Professor Imants Barušs

Blog

December 18, 2025. At the end of last August, I started working with a group at Rīga Stradiņs University in Latvia to develop a graduate program that would expose students to the cutting edge of postmaterialist research about consciousness. And we did it. The program is called Toward a New Paradigm: Postmaterialism, Consciousness, and Spiritual Self-Transformation. It takes place, usually every second Saturday (except for the summer), during 2025 for a total of 20 lectures by some of the world’s leading luminaries and up and coming talent. In order to be considered for acceptance to the program, a person needs to have a Bachelor’s degree in any subject from a recognized university. You can check it out and apply here: https://www.rsu.lv/en/events/experimental-research-based-continuing-education-programme-toward-new-paradigm.

December 6, 2024. My very first ever academic presentation was in 1988 at a meeting of the American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery at Yale University where I presented some of the results of my PhD research. The organizer was Roni Beth Tower. She reached out to me recently and it was fantastic to reconnect with her! So she included me in a blog she wrote for Psychology Today, which you can read here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-refracted/202411/holidays-and-coping-with-a-beloveds-recent-death. 

October 31, 2024. I've been asked to do a fair number of interviews lately. In fact, I just turned down an interview with CBC radio for this afternoon. But I'm always happy to help out students, so here's an interview in our student newspaper. Enjoy! https://westerngazette.ca/culture/science-or-spirit-this-professor-studies-what-happens-after-death/article_c6b145ee-9793-11ef-9d38-076e0a2319c2.html

June 26, 2024. Recommended reading: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman (Crown, 2023).

May 6, 2024. There were three highlights for me this past academic year. The first was the publication of Death as an Altered State of Consciousness and being a finalist for a PROSE award. You work in obscurity for decades and then, one day, somebody notices that you have done some good work. So that is definitely appreciated. Second was receiving the Bial Foundation research grant that has allowed us to study people's experiences of after-death communication with their cell phones. This has been interesting and fruitful. Third was a recent trip to Brazil to present two talks and five workshops organized by the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. It felt as though the zeitgeist is changing.

March 29, 2024. Death as an altered state of consciousness has been selected as a 2024 PROSE Award Finalist in the Psychology and Applied Social Work category. The PROSE book awards are granted by the Association of American Publishers to recognize Professional and Scholarly Excellence in book publishing. From the AAP web site: “The PROSE Awards 2024 Finalists and Category Award winners illustrate the extraordinary depth, breadth and complexity of scholarly authorship and publishing,” commented Syreeta Swann, AAP’s Chief Operating Officer. “We are pleased to honor these works, and delighted to report that the standard for scholarly works has never been higher.” So, I want to thank everyone who contributed to my book, particularly the staff at APA Books, who put up with my perfectionism. We knew that we had done a good job, but it is heartening also to be recognized for doing that.

August 24, 2023. My three thesis students presented at the SSE meeting this summer. Here's a write-up: Psychology alumnae made King's proud at US-based conference - King's University College (uwo.ca)

May 12, 2023. I have done the annual update of my website. There were three things of note for me this past academic year: 1. I taught all of my courses online this past academic year. I think I'm getting better at it and also appreciate online teaching more than I did in the past. 2. I went through the editing, copyediting, proofreading process for my new book Death as an Altered State of Consciousness. This is the third of my books being published by the American Psychological Association, and it is always a pleasure to work with the editors, designers, and marketing staff at APA Books. It's turning out to be a really nice book and I think that it will be useful to many readers. You can see it at the top of the Books page. The release date for the paperback edition is July 11, 2023. 3. I applied for, and received, a research grant of Euro 26,500 over two years from the Bial Foundation for a project titled "After-Death Communication with Cell Phones." We're just getting going with that and it is a real blast! I'll let you know if we find anything interesting.

April 21, 2023. Recommended reading: Coders: The making of a new tribe and the remaking of the world by Clive Thompson (Penguin, 2019).

December 16, 2022. One of my students looked into the aftermath of taking Jeffery Martin's Finder's Course. That paper has now been published. Here is the doi for it: https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000297.

October 26, 2022. Recommended reading: The psychology of totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022).

September 5, 2022. Recommended reading: The Courage to Face Covid-19 by John Leake and Peter McCullough (Counterplay Books, 2022).

July 1, 2022. Recommended reading: Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An insider’s account of the secret government UFO program by Lacatski, Kelleher, & Knapp (RTMA, 2021).

June 21, 2022. Summer solstice.

