“The new/old area of subtle materialism”
In this youtube video Charles Tart celebrates his 201 st publication ”The end of materialism” as he says his “Magnus Opus” on which he has researched for 50 and written for 3 years.
The main example that he quotes in this first part is an experiment of a Hungarian man who snipped off the skin of mice, then put them in paper bags and proved that holding these paper bags in his had would heal the wounds quicker then without …… listen and wonder this happened about 100 years ago.
Charles I want to suggest you to leave your book-filled dusty library and go out to the hundreds of touch-for-health healers in your own city and speak with them and observe their work.
What a poor situation for you and ISSSEEM that you have to use such outdated material in your Magnus opus and present this as an outstanding part of it.
But besides the fact of the dustiness of this material I am want to use this as a very good example that many of us still struggle with. Non-materialism or even spirituality does not mean that one believes/ accepts/ researches the possible existence of forces and energy that are not conventionally excepted/ measurable….. like the example Charles gives with a sensation of warmth between two close hands.
If this would be the definition of “beyond materialism” or even “spirituality” the researchers at the CERN Hadron-collider would have to be considered spiritual as the Hadrons they are looking for are certainly as invisible/ subtle/ hard to measure as the effect that creates the sense of heat between two hands.
Non-materialism is not about invisible matter or energy it is about the way that materialistic science tries to set up experiments. Generally by taking out the “subjective” human element. You call this experiment “a first class example” because he uses mice that are not as “suggestible” as humans…… but how about the healer himself…. why not go one step further and train mice in ”lying-on of hands” then we would have really had taken out this ”unpredictable” human element and made it not only a “First class experiment” in your sense but a 100% materialistic one (if we want to consider mice as material…. as at least he treats them as material).
“Going beyond Materialism” means in fact to get the human element with its imagination, individuality, unpredictability, DLE back into the picture and to develop new ways of designing experiments and not simply searching for more subtle matter.
