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                  Science and the Sources of Value
 
                        by Charles T. Tart
 
This article was originally published in "Phoenix: New Directions in 
the Study of Man, Summer 1979, Volume 3, Number 1, 25-29.
 
 
Abstract:
 
While values may be conditioned by known psychological 
techniques, such values are mechanical, relative, and may yield 
readily under stress.  Mankind's deepest values have sprung from 
the direct experiences of the founders of various religions, 
experiences occurring in discrete altered states of consciousness 
(d-ASCs).  However the subsequent adaptation of these experiences 
to cultures and religions-as-social-institutions makes them 
relatively ineffective unless there are technologies for 
experiential reaffirmation of such values.
	Values formed from d-ASC experiences are extremely powerful, 
yet our scientific understanding of d-ASCs is still very 
fragmented and poor.  To acquire an adequate understanding of 
d-ASCs and the "mystical" and value experiences resulting from 
them requires a large expansion of conventional research, but, 
even more importantly, it requires the development of 
state-specific sciences, the practice of scientific method by 
investigators who are experiencing the d-ASCs themselves.  The 
development of such sciences will provide the ground-work of an 
adequate understanding that in turn can lead to practical 
implementation by creating deep value experiences such as the 
unity of life and an ecological ethic, values which will be 
powerful because they are based on deep personal experience 
rather than being shoulds that are taught externally.  Practical 
problems of such implementation are also discussed.
 
 
Introduction
 
	In this brief paper I shall discuss the nature of basic 
values, particularly those we consider "spiritual" or "religious" 
values, and argue both that the search for spiritual values is 
compatible with the essence of scientific method and that 
scientific method can be of great value in the pursuit of 
spiritual values.  The approach I shall take is one I am 
beginning to call transpersonal behaviorism, a psychological 
approach that on the one hand recognizes the spiritual nature and 
potentialities of man while on the other hand balancing this with 
a realistic view of the conditioned, socialized, 
psychopathological nature of most of our behavior, a view that 
modern, psychological investigations of a behavioristic 
orientation has forced on us.  That is, we do have great 
spiritual potentials that can be developed, but the 
psychopathology of everyday life that we start from is very real 
and will not go away simply by deciding that we are "on the 
spiritual path."
 
 
                           
