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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Bill wrote me,

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I telephoned.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The correspondence further deepened the mystery.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who sent the messages?”

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

If Helpers, why?

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

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

Student: I have a question that I’ve been wondering about. Have you actually met anybody personally that you would think of as an enlightened being, or…?

Student: Or admitted to being enlightened?

Student: Admitted is one thing. Anyone that you thought was actually enlightened though?

CTT: Well let’s take the admitted part first because that’s easier. I’ve met people who let their students claim that they’re enlightened, but they are too humble to actually claim to be enlightened. Now from one point of view, yeah, if you felt relatively enlightened it would be sensible and courteous not to make any claims to that effect. On the other hand, if you are in the guru business for fun, profit, fame, and money, it’s good to let people think you’re enlightened and just have a little secret smile when they ask you about it, but don’t actually answer them. I mean there are lots of games that could get played here.

Now so have I met anybody that’s enlightened? I’ve met people that I think are more enlightened than me. Now that’s easy to say because I know I’m not at all enlightened. Okay. But let me put that more precisely. I’ve met people who I think have kinds of spiritual knowledge which I would like to know, that I think are very valuable, and I have a special kind of respect for those people.

But I don’t think of “enlightened” in absolute terms anymore. I don’t think there’s some certain point a person gets to and then, click, they are now perfect in every single thought, word, action, feeling, experience, etc. I tend to think more about how there are moments when a person is more or less enlightened in particular things they do. So you may have someone who is pretty enlightened in certain ways or when they do certain kinds of things and then in other areas of life, they screw up.

One example, a good controversial example, is we have a whole history, even in this brief 30, 35 years of Transpersonal Psychology, of famous Eastern gurus coming to teach in this country, and they were thought so enlightened by so many people. Then it ends up that they sleep with little boys and sexually exploit people and do all sorts of things and it makes you wonder. The thing I wonder is, some of these people were charlatans, but I don’t know how many of them were actual charlatans.

But it could very well be that when you’re raised in a certain cultural setting, there are certain human skills and problem areas that you never have to deal with, because the culture handles those things very well. And you come into another cultural setting and you may have gotten pretty enlightened in your first setting but now you don’t know how to handle things in this second setting. And so stuff that hasn’t been worked on comes out. So I’ve met people I’ve respected a lot and wanted to learn from, but nobody that I have thought was enlightened in any absolute sense. And how would I know?

Student: But there’s no test certainly.

Student: I know a group of people who have been asking this question for the last 15 years: the editors of the magazine, What Is Enlightenment?

CTT: Oh yeah.

Student: I don’t know if they have answers yet.

CTT: They don’t have a list of the approved enlightened beings?

Student: I don't know. The editor himself, Andrew Cohen, wrote a book of Enlightenment Is a Secret. That’s a big answer to me.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Yeah.

Student: I don’t think they’ve got a real investment in figuring the answer to that question out, right?

(Laughter)

CTT: There’s a book – I don't know if our library has it but it would be well worth reading if you could get your hands on it – and the title is something like How to Become a Modern Guru, by Norman Livergood.

(Laughter)

And it’s got all the tricks to make yourself look like a major spiritual teacher and acquire lots of influence. [the book is now (April 2010) available for free downloading on the web]

(Laughter)

Norman, Norman Livergood. That’s the guy who wrote it. Norman Livergood. I met him. Nice fellow. He had his own group of course.

(Laughter)

So even while he was writing a book on how to fake it all, he had a group that thought he was pretty enlightened.

(Laughter)

Student: That’s a testimonial.

CTT: Yeah. But when you read the book and see how easy it is to fake it, it really makes you wonder.

Student: I just thought of Enlightenment for Dummies. That would be…

(Laughter)

Student: That’s a great one.

Student: That would be really good.

Student: You should send them an email.

CTT: There is a Meditation for Dummies book that actually is a very good book on meditation.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

An amusing and perhaps insightful incident….

My wife and I were hiking in Zion National Park this morning, the Emerald Pools trail. Judy had gone on ahead to see something I wasn't that interested in, so I'm sitting on a big boulder beside the trail, waiting for her to come back. The surface of the boulder is tilted, so the only way to comfortably sit is cross-legged, “loose lotus,” with my hiking staff over my knees and my pack beside me. I wasn't particularly “meditating,” but thought I looked like I was and was self-conscious, this was a public place with lots of parties of people coming up the path. So I looked around a lot to look more “normal,” like a guy sitting around waiting rather than a funny fellow “meditating.”

After a while I decided my self-consciousness was silly, let people think I was meditating if that was what they wanted to think, maybe it would, in some very small way, help introduce meditation into our culture. Hardly had I thought this when some cute little kids climb up on the rock below me and a passing man calls out, “Oh Great Guru, what advice do you have for us?”

