[Music] thinking aloud 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 Tarte an emeritus professor of psychology the University of California
at Davis and also emeritus professor at the Institute of transpersonal
psychology dr. Tarte 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 and 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 that did so I looked in the scientific literature and what did
it do well made your eyes read and it made you
hungry and might affect your blood pressure slightly and it made her major
risk of going to jail people will take a risk of going to jail for eyes getting
red nobody had really done much about what actually happened people's
consciousness that made them want to do this so I I did a straightforward survey
and as I recall the major finding was the things look better sound better
taste better yeah I mean the munchies there the increased eating happened cuz
stuff tasted better people were paying more attention to just sensory qualities
of all sort instead of you know are 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 hope 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's go out there and survey thousands of people who really
get encyclopedia acknowledged 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 10 years later it was very common for people to drink
fairly heavily while do 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 older 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 things for newzik mm-hmm
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 am like I guess I kind of pioneered it because there was hardly
anything done in if gnosis 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 existed it's important could you increase it if a hypnotized B but then while B was still
hypnotized be hypnotized a and then a deepened B and B deep into 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 and a lot of unusual sources following up my interest
so I thought let me 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 mm-hmm and
I still get to email every once in a while from somebody 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 there's more to
life than just normal everyday waking consciousness yes
came kind of humdrum in a way compared to the possibilities in altered states
well when 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 noticed certain things that another culture might ignore were excited by some things that aren't
exciting to another culture or vice-versa and every cultures
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 they 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 exorcised 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 hmm 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 yes the states written they didn't come to me to ask anything
about it but some stuff was yeah I'm gonna show a little clip from that movie
because you're mentioned yes and I think I think it's interesting just to reflect
historically on the cultural impact that your work has had there's some good
people in the field tart Ornstein Dyckman but most of it is radical hip
stuff drug culture up 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 Goldberg Oh what are we getting
into our sensory deprivation isolation of studies I mean you know where will we
be going with the tank stuff writing up a grant Arthur strictly bootlegging just
for kicks I figure as long as you get the use of this tank let's play around with it let's find out where it takes us
fascinating stuff Arthur better get into it the book was a scientific best-seller
I mean usually scientific anthologies you know a hundred copies in the culture
that's doing pretty well it's sold over a hundred thousand copies because people
were desperate for this information you know they didn't like the idea that
weird things happen which might be nicer 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 don't go there mm-hmm
well of course the plot of that particular movie is a college professor
gets deeply interested in altered states and acquires a variety of super normal
powers is a little more exciting than happened in my laboratory well you 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 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 young I started
thinking about this 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 he
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 advisers was no it couldn't be done because you know Freud's idea was that de residue might
affect a dream but only an extremely indirect ways and maybe many days later
and what not mm-hmm but what I basically found is I could train some people to be
very good at going into hypnosis then hypnotized them and while they were in a
trance state suggests 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 asked him to dream about bring them out of hypnosis with amnesia so
consciously they didn't worry about what they were supposed to dream out 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 there in 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 biofeedback for payback was just being discovered and worked with yeah people it was amazing
to researchers a person could learn to control the firing of a single neuron
learn to control their heartbeat yeah then 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 but 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 mm-hmm I believe you've had a
chapter on that here you give it out right you're I don't usually think of it
in those words it's about the seneye of Malaysia mm-hmm there was a report by an
anthropologist killed in Stuart 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 yeah well I read that and that was fascinating but I had no
idea where there was true or not no other anthropologists had ever reported anything like that for these particulars
annoy people soon oh yeah yeah they were just too isolated mm-hmm and their
culture was almost wiped out during the Second World War as various armies going
through the jungles in Lodi 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 Senoia ever actually do 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 but when I was a kid I had occasional nightmares and
they were awful and I had 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 that with that intensity these
are my dreams why is that happening yeah and I taught myself that as soon as I
woke up enough to realize I've been having
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 what's going on or I would find the monster and punch him in the nose Oh
in almost no time I stopped having nightmares so I knew personally you could learn a degree of dream control so
the center I were possible whether they were 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 involved 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 dreamlike manifestation
which is tricky in terms of its consequences but yeah so then learning
to do that in your dreams would be a demonstration of it mm-hmm 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 advance 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 mm-hmm you know we're opening
