Charles T. Tart

Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist and a founding figure of transpersonal psychology and the scientific study of consciousness. His landmark anthology Altered States of Consciousness (1969) helped legitimize the study of non-ordinary states—meditation, hypnosis, psychedelic, dreaming, and mystical states—as serious objects of research, and his concept of “state-specific sciences” proposed that knowledge gained within one state of consciousness might require investigation from within that state to be fully understood.

Tart developed a systematic “states of consciousness” framework treating each state as a semi-stable configuration of psychological subsystems, and he conducted long-running (if controversial) parapsychology experiments.

He also drew heavily on the Gurdjieff/Fourth Way tradition, from which he adapted one of his most influential ideas. That idea—“consensus trance”—is Tart’s signature contribution to the mind-power and wellbeing lineage.

He argued that ordinary “waking” consciousness is not a neutral baseline but itself a kind of conditioned, culturally induced trance: from childhood we are hypnotized by socialization into a narrow, consensus-defined sense of self and reality, mistaking this trained constriction for simply “being awake.” Genuine transformation, then, begins with recognizing that normal awareness is a learned limitation and deliberately cultivating fuller, more flexible states—self-observation, mindfulness, and “waking up” in the Gurdjieffian sense.

This reframes wellbeing not as positive thinking layered over the ordinary self, but as de-automatizing the ordinary self altogether. Tart’s careful, scientifically-minded approach (he insisted on rigor even while taking spiritual experience seriously) makes him a key bridge between contemplative claims and consciousness research, while his parapsychology work marks where his program meets sustained empirical skepticism.