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Transpersonal Realities or Neurophysiological Illusions:
Toward an Empirically Testable Dualism
Presented at 1978 Meeting of the American Psychological
Association in Toronto
Charles T. Tart
University of California, Davis, California
and
Consultant, SRI International
Menlo Park, California
Abstract: Transpersonal experiences, in which a person seems to go
beyond (trans) the limits of his body and mind, are exceptionally
important to their experiencers, and can form the basis of
religions and philosophies, yet the current scientific position
that totally equates consciousness with brain functioning
automatically views the content of these vital experiences as
illusions and delusions. Transpersonal psychology is thus reduced
to the study of hallucinations. More than 600 experiments,
however, provide first-class scientific evidence for the
existence of paraconceptual phenomena such as extrasensory
perception (ESP), phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of
brain processes and which argue that some aspects of
consciousness are of a qualitatively different nature than
physical processes. This paper presents a theory of Emergent
Interactionism, in which consciousness is seen as an emergent
systems product of two qualitatively different systems, the brain
or B system on the one hand, and the mind/life or M\L system on
the other. Psi phenomena, ESP and psychokinesis (PK) are the
mechanism of interaction between the B and M\L systems. Thus psi
phenomena are seen as common within a person, it is only their
manifestation outside the body to produce information about
distant events in the world that is unusual. In contrast to
philosophical theories of dualism, Emergent Interactionism has
testable consequences, and so it is proposed as a scientific
theory rather than a philosophy. From this point of view,
transpersonal experiences, rather than necessarily being
illusory, may be valid and important insights into the nature of
human consciousness.
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Although psychologists like to emphasize the
empirical nature of psychology, every psychologist starts more or
less with his own personal experience of himself and his world,
experience which creates both explicit and implicit guides as to
what is important to study. Western psychologists have focused on
our ordinary, Western state of consciousness, appropriate in a
culture highly concerned with manipulation of the external world,
and much of our research interests reflect this. There are a
large number of experiences, however, that we might call
transpersonal, experiences which while not actively encouraged in
our culture nevertheless happen, and seem to imply a much broader
view of man than our Western psychological one. Let me give you
some brief examples of such experiences.
The first is from William James' classic
collection:
. . suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in
heaven an inward state of peace and joy and assurance
indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed
in warm glow of light, as though the external condition had
brought about the internal effect - a feeling of having passed,
beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more
clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the
illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This
deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I
reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing
away. - James, 1929, p.388
As a second example from James, consider Symonds'
description of an experience he had while undergoing chloroform
anesthesia:
I thought that I was near death; when suddenly, my soul became aware
of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to
speak, in an intense, personal present reality. I felt him
streaming in like light upon me . . . I cannot describe the
ecstasy I felt. Then as I gradually awoke from the influence of
the anesthetic, the old sense of my relation to the world began
to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. -
James, 1929, p.382
To be a little more contemporaneous in time, consider the
following experiences of Claire Myers Owens, an American writer
on Zen Buddhism. She had been sitting for three days in a Zen
session, having a very difficult time attempting to clear her
mind and meditate. Finally she reports:
as I stared at the blank surface of the low
divider wall in front of me, I suddenly beheld a row of people -
my mother (dead), my brother, and a young woman, my friendly
enemy. They were all gazing at me with sad accusing eyes. I knew
I had hurt them in real life in various ways, though not always
intentionally. Suddenly such powerful repentance and desire to
expiate seized me that my very body shook uncontrollably. Sobs
tore up from the depths of my being. It was like tearing up the
roots of my ego, annihilating life-long delusions of my own
goodness. This emotional storm continued hour after hour. I was
oblivious, blind to everything and everybody in the zendo. After
five hours two monitors came and lifted me up. My body was so
heavy and my legs so weak I was unable to walk. They carried me
upstairs and placed me on the bed. After an hour's rest I
returned to the zendo and commenced concentrating with renewed
assurance. As I gazed at the low wooden dividing wall in front of
me it seemed to abruptly turn into a beautiful luminous blue with
the lights flickering at the lower edge. Then it changed to thick
silvery ice, next to gauze. Then I saw right through the wall and
beheld two men sitting on the other side. I was incredulous even
while this phenomenon was occurring. When it happened again the
next day I accepted it as makyo, a psychic power, encouraging,
but not worth clinging to.
As a final example of a transpersonal experience,
consider this older case of a near-death experience:
On Saturday ninth of November, a few minutes after midnight, I
began to feel very ill, and by two o'clock was definitely
suffering from acute gastro-enteritis, which kept me vomiting and
purging until about eight o'clock . . . by ten o'clock I had
developed all of the symptoms of acute poisoning: intense
gastro-intestinal pain, diarrhea, pulse and respirations became
quite impossible to count. I wanted to ring for assistance, but
found I could not, and so quite placidly gave up the attempt. I
realized I was very ill and very quickly reviewed my whole
financial position. Thereafter at no time did my consciousness
appear to me to be in any way dimmed, but I suddenly realized
that my consciousness was separating from another consciousness
which was also me. These, for purposes of description, we could
call the A and B consciousness, and throughout what follows the
ego attached itself to the A consciousness. The B personality I
recognized as belonging to the body, and as my physical condition
grew worse the heart was fibrillating rather than beating, I
realized that the B consciousness belonging to the body was
beginning to show signs of being composite - that is, built up of
"consciousness" from the head, the heart, and the viscera. These
components became more individual and the B consciousness began
to disintegrate, while the A consciousness, which was now me,
seemed to be altogether outside my body, which it could see.