Values and Experience
 
While in many ways values are taught to us in the enculturation 
process, it is also true that we personally accept and reject 
various values of the culture, and so have some responsibility in 
what our final values are.  Our personal experience strongly 
affects our values.  To illustrate, consider several common 
experiences.  Most of us most of the time experience our 
consciousness as localized or located within our physical body 
(primarily our head, for Westerners); we experience ourselves as 
separate from the rest of life.  Further, the world around us 
frequently does not make sense, events go opposite to the way we 
would like them to turn out, so we feel the need to control or 
conquer the world.  Additionally, others around us seem selfish, 
and often harm and endanger us in order to gain things for 
themselves.  Thus personal experience makes it easy to develop a 
prime value of "me first," where it is of the utmost importance 
to assure your own physical survival and ego gratification, to 
control the world around you, to distinguish your values from 
others' values.
	Contrariwise, we have been told, primarily through our 
religious traditions, that all life is interconnected, that the 
universe is running according to a comprehensive divine plan, and 
that we have a place in it.  But few manage to live by these 
values, as they do not fit most people's direct, personal 
experience.  In general, many religious values are simply not 
very strong motivators for most people because they do not 
resonate with and get support from people's actual experience.
	Where do these basic spiritual values come from?  If we look 
back, we find that spiritual values arose because the founders of 
various religions had what are loosely termed "mystical 
experiences."  Mystical experience is not a very useful term in 
today's scientific climate, and I would prefer to say that the 
founders of various religions entered into one or more discrete 
altered states of consciousness (d-ASCs) at various times (1,5), 
and while in these d-ASCs had profoundly moving experiences which 
gave rise to the values and morality they later taught to others.  
But the spiritual values we were taught in our religious training 
are very watered down derivatives of the experiences of the 
various spiritual founders.
	Deep values begin then with a religion's founder's mystical 
experience in a d-ASC.  Space precludes discussion of the nature 
of d-ASCs here, but I have treated this at length in a recent 
publication (5).  Suffice it to say that it is now clear that our 
ordinary state of consciousness is not a "natural" or "given" 
condition, but a semi-arbitrary construction brought about 
through the enculturation process.  Through various techniques, 
the structures of our ordinary consciousness can sometimes be 
temporarily but radically rearranged into what I call a d-ASC, a 
different way of (1) perceiving reality, and (2) different 
"logics" for understanding and interacting with it.  Some of the 
experiences in d-ASCs can be of immense emotional power and carry 
a conviction of great insight and truth with them; the intense 
seeking of such experiences through meditative techniques and 
psychedelic drugs today is a demonstration of this.  These 
experiences can affect an individual's life profoundly, sometimes 
temporarily, sometimes for the rest of his or her life.
	Let us consider three kinds of experiences that sometimes 
happen in d-ASCs, relevant to the everyday experiences we 
discussed above of feeling separate from other people, feeling a 
need to control and conquer the world, and feeling a need to 
protect yourself and put your own interest first.
	One of these experiences can be called the unity experience, 
where there is a direct experience of being connected with or at 
one with all other life (and/or the universe as a whole).  I 
stress that this is a direct experience, not simply an 
intellectual concept, and so carries great power.  An intrinsic 
value consequence of this is a feeling of love and beneficence 
toward other humans and other creatures, a love ethos based on 
experience, not on being told that one should love others.
	A second experience frequently occurring is a feeling of the 
inherent harmony or rightness of the universe, a transcendence of 
apparent conflicts and dichotomies and a feeling that the 
universe is in harmony or running according to some divine plan.  
A natural value consequence of this is what we might call an 
"ecology ethic," a desire to understand and work with the natural 
flow of a universe that is basically all right, rather than a 
need to "conquer" a hostile or disorderly universe.
	A third experience occurring in some d-ASCs is what has been 
called an out-of-the-body experience (OOBE), a feeling of 
perceiving the world from some location other than where one's 
physical body is, while simultaneously feeling that one's 
consciousness is functioning in an apparently normal and rational 
manner.  The OOBE can be as or more "real" than ordinary 
experience.  The experiencer often runs through a series of 
logical arguments to "prove" that his ongoing OOBE is impossible, 
but it keeps right on happening.  Our orthodox, scientific belief 
is that OOBEs must be interpreted as some kind of aberration 
rather than being literally true.  Although there is now some 
good experimental evidence, such as my psychophysiological 
studies of OOBEs (1, 2, 7), to suggest we take a literal 
interpretation as a useful hypothesis, our concern here is not 
with the explanation of the experience, but with the fact that it 
almost invariably convinces the experiencer that his 
consciousness will survive physical death because his 
consciousness is separate from his body.  This results in a 
profound change in values, for the ego does not need to be so 
tremendously protected when this life is seen as one episode in a 
longer series.
	The founder of a religion, then, has various mystical 
experiences, perhaps of the three sorts mentioned above.  Like 
any human being, he usually does not rest content with the pure 
experience, but, in various ways, conceptualizes it.  I have 
shown this and subsequent developments in overview in Figure 1.  
The second step of the value formation process is a translation 
process, where, taking into account the time, the place, and the 
people, the culture he is attempting to communicate to, the 
founder teaches various things about the truth he feels he has 
experienced.  There is then a further translation and adaptation 
to the needs of the time by the founder's followers, a process 
that may go on for generations.  I have shown a third step of 
long term social adaptation to indicate that for most of us the 
founders of the spiritual traditions who gave rise to many basic 
social values are many, many generations removed from our 
lifetime.
 
