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

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

One of the ways I make it easier for myself to hold both positions, which may be a useful strategy for some of the rest of us, is to make my primary definition of myself as a professional be a transpersonal psychologist rather than a parapsychologist. Within transpersonal psychology, parapsychology is a narrower, technical interest of mine. Thus, while true to my scientific responsibilities, I can be true to my own and others' deep personal interests in spiritual matters, and I can take a variety of positions--philosophical, psychological, humanistic, Buddhist, Sufi, and so on--with respect to a variety of aspects and studies on psi and transpersonal phenomena, instead of being limited to an ultra-scientific, laboratory-research-only position.

Since I have gotten static for not "defining" the spiritual, I had better at least define the transpersonal. What is transpersonal psychology? Here is a definition of the field, which I helped to compose, from the catalog of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology:

Transpersonal psychology is... based on people's experiences of temporarily transcending our usual identification with our limited biological, historical, cultural and personal self and, at the deepest and most profound levels of experience possible, recognizing/being "something" of vast intelligence and compassion that encompasses/is the entire universe. From this perspective our ordinary, "normal" biological, historical, cultural and personal self is seen as an important, but quite partial (and often pathologically distorted) manifestation or expression of this much greater "something" that is our deeper origin and destination."

Notice that the emphasis in this definition is on experiences. People's experiences are taken as primary data for the field, rather than dismissed as merely "subjective," as the behavioristic emphasis in psychology did, or as Materialistic Scientism does. But, you might object, are not such experiences mere delusions? Marx talked about religion as the opiate of the masses. Because we are dealing mainly with the White middle-class as the people currently most interested in transpersonal psychology, are we talking about merely the "hallucinogens of the elite," to coin a phrase? That is certainly the way Materialistic Scientism would tend to dismiss transpersonal psychology.

By way of answering, let me introduce an analogy that I have used for many years: Parapsychology is to transpersonal psychology as physics is to engineering.

Parapsychology/Transpersonal psychology = physics/engineering = basic nature of reality/applications

That is, parapsychology, like physics, studies the basic nature of reality, whereas transpersonal psychology and engineering are concerned with practical applications of that reality. (1)

Transpersonal psychology needs parapsychology to discover the fundamental nature of the mind, which both opens up and sets limits on the possibilities of what can be done with practical applications. Parapsychology also helps discover aspects of mind that might not be at all obvious with only an interest in practical applications or spontaneous psychic and transpersonal experiences. For example, laboratory psi research discovered the phenomena of psi missing, which I doubt would ever have been discovered if we simply studied the spontaneous experiences that happen to people in everyday life. Might there be phenomena comparable with psi missing in transpersonal psychology?