BG 179: An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century
Episode Description:
We’re joined by Charles Tart, one of the founders of the branch of psychology known as transpersonal psychology. Dr. Tart’s life work has to do with putting forward an “evidence-based spirituality for the 21st century.” In this conversation we explore the evidence that he explored for phenomena like reincarnation, as well as the “big five” of telepathy, clairvoyance, pre-cognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing. With all of these phenomena Charles warns about adopting a “scientistic”—as opposed to scientific—view of reality, which says that none of those things can be real, simply because they don’t fit into the mainstream view of materialism. Instead, he suggests, we should be looking at the evidence and letting it shape our understanding of reality.
Episode Links:
- Charles T. Tart’s Official Website
- The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together
- The Buddhist Atheist, Our Interview with Stephen Batchelor
- Ian Stevenson
- The Division of Perceptual Studies at The University of Virginia Medical School
Transcript:
Vincent: Hello, Buddhist Geeks, this is Vincent Horn, and I’m joined today by Dr. Charles Tart. Charles, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I’m really excited about this topic. It’s going be interesting I think.
Charles: I think it’s going be fun too.
Vincent: Yeah, yeah, and the topic I’m speaking about is… well it includes a couple things. One is the scientific materialist worldview. The other is the evidence for things like reincarnation, things like telepathy, clairvoyance, some of these things in the Buddhist tradition we might think of as siddhis or special powers.
And Charles is actually one of the key figures in the transpersonal psychology movement and he’s been studying the paranormal as a scientist for some 50 years. So you’ve been at this for a long, long time.
Charles: It’s been an interesting life, I’ll tell you. [Laughter]
Vincent: And you also are an on and off again, as you say in your book, The End of Materialism, Buddhist practitioner. And it sounds like you’ve had some periods of life where you’ve been very serious about Buddhist practice, and then it sounds like you’ve had other periods where maybe you’ve gone in other directions. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit to start with about your relationship to the Buddhist tradition and Buddhist practice?
Charles: Well, yeah it has been pretty varied, you know. I guess my first contact with serious Buddhists was in the late ’60s when I met Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan lama who settled in Berkeley. Some friends and I went to talk with him and he very quickly figured out that we weren’t very serious, and said he had no secrets to give us and said goodbye. And in retrospect that was quite appropriate. But then a few years later after some other kinds of spiritual training I ended up taking a basic meditation course from him. In fact, I took his course three times and tried to take it a fourth time because I felt that I didn’t get it. And he said you do so get it; you’ve have to go take the advanced course.
But it really has been on again, off again, because I’ve never felt that I was particularly good at meditation, which is the heart of the Buddhist practice to me. Until I met Shinzen Young back in the ’70s, and that was quite interesting because I heard him give a lecture on meditation in the context of a scientific conference. And I didn’t know who he was, but some part of me sat there and listened and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It’s like I was thinking this guy actually knows what he’s talking about from experience. And I realized these many other meditation teachers had all had great lines because those lines have been practiced and perfected for a couple thousand years. But I didn’t know whether they were actually speaking from experience or just been taught to say these things. Shinzen made me into a pretty regular meditator.
Vincent: That’s cool. Yeah, we’ve interviewed Shinzen and I’d have to say he’s one of the geekiest people we’ve interviewed by far.
Charles: Oh I know. We get on the phone and have very geeky conversations sometimes.
Vincent: Yeah. So it’s interesting, you have this sort of spiritual background and spiritual life, and then you’re also a trained scientist. And you say in your newest book, The End of Materialism, that these are two aspects of your life, or two aspects of your identity, that you’ve now become quite comfortable in being both. And for most people these things seem to be at odds. And you claim that it’s not actually that they’re at odds, it’s actually that the second rate versions of each of these things are at odds. And you make this distinction by saying there’s a difference between scientific and scientistic. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about that distinction and why it’s important?
Charles: Yeah, it’s not a distinction I was the first to make by any means. I think sociologists first came up with it back in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century. They talked about scientism to mean when instead of remembering science is a process where you’re constantly asking questions and revising things, you start to take what the current best findings are and assume that they are the final truth for things. It’s a very human thing you know. We want certainty, your mind hardens into taking something as a doctrine. Now the trouble with scientism is that most people confuse it with science, and scientism is very rampant and it has no place at all for spirituality.
My main purpose in writing The End of Materialism, for instance, was to help people who’ve had spiritual experiences of one sort of another, and to then think well, science has shown this stuff is all nonsense. I must be dumb or crazy. And what I really tried to do in that book is show that if you use real science, not scientism, but real science, and bringing this data from parapsychology particularly, you see there’s lots of very good scientific evidence that we human beings have the kind of qualities you would expect a spiritual being to have. So, you can be both scientific and spiritually inclined. That doesn’t mean you should believe anything and everything that’s got a spiritual label on it, of course. There’s lots of nonsense in that category. But, you shouldn’t reject it a priori either. You shouldn’t think somehow science has proven the spiritual is all nonsense.
Vincent: There’s one quote that I was struck by in the introduction of your book where the Dalai Lama says, “The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.”
Charles: Yeah, it’s as if people think that science has somehow proven that only the physical processes in the brain constitute consciousness. And, that hasn’t been proven. That’s all right as a working hypothesis, but there’s lots of things that say, “No, that’s an inadequate hypothesis. That won’t explain everything.”
Vincent: Nice, and I really appreciate that as a starting point because part of the reason I thought it’d be fun to interview you is because, recently, we interviewed a teacher named Steven Bachelor, and we had a really interesting discussion with him on Buddhist atheism. In particular on the Buddhist doctrines of Karma and rebirth. And, he took a very interesting stance, which was that he felt there simply wasn’t evidence to support reincarnation. And so we shouldn’t blindly believe in that doctrine. And that doing so could actually have harm in terms of how we approach our life and how we approach our practice, and so forth. And, I didn’t know that you were a listener, but apparently your wife Judy suggested that you come on and respond to that because the point of your newest book, The End of Materialism is to actually show that, in fact, there is evidence for many of the things that we consider spiritual in nature like reincarnation.
