2) Dream Telepathy: Comments on a Scientific Language for Psi/Dowsing (including reflections on a letter from Charles T. Tart)

My views on consciousness first began to take shape in 1983 after reading Charles T. Tart's 1981 essay "Transpersonal Realities or Neurophysiological Illusions? Toward an Empirically Testable Dualism" (Tart, 1981). In a marginal note that I made while reading Tart's essay, I defined consciousness as:

The immediacy of the continually emerging effort to establish an awareness of the reciprical interaction taking place between the person-the-environment-and-the-fundamental unifying principle bonding this relationship together at any given moment. I have expanded on this definition of consciousness in my work on David Bohm's Holistic Physics.

Sometime in the fall of 1983 I wrote a letter to Tart, inquiring about working on a master's degree in parapsychology with him at the University of California-Davis. Responding on November 11, 1983, Tart took an extraordinary amount of time and careful effort to explain the political realities of pursuing a degree in parapsychology at UC-Davis (Tart, 1983). A more complete account of Tart's letter is forthcoming in a future blog. For now I will suffice to say that Tart's letter was extremely disheartening news and yet it served to awaken me to the difficulties ahead on the path that I had chosen. Still at the time my thoughts were mostly reeling, contemplating the fact that UC Davis offered fewer hours in transpersonal psychology than where I was currently pursuing graduate work at Kearney State College in Nebraska (now the University of Nebraska-Kearney). So I decided to remain in Nebraska, miserable, working by myself, and assisting in creating more courses in transpersonal psychology with Yozan Dirk Mosig (a student of Sidney Jourard, and later contributor to chapter 15 on Zen Buddhism in James Fadiman na Robert Frager's book "Personality and Personal Growth," 1994.

On January 23-24, 1994, I attended a workshop on "Myths, Dreams, and Shamanism" near Boston (actually Newton) with Stanley Krippner. During that weekend I began sleuthing out the meaning of an 11-year recurring dream whose insights are discussed in other blogs I have written on this site. On September 21-22, 1984, I returned to Boston to attend the conference "Science and Mysticism: Exploring the New Realities" at Harvard University, that included presentations and panel discussions by Renee` Weber, Huston Smith, David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake.

I wrote to Tart on January 30, 1985, inquiring about the significance of Sheldrake's ideas to understand psi, receiving his letter dated February 14, 1985, conforming my suspicions that morphogenetic fields or M-fields "are a biologiccally sound way of talking about psi influences" (Tart, 1985). Krippner supports this view (Kripner, 1988), and as early as 1975 in "Song of the Siren" had discussed similar work being conducted by Russian psychologist Edward Naumov. Naumov had suggested a new language for discussing psi influences that he referred to as "biological information," or "bioinformation." Krippner explains Naumov's perspective on psi, telling us (in a rather long quote below):

"If a person were to gain information from a telepathic transmitter, this would be an example of 'biological communication.' If a person were to gain information clairvoyantly (without a transmitter), the term 'biological location' (or 'biolocation') would be used[, whereas dowsing was referred to by Naumov as the 'biophysical effect'] . . . . The terms 'biological energy' and 'bioenergy' were put forward by Naumov to replace 'psychokinesis' and 'PK.' However, the term 'PK' would not be entirely discarded; it would be used to refer to either the spontaneous or experimental action of bioenergy on nonliving things. Examples given by Naumov included psychic photography (the paranormal creation of film images, often called the 'bio-optical effect') and the psychokinetic movement of small objects at a distance" (Krippner: 139-141, 1975).

Naumov also suggested "psychoenergetics" as a way of referring to all investigations of psi because, says Krippner: "He felt that this designation included both the informational and the energetic aspects of psi phenomeonon. Further, it implied that the field was interdisciplinary, while the term 'parapsychology' did not do credit to physicians, physicists, biologists, and other scientists who were conducting experiments" (Krippner: 141, 1975). Meanwhile 29 years have passed since Krippner alerted us to Naumov's proposals for a more scientific language to describe psi, and yet this lexicon and paradigmatic framework continues to remain unknown to most of us. Likewise Sheldrake's work continues to be ignored and/or denigrated (O'Hara, 1984).

References

Fadiman, James & Frager, Robert. (1994). Personality and Personal Growth. (3erd ed.). New York: HarperCollinsCollegePublishers.

Krippner, Stanley. (1975). Song of the Siren: A Parapsychological Odyssey. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

O'Hara, Miller Maureen. (1984). "Reflections on Sheldrake, Wilber, and 'New Science.'" Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 24 (2), 116-120.

Tart, Charles. T. (1981). "Transpersonal Realities or Neurophysiological Illusions?: Toward An Empirically Testable Dualism." In Ronald S. Valle & Rolf von Eckartsberg (Eds), The Metaphors of Consciousness. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 199-222.

Tart, Charles T. (1983, November 11). Personal Correspondence.

Tart, Charles T. (1985, February 14). Personal Correspondence.