Gradually I realized that I could see, not only my body in the
bed in which it was, but everything in the whole house and
garden, and then realized I was seeing not only ''things'' at
home but in London and in Scotland, in fact wherever my attention
was directed, it seemed to me; and the explanation which I
received, from what sources I do not know, but which I found
myself calling to myself my mentor, was that I was free in a
time-dimension of space wherein "now" was in some way equivalent
to "here" in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday
life.
The narrator then says that his further experience could
only be described metaphorically, for while he seemed to have
ordinary two-eyed vision, lie "appreciated" rather than "saw"
things. He began to recognize people he knew in his visions, they
seemed to be characterized by colored condensations around them.
He goes on to report that:
Just as I began to grasp all these, I saw my daughter enter the
bedroom; I realized she got a terrible shock and I saw her hurry
to the telephone. I saw my doctor leave his patients and come
very quickly, and I heard him say or saw him think, "He is nearly
gone." I heard him quite clearly speaking to me on the bed but I
was not in touch with my body and could not answer him. I was
really cross when he took a syringe arid rapidly injected my body
with something which I afterwards learned was camphor. As the
heart began to beat more strongly, I was drawn back, an4 I was
intensely annoyed, because I was so interested and just beginning
to understand where I was and what I was "seeing". I cam back
into the body really angry at being pulled back, and once I was
back, all the clarity of vision of anything and everything
disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of
consciousness, which was suffused with pain.
What do we make of such experiences?
As we all know, mainstream Western psychology has made
nothing of these shorts of experiences. Partly this is a matter
of the training of psychologists, in which they are informed at
various times that "crazy" experiences happen to people which
gives them strange beliefs, but these sorts of experiences need
not be taken seriously. As a result, the typical psychologist
unconsciously avoids coming across these kinds of experiences and
casually dismisses them if he does come across them. But why this
strong dismissal among the community of psychologists?
I think an important part of the answer lies in
considering the implications of transpersonal experience. The
prefix trans conveys the idea that these experiences go beyond
the individual, not merely in an abstract sort of way as we might
say that democracy goes beyond a single person, but in a very
real and important sort of way. These sorts of experiences seem
to imply that consciousness may not always be restricted to the
body and brain, that there may be other kinds of consciousness
than human with which we may interact, etc. Aside from the many
historical reasons, such as the old conflict between science and
religion, for rejecting these implications, a more immediate and
formal reason is that monistic, physicalistic philosophical views
about the nature of consciousness are dominant in modern science.
Monistic Views of Consciousness
The physicalistic, monistic view of consciousness which
is so predominant states that physical matter and physical
energies, operating within physical space and physical time, are
the fundamental realities of the universe. Consciousness is not
considered to be a basically different kind of reality, but
merely a manifestation of matter, energy, space, and time. Every
manifestation of consciousness, every kind of experience, is, in
principle, reducible to physical interactions within the body,
brain, and nervous system. I express this view schematically in
my States of Consciousness book.
Starting with fixed physical reality, basic and immutable
physical laws govern all manifestations in the universe. A
particular segment of. this manifest reality of great interest to
us is the physical structure of the brain (I shall, for short,
speak only of the brain rather than the full system of body,
brain, and nervous system). The brain structure, whose operation
is in principle reducible to more basic physical laws, can
further, for convenience, be divided into two aspects, the
relatively fixed qualities of the brain, such as the built-in
"instructions" on how to run the kidneys and the like, and the
more flexible, programmable aspects of it, the "software" for
those who like computer analogies. Each of us has the software
capabilities of the brain programmed by his interactions with the
culture, his parents, the language he speaks, and the like, to
produce further semi-permanent structures or processes in the
brain. The interplay of these various physical processes in the
brain is very complex; a very small subset of them, from the
physicalistic. monistic view, lead to the experience of
consciousness as we know It.
I conceive of something labeled pure awareness emerging
from the physical structure of the brain. This is an important
distinction in my systems approach to understanding states of
consciousness, for it relates to certain kinds of experience,
often associated with meditative practices or altered states of
consciousness, in which a person seems to get back to a more
basic version of awareness than the concepts and word play which
is our usual experience. From the physicalistic, -monistic point
of view, however, this experience of pure awareness (or any other
kind of special experience, for that matter) is an emergent from
the physical operation of the brain, and can be totally reduced
to it, in principle. In practice, of course, the brain is
incredibly complex and we may never be able to find the exact
physical parallel of every single experience, even though in
principle we believe it is there. -
The physicalistic, monistic view of consciousness tells
us that the four experiences cited at the beginning of this paper
were indeed real experiences. Any experience reduces to some
specific pattern of electro-chemical firing within the brain, and
the four "transpersonal" experiences given are just as real as
your everyday experiences. Everyday experiences, however, are
assumed to be a rather good reflection of the reality of the
physical world, while these transpersonal experiences are clearly
hallucinatory insofar as the physical world is concerned. When
Trevor felt himself bathed in a warm glow of light and found the
scene around him standing out more clearly, with a feeling of
great peace and joy, we postulate that some unusual firing
pattern in his visual-sensory and emotional brain centers was
taking place. When Symonds experienced God like light streaming
in upon him during his chloroform experience, he was clearly
experiencing a simulation ion of reality on the order of a dream,
probably again with some firing pattern in the appropriate
emotional centers of the brain giving that special feeling of
peace. Owens' seeing of faces of emotionally relevant people in
her life and undergoing catharsis as to her relations with them
was probably good for her mental health, but was again
hallucinatory in that the faces were not there in the external
world, and her experience of apparently seeing through a wall was
obviously also a neural firing pattern in which hallucination
replaced her concurrent visual sensations. Finally, the gentleman
who apparently left his physical body in his near-death state and
experienced his consciousness as a composite may have had a
useful psychological insight in seeing the composite nature of
consciousness, but the visual experience of floating above his
body was obviously another neural firing pattern creating a
visual hallucination, as were his feelings of being able to
perceive wherever he directed his attention, or getting
explanations of his state from some sort of non-incarnate entity.
