Altered States of Consciousness with Charles T. Tart #GJWMotivation #GJWpsychology #GJWhealth #GJWsc

Thinking Allowed Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove Hello and welcome, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is altered states of consciousness and with me is Professor Charles Tartt, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis and also emeritus professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Dr. Tartt has authored many books and his anthology called Altered States of Consciousness published in 1969 put that phrase on the map. As a matter of fact, I recall arriving in Berkeley that year and his book was pretty much must-reading for every college student at the time. I saw it everywhere. His other titles include States of Consciousness, Open Mind, Discriminating Mind, Waking Up and Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception. Welcome again Charlie. Hi Jeff. Pleasure to be with you. You know, it's pretty obvious to me that the interest in Altered States of Consciousness, which was so intense back in 1969 when your book came out, was largely because of the drug culture on the college campus. And I should mention you had also authored a book in that era on being stoned. A couple of years later, yeah. You really took a very serious psychological survey of the experiences reported by marijuana users. I was amazed by people's reactions to marijuana and they talked about the terrible things it did. So I looked in the scientific literature and what did it do? Well, it made your eyes red and it made you hungry and might affect your blood pressure slightly and it made a major risk of going to jail. People take a risk of going to jail for eyes getting red. Nobody had really done much about what actually happened to people's consciousness that made them want to do this. So I did a straightforward survey. And as I recall, the major finding was that things look better, sound better, taste better. Yeah, I mean the munchies, the increased eating happened because stuff tasted better. People were paying more attention to just sensory qualities of all sort instead of, you know, the senses bring us information, but we're busy up in the executive office making decisions and thinking and all that. And there are many other very interesting effects, too. I also hoped that my work would be totally outmoded within a few years because I did a relatively small survey, 150 experienced users, but now that I showed it could be done, I expected somebody to go out there, survey thousands of people, really get encyclopedic knowledge. Didn't happen, though. No, your book is probably still, after so many decades, the authoritative study. Not quite because I think marijuana use has changed considerably since then. When I did this study, for instance, almost all the experienced users would say, you don't drink when you're smoking marijuana. I mean, maybe a little wine for the taste, but you don't drink. Then, ten years later, it was very common for people to drink fairly heavily while doing it, which wipes out a lot of the marijuana effects. So, different things were happening, but it illustrated an important point. A drug may make certain physiological changes, but what happens to your consciousness depends a great deal on what people do with those changes. So, for instance, it was common knowledge that a lot of people smoked marijuana and nothing happened. Their friends thought they were stoned. Their friends thought they were in an altered state. They didn't notice anything, and then they finally learned to shift their perception somehow, and they realized they were in an altered state, but they needed the psychological effects to modulate the physiological effects. Well, your classic anthology talks about ten different kinds of altered states. Mm-hmm. Dreams, hypnosis. In fact, there's a really fascinating chapter, as I recall, on mutual hypnosis. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was something I... I guess I kind of pioneered it because there was hardly anything done. In hypnosis, there was the idea that a special relationship or rapport existed between the subject and the hypnotist, and I started thinking, well, if that rapport exists and it's important, could you increase it if A hypnotized B, but then while B was still hypnotized, B hypnotized A, and then A deepened B, and B deepened A, and I was able to do a few sessions like that with a couple of people who were reasonably hypnotically talented, and it was fabulous. They got into some very unusual states of consciousness, more than just ordinary hypnosis. Well, and I believe all around the country, college students began to have available to them courses on altered states of consciousness. When I put out that book, one of the reasons was that there was very little information available about altered states from a scientific perspective, but I had read in a lot of unusual sources following up my interest, so I thought, let me put it together, and it made an impact, and then people saw, oh, we could have a course on this. We've got a textbook now, and I still get email every once in a while from somebody who says, 50 years ago, I read the Altered States of Consciousness book, and it changed my life, realizing what was possible there. Yeah, I think the basic message is there's more to life than just normal, everyday, waking consciousness, which became kind of humdrum in a way, compared to the possibilities in altered states. Well, what I want to get