The NeXt Files

Lisa Ferguson

Tuesday, March 3, 1998 | 10:26 a.m.

Rolling up his long, striped shirt sleeves, Charles Tart prepares to journey into the mysteries of the mind.

And, just as he's done twice weekly since January, he's taking the 69 UNLV students enrolled in his "Altered States of Consciousness" class with him.

On a recent blustery afternoon, Tart, distinguished visiting professor on a one-year appointment with the university's Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies, took the stage of an expansive lecture hall in the Flora Dungan Humanities building.

The topic of this day's lecture: Dreaming. "In my ordinary life, I'm a mild-mannered professor. In my dream life, you're looking at Indiana Jones," he jokes with the group.

But the study of human consciousness is no laughing matter to Tart, who has spent the bulk of his career researching, teaching, lecturing and writing more than a dozen books and countless academic papers about the subject.

His 1969 volume, "Altered States of Consciousness," (which is also one of the course's textbooks) sold more than 100,000 copies. It was followed by such intriguingly-titled scientific works as "On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication" (1971) and "Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm" (1977).

"I find the world tends to be divided into people who believe everything that's labeled psychic ... (and) people who are totally, irrationally skeptical ... and really biased and won't look at any evidence" in its favor, Tart says. "I have this funny position in the middle where I say, 'It looks like some of it is true and we ought to look at the evidence and think about it.' "

Now he's asking UNLV students to consider the possibilities.

Tart is the first professor to head the Bigelow Chair, a program, established last fall, that is funded with a $3.7 million endowment awarded to the university by Las Vegas real estate magnate Robert T. Bigelow.

Housed within the university's College of Sciences, its purpose is to study and teach empirical research about the nature of consciousness, especially as it exists after bodily death.

The Bigelow Chair's curriculum fits in well with other scientific course work offered on campus, says Dr. Peter L. Starkweather, associate dean of the College of Sciences.

Consciousness, Starkweather says, is "a broad classification which can incorporate ... everything from the neurobiological," and how the brain produces cognition and consciousness, to "a complete constellation of different subjects that get into the area of true psychology.

"As an intellectual structure, it has a great potential to be a very active interdisciplinary area of study," he says.

While Tart spent much of last semester organizing and pondering plans for the program's future, he'll be in the classroom most of this spring.

Besides the "Altered States" class -- which studies emotional and drug-induced states, as well as sleep and hypnosis -- he also teaches a course titled "Cutting Edge Research in Science: The Case of Parapsychology," which gives an "overview" of that branch of psychology. (His most recent book, 1997's "Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality," is the course textbook.)

Stretching minds

A professor of psychology, Tart spent 28 years teaching at the University of California, Davis, along with a slew of other schools, including the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where he taught psychiatry in the mid '60s.

He accepted the job at UNLV this year, "because my personal and professional goals are the same as those that the Bigelow Chair was set up for."

He also has questions that are similar to those posed by the program. "I don't know that (life after death is) definitely true or exactly what form it would take, so I want to see an awful lot more research done on it because it's such an important question," Tart says. "But, I think there's enough evidence that people can sort of factor it into their philosophy of life and how they're going to live.

"Think of it this way," he says: "Would you live your life differently if, on the one hand, you knew for certain that death was the end or, on the other hand, you knew for certain that this (life) is the interval in a long series of lives or some kind of long continuing life?"

How do you answer a question like that within a college semester?

You don't. "I'm not sure we can ever get certainty here," he says. "But I think the more factual information you have as part of your belief system, the better."

When his stint at UNLV ends in June (the search for his replacement is already underway), he will return to his teaching position at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, Calif, where he's taught since 1994.

"I like teaching," Tart says. "I have fun when I see students' eyes light up as they start thinking about something; that's real rewarding. I like to stretch minds that way."

The class turned out to be exactly what senior Laura Weiss was looking for.

"I'm really into consciousness," the environmental studies major says. "I was expecting to learn more about the different states of consciousness and studies that have been done about it and philosophies about where certain drives come from and what they mean to us.

"I don't think you can say there's a normal state of consciousness and that's who you are," she says. "I think you're a mixture of all these different drives you have."

Dr. Daniel Deslauriers, a professor of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, taught alongside Tart there in 1994, and recalls his "no-nonsense approach" to his work.

He also notes Tart's ability to "translate these traditional teachings into everyday language" that students can understand. "I think that's what makes him such a popular teacher," Deslauriers says.

But it also kept him from getting a promotion once.

Tart says that at another university, administrators argued that one of his books was so clearly written -- laymen could actually comprehend it -- that it couldn't be considered a true academic contribution. "I think the real issue was prejudice against my daring to look at parapsychology," he says.

Science versus spirit

Outside the classroom, Tart is best known for his scientific work in transpersonal psychology, a nearly 30-year-old field of which he is regarded among the founders, along with the late Abraham Maslow, considered the founder of humanistic psychology.

According to a definition Tart penned in 1995, transpersonal psychology studies "people's experiences of temporarily transcending our usual identification with our limited biological, historical, cultural and personal self" to experience and recognize " 'something' of vast intelligence and compassion that encompasses/is the entire universe."

It may be easier to relate a transpersonal experience than define one. The most "popular" type is the near-death experience, Tart says, estimating that eight million people in the United States have undergone one as a result of having been medically resuscitated.

"They knew they had died, but they were still there," he explains. "They went out of their ordinary, individual self and felt part of, shall we call it, 'universal intelligence' ... much bigger than themselves.

"They had a new kind of knowledge," which is often difficult to describe with words, he says. "They knew things in an incredible new way, they understood the meaning of things, how things fit together."

He adds that a few moments of a transpersonal experience may change a person's life for decades. "That's the data," Tart says. But skeptics have argued that it is instead "some kind of illusion."

Not surprisingly, doubters of consciousness study are plentiful, since it has long been ignored as a serious scientific field.

"People have experiences that be can put under this rubric of spiritual or transpersonal ... and yet, that's denied" by science, he says. "When you take any part of a human being that's real in some sense and deny it, people get sick."

In "Body Mind Sprit," he broaches "what I consider to be one of the major diseases of our times: The fact that the culture we have, that seems to be scientific, totally denies any spiritual side to human beings. And yet, as a psychologist, I know there is something real to that side."

Hence the reason that Tart does not sidestep the issue with his students. He separates scientific from spiritual issues early on, "so that our speculations stay reasonably grounded in the actual facts."

On the other hand, he says, "(science) has really high-quality evidence that there's something non-material to the mind, that there's something that may be spiritual that's worth looking at.

"As I tell my students, they're not required to believe anything in particular as a result of taking my classes, but they are required to think about the material and try to develop a more discriminating outlook."

archive