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How to go to your page This eBook contains two volumes. Each volume has its own page numbering scheme, consisting of a volume number and a page number, separated by a colon. For example, to go to page “vi” of Volume 1, type “V1:vi” in the "page #" box at the top of the screen and click "Go." To go to page “7” of Volume 2, type “V2:7”… and so forth.
Altering Consciousness
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Altering Consciousness Multidisciplinary Perspectives Volume 1: History, Culture, and the Humanities
Etzel Carden˜a and Michael Winkelman, Editors
Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Altering consciousness : multidisciplinary perspectives / Etzel Carden˜a and Michael Winkelman, editors. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–38308–3 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–38309–0 (ebook) 1. Consciousness. I. Carden˜a, Etzel. II. Winkelman, Michael. BF311.C2773 2011 154.4—dc22 2010054086 ISBN: 978–0–313–38308–3 EISBN: 978–0–313–38309–0 15 14 13 12 11
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This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments Preface: Extending Our Knowledge of Consciousness Charles T. Tart Chapter 1
Altering Consciousness: Setting Up the Stage Etzel Carden˜a
Chapter 2
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness: The Integrative Mode of Consciousness Michael Winkelman
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Part I: Historical Perspectives Chapter 3
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity Yulia Ustinova
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Chapter 4
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 73 in the Christian Western Tradition Moshe Sluhovsky
Chapter 5
Altered Consciousness from the Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century Etzel Carden˜a and Carlos S. Alvarado
Chapter 6
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Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness: 113 A 50-Year Retrospective Julie Beischel, Adam J. Rock, and Stanley Krippner
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Part II: Cultural Perspectives Chapter 7
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness 139 Jonathan Shear
Chapter 8
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness Michael Winkelman
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Chapter 9
Altered Consciousness in Society Charles Whitehead
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Chapter 10 Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness in Contemporary Counterculture Graham St John
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Part III: The Humanities Chapter 11 Altered Consciousness in Philosophy Jennifer M. Windt
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Chapter 12 Altered Consciousness in Religion Antoon Geels
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Chapter 13 Colored Inklings: Altered States of Consciousness and Literature Wendy E. Cousins
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Chapter 14 Altered Consciousness in Performance: West and East 301 Phillip B. Zarrilli Chapter 15 Altered Consciousness and Modern Art Mark Levy Chapter 16 Time Is the Key: Music and Altered States of Consciousness Jo¨rg C. Fachner About the Editors Advisory Board About the Contributors Index
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Acknowledgments
We want to acknowledge first the forebears of these books, the men and women who across many thousands of years have descended into dark caves, led community rituals, and explored consciousness-altering plants in order to encounter anew the world and their selves. We recognize our pioneers in Plato in the West, Pantanjali in the East, and other exemplars of first-rate intellects who laid the groundwork for integrating the insights of alterations of consciousness into our views of reality. Among the founders of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated alterations of consciousness into their theories of human mind and behavior. Even during the decades-long exile of consciousness by behaviorism, some brave souls dared to engage in research on altered states, among them Stanley Krippner, Arnold Ludwig, Robert Ornstein, and Jerome Singer in psychology, E. E. Evans-Wentz, Erika Bourguignon, Michael Harner, Joseph Long, and Charles Laughlin in anthropology, and Albert Hofmann in pharmacology. Among those who helped to point out the importance of studying alterations of consciousness as a basic element of human experience, the leading figure in establishing them as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry was Charles T. Tart, an erstwhile engineering student turned psychologist. Our two volumes are dedicated to these and the many other pioneers of inquiry into consciousness who provided the foundations for the perspectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisitions editor who made Altering Consciousness possible, and our many contributors, without whom these volumes would not have seen the light of day. We especially would like to thank Julie Beischel, Cheryl Fracasso,
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David E. Nichols, and Moshe Sluhovsky, who came to the rescue when it looked as if we might not be able to include some important topics. We are also very fortunate to have been the recipients of the generosity of Anna Alexandra Gruen, who gave us permission to use the extraordinary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Go´ mez del Campo, who made it happen.
Dedications Michael dedicates these volumes to the next generation of investigators who will take the foundations of a multidisciplinary science of altered consciousness described here and produce a more comprehensive paradigm for understanding these inherent aspects and potentials of human nature. Etzel dedicates Altering Consciousness to: My dear departed, Ma (May Buelna de Carden˜a), Blueberry, and Ninnifer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath. And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie: “ . . . somos ma´s que dos piezas de rompecabezas, le dijo la arena al mar, somos algo nuevo y distinto.”
Preface: Extending Our Knowledge of Consciousness Charles T. Tart Some people have called me the “father” of altered states research, correctly or not, so let me play that role to introduce this very important Altering Consciousness set, hopefully entertaining you with a recollection of the early history of studying altered states while making some methodological points and adding some bits of history. There’s an old story we have all heard, in many variations, but it keeps going around for good psychological reasons. A man returns home late one night and finds his somewhat tipsy neighbor crawling around on hands and knees under a streetlamp, earnestly searching for something. “What are you looking for?” “My house key.” “Oh, I’ll help.” So our protagonist gets down on hands and knees and searches too, but is unable to find any key. After some time has gone by he asks, “Just where did you lose them?” “Back there, in that dark alley.” “Well then why in the world are we looking here, instead of there?” “The light is better here.”
I’ve been a psychologist for almost half a century now and I often think of this story when I look at our collective research efforts. Some major keys to “houses” of the mind, to domains of consciousness, seem to be nearby, in dark, messy, taboo, or methodologically ambiguous places, but we can do such nice, scientifically rigorous studies here in the light cast by ordinary consciousness. Most of our colleagues are here in the lamplight of
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“normal” consciousness and we support, approve of, and reward each other. But, funny thing, we have this nagging feeling we haven’t actually gotten into some houses. . . . When I was a child I had vivid dreams, mostly pleasant and interesting, sometimes nightmarish, occasionally lucid. What was this strange world I was experiencing? Why was it so different from my ordinary waking world? I learned to fly in my dreams, for example, and it was really neat! At first I had to run and flap my arms to take off; eventually I could do it just by taking a certain mental attitude, and up I went! But try as I might to take that mental attitude when awake, it just didn’t work here! Darn! This rich dream life and my puzzles about it were important reasons I became a psychologist. Flash forward to my early 20s, I’m in graduate school. I want to do my master’s and doctoral experiments on dreams, but my advisors discourage me. Behaviorism is still riding high, dreams are “subjective,” “unscientific,” studying them is not a good career choice for an aspiring psychologist. Dreams exist in one of those dark, murky alleys, and the light is so much brighter over here with the rats and pigeons and Skinner’s elaborate renaming of aspects of behavior. Those clinical psychologists and Freudians were doing things in those alleys some of the time, of course, but they didn’t get much respect in the pure, upper reaches of scientific psychology. If there was a door to a house back in that alley, who wanted to unlock it, leading down, as it were, to a basement of perverted sexual impulses and animal aggression and craziness? Maybe neurotics and psychotics and their helpers had to go there, but not us mature, smart, welladjusted scientific psychologists! The prevailing intellectual philosophy didn’t help, either. I kept reading everything I could find on dreams—I was always a stubborn student—and read an English philosopher’s book (Malcolm, 1959) that logically proved that dreams didn’t exist. This was one dark alley we didn’t need to worry about! Malcolm’s logic was so impressive I had nightmares about it all night long. There was logic saying no dark alley, no lost keys, there was experience beating up on me over how stupid “logic” can get. Then a kind of conceptual and political miracle occurred! Aserinsky and Kleitman (Aserinsky, 1953) found distinctive brain wave changes in sleep with accompanying rapid eye movements (REMs), from which awakenings produced almost 100 percent dream recall. Voila`! The dream is now no longer subjective and unscientific, it’s a brain state! It’s real! All of us good psychologists bow down and worship when the brain is invoked, because physiology is so much more real and scientific than our derivative field, psychology. I’ve never felt that, as a psychologist, I’m
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doing inferior scientific work compared to a physiologist, chemist, and so forth, but I was happy to accept the positive political fallout of dreams becoming “real” and so get on with my master’s and doctoral work on using posthypnotic suggestion to influence the content and process of nocturnal dreaming (Tart, 1966, 1967a). I’ve always loved psychology. As soon as I started reading in it as an undergraduate and in graduate school, I was fascinated by the detailed mapping going on under the bright streetlamp of ordinary consciousness. I did begin to notice, though, that the great bulk of psychological effects seemed to be of pretty small magnitude, a 4 percent shift in mean performance, significant at the .05 level, two-tailed in one study, a 10 percent shift significant at the .01 level, two-tailed, in another. That was nice. The bricks in the sidewalk under the streetlamp were showing only a little variation and you couldn’t do much with them, but the patterns and statistical analyses were intellectually exciting. I was an idea junkie from childhood on, I could get off on these kinds of findings. But where was the big, important stuff? Graduate school was done; time for more training doing a postdoc. I had already been offered one at the Menninger Foundation with psychologist Gardner Murphy, whom I had personally met through some mutual interests about what was happening in those dark alleys. Murphy was a former president of the American Psychological Association, and normally this would have been a prestigious postdoc. But he and his wife had recently published a book on Asian psychology (Murphy, 1968). My graduate school advisors were horrified! They thought I was bright but already too open to and interested in unorthodox ideas. No one would openly admit to being culture bound or prejudiced, of course, since we were scientific psychologists, but Asian psychology? Yoga? Meditation? We knew all that stuff was delusional and probably psychotic, crazy practices done by little people who sat cross-legged in the mud—and had no scientific training at all! And Menninger? That was a psychiatric organization heavily involved in psychoanalysis, that dark alley of suspicious character. So my advisors “saved” me. A few quick phone calls, the Old Boy network in action, and I had a more attractive postdoc in California, where the light was much brighter. Indeed, very much brighter, as California was now a major center of the Psychedelic Revolution! And it was already too late to keep me from beyond-the-establishment influences. While still in graduate school, where I was quartered in the basement of the psychiatry department, they had the EEG machines I needed for my dream (oops, I mean stage 1-REM state verbal report) studies. One of the psychiatrists, Martin Keeler, was
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doing studies of the effects of LSD and psilocybin, and I was an occasional participant. Go into one of those alleys, pick up a key or two, and go through some doors. Some of those doors did indeed lead to Freudian basements, and I got some vivid, gut-wrenching education in aspects of psychopathology (in me, no less!) of which textbook learning was a pale shadow. And some of those doors led to places of light and apparent knowledge that was way, way brighter and clearer than what the streetlamp of ordinary consciousness cast on the consensus consciousness sidewalk, and I got some powerful glimpses of the potential heights of human experience as well as the depths. I wrote about what I learned from psychedelic experiences some years later (Tart, 1983). My California postdoc was with Ernest Hilgard, another former American Psychological Association president, and a real gentleman and scholar. His laboratory at Stanford was devoted to doing hypnosis research thoroughly and carefully, systematically exploring one of those dark alleys, as it were, and Hilgard and colleagues’ work considerably advanced the field. Some of it was like the bulk of mainstream psychological research, 10 percent changes in, say, hypnotizability with age. Other parts of it were standardized and routine, you got used to them, but really incredible. I spend 10 minutes hypnotizing a talented student with a standard procedure, for example, reading a script really, and a few minutes later I tell him for a minute that he can’t smell anything, all sense of smell is gone, and then I tell him, “See, you can’t smell, I’ll hold a bottle of something with an odor under your nose, you take a good sniff to see that you can’t smell anything.” What I hold 1 inch under his nostrils is a bottle of household ammonia. He takes a deep sniff and shows no reaction! I ask if he smelled anything, he says no. Be very careful if you try this at home: The smell is not only powerful, it’s quite painful! All this from talking to someone for a few minutes, reading a standardized script, no special “hypnotic powers” or the like on my part . . . For really talented volunteers, we used chemical lab ammonia that was 10 times as strong. My years of hypnosis research also repeatedly exposed me to the blindness commitment to particular methodological approaches could bring. In my 2 years with Hilgard, for instance, a big question in the field was whether hypnosis was something special, an altered state of consciousness (ASC), or just various degrees of ordinary suggestibility without any special alteration of consciousness. A partial but straightforward approach to studying this was to either hypnotize volunteers or not and then give them a standardized suggestibility test: Would the hypnotized people be more suggestible? A colleague and I found considerable bias in doing such
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testing right there in our Stanford Hypnosis Research laboratory (Troffer, 1964), but it was correctable in a second run of the study. What was (and still is) more puzzling to me was the amazing way experiments by a number of others were clearly biased to show that hypnosis was nothing special. The bias came about by apparently being complexly “objective.” A “hypnotized subject” was defined as someone who had gone through the standardized induction procedure; a “nonhypnotized subject” was someone who had not been given that induction procedure. Yet anyone who has ever worked with hypnosis knows that some people are only mildly responsive or not at all responsive to an induction procedure. It’s also clear that some highly hypnotizable subjects can slip into hypnosis in the course of suggestibility testing, without a formal induction procedure. Thus the idea that one group was hypnotized and the other was not became silly. The so-called hypnotized group contained lots of people who were not hypnotized at all or only slightly, the so-called nonhypnotized group contained some people who were hypnotized to various degrees. What a way to wipe out real differences! Etzel Carden˜a in his introduction discusses the problem of equating an ASC with the presence of an induction procedure, and makes this same point. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is! An altered state of consciousness must be assessed by reported or observed significant changes in the quality of a person’s consciousness. We are psychologists and should not be ashamed, as behaviorists would have us be, to observe and study consciousness. I would like to think this fallacious equating of induction processes with the presence of ASCs was widely recognized and is now of only historical interest, but, alas . . . To illustrate, I was recently sent a manuscript to review that, from its title and text, was supposed to be about studying the effects of the psychomanteum on ESP test results. The term psychomanteum was recently introduced by philosopher Raymond Moody (Moody, 1992) to refer to ritual practices in classical ancient Greece. After days of ritual preparation, including prayers and sacrifices to the gods and various rituals with the officiating priests, often in special dark, underground temples, a person was brought into a special chamber. The chamber was very dimly lit, and from a balcony you looked down into the smooth, mirror-like surface of a huge vat of oil. You were looking at a mirror that reflected only the vague, darkened ceiling above it. The goal was to see and hear an apparition of some deceased person to find out important information. The cult was apparently widespread in classical Greece but eventually suppressed. Moody created a modern version where he would spend half a day or more with a client who wanted to contact a deceased person that they
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had unfinished business with. After exploring the many psychological aspects of this, the client entered a dimly lit room where a large, tilted mirror in front of a comfortable lounge chair showed only a vague image of the dark ceiling and was left there for half an hour or more. Many of Moody’s clients (more properly participants, since he was developing this psychomanteum technique) experienced visual and auditory apparitions and often felt they had indeed made significant contact with the deceased and learned important information or resolved unfinished business. One of my colleagues at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Arthur Hastings, has developed Moody’s psychomanteum procedure into a vehicle for grief counseling, with excellent results (Hastings et al., 2002), but, like Moody’s procedure, there was significant time spent in creating the right psychological set for participants, not just sitting in a chair looking at a tilted mirror. The manuscript I refereed had a participant sit in a dimly lit room with a tilted mirror showing only the dark ceiling, and an ESP test was later administered. But to call this the psychomanteum procedure like Moody’s or the ancient Greeks . . . there was no psychological preparation to make this special, to create a psychological set about visions or the like. My main criticism of the manuscript was that it should be called a study of the effects of sitting in a dimly lit room, not a psychomanteum study. Similarly, studies that claim to be studies of ASCs should provide evidence that their assessments showed that an ASC had actually been experienced by a particular individual, not just assume it had happened because an induction procedure was used. Down an alley, open a certain door with a certain key, the hypnosis key, and enormously powerful effects can occur. Often during our various experiments, or in hypnosis research I later did at my own laboratory at UC Davis, I would wonder, “Why is psychology focused almost exclusively on all those little effects when such powerful ones can be easily evoked?” Research on hypnosis or psychedelics was but a tiny, tiny fraction of the effort in the field of psychology and was largely ignored or looked upon with suspicion. There was nothing wrong with refining our knowledge of the conventional, of course, but not at the expense of ignoring other aspects of mind that were important. My own research efforts were focused on exploring the nature of hypnosis, especially very deep hypnosis, and its potential uses to deliberately control nocturnal dream content (Tart, 1965a, 1965b, 1966; Tart & Dick, 1970), and it was easy to keep extending and refining that work. Indeed, two of my former students, Etzel Carden˜ a and Helen Crawford, later became leading investigators of hypnosis. But by the late 60s I had become
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well aware that dreams and hypnosis were part of the much larger spectrum of significant qualitative changes in the way consciousness could function, ASCs, and I felt a strong need to understand that larger spectrum if I was to understand the more specialized work I was doing. Toward that end, I published my Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings anthology in 1969 (Tart, 1969) to give researchers and students a look at this wider spectrum. I knew about these variations of consciousness from wide reading, but most people didn’t. There wasn’t that much research material to begin with, and it was widely scattered, a lot in places most psychologists would never come across it, such as the basic discovery material on lucid dreams that originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (van Eeden, 1913). In the ASC book, I reprinted several articles each about general aspects of ASCs, the hypnagogic state, dream consciousness, meditation, hypnosis, minor psychedelics like marijuana and major psychedelics like LSD, mescaline and psilocybin, and some beginning psychophysiological studies of ASCs. But, as I said, in spite of intensive effort in searching widely in the literature, there often wasn’t much to find. For instance, I “boasted” in my introduction to the ASC section on meditation that I was reprinting two thirds of the English language research literature on meditation. This sounded impressive until you realized I had only been able to find a total of three articles. Amusingly but usefully, a few years after publishing the ASC book, the same thing happened to meditation as had happened with dreams while I was a graduate student. No one would admit to cultural biases, but, as I mentioned earlier, we scientific psychologists knew all that meditation and spiritual stuff was delusional and probably psychotic, crazy practices done by little people who sat cross-legged in the mud. And then an article was published in that so-prestigious journal Science (Wallace, 1970) that showed there were physiological correlates of meditation. All of a sudden, politically speaking, just like with dreams, meditation became “real” and a legitimate topic of research. Now there are more than a thousand research studies of meditation, although most are, from my perspective, still too elementary, showing meditation is good for relieving stress-related problems but not yet really addressing the deeper psychological and spiritual issues it was designed to shed light on. Returning to my Altered States anthology, its publication was timely and it became a bestseller for a scientific book, often serving as the textbook for courses on ASCs that now could be taught since they had a text, and helping to stimulate research in some areas. The Altered States book is more than 40 years old now, though, and I’m very pleased these two
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volumes will replace it with much more extensive, sophisticated, and upto-date material. New research after the publication of ASCs has been uneven, though. For example, one of the most promising lines, research on the psychological and transpersonal effects of psychedelic drugs and their therapeutic value when used properly, had been showing great promise, although it was still in its infancy. Such research was essentially stopped by the hysteria over drugs and the so-called war on drugs in the 70s. Studies biased toward showing negative effects of psychedelics, which could justify the government’s position, got funded. In terms of long-term benefit, studies of physiological aspects of psychedelics were funded to some extent, and the incredible power of LSD to produce major changes in consciousness in such minute, microgram doses has been credited with stimulating our whole new era of brain chemistry research. Our materialistic climate in science, of course, has longed privileged physiologically oriented research over psychology per se, and while I’ve always valued physical and physiological findings and contributed a little to them myself (Tart, 1963, 1967b), I regret the effect it has had on making more phenomenologically oriented, psychological research a poor stepchild. As I said above, I don’t subscribe to the bias that anything physical or physiological is automatically more important, “real,” and “scientific” than the psychological, and I wish my colleagues were more sensitive to the assumptions and biases in a too-materialistic approach. Indeed, I sometimes tease my physical science colleagues by changing the usual distinction between the “hard” and “soft” sciences by talking about the “hard” and “easy” sciences. The physical sciences are easy; what happens is pretty independent of the nature and mood of the scientists doing the research, but psychology is hard because of all the biases that can creep in. “Subjects” are smart, sensitive problem solvers, and many psychologists have unrecognized hopes, fears, and biases of their own that participants pick up on, to complicate things. In the 70s it looked like we were going to really tackle problems of experimenter bias (Rosenthal, 1963, 1966) and demand characteristics (Orne, 1962), but interest quickly disappeared. I would argue it was repressed, as we have too much investment in our status of being “objective” scientists, but that’s too broad an issue to go off into here, except to note that being in ASCs will sometimes make one’s biases clear—and if we want to think about possible parapsychological contributions to experimenter effects, it gets really complex (Tart, 2010a). One of my last major contributions—perhaps a mistake, perhaps premature—to ASC research was my proposal for the creation of
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state-specific sciences. I’m hoping that the information provided by these two excellent volumes will stimulate work in that direction, but we shall see. I proposed that science (observation, theorizing, predicting, and testing, sharing all steps with colleagues, for gradual improvement in the way our understandings fit actual phenomena) could be done in some ASCs, as well as in our ordinary, consensus consciousness. That we could explore in those dark alleys, as well as under the bright light of ordinary consciousness. The result would be multiple, complementary kinds of understandings, based on the state-specific, altered perceptions and logics manifested in some ASCs. The proposal was published as a feature article in Science (Tart, 1972) and generated an unusual amount of reaction. Most scientific articles stimulate almost no letters to the editor and only occasional replication and follow-up studies. Although the editors only had room to publish four letters, they received nearly a hundred on my proposal and passed them on to me. Many interesting ideas and comments were contained in them, but to simplify, they almost all fell into two camps. The first camp, a little more than half the letters, argued, often vehemently, that Science had made a major mistake in publishing my article, our ordinary state was the only sane, rational state, all ASCs were pathological or seriously impaired, so you couldn’t possibly do science in any ASCs! I recognized the names of some quite prominent scientists in this first camp. Those in the second camp said the idea was plausible, were enthusiastic about it, and said let’s get on with extending our knowledge by developing state-specific sciences. Judging by names I recognized and ranks and titles (e.g., full versus assistant professors), the first camp consisted almost exclusively of older scientists, the second of younger ones. Being relatively young at the time, I, of course, shared the prejudice that most old folks get closed and fixed in their thinking. Being old now, it’s obviously true in many cases as I can see it in myself, even though most people think I’m very openminded. The most interesting letter to the editor, or rather pair of letters, came from a psychiatrist who was doing consciousness research. His first letter put him in the first camp, the idea of doing science in an ASC was dumb and crazy. A week later, though, he wrote that while he was personally embarrassed to be writing again, his scientific integrity compelled him to. He had been in an ASC the day before, had thought about my state-specific science proposal, and it was obvious that I was correct, we could gain new and useful ways of understanding by complementing ordinary-state science with sciences developed in various ASCs. I couldn’t have hoped for a nicer and clearer illustration of my proposal.
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Was I right about the need to develop state-specific sciences if we are to fully understand the nature of consciousness and perhaps aspects of the nature of reality? That it takes special kinds of “lights” to go down some of those dark alleys and unlock the doors to those houses of mind? It’s much too soon to venture an answer, as almost nothing has been done along those lines. To mention the two lines of research that are relevant, as I noted in a later revision of the proposal (Tart, 1998), some lucid dreamers have begun making more systematic observations within lucid dreams and communicating about them in their ordinary waking state, so possibilities are interesting there. Some mathematicians I’ve corresponded with have made me think that some aspects of mathematics work are a state-specific science: You have to be in some kind of ASC to really have certain kinds of mathematical insights and understand what colleagues are talking about, even though, as with lucid dreams, the sharing with colleagues has to be done in ordinary consciousness, for better or worse. In both cases the sharing in ordinary consciousness tends to make people assume that the original thinking was done in ordinary consciousness rather than in an ASC. One of my hopes for these two volumes is that interest in and research on ASCs will be promoted so intensively that we will move on to trying to develop state-specific sciences and then will find out whether they are indeed useful supplements to knowledge or an interesting idea that doesn’t really work. Also, self-study of your own reaction to the idea of doing science in ASCs may be quite revealing of hopes, fears, and biases. I made one major attempt to construct a grand theory of states of consciousness, ordinary or altered, in the 1970s (Tart, 1975).1 I was dissatisfied with the few attempts I’d seen by then (and those since then), as they tended to greatly oversimplify the phenomena of consciousness to get an apparently straightforward and simple theory. My approach was a systems approach, based on my earlier work as a radio engineer and contemporary biological and engineering approaches to life. I was not afraid of complexity per se. The so-called rule of Occam’s razor, for example, is about the fact that we prefer conceptual simplicity in a theory when that theory accounts for observations as well or better than competing theories. But our psychological preference is not some cosmic law. My systems approach allowed for emergent properties as various subsystems, aspects of 1
I called the book States of Consciousness, which was a mistake, as being so like Altered States of Consciousness, people confused them and assumed they’d already read it. Friends have teased me ever since that, in accordance with the common custom with sequels of films, I should have called it Son of Altered States, or Altered States Strikes Back . . . . ;-)
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consciousness, changed their functioning, and had what I considered useful analyses of general principles for inducing and maintaining altered states. It did not catch on, though, ignored in the desire for simplicity and/or the hope that physiologists would soon explain consciousness and all its aspects in terms of brain functioning. “It’s all a matter of how activated the basal X is” sort of thing. As our knowledge of consciousness gets more sophisticated, perhaps my systems approach will prove useful, perhaps not. At any rate, that systems approach and my proposal for developing state-specific sciences are probably my final conceptual contributions to consciousness studies, as I expect to devote the rest of my career to promoting the idea of developing evidence-based spiritualities (Tart, 2010b, in press). So, dear reader, I expect much new richness in our understanding of consciousness and ASCs from the contributors to these two volumes— and from you. We’ve made some great discoveries in the bright lamplight of ordinary consciousness, and we’re ready to venture further into the darker byways and lanes, the hidden houses of the mind, where I’m certain some important discoveries await, discoveries that will complement and greatly broaden ordinary consciousness psychology. And we might discover that being in our ordinary state of mind (what I’ve called consensus consciousness to remind us that it’s a product of socialization, not just “natural”) is indeed, as in the old story, a kind of tipsiness, of intoxication with beliefs and norms that is not the whole picture of reality it believes itself to be.
References Aserinsky, E. K. N. (1953). Regularly occurring periods of eye motility and concomitant phenomena during sleep. Science, 118, 273–274. Hastings, A., Hutton, M., Braud, W., Bennett, C., Berk, I., Boynton, T., Dawn, C., Ferguson, E., Goldman, A., Greene, E., Hewett, M., Lind, V., McLellan, K., & Steinbach-Humphrey, S. (2002). Psychomanteum research: Experiences and effects on bereavement. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 45, 211–227. Malcolm, N. (1959). Dreaming. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Moody, R. (1992). Family reunions: Visionary encounters with the departed in a modern-day psychomanteum. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 11, 83–121. Murphy, G. M., & Murphy, L. B. (1968). Asian psychology. New York: Basic Books. Orne, M. (1962). On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: With particular reference to demand characteristics and their implications. American Psychologist, 17, 776–783.
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Rosenthal, R. (1963). On the social psychology of the psychological experiment: The experimenter’s hypothesis as unintended determinant of experimental results. American Scientist, 51, 268–283. Rosenthal, R. (1966). Experimenter effects in behavioral research. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Tart, C. (1963). Hypnotic depth and basal skin resistance. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1, 81–92. Tart, C. (1965a). The hypnotic dream: Methodological problems and a review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 87–99. Tart, C. (1965b). Toward the experimental control of dreaming: A review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 64, 81–92. Tart, C. (1966). Some effects of posthypnotic suggestion on the process of dreaming. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 14, 30–46. Tart, C. (1967a). The control of nocturnal dreaming by means of posthypnotic suggestion. International Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 184–189. Tart, C. (1967b). Patterns of basal skin resistance during sleep. Psychophysiology, 4, 35–39. Tart, C. (1969). Altered states of consciousness: A book of readings. New York: Wiley. Tart, C. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176, 1203–1210. Tart, C. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton; currently in print through www.iuniverse.com. Tart, C. (1983). Initial integrations of some psychedelic understandings into everyday life. In L. Grinspoon & J. Bakalar (Eds.), Psychedelic reflections (pp. 223–233). New York: Human Sciences Press. Tart, C. (1998). Investigating altered states of consciousness on their own terms: A proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences. Ciencia e Cultura, Journal of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science, 50(2/3), 103–116. Tart, C. (2010a). Reflections on the experimenter problem in parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology, 74, 3–13. Tart, C. (2010b). Toward evidence-based spirituality. Journal of Parapsychology, 74, 31–60. Tart, C. (in press). Toward an evidence-based spirituality: Some glimpses of an evolving vision. Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine. Tart, C., & Dick, L. (1970). Conscious control of dreaming: 1 The posthypnotic dream. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 76, 304–315. Troffer, S. T., & Tart, C. (1964). Experimenter bias in hypnotist performance. Science, 145, 1330–1331. van Eeden, F. (1913). A study of dreams. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 26, 431–461. Wallace, R. K. (1970). Physiological effects of transcendental meditation. Science, 167, 751–754.
CHAPTER 1
Altering Consciousness: Setting Up the Stage1 Etzel Carden˜a What’s in a Name? The two volumes of Altering Consciousness cast a wide net across various disciplines and evaluate the role that altered states of consciousness (ASC)2 and the procedures to induce them have played, and continue to play, in human history. Disputing the bias that ASC is a topic of concern only to drug-addled youngsters or exotic cultures, the contributors to these volumes show that we cannot have a full understanding of human culture and our biological heritage without considering spontaneous and induced alterations of consciousness. There is no denying that researching consciousness is no longer the academic death knell that it used to be some years ago, but the area has been mostly one dimensional, or perhaps two dimensional if we add studies on sleep and dreams, and most of the current discussions about consciousness revolve around philosophical or neuroscientific issues of waking consciousness and perhaps a few pathological states while maintaining a safe distance from the implications of ASC to the nature of consciousness and our apprehension of reality. These volumes aim to address that imbalance. Current discussions of consciousness have mostly ignored the fact that we transit among different states of consciousness even while “being awake,” that these states exhibit differing configurations of cognition, emotion, physiology, and behavior, and that what is postulated about one state may not apply to others. As I have argued elsewhere (Carden˜a, 2009), 1
This chapter benefited from the lucid and loving suggestions of Sophie Reijman. The standard abbreviation in this volume for “altered states of consciousness” both in singular and plural is ASC. Also note that to help cross-reference other relevant chapters in the two-volume set there are editorial square brackets [ ] throughout the chapters.
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at least in some respects the Western world has not added much to the contributions made by Socrates and Plato in this area more than 2,000 years ago [see Ustinova, this volume]. Socrates maintained that the beginning of wisdom depends on defining one’s terms and, from that perspective, the study of consciousness in general has been fairly unwise. One of the most confusing aspects in the literature on consciousness is that different concepts of the term are used often without any seeming awareness of their distinctions (cf. Natsoulas, 1983). Thus, writers may speak about the problem of consciousness when, in fact, there are many problems, including the “hard” problem of the relationship between qualia and neurological processes, but also the integration of different sources of information into an experiential unity, personal identity across time, and so on (Natsoulas, 1981). Lack of agreement as to what different authors actually mean when using the term consciousness seems to be more the rule than the exception, but “there is nothing to prevent discussion and organized research into aspects of ‘consciousness’ denoted by a given, specific usage of that term” (Velmans, 2009, p. 142). Throughout these volumes we will be using the terms altering consciousness (which emphasizes not only altered phenomenology but also the procedures to bring it about), altered consciousness, and altered states of consciousness because they have become the most recognizable and used cognates. At the same time, I agree with Bunge’s (1980) warning that to speak literally of “states of consciousness” reifies consciousness as an entity whereas it is the creature (human or otherwise) who experiences these variations. A different criticism of the ASC term (Rock & Krippner, 2007) is that it confuses the basic sense of consciousness as being aware of something with the phenomenal field of the episode of consciousness; they propose instead that it would be more appropriate to speak of altered pattern of phenomenal properties [see also Beischel, Rock, & Krippner, this volume]. Although I am sympathetic to their analysis, their suggestion disregards a long historical precedent (cf. Natsoulas, 1983) and is unlikely to substitute at this point for the easier-on-the-tongue ASC. Also, although it has not gained traction in this context, a phrase such as modalities of experiencing would be a closer indication that we are dealing with an ever-changing dynamic event rather than a static one (James, 1890). With these caveats in mind, we will continue to use the term ASC for convenience’s sake. Ludwig described an ASC as any mental state(s), induced by various physiological, psychological, or pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the
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individual) as representing a sufficient deviation in subjective experience of psychological functioning from certain general norms for that individual during alert, waking consciousness. (1966, p. 225)
Tart further elaborated this concept, describing a discrete state of consciousness as a “unique, dynamic pattern or configuration of psychological structures, an active system of psychological subsystems” that although showing some variations remains overall the same (1975, p. 5). He further went on to state that a discrete altered state of consciousness would be a qualitatively different state from the person’s ordinary, baseline state. This distinction was developed in the concept of “anomalous experiences” (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), but ASC and anomalous experiences are not synonymous concepts because although some anomalous experiences constitute the baseline state for some individuals (e.g., strong synesthetic experiences for synesthetes), they occur only, if at all, during an ASC for the rest of us. Furthermore, anomalous experience is also used for experiences that although not necessarily occurring in an ASC may nonetheless go against the current sociocultural norm such as experiences of putative telepathy in a Western culture. An alternative to ASC as a qualitative shift in an overall organization of consciousness was offered by Fischer (1986), who proposed a cartography of states of consciousness along a continuum of sympathetic/parasympathetic intensity. Although this was a good first step, Fischer’s understanding of sympathetic/parasympathetic interactions is simplistic (cf. Berntson, Cacioppo, & Quigley, 1993) and has had limited influence in the field [but see Winkelman, this volume], whereas Tart’s has had a much broader influence on the theory and evaluation of ASC (e.g., Farthing, 1992; Pekala & Carden˜a, 2000). Despite its popularity, there is little doubt that Tart’s definition of an ASC is difficult to operationalize. For instance, what constitutes a “dynamic pattern or configuration,” how much can a system vary and still remain a recognizable system and, relatedly, what constitutes enough of a deviation of the baseline state? Furthermore, if we base the definition on the individual’s experience, how can we study states such as coma in which s/he may not even be able to report any experience (if there is one; see Noirhomme & Laureys, Volume 2). In their recent Altered State Theory of Hypnosis, Kallio and Revonsuo (2003) sought to address these problems and provide a new way of conceptualizing an ASC. However, their proposals are neither new nor do they solve the problem. They write that a state of consciousness refers to “background mechanisms outside the phenomenal
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contents of consciousness that are inside the brain and modulate or realize these contents” (p. 141). Leaving aside their arguable (cf. Kelly et al., 2007; Presti, and Beauregard, Volume 2) a priori materialistic position that consciousness is by definition caused by brain mechanisms (see below), what they propose is nothing new. Their “background mechanisms” could be easily exchanged for “dynamic pattern,” and Tart (1975) distinguished decades ago between the (phenomenal) contents of consciousness and states of consciousness. Kallio and Revonsuo also reiterate the earlier, although not credited, position (Natsoulas, 1983) that ASC “create phenomenal contents of consciousness that misrepresent or create delusional beliefs of the surrounding world and oneself” (pp. 141–142). This type of naı¨ve realism is questionable (cf. Hoffman, 2009), and it completely ignores one of the most interesting facts about hypnosis and similar procedures, namely that, up to an extent, committing to that “delusional belief” may bring about experiential and physiological changes that no longer make it delusional (Carden˜a & Beard, 1996). Furthermore, it assumes that mystical and other states are delusional by definition, although that is very much an open question (Wulff, 2000; see also Geels, this volume, Beauregard, and Windt, Volume 2). The notion that the “ordinary” state of consciousness is not at least partly delusional or incomplete is another questionable assumption (Hoffman, 2009; Tart, 1975; see also Shear, Volume 2). Mishara and Schwartz (Volume 2) propose a phenomenologically grounded approach to this issue in which ASC provide alternatives to the “natural” but naive realism. This position, to me, is less biased and more promising than that argued by Kallio and Revonsuo. Kallio and Revonsuo (2003) also flirt with a type physicalist theory of ASC (p. 134) but prudently conclude that much more needs to be known about the relationship between phenomenal experience and brain states before such a view can be advocated. As Velmans (2009) points out in reference to Dennett but also applicable to their approach, defining consciousness as a brain function (or assuming that ordinary consciousness is the state that provides us the best description of all of reality) begs the question and brings about an unjustified premature closure. A different terminological problem in ASC is that authors often fail to specify what it is they are talking about. Let us take for instance a term often used in the literature, trance (and also trance-like). It is often used to refer to some nebulous and unspecified ASC, for instance the trance after a hypnotic induction, or while listening to a beautiful piece of music, or while experiencing being possessed by another entity, or while becoming unresponsive to others, or while fainting, and so on. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) described six different senses of trance, and many authors use the term to
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avoid having to actually define what it is that they are describing either in this or in other cultures (Carden˜a & Krippner, 2010). A similar point can be made about the term ecstasy, which may denote an intense emotional or visual experience, and/or a sensation of being lifted out of one’s body! To avoid these confusions, we have asked contributors to describe what they mean experientially (and at times neurophysiologically) with the terms they use. This does not mean, of course, that a concept may not involve different dimensions. For instance, the concept of absorption includes important variations such as whether this process refers to a narrow or expanded consciousness and whether the focus is internal or external (Tellegen, 1992). Nonetheless, we need to establish the empirical basis for possible variations within a phenomenon rather than assuming them by fiat or hiding them behind some vague concept.