While I personally do not necessarily accept these explanations,
they are straightforward ones from a physicalistic, monistic
point of view.
Now I shall make a statement that may very well be
unpopular with many of you, but one that I think it is important
to make. If the sorts of things illustrated were all that there
were to transpersonal experiences, I think it would be fair to
say that the developing field of transpersonal psychology is one
in which unusual illusions, hallucinations, and aberrations of
thought processes were studied. It would be different from
classical abnormal psychology in that transpersonal experiences
may have a positive, beneficial effect on tile people they happen
to. Nevertheless, they are clearly unrealistic, abnormal
experiences, and those of us dedicated to values of making people
more rational would have an inherent distaste for them. Even so
we might consider ourselves realistic and accept the fact that
most people do not want to face the cold hard facts of reality,
but need some sort of comforting illusions for the sake of their
psychological health, and so it might be useful to learn how to
induce transpersonal illusions deliberately in order to reinforce
irrational belief systems that nevertheless allow people to
function well. Politically speaking, this is also a convenient
path to social respectability for transpersonal psychology, as
it will seem to fit experiences which tend to be regarded as
disturbing into the physicalistic, monistic status quo. Since
psychologists have always been a little bit insecure about their
status as "real scientists", we should not underestimate this
political aspect of things!
As a scientist, I am supposed to be more committed to
observational data than to theoretical concepts, to be ready to
reject old conceptual systems and explore new ones if my data
require me to do so. In spite of the controversial nature of what
I shall present, I have followed the implications of some very
important data and will attempt to show that there is first-class
scientific evidence for a dualistic theory of consciousness. a
theory that has a "mind" or "life" component to consciousness
that is of a different nature than known physical systems, and
thus implies that at least some transpersonal experiences are not
merely interesting illusions, unusual patterns of neural firing,
but actually tell us something about the potential for literally
transcending our ordinary physical limits.
Paraconceptual Phenomena
Let us start by operating strictly within our
contemporary scientific knowledge of the physical world In this
framework, it is both a useful and a precise statement to say
that a given person is located at a certain spatial position and
his behavior is occurring at a specific time. We can also specify
both theoretically and practically, by means of instrumentation,
the kinds of physical energies that might reach this person or
emanate from this person, and accordingly calculate whether such
physical energies could serve as useful carriers of information.
We can then put two people at different spatial locations and,
either by the sheer physical distance between them and/or by
physical shielding existing between them, we can set up a
situation in which we can say that these people are totally
isolated from each other, in terms of practical information
transfer. That is, we can say that the physical energies emitted
by the one person, even if they are modulated to carry
information, are so attenuated and lost in the noise level before
they reach the second person that no information transfer could
occur. If we have two people sitting in open fields a hundred
miles apart, for example, we can physically show that no matter
how loudly one shouts, the sound vibrations of the shouting in
the air drop below the noise level of the Brownian motion of the
air long before that sound energy reaches the second person. We
can do the same thing by putting our two people in
sound-attenuated rooms.
We can now carry out an experiment in which one person,
whom we shall designate the sender, is given some randomly
selected stimulus, such as a number to concentrate on or a
picture to look at, and ask him to try to mentally "send" it to
the other, sensorially isolated person, the receiver in this
experiment. What if, over a series of experimental trials, the
receiver's behavior shows sufficient correlation with the
randomly selected targets presented to the sender that we cannot
dismiss it as coincidence, but, using appropriate Statistical
tests, we find that there is at least some transfer of
information at a statistically significant level? If such a thing
were to happen, we would have a paraconceptual phenomenon. That
is, our observation is what it is, we observe such and such an
amount of information transfer, but it is beyond, para to our
conceptual system.
Under basic rules of scientific procedure, our first
obligation would be to double check or triple check the physical
isolation between the sender and receiver to make sure we had not
overlooked some potential information transfer channel. Suppose
we did that and found no overlooked channel, so our
paraconceptual phenomenon was still with us. Our next task, under
the basic rules of scientific inquiry, would be to then recognize
that our current conceptual system was incomplete, and then to
investigate our paraconceptual communication effect to see what
new things it might tell us about our sender and receiver or our
view of reality. To concertize this and take it back to our
earlier example, suppose the gentleman who was ill not only
believed he could tell what was going on in London, in spite of
the total sensory isolation of his body from London, but that he
had gone on and given a highly specific description of a very
improbable, non-deductible event happening in London at that
time. This would be a truly transpersonal event, for his
consciousness would seem to be functioning beyond the confines of
his physical body. What then?
I have been speaking hypothetically, but, as you know,
there have been claims that these sorts of para conceptual,
transpersonal events happen rather frequently in everyday life.
In a representative survey of the American population, for
example, the sociologist, Andrew Greeley, in 1975 found that 58%
of his sample believed they had experienced telepathic,
mind-to-mind contact with someone at a distance at least once in
their life. Many other kinds of paraconceptual experiences,
extrasensory perception to use the general term for them, occur
in everyday life and clearly they are quite "normal" in that at
least some form of ostensible ESP experience happens to the
majority of people. At least in the ordinary American population,
if not in the academic subculture!
These kinds of ESP experiences seem to fit some kind of
dualistic view of mind, and so might be potentially very
important in deciding between a monistic and dualistic view, but,
as we know, the scientific investigation of ESP and related
phenomena is not only not exactly in the mainstream of American
psychology, it is an extremely small-scale activity. A recent
survey of mine showed that the entire research budget for America
only runs around half a million dollars a year, and there are not
more than a dozen or so scientific investigators working most of
their time on this subject.
