Charley Tart on consensus trance: wake up! - slap slap - University of California psychology professor

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1992 by Howard Rheingold

The relationship between the use of language and the induction of trance states might be one of the keys to understanding life in the last years of the technology millennium. What if we're all in a trance, and have been given hypnotic suggestions to ignore the evidence that we are in a trance? As we stumble around, bedazzled enormous machines eat the earth. How would we treat people who try to tell us that we need to wake up?

Ask Charley Tart. As Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he has taught, conducted research, and written books for 26 years, Charles Tart, Ph.D., qualifies as a tweedcoat and even a whitecoat. He is a member in good standing of the sciencecult, and his down-to-earth, low-key presentation lends an unexpected insider punch to his statements about the science cult's blind spots -- and every human's blind spots. He thinks of himself as a scientist, not a guru, working in a field that is underpopulated despite its importance. It is underpopulated because research into consciousness is dangerous to an experimental psychologist's career, and because it isn't easy to do the kind of research that can get the attention of the orthodoxy. Tart's most recent book is Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (p. 36). When we decided to publish George Gleason's "Mutual Hypnosis" (p. 28), I remembered some notes I had made when I talked with Tart a couple of years ago. You can contact Dr. Tart via email: cttart@ucdavis.edu. --HLR

TATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, from altered states to the state earthlings call "normal waking consciousness," have been Charley Tart's specialty for two decades. Surprisingly, Dr. Tart no longer calls the latter state "normal consciousness," and has substituted what he feels to be a more accurate term: consensus trance. To him, the idea of "normal consciousness" is the kind of convenient fiction illustrated by "The Emperor's New Clothes." Human groups agree on which of their perceptions should be admitted to awareness (hence consensus), then they train each other to see the world in that way and only in that way (hence trance).

In the 1960s, Tart's groundbreaking scientific articles about hypnosis and dreams appeared in psychological journals; in 1969 he published a collection of scientific articles, Altered States of Consciousness (1969, 1990; HarperSanFrancisco, SF), bringing together laboratory studies of yogis, analysis of the brain waves of Zen masters, and research into hypnotically induced dreams, lucid dreams, mutual hypnosis, and other borderlands of human consciousness that were beginning to attract scientific attention.

By his account, Charles Tart's childhood interest in his own vivid dream life -- a wondrous realm that everybody around him declared to be "unreal" -- was a factor in his decision to become a psychologist. Each night, in the dream state, he discovered as all children do that he could visit magical kingdoms and do all manner of miraculous things. And like all children, when he told his parents about these dreams he was reminded that such experiences are "figments of the imagination." If his nocturnal adventures were not considered to be legitimate reality by the adults he told about his dreams, what was so special about being awake that made it more real? And why do people, when awake, seem oblivious of the existence of that other, magical realm of dream consciousness?

Experimental psychology was the vehicle Tart chose to pursue his questions about consciousness and reality. Although much of his early research involved dreaming, he was attracted to the mysterious altered state of consciousness known as hypnosis. Tart learned from his earliest experiences as a hypnotist that reality can be influenced far more strongly by one's state of mind than most people suspect, most of the time:

"In inducing hypnosis I would sit down with a volunteer who wanted to be hypnotized," Tart recalled. "We were presumably both normal people. With our eyes we presumably saw the same room around us that others saw; with our ears we presumably heard the ordinary sounds in the room. We smelled what odors were there and felt the solidity of the real objects in the room.

"Then I began to talk to the subject. Researchers give the style of talking the special name of 'hypnotic induction procedure,' but basically it was just talking. The subject was given no drugs, was not in a special environment, had nothing external done to his brain -- and yet in twenty minutes I could drastically change the universe he lived in. With a few words, the subject could not lift his arm. With a few more he heard voices talking when no one was there. A few more words and he could open his eyes and see something that no one else could see, or, with the right suggestion, a real object in plain sight in the room would be invisible to him."

How can anybody distinguish, then, between dream, hypnotic trance, and reality? Dehypnotization, the procedure of breaking out of the normal human state of awareness, according to both mystics and hypnotists, is a matter of direct mental experience. The method can be learned, and that's the nutshell description of the esoteric wisdom of the ages.