Charles Tart - a man of many passions

by SIMON FORSYTH

     PROFESSOR CHARLES Tart is a man of many passions. From starting with amateur radio while a teenager to the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), his interests are varied and diverse. Along with his enthusiasm for anything which stimulates his intellectual interest is a robust determination to acquire knowledge and understanding of his subject. And perhaps nothing quite inflames his cerebral curiosity more than the question of survival after death. It is a subject he has been closely involved with for more than 30 years.

He has been a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) and he was the first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. As well as being a laboratory researcher, Dr Tart has written various books including Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception and Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm. His book, Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality examines the relationship between psychic abilities and our spiritual nature. It was the March 1998 best metaphysical book selection of Amazon.com, the world's largest on-line book retailer.

Clearly, Dr Charles Tart is a scientist firmly aligned to the Spiritualist belief in the reality of the spirit. And he has strong views on society's lack of support for the Survival issue:

"Frankly, I think that it is insane that society does not give widespread support to the question of survival after death. I think for practically everybody it would make an enormous difference right now in how they live their lives. If scientists had extensively investigated the possibility of life after death armed with the same kind of financial budgets as mainstream fields of research, just think what could be achieved. If they found at least sufficient evidence to declare Survival a probability then people would undoubtedly live their lives differently if they believed that death was not the end but was simply the start of a new life and that there would be consequences for their actions on earth. I find it crazy that society doesn't look at this issue. After all, death is a destination that we are all travelling towards. Yet so little interest is being shown towards it.

"I was at a meeting recently regarding the question of survival after death and there was about 14 of us and probably 10 of those were amongst the 10-15 most knowledgeable people about research into Survival on the planet. And that is ridiculous because most of us were theoreticians. We have almost no time to do any actual research into it. We are just able to give some part-time attention to whatever evidence has been collected in the past. Yet we are the experts! Now that's just plain ridiculous."

When analysing the reasons for the paucity of enthusiasm, Dr Tart has thought-provoking views:

"Well, there's two levels here. One is that organised religion doesn't want people to think about testing beliefs about the spirit and soul. It wants people to blindly believe a particular doctrine. It's funny in a way. You'd think that the religious leaders would be very interested in science providing some evidence for belief in a soul. However, once you get into psychical research you are adopting an attitude that all beliefs are open to test. And most religions do not want their beliefs to be open to testing because evidence may be forthcoming which opposes a certain creed. That is why they don't want people to question and test their doctrines.

"Secondly, from a psychological perspective there is a deeper level of resistance to psychical research that comes from the fear of the phenomena. And fear is mostly unconscious in this regard. For example I was once giving a lecture at the American Society for Psychical Research in the 1970's. Afterwards they had a little reception in my honour and there were a lot of parapsychologists there and I decided to take advantage of the situation. As the guest of honour I was allowed a certain latitude in directing the discussion. Now, in those days I had a certain ambivalence about testing psychic phenomena. I liked experiments to work, but was not sure I wanted them to work too well - I had a certain fear of them. Now, I just thought it was me. I was young, hadn't found my place in life yet etc. So I thought that all these older and wiser heads around me would be able to give me some good advice about my fears.

"But you know what? I just couldn't get a discussion going about the fear of psychic phenomena. People would ignore what I said or intellectualise the idea and go off on some abstract philosophical discussion. And so finally, I really exploited my position of guest of honour and said: 'Look, I want us to do a little mental experiment. I want you all to imagine that I have brought with me a new drug that has been created. We'll call it Telepathine. It's a drug that when taken, will enable you to read the thoughts and experience the feelings of everybody within a hundred yards of you. Once you have taken this drug, you will have this ability permanently.

"Now, in this mental experiment of mine, I was offering these people the chance to posses an extraordinary psychic ability. These very same people had worked enormously hard to have careers in parapsychology at great personal cost. Yet, not one of these people wanted to take the imaginary drug. They didn't even want to address the scenario. They either ignored it or started all this philosophical talk again. Finally, I got so frustrated I shouted 'Who wants this?!' Still nobody wanted it. So, this made me realise that it wasn't my youth or insecurity that made me have ambivalent feelings. These same feelings must be pretty widespread and taboo. They mustn't be discussed. I have since done a little research on people's fears of psychic abilities and if you really push people into this idea of having a lot of telepathic ability, they get scared.

