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Parapsychology and transpersonal psychology: "Anomalies" to be explained away or spirit to manifest?
Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Charles T. Tart
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It is a real pleasure to be here today, and I look forward to giving this talk with anticipation. I have already stirred up quite a bit of excitement, judging by comments I have gotten, by having the word spirit in the title, and also by asking, in my recent e-mailed questionnaire to Parapsychological Association (PA) members, about the importance of spiritual values in motivating them to become parapsychologists. I am glad to have stirred up this excitement, because I am not happy with the current state of parapsychology, and I want to stimulate some thinking about that, which I think will be helped by excitement.
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To give us some context, I want to provide a brief update on where popular culture in the United States is. Table 1 shows some May 2001 Gallup poll results. From it, you can see that a majority of the United States population believes in psychic healing or mind-body healing, up 8% from 11 years ago, and well over a third of the population believes in such phenomena as ESP, haunted houses, the return of spirits of the dead, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.
Obviously, the logical conclusion that can be drawn from these data is that, given the enormous cultural interest in the topics we study in parapsychology, the study of these phenomena must be a major field of study, widely and generously supported. Yes?
Hah!
What's wrong?
SUBSTANTIVE PROGRESS, BUT STILL No ACCEPTANCE
It is quite appropriate that this meeting of the PA is organized in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Parapsychology Foundation, as I have been professionally active in the field of parapsychology for more than 45 years and became interested in it just about 50 years ago. My first grant to do parapsychological research, while I was still a college sophomore, came from Eileen J. Garrett and the Parapsychology Foundation in 1956. It was to study hypnotically induced out-of-body experiences (OBEs).
In terms of the substance of our field, I have seen a number of exciting discoveries in these 50 years. Among them are the remote viewing procedure, which seems to give some of the best psi yields in the field, as well as the ganzfeld procedure. Both of these approaches also show that we have learned a lot about handling free-response data in an objective fashion, insofar as evaluating whether psi is present (although we still cannot handle the free-response data in a well-quantified fashion, such that we can do good functional research). Further, I have been impressed by the geomagnetic and sidereal-time correlates of ESP findings, by various studies using physiological responses to detect psi, and by psychic healing research, as well as many other findings. In spite of the progress in learning more about psi, however, our field is not accepted.
One of our major goals in these 50 years has been acceptance by the scientific establishment. We want bright people who have research money and access to the scientific journals and expertise to see the importance of our field, agree that we have important phenomena, and help us in our research. I understand and agree with this attempt to gain acceptance by the scientific establishment! It has inspired excellent quality work, as well as having many other things to say for it, and yet...as part of this attempt to gain acceptance by mainstream science, we often present psi as an anomaly, hoping that using this term, which is used in other fields of science, will increase our chance of acceptance. Sometimes I have used the term when it is strategically useful, but generally I have never liked anomaly: It trivializes psi phenomena.
I looked at my college dictionary to recheck the definition and found that anomaly meant "deviation from the common rule; irregularity; something that deviates in excess of normal variation." The synonym given for anomaly was paradox. With the connotations of this kind of definition, I think you can see that it has a tendency to trivialize psi phenomena and to undercut their possible revolutionary implications for scientific thinking. Given the resistance to psi that I will discuss later, having a word that implicitly trivializes psi helps to dismiss it.
So our work has not led to scientific acceptance of our field, with the possible exception of military intelligence applications, in which a lot of research money was spent. But I think most people would consider that a mixed blessing, as well as something highly variable: There was a lot of military and intelligence agency research money for some years, but it has all pretty much disappeared.
I think the main reason for the lack of acceptance is that there is a deep and powerful resistance to psi phenomena, a resistance we have not dealt with adequately. In looking for acceptance by mainstream science, we have been very rational, and our approach tends to assume that the lack of acceptance is a rational matter. After all, that is the way the science game is supposed to be played! If only we had better replicability, or a comprehensive theory of psi, or theories of psi that integrated psi with mainstream knowledge, surely we would be accepted? But it has not worked. I will talk more about this resistance below.
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