 
          _________________________________________     Social
         |  inhibition                inhibition   |  conditioning
         |                            __________   |     |
         |                           |          |  |     |
 _______\|/_           _____________\|/_       _|__|____\|/_
|           |         | Technology for  |     |             |
| Mystical  |         |   Experiential  |     | Scientistic |
|Experience |         |  Validation of  |     |  Rejection  |<-----i
| in ASC    |         |   Basic Value   |     | of Mystical |      |
|___________|         |     System      |     |  and ASCs   |      |
    |   |             |_________________|     |_____________|      |
    |   |                ^         | |                             |
    |   |              /   \       | |                             |
    |   |               | |        | |                             |
   \     /              | |        | |                             |
    \  /                | |        | |                             |
 ______________        _|_|_______\___/_       ____________        |
|              |      | Translations and|     |            |  Ethics, Morality
| Translation  |----\ |  Adaptation by  |____ | Long-term  |  as conditioned,
| by Religion's|     >|    Founder's    |____>|  Social    |--> unalive,
|   Founder    |----/ |    Followers    |     | Adaptation |     weak
|______________|      |_________________|     |____________|
      /|\   /|\               /|\              /|\                /|\
       |     |                 |                |                  |
     Time,   |_________________|________________|__________________|
     Place                     |
     People          Social Conditionings              
 Considerations
 
 
Figure 1: Historical and psychological development of basic religious values.
 
 
	It is important to note that the translation by the 
religion's founder, the immediate translation and adaptation by 
his followers, and the long term social adaptation are all done 
by people who have been subjected to various degrees of social 
conditioning.  This is the behavioristic part of the 
transpersonal behaviorism view.  Each of us has been taught to 
perceive, to think, and to behave in certain conditioned ways, 
and, just as importantly, to automatically not perceive, think, 
and behave in certain ways.  As a system for understanding and 
transmission of information, each of us is flawed.  However, we 
seldom sense our imitations and flaws because part of the 
enculturation process in any culture is to make its members feel 
that they are intelligent, noble, etc., not limited and flawed.  
The founder had his prejudices, and all his followers did too, 
but, by and large, these are (to members of the culture) hidden 
prejudices.  Thus, regardless of whatever inherent validity or 
usefulness the original experiences of the religion's founder 
had, the end product we see much later on has been subjected to a 
great deal of distortion in ways that we are now beginning to 
understand through the investigations of psychology, social 
psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.
 
	I emphasized at the beginning of this paper that values must 
resonate with one's personal experience if they are to be 
dominant under stress.  For any spiritual values to remain really 
vital, the traditions started by the founder and his immediate 
followers must not only pass on the conceptual and value system 
based on the original d-ASC experience, but, as much as possible, 
they must pass on a technology for experiential validation of the 
basic value system, methods whereby people can, to at least some 
degree, have experiences like that of the religion's founder.  
Thus we may have specialized techniques like prayer, meditation, 
ecstatic dancing, spiritual teaching, etc., as well as the 
experiential consequences which should follow in a general way 
from living the system's values, which are designed to put life 
into the spiritual teaching and its values.  We shall not 
consider the question at this point as to whether this technology 
provides a "scientific" validation of the spiritual insights, but 
merely note that it provides experiential and emotional life for 
the teachings.
 
 
The Current Value Situation
 
	At the extreme right of Figure 1, I have shown our present 
situation, namely that we have an ethic, a morality that for most 
of us is not really alive as it was for the original founder and 
his followers.  Rather we have the long term social adaptation of 
various spiritual values injected into our culture a long time 
ago, and modified by other cultural and biological processes, 
such as biological survival needs, needs for social order and 
predictability, etc.  In our Western culture today, the values 
most of us have are concepts that were taught to us, do's and 
don'ts that we were told to do or not to do.  Insofar as the 
socialization process was effective, these values were 
conditioned in us, they were tied in with experiences of reward 
and punishment in our early childhood that gives them a certain 
emotional power.  But these are behavioristically shaped values, 
these are mechanical values imposed on us by others.  I am not 
speaking of "man" in the abstract now, I am speaking of you and 
me, and I believe that the personal recognition that this is the 
case for each one of us is crucial for the adequate development 
of a useful scientific approach to values, unpleasant as it may 
be.  To put it in extreme form, our "noble" reasons for being 
interested in these kinds of areas may be quite mechanical, we 
really had no choice, given the way our personalities were 
shaped.  Falsifying this statement, being genuinely concerned for 
others as a result of our own experiences, rather than from what 
we have been conditioned to believe is good, is a central 
personal and scientific concern.
 