As psychologists we can readily think of reasons for not
taking a large number of spontaneous ostensible ESP occurrences
seriously. Many people have faulty judgments about the
paraconceptuality of such events to begin with, their memories
may be faulty, they may distort or exaggerate their accounts for
various reasons, etc. This point was recognized at the beginning
of the century, and the few scientists interested in this area
realized that a firm scientific basis for the existence of
paraconceptual phenomena could not be established very well by
the investigation of spontaneous cases. These events needed to
lee studied under laboratory conditions where alternative
hypotheses like incorrect observation, sensory leakage, object
fraud, and the like could be ruled out. Occasional scientific
experiments were carried out over the years, and the methodology
for them became quite refined, especially beginning with the work
of J.B. Rhine and his colleagues at Duke University in the 1930s.
Because of a variety of factors, primarily what I would consider
prejudicial ones where people attached to various conceptual
systems preferred to reject the data rather than question their
conceptual systems, the large body of high quality experimental
work that has accumulated in the last 40 years is largely unknown
to the scientific community. It is published in five specialty
journals (Journal of Parapsychology, European Journal of
Parapsychology, International Journal of Parapsychology, Journal
of the Society for Psychical Research, and the Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research) and in book form. In
spite of the small scale of the effort compared to most fields of
science, however, I estimate that more than 600 high quality
experiments, the vast majority showing statistically significant
evidence for various kinds of paraconceptual processes, have now
been published, and the overall mass of this evidence is quite
compelling. I do not have time here to even begin to consider
this mass of evidence in detail, but the interested reader might
look at my recent Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm,
or the recent, authoritative Handbook of Parapsychology (Wolman,
et al., 1978). What I shall basically do is just define the four
kinds of paraconceptual or psi events as they are now generally
called, for which I believe there is overwhelming, high quality
scientific evidence.
The first of the four well-established psi phenomena is
clairvoyance, a phenomenon involving a direct (without mediation
by the known senses or any known form of physical energy)
perception of the state of physical matter. The classical
experimental procedure which established its reality was that of
a card-guessing test, in which a deck of cards would be
thoroughly shuffled, face down, so that the shuffler did not know
what the order of the deck of cards was. The cards would then be
guessed at by a receiver-subject who was sensorially isolated
from them, and after his guesses had been recorded they would be
checked for correspondence with the card holder, and the results
statistically evaluated for hitting beyond chance expectation.
Many dozens of experiments established the reality of
clairvoyance with this experimental procedure. Clairvoyance has
been demonstrated for many other types of target material than
cards, such as identifying musical selections on randomly
selected magnetic recording tapes to which no one was listening.
The phenomenon most people think of with respect to psi
is telepathy. The classical experimental procedure for
establishing this was to again start with a very thoroughly
shuffled deck of cards, but now each card would be looked at for
a fixed period by a person designated the sender or agent who
attempted to mentally "send" the identity of the card to a
receiver. Again the receiver would be thoroughly isolated (in
terms of our current physical world view) from any informational
energies put out by the sender. Results would again be scored for
extra-chance hits, and many dozens of experiments with cards and
other kinds of material established the reality of telepathy.
However, most researchers conversant with this field would now
argue that while the concept of telepathy is appealing, this
particular experimental paradigm does not necessarily establish
it as a phenomenon separate from clairvoyance, for there is no
way of telling whether a successful receiving subject acquires
the information from the sender's mental processes or directly by
clairvoyance from the cards. Indeed, Rhine has argued that it may
be logically impossible to test for telepathy in a way that
totally excludes clairvoyance.
The third kind of psi phenomenon is precognition, the
prediction of future events that cannot be logically predicted
from a knowledge of current events. The classical experimental
procedure for this was to ask a subject to write down what the
order of a deck of cards would be after it had been thoroughly
shuffled at some future time. That time lag might be anywhere
from a few minutes to days or months. Again, results have been
quite successful in establishing the reality of precognition. I
have personally always found this difficult to accept, in spite
of the strength of the experimental evidence, but I have been
forced to accept the reality of precognition in spite of my
emotional resistance to it because of strong precognitive data
appearing my own laboratory work.
The above three kinds of psi have been generally
classified as extrasensory perception, an information gathering
process analogous to sensory perception, but occurring in the
absence of any known form of energy and/or receptor to convey the
information. There is a fourth major psi phenomena, psychokinesis
or PK, the direct influence of desire on the state of the
physical world, without the mediation of any known form of
physical energy. The classical experiment for establishing this
was to have a machine throw dice. A subject who could watch the
events but not otherwise physically influence them would be asked
to try to make particular die faces come up more often than would
be expected by chance, and dozens of successful experiments were
reported. Modern research on PK usually uses electronic random
number generators, where the subject is asked to influence a
meter or recorder monitoring the decisions of the electronic
random number generator. A large number of experiments have been
tried with electronic generators and have been quite successful.
There are a variety of other kinds of phenomena around
that have been claimed to be paraconceptual, to be psi phenomena,
but many of these have simply not been studied very extensively
and so may be potentially explicable in ordinary physical terms,
so I shall not discuss them here. I shall take the basic
existence of the four psi phenomena mentioned above as well
established, and go on from there to propose a scientifically
useful form of a dualistic understanding of consciousness.
It is important to note that the dualism I shall propose
is in no way absolute. In my attempts to read philosophical
theories about consciousness, I have always been struck by the
attempts philosophers have made to come up with absolute,
everlasting definitions of terms. Philosophically I am inclined
to be a pragmatist, and, with my scientific preference I also
consider experience and data much more primary than concepts.
