Parapsychology and transpersonal psychology: "Anomalies" to be explained away or spirit to manifest?

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Charles T. Tart

PSYCHOLOGICAL/SPIRITUAL RESISTANCE TO PARAPSYCHOLOGY

Now let us look at what I think is the powerful and spiritual conflict that underlies our lack of acceptance by mainstream science.

Rather than attempt a comprehensive definition of spiritual, which I am sure cannot be adequately defined in ordinary words or ordinary consensus consciousness anyway (Tart, 1972, 1998), let me give an example of what I consider archetypal spiritual experience: the Cosmic Consciousness experience of Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian physician who had this spontaneous experience in 1867.

It was in the early spring at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom.... His mind deeply under the influences of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city, the next he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught. (Bucke, 1961, p. 7-8)

That is an example of the kind of experience I mean by spiritual.

Although Bucke's experience dates back more than 125 years ago, such experiences still happen. Those of you who are interested will be fascinated by the experience of Allan Smith, a leading young physician and anesthesiology researcher, who had a spontaneous Cosmic Consciousness experience almost identical to Bucke's in 1976, and who gave up an academic tenure career and research track to have more time to understand the import of his experience (Smith & Tart, 1998). Smith was an atheist, had never heard of Bucke, and was not interested in such subjects, yet the parallels between their experiences, more than 100 years apart, are amazing.