Appendix 3:
One of the themes we’ve constantly dealt with in this book is the popular, but false, idea that science long ago showed that spirituality was nonsense. If this were true, it might follow, perhaps, that scientists, being highly intelligent and rational people, would certainly not have spiritual or psychic experiences themselves, yes?
Well, Richard Maurice Bucke was a physician, which meant that he’d had a lot of the best scientific training of his time; Joseph Waldron was an experimental psychologist; and Allan Smith was also a scientifically trained physician in modern times. Perhaps they were exceptions?
In reality, over the years many scientists, once they’ve realized I’m a safe person to talk to, have told me about unusual and transcendent experiences they’ve had. Too often I’m the first and only person they’ve ever spoken to about their experiences, for fear of ridicule from their colleagues and of adverse, prejudicial effects on their careers. Such fears have, unfortunately, too much of a basis in fact. There are a lot of scientists with negative intentions deliberately trying to suppress their colleagues, even if it’s mainly the automatic manifestation of the social conditioning of our times rather than deliberate nastiness. A real interest in, much less actual research in, the spiritual and the psychic has too often been a career killer in the academic and scientific worlds (Hess 1992). I wanted to start to change that, and this appendix points you toward a small step in that direction.
As we’ve discussed, scientists today often occupy a social role like that of “high priests” in earlier cultures, telling laypeople and each other what is and isn’t “real,” and, consequently, what is and isn’t valuable and sane. Unfortunately, the dominant materialistic and reductionistic psychosocial climate of contemporary science, scientism, rejects and suppresses both having and sharing transcendent, transpersonal, and altered-state (or “spiritual” and “psychic” experiences, to use more common words, in spite of their often too vague connotations) experiences.
From my perspective as a psychologist, though, this prejudicial suppression and rejection psychologically harms and distorts both scientists’ and laypersons’ transcendent (and other) potentials, and also inhibits the development of a genuine scientific understanding of the full spectrum of consciousness. Irrational denial and suppression of any aspects of our nature, whatever their ultimate reality status, is never psychologically or socially healthy.
The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences (TASTE), a website I created in 1999, is intended to help change this restricted and pathological climate by operating in journal form, allowing scientists from all fields—anthropology, botany, mathematics, physics, psychology, and zoology, to name just a few—to share their personal transcendent experiences in a safe, anonymous, but quality controlled, space that almost all scientists and the general public have ready access to.
TASTE, to various degrees:
• (BL)Allows individual psychological growth in the contributing scientists by providing a safe means of expression of vital experiences
• Leads toward a more receptive climate to the full range of our humanity in the scientific professions, which, in turn, would benefit our world culture at large
• Provides research data on transcendent experiences in a highly articulate and conscientious population, scientists
• Facilitates the development of a full-spectrum science of consciousness by providing both data and psychological support for the study of transcendent experiences
• Helps bridge the unfortunate gaps between science and the rest of culture by illustrating the humanity of scientists
As an example of how this gap can be bridged, the site was given the Science Social Innovations Award for 2000 by the Institute for Social Inventions.
If you want to see the range and often amazing character of scientists’ transcendent experiences, take a look at the TASTE site, psychology.ucdavis.edu/tart/taste (or, if the UC Davis psychology server is off-line, visit www.issc-taste.org). There are fuller versions of Joseph Waldron’s ADC experience and Allan Smith’s Cosmic Consciousness experience there. If you find it valuable, please pass this information on to friends and colleagues. I have no budget for advertising and thus must depend on word of mouth to get the information that’s on the TASTE website out to the world.
If you have a website of your own that would be suitable to link to TASTE, thank you! Feel free to copy one of the TASTE experiences as an example on your website, if you like.
In terms of more conventional, slower publicity, if you can recommend any journals I should send notices to, please let me know. If you’re the editor of any publication, you have my permission (and thanks!) to print this notice in your publication.
At the time of this writing (November 2008) I’ve frozen the TASTE site in the sense of not accepting new experience submissions, for lack of time to work on it, but the earlier experiences are there for the reading. I hope to someday get an assistant to manage the TASTE site so that it can be open for submissions again.