There is a joy in the actual taste of vanilla ice cream that does not come from knowing the chemical formula of vanilla. There is a joy, an inherent aliveness in the body that you can experience if you pay attention to your body. But if you live up in your head, in your words all the time, you don’t notice it.
Charles Tart
Contributed by: Siona
Charles Tart Don't go for happiness, go for truth!
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
R. D. Laing
Charles Tart
Contributed by: Siona
Charles Tart Don't go for happiness, go for truth!
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
R. D. Laing
“We have no idea what the mechanism is that makes this happen. If we ever do understand, it will bring a new understanding to the universe.” Charles Tart
“Hypnosis is probably the closest metaphor as a state but I don't know if I could equate it [with television watching]. Hypnosis is a state where you destabilize the ordinary state and then eventually get people into an altered state where they will follow a particular stimulus input much more strongly and with much less critical reflection than they would normally; there is certainly a lot of comparability there.” Charles Tart quote
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/In the end we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge.
— Charles T. Tart
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/In the end we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge.
— Charles T. Tart
http://www.cantrip.org/charles_tart.html
http://www.cantrip.org/charles_tart.htmlBiographyCharles Tart was born in 1937 in Morrisville, Pennsylvania and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He was active in amateur radio and worked as a radio engineer (with a First Class Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission) while a teenager. As an undergraduate, Tart first studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before transferring to Duke University to study psychology, on the advice of Dr Rhine of Duke. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard atStanford University.[1]
He is currently (2005) a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he served for 28 years, and emeritus member of the Monroe Institute board of advisors. Tart was the holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at theUniversity of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).[1]
He was also integral in the theorizing and construction of the automatic ESP testing device the ESPATEACHER machine that was built at the University of Virginia. He supports Joseph McMoneagle's remote viewing claims that McMoneagle has remote viewed into the past, present, and future and has predicted future events.[2]
As well as a laboratory researcher, Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. Tart believes that the evidence of the paranormal is bringing science and spirit together.[3] His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.
In his 1986 book Waking Up, he introduced the phrase "consensus trance" to the lexicon. Tart likened normal waking consciousness to hypnotic trance. He discussed how each of us is from birth inducted to the trance of the society around us. Tart noted both similarities and differences between hypnotic trance induction and consensus trance induction. He emphasized the enormous and pervasive power of parents, teachers, religious leaders, political figures, and others to compel induction. Referring to the work of Gurdjieff and others he outlines a path to awakening based upon self-observation.
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/ctt_articles2.cfm?id=18
[edit]
Waking Up: Selections from the Book
Charles T. Tart
University of California, Davis and Institute of Noetic Sciences
(1986, Institute of Noetic Sciences.)
The following are assorted selections from Charles T. Tart's Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential book, taken from a descriptive article in the Fall 1986 Newsletter of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Transition from one section to the next is sometimes uneven given the layout of the original article. (seedetail)
Abstract
Article
Note: Institute of Noetic Sciences Board Member Henry Rolfs has long recognized the importance of the work of G. I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949). Rolfs saw a need for a book on this work, comprehensible to the educated lay reader. He commissioned psychologist Charles T. Tart, student of Gurdjieff's work, to write such a book through a grant from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. We are proud to announce the availability in December of Tart's book, Waking Up, published as part of the Institute of Noetic Sciences Book Series. (Note added December 2000: the book is now officially out of print, but autographed copies may be mail order from the www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site. It will eventually be brought back in print through www. iUniverse.com.)Waking Up draws heavily on Tart's own understanding of the work of Gurdjieff, whose teachings have become very popular in recent years. It is quite different from the usual "Gurdjieff said..." book, however. Waking Up is an original formulation by an internationally known scientist, integrating Gurdjieff's ideas with modern growth psychology, research on altered states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology.
