or overcome so that the spiritual nature of the human being is more and more identified with and applied to one's thinking and actions in life.
If Ken Wilber and the school of transpersonal philosophy which he represents can be called "evangelistic" in the sense of bringing eastern spirituality to Western societies, another school of transpersonal thought can be considered scientific. As noted by Sovatsky (1998), this school of thought is closer to the notion of transpersonal psychology as a field of inquiry into human consciousness. This perspective attempts to bring, at least to some extent, scientific methods and procedures to the study of altered states of consciousness as a means of gaining more information about transcendent or mystical experiences. Work in this field is best exemplified by the writings and research of Charles T. Tart and John C. Lily.
Charles Tart (1975), even in some of his earliest work, challenged the assumptions of western scientific thinking,
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