So, I was wondering if you could share with us some of the evidence that you found while doing research for this book, for instance, that might support a contrasting view on reincarnation for those that may have been sort of confused or provoked by Bachelor’s suggestion that there simply wasn’t any evidence to support that from a scientific perspective?
Charles: Oh, there’s so many ways I could respond to that. First off, there’s a lot of very interesting evidence. Apparently, he’s just not aware of it. And, one of the problems we human beings have is that when we have certain beliefs, we usually won’t bother to look at any evidence that might contradict them, and that keeps our beliefs very strong, but keeps our knowledge less than it should be.
And as to beliefs in something like reincarnation being harmful, well, I would say that any belief in anything can be harmful if you use it in certain kinds of ways and helpful in other kinds of ways. So, for instance, if you use the belief in reincarnation to say, “Well, I’m not going to bother to clean up my act or grow or anything like that,” then if reincarnation’s true, you’re certainly hurting yourself. But, getting down to the reality of it, there is excellent evidence for that. Now, I don’t know if I should talk about the more easy kind of things, the big five as I called them in my book first or jump right into reincarnation? What’s your preference?
Vincent: Well, I think, starting with that and, maybe, explaining the difference between, in your book, what you call the many maybes, which I understand are different than what you’re calling the big five.
Charles: Sure.
Vincent: So, maybe, you could sort of explain the difference and then we could finish by exploring the things that actually seem to have very, very compelling evidence for the.
Charles: Sure. The many maybes are a class of psychic phenomena for which, I think, there’s enough evidence that you’d be foolish to just ignore it and say, “There’s nothing there.” But, there are things that I don’t feel comfortable about saying, “These are proven. We have 99.9% confidence in these things,” as compared to the big five that I’ll talk about later where we have so many solid experiments and observations that, I think, you could just take these as fundamental realities.
Well, reincarnation is one of those many maybes. And, the prime kind of evidence for it is not the stuff you see in the movies where somebody’s hypnotized and regressed, cause that usually yields an awful lot of fantasy. But, really, it’s the cases which now number in the thousands of little kids, usually somewhere between three and six years old or something like that, who suddenly start talking about a previous life, and who talk about it with enough specificity, they lived in such and such a town. Their name was so and so. They had relatives named so and so and all that, that you’re then able to go to that other place and find someone who died not long before that kid was born and be able to come up with a reasonably good match there. If there were one or two cases like that you’d think “ah, you know, coincidence or they heard somebody talking about somebody who died,” but we’ve got thousands of them where that kind of thing has been ruled out. You know, when you’re a three year old and you suddenly start talking with specificity about somebody in a village 150 miles away who died, there’s no context with your family in that village or something, and it matches, then you’ve got something to look at.
Most of these cases were collected were originally by a psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson, now deceased for several years, who himself never said he proved reincarnation, but he collected a lot of evidence for it. And his successors at the University of Virginia Medical School, now have, let’s see, last time I talked to them they have about 4,000 cases total in their files and about 2,000 of them have been analyzed and digitized enough to go into the computer that they’re beginning to look for patterns in them.
I’ll tell you one of the most interesting patterns that’s been found for instance, and that is that a lot of these kids remember a violent death. And it’s as if the trauma of that violent death somehow knocked out the usual forgetting mechanism for reincarnation. And particularly interesting subset of those kids, they not only remember being killed in a certain way, but they have birthmarks on their body that look like the kind of scars you would expect if they were killed that way. So for instance, some little four year old remembers being killed because somebody shot him in the chest with a shotgun, and he’s got a little round birthmark on the front of his chest, and a much bigger one on his back behind that, which would look like the entrance and exit wounds for a shotgun AT close range. So you apparently get these biological markers once in a while.
This is fascinating. I mean this is why I say you know, you can’t ignore this kind of thing. Even though I would like to see a lot more research on it. The idea that reincarnation is so unimportant that we’ve only had one person and maybe a few colleagues investigate it in the last 50 years, that’s crazy. I think whether reincarnation is true or not is a lot more important than curing the common cold. But the people who fund research don’t share my views.
Vincent: Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s been difficult to find a way to make significant pharmaceutical products from that sort of research. [Laughter]
Charles: Yeah, that’s true. What in the world could you sell if reincarnation was true? No wait, wait, accountants and lawyers would love it because they’d set up trusts where if you could identify yourself properly in the next lifetime, you could inherit all this property.
Vincent: Oh, that’s be awesome. I can think of a few people who would like that.
Charles: It’s gonna happen now that we’ve found the commercial angle.
[Laughter]
Vincent: That is really interesting, and I was wondering since you’re somewhat familiar with the research coming out of the University of Virginia Medical School, if there seem to be any conclusions that can be drawn from some of the patterns of some of the research? And how they might fit in with some of the views of reincarnation that come from some of the other wisdom traditions?
Charles: Yeah, well let me give you one specific example which I don’t think I used in The End of Materialism book at all, and that is the theme I’m working on for probably the rest of my career is that we need to develop an evidence -ased spirituality for the 21st century. That is, as much as possible we need to look at evidence for and against particular aspects of spiritual and religious beliefs, and make our practice fit around those as much as possible.
So I’ve come up with one around the idea of reincarnation. As a student of Tibetan Buddhism, I’ve heard the story many times, I bet you’ve heard it too, it was used to say that you’re really luck to get a human reincarnation. That it’s very rare to come back as a human being without going through a lot of other things first. And that’s why you should practice so hard in this life to build a big karma. And the illustration usually used to reinforce that admonition is you imagine a world that’s all ocean and there’s a six foot ring floating on it. I think of it as a big hula hoop, but I’m probably dating myself. And you imagine a turtle that once every thousand years comes up for air. What are the odds it’s going come up in the center of that floating ring? It’s a very dramatic way of saying it’s really hard to come back as a human being.
Well I started thinking about that and I said, this is a theory about some of the aspects of reincarnation that could be tested. Let’s look at these thousands of cases of kids at the University of Virginia’s database, and say okay, if it really is that rare, and you’ve got to have really good karma to come back as a human being immediately in your next reincarnation, then most of these kids will obviously have been monks and nuns and yogis and saints of one or another who have really good karma to comeback of the human being so quickly.