The book is in three major sections. "Possibilities" examines the idea of enlightenment and the part played by altered states. What we could be is so far beyond our usual state, though, that Section 2, "Problems", goes into detailed examination of why we live in a state of illusion. Section 3, "Practices", describes specific methods of self-observation and self-remembering that can lead to waking up into higher states of consciousness. These practices are intended for use in everyday life. The advantages of working within a spiritual growth group are discussed, as well as the dangers inherent in such groups and teachers. The book ends with a chapter on intelligently selecting a spiritual path as a personal experiment and includes a "Spiritual Commitment Contract" designed to maximize the learning opportunities and minimize the risks of spiritual work.
The Fourth Way as a System of Spiritual Growth
Gurdjieff's ideas contain so many useful psychological understandings and techniques that it is possible to study them on a purely psychological level. That is, you can profit from them without any interest in or acceptance of "spiritual" ideas-ideas that we are more than our physical bodies.
In some ways this is fine. So much nonsense has been promulgated in the name of the spiritual that our culture's aversion to it has many healthy aspects. At the same time I am convinced that there are vital spiritual realities, and if we do not come to terms with them and spiritually evolve we and our civilization will die.
Intelligence, discrimination, and personal experience are what is needed, not blind belief or blind disbelief.
I focus on Gurdjieff's teachings as a psychology in this book because that is how I best understand them. I do not want to give you the impression that is all there is to Gurdjieff, though. His psychological ideas were imbedded in a very elaborate and sophisticated spiritual system. In common with many great spiritual systems, it is a worldview that sees the entire universe as an integrated, meaningful, and alive manifestation of the Absolute. Humankind has a place and a function in this alive, evolving universe. Our function interlocks with those beings higher on the scale of the universe, beings who would be considered "non-physical" or spiritual in ordinary terms. That humankind has fallen into the insanity of consensus trance and lost touch with our true possibilities and functions is a tragedy. The Fourth Way is not just a way of optimizing programming in your organic bio-computer; it is a system of spiritual growth, eventually going beyond organic, physical life as we know it, so humans can regain their true function and happiness.
Essence versus False Personality
The study of personality is one of the major areas of specialization in modern psychology-I specialized in it in my graduate training-and a fascinating subject for almost everyone. Do I have a good personality or a bad one? Should I take a course on improving my personality?
By personality we usually mean an enduring and persisting set of attitudes, traits, motivations, beliefs, and response patterns that characterize an individual and distinguish him or her from others. We value, defend, and cling to our personality, even when it has characteristics that cause suffering.
Modern psychology has recognized that for some people the overall structure of their personality is just so pathological that they would be better off if it could somehow be destroyed and replaced with a "normal" personality. By and large, though, psychologists do not question the desirability of personality per se.
The great spiritual traditions, the other hand, have frequently condemned personality. Each of us is (or could be) something far more basic and important than we are. To the extent that personality consumes our vital energy and/or actively interferes with the discovery, development, and manifestation of our deeper self, personality is an enemy of real growth.
Gurdjieff expressed this traditional dichotomy as the conflict betweenessence and false personality.
Essence is what is uniquely you. You were born as a unique combination of physical, biological, mental, emotional, and spiritual traits and potentials. Most of this is only potential at birth, and may never manifest unless the right circumstances are created by your world, or by you yourself later in life. Some of these potentials are highly desirable in a universal sense, "the essential delight of the blood", the capacity for love.
Others may be troublesome if they develop, such as an inability to delay gratification in favor of some later goal or too quick a temper.
Your parents and your culture begin shaping your development from the moment of birth. Certain manifestations of your essence are rewarded, some are simply neglected, some are denied and punished. This enculturation process is exceptionally powerful because its agents are so capable and knowledgeable and you are so helpless and ignorant by comparison. It is powerful because your physical and emotional well being are at stake, and because you have an inherent social instinct, a desire to belong, to be "normal".
