Many of you know that one of my primary interests is building bridges between first-class science and first-class spirituality, so they can stimulate each other. My The End of Materialism book in 2009 was a major effort in this direction, arguing that, given scientific evidence, it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in life, rather than genuine science having somehow shown that all spirituality was nonsense.
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 21st 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.
Dear Dr. Tart,
I almost wrote a book titled “Waking Up” but you beat me to it, so I changed my book’s title and even rewrote some of the contents to make better sense of the new title. This made me curious about your work, so I picked up “The End of Materialism” which I read on my way home from a trip to London. I very much like the ideas you have in there, and now I recommend it to others who need a quick infusion of information about parapsychology. This leads me to this post, which is related to this very interesting talk of yours. The irony is that a couple weeks ago I finished writing a presentation for the IASD conference on the same subject, though I come to a different conclusion.
As a little background, my book “Dreamer: 20 years of psychic dreams” is based on 20 years of dream journals that chronicle many precognitive dreams, OOBEs, after death communications, and spiritual experiences. I structured the book around purely materialistic phenomenon, purely spiritual phenomena, and the stuff in between that was a little of both. The reason is that I wanted to show how evidence for physical psi supports the half and half material and that material supports the purely spiritual material. I had plenty of good documentation for the physical stuff (by “physical”, I mean anything that can be verified physically, like precognition or an OOBE)but how can you verify a spiritual experience?
I had some confidence in them because of the veridical material, and also because of the intermediate items where an angel or spirit guide would show me the future. If the future event happens, why not accept the reality of the angel/spirit guide also? The problem is, if you go straight to the full spiritual experience, there’s no way to verify any of it because it doesn’t intersect our physical reality at all. At least, that is the conclusion I have come to in my talk. This doesn’t mean that these things can’t be trusted, but that they can’t be trusted on the basis of evidence because the nature of evidence is physical.
I am curious to know if you disagree, because I would love to have some other way to verify these things, but simply haven’t seen a way to do it.
In case you are curious about my journals or the book, some info on them is available on my website here: https://sites.google.com/a/mundusvirtua.com/dreams/home
Best regards,
AP