The dualism I shall propose is a pragmatic one: my argument is
that it is useful to distinguish mental and physical aspects of
consciousness, and that these will have effects on the kinds of
research we do. The distinction is based on our current knowledge
of the physical world, however, and reasonable extension of it,
and the distinction may very well be broken down by further
scientific progress. Indeed, I associate fairly often with
physicists, and the cutting edge of their world in the quantum
realm is so unusual and uncommonsensical that much of it seems
more far-fetched to me than psi phenomena do!
Emergent Interactionism
The primary empirical data that forces me to propose a
dualistic theory are psi phenomena. Given our current knowledge
of the physical world and our concepts about it, and reasonable
extrapolations of these concepts, psi phenomena are
paraconceptual. They indicate a quality to consciousness that is
not likely to be explained without recourse to some other
conceptual system than physics. My various psychological studies
of consciousness and altered states of consciousness, further
force me toward a dualistic position. This position is basically
expressed diagrammatically in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Basic model of the Emergent Interactionist approach to
understanding consciousness.
The physical structure of the brain is represented on the
left hand side of Figure 1, the qualitatively different factor we
can loosely call Mind/Life is represented on the right hand side
of the figure. In order to avoid semantic problems associated
with our ordinary associations to terms like brain or mind or
life, I shall begin referring to these two basic component
subsystems of consciousness as the B system and the M\L system.
The B system refers to the body, brain, nervous system, these
physical things that we understand by physical concepts. The M/L
system refers to those qualitatively different aspects of
consciousness that defy understanding in physical terms. The L or
life aspect of the M/L system is added to reflect the fact that
psi phenomena can happen in conjunction with a person without
there necessarily being any conscious experience going with it.
Although the evidence is still sparse here, I suspect that it is
a general property of life to exercise some sort of weak
psychokinetic effect on the physical matter about it.
Consciousness, as we experience it, is an emergent factor, a
systems effect from the interaction of the B system and the M/L
system.
The B system is the link between consciousness and the
physical world around us. Environmental factors are registered
via the sense organs and end up as electrical/chemical patterns
within the B system. Decisions to behave in various ways begin as
electrical/chemical patterns somewhere within the B system and
eventuate in specific neural impulses to motor apparatus that
creates our overt behavior.
The B system is an ultra-complex, especially interesting
structure, for while many aspects of the B system functioning
seem clearly determined, such as basic reflexes, a variety of
other important aspects seem to be under the control of
quasi-random or fully random processes, they are controlled by
neurons or neural ensembles that are frequently in an almost,
but-not-quite, -ready-to-fire state, easily triggered by very
slight influences. My dualistic theory of consciousness, that I
am calling Emergent Interactionism, postulates that the M/L and
the B systems interact by psi. Specifically, the M\L system at
least occasionally cognizes the physical state of the brain, and
thus factors in the environment that are represented as physical
patterns in the B system, by means of clairvoyance. Further, the
firing patterns of the B system are influenced at Critical
junctures by a psychokinetic influence from the M\L system, in
addition to the organization imposed by the deterministic and
self organizational properties inherent in the B system. The
holistic emergent of the interaction of these two systems, the
system or, more technically, supra-system emergent of the B an
M\L system interaction is consciousness as we experience it. To
express that another way, what we ordinarily consider our
consciousness is not an experience of what our B system alone is
like, nor what the M/L system alone is like, it is the experience
of the emergent of the complex mutual patterning and
interpenetration that is the normal state of the organism.
I am making a quite unusual claim, namely that psi is not
a rare occurrence, but something that goes on all the time. Under
normal circumstances, psi is frequently occurring within the
organism. Psi is the mechanism that philosophers always leave out
in dualistic positions, the mechanism whereby mind and body, the
M\L system and the B system, interact. To keep the discussion
clear, I shall begin to call psi within the organism auto-psi, or
more specifically, auto-clairvoyance and auto-PK. The unusual
manifestation of psi that makes us aware of it in the first
place, its use to gather information about events distant or
shielded from the organism, we shall call allo-psi, and we may
break that down into specific forms such as allo-clairvoyance,
allo-PK, allo telepathy, etc. The model of the Emergent
Interactionist approach sketched in Figure 1 is, of course,
grossly over-simplified, for we know that the B system is a
highly complex, large self-organized, hierarchical system in and
of itself. It manifests properties determined nut only at
particular levels by component parts but, as in any complex
system, has emergent properties manifesting at various levels. A
more realistic schematic representation of the Emergent
Interactionism position is of the sort shown in Figure 2. This
representation beings in a number of new considerations.
First, we should realize that there are various
hierarchical levels of organization in the B system alone,
leading to system complexities, without even beginning to
consider M/L system interaction. The lowest level shown on the
left hand side of Figure 2 is that of the individual neurons, and
while they have isolated properties we are beginning to
understand fairly well, they are organized into neural ensembles
at the next level of complexity, a level which would begin to
have emergent, system properties. That is, basic neural ensembles
can have properties that are not clearly predictable from those
of neurons alone. The ensembles, in turn, can interact back down
to the more basic level to influence the properties of isolated
neurons. Various neuron ensemble levels become more and more
complex, interacting in more and more ways, as is represented by
the information transfer and interaction arrows in the figures.
We have many lifetimes of scientific work ahead of us just trying
to understand the B system solely in terms of physical properties
because of these complex interactions and emergent properties.