With each surrender, of an aspect of our essential self, energy is taken from essence and channeled into supporting our developing personality. The original meaning of "persona"-a mask used by actors-is apropos here. Slowly we create a more and more comprehensive mask that is a socially approved presentation of ourselves, something that will get us acceptance and approval, something that makes us "normal", like everybody else. As we identify more and more completely with the mask, with personality, forget that we are acting a role and become the role, more and more of our natural energy goes into personality, and essence withers.
We can sublimate some aspects of our essential nature that are not allowed direct expression to partially salvage them. A few may persist because our culture happens to value them. For many aspects of our essence, their energy is either lost altogether or sublimated into false personality.
Gradually, with noise and fog, the traffic of consensus trance has smothered the flowering of the vital spirit.
This denial can destroy our lives, for essence is the vital part of us, the truly living spark. It is the light that was found in meadow, grove, and stream, the earth and every common sight. As false personality eventually uses up almost all of our vital energy, the light fades, and life is a mechanical, automa
End Notes
References
Copyright Detail
You may forward this document to anyone you think might be interested. The only limitations are:
1. You must copy this document in its entirety, without modifications, including this copyright notice.
2. You do not have permission to change the contents or make extracts.
3. You do not have permission to copy this document for commercial purposes.Attachment to ExperiencesDr. Charles T. Tart on August 1st, 2011Dr. Charles Tart
Mindfulness
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 4, Part 13 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: I was thinking about something. I guess it actually ties in all the stuff we’ve been talking about in states of being, and I have an interesting problem along these lines. I remember you mentioned that when you started reading Gurdjieff, that you had a process of waking up that was brief, and then afterwards you went around talking about it for a long time, but you weren’t really awake.
CTT: That’s right.
Student: I had something like that, I guess. I mean, I’ve been having little sort of mini-satoris recently, but in the morning, on Saturday, the very early morning – I had a very strong sort of mystical union experience. And afterwards, I’m now feeling as though I should be able to constantly involve everything within my self-concept and feel at peace with it. I realize that the expectation is overlapping that of my actual experience, and so it’s causing some sort of dissonance.
CTT: I think the Tibetan Buddhists have a nice attitude toward this. They say about allexperiences – whether they’re wonderful, mystical experiences or not – they’re just experiences. The Tibetan term for these nice experiences is nyams. If they happen and they’re nice, that’s nice. Now get on with the real work of whatever it is we’re doing in life.
And that’s a way of advising non-attachment to particular experiences. I think I warned you when I first talked to you about sensing, looking, and listening – if I didn’t, I should have – that sometimes, by the time you find your arms and legs and then begin sensing, looking, and listening, sometimes it’s going to be very nice. You’re really going to feel like, “Wow, I’m here.”
That’s great — but don’t hold onto it. Don’t hold onto it in the sense of, “From now on, when you do the procedure, you want to recreate that particular feeling.” Because then you’re no longer opening yourself to the now, while based in your body. You’re trying to recreate a particular feeling. Getting caught up in trying to recreate particular feelings is where we’re stuck in the first place.
We’re going around trying to make things nice all the time, and a lot of that is done by basically cutting ourselves off from actual reality and filling it in with fantasy of one sort or another. Like making our vision of the whole world appear smooth, even though really there’s only a little section in the center of our vision that we see in any detail. We need to not do that, okay?
Student: It’s been my experience, though, that –
CTT: Oh, and if you catch yourself doing it, that’s all right. Just go back to sensing, looking, and listening. Guilt is optional.
(Laughter)
I’m sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to get that in.
Student: I mean, I can see the value in not holding onto experiences. But at the same time, one of the things we’re here to study is peak experiences. And it’s been my experience that after a peak experience, you learn more from that experience in retrospect by reliving it. So how do you hold onto the fruits of the experience and get more out of reflecting on this experience without holding onto the experience?
CTT: You experiment. You experiment and find out what works for you. Okay? I mean, you want to avoid the extreme on the one hand of, “My precious experience. No one must question my precious experience.…” – I’m grasping my ring.
(Laughter)
The Gollum complex is coming out! My precious!
