Bringing Science and Spirit Together

	Book review on The End of Materialism by Charles T. Tart Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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Charley Tart will be known to many readers and some may even remember his superb talk at the first Beyond the Brain conference in Cambridge where he introduced the notion of 'endarkenment'. Here he brings together in a masterpiece 50 years of research and thinking at the parapsychological interface between science and spirituality to provide his own evidence-based synthesis of science and spirit. I remember him saying at an earlier Mystics and Scientists conference that the conflict between science and religion was one between second-rate scientists and second-rate theologians.

The title is an ambitious one, but the book fulfils it in its own terms. We are all familiar with the resistance of scientific materialists to both spiritual experience and parapsychological experiments. Strictly speaking this is not science so much as scientism, an ideological position which not only takes materialism for granted but resolutely refuses to countenance any evidence against it. Huston Smith, who contributes the foreword, has written extensively about scientism, but one scientist astutely observed to him that there was only one problem with his analysis: that many scientists did not make the distinction and were not aware of it. This reinforces the argument for philosophy of science to be a standard component of scientific training and goes to the heart of why the Network was founded with the conviction that the philosophical assumptions of science need not necessarily be materialistic. We hear much about evidence-based medicine, but the challenge here is to persuade scientists to look at the evidence base for parapsychology and spirituality.

Part of the framework from the book is provided by the well-known mystical experience of Richard M. Bucke. What is one to make of it? Does it tell us something essential about the nature of consciousness and the universe? Or is it simply the result of disordered brain functioning? Charley has made it his business to seek the spiritual as a scientist, distinguishing here spirituality from institutional religion, which he himself also rejects. Again, this is a distinction not generally made by atheist intellectuals. Charley proposes an original approach in terms of what he calls the Western Creed, a formulation of the materialist worldview, which he invites readers to recite while taking note of their feelings. He then sketches out his models for a materialistic and spiritual understanding of life and consciousness, adding a sophisticated discussion of ways of knowing and 'ways of not knowing', leading to distortions of science and intelligence. He has a section distinguishing between skepticism and pseudoskepticism, reserving the latter term for those who argue that parapsychological results must be wrong because they are scientifically impossible. In other words they contradict the pseudoskeptic's basic assumptions about the nature of reality.

Charley introduces what he calls the 'big five' - telepathy, clairvoyance or remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis and psychic healing - with an experience of his own in which he found himself saying the word 'coup d'etat' to himself, only to find waiting for him in his office the next day a letter from Mrs Coudetat about her son, who was one of his students. In writing this up, Charley discusses issues of analytical and theoretical overlay in interpreting such cases. Sceptics would just dismiss this as coincidence, so cases of this kind provide an interesting litmus test of one's underlying attitude. The major chapters that follow report on his own research and that of other leading parapsychologists like Dean Radin, arguing that these phenomena are genuinely nonphysical and cannot therefore be accounted for within a materialistic framework. All the more so, when it comes to other experiences outside the 'big five' such as postcognition, out of body experiences, near death experiences, post-mortem survival and after death communications, mediumship and reincarnation. As I remarked in my review of the Fenwick's book The Art of Dying  last summer, one cannot even begin to make sense of such experiences within the materialistic framework of scientism which simply attempts to dismiss or explain away the evidence rather than trying to understand it. It is superficial and disingenuous to write the whole field off in terms of hallucinations or psychopathology; indeed, William James said as much 100 years ago.

Charley provides a helpful summary at the end of chapter 13, highlighting some of the key points pointing to a wider model of human nature, a version of which is essential if one is to make sense of these experiments and experiences. A particularly striking case concerns the post-mortem return of the wife of a sceptical psychology professor, Joseph Waldron, which contains all the hallmarks of an unexpected but genuine communication. This and other cases can be viewed on Charley's website, The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences, www.issc-taste.org  - and short of describing Waldron as deluded on this particular occasion, a possibility which he himself discusses, it is hard to dismiss out of hand. The chapter on the mediumship provides a fascinating account of the 1930 R-101 airship disaster, where Eileen Garrett received accurate technical  - and classified - information, ostensibly from the deceased captain H.C Irwin.

Chapter 18 reviews the empirical findings of the book and asks what kind of picture of human beings emerges. It is one indicating that we are 'more than just our physical bodies, that we can sometimes communicate mind to mind, sometimes clairvoyantly know the state of the physical world' and have other capacities for precognition, psychokinesis and psychic healing. Traditional spiritual worldviews tell us that physical life is part of a larger reality, and that we have an essence or soul which is the core of our real self. It seems that we have ' non-physical aspects of mind imbedded in and interacting with the characteristics of the body, brain and nervous system.' Hence Charley's observation that he won't be surprised if he regains consciousness in some form after he dies, but he expects that his sense of 'I' will have changed.

All this brings him full circle back to the Western Creed exercise: are we human beings a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos, a meat-based computer that will soon die? Or are we spiritual creatures with greater capacities alongside our biological and physical existence? Charley provides his 'best bets' on the basis of his previous analysis, which open-minded readers will find eminently reasonable. The final chapter returns to Richard Bucke, whose experience is compared with the more modern account by Allan Smith, which resembles it in a striking manner. He records that our deepest questions are fully answered in a state of cosmic consciousness that they cannot be resolved in terms of everyday language. There is a strong indication, however, that Bucke's experience really does tell us something essential about the nature of life and consciousness. In this case, scientific materialism suffers from a limited view of reality and needs to remove its blinkers. It is no exaggeration to say that this book, along with others, actually overturns the dominant scientific paradigm. However, because so few leading scientists have considered this kind of evidence, the paradigm apparently remains intact. The fortress of scientism still stands, so we need to find new ways of engaging scientists with this evidence base. Books like this and 'Irreducible Mind', reviewed in the last issue, form part of the necessary wider picture.

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