Altered States of Consciousness

Altered States of Consciousness is Charles Tart's landmark anthology gathering scientific and first-person accounts of non-ordinary states—meditation, hypnosis, dreaming, psychedelic, and mystical experience. Its central claim is that such states are legitimate objects of rigorous study, and that ordinary waking awareness is only one configuration among many rather than a neutral baseline.

The collection advances a systems view in which each state is a semi-stable arrangement of psychological subsystems, and proposes "state-specific sciences": knowledge gained within a given state may require investigation from within that state to be fully understood. From the Gurdjieff tradition Tart also draws the idea of "consensus trance"—the notion that ordinary consciousness is itself a culturally conditioned, hypnotic constriction.

A founding text of transpersonal psychology and the scientific study of consciousness, the anthology helped make altered states a respectable research field. It joins the contemplative project of "waking up" to empirical consciousness studies, though some of Tart's allied parapsychological claims remain contested.