[reference to character Gollum in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series]
(Laughter)
You don’t want to grab like that and put so much sacredness and depth on it that basically everything that might threaten it in any way becomes the enemy. Okay? That’s way in the wrong direction. Nor, on the other hand, do you want to just forget it.
So while the Tibetan approach of regarding it as “just experience” is a way of not getting overly attached, you do have a chance to learn from it. And I say a chance, because there will be some unusual experiences that you’ll have, and they’ll really clarify things for you. They’ll move you around a little in life where you’ll be able to see things in a different way from that point on. And there will be other unusual experiences you have where probably the main thing you learn from it is, “Gosh, it’s strange. I don’t know what the hell that meant!”
So you experiment in between somewhere of how to learn from an experience without glomming onto it too much. And it is very individual how you do that.
So for example, I find – and some people find – there’s some experiences where you don’t want to tell people about it because something is still happening as a result of that experience. If you tell people about it, you kind of use up the energy and end the process prematurely.
But then there may be a time when it’s fine. You can talk about the process. It’s done. And others where you don’t need to hold things like that in the first place, and others where you really need to share it because you need other people’s perspectives on it to help you work with it more effectively. It’s very individual.
A very good dissertation topic for someone would be to start making a wide scale collection of how do people hold sacred experiences in ways that let them continue to work their magic, and how do they do it in ways that screw up. Ways to try and ways that you should generally avoid.
I love suggesting dissertation topics.
(Laughter)
Like you guys don’t have enough to do!Dr. Charles Tart pioneered the field of consciousness studies decades ago, with his classic best-selling anthology Altered States of Consciousness, in print for more than 20 years and selected by Common Boundary as one of the one hundred most influential psychology books of the twentieth century. Tart is credited with almost single-handedly legitimizing the study of altered states, including hypnosis, meditation, lucid dreaming and drug-induced states. He initiated several important lines of research in parapsychology, including teaching ESP and out-of-body experiences. Altered States of Consciousness(1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.
Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before electing to become a psychologist. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University. He is currently a Core Faculty Member at theInstitute of Transpersonal Psychology, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California, where he served for 28 years. He was the first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).
IONS and New Harbinger published Charles Tart's latest book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together in 2009. This was a major culmination of his work on consciousness and parapsychology, to help people who think their spiritual experiences are dumb or crazy because "science" has shown the spiritual is all nonsense. Properly done science has actually shown it is actually quite reasonable to beboth scientific and spiritual in one's approach to life." People who automatically dismiss the spiritual are the ones being dumb and crazy.
As well as a laboratory researcher, Professor Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.
http://www.cantrip.org/charles_tart.htmlBiographyCharles Tart was born in 1937 in Morrisville, Pennsylvania and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He was active in amateur radio and worked as a radio engineer (with a First Class Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission) while a teenager. As an undergraduate, Tart first studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before transferring to Duke University to study psychology, on the advice of Dr Rhine of Duke. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard atStanford University.[1]
He is currently (2005) a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he served for 28 years, and emeritus member of the Monroe Institute board of advisors. Tart was the holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at theUniversity of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).[1]
He was also integral in the theorizing and construction of the automatic ESP testing device the ESPATEACHER machine that was built at the University of Virginia. He supports Joseph McMoneagle's remote viewing claims that McMoneagle has remote viewed into the past, present, and future and has predicted future events.[2]
As well as a laboratory researcher, Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. Tart believes that the evidence of the paranormal is bringing science and spirit together.[3] His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.
In his 1986 book Waking Up, he introduced the phrase "consensus trance" to the lexicon. Tart likened normal waking consciousness to hypnotic trance. He discussed how each of us is from birth inducted to the trance of the society around us. Tart noted both similarities and differences between hypnotic trance induction and consensus trance induction. He emphasized the enormous and pervasive power of parents, teachers, religious leaders, political figures, and others to compel induction. Referring to the work of Gurdjieff and others he outlines a path to awakening based upon self-observation.