The M\L system is represented on the right hand side of
Figure 2. Because physicists have found it highly profitable to
assume that there is a basic symmetry in real world processes, I
have applied this symmetry principle in drawing the picture and
have assumed that the M/L system is also organized
hierarchically. At the lowest levels would be the most basic
"life energies", a vitalistic term I am not really comfortable
with, but one I've not found a good replacement for yet. Basic
M/L system phenomena occur at these lower hierarchical levels,
which, as in the B system levels, interact with each other and
have various emergent properties. As we go higher in the M/L
system hierarchy, there is more likelihood of an experiential
representation of M/L system properties, so we can begin to talk
about it as a "mental" level rather than just a basic life energy
level. Thus system properties result from emergence laws in both
the B and M/L systems.
Click here for Figure 2
Extended model of the Emergent Interactionist
position,
representing the complexities and emergent system
properties of both the B and M/L systems,
as well as their
interactions.
B System Self-Determination
While it would be highly speculative to discuss possible
self-organization qualities of the M/L system, it is clear from
current scientific knowledge that the B system possesses a
considerable degree of self-organization. We cannot make this an
absolute statement, for, insofar as the Emergent Interactionist
position is correct, we never observe a B system functioning in
total isolation: if the M/L system were not interacting at all
with the B system, the B system would be dead. Dead brains do not
process much information. However, since we are now learning how
to build complex, internally stabilized and organized computer
systems, and can extrapolate from present day computer systems to
at least some of the functions of living B systems, it is a good
assumption that much self-organization and self-determination in
the B system comes about through its inherent physical and system
properties. We could further divide this self-organized activity
into basic biological functions that the organism can carry out
from birth, such as internal homeostatic operations on the body,
and learned operations that come about through the enculturation
process. The very fact that we have concepts such as the
personality or habit, implying the predictability of a person
given a knowledge of the situation, suggests that semi-permanent
physical changes are made in the B system which will produce
determined results given the requisite environmental stimuli to
trigger off these internal circuits. Further, a moment's
introspection about ordinary consciousness will indicate that it
is characterized by almost continuous mental activity, thinking,
remembering, associating, planning, thinking, in a never-ceasing
stream. Since the content of this activity largely reflects the
consensus reality about us, and was created by stimuli in our
developmental history brought in and mediated by the B system, it
seems likely that this continuous activity is mediated largely by
semi-permanent physical traces in the B system also. The B system
then, can be seen as doing a great deal of information processing
and internal operations purely on its own, without regard to
specific interactions with the M\L system. This automatization
of ordinary consciousness is an important factor to keep in mind.
Ordinary and Non-Ordinary Psi
As I stated earlier, from the Emergent Interactionist
point of view we postulate that psi is being used a great deal of
the time in everyone's life as auto-psi, used internally within
the organism. What we observe in parapsychological experiments,
however, is not ordinary psi but extraordinary psi, allo-psi,
taking a process ordinarily confined within an organism and
requiring the M/L system to interact via psi with something
outside the organism. I have represented the various
considerations that we would like to make in Figure 3.
The information flow arrows in the figure summarize
points made previously and expand on them. Two of the most
prominent information and energy flow arrows are sensory input to
and motor output from the B system. Within the organism,
auto-clairvoyant interaction from the B system to the M\L system
and auto-PK interaction from the M\L system to the B system also
constitute major routes of information flow. Thus the B system
and M/L system interact to produce the emergent system property
of consciousness as we experience it.
The unusual use of psi outside the organism is shown by
the information flow arrow for allo-clairvoyance, arid the
information\energy output arrow for allo--PK for interaction with
the physical world. Communication from one discrete M/L system to
another, telepathy, can be divided into receptive telepathy,
picking up information from another M/L system, and projective
telepathy, sending information to another M\L system. This
division maintains symmetry with the clairvoyance and PK
processes. With our terminological convention, telepathy is
automatically a form of allo-psi. Indeed, the fundamental
distinction with psi processes could be M\L system to M\L system
interaction and M\L system to physical world system interaction.
There is, of course, a methodological problem in trying to
observe pure allo telepathy under experimental conditions, for if
we want objective verification of it we must add auto-PK in order
to have a behavioral manifestation6n of the telepathically
acquired information that we can verify.
Earlier in this paper I noted precognition as one of the
basic psi phenomena, but I am now inclined not to consider the
temporal specification of when psi operates as a fundamental
distinction. This is reflected in Figure 3, where I've indicated
that the M/L aspect of consciousness has a low inherent degree of
localization in space and time, an idea arising from my concept
of transtemporal inhibition. The B system, on the other hand, is
very highly localized in space and time. We can make quite useful
and precise statements that certain neurological firing patterns
exist in such and such locations at such and such moments in
time.
This lower degree of inherent localization of the M\L
system comes from the properties of psi, or, more technically,
allo-psi, which allow the organism to pick up information
sensorially distant or shielded from it, and distant or shielded
by either space or time. To put it more generally, there is an
aspect of human consciousness that while largely focused on the
here and now of physical space and time is also spread out to
some extent in the immediate space and time around the organism,
and is capable of focusing to quite extreme spatial and temporal
distances away from the organism when allopsi is successfully
used. It illustrates one of the empirical consequences of the
Emergent Interactionist approach to consciousness, namely the
prediction that consciousness will manifest properties that are
paraconceptual by our ordinary concepts of space and time, and so
which require understanding on their own terms. M\L system terms,
rather than being reducible to physical explanatory concepts.
Out of the Body Experiences
I have been trying to make a careful scientific case for
my version of dualism, Emergent Interactionism, drawing upon the
implication of hundreds of high quality experiments. In the real
world, however, very large numbers of people, probably a
majority, do not need any scientific ease made for a dualistic
division between matter and some kind of soul. Now, we need not
take the fact that large numbers of people believe in some kind
of non-material soul as very important evidence in science, for
we know, as psychologists, that almost all beliefs people have
(including the belief that they do not have a soul) are not
formed from scientific evidence but are conditioned in people in
the course of enculturation. What should interest us as
psychologists, however, is the fact that there are some people, I
do not know how many, who believe that they have some kind of
immaterial soul not on the basis of what they have been taught,
but as a result of personal experience. These are people who have
had what I have termed an out-of-the-body experience, abbreviated
OOBE.
