DR WILLIAM A TILLER
Dr. William A Tiller, Professor Emeritus Stanford University and founder of The Tiller Foundation was known by many around the world as the pioneer of Psychoenergetic Science. He dedicated most of his working life to the study of science that includes consciousness. Dr. Tiller collaborated in this work with his loving wife, Jean. Together they explored many groundbreaking discoveries that profoundly help to uplift humanity and make our world a better place. Dr. Tiller was preceded by Jean in 2021 and by their son, Jeff who passed in 2000. He is survived by his beloved daughter, Andrea. Dr. Tiller will be remembered as a kind, loving and generous person and his remarkable legacy of work and his beautifully lived life will continue to inspire and support all humankind.
Bill, as his friends and colleagues knew him, was born September 18, 1929, in Toronto, Canada. He received his doctorate in Physical Metallurgy at the University of Toronto in 1955. He was a research scientist and advisory physicist at Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania until 1964 when he accepted a professorship at Stanford University in the Department of Materials Science. He became chairman of that department in 1966.
Simultaneously, Bill began personal investigations of human consciousness and the potential for inner enlightenment, or inner self-management, through meditation processes. While on a Guggenheim Fellowship and sabbatical to Oxford University in 1970, he realized that it was crucial for future science that a competent investigator from the United States make a long-term, serious commitment to both experimental and theoretical investigations of psychoenergetic phenomena. This area was anathema to the conventions of science at the time. His scientific experiments led him to the conclusion that human consciousness and intention can significantly influence physical reality. Around that time he realized that extant experimental data from the previous two centuries of psychoenergetic studies conducted around the world, when combined, further substantiated his theory. Bill returned to Stanford and gave up chairmanship of his department, as well as most of his committee work, in order to pursue formal research of psychoenergetics that would be parallel with his traditional research at Stanford. Despite opposition by most of his Stanford colleagues Bill pressed forward, solidly and consistently supported by his wife, Jean.
In the 1990's, after leaving Stanford, he moved to Arizona where he founded the Tiller Foundation for New Science. This became the Tiller Institute and later, shortly before fully retiring, he created The Tiller Foundation to continue his work.
During his rich and productive career, Bill taught graduate level classes in the areas of thermodynamics, kinetics, phase transformations and semiconductor processing, supervised over fifty doctoral theses, served on numerous professional and government committees, consulted with numerous industrial corporations, and published over two hundred scientific papers and four books. In 1992 Stanford University named him Professor Emeritus.
William A Tiller, PhD, passed on February 7, 2020 in Scottsdale, Arizona
How this Psychoenergetics adventure began.
Told in his own words
This story actually began about forty years ago in the summer of 1964. My wife, Jean, and I, along with our two small children, Andrea (6) and Jeff (4), were driving our Ford Fairlane across the country from Pennsylvania to California. I had resigned from my job of 9 years as a research scientist at Westinghouse Research laboratories, on the east side of greater Pittsburgh, and was taking up a new position as a tenured, full professor of Materials Science at Stanford University. I was thirty-four at the time and thought of myself as a scientist/business man who was a world-class expert on the science of crystallization. It was the beginning of a great, new adventure for all of us!
One day, while the kids were resting quietly in the back seat, Jean turned to me and said “Bill, when we get to California, let’s try and pull together the spiritual side of our lives”. I said “sure, let’s do that”. We had already been exploring the works of Edgar Cayce and had had a long-standing but casual and accepting interest in the psychic domain of human experience. Jean had grown up living across the street from a United Church of Canada (the closest analogy would be the Methodist church in the U.S.) and activities there were an important part of her early life. I, on the other hand, although very interested in “human fruits of the spirit”, had a low tolerance for organized religion.
The way this joint decision unfolded in California was to get involved in some of the A.R.E.’s activities (Association for Research and Enlightenment, the Edgar Cayce organization). This introduced us to serious meditation practice and to study-group activities on two of Cayce’s books “Search for God, Books 1 and 2”. Concurrently, we found a Religious Science church in the Palo Alto area that we enjoyed attending. I took to meditation like a duck to water, while Jean not quite so quickly. We soon built this practice to a daily routine of ~1 hour duration. Meditation, centering ourselves daily in the spirit domain of reality allowed us to experience and explore both inner and outer realms of human awareness in a very balanced way. It greatly enriched our life and we both loved the time devoted to this practice. From this practice, both Jean and I developed a sense of communion with, and subtle guidance from, the “unseen”. For me, I learned to rapidly oscillate (timeshare) between a state of being sharply focused on an item of particular interest and on a state of being open, receptive and loving to everything in the environment of the moment. It greatly aided me in my technical consulting practice and in my role as Department Chairman of Materials Science that I accepted in 1966 (due to an unforeseen illness to the long-time incumbent of that post at Stanford).
Although the late 1960’s were turbulent years for academia in Northern California, they were also the years that Jean and I became avocationally exposed to many psychics and to many interesting psychic phenomena. These years might be labeled the “learning discernment” years for us. As the 60’s came to an end, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a sabbatical year of study at Oxford University in England and, just before leaving the U.S. with my family, I purchased a copy of a fascinating new book that had just appeared, “Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain”, to read on the plane.
