Ego dissolution (ED; a temporary disruption of self-boundaries and personal identity) is a central feature of many altered states of consciousness. With the resurgence of psychedelic research, these experiences have become of growing clinical relevance, as they can evoke both profound therapeutic transformation and significant psychological destabilization. This conceptual paper reviews the...
The out-of-body experience (OBE) is a state of altered consciousness in which one has the impression of being consciously outside of the physical body either somewhere on Earth (often, but not always, in the vicinity of the physical body) or in some transcendental location (having ventured into some otherworldly place distinct from the Earth). Some OBEs are known to occur in association with a...
Objective: To explore how individual differences and physical and physiological factors correlate with exceptional experiences (ExE) in a psychomanteum. Methods: Thirty people who reported a prior experience with a “ghost” participated in a psychomanteum. Fifteen also experience synesthesia. The procedure consisted of a 15-minute intention session and 45-minute mirror gazing session...
Objective. Remote viewing data frequently contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate elements, which has raised concerns regarding its reliability in applied contexts. The objective of this study was to examine whether remote viewers report being able to recognize when specific pieces of information are correct. Methods. A survey using an experience-centered, phenomenological approach was...
The currently expanding science of anomalous experiences is unique, in the sense that it necessarily sits at the treacherous borderlands between the often-opposed ontologies of religion/spirituality and secular physicalism. As might be expected in such an inherently charged position, the scientific study of the hallucinatory neurobiological underpinnings of these experiences has resulted in the...
Return to the Real describes how culturally prevalent narratives shape psychedelic experience. Building on Ten Berge’s two-part analysis, our commentary argues that psychedelic effects are best understood within cultural feedback loops linking cultural set and setting, individual expectations, experience, and its articulation back into culture. On this view, psychedelics operate primarily as...
Having identified a typically Modernist view of what (psychedelic) drugs “do” in “Return to the Real, Part I,” this follow-up article discusses some of the implications of this observation for drug studies in general and for the notion of set and setting in particular. A fourfold diagram is proposed in which the cultural set and setting, the individual set and setting, the drug experience, and...
Triggered by Aldous Huxley’s 1954 description of mescaline as “cleansing the doors of perception” and Ido Hartogsohn’s consideration of the cultural set and setting regarding drug use, this article attempts to demonstrate and delineate a particular discourse about drug effects that was prevalent in 20th-century Western culture until at least the 1960s. As shown by the analysis of several drug...
Objective: To explore what it is like to have a distressing near-death experience (NDE) and its aftereffects. Method: We accessed all distressing NDE narratives from the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) database and analyzed eight individual narratives using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Distressing NDEs include features such as disturbing...
Objective. The near-death experience (NDE) is an altered state of consciousness in which experients generally perceive that they are out of and/or away from their physical body during real or presumed life-threatening incidents and/or near-death circumstances. While this is occurring, experients can also sometimes encounter a presumed deity that usually relates to their cultural and/or...
Following the previous homage to Charles T. Tart and considering that Stan Krippner has celebrated more than 90 birthdays, this issue commemorates Stan along with two consciousness trailblazers who collaborated with him while they were alive: Jeanne Achterberg and Ruth-Inge Heinze. Jeanne was a very influential pioneer in mind/body medicine, particularly imagery in healing. Ruth-Inge Heinze had...
Objective: We used the ChatGPT-3.5 artificial intelligence (AI)-based language program to compare twelve types of mystical, supernatural, or otherwise anomalous entity encounter narratives constructed from material in the publicly available corpus of information, and compared their details to the phenomenology of spontaneous accounts via the Survey of Strange Events (SSE) and the grounded...
In this Festschrift in honor of Charles Tart, I originally intended to focus on how Charley – as his friends call him – influenced the discipline of parapsychology from his entry into the field in the 1960s to the present day. That turned out to be an overly ambitious goal because Charley has made so many influential contributions, and in so many facets of parapsychology, that it is not...
Charles Tart was arguably the most important theoretician and researcher of altered states of consciousness (ASC) during the second half of the 20th century. His vast output included books and articles extending the frontiers of study of states of consciousness in general, and of the hypnagogic state, dreaming, meditation, hypnosis, and minor and major psychedelic drugs, among others. Rather...
This summary honors Charles Tart on his 85th birthday by reviewing his contributions and the influence of his work in the subdiscipline of Transpersonal Psychology. Six contributions are reviewed, namely his vision of Transpersonal Psychology as: (a) a science of Mind and Spirit, (b) a critical psychology, (c) an empirical, non-churchly approach to religion as spiritual psychology, (d) a...
The rigorous scientific study of precognition, the human ability to accurately predict future events that are not already predictable based on information about the past or from the five senses, spans the last 90 years. This review describes different types of precognition, underscores the basic principles of precognition research, and discusses the evidence for and potential mechanisms of two...
This paper proposes a framework that supports both free will and anomalous mind-matter interaction (psychokinesis). I begin by considering the argument by the physicist Sean Carroll that the laws of physics as we understand them rule out psychokinesis (and other modes of psi), and find his claims problematic, in part due to misunderstandings of arguments borrowed from David Hume. I proceed to...
Objective. Throughout history and across all cultures, many people have believed in some form of afterlife. Recent surveys show that most people worldwide believe they will survive after bodily death. Those who do not believe would require substantial empirical evidence to influence their skepticism. This study’s objective was to evaluate what types of evidence might persuade academic...
Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the results of all meta-analyses on anomalous cognition conducted between 1989 and 2021 in order to find moderators associated with greater effect sizes. Method: We included all meta-analyses of studies related to anomalous cognition published up to 2021. Results: Our dataset, accumulated over more than 80 years of investigation, refers to 11...
The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (IIT) has generated much excitement inside and outside the scientific community, and seems to many the leading contender for a satisfactory theory grounded in systems neuroscience. It is a bold theory, one that provides plausible explanations for various recognized neuroscientific facts, makes surprising predictions that go beyond current...
As with memories of the present life, memories of apparent previous lives may appear in dreams, sometimes in nightmarish dreams. This paper presents the case study of a dream of a traumatic event (a death) that transpired 36 years before the birth of the dreamer. The dream recurred several times a month from age 4 until the dreamer was in his 20s. The dream invariably caused waking in distress...
This paper is an exploratory sociological analysis of poetic confluence, a spontaneous telepathic phenomenon that occurs in everyday social interaction. In poetic confluence, one person’s talk exhibits an enigmatic relationship to another’s unstated thoughts or imagery at that moment. The analyses draw from an empirical approach called Conversation Analysis, a formal qualitative method for the...
We investigated sleep paralysis (SP) with an online questionnaire. Our sample consisted of 380 participants who experienced at least one SP. In this paper, we present the relation of SP to extraordinary experiences, paranormal beliefs, and absorption. We used a German questionnaire, Fragebogen zur Phänomenologie außergewöhnlicher Erfahrungen (PAGE-R-II), to assess the extent to which people...