 
Science and Mystical Experience
 
	Figure 1 also sketches the place of current day science in 
this value transmission process.  In many ways, scientists are 
products of their cultures:  thus the conditioned ethics and 
morality that is the mode of our culture today form the basis of 
most scientists' personal value systems, and thus of science as a 
whole.  These values come not only from spiritual values of 
religious founders but from the long term adaptations of other 
cultural and biological processes shaping our current values.  
These have included a struggle against and rejection of orthodox 
religion in our culture, and the construction of the 
physicalistic explanatory systems of the world which dismisses 
the d-ASC experiences that originally lay behind our basic values 
as "irrational," "psychotic," "nonsensical," or, the least 
pejorative, as simply being "nonscientific" and so not to be 
looked at.  I have labeled this process "scientistic" rejection 
of d-ASC experience and of the technology for experiential 
validation of the values arising from such experiences.  I 
deliberately say scientistic rather than scientific for I believe 
this rejection has been more a phenomenon of cultural forces 
rather than anything inherent in scientific methodology per se.
	This leaves us in quite a predicament.  Many of our highest 
cultural values came out of experiences in d-ASCs, but were 
subjected to great dilution and distortion in the long term 
social adaptation processes, such that most of us have rather 
weak, unalive values that were taught us or conditioned in us, 
rather than having real experiential bases.  Thus they easily 
fall before the press of other needs.  Orthodox science, as 
developed so far, has compounded the plight by rejecting the 
experiences in d-ASCs that gave rise to these deep values in the 
first place.  Thus the personal or professional concern of 
scientists for values is in many ways flawed by being based on 
unalive, mechanical values.  What are we to do?
 