May 27, 2022. When people with whom I haven't spoken for some time ask me what's new, I laugh and remind them that in the academy things move at glacial speed and that very little has changed. The fact that I only update this web site once a year in the spring is a testament to that. But the flip side is that things do actually change over time. I've had several books and key papers come out in the last several years. And I have just completed the first draft of my new book about death as an altered state of consciousness. And my students keep doing fantastic work, along the way, winning awards, presenting at major conferences, and getting their papers published in influential journals. So I hope that my annual update of this web site inspires those of you who are reading this.

March 22, 2022. Recommended reading: Adjunct professors struggle with low wages, no health benefits (usatoday.com).

March 17, 2022. I've been on sabbatical this academic year, writing a book about death. So I wrote a paper about writing about death. You can read it here:   https://www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/49.

December 13, 2021. Recommended viewing: FLCCC Weekly Update Dec. 8, 2021: Profits before Patients? (odysee.com)

October 15, 2021. Recommended reading: CUP Wire: The story of education in five scams - The Fulcrum.

October 4, 2021. Recommended reading: ‘This is an endemic situation’: The realities of part-time professorship - The Fulcrum.

September 22, 2021. Recommended reading: Diary of a Death Doula: 25 Lessons the Dying Teach us about the Afterlife by Debra Diamond (John Hunt Publishing, 2019).

September 15, 2021. Recommended viewing: https://rumble.com/vhp7y5-full-interview-world-renowned-doctor-blows-lid-off-of-covid-vaccine.html.

August 9, 2021. Recommended reading: Till death don’t us part: A true story of awakening to love after life by Karen Frances McCarthy (White Crow Books, 2020).

June 21, 2021. Recommended reading: After: A Doctor Explores what Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson (St. Martin's Essentials, 2021).

Several years ago, one of my thesis students ran a random event generator (REG) experiment to see if the mind could directly influence the REG. Nope. Another student came along and decided to tweak some of the variables to increase the likelihood of an effect. In particular she (or a research assistant) led participants through a guided imagery exercise which included inducing feelings of love. This time there was an effect in the intended direction. The paper describing those experiments has now been published and you can read it here: https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse/article/view/1891.

February 19, 2021. Recommended reading: Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing by Jeffrey Rediger (Flatiron, 2020).

February 9, 2021. Radical Transformation has been published! You can find it here: Imprint Academic or at your favourite bookseller. And King's wrote up a nice press release for it here. I felt compelled to write the book as part of an effort to heal planetary crises, so I hope it is useful to you.

December 15, 2020. My new book Radical Transformation now has a web site: Imprint Academic.

December 5, 2020. Recommended documentary: "I am Greta" Official Trailer (imdb.com).

August 14, 2020. The second edition of Alterations of Consciousness has now launched! You can see it on the Books page. Enjoy!

May 20, 2020. I have completed the annual update of my web site! Most notably, I cleaned up the "Books" page, added the second edition of Alterations of Consciousness, and added a cover photo and a title page image for a couple of the older books. I just want to say, for those of you who are interested in what I have to say, that the older books are still useful. In particular, for those of you who have not read it, Chapter 2, Authenticity, from Authentic Knowing is an apposite analysis of compliance that is as relevant now as it was when I wrote it. I don't have time to repeat myself, so if you're wondering how I got to have the crazy or brilliant (or both) ideas that I now have, well, you can read the earlier books to find out. I also added a page for Psychology 2065a Psychology of Religion and Spirituality which I am teaching again for the first time in 30 years! Looking forward to it!

May 7, 2020. I have finished working on the second edition of Alterations of Consciousness and it is now in production with a release date of July 28, 2020. You can preorder your copy here or from your favourite bookseller. Enjoy!

April 20, 2020. Recommended reading: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-coronavirus-and-post-traumatic-growth/.

April 6, 2020. Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949003582.

November 27, 2019. Resource about careers in psychology in Canada: https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/psychologycareers/front-matter/foreword/.

August 8, 2019. The talk I gave last summer at the annual meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology has been published as a paper in the journal Consciousness with the title "Categorical Modelling of Conscious States." The paper is open access and you can read it here. Enjoy!

October 8, 2018. I've been working on a theory of meaning fields, extending meaning beyond the human, with the first paper now published in EdgeScience, Volume 35, which you can read by clicking here and scrolling down to page 8.

July 12, 2018. Recommended reading: How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn (University of California Press, 2013). I read this book several years ago and am just returning to it to read the sections I highlighted and my margin notes. I like the way Eduardo feels his way into both the phenomenology and the scholarship of reaching beyond the human in an effort to understand representation, thinking, and meaning-making.

June 22, 2018. The Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences, which I helped to found, is off to a strong start. Check it out here: http://www.opensciences.org/blogs/open-sciences-blog/introducing-the-academy-for-the-advancement-of-postmaterialist-sciences or here: https://www.aapsglobal.com/.

