Well, why not? If you’re in Dr. Charles Tart’s graduate level course on altered states of consciounsess at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP) in Palo Alto, California, you can do just that and no one will ever know—because you don’t have to leave your house to earn college credits or get a degree anymore! 

In addition to his in-room classes on Mindfulness Meditation, and Parapsychological Research , Dr. Charles Tart teaches interactive courses related to altered states of consciousness at ITP on-line. In this “virtual classroom,” students from all over the country meet weekly to discuss the nature of consciousness, investigate hypnosis, examine varied states of dreaming, and learn more about meditative and drug-induced states. 

For example, most of us know something or another about meditation. But according to Dr. Tart, the word, “meditation,” is used so “vaguely and in so many ways that it’s almost a useless term.” He believes that a distinction needs to be made between a meditation procedure, which is what we actually do, and whether or not that procedure actually has any affects on our consciousness. 

“A lot of times when people meditate for a half hour,” Dr. Tart reports, “the only thing they notice is that their back got sore.” On the other hand, someone else may have a deep and insightful experience.”

In his classes, Dr. Tart has each person describe what it is they actually do when they meditate. He has found that some people primarily focus on a visual image, while others might use a mantra, a special sound. Some describe just relaxing and “going with the flow.” He has discovered that practically nobody does the same technique.

Further, he believes that “most techniques are extremely inefficient if you consider how many people they actually work for. Ancient scriptures on how to meditate were written in a certain historical period for people of a certain culture who spoke a certain language. When we read a translation of that now, how do we know that we are getting the same idea from it? Words have different associations. And people in different cultures think in different styles and ways. We may present a very venerable meditation or problem solving technique which doesn’t work anymore. We need to learn how to instruct people that makes sense for their particular psychology.”

What is most exciting to Dr. Tart is that “the field of transpersonal psychology, is being developed and refined as we go along, so that when a student finally gets to do a dissertation, it’s not just some sort of academic hurdle that needs to be gone through to get a degree, it’s a chance to really contribute to our understanding, to refine our knowledge, to find out what works for people today.”  This allows students to actively engage in the cutting edge of consciousness.

Although Charles never meets his on-line students face-to-face, his pupils are responsible for assigned readings, brief papers, and then for uploading their papers to a bulletin board conference server which serves as the virtual classroom. 

When he began teaching on-line, Charles’ original idea was to have his students e-mail their papers to him first, then post the most interesting ones on the group’s bulletin board to serve as a basis for the class’s discussion. But he quickly discovered that 1) “there weren’t any uninteresting papers,” and 2) using this approach, he was a “bottleneck.” 

Charles further says, “If I had to first read, then make decisions about each student’s papers, then post them, I basically slowed down the whole process. This revealed an interesting assumption about education, that only I, “the almighty professor,” was competent to comment on a student’s paper. In point of fact, when the students post their papers directly, everybody becomes the teacher; everybody has something intelligent to say and comment upon. The whole discussion is much more rich when you drop the assumption that only the professor has anything to say about the student’s paper.” 

This system has worked out so well, that in his in-room courses at ITP, Charles has each student make three or four copies of their papers to give to other students to comment upon. The students’ comments on each other’s papers constitutes the classroom discussion, and students consistently give this unique format high ratings.

Another area of interest to Charles in his classes is an examination and understanding about the nature of “ordinary consciousness.” “People study altered states of consciousness assuming that we already know everything about ordinary consciousness, but we don’t know very much about the way ordinary consciousness works. For instance, if you could telepathically get into my mind right now and experience my mind the way I experience my ordinary life, you might say, “He’s in an altered state all of the time.” Yet we both pass for normal; we both do the external things that are acceptable in terms of our society. 

“When you start talking to people about the way their mind works, there are similarities, but there are a lot of differences that are glossed over, too. For example, some people think primarily in visual images, while other people think much more in words and have almost no visual imagery whatsoever. When they hear other people say, “I saw this in my mind,” they think it’s some kind of metaphor, or a style of literary expression. They don’t understand that some people actually see scenes in their minds.”

“My studies have shown me that our ordinary minds are a three-ring circus. Quite frequently when people are given some instructions to meditate, they’re told to sit still and calm their mind, and pay attention to one single thing, such as their breath. Often they complain that this technique makes their minds race like mad and they can’t stop thinking. Then as they practice, they realize that the meditation technique doesn’t make their mind race—their mind races all the time—it was the attempt to slow it down, and be still that made them aware of it. 

“We’re constantly creating a reality, a kind of biological, psychological, virtual reality, analogous to the virtual reality we can now generate with computers. We create our own reality that we take as real, but it’s only an imitation of the reality that is actually around us, and it’s often a very distorted, but powerful imitation.  Using an old analogy, we live in a theater of the mind, and we take the drama of that theater to be real. 

“For example, let’s say you are walking to work and somebody across the street looks at you funny and you get angry. Well, the reality was that the person across the street didn’t even notice you. They were thinking about some problem of their own and had a funny expression on their face when their head happened to turn toward you. So there was really nothing in reality that was an attack on you, but your own mind took their facial expression as some kind of threat or attack and it got your guts going. Things like that happen all day long. 

In his course on mindfulness, Dr. Tart states that, “Mindfulness is an attempt to see how that process happens, the first stage being to observe how your mind operates, how it’s constantly creating things. As you get better at this process, you can begin to create more spaciousness in your own mind. Then instead of one thought instantly triggering an emotion, which triggers another thought, which triggers another emotion, which leads to you doing something you might regret, which then triggers another thought, and so on, you start to get spaces of calmness between these thoughts and actions, where you can assess the situation more accurately. You get to figure out what you really want, instead of being impelled into mindless action all the time. 

Dr. Tart is hoping to obtain a grant proposal in the near future to encourage scientists to “come out of the closet,” and start talking about their spiritual experiences. “As a group, scientists have a hard time owning up to their own spiritual experiences. They get ridiculed by other scientists if they talk about that sort of thing.”

A scientist himself, Dr. Tart says that, “Scientists have become the high priests of our society for saying what is real and what’s unreal, and a lot of people have a very difficult time with their own spiritual experiences because they think that science has somehow proven that their experiences are not real, or that they’re crazy. Well, that’s false; that’s “scientism,” not real science. 

“Scientism is when the current discoveries of science are more like a religion that has to be defended, instead of allowing for the openmindedness that’s supposed to be there. There’s lots of “scientism” around in the guise of “science” and it’s harmful. It hurts a lot of people by invalidating their important spiritual experiences. If I can get scientists to admit to having these kinds of experiences, I think I can shift the cultural climate some, and make it a little more healthy, and a little less pathological in terms of its crazy kind of denial.”

Internationally known for his psychological work on altered states of consciousness and as one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, Charles Tart, Ph.D., is currently a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Senior Reseach Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California. The author of eleven books, Dr. Tart’s goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, as well as to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for understanding our inner and outer worlds.