President James Oschman with Incoming President Charles Tart
at the 2009 Conference in Westminster


Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.: On Becoming President of ISSSEEM

When I was asked to become President of ISSSEEM, I was hesitant.  Why me?  What could I contribute?  I'm not someone with great social skills or a natural leader, and the ISSSEEM Board was already doing a fine job guiding the organization.  I wouldn't have to be an operational leader, I was reassured, but more of a symbolic leader: my own professional career demonstrated the central theme and mission of ISSSEEM, namely to be open to unusual, "psychic" or "spiritual" aspects of reality, "subtle energies," especially in their relationship and application to healing, and to use the best methods of science and scholarship to clarify, refine and develop this knowledge.  OK, I thought, I could go with that. 

I've spent my career working at several frontiers of knowledge, such as altered states of consciousness, parapsychology, and the science and spirituality interface, and my work been driven by a personal dynamic of being curious and open on the one hand, while hating to be fooled (by others or, even worse, myself!) on the other.  Abraham Maslow, the principal founder of both humanistic and transpersonal psychologies, noted how science can be used as an open-ended personal growth system or as a highly prestigious neurotic defense system.  I've tried to work in the first mode, and it's been a fascinating and satisfying career.  Anyone interested can get an overview of it as my website, www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/.

My second source of hesitation was the uneasy feeling that there's a lot of far out people involved in ISSSEEM, and a distant knowledge of what they were doing sometimes exceeded my boggle threshold.  "Uh oh," I thought, "I'm reacting just like the establishment authorities who have irrationally rejected my own work and interests!"  Identification with the aggressor syndrome?  Too much acceptance in the mainstream?  Acting as President of ISSSEEM will be a personal growth opportunity to actually practice what I preach about being open and forming opinions on the basis of study and evidence, rather than socially conditioned reactions.  Practically, I can't possibly study all the many streams flowing under the ISSSEEM umbrella adequately, but where I can't do so, I can still suspend both belief and disbelief and encourage people to keep using the best scientific methods to develop their ideas and treatments.  This will be interesting....

What finally convinced me to accept the honor of being President was the chance to set the theme for our 2010 conference.  Last April I published what will probably be my magnum opus, "The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together," bringing my studies of consciousness, the paranormal and spirituality together.  It's primary aim is to help the many people who have spiritual inclinations or have had spiritual experiences, but believe that science has shown that all spirituality is nonsense, so they can't accept their own inner knowing.  They worry that they must be crazy or stupid to go against Science. 

It's true, of course, that lots of nonsense and pathology have been promulgated and rationalized in the name of spirituality and religion, but that's true for all areas of human life.  If you apply the basic methods of science to looking at psychic and spiritual experiences though, you find that humans sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect a spiritual being to have, so the idea of spirituality has not been shown to be all nonsense by proper science.  It's scientism, a rigid philosophy of materialism pretending to be essential science that rejects all spirituality.  The book argues that actual evidence shows it's reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual. 

But that's just the start.  Where do we need to go, what do we need to study to make our spirituality more evidence-based or evidence-enriched, so the spirituality and religion of the future becomes more in tune with reality and more effective?  That's the theme we'll have for our coming conference, and I'm looking forward to see what directions we come up with!

Charles T Tart




A Ph.D. committee member is needed for one of the students at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP), Richard Knowles, whose research on potential brain wave entrainment to the Earth's Schuman resonance has ground to a halt with the unexpected death of one of his committee members.

Please follow the link to our Archives of a past eSEEM for further information or email Richard directly at  rknowles@itp.edu