After a long meditation retreat last month, my curiousity about one aspect of my meditation exprience led me to write the following little query about images. I’ve submitted it to the Journal of Consciousness Studies Online site, and if they accept it I may get some “expert” reflections on it, or I may get some [...]
Continue reading about Where Do All Those Images and Dreamlets Come From?
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 8 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: I just want to tell you to go back to the broader conversation about thought and thinking. In the Buddhist context, as well as in the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction version [...]
My wife Judy and I are at a 10-day Tibetan Buddhist retreat in San Diego this week (November 26 through December 6, 2010), run by Lama Sogyal Rinpoche and his Rigpa Fellowship organization. We’ve been coming to these retreats for more than 20 years, and I have enormous respect for Rinpoche’s knowledge and compassion. But [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 17 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. CTT: It’s a very unusual environment here at ITP, going back to William’s concerns for a minute or so. We don’t have a doctrine. We’re not a religion, not a particular spiritual [...]
Continue reading about Validating Spiritual and Psychic Experiences
Some parapsychologist colleagues and I were discussing the many shortcomings of the way the media covers scientific parapsychology recently. I contributed a little memory that was sort of amusing, but really sad, that I think would be of general interest. Twenty years or more ago I was asked to come to Hollywood, at their expense [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 15 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: I think I agree with what everyone said, and there’s also a thing about worrying about losing something. That I’ve had this and I know if I don’t do something I’m [...]
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Lecture 4, Part 14 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here. Student: So would it be hurtful, though, or pathological to do what Bob was talking about and really glean from that experience what seemed to be a significant portion of truth there, [...]
For the past week I have been reading a ms. (the current working title is Straight Talk) sent me by P. M. H. Atwater, what is to be her final (and very big!) book on her years of investigations of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Atwater is a leading independent scholar in this area, and I’ve enjoyed [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]