Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., is internationally 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 scientific parapsychology. His two classic books, Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.

Charles Tart was born in 1937 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. Questions about the religion he was raised in, Lutheranism, started him reading scientific and spiritual books as a teenager. Spiritual interests, explorations, and practices became a regular part of his life, meshing fruitfully with his professional psychological interests.

As well as a university teacher and laboratory researcher, Professor Tart has been happily married for more than 50 years and has two children and two grandchildren. He has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's mindfulness in life work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. He has been teaching classes on mindfulness and meditation at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for more than ten years, and in the summer of 2012, under the aegis of GlideWing.com, plans to launch a repeating webinar class on mindfulness, with the primary goal of giving students a taste of how to be more mindful in everyday life, as well as an introduction to concentrative (shamatha) and insight (vipassana) styles of meditation. His primary goal, personally as well as professionally, 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.

Professionally, Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before deciding to become a psychologist, received his PhD from the Universi­ty of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University. He is currently a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California, where he taught and carried out research for 28 years. He was the first 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).

Tart's books, in addition to (1) Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and (2) Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), are (3) On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication (1971), (4) States of Consciousness (1975), (5) Symposium on Consciousness (1975, with P. Lee, R. Ornstein, D. Galin & A. Deikman), (6) Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception (1976), (7) Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm (1977), (8) Mind at Large: Institute of Electrical and Elec­tronic Engineers Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception (1979, with H. Puthoff & R. Targ), (9) Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (1986), (10) Open Mind, Discrim­inating Mind: Reflections on Human Possibilities (1989),and (11) Living the Mindful Life (1994). His recent, (12) Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality (1997), examined the relationship between parapsychological abilities and our spiritual nature. A more recent book is (13) Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People (2000), and his most recent book, (14) The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together shows that science has not shown that all spirituality is nonsense. Rather there is excellent scientific evidence that humans have qualities, like telepathic abilities, that you would expect a spiritual being to have. He has had more than 250 articles published in professional journals and books, including lead articles in such prestigious scientific journals as Science and Nature.

Further biographical information, as well as the text of many of Professor Tart’s publications, can be obtained via his primary website at http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ and his ongoing writings on a variety of topics pertaining to consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality appear on his blog, http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/ .