 
Alternatives
 
	Given the situation, there are three major alternatives as 
to what we can do.
	First, we can basically continue in the scientistic 
rejection of d-ASCs and "mystical experiences" and hope that some 
sort of "rational" humanism will give us a final set of values 
that everyone will "rationally" accept.  I shall not say much 
about this as I don't think it's a feasible alternative, even 
though many scientists will attempt to take it.  While pretending 
to be rational, it cloaks a lot of hidden assumptions and 
cultural conditionings which are of the same sort that have put 
the world in the mess it is in now, so it won't really work in 
the long run.  Further, it ignores the fact that more and more of 
our brightest people, young and old, are turning to meditation, 
psychedelic drugs, and other ways of directly experiencing d-ASCs 
and the mystical, and as long as the "official" scientific 
attitude denigrates these experiences all we do is contribute to 
this polarization which is already such a destructive force in 
our culture.
	Second, on a personal level you can pick one of the world's 
spiritual systems, decide you're going to believe in it and give 
it a try, and try to inhibit your doubts and scientistic training 
so you can go at it wholeheartedly.  This has a very real 
advantage of possibly putting you in a working relationship with 
a technology for producing d-ASC experiences that may produce 
very profound effects.  Given the historical distortions of 
spiritual teachings, however, the effects may no longer be 
desirable.  Insofar as some spiritually evolved human beings may 
be alive today and working with us near the beginning of the 
process sketched in Figure 1, however, much may be gained 
personally from this.
	Unfortunately, we are educated, Western scientists, and we 
cannot very readily inhibit our scientific training, or try to 
completely isolate our scientific training from the rest of our 
life.  I believe that any kind of tactic which involves rigid 
separation of different parts of one's life and knowledge is 
inherently pathological.  Nor does this second alternative 
necessarily contribute to the problem of lessening the 
polarization between science and the spiritual that is already so 
much with us.  There is much to be said for finding a spiritual 
person or system and accepting them or it as a teacher and making 
a wholehearted effort at it, and it might even be a necessary 
part of the eventual training of scientists who have to function 
in this area, but as a long term solution I do not think we can 
polarize science and the spiritual so rigidly.
	This brings us to the third alternative, the one I favor, 
namely to give priority to developing a genuine, comprehensive 
scientific understanding of the nature of d-ASCs and the kind of 
phenomena that happen in them.  Our present level of knowledge in 
this area is very chaotic and contains much nonsense masquerading 
as data.  While I have attempted elsewhere (5) to come up with a 
conceptual framework that would start integrating this data, we 
are still a long, long way from comprehensive knowledge.  Yet we 
badly need it.  How can we really decide whether it is useful to 
develop and refine the technology to promote something like the 
unitive experience when we don't really know much at all about 
the kind of states it takes place in or anything in detail about 
its consequences?
	The scientific study of d-ASCs has to proceed along two 
lines.  One is a continuation of the kind of research we are 
starting to do now, where an investigator in an ordinary (for his 
culture) state of consciousness (consensus consciousness) makes 
observations of the behavior and reports of people in d-ASCs, 
theorizes about them, tests his theories, etc.  The other effort 
is the development of what I have called state-specific sciences 
(3, 5, 6).  Much of the most interesting and important data about 
d-ASCs consists of what we might call state-specific knowledge, 
knowledge which can only be adequately experienced and understood 
while one is in that d-ASC, where one's perceptions, logics, 
memory functionings, etc. are "tuned" in a unique way to 
understand certain things.  As a common illustration, high levels 
of sexual excitement constitute a d-ASC.  If you try to 
understand in your ordinary state right now exactly what an 
orgasm is all about, and then recall the question the next time 
you are highly sexually aroused and experiencing an orgasm, you 
will have an immediate demonstration of the nature of 
state-specific knowledge.
	To develop state-specific sciences we must train scientists 
to function stably in particular d-ASCs and then apply scientific 
method to their own and others' experiences in those d-ASCs.  
They must make observations, theorize about the, make predictions 
and test them, and communicate all these processes with 
colleagues who also can function in that d-ASC so they can test, 
validate, invalidate, and expand the original investigator's 
observations and theories.  It is going to be a long and 
difficult process, requiring us to deal with things like intense 
emotional states that scientists have deliberately avoided, but 
the very fact that there will be so many difficulties in 
developing adequate scientific understanding of d-ASCs is the 
reverse side of the coin that makes the experiences in d-ASCs 
such incredibly powerful givers of values.
	I believe the historical identification of scientific method 
with a philosophical preference for physicalism, an assumption 
that the ultimate and valued explanatory entities are physical in 
nature, has kept us from making a serious effort to apply the 
magnificent tool of scientific method to psychological experience 
in general and d-ASC experience in particular.  Admittedly it is 
much easier to reach social agreement on whether a meter in one's 
apparatus reads 50 milliamperes or 55 milliamperes than to agree 
on whether my sense of identity feels more localized in some part 
of my body than your's does, but the fact that physical research 
has been easier does not really allow us to then call physical 
explanations the ultimate explanations and ignore psychological 
experience.
	As I understand basic scientific method, it starts from a 
certain kind of humility, where you recognize that, in isolation, 
you may be flawed as an observer and thinker.  But, by committing 
yourself not only to try to constantly improve your observational 
powers and conceptualizing processes but also to communicate the 
details of observations and conceptualizations to colleagues, who 
(sometimes) have different flaws, different blind spots, we 
create a social system, science, whereby we compensate for each 
other's errors and expand each other's abilities.
	Given this basic understanding of science, detailed 
elsewhere (3, 5, 6), it does not matter in principle whether our 
basic data are external physical observations or internal 
experiences.  In our ordinary state or in a d-ASC, we can observe 
and try to improve our methods of observation, we can theorize, 
conceptualize about the meanings of our observations and test the 
consequences of them, and we can communicate the process to our 
colleagues.  If we do this under the temporary but radical 
restructuring of our perceptions and cognitive processes that we 
call a particular d-ASC, then we are practicing a state-specific 
science.
	Thus we can develop a scientific understanding of various 
d-ASCs from the "inside," as it were, and of the kinds of 
experiences in these states that lead to our deepest values.
 