May 17, 2018. Well, I updated my website today. I do that once a year when classes have ended. The main difference is on the "research" page where I summarized some of the current research projects. Several students have remarked that my web site is a bit "clunky" (my word, not theirs) implying that that were somehow a shortcoming. But a recent conversation with Charley Tart clarified that such "clunkiness" is actually beneficial because it helps to focus the reader's attention on the substance of the content of the website. Are Charley and I just rationalizing? Whether we are or not is irrelevant since I don't have time to improve the appearance of the web site anyway. Which reminds me of a comment that I read on the Internet several years ago by a pundit who complained that I had "no web presence" or something to that effect, making it sound as though that were a bad thing somehow. That made me laugh. I am here for those who can find me and need me. That's it.

February 9, 2018. The Consciousness Conference is set to go on Saturday, March 3, 2018. Information about the conference, including a poster and the full program, with abstracts, can be found at this url: http://baruss.ca/cc.htm.

December 13, 2017. I have created a web page for the Consciousness Conference, which can be found at this url: http://baruss.ca/cc.htm.

December 8, 2017. Some students and I have organized a one-day Consciousness Conference here at King's for Saturday, March 3, 2018 for anyone who is interested. Here is the poster for it.

November 3, 2017. I have a new paper published, titled "Consciousness:Where We Are At," in Consciousness, the new journal of our Society for Consciousness Studies. You can read the paper at the following url: http://www.conscjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CONSCIOUSNESSIB.pdf.

September 4, 2017. Sixteen of my papers are now open access on Western's server: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Baru%C5%A1s%22%20AND%20author_fname%3A%22Imants%22&start=0&context=674312&sort=date_desc&facet=.

July 28, 2017. Recommended reading: The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening by Steve Taylor (New World Library, 2017).

July 27, 2017. Recommended reading: Why Dissent Matters: Because Some People See Things the Rest of Us Miss by William Kaplan (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017).

May 5, 2017. Working on the annual update of my web site. The biggest change is to the Research Projects page. I dumped all the language about the old stuff that I had been doing in the past, which readers can interpolate from the publications list anyway, and focussed on my currently active projects. I also renamed the page "The Consciousness Lab" since my collaborators and I have been spending mucho hours down there. So, to see what we've been up to, just go to the research page.

August 20, 2016. Transcendent Mind is currently #1 New Release in Popular Experimental Psychology on Amazon.com.

August 15, 2016. My new book, Transcendent Mind, co-authored with Julia Mossbridge, is released for sale today. Please see my books page for more information. Enjoy!

June 15, 2016. My thesis student, Paula Rayo, received the Department of Psychology Thesis Award during convocation ceremonies yesterday for her thesis "Surrendering to the Vine of the Soul: Ayahuasca Shamanism as a Logotherapy." She spent four weeks at a retreat centre in the Amazon gathering questionnaire and interview data, and found that participation in ayahuasca ceremonies was correlated with increased existential meaning.

May 20, 2016. My new book, co-authored with Julia Mossbridge, titled Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness, published by American Psychological Association Books has a release date of August 15, 2016 but is now available for pre-order from the publisher APA Books, from Amazon.com, and from Amazon.ca. Enjoy!

May 2, 2016. Recommended reading: Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life by Kari Marie Norgaard (MIT Press, 2011).

April 27, 2016. Recommended reading: Subtle Activism: The Inner Dimension of Social and Planetary Transformation by David Nicol (State University of New York Press, 2015).

March 7, 2016. Recommended reading: The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation by Michael Grosso (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).

January 7, 2016: Recommended: https://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/paramooc2016-new-series-of-lectures-about-parapsychology/.

June 9, 2015: Recommended reading: Your Inner Will: Finding Personal Strength in Critical Times by Piero Ferrucci (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2014).

March 13, 2015. Recommended reading: Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds by Kelly A. Turner (HarperOne, 2014).

December 26, 2014: Two undergraduate thesis students, a research assistant, and I gathered data at a Matrix Energetics seminar in Philadelphia on the weekend of August 18 to 20, 2012 as well as on a web site two months after the seminar. We have now completed analyzing the data and written a final report that has been published as a paper "Alterations of Consciousness at a Self-Development Seminar: A Matrix Energetics Seminar Survey" on pages 1064 to 1086 in Volume 5, Number 11 of the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research. There were 97 participants in the study. On the basis of self-report and behavioural measures, we found that participants appeared to experience reality as being more plastic than we ordinarily assume it to be while in an attentive, expanded, and emotionally positive state of being. We were unable to email 10 of the 97 participants with our final report, so if you are one of those participants, please let me know and I will get the report to you. Also, anyone who could like a copy of the paper, please send me an email with your mailing address and I will send you a copy.

