Consciousness: 3 Approaches

           Consciousness: A Psychological, Transpersonal and
                      Parapsychological Approach


                            Charles T. Tart

                       University of California
                        Davis, California 95616

                                  and

                     Institute of Noetic Sciences
                      Sausalito, California 94965



This paper was presented at the Third International Symposium on
Science and Consciousness in Ancient Olympia, 4-7 January, 1993.


        It has long been fashionable to speak of humanity as a tool-
making species.  This is accurate but, unfortunately, we tend to then
concentrate on the secondary tools, the physical, external machines,
and ignore the primary and ultimate tool, human consciousness, our own
minds.


        What is the nature of human consciousness, especially its
deeper and more profound aspects?  I shall approach this questions
from three related perspectives that represent major aspects of both
my scientific research and my personal life as a Westerner.  (My
personal life is included in this statement of approach because we
cannot ignore the mind of the scientist when it comes to studying the
mind, as we can in so many more external disciplines.)  The three
perspectives are those of ordinary psychology,  transpersonal
psychology and parapsychology.  I shall briefly discuss each of these
perspectives in turn, with comments on its primary implications for
understanding consciousness.


                         Ordinary Psychology:

        I begin first with ordinary, mainstream psychology, an area
long dominated by two approaches, the behavioristic and the
psychoanalytic.  Behaviorism insists that externally observable
behavior (material phenomena) is the only proper subject matter of a
scientific psychology.  It has given us useful research tools in some
areas, but its dismissal of experience as a legitimate research topic
has made it far too narrow.  The psychoanalytic/psychopathological
approach, drawn from observations of and therapy with the mentally
ill, has been very useful in dealing with mental illness, and has cast
much light on ordinary activities of consciousness, especially
socially hidden kinds of pathologies.  Unfortunately this second
mainstream approach tends to see almost all human activity as
pathological, giving us a lopsided view.

        Classical behaviorism is no longer of great importance in
psychology, partly because of its shortcomings, but mainly through
having been largely displaced by contemporary cognitive psychology.
Cognitive psychology was inspired by digital computers, and its
primary function is to explain consciousness in terms of simpler, non-
conscious subsystems, to reduce it to information processing
procedures in a physical system, whether that system be digital
computer or biological computer.

        As a result of the dominance of behavioristic/cognitive and
psychoanalytical approaches, humans tend to be seen as nothing but
some combination of robots and instinctively driven animals, whose raw
instincts are barely held in check by civilization. These views do not
encourage exploration of the deeper levels of consciousness, for they
suggest that all we will find there are animalistic and primitive
impulses that are best left alone.

        These two dominant psychological schools are very much in
harmony with the materialistic view of man that still dominates
Western intellectual thought, a view that, when it masquerades as
science, I and sociologists of science have called "scientism," a
rigidity and pathology of thought that takes the success of the
physical sciences and their current findings as a total system of
thought.  It is called scientistic or scientism because of its
resemblance to various other dogmatic religious and political systems,
rather than having the continual openness to new data and ideas that
proper scientific inquiry should have.

        To illustrate the effects of scientism in Western life, some
years ago I devised an experiential exercise to use in workshops, a
"belief experiment" I called the Western Creed.  It's purpose was to
make people aware of the implicit and hidden assumptions that Western
civilization and scientism have instilled to varying degrees in all of
us, even people who think they have a spiritual orientation to life.
I will just describe the Western Creed exercise today, as it is
usually too emotionally powerful to actually do with people unless
time is allowed to work with the feelings arising from it.  Just
hearing it described will give you some feeling for it, though.

        I ask people to participate in a "belief experiment," a 20-
minute period where they will believe the words we later say as much
as possible and will try to observe and later share their emotional
reactions to it.  I stress that they participate emotionally, rather
than intellectually, from the heart rather than the head, because it
is the emotional aspects of our beliefs that are of prime importance
in their lives.

        Then I use the power of social pressure and conformity to
intensify the effects of participation.  I don't know how universal
this is, but in the United States we are trained as children in school
to stand in a martially rigid position of attention, in orderly rows
and columns, put our right hands over our hearts, and recite the
pledge of allegiance to the American flag, in unison with each other.

        I have participants take that physical posture and recite the
Western Creed together.  This Creed takes the same external form as
the Nicene Creed in Christianity, but its content is based on
currently popular scientistic beliefs, put in a form to make their
emotional connotations clearer.  Incidentally, I want to assure you
that this is not an attack on Christianity, only an educational
exercise.

        Here is the creed the participants read aloud together:


     I believe - in the material universe - as the only and
     ultimate reality - a universe controlled by fixed
     physical laws - and blind chance.