Classifying ASC Although some Eastern traditions developed sophisticated classifications of meditative states (Goleman, 1988; see Maliszewski et al., Shear, and Zarrilli, this volume), such was by and large not the case in the West, where an etiological rather than a phenomenological approach became dominant. An important exception is perhaps the first systematic categorization of alterations of consciousness developed by Plato (as discussed by his teacher Socrates) in his Phaedrus (1961), where he postulated four different types of manias, or states in which humans could be affected by a divinely inspired form of “madness”: prophetic (the ability to see into the future, as in the sibyls of the oracles in Greece), poetic (providing inspiration for artistic and other forms of creation), initiatory (relevant to spiritual rituals), and erotic (centered on transcendent love). When the Christian tradition became dominant, it generally questioned any form of direct experience of the divine and deemed it far more important to discern the putative provenance of the alterations of consciousness, whether God or the Devil [see Sluhovsky, this volume]. Probably it was not until the discussion of mesmeric/hypnotic depth levels during the the 18th and 19th centuries that a more descriptive classification of states of consciousness was attempted in the West [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume]. By the end of the 19th century, a study of multiple consciousness, dissociation, hypnosis, mediumship, and related phenomena was central to the birth of clinical psychology (Ellenberger, 1970). The early part of the 20th century was auspicious for the study of alterations of consciousness, not always cast within psychopathology. Probably
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the clearest contribution on the nature, function, and dynamics of states of consciousness was made by William James. Among other writings, in his 1896 Lowell lectures (Taylor, 1983), he discussed dreams and hypnosis, pathological and nonpathological forms of dissociation, and genius, among other topics. He also offered very informed and lucid views about the relationship between neurology and psychology, and about parapsychological phenomena. James was influenced by his contemporary, F. W. H. Myers, who developed a bold theory to account for ASC, psychopathology, and parapsychology (Kelly et al., 2007). Nonetheless, with the double-barrel shotgun of radical behaviorism (which rejected consciousness altogether) in academia, and psychoanalysis (which was mostly interested in nonconscious causation) in clinical psychology, a systematic consideration of ASC was stifled for decades, with few exceptions. Closer to our days, in a brief but very rich paper, Arnold Ludwig (1966) reintroduced a serious discussion of the topic and summarized literature from various areas discussing the general characteristics of ASC, how they are produced, and their functions. At about the same time, Charles Theodore Tart edited an extremely influential anthology of research in various ASC (1969) and developed a systems approach to AC (1975) that remains to be fully mined in all its richness. Various other works followed in psychology (e.g., Barber, 1976; Zinberg, 1977), anthropology (e.g., Bourguignon & Evascu, 1977) and in the media with such films as Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), partly fueled by the impact of psychedelic drug experimentation. Despite these attempts and the interest in experientially exploring ASC and Eastern traditions during the 1960s, it is fair to say that research on ASC has been by and large a minimal and undervalued academic endeavor and current work on a “science of consciousness” has mostly ignored ASC. The study of ASC currently is at a similar stage to where botany was before Linnaeus proposed his taxonomy, namely a collection of interesting observations lacking enough organization and integration to make theoretical and empirical sense of them. Some initial attempts have been made to establish a classification (e.g., Vaitl et al., 2005; Walsh, 1990), but they suffer from a number of problems. One of them has been to confuse induction procedures that may (or may not) bring about ASC with the ASC themselves (see below). Another has been oversimplification. For instance, the theory of lowered frontal brain activity (Dietrich, 2003) may account for a number of phenomena in ASC but cannot be the whole story and does not explain the complex set of findings even within the domain of hypnosis (cf. Oakley, 2008; also Beauregard, Volume 2) or consciousness alterations in some disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder
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(Lanius et al., 2010). Nor do I agree with my coeditor that all ASC can be neatly arranged into four modes [see Winkelman, this volume], one of which is characterized by neurophysiological integration and synchronicity. In fact, as Noirhomme and Laureys show [see Volume 2], some of the most synchronous brain states involve seizures and comas, and we have evidence that mystical-type reports are related to reduced, not increased, synchronicity (Carden˜a, Lehmann, Jo¨nsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007). I do agree with my coeditor, however, that a neurophenomenological approach matching careful phenomenological descriptions with neural functioning (cf. Lutz & Thompson, 2003) is very promising, as long as it is not confused with the contemporary “neurolatry” in which clear conceptualization takes second place to just finding some kind of increase in neural activity somehow connected to some type of experience, disregarding a clear description of the state of consciousness evaluated and the limitations of brain imaging (see Sanders, 2009). Whichever classification we eventually arrive at should be conceptually clear and offer justice to the complexity of both mental and brain events. Hobson (2008) offers promising insights in his careful comparison of waking and dreaming consciousness, although his three-variable model (AIM: activation, source of input, and neuromodulation) is probably not yet complex enough for a comprehensive taxonomy of ASC.
ASC Are Not the Same as Induction Procedures In Altering Consciousness, contributors discuss natural or human-made procedures to induce ASC along with the characteristics of the latter, but other discussions of ASC conflate qualitatively distinguishable states of consciousness with induction procedures or techniques. Even in their otherwise sophisticated paper, Vaitl and collaborators (2005) do not distinguish between alterations of consciousness (e.g., near-death experiences) and psychological procedures that may have a striking, medium, mild, or next to no effect in the state of consciousness of those exposed to them (e.g., meditation, biofeedback). It is a common confusion in the hypnosis literature to state that people were hypnotized, conflating two different phenomena. The first, inarguable, is that a particular (hypnotic) procedure that may or may not produce ASC was employed (Kirsch, 1994). The second, much more arguable, is that the people exposed to that procedure entered into a hypnotic state of consciousness (see also Tart, 1975). One of the problems with this use of the term is that some of the alterations in consciousness actually elicited by a hypnotic procedure may also be triggered
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by a very different context such as exposure to trauma (Carden˜a, Maldonado, van der Hart, & Spiegel, 2009). Nonetheless, we do not talk of the “trauma state of consciousness,” but rather describe some of those features under the descriptive senses of “dissociation” (Carden˜a, 1994). Consequently, similar alterations of consciousness can be more fruitfully discussed under the same rubric (say, state of consciousness, or anomalous experience X) regardless of their antecedent induction procedures or events. These remarks, however, should not be construed as implying that the antecedents to an ASC are unimportant. It may be, as suggested with regard to transcendent experiences (Zaehner, 1973), that their etiologies, whether meditation or drugs, may have differential effects, but rather than assuming that they do or do not, research on this issue is called for. Another example of conceptual confusion when discussing an induction procedure and taking it as an ASC is the undifferentiated literature on “meditation,” which is not one but various sets of procedures [see also Mishara & Schwartz, and Shear, this volume]. These procedures, depending on the individual personality and cognitive traits, the level of expertise, the setting, and the specific technique used may effect nothing more than a sore back and boredom for some people, and varying ASC for others (e.g., Goleman, 1988). With respect to this point, the research in hypnosis is very clear. For instance, a simple hypnotic induction with the suggestion to go into a “deep” state of hypnosis produced noticeable effects in the phenomenology and neurophysiology of individuals previously identified as high hypnotizables but had little effect on low hypnotizables (Carden˜a et al., 2007). Furthermore, there is a meaningful heterogeneity even among individuals who do respond to a particular procedure such as hypnosis, which further qualifies what can be said about the effects of induction procedures even for those who respond strongly to them (Terhune & Carden˜a, 2010). Finally, even in the absence of a hypnotic induction procedure, responsive people may be affected even when just asked to use their imagination (Hilgard & Tart, 1966). Rather than assume that individuals do not experience ASC during a “control” procedure, the researcher should evaluate what they actually experienced.
ASC Are Not Static Entities A problem with the term ASC is that it seems to imply a “state,” a homogeneous and unchanging modality. This ignores the various changes occurring from one moment to the next and the fact that a defining characteristic of consciousness is its constant change (James, 1890). There are important
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transitions and changes even within the ordinary baseline waking state (cf. Kunzendorf & Wallace, 2000), as there are in ASC. For instance, among some very highly hypnotizable individuals, distinct patterns seem to emerge spontaneously during hypnosis: At the beginning, subtle alterations in their physical body, followed by experiences of being in a different phenomenal place than their physical body, culminating with experiences of being in a dreamlike reality and/or transcendental experiences such as merging with a light or complete emptiness, experiences that are parallel to those reported by some “deep” meditators (Carden˜a, 2005; Davidson & Goleman, 1977). Another important but under-researched topic is Tart’s notion (1975) that the transition between states of consciousness is characterized by transient cognitive and physiological disorganization. Observations of different phenomena such as the transition from waking to sleep (Foulkes & Vogel, 1965), the changes between different alters in individuals with dissociative identity disorder, erstwhile known as “multiple personality” (Putnam, 1988), and those between an ordinary or a spirit possessed-identity (Carden˜a, 1989), support Tart’s proposal. Shamanistic healers also describe that their transition into an ASC becomes much smoother and more controllable with time (e.g., Carden˜a, 1991, Winkelman, this volume). The dynamic properties of such transitions can be evaluated neurophysiologically according to both small changes within a state (i.e., EEG microstates; Vaitl et al., 2005) and longer and more impactful transitions between states (e.g., from being awake to going under anesthesia or going to sleep). Besides transient alterations of consciousness, Western and Eastern traditions have long posited more permanent changes in consciousness under such terms as reaching enlightenment, sainthood, or kundalini. Such change may come after long-term meditative or philosophical practice (cf. Bakan, Merkur, & Weiss, 2009), or quite fortuitously (e.g., WrenLewis, 1988). Robert Forman has called a permanent or semipermanent change a dualistic mystical state (Forman, 1999; also Geels, and Shear, this volume). We need additional systematic inquiry into long-term effects of ASC related to near-death, mystical, and drug experiences, and others (cf. Carden˜a et al., 2000; Tart, 1991), along the lines of neurophysiological and psychological research on meditation (e.g., Cahn & Polich, 2006; Easterlin & Carden˜a, 1998–1999).
ASC and Individual Differences In the 4th century BC, Plato hinted that not all initiates into the Bacchic mysteries could experience them [Ustinova, this volume], during the Middle
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Ages women were considered to be more porous to spiritual possession than men, [see Sluhovsky, this volume], and the mesmeric authors claimed that some individuals were more sensitive to animal magnetism than others [Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume]. Nonetheless, the study of ASC, alongside with much of psychology (Bakan, 1973), has often confused aggregate (i.e., asserting something presumably true only of the class as an aggregate) with general (i.e., asserting something that is true of most or all of the members of that class) functions, disregarding important individual differences in conscious experiencing. Even leaving aside for a moment exceptional cases such as synesthetes, such basic processes as auditory perception reveal consistent and substantial individual differences (Deutsch, 1988). Various authors have also documented that we differ dramatically in our experiences of imagery and thought in the waking state, daydreaming, dreaming, hypnosis, and other phenomena (Kunzendorf & Wallace, 2000). Within modern psychology, it may have been Myers who first discussed differences in the propensity to experience ASC. An influential personality classification includes self-transcendence, or the propensity to experience oneself as part of a larger unity, as a character trait (Cloninger, Przybeck, & Svrakic, 1993). This construct has unique genotypic variance (Gillespie, Cloninger, Heath, & Martin, 2003), and correlates moderately with hypnotizability, absorption, mental boundaries, and related constructs that have been often associated with ASC (Carden˜a & Terhune, 2008). Relatedly, specific neurotransmitters and alleles have also been associated with hypnotizability (Lichtenberg, Bachner-Melman, Ebstein, & Crawford, 2004), suggesting that from birth we may differ in the propensity to experience ASC, a propensity that likely interacts with epigenetic factors, both benign (e.g., play-acting in childhood) and toxic (e.g., traumatic events and failures in attachment; see Granqvist, Reijman, and Carden˜a, Volume 2). To further elucidate individual differences, research on trait(s) associated with the propensity to have ASC should look at the effect of their interaction with states and induction procedures. In addition to these differences, the same phenomenal event may be interpreted in different ways, evidencing cultural (e.g., Pasricha & Stevenson, 1986), and idiosyncratic variations. For instance, in the study with hypnotic virtuosos mentioned earlier (Carden˜a, 2005), every participant had a spontaneous experience of a very bright light, but whereas for some this light was experienced as a source of transcendent bliss (“all the good things”), for others it was just a sudden brightening of their imaginal experience. Finally, there is also some research showing that individual biological rhythms are related to having more fantasy and being more
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suggestible to hypnosis at different times of the day (see Wallace & Fisher, 2000), so biological cycles should also be a variable to consider [see Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2].
Why Study ASC? William James penned what must be considered the rallying cry for the study of ASC (James, 1902/1958): Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. (p. 298)
The latter part of this quotation, mentioning the probable utility of ASC, contrasts with mainstream views that have placed the ordinary waking state as the foremost state to apprehend reality and any other variations as “departures, alterations, or aberrations from it” (Natsoulas, 1983, p. 51). (A pejorative interpretation of “altered” along these lines drove Zinberg (1973) to propose the phrase “alternate states of consciousness,” although this term is rarely used nowadays.) That matters are not quite that simple has been proposed by a number of religious and esoteric traditions that described our ordinary state as a “dark glass” through which we seek to apprehend reality. Plato in The Republic (1970) used the beautiful allegory of a cave in which chained people interpret shadows projected in a wall to be an accurate depiction of reality. The image becomes crystal clear if we substitute biologically predisposed and idiosyncratic and culturally determined habits of perceiving reality as the chains. Besides philosophy, we have current research that supports, at least in broad terms, the image offered to us by Plato regarding our ordinary or waking consciousness. For instance, Ornstein (1986) reviewed different strands of research and concluded that waking consciousness may be quite limited when events do not change or change slowly. Hoffman (2009), a cognitive psychologist, has described how evolution may select for a modeling of reality that differs to an extent from what is “actually there.” And these critiques of naı¨ve realism do not even consider evidence from quantum physics and parapsychological research suggesting that the fabric of reality may be quite different from how we ordinarily experience it [see Luke, Volume 2].
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In an earlier book on anomalous experiences, we gave seven reasons why the systematic study of anomalous experiences is important to our understanding of humans and, perhaps, the fabric of reality. These thoughts are also applicable to ASC: 1 Psychology cannot be considered a comprehensive account of human experience otherwise. 2 Considering their ubiquity, some of these experiences might be expected to grant an evolutionary advantage. 3 The clinician needs to be able to distinguish dysfunctional experiences from those that are just uncommon. 4 Some of these experiences (e.g. synesthesia) may developmentally precede ordinary ones and thus may be required to explain the latter ones. 5 They help us understand the effects and limits of society and culture on experience. 6 Some of these experiences may provide long-lasting benefits, including a greater appreciation of life. 7 They suggest that the relationship of consciousness to reality may require a substantial revision (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000, pp. 16–18).
Similarly, Putnam (2005) has argued that knowledge about “states of being” is necessary to understand childhood development and variations in psychopathology and Whitehead [this volume] discusses how ASC may help social functions. As will be clearer from reading the various contributions to the volumes of Altering Consciousness, the history of humankind (and consciousness of sentient beings in general) cannot be fully understood without seriously grappling with the biological and cultural importance of ASC and attempts to induce them. And, as will become evident throughout the various contributions, not only psychology but also the humanities, arts, biological, and social sciences must acknowledge a far more central role to altering consciousness in their fields than has been the case so far. I also hope that the multidisciplinary nature of Altering Consciousness will reveal that we need the perspectives of the artist and the experiencer as much as that of the scientist to gain a full understanding. It is arguable whether the current work on ASC represents a kind of new paradigm or just extensions of mainstream epistemology and methodology into an area that has been mostly neglected and requires methodological plurality and multidisciplinary integration, from the biochemical to the cultural (Kelly & Locke, 2009). Tart’s (e.g., 1998, preface to this volume) call for state-specific sciences, although still in need of further development, would come closer to a more radical proposal than either a wholesale rejection of the current scientific methods (which many experients of ASC
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would advocate) or a minimal extension of it. In any case, the various contributions by our distinguished cadre of international scholars show that ASC is a vital area of investigation, although still in need of much conceptual and empirical development before we can say that we have truly advanced much further than Plato did in his musings on the subject.
Introducing Volume 1 Volume 1 provides an overview of the history of altered consciousness, before covering cultural aspects and the humanities. Although Western academic literature is predominant, some chapters provide an overview of alterations of consciousness in non-Western settings and groups. It is fitting that the most influential contemporary author on AC since William James, Charles T. Tart, open the volumes with a preface in which he describes how impoverished the psychological study of the topic was before he stormed the academic bastion with his research and publications. I follow with this introduction in which I set the stage for the volumes that follow, trying to clarify unnecessary conceptual obfuscations and calling for research on the topic that respects its complexity and does not give short shrift to individual differences or the ever-changing nature of conscious experience. The next introductory chapter is by Michael Winkelman, who introduces his Integrative Model of Consciousness, which ambitiously aims to integrate evolutionary, neurophysiological, and anthropological views on a model of ASC. The historical section opens with a scholarship tour de force by Yulia Ustinova, who covers an enormous historical and geographical terrain from prehistory to late antiquity. She includes her fascinating account of how caves have been associated with the induction of ASC not only among prehistoric groups but also among the classical Greeks (Ustinova, 2009). The next contribution is by Moshe Sluhovsky who, following his acclaimed book (2007), surveys the Western medieval mental landscape, underlining how some of the best minds of their time tried to make sense of the unusual alterations of consciousness and behavior they observed, trying to discern whether their source was divine or diabolic. Besides the mostly spontaneous phenomena studied by Sluhovsky, the Medieval Ages also included a serious study of a number of techniques that would currently fall under the umbrella of meditation (Baier, 2009). Although the Age of Enlightenment diminished the overbearing influence of the Church, the discernment problem did not go away but underwent a transformation so that ASC tied to mesmerism/hypnosis and
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spiritualism were variously interpreted as being caused by cosmic forces, other selves, or mere sociocultural influences, as my chapter with Carlos Alvarado describes. The historical section concludes with a comprehensive 50-year overview of the scientific study of ASC by Julie Beischel, Adam Rock, and another immense figure in the field, Stan Krippner. The next section looks at AC in non-Western groups. Jonathan Shear integrates and makes sense of various Eastern traditions regarding the possibility of achieving a higher state of consciousness characterized by pure being or potentiality, also experienced spontaneously by high hypnotizables in a secular setting (see Carden˜a, 2005). Michael Winkelman, who has already written a number of foundational works in this area, provides an authoritative discussion of shamanism and altered consciousness. In his chapter Charles Whitehead surveys a vast cross-cultural landscape and unveils how what we consider “ordinary consciousness” is partly the end product of a number of cultural choices that are rarely recognized, much less questioned, and how cultures differ in their attitudes toward ASC. This section concludes with the work of Graham St John, who illustrates how young and countercultural groups are adopting ancient and new technologies to alter their states of consciousness and propose new models of the self. That these explorations carry risks beyond the potential dangers of drug use and abuse is borne by criticisms of the unthinking embrace of current technologies (Lanier, 2010; Smith, 2010). This volume concludes with chapters on the intrinsic link between the humanities and AC. Jennifer Windt summarizes various ways in which philosophical discourse and ASC can cross-pollinate each other above and beyond the current philosophical interest in consciousness at large. The chapter by Antoon Geels illustrates that visionary and other religious experiences are not only of historical interest but life-changing events for many of our contemporary brethren. The elegantly written chapter on ASC and literature by Wendy Cousins shows how central human endeavors such as literature remain incoherent until one takes altered consciousness into consideration. Literature has often heeded Rimbaud’s call for a de´re`glement de tous les sens (derangement of the senses), whether through the experience of receiving a bout of inspiration (that Manguel, 2004, claims underlies the origin of my favorite short story by Borges, Las Ruinas Circulares, which can be read as a parable on consciousness and reality), or in the deliberate use of shamanic, meditative, and hypnotic techniques, as in the case of the exceptional poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (cf. Middlebrook, 2004), not to mention the use of alcohol and other psychoactive drugs by many other writers.
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In the next chapter, the scholar, director, and performer Phillip B. Zarrilli reveals how an attempt to alter one’s consciousness and attain a more intense presence is a central part of various Western and Eastern acting traditions. I was particularly happy to see that he includes in his survey the Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales in Me´xico, where I first got a taste of altered states far more intense than what I had experienced under mere verbal techniques (I have been fortunate to remain a friend and collaborator with Nicola´s Nu´n˜ez and his life and theatre accomplice, Helena Guardia, throughout all these years). Mark Levy discusses the connection between AC and the visual arts, focusing on painters and sculptors who have deliberately sought to alter their ordinary state through shamanic and meditative techniques, among other procedures. He also discusses the SpanishMexican artist Remedios Varo, two of whose paintings are on the covers of these volumes and whose exquisite depictions of other worlds were influenced by her dreams and esoteric practices (Ruy Sa´nchez, Arcq, Engel, Moreno Villareal, et al., 2008). Finally, Jo¨rg Fachner gives a nuanced analysis of why music has been a constant companion in the attempts to alter one’s consciousness. Besides his disquisitions, there are of course examples of great musical compositions being tied in one way or another to alterations in consciousness, from the partly opium-inspired Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz to the synesthetic integrations of music and color in the composition of Olivier Messiaen and Alexander Scriabin. I should add a few words about the most popular current artistic medium, cinema. Although the bromides produced by Hollywood and other commercial centers have come to dominate the production of films, cinema had from its inception adventuresome creators who sought to explore ASC or even instill them in their audience. Some early examples that come to mind are the 1920 film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari by Robert Wiene, dealing with both hypnosis and madness, and the 1932 film Vampyr by Carl Theodor Dreyer, in which the dream and waking lives of the protagonist Allan Gray are intermixed, various surrealist films and L’Anne´e dernie`re a` Marienbad, the 1961 masterpiece by Alain Resnais, which has been interpreted as the world as seen in a dream or from a schizophrenic mind. More recently, besides the obvious reference of Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States, are the films by David Lynch, a long-time meditator who evidently likes to mess around with his audience’s sense of reality, as well as Repulsion (1965) by Roman Polanski and Spider (2002) by David Cronenberg, which provide an experiential insight into altered states associated with schizophrenia (see my chapter on this issue in Volume 2). Also worth mentioning are Darren Aronofsky’s 1998 film Pi, a sojourn through
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metaphysical madness, and Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, a multilayered portrayal of lucid dreaming. Seeking to do justice to both the first- and third-person perspectives on consciousness, as well as the different understanding granted to us by the sciences and the humanities, I will close this introduction with the exuberant La Prosa del Observatorio (The Prose of the Observatory, 1972) of Julio Corta´zar. In it, he demands that the passionate vertigo of life be faced in all its wonderment and terror: aspirar profundamente un aire que es puente y caricia de la vida . . . pero lo abierto sigue ahı´, pulso de astros y anguilas, anillo de Moebius de una figura del mundo donde la conciliacio´n es posible, donde anverso y reverso cesara´n de desgarrarse, donde el hombre podra´ ocupar su puesto en esa jubilosa danza que alguna vez llamaremos realidad. (To deeply inhale an air that is life’s bridge and caress . . . but the open remains there, pulse of stars and eels, Moebius’s ring of a figure of the world where conciliation is possible, where front and back will stop tearing each other apart and humanity may take its place in that joyous dance that we will at some point call reality.)
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CHAPTER 2
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness: The Integrative Mode of Consciousness Michael Winkelman Ritual alterations of consciousness are a virtual universal of human cultures, reflecting a basic human drive generally considered of central importance to religion and spiritual practices. Cross-cultural perspectives show both similarities in the experiences of altered consciousness (AC) that implicate biological factors as the basis for similarities across cultures, time, and space, as well as cultural differences in the manifestations of these potentials that implicate social factors. Individual and group experiences of altered consciousness may vary in many ways, but it is commonalities and recurrent patterns, rather than unique differences, that are crucial to understanding AC. This introduction reviews evidence for the universal manifestation of altered consciousness. This universal manifestation is not well explained in the classic paradigms of altered states of consciousness that emphasize their individual nature. In contrast, a biological approach to consciousness helps to situate altered consciousness within human nature. This perspective provides a foundation for an approach that characterizes AC in terms of an integrative mode of consciousness that reflects systemic features of brain functioning. This integrative mode of consciousness is typified in theta wave patterns that synchronize the frontal cortex with discharges from lower brain structures. This integration of ancient brain functions into the frontal cortex explains many of the key features of AC.
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Culture, Science, and Altered Consciousness Institutionalized procedures for ritually altering consciousness are found in virtually all societies (Bourguignon, 1968; Winkelman, 1992), reflecting an innate drive for altering consciousness (Siegel, 2005). Societies have a number of adaptations to the capacities of AC, for example, those manifested in conditions distinguished as soul flight, possession, enlightenment, and others. As Whitehead points out in Volume 1, culture fundamentally influences how our capacities are developed. Some cultures extol these experiences while others vilify and block access to them. Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili (1992) characterized cultural differences in relating to the alteration of consciousness as ranging from “monophasic” cultures, which institutionally value only waking consciousness, to “polyphasic void” cultures, which encourage exploration of phases of consciousness beyond phenomenal reality. Most cultures have traditions designed to enhance the availability of altered consciousness such as those produced in shamanic and meditative traditions. In contrast, the dominant cultural ethos of Indo-European societies generally ignores them or subjects those who seek them to pathologization, social marginalization, or persecution. Some cultures believe that altering consciousness provides a variety of adaptive advantages through development of a more objective perception of the external world in recognizing the illusory and constructed nature of ordinary perception. For example, many cultures have viewed some drugs as entheogens, sacred substances that produce a contact with the divine (e.g., Ra¨tsch, 2005; Schultes & Hofmann, 1979). In spite of different attitudes, it appears that virtually all societies have practices that support the ability to function in this mode of altered consciousness (Laughlin et al., 1992; Winkelman, 2000). This universality indicates that these manifestations of AC are a part of human biological potentials. Even when there is cultural repression of altered consciousness, these experiences are nonetheless manifested because they reflect a biological basis and its inevitable expression in human experience. Such a biological basis indicates that we should be able to provide a scientific explanation of these persistent and significant human phenomena.
Situating Altered Consciousness within Science The scientific status of studies of altered consciousness has a doubly stigmatized position—first, by being about consciousness, a field that still struggles for general scientific recognition, and second, by being marked as something altered. In spite of many scientific and other inquiries, one
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might legitimately claim that we still do not have a science of altered consciousness. Scientific fields, as conceptualized by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1970) in his now classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, have regular features called paradigms that guide research and provide general modes of explanation. In his Postscript—1969 Kuhn (1970, p. 175) clarified his concepts of paradigm, emphasizing two levels of use, which he distinguished with new terms: 1) the disciplinary matrix, the common beliefs, values, and techniques of a group of scientists that provides the universally accepted concepts and practices of the field and frameworks for most research; and 2) exemplars, an element of the disciplinary matrix, defined as concrete models used for solutions to research problems.
The main elements of the disciplinary matrix include: 1) symbolic generalizations (exemplified in mathematical expressions, formulas and laws); 2) metaphysics, analogies, and metaphors that provide acceptable models and explanations; 3) values (e.g., criteria for research and evaluation of theories); and 4) exemplars (“paradigms”), the concrete problem solutions used to solve the puzzles confronting the discipline (e.g., use of hydraulic models for explaining electricity, wind, crowds, etc.).
Altered Consciousness within Paradigmatic Frameworks As is typical of the social sciences in general, consciousness studies are not characterized by the uniformity and agreement typical of paradigms of the physical sciences; rather, theoretical diversity and heterodoxy reflecting mutually exclusive paradigms are characteristic. For example, consider the divergent concepts and theories regarding the nature of consciousness found in Freudian psychology versus behaviorist psychology. Kuhn emphasized that paradigms are shared by members of a scientific community as a result of common education and training. The diversity of scientific disciplines that study consciousness precludes the uniformity that a paradigm presumes. Kuhn proposed that competing schools of thought characterize scientific fields in a preparadigm period, suggesting that consciousness studies are in a preparadigmatic period. The study of consciousness and AC does not have accepted symbolic generalizations or laws. Consciousness studies
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in general do not share a metaphysics; instead, one might contend that diametrically opposed metaphysics are found, ranging from strictly materialist, reductionist, and dismissive perspectives to idealist and spiritual systems of explanation. Consciousness studies have no core set of values, with extreme disciplinary diversity and competing camps (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative approaches). Metaphysical and methodological diversity produces a similar diversity in the exemplars used to elucidate consciousness. These range from strictly descriptive and phenomenological approaches to more systematic cross-cultural concepts (e.g., “soul flight” and out-of-body experiences), to strictly materialist approaches exemplified in using brain imaging as a measure of consciousness.
Paradigm Shifts in Science Consciousness studies and AC may nonetheless be elucidated by Kuhn’s models. A central feature of Kuhn’s model is the occurrence of scientific revolutions that lead to radically new ways of understanding. Scientific revolutions associated with the impacts of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein involved abandoning one way of viewing the world in favor of a new incompatible approach that rejected many prior elements and concepts. Kuhn noted these are relatively rare occurrences, but that they are key to advances in science. Kuhn proposed that significant changes in scientific fields are characterized by a succession of paradigms (exemplars) involving a reinterpretation of the elements of the disciplinary matrix. Kuhn characterized scientific revolutions as reinterpretations, a new way of seeing relationships among theories, concepts, and laws that involve changes in the meaning of concepts. For instance, in the shift in astronomy from the geocentric to the heliocentric model of the solar system, the elements (the sun, planets, moons, and asteroids) remained the same although there were changes in relationships among them and the laws and models that explain their behavior. Scientific revolutions are not the outcome of normal science but of impediments to normal science produced by anomalies, findings that are in contradiction to normal expectation. Anomalies play central roles in the development of science. Anomalies are findings that provide counterexamples to the assumptions of the dominant paradigm and are generally key elements in the development of new theoretical frameworks. These crises produced by anomalies are the “prerequisite to fundamental inventions of theory” (Kuhn, 1977, p. 208), producing a scientific revolution in the development of a new exemplar for the disciplinary matrix [see Beischel, Rock, & Krippner, this volume].
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Altered Consciousness as an Anomaly Studies of both ordinary consciousness and AC have produced findings that are anomalies for the dominant materialist assumptions of the physical sciences. But these anomalies have few central roles in any major field of scientific inquiry, with the very question of consciousness seen by some as falling outside of scientific inquiry altogether. Anomalies of altered consciousness are generally seen as exceptions that are best dismissed as distorted data rather than novel findings. Why have these disjunctures between consciousness studies and the rest of science not provoked a scientific revolution? Kuhn noted that anomalies must impede the work of normal science and that the significance of an anomaly is dependent on the development of concepts and methodologies that make it apparent. Furthermore, what constitutes anomalies and the need for new paradigms is not strictly the facts but the social context that dominates a science, including the policies and practices of professional organizations and their publication organs. This lack of import of the anomalies of AC for science in general reflects a significant source of these findings outside of the established sciences in anthropology, folklore, parapsychology, occult studies, and other marginalized sciences. One can conclude that whatever anomalies the studies of AC present, they do not affect the progress of scientific disciplines as currently practiced. These phenomena of AC may, nonetheless, be the keys to truly novel developments in science. Philosopher of science Karl Popper chided Kuhn for his satisfaction with scientific revolutions, considering them to be “ordinary science.” Scientific revolutions are rather modest affairs in Kuhn’s (1970) clarifications, the change in the exemplars with other aspects of the disciplinary matrix (values and metaphysic and symbolic generalizations) remaining the same; the findings of the past are maintained. Popper (1972) argued for a more thorough revision of the bases of science in ideological revolutions in which the fundamental assumptions of the paradigm and theories of science are altered. In assessing the role of AC within the broader psychology of consciousness, a paramount question is whether such findings constitute a scientific revolution or even a more profound ideological revolution. Those who have devoted their lives and careers to consciousness studies often make such claims, pointing to vastly different conceptions of human nature demanded by these unusual experiences. Their claims, however, have not swayed the heterodox field of consciousness studies to a unanimity of opinion that would create a common paradigm, nor have the anomalies demanded major changes in metaphysics, methodology, and values of
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other scientific disciplines that are the hallmark of ideological revolutions. Whatever claims studies of AC have for fomenting scientific or ideological revolutions, they remain unrealized, perhaps simply premature for a field still in its infancy. Nonetheless, Kuhn also emphasized that during the preparadigmatic period, the community shares paradigmatic elements. In our contributions here, I foresee the emergence of a paradigm for the study of AC that may bring the significance of these phenomena to the forefront of other scientific disciplines. Below I propose a model of AC that constitutes a neurophenomenological paradigm linking biological features and phenomenological experiences.
A Reconceptualization of ASC: The Integrative Mode of Consciousness The concept of altered states of consciousness (ASC) as a topic for legitimate scientific inquiry emerged in the 1960s. A central figure contributing to this emerging field was Charles Tart (e.g., 1975, 1977). His influential books and edited volumes contributed to the formation of an implicit paradigm of ASC that has persisted for decades. This paradigmatic framework for AC was explicitly linked to waking consciousness. Tart defined states of consciousness (SoC) as conditions that differ qualitatively from others by the presence of conditions or characteristics absent in other states. SoC represent how people judge usual alterations in experience and are identified by the individual’s assessment of patterns of experience. Different SoC are determined by personal significance. Tart (1977) conceptualized ASC in terms of differences from the baseline state of consciousness, “an active stable overall patterning of psychological functions that, via multiple (feedback) stabilization relationships among the parts making it up, maintains its identity in spite of environmental changes” (p. 192). The ASC paradigm takes the ordinary aspects of consciousness as the framework for conceptualizing the significant aspects of altered consciousness. The personal significance of a SoC is of less importance to science than are the underlying biological dynamics that give both similarity to SoC across people and regular features of ASC across people and cultures. What is most significant about ASC is not simply that they have personal significance but that they have a significance that transcends both personal and cultural factors. These transpersonal and transcultural features point to their biological foundations. This notion of a biological basis did not figure significantly in this paradigm of ASC. But Tart’s pioneering work also pointed to the reality of altered consciousness that involves something
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transcendental, a set of significant human conditions that must be understood with respect to their own intrinsic properties. Tart’s (1972) concept of state-specific sciences foreshadowed the perspective suggested below that characterizes AC in epistemological terms, as specific forms of knowing (also see Winkelman, 2010). To understand altered consciousness requires a framework that goes beyond personal significance and baseline or waking consciousness.The neurophenomenological approach proposes a conceptualization of altered consciousness in relationship to several biologically based functional modes of operation that we share with other organisms.
Modes of Consciousness Similarities in manifestations of waking, deep sleep, and dreams across species and cultures reflect common underlying biological structures. These biologically structured foundations are discussed as modes of consciousness. A mode of consciousness is a biologically based functional system of organismic operation that reflects conditions of homeostatic balance among brain subsystems to meet global organismic needs (see Winkelman, 2010, for discussion and details). Different modes of consciousness are revealed in the congruencies in the primary daily patterns of variation in behavior and experiences of humans and other animals. We share with other animals the daily cycles of sleep and waking, with homologous brain structures responsible for these patterns. Similarly, humans share the dream mode of consciousness with most mammals. Their presence in other animals indicates the transcendent nature of these human modes of consciousness. In addition, humans experience altered consciousness, conceptualized here as the integrative mode of consciousness. Although learning and cultural factors produce variance in these modes of consciousness in humans, their similar patterns crossculturally (and across species) reflect underlying biological functions and organismic functions and needs: Waking: learning, adaptation, and food and other survival needs; Deep sleep: recuperative functions, regeneration, and growth; Dreaming (REM sleep): memory integration and consolidation and psychosocial adaptation; and Integrative: psychodynamic growth and social and psychological integration.
These modes are so basic to organismic operation that they are functionally wired in multiple ways into brain structures, as illustrated in the brain’s
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control of dreaming. No single region of the brain is entirely responsible for the initiation of REM sleep, and dreaming persists or re-emerges even after excising the supposed dream areas (Graham, 1990; also see Alkire & Miller, 2005; Hobson, 2005; and Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2, for general neural correlates of sleep and dreams). Tart’s baseline and altered states of consciousness correspond to the waking and integrative modes of consciousness, respectively. Because SoCs differ in terms of personal significance or psychological subsystems, they are a subsidiary level of analysis to that of modes, which are derived from physiological processes related to organismic needs and homeostatic balance. SoC occur within modes, with their specific characteristics determined by the social, cultural, and psychological effects rather than by the strictly biological needs. Different states of consciousness are found within each of the modes of consciousness—sleep, dreaming, waking, and integrative. During the modes of deep sleep and dreams, a variety of SoC may emerge, including pathological states such as somnambulism, nocturnal automatisms, sleep drunkenness, sleep terrors, and also “normal” states such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic transitions between being awake and being asleep. The integrative mode of consciousness includes various SoC (e.g., soul flight, possession, samadhi), but would not include everything that Tart considered ASC since some SoC have disintegrative and pathological features rather than integrative effects.