So I asked the folks of Virginia, they are all friends of mine, I said you know how many holy people have you got in your re-incarnation of kids memories stuff database. And they thought and thought and they said “Well, of the two thousand we have scored so far maybe half a dozen”. Well that does not like you have to be a saint to come back. I mean, these kids remember very ordinary kinds of lifetimes. So I appreciate the idea that it is good to encourage people to practice when they have the opportunity, but if you are encouraging them with a theory that is false as far as the facts go, I think it’s time to change that particular theory and this is also an example of how basic scientific methods can interact with spiritual beliefs and start to refine them, start to make them more discriminating.
Vincent: I have heard a couple times even the Dalai Lama, for instance is open to revising the Tibetan Buddhist doctrine, at least in his order based on evidence and that that seems interesting that there are leaders out there who share that kind of view or opinion.
Charles: Yeah, he is quite wonderful and quite unique that way. That’s also another example where I think science can help spirituality. When I read about the way they choose the next Dalai Lama, the testing situation they use would never pass muster in a parapsychological experimental setting. With monks actually there who knew the previous Dalai Lama, you have all this chance for sensory cues to coach a child to give the right responses. We should teach they how to do it double-blind and then you get a more accurate reading.
Vincent: That would be awesome, the double-blind Dalai Lama!
Charles: There you go.
Vincent: Nice, nice and besides the many maybes which re-incarnation is one of them, you also spend a lot time exploring what you consider the big five. I wanted to hear about that because you feel from the research that it’s actually much more persuasive, the evidence that these five things are actually like you are saying earlier they’re actual realities. They are not simply things that might be the case but there is actually some very strong evidence to suggest that they are real.
Charles: And it is mostly experimental evidence too, where you have good control over conditions. Something like these kids cases you know, it just happened it is not like you can produce it on demand. Although in moments of darker humor, I’ve thought perhaps we should barcode corpses and see if that would effect incarnation, and make them come up with birthmarks where we could just read with a scanner, but we have to bring a little humor to this situation. [Laughter]
The big five we have, dozens to hundreds of experiments showing that this stuff can happen. One of course is telepathy. You separate people so that as far as our known sensory apparatus goes there is no way that they can communicate, but sometimes what one person is thinking can be picked up by another person when they are completely shielded.
Another of the big five is what we call clairvoyance, the direct perception of physical reality. The information you want is not in somebody else’s mind at the time, It’s just the physical state of affairs, but people get it. The classic kinds of experiments that started these were basically card-guessing experiments. You separate two people, you have the sender in a telepathy experiment thoroughly, and usually that’s 10-12 times shuffle a deck of cards, and look at them one by one while trying to send them. If you get by chance, we are talking about Telepathy. If the cards are just thoroughly shuffled but nobody is looking at them and the person has to try to figure them out anyway at a distance and they get them that’s Clairvoyance. They’re somehow directly perceiving the state of the physical world.
The third of the big five is pre-cognition, where you accurately predict a future state of events when even if you knew the present state of events you couldn’t predict it because there are random processes in between scrambling things up.
The fourth one is psychokinesis, the direct effect of mind over matter. Originally studied with dice throwing experiments, eventually resulting in these wonderful Rube Goldberg machines throwing dice, while a subject would stand on the other side of the room, and be told, “Make them come up fours this time. Thank you, now make them come up threes,” and so forth. And you get these deviations from chance that show that sometimes the person’s intention is indeed affecting it.
And the fifth one is psychic healing of one sort or another. This might actually be a form of psychokinesis, or it might be some separate form of psychic ability, but there’s lots and lots of evidence, now.
These are the big five. These are the things human beings can do, that we don’t have any feasible explanation of, in terms of our current material understanding of the world, or reasonable extensions of that. And I say reasonable extensions, because who knows but that there might be some drastic revisioning of physics the way, for instance, quantum physics revisioned classical physics, and then things might fit in. But for now, they don’t fit in, and that’s why I talk about non-materiality; they don’t fit that material kind of view of things. So, we should study these things on their own terms.
Vincent: One of our earliest guests was a gentleman named B. Alan Wallace, and he talks about how we’re sort of poised for a revolution in the mind sciences, the way there was a revolution in the physical sciences, or in the biological sciences, and it sounds like some of this stuff sort of fits in with his position that there’s, in fact, a lot we can learn about the mind through this sort of exploration. That’s cool.
Charles: It’s stuff we have to learn also, you know. I’ve seen innumerable books and articles that try to explain the mind solely on a physical basis, and I immediately look in the index to see whether they even deal with these psychic kinds of phenomena, and if they don’t deal with it, I know immediately they’re trying to explain things while ignoring an important part of reality; there’s got to be something wrong.
Vincent: It’s interesting, I guess for me personally, as we’re exploring some of these things. It brings up the question, because I can look back at my own experience being a Buddhist practitioner, and I can see that there have been periods where I’ve been extremely skeptical of any sort of psychic phenomena, and those sort of things. And yet, at the same time, I’ve had a lot of crazy experiences doing meditation, and being on retreat, and even just in my normal life where I’ve become more and more open to these things, and yet it seems like such a difficult thing to talk about, because those are sort of subjective accounts, they’re not really evidence based in terms of double-blind studies, and things like that. But I wonder for people out there who have had these type of experiences, what it’s like not really being able to talk about them without the potential of being sort of outcast.
And then on the other side, we’ve got people who may be extremely skeptical, and have not had experiences like this, and simply find it unhelpful. All of these people are sort of coexisting in different spiritual traditions. I know in the Buddhist tradition, they’re definitely together practicing, and I wonder, on a cultural level, how do we deal with that rift? Do you have any ideas about how these things can be brought together?
Charles: I love the way you ask me thirty questions, simultaneously…
Vincent: Sorry. [Laughter]
Charles: I’ll take a shot at it. Sometimes, for instance, when I teach basic meditation practices at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where I teach part-time, I’ll deliberately avoid mentioning any spiritual components of it at all, and I’ll present it as sort of a basic meditation for materialist. And you can present it that way as a very minimal sort of thing , and say “this is something that will help your brain get in a better sort of state and you’ll like that.” And that’s not bad. I mean you know, if you can help people be happier or whatever with the belief system they have that’s a fine thing to do.