“Take a breather once in a while,” I instantly reply, with a smile. He ponders this a moment and asks “Is this advice just for hiking or for all of life?” “All of life,” I reply…. And the cute little kids get their photos taken by their mom….

So, all those years of spiritual practice, and now this!

And I didn't even have a white robe on or a beard like all the great guru cartoons….and was wearing my cowboy hat…..

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

"Are you suggesting that even someone with anomalous perceptions can contribute to a scientific study of such experiences as a scientist and not simply as a “lab rat” to be studied?"

I think you're worried about the problem of bias here, and it's reasonable to think about it.  One of the great strengths of science is the commitment to be as objective as possible and to report the facts, the data, and keep your interpretations of the data logically close to the facts, rather than distorted by personal preferences and beliefs.

But how far do we want to take this?  Should we say that only blind people can study vision because sighted people may be biased?  That only deaf people can study hearing since hearing people may be biased?

You could argue that sighted and deaf people will have insights into the stuff being studied that are great advantages.

They still have to watch out for their personal biases.  For example, I have a dear friend of many years who has made her living as a psychic, but I have never formally studied her, interesting as that might be, because I know I might well be too biased and unable to compensate for that bias.

Questioning your own experiences?  Sounds like exactly what I would expect of a scientist.  A "believer" would say "My experiences are sacred and prove Doctrine X, it would be heresy to question them!"  A scientist would think, "Here's my data, what I saw/experienced, it's interesting to interpret it by theory A, also interesting to see if from the point of view of theory B, maybe there's another theory that will work even better, I'll tentatively say theory D works best for now, let's go on and see what happens…."

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

Lecture 4, Part 2 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Sorry this one is a little late in going up, I've been on a 10-day meditation retreat, pretty heavy…..

CTT: So we’re trying to be bodily present in the here and now. I’ll give reminders once in a while, but otherwise we'll have a more general discussion. What I’m going to do is something I normally never do until the end of class, and that is to pass your last two papers back with my comments on them. I’ll give you a few minutes to look at those because I often make notes on them that you should bring such and such a topic up in class. You often raise issues of general interest and importance, and then it tends to be forgotten a week or two later when the opportunity might arise to bring it up in class, so I thought I’d spark the discussion in this particular fashion.

Start some of them going this way and, like passing the pad around, remain aware of your body, what’s happening in the here and now. You may find it helpful to slow down ever so slightly while you do it because that often aids mindfulness, to just do ordinary actions at a slightly different speed from usual. I should warn you that if you make that slight slowing a practice in everyday life, though, you will be subject to more scrutiny.

(Laughter)

Student: Really?

CTT: It’s quite amazing. I used to teach a humanistic and transpersonal psychology class at U.C. Davis, which was a long class. We’d have a coffee break in the middle and often walk over to the coffee shop across the quadrangle. As a mindfulness exercise, I would tell people to just do everything normally, but walk maybe 5 percent slower than usual.

Now in the grand cosmic scheme of things, and with natural variability, walking 5 percent slower than normal shouldn’t mean a thing. It has no significance whatsoever. But my students were always conscious of how other people who weren’t in the class would look at them. They sensed something funny was happening.

I may have gotten the idea from a colleague who told me about a trip he’d taken to Istanbul. He was being shown around the city by a friend and the markets especially were very crowded. It was hard to get anywhere. So the friend told him “Oh, we’ll walk slightly slower than normal, because that’s what wise men do, and we won’t have any trouble getting around.” And sure enough, by a very slight drop in speed, crowds just automatically parted and they could go wherever they wanted. So now you know how to fake being wise.

(Laughter)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Anonymous asks, in response to my last post, “Do you think this was a
 glimpse of a higher reality and not an illusion?”