up to the possibility and we've explored a little here and there but we don't have to tail knowledge so for instance
you know 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 we're within a dream you 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 get some skeptics you know how do you how do you know that
you're dreaming and I'd say well okay I wait we can have a philosophical
discussion that maybe right now you're actually dreaming about being in a class
okay you only had a lot real life be an easy sort of dream are you willing to
bet me 50 bucks that you can wake up and your bed at home in couple of minutes
you know if I ever was interested okay you can make an assessment of the state
of your consciousness and decide this does not feel like dreaming the same
sort of thing happens with lucid dreaming a person says gee I know I'm
dreaming but god 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 to in a sense instead of trying to deal with in an indirect
manner mmm-hmm and I don't think that has been adequately investigated but the
possibilities there were quite enormous when you coined the phrase state
specific research and it's all I think I did yeah you made it famous by
publishing it in science magazine I think in 1970 and 573 I think you know
something like that yeah proposal to create state specific
sciences and lucid dreaming it would seem to me could be a an archetypal
state specific science people can be trained to go into lucid dreams and
there we don't know what realms of consciousness or hyperspace for all I
know are there to be explored yes exactly I mean 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 you know it's the only tool you have as a hammer must you
investigate everything but hammering on it
mmm that won't work very well for some things yeah so I thought of some drug
intoxication states that don't wipe out your understanding that there are things
you'd like to do an 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 Stephen Laberge
who was 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 uh-huh okay 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 about it 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 and maybe
the culture hasn't quite come around to support that I mean a lot of people
thought this was an incredibly nutty idea when you mentioned my proposal
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 mm-hmm they sent it to two referees one of whom clearly had no idea
what it was all about 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 that they contribute little bricks of knowledge
but they don't get much excitement science received over a hundred letters
to the editor on this mmm 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 huh no they only published three of the letters but four 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 because compared to an 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 in 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 see what we can do well I
should mention the movie altered states picked up on your ID 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 high
my year in India was a defining moment I displacement overs almost eight specific technology operating in the service of
an a priori belief system how much do we scientists have a moral obligation to write on more power to them it's it's
gonna happen eventually if science is going to keep progressing you know we've
got to realize our tools are specialized for example I always carry a tool with
me mmm 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 of a
small screwdriver I've got it yeah 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 and we're all capable of
experiencing multiple states of consciousness I think everybody dreams
ok 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 dream and then tell them to put a notebook beside
their bed at night and write down anything they remember half of them will
immediately become Dream recallers yeah they just haven't turned their attention
to it because dreams haven't been given any value mm-hmm well Freud as I recall
said a a dream uninterpreted is like a letter unopened mm-hmm and though the
trouble with that analogy now is we all get so much spam and advertising on open
well and I feel that way myself I don't want to bother with all of my dreams I
have a friend you've know Patricia Garfield who is
written her dreams down for half a century has all of her dreams and 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 have I used to have an
occasional lucid dream you know so I knew lucid dreams were possible
again that's why I published that article on the sin oh I and their dream
techniques yes a lot of altered states I've never experienced but you know for
people whose word are respect there are their 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 quite a few people who are
perfectly honest people as far as I know and tell 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 have these other characteristics
okay that's an interesting figure person if 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 this scientific so oo bees
now those 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 by ooby's body
would pronounce it so just OBEs out a lot of experiences you don't capitalize
the F well 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 a 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 would 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 me it seems very real to me that I'm
floating up near the ceiling but it can't be real candid it must be just a
dream mm-hmm and I said well take 10 sheets of paper write the numbers 1 to
10 on them shuffle them up in a box face down and after you're in bed without
looking put one on the table it happened to float near the ceiling memorize the
number hmm I saw a few weeks later and she said Oh 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 lurk location but
with an interesting brainwave state but on the one occasion which she said she
could read the numbers she correctly said oh it's two five one three two that's odds of $100,000 to guess a five
digit one guess so I felt I'd demonstrated that you could take as
exotic and altered state as and how the body experience and study it in the
laboratory and she wasn't near death okay it was a safe thing to do and so
now millions of researchers would start researching this but know I'm was a head of the culture if you didn't repeat that
study with the famous out-of-body experience or Robert Monroe yes and he
couldn't quite do his clearly on something like that and his physiology
was somewhat different but again it demonstrated this stuff we can apply
science and learn or about it it's not just whether 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
mm-hmm you know it's not that some Greek theologians were debating about some
word that meant wind and they just 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 gonna 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 believe I mean I know some things we got it parks a belief in
it one way or the other but the more your belief it 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 with us
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