My own feeling though is if you reduce Buddhism to nothing but a way of putting your brain in order, then let’s face the fact that meditation is a very inefficient way to do it. All those thousands of hours sitting on your ass with weird things happening, and being bored and tired, and distracted, and all that… And the pharmaceutical companies will invent a pill that will do it much better someday if indeed it is nothing but material.
But, if our minds are something more than our brains, if we are spiritual beings in some sense, then I don’t think we should think that the big pharma is going solve all our problems someday. They might help us. They might come up with a drug that makes us meditate more effectively, but we have to understand what mind is on its own terms and work with that also. And that’s why I think the spiritual side of Buddhism is important, okay. It’s fine as just a psychotherapy for materialists to make their brains function more smoothly, but it’s much more than that. And I think Buddhism has to recognize that.
There’s all these attempts right now to keep finding brain correlates of meditation. And I think it’s wonderful, I mean I’m a nerd, I’ve done that kind of research in the past. And politically it’s an excellent thing to do. When I was in graduate school for instance, I wanted to do my research on dreams. And dreams were considered subjective and unscientific, and all my mentors were discouraging me. And then along came the discovery that dreams were accompanied by a change in brain waves. “Oh my gosh, that means dreams are real.”
I saw the same thing happen for meditation about a dozen years later. In psychology up to the point, meditation, to put it harshly, was something done by foreigners who were half-naked sitting in the mud, and they were probably schizophrenic. And it was weird and crazy. And then all of the sudden there were brain wave changes down from meditation that became real and legitimate to study for it.
Well, I think it’s great to study that stuff. I mean the brain is part of who we are and if we can make it work more effectively, great. But it’s real important whether you’ve had psychic experiences or not or if you’re even open to them, to not let Scientism tell you that if you have these unusual experiences they can’t be what they seem to be, you’re probably dumb or crazy to have them. Again, that’s the main reason I wrote The End of Materialism to give people a basic factual background that says that these things happen and they imply a spiritual side of man, and don’t be ashamed of them. Try to understand them on their own terms. Develop them.
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Now that I know that intense meditation practice ain't going to necessarily get me reincarnated, I'm giving it all up and just banking on a good spin of the reincarnation wheel.
Kidding.
I still think Stephen Batchelor's basic point holds here: why *would* one be reincarnated? And why those three thousand kids who discovered they were auto-mechanics who'd died violent deaths in villages 150 miles away, as opposed to everyone else?
I recently heard an interview with Rupert Sheldrake where he made an interesting suggestion. He discussed the possibility that everyone's life experience is a part of a morphic field and that past life memories could be a result of us "tuning into" another person's life history in such a vivid way that we experience the memories, emotions, etc as if they were our own. Perhaps he would be a good Geeks interview on the subject of reincarnation.
I think this is an important point – once you discard the mainstream scientific worldview, the field is wide open. Why is reincarnation the right explanation? Why not Sheldrake's morphic fields? Or we could use traditional Christian metaphysics rather than Vedic. The evidence for reincarnation could be equally interpreted as evidence for demon possession.
right. the kids have these memories. what does that mean? well, it means that those kids have those memories. when get into explaining it, it's anybody's guess. even with rigorous research, there's always issues. i think buddhist ideas of not believing anything are important here. starting to believe in a specific interpretation of a phenomenon is a slippery slope and definitely not the middle way. for example, let's say reincarnation is real in it's popular sense. how they do we generate karma to not be reborn etc. it's all dangerous when taken to far. rebirth, karma, enlightenment, these are 'concepts' that point to the mystery of being. leave it there or we'll make ourselves crazy.
One question is counts as evidence, and one what basis do we evaluate evidence? Scientific method has an established procedure for this and as far as I know there is no test for psychic powers that has ever passed muster – there are anecdotes a plenty, but *no* evidence. On the other hand there have been several debunkings of high profile 'psychics' who had taken in people who were not particularly gullible (one thinks of Uri Geller, or Sai Baba…). Compare the situation with homeopathy for which is there is no good evidence that it is better than placebo (probably because it IS placebo).
The other question is "what is spirituality?" (and is it the same as spiritualism?) At what point do we stop wasting our time tracking down evidence for magic (in the hope of a shortcut to Enlightenment?), and get on with the relatively mundane work our practice? I know plenty of people who claim to have had psychic experiences of various sorts. Often they simply become distracted by the details of the experience and behave as it it makes them special, without it really making any positive difference to how they live their lives. Even if there are psychic powers they don't seem to help with the job at hand, and may make it more difficult. This may be why the Buddha appears many times in the Pāli Canon to warn bhikkhus against cultivating or displaying their psychic powers.
The evidence for the beneficial effects of ethical behaviour and meditation is far stronger (in the sense that it actually exists!), more widely accepted and confirmed by impeccable scientific method. That's what an evidenced based spirituality will be based on.
I thought Vince did a fantastic job with the interview–great questions!
I'm very familiar with the ambivalence that Vince expressed, as when he mentioned going through periods of extreme skeptical doubt about any and all metaphysical claims. I can certainly relate to this. And yet, I'm not quite willing to surrender totally to the upper-right quadrant and give up even agnosticism about a transcendent dimension or what have you.
Anyway, thanks again to Vince for a really interesting interview.
Half the point of Tart's work, and the work of people like Dean Radin, is in fact to take a totally scientific approach to testing psychic powers. Their assertion is that they have, in fact, demonstrated ample, good evidence for psychic powers.
If you want to specifically criticize specific methods or findings, go ahead, but your comment as it stands is completely ignoring the issue at hand.
Tart, Radin and others have taken the trouble to write entire books detailing the evidence which you blithely claim is lacking. Have you even read the books?
James Randi, the famous sceptic has a one million dollar paranormal challenge. If paranormal evidence can be demonstrated through a scientific approched, the applicant will be given a million dollars. It my be interesting for Mr Tart to submit his findings. This, at the very least, would expose the debate to a larger audience.