     I affirm - that the universe has no creator - no
     objective purpose - and no objective meaning or
     destiny.

     I maintain - that all ideas about God or gods -
     enlightened beings - prophets and saviors - or other
     non-physical beings or forces - are superstitions and
     delusions.  - Life and consciousness are totally
     identical to physical processes - and arose from chance
     interactions of blind physical forces.  - Like the rest
     of life - my life - and my consciousness - have no
     objective purpose - meaning - or destiny.

     I believe - that all judgments, values, and moralities
     - whether my own or others - are subjective - arising
     solely from biological determinants - personal history
     - and chance.  - Free will is an illusion.  - Therefore
     the most rational values I can personally live by must
     be based on the knowledge that for me - what pleases me
     is Good - what pains me is Bad.  - Those who please me
     or help me avoid pain are my friends - those who pain
     me or keep me from my pleasure are my enemies.  -
     Rationality requires that friends and enemies be used
     in ways that maximize my pleasure - and minimize my
     pain.

     I affirm - that churches have no real use other than
     social support - that there are no objective sins to
     commit or be forgiven for - that there is no divine or
     supernatural retribution for sin or reward for virtue -
     although there may be social consequences of actions.
     - Virtue for me is getting what I want - without being
     caught and punished by others.

     I maintain - that the death of the body - is the death
     of the mind.  - There is no afterlife - and all hope of
     such is nonsense.


        Now I have not asked you to actually perform this belief
experiment, but I suspect that some of you, from just hearing the
description, are feeling some of the depression, nihilism and
negativity that participants commonly experience.  I think of this as
a "sadder but wiser" psychological exercise, for participants discover
that many of these beliefs are indeed part of their makeup and affect
their lives.  They never made any conscious decisions about whether
they wanted their beliefs to be like this, they were just conditioned
into them as part of being a modern Westerner.

        Ordinary psychology is a source of much useful information
about and research methodology for studying consciousness, but it is
usually carried out within the implicit scientistic paradigm of our
times.  In spite of these limitations, there are a number of findings
relevant to understanding consciousness that we can draw from it.  To
note just three:

     (1)        The totality of mental functioning is greater than
     the part we experience as the contents of our conscious
     mind.

     (2)        There are personal psychological distorting
     mechanisms, such as the classical defense mechanisms of
     psychoanalysis or needs for personal approval, that
     warp our observations of the contents of consciousness,
     as well as our observations of the external world and
     other people.

     (3)        There are culture-specific emotional and cognitive
     investments in various beliefs and world views that
     similarly warp our observations.

        This brings me to the second perspective I bring to studying
the nature of consciousness, transpersonal psychology.

        In the 1950s, a new kind of patient began coming to see
psychotherapists.  Your ordinary patient comes because she or he can't
function well in ordinary life.  They may experience too much stress,
have unsatisfactory personal relationships, be too shy or too
resentful, etc.  These new kind of patients should have been perfectly
happy by ordinary social criteria, for they functioned well and had
the social rewards that are supposed to produce happiness, things like
fulfilling relationships, good sex lives, respect in the community,
good jobs, and lots of money and material things.  Their complaints
were things like "Is this all there is to life?"  Or "I'm bored with
just getting richer, isn't there something more?"

        These "existential neurotics," as they were called, wanted
more meaning than Western society was able to provide.

              Intermediate Step - Humanistic Psychology:

        This led to the creation of a small but important new branch
of psychology, a "third force," humanistic psychology.  People who
functioned especially well, rather than psychiatric patients, were
studied by psychologists like Abraham Maslow.  New, heretofore largely
neglected,  psychological topics became legitimate areas of study,
topics like authenticity, peak experiences, love, and creativity.
Culturally "normal" successful psychological functioning was shown to
be subnormal, compared to what humans could learn to be.  Considerable
emphasis was put on practical application of these ideas, primarily as
new forms of emotional and bodily education, and we had encounter
groups, e.g., where otherwise ordinary people learned to live a much
richer emotional life.

        By and large, though, humanistic psychology did not really
question the reigning materialistic, scientistic paradigm.  We were
still nothing but material processes, with no inherent reasons for
living other than the accidentally acquired biological drives which
pushed us on, and with everything ending in meaningless death.

                       Transpersonal Psychology:

        My second perspective on consciousness, transpersonal
psychology, the fourth major force in psychology, evolved from
humanistic psychology in the 1960s.  "Trans" comes from Latin roots
which mean beyond, beyond the "persona," the social mask, the ordinary
self, the personal.  All through history, women and men have had
experiences that convinced them that we are far more than our ordinary
selves.  Consider this minor "mystical experience," described in one
of Yeats poems, "Vacillations."