Our previous half-decade of personal exploration of this general topic area had prepared us to be able to accept the reality and viability of such psychoenergetic phenomena but not the scope and richness of the Russian technical explorations. At some deep level of self I knew that these writings were largely truthful, but I couldn’t conceive of how the universe might be constructed to allow this crazy-seeming kind of “stuff” to naturally coexist with the orderly scientific phenomena that I was dealing with daily in my Stanford laboratories.
This puzzled me to such a degree that I largely abandoned what I planned to work on during this sabbatical stay in England (however, I did pursue and complete that work during the 1980’s). I decided to use my mediation practice time to seek an answer to the question “how might our universe be constructed so that a natural expansion of our conventional scientific constructs would allow this strange class of psychoenergetic phenomena to become both sane and rational within a larger conceptual framework? What assumed rigid constraints of our conventional worldview could possibly be relaxed to allow these two sets of experimental data to comfortably coexist?”
The procedure I followed on a daily basis was to hold both this general question and more specific detailed questions (like a “brick” in my open palms) during Jean’s and my daily meditation - like a supplicant asking for guidance from the “unseen”. By the end of the hour, I would usually have some intuitive measure of seeming enlightenment concerning the detailed questions. These, Jean and I would discuss after the meditation period and then I would work with them in my office for most of the day to see if they violated any rock-solid experimental data as distinct from our present interpretation of such data. Her unprofessional intuitions on such matters were importantly helpful. It was like trying to assemble an amazingly large and complex jigsaw puzzle with the boundaries between the individual pieces being allowed to be a little fuzzy. After six months of this daily routine a “working hypothesis model” had formed in my conscious brain that, although quite radical, might be useful, testable and possibly even correct! It had a distinctly theosophical flavor - probably from some of the books I had been reading around that time. Probably the most important part of this structure is that it was multidimensional; well beyond spacetime.
By this time, I had reached the irrevocable conclusion that it was extremely important for both humanity and future science that some competent U.S. investigator make a long-term, serious commitment to both experimentally and theoretically investigate psychoenergetic phenomena from a science perspective. Of course, this was a study area that was a total anathema to current and past science. This is because all science to date has worked under the implicit assumption that no qualities of human consciousness and intention can significantly influence well-designed experiments into physical reality. By this time I realized that the fragmentary experimental data from psychoenergetic studies, conducted at various locations in the world over the previous two centuries, overwhelmingly showed that this implicit assumption was very, very wrong!
Before returning to the U.S., I decided that I could not avoid taking up this challenge and must begin leading a dual-path type of life wherein I would professionally continue my conventional science as a Stanford professor and, simultaneously, begin an avocational life-path of serious research in the area of psychoenergetics studies. In order to gain a block of time for the avocational research, I felt it was necessary for me to give up all my professional power positions, (1) the chairmanship position in my Stanford department, (2) my U.S. government committee memberships and (3) my technical societies committee memberships. My uses for this avocational block of time were threefold and all were equally important: (1) the continued experiential development of self via “inner” practices, (2) theoretical modeling of a multidimensional universe that allowed both conventional science and psychoenergetic science to easily coexist and (3) design and conduct of experiments to both test the theory and to push the envelope of our understanding. My ultimate goal was to build a robust and reliable bridge of scientific understanding that would, on one end, seamlessly join with conventional scientific understanding; would straightforwardly project through the various subtle domains of reality in the middle; and would be firmly planted in the bedrock of spirit at the other end. I was substantially supported in this by my wife, Jean, and substantially opposed in this by most, but not all, of my Stanford colleagues.
This psychoenergetics adventure was a joint adventure between Jean and myself. I was the very visible member of the team “trodding the boards of the world stage” so-to-speak while Jean made sure that everything ran smoothly at home. She served the daily needs of our two children and her husband, maintained a beautiful home, served as a cook and gracious hostess for many, many meals and meetings in our home for visitors, friends and acquaintances from both our conventional and unconventional worlds, arranged most of the social activities of our overly-busy life and yet still managed to strongly participate in the spiritual core of our unfolding adventure. Although I get most of the credit for this work, it could not have been accomplished without such a supportive and contributing partner!
During the 1970’s I lectured widely on the topics of both psychoenergetics and conventional materials science. During this early period, I became a founding director of both (1) the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine and (2) the Institute of Noetic Science, and began to also write scientific papers in the area of psychoenergetics. A reference list of these early psychoenergetic publications is provided in Appendix I-A for those who might be interested in learning what types of areas we had begun to investigate. Almost none of these journals are front-line scientific journals because the editors of such journals “were sure that their readership would not be interested in such material”. By 1992, I had fulfilled my obligation to my main conventional science field by writing and publishing two books as a 40-year long investigation of the science of crystallization and thus felt free to more strongly pursue my psychoenergetics studies. In 1992, I gave up my academic teaching duties to become a Professor Emeritus of Materials Science. I continued having conventional science Ph.D. students until ~2000 but began writing my first psychoenergetics book in 1992 based my ~50 years perspective on this field. This first book “Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness” was published in 1997) and provided some important conclusions for this present book. Some of the figures from that book will appear later without detailed captions but with a code.