@G-M. As I say, scientists have standards of evidence that popular books on ESP tend to overlook – it's been a while, but yes I've read one or two; and in the mean time gained a degree in chemistry and physics, and had one or two peer-reviewed papers on Buddhism published. I've also self-published books and so I know the difference. I'll read, and assess, the evidence when in it's in Nature, Science, or some other high profile peer-reviewed journal – let Radin et al satisfy the editorial boards first. Meditation research certainly seems to have no problem getting through the peer-review process these days. ESP has tried and failed for decades. Life is too short to spend it on day time TV.
So your criteria for giving their research a fair shot is that it 'satisfies' the 'editorial boards' of some 'high profile peer-reviewed journal' like Nature, Science….'
Do you actually believe that those journals (especially those ones) are going to give such work a fair reading, or even a proper review, in the first place?
And so it goes, actually this is a great illustration of how the peer review process is similar to a high school popularity contest rather than any type of unbiased look at evidence.
My view of the situation is that at least some psi-related studies are *absolutely* done according to proper standards… standards that would be unquestioned if the topic wasn't psi… the real reason they are not accepted by mainstream science is this type of anti-scientific circular logic: "Well if this was true it would suggest there are important principles totally missed by the standard models of physics… therefore the experiment itself must have been done wrong or the author is a full-on liar".
Have you read any studies involving random number generators, ganzfields or precognitive gsr-response to visual stimuli? Calling down Uri Geller then claiming there are *no* interesting tests for psi just sounds like you simply haven't looked.
Charles Tart has been doing interesting work for a long time, if you look into his cv and work I think you will understand my opinion that he is intimately acquainted with proper standards of evidence.
Anyway I am sincere about my interest in this and not just trying to pick Internet fights…
It's getting late here but there is a 2nd point I wanted to bring up:
Do you have any interest in concepts such as Rigpa or Buddha-mind or storehouse consciousness? Are they not 'properly' spiritual?
If we accept the standard materialist account of "it's all in your brain" it would suggest that there really isn't any way a person could 'experience' a 'universal source of awareness', wouldn't it? Is 'nirvana' more just about 'reducing stress', in your view?
And even if you do favor the most 'dry/reductionist' view on what these practices aim to achieve, is it really fair to say the more metaphysical angles are superfluous or 'spiritualist'? The 'view' and metaphysics of buddhism do seem to matter to a great number of practitioners.
@G-M. So your criteria for giving their research a fair shot is that it 'satisfies' the 'editorial boards' of some 'high profile peer-reviewed journal' like Nature, Science….'
Yep. You've got it. If we are going to have evidence based spirituality then let's have the highest standards of evidence – let's have proper scrutiny of method and observations, let's expose conclusions to the deepest questioning, let's dig out unspoken assumptions, and sort out anecdote and conjecture from fact and evidence. Let the results be repeatable and testable. It was Charles Tart that invoked the scientific method, and I was going along with him, 100%.
Quantum Mechanics (completely weird and counter intuitive) got through this process and has become widely accepted, despite opposition from Einstein and other conservative/establishment physicists of the day. Recently ideas about "dark matter" and "dark energy" which run counter to all known cosmological theories got published in Nature and are being widely discussed by physicists. Both of these happened because there was experimental and theoretical *rigour*, and because the evidence could be compared and confirmed by other experimenters. That is what science is like. Let ESP satisfy those same criteria and I will indeed take it seriously as science. Until then it's magic; and I have Dharma practice to get on with.
To answer your 2nd question I have no interest in Buddha Nature, though there is no doubt that many Buddhists do, and in my opinion Buddhism is all about what Buddhists believe it to be about. Hence Buddhism is often all about metaphysics. Though I have often argued that metaphysics are a red-herring, just as ontologies are. The materialist/non-materialist dichotomy is hopelessly limited for discussing real life views. I'm not a materialist or a reductionist: I'm an sceptical epistemological realist, and a transcendental idealist. Perception arises out of the interaction between an object (which I take to exist in some sense without me observing it, though I cannot say more than that) and a subject (which has an important determining role in how the object is perceived through a-priori categories and psychological conditioning). Though as I'm also a pragmatic Popperian empiricist I don't believe that any view can be proved, only disproved; however some things are useful to believe even if they are not factually true (which doesn't include ESP).
at the same time, there's a lot people who have prostrated a million times, sat for 20 years, or chanted everyday who are still nuts. waking up and growing up aren't the same as we heard in the podcast. like you said, practicing ethics and some sort of meditation is the real work and it does help. that's as far as i'm will to go and that's more than a lifetime's of work:)
There are many points that I could respond to in these interesting and important comments on my interview….but, for lack of time, I can just touch on a few….Hopefully I do this in the Buddhist spirit we share of less attachment to opinions and ideas, and more accurate perception of reality….
Classical Buddhism, as I understand it, is about lessening and, hopefully, completely ending one’s suffering. I believe we all think this is a desirable goal. A major question for our times would then become “How effective are various aspects of Buddhist practice in doing this in today’s world?” Reincarnation, gods and goddesses, spirits, etc., were an accepted part of most people’s reality in the Buddha’s time, e.g., but if they are not literally true – we won’t deal with their psychological functions here – then they can be big obstacles to effective practice for many of us moderns, distracting or confusing us. Can we have a completely materialist or physicalist Buddhism that is an effective way of lessening or ending suffering?
By materialist, I mean a basic belief that nothing fundamentally exists but physical objects and forces of the type we are familiar with, stuff and forces that can be sensed with our physical senses or instrumental extensions of our senses. For the complete materialist, our minds, our consciousness, our experience arises solely from the operation of physical forces in your brain, and cease when the brain ceases to function. Your understanding of what you’re reading now, e.g., or any of your experiences, is, in principle, totally reducible to the electrical and chemical configuration of your brain. Any suffering you have is an unsatisfactory configuration of your brain’s electrochemical state, any satisfaction is another electrochemical configuration of your brain. Basic Buddhism, with it’s admonitions to live a moral life and practice meditation, is then a psychological method designed to lessen or eliminate unsatisfactory brain states and increase satisfactory ones. I’m oversimplifying greatly, of course, but that’s the essence, as I see it, of Buddhism from the point of view of complete materialism.