more specific now, I no longer talk about ordinary consciousness. I talk about consensus consciousness, and that is that the way our minds function has been strongly shaped by the culture we've been brought up in, so we notice certain things that another culture might ignore, we're excited by some things that aren't exciting to another culture, or vice versa, and every culture's consciousness is reasonably good at dealing with reality, or the culture wouldn't be still existing, but every culture also has blind spots, and psychopathology in certain ways. I mean, what some cultures think is a great way to live would be seen as quite pathological by others. Mm-hmm. Take, for instance, the ability to go into an altered state of consciousness. If a young kid shows, you know, that their eyes glaze over, and then they talk about strange things that happen, we send them to a doctor, or to a minister to get exercised, or something like that. In some more basic human cultures, they might say, ah, maybe he's got a problem, or maybe he's got the talent to become a shaman. Let's send him to a shaman for training, and see what happens. Use those potentialities instead of, it's crazy, let's get rid of it. Now, since we're talking about altered states, I need to mention the movie, Altered States. They didn't come to me to ask anything about it, but some stuff was in there. I'm going to show a little clip from that movie, because you're mentioned. Yes, and I think it's interesting, just to reflect historically on the cultural impact that your work has had. There's really very little literature on this kind of research. There's some good people in the field, Tartt, Ornstein, Deichmann, but most of it is radical hip stuff, drug culture, apologists. Obviously, the first thing to do is set up some sensible methodology, see if we can't study these experiences under controlled laboratory conditions. It will not interfere with the work we're doing with robots. Oh, what are we getting into? Sensory deprivation? Isolation studies? I mean, you know, where will we be going with the tank stuff? We're not writing up a grant, Arthur. It's strictly bootlegging, just for kicks. I figure as long as we get the use of this tank, let's play around with it. Let's find out where it takes us. It's fascinating stuff, Arthur. I think we ought to get into it. The book was a scientific bestseller. I mean, usually scientific anthologies, you know, a hundred copies in the culture, that's doing pretty well. It sold over 100,000 copies because people were desperate for this information. You know, they didn't like the idea that weird things happen which might be nice or might be crazy, and I can't get any information from people who should know better except that, oh, I think that's crazy. Don't go there. Well, of course, the plot of that particular movie is a college professor gets deeply interested in altered states and acquires a variety of supernormal powers. Right. A little more exciting than happened in my laboratory. You began your work by looking at dreams, if I'm correct. Yeah. I was very interested in dreams all my life. When I was a kid, I used to have very interesting dreams sometimes. And I wondered, well, what are they? I mean, I go to bed at night and there's some blank spots and then I'm in this world doing things. And I wake up the next morning and ask adults about it and they can't tell me anything useful or they say, oh, it's just a dream. That's our culture's way of saying it's unimportant. Don't bother to think about it and so forth. And then as I got older and started reading psychological ideas, Freud and the like, Jung, I started thinking about the possible significance of dreams. And then I came across information that hypnosis might be used to affect dreams. But it was very old literature buried in obscure places and was mixed in with psychotherapy stuff. It wasn't clear how real it was, but it got me interested. Hypnosis was interesting. That's an altered state for some people. Dreams were interesting. Could I use dreams? Or could I use hypnosis to affect what went on in nighttime dreams? In other words, using one altered state to influence another. Right. And the consensus among my advisors was, no, it couldn't be done. Because Freud's idea was that day residue might affect a dream, but only in extremely indirect ways, maybe many days later and whatnot. But what I basically found is I could train some people to be very good at going into hypnosis, then hypnotize them, and while they were in a trance state, suggest something very specific for them to dream about that night. And by specific, I mean it would have five or six quite specific details that I'd ask them to dream about, bring them out of hypnosis with amnesia so consciously they didn't worry about what they were supposed to dream about, and then they slept in my sleep laboratory and I could wake them at the end of each dream, and an amazing degree of control was possible. Almost every dream would show most of those elements in their various creative kind of forms. That was very interesting. Well, you were doing this research back in the 1960s. That's right. And it was an era in which researchers discovered for the first time that we have enormous possibilities of self-control that were not acknowledged up until then. Biofeedback, for example. Biofeedback was just being discovered and worked with. Yeah. It was amazing to researchers a person could learn to control the firing of a single neuron, or to control their heartbeat. Yeah. The single neuron firing came along a little later, but I thought that my work on controlling dreams through hypnosis would inspire lots and lots of people to work on that, but it was still a little too far out to make it. Well, there are little pockets. It's often now done outside of academia. Yeah. For example, I know there are groups of people who get together to do mutual dreaming. I believe you had a chapter on that. Or maybe I'm confusing... You're thinking of it... Right. I don't usually think of it in those words. It's about the Senoi of Malaysia. There was a report by an anthropologist, Kilton Stewart, that this quite isolated tribe in the jungles of Malaysia not only valued dreams, they taught people to become more conscious in the dreams and then deliberately control them, and they would also all get together in the morning and swap their dream stories and the like. It was a way of social bonding. Well, I read that, and that was fascinating, but I had no idea whether it was true or not. No other anthropologist had ever reported anything like that for these particular people. The Senoi people. The Senoi, yeah. Yeah. They were just too isolated, and their culture was almost wiped out during the Second World War as various armies going through the jungles and whatnot. I see. But I thought, well, if these people could learn to do it, maybe that was one of the reasons for doing it with hypnosis. And it did inspire all sorts of people to set up similar groups. We'll meet in the morning and talk about our dreams. Whether or not the Senoi ever actually did it. But see, this was the interesting thing. I said, this guy may have dreamed up the whole thing. I'm using dreams in the usual negative sense now. But when I was a kid, I had occasional nightmares. And they were awful. I'd waked up soaked in sweat, partially paralyzed. Some monster had chased me in the dream. And when I could, run off to my parents' bed. And I didn't like it. And there came a point when I said, darn it, I wouldn't have said damn it as a young kid, all right, but with that intensity. These are my dreams. Why is that happening? And I taught myself that as soon as I woke up enough to realize I'd been having a nightmare, I would go back to sleep in the dream and I would take over. Either I would find the monster and say, hey, wait a minute. What are you chasing me for? What's going on? Or I would find the monster and punch him in the nose. In almost no time, I stopped having nightmares. So I knew personally, you could learn a degree of dream control so the senoi were possible. Whether they had been made up in fiction or not, this was possible. So I took a chance on publishing something that might be fiction, but it worked. All sorts of people tried those techniques and it worked for them. Well, I'm sure over the decades you've come to appreciate that amongst various esoteric schools and shamanistic training programs, there's some very detailed approaches to working with dreams. Yes, Tibetan yoga techniques, for instance. Some of them involve a lot of work trying to control your dreams. And it's interesting because it fits in with the whole idea that part of the path to liberation is learning to regard ordinary reality as just an illusion of some sort, a dream-like manifestation, which is tricky in terms of its consequences. So then learning to do that in your dreams would be a demonstration of it. Well, it seems as if in a way what you were writing about in 1969 is perhaps indicative of how we in the West were just starting to catch up to advanced knowledge that had been maintained in Eastern esoteric traditions for centuries, maybe millennia. And I think the key word in what you said is starting to catch up because I think in most ways we're still just starting. We're opening up to the possibility and we've explored a little here and there but we don't have detailed knowledge. So, for instance, I could casually describe Tibetan dream yoga in one or two sentences but I know that there are deep aspects of it that I don't even begin to understand much less be able to describe much less be able to actually practice myself. I've had a few of these lucid dreams as they're called where within a dream your consciousness suddenly clears up and you know you're dreaming and you feel your consciousness is like it is normally. Now, when I tried to teach that to people, especially in my altered states class I'd get some skeptics you know, how do you know that you're dreaming? And I'd say, well, ok we can have a philosophical discussion that maybe right now you're actually dreaming about being in a class, ok? You do that a lot in real life would be an easy sort of dream. Are you willing to bet me 50 bucks that you can wake up at your bed at home in a couple of minutes? Nobody ever was interested in doing any of this. Ok, you can make an assessment of the state of your consciousness and decide this does not feel like dreaming. Same sort of thing happens with lucid dreaming. A person says, gee, I know I'm dreaming but I know who I am I know it's a dream, I can think logically I can begin to do different sorts of things and there was interesting initial clinical work that this might enable you to clear up psychological problems in a much more direct way, like you were in your subconscious in a sense, instead of trying to deal with it in an indirect manner and I don't think that has been adequately investigated, but the possibilities there were quite enormous. You coined the phrase state-specific research I think I did, yeah. You made it famous by publishing it in Science Magazine, I think, in 1975 73, I think actually, something like that Proposal to Create State-Specific Sciences. And lucid dreaming it would seem to me could be an archetypal state-specific science. People can be trained to go into lucid dreams and we don't know what realms of consciousness or hyperspace for all I know are there to be explored Yes, exactly My proposal basically was that ordinary consciousness God bless it, it's wonderful in all sorts of ways and totally nuts in others but it's a specialized sort of thing and to assume it's the best possible way to think about and understand everything that's kind of silly If the only tool you have is a hammer must you investigate everything by hammering on it? That won't work very well for some things So I thought of some drug intoxication states that don't wipe out your understanding that there are things you'd like to do and investigate would work, like marijuana intoxication for instance. Lucid dreams would certainly work right there in the dream You could say, okay, I want to investigate certain things So for instance, Steven LaBerge who was a prominent investigator with lucid dreams said, what happens if you hold your breath in a lucid dream He had some lucid dreams in a laboratory where his breathing was being measured and yeah, you hold your breath in a lucid dream your actual breathing pretty much slows down which is interesting because it could mean you might be able to communicate that you were having a lucid dream by deliberately changing your physiology This is interesting because sleep talking is relatively rare for most people but if you could train someone to sleep talk when they were having a lucid dream, you could get on the spot descriptions which would be very interesting to find out I did some preliminary research suggesting this would be a possibility, but I didn't have enough research support to really push it all the way, but I had an idea that if I could train people to take sound stimuli from outside, the experimenter talking to you actually into a lucid dream state and then be able to sleep talk back it's like being able to talk to an astronaut over a radio link We never quite got that far because again, the research support ran out but it was fascinating And maybe the culture hasn't quite come around to support that A lot of people thought this was an incredibly nutty idea. When you mentioned my proposal for state-specific sciences it was published in Science which was one of the top ten leading scientific journals in the world. It amazed me that they accepted it for publication They sent it to two referees one of whom clearly had no idea what it was all about and didn't say anything relevant, but the other one said it's a great idea so they published it But then the reaction was wonderful Most scientific articles never stimulate a letter to the editor Most scientific articles they contribute little bricks of knowledge but they don't get much excitement. Science received over a hundred letters to the editor on this About half of them said you were insane to publish this article Our ordinary state of consciousness is the only state you could possibly do science in Every other state is psychopathological and dumb. Why were you so crazy? And the other half said, hey, this is an interesting idea. Let's do it Now, they only published three of the letters for space limitations, but what was really interesting is they sent all the letters to me and I recognized the names of some of the scientists who wrote them as quite prominent scientists. Others I didn't know how prominent they were, but if they had a title like professor I knew they were pretty establishment compared to an assistant professor And the breakdown was very interesting because the ones who said this was crazy were the well-known scientists holding advanced academic posts and the like who had made their career in normal consciousness and didn't like the idea of anything weird It was the young folks who said oh, let's check it out and see what we can do. Well, I should mention the movie Altered States picked up on your idea I have another clip from that movie I want to show and you can see here William Hurt the actor, Academy Award winning actor, playing a professor talking about yoga as a state specific technology in the service of an a priori hypothesis Right on More power to him It's going to happen eventually if science is going to keep progressing. We've got to realize our tools are specialized For example, I always carry a tool with me because it is just so handy. It's the big Swiss Army knife. Look at that And it's very handy for some things. If I need a screwdriver and a can opener a small screwdriver, I've got it But I can't solve all the world's problems with a screwdriver If I need a knife blade, I've got a knife blade Knowing your state of consciousness is a specialized tool means you can then say what is it good at doing and I can use it there and what's it not good at doing instead of thinking there's only one way to do it And we're all capable of experiencing multiple states of consciousness. I think everybody dreams. Now you have some people who will claim they've never dreamed, but we know this particular brainwave state in which dreaming is usually reported happens to everybody, happens to most mammals and so forth So we assume now these are people who for some reason never remember dreams. And in fact if you survey people and find the