Biological Bases of the Integrative Mode of Consciousness Diverse states of altered consciousness reflect similar brain responses. Common mechanisms involve manipulation of the autonomic nervous system through extensive ergotropic (sympathetic) activation leading to a collapse into a trophotropic (parasympathetic) dominant state with a slowing of the brain wave discharges into a more synchronized and coherent pattern (see Winkelman, 2010, for review). Altered consciousness episodes are also characterized by an integration of the various levels of the brain. This integration is manifested in entrainment of the frontal cortex by highly coherent and synchronized slow-wave discharges emanating from the limbic system and related lower-brain structures. These entrainments may occur at a variety of frequencies, but two predominant patterns are synchronized slow-wave theta bands (3–6 cycles per second) and the high-frequency gamma oscillations (40+ cps). These synchronized brain wave patterns justify labeling them as an integrative mode of consciousness (Winkelman, 2000). The biological foundation for these experiences is
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reflected in their production by a wide variety of natural agents (i.e., psychedelic drugs) and ritual procedures (i.e., trauma, extreme fasting, and exertion) that elicit these brain wave patterns. This paradigm of integrative consciousness originates in the work of Mandell (1980), who suggested that physiological mechanisms underlying “transcendent states” are based in a common neurochemical pathway-involving the temporal lobe. Many agents and procedures result in a loss of serotonin inhibition to the hippocampal cells, producing an increase in cell activity and the manifestation of hippocampal-septal slow-wave EEG activity (alpha, delta, and especially theta) that imposes a synchronous slow-wave pattern across the lobes. Mandell suggested that the neurobiological basis underlying transcendent states, including their ineffable and religious components, involves a “biogenic aminetemporal-lobe limbic neurology . . . the mesolimbic serotonergic pathway that extends from the median raphe nucleus in the mesencephalon, coexistent with part of the mesencephalic reticular formation regulating arousal . . . to the septum and hippocampus” (pp. 381, 390). This produces hypersynchronous discharges across the hippocampal-septal-reticular-raphe circuit, which links the R(reptilian) complex and paleomammalian brain. Agents and procedures that invoke this pattern include hallucinogens, amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana, polypeptide opiates, long-distance running, hunger, thirst, sleep loss, auditory stimuli such as drumming and chanting, sensory deprivation, dream states, meditation, and a variety of psychophysiological imbalances or sensitivities resulting from injury, trauma, disease, or hereditarily transmitted nervous system conditions (see Winkelman, 2010, for review). The underlying psychobiology of many forms of AC involves this response based in the serotonergic connections between the limbic system and brain stem regions [see Presti and various chapters on psychoactive drugs, Volume 2]. While dopamine mechanisms are also involved, serotonin has a significant role as a neuromodulator that regulates the activities of many other neurotransmitter systems.Mandell proposed that the hippocampus is the focal point of the mechanisms that reduce the inhibitory serotonin regulation of temporal lobe limbic function. The loss of inhibitory regulation by serotonin results in a reduction or loss of the “gating” of emotional response and an enhancement of dopamine circuitry. This loss of gating combined with hippocampal-septal-discharges results in an emotional flooding or ecstasy (cf. Mandell 1980, p. 400). The hippocampal-septal system is an association area involved in the formation and the mediation of memory and emotions. The synchronous patterns originating in the hippocampal-septal-reticular raphe circuits
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reflect linkages of the attentional mechanisms in the behavioral brain regions (reticular formation) and the emotional brain. These synchronous electrical discharges propagate up the major axon bundles from the base of the brain into the frontal cortex, integrating activity from ancient levels of the brain into the frontal lobes.
Psychedelics and Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical Feedback Loops This paradigm of integration as a generic feature underlying AC is illustrated by Vollenweider’s (1998) research on the mechanisms of action of psychedelics on the major cortical loops. The frontal-subcortical circuits provide one of the principal organizational networks of the brain involving neuronal linkages and feedback loops of the cortical areas of the frontal brain with the thalamus of the brain stem region (Cummings, 1993). These loops unite specific regions of the frontal cortex with lower brain regions, specifically the basal ganglia, substantia nigra, and the thalamus. These circuits are central to brain–behavioral relationships, mediating motor activity and eye movement, as well as social actions, motivations, and executive functions. Vollenweider attributes the consciousnessaltering properties of psychedelics to their selective effects on the brain’s cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical feedback loops that link the information gating systems of lower levels of the brain with the frontal cortex. These loops are regulated by the thalamus, which limits the ascending information to the frontal cortex from the environment and body. Psychedelics disable this disinhibition process; this increases access to the flow of information that is ordinarily inhibited, overwhelming the frontal cortex and leading to an alteration of experience of self, other, environment, and the internal world of psychological structures and projection.
Altered Consciousness as Dysregulation of the Prefrontal Cortex The notion that alterations of consciousness involve a disruption of the processes of the frontal cortex is elaborated by Dietrich (2003), who proposes that a variety of conditions of AC involve a temporary dysregulation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). He reviews psychological and neurological studies on the effects of endurance running, dreaming, hypnosis, druginduced states, and meditation to illustrate their commonality in the disruption of the higher-order functions associated with the PFC. The common effects of this disruption are manifested in the loss of the roles of the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex involved in highly integrated aspects of neural information processing and higher cognitive functions.
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness
The downregulation of certain mental faculties from conscious awareness involves a subtraction of certain faculties or experiences, with a variety of different modules capable of being down-regulated, reducing awareness to a lower condition within the hierarchy of conscious states. Greater alterations of consciousness, such as those experienced in dreaming or out-of-body experiences (OBE), involve a greater amount of downregulation of prefrontal mediated capacities [see Dieguez & Blanke, Volume 2]. The different kinds of prefrontal capacities and different degrees of deregulation provide for a variety of phenomenological alterations to consciousness. The different agents and activities that lead to this dyseregulation do so in distinct ways that produce unique phenomenological characteristics of religious experiences. Dietrich proposes that these different forms of hypofrontality involve a general principle of a hierarchical and progressive disengagement with the more sophisticated cognitive skills and levels of consciousness involving self-awareness and planning (e.g., self-reflection, sense of time, planning) being compromised first, followed by lower-level systems. The dysregulation of the PFC allows a number of unusual self-experiences related to our more ancient brain functions. Dietrich (2003) proposed that the lack of engagement of the PFC results in the lack of certain frontal qualities—willful action, selfawareness, the deliberate direction of attention, abstract and creative thought, and planning. However, many alterations of consciousness, notably the shamanic soul journey and many meditative states, have those properties, requiring explanation of how these capacities persist.
Meditation as Integrative and Dissociative Brain Dynamics The integrative and dissociative or “dysregulated” brain dynamics of AC are exemplified in meditation. Since the earliest studies, there have been consistent reports of similarities across meditative disciplines in a shift toward parasympathetic dominance, an overall decrease in frequency of the brain waves to alpha and theta ranges, and increases in alpha and theta amplitude and regularity in the frontal and central regions of the brain (Taylor, Murphy, & Donovan, 1997). More recent research confirms that typical brain waves associated with meditation involve an increase in alpha waves, which then decrease in frequency toward dominant theta rhythms (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Takahashi et al., 2005). Hebert and coworkers (2005) implicated alpha EEG during meditation as a form of “integration in the brain that leads to high-level cognitive processes.” These are the same basic systemic physiological principles underlying the concept of the integrative mode of consciousness: enhanced synchronization
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of brain wave patterns. An additional level of meditation-induced integration in the brain is reflected in biphasic hypersynchronous high-frequency gamma waves (35–44 cps; see Lehmann et al., 2001; Lutz et al., 2004, Vialatte et al., 2009). The presence of gamma in meditation is a direct confirmation of the integrative model because gamma is associated with binding of diverse signals within the brain; furthermore, gamma synchronization is modulated by the theta and alpha rhythms (Fries, 2009, p. 217). Altered consciousness also necessarily involves selective segregation or deafferentation of input from brain systems. Dissociation may nonetheless reflect the integration of the principles of lower brain systems and their imposition on the frontal cortex. This dissociation is specifically seen in meditation and hypnosis, as well as in more obviously dissociative conditions such as spirit possession [see Sluhovsky, this volume]. D’Aquili and Newberg (1999) propose that mystical experience involves interference with the normal functions of tertiary association areas, namely a deafferentation or functional cutting off of input into a structure. Deafferentation results in a structure firing independent of normal input from other parts of the brain. Inhibition of some structures explains the ineffable aspects of mystical experiences, a result of being cut off from language production centers. D’Aquili and Newberg propose that deafferentation of limbic stimulation results in specific effects such as relaxation and profound quiescence, ecstatic and blissful feelings, and a sense of pure space and obliteration of the self–other distinction. Enhancing the attentional processes characteristic of meditation results in deafferentation of input from other systems, such as the environment, that would be distracting to highly focused attention.
Hypnosis as Dissociation Selection for a biological disposition to these highly focused internal states of awareness and limbic–frontal integration characterized by theta wave discharge patterns is illustrated by hypnosis (Crawford, 1994). Highly hypnotizable people have attentional filtering mechanisms that provide a concentration with a simultaneous dissociation of some cognitive features [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume]. Crawford proposed that hypnosis and its enhanced attention reflect an interaction between subcortical and cortical brain mechanisms that enable highly hypnotizable people to sustain attention as well as disattention. A consequence of the highly hypnotizable individual’s more efficient frontal limbic attentional systems is the ability to disattend to extraneous stimuli, known as cognitive inhibition, which is associated with enhanced theta-wave production.
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Enhanced limbic frontal interaction characteristic of highly hypnotizable individuals is a pattern of brain functioning that typifies the integrative mode of consciousness, an enhanced interaction between the limbic and the frontal brain that produces integration across the neuraxis and holistic information-processing styles (Crawford, 1994) Dissociation is reflected in the highly susceptible hypnotic subject’s ability to engage an alternative reality that is demanded by a social relationship with the hypnotist, expressed in the concept of rapport that reflects the person’s cooperation with the hypnotist. This feature of hypnotic susceptibility also exemplifies integration, epitomized in the ability to subject oneself to the theory of mind manifested by others in complying with the requests of the hypnotist. This lower-level brain control is illustrated by highly hypnotic subjects’ greater efficiency in implementing the strategies suggested by others (the hypnotist) while having a general inability to voluntarily alter their own strategic performance, a predominance of paleomammalian brain functions over the frontal cortex (also see Jamieson, 2007; Jamieson & Woody 2007; Ray, 2007). Hypnosis shifts the interaction between the frontal and limbic systems to the latter’s evolved capacities for processing of survival-related information and feelings (Woody & Szechtman, 2007), allowing social feelings to take precedence over the sensory world in dictating behavior. Hypnotic susceptibility engages the motivational systems that manage social hierarchy, with the individual accepting a subordinate position and the imposition of the will of a dominant other. Highly susceptible hypnotic subjects experience a dominance of the limbic structures in an enhanced orientation to the emotional/motivation engagement with the hypnotist, reflecting the survival value of the evolved capacity to subordinate the individual’s personal perceptions and behaviors to the wishes of the leader. This reflects the unconscious emotional control of volition characteristic of hypnosis, where the higher-level ego structures do not identify with the volitional qualities of behavior generated unconsciously. This reflects the basic features of the model of the integrative mode of consciousness, where lower-level structures impose their dynamics on the overall functional outcomes. The model is supported by the state approaches to hypnosis, which see it as engaging structures of consciousness and brain networks distinctive from those of waking consciousness. In contrast to the orientation to the external sensory world, hypnosis and SoC in the integrative mode of consciousness engage this imagined alternative that controls the body, including physiological responses, perceptions, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.
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Spirit Possession as Integration and Dissociation This interactive dynamic of integration and dissociation is illustrated in the context of possession and dissociative disorders.Since dissociation is by definition “a lack of integration of psychological processes that normally should be integrated” (Carden˜a & Gleaves, 2003, p. 474), it would seem that the dissociative interpretation of possession directly contradicts the fundamental thesis of the integrative mode of consciousness. Without question, possession involves some forms of dissociation and separation, such as manifested in amnesia. But what do the symptoms or processes of possession tell us about the functioning of the individual? These processes of dissociation have been viewed as defense mechanisms to allow the integrated functioning of the emotional self in the face of self-destroying trauma. Seligman and Kirmayer (2008) reviewed research on dissociation in normal populations, where its similarities with pathological forms are characterized positively in terms of an intense focus of attention, isolation from the external environment, and absorption, particularly with internally generated thoughts and images such as daydreams. A dominant hypothesis is that dissociation evolved as a mechanism to block awareness and memories in order to escape the stress of interpersonal situations, for example, protecting oneself from extreme emotional stimulation and associated autonomic arousal that comes from an attack or betrayal. The ability of traumatic stress to block consolidation of conscious narrative memories provides an explanation based on evolutionary adaptations. Distancing of self and identity provides emotional numbing mechanisms that can inhibit the flight-or-fight response, enabling a more objective search for survival strategies rather than being driven by emotional fears. In order to seek solutions to pressing problems, certain information is compartmentalized, kept out of consciousness, so that adaptive responses may be made. Seligman and Kirmayer (2008) showed how we can reconcile the adaptive paradigm of dissociation with the obvious nonadaptive pathological dimensions by examining how the social context interacts with psychophysiological bases. Dissociation involves a regulation of attentional mechanisms that allow a selective suppression of perceptions and memories and a reduction of physiological stress. In shamanistic rituals, these traumatic dissociative experiences are addressed in processes that allow the emergence of an integrated sense of self linked to “others” who provide a variety of attachment functions for self integration. Sar and Ozturk (2007) propose that dissociation involves a detachment of the psychological self from the sociological self. In this dissociation, the sociological self becomes amplified. This sociological self, which functions in
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the interface between the individual and society, undergoes an accelerated development as a consequence of trauma. This protective dissociation of the psychological self allows for a reestablishment of connections between the inner and outer world through the sociological self. Social roles of possession exemplify this control, where higher-order representations embodied in the personalities of possession spirits redirect identity and behavior to adapt to varying social circumstances. Possession must be seen in light of an extreme tendency to identify with idealized social norms embodied in the social functions of the paleomammalian brain. Allison and Schwarz (1999) provide an understanding of the integration involved in the possessing “other” in the context of dissociative identity disorders and the operation of what they called an “inner self helper,” a source of unconscious inner guidance. This personality structure of these patients was aware of all of the multiple identities and had a greater consciousness and control than did the ego. This inner helper also could help and strengthen the ego in its struggles with the other personalities. The inner self helper provides a psychological space for control, stability, clarity, and self-understanding. Comstock (1991) emphasized the ability of this structure to operate as an organizing force for the person. This identity provides integrative potentials for the patient and processes of therapeutic resolution of the dissociated aspects of the ego in the integration or psychological fusion of the personalities.
Common Denominators in Altered Consciousness Frecska and Luna (2006) suggested that commonalities in techniques that alter consciousness involve two opposite processes: overstressing the frontal-prefrontal circuits of the coping mechanisms or dysregulating them, pushing them below the functional range. They propose that the resulting effect is the emergence of a direct intuitive information processing that replaces the ordinary perceptual-cognitive processing. Frecska and Luna point to support for this model of integrative consciousness in: (1) the final common pathway of psychedelic drugs’ action in the thalamus; (2) the role of thalamic gamma synchronization in binding; (3) the vertical organization of fronto-subcortico-thalamic feedback loops; and (4) their relations to the horizontal layering of McLean’s triune brain model. This perspective illustrates that integration and dissociation or deafferentation are complementary and co-dependent processes. Typical
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alterations of consciousness occur with an enhanced integration of lower brain processes that may simultaneously disengage other habitual processes of knowing. This also helps illustrate how AC constitutes a special form of knowing. Examination of these brain patterns of AC from the perspectives of MacLean’s (1990) model of the triune brain illustrates the elicitation of the paleomentation and the emotio-mentation processes of lower brain structures (R-complex and limbic brain) and their management of emotions, attachment, social relations and bonding, sense of self, and convictions about beliefs.Procedures and conditions that alter consciousness have an intrinsic potential to produce an integration of information processing between the R-complex and the limbic system, between the limbic system and the frontal cortex, and between the hemispheres of the cortex; hence the labeling as the integrative mode of consciousness. A primary characteristic of integrative consciousness involves an ascending integration of brain mechanisms, a limbic-system driving of the frontal cortex that integrates the preconscious or unconscious functions and material into self-conscious awareness. Key physiological mechanisms underlying integrative forms of consciousness are found in activation of the paleomammalian brain, specifically the hippocampalseptal circuits, the hypothalamus, and related brain structures that regulate emotions (MacLean, 1990). These effects contribute to a second characteristic of integrative forms of consciousness, the ability to act on the structures of earlier levels of consciousness by engaging operational structures of the unconscious and dissociated aspects of the self. This engagement allows a differential elicitation of specific aspects of the psyche and their integration at a higher level of awareness and self-organization.
Conclusions Explaining AC requires neurophenomenological approaches that link biological functions and structures to the cultural processes producing experience. These neurophenomenological approaches (e.g., Laughlin, McManus, & d’Aquili, 1992; Winkelman, 2010) illustrate that alterations of consciousness engage special forms of knowing. A prominent manifestation of altered consciousness involves imagetic representations known as a presentational symbolism (Hunt, 1995). This system of visual symbolism provides knowledge—one might even say wisdom—beyond that of our rational language-based consciousness, exemplified in the out-ofbody experiences of shamans. Altered consciousness reflects this early
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level of symbolism through which we know the universe in ways much like those of other animals through a variety of prelanguage structures and processes of knowing. Altered consciousness involves special forms of the integration of consciousness through an elevation of the preconscious processes of our ancient reptilian and paleomammalian brains. These levels of consciousness produce key aspects of AC such as holistic perceptions and intuition, special forms of pre–self-identification, nonverbal knowledge, and manifestations of intense emotional engagement and detachment.
References Alkire, M., & Miller, J. (2005). General anesthesia and the neural correlates of consciousness. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 229–244. Allison, R., & Schwarz, T. (1999). Minds in many pieces: Revealing the spiritual side of multiple personality. Los Osos, CA: CIE Publishing. Bourguignon, E. (1968). Cross-cultural study of dissociational states. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cahn, B., & Polich, J. (2006). Meditation states and traits: EEG, ERP and neuroimaging. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 180–211. Carden˜a, E., & Gleaves, D. H. (2003). Dissociative disorders: Phantoms of the self. In S. M. Turner & M. Hersen (Eds.), Adult psychopathology and diagnosis (4th ed., pp. 473–503). New York: Wiley. Comstock, C. (1991). The inner self helper and concepts of inner guidance. Dissociation, 4(3), 165–177. Crawford, H. (1994). Brain dynamics and hypnosis: Attentional and disattentional processes. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 42, 204–232. Cummings, J. L. (1993). Frontal-subcortical circuits and human behavior. Archives of Neurology, 50, 873–880. d’Aquili, E., & Newberg, A. (1999). The mystical mind: Probing the biology of religious experience. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: The transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 231–256. Frecska, E., & Luna, E. (2006). Neuro-ontological interpretation of spiritual experiences. Neuropsychopharmacologia Hungarica VIII, 3, 143–153. Fries, P. (2009). Neuronal gamma-band synchronization as a fundamental process in cortical computation. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 32, 209–224. Graham, R. (1990). Physiological psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Hebert, R., Lehmann, D., Tan, G., Travis, F., & Arenander, A. (2005). Enhanced EEG alpha-time domain phase synchrony during transcendental meditation: Implications for cortical integration theory.Signal Processing, 85, 2213–2232.
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Hobson, J. (2005). Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. Nature, 437, 1254–1256. Hunt, H. (1995). On the nature of consciousness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jamieson, G. (2007). Previews and prospects for the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and conscious states. In G. Jamieson (Ed.), Hypnosis and conscious states: The cognitive neuroscience perspective (pp. 1–14). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jamieson, G., & Woody, E. (2007). Dissociated control as a paradigm for cognitive neuroscience research and theorizing in hypnosis. In G. Jamieson (Ed.), Hypnosis and conscious states: The cognitive neuroscience perspective (pp. 111–131). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. (1977). The essential tension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laughlin, C., McManus, J., & d’Aquili, E. (1992). Brain, symbol, and experience. Toward a neurophenomenology of consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. Lehmann, D., Faber, P., Achermann, P., Jeanmonod, D., Gianotti, L., & Pissagalli, D. (2001). EEG brain sources of EEG gamma frequency during volitionally meditation-induced, altered states of consciousness, and experience of the self. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 108, 111–121. Lutz, A., Greischar, L., Rawlings, N., Richard, M., & Davidson, R. (2004). Longterm meditators self-induced high-amplitude gamma synchronization during mental practice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101, 16369– 16373. MacLean, P. (1990). The triune brain in evolution. New York: Plenum. Mandell, A. (1980). Toward a psychobiology of transcendence: God in the brain. In D. Davidson & R. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of consciousness (pp. 379–464). New York: Plenum. Popper, K. (1972). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Ra¨tsch, C. (2005). The encyclopedia of psychoactive plants: Ethnopharmacology and its applications (Trans. J. Baker). Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. (Originally published 1998, Enzyklopa¨die der psychoaktiven Pflanzen. Aarau, Switzerland: AT Verlag.) Ray, W. (2007). The experience of agency and hypnosis from an evolutionary perspective. In G. Jamieson (Ed.), Hypnosis and conscious states: The cognitive neuroscience perspective (pp. 223–240). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sar, V., & Ozturk, E. (2007). Functional dissociation of the self: A sociocognitive approach to trauma and dissociation. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 8(4), 69–89. Schultes, E., & Hofmann, A. (1979). Plants of the gods. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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Seligman, R., & Kirmayer, L. (2008). Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: Narrative, metaphor and mechanism. Medicine & Psychiatry, 32, 31–64. Siegel, R. K. (2005). Intoxication: The universal drive for mind-altering substances. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Takahashi, T., Murata, T., Hamada, T., Omori, M., Kosaka, H., Kikuchi, M., Yoshida, H., & Wada, Y. (2005). Changes in EEG and autonomic nervous system activity during meditation and their association with personality traits. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 55, 199–207. Tart, C. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176, 1203–1210. Tart, C. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton. Tart, C. (1977). Putting the pieces together: A conceptual framework for understanding discrete states of consciousness. In N. Zinberg (Ed.), Alternate states of consciousness (pp. 158–219). New York: Free Press. Taylor, E., Murphy, M., & Donovan, S. (1997). The physical and psychological effects of meditation: A review of contemporary research with a comprehensive bibliography: 1931–1996. Sausalito, CA: Institute of Noetic Sciences. Vialatte, F., Bakardjian, H., Prasad, R., & Cichocki, A. (2009). EEG paroxysmal gamma waves during Bhramari Pranayama: A yoga breathing technique. Consciousness and Cognition 18, 977–988. Vollenweider, F. (1998). Recent advances and concepts in the search for biological correlates of hallucinogen-induced altered states of consciousness. Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research, 1, 21–32. Winkelman, M. (1992). Shamans, priests, and witches. A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners. Anthropological Research Papers #44. Tempe: Arizona State University. Winkelman, M. (2000). Shamanism: The neural ecology of consciousness and healing. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Woody, E., & Szechtman, H. (2007). To see feelingly: Emotion, motivation and hypnosis. In G. Jamieson (Ed.), Hypnosis and conscious states: The cognitive neuroscience perspective (pp. 141–256). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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PART I
Historical Perspectives
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CHAPTER 3
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity Yulia Ustinova Preliminary Remarks In discussion of any personal experience, the account of the experience is crucial. In the absence of first-hand reports, a researcher may employ a witness’s testimony. When studying the distant past, we usually have none of these. Prehistory covers the period before the invention of writing. Processes and events in prehistory can be determined on the basis of archaeological evidence, while explanatory models provided by other disciplines, such as anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, can broaden our understanding. Nonetheless, prehistoric humans remain essentially mute, and their practices and experiences can only be reconstructed with various degrees of probability. The invention of writing changes the situation, of course, but less dramatically than one would wish. Texts from the Ancient Near East seldom focus on alterations of consciousness, and this meager information is often open to contradictory interpretations. Even in a richly documented epoch, such as Classical Antiquity, personal accounts of alteration of consciousness are very rare, and we are dependent on abundant second-hand descriptions and passing references concerning manipulation of consciousness. Although ancient sources on altered states of consciousness in prehistory and even in antiquity differ substantially from the records available by means of modern science, this evidence is of crucial importance. Modern science with its experimental approach exists only since the 16th century, and
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psychology as a separate scientific discipline developed in the 19th century, whereas Homo sapiens as a biological species has been present for about 150,000 years. To assert that a phenomenon is typically human rather than limited to a certain culture or epoch, one requires data covering more than recent history. Rather than survey all the evidence on altered states of consciousness from prehistory till late antiquity, my purpose is to discuss some remarkable cases, which do not require minute analysis of their cultural context in order to be appreciated. The discussion is focused on experiences proper, at the expense of leaving aside testimonies emphasizing other aspects of manipulation of consciousness. In terms of geography, the Near East is regarded as a part of the West because the Mediterranean world has always served as a bridge between northern Europe and the Levant. Chronologically, the paper covers the time span between the Upper Palaeolithic period (38,000 to 12,000 before present) and the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE.
Prehistory Palaeolithic mind is notoriously elusive, even more so its transient alterations. In the absence of a single recorded word, Stone Age people can communicate with us by means of their art. Its most fascinating genre is represented by paintings and engravings that were created in the depth of subterranean caverns, featuring mostly animals and mysterious signs and very rarely depicting humanlike figures (Figure 3.1). Many of these murals are breathtakingly beautiful, for instance the panels in the famous caves of Lascaux (ca. 17,000 before present) and Chauvet (ca. 30,000 before present) in France and Altamira (ca. 14,000 before present) in Spain (Beltran, 1999; Chauvet, Brunel Deschamps, & Hillaire, 1995; Lorblanchet, 1995; Ruspoli, 1986). What motivated a human being, Homo sapiens like us, to clamber down, encumbered with lamps and pigments, hundreds of meters into an enormously long and frightening cave, in order to depict there animals and enigmatic signs? Using observations of existing communities who create rock art, the San in southern Africa and the Indians of the far west of North America, as well as neuropsychological studies of various methods of manipulation of consciousness, D. LewisWilliams (2002) convincingly demonstrates that it was imagery of altered states of consciousness that led the prehistoric painters to image making in the depth of the caves. He argues that signs depicted inside many caves, whether zigzags, grids, or dots, are modeled on geometric percepts that often emerge at the outset of altered states of consciousness (entoptic or phosphene forms). Proceeding further toward full-fledged hallucinations,
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
Figure 3.1 Portion of a panel in the cave Les Trois Fre`res, ca 15,000 before present. Lewis-Williams, 2002, ill. 44, p. 195. Reproduced by a kind permission of J. Clottes
many people experience mental vortex, a passage through a rotating dark space that they define as tunnel or cave, with various iconic images appearing on its walls. Representation of animals in parietal art derives, in the opinion of D. Lewis-Williams, from such experiences, while portrayals of human beings record somatic hallucinations of prehistoric shamans (Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1996, pp. 81–114). As a result of the identification of the vortex leading to the spirit world with caves and subterranean passages, these natural features were regarded as entrances into the world
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beneath the earth: “spiritual” experiences were thus accorded “topographic reality.” D. S. Whitley develops this approach, arguing that images common in prehistoric art are embodied metaphors expressing subjective feelings of death, bodily transformation, spiritual trip, and other experiences, mainly elements of a shamanic altered state (2009, esp. pp. 179–207). The richness of parietal art can hardly be embraced by a single universal theory, but even the critics of this approach recognize the role of altered states of consciousness (ASC) in the origin of certain motifs in cave paintings of Western Europe (Bahn, 1998, pp. 218–253). Mind alteration practices persisted during more recent epochs. For instance, various patterns interpreted above as referring to entoptic phenomena occur in the art of the Neolithic period (10,000 to 5,000 before present). Spirals are especially conspicuous in the decoration of several European monumental burials, such as Newgrange and Knowth (Republic of Ireland, 3600 to 3100 BCE) and Gavrinis (Brittany, France, ca. 3500 BCE, Figure 3.2). The same pattern consistently appears in the drawings of narcotic-induced visions by modern shamans and is explained by them as designating doors or passages from one dimension to another. It is therefore suggested that spiral motifs at the entrances and in the passages the Neolithic tombs represented the fundamental form of vortex and symbolically indicated transitions between different realms of the cosmos (Lewis-Williams & Pearce, 2005, pp. 250–280). In late prehistoric southern Levant, comparable experiences of its Chalcolithic inhabitants are suggested by relics from Tuleilat Ghassul and other sites (ca. 4500–3500 BCE). The star fresco from Tuleilat Ghassul features a variety of geometric motifs, along with mysterious beasts and grotesque faces, probably masks (Figure 3.3). A set of similar paintings was discovered in another chamber of the building. These murals display a fascinating mixture of entoptic signs, on the one hand, and attributes of shamanic practice, such as masks and wands, on the other (Gilead, 2002). Dance and music not only create collective experiences but can also lead to ASC, especially when rhythmic music is combined with extensive motor behavior. The origin of musical tradition is now confidently dated back to the Upper Palaeolithic1: The most ancient bird-bone finger-hole pipes, discovered at Geissenklo¨sterle and Hohle Fels (Germany) and at Isturitz (France), are dated to 35,000–30,000 before present. These are sophisticated instruments with complex acoustic possibilities, designed to be played two-handed. There can be no doubt that vocal and percussive music, as well as dancing, anteceded the invention of these advanced instruments, which 1
Or perhaps even earlier; see Mithen, 2005.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
Figure 3.2 the author.
Gavrinis, engraved stone. Drawing by Y. Sokolovskaya, after a photo by
presuppose pitch-organizing behavior of some kind. Such instruments as drums and rattles were probably made of perishable materials that are not present in the archaeological record (Conard, Malina, & Mu¨nzel, 2009; D’Errico et al., 2003, p. 36–48). Epipalaeolithic (ca. 8,000 before present) depictions of dance were discovered in caves of Addaura in Sicily and on the island of Levanzo near Sicily (Leroi-Gourhan, 1965, pp. 381–382). Dancing scenes are common in the art of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods (eighth to fourth millennia BC; Garfinkel, 2003). Given the cross-cultural distribution of ASC attained through dancing and music, and the fact that music was performed during the Palaeolithic, it is very probable that music and dancing were used for manipulation of consciousness as early as in prehistory [see Fachner, this volume]. One of the best-known ways to alter consciousness is the use of psychoactive plants. Hunters-gatherers of the Palaeolithic were familiar with lots
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Figure 3.3 Fragments of the Tuleilat Ghassul frescoes: 1–5: elements of the ‘Star fresco’; 6: mask from the ‘Room of the bird’; 7: mask from the ‘Star fresco.’ Drawing by Y. Sokolovskaya, after Mallon, Koeppel, and Neuville, 1934, frontispiece and pl. 68.
of plants and could not remain ignorant of their mind-altering potential, but there is no unequivocal evidence to ground this assertion.However, beginning from the Neolithic, the use of narcotics is attested to by explicit archaeological record. In the Old World, the most potent natural narcotic is opium, the congealed latex deriving from the sap of unripe capsules of the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. It seems to have been domesticated in the Western Mediterranean in the sixth millennium BCE and soon expanded northwards. Poppy seeds are often discovered in Neolithic sites in Switzerland, Spain, northern Italy, and Germany, and the plant’s psychedelic properties could hardly remain unknown. Discoveries of opium poppy capsules among objects accompanying the dead buried in Cueva de los Murcie´lagos at Albun˜ol in southern Spain provided undisputable evidence that opium was used there as intoxicant about 4200 BCE. Inhalation of hemp (Cannabis sativa) is probably attested to by the finds of hemp seeds in association with objects interpreted as incense burners in fourth- and thirdmillennia BCE Neolithic sites from Romania to South Russia (Kapoor, 1995, p. 8; Merlin, 2003; Rudgley, 1993, pp. 24–25; Sherratt, 1997, pp. 407–411). The population of temperate Neolithic Europe had no access to sugarrich substances allowing fermentation. Alcoholic beverages trace their origin to the fourth millennium in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
The first wine was perhaps produced by dates. Vine (Vitis vinifera) seems to have been cultivated there by the end of the Neolithic period, and archaeological finds from Mesopotamia and Egypt illustrate brewing and drinking of beer (Rudgley, 1993, p. 31; Sherratt, 1997, pp. 389–419).2 Mind-altering agents in prehistoric societies were almost exclusively used in religious contexts, as both archaeological record and comparative anthropological material demonstrate. Medical and recreational uses became divorced from the ritual only recently, when the modern distinction between sacred and secular emerged (Merlin, 2003, pp. 295–296; Sherratt, 1997, pp. 405–407). In any case, there is no doubt that prehistoric humans manipulated their minds by use of psychoactive substances. It is most probable that they also employed other techniques, such as sensory deprivation, and it is likely that experiences induced by various methods of alteration of consciousness are reflected in the prehistoric art.
Protohistory Protohistoric peoples differ from many other nonliterate societies in the fact that the modern scholar does not find them entirely silent. For instance, Iranian-speaking nomads and seminomads living in the Black Sea area and Central Asia were neighbors, trade partners, enemies, or allies of the Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other literate peoples. These peoples left texts that supply precious information on the lifestyle of the barbarians, including their practices of consciousness alteration. Herodotus, who wrote in the 5th century BCE, describes (4, 73–75) a strange Scythian habit: They construct a tent, make a pit in its centre, put red-hot stones into it, throw hemp seeds on the stones, and “howl in joy” in the steam. Herodotus interpreted this custom as a purification rite, performed after funerals. Although he did not recognize the role of hemp as hallucinogen, he faithfully recorded the technique. His account was corroborated when copper censers with hemp seeds, as well as stones and poles, were discovered in burial mounds, dated to the 5th century BCE, erected in Siberia by another subgroup of the Scythians and exceptionally well preserved because of the perpetual frost (Rudenko, 1970). It is clear that various Iranian-speaking peoples used hallucinogens in their religious ceremonies, and Scythians of Europe and Asia employed hemp, Cannabis sativa, as a psychoactive substance. As to alcohol, the Celts and the Germans drank beer. The first indisputable evidence of mead in temperate Europe dates to the first millennium 2 However, A. Sherratt (1997, pp. 389–419) infers drinking other kinds of intoxicating beverages from the proliferation of ritual pots, especially beakers, in later Neolithic Europe.
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BCE. At the same time, colonial contacts with the Classical world brought wine to Gaul, Spain, and Scythia (Sherratt, 1997, pp. 394–396).
Ancient Near East Alteration of consciousness by means of drugs was well known in the Ancient Middle East and attested to by archaeological and written sources.3 Juglets shaped as poppy capsules were commonly imported to Egypt from Cyprus during the sixteenth through 14th centuries BCE. Chemical analysis of the residue demonstrates that, at least in some cases, these vessels contained opium. Although references to opium in Egyptian medical texts mention its sedative and pain-killing powers only, it is scarcely possible that the plant’s psychedelic properties remained unknown (Rudgley, 1993, pp. 26– 28). Flowers of the water lily, Nymphaea ampla or Nymphaea caerulea, were probably also used as narcotic, perhaps in cultic contexts, as the depictions of the blue water lily and poppy flowers and capsules in ritual scenes suggest (Emboden, 1978, 1979, p. 12; Merlin, 2003, pp. 305–306). Numerous artifacts featuring incised opium capsules attest to the popularity of the drug in the Minoan civilization that flourished on Crete, reached its zenith in the seventeenth through 15th centuries BCE, and maintained broad connections with Egypt (Merlin, 2003, pp. 303, 306; Merrillees, 1962, p. 26).4 The famous bust of a goddess or priestess from the site of Gazi on Crete (near Knossos), depicting her wearing a diadem of poppy capsules, found in association with objects probably used for inhalation of opium vapors, attests perhaps to the use of opium in religious ceremonies (Emboden, 1979, pp. 28–29, Figure 23; Kritikos & Papadaki, 1967, p. 23; Merlin, 2003, p. 308). Thus, in several cultures of the eastern Mediterranean, opium and other plants were most probably used as psychotropic drugs. Consumption of alcohol, barley beer and wine, in social and ritual contexts in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, is abundantly attested by a variety of written and archaeological sources (Emboden, 1979, pp. 148–152). Alteration of consciousness in the Ancient Near East was sometimes associated with prophecy giving. Direct communication with the gods through mediums, among them ecstatics, or through visions and dreamvisions, is known among the Mari, Hittites, Babylonians, and Assyrians, 3
Although some experts assume that Sumerian and Assyrian texts contain references to opium (e.g. Kapoor, 1995, pp. 1–4; Stuart, 2004, p. 77), others are much more cautious in their reading (Krikorian, 1975). There is no unequivocal evidence on the use of opium in these cultures. 4 The incisions show that the capsules were deprived of the sap in order to obtain the opiates.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
although these methods seem to have played a minor role in these civilizations. Noteworthy are 18th century BCE Mari texts recording divine messages delivered by male and female prophets, referred to either as ecstatics or respondents. The former seemed to act spontaneously, as if possessed by the spirits, whereas the latter were perhaps able to control the spirits in order to obtain their message [other authors such as Rouget, however, use enthusiasm to describe spirit possession (see also below) and ecstasy to describe out-of-the-boy and visionary experiences].The mode of revelation and the prophet’s lifestyle usually remain obscure, but in some cases the behavior of the diviner is described as bizarre. In Neo-Assyrian sources, frenzied prophets are mostly women and occasionally transgender individuals, engaged in the cult of Ishtar, who proclaim the divine words (Botte´ro, 1974, pp. 89–93; Durand, 1997; Haldar, 1945, pp. 21–29; Nissinen, 2000; Overholt, 1986). In ancient Israel of the monarchical period (ca. 1000–586 BCE),5 in contrast to other Near Eastern cultures, inspired prophecy, which was considered directly communicated by a deity, played a prominent role. The Old Testament prophet or seer is an intermediary between the human and divine worlds; he is sometimes called “man of god” and described as “dreamer of dreams,” and the experience is usually referred to as vision (Grabbe, 1995, pp. 82–84, 108–112; Haldar, 1945, pp. 108–126; Huffmon, 2000, pp. 63–69; Wilson, 1980).6 It is noteworthy that the latter ability is attested to not only by the text of the Bible, heavily edited during the postexilic period, but also by an inscription discovered at Deir Alla in Jordan, datable to 840–760 BCE, which states in its first line that the pagan prophet Balaam has seen the gods (van Kooten & van Ruiten, 2008). Although groups of ecstatics, known as “sons of the prophets” or “bands of prophets,” experienced collective alterations of consciousness (e.g. 1 Samuel 10: 5, 10; 19: 20, King James Version), normally the seer attained illumination individually. The revelation could comprise mental pictures of the future or sights of the other world, such as encounters with divine councils, heavenly armies, and awesome god-sent apparitions. Such figures as Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha, combining the characteristics of sages, sorcerers, medicine men, and seers, may be classified as belonging to the shamanistic type: According to Kings 1 and 2, they multiplied oil, flour, and other substances, called fire or water from the heavens, purified lands, healed leprosy, and 5
The historical books of the Old Testament received their definite form only after the Babylonian exile; hence the ongoing debate on the accuracy of the data on early prophecy. 6 Female prophets are exceptional, but seem to perform in the same manner as male seers (Huldah in 2 Kings 22. 11–20; 2 Chronicles 34. 22–28).