In a classic OOBE, a person finds himself located at some
other location than where he -knows, at the time, that his
physical body is located. He can look around, inspect that
location, try interacting with it in various ways, etc. just as
he would any ordinary physical location. Second, and of crucial
importance in definition, the experiencer knows during the
experience that his consciousness is basically functioning in the
pattern he recognizes as his ordinary state of consciousness.
Just as you can right now, with a moment's introspection, realize
that you are in your ordinary state of consciousness and not
dreaming or drunk or in any other altered state, the OOBE
experiencer recognizes the pattern of functioning of his
consciousness during the OOBE as ordinary. He can call upon most
or all of his ordinary cognitive faculties during the OOBE, and
it is not uncommon for people during the OOBE to engage in very
"logical" reasoning to the effect that what is happening to them
is impossible by all they have been taught, they cannot be in
their ordinary state of consciousness and yet find themselves
located outside their body, but nevertheless there is their
experience, perfectly real and happening to them right at the
moment, regardless of their conceptual system.
A few of the people who experience this classic sort of
OOBE retrospectively manage to talk themselves out of the
implications of their experience, and convince themselves that it
must have been some kind of unreal experience no matter how real
it seemed. The majority of people who have had an OOBE, however,
know, at a direct experiential level, that there is some
essential aspect of their consciousness that is of a quite
different nature from their brain functioning. We could logically
argue the contrary, of course, and state that their B system was
obviously functional, and perhaps the experience was just some
kind of interesting hallucination, perhaps what has been called a
lucid dream elsewhere, but our arguments as outsiders carry
little weight with people who have actually had the experience.
As I have defined OOBEs so far, they can easily be
included within the domain of ordinary psychological concepts and
investigation, although, as we know, they are not, probably
because their implications make them too paraconceptual. The
example of the gentleman who seemed to be floating above his body
given as an example of a transpersonal experience at the opening
of this paper is an excellent example of an OOBE, at least the
first part of it where he seems to possess his ordinary
consciousness, before it began to change later in the experience.
In some OOBEs, however, there is a psi element that
drastically strengthens the implication that the M/L system may
indeed be functioning in a quasi-independent way from tile B
system. When an OOBE case has a psi element, what this means is
that the person not only experiences himself as at some distant
location, he accurately describes what is going on at that
distant location at the time, and his description is sufficiently
accurate and the events sufficiently improbable, given what he
could ordinarily know, that we consider psi the best explanation
for how the information was gathered. The particular example at
the beginning of the paper does not have a strong element like
that: the experience of the perception of his daughter coming
into his bedroom, for example, could readily be explained in
conventional terms as mediated by his senses and B system, even
though he was having the hallucinatory experience of being
outside his body.
There are case collections of OOBEs where the information
about a distant location is specific enough to seem to require a
psi explanation. The one example I shall give you today, however,
comes from an experimental study of OOBEs under laboratory
conditions that I was able to carry out through having the good
fortune of meeting a young woman who had had several OOBEs per
week throughout her life as long as she could remember, and was
still having them. Basically, this young woman spent four nights
sleeping in a psychophysiological laboratory where I monitored
EEG, eye movements, blood pressure, and skin resistance on a
polygraph through the night. She slept in an ordinary bed with
short electrode cables that prevented her from sitting up or
getting out of bed. There was a shelf approximately seven feet
above the floor, over the bed, with a clock beside it. After she
was ready to go to sleep for the evening, I would go off to
another room, randomly enter a random number table and write a
five-digit random number from it on an 8< x 11 sheet of paper,
put this sheet of paper in a folder, take it into the laboratory
and slip the sheet of paper off, face up, on the shelf, so that
the number could not be read by anyone even walking around the
laboratory, much less lying in bed with short electrodes on, but
was readily visible to an observer whose visual apparatus was
near the ceiling. The subject, whom I called Miss Z, was
instructed to try to have OOBEs during the night, to try to wake
up shortly after them if at all possible in order that I could
compare the physiological records at about the time of her
reported OOBEs with her ordinary sleep record, and she was also
instructed to try to float high enough during her OOBE to read
and memorize the target number and report it to me.
She had several OOBEs during the nights she was able to
spend in the laboratory, and because of her relatively quick
awakenings from them I could generally localize them on the
physiological records with some confidence. I discovered that
this rather unique psychological experience occurred ill
conjunction with a rather unique EEG pattern. Although I had been
involved in sleep research for some years prior to this
experiment, I had never seen a pattern quite like the EEG pattern
that went along with these OOBEs, consisting, as it were, of a
mixture of a stage 1 EEG such as might be found in conjunction
with REM sleep, but also containing large amounts of slowed alpha
rhythms and no rapid eye movements. So we had an interesting
correlation: a unique psychological experience, a unique EEG
pattern. Heart rate and skin resistance measures did not show
anything noticeably different from the ongoing sleep pattern. In
all but one of her OOBEs, Miss Z reported that while she was
definitely out of her body, she was not able to control her
movement within the room to get high enough or close enough to
the target number to be able to read it, so she ventured no
opinion as to what the target number was. On the one occasion in
which She reported that she had been able to see the target
number, she correctly reported all five digits of it in order,
25139, an event with an a priori probability of one in 100,000.