Wow, what a question!  The particular incident I wrote of
was a long, long time ago, so I’m going to draw on more
extensive experience later on when I was doing Gurdjieffian
mindfulness work, rather than trust my memory that much.
  This is going to tax my powers of description.
I’m going to say there is nothing “special” about my
“waking up” for a few moments.  It is quite “ordinary,”
except that, from its perspective, my ordinary,
semi-dreaming consciousness is quite extraordinary.  
I’ve experienced extraordinary altered states back
when I was a subject in psychedelic experiments in
graduate school, when research was still legal, so I have
a baseline of memories of what it’s like to think one’s
experience is really different and extraordinary.  This
kind of “waking up” is not like that at all.
I don’t feel at one with the universe, I don’t feel like I
know new kinds of things, any “secrets of the universe,”
or have any exotic new abilities.
An ordinary life analog would be if you’ve ever had the flu
for a few days.  Your feverish, you ache, you can’t think
very clearly, you just want it all to go away.  You wake up
the next morning and the flu is gone.  Your mind is clear! 
Your perceptions are sharp, the world is real!  You have
all those extraordinary (from the flu perspective)
powers that a “normal” person has, like walking, talking,
thinking.  Life is real and good, the time with the flu was
a mushy, dark time, you’re glad it’s over.  (But of course
you adapt quickly and soon take no particular notice of
your amazing powers to walk, talk, think clearly, etc.)
My experience of “waking up” was like that for many
years.  I mush along – being fine, smart, adaptive,
intelligent by ordinary standards – and suddenly
remember to come to my senses, to “wake up,” and my
goodness, I’m alive!  How could I have stayed in that
mushy state for hours, days, weeks?  Now the contrast
is not so great.  I want to believe it’s because I’m not as
deeply asleep in my ordinary state, but it may be that I
just don’t “wake up” as much.
In what way is this “waking up” really a higher reality? 
The most immediate criterion is that it feels that way,
like the way your waking consciousness feels when you’ve
awakened from a blurry, stupid nighttime dream.  
Have I ever done anything extraordinary while feeling
awake that would be “objective” evidence that I’m in a
higher state of consciousness?  Usually the “waking” is
very brief, so there’s no time to do anything special, but
I often do feel like I see aspects of my immediate
situation that were unclear before.  But who knows? 
And I feel no urge to “prove” anything, the sun is shining,
I’m alive, life is interesting!
Note that I keep putting a lot of words in quotes, like
“waking up,” to remind us that words are not all that
adequate here.  
Is my experience what Gurdjieff meant by “waking up?” 
Probably to some degree, but I remain open to the idea
that there is also some kind of greater Waking Up that I
 don’t have any direct knowledge of.
Interesting questions.....

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

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

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

Hmmm……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, Universe, have I written enough for now?

Judy Tart’s Impressions for Our Grandson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope this is helpful…

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Lecture 3, Part 4 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I have a question.

CTT: Yes. Good. Ask a question.

Student: Well not a question, I guess an observation about the relaxing. I find it really difficult not to fall asleep when I’m doing this meditation because my body starts relaxing so quickly. And then I find my attention on keeping myself awake.

CTT: Do you get enough sleep at night?

Student: I think I do. I’m like an 8, 10 hours sleeper.

CTT: Oh. That’s pretty good. Do you sit up when you meditate so you have to put a little attention into keeping your body upright?

Student: Yeah. I sit in a chair and upright.

CTT: And then what happens as you fall asleep? Does your head start to fall?

Student: I start to fall forward.

CTT: Okay. Now see, this is your very own biofeedback mechanism, right? You have a little “meter” here and as it starts to point in this direction it indicates you’re falling deeper asleep and then you just wake yourself back up. Try it with your eyes open too. I assume you’re meditating with eyes closed?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Yeah. Park them somewhere, but keep your eyes open. That’ll probably keep you more awake. And, if worse comes to worse, as happened to me some years ago when I began to get very sleepy when I meditated, you can eventually take the sensation of sleepiness as the focus of your meditation and bring to explore precisely what that’s like. And you will get to amaze your friends by telling them – I always get a kick when I tell people this – that you’re meditation is an exploration of the bhavanga! Doesn’t that sound exotic?

That’s a Sanskrit word for that state where you’re going into sleep. It actually has a theoretical or philosophical meaning of a kind of state of continuous mental flux out of which reality coalesces and arises. It’s possible to learn to sort of hover in that and watch a continuous flow of stuff that’s never quite anything, except it starts concretizing once in awhile, but you can let it go and watch it flow. But meanwhile you might want to keep your eyes open and try to stay awake. Master that part first, okay?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

So how do transpersonal psychologists know what to tell someone who has come in for counseling?

One of my colleagues in the Spiritual Guidance program at ITP responded

I know that this is an issue in Spiritual Guidance. I have worked with individuals who have had co-morbid diagnosis – both having an existing pathology and have spiritual/paranormal experiences. It does become tough to sort through and requires a good deal of discernment along with faith in the human potential toward health and wholeness. Thus, how I (not a therapist) might answer the question below is:

First, it is important to discern the functionality of the individual (is she/he functioning in day to day life) and his/her relationship to society (is he/she being called to step outside of traditional roles and ways of being in society, much like a shaman might be called to sit at the edge of the community). Second, it would be important to discern if the paranormal/spiritual occurrences are part of a larger growth pattern for the individual. In other words, are the experiences directly related to spiritual practices? Do they occur or stop when the individual is centered? Could they be contextualized as kundalini, dark night of the soul, etc. that provides a sense of meaning for the individual? Finally, I believe it would be important to discern if the individual was a physical threat to him / herself or others. If so, then even if the person’s experiences are spiritual (such as a death rebirth experience) then that individual likely needs help by a therapist or psychiatrist. We want the person to be around in order to continue her/his development as a being. Once stabilized, then a transpersonal guide (therapist, expressive artist, spiritual guide) could work with the individual to work through the threatening material (be it images of suicide – self-transformation – or shamanic death and disintegration themes, etc.).

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

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

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

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

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

More later.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites