.

Your paper should be uploaded to the Discussion Forum for our class on Angel by Monday of each week.  Note then that all of your paper is readable and commentable on by the other class students, which is fine.  This brings a broader range of knowledge to bear on the ideas expressed in each paper, as well as providing training for your future role as an instructor.  I will later highlight what I think are some particularly provocative points in your papers and invite others to specifically comment on them, but I will undoubtedly miss things which are important or exciting to you.  By reading each others’ papers, we serve as instructors to each other, I am not the sole teacher of this material.

Note that for reading on screen, I much prefer to have things in Comic Sans Serif, 12 points, it’s easier on my old eyes than most other fonts and sizes.  That’s the font this document is in.

I’m still working out the details of how we do this discussion since Angel is a new platform for me to work on.

Personal Experiences and Feelings:

I will respect your personal experiences in these papers, as should other students commenting on them, but may provide critical intellectual feedback on content and style as part of my educational responsibility.

Not Book Reports: Grapple with the Ideas:

Your papers should not be "book reports," on the order of "…the chapter said A, B, C, D… and the discussion covered M, N, O,… etc."  I already know you can write book reports.  Nor should they be just emotional reactions, "I was offended by X, I loved Y…."  In each paper I want you to work with one or two points from readings and lectures that stimulate you and show me you're thinking about them, working with them, relating them to other things you know, exploring *why* you have an emotional reaction to them if you have one, etc.  Grapple with the material.

Another thing you may do in these weekly papers is raise important questions about the material of the textbooks or discussion.  By important I mean not just space filling questions of what is A, what is B, etc., but material you have thought about, tried to figure out on your own but not reached a satisfactory answer, etc.  You can even question my authority on specific issues if you feel you can make a good case:  I will be greatly disappointed if you go away from any of my courses thinking I know everything!  These kind of thought-provoking questions can provoke useful answers from me and/or your fellow students.  The latter responses are especially important, as it’s not just me who knows something about this subject, the cumulative life-experience of the class is very big!

Note that one of the reasons for these papers is to give you practice in professional level writing.  Thus, parallel to the ITP rule for the major paper that shows competence for advancing to the PhD level, you should carefully proof your papers for grammar and spelling or other composition errors before posting them.  If a paper has more than 5 such errors, the first time it will be turned back with instructions to rewrite it.  After that such papers will be marked unacceptable.

The last paper of the course should be a 1,000-3,000 word "What have I learned in this course" type paper.

Late turning in of assignments is strongly discouraged – I may require extra papers from you if you do this.  Similarly, ITP policy is to strongly discourage Incomplete grades, so don't be late!

Auditing Policy:  Auditors are not allowed unless they plan to read the material in all weeks.  People who just drop in occasionally are disruptive to the group spirit of the class.  Also, auditors, if any, and Significant Others do not have the privilege of writing papers for the instructor or other students to read and comment on.

Overload Contingency: A graduate course should ideally really not have more than 8-10 students in it, to allow the instructor to give adequate individual attention to each student's work.  But it's hard to turn away students who want and need to know this material when there are so few opportunities to get decent information on parapsychology.  So if more than 10 or so students enroll, the paper assignments may be modified so you will still turn in papers each week and get comments from fellow students, but the instructor will not always comment on them.

Attendance: Our class weeks are sequenced for optimal learning, and the discussions online are an important part of that learning and integration process, so please read the material and turn in your papers for all weeks. I don’t fully understand this feature yet, but note that there is a part of Angel Learning System keeping track of what you do and when you do it!  (Those of you old enough will wonder if Big Brother is watching  you…..[grin])  Life does interfere at times, though, so if you should miss a week, please study and reflect on the assigned readings and keep up with the regular writing assignments.  You can miss one week in a quarter with no problem as long as your regular writing assignments are completed in a timely way, but if you miss more than one week, you should write an extra paper in addition to the one due for that missed week, commenting on the readings assigned for that class, for each class you miss.  Please indicate at the top of this paper that it’s a makeup for a particular week (which week?) you missed. These papers must be turned in before the end of the quarter.  If more than two weeks are missed and not satisfactorily made up, ITP policy is that you cannot receive credit for the class.

Makeup Classes:  One advantage of the online format is that I can keep up with the class even if I’m traveling, so my usual notes for in-person classes about makeup classes if I’m traveling don’t apply here.

Office Hours: Another advantage of the online format is that you can email me any time.  I’m usually pretty good about replying within a day or two.  To discuss more complex issues with me, we can arrange in advance, by email, a telephone call or a Skype (with video if you have it) conversation.  I prefer weekday afternoons for this.  My email is ctart@itp.edu.  As I haven’t mastered Angel yet – indeed I think it’s a Devil sometimes! – direct email to me at the above eddress is preferable to sending it thru Angel.

Goals, Structure and Objectives of the Course: The objectives of this course are, (1) on the academic level, to familiarize the student with the nature of basic parapsychological phenomena and their implications as a foundation for transpersonal psychology,  (2) on the professional level, to sensitize the student to recognize the occurrence of parapsychological phenomena in everyday life and their implications for affecting peoples' views of reality, and, (3) on the personal level, to foster sensitivity to parapsychological events and so be able to discern more appropriate and mindful styles of reaction to them.  The goals and learning outcomes of this course are that each student should be able to intelligently orally discuss and write about the above three objectives.

Student Disabilities:  If you need accommodations for a disability, please write me before the course or by the end of the first class.

Abbreviations:  Radin = The Conscious Universe, The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena; and EoM = Tart, The End of Materialism

Note: I may occasionally put brief videos on the web for you to watch – I’ll let you know by email if and when this happens.

Required Textbooks:

Radin, D. (1997).  The Conscious Universe:  The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena.  San Francisco: Harper.  Later softcover editions are fine.

Tart, C. T. (2009).  The End of Materialism.  Oakland, California: New Harbinger.

Recommended, but not Required Books:

Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M. & Greyson, B. (2006).  Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.  Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman and Littlefield.  Indispensable reference book as to the many reasons why Dismissive Materialism is inadequate.

Radin, D. (2006).  Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality.  New York: Pocket Books (Simon & Schuster).

Tart, C. T. (Ed.). (1997).  Body Mind and Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality. Charlottesville, Virginia: Hampton Roads Press.  An anthology I edited with leading parapsychologists speculating on the meaning of parapsychological findings, has many ideas I didn’t have time to cover in The End of Materialism.

Clarifications: What my Parapsychology Course Is and Isn't

Charles T. Tart

In a school with a recognition that learning and growth involves emotional, bodily and spiritual, as well as intellectual, creative and community  processes, there is sometimes confusion over what is expected and appropriate in a particular course.  This note is to clarify this matter for my course on Basic Parapsychology, in the hope of maximizing learning and minimizing misunderstandings and inappropriate expectations.

Basic Parapsychology is a course that is almost exclusively intellectual in terms of readings and classroom lecture and discussion, although most students bring their own personal previous experiences of psychic events to bear on their understanding of the material.  Students are not required to experience any parapsychological phenomena as part of the course work, and any suggestions about what might be interesting to try in this regard should be evaluated by you in terms of your personal needs, understanding, and boundaries.

The course work contains some exciting ideas for personal growth,  but the course is not intended to be or represented as a form of therapy, spiritual growth, or emotional process work, although I certainly hope that the intellectual content of the course may sometimes contribute to your personal growth.  I state these limitations here because, among other things, I am a scientist and educator, not a psychotherapist, psychic, or spiritual teacher.

I do not intend to denigrate nor disregard individual experiential, emotional or spiritual knowledge, resources, growth challenges or problems.  I respect and honor your personal process!  Indeed when your individual knowledge of this sort is relevant to expanding or clarifying the conceptual or experiential material we discuss, it is welcome and enriching, both in class discussions and papers.  I would also suggest that, like me, you regard what you think you already know about these matters as your best guess at this time, but be open to thinking about options and learning more.

I also ask you to consider and honor the following points, adapted from standards of personal responsibility that were used by Professor Jill Mellick (now retired from ITP) in her classes at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.  While they are phrased for courses deliberately involving fairly powerful emotional and growth work, they are relevant in the context of all ITP courses.

ª       Be aware of the context in which you are experiencing your own growth, both personal and intellectual. This is a class; while I hope it will be beneficial to you personally as well as academically, the class is not individual or group therapy.

ª       Please set clear protective boundaries for yourself.  Some of the topics or exercises in this class may evoke personal issues with which you need/want to deal.  You are welcome to clarify these issues in your papers or class discussion if they are relevant to the class, and you might reach new understandings through doing so.  But remember that the class is not an appropriate context in which to actually work through your personal issues.  Such issues are best worked through with a qualified psychotherapist or spiritual teacher.

ª       Please respect your own material and the limitations of your peers.  In class discussions and experiential exercises you are often including your personal history, implicitly if not explicitly.  In the case of conflictual, emotional, unresolved material, respect yourself by sharing only material which is reasonably well resolved or which you are comfortable not having resolved.  A statement that an area under discussion is very difficult for you may be a useful contribution, but don't bring it up if it's too difficult for you to handle in the intellectual context of the class.

