Charles Tart was born in 1937 and grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He was active in amateur radio and worked as a radio engineer (with a First Class Radiotelephone License from the Federal Communications Commission) while a teenager. Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before electing to become a psychologist. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University.

He is currently (2005) a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he served for 28 years, and emeritus member of the Monroe Institute board of advisors. Tart was the holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).

He was also integral in the theorizing and construction of the automatic ESP testing device the ESPATEACHER machine that was built at the University of Virginia. He supports Joseph McMoneagle's remote viewing claims that McMoneagle has remote viewed into the past, present, and future and has predicted future events.

As well as a laboratory researcher, Tart has been a student of the Japanese martial art of Aikido (in which he holds a black belt), of meditation, of Gurdjieff's work, of Buddhism, and of other psychological and spiritual growth disciplines. Tart believes that the evidence of the paranormal is bringing science and spirit together.His primary goal is to build bridges between the scientific and spiritual communities, and to help bring about a refinement and integration of Western and Eastern approaches for knowing the world and for personal and social growth.

In his 1986 book Waking Up, he introduced the phrase "consensus trance" to the lexicon. Tart likened normal waking consciousness to hypnotic trance. He discussed how each of us is from birth inducted to the trance of the society around us. Tart noted both similarities and differences between hypnotic trance induction and consensus trance induction. He emphasized the enormous and pervasive power of parents, teachers, religious leaders, political figures, and others to compel induction. Referring to the work of Gurdjieff and others he outlines a path to awakening based upon self-observation.

• Altered States of Consciousness (1969), editor. ISBN 0-471-84560-4
• Transpersonal Psychologies (1975)
• On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication (1971)
• States of Consciousness (1975)
• Symposium on Consciousness (1975) With P. Lee, R. Ornstein, D. Galin & A. Deikman
• Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception (1976)
• Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm (1977)
• Mind at Large: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Symposia on the Nature of Extrasensory Perception (1979, with Harold E. Puthoff & Russel Targ)
• Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (1986)
• Open Mind, Discriminating Mind: Reflections on Human Possibilities (1989)
• Living the Mindful Life (1994).
• Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality (1997). Examines the relationship between parapsychological abilities and human's spiritual nature, and was voted the March 1998 best metaphysical book selection of Amazon.Com.
• Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People (2001).
• States of Consciousness (2001). ISBN 0-595-15196-5
• The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together (2009)

He has had more than 250 articles published in professional journals and books, including lead articles in such scientific journals as Science and Nature.