I suspect that this was a clearcut instance of psi
functioning, although I do not generally make this as an airtight
claim, both because this was the first experimental study of this
type and because I could not feel absolutely certain that some
sophisticated form of fraud had not been used by Miss Z, although
I doubt this latter hypothesis strongly. I took these results
primarily as a demonstration that these exotic Sorts of
experiences could be studied under laboratory conditions. It does
lend support, however, to the psi component of OOBEs.
Although this is a radical thing to say as far as
mainstream psychology is concerned, I am inclined, because of the
strong psi component of some OOBEs, to take them as being pretty
much what they seem to be, a temporary spatial-functional
separation of the M\L system from the B system. This separation
is only temporary (otherwise we wouldn't get any subsequent
report!), and it is probably only partial with the M/L system
still interacting with the B system by auto-psi to some extent.
Several aspects of case reports of OOBEs support this separation
view.
First, in most OOBEs the person does not experience his
consciousness as very different from ordinary: Indeed, I use the
maintenance of ordinary consciousness, as perceived by the
experiencer, as a criterion for a classic case of OOBE. But I
have defined ordinary consciousness as an emergent from B and M\L
system interaction and mutual patterning, so this suggests that a
considerable amount of this autopsi interaction is still
occurring, and/or that the force of habit, the lifetime practice
of this patterning, is still fairly active in the M\L system in
spite of partial or full loss of interaction with the B system.
Second, while most OOBEs seldom seem to last more than a
minute to a few minutes, there are OOBEs which seem to last for
half an hour or an hour or more. In these prolonged OOBEs, or the
OOBEs of people who have had many such experiences rather than
the typical once in a lifetime case, or OOBEs apparently
resulting from severe disruption of physical functioning as when
a person has almost died, consciousness as experienced tends to
start drifting away from its ordinary pattern and become some
kind of altered state. The transpersonal experience given at the
beginning of this paper is an excellent example: the experiencer
first simply experienced his ordinary consciousness as being
above the bed, and then it began to function in ways that were
ineffable for reporting. This alteration of style of
consciousness function is what we would expect from the Emergent
Interactionist point of view as interaction between the B system
and the M/L system decreased. The M\L system would start drifting
toward its own inherent patterns of functioning as they would be
unpatterned by B system characteristics. Indeed, it is these
unusual kinds of OOBEs that may offer us one kind of potential
for insight into the inherent properties of the M\L system.
Third, the case study evidence we have suggests that
there are few if any physiological changes of great consequence
during ordinary, brief OOBEs. The physiological changes I found
for Miss Z, for example, were unusual but not of the sort
associated with pathological physiological functioning. From this
we might reason that the B system is able to function pretty much
on its own in an adaptive fashion, maintaining body homeostasis,
during brief OOBEs. People who have reported prolonged OOBEs,
however, often report large and usually pathological changes in
their physical body that they notice upon the cessation of the
OOBE. Robert Monroe, for example, an American businessman who
began having prolonged OOBEs quite spontaneously, reports that
his body has been quite chilled following prolonged OOBEs, a
pathological enough sign so that he tries to avoid their being
prolonged. .1 suspect this reflects the fact that life and
consciousness, as we know them, arise from the mutual interaction
and patterning of the B and M\L systems, and when the patterning
of the M/L system upon the B system becomes sufficiently
attenuated, the B system cannot adequately run the complex system
of the brain and body by itself. Small physiological errors start
to accumulate, and, in principle, would eventually lead to death.
Conclusions
I recognize that in terms of mainstream psychological
constructs, the theory of consciousness I have proposed, Emergent
Interactionism, is quite radical and will be automatically
dismissed as a throw-back to primitive and unscientific notions
by some psychologists. Nevertheless, I feel that excellent
scientific evidence forces us to be pragmatic dualists at the
present stage of our knowledge, to acknowledge that consciousness
has aspects to it, particularly the psi aspects, which are not
and probably never will be reducible to contemporary physical
notions of what the physical world is about.
As a psychologist, however, I recognize that logic plays
only a part in paradigm change. The interest in transpersonal
psychology is partly a matter of ordinary scientific interest,
and partly a deeper dissatisfaction (with strong emotional
components) of the view of man prevalent in orthodox, mainstream
American psychology. Thus, to be realistic, I expect that some
of you will find the Emergent Interactionist position I have
presented a useful formulation of what you would like to see as a
basis for transpersonal psychology because of personal as well as
scientific reasons, and I expect others to find it too
far-fetched for personal as well as scientific reasons.
Nevertheless, I want to end by underscoring the most important
conclusion to be drawn from this Emergent Interactionist
position, namely that transpersonal phenomena may be something
more than interesting but hallucinatory patternings of
neurological firing in the brain. Note carefully that I am not
saying that every unusual experience, whether or not "glorified"
by the label "transpersonal" should be taken at face value.
People have experiences, and they then almost always go on to
interpret these experiences. These interpretations are usually
based on emotional and psychological needs rather than logic. A
great deal of nonsensical and pathological interpretation of
ordinary experiences as well as transpersonal experience has
always been with us, and will always be with us. Much
pathological material will not be presented by its exponents
under the name of transpersonal. So, my proposal for an Emergent
Interactionist paradigm for understanding human consciousness is
in no way a call for abandoning a critical stance and scientific
rigor in our research. It is a call to not automatically dismiss
the apparent meaning and implications of transpersonal
experiences which imply that a human being is not necessarily
limited to the neural firing patterns within his brain. It is my
personal belief that we are creatures of much wider potential
than orthodox psychology imagines. My concern now is that we do
not leave the important human experience in the area of
transpersonal psychology solely in the hands of cultists, but use
what we have learned about scientific investigation to go on to
fully understand the transpersonal and psychic nature of man,
both for the sake of scientific knowledge and for human
betterment.
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