ª       Please respect your own privacy and the overall purpose of the class.  Share only material you are willing to have become part of current and later class discussions.  Note too that in spite of the following point, privacy of your discussion contributions cannot be guaranteed.

ª       Please respect your peers' privacy.  If a classmate shares important personal material, please do not talk about it to anyone outside the class unless (a) it is intellectually or compassionately useful to do so AND (b) you can disguise the identity of the person sufficiently so that they cannot be recognized.  If in doubt about your ability to adequately disguise the identity of the person from others who may know them, don't mention the material.   To put it another way, avoid gossip or story telling that may hurt someone else.  Of course if you think a classmate is at serious risk and is not receiving professional help outside the classroom (such as being in therapy), do notify appropriate administrative authorities who may be able to help.

ª       Please recognize and respect your own and others' capacities.  If a certain part of the discussion or an experiential exercise looks as if it will be too difficult for you emotionally, please inform me (no explanation is needed) that you don't want to take part in that part of the discussion or participate in that exercise.  If much of the class causes this kind of problem, of course, we should discuss whether you should be in the course.

This note is meant to create an atmosphere conducive to learning, not the final word on human life, so please take it in that spirit.  Class discussion of these considerations is appropriate.

Writing Comments on Classmates' Papers

After class one night, someone asked me what kind of comments she should write on classmates' papers.

This was an interesting question, for in more than 10 years of having students do this, nobody ever asked me anything like this, and it never occurred to me to say anything….   

I suppose that's partly because I was educated in an old style in which you learned how to be a teacher by, as it were, osmosis.  Nobody ever instructed us on how to teach, even in graduate school, but implicitly assumed that we'd all been exposed to good, middling and poor teachers in our educational career and we had hopefully picked up the qualities of the good teachers by osmosis or imitation or something….   In retrospect, I see that system doesn't always work, although there's a lot to be said for it….

So here's some first-level comments on how to write comments.

Imagine yourself in the role of instructor, and these are your students.  You're likely to be in that role officially in a few years, so this is good practice.

What do you want to do as an instructor?

You want your students to learn the material, and learn it as well as possible.

A most basic level of learning is simply remembering what was said in class and what was in the readings, but by graduate school level we can generally assume people have mastered that skill.  We want a deeper level of learning, where they can think about the material in both a critical and an expansive way.  That's what I look for when I read a paper: is the writer thinking about, grappling with some aspects of the material?  Are they understanding it better as a result?  Or if they are puzzled by some of the material, are they puzzled in a more sophisticated manner as a result of grappling with it because they have a more specific understanding of what does not make sense to them?

Part of helping students learn is encouraging them when they are doing so.  Thus when I see a student is seriously working with the material I usually write some sort of encouraging comment(s) to that effect.  If I see real interest in some aspect of the material, I may give some directions to sources the student could get more info from.  Sometimes I may just say some version of "Right on!" or, say, writing something briefly about my own interest in that particular topic, a kind of teacher-student bonding.

Another part of helping students is giving them feedback about standards.  We're learning to be professionals.  If a paper has been printed out with a worn ribbon, e.g., and is hard to read, that's discourteous and unprofessional and I will make comments about that.  Same deal with spelling (an "SP" beside misspelled words) and grammatical errors("a "GR"), or typos that indicate the paper was not proofed after being written.  I don't like to tell someone that they are being sloppy, vague, unprofessional, etc., but it's part of my job as an instructor.  You should be the same way.  You're not being genuinely friendly to a classmate if you let them get by with low quality, unprofessional behavior, it's going to hurt their future career.

One other point to stress.   As mentioned earlier, your papers should not be "book reports," on the order of "…the chapter said A, B, C, D… and the lecture covered M, N, O,… etc."  I already know you can write book reports.  Nor should they be just emotional reactions, "I was offended by X, I didn't like Y…."  I want you to work with one or two points from readings and lectures and experiential practices and show me you're thinking about them, working with them, relating them to other things you know, exploring *why* you have an emotional reaction to them, etc.

OK, write away!  Hope this helps.

Info on Consciousness, Parapsychology, Transpersonal:

If you go to my primary web page, www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ , you can sign up to receive occasional (as few as once a month, as often as several times a week) studentnotices, email notices from me about interesting developments on consciousness, parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, and the like, conferences about them, etc.  This is open to anyone who thinks I may recommend interesting stuff, not just ITP students, even though it’s named Studentnotices, so feel free to pass this info on to anyone you think might be interested.  You may also find some of the reprints on my web site of interest, or the writings on my blog (accessed from the above web site) of interest.

[2] APA style is very important at ITP, the quicker you learn to write that way, the better.  There might or might not be an error in this reference…..

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