Note I said “complete” materialism. There are philosophical positions that admit the importance of the physical without assuming that only the physical is ultimately real. They assume, as I do as a working, scientifically testable hypothesis, that there is something real we loosely call “mind” that is of a different nature than the physical brain, but which can effect the brain and body. This approach does not necessarily mean, as many committed complete materialists seem to assume, that the universe can’t really be understood because “mind” is some kind of “supernatural,” inherently non-understandable phenomena. You can let “mind” be of a different nature and nevertheless assume it has its own properties and regularities, “laws,” that we can discover and use. Classical Buddhism of course assumes this position: it knew nothing of brains, but felt it knew a lot about minds and minds’ effects, such that suffering could be lessened or eliminated. Personally I think that knowing the properties and laws of both mind and brain will allow more effective functioning than knowing only one set, so I’m all for appropriate research on both.
By analogy, I am the “mind” as far as this computer I am typing on is concerned, but the real physical action and outcome is a set of electrical configurations in the material substrate of the computer – which ultimately convey my mind’s meaning to your mind via your computer. That’s a dualist position.
Materialist Buddhism:
We could, then, have a completely materialistic adaptation of Buddhism. No minds, spirits, gods or goddesses, psychic stuff, etc., just brain states and meditation practices to optimize our brain functioning, less suffering, more happiness. “Mind” or “mental practices” are just semantically convenient ways of referring to processes that are actually physical processes in the brain.
Interestingly, I initially mistyped “meditation” in the previous paragraph as “medication,” so it read “medication practices,” my fingers (or unconscious mind or whatever) anticipating the point I’ll now make. If complete materialism is true, then probably all this meditation stuff, taking so many years and not working well for so many people, will eventually be replaced as Big Pharma develops the drugs to optimize our brain states. Then you have to wonder: how fast will Big Pharma get there? How bad is my personal suffering? Shall I put in all this time meditating, even though it may not work for me, before I die but it might, and so less suffering might happen before Big Pharma develops Nirvana®? Or shall I spend all this time doing what pleasures me and bet that Big Pharma will ultimately eliminate all my suffering in time with Nirvana®?
Charles T. Tart
Part 3:
There Is No Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?
If you accept that the Buddhist approach to ending suffering is based on the 8-fold path, not just exotic meditation techniques, then Right Speech, accuracy, is important. I would like to ask that we use right speech when we discuss the evidence for psychic phenomena (like reincarnation or telepathy), which imply possible spiritual realities. This evidence and its implications is what my “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book is all about, and my book in turn refers to many other scientifically accurate books and articles on this area.
Right speech would not allow a statement that there is no evidence for psychic phenomena.
Right speech would allow statements like the following:
“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities and so neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”
“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities, I look for articles and books which support my view and neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”
“I apply my critical faculties extensively to look for flaws in arguments whose conclusions I don’t like but am quite uncritical and accepting of arguments whose conclusions I want to believe.”
These are honest statements which would be accurate representations of many people’s views.
Most of us could probably also accurately state:
“My beliefs and feelings about psychic and spiritual possibilities are largely the result of my cultural conditioning and person history rather than a result of rational investigation and thought.”
A commitment to Right speech would also note that if you want to make accurate and authoritative statements about this area, scientifically accurate statements, you have a lot of studying to do! I got actively involved in parapsychological research, e.g., in the early 60s, and subscribed and read practically all the scholarly and research reports in the four refereed specialty journals for that field since then. At two to five articles per issue, four issues per year, that’s a rough estimate of 50 years, 32 to 80 articles per year, that’s a total of 1,600 to 4,000 articles. Plus many books, of course. And there were hundreds of experimental articles published before I came into the field.
I could go on, but I’ve gone on at probably too much length already. So I’ll just conclude with the basic theme of “The End of Materialism." When you actually apply basic scientific method, you find humans occasionally demonstrating psychic abilities which are the sorts of things you would expect a spiritual being to have, so it’s reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in your approach to life.
Can you still gain something valuable as a materialistic Buddhist? Probably. Should you believe everything labeled “spiritual” or “Buddhist?” Of course not, there’s lot of nonsense under these labels….as there are in all areas of life. Develop your sensitivity, discrimination, ethical character, meditative skill, and your logical abilities – we’re moving in an interesting direction!
Charles T. Tart
Perhaps reincarnation is the natural law of what being described as the effects of cosmic or universal consciousness or presently being studied as quantum and unify field sciences. Reincarnation can be the manifestation of nature interdependent-interconnect-interrelate phenomena such as quantum synchronicity, non-locality, coherence and entanglement from oneness spiritual existence or universal consciousness.
My reaction to all this is that I don't think we can exclude 'magick' from Buddhism, and I don't think that we can reconcile Buddhism with materialism.
If we adopt materialism, then matter is the fundamental source of all our knowledge. Matter is taken to be real and substantial and the teachings on Emptiness fall by the wayside. If matter is reality and not Emptiness then enlightenment is a 'material' configuration also – presumably some kind of brain state. Enlightenment would therefore be a 'seeming' and not the underlying nature of all things, in which case the practices of Buddhism would lead merely to this 'seeming' also, rather than insight into the truth of things. So there would be no special advantage to Buddhism above any other religious or ethical system. Hence: Buddhism could not survive materialism.
The term 'magick' has been used disparagingly above, but it should be noted how many traditions of Buddhism include magical practices to a greater or lesser degree. What magick is very good at enabling us to realise is the contingent nature of reality. Our desire shapes our belief, which shapes our perception, which shapes our reality. Magick is the fundamental art of bending reality with our desire, employing this chain of dependencies.
There is no objective evidence for magick. Likewise there is no objective evidence for Emptiness, for enlightenment, or for your most amazing experience on the meditation cushion being what it seemed to be. Magick depends upon subjective experiences. The evidence of science for magick is often statistical, yet it's the subjective experience that is the vital aspect of magick. The lack of such evidence for magick should not be something that troubles Buddhists – unless they also believe they will reach enlightenment by being presented with evidence of its reality, rather than through first-hand practice.