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performed the supreme feat of resurrecting the dead (Aune, 1983, p. 83, 86–87; Grabbe, 1995, p. 149). Elisha’s demise was no less miraculous than his life: He was taken to heaven by a fiery whirlwind (2 Kings 2: 11). It seems that some prophets were capable of reaching out-of-body states at will: Elisha followed in spirit his servant, and Ezekiel claimed that a spirit seized him and carried away (2 Kings 5: 26; Ezekiel 3: 12). The revelatory ASC of these “men of god” could be spontaneous and uncontrolled or deliberately induced by various methods, such as rhythmical music, dancing, and even use of hallucinogens (e.g., 1 Samuel 10: 5; 1 Kings 20: 36; 2 Kings 3: 15; Zechariah 13: 6; 4 Ezra 14: 39). Their behavior was so manifestly anomalous that hostile sources branded them as mad (Jeremiah 29: 26; Hosea 9: 7; 2 Kings 9: 11).7 While the deeds of the Old Testament prophets were deemed worthy of record, their subjective experiences usually remain concealed. We are fortunate to have detailed accounts of Ezekiel’s multiple harrowing visions of unearthly force, among them the following overwhelming experience (Ezekiel 1–3): The word of the Lord came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest . . . and the hand of the Lord was there upon him. And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself . . . Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And . . . they had the likeness of a man . . . And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech . . . And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it . . . This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake. And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee. And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me . . . He said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel . . . Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness . . . Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears . . . Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place. I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another . . . So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the 7 Cf. Saul’s stripping off his clothes (1 Samuel 19. 2–24); Isaiah’ remaining naked for three years (Isaiah 20. 3); Ezekiel’s austerities and magic (Ezekiel 4–5).
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
heat of my spirit; but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me. Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-abib . . . and remained there astonished among them seven days.
This is a formidable description of a complex multistage experience that comprises visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and kinesthetic hallucinations. It starts as an apparition of a fiery vortex, consisting of winged manlike burning creatures that are elsewhere defined as cherubs (Ezekiel 10. 16–22). The vision is accompanied by the noise of their wings, and it grows into the magnificent picture of the Lord enthroned and talking to the prophet. This tremendous encounter leads Ezekiel to the next stage of his experience, the feeling that the spirit entered him. Overridden with awe, he fell prostrated before the god, but the spirit supported the prophet from the inside and forced him to stand up and heed the words of the god. At this stage, two more feelings became involved in the hallucination: Ezekiel not only saw the scroll given by the god but also felt its touch and sweet taste in his mouth. Until this moment, the prophet felt that he remained in the same place where his experience started. Then suddenly the spirit lifted him into the air and he sensed himself flying, the fiery creatures surrounding him. After the return from his flight, Ezekiel remained torpid for 7 days. Ezekiel’s intricate experience comprises hallucinations involving all his senses, or perhaps synesthesia with one sensation altering into another, as well as possession by a spirit and an out-of-body flight. No wonder that this exquisite passage has inspired Jewish mystics ever since.8
Ancient Greece9 In ancient Greece, certain forms of anomalous behavior, considered to be inspired by supernatural forces, were actively sought, whereas others were dismissed as negative and abhorred. “Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided it is given us by divine gift,” says Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus (244A). In contrast, other kinds of madness were expunged, either by purifications or other religious means, or by more rational methods. Plato further explains that the divine madness is produced by “a divinely wrought change in our customary social norms” (Phaedrus 265A) and states that there are four types of god-induced frenzy or mania: prophetic, initiatory, poetic, and erotic (Dodds, 1973, p. 64). Following Plato, we will survey some most remarkable cases of different kinds of madness. In Greece, prophecy inspired directly by a divinity was 8 9
“Merkabah literature,” Sholem, 1987, pp. 19–24. This section of the paper is largely based on my book: Ustinova, 2009b.
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considered to be more ancient than the decipherment of signs and superior to it. To gain inspiration, a mortal had to become possessed by a god, or “to have the god inside him- or herself” (entheos): The seers or prophets served as mediums, conveying superhuman knowledge by means of their bodies. In the grip of the god, the medium could display a wide range of anomalous behavior, from mere detachment and aloofness to violent paroxysms. These mental states, which today would be referred to as ASC, were enthousiasmos (divine possession) or mania (madness, frenzy) for the Greeks. Prophetic utterances could be obtained in the sanctuaries of several gods, but Apollo was considered the god of divination par excellence. In the four great oracular sanctuaries of Apollo, at Delphi in the Balkan Greece, and at Didyma, Claros, and Patara in Asia Minor, oracles were given by a priest or a priestess inspired by the god and speaking on the god’s behalf (Burkert, 2005; Flower, 2008; Heintz, 1997; Johnston, 2008; Johnston & Struck, 2005; Rosenberger, 2001).The most intriguing question is how inspired divination was attained. By what techniques could an individual, whether a “free-lance” seer or a prophetic priest in an established shrine, induce in himself or herself the state of enthusiasm? Methods of attaining enthousiasmos differed from sanctuary to sanctuary. For instance, at Claros the mantic session was held in a grotto, where the medium drank the sacred water and sang the responses of the god (Parke, 1985, pp. 219–224; Robert, 1967). At Didyma, the priestess entered the inner chapel inside the sacred enclosure, where she was perched on a special seat above the spring, dipping her feet into the water, and responded to the inquirers’ questions (Parke, 1985, pp. 210–219). In Patara, the priestess was shut up in the temple with the god for a night (Herodotus 1. 182). In Delphi, the most revered Greek oracle, prophecy was delivered by a simple woman, known as the Pythia, who entered the holy of holies, mounted her sacred tripod and, inspired by Apollo, responded to the questions posed by inquirers. Recent geological discoveries in the area of Delphi have succeeded in demonstrating that under the temple of Apollo occurred emissions of intoxicating gases. It is clear now that at Delphi the inner sanctum was an artificial grotto. There the Pythia experienced an ASC, which was induced to a considerable extent by inhalation of hydrocarbon gases emitted from the fissure in the bedrock (Bowden, 2005, pp. 4–36; Johnston, 2008, pp. 38–60; Parke & Wormell, 1956; Ustinova 2009a, pp. 275–280; pp. 121–153). In all these sanctuaries, the lifestyle of the mouthpiece of the god comprised seclusion, purifications, fasting, and other austerities, and indeed the strain of possession by the god. Oracles could be given on a limited number of days, and even then the prophets faced serious health risks: Pliny notes
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
that drinking from the sacred pool at Claros inspires wonderful oracles but shortens the life of the drinker (Pliny, Natural History 2. 232; Iamblichus, On the mysteries 3. 11). The life-shortening factor was most probably not the sacred water alone but the way of life of the medium. In contrast, in many oracular centers inquirers received the response directly from the deity, who appeared to them in a dream or in a revelation. We are fortunate to have a unique account of an experience in such a sanctuary. Trophonius, whose oracle was in Lebadeia (Central Greece), was believed to have vanished there beneath the earth and to live in a cave under a hill as an oracular god. The oracle in Lebadeia already existed by the 6th century BCE (Bonnechere, 2003; Schachter, 1981–1994, Volume 3; Ustinova, 2002). The descent to Trophonius is described in detail by Pausanias, who wrote his Description of Greece about 140 CE (Pausanias 9. 39). The preparation for the consultation took several days and included not only preliminary sacrifices but also secluded lodging in a small building, cold baths, prayers, special diet, and sexual abstinence, as well as music and dancing. Only when well-prepared for the tremendous experience, that is, exhausted, tense with anticipation, and disposed to hallucinating, did the petitioner descend to Trophonius’ cave. The symbolism of the sanctuary was that of the netherworld: At night two boys, personifying Hermes, the conductor of the souls to realm of the dead, led the person to the oracular cave. The prophetic sanctum was most probably an artificial circular hole, several meters deep: The inquirer lay on the ground, and then he was swiftly drawn into another hole, as if by an eddy. The inner space was perhaps a small recess at the bottom of the larger grotto, where only the feet of the people entered, while they remained stretched out on the floor (Bonnechere, 2003, pp. 159–163). In fact, the image of the whirl could derive from the vortex experienced by the inquirers at the beginning of their prophetic ASC, induced by the immersion into the dark coolness of the grotto.10 Immediately after the stay in the underground cave, the inquirer took a seat on the chair of the goddess of Memory and recounted his experience to the 10
For a different reconstruction of the layout of the prophetic grotto see: Rosenberger, 2001, pp. 37–38, fig. 2. A feeling of passage through a rotating dark space defined by the experiencer as tunnel, cave, corridor, well, spiral, vessel, or swirl, is characteristic of the initial stages of ASC. This experience is frequently reported by participants in laboratory experiments investigating the effects of stress and various hallucinogens, and often appears in anthropological accounts of altered states of consciousness as experienced by shamans and other religious practitioners (Harner, 1990, pp. 28–30; Siegel & Jarvik 1975; Merkur, 1989, pp. 136– 137). Reclining position, like the one assumed by the consulters at the Trophonium, can also trigger visions (Siegel, 1980, p. 925).
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priests. Only after this procedure was the suppliant, semiconscious and paralyzed with terror, allowed to be taken away by his relatives. The suppliant’s experience in this sanctuary is described in a dialogue entitled The Daimonion of Socrates by Plutarch, philosopher, biographer, and priest at Delphi, who lived ca. 50–120 CE. This is a fascinating account of the communication of a young Athenian named Timarchus, who spent 2 nights and a day in the cave, in a world beyond normal experience (590B–592F): He said that on descending into the oracular crypt his first experience was of profound darkness; next . . . he lay a long time not clearly aware whether he was awake or dreaming. It did seem to him, however, that at the same moment he heard a crash and was struck on the head, and that the sutures parted and released his soul. As it withdrew and mingled joyfully with air that was translucent and pure, it felt . . . that now, after long being cramped, it had again found relief . . . ; and next it faintly caught the whir of something revolving overhead with a pleasant sound . . . He saw islands illuminated by one another with soft fire, taking on now one colour, now another . . . All this he viewed with enjoyment of the spectacle. But looking down he saw a great abyss . . . most terrible and deep it was . . . After an interval someone he did not see addressed him: “Timarchus, what would you have to explain?” “Everything,” he answered . . . “Nay,” the voice replied, “in the higher regions we others have but little part . . . ; but you may, if you wish, inquire into the portion of Persephone [the Netherworld] . . . Of these matters . . . you will have better knowledge . . . in the third month from now; for the present, depart.” . . . Once more [Timarchus] felt a sharp pain in his head, as though it had been violently compressed, and he lost all recognition and awareness of what was going on around him; but he presently recovered and saw that he was lying in the crypt of Trophonius near the entrance, at the very spot he had first laid himself down. . . .When he had come back to Athens and died in the third month, as the voice had foretold, we were amazed . . .
For the purposes of the present discussion, Timarchus’ historicity as a person is insignificant. The most substantial inference from Plutarch’s description is that an inquirer in the sanctuary of Trophonius lived through an out-of-body experience: lack of awareness of the surroundings, passage through darkness to translucent and pure light, flight over a magnificent country, visual and auditory hallucinations, mixture of joyfulness and awe when he heard voices that explained to him the mystery of metempsychosis, and the final gift of precognition that allowed the prediction of his imminent death. Unsurprisingly, Timarchus’ ASC was accompanied by culturally patterned visions, reflecting Greek religious
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
and philosophical ideas. The variance in the kind of hallucinations experienced in Trophonius’s cave was known to Pausanias (9. 39. 11), who observes that inside the prophetic chamber different inquirers learn the future in different ways, sometimes by sight and at other times by hearing. To achieve this ASC, the suppliant did not need other influences besides his being alone in awe-inspiring surroundings, isolated from the world, its fresh air, light, sounds, human society, and other distractions. Even if we assume that at the sanctuary of Trophonius inquirers who did not appear likely candidates for surrender to ASC were segregated at the stage of preliminary ceremonies, their number remained limited. Cases of alteration of suppliants’ consciousness and ensuing reports of divine revelations must have been common enough to allow institutions like this oracular center to operate smoothly. Regrettably, Plutarch’s detailed account of the revelations experienced in the cave of Trophonius is the exception to the rule; testimony on other oracular centers consists of indirect allusions or brief hints as to ASC experienced by inquirers or personnel. However, we do know that entering caves regularly occurs as a major requirement for a prophetic se´ance, both in established cults and in the activities of individual seers. The evidence on Trophonius’ oracular shrine suggests that under similar conditions, namely cultic preparations, isolation inside a cave, and religious awe, ancient Greek suppliants would have attained similar experiences and interpreted them in a similar way (Ustinova 2009a; 2009b, pp. 53–155.). Initiatory madness, according to Plato, provides release from physical ailment and troubles of the world: “By purifications and sacred rites, he who has this madness is made safe for the present and the after time, and for him who is rightly possessed of madness a release from present ills is found” (Phaedrus 244E). People engaged in these rites were called mystai (singular, mystes), hence the English word mystery. These cults were individual and voluntary. In contrast to most cults in the Greek city-state, which were focused on a group, from family to civic community, mystery rites were about the individual only and influenced his or her attitude to life and death. In the cause of the central ceremony, a great secret, unknown to the public at large, was imparted to the mystai. The details of the eyeopening, life-changing disclosure of the ultimate secret were not to be divulged; therefore, ancient authors provided but circumspect allusions to mystery rites. In modern literature, Greek mysteries are usually included in the category of initiations or passage rites, both terms designating rites that focus on introduction of a novice into a group of those who already possess exclusive knowledge (Burkert, 1987).
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Aristotle stated that “the purpose of initiations into mysteries is not to learn anything, but rather to experience and to be inclined, that is to say, to become fit for the purpose” (fr. 15 Rose). He obviously means a generic mystery experience, disregarding particularities, such as divine patrons of cults or places of ceremonies. Thus, the most important objective of the Greek initiations was to make the participants live through a certain experience, and in order to attain it, they had to be inducted into a certain state of mind. Aristotle’s phrase poses two main questions for the modern reader. What was the nature of the experience? What methods were used to make the initiated “fit for the purpose”? Mysteries were secret cults that were intended to bestow happiness in this world and a better life in the hereafter on the mystai. They emerged to a large extent as an alternative to the prevailing belief in grim postexistence of the soul beneath the earth as a shadow deprived of consciousness and will, as in the chilling picture painted by Homer in the Eleventh Song of the Odyssey. Several mystery cults, among them the mysteries of Dionysus discussed below, are known to have existed by the 6th century BCE, or perhaps even earlier (Burkert, 1987; Cosmopoulos, 2003; Scarpi, 2002). The basic characteristics of the mystery cults remained constant throughout the many centuries of their history, modifications of ritual notwithstanding. Why were mystery initiations so important? Joyful earthly existence was of course desirable, but it could be attained simply by proper worship of gods. The initiated obviously did not have any hope to avoid death: Physical death of the body remained the only perspective known to the Greeks. Their status in the world remained unchanged. The unique gift bestowed by mystery initiations was peace of mind and readiness to accept death (Plato, Republic 560 DE). Mystic initiation may be defined as ersatz-death. Hints scattered through the works of various authors indicate that the aim of the initiate was to attain harmony and bliss by enduring death and learning not to fear it. The deeper the feeling of death, the greater was the blessing. Plutarch compares mystery initiations to death and continues with the following observations on mystery cults (On the Soul, Sandbach, 1967, fragment 178): At first there was wandering, and wearisome roaming, and some fearful journeys through unending darkness, and just before the end, every sort of terror, shuddering and trembling and sweat and amazement. Out of these emerges marvelous light, and pure places and meadows follow after, with voices and dances and solemnities of sacred utterances and holy visions. Among these the completely initiated (mystes) walks freely and without restraint; crowned, he takes part in rites, and joins with pure and
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pious people; he observes the crowd of people living at this very time uninitiated and unpurified, who are driven together and trample each other in deep mud and darkness, and continue in their fear of death, their evils and their disbelief in the good things in the other world. Then in accordance with nature the soul stays engaged with the body in close union thereafter.
If one had tried to think up a description of mystic experience as close to near-death experience as possible, it is hard to imagine a more apt and vivid account. An unending flight through the darkness, with a marvelous light in its end, as well as all kinds of visions, happiness, and meetings with kindly people—what could be closer to the paradigmatic neardeath experience (Greyson, 2000; Moody, 1976)? At the end of the passage cited above, Plutarch restates the ancient idea that is attested to as early as in the 6th century BCE: Those who arrive in Hades uninitiated will wallow in the mud, while those initiated will dwell with the gods (Plato, Phaedo 69C). The same notion is repeated time and again in the texts inscribed on gold tablets that accompanied initiates to the grave and were believed to guide their souls on their last journeys. The change in the mystes’ destiny was so dramatic that it could be perceived as an apotheosis: “Once human, you have become a god,” is the inscription on one of the gold tablets (Cole, 2003, p. 207; Price, 1999, pp. 119–121; cf. Graf & Johnston, 2007). Initiation transformed the initiate’s personality through changing his or her attitude to life and death. Here once again, it is illuminating to return to the accounts of modern near-death experiences. In many cases their impact on the survivors amounts to overall personality change. Pagan mysteries apparently had a similar impact, at least on those initiates who sincerely believed in the efficacy of the ritual. The phenomenon of near-death experience was known in Greece; mystery initiations were to a considerable extent modeled on near-death experiences, described by their survivors (Ustinova 2009b, pp. 218–255). Initiatory madness belongs to Dionysus Bacchus and is the dominant element in his cult. For the Greeks, the god himself is the embodiment of madness, mania, which is not just frenzy but intensified mental power. The experience of madness is merging with Bacchus, and wine is not only Dionysus’ gift to the mortals, it is the god himself: “He is the gods’ libation, himself a god, so through him good things happen to men” (Euripides, The Bacchants, 284–285). Dionysiac mania is achieved in a group, which is symbolically mirrored in the ecstatic retinue surrounding the god, his maenads and satyrs (Figure 3.4). A votary of Dionysus Bacchus, abandoning
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Figure 3.4 Raging maenad. Wine cup by Brygos painter, Athens, 490 BCE. Drawing by Y. Sokolovskaya, after Beazley, 1963, p. 371, No. 15.
his or her usual identity, becomes one with the god and is called bacchos (Graf & Johnston, 2007; Jeanmaire, 1970; Seaford, 2006). Both men and women participated in mystery rites in honor of Dionysus, and in several places only married women were admitted. The rites included sacrifices, wine drinking, and dancing to intoxicating tunes that inspired breaking the regular norms of behavior and reached their climax at the revelation of the main mystery. Scenes of initiations, preserved on works of art, depict the initiate, head veiled, being led toward another figure, who is about to disclose the great secret, a basket filled with fruit (a symbol of fertility), among which a huge phallus rises (Figure 3.5). Preparation and alteration of the state of consciousness, referred to by Aristotle, were necessary to ensure that viewing trivial objects like this basket produced the sensation of a direct encounter with the divine, imparting exclusive knowledge that elevated the initiate to his new blessed state.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity
Figure 3.5 Initiation scene. Fragment of a Roman terracotta relief. Drawing by Y. Sokolovskaya, after Kere´nyi, 1976, fig. 135.
Plato’s third kind of divine madness is poetic inspiration. Greek writers are quite explicit about the divine nature of poetry. Democritus says: “Everything a poet does with enthusiasm and divine spirit, is very good” (Delatte, 1934, pp. 28–79), whereas in Plato’s opinion, “the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madman” (Phaedrus 245a). For the Greeks, poetry and prophecy spring from the same source. The poet Hesiod regarded the knowledge of past and future as part of his poetic investiture. In his Theogony, the Muses “delight the mighty heart of Zeus on Olympus by telling of what is and what shall be and what was before,” and the poet inspired by them has to “celebrate past and future” (Hesiod, Theogony 36–39; cf. Plato Laws 3. 682a; Ion 533–536B; Compton, 2006, p. 177–179; Cornford, 1952, p. 66; Tigerstedt, 1970). The Greeks even developed ideas that we could define as a theory of conscious alteration. They perceived mental experiences of exceptional intensity as stemming from divine intervention: Poets were inspired by the Muses, the visions of prophets were imparted by gods, sages received revelatory dreams, and the intense emotional experiences of simple mortals were also believed to be caused by divine intervention. Unusual psychological phenomena were explained as possession by the gods or enthousiasmos (Chadwick, 1942; Cornford, 1952, pp. 88–106; Delatte, 1934, p. 5; Murray, 1981; Vernant, 1974, pp. 12–13). Democritus, the inventor of the atomic theory of matter, also recognized the kinship of the seer’s intuitions, poetic genius, mystic insights, and mental afflictions
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but ascribed these phenomena to an anomalous physical condition, namely to extremely rapid motion of psychic atoms (Cornford, 1952, pp. 64–66). At the same time, distrust of the mundane human wisdom is inherent in Greek thought. The early Greeks believed that only the gods could really know the truth (Snell, 1960, p. 136; Starr, 1968, pp. 349, 351). In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that the sustenance of the body and its desires hinders the pursuit of the truth and that even when people turn to philosophy (66 DE), the body is constantly breaking in upon our studies and disturbing us with noise and confusion, so that it prevents our beholding the truth, and in fact we perceive that, if we are ever to know anything absolutely, we must be free from the body and must behold the actual activities with the eye of the soul alone. And then, as our argument shows, when we are dead we are likely to possess the wisdom which we desire and claim to be enamoured of, but not while we live. For, if pure knowledge is impossible while the body is with us, one of two things must follow, either it cannot be acquired at all or only when we are dead; for then the soul will be by itself apart from the body, but not before. And while we live, we shall, I think, be nearest to knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible, intercourse and communion with the body
For Socrates, in order to reach the ultimate truth, the mind of a mortal must cease to be merely human and mingle with the divine. To attain the superhuman wisdom, the soul must be liberated from its connection with the body. He says in the Phaedo that in order to transcend the limits of incarnate knowledge, the philosopher must terminate his worldly existence, and only then is he able to reach the real divine postcarnate knowledge (Cornford, 1952, p. 58; Morgan, 1990, pp. 55–79). The Greeks knew several ways to liberate their souls from the constraints of the body and still remain alive. Some mystics claimed that they could release their souls at will; independent of the body, the soul could achieve superhuman knowledge. Others attained states of intense concentration by means of meditation-like techniques. Ordinary people on the verge of death reported out-of-body experiences involving the feeling of their soul’s flight. Possession by a deity, divinely inspired madness, enabled temporary abandonment of the human self and transformed an individual into a medium, uttering words coming from the deity rather than from the mortal mind. The variance in the ability to attain ASC was not unknown to the Greeks. Plato notes: “Many bear the Bacchic rod, but few are Bacchants” (Phaedo 69D).11 11
For mystics and out-of-body experiences, see Ustinova, 2009b, pp. 177–217.
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The Roman Empire Traditional Roman piety did not welcome manipulations of consciousness, but after the Romans had conquered the Mediterranean world and founded an empire, Greek and Near Eastern beliefs and cults flooded their religion and culture. For instance, the mystery cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, extremely popular in the Roman world, seems to have been modeled on the Greek mystery initiations discussed above (Burkert, 1987, p. 2; Clinton, 1992, p. 131; Dunand, 2000, p. 131). It underwent vast transformations before being adapted to Greek and Roman devotion. The core of the Greco-Roman mysteries of Isis was the goddess’s own life story (Assmann & Bommas, 2002; Dunand, 2000, p. 131). Initiates, male or female, were supposed to feel the anguish of the goddess and to live with her through bereavement and the visit to the netherworld. Hidden or true meanings of images and rites were revealed to them as a living experience shared with the goddess rather than the product of systematic teaching, and the knowledge bestowed by the goddess redeemed them from the fear of death and other calamities. The Greco-Roman Isiac initiations culminated in the inner room of Isis’s shrine. These structures may have served as images of the netherworld, where divine images were revealed to the initiate. In total stillness, alone and naked (Witt, 1971, p. 161), prepared by prolonged fasting, ascetic abstinence, purifications, and silent meditations, the aspirant initiate could approach “the threshold of death” and experience the overwhelming contact with the divinity, beyond the limits of space and time. An Isiac initiation and the sentiments of the initiate are depicted by Apuleius in the Metamorphoses, written in the mid-second century AD (11. 23): I approached the boundary of death and treading on Proserpine’s threshold, I was carried through all the elements, after which I returned. At dead of night I saw the sun flushing with bright effulgence. I approached close to the gods above and the gods below and worshipped them face to face.
The initiate uses an intriguing phrase, usually translated as “In the middle of the night I saw the sun flashing with bright light.” This phrase is reminiscent of the bright light shining in the darkness in the descriptions of mental vortex, typical of the initial stages of ASC. The initiate even depicts the light of the sun as lumen candidum, which may mean not only bright but also benign or kindly. Furthermore, his flight “through all the elements” brings to mind out-of-body experiences occurring in ASC, including near-death experiences.
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At the climax of the Isiac initiation, the votary was “alone with the Alone,” to use the phrase of Plotinus, a philosopher and mystic (Witt, 1971, p. 160). The initiate experienced “voluntary death and eternal salvation,” an ineffable communion with the divine, that “produced a profound and elevating effect” (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11. 21–25). Apuleius’s description of the initiate’s intense happiness in front of Isis’s statue, in the innermost place in her temple, attests to spirituality imbued with a sensuous element. This experience, which could be incited by the sublimation of eros, developed into a genuine mystic union with Isis, a radiant all-encompassing joy (Griffiths, 1986, p. 59). Achieved as a result of the solitary vigil, it came from within the initiate’s mind, which means that the Isiac initiation closely approximated the revelations attained by individual seers or sages. The earliest evidence of hypnotic-type techniques seems to date from the third century CE. The Demotic Magical Papyrus discovered in Egypt contains a description of a curious divinatory technique, based perhaps on a state conducive to revelations (Waterfield, 2003, p. 43): You take a new lamp . . . and lay it . . . on a new brick, and you take a boy and seat him upon another new brick, his face being turned to the lamp, and you close his eyes and recite these things that are (written) above down into the boy’s head seven times. You make him open his eyes. You say to him, “Do you see the light?” When he says to you: “I see the light in the flame of the lamp,” you . . . ask him concerning everything that you wish after reciting the invocation . . . (column 16; Griffith & Thompson, 1904, pp. 112–113)
The boy was probably an adolescent undefiled by sexual contacts, as required for magical proceedings in other parts of this long papyrus. His state of consciousness was altered by means of fixation on light, and the words uttered in this context were believed to contain superhuman knowledge. The idea that that human mind is evicted by the divine and that a gap divides the unexcited state from the divine mania remained ingrained in ancient pagan philosophy until its eclipse (Nasrallah, 2003, p. 41). Plotinus, a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Egypt and lived in Rome, is often labeled “the father of Western mysticism” (Rist, 1977, p. 213). His exceptional account of his own multiple out-of-body experiences allows fascinating insights into the philosopher’s mental world (Plotinus, Ennead 4. 8. 1. 1–11): Often I have woken up out of the body to myself, out from all the other things, but inside myself; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all belonged to the better part; I have actually
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lived the best life and come to identify with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that actuality setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever come down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be in itself, even when it is in the body.
This powerful description allows a unique glimpse into the mind of a mystic living in the third century AD. His frequent ecstatic experiences left him with the sensation of having seen the ultimate beauty.12 Plotinus felt that he became one with the divine: The beholder and the beheld were united. This ineffable experience, which he called henosis (unity), was beyond the ordinary borders of intellect, which acts along the lines of logical reasoning. The joy of this mental state was so overwhelming that Plotinus wondered why his soul returned to the body at all. It is noteworthy that he compared his henosis to prophetic possession (Ennead 5. 3. 14. 9–14; Dillon, 1992, pp. 198–200; Schuhl & Hadot, 1971; Wallis, 1972, pp. 72–82). For Plotinus, his out-of-body state is pure Mind, and the return to the body entails return to discursive reasoning. Thus, there was a noetic insight while the thinker was ecstatic, but afterward it was subjected to rational analysis and expressed in conventional literary form.
Conclusions Since the Stone Age, human beings have manipulated their consciousness. There is little doubt that psychotropic plants were used in the Neolithic period, and it is most probable that this and other methods of consciousness alteration, such as sensory deprivation, auditory driving, and extensive motor behavior were employed even earlier, during the Palaeolithic. With the invention of writing and subsequent development of literature, descriptions of individual experiences of divine revelations, out-of-body states, and related practices made their appearance. Ancient Greeks went farther and began to expound altered states of consciousness as a complex world view, basing their approach on the belief that human ability to attain the ultimate truth is limited by nature, and only liberation from the restraint of the mortal flesh can allow a glimpse into the realm of the absolute. These ideas persisted till late antiquity and were further developed by the adherents of syncretistic cults and philosophical schools 12 However, on its way to the absolute, Plotinus’s soul is exalted above the beauty, Ennead 6. 9. 9–11.
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drawing on the heritage of the entire Mediterranean world—as well as on the inherent human drive to attain extreme experiences by means of consciousness alteration.
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Van Kooten, G. H., & van Ruiten, J. (Eds.). (2008). The prestige of the pagan prophet Balaam in Judaism, early Christianity and Islam. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Vernant, J.-P. (Ed.). (1974). Divination et rationalite´ [Divination and rationality]. Paris: Seuil. Wallis, R. T. (1972). Neoplatonism. London: Duckworth. Waterfield, R. (2003). Hidden depths: The story of hypnosis. London: Routledge. Whitley, D. S. (2009). Cave paintings and the human spirit. The origin of creativity and belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Wilson, R. W. (1980). Prophecy and society in ancient Israel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Witt, R. E. (1971). Isis in the ancient world. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Editions of Ancient Sources Apuleius, Metamorphoses book 11: Griffiths, J. G. (1975). Apuleius of Madauros. The Isis-Book. Leiden: Brill. Aristotle, Fragments: Rose, V. (1886). Aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta (The surviving fragments of Aristotle). Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Euripides, The Bacchants: Kovasc, D. (Ed. and Trans.). (2002). Euripides, Works. Vol. 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herodotus: Godley, A. D. (Trans.). (1975). Herodotus, History Vols. 1–4. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hesiod, Theogony: Evelyn-White, H. G. (Trans.). (1964). Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Homer, Odyssey: Murray, A. T. (Trans.). (1966). Homer, The Odyssey. Vols. 1–2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Iamblichus, On the mysteries: Clarke, E. C., Dillon, J. M., & Hershbell, J. P. (Trans.). (2003). Iamblichus, De mysteriis. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. Pausanias: Jones, W. H. S. (Trans.). (1964–1965). Pausanias, Description of Greece. Vols. 1–5. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato: Fowler, H. N., Bury, R. G., & Lamb, W. R. (Trans.). (1962–1971). Plato, Works. Vols. 1–12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pliny, Natural History: Rackham, H., & Jones, W. H. S. (Trans.). (1962–1967). Pliny, Natural History. Vols. 1–10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plotinus, Enneads: Armstrong, A. H. (Trans.). (1966–1967). Plotinus, The Enneads. Vols. 1–6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch, The Daimonion of Socrates: de Lacy, P. H., & Einarson, B. (Trans.). (1968). Plutarch, Moralia. Vol. 7. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch, On the Soul: Sandbach, F. H. (1967). Moralia Vol. 7. Leipzig: Teubner.
CHAPTER 4
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness in the Christian Western Tradition Moshe Sluhovsky Introduction The concept of an altered state of consciousness presupposes notions of selfhood and consciousness that are stable enough to be altered and transformed. In the Western Christian tradition, self and consciousness have always been bound with notions of a relatively coherent inner self and the existence of external agencies—spirits—that, at times, can take possession of this inner self and change it. The change could last anything from a few seconds to a lifetime, could be voluntary or involuntary, and could have either permanent or only short-term impact on the living subject whose self is being possessed. An alteration of consciousness could be ritualized, enabling a person to achieve a goal (usually spiritual) that could not be achieved by normative human potentialities, and, alternatively, could be spontaneous, unstructured, and chaotic. It could lead to a condition that could be evaluated by society as either positive or negative. It could endow people with the halo of sanctity or label them as sick. Theologians, philosophers, natural philosophers, and physicians participated in ongoing efforts throughout the Classical Age, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period to develop and systematize epistemologies of the self and of consciousness and to address the physiological and psychological implications of the theories they developed. Once they moved away from a consensual understanding that self, consciousness, and altered states of consciousness exist, however, there was very little they agreed on. Where,
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exactly, is the location of the self and of consciousness within the body and where does the alteration of the self take place? The mind–body nexus in the Western tradition, starting, in fact, even prior to the Christian era, blurred the boundaries between the inner and the outer parts of the self. The human body was understood to be porous, and external forces could act internally just as much as internal processes shaped the outer body. Fragmented and inconclusive evidence from different peripheral corners of Europe documents the possible existence of pre-Christian shamanistic traditions throughout the continent. Although their exact configurations differed according to local traditions and circumstances, they all shared a few characteristics. From Greenland and Iceland to Siberia, from Lapland to the Balkans and Sicily, some individuals were recognized as vessels who had unique powers to transmit messages from deities and from the dead to the community or to one of its members, or, alternatively, to deliver the community’s or an individual’s requests to the divine powers (Po´cs, 1999; Po´cs, 2005, with very detailed bibliography; but see also de Ble´court, 2007). These professional spiritual leaders (healers, mediums, shamans) used dream divination, hydromancy, crystal gazing, induced yawning, and trance states as divinatory techniques (Buchholz, 2005; Tuczay, 2005). A trance state in this context has been defined as a psychobiological condition that enables the surrendering of the body to external entities and the fall into catalepsy (immobility), and it was understood as a precondition for a communicative act (Crapanzano, 1987, p. 14). The interaction with the deity or the dead was usually construed either as mostly an imaginal journey of the shaman’s soul to the realm of the divine or of the deceased ancestors (i.e., the shamanic “magical flight”), or, less often, as a penetration of his or her soul by a supernatural entity (i.e., “spirit possession”; see Carden˜a, 1996, and Winkelman, 1992, for further discussions of this distinction). Although most European shamans practiced alone and in secrecy, in some parts of Europe entire groups of practitioners (males as well as females) participated in a collective alteration of consciousness. Using incantations, dancing (Tarantism), recitations, and maybe hallucinatory drugs, they waged battles against malevolent entities. These battles of the good people against enemies—evil or night spirits, donne di fuori (women from outside), Mistresses of the Night, and others—were assumed to heal individuals, overcome maleficium, and save the crops and guarantee fertility (Ginzburg, 1966, 1991; Henningsen, 1990; Pizza, 1996, 1998; William of Auvergne, 1674, p. 1066). While folklorists and ethnographers have catalogued and differentiated among distinct types of such alterations of consciousness, it is important to keep in mind a number of caveats. First, their morphological differences notwithstanding, the cosmological framework of all of these
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phenomena was similar, namely a belief in a supernatural realm and in the ability of individuals to interact with this realm by means of transfiguration or transmigration of their souls. Second, from a theological Christian perspective, all of these pre-Christian and syncretistic pagan-Christian techniques were heretical. It is therefore not surprising that much of our knowledge concerning the prevalence of these altered consciousness systems in the European past derives from inquisitorial records, witchcraft accusations, and catalogs of superstitious practices the church tried to eradicate. Was a departing soul actually journeying or was it a dream state? Was this belief a part of an old Eurasian-wide tradition or merely local and unrelated manifestations? Given the fragmented nature of the evidence, these questions are not likely to be answered conclusively. The tradition of possession of the soul by external entities is much better documented, but this tradition, too, raises a number of philosophical, theological, and morphological questions. Was a possessing spirit taking hold of the soul, the spirit, or merely of the body of its host? How does it get in and how does it get out? Is there a “core” that cannot be penetrated and possessed? And how dramatic and profound should an alteration of consciousness be in order to qualify its agent/victim as being possessed by a spirit? The Christian god was an embodied god, a fact that added a layer to the relations between body, soul, and the divine in Europe. Do, for example, the tranquility, restfulness, and sense of both a shared community with fellow human beings and of communion with the divine following the intaking of the divine in the shape of the Eucharist count as an altered state of consciousness? Alternatively, does a nocturnal emission, which was understood in the monastic tradition to be a result of a demonic overpowering of a resisting self, constitute an altered state of consciousness? (Elliott, 1999, 14–34). Given the huge body of theological, medical, natural philosophical, and philosophical writings that were composed by medieval and early modern theologians, physicians, philosophers, and natural philosophers in their effort to make sense of the self, consciousness, and their transformations and the spectrum of altered states of consciousness (ASC) in the preChristian and Christian Western traditions, it is unavoidable that we restrict our discussion to the most common and the best documented Christian configurations of ASC, namely “dramatic” possessions of individuals by either a divine or a demonic spirit, while excluding from our discussion the syncretistic traditions that undoubtedly helped to shape the Christian medieval configurations of both divine and demonic possessions. Divine spirit possession appeared commonly in the shape of a mystical union, while a possession by diabolic spirits was understood to be an affliction that
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resulted from the control (whose exact nature was open to debate) of demonic entities over the self. Although in cases of a unitive mystical experience with the divine only the spirit itself determined the length of the experience, a demonic possession necessitated an intervention by healing professionals (saints, charismatic figures, or both lay and religious exorcists), whose intervention terminated the possession. In this chapter, I trace some historical transformations of the Christian idiom of spirit possession. The sense of change over time sometimes gets lost in anthropological and ethnopsychiatric discussions of ASC that too often assume stable conceptual notions of the interactions among humans and divine or diabolic entities. The two forms of alteration of consciousness I discuss, however, went through a major historical reconfiguration. They had separate and distinct histories from the early Christian period until about the 13th century. From then on, they started to resemble each other morphologically more and more (Caciola, 2000, 2003; Elliott, 2004; Newman, 1985). As Nancy Caciola rightly pointed out: “We can . . . legitimately speak of two kinds of spirit possession existing in the Middle Ages—one malign and one benign—that were outwardly indistinguishable from one another” (Caciola, 2000, 272). This growing similarity between two phenomena that were theologically very different, even antithetical, and that occupied the extreme ends of the malevolence–benevolence spectrum, troubled theologians and threatened the stability of presumed clear distinctions between the realms in which God and Satan can act and among the forms possessions could take. The confusion, in turn, led, by the later part of the period under discussion (the 16th and 17th centuries), to new definitions of both divine and demonic possessions, to new techniques of discerning the differences between them, and then to processes of legitimazing or delegitimazing of specific forms of ASC and the individuals who experienced them.