August 20, 2014: Tara MacIsaac included me as one of her eight scientists in her blog post "8 Scientists Contemplate the Place of Consciousness in Science" published this morning in Epoch Times.

August 19, 2014: "I have always tried to maintain my amateur status. . . . I am not even sure that I comply with my own definition of a good teacher: he learned much, he taught more. Of one thing I am certain: a good teacher can only have dissident pupils, and in this repsect I may have done some good." --- Erwin Chargaff, p. 7, A Fever of Reason (The Rockefeller University Press, New York, 1978)

August 15, 2014: My talk at the Society for Consciousness Studies, titled "A Vision for the Society for Consciousness Studies," has been published as a Guest Editorial in Volume 5, Issue 6 of the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research. Anyone who would like to read the paper but cannot access the journal can e-mail me at baruss@uwo.ca.

June 23, 2014: A short paper based on my talk "Questions about Interacting with Invisible Intelligences" has now been published in EdgeScience. Also, an edited part of the paper I gave last summer at the Franklin Wolff conference has been reprinted in Hypnology: The Journal of Hypnosis and Consciousness Research. Also, I gave a talk, titled "A Vision for the Society for Consciousness Studies" at the inaugural meeting of the Society for Consciousness Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies on May 31, 2014. I have submitted the paper for consideration for publication and will post a note here if the paper is accepted for publication.

April 25, 2014: One of my thesis students, Vanille Rabier, wanted to see if she could replicate Daryl Bem's retrocausal recall experiments in which participants exposed to a list of words practice a random selection of those words after doing a free recall task. The idea is to see whether the later practice affects the recall task. We did not find an effect. That was published as an article: "Failure to Replicate Retrocausal Recall" in the new American Psychological Association journal Psychology of Consciousness. The full reference is given on the publications page. On March 21, 2014, I gave a talk titled "Questions about Interacting with Invisible Intelligences" at the sixth Exploring the Extraordinary Conference held at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. For those who are interested, the substance of that talk will show up in future papers and books. Please note that I am on sabbatical for this coming academic year and will not be teaching or supervising undergraduate student theses.

October 11, 2013: I was invited to give the keynote talk at the 2013 Franklin Merrell-Wolff Conference at the Great Space Center in Lone Pine California on August 10, 2013. My talk was titled "Learning to Forget: Reflections on Self-Transformation." That talk has now been published with the title "Learning to Forget: Deprogramming as a Precondition for the Occurrence of Non-Dual States of Consciousness" in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research. To read it click on the following link: http://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/326/352.

August 5, 2013: A logic paper written together with Robert Woodrow titled "A Reduction Theorem for the Kripke-Joyal Semantics" has been published online in the journal Logica Universalis. I will have offprints available once the print version of the journal hits the stands for anyone who would like one.

May 8, 2013: My new book is out! I have put some information about it on my books page. I like the finished product.

January 1, 2013: Just a couple of news items. The Russian-language version of my paper "What We Can Learn about Consciousness from Altered States of Consciousness" has been published with the title "On the Study of Consciousness" in Existentia: psihologija i psihoterapija, Volume 5, pages 88 to 113. Carlos Alvarado mentioned the English-language version of that paper in a recent blog http://carlossalvarado.edublogs.org/2012/11/26/imants-baruss-on-altered-states-of-consciousness/. And John Hunt has announced a launch date of March 29, 2013 for my new book: http://www.iff-books.com/books/when-impossible-happens. He is publishing it under his science, philosophy, and law imprint, Iff Books. It is already available for pre-order from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk at a reasonable price. Professor Gary Schwartz had this to say about the new book: "Sometimes the most convincing and meaningful data come not from the university laboratory but from the laboratory of personal life. Dr. Imants Baruss practices the integration of academic and self-science in an inspiring and compelling manner. This book stunningly illustrates how the trained scientific mind can help reveal the seemingly impossible in everyday life."

August 2, 2012: I was invited to give a talk on April 28, 2012 at the California Cognitive Science Conference at the University of California Berkeley. That talk titled "What We Can Learn about Consciousness from Altered States of Consciousness" has now been published in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research and can be read at: http://www.jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/227. The paper is also being translated into Russian and will appear in the Russian-language journal Existentia: psihologija i psihoterapija. Here's a photo from the debate with John Searle holding the microphone (those are his notes on the chalkboard) and Christof Koch between Professor Searle and myself.

© 2015-21 Imants Barušs