In other words, as with Buddhist practice, so with magick: you will only experience and find 'evidence' for them in your own experience.
Although magick is great for demonstrating to us immediately the contingent nature of reality, people can get hung up on the simple trick of bending reality to their will without taking that extra step of realising that the 'self' performing the magick is also a part of a contingent reality. It is in this sense that the Buddha warned against the siddhis. Magick itself is an essential but implicit aspect of Buddhist practice.
Hi Duncan.
I've got a friend who says, "With perfect knowledge of neurobiology–which is coming–we'll be able to induce the full range of interior experience." In other words, the Matrix.
So, for him, whatever the Buddha's enlightenment experience was under the Bodhi tree, it was only a brain state, albeit one that might have depended on previous re-wiring through ardent practice and enabled by neuroplasticity. If that state could be reproduced in a laboratory and all of the neurological data related to it could be captured somehow, then future brain-manipulators would simply be able to induce enlightenment in all humans whenever they wanted. Or so the theory goes.
Charles points to the idea of an enlightenment drug, but there is already something called "the God helmet," which a Canadian neuroscientist uses to induce "spiritual" experiences. People who put this thing on apparently have out-of-body experiences and even sense spiritual presences in the room with them. The scientist's take is that stimulation of the right-temporal lobe induces a kind of detachment that eases the death process, and that all "spiritual" experiences throughout history have been mere activations of this part of the brain, which were then interpreted based on the magic/mythic understanding of the day. A segment on this appeared on the recent TV show "Through the Wormhole."
The march of materialism seems absolutely relentless. Increasingly, even taking a position of agnosticism seems to be something that people will have to defend. As Ken Wilber points out, the center of gravity of our culture is scientific materialism. I find this gravitational pull to be so strong that I actually have a tendency to forget all the weird, seemingly psi-related stuff that has occurred in my life. Truly, practice seems to be the only refuge, which I suppose is a great thing!
Hi Joel –
My difficulty is with the definition of enlightenment as a 'state', which it can't be if it is the realisation of the unchanging and the non-contingent. Otherwise, should we suppose that the Buddha was more enlightened at some times than others, or that his enlightenment depended on what his circumstances happened to be at a particular moment? I don't think we should – and we don't have to, if we discard the idea of enlightenment as state.
'The God helmet', on the other hand, certainly produces a state – which ceases when the helmet is switched off. A so-called 'enlightenment drug' would be unlike any medicine that I can think of, in that it would have to produce an effect that never wore off and wasn't contingent upon the organism of the taker. All drugs so far invented produce states, wouldn't you say? It's like supposing there might be a drug which enabled us to speak and understand Russian when we took it! Maybe that's possible (although I personally doubt it), but I'd hazard that it's somewhat further off than your friend might suggest.
These imminent promises of devices to store 'neurological data' also provoke my scepticism. They may turn out to be as indefinitely postponed as our personal jet-packs and our holidays on the moon! As I mentioned in my last post, such ideas seem to contradict the teachings on emptiness. How are we to regard our experience as 'data'? Imagine a coin pressed into some putty – certainly, it leaves an impression or an image, but where is the 'data' in this? What has been 'stored' and in what?
Call me a cynic!
Not a cynic, I would say, but a very perceptive observer. Your post above has helped me realize that I have indeed been conceiving of enlightenment as a state. Seems like an important correction.
On a related note, I ran across this spirited defense of agnosticism on Slate. It's a good read…
http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/pagenum/all/
Many thanks for this great interview Vince and Charles and many thanks Charles for your kind and comprehensive answer above – it is most generous. There is a lot of resistance as one paradigm dies and another is born as (Buddhism or psychology) folks create their identities out of all sorts of bits of "stuff" (views, opinions et al) and often pointing out (pun intended tehe) can demolish someones main roof post so is emotively resisted. Tough labour for those of us trying to shift things along!
I also think this was a nice one for BG as whilst historically a fan of Bachelor I found his current position increasingly unpalatable not so much "Buddhism without beliefs" as "Buddhism squashed into a western modern materialist paradigm". Although he talked about scepticism I dont see that in his position (for the reasons Charles mentioned – namely there is a ton of data showing psi phenomena are real).
More broadly ultimately we need to move "beyond the silos" to a coversation which can include all folks – Buddhist, Avdaita, Sufi etc etc – and all those preapred to mine experience until the sweet end – and having got there be prepared to go beyind the silo-specific framing and language. Easier said than done although the Buddha pointed the way re not carrying his teachings around on the shoulders like a raft having reached the other side.
Pity Charles didnt repsond to the Sheldfrake point about tuning into morphic fields of "others" prior lives rather than "ones own" … other than the birthmarks I dont recall anything in the interview which would indicate it was "ones" "own" prior life being recalled.
thanks again to Charles and Vince
kindest
MikeB
I need to make a clarification here. I doubt very much that I said in my interview with Vince that there is "no evidence" for rebirth. I am fully aware of the work of Dr. Stevenson and his colleagues in Virginia, and agree very much that in exploring the question of rebirth that this is the way to go. If there turns out to be sufficient empirical data to suggest that rebirth is a reality, then I would accept it. The problem remains, though, that even were rebirth to be accepted one day as a scientfic fact, it would not necessarily tell us anything about the rather more important (for Buddhists) question of karmic cause and effect. Rebirth is important doctrinally because it provides a vehicle for moral causality. But there is no reason to assume that just because there is rebirth, then moral causality follows. The two ideas are logically distinct – despite the fact that many Buddhists use the term "karma-and-rebirth" as though it were a single idea. it may be turn out to be the case that rebirth is a matter of chance and has no bearing at all on the quality of your acts in a former life or former lives. The example Charles Tart gives of the tiny percentage of young kids on the Virginia database who might be considered as formerly wise or saintly people points in this direction. If this turns out to be so, then it would be extremely problematic for traditional Buddhists. For rebirth, in this case, would no longer have any relevance at all in terms of moral acts and their consequences.
