Robert K. C. Forman, is a former professor of religion at the City University of New York, author of several studies on religious experience, and co-editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Forman has worked as professor of religion at City University of New York, both Hunter College and City College, and is Founding Executive Director of The Forge Institute for Spirituality and Social Change. His books include The Problems of Pure Consciousness, The Innate Capacity and "Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up to Be".
Lola Williamson has criticized Forman's description of transcendence as "a state of wakeful though contentless existence". Based oninterviews with transcendental meditation practitioners, she notes that those transcendent experiences show variations between practitioners, and are also not contentless.
Yaroslav Komarovski (2015) notes that Forman's notion of a "pure consciousness event" (PCE) has a very limited applicability in Tibetan Buddhism. According to Komarovski, the realization of emptiness as described in the Buddhist Madhyamaka tradition is different from the PCE. Not only the realization itself is different, but also the causes and the subsequent influence on the personality. According to Komarovski, it is brought about by specific Buddhist techniques, and results in specific Buddhist objectives, thereby illustrating the opposite of what Forman argues. According to Komarovski, to force the PCE into the spectrum of Tibetan Buddhist practices, it would be, at best, one of the minor events, and not the key mystical experience. Rather, according to Komarvski, "certain experiences and mental states adresses by Tibetan thinkers are treated as PCE due to an oversimplification of and confusion about the nature of those experiences."