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I don't want to make too much of it. It could after all be my fantasy. But I imagined and sometimes imagination is a very powerful tool that Charlie and I were passing a large like a beach ball back and forth between my reality here and the three dimensional world and his reality somewhere in what I sometimes think of as hyperspace or the Bardo Plains or the afterlife. Keep watching to learn more.

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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology now available on Amazon.

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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu.

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You can now download all eight copies.

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Of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies.

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Go to newthinkingallowed.org.

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Thinking allowed conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.

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Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. You may know from having watched previous In Presence monologue dialogues with me. I'm Jeffrey's alter ego and conversation partner. Today I'd like to talk about my friend and mentor, Professor Charles Tart. I have had a close personal relationship with Charlie for over half a century. He was one of my dissertation advisors when I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the 1970s. In fact, I have to say he stood by me at one of the most trying and traumatic times in my life. After I had completed my doctoral dissertation, after it had been approved by all of the professors on my dissertation committee, which were five at that time, there was a pressure campaign mounted by members of the so called skeptical community to get the University of California to withdraw my dissertation and to withdraw my diploma and my degree. In fact, that effort nearly succeeded, but it didn't succeed and Charlie Tartt stood by me and has been a strong supporter of my work and of the New Thinking Allowed foundation and videotape series of the original Thinking Allowed series and the YouTube channel consistently since then. I owe him a debt of gratitude. As partial repayment of that debt, we have recently released a new book of 16 interviews transcribed that I conducted with Charlie over many years reviewing his amazing career in parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, and humanistic psychology. If you'd like to remember this giant in the field of psychology and support the New Thinking Allowed foundation I encourage you to order this book on Amazon. I also want to mention in passing that among other things, Charlie donated 20 copies, signed copies of his classic book Altered States of Consciousness. And they are also available to people for $100 donation to the New Thinking Allowed Foundation. Write to us@friendsewthinkingallowed.com if this is of interest to you. Charlie began his career in parapsychology back in the 1960s working with the great researcher Andrija Puharich, who had established the Roundtable foundation in the state of main. Was there that he came up with the idea that you could reduce the signal to noise problem in ESP reception by putting your research subjects inside of a Faraday cage which would provide electrical shielding. A cage built out of copper wire essentially, or a screen. Copper screen essentially, so that radio signals and other electromagnetic transmissions can't penetrate into the cage. So it was electromagnetically. And he found that research subjects perform better inside the cage. Charlie was able to replicate that work. There are many technical details involved which he describes in the transcribed interview in our book. So I won't go into those details now, but to say that he was already interested in achieving replicable consistent results in parapsychology. This was his first step on a long journey. Now, Charlie has published over 250 academic papers and chapters in professional books. However, I'm not going to be able to cover all of that. I'm just going to talk about some of the highlights of his career. One of the things that Charlie is known for is that he did the very first study on what it's like to experience cannabis inebriation. It was published in a book which remains a classic on being stoned. It's still a very consistent and accurate description of the use of marijuana, which of course when I was a college student back in the 1970s was very widespread, even though it was then considered illegal. I can also say when I entered graduate school at BERKELEY in the 1970s, in fact, in 1970, if you were to go on campus, everywhere you go, you would see people carrying his classic anthology Altered States of Consciousness, the very same book I mentioned earlier, of which I have 20 signed copies donated by Charlie to help support the work of new thinking allowed the book covers, of course, the use of psychedelic drugs and marijuana as one form of altering consciousness. It also includes yoga, meditation, hypnosis, mutual hypnosis, brainwave feedback and naturally dream consciousness. So it was a landmark book. It really put the phrase altered states of consciousness into our vocabulary. In fact, now that I think about it there was a movie called Altered States that came out in that era featuring the actor William Hurt. There's a scene in that movie where Hurt, who plays a university professor, talks about the research in the field and he says, well, there's some good work by Charlie Tartt and Arthur Dyckman and a few others right in the movie. As a parapsychology student, of course, I was particularly interested in Charlie's learning to use extrasensory perception. That became a focus of my own research. And Charlie had developed what he called a ten choice trainer. The research subjects had ten different choices arranged like around a clock. They could choose numbers 1 through 10. The unique feature of this system, which was fully automated, is that the research subjects received trial by trial feedback, which was not always done in parapsychology. In fact, the early work in parapsychology noticed a decline effect. After all, it gets very boring doing a repetitive task over and over and over again. The early research with the Zener cards, for example, included sometimes tens of thousands of trials. What J.B. rhine and his colleagues