people who claim they never dreamed and then tell them to put a notebook beside their bed at night and write down anything they remember half of them immediately become dream recallers. They just haven't turned their attention to it because dreams haven't been given any value Well Freud, as I recall said, a dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened The trouble with that analogy now is we all get so much spam and advertising there's an awful lot of stuff we don't want to open And I feel that way myself. I don't want to bother with all of my dreams. I have a friend, you know, Patricia Garfield who has written her dreams down for half a century has all of her dreams It's fascinating, but that's not for everybody. Yeah, there was a time for instance when I recorded my dreams and I learned some things about my psychology from it, but I think, you know I kind of got the basic message and I don't remember my own dreams anymore I used to have an occasional lucid dream so I knew lucid dreams were possible. Again, that's why I published that article on the Senoi and their dream techniques A lot of altered states I've never experienced, but you know from people whose word I respect there are other altered states for instance, out of the body experiences You know, I've never experienced leaving my body and being in full normal consciousness but I've talked to quite a few people who are perfectly honest people as far as I know and tell you, you know, this is crazy but the other night I found myself floating to the ceiling and I was wide awake but I could see my body on the bed and the state had these other characteristics Okay, that's an interesting thing to investigate. In fact, you're the person if I'm correct, who introduced the phrase out of body experience into the research literature. Although unfortunately, I originally thought out of the body experiences, that needs an acronym to be scientific, so O-O-B-E, out of body experiences and I made a terrible mistake because people started coming up to me after lectures and say, I want to tell you about my Oobies I never thought anybody would pronounce it, so just O-B-E, out of body experiences. You don't capitalize the F. That's also an example of the importance of altered states because people who have an out of the body experience almost always end up saying something like I don't believe my mind is going to survive death I know it because I've been out of my body with my mind still functioning Tremendous shift in the way they view the world whether they'll take chances how they want to live their life because it's not a belief anymore it's drawing on your own experience even if that's not factually true Wow, what an incredibly powerful psychological thing to study But your research shows that there are some verifiable examples of clairvoyance associated with the out of body experience Yes I was very lucky to find a person she had been our babysitter actually who started talking about out of the body experiences when she realized I was a safe person to talk to and she asked it seems very real to me that I'm floating up near the ceiling but it can't be real, can it? It must be just a dream and I said well, take ten sheets of paper write the numbers one to ten on them shuffle them up in a box face down and after you're in bed without looking put one on the table if you happen to float near the ceiling memorize the number I saw her a few weeks later and she said she'd done it eight or ten times she was always right about the number was there anything else interesting we could do? And she was moving across the country then but luckily I was able to have her spend several nights in my sleep laboratory and I put a five digit number up on a shelf told her if you get up there memorize it and she reported several out of the body experiences but with kind of poor control over her location but with an interesting brainwave state but on the one occasion which she said she could read the number she correctly said oh it's 25132, that's odds of 100,000 to one to guess a five digit number in one guess so I felt I demonstrated that you could take as exotic and altered state as an out of the body experience and study it in the laboratory and she wasn't near death it was a safe thing to do and so now millions of researchers would start researching this but no I was ahead of the culture But you did repeat that study with the famous out of body experiencer Robert Monroe and he couldn't quite do his clearing on something like that and his physiology was somewhat different but again it demonstrated this stuff we can apply science and learn more about it, it's not just well there are these weird people who have funny experiences the idea of a soul to me clearly comes because some people have had out of the body experiences all through history you know it's not that some Greek theologians were debating about some word that meant wind and they came up with the concept of soul thinking you have a soul is going to make a big difference over thinking you're just a collection of chemicals and you're going to die and that's the end of it. I want to see evidence as to whether this soul or whatever you want to call it is actually there not just belief. I know some things we got to park some belief in it one way or the other but the more your belief has evidence supporting it the better Dr. Charles Tart thank you so much for being with me this has been fascinating in the body as it were but out of my mind and thank you for being with us