EDITORIAL A Festschrift for a Consciousness Hummingbird: Charles T. Tart

: 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 than a specialized scientist, he was a fast and agile hummingbird who did not visit only a flower or two but extracted noetic nectar from many more and proceeded to pollinate a wide field of study that had mostly lain barren since the early contributions by William James and a few others. In this editorial I provide a general introduction to his work and its influence on mine.

which continues its activities to this day, my consciousness was radically transformed and I was able to achieve a bodily know-how and imperviousness to pain that had been unknown to me (Cardeña, 2019). My psychology textbooks and courses did not help me understand the extraordinary experiences (not drug induced, by the way) I was having, as the only other states they mentioned were sleep and intoxication, under the assumption that any other state than the waking one was delusional if not outright pathological. The university library, though, came to my rescue and offered me two books that changed my life: Robert Ornstein's The Nature of Human Consciousness (1973) and Charles Tart's epoch-making anthology Altered States of Consciousness (1969).
Ornstein's book had 41 chapters (with two contributions by Tart, one on statespecific sciences and one on the nature of psi) that challenged a narrow, rational view of science and human consciousness. It emphasized what Ornstein called "two modes of consciousness" (including the then novel split-brain research by Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others), along with meditation and Sufism. Tart's book was not as programmatic and included papers on general considerations of states of consciousness (including a concise but amazingly rich discussion of altered state by Ludwig, 1966), the hypnagogic state, dreaming, meditation, hypnosis, minor and major psychedelic drugs, and the psychophysiology of some altered states. Not only did Tart's book become a widely influential academic classic (close to 2,000 citations according to scholar google in not knowing better, boasted that I had read most of his works. In reality, I had read his two main books on ASC plus a few papers, which is what I thought was the typical academic output, instead of the more than a hundred papers he had published by that time. He kindly responded with a letter recommending that, for pragmatic reasons, one should become an expert in an accepted topic before researching unorthodox areas such as psi, an advice that I now pass to those who write to me wanting to be my students.
Besides his epoch-making anthology, Tart's contributions have ranged widely across the whole spectrum of altered states. To mention but a few of them (doing justice to all would require a whole book): a still widely relevant and not sufficiently-mined systems theory on ASC (Tart, 1975); a phenomenological study of marijuana experience (Tart, 1971); a radical methodological proposal to create state-specific sciences, published in Science (Tart, 1972); papers on various aspects of hypnosis (e. g., Tart, 1970; which inspired my own doctoral work and later studies, e. g., Cardeña, 2005;Cardeña et al., 2013); pioneering studies of out-of-body-experiences (e. g., Tart, 1998); and works on dreaming, lucid dreaming, mindfulness, meditation, and how to test the ontological validity of aura perception (see https://blog.paradigm-sys.com for a list and description 2023, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 222-227

P A G E 2 2 5 P A G E 2 2 6
Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition (JAEX) of many of his works). It is such a vast and rich oeuvre that just trying to take the measure of it is overwhelming. His important work on transpersonal psychology is discussed in this issue of JAEX by Paul F. Cunningham and that on parapsychology (psi or anomalous cognition) by Dean Radin.
As to the title of this editorial… People who know Tart (or Charley, as he likes to be called) might be surprised that I describe him as a "hummingbird," but let me explain my metaphor. Charley has had a heterodox career in the many types of scholarly activities he has brilliantly engaged in, from researcher and theoretician -particularly in the first decades-to pragmatic thinker -in the last few. Most academics would be happy to excel in one area or activity, whereas he has been a trailblazer in many of them. He might have stayed an eminent researcher and theoretician, say, in hypnosis (he held a postdoctoral position at Stanford with one of the giants of the field, Ernest Hilgard), but he also researched many other induction techniques and alterations of consciousness, authoring books and papers with well-thought proposals about the general nature of states of consciousness and how to define and study them. He would then focus for a while on a specific alteration before shifting to study another, while also bringing psychological insights into the study of the psi hypothesis. For me, it is as if he has been a noetic hummingbird, not resting too long on any specific flower (or state of consciousness), but extracting noetic nectar from many different species before proceeding to pollinate a wide field that had mostly lain barren since the turn of the century contributions by William James and a few others.
It is with personal and professional pride that JAEX dedicates this editorial and the following two articles to the 85 th birthday of Charley last year (and to the memory of his beloved Judy). Gracias, Carlitos, for being my supervisor and then friend all these years.