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Charles T. Tart (born 1937) is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness (particularly altered states of consciousness), as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology.^[1]

Biography

Charles Tart was born on April 29, 1937, in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He was active in amateur radio and worked as a radio engineer (with a First Class Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission) while a teenager. As an undergraduate, Tart first studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before transferring to Duke University to study psychology under J. B. Rhine. He received his PhD in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then completed postdoctoral research in hypnosis under Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University.^[1] He was a professor of psychology at University of California, Davis for 28 years.

His first books, Altered States of Consciousness (editor, 1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.^[1] As of 2005, he was a core faculty member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California), a senior research fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), a professor emeritus of psychology at the UC Davis, and emeritus member of the Monroe Institute board of advisors. Tart was the holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a visiting professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an instructor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).^[1]

Tart was also integral in the theorizing and construction of the automatic ESP testing device called the ESPATESTER machine that was built at the University of Virginia.^[2] He supported Joseph McMoneagle‘s claim of having remote viewed into the past, present, and future, and having predicted future events.^[3]

As well as a laboratory researcher, Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff‘s work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. Tart believes that the evidence of the paranormal is bringing science and spirit together. His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.

In his 1986 book Waking Up, he introduced the phrase “consensus trance” to the lexicon. Tart likened normal waking consciousness to hypnotic trance. He discussed how each of us is from birth inducted to the trance of the society around us. Tart noted both similarities and differences between hypnotic trance induction and consensus trance induction. He emphasized the enormous and pervasive power of parents, teachers, religious leaders, political figures, and others to compel induction. Referring to the work of Gurdjieff and others he outlines a path to awakening based upon self-observation.