 
Practical Application
 
	The above recommendations are very good in the abstract:  it 
never hurts to call for more research and fuller understanding.  
But we are not operating in a vacuum but in a world that is 
rapidly deteriorating and where civilization may collapse, not 
simply through economic factors but because of a lack of shared 
values that would enable us to put cooperation ahead of 
separatist, individualistic values.  We have a real practical 
question then of how do we use the knowledge we will gain about 
d-ASCs to guide people into various d-ASC experiences that induce 
the values that lead to cooperation.
	It is very easy to quickly come up with a grand scheme that 
says we need various kinds of training centers for every N number 
of people, and that at these training centers people would 
receive basic psychotherapy to eliminate the major neurotic flaws 
in their personality and then be taught to achieve, through the 
technology we would develop, various d-ASCs that would promote 
the unitive experience and other kinds of valuable value 
experiences.  But innumerable questions remain before something 
like this becomes practical.  How much in depth knowledge of 
d-ASCs and the long term effects of experiences in them do we 
have to have before we begin such application, versus the very 
real pressure that if a sufficient number of people do not have 
these kinds of values above all else, there may be no world left 
to continue our investigations in?  Remember, too, that we 
already have state-specific technologies (6), techniques for 
inducing various d-ASCs and manipulating people's experiences in 
order to validate a particular belief system.  How do we prevent 
this grand scheme from turning into one more set of techniques 
for manipulating people into values that someone else thinks are 
good for them?  How do we get world leaders to have these kinds 
of experiences?  How do we get people to support world leaders 
who wish to promote these experiences?  And, on a more immediate 
level for us, how do we overcome our own, thoroughly conditioned 
biases, much less those of our colleagues, that say there is only 
one normal, "rational" state, and all d-ASCs are dangerous and 
insane?
	I leave you with these questions.
 
 
References
 
1. Tart, C. A second psychophysiological study of out-of-the-body 
experiences in a gifted subject.  Inter. J. Parapsychol., 1967, 
9, 251-258.
 
2. Tart, C. A psychophysiological study of out-of-the-body 
experiences in a selected subject.  J. Amer. Soc. Psych. Res., 
1968, 62, 3-27.
 
3. Tart, C. (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness:  A book of 
readings.  John Wiley & Sons:  New York, 1969.  Second edition, 
Doubleday, 1972.
 
4. Tart, C. States of consciousness and state-specific sciences.  
Science, 1972, 176, 1203-1210.
 
5. Tart, C. States of consciousness.  Dutton:  New York, 1975.
 
6. Tart, C. (Ed.), Transpersonal psychologies.  Harper & Row:  
New York, 1975.
 
7. Tart, C. Psi:  Scientific studies of the psychic realm.  
Dutton:  New York, 1977.
 
Author note from article:
Charles T. Tart is Professor of Psychology at the University of 
California, Davis and a consultant to SRI International in Menlo 
Park, California.  He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the 
University of North Carolina in 1963, and has focused on research 
on the nature of human consciousness, with particular emphasis on 
altered states of consciousness, sleep and dreams, hypnosis, and 
parapsychology.  His Altered States of Consciousness (3) helped 
to establish the respectability of these phenomena in the 
scientific world, and his major aim has been to apply the best 
kind of scientific methodology to the study of consciousness, 
without distorting the phenomena to make them fit our 
preconceptions.  His other books include Transpersonal 
Psychologies; On Being Stoned:  A Psychological Study of 
Marijuana Intoxication; States of Consciousness; Psi:  Scientific 
Studies of the Psychic Realm; and Learning to Use Extrasensory 
Perception.  Professor Tart's latest collection, edited in 
conjunction with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, is Mind at 
Large:  Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Symposia 
on Extrasensory Perception which will be published this coming 
summer by Praeger Publishers.

end of article