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/ctt_articles2.cfm?id=18
[edit]
Waking Up: Selections from the Book
Charles T. Tart
University of California, Davis and Institute of Noetic Sciences
(1986, Institute of Noetic Sciences.)
The following are assorted selections from Charles T. Tart's Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential book, taken from a descriptive article in the Fall 1986 Newsletter of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Transition from one section to the next is sometimes uneven given the layout of the original article. (seedetail)
Abstract
Article
Note: Institute of Noetic Sciences Board Member Henry Rolfs has long recognized the importance of the work of G. I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949). Rolfs saw a need for a book on this work, comprehensible to the educated lay reader. He commissioned psychologist Charles T. Tart, student of Gurdjieff's work, to write such a book through a grant from the Institute of Noetic Sciences. We are proud to announce the availability in December of Tart's book, Waking Up, published as part of the Institute of Noetic Sciences Book Series. (Note added December 2000: the book is now officially out of print, but autographed copies may be mail order from the www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site. It will eventually be brought back in print through www. iUniverse.com.)Waking Up draws heavily on Tart's own understanding of the work of Gurdjieff, whose teachings have become very popular in recent years. It is quite different from the usual "Gurdjieff said..." book, however. Waking Up is an original formulation by an internationally known scientist, integrating Gurdjieff's ideas with modern growth psychology, research on altered states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology.
The book is in three major sections. "Possibilities" examines the idea of enlightenment and the part played by altered states. What we could be is so far beyond our usual state, though, that Section 2, "Problems", goes into detailed examination of why we live in a state of illusion. Section 3, "Practices", describes specific methods of self-observation and self-remembering that can lead to waking up into higher states of consciousness. These practices are intended for use in everyday life. The advantages of working within a spiritual growth group are discussed, as well as the dangers inherent in such groups and teachers. The book ends with a chapter on intelligently selecting a spiritual path as a personal experiment and includes a "Spiritual Commitment Contract" designed to maximize the learning opportunities and minimize the risks of spiritual work.
The Fourth Way as a System of Spiritual Growth
Gurdjieff's ideas contain so many useful psychological understandings and techniques that it is possible to study them on a purely psychological level. That is, you can profit from them without any interest in or acceptance of "spiritual" ideas-ideas that we are more than our physical bodies.
In some ways this is fine. So much nonsense has been promulgated in the name of the spiritual that our culture's aversion to it has many healthy aspects. At the same time I am convinced that there are vital spiritual realities, and if we do not come to terms with them and spiritually evolve we and our civilization will die.
Intelligence, discrimination, and personal experience are what is needed, not blind belief or blind disbelief.
I focus on Gurdjieff's teachings as a psychology in this book because that is how I best understand them. I do not want to give you the impression that is all there is to Gurdjieff, though. His psychological ideas were imbedded in a very elaborate and sophisticated spiritual system. In common with many great spiritual systems, it is a worldview that sees the entire universe as an integrated, meaningful, and alive manifestation of the Absolute. Humankind has a place and a function in this alive, evolving universe. Our function interlocks with those beings higher on the scale of the universe, beings who would be considered "non-physical" or spiritual in ordinary terms. That humankind has fallen into the insanity of consensus trance and lost touch with our true possibilities and functions is a tragedy. The Fourth Way is not just a way of optimizing programming in your organic bio-computer; it is a system of spiritual growth, eventually going beyond organic, physical life as we know it, so humans can regain their true function and happiness.
Essence versus False Personality
The study of personality is one of the major areas of specialization in modern psychology-I specialized in it in my graduate training-and a fascinating subject for almost everyone. Do I have a good personality or a bad one? Should I take a course on improving my personality?
By personality we usually mean an enduring and persisting set of attitudes, traits, motivations, beliefs, and response patterns that characterize an individual and distinguish him or her from others. We value, defend, and cling to our personality, even when it has characteristics that cause suffering.
Modern psychology has recognized that for some people the overall structure of their personality is just so pathological that they would be better off if it could somehow be destroyed and replaced with a "normal" personality. By and large, though, psychologists do not question the desirability of personality per se.