Divine Possession Following St. Augustine, the medieval Christian tradition recognized three experiences of union with the divine. “Spiritual experience is more excellent than the corporeal, and intellectual is more excellent than spiritual” (Augustine, 1982, p. 213). In intellectual mystical experiences, the mystic acquires an inward presence of the divine independently of any sensory form. Spiritual experiences involve imaginary hearing or seeing things with the spiritual (as opposed to the bodily) senses (imaginations). Finally, corporeal experiences are perceived through the body and its real senses. An intellectual unitive experience is the most reliable, while spiritual and corporeal
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experiences are always compromised because they rely on the materiality of the natural world and of human perception and are further threatened by the possibility of intentional distortions by evil spirits, who operate through the senses. By the thirteenth century, two distinct “schools” of achieving the transcendent experience of the divine co-existed in Europe. The intellectual tradition was now joined by the pseudo-Dionysian school, which emphasized the Via negativa, the stripping away of all modes of thinking or understanding in order to annihilate the self within the divine. Love, rather than intellect, was the route to achieve transcendence. This school encouraged practitioners to employ affects rather than intelligence; to first meditate upon Christ’s life and death and to visualize themselves present at these events. They then went beyond the first stage of meditating on concrete sensory things to contemplating Christ’s agony even without visualization, which could lead them, finally, to achieve unity with Him through experiencing His experiences. For the proponents of affective transcendence, although the unity with the divine was always totally interior and involved rapture (raptus), an alienation from one’s senses (ecstasy, we should not forget, comes from the Latin ex stasis: standing outside one’s senses), it was always first mediated through the body. It was always experienced through the senses and the emotions and communicated through language. The unio mystica of the intellectual type is immediate, uncommunicative, and cannot be reached through exercises. In affective mysticism, however, the practitioner actively seeks to alter her consciousness by means of contemplation. She does so by learning and then regularly practicing a prescribed set of meditations and other spiritual exercises that train the mind to experience the visible manifestations of the divine. Admittedly, only divine will can infuse a mystical experience into the contemplating self, and no effort on behalf of a practitioner can guarantee a transcendent unity, but one can advance systematically toward acquiring deeper and deeper comprehensions of God through exercises. Not all the practitioners, obviously, achieve the mystical unity, and contemplation in and of itself is not a guarantee that the practitioner reaches the goal, but successful contemplation leads to an alienation of the mind, which acquires a state of the soul that is elevated above itself and above human effort. The soul finds itself surmounting its natural capabilities, suspending in God (McGinn, 2004). The development of such sensory-imaginative forms of spirituality meant a democratization of contemplation and meditation. Some spiritual and contemplative guides, the most famous and popular among which was The Clowde of Unknowyng (written between 1375 and 1400), were written now in the vernacular and thus became available to the laity
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(Cloud of Unknowing, 1944). Religiously inclined women in the later Middle Ages found affective and emotive spiritual exercises especially appealing. It enabled them to contemplate the divine in its humanity (as Christ) and to strive toward being possessed by it by using their own bodies and emotions as the means to do so. Women, much more than men, made divine possession a common religious idiom between the 13th and 16th centuries, and, more often than not, their possessions took a bodily configuration. Female mystics levitated, entered into trance states, shed copious tears, or were paralyzed in rigid positions. Women, after all, were perceived to be more emotional, more embodied, and more passionate than men (Bynum, 1987). Their bodies, which had often been portrayed as a disadvantage and imperfection, could now be the tools that enabled women, rather than men, to acquire knowledge of God. But, the democratization, embodiment, and feminization of contemplation came with a price. As the technique spread from monastic communities to the laity and from learned men to “ignorant” women, more and more forces rallied against it. It potentially diminished the centrality of the mediation of the Sacraments through the church (and, thus, diminished the clerical monopoly over access to the sacred), argued the opponents of affective spirituality. It gave free rein to Free Spirits Antinomists and other heretics or untrustworthy individuals. It gave credence to women, whose visions and experiences should always be suspect. Systematic campaigns against the contemplative route to ASC led, by the second half of the seventeenth century, to its demise.
Diabolic Possession Unlike divine possession, the techniques of which could be learned (but it is worth repeating, demanded an “infusion” of the divine spirit to actually occur), diabolic possession in the Christian tradition was never self-induced. It was always regarded as an undesired intrusion and always necessitated an intervention by healing experts who could expel the demonic spirit from the possessed body. Here, too, there was no consensus among medieval and early modern theologians and other experts concerning the exact nature, origins, and configuration of this malign ASC. Individuals could be possessed by either revenants (souls returning from the realm of the dead), Satan himself, or other (lesser) demonic agents; they could remain possessed for many years or only for a short while; they could manifest their possession in purely physical symptoms, purely “psychological” symptoms, or both; and they could be relieved of their possession by a local lay or religious professional (exorcist), by the charisma of a saint (dead or alive), or only by
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traveling to a specific site (usually a shrine) whose patron (a Christian saint) was renowned for his or her efficacy in combating possessing agents. In short, diabolic possession was a catchall term that was used to describe all sorts of both physiological and psychological afflictions, whose causes were not self-evidently organic, and illnesses that failed to respond to standard naturalist medical cures. The Christian configuration of demonic possession was an old as the Church itself. In the Bible, most demonic agencies within a possessed body manifested themselves in physical signs such as contortions, convulsions, deafness, blindness, speech impediments, arthritis, epilepsy, and temporary insanity (Luke 9.39, 11.14, 13.11–16; Mark 1.23–26, 1.32–34; Acts 10.38, 19.12; Bo¨cher, 1972; Kelly, 1974; Langton, 1949, pp. 151–172; Rodewyk, 1963, pp. 7–45; Van Dam, 1970). Only in very few cases, possessing agents also exhibited supernatural knowledge, as was the case with the demon who affirmed Jesus’ identity as “the Son of God” (Mark 16.17; Matthew 8.29ff). As such, it was not easy to determine whether a person was possessed by demonic agents or was merely suffering from physical “organic” affliction. It usually took a tacit understanding among the possessed individual, her family and neighbors, and the expelling agencies to determine that a person was, in fact, possessed by evil spirits, as the physical signs themselves were similar to signs of purely natural and physical afflictions or mental illness. Traditionally, and from a purely theological perspective, there was thus a clear distinction between diabolic and divine possessions. Thomas of Cantimpre´, a 13th-century preacher and theologian, for example, asserted that demons can only be “in the body, not the soul.” Most theologians, including Thomas of Aquinas, agreed that while the Holy Spirit can penetrate the heart itself, demonic agencies can only penetrate the body, usually the digestive system. From there, however, they influence the senses in such ways that it feels and looks as if they are in possession of the soul itself. (Caciola, 2000, pp. 279–285; Caciola, 2003, pp. 176–207; Elliott, 1997; Maggi, 2001; Sweetman, 1999). Practically and morphologically, therefore, even prior to the “spiritualization” of possession (to be discussed below), it was extremely difficult, if at all possible, to determine whether a person was possessed by a divine or a demonic spirit. More importantly, starting in the Late Middle Ages, the diagnosis of demonic possession was expanding. In the growing body of literature on diabolic possession, more attention was paid from the 15th century onward to its supernatural rather than simply physiological symptoms. By the early 17th century, an official Roman Rite determined that the knowledge of hidden secrets, together with additional supernatural
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symptoms, such as physical strength that exceeded the possessed person’s age and gender, and the inability to tolerate the presence of Christian symbols such as the Cross, the Bible, or the Host, or of priests or members of religious orders, were prerequisites to a definition of diabolic possession (Rituale Romanum, 1871). This document completed the transformation of demonic possession from being manifested in purely physical symptoms in early Christianity through a combination of physical and “psychological” and supernatural symptoms in the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages to the primacy and necessity of supernatural marks as a sine qua non for a diagnosis of possession. It is important to note, though, that popular understanding of possession maintained a more expansive definition, and people suffering from purely physical symptoms continued to be diagnosed as possessed by demons and to be dispossessed by both lay and religious exorcists well into the 20th century (De Martino, 1959). This widening of the scope of possession was a response to unprecedented growth of ecstatic behaviors that had in the past characterized only divine possessions. With more people than ever claiming direct interactions with the divine and possessions by the Holy Spirit, people who in the past could have been understood to be mystics, prophets and prophetesses, and visionaries were now often diagnosed as being possessed by diabolic spirits. And because the large majority of these people were women, including lay women, this spiritualization of demonic possession, namely, the increasing importance attached to psychological signs of possession, and the tacit willingness to ascribe to demons the ability to take possession of a person’s soul (and not merely a person’s body), was a gendered process. Diabolic possession of and in the soul (or that looked as if it were taking place in the soul) implied uncertainty as to the causes of a person’s behavior, a suspicion concerning visual signs, and a theological confusion. In its clearly manifested signs of lack of control and the likelihood of deception, diabolic possession of the soul became connected more than ever before with the feminine, as these attributes had long been associated with women (Caciola, 2003; Elliott, 2004; Newman, 1985; Sluhovsky, 2007).
Discernment of Possessing Spirits Starting in the 13th century, then, possession came to indicate an involuntary encounter between a human being and a spirit of undetermined nature, and it was left to concentric circles of people to define the nature of this spirit. At the core of these decision-making circles stood the possessed person and her immediate family, since they were the only ones who could testify as to the precise circumstances of the first outburst of
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the behavior. The reliability of their testimonies, as well as their standing in the community, past histories of the person at the center of the drama and of her relatives, and other variables helped to shape, in turn, the surrounding community’s own diagnosis. A third circle of decision makers was the theologians or exorcists. They, in fact, had the final word. In cases of suspected diabolic etiology, their willingness to cast out the possessing agent was an affirmation of the demonic origins of the possession. In cases of alleged divine possession, their patronage and support of the claimant were of utmost importance. They, and only they, could authenticate mystical experiences of a claimant and decide that a specific woman or man was, in fact, a mystic who enjoyed a possession by a divine spirit. Alternatively, they, and only they, could put an alleged mystic to tests, deny her claims, or even arrest her. This being said, in a few cases families, friends, and devotees continued to believe in the divine origins of a person’s possession even after the religious authorities determined otherwise (Di Agresti, 1980, pp. 199–200; Polizzotto, 1993). This new indeterminacy of possession was a major theological, epistemological, and philosophical challenge. The result was the development of an ever-growing and more and more elaborate theology and techniques of discernment of possession spirits, new practices, and a new literary genre that reached its peak in the 17th century and the accumulative production of which reached hundreds of titles (Anderson, 2002; Caciola, 2003; Schutte, 2001; Sluhovsky, 2007, pp. 169–205; Zarri, 1991). Although successful discernment of possessing spirits had historically been understood to be one of the seven divine graces, it was now understood to be a system of diagnostic tools that could be learned and hence acquired by clerics. The most prominent theologians of late medieval and early modern Europe participated in the effort to redraw boundaries between forms of possession, producing new spiritual and judicial probative categories that further confused rather than clarified the difference between divine and demonic possessions. But by emphasizing repeatedly the hypotheses that moderation in spiritual behavior, humility, advanced learning, and “worthiness” are more likely to be indications of a divine possession while ecstatic behavior, lack of humility and learning, and social or educational unworthiness are more likely than not to indicate a demonic possession, these theologians restricted significantly the chances of a woman to claim mystical experiences. A woman, they argued repeatedly, is by nature more credulous, less reliable, more likely to deceive and be deceived, and less capable of learning and understanding divine matters. As such, her claims for possession by the divine spirit are very often either lies and deceptions or hysterical misconceptions.
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The task of discerning interior possessing spirits was, obviously, beyond the competence of lay eyewitnesses to possession or medical specialists. Although each individual could, theoretically at least, participate in the process of diagnosing physical diabolic possession, and many lay people took place in the negotiation that led to such a definition, basing their opinion on visual symptoms, only expert theologians could discern and differentiate among spirits that possessed the soul and that manifested themselves in purely “psychological” symptoms. This spiritualization of demonic possession from the 13th century on was, therefore, a multidimensional process. By emphasizing the psychological rather than the physical symptoms of diabolic possession, it changed its traditional configuration; by associating its symptoms with the allegedly natural characteristics of women, it “feminized” it and concurrently restricted women’s potential to enjoy divine possessions; and by requiring a discernment of spirits as a precondition for a recognition of possession, it monopolized the control over all decisions concerning alterations of consciousness in the hands of male clerics.
Exorcism Divine possession, as we pointed out, was induced by God, and only God determined its length. But malignant spirits, who possessed a body with God’s permission as a result of satanic wickedness, could and should be expelled. Christ cast out possessing demons by the power of his command, but his disciples no longer enjoyed this power, and they expelled demons by invoking Christ’s name (Mark 16.17; Matthew 8.16, 10.1). Throughout the Middle Ages, numerous traditions coexisted in the Christian West concerning exorcism. Within the religious hierarchy, both charismatic saints (both males and females) and ordained exorcists expelled demons from possessed bodies. Alongside them, many lay individuals also employed supernatural powers to cast out demons. It is extremely difficult to generalize about these healers’ sources of authority. Some gained their power through esoteric knowledge passed to them from relatives (usually mothers or other female relatives). Others acquired exorcismal powers because they were the third, fifth, or seventh sons of fathers who were themselves third, fifth, or seventh sons in their lineage. Some acquired reputation as exorcists because they were born on Good Friday or Christmas Day, others because they were born with the caul (Del Rio, 2000, p. 50; Ginzburg, 1966; Sluhovsky, 2007, 39–49). The rituals used to expel demons also varied. Living charismatic figures, whether they were religious or lay, often followed the tradition and invoked
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Christ, but at times their mere presence in a place was enough to cleanse a possessed body (Brigitta of Sweden 1990, p. 8; Il primo processo per San Filippo Neri, 1957–1963, 1:100, 156–157, 214–215, 401; 2:75, 136–139, 142–143, 170–171, 268; 3:290–291; Vita sanctae Genovefae, 44). Cult practitioners in saints’ shrines usually invoked both Christ and the local saint, who had been herself or himself renowned in her or his own lifetime for performing successful exorcisms. Professional religious exorcists followed prescribed rites and formulas, which varied from place to place, and both they and lay exorcists used a combination of Christian prayers, saints’ relics, fumigations, incantations, herbs, and a mixture of amulets and other paraliturgical and magical techniques. Making the sign of the Cross over the possessed body was a common and successful technique, as were reading citations from the Bible, reciting names of demons and forcing them to reveal their names, recalling the Christian myth of creation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and redemption, and, at times, using physical violence against the demon (Maggi, 2001; Sluhovsky, 2007, pp. 36–70). The need to systematize exorcismal practices arose only in the early 16th century as part of the Catholic Church’s ongoing battle against “superstitious” beliefs and practices. Many techniques that had been tolerated by the church and often used by clerical exorcists themselves were now deemed to be unauthorized, superstitious, and at times even criminal. A first effort to compile an authorized Catholic rite of exorcism was initiated by Pope Leo X in 1513, and in the last quarter of the 16th century the Franciscan exorcist Girolamo Menghi authored five books in which he offered practicing exorcists a collection of legitimate rites. These books were then incorporated into the massive compendium the Thesaurus exorcismorum of 1608. Hundreds of other guides circulated in the early modern Catholic world, and even the publication of the Rituale Romanum of 1614 did not put an end to the spread of alternative variations. What all these books had in common was a demarcation of the boundaries between authorized and unauthorized techniques of exorcism and between purely physical aliments and diabolic possession, and a growing attention to the uncertainty of all symptoms, both physical and “psychological” (Libellus ad Leonem X, 1723, c. 688; Thesaurus exorcismorum, 1608). At the same time that the curative aspect of exorcism was being codified for the first time, an equally or maybe more important process was going on. With the clericalization of exorcism that, I argue, started in the 15th and 16th centuries, exorcism acquired an additional meaning. Clerical exorcism was now also used as a technique that enabled clerics to discern possessing spirits. Thus, for example, when the 16th century Spaniard Teresa of Avila was first experiencing her mystical visions, her father confessor
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recommended exorcisms not because she exhibited traditional signs of either “physical” or “psychological” possession but in order to determine what the source of her experiences was and whether it was divine or demonic. (Weber, 1993; see also Paluzzi, 1980, p. 189 and additional examples in Caciola, 2000, pp. 274–279). Originally, as we recall, divine possession had nothing to do with exorcism, which was a response to diabolic possessions. Now, because of the growing morphological similarities between the two forms of alteration of consciousness and the growing anxiety concerning (mostly women’s) ecstatic forms of divine possession, exorcism became a means of discerning false claims for mystical possessions as much as it was a healing technique.
Summary At the center of my chapter is the argument that, although both divinely and demonically inspired forms of altered states of consciousness have always existed in the Christian West, it is important to note the historical changes these idioms went through and to contextualize these transformations within their precise historical settings. Divine possession, as we have seen, broke away from the confined walls of male monastic communities in the twelfth and 13th centuries and reshaped Christian mysticism, prayer, and men’s and women’s access to the divine. New theology of contemplation and new practices popularized and democratized possession by the divine spirit, while affective, imaginary, and sensory techniques enabled unlearned but nonetheless spiritually inclined individuals, including women, to pursue new forms of religiosity and alteration of consciousness. Possession by demonic entities also witnessed a transformation in the later Middle Ages. Its symptoms, which in the past had been mostly physical, now became psychological. And with this change, a new set of quandaries arose: How could demonic entities possess the soul, which is supposed to be immune to their penetration? Who is to decide that a person is possessed when she does not exhibit the traditional physical symptoms of diabolic possession? How does one discern possessing spirits? The fact that both divine and demonic possession were assumed now to take place within the human soul and that both led to alterations in consciousness that were morphologically similar created a theological, conceptual, and philosophical confusion. Unsurprisingly, then, the church’s attempt to redraw the boundaries between divine and diabolic possession went hand in hand with its systematic effort to delegitimize most forms of affective mysticism.
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Among the means it employed to pursue this goal was the old technique of exorcism. Just as the discernment of possessing spirits was a new technique that shifted power from the laity to the clergy, the new employment of exorcism as a probative mechanism restricted its own use to religiously trained exorcists. Both forms of spirit possession have continued, however, to exist. Even after the restriction on some forms of female contemplative experiences that could lead to unity with the divine and annihilation of the self, and even after new and stringent rules for the authentication of mystical experiences were codified, some women continued to be recognized as “true” mystics and had their divine possessions authenticated (Bergamo, 1992; Vidal, 2006). Similarly, Christian believers continue to this day to become possessed by evil spirits. The etiology of demonic possession is restricted nowadays to very precise types of “mental illness,” and the Catholic Church demands that a diagnosis of mental illness is ruled out by “medical and psychological experts” before a definition of diabolic possession is advanced (De Exorcismis, 1998). The Catholic Church, in other words, still maintains the 2000-year-old Christian tradition of defining alteration of consciousness through encounter with possessing spirits.
References Anderson, W. L. (2002). Free spirits, presumptuous women, and false prophets: The discernment of spirits in the later Middle Ages. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Chicago. Augustine of Hippo. (1982). The literal meaning of Genesis: books 7–12. J. H. Taylor (Trans.). New York: Ancient Christian Writers. Bergamo, M. (1992). Les sciences des saints [The inquiries of mystics]. Grenoble: J. Millon. Bo¨cher, O. (1972). Christus exorcista: Da¨monismus und taufe im neuen testament [Christ the exorcist: Demonism and the devil in the New Testament]. Stuttgart: Kohlhamer. Brigitta of Sweden. (1990). Life and selected revelations. M. T. Harris (Ed.). New York: Paulist Press. Buchholz, P. (2005). Shamanism in medieval Scandinavian literature. In G. Klaniczay & E´. Po´cs (Eds.), Communicating with the spirits (pp. 234–246). Budapest: Central European University Press. Bynum, C. W. (1987). Holy feast, holy fast: The religious significance of food to medieval women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Caciola, N. (2000). Mystics, demoniacs, and the physiology of spirit possession in medieval Europe. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42, 268–306.
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Caciola, N. (2003). Discerning spirits: Divine and demonic possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carden˜a, E. (1996). “Just floating on the sky.” A comparison of shamanic and hypnotic phenomenology. In R. Quekelbherge & D. Eigner (Eds.), 6th Jahrbuch fu¨r Transkulturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie [6th yearbook of crosscultural medicine and psychotherapy] (pp. 367–380). Berlin: Verlag fu¨r Wissenschaft und Bildung. Clowde of unknowyng. (1944). In P. Hodgson (Ed.), The cloud of unknowing and related treatises. London: Oxford University Press. Crapanzano, V. (1987). Spirit possession. In M. Eliade (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of religion 14 (pp. 12–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. De Ble´court, W. (2007). The return of the sabbat: Mental archaeologies, conjectural histories or political mythologies? In J. Barry & O. Davies (Eds.), Witchcraft historiography (pp. 123–145). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Del Rio, M. (2000). Investigations into magic. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Ed.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Martino, E. (1959). Sud e magia [The south and its magic]. Milan: Feltrinelli. Di Agresti, D. (1980). Sviluppi della riforma monastica Savonaroliana [Developments in the Savonarolan monastic reform]. Florence: Olschki. Elliott, D. (1997) The physiology of rapture and female spirituality. In P. Biller & A. J. Minnis (Eds.), Medieval theology and the natural body (pp. 141–173). Bury St. Edmunds: St. Edmundsbury Press. Elliott, D. (1999). Fallen bodies: Pollution, sexuality, and demonology in the middle ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Elliott, D. (2004). Proving woman: Female spirituality and inquisitional culture in the later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. De Exorcismis et supplicationibus Quibusdam [Of exorcisms and certain supplications]. (1998). Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis. Ginzburg, C. (1966). I benandanti [The night battles]. Turin: Einaudi. Ginzburg, C. (1991). Ecstasies: Deciphering the witches’ Sabbath. New York: Pantheon. Henningsen, G. (1990). “The ladies from outside”: An archaic pattern of the witches’ Sabbath. In B. Ankarloo & G. Henningsen (Eds.), Early modern European witchcraft: Centers and peripheries (pp. 191–215). Oxford: Clarendon. Il primo processo per san Filippo Neri [The canonization process of saint Filippo Neri]. (1957–1963). G. I. della Rocchetta and N. Vian. (Eds.). 4 vols. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Kelly, H. A. (1974). The devil, demonology, and witchcraft: The development of Christian beliefs in evil spirits. New York: Doubleday. Langton, E. (1949). Essentials of demonology. A study of Jewish and Christian doctrine: Its origin and development. London: Epworth Press. Libellus ad Leonem X. (1723). In Annales camaldulenses ordinis Sancti Benedicti [Annals of the order of Camaldoli] (Vol. 9). Venice: J.-B. Pasquali. Maggi, A. (2001). Satan’s rhetoric: A study of Renaissance demonology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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McGinn, B. (2004). The presence of God: A history of western Christian mysticism. Vol. II: The growth of mysticism. New York: Crossroad. Newman, B. (1985). Possessed by the spirit: Devout women, demoniacs, and the apostolic life in the thirteenth century. Speculum, 73, 733–770. Paluzzi, C. (1980). Caterina Paluzzi e la sua autobiografia [Caterina Paluzzi and her autobiography]. In G. Antonazzi (Ed.), Rome: Storia e Letteratura. Pizza, G. (1996). Sulla ‘possessione europea’ [On European possession]. Rivista della societa` italiane di anthropologia medica, 1–2, 261–286. Pizza, G. (1998). The Virgin and the spider: Revisiting spirit possession in southern Europe. In C. Papa, G. Pizza, & F. M. Zerilli (Eds.), Incontri di etnologia Europea [European ethnology meetings] (pp. 49–81). Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane. Po´cs, E´. (1999). Between the living and the dead: A perspective on witches and seers in the early modern age. Budapest: Central European University Press. Po´cs, E´. (2005). Possession phenomena, possession-systems, some east-central European examples. In G. Klaniczay & E´ . Po´cs (Eds.), Communicating with the spirits (pp. 84–151). Budapest: Central European University Press. Polizzotto, L. (1993). When saints fall out: Women and the Savonarolan reform in early sixteenth-century Florence. Renaissance Quarterly, 46, 486–525. Rituale Romanum Pauli V potificis maximi [The Roman ritual]. (1871). Mechelen: Hanicq. Rodewyk, A. (1963). Die da¨monische besessenheit in der sicht der rituale romanum [Demonic possession in the Roman ritual]. Aschaffenburg: Paul Pattloch Verlag. Schutte, A. J. (2001). Aspiring saints: Pretense of holiness, inquisition, and gender in the republic of Venice, 1618–1750. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sluhovsky, M. (2007). Believe not every spirit: Possession, mysticism, and discernment in early modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sweetman, R. (1999). Thomas of Cantimpre´: Performative reading and pastoral care. In M. A. Suydam & J. E. Ziegler (Eds.),Performance and transformation: New approaches to late medieval spirituality (pp.133–167). New York: St. Martin’s. Thesaurus Exorcismorum atque conjurationum terribilium, potestissimorum, efficacissimorum, cum practica probatissima . . . [A treasury of exorcisms]. (1608). Cologne: L. Setzner. Tuczay, C. (2005). Trance prophets and diviners in the Middle Ages. In G. Klaniczay & E´. Po´cs (Eds.), Communicating with the spirits (pp. 215–233). Budapest: Central European University Press. Van Dam, W. C. (1970). Da¨monen und Besessene: Die Da¨monen in Geschichte und Gegewart und ihre Austreibung. [Demons and possessions: Demons in history and the present and their expulsion]. Aschaffenburg: Paul Pattloch. Vidal, F. (2006). Les sciences de l’aˆme, XVIe–XVIIIe sie`cles [The inquiries of the soul, 16th–18th centuries]. Paris: Champion. Vita sanctae genovefae [The life of saint Genevieve]. Acta Sanctorum, January 3.
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Weber, A. (1993). Between ecstasy and exorcism: Religious negotiations in sixteenth-century Spain. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23, 221–234. William of Auvergne (1674). De universo. In Opera Omnia [Complete works] (Vol. 1). Paris: Billain. Winkelman, M. (1992). Shamans, priests and witches: A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners. Anthropological Research Papers #44. Tempe: Arizona State University. Zarri, G. (Ed.). (1991). Finzione e santita` tra medioevo ed eta` moderna [Pretense and holiness between the Middle Ages and the early modern period]. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier.
Additional Essential References Not Cited in the Text Baier, K. (2009). Meditation and contemplation in high to late medieval Europe. In E. Franco (Ed.), Yogic perception, meditation and altered states of consciousness ¨ sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaftern. (pp. 321–345). Vienna: O Behringer, W. (1994). Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the phantoms of the night. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Da¨monishce besessenheit [Demonic possession]. (2005). Bielefeld: Akademie der Dio¨zese Rottenburg-Stuttgart. Franz, A. (1960). Die kirchlichen benediktionen in mittelalter [The Church’s Benedictions in the middle ages] (Vol. 2, 2nd ed.). Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck. Jantzen, G. M. (1995). Power, gender, and Christian mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, H. A. (2007). Satan: A biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Klaniczay, G. (1997). Miraculum and maleficium: Reflections concerning late medieval female sainthood. In R. P. Hsia & R. W. Scribner (Eds.), Problems in the historical anthropology of early modern Europe (pp. 49–73). Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz. Maggi, A. (2006). In the company of demons: Unnatural being, love, and identity in the Italian renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER 5
Altered Consciousness from the Age of Enlightenment Through 1 Mid–20th Century Etzel Carden˜a and Carlos S. Alvarado Introduction The alterations of consciousness, discernment strategies, and explanatory models described in the previous chapter [see Sluhovsky, this volume] continued throughout the 18th century, although the Age of Enlightenment would bring its own ideology to bear on these matters. Even earlier, the physician Duncan in 1634 had attributed the phenomena of the possessed nuns of Loudun to “folly and error of the imagination” and suggestion by the confessors rather than to supernatural causes (in de Certeau, 2000, pp. 135–136). The 17th century had a cadre of outstanding thinkers such as Leibniz and Descartes, but their rational models of the universe were still undergirded by God and religion; thus, the 18th century stands out thanks to a plethora of important works that pushed rational analyses above and beyond religious concerns. The groundbreaking works of Kant, Voltaire, and the French Encyclopedists set the stage for a search for knowledge perhaps unparalleled since the Al-Andaluz period during the Arabic reign of the Iberic peninsula in which rational and empirical concerns were harmoniously integrated with a mystical vision (Bakan, Merkur, & Weiss, 2009). Similarly to classical Greece (cf. Dodds, 1951/1973), however, the age of enlightenment and rationality in Europe and the Americas had a corresponding and perhaps partly reactive set of religious and quasi-religious movements in which alterations of consciousness and behavior were a major concern for a large segment of the population, even though many of these manifestations had, earlier on, been condemned by the Christian 1
We are grateful for the editorial assistance of Alan Gauld.
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church. Rosen (1969) provides a nonexhaustive list of movements that announced that their devotees could prophesize and be in contact with a divine realm, including the Camisard prophets and the Jansenist convulsionaries in France; the Shakers, the early Methodists, and the Great Awakening, especially in Great Britain and the USA; the Chlysti in Russia; and the Hassidic movement of the Baal-Shem Tov. Similarly to contemporary Brazilian followers of Afro-Caribbean religions (cf. Frigerio, 1989), the prophetic state of consciousness among devotees of French sects included various degrees—the warning (l’avertissement), the whisper of inspiration (le souffle´), the prophecy (la prophe´tie), and the gift (le don)—besides physical manifestations including shivering, twitching convulsively, leaping, foaming in the mouth, speaking in tongues (i.e., glossolalia), and falling into stupor (Rosen, 1969, p. 211). The way to achieve such alterations in consciousness and behavior included, depending on the group, praying, singing, frenetic movements or dancing, fasting, sexual abstinence or license, and in more extreme cases whipping and even sexual automutilation (as among the Skopze, cf. Zacharias, 1980). Many of these religious movements are analyzed in detail by Garrett (1987) and the experiences and behaviors they manifested can be found across cultures and times, including ecstatic religions and Christian, Moslem, and Judaic traditions that continue to seek a direct religious experience of being possessed by spirits, saints, or the Divinity. Although there may be a temptation to assume that all or most of the followers of these groups may have suffered from psychopathology, contemporary studies in different cultures suggests that practitioners in these sects are as a group at least as healthy as their cultural referent groups (Carden˜a, van Duijl, Weiner, & Terhune, 2009; Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Carden˜a, 2008). We will now discuss the most influential set of ideas and practices in the Western World concerning altered consciousness during the end of the 18th through beginning of the 20th centuries, namely animal magnetism/ hypnosis and mediumship.
Mesmer and Animal Magnetism The Age of Enlightenment was characterized by secular, rational explanations for many phenomena, including altered consciousness, previously understood only within a religious context. Perhaps the most influential was the development by the physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) of animal magnetism. Although it may be the case that the priest Johann Joseph Gassner (1727–1779) used what would now be called psychotherapeutic strategies in his exorcisms (Peter, 2005), his explanation invoked the metaphysical battle between good and evil. In contrast, Mesmer
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developed in his medical dissertation a theory that purported to explain possession and exorcism phenomena in terms of his conception of an allpervading magnetism in the universe (Mesmer, 1779; see also Pattie, 1994). Some of his tenets may bespeak of esoterism to some today, but they were compatible with the interpretation by Mesmer of what Benjamin Franklin and others researched about the electromagnetic forces of the universe. Furthermore, the astronomical underpinnings of Mesmer’s theory, although suspect nowadays, were in agreement with a nonreligious explanation of the universe, as sought by Enlightenment authors (cf. Darnton, 1968). Mesmer (1779) declared that there is “an universally distributed fluid . . . which by its nature, is susceptible of receiving, propagating & communicating all the impressions of movement . . . .” (p. 74). This substance, which he postulated interacted with the rest of the forces in the universe, he called animal magnetism. Sickness was explained as a disturbance in the flow of this substance that could be exaggerated by the use of magnets or hands to the point that the system would go into a crisis and rebalance itself into its natural, healthy condition. Thus, the exorcism healings produced by the charismatic Father Gassner, the ironically named Father Hell (1720–1792), and others were explained by Mesmer through the skilful manipulation of animal magnetism rather than by the struggle between divine and demonic forces (Gauld, 1992). At the beginning, Mesmer performed individual treatments touching or passing above the body magnets and, later on, his hands. After he traveled to Paris and became very well known and sought after, he had group healing sessions in which he used music and appeared in a showy purple robe while the afflicted Parisian nobility sat around a baquet (tub) filled with magnetized water from which protruded metal tubes that could be moved to the afflicted bodily parts (see Figure 5.1). Reports from the time mention the crises experienced by Mesmer’s clients, particularly women. One writer stated that the crises started “by a small cough that becomes convulsive, which is soon followed by hiccups, a shriek, [and] by extraordinary singing,” and by the imitation of dogs, cats, and chickens (Paulet, 1784, p. 22). In addition, some individuals cried, laughed, had gastric disturbances, experienced a sense of warmth or heat, went into convulsions, and even lost consciousness supposedly as a manifestation of the magnetic crisis (Gauld, 1992), phenomena previously observed in connection with spirit possession. Some of the behaviors seen at Mesmer’s sessions seemed to spread once a person had manifested them, reminiscent of group manifestations occurring earlier as part of the Tarantella or St. Vitus’s dances in which individuals affected with apparently uncontrollable dancing would end up affecting other onlookers. This phenomenon, when referring
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Figure 5.1
Drawing of a group of patients around Mesmer’s baquet.
to a pathological manifestation, is currently called medically unexplained epidemic illness or mass psychogenic illness (Van Ommeren et al., 2001), probably mediated in part by an automatic emotional response, especially among some suggestible individuals (Carden˜a, Terhune, Lo¨o¨f, & Buratti, 2009). As Gauld (1992) observes, Mesmer would explicitly state what physical manifestations the person could expect, which besides less direct suggestions probably had a strong effect on many individuals. Although it is not possible to ascertain with accuracy the effectiveness of Mesmer’s treatments, he seemed to have had success in relief of pain and general unease and perhaps even in healing refractory medical cases. The two Royal
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Commissions ordered by Louis XVI to investigate the scandalous practices of Mesmer would not dispute their effectiveness, but would criticize his theory to explain his cures and point to the potential danger of the use of imagination and the implicit sexual tension fraught in the practices (Gauld, 1992).