        My fiftieth year had come and gone.
        I sat, a solitary man,
        In a crowded London shop,
        An open book, an empty cup
        On the marble table top.

        While on the shop and street I gazed,
        My body of a sudden blazed,
        And twenty minutes, more or less,
        It seemed so great my happiness
        That I was blessed and could bless.

That is not the way we ordinarily feel about ourselves, but a feeling
of being an intimate part of and "channeling" something much greater
than our ordinary selves, "trans" our personal.

        As a fuller example, consider the full blown mystical
experience of Maurice Bucke, a 19th century physician.  He described
it in the third person, trying to be as accurate and objective about
it as he could.

        It was in  the early spring at the beginning of
     his thirty-sixth year.  He and two friends had spent
     the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats,
     Browning, and especially Whitman.  They parted at
     midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was
     in an English city).  His mind deeply under the
     influences of the ideas, images and emotions called up
     by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and
     peaceful.  He was in a state of quiet, almost passive
     enjoyment.  All at once, without warning of any kind,
     he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame
     colored cloud.  For an instant he thought of fire, some
     sudden conflagration in the great city, the next he
     knew that the light was within himself.  Directly
     afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of
     immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed
     by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to
     describe.  Into his brain streamed one momentary
     lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever
     since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop
     of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an
     after taste of heaven.  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.  He
     claims that he learned more within the few seconds
     during which the illumination lasted that in previous
     months or even years of study, and that he learned much
     that no study could ever have taught.

        The illumination itself continued not more than a
     few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable; it
     was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that
     time saw and knew, neither did he, or could he, ever
     doubt the truth of what was then presented to his
     mind....

        To say the Bucke was beyond, trans, his ordinary self is to
put it mildly.

        Transpersonal psychology is the study and application of these
experiences that seem to take us beyond our ordinary, biological and
material selves.  Still in its infancy, it draws heavily on older
spiritual traditions for stimulation.  Young as it is, we can still
draw a number of important points from it for understanding human
consciousness.  In the realm of human experience, a qualification
whose importance I will discuss below, we may say that it is possible
for humans to experience:

     (4)        A huge widening of the sense of self and
     consciousness that makes ordinary consciousness seem,
     by comparison, a very narrow and limited manifestation
     of a greater totality of Self.

     (5)        An amusement and loving tolerance for the
     pretentiousness of the ordinary self in taking itself
     as the supreme manifestation of intelligence.

     (6)        Various kinds of new knowledge, "transcendent
     knowledge," which make ordinary knowledge relative
     rather than absolute.  These transcendent kinds of
     knowledge are often state-specific, i.e., they are not
     remembered or understood very well in ordinary
     consciousness, but make perfect sense in the altered
     transpersonal states of transcendence.  The content of
     such knowledge usually concerns questions of ultimate
     value and purpose, and constitute "emotional" as well
     as intellectual "knowledge."

     (7)        Even the briefest kinds of transpersonal
     experiences may enormously transform the remainder of
     the experiencer's life.  An example is the absolute
     conviction brought back by many who have had near death
     experiences (NDEs) that the primary purpose of life is
     to learn to love; that if you haven't learned to love,
     your life has not been of much value.

     (8)        Absolutely convincing knowledge that the universe
     is an intelligent living organism, in a mind dimension
     that includes material phenomena as a subset, and that
     this Intelligence makes the universe inherently loving
     and meaningful, in spite of apparent horrors on the
     ordinary level.  We are an inherent part of that
     Intelligence, not a meaningless accident.

                            Parapsychology:

        Note that in giving a brief overview of considerations for
understanding consciousness from a transpersonal perspective, I
qualified them as phenomena in the realm of human experience. Now we
must deal with the main reaction that those caught in the scientistic
paradigm usually have to the transpersonal.  This reaction would be
something like "The import of these transpersonal experiences is
obviously factually false, conceptually nonsensical and probably
psychopathological: human consciousness is nothing but the operation
of the human brain. Consciousness, the human brain, is confined within
the skull and body, with only indirect, sensory contact with the
external world and others, and when the brain dies, consciousness
dies.  At worst, these transpersonal experiences foster delusion and
superstition; at best they might be necessary opiates to soothe those
who cannot face the reality of our material mortality." From the
scientistic paradigm, transpersonal society can never be more than the
study of illusions.

        Parapsychology, a field of psychology literally para, beyond
or along side of, ordinary psychology, is my third perspective on the
nature of consciousness, as it is of vital relevance to this
criticism.

        It is somewhat daunting to try to summarize more than a
hundred years of scholarly and scientific study in a few paragraphs,
but I will try.