at Duke University had noticed was a effect. After a while, the subject simply, I think, got tired of doing this dull experiment. But what Charlie discovered is with trial by trial feedback, some subjects actually learned how to improve their scores. Presumably, they did this by coming to understand the inner psychological cues associated with accurate extrasensory perception. But minimally speaking, these subjects learned how to prevent the decline effect. Trial by trial feedback made a difference, and that was one of Charlie's important findings. In 1973, while I was working with him as a graduate student at Berkeley, of course, Charlie was a professor in the University of California system at UC Davis. He became famous across the country for his article on state specific scientific research that was published in the flagship magazine of the association, the American association for the Advancement of Science. Of course, the name of that magazine is Science. That article still remains a classic. Charlie envisioned an era in which scientists themselves would enter into altered states, giving them access to aspects of reality that they couldn't see or perceive through their normal, everyday waking state of consciousness. You can imagine how controversial that position was in 1973. As I recall, the editors of Science said they never received so much feedback, both positive and negative, as a result of that article. But what Charlie was presaging was the development of a new type of scientist. You could call him him or her, a psychonaut, a person who was willing to experience altered states as a way of understanding reality more deeply. I have to confess, it's true that very little actual Progress has been done in that area. It's very difficult to do, as Charlie himself pointed out. The main difficulty of course are cultural predispositions that influence altered states. Nevertheless, there are psychonauts today. Work has progressed and when it is reported in the literature, I try to feature it here on the new thinking allowed channel. One example of that, in addition to the many people who report on their experiences with DMT and other psychedelics, is our work with Professor William Van Gordon on meditation induced near death experiences. A perfect example of following on From Charlie initial 1973 paper. Yet another important contribution that Charlie made was his website featuring the spiritual and paranormal experiences of scientists. Now you can imagine because of the materialistic culture that exists within mainstream science, most scientists who have spiritual and paranormal experiences are afraid to go public about them. But Charlie created a venue where they could describe their experiences in detail and do it anonymously. His website, an archive of these experiences, is still available as a resource. I should point out of course, that Charlie himself was an experimenter in spiritual traditions. He published an important book on transpersonal psychology, the psychology that endeavors to integrate states of consciousness beyond the ego, beyond the personality states in which we reach into. You could call it universal consciousness, cosmic consciousness, higher states of awareness, states often associated with religious and spiritual traditions. He was particularly interested in Buddhism and he was particularly interested in the work of Gurdjieff and Uspensky. As a result of that, he published his book called Waking up, in which he addressed the issue of the kind of automatic, robotic, habitual behavior we often engage in without thinking. Of course, that's normal human behavior. We're not 100% aware and conscious of everything we do. Much of our behavior is mechanical. But Charlie addressed the question of how we can become more vital, more alert, more aware, conscious and less robotic in our lives. In that important book, many people also don't realize that Charlie was a pioneer in the field of remote viewing. He spent a year at SRI Stanford Research Institute, also known as SRI International, working with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, developing their work in remote viewing. And he edited a very important volume based on a symposium held at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers discussing telepathy, clairvoyance and remote viewing. That volume of course, is known as Mind at Large. I'd like to conclude this monologue dialogue on a personal note. I feel very fortunate that I was able to be in communication with Charlie just days before he died in March of 2025 this year he was able to see the galleys of our book of 16 interviews, transcribed interviews that I'd conducted over a period of many years with him. It was very gratifying for me to be able to share that with him. We also talked about his impending death. He knew it was going to be soon. He had already been in the dealing with one crisis in which they brought him back to life. Using electrical stimulation of his heart, he told me how painful it was. He expressed to me that he didn't want to have to go through that again, that he was ready to die. We talked about the afterlife and my interest in it and his interest in it. We both have had a lifelong curiosity for I have had this feeling of being in touch with Charlie since his death. In fact, I don't want to make too much of it. It could after all be my fantasy. But I imagined, and sometimes imagination is a very powerful tool that Charlie and I were passing a large like a beach ball back and forth between my reality here and the three dimensional world and his real what I sometimes think of as hyperspace or the Bardo planes or the afterlife. By passing a ball back and forth between us, it seemed to be a way for me to open up. I realize my perspective of course, is that we all have access to these realms. Most of us of course are too busy dealing with our daily lives to really address these things. Charlie understood this. He was a very down to earth fellow. But I have such fond memories of my time with him and I'm so grateful that I was able to share decades of friendship with this wonderful person. I can say in conclusion that Charlie lives on. He lives on in my heart and he certainly lives on in the hearts of hundreds of his colleagues and students and friends. He was a towering giant in the field of psychology and I know he is missed and will be missed and will be remembered for a very long time. So thank you for being with me and as I always say, A New Thinking Allowed. Thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.