Hypnotic Somnambulism Although Mesmerism as a theory came into disrepute following the reports by the commissions, the idea of animal magnetism as a physical agent persisted longer than it is generally realized (Alvarado, 2009). A student of Mesmer, A. M. J. Chastenet, Marquis de Puyse´gur (1751–1825), would introduce changes in practice that are the true predecessors of contemporary hypnotic practice. When he treated the peasant Victor Race for a lung condition, Puyse´gur noticed that he did not go into a mesmeric crisis (perhaps because he did not have any models as to how he should behave and/or perhaps because he might have been delirious) but instead seemed to be experiencing and acting as if he were in a dream, which he could not recall once he seemed to come out of that state as if waking up. This and similar manifestations were called somnambulism, which means carrying out complex acts in a sleeplike state. This presumed association between mesmeric phenomena and sleep would be retained in the later term hypnos, which refers to the Greek god of sleep. Puyse´gur and other contemporary practitioners also noted a number of potential parapsychological phenomena, for instance, that patients in the state of magnetic somnambulism reputedly knew the cause of their own and others’ diseases and were able to indicate the means of healing them (Chastenet de Puyse´gur, 1820, p. 1). Crabtree (1993) has listed for us various described alterations in consciousness: a sleepwalking kind of consciousness, a different reservoir of knowledge and memory during that state, loss of the sense of identity, suggestibility to the mesmerist’s communications, heightened memory, alterations in the senses, apparent insensibility to pain, and a special rapport with the magnetizer. Crabtree (1988) has also documented copious sources that describe potential psi phenomena during the magnetic state, including the apparent communication of the sensations or behaviors of the magnetizer to the magnetized without any known sensory or logical links (community of sensation and of muscular action), telepathy, becoming mesmerized at a distance without sensory or logical intermediation, clairvoyance of remote (in time and place) events and of medical conditions, and awareness of spiritual things and beings (see also Dingwall, 1967–1968).
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Many, but not all, of these observations might be explained by unconscious sensory leakage, inferences, and similar ordinary mechanisms, but carefully described cases such as Pierre Janet’s (1859–1947) patient Mme. B (the pseudonym of Le´ onie Leboulanger; Janet, 1885/1968a, 1886/1968b) or the extraordinary displays while mesmerized of the brothers Didier cannot be so easily explained away (cf. Gauld, 1992). Thus, the conclusion by Dingwall (1967–1968) regarding a possible connection between psi phenomena and hypnosis that “[A]n attitude of suspended judgment both as regards the past and the present is perhaps the most judicial (V. 1, p. 297)” is not far fetched, especially when controlled psi experiments generally suggest that hypnosis may be a context that facilitates psi phenomena (Carden˜a, 2010). In the early 19th century, Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge (1782–1844) categorized six levels or degrees of the phenomenology of magnetic somnambulism: waking state with increased warmth, half-sleep, “inner darkness” (sleep proper and insensitivity), “inner clarity” (perception through the body), “self-contemplation” (the ability to accurately see one’s body and those of others), and “universal clarity” (perception unconstrained by time or space). He maintained that only a few people, such as the famous seeress of Prevorst, could attain the last three degrees (Kluge, 1811; see also Ellenberger, 1970, pp. 78–80). Current research on hypnotic phenomena has partly validated this categorization in the sense that only a minority of individuals (i.e., highly hypnotizables) spontaneously report transcendent experiences, and only when they feel that they are in self-evaluated “very deep hypnosis,” whereas they experience mostly body sensation and image changes during “light hypnosis” and disembodied and imaginal experiences during “middle hypnosis” (Carden˜a, 2005; Carden˜a, Lehmann, Jo¨nsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007). Other authors recorded interesting somnambulistic manifestations in their mesmeric participants. In France, the mesmerist Joseph Philippe Franc¸ois Deleuze (1753–1835) wrote in his book Histoire Critique du Magne´tisme Animal that somnambulists could recover the “recollection of things that were forgotten during wakefulness” (Deleuze, 1813, p. 176). Also, events taking place during somnambulism were forgotten when the person was in his or her normal state, which Deleuze believed was an indication that “the two states are unfamiliar to one another,” and that there were “two separate beings” (p. 176). He mentioned a case in which a woman in the somnambulistic state was opposed to the desire of her normal self to work in the theatre. Answering a question during her somnambulistic state about why she wanted to be in the theatre, she said, “It is not me, it is her . . . she is mad” (p. 177).
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There was also a discussion of what we would refer today as examples of state-specific memory. In France, Alexandre Bertrand (1795–1831) referred to the phenomenon as “one of the most constant properties” of the somnambulistic state (Bertrand, 1826, p. 409). In England, William Gregory (1803–1858) wrote as follows in his Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism: As a general rule . . . the sleeper does not remember, after waking, what he may have seen, felt, tasted, smelled, heard, spoken, or done, during his sleep; but when next put to sleep, he recollects perfectly all that has occurred, not only in the last sleep, but in all former sleeps, and, as in the ordinary state, with greater or less accuracy, although usually very accurately indeed. He lives, in fact, a distinct life in the sleep, and has, what is called, a double or divided consciousness . . . (Gregory, 1851, p. 82)
In later years, the leading English researcher of hypnosis and psychical phenomena Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) conducted more systematic studies of hypnotic state-specific memory. He described one test when his subject was hypnotized: In this condition he was able to read . . . After reading a paragraph . . . he was then woke [sic] completely as usual. But only one word of what he had read could be recalled, and he was very uncertain about that; he recollected distinctly, however, a paragraph that he had recently read in the normal state, and felt satisfied that that was the last one read. Again hypnotized, he had full recollection of the paragraph read in the hypnotic state with open eyes. (Gurney, 1888, p. 10)
Nowadays, hypnosis research has generally found that when controlling for implicit and explicit suggestions, amnesia is not a typical outcome of a hypnotic induction (e.g., Laurence & Perry, 1988). Gurney (1884) also mentioned two hypnotic states, an alert and a deep hypnotic one. He believed that the identification of these states was difficult because (E)ach state admits of many degrees and the characteristics of either of them may be only slightly or only very transiently presented; and in the second place, unless special means are adopted, it is very easy to mistake the alert state for normal waking, and the deep state for sleep. (Gurney, 1884, p. 62)
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According to Gurney (1884), individuals in the alert state may look vacant, the state resembling that of the usual consciousness, the eyes could be open and the person would be sensitive to pain but particularly open to suggestion. Gurney said that the deep stage could escape detection because it “ . . . is liable to be confounded with a contiguous condition, namely, the genuine hypnotic sleep into which it tends to merge. It resembles that condition in the fact that the eyelids are closed; that, if one of them be forcibly raised, the eyeball is found to be rolled upwards; in the general insensibility to pain and to ordinary modes of stimulation . . . If the ‘subject’ be left to himself, he will have no opportunity to manifest its characteristics, but . . . will soon lose consciousness and individuality in profound slumber. With some ‘subjects,’ moreover, the invasion of mental torpor is so rapid that it might be hard to fix and retain them in the genuine deep stage . . . . But many others, if taken in time, after their eyes are closed and they have become insensible to pain, but before sleep has intervened, will prove quite capable of rational conversation; they are mentally awake, even when their bodies are almost past movement . . . . The state is, however, harder to sustain at an even level than the alert one, owing to a stronger and more continuous tendency to lapse into a deeper condition.” (p. 64)
Other observations documented changes of personality of different sorts. This was the case of a patient named Isabella: When in the state of what has been termed sleepwalking, or somnambulism, the patient always talks of herself as of another person. In the Mesmeric state she calls herself Martha, and she talks of Isabella (her real name) as of a totally different individual. When asked about the complaints with which Isabella was troubled, she described them with what seemed to be the greatest accuracy, and indicated the most suitable remedies. (Lang, 1843, p. 108)
Other changes were documented in a case reported by Gregory (1851): When the sleeper has become fully asleep, so as to answer questions readily without waking, there is almost always observed a remarkable change in the countenance, the manner, and the voice. On falling asleep at first, he looks, perhaps, drowsy and heavy . . . But when spoken to, he usually brightens up, and, although the eyes be closed, yet the expression becomes highly intelligent . . . a person of a much more elevated character than the same sleeper seems to be when awake . . . In the highest stages of the magnetic sleep, the countenance often acquires the most lovely expression
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. . . As to the voice, I have never seen one person in the true magnetic sleep, who did not speak in a tone quite distinct from the ordinary voice of the sleeper . . . softer and more gentle, well corresponding to the elevated and mild expression of the face . . . For the sleeper, in the magnetic state, has a consciousness quite separate and distinct from his ordinary consciousness. He is, in fact, if not a different individual, yet the same individual in a different and distinct phase of his being; and that phase, a higher one. (pp. 80–82)
These interpretations of mesmeric and hypnotic phenomena would be the basis for some later theories of double and multiple personalities, as well as for the notion of a superior self described in the writings of Myers, James, and others.2 There were also examples of suppression of physical sensations through mesmeric procedures. This was clear in James Esdaile’s (1808– 1859) discussions of pain control, as seen in his book Mesmerism in India (1846). In his view, “in the mesmeric trance the most severe and protracted surgical operations can be performed, without the patients being sensible of pain” (p. 271), although some of his descriptions have been recently qualified (Chaves, 1997).
Mediumship Besides putative exceptional powers, some of the anomalous experiences reported by gifted participants during magnetic/hypnotic sessions 2
Even before mesmerism, there have been discussions of such phenomena as alternate consciousnesses and psychogenic amnesia (Gauld, 1992), and from early mesmerism onward it was proposed that mesmeric and—later—hypnotic techniques provided access to one or more selves that manifest different characteristics from the normal, waking self or identity (Crabtree, 1993; Ellenberger, 1970). Thus, the clinical phenomena that were first discussed under the umbrella of such terms as hysteria, double or multiple personality and, more recently, dissociative identity disorder became associated with hypnotic phenomena and techniques. This is evident, for instance, in the works of Pierre Janet (1889), Breuer and Freud (1895/1955), and many other pioneers of clinical psychology and psychiatry (Ellenberger, 1970; see also Spiegel & Carden˜a, 1991). The relationship between hypnosis, suggestion, and identity multiplicity has been contentious. Suffice it to say here that although some authors have criticized the reality of identity multiplicity or fragmentation as mere cultural creation or, worse, iatrogenic suggestion, research has overwhelmingly shown a relationship between dissociation (including identity fragmentation), exposure to trauma, and hypnotic capacity (for a review, see Carden˜a & Gleaves, 2007), although this relationship seems to occur only in a subgroup of highly hypnotizable individuals (Terhune, Carden˜a, & Lindgren, 2011).
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mentioned contact with angels and departed spirits, and there were some who interpreted these literally (Billot, 1839; Cahagnet, 1851; cf. Gauld, 1992, p. 3). One such mesmeric subject was an English woman called Emma. According to the report: Emma . . . began to speak frequently of spiritual objects and beings. I soon perceived, that one being, under whose influence she seemed to be, and of whom she frequently spoke, had been most nearly related to me, while in this world, but she had departed this life for about ten years when the first of these trances occurred. Emma always says that this ‘lady’ . . . ‘helps her’ in all serious cases of illness, and the like, but not in mere secular, or trifling cases. (Haddock, 1851, p. 187)
Mediumship, the experience and belief that an individual may be able to receive or be the medium for communications from spiritual entities, is an ancient and nearly universal phenomenon (Oesterreich, 1974/1921), and has been discussed in terms of dissociation and disruptions of an integrated identity. As argued by Podmore (1902), there seemed to be a connection between some of the manifestations of somnambulism and the performances of mediums from the movement referred to as “modern spiritualism.” There was a short step from the experimental metaphysics of some magnetizers to the beginning of the spiritualist movement by the mid–19th century, which proposed that discarnate entities, especially the deceased, could communicate with the living in various ways. Although physical manifestations such as levitating tables were an innovation of this movement, “trance” mediumship, in which a gifted individual is supposed to communicate with the dead after entering some kind of altered state of consciousness (ASC), can partly trace its roots to mesmeric/hypnotic theories and practices; accordingly, historian Nicole Edelman (1995) has stated that mediums were both “the daughters and the sisters of somnambulists” (p. 9). From the beginnings of modern spiritualism in the United States, mediums presented various unusual behaviors. Many of them, presumably under the influence of discarnate spirits, talked at length about the other world and about a variety of moral, philosophical, social, and scientific topics (e.g., Hatch, 1858). Others saw spirits, had impressions, personified the dead, and produced writing. Furthermore, there were mediums that painted, performed music, and sang. In their book Spiritualism (1853) Judge John W. Edmonds (1799–1874) and physician George T. Dexter discussed many of these manifestations. Commenting on the automatic writing produced by Dexter, Edmonds stated in the introduction of the book that some of the messages received came
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from the scientists Swedenborg and Bacon (presumably Sir Francis). He wrote: I call attention to the marked difference in thought and expression between . . . papers purporting to be written by Bacon or Sweedenborg [sic], and to the remarkable resemblance between the style of each in those papers, and that which characterized the writings of each when on earth . . . . There is something peculiar about the handwriting. All that purports to come from Bacon is always in the same handwriting; so it is with Sweedenborg [sic] . . . when he is under the influence, he writes several different kinds of handwriting, and some of them more rapidly than he can write his own. This he can not do when he is not under the influence; and I have never seen any person that could, in his normal condition, write with such rapidity, at one sitting, four or five different kinds of handwriting, each distinctly marked, and having and always retaining its peculiar characteristic. (Edmonds & Dexter, 1853, Vol. 1, p. 50)
It was common for mediums to present communications from a variety of persons, some of which were famous individuals. In addition to the above mentioned communications from Swedenborg and Bacon, there were many other examples. In Henry Spicer’s Sights and Sounds (1853) there was mention of communications from such individuals as Washington (pp. 145–146) and Calvin (pp. 147–148). But there were also many mediumistic performances representing the action of common individuals, as well as ancient characters, as seen in the case of a purported Egyptian spirit (Berry, 1876, pp. 193–217). Even more exotic were the communications of spirits claiming to live on other planets, such as those the playwright Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) claimed to receive from planet Jupiter (Sardou, 1858). Impersonation in verbal or written communications was sometimes accompanied by apparent changes of mannerisms and personality. In one such example recorded by Sophia de Morgan (1809–1892), it was stated that the medium’s “voice and manner differed much when under different influences” (De Morgan, 1863, p. 90). Alterations of consciousness in mediums were commented upon by many. In one case the writer stated that “nervous hebetude is distinctly present, the operator is more or less taciturn and irritable, and the intellectual faculties are torpid” (Fairfield, 1875, p. 24). Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) wrote as follows about his cousin, a 15½-year-old medium he studied: “S. W. grew very pale, became cataleptic, drew several deep breaths, and began to speak . . . .” (Jung, 1902/1983, p. 19; see also Ellenberger, 1991). It is common to find mention of “trance” throughout
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the spiritualistic and psychical research literatures to refer to a variety of apparent ASC while mediums produced their phenomena, but from the beginnings it was noticed that not all mediums showed this feature. For example, commenting on their own mediumship, Edmonds and Dexter (1855, p. xviii) pointed out that the first was never “unconscious” while the second frequently was. Some of the communications appeared to present information that could be verified as related to the ostensible discarnate communicator. An early example referred to communications from the writer’s wife: The communications were perfectly characteristic of herself and when made in writing exactly corresponded with her original chirography. Besides on one occasion, she addressed me by a name she was in the habit of calling me, which name I had not thought of for years, and I did not at first recognise it. (Cooper, 1867, p. 75)
For our purposes, the paranormality or not of some of these communications is not relevant, although skeptical accounts have not explained away successfully the most spectacular and well-researched cases of some mediums, among them Leonora E. Piper (1857–1950) and Gladys Osborne Leonard (1881–1968; for overviews see Sage, 1904; Smith, 1964). Consequently, we focus on other aspects of their mediumship. Mrs. Piper showed a variety of alterations of consciousness and corresponding phenomena (Sidgwick, 1915). Psychical researcher Richard Hodgson (1855–1905) observed what he described as an initial stage in which Mrs. Piper was “dreamily conscious of the sitter, and dreamily conscious of ‘spirits’” (Hodgson, 1898, p. 397). This was followed by a “fuller and clearer consciousness—we may call it her subliminal consciousness— which is in direct relation . . . not so much with our ordinary physical world as with ‘another world’” (p. 397). Then came a state in which he thought the “subliminal consciousness (i.e., the subconscious mind) withdraws completely from the control of her body and takes her supraliminal consciousness (i.e., the conscious mind) with it” (p. 398). At the end it seemed to Hodgson that Mrs. Piper returned to her normal consciousness in a reverse order of the previous states. Hodgson wrote: But in passing out of trance, the stages are usually of longer duration than when she enters it. She frequently repeats statements apparently made to her by the “communicators” while she is in the purely “subliminal” stage, as though she was a “spirit” controlling her body but not in full possession of it,
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and, after her supraliminal consciousness has begun to surge up into view, she frequently has visions apparently of the distant or departing “communicators.” (pp. 400–401)
In a very thorough account of Mrs. Leonard’s mediumship, Una Lady Troubridge (1887–1963) described four different states of consciousness of Mrs. Leonard: (a) “normal,” (b) slight drowsiness associated with automatic writing, (c) a “trance,” including analgesia and amnesia and in which she manifested a different personality, and (d) a state in which she impersonated deceased individuals. The amnesia in the latter two states was not always present or sustained (Troubridge, 1922, p. 357), resembling spirit possession (Frigerio, 1989). Also, sometimes Mrs. Leonard’s body seemed to lose all muscle tone, as has been observed in various ritual contexts, including Balinese dancers possessed by a spirit (Belo, 1960) and among a subgroup of highly hypnotizable and dissociative individuals (Barrett, 1990; Carden˜ a, 1989). Troubridge also described how the medium Stanislawa Tomczyk initially interpreted her control Moyenne as being an inner part of her personality before concluding that she was a spirit and mentions that it was common to find that the mediums’ controls were disinhibited and undersocialized as compared with the mediums’ regular personalities, as exemplified by the “alter” Margaret of Doris Fischer and the Feda control of Mrs. Leonard (Troubridge, 1922). Trance mediumship was one of the phenomena studied during the latter part of the 19th century that contributed to the development of ideas of the subconscious mind and of dissociation (Alvarado, Machado, Zangari, & Zingrone, 2007; Crabtree, 1993). Two important examples of this were the ideas of Pierre Janet and of classical scholar and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901). Janet discussed mediumship in his classic work L’Automatisme Psychologique (1889) to support the concept of dissociation. He believed that the phenomena of hypnotized individuals and of mediums were similar, showing the “disaggregation of personal perception and . . . the formation of several personalities that developed both successively as well as simultaneously” (Janet, 1889, p. 413). Furthermore, probably following J. M. Charcot’s (1825–1893) ideas of the link between hypnosis and psychopathology, Janet thought that mediumship was related to pathology because mediums showed phenomena similar to those shown by hysterics (e.g., partial anesthesias, unconscious acts), and “nervous accidents” (e.g., tremors and nervous crises). In contrast, Myers did not equate mediumship and pathology and defined it in part as a manifestation of the subliminal (or subconscious) mind. He believed that the utterances of trance mediums “constitute one
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of many classes of phenomena which occur in sane subjects without entering the normal waking consciousness or forming part of the habitual chain of memory” (Myers, 1890, p. 437). Myers saw mediumship as one of several psychological processes that illustrated the idea that the subliminal mind communicated with the supraliminal (or conscious) mind through a variety of automatism using sensory and motor means (e.g., hallucinations, speaking; Myers, 1884, 1885, 1889). Regardless of the differences between Janet and Myers, their work on mediumship shows that the phenomenon was part of the development of the constructs of the subconscious mind and of dissociation, a position that mediumship shared with hysteria and hypnosis, among other phenomena.
Into the 20th Century A systematic study of “debatable phenomena designated by such terms as mesmeric, psychical, and Spiritualistic . . . without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry” would be initiated by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) at the end of the 19th century (Society for Psychical Research, 1882). The foremost members of this society continued doing research on mediumship and hypnosis, both with regard to the nature of these phenomena as well as their possible relationship with potential parapsychological phenomena such as telepathy and precognition (Gauld, 1968; see Luke, Volume 2). One of their major works was Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, & Podmore, 1886), which presented a meticulous account of the phenomenology of hallucinations in the population at large and of how they provide consistent evidence for some type of anomalous transfer of information. Contemporary research has supported their findings at least with regard to the phenomenal experience of hallucinations among nonclinical samples (Aleman & Larøi, 2008, pp. 61–71). Although Edmund Gurney died fairly young, F. W. H. Myers continued working prolifically on all of these areas and his thoughts culminated in his posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903; see also Alvarado, 2004). Before the book was published, Myers had argued: I suggest . . . that the stream of consciousness in which we habitually live is not the only consciousness which exists in connection with our organism. Our habitual or empirical consciousness may consist of a mere selection from a multitude of thoughts and sensations, of which some at least are equally conscious with those that we empirically know. (Myers, 1892, p. 301)
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In articles and in Human Personality Myers presented a broad theory to explain apparent disparate phenomena such as dissociation, hypnosis, creativity, parapsychological phenomena, genius, and altered states of consciousness. He advanced the idea of a subliminal mind (which he defined as anything outside of the margins of ordinary consciousness) that also gave evidence of a link from our self to a larger Self, a concept that William James (1842–1910) would discuss as “consciousness at large.” Myers wrote: I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,—revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford it full manifestation. (1903, Vol. 1, p. 15)
Although Myers’s work was largely overshadowed by that of James, it has been recently championed by a discussion and update of his work in the light of contemporary psychology (Kelly et al., 2007). It is to the towering figure of William James that we now turn. He is widely acknowledged as one of the most important psychologists of all time. His Principles of Psychology (James, 1890) provided a comprehensive summary of most of what was known in psychology at the time, with a philosophical depth and literary elegance that remain unmatched. James’s attention to dissociation was evident in his early writings about Mrs. Piper and automatic writing in which he suggested the action of a secondary consciousness directing the phenomena. (James, 1886, 1889). In the case of a 21-year-old student that produced writing with his hand and with a planchette, James wrote: Here . . . we have the consciousness of a subject split into two parts, one of which expresses itself through the mouth, and the other through the hand, whilst both are in communication with the ear. The mouth-consciousness is ignorant of all that the hand suffers or does; the hand-consciousness is ignorant of pin-pricks indicted upon other parts of the body. (James, 1889, p. 551)
Regarding multiplicity, he wrote: “It must be admitted . . . that in certain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them” (1890, Vol. 1, p. 206). In the Principles, besides automatism he also discussed hypnotism, imagination, the mind–body problem (his discussion against jumping
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from neurological correlation to causation should be obligatory reading in neuroscience courses), and an extraordinary chapter on the stream of thought (later referred to as the stream of consciousness) that influenced not only psychological thought but literary practice through the “stream of consciousness” literary style of one of James’s students, Gertrude Stein, and of James Joyce and others [see Cousins, this volume]. It is, however, another of James’s masterpieces that has proven to be the cornerstone of the scientific studies of ASC. His The Varieties of Religious Experience provided the most cited justification for the study of alterations in consciousness: Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . at a touch they are there in all completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (James, 1902/1961, p. 298)
But even before his treatise on religious experience, in his 1896 Lowell lectures he had discussed dreams, hypnosis, automatism, “hysteria,” multiple personality (nowadays dissociative identity disorder), and a number of other alterations of consciousness (Taylor, 1983). Besides Myers and James, many if not most of the pioneers in clinical psychology/psychiatry at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th were very much involved in the study of altered consciousness. To give just some examples, besides his foundational work on dissociation, Pierre Janet (1926) provided a thorough account of various ASC of some of his patients including Madeleine, whom he treated for 22 years and who experienced mystical transports and other intense emotional events. The Swiss professor of psychology The´odore Flournoy (1854– 1920) gave a detailed case analysis of the medium He´le`ne Smith (1861– 1929, pseudonym of Catherine Elise Mu¨ller) who, among other things, experienced visiting the planet Mars (Flournoy, 1900). He described the creative abilities of the subconscious, particularly as it was expressed via mediumship. His work is also an exemplar of the influence of the psychosocial environment on subconscious creations, including the effects of suggestion and surrounding beliefs, topics of much concern in the study of “hysteria” and hypnosis during the late 19th century (Alvarado, 1991).
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In addition to Flournoy, other students of mediumship contributed to develop the idea of the dramatizing powers of the medium’s subconscious mind (Alvarado et al., 2007). This was the case of studies with Mrs. Piper (e.g., Sidgwick, 1915; Tanner, 1910). Eleanor Sidgwick (1845–1936) wrote about her: I think it is probably a state of self-induced hypnosis in which her hypnotic self personates different characters either consciously and deliberately, or unconsciously and believing herself to be the person she represents, and sometimes probably in a state of consciousness intermediate between the two. In the trance state her normal powers transcend in some directions those of her ordinary waking self . . . . And further—what makes her case of great importance—she can obtain, imperfectly and for the most part fragmentarily, telepathic impressions. (Sidgwick, 1915, p. 330)
In Italy, psychiatrist Enrico Morselli (1852–1929) argued that mediums were persons showing an anomalous psychic constitution, or, at least, on the extreme gradation of the scale of normal variability regarding the coalescence of the psychic elements. In mediums this coalescence is . . . labile to the extreme . . . with a facility for personal disaggregation. (Morselli, 1908, Vol. 1, p. 93)
Later, French psychical researcher Rene´ Sudre (1880–1968) discussed what he referred to as prosopopesis or the nonconscious tendency to impersonate, as seen in mediumship, as well as in hypnosis, possession and cases of double and multiple personality (Sudre, 1926). Relatedly, a dramatic aspect of spirit possession in other cultures was discussed by Me´traux (1955). Besides them, many other eminent psychological clinicians and researchers of the time from various countries took a keen interest in dissociation, hypnosis, depersonalization, and similar areas, but the ascent of psychoanalysis within clinical practice and behaviorism within academic psychology condemned the study of ASC to oblivion until a few decades ago (Spiegel & Carden˜a, 1991). There were, however, a few exceptions here and there to this exile. Thus, despite Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) dominant interest in the unconscious causes of symptomatology, his and Joseph Breuer’s (1842–1925) Studies on Hysteria (1895/1955) contains extraordinary descriptions of altered, “hypnoid states,” and Freud would also discuss other alterations of consciousness such as his own dissociative episodes (Freud, 1936), and a case of demonic possession (Freud, 1923).
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There were also exceptions within academia such as the short-lived but extraordinarily fruitful research by Clark L. Hull (1884–1952; 1933) of hypnosis, although it was clear that even he was primarily interested in behavior rather than consciousness. After the impressive efforts of both the Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research, Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) led an impressive program of investigation of parapsychological phenomena at Duke University, although, perhaps because of his original training in botany, he did not seem to be as interested in the alterations of consciousness that have long been associated with them (cf. Alvarado, 1998). With regard to the neurosciences, some of the most eminent minds during the first half of the 20th century devoted considerable time to researching altered consciousness. Santiago Ramo´n y Cajal (1852–1934), 1906 Nobel prizewinner and a towering figure for his work on the neuron, did research on hypnosis, mediumship, and parapsychological phenomena, although unfortunately a book he had written on the subject got lost during the Spanish Civil War (Sala et al., 2008). Hans Berger (1873–1941) created the EEG to try to obtain an “objective” measurement of possible telepathic communications, which his sister seemed to experience when he had an unexpected and serious accident (Millet, 2001). Charles Richet (1850–1935), another Nobel laureate for his work on physiology, devoted a substantial part of his life to research hypnosis, mediumship, and psi phenomena (Alvarado, 2008). We will also mention briefly a tendency outside of both the academic and clinical spheres (some therapists such as C. G. Jung were clearly influenced by a non-academic visionary tradition). For lack of an accepted name, we can refer to it as the goal to radically change or expand one’s ordinary state of consciousness. Although some religious and esoteric practices such as alchemy have had this goal (Cavendish, 1967), the period covered by this paper also includes other attempts, some of them still influential, to “expand” or “awaken” or, to paraphrase William Blake’s (1757–1827) line, cleanse the doors of perception. This “cleansing” typically includes questioning the absolute value of rationality and the “givenness” of reality as presented by the senses, an idea present in Plato and recurrent throughout history and in various places such as American transcendentalism. To achieve this goal, various esoteric traditions have advanced practices to alter one’s state of consciousness and, at times, to “derange the senses” to use the phrase of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891; cf. Cavendish, 1967). Besides the use of psychoactive drugs, covered in other chapters, it is worth mentioning other proposals to achieve this altered consciousness.
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For instance, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) is not only a set of beliefs about spiritual matters but also includes a number of specific physical exercises (eurythmy) and pedagogical practices, some of which are currently practiced in the Waldorf educational system (cf. Ahern, 2009). Also influential in some circles is the very controversial George Gurdjieff (1866–1949) whose “The Work” also proposed a set of movements and psychological practices to uncover one’s automatic cognitions and become more mindful. More recently, Charles Tart (1986), while discarding much of the metaphysical baggage of Gudjieff, has discussed his valuable ideas on the automaticity of the mind in the context of meditation and contemporary psychology. Nonetheless, any history of psychology will show that consideration of ASC as a fundamental aspect of the human experience was to a large degree relegated to the academic dustbin during a great part of the 20th century. Although the study of ASC has remerged during recent decades [see Beischel, Rock, & Krippner, this volume], it may be still some time before the more comprehensive view of reality of such thinkers as Myers, James, and yes, even Steiner gets a full hearing.
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Gregory, W. (1851). Letters to a candid inquirer, on animal magnetism. Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea. Gurney, E. (1884). The stages of hypnotism. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 2, 61–72. Gurney, E. (1888). Recent experiments in hypnotism. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 5, 3–17. Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., & Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the living (2 vols.). London: Tru¨bner. Haddock, J. W. (1851). Somnolism and psycheism; Or, the science of the soul and the phenomena of nervation (2nd ed., rev.). London: James S. Hodson. Hatch, C. L. V. (1858). Discourses on religion, morals, philosophy and metaphysics (Vol. 1). New York: B. F. Hatch. Hodgson, R. (1898). A further record of observations of certain phenomena of trance. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 13, 284–582. Hull, C. L. (1933). Hypnosis and suggestibility: An experimental approach. New York: D. Appleton-Century. James, W. (1886). Report of the Committee on Mediumistic Phenomena. Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1, 102–106. James, W. (1889). Notes on automatic writing. Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1, 548–564. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (2 vols.). New York: Henry Holt. James, W. (1961). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York: Collier. (Original work published 1902). Janet, P. (1889). L’automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expe´rimentale sur les formes infe´rieures de l’activite´ humaine [The psychological automatism: An experimental psychology essay on the inferior forms of human activity]. Paris: Fe´lix Alcan. Janet, P. (1926). De l’angoisse a l’extase. E´tudes sur les croyances et les sentiments [From anxiety to ecstasy. Studies on beliefs and feelings]. Paris: Fe´lix Alcan. Janet, P. (1968a). Report on some phenomena of somnambulism. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 4, 124–131. (Original work published 1885) Janet, P. (1968b). Second observation of sleep provoked from a distance and the mental suggestion during the somnambulistic state. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 4, 258–267. (Original work published 1886). Jung, C. G. (1983). On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena. In C. G. Jung, Psychiatric studies (pp. 3–88). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1902). Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M., & Greyson, B. (2007). Irreducible mind: Toward a psychology for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kluge, C. A. F. (1811). Versuch eine Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus, als Heilmittel [Attempt a depiction of animal magnetism, as a remedy]. Berlin: C. Salfeld. Lang, W. (1843). Mesmerism; its history, phenomena and practice. Edinburgh: Fraser.
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Laurence, J. R., & Perry, C. (1988). Hypnosis, will & memory: A psycho-legal history. New York: Guilford. Mesmer, F. A. (1779). Me´moire sur la de´couverte du magne´tisme animal [Memories on the discovery of animal magnetism]. Geneve: P. Fr. Didot le jeune, Librairie Imprimeur de monsieur. Me´traux, A. (1955). Dramatic elements in ritual possession. Diogenes, 11, 18–36. Millett, D. (2001). Hans Berger: From psychic energy to the EEG. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 44, 522–542. Moreira-Almeida, A., Lotufo Neto, F., & Carden˜ a, E. (2008). Comparison between Brazilian spiritist mediumship and dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 196, 420–424. Morselli, E. (1908). Psicologia e “spiritismo:” Impressioni e note critiche sui fenomeni medianici di Eusapia Paladino [Psychology and “spiritism”: Impressions and critical notes on the mediumnistic phenomena of Eusapia Palladino] (2 vols.). Turin: Fratelli Bocca. Myers, F. W. H. (1884). On a telepathic explanation of some socalled spiritualistic phenomena: Part I. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 2, 217–237. Myers, F. W. H. (1885). Automatic writing.—II. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 3, 1–63. Myers, F. W. H. (1889). Automatic writing.—IV.—The daemon of Socrates. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 5, 522–547. Myers, F. W. H. (1890). A record of observations of certain phenomena of trance (1). Introduction. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 6, 436–442. Myers, F. W. H. (1892). The subliminal consciousness: Chapter I. General characteristics of subliminal messages. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 7, 298–327. Myers, F. W. H. (1903). Human personality and its survival of bodily death (2 vols.). London: Longmans, Green. Oesterreich, T. K. (1974). Possession and exorcism among primitive races, in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times. New York: Causeway. (Original work published 1921). Pattie, F. A. (1994). Mesmer and animal magnetism: A chapter in the history of medicine. Hamilton, NY: Edmonston. Paulet, J. J. (1784). Mesmer justifie´ [Mesmer justified] (new ed.). Constance, Switzerland: n.p. Peter, B. (2005). Gassner’s exorcism—not Mesmer’s magnetism—is the real predecessor of modern hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 1–12. Podmore, F. (1902). Modern spiritualism: A history and a criticism (2 vols.). London: Methuen. Rosen, G. (1969). Madness in society: Chapters in the historical sociology of mental illness. New York: Harper.
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Sage, M. (1904). Mrs. Piper and the Society for Psychical Research. New York: Scott-Thaw. Sala, J., Carden˜a, E., Holgado, M. C., An˜ez, C., Pe´rez, P., Perin˜a´n, R., & Capafons, A. (2008). The contributions of Ramo´n y Cajal and other Spanish authors to hypnosis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 56, 361–372. Sardou, V. (1858). Des habitations de la plane`te Jupiter [On the housing in the planet Jupiter]. Revue spirite, 1, 223–232. Sidgwick, E. (1915). A contribution to the study of the psychology of Mrs. Piper’s trance phenomena. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 28, 1–657. Smith, S. (1964). The mediumship of Mrs. Leonard. New Hyde Park, NY: University Books. Society for Psychical Research. (1882). Objects of the society. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1, 1–4. Spicer, H. (1853). Sights and sounds: The mystery of the day. London: Thomas Bosworth. Spiegel, D., & Carden˜a, E. (1991). Disintegrated experience: The dissociative disorders revisited. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 366–378. Sudre, R. (1926). Introduction a` la me´tapsychique humaine. Paris: Payot. Tanner, A. (1910). Studies in spiritism. New York: D. Appleton. Tart, C. T. (1986). Waking up: Overcoming the obstacles to human potential. Boston: New Science Library. Taylor, E. (1983). William James on exceptional mental states. The 1896 Lowell lectures. New York: Scribner. Terhune, D. B., Carden˜a, E., & Lindgren, M. (2011). Dissociative tendencies and individual differences in high hypnotic suggestibility. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 16, 113–135. Troubridge, U. L. (1922). The modus operandi in so-called mediumistic trance. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 32, 344–378. Van Ommeren, M. V., Sharma, B., Komproe, I., Sharma, G. K., Carden˜a, E., de Jong, J. T., Poudyal, B., & Makaju, R. (2001). Trauma and loss as determinants of medically unexplained epidemic illness in a Bhutanese refugee camp. Psychological Medicine, 31, 1259–1267. Zacharias, G. (1980). The satanic cult. London: Allen & Unwin.
CHAPTER 6
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness: A 50-Year Retrospective Julie Beischel, Adam J. Rock, and Stanley Krippner Introduction Although consciousness in its various senses has received attention as a construct for more than three millennia, in modern psychology altered states of consciousness (ASC) have often been deemed pathological or anomalous and outside of conventional Western psychological frameworks. Eastern traditions, however, have developed intricate vocabularies for describing these inner episodes of altered consciousness and spiritual experiences and assign them a deeper grasp on reality. The purpose of this chapter is to survey the preceding 50 years of research on altering consciousness. Using Kuhn’s (1962) perspectives of scientific paradigms (i.e., the systemic features of scientific fields that guide research and provide models for the solution of research problems), we will highlight how the field has been reconceptualized during this time. Kuhn suggested that science approaches a topic like consciousness from the standpoint of the prevailing paradigm—in this case, materialism— until evidence for alternative interpretations reaches a critical mass and new explanatory models take hold. For example, experiences of ASC viewed as pathological by the existing psychological paradigm of the 1940s and ’50s were eventually embraced as normative experiences exemplifying heightened awareness, transpersonal development, and even spiritual transcendence by the turn of the century. This shift is evident in the publication during recent decades of texts that treat ASC as normal and healthy experiences—though uncommon
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in some cases. For example, The Psychology of Consciousness by G. William Farthing, published in 1992, serves as a textbook for studying consciousness and discusses ASC including dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelic drug use. In addition, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), published by the American Psychological Association (APA), dedicates entire chapters to ASC including hallucinations, synesthesia, and lucid dreaming as well as out-of-body, near-death, anomalous healing, and mystical experiences. Also published by the APA, Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists by Imants Barusˇs (2003) continued to explore ASC including “trance,” hypnosis, psychedelic, transcendental, and death-related experiences. These and similar developments over the last half century demonstrate a shift in focus from altered consciousness being viewed as abnormal or pathological to a scientific landscape that embraces these experiences. This chapter will briefly discuss phenomena of altered consciousness studied during the past five decades including meditation, hypnosis, near-death and out-of-body experiences, hallucinations and hallucinogenic drugs, nonlucid and lucid dreaming, and mystical experiences as well as theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding the definitions, language, and contexts associated with these topics. However, a truly in-depth discussion of any of these individual experiences or factors is beyond the scope of this chapter, though every effort was made to reference additional materials that an interested reader may wish to review. In addition, it should be noted that many of these topics were studied over several decades (and continue to be investigated today) and the decision to include a phenomenon in a certain decade was based on the timing of the initial work, a key discovery, or the majority of research happening at that time. Through this discussion, our retrospective look at research on altering consciousness may suggest new directions of inquiry including further empirical, phenomenological, neurological, and psychological studies of ASC in the upcoming 50 years.