My position, however, on this subject is basically this: I am not interested in whether or not one is reborn. I find the whole issue irrelevant, an unnecessary distraction from what is central to the Dhamma: how to live a good life here and now. If there is rebirth and a law of karma, then this would surely be the best way to prepare for a future life. But if there is not, then one has lived optimally here and now. Moreover, this very point is explicitly made by the Buddha himself in the Kalama Sutta.
Warmly, Stephen
Stephan you make some good points. Compared to what I consider the importance of the question of whether there is reincarnation, there is indeed a “paucity” of evidence. We should have hundreds, if not thousands of smart folks researching reincarnation, not half a dozen at the University of Virginia. Clearly this is taboo in current social times, but we should.
Why do I emphasize “should?” I agree that (1) leading a good life now is vitally important, (2) that thinking about reincarnation can be a major distraction, and (3) if reincarnation and karma in a traditional Buddhist sense are true anyway, then leading that good life now is certainly one of the best possible ways to create good karma and up the odds of a good life next time.
So let’s settle the reality of reincarnation with extensive research and, of course, be researching what we can about karma at the same time. I think it matters a lot.
For example, to make it very personal seeming, let’s say you and I have a life-threatening disease, but there’s only one dose of medicine around. No reincarnation, no karma, I’m certainly going to be tempted to steal that one dose and use if for myself – and let you die. I may feel guilty, for social conditioning and/or built in biological reasons, but I’m alive to feel guilty and you’re dead and done with. And Big Pharma can probably give me some tranquilizers so my guilt won’t bother me so much….. But if traditional Buddhist ideas of karma are correct, I’m going to pay heavily somewhere down the line, this incarnation or the next, for being so selfish and nasty.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have some relevant data on this rather than just a belief?
I know the Buddha is supposed to have said somewhere – I’m not a Buddhist scholar – don’t think too much about reincarnation and karma before you’re fully enlightened, because of circumstances needing to “ripen” for karma to manifest it’s just too hard to figure it out. But nowadays we do multi-causal correlations studies all the time in psychology and medicine, we can probably tackle that issue now.
Meanwhile I like to think that I’m a basically decent sort of guy (Buddha nature?) and I’m not going to steal your medicine anyway because it’s wrong, that I’m not just a cold, calculating, what’s-in-it-for-me kind of guy…. I hope I’m right.
As to the idea of karma not being real, reincarnation just happens, your future life has nothing to do with what you do now…..kind of undercuts the whole point of building good karma, doesn’t it?
I’ve always found confusing the idea that we have no permanent “self,” but it’s “your” karma that affects the next life. The best I can do with this is agree that we way, way overemphasize the self in all sorts of crazy ways and it helps to lighten up, but I’m not up to any absolute metaphysical beliefs about whether we have a more permanent self or not. And for all that we like and respect Buddhism, maybe “they” just never got this one figured out correctly…..
Charles T. Tart
Dr. Tart, I'm late to this discussion (and I haven't listened to the podcast yet because my iPhone is on the fritz with podcasts at the moment….eagerly waiting for the transcript). But I read this and all your previous comments above, and I'm really grateful for the open-minded yet scientifically grounded perspective you bring to this discussion. It is long overdue, and is like a balm for those whose minds ache from overexposure to the impoverished view of materialism. I'm looking forward to delving into your website and getting more familiar with your work.
Batchelor seems to assert, in his comment above, that the apparent disconnect between rebirth as a pauper child in this life and having been a saintly figure in the previous life points to the absurdity of karma as a propulsive force in rebirth (or any demonstrable connection between karma and rebirth). It does so only if one is limiting one's view of the karmic situation to two lifetimes. Batchelor has studied Buddhist scriptures and teachings on karma and rebirth sufficiently that he ought to know better than to make that very elementary mistake.
Hi Dennis,
Sorry the transcript wasn't posted. We had it all along, but it looks like it didn't get posted correctly. Anyway, it's up now if you want to check it out.
'We have such an extraordinary paucity of any hard evidence that people have ever been reborn', was Stephen's wording, according to the podcast transcript.
"One question is counts as evidence, and one what basis do we evaluate evidence? Scientific method has an established procedure for this and as far as I know there is no test for psychic powers that has ever passed muster – there are anecdotes a plenty, but *no* evidence." I'm wondering from this statement if Jayarava actually read the interview? The point that was being made was that scientific method does indeed have evidence for such things… it is the scientist belief system that clings to current preponderance of evidence and uses the majority evidence to ignore scientific method's own minority evidence. The evidence gathered by scientific method is that although most people don't remember past lives, some people do. That's a fact… whether you like or accept that fact or not depends on your belief system. Of course, both Buddhism's doctrine of impermanence and scientific method say that as more evidence is gathered that fact may change…
How can we demonstrate that they (personally) were present at some previous time? The usual historical methods seem insufficient, and taking their word for it hardly credible (think Uri Geller, the famous bender). Perhaps one of these people could predict some *previously unknown* historical fact that could then be shown to be true by previously unknown archaeological finds? Get the prediction made under control circumstances with no advance warning to the subject, publish it well in advance of the search, and then go off and dig and find some previously unheard of city or civilisation which substantially confirms the predictions of the person. That should not be hard to organise. Or perhaps get the person to predict the discovery of the previously unknown species recorded in the fossil record, and then discover a fossil just as described, and where described. Perhaps they could decipher one of the previously undecipherable scripts?
The value of a scientific theory is in the predictions it makes. Predicting the known has value as a calibration, but predicting the unknown is what makes people sit up and take notice.
That would satisfy me and, I think, the scientific community more broadly. If such evidence exists, then let me know.
The main problem with "remembering" past lives is that memory formation, storage and recall is at every stage absolutely dependent on the brain – the details of the parts of the brain involved having been worked out in part from malfunctions in memory. If brain damage can completely disrupt (any, or all of) the formation, storage and recall of memories in living people, then how do memories survive the complete death of the brain?
Looks like the comments are petering out, but:
It seems like Dr. Tart has neatly divided Buddhist experience into 1) stuff that could be gotten more easily with the right drug or psychoanalyst and 2) stuff that necessarily involves "psychic phenomenon." It's all about "states." Before I blather on, would that be correct?