The great spiritual traditions, the other hand, have frequently condemned personality. Each of us is (or could be) something far more basic and important than we are. To the extent that personality consumes our vital energy and/or actively interferes with the discovery, development, and manifestation of our deeper self, personality is an enemy of real growth.
Gurdjieff expressed this traditional dichotomy as the conflict betweenessence and false personality.
Essence is what is uniquely you. You were born as a unique combination of physical, biological, mental, emotional, and spiritual traits and potentials. Most of this is only potential at birth, and may never manifest unless the right circumstances are created by your world, or by you yourself later in life. Some of these potentials are highly desirable in a universal sense, "the essential delight of the blood", the capacity for love.
Others may be troublesome if they develop, such as an inability to delay gratification in favor of some later goal or too quick a temper.
Your parents and your culture begin shaping your development from the moment of birth. Certain manifestations of your essence are rewarded, some are simply neglected, some are denied and punished. This enculturation process is exceptionally powerful because its agents are so capable and knowledgeable and you are so helpless and ignorant by comparison. It is powerful because your physical and emotional well being are at stake, and because you have an inherent social instinct, a desire to belong, to be "normal".
With each surrender, of an aspect of our essential self, energy is taken from essence and channeled into supporting our developing personality. The original meaning of "persona"-a mask used by actors-is apropos here. Slowly we create a more and more comprehensive mask that is a socially approved presentation of ourselves, something that will get us acceptance and approval, something that makes us "normal", like everybody else. As we identify more and more completely with the mask, with personality, forget that we are acting a role and become the role, more and more of our natural energy goes into personality, and essence withers.
We can sublimate some aspects of our essential nature that are not allowed direct expression to partially salvage them. A few may persist because our culture happens to value them. For many aspects of our essence, their energy is either lost altogether or sublimated into false personality.
Gradually, with noise and fog, the traffic of consensus trance has smothered the flowering of the vital spirit.
This denial can destroy our lives, for essence is the vital part of us, the truly living spark. It is the light that was found in meadow, grove, and stream, the earth and every common sight. As false personality eventually uses up almost all of our vital energy, the light fades, and life is a mechanical, automa
End Notes
References
Copyright Detail
You may forward this document to anyone you think might be interested. The only limitations are:
1. You must copy this document in its entirety, without modifications, including this copyright notice.
2. You do not have permission to change the contents or make extracts.
3. You do not have permission to copy this document for commercial purposes.Attachment to ExperiencesDr. Charles T. Tart on August 1st, 2011Dr. Charles Tart
Mindfulness
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 4, Part 13 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: I was thinking about something. I guess it actually ties in all the stuff we’ve been talking about in states of being, and I have an interesting problem along these lines. I remember you mentioned that when you started reading Gurdjieff, that you had a process of waking up that was brief, and then afterwards you went around talking about it for a long time, but you weren’t really awake.
CTT: That’s right.
Student: I had something like that, I guess. I mean, I’ve been having little sort of mini-satoris recently, but in the morning, on Saturday, the very early morning – I had a very strong sort of mystical union experience. And afterwards, I’m now feeling as though I should be able to constantly involve everything within my self-concept and feel at peace with it. I realize that the expectation is overlapping that of my actual experience, and so it’s causing some sort of dissonance.
CTT: I think the Tibetan Buddhists have a nice attitude toward this. They say about allexperiences – whether they’re wonderful, mystical experiences or not – they’re just experiences. The Tibetan term for these nice experiences is nyams. If they happen and they’re nice, that’s nice. Now get on with the real work of whatever it is we’re doing in life.
And that’s a way of advising non-attachment to particular experiences. I think I warned you when I first talked to you about sensing, looking, and listening – if I didn’t, I should have – that sometimes, by the time you find your arms and legs and then begin sensing, looking, and listening, sometimes it’s going to be very nice. You’re really going to feel like, “Wow, I’m here.”