The 1960s: Formative Years The Language of Altered States In contrast to the earlier paradigmatic framework of pathology, psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig (1966) positively characterized the term altered states of consciousness as
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any mental state(s), induced by various physiological, psychological, or pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the individual) as representing a sufficient deviation in subjective experience or psychological functioning from certain general norms for that individual during alert, waking consciousness. (p. 225)
Ludwig also delineated an assortment of general characteristics associated with ASC: alterations in discursive thinking, emotional expression, significance or meaning, subjective time, body image perception, a sense of ineffability, reduced volitional control, hypersuggestibility, and rejuvenation. Nevertheless, one limitation of Ludwig’s definition is that it neglected to operationalize a “sufficient deviation in subjective experience” (1966, p. 225). Further, the “general norms” considered to be indicative of ordinary waking consciousness were not elucidated. Indeed, the “general norms” for one individual or culture might differ considerably relative to the “general norms” of another individual or culture. Research from the 1960s was covered in psychologist Charles Tart’s seminal volume Altered States of Consciousness, which reflected the burgeoning multidisciplinary interest in the field of altering consciousness. Tart (1969a) defined an altered state as a “qualitative shift in his pattern of mental functioning, that is, he feels not just a quantitative shift (more or less alert, more or less visual imagery, sharper or duller, etc.), but also that some quality or qualities of his mental processes (e.g., perception of time, fluctuations in body image) are different” (p. 1). The usefulness of his definition is limited, however, because he neglected to stipulate how prominent the qualitative shift must be, or how many qualities of one’s mental processes must be different, in order for an altered state to be inferred. Tart’s volume also illustrated the importance of the psychophysiology of ASC and exemplified a wide range of phenomenal experiences (e.g., hypnagogic states, dreams, meditation, hypnosis, psychedelic drug use).
Out-of-Body Experiences During an out-of-body experience (OBE), an individual experiences him- or herself outside of the physical body, often floating or traveling away from the body. The prevalence of OBEs ranges from 10% to more than 80% depending on the population in question (e.g., general, students, certain personality types, groups with parapsychological interests).
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Each OBE is as unique as the experient, but the majority of individuals who have had an OBE report having more than one as well as the experience of viewing the physical body from above. Less common features include: a nonphysical “body,” a ropelike connection between the physical body and the location of the self, and the ability to observe verifiable information (reviewed in Alvarado, 2000). These experiences result in a change in attitude regarding life after death and a reduction in fear of death in the majority of experients (e.g., Osis, 1979); it should be mentioned that some of these OBE reports happened in the context of near-death experiences (see below). Laboratory studies of the psychophysiological correlates of OBEs most often employed participants, including Robert Monroe and Ingo Swann, who could enter the state on demand. For example, Tart found that Monroe’s OBEs involved electroencephalogram (EEG) patterns indicative of Stage 1 sleep (e.g., few eye movements; 1967) and transitions between Stages 1 and 2 (1969b). Summary
The early study of ASC suffered some degree of definitional “fuzziness,” though some efforts at operationalization, including the LintonLangs questionnaire (Linton & Langs, 1962) were attempted. At that stage, the necessary and sufficient conditions for ASC to be inferred had not been formulated, but ASC including out-of-body experiences had begun to move out of the realm of exotica and into the laboratory.
The 1970s Honing Definitions In 1972, psychologist Stanley Krippner extended previous definitions of ASC by comparing the changes that occur during ASC to the individual’s “normal” state rather than the comparison to “general norms” that Ludwig (1966) made. Krippner proposed the following characterization: “a mental state which can be subjectively recognized by an individual (or by an objective observer of the individual) as representing a difference in psychological functioning from the individual’s ‘normal’ alert state” (1972, p. 1). While ostensibly resolving previous problems associated with operationalizing the qualifier sufficient, Krippner’s definition neglected to operationalize mental state and normal alert state. In addition, it failed to specify whether changes in the pattern and/or the intensity of psychological functioning are different.
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In response to terminological problems regarding states of consciousness, in 1975, Tart proposed the term discrete states of consciousness (d-SoC), which he defined as a “unique configuration or system of psychological structures or subsystems . . . that maintains its integrity or identity as a recognizable system in spite of variations in input from the environment and in spite of various (small) changes in the subsystems” (p. 62). According to Tart, psychological structures include, for example, sensory qualities and body image (i.e., content of consciousness). It is evident that Tart is suggesting that a d-SoC is not a process (i.e., conscious awareness) that renders a system of psychological structures (content) recognizable but rather the actual system of psychological structures (content) that is rendered recognizable. Thus, when Tart affixes the qualifiers discrete state of and state of to the concept of consciousness, he confuses consciousness with its content (i.e., a recognizable system of psychological structures).
Expanding Methods Tart continued to advocate for the systematic investigation of ASC in 1972 when he proposed that the fundamental principles of the scientific method could be utilized to address ASC using what he termed “statespecific sciences” (SSS), which would provide a group of highly skilled, dedicated, and trained practitioners able to achieve certain [states of consciousness (SoCs)], and able to agree with one another that they have attained a common state. While in that SoC, they might then investigate other areas of interest, whether these be totally internal phenomena of that given state, the interaction of that state with external, physical reality, or people in other SoCs. (p. 1206)
He also emphasized that the creation of SSS “neither validates nor invalidates the activities of normal consciousness sciences . . . [It] means only that certain kinds of phenomena may be handled more adequately within these potential new sciences” (p. 1207). Tart later refined his suggestion by proposing that ASC could be studied “on their own terms” as “statespecific perceptions and logics” (1998, p. 103). For example, ordinary waking states operate according to the logic of binary and linear segmentation (i.e., duality and temporality, respectively), whereas ASC such as samadhi ostensibly do not. Tart emphasized that “the methods of essential science (observation, theorizing, prediction, communication/consensual validation) can be applied from within various SoCs and ASCs” to generate
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state-specific sciences (1998, p. 103). Perhaps the most well-known example of an investigator examining ASC from within those states is physician John C. Lilly’s inquiries into the use of isolation tanks and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in tandem (e.g., Lilly, 1972).
Psychedelics Although it can be argued that the use of psychedelic—or “mindexpanding”—drugs peaked during the 1960s, the majority of research on these substances occurred during that as well as the following decade and included studies of marijuana (e.g., Tart, 1971), psilocybin (e.g., Leary, 1967–1968), and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD; e.g., Houston, 1969). The most interesting findings from studies of marijuana intoxication demonstrated contradictions between the subjective experiences of the user and objective reality. It was shown that experiences of increased visual acuity (Moskowitz, Sharma, & Shapero, 1972), tactile sensitivity (Milstein, MacCannell, Karr, & Clark, 1974), sensory abilities (Roth, Tinklenberg, & Kopell, 1976), and perceptions of others’ emotions (Clopton, Janowsky, Clopton, Judd, & Huey, 1979) were not reflected in related objective measures. In addition, researchers in the 1970s demonstrated marijuana’s effects on attention, memory, perception of time, creativity, driving ability, cognition, and mood (reviewed in Farthing, 1992). During this decade, Siegel (e.g., 1977) performed controlled research on the form, color, movement, and actions of visual hallucinations produced by psychoactive substances including LSD, psilocybin, marijuana, and mescaline by using an image classification system that participants were trained to use to describe their experiences. Siegel and Jarvik (1975) proposed that the same mechanism is involved in the production of visual hallucinations by different hallucinogens (as well as other situations such as migraines) because of the similarities in the content of the hallucinations regardless of the substance involved.
Near-Death Experiences A global sensation, the publication of physician Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life (1975) first brought the unique altered state that Moody called a “near-death experience” (NDE), the subjective experience of surviving clinical death, into light. Moody described 150 cases and recognized 15 commonly recurring elements of NDEs (e.g., ineffability, a brilliant light, an out-of-body experience, a tunnel, feelings of quiet and peace, meeting others, and a border or limit) but noted that “both the
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circumstances surrounding [NDEs] and the persons describing them vary widely” (p. 17). This publication marked the start of decades of NDE research to come and that continues today. In his foreword to The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Holden, Greyson, & James, 2009), Kenneth Ring describes the new scientific interest in NDEs during the 1970s by saying: “We were out neither to prove it nor debunk it: our aim instead was only to try to understand it and to encourage other scientists and scholars to do likewise” (p. viii). This outlook was indicative of the scientific paradigm shift surrounding ASC that occurred during the last half century.
Other Inquiries The experimental approach to ASC was extended in the early 1970s when Jean Houston and Robert Masters (1972) developed the Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device (ASCID) to induce religioustype experiences in a laboratory setting. The ASCID is a “metal swing or pendulum in which the subject stands upright, supported by broad bands of canvas and wearing blindfold goggles” (p. 310). Participants were more likely to report that their experiences were “religious” if they were spiritual growth seekers with a readiness or need for such an experience. Positive aftereffects from the ASCID included improved family relationships and a sense of continuing growth by one theologian participant (Houston & Masters, 1972). Another unique alteration in consciousness that garnered attention in the 1970s was spirit possession, which involves a voluntary or involuntary dissociative state in which the individual’s personality is substituted by that of purported “spirits” (Bourguignon, 1976). In possession trance, alterations of consciousness occur in which the possessing entities may speak and engage in other observable behaviors (Bourguignon, 1976). Possession trance is a state welcomed by trance mediums who, during readings, freely turn over control of their bodies to “spirit guides,” deceased loved ones, or other “friendly” entities for a prescribed purpose and length of time, as well as being embraced by other individuals engaged in certain religious or secular practices. Perhaps the form of altered consciousness that people experience most often, dreaming was examined extensively during the 1970s. Though the association between the rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep and dreaming was first noted by Aserinsky and Kleitman in 1953, the physiological parameters of dreaming were more thoroughly investigated during the 1960s and ’70s. For example, Dement (1976) noted specific brain
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wave and respiration patterns during REM periods. The content of dreams was also studied during this decade. Snyder (1970) and colleagues collected more than 600 dream reports from roughly 50 college and medical students and concluded that dreaming consciousness “is a remarkably faithful replica of waking life” (p. 133) containing environments, objects, and people similar to those experienced during waking consciousness. In addition, Van de Castle (1971) found cross-cultural differences in dream content and Winget, Kramer, and Whitman (1972) noted that differences in gender, age, and socioeconomic status were also associated with differences in content.
Mapping Consciousness The development of various cartographies of consciousness that emphasized an empirical domain was another notable feature of the 1970s. These included Ken Wilber’s spectrum of consciousness, which consisted of various levels (e.g., ego, existential, Mind). Wilber’s (1974, 1975, 1977) model argues that Eastern metaphysics and Western psychology are not incompatible; rather, they address different states within the spectrum of consciousness (e.g., Freudian psychoanalysis is useful for addressing the “Shadow level” while Eastern psychologies relate to the “level of Mind”). In 1975, psychiatrist Stanlislav Grof published his seminal work Realms of the Human Unconscious, which outlined a cartography of the human psyche derived from his research on LSD psychotherapy. Grof’s cartography proposed spatial and/or temporal expansion of consciousness within and beyond Einsteinian space-time, as well as psychoid experiences where mind/matter duality ostensibly collapses (e.g., in instances of putative psychokinesis). Psychiatrist Roland Fischer (1971, 1972, 1976) also formulated a cartography of ASC on a perception–meditation continuum that emphasizes differences between ergotropic and trophotropic arousal. Ergotropic arousal refers to hyperaroused states such as shamanic journeying experiences while trophotropic arousal denotes hypoaroused states such as zazen or samadhi meditation (Fischer, 1971). In contrast to these cartographies of consciousness, which described an empirical reality to ASC, this decade also accommodated several constructivist perspectives. This involved philosophers of religion addressing the epistemology of ASC, especially mystical experiences. The key elements of the constructivist position were distilled in Steven Katz’s influential edited volume Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978). The
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contributors argued that mystical experience is conceptually and linguistically “shaped” by the experient’s religious beliefs and values. Katz’s position may be termed incomplete constructivism because he suggested that not all aspects of mystical experience are shaped by one’s religious tradition. In contrast, Gimello (1978) advocated hard or complete constructivism in which mystical experience is entirely determined by the experient’s religio-cultural-linguistic framework. Summary
This decade witnessed a concern with addressing terminological issues and, more importantly, a shift from definitions of ASC to the development of more sophisticated models exemplified in cartographies that acknowledged the phenomenological diversity of ASC. In addition, systematic research was performed on specific ASC including psychedelic drug use, near-death experiences, spirit possession, and dreaming.
The 1980s Mystical States During the 1980s, philosophers of religion continued to reflect on ASC and substantiated the decontextualist position, as exemplified in Robert Forman’s 1986 article “Pure Consciousness Events and Mysticism” (c.f., Almond, 1982; Kessler, & Prigge, 1982). Forman defined a pure consciousness event (PCE) as a waking state of consciousness devoid of phenomenological content. A substantial body of evidence in the form of introspective accounts was produced to support the contention that the PCE exists cross-culturally. For example, Bucknell (1989) asserted that the “third non-material jhana” encountered during Buddhist meditative practice is consistent with the introvertive mystical experience “in which both the thought-stream and sensory input have ceased, leaving zero mental content” (p. 19). The 1980s also witnessed a resurgence of anthropologically inspired studies of consciousness, exemplified in the neoshamanic practices that were becoming rather popular amongst westerners. For example, in a seminal study published in 1980, Peters and Price-Williams examined the ethnographic literature pertaining to 42 different cultures and delineated several transcultural factors indicative of shamanic ecstasy including mastery or control with respect to both the entrance and duration of the altered state, the ability to communicate with spectators, and postevent memory (p. 397). In later research, Noll (1983) used a state-specific
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approach to demonstrate that shamanic states are incompatible with schizophrenic states on a number of phenomenological dimensions including volition, affect, and modality of perceptions (p. 443). Noll (1985) also evaluated the ethnographic literature pertaining to shamanism and concluded that shamanic mental imagery training consists of two phases: enhancing the vividness of imagery and cultivating a mastery over mental images. In a review paper published near the end of this decade, Peters (1989) identified parallels between shamanic states and lucid dreaming (discussed below). Thus, shamanic studies up to this point typically consisted of nonexperimental methodologies and were conducted from an anthropological perspective. It must be acknowledged, however, that during this decade, a small number of experimental studies of shamans were, in fact, conducted (e.g., Saklani, 1988).
Empirical Attitudes Empirical approaches to ASC continued to be developed in other areas in the 1980s and were exemplified by clinical psychologist Ronald Pekala, who extended research regarding ASC with quantitative instruments that permitted operationalization of ASC (Pekala, 1985; Pekala & Levine, 1982–1983). The first version of this instrument (the Phenomenology of Consciousness Questionnaire) was revised into the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI; Pekala & Kumar, 1986), a 53-item questionnaire that quantifies 12 major dimensions (altered state, rationality, positive affect, arousal, self-awareness, memory, inward absorbed attention, negative affect, altered experience, volitional control, vivid imagery, and internal dialogue) and 14 minor dimensions (joy, sexual excitement, love, anger, sadness, fear, body image, time sense, perception, meaning, visual imagery amount, vividness, direction of attention, and absorption; Pekala, Wenger, & Levine, 1985). The PCI builds on the theoretical foundations of earlier consciousness researchers in operationalizing three different states of consciousness (SoCs): identity or I-states that exhibit nonsignificantly different “phenomenological intensity and pattern parameters” (Pekala, 1991, p. 231); discrete or D-states that exhibit a significantly different intensity and pattern relative to another SoC; and discrete altered or A-states, which are D-states that exhibit significantly higher altered-state-of-awareness intensity ratings relative to another SoC. In 1985, Dittrich and his colleagues developed the APZ-OAV Questionnaire (Abnormer Psychischer Zustand refers to altered or abnormal mental states) to quantify ASC induced by hallucinogens and other stimuli (e.g., sensory deprivation; Dittrich, von Arx, & Staub, 1985). This 66-item
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questionnaire consists of three subscales: (1) oceanic boundlessness measures a positive state that may include depersonalization, ethereal happiness, and grandiosity; (2) dread of ego dissolution measures a state involving thought disorder, ego disintegration, and paranoia; and (3) visionary restructuralization measures a state comprising illusions, hallucinations, and synesthetic phenomena. The validity of these three dimensions is supported by the results of the International Study on Altered States of Consciousness (Dittrich, 1998), which sampled more than one thousand participants from six countries. Other notable quantitative instruments that ostensibly measure constructs related to altered consciousness include Friedman’s (1983) Self-Expansiveness Level Form (SELF) and Mathes, Zevon, Roter, and Joerger’s (1982) Peak Experiences Scale (PES).
Lucid Dreaming Lucid dreaming, one’s experience of being aware that one is dreaming, gained notoriety in the 1980s. Snyder and Gackenbach (1988) found that the majority of U.S. adults have had at least one lucid dream. The phenomenology of lucid dreams differs from that of nonlucid dreams in that the former usually contain more auditory and kinesthetic imagery, more control over the direction of the dream, and fewer dream characters (Gackenbach, 1988). Perhaps the most intriguing research done on this topic was performed by investigators at Stanford University and involved participants able to voluntarily enter into the lucid dream state and consciously alter their eye movements (LaBerge, Nagel, Dement, & Zarcone, 1981), respiration rates (LaBerge & Dement, 1982), and level of sexual arousal (LaBerge, Greenleaf, & Kedzierski, 1983), which were simultaneously tracked by the researchers. Tholey (1988) later proposed that lucid dreaming could serve as a clinically relevant tool for personal integration because resistance to frightening characters or situations is limited; the dreamer can focus on individuals, places, times, or situations of relevance; and the dream ego can recognize and then alter certain aspects of the personality.
Hallucinations The scientific paradigm shift continued to be demonstrated in the 1980s through the surge of research on hallucinations that, until that time, were generally viewed from a psychopathological standpoint rather than “in terms of psychological processes known to be responsible for normal
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perception and reasoning” (Bentall, 2000, p. 85). A hallucination can be defined as an involuntary perception-based experience that occurs in the absence of relevant stimuli and affects the experient with the same “force or impact” as a similar actual perception would (Slade & Bentall, 1988, p. 23). It should be noted that hallucinations that occur in the absence of hallucinogens like LSD (described above) are phenomenologically different than drug-induced hallucinogens (Siegel & Jarvick, 1975). During the 1980s, several instruments were developed to measure the severity of psychiatric symptoms including hallucinations (e.g., the Positive and Negative Syndrome Schedule; Kay, Opler, and Fiszbein, 1988) and where they might fall on the continuum of normal psychological processes (e.g., Chapman & Chapman, 1980; Launay & Slade, 1981). These led to the development of additional scales in the 1990s including the Mental Health Research Institute Unusual Perceptions Schedule (MUPS; Carter, Mackinnon, Howard, Zeegers, & Copolov, 1995), which rates several characteristics and aftereffects of auditory hallucinations and the experient’s coping strategies. Romme and Escher (1989) reported that roughly two thirds of 450 study respondents had difficulty coping with hallucinated voices. Though hallucinations are often a symptom of physical and psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a number of survey studies about hallucinations in nonclinical populations have taken place and found that between 10% and 25% of the general population have had at least one hallucination, most often a visual experience (reviewed in Bentall, 2000). Summary
The 1980s were characterized by the development of more operationalized psychophenomenological approaches to experimentally investigate whether an altered state effect had been induced and to empirically differentiate among ASC using quantitative instruments and anthropological approaches. Furthermore, specific states including lucid dreaming and hallucinations were investigated.
The 1990s Meditation Although research from prior decades investigating meditation (i.e., a procedure used to intentionally control one’s attention for the purpose of achieving a short- or long-term benefit) focused on the perceptual (e.g., Brown, Forte, Rich, & Epstein, 1982–1983; Walsh, 1978), emotional
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness
(e.g., Maupin, 1965; Osis, Bokert, & Carlson, 1973), developmental (e.g., Brown & Engler, 1986), and neuroelectrical (e.g., Anand, Chhina, & Singh, 1961; Banquet, 1973) nature of the experience, it has been noted that this body of research may contain key methodological limitations regarding sample sizes, representativeness of samples, expectancy effects, appropriate control conditions, and suitable levels of practice or training by the participants (reviewed by Farthing, 1992; Pekala, 1987). In 1994, Gifford-May and Thompson used a phenomenological approach to address meditation by interviewing 10 coresearchers (a term used to emphasize the active role of the participants in the interview process) from different traditional backgrounds (including Siddha and Kundalini yoga, Transcendental Meditation, and Buddhism) and of different levels of experience. The coresearchers’ detailed descriptions of their “deep states” of meditation revealed “a complex range of experiences” (p. 136) and the following key themes: (1) transcendence beyond the normal physical and mental boundaries of the self, (2) a different sense of reality, and (3) positive emotions including calm and joy. Only the first theme was experienced by all 10 meditators.
Experimental Approaches During the 1990s, psychologists began investigating shamanic phenomena using experimental rather than anthropological methodologies. For example, Wright (1991) found that a shamanic drumming group reported numerous shifts in mental functioning (e.g., changes in time sense, affect, and imagery vividness) relative to baseline. Maxfield (1994) reported experimental evidence suggesting that shamanic drumming facilitates theta activity that, in turn, promotes the production of ASC. In another study, Woodside, Kumar, and Pekala (1997) reported that “trance” postures and monotonous drumming were associated with a myriad of phenomenological effects (e.g., self-awareness and absorption) compared to baseline. However, Woodside et al. concluded that their results were indicative of a discrete state of consciousness rather than an altered state of consciousness. In 1994, psychiatrist Rick Strassman and his team published preliminary data regarding a 126-item quantitative instrument (i.e., the Hallucinogen Rating Scale; HRS) that they developed to assess the subjective effects of hallucinogenic drugs (Strassman et al., 1994). The HRS items were derived from interviews with 19 N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) users and were organized according to the following six predetermined clinical clusters: (1) somaesthesia, (2) affect, (3) perception, (4) cognition, (5) volition, and (6) intensity. Strassman and his colleagues (1994) discovered varying patterns of visual hallucinations, bodily dissociation,
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alterations in affect, and somaesthetic effects that were dependent on the intravenous dose of DMT.
Continued Theoretical Shifts Psychiatrist Roger Walsh differentiated among ASC using a phenomenological mapping technique that consisted of various key dimensions: awareness of the environment, ability to communicate, concentration, control, degree of arousal, degree of calm, affect, self-sense, and content of inner experience. He concluded that although shamanic, Buddhist (e.g., jhanas), and yogic (e.g., samadhi) states exhibit commonalities, they remain distinct from one another and markedly different from schizophrenic states (Walsh, 1993), thus challenging scholars (e.g., Silverman, 1969) who pathologize ASC such as shamanic states. Empirical studies with traditional healers (e.g., Van Ommeren, Komproe, Carden˜a, et al., 2004) and practitioners of ritual spirit possession (Carden˜a, van Duijl, Weiner, & Terhune, 2009) have shown them to generally be at least as psychologically healthy as their referent groups. Throughout the 1990s, anthropologists continued to demonstrate an interest in ASC. For example, Winkelman’s (1992) seminal cross-cultural study focused on 47 societies’ magico-religious practitioners, who claim to interact with nonordinary dimensions of human existence. This interaction involved special knowledge of purported spirit entities and how to relate to them, as well as special powers that supposedly allow these practitioners to influence the course of nature or human affairs. This research also confirmed and extended Bourguignon’s (1976) research on the social correlates of spirit possession by drawing distinctions between possession and other ASC. Summary
During the 1990s, researchers formulated techniques to further investigate the phenomenological diversity of ASCs and experimental methodologies were applied in a variety of new contexts (e.g., meditation, shamanic drumming, hallucinogenic drugs).
The New Millennium More Hallucinogenic Drugs The experimental investigation of the effects of hallucinogenic drugs continued into the new millennium with the publication of a plethora of
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness
double-blind studies evaluating the psychological effects of, for example, psilocybin (e.g., Griffiths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006), ketamine (e.g., Lofwall, Griffiths, & Mintzer, 2006), MDMA (e.g., Cami et al., 2000), DMT (e.g., Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 2005), and ayahuasca (e.g., Riba et al., 2003). Studies of this nature typically used the HRS and/or the APZ-OAV Questionnaire to quantify drug-induced ASC.
Other Altered States Although the “history of hypnosis is longer than the history of psychology” (Farthing, 1992, p. 334) and a number of standardized instruments were developed in decades prior to 2000 to quantitatively measure hypnotic susceptibility (e.g., the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, Weitzenhoffer & Hilgard, 1959, 1962; Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Shor & Orne, 1962), suggestion (e.g., Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale, Spanos et al., 1983), and depth (e.g., Tart, 1979), controversy also existed regarding whether hypnosis, that is, “a psychological state or condition, induced by a ritualistic procedure, in which the subject experiences changes in perception, thinking, memory and behavior in response to suggestions by the hypnotist” (Farthing, 1992, p. 337) is truly an ASC and whether hypnotic responses are real (reviewed in Farthing, 1992). Etzel Carden˜a (2005) addressed various methodological limitations of research from previous decades on the experience of hypnosis by controlling for the effects of relaxation on subjective experience through the use of physical activity, evaluating the effects of different types of physical activity on subjective experience, and integrating valid quantitative techniques with qualitative methods such as experience sampling and interview. (p. 41)
Carden˜a investigated 12 hypnotic “virtuosos” who were given the neutral suggestion to simply go “deeply” into hypnosis. He found that participants experienced “consistent and significant . . . alterations of consciousness, even after controlling for the effects of relaxation” and concluded that different levels of hypnotic experience (e.g., light vs. deep) are “distinct modes of experiencing” rather than “variations in intensity” (p. 51). During the first decade of the new millennium, the scientific study of mediums (i.e., individuals who experience regular communication with the deceased) underwent a major resurgence after considerable neglect. This rejuvenated field of research included phenomenological studies of
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mediums’ experiences during mediumship readings. For example, Rock and Beischel (2008) quantitatively analyzed seven credentialed nondenominational, mental mediums’ experiences using the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (Pekala & Kumar, 1986), and found that readings in which information about a deceased person were requested by an experimenter were associated with ASC on the part of the medium when compared to a control condition in which contact with the deceased was not attempted (p. 172).
Reformatting Terms In a recent series of theoretical essays, Rock and Krippner (2007a, 2007b, 2011) have argued that definitions of the term consciousness clearly differentiate: (1) consciousness (i.e., awareness) from (2) the content of consciousness (i.e., phenomenology, e.g., visual imagery, affect, time sense), whereas definitions of [altered] states of consciousness (e.g., Krippner, 1972; Ludwig, 1966; Tart, 1969a) confuse consciousness with its content. That is to say, Tart, Ludwig, and Krippner asserted that ASC refers to shifts or deviations in the content of consciousness rather than consciousness itself. Rock and Krippner further argued that this confusion is avoided if the term altered pattern of phenomenal properties replaces altered states of consciousness. This change would then compel reconceptualizing the field of altering consciousness as altering phenomenology and have numerous implications for future research. Paradigm shifts are necessary for any field of inquiry to retain its vitality and, therefore, avoid succumbing to stasis. Perhaps reconceptualizing altering consciousness as altering phenomenology will serve to revitalize this field as we enter the second decade of the new millennium.
The Increasing Importance of the Neurosciences The study of ASC in the neurosciences has remained by and large marginal, with a few important exceptions such as the more sophisticated recent studies on neurological changes associated with OBEs (e.g., Blanke & Arzy, 2005), hypnosis (e.g., Oakley & Halligan, 2009), and meditation (Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008). Very promising is the neurophenomenological approach that ties first-person data about conscious experience with the large psychodynamics of consciousness (Lutz & Thompson, 2003) and has been used in the investigation of specific hypnotic experiences and brain dynamics (Carden˜a, Lehmann, Jo¨nsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007).
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness
Summary
During the first decade in the new century, altered states including hypnosis, mediumship, and hallucinogenic drug use continued to be investigated with a multiplicity of methods and in increasingly complex ways. In addition, the terms used to describe consciousness and its changes have been called into question and alternatives suggested.
Concluding Remarks The previous 50 years of consciousness research have witnessed significant changes in the definitions, methods, and theories that investigators have used to address ASC. As members of the general public continue to intentionally engage in, experiment with, and embrace altered states personally (e.g., through meditation, psychedelic drugs, lucid dreaming, and hypnosis) or simply endorse these states as interested observers concerned with learning about them through books, articles, and television shows, academics and researchers will ideally keep investigating these and other similar phenomena using open minds, sound methods, and varied approaches.
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PART II
Cultural Perspectives
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CHAPTER 7
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness* Jonathan Shear I. Eastern civilizations have traditionally placed much greater emphasis on altered states of consciousness than the civilizations of the West. Altered, “higher” states are crucial to the major Eastern religions. They play an important role in the practice and content of cultural activities from poetry, painting and dance to traditional martial arts throughout much of Asia [see Zarrilli, this volume]. And their existence is taken for granted and often emphasized in popular mythology. So it is only natural that Eastern civilizations over the centuries have paid a great deal of attention to analyzing the nature of these states and developing techniques to produce them as effectively as possible. A wide variety of approaches to altering states of consciousness have been developed and used. These include purely mental meditation procedures, ancillary physical procedures, and behavioral procedures combining mental and physical components.1 The story of Eastern approaches to altering consciousness is much too vast and complex to be covered in a single chapter. Nevertheless, if we confine ourselves to the major traditions such as Yoga, Vedanta, and East-Asian Buddhism, important common understandings of altered, “higher” states of consciousness readily emerge. For despite their different imagery and often conflicting metaphysical interpretations, they all emphasize meditation, recognize comparable “levels” of mind, and describe the same basic “higher” states of consciousness.
*Copyright # Jonathan Shear. Reprinted by permission. 1 The use of pharmaceutical approaches is also mentioned favorably in some very ancient texts. In recent millennia, however, it has generally been downplayed and portrayed negatively, and major traditions often discourage it as damaging to aspects of the nervous system responsible for the growth of higher states of consciousness.
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This chapter will describe important experiences, states of consciousness, levels of consciousness, and real-world effects emphasized by these traditions, relate them to features of meditation procedures, and offer reflections from the perspective of ongoing scientific research.
Experiences II. The major Eastern traditions focusing on developing higher states of consciousness all hold that meditation, when successful, can enable the activity of the mind to settle down and disappear entirely so that its fundamental inner nature, independent of all the contents of ordinary awareness, can be experienced with clarity. Different traditions may interpret the experience differently, according to their different theories, but there is wide agreement that the experience is fundamentally important, for it is said to enliven our true inner nature and help free it to express itself naturally and fulfillingly throughout life. Gaining the experience is also said to enhance psychological and physiological integration and functioning and to have all sorts of beneficial effects, including liberation of our natural tendencies for compassion and helpfulness and enhanced performance in all areas of life. And most important for our present discussion, it is said to be the basis of growth of a unique higher state of consciousness referred to as “liberation” or “enlightenment,” the overarching goal of all the major meditation traditions. The experience itself is extraordinarily simple. Indeed, it appears to be the logical ultimate of simplicity. For it has nothing in it all—no perception of objects, no colors or sounds, no feelings or emotions, no thoughts. This of course is not easy to imagine. In fact, it is impossible to imagine. For if anything we can imagine were in it, it would not be this completely empty experience. What is the experience like? By all accounts it is not like anything at all. Just itself. Yet it is different from unconsciousness. For unlike unconsciousness, when one comes out of the experience, one can remember it. What is it remembered as? Not as anything at all. Just itself. Some traditions, such as Yoga and Vedanta, call the experience “pure consciousness” inasmuch as it appears to be consciousness itself, that is, what remains when everything one is conscious of has been removed from consciousness. Buddhist traditions generally refer to it as “emptiness,” reflecting the fact that it is empty of everything that can be imagined. Vedanta also refers to it as “Being,” since all that can be said about it when one emerges seems to be that it was. Many Buddhists also often refer to it as “nonbeing,” since there seems to be nothing there. Zen Buddhists refer to it in all of these ways, reflecting both the usefulness and inadequacy of
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
all these terms. All the traditions naturally link the terms used to their preferred metaphysical beliefs. But all questions of metaphysics and terminology aside, in tradition after tradition all over the world, the descriptions make it clear that what is being referred to appears to be completely empty of empirical content, so empty, in fact, that it does not even contain the internal perceptual manifold or “space” in which such content could appear. The standard descriptions of the experience can easily seem incomprehensible to people who have never had it. So they may often try to “explain them away” as empty words, reflecting little more than the preconceptions of people committed to metaphysical traditions and their terminology. People who have had the experience, however, find the above sorts of descriptions quite natural, regardless of their backgrounds, metaphysical or not. Indeed, anyone with much familiarity with the topic is likely to know, or at least know about, people who had the experience spontaneously and only later became drawn to some meditation tradition or other after they learned that it seemed to describe the experience they had already had. Laboratory studies of meditators also give us good reason to take the above sorts of experiential reports seriously. Meditation traditions have reported for centuries that the experience is accompanied by significant reduction of metabolic activity, including most conspicuously complete cessation of respiration. This is found in many Indian traditions, including, for example, the Yoga Sutras, the canonical text of Yoga. It is found in ancient Taoist texts. The association is so standard that Chinese Zen even uses the expression “breath stops” as a name for the experience itself. Laboratory studies of people practicing traditional meditation procedures now provide objective, scientifically significant corroboration of such reports. Studies of people practicing the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique from Advaita Vedanta, for example, show extremely high correlation between reported instances of the experience and cessation of perceptible respiratory activity, as reported in the traditional literature. They also report that the O2 and CO2 levels in the blood remain unchanged during these episodes of respiratory suspension, consistent with the traditional accounts of reduction of metabolic activity. They also have found other physiological parameters unknown to prescientific observers, such as high frontal alpha EEG coherence, correlated with this and closely related meditative experiences. (e.g., Travis et al., 2010; Travis & Wallace, 1997) The application of these findings to the question of whether traditional sorts of descriptions of the pure consciousness/emptiness experience
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should be taken at all seriously is straightforward. For it would hardly seem plausible that different types of procedures, practiced in different cultures with different, often opposing belief structures, would produce the same pairing of (i) a specific, unique type of experiential report and (ii) a unique unconscious physiological state unless (iii) the reports reflected the natural subjective correlate of that particular state, rather than (iv) the inconsistent and often opposing contexts of belief in which the reports were made. The traditional reports and contemporary research thus give us good reason to think that, at least sometimes, reports of experiences devoid of all empirical content reflect the experiences themselves rather than such things as metaphysical beliefs and wishful thinking.2 In other words, they give us good reason to conclude that experiences corresponding to the standard descriptions of pure consciousness/emptiness actually exist. III. The question naturally arises of why throughout history people should have been so concerned to obtain an experience that, as completely empty, is necessarily devoid of any interesting content. The simplest answer is that it has been thought to be desirable for the effects it produces, for it is widely held to be the basis of developing all sorts of remarkable, intrinsically desirable experiences and states, including that of full enlightenment. Consider, for example, the following examples from modern North Americans and Europeans practicing Zen (Japanese Buddhist lineages) and TM (Advaita Vedanta), traditions especially well known for their focus on altered, “higher” states of consciousness. First, two descriptions of the pure consciousness/emptiness experience we have been discussing: E1. The time comes when no reflection appears at all. One comes to notice nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, see nothing . . . But it is not vacant emptiness. Rather it is the purest condition of our existence. (Zen: K.S., quoted in Austin, 1998, p. 473)
E2. My meditations are characterized by the experience of “no experience” . . . I just remain in the Absolute for the entire sitting and nothing else seems 2
This is not to say that reports that are false and/or simply confused cannot also occur. Meditation traditions have accordingly devised various protocols to separate valid from invalid reports. To minimize the risk of their being thwarted, these protocols are generally not a matter of public record and will not be discussed here.
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
to happen, other than the feeling of bliss permeating me completely. (TM) (P.B., quoted in Maharishi, 1977, p. 80)
Next, some more advanced experiences of the kinds often said to develop from the above: E3. A thousand new sensations are bombarding my senses, a thousand new paths are opening before me . . . a warm love pervade[s] my whole being, because I know that I am not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self. My constant thought is to have everybody share this deep satisfaction. (Zen) (A.M., in Kapleau, 1972, p. 245) E4. Then I knew that my little me had become big Me . . . I felt like I had been reborn into the purity and innocence of a new-born child, yet I felt wise, like a person who had lived for a long time. My inner awareness is immovable, stable, integrated, flexible and confident. I am no longer dependent on changing circumstances, friendships, or activities for an inner stability peace and fulfillment. (TM) (D.N., in Maharishi, 1977, p. 81) E5. I noticed a totally new feeling of softness and sweetness develop. There were days when I felt my heart melting as if I could take everything in creation into myself and cherish it with the greatest love. Often I would have long periods of the day when everything I saw seemed to be glowing with divine radiance. (TM) (J.B., in Maharishi, 1977, p. 81) E6. The least expression of weather variation, a soft rain or a gentle breeze, touches me as a—what can I say?—miracle of unmatched wonder, beauty, and goodness. There is nothing to do; just to be is a supremely total act . . . When I am in solitude I can hear a “song” coming forth from everything. Each and every thing has its own song; even moods, thoughts, and feelings have their finer songs. (Zen) (D.K., in Kapleau, 1972, p. 268) E7. My self, activity, and what I am interacting with, as well as one object with another, all seem to be connected through perception. Body and environment are not separated. It seems all of creation constitutes the fluctuations of my body and consciousness. These fluctuations have a quality of sameness. The same style of wave function is in everything. It also seems that every object contains all sizes of waves, all in some kind of synchrony. Yet underlying that, there is no movement or fluctuation. (TM) (L.A., in Maharishi, 1977, p. 84) E8. The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all simple. It is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects reaching
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forward into Unknowingness and back into an infinity of Silence where individual consciousness cannot even enter . . . Yet beneath this variety they [all things] intermingle in one inexpressibly vast unity. (Zen) (D.K., in Kapleau, 1972, p. 268)
From the perspective of our ordinary waking state experience, these six experiences, filled with such things as “expansion of self,” refined perception, bliss, universal love, and unity with all of nature, are all quite remarkable. They are precisely the kinds of things that often attract people, especially in the West, to meditation in the first place.