Defining the whole person
By this time, I had come to believe that we are all spirits having a physical experience as we ride the “river of life” together and, to effectively have this experience, we needed a suitable structural interface with the spacetime world. To make this more tangible, I came to believe that the whole person is much more than they appear to be. As a metaphor for the whole person, I like to visualize a sphere comprised of three concentric zones that are at least weakly coupled to each other.
The outermost zone consists of two concentric layers of very different kinds of materials. This I call the personality self. The middle zone consists of three concentric layers, each constructed from three still different kinds of materials. I call this the soul self. The third, and inner zone, I call the high spirit self or the “God Self”, whichever label one wishes to use. Thus, the whole person is made up of three very different selves!
In the personality self, the outermost layer of material interfaces, via our five-physical senses neural circuitry, with what we call the outer world - the earth, our solar system, the cosmos. We have developed, over time, a successful reference frame (R.F.) for analyzing and understanding this outer world - we call that R.F. spacetime, a 4-dimensional construct.
With the adjacent layer in the personality self, via a yet unspecified sensory system but which is probably the acupuncture meridian/chakra system, we interface with the soul self. The R.F. that we in our Payson lab use to analyze and understand this inner world is called “reciprocal spacetime”, another 4-dimensional construct but which is a frequency domain. Thus, together we use a single, duplex R.F. for analyzing and understanding a united, inner and outer worldview of nature’s manifold expressions. Because these two, 4-dimensional subspaces of the unique 8-dimensional R.F. are reciprocals of each other, mathematics requires a unique and quantitative connection between the different materials in the two layers of the personality self.
With this unique 8-dimensional R.F., one is automatically led to simultaneous particle-type behavior in one sub-space connected to wave-type behavior in the other. This type of wave/particle behavior is a cornerstone of present quantum mechanics. In addition, this reference frame shows that a unique connectivity exists between any two points in one subspace via the totality of the other subspace and vice versa. The degree or magnitude of that connectivity, in turn, depends upon the activation of a particular energy that is thought to come from the soul self body.
As we all know, although our collective personality selves are all stewards of the earth, our personality selves have only a brief temporal existence.
The soul self, consisting of the still higher dimensional domains of emotion, mind and an aspect of spirit, is the entity that is importantly evolving in this overall process. It is much more durable than the personality self and is the repository of all the key experiences from a long succession of personality selves. When the various outer world classrooms have little more to teach the soul self, it graduates and transfers all of its essential information to the God Self. In this way the God Self is thought to keep expanding.
The personality self body is thought to be an evolved form of a basic animal species appropriate to the planet, in our case from the chimpanzee/ape family. In this way, it provides the well-developed 5-physical senses infrastructure needed to interface with spacetime. Interaction with the soul self genetically alters this personality self body making it an increasingly resonant vehicle for the soul self to interface with the spacetime world. However, at all stages of this complex uplift process, vestiges of the basic animal instincts and drives are present to varying degrees in the personality self. Thus, the personality self has a basically independent will and emotional structure from the soul self but can entrain to that of the soul self with ever-increasing degrees of coherence. It is interesting that such a model would make the Darwinian evolutionists correct (with respect to the personality self body) and the creationists correct (with respect to the soul self body).
As to the God Self, when I was considerably younger I had many wonderful theories about God. Now that I am older, and perhaps more awake, I realize that my personality self is not sufficiently conscious to even begin to seriously understand what that concept means!
Of course, this overall construct looks like a type of two-stage stepdown transformer/transducer between what we call God and one of God’s inventions “spacetime nature perturbed by free-will humans”. Consciousness exists at each stage with much more existing at the soul level than at the personality self level and, when a particular personality self breaks down and dies, consciousness continues in the frequency domains of the soul self and the high self. Our working hypothesis concerning what is meant by the term “consciousness” is that it is a byproduct, or emergent property, of spirit entering dense matter.
All of this metaphor is useful to our understanding of nature, but very little of it has been proven in a way that is satisfactory to science. Thus, let us now put on our “science” hat and return to a discussion of our experimental observations.
Professor William Tiller - His Background
Dr. Tiller briefly discusses his background and the main challenge orthodox science has when trying to measure phenomena that are not distance-time related.
SUBTLE ENERGIES, INTENTIONALITY AND SELF-EMPOWERMENT
Dr William A Tiller - 2005
With this psychoenergetic science work, a new door has been opened for deeper explorations of nature than heretofore, where human consciousness, intentions, emotion, mind and spirit will play a much greater role in the great adventure of science and technology as we “ride the river of life” together!
SPANISH TRANSLATED VERSION
Energías Sutiles, Intencionalidad y Auto Empoderamiento
por
William A Tiller
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