"And you know why they get scared? Suppose your ability enables you to find out that your neighbour is contemplating suicide. Aren't you responsible for their well-being now? Suppose you find out what your lover really thinks of you and it's not very flattering? It sensitises me to the fact that a lot of our polite social interaction is based on an attitude of: 'If you'll accept my image of myself that I like to project, then I'll accept your image of yourself that you want to project. I want to be known, but on my own terms and not too deeply.' So, I think that there are a lot of deep-level fears like that underneath the supposedly rational arguments."

Academic research into psychic ability and life after death has always been a woefully under-funded area of scientific investigation. It is a problem that certainly arouses Dr Tart's chagrin:

"Really, the under-funding of psychical research is ridiculous. Back in the 70's I did a survey of all the parapsychologists in the USA and Canada who could be remotely regarded as heading a psychical research laboratory. I counted about 13 people, which is such a disappointingly small number. I found that the amount of financial support for their research amounted to around $500,000 a year. That ranged from zero for individual labs up to around $100,000 for the really lucky ones. By scientific industrial standards of the time, $500,000 was enough to support 1 or 2 scientists and their associated support costs. It's like saying, 'Let's try and cure cancer. We'll hire one guy to work on it part time'. That is how psychical research compares to mainstream research!"

Will this situation improve?

"Not for rational reasons. The situation gets improved every once in a while when some wealthy individual gives some financial support to the field for a while. Right now, the field is probably in worse financial shape than it's been in the last 20 or 30 years."

Despite the lack of professional research into the subject, there are many amateurs around the world who devote many hours to the cause of Survival study in various fields. The Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) is one of them. This is the alleged appearance of spirit voices recorded on cassette tape while a radio is tuned between stations. While Dr Tart has the utmost respect for EVP researchers, he voiced his concern regarding this field of research.

"Frankly, I'd like it to believe that EVP is a promising area of study because I'm a very technical kind of person myself. However, I have to say that in the few occasions in which I have dipped into that literature, I have found it to be very poor quality research. For example, I used to be a radio engineer so I have a lot of practical experience with radio.

"These people basically tune a radio between stations and listen to the static until they think they hear something. As a psychologist, I can tell you that if you listen to white noise and static for a long period of time you are going to hear all sorts of things because you're hallucinating. That is what static does to the brain.

"From my background as an radio engineer, I can tell you that radio waves are capable of being broadcast on every single frequency known to man. There's millions of transmitters all over the planet, most of them usually only carry a short range but can sometimes carry much further. How can we know where these 'voices' are coming from? If anybody wants to claim that the voices they have recorded via their radios are from a discarnate source, they have got to show me that their receiver is inside a specially constructed enclosure that prevents any radio waves from getting through.

"It is pretty straight forward to construct a series of concentric metal boxes that would prevent the penetration of outside radio waves. But EVP researchers don't do that. They listen to their radios in ordinary rooms. So, my contention is that every once in a while some stray radio signal is going to be picked up that sounds like a voice. So, I really have to be honest and say that I'm disappointed in this field.

"Now, as a psychologist I can understand why they don't use a box which prevents radio waves from getting through. People are generally not rational about the evidence for Survival. The last time I gave a talk on the evidence for Survival I told people I was speaking as a scientist and of course scientists are supposed to be objective and I would try and be objective but I don't think that anybody who is going to die can be completely objective about the question of Survival!

"Now, I don't condemn EVP phenomena completely. I'm sure that researchers get something related to Survival once in a while for psychological reasons. Psychic phenomena do happen once in a while and they are more likely to happen if you have a belief system that makes it ok for them to have it. But I wish the evidence were better. But I have never seen enough to encourage me to even look at it thoroughly."