        Parapsychology began with "psychical research," primarily
scholarly, but retrospective study of spontaneous human experiences of
acquiring information about distant events when no plausible sensory
or physical mechanisms seemed able to account for them.  A mother,
e.g., who seldom recalled dreaming, might suddenly have a terrifying
dream of her son being killed and later receive a telegram that her
son, in a distant country, had unexpectedly been killed in an accident
at that time.

        Although one can build a moderately convincing case for
unknown information transfer mechanisms from the better cases of this
sort, there are inherent problems of the reliability of witnesses,
distortions of memory, occasional hoaxes, and evaluating precisely
just what "coincidence" is in this approach. Parapsychology is the
termed generally applied to the body of procedure and knowledge built
up when active laboratory research began to solve the above problems.
I should also note that, unfortunately, the term parapsychology has
become one popularly used to cover everything mysterious, but I speak
here only of serious scientific parapsychology.

        Over the years stringent laboratory methods gradually
developed, employing elaborate safeguards against fraud, double blind
procedures, and conservative statistical evaluations of results.  To
make a long story short, four basic psi phenomena, as they are now
termed, had enough research with significant outcomes (dozens to
hundreds of studies each) done on them that I consider them proven to
exist beyond any reasonable doubt.  These are three forms of
extrasensory perception (ESP), viz. telepathy, clairvoyance and
precognition, and one form of physical action on the material world,
psychokinesis (PK).  There may be other genuine forms of psi
phenomena, but we will stick with these basic four here.

        Although psi phenomena usually manifest weakly and unreliably
in the laboratory, we can conclude the following. Given what we
scientifically know about the nature of the material world and
reasonable extensions of that knowledge, in the absence of any known
or readily plausible physical information transfer mechanisms:

     (9)        People can sometimes pick up the conscious mental
     contents of another's mind, telepathy.

     (10)       People can sometimes directly cognize the state of
     the distant physical world when it is currently unknown
     to any other human, clairvoyance.

     (11)       People can sometimes accurately predict future
     events which are inherently unpredictable due random
     processes determining their outcome, precognition.

     (12)       People can sometimes affect the outcomes of
     physical processes simply by wishing for a desired
     outcome, psychokinesis.

        Without having the time to argue it in detail, the
consideration for understanding consciousness that is readily drawn
from the above is:

     (13)       Since these empirical data show properties of
     consciousness that do not seem to be reducible to
     physical variable with our current physical
     understanding or reasonable extensions of it, they
     indicate that consciousness must be investigated as a
     factor in its own right and with real properties of its
     own, not just as an epiphenomenon of physical brain and
     nervous system properties.

        Note that this is a pragmatic approach and a conservative
scientific approach.  I am one of those scientists who believe data is
primary and theory secondary.  We have data that do not fit
scientistic, physicalistic models.  While we could have some kind of
"religious" faith that perhaps someday they will be explainable in
terms of some future physics quite unlike the one we know, that is
faith, not a proper scientific approach.


                             Conclusions:

        Now we have the scientific basis to deal with the criticism
that transpersonal psychology is about nothing but illusions.  Of
course it is - some of the time.  Ordinary psychology has shown us
innumerable mechanisms by which people fool themselves and each other.
On the other hand, the data of parapsychology show us that sometimes
there is a very real way in the "mind" "transcends" the "brain."  I
put all three critical words in quotation marks to emphasize that
while this statement is correct in general, our understanding of what
exactly this means is still very crude, and great amounts of open-
minded research are needed to flesh this statement out.

        These considerations for understanding human consciousness are
not simply intellectually interesting, but of great import to our and
our planet's survival.  The "Me first!" ethic fits easily with the
dominant scientistic world view.  Who cares about the meaningless
lives and meaningless fates of a bunch of other meaningless biological
accidents, other people, compared to my pleasure?

        The traditional values of the worlds great religions say we
should care, and exhort us to live moral lives and be kind to our
neighbors, but they have become value systems seemingly left behind in
the modern world, apparently "proven" to be just superstitions by
scientism, so we can't count on those traditional sources of values to
create the attitudes that can reorientate us to a compassionate,
global perspective.  Religion is just conditioning, exhortation,
meaningless words to too many people.

        If you look at the sources of the great religions, however,
you discover transpersonal experiences by the founders of the
religions.  If you look at transpersonal psychology, you see that such
life transforming experiences of love, unity, and compassion are a
basic part of human potentials, not just things that happened to a few
people long ago.  And if you look at the data of parapsychology, you
see that the scientistic basis for automatically rejecting such
transpersonal experiences is fallacious.

        There is considerable hope for humanity as conscious beings,
and there is a lot of excitement awaiting us as we discover exactly
what that means!