That’s great — but don’t hold onto it. Don’t hold onto it in the sense of, “From now on, when you do the procedure, you want to recreate that particular feeling.” Because then you’re no longer opening yourself to the now, while based in your body. You’re trying to recreate a particular feeling. Getting caught up in trying to recreate particular feelings is where we’re stuck in the first place.
We’re going around trying to make things nice all the time, and a lot of that is done by basically cutting ourselves off from actual reality and filling it in with fantasy of one sort or another. Like making our vision of the whole world appear smooth, even though really there’s only a little section in the center of our vision that we see in any detail. We need to not do that, okay?
Student: It’s been my experience, though, that –
CTT: Oh, and if you catch yourself doing it, that’s all right. Just go back to sensing, looking, and listening. Guilt is optional.
(Laughter)
I’m sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to get that in.
Student: I mean, I can see the value in not holding onto experiences. But at the same time, one of the things we’re here to study is peak experiences. And it’s been my experience that after a peak experience, you learn more from that experience in retrospect by reliving it. So how do you hold onto the fruits of the experience and get more out of reflecting on this experience without holding onto the experience?
CTT: You experiment. You experiment and find out what works for you. Okay? I mean, you want to avoid the extreme on the one hand of, “My precious experience. No one must question my precious experience.…” – I’m grasping my ring.
(Laughter)
The Gollum complex is coming out! My precious!
[reference to character Gollum in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings series]
(Laughter)
You don’t want to grab like that and put so much sacredness and depth on it that basically everything that might threaten it in any way becomes the enemy. Okay? That’s way in the wrong direction. Nor, on the other hand, do you want to just forget it.
So while the Tibetan approach of regarding it as “just experience” is a way of not getting overly attached, you do have a chance to learn from it. And I say a chance, because there will be some unusual experiences that you’ll have, and they’ll really clarify things for you. They’ll move you around a little in life where you’ll be able to see things in a different way from that point on. And there will be other unusual experiences you have where probably the main thing you learn from it is, “Gosh, it’s strange. I don’t know what the hell that meant!”
So you experiment in between somewhere of how to learn from an experience without glomming onto it too much. And it is very individual how you do that.
So for example, I find – and some people find – there’s some experiences where you don’t want to tell people about it because something is still happening as a result of that experience. If you tell people about it, you kind of use up the energy and end the process prematurely.
But then there may be a time when it’s fine. You can talk about the process. It’s done. And others where you don’t need to hold things like that in the first place, and others where you really need to share it because you need other people’s perspectives on it to help you work with it more effectively. It’s very individual.
A very good dissertation topic for someone would be to start making a wide scale collection of how do people hold sacred experiences in ways that let them continue to work their magic, and how do they do it in ways that screw up. Ways to try and ways that you should generally avoid.
I love suggesting dissertation topics.
(Laughter)
Like you guys don’t have enough to do!Dr. Charles Tart pioneered the field of consciousness studies decades ago, with his classic best-selling anthology Altered States of Consciousness, in print for more than 20 years and selected by Common Boundary as one of the one hundred most influential psychology books of the twentieth century. Tart is credited with almost single-handedly legitimizing the study of altered states, including hypnosis, meditation, lucid dreaming and drug-induced states. He initiated several important lines of research in parapsychology, including teaching ESP and out-of-body experiences. Altered States of Consciousness(1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.
Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before electing to become a psychologist. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University. He is currently a Core Faculty Member at theInstitute of Transpersonal Psychology, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California, where he served for 28 years. He was the first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).
IONS and New Harbinger published Charles Tart's latest book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together in 2009. This was a major culmination of his work on consciousness and parapsychology, to help people who think their spiritual experiences are dumb or crazy because "science" has shown the spiritual is all nonsense. Properly done science has actually shown it is actually quite reasonable to beboth scientific and spiritual in one's approach to life." People who automatically dismiss the spiritual are the ones being dumb and crazy.
As well as a laboratory researcher, Professor Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.