Despite his reservations of EVP, Dr Tart remains upbeat about psychical research and what it has achieved during its long history:

"Yes, of course more could have been achieved if more money was available. But I have to say that in spite of woefully inadequate funding for research and tremendous obstacles thrown in the way - not to mention the phenomena themselves being inherently difficult to 'pin down' so to speak - the fact that we have collected around 1500 excellently executed experiments over the past 100 years that have demonstrated some aspect of ESP and psychokinesis I think is amazing."

Professor Tart is particularly impressed by his researches into out-of-body experiences. But he is quick to differentiate them from what is known as remote viewing. Remote viewing experiments were pioneered at the Stanford Research Institute by Russell Targ. It is the alleged psychic ability to perceive places, persons and actions that are not within the range of the senses.

"I get incensed sometimes when people talk about out-of-body experiences and remote viewing experiences as if they were the same thing. They are not at all. In a remote viewing experiment the person is in their ordinary waking state. They are making drawings, talking and describing what's going on. Ingo Swann, known as the father of remote viewing, even smoked a cigar while he was doing it! But in an OBE people feel totally separate from their physical body, so the two are drastically different."

The professor went on to recount a highly convincing out-of-body experience of a young woman who was one of his research subjects. What makes this particular out-of-body experience remarkable is that she was apparently able to leave her physical body and read a 5-digit number, which was at a significant distance, and correctly give it to him upon return.

"During a conversation with a friend a couple of years ago, this lady - I'll call her Miss Z - reported that she had spontaneous out-of-body experiences approximately two to four times a week and that she would be interested in being studied in the laboratory. As this afforded an unusual opportunity for research, I decided to study her for four nights in a sleep laboratory in order to determine what, if any, out-of-body experiences occurred. The sleep laboratory consisted of two rooms, each lined with acoustic tile for sound attenuation.

"An intercom system allowed hearing anything the subject said. I monitored the recording equipment throughout the night while the subject slept and kept notes of anything she said or did. Occasionally I dozed during the night, beside the equipment, so possible instances of sleep talking might have been missed. The subject slept on a comfortable bed just below the observation window. Each laboratory night, after Miss Z was lying in bed, the physiological recordings were running satisfactorily, and she was ready to go to sleep, I went into my office down the hall. Once there, I opened a table of numbers at random, threw a coin onto the table as a means of random entry into the page, and copied off the first five digits immediately above where the coin landed.

"These were copied with a black marking pen, in figures approximately two inches high, onto a small piece of paper. Thus they were quite discrete visually. This five-digit random number constituted the 'psychic' target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered Miss Z's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject. This now provided a target which would be clearly visible to anyone whose eyes were located approximately six and a half feet off the floor or higher, but was otherwise not visible to Miss Z. She was instructed to sleep well, to try and have an out-of-body experience, and if she did so to try to wake up immediately afterwards and tell me about it, so I could note on the polygraph records when it had occurred. She was also told that if she floated high enough to read the five-digit number she should memorise it and wake up immediately afterwards to tell me what it was. My conversation with her after I had prepared the target was, of course, minimal and could not have given her any clue as to the target number.

"On reporting to the laboratory on the fourth night, Miss Z seemed to be determined to have the right kind of out-of-body experience. Although I had indicated complete satisfaction with her performance so far, she was angry at herself because she had not been able to float up and read the target number. Anyway, the night was uneventful for the most part - there were several dream periods in the first two-thirds of the night, as would be expected for any normal subject. Then at 6.04 am. Miss Z awoke and called out that the target number was 25132. This was absolutely correct, with the digits in the correct order.

"Now, that is a definite indication that something extraordinary had indeed happened. But what is needed is more thorough investigation and research. We are really only touching the tip of the ice-berg with experiments such as this."

If only the vast structure of modern science had more of Charles Tart's passion for this 'ice-berg'. Instead, like a gargantuan vessel steaming across the great sea of discovery, it fears and avoids confronting it.

Yet that didn't do the Titanic much good, did it?