Higher States of Consciousness IV. The contents of the above experiences might at first glance appear to be a bit of a jumble. But Eastern traditions have developed a variety of phenomenological maps to make sense out of the above sorts of experiences and relate them both to each other and to our more ordinary ones. And the list of experiences above was organized in accord with one of the most basic maps, a map of “higher” states of consciousness used for centuries by major meditation traditions. In its simplest form, the map distinguishes three major “higher” states of consciousness in the sequence in which they typically are reported to develop. The identifying phenomenological feature of each of these states can be described as follows: HS1. pure consciousness/emptiness, by itself, in isolation from everything else HS2. pure consciousness/emptiness permanently stable throughout all of one’s experiences HS3. pure consciousness/emptiness as the perceived ground of everything one experiences, external as well as internal.
The first thing that we can note is that all of these higher states of consciousness are defined in terms of the relation of pure consciousness/emptiness to all the other contents of our awareness. In the first of these states, pure consciousness/emptiness is experienced alone by itself. And this experience is widely held to be the precondition of recognizing the experiential nature of consciousness itself, as contrasted with the all the other things we experience, in the first place. That this should be the case should not be surprising. Our attention is normally drawn to what is changing in experience. This is a psychological truism, and information
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
theory often even defines “information” as “news of a difference.” So even if consciousness actually is the pervasive ground of all consciousness experience, as most meditation traditions hold, its presence would not draw one’s attention to one part of one’s perceptual field in preference to any other. Consider, by way of analogy, a person in a movie theater. So long as his or her attention is on the changing shapes and colors of the movie, the unchanging flatness of the screen is unlikely to be noticed until, that is, the film (but not the light) stops, leaving the screen to be seen alone by itself. So it should not be surprising if, as widely reported, the experiential nature of pure consciousness/emptiness usually first becomes apparent only in the first “higher” state, HS1 as defined above, where it is experienced alone by itself after all objects of perception have disappeared, before it is likely to also be experienced along with everything else one experiences, the defining feature of the second higher state, HS2 above. For most people, of course, the experience of pure consciousness/ emptiness by itself at fist occurs only as a result of practicing a meditation technique designed to produce it. Once it has occurred, however, what had formerly been merely subliminal can become apparent along with other experiences, first, perhaps, along with quiet thoughts and feelings in meditation, later along with all the dynamic, previously “overshadowing” experiences of daily life. This may at first occur episodically. But in time, according to tradition after tradition, it can become experienced as stable and permanent throughout all the changing experiences of the waking state of consciousness, the chaos of the dream state, and even the obscurity of dreamless sleep. Different explanations are given for this progression. But regardless of explanations, it should be easy to see why the experience HS1 of pure consciousness/emptiness by itself is the natural prerequisite for the more advanced higher state HS2, in which pure consciousness/emptiness has become stabilized permanently throughout all of one’s other, changing experiences [see Geels, this volume]. The next higher state HS3, pure consciousness perceived as the ground of all of one’s experiences, is more difficult to grasp. Here, using our movie screen analogy, it is as though one’s perception has become so subtle that all the colors are seen not only as on the screen but of it. That is, to stretch our analogy further, it is as though one sees (rather than merely grasps conceptually) that the colors are not something superimposed on the
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screen but direct expressions of its nature. But for our purposes it will be enough simply to recognize the typical descriptions of the phenomenological nature of HS3, where everything, internal and external alike, is perceived as emerging from the same pure consciousness/emptiness that one experiences in HS1. With this, the whole universe, oneself included, is perceived as a single unified existence.3 We should note here, however, that while major nondual traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta clearly emphasize all the “higher” states as described above, nondual traditions such as Yoga and Dvaita Vedanta argue that one could never in fact perceive the single ground of everything, despite how things might appear to an advanced experiencer. For even if pure consciousness can (and should) be experienced as the ground of different individuals’ awareness, this does not imply that the pure consciousness experienced by each has the same source, any more than pure water drawn from two different wells has to come from the same aquifer. Theravada Buddhism rejects the notion that the emptiness an advanced practitioner can recognize everywhere represents a fundamental “ground” either of oneself or the universe as a whole, for they reject the notion of such a ground in the first place. Nevertheless, all questions of metaphysical interpretations aside, there is wide agreement among the major traditions that the above higher states (or variations extremely close to them), defined phenomenologically, not only exist but also represent important advanced stages of spiritual growth.4 V. The above higher states map is rather abstract. So to fill it out somewhat, let us return to the experiences described earlier. The descriptions 3
It is worth noting that pure consciousness/emptiness, as devoid of empirical qualities, is the only phenomenologically definable “thing” (or non-thing) that, logically speaking, could ever be experienced as the ground of all possible experiences. For anything that has empirical qualities of its own would be incompatible with logically possible experiences where those qualities were not present. 4 Compare, for example, emphatic comments to this effect by Samdong Rinpoche (noted scholar and head of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile) in Shear and Mukherjee, 2006, p. 360. We can also note that the first and third of the higher states described above (pure consciousness/emptiness by itself and as the ground of everything, respectively) correspond to the “introvertive” (IME) and “extrovertive” (EME) mystical experiences identified by Walter Stace in the mid 1900s and often held by scholars to be the two central mystical experiences. Stace, however, took the IME to be the more advanced experience (perhaps because, unlike the EME, it seems to have nothing in common with ordinary experience), and as a result was puzzled by the fact that the supposedly more advanced IME experience was recorded in the literature much more often than the supposedly less advanced EME. The map and gloss above resolve Stace’s puzzle by showing, and explaining, the actual sequence of development traditionally described.
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
consist of four pairs of examples drawn from Zen and TM. The first pair (E1 and E2) consists of examples of pure consciousness/emptiness; the second (E3 and E4) consists of examples of what is often called “expansion of self;” the third (E5 and E6) consists of examples of refined aesthetic and expanded affective perception; and the fourth (E7 and E8) consists of examples of perceptions of a deep unity with all of nature. The relation of the first pair of experiences (E1 and E2) to the higher states map is transparent: both experiences, as already noted, are examples of pure consciousness/emptiness by itself, the first higher state described by the map. The relation of the other pairs to the map, however, will need some explanation. The second pair, for example, states E3. A thousand new sensations are bombarding my senses, a thousand new paths are opening before me . . . a warm love pervade[s] my whole being, because I know that I am not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self. My constant thought is to have everybody share this deep satisfaction. (Zen) E4. Then I knew that my little me had become big Me . . . I felt like I had been reborn into the purity and innocence of a new-born child, yet I felt wise, like a person who had lived for a long time. My inner awareness is immovable, stable, integrated, flexible and confident. I am no longer dependent on changing circumstances, friendships, or activities for an inner stability peace and fulfillment. (TM)
Both of these examples describe typical meditation-related experiences of “expansion of self,” as noted earlier. But they do not mention pure consciousness/emptiness, the crucial variable in the definition of all the higher states on the map, at all. So their relation to the map might not at first glance be at all apparent. However, once we know the linguistic conventions of Zen and Advaita Vedanta, the traditions associated with the two descriptions, the connection becomes readily apparent. For both of these traditions tend to (i) use the term “self” to refer to self as ordinarily understood in terms of body, personality, self-images, and so forth, and (ii) “Self” (with a capital “S” in English) to refer to what they take the self (or “Self”) to really be, namely pure consciousness/emptiness itself, experienced deep within. Thus when they say such things as “not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self” and “my little me became a big Me,” what they mean is not, of course, that they have grown physically bigger, but that what they experience themselves as being has shifted from (i) the
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small, space-time–bounded entities they formerly thought of themselves as to (ii) the pure unbounded consciousness now experienced in the midst of their daily lives, even as they wrote their descriptions. This in turn identifies the passages as describing the type of experiences characteristic of the state HS2 above, where pure consciousness/emptiness—here identified with Self—is experienced along with all the ordinary experiences of daily life.5 We should note, however, that the above examples are offered just to illustrate what experience in this second advanced state HS2 is like. The examples by themselves do not indicate whether this kind of experience was established permanently throughout waking, dreaming, and even, as strange as it might sound, throughout deep dreamless sleep, as full development of HS2 would require. The relation of the third pair (E5 and E6) of experiences to the map of higher states is more complex. We will return to these experiences in section VIII below. The relation of the fourth pair (E7 and E8) of experiences to the map, however, is simple enough. They describe everything—minds, bodies, consciousness, and external universe—as comprising a profound unity, and they refer to the unifying ground as unfluctuating consciousness, an infinity of silence, and beyond the grasp of the intellect. Zen and Vedanta (along with many other traditions) regularly use such expressions to refer to the pure consciousness/emptiness they take to be the perceived ground of both (i) individual consciousness and (ii) all of nature. The descriptions, written by advanced meditators in the contexts of their own traditions, make it clear that the perceived unifying ground referred to is pure consciousness/emptiness. The experiences, in other words, are clear examples characteristic of the highest state, HS3, in the map. VI. The above modern examples of reports of higher states have been used to illustrate the significance of the typology of the map. The map, once understood, can then often clarify otherwise confusing claims and reports in the fields of meditation and mysticism in general. It can let us 5
We should note that Theravada Buddhism, emphasizing the Buddhist doctrine of “noself,” eschews such talk about “Self.” However East-Asian Mahayana Buddhism, referring to the Mahaparisamadhi Sutra they take to be preserved in Tibet and China but lost in India and South-Asia, regularly asserts that the “no-self” doctrine is a preliminary one that Buddha said was to be superseded (for sufficiently advanced practitioners) by a doctrine of transcendental Self of the sort described above. Thus the above terminology, although consistent with Mahayana, is inconsistent with Theravada. Terminology aside, however, they all appear to have the experiences described above.
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
recognize for example that inconsistent claims about the contents and implications of experiences often arise from the fact that different states of consciousness are being referred to. It can also help us see that seemingly unrelated descriptions can often actually reflect the same higher state. Sorting things out in this way is not always easy, of course, since experiential accounts are often formulated in and/or alluded to in very different ways in different traditions and cultures. Still, with the above map otherwise obscure relationships can often become transparent. Thus, for example, it is easy to see that the following account of a disciple’s experience, written by Shankara, the 8th-century Advaita Vedanta Master, refers to the map’s highest state, HS3. I dwell within all beings as the Atman [Self], pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena, internal and external. I am both the enjoyer and that which is enjoyed. In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as being separate from myself. Now I know that I am all. (Shankara, 1970, p. 105)
The following excerpt from Butsugen (Chinese: Fo-yen Ch’ing-yuan), the 12th-century Chinese Zen Master, might at first seem entirely unrelated both to Shankara’s description. But with a little thought, the map lets us recognize that it reflects the same higher state. A short while ago my attendant monk told me that it was raining too hard and the audience might find it too difficult to hear me . . . Most people might say the sound of the rain itself is the great sermon. Is this right? I say no, it is not! The sound of the rain—this is the sermon you are giving. (quoted in Suzuki, 1971, p. 5)
On its own, the assertion “the sound rain is the sermon you are giving” might simply seem to be a typical Zen enigma. But Butsugen’s meaning becomes clear when he follows the above remark with the story of Gensh’s (another famous Zen master) responding to a monk’s warning shout of “Tiger!” by shouting back, “It is you who are the tiger!” Tiger, rain, you, everything . . . all one thing. That’s how it seems in the map’s highest state. For, D. T. Suzuki, commenting on the above text, adds, here “all the worlds in the ten quarters are [experienced here as] your whole body” (p. 6). The map’s phenomenological categories can thus, in short, be used to identify state-specific structural features of diverse types of experiences,
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even when the experiences are expressed in seemingly unrelated language. This, in turn, can help identify when differences of metaphysical claims and theories reflect differences of state-specific types of experiences offered in evidence. The hierarchal, developmental nature of the map has also been used for centuries to sort theories as well as experiences hierarchically, as reflecting more and less full levels of development of consciousness—although such conclusions are often roundly disputed by those said to be of lesser levels of development.6 Having seen something of the phenomenological significance and the use of the states of consciousness map, let us now turn to a second ancient phenomenological map, a map of “levels” of inner awareness.
Levels of Inner Awareness VII. This map distinguishes six levels of inner awareness, each defined phenomenologically.7 All of the levels are said to be experienceable in sequence as the mind reduces its activity and settles inward to its silent core in meditation and as it returns to the surface again. Noticing the levels may require that the settling and/or emerging take place slowly, especially because the deepest levels are exceedingly abstract. Depending on the technique practiced and one’s habits of attention, one may simply “pass through” any particular level without noticing it, especially at the beginning of one’s practice. But all the levels are said to be experienceable by sufficiently advanced practitioners. The content of each more superficial level is also held to emerge from the deeper ones. From surface to depths, the levels are: L1. senses L2. discursive thinking L3. discriminative intellect L4. pure individuality or ego8 L5. pure bliss (pure positive affect) L6. pure consciousness (pure emptiness)
6
The best-known examples of this, of course, are the traditional disputes between Theravada and Mahayana. 7 Portions of this section have been adapted from Shear, in Walach and Schmidt, in press. 8 Technically this is identifiable as the deepest stratum of L3. For ease of expression, and to emphasize its importance, however, it will be referred to here as a separate “level” (L4) rather than “the deepest stratum of L3.”
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
We are all familiar with the first two levels, “senses” and “discursive thinking.” The phenomenological nature of the first level, the “senses,” needs no special explanation. The second level, “discursive thinking,” is where thinking in words, as in ordinary internal discourse, takes place. The third level, “discriminative intellect,” is more abstract. It is said to underlie the activity of discursive thinking and intelligent activity in general. Without it, we would not be able to distinguish different sensory objects, recognize that words are particular kinds of “objects,” or even understand that words relate to other things, much less relate to them meaningfully. As abstract as this level is, however, its existence can be recognized experientially in the preverbal thinking of the kinds ordinary people sometimes, and highly creative people often, report. The deeper levels are less likely to be familiar. All of them lie outside the ordinary range of experience. They are all highly abstract. And they are usually first experienced clearly only as a result of meditation. Level L4, “pure individuality” or “ego,” at first may appear to be completely empty and thus seem to be the experience of pure consciousness/emptiness we have been discussing. For it is completely devoid of all sensations, thoughts, images, and other localized phenomenal objects—all the kinds of things, in other words, that we are ordinarily aware of. This can occur after the activity of the more superficial levels has settled in meditation and their phenomenal objects have disappeared, while one nevertheless remains awake. It is in effect experience of the “space” of mind—the phenomenological manifold. Traditionally the experience is likened to that of being a disembodied observer in the midst of vast emptiness. Thus, in the language of Vedanta, one is said to “hold one’s individuality” in a “void of abstract fullness,” steady like “a lamp in a windless place.”9 This experience might easily be confused with that of pure consciousness/ emptiness discussed above. But unlike the experience of pure consciousness/ emptiness, this experience is not completely empty, phenomenologically speaking. For the sense of being a disembodied observer or “mind’s eye” in the midst of vast emptiness makes it clear that it still contains the “I–it” structure of ordinary experience, even if the “it” has been reduced so far towards nothingness that nothing but the emptiness of the phenomenal manifold remains to be experienced. In the middle of the experience, one does not think “Ah, emptiness,” since this would be a thought, and there 9
The above terminology is from the tradition of Advaita Vedanta, as in Maharishi, 1967. Compare also the first of the tree experiences in the following from the Zen tradition: “[inner] space becomes the object of consciousness, followed by an awareness of objectless infinity, and then by absorption into a void which has ‘nothingness’ as its object” (Austin, 1998, p. 474).
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are no thoughts or other phenomenal objects here. But the empty structure can be remembered, and recognized conceptually, when one returns to more ordinary levels of awareness. It can also be remembered as permeated by abstract undifferentiated objectless bliss. Level L5, “pure bliss (or pure positive affect),” is even more abstract. For here there is no longer any sense even of being an observer or having a vantage point. Thus even the empty subject–object duality of L4 is no longer present. All that remains is abstract bliss or well-being itself—“happiness beyond the superlative,” as the Bhagavad Gita, canonical to most Indian traditions, puts it. Level L6, “pure consciousness (pure emptiness),” is simply the pure consciousness/emptiness we have been discussing, the logical ultimate of abstraction. VIII. The basic link between the levels and states maps is straightforward: The pure consciousness/emptiness of the deepest level, L6, of the levels map is the same pure consciousness/emptiness central to the definitions of all the states described by the higher states map. The first higher state HS1 amounts to experiencing this deepest level by itself. The second higher state HS2 amounts to experiencing it as a stable component of one’s awareness in general. The third higher state HS3 amounts to experiencing everything in terms of its nature. And so far as the traditions that focus on these higher states are concerned, the central function of meditation is to enable attention to settle down through all the levels of inner awareness until the deepest level is first experienced and then enlivened throughout all of one’s awareness in the appropriate ways. The same process of moving attention from the surface levels through the intermediate levels to the deepest level and back again also is found to enliven the intermediate levels as well. Which particular levels are enlivened to what degree is highly variable and depends on such things as the particular techniques practiced and the nature and degree of development of individual meditators. But it is a widely reported effect. And it is not hard to recognize in some of the experiences we described earlier. Repeated experience of the deep bliss-filled level L5, for example, is often followed by experiences of aesthetic beauty and expansive love such as those described in E5. I noticed a totally new feeling of softness and sweetness develop. There were days when I felt my heart melting as if I could take everything in creation into myself and cherish it with the greatest love. Often I would have
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness
long periods of the day when everything I saw seemed to be glowing with divine radiance. (TM) E3 . . . a warm love pervade[s] my whole being, because I know that I am not just my little self but a great big miraculous Self. My constant thought is to have everybody share this deep satisfaction. (Zen)
Enlivenment of refined preverbal strata of level L3 of the map, coupled with growth of positive affect, is said to produce the kinds of subtle conceptual and perceptual discrimination evident in the following passage E6. The least expression of weather variation, a soft rain or a gentle breeze, touches me as a—what can I say?—miracle of unmatched wonder, beauty, and goodness. There is nothing to do; just to be is a supremely total act . . . When I am in solitude I can hear a “song” coming forth from everything. Each and every thing has its own song; even moods, thoughts, and feelings have their finer songs. (Zen)
And the same kind of perceptual refinement is naturally evident in experiences such as the following, characteristic of the highest state of the states map. E7. It also seems that every object contains all sizes of waves, all in some kind of synchrony. Yet underlying that, there is no movement or fluctuation. (TM) E8. The least act, such as eating or scratching an arm, is not at all simple. It is merely a visible moment in a network of causes and effects reaching forward into Unknowingness and back into an infinity of Silence where individual consciousness cannot even enter. (Zen)
The above examples should be enough to give an idea, at least in principle, of how the states and levels maps have traditionally been used both to help understand meditation-related experiences and to evaluate the degree of development of meditators.
Practical Effects IX. In culture after culture, it is taken for granted that access to the deeper levels of awareness and development of higher states of consciousness
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can significantly enhance a wide spectrum of human abilities. Many different kinds of explanation for this are offered, some metaphysical, others down to earth. The logic of many of the latter can be explained as follows: The higher states we have been discussing all involve enlivening the silent, nonactive, empirically contentless ground of awareness, consciousness/emptiness itself. In one common analogy, a mind in which this qualityless ground remains lively when the other levels become active will, like a completely clean mirror, be optimally responsive to its environment. Or, to use a modern image, a mind that is tuned to pure silence is like a good stereo. Free from internal noise, it is completely silent when the programs are off and the volume control is turned up high. A stereo that maintains the absence of internal noise when programming is reintroduced optimizes its signal-to-noise ratio. It will, in other words, be “high fidelity.” Thus, according to this logic, minds that preserve the silence of their own fundamental nature as a baseline while engaged in activity can be expected to be more perceptive and effective in whatever they do. Enlivenment of the subtle activity of the other deep levels of inner awareness, it would seem, should enhance this result. Refined intellectual and perceptual discrimination should be expected to enhance activity in the world holistically. Stable experience of bliss ought to help people become more ethical. For the selfish cravings for happiness that all too often block our natural concern for the well-being of others should be expected to be reduced in people who are already fulfilled. And growth of unbounded love should enliven this concern for others directly. Whether or not the above sorts of explanations are plausible, realworld results of the kinds they are supposed to explain have been reported for millennia. Claims of such results have also become the subject of scientific research. X. The idea that higher states of consciousness might produce such practical results, however, seems counter to the widespread understanding that meditation and its products are really impractical, best suited only for hermits, monks, and others who want to withdraw from daily life. The practice of meditation involves withdrawal of attention from the world inward to the mind’s silent, nonactive source. To facilitate this, serious seekers often withdraw from ordinary life for extended periods of time. The states sought are thus easily associated with withdrawal from ordinary life. If the traditions we have been discussing are correct, however, this association is merely contingent and highly misleading. For they often emphasize that it is a mistake to confuse the paths to these states with the states themselves. For, as the famous Mahayana image puts it, the path
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and the goal are as different as a boat and the shore it should take one to. Ancient texts and modern teachers alike often make it clear that they do not think of the goal in terms of withdrawal from life but as the basis for maximum success in it. The traditions we have been discussing are often quite explicit about this. It is a theme in many Zen stories. It is expressed in the BhagavadGita’s injunction that we should become established in pure consciousness as the basis for performing action (yogastah kurukarmani). The fact that this injunction is given to a warrior on the battlefield, where performance is a life-and-death matter, is especially telling. The same theme is a well-known feature of the Zen and Taoist martial arts that have had ample time—and the highest motive—to determine what really does and does not really work in practice. And, moving from battle to high culture, throughout much of Asia practices designed to produce higher states are integrated into the training in artistic disciplines such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, and dance, both because of the efficiency in action and the creativity, refined perception, deep positive affect, and intimacy with nature they are thought to produce. 10 Comparable ideas have been reflected in well-known Taoist texts and stories about artisans as well as artists and warriors since the time of Laotse and Chuangtse. As valuable as such purported external effects of higher states might be, the major meditation traditions all consider them secondary to the internal psychological ones. These include such things as psychological stability, happiness, joy, creativity, freedom from dysfunctional cravings, and liberation of our natural tendencies to be concerned for the welfare of others—all features of what psychologists today often refer to as “selfactualization.” XI. How seriously should we take such claims? All of them, internal as well as external, are just the kinds of things that modern scientific protocols are designed to examine.11 And in recent decades, thousands of studies have been conducted on the psychological, physiological, and
10
Compare, for example, D. T. Suzuki’s fascinating Zen and Japanese Culture (Suzuki, 1970). 11 Claims about fantastic abilities such as being able to become invisible, walk on water, change one’s size at will, and so forth, are also often found. Texts such as the Yoga Sutras even list techniques intended to develop them in the service of enlivening subtler levels of awareness and helping the nervous system become fully integrated. Such texts also contain strong warnings, however, that it is all too easy to become attached to such abilities and distracted from the goal of enlightenment. In the absence of credible scientific evidence for such abilities, however, we need not deal with them here.
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behavioral correlates and effects of meditation and associated experiences of higher states. Significant problems in interpreting the results of such studies have arisen, however. These problems arise from the fact that meditation techniques often differ greatly in both their internal mechanics and their internal and external effects. Consider, for example, the following short list of features of major meditation procedures described by representatives of the traditions referred to: Zen Buddhist practices are likely to use concentration, whether directed perceptually toward breathing or conceptually toward paradoxes (koans) that defy intellectual resolution. Taoist practices emphasize circulation of energy throughout channels of the body. Transcendental Meditation uses relaxed attention to special sounds (or mantras) repeated silently within the mind. Yoga adds many other procedures and objects, such as concentration on energy centers in the body (chakras), the “light” of the mind, and attributes of God. Theravada Buddhism emphasizes dispassionate observation of the impermanence of sensations, thoughts, and whatever else is meditated on, including the self itself. Sufism follows the inner feeling of love for God [see Maliszewski et al., Volume 2]. Traditional meditation procedures thus differ with regard to the mental faculties they use (attention, feeling, reasoning, visualization, memory, bodily awareness, and so forth), the way these faculties are used (effortlessly, forcefully, actively, passively), and the objects they are directed to (thoughts, images, concepts, internal energy, breath, subtle aspects of the body, love, God). They also often differ strongly with regard to how they relate to questions of belief, with some systems emphasizing the need to hold particular philosophical, metaphysical, and/or religious views and others emphasizing complete independence of them all.12 This diversity makes it difficult to talk about effects of “meditation” considered generically, since different procedures often produce very different results. Thus, for example, procedures focusing on respiration and those ignoring it have been found to have different effects on respiratory parameters, as might be expected, and procedures involving intense focus and those emphasizing effortlessness naturally have different effects on variables such as EEG patterns and trait anxiety. Traditional texts, contemporary teachers’ claims, and contemporary meditators’ reports also differ greatly about how quickly (if at all) experiences and states of the kinds we have been discussing are likely to be gained. Some claim ordinary people can begin to enjoy them within a few weeks or months, others 12
The two preceding paragraphs were adapted from the “Introduction” to Shear, 2006, p. xvi.
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insist that it is likely to be years, and others hold that only very few people have the ability to gain them at all. Perhaps because the topic is relatively new to modern Western culture, people nevertheless have often tended to lump all meditation procedures together and think of them as more or less equivalent. This has led to significant errors in interpreting the existing research. One has been to take the many conflicting outcomes on given variables as implying that meditation (conceived generically) has no significant effect at all. An opposite error has been to assume that results found for one procedure can simply be presumed to be produced by other procedures as well. Both of these mistakes are of course methodologically unsound. They are also unfortunate. The first diminishes interest in further research. The second has often led people to begin to practice particular procedures on the basis of results reported for some other procedure and, not finding the expected result, to become disillusioned and reject meditation in general. What is needed is a concerted, nuanced research program to determine which procedures produce what experiences and states on what subpopulations and over what time frames. Only then will we know how practical the idea of gaining the remarkable experiences, states, and effects we have been discussing really is.
References Austin, J. H. (1998). Zen and the brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kapleau, P. (Ed.). (1972). The three pillars of Zen. Boston: Beacon Press. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (1967). The Bhagavad-Gita: A new translation and commentary. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. (1977). Creating an ideal society. West Germany: MERU Press. Shankara. (1970). Shankara’s crest jewel of discrimination (translated by Swami Prabhavananda & C. Isherwood). New York: Mentor Books. Shear, J. (Ed.). (2006). Introduction to The experience of meditation. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Shear, J. (in press). Meditation as first-person methodology: Real promise—and problems. In H. Walach & S. Schmidt (Eds.), Meditation: Neuroscientific approaches and philosophical explanations. New York: Springer. Shear, J., & Mukherjee, S. P. (Eds.). (2006). Consciousness: A deeper scientific search. Kolkata, India: Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. Suzuki, D. T. (1970). Zen and Japanese culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Suzuki, D. T. (1971). What is Zen? New York: Harper and Row.
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Travis, F. T., Haaga, D. H., Hagelin, J., Tanner, M., Arenander, A., Nidich, S., Gaylord-King, C., Grosswald, S., Rainforth, M., & Schneider, R. (2010). A self-referral default brain state: Patterns of coherence, power, and eLORETA sources during eyes-closed rest and the transcendental meditation practice. Cognitive Processes, 11, 21–30. Travis, F. T., & Wallace, R. K. (1997). Autonomic patterns during respiratory suspensions: Possible markers of transcendental consciousness. Psychophysiology, 34, 39–46.
CHAPTER 8
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness Michael Winkelman The concept of shamanism provides an important paradigmatic framework for understanding altered consciousness. Shamanism is a primordial form of transcendence of ordinary consciousness that was found crossculturally, reflecting manifestations of evolved biological adaptations. Evolved capacities for hypnotic susceptibility, processing exogenous neurotransmitter analogues, and music and dance contributed to the emergence of shamanism. Other cross-cultural features of shamanic alteration of consciousness such as dream incubation and strenuous and stressful activities share physiological effects of inducing parasympathetic dominant states. These contribute to the production of a key feature of shamanism, the soul flight or out-of-body experience, which illustrate basic features of altered consciousness involving aspects of self related to an ancient pre-language system of personal representation and emotional bonding.
The Classic Shaman Shamanic practices involving the alteration of consciousness became part of post-Renaissance conceptual frameworks as Western colonial enterprises provided many accounts of what came to be recognized as shamanism (Siikala, 1978). The English use of the term shaman was a result of Russian and German explorations that brought the concept from Siberia, where etymologically and phonologically similar terms are widely dispersed. These early reports characterized shamanistic practices as representing an irrational aspect of human nature. These fragmentary and distorted descriptions were eventually superseded by ethnographic reports in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, which occurred after political, economic, and societal reforms had radically transformed Siberian
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shamanistic practices. Integration of reports on practices among Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and Native American cultures contributed to a growing recognition of core commonalities in spiritual healing practices worldwide. This was exemplified in Mircea Eliade’s (1951/1964) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, which provided a synthesis of these and other cross-cultural materials that contributed to a modern perspective on shamanism as a cross-cultural phenomenon. Eliade characterized shamanism as involving “techniques of ecstasy” used for interaction with the spirit world on behalf of the community, particularly for healing, protection, and finding game animals. Eliade (1951/1964, p. 511) noted that the shamanic ritual played an essential role in the psychological integrity of the community. Shamans fought spirits and disease and defended “life, health, fertility, the world of light, against death, diseases, sterility, disaster, and the world of darkness” (p. 509). The shamanic ritual was typically a night-time ceremony attended by the entire local group in which the shaman’s enactment of battles with the spirits produced fear, awe, and, finally, assurance as the shaman dominated enemy spirits with the assistance of spirit allies. Dancing violently and excitedly for hours to the accompaniment of drums, rattles, singing, and chanting, the shaman eventually collapsed, exhausted, and entered the spirit world. This ecstatic state involved “a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld” (Eliade, 1951/1964, p. 5). This signature feature of the shamanic alterations of consciousness referred to as soul flight involved a personal aspect that separated from the physical body in order to travel to the spirit world. Interaction with spirits, particularly animal spirits, was fundamental to shamanism. Spirit allies were central to shamanistic healing, consulted to determine the causes of illness, which were generally attributed to the actions of spiritual entities. Animal spirits were the vehicle through which the shaman acquired needed information and provided protection against spirits and the malevolent actions of other shamans. Shamanic activities were primarily concerned with health, and illness was typically attributed to spirits or other shamans. Shamanic rituals enacted dramatic struggles to recover the patient’s soul, whose departure from the body posed grave risk of death. The selection of an individual to be a shaman was generally attributed to the spirits as well, who afflicted the initiate with illness and required a search for power, often conceptualized as a vision quest. These experiences typically involved a “death-and-rebirth experience” in which the animal spirits attacked the initiates, killing them and ripping their bodies apart. During this period of death, the spirits healed the initiates,
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reassembling each person with new capacities and powers that empowered the shaman as a wounded healer. Eliade’s suggestion that shamanism was a worldwide phenomenon, sharing common characteristics and functions in diverse cultures, was reinforced by a subsequent generation of researchers (Halifax, 1979; Harner, 1982; Hultkrantz, 1978) who emphasized additional features of shamanism such as: occurring in hunter-gatherer societies; serious illness as part of the selection process; a calling by the spirits; a death/rebirth experience; a deliberate vision quest for spirit contact; the capacity to fly; a special relationship to animal spirits involving transformation into an animal; and the potential for malevolent use of power to cause sickness or death. These intuitive and impressionistic approaches to shamanism have led to the assimilation of many different types of practitioners under the label of shamanism. Uncertainty regarding the empirical status of shamans and their characteristics has persisted because of the relative recency of formal cross-cultural studies.
Cross-cultural Features of Shamans Winkelman’s (1990, 1992; Winkelman & White, 1987) systematic ethnological research, which established the cross-cultural or etic validity of the concept of the shaman, is the basis for the following claims regarding the empirical nature of shamanism. A formal cross-cultural sample and quantitative analysis of the features of magico-religious practitioners established the empirical nature of shamans and their characteristics around the world. The determination of the common features of shamans and their differences from other types of religious practitioners was based on variables such as: selection and training procedures; ritual induction techniques and characteristics; labeling of altered states of consciousness; sources of power and relationships to spirit entities; magico-religious activities; types of healing and divination techniques employed; context and motives for professional activities; and sociopolitical powers and activities. Cluster analysis assessment of shared characteristics provided the basis for determination of different types of religious practitioners and their differences from shamans in terms of their respective characteristics.
Shamans and Other Types of Religious Practitioners These quantitative procedures and empirical analyses revealed a similar form of religious practitioner in foraging societies worldwide (labeled as shamans), as well as identifying different types of magico-religious
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practitioners that varied significantly from shamans (which were labeled shaman/healer, healer, medium, priest, and sorcerer/witch, following terms frequently employed by anthropologists). These practitioner types differed significantly in terms of their central characteristics as well as in terms of the social complexity of their respective societies (Winkelman, 1990, 1992). The cross-cultural validity of the concept of the shaman is substantiated by these empirically derived groups, which indicate that essentially identical religious practitioners are found in different regions of the world (e.g., shamans are found in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas). This empirically derived group of shamans shares more characteristics in common amongst themselves than they do with other magicoreligious practitioners. The empirical similarity shared by these practitioners in different societies is more relevant than a priori definitions or common geographical location. The findings of these cross-cultural studies of Winkelman indicate that shamanism is an empirical phenomenon sharing the following characteristics: a charismatic group leader who is generally a male, with female shamans restricted to nonreproductive periods; professional training involving a vision quest interaction with the spirit world; deliberate alteration of consciousness during both training and practice; an initiatory death-and-rebirth experience; an experience known as the soul journey or soul flight; communal ritual activities involving chanting, music, drumming, and dancing; a primary source of power involving control of animal spirits; a belief in their ability to transform into animals; professional abilities involving healing, diagnosis, divination, and assistance in hunting; theories of illness involving soul loss, magical intrusion of objects, and attacks by spirits and shamans; and a belief in their ability to do harm through sorcery.
This empirical similarity found cross-culturally indicates that the term shaman should be restricted to practitioners that share these characteristics. This includes not only their personal features but their social characteristics as well, such as their principal occurrence in foraging societies, particularly the hunter-gatherer societies where their activities first arose. Shamanism persisted in horticultural societies, but their practices began a transformation as a function of changing subsistence patterns, increased societal complexity, and the emergence of new types of religious practitioners such as priests (Winkelman, 1992).
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Shamanistic Healers In addition to the shamans, other types of religious practitioners (shaman/healers, mediums, and many healers) also shared the core characteristic of shamanism suggested by Eliade (1964), namely altering consciousness in community rituals to interact with spiritual entities. Furthermore, they also all engage in divination and healing rituals. These common features that they share with shamans led Winkelman (1990) to propose the inclusive term shamanistic healers. Shamanistic healers represent a human universal; every society has religious healing practitioners who have a central concern with ritual procedures for altering consciousness. Shamanistic healers also share other central characteristics: spiritual interpretations of therapeutic processes; the utilization of spirit entities as projective mechanisms for representing the unconscious; symbolic and ritual restoration of social relations; and removal of illness attributed to spirits or other humans.
Explaining Shamanistic Universals: The Evolutionary Origins of Techniques for Alteration of Consciousness The universals of shamans and other shamanistic healers point to a basis in something fundamental about human nature. The alterations of consciousness, soul flight experiences, spirit and animal identities, healing and divination practices, and other aspects of shamanistic healers reflect a biological basis. A deep evolutionary basis for shamans is attested to by their virtually universal presence in the foraging societies of the historic past and evidence of an even greater antiquity to shamanism. Although the presence of shamanism some 40,000 years ago during the emergence of modern human culture (the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition) is still seen as controversial by some, it is increasingly accepted that at least some aspects of the Upper Paleolithic cave art reflect shamanistic rituals and experiences (see Winkelman, 2010; also see Ustinova, this volume ). Why should shamanism have been present at the origins of modern human culture, and what is the significance of its role in practices related to the alteration of consciousness? An evolutionary perspective is necessary to understand these features of shamanism and how they emerged as adaptations (Winkelman, 2002, 2010; Winkelman & Baker, 2008). The complex of shamanic practices undoubtedly has many origins; Winkelman and Baker (2008; cf. Winkelman, 2010) demonstrate substantial similarities between chimpanzee and shamanic rituals that establish the latter’s ancient roots in hominid lineage. Humans’ ritual
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activities to alter consciousness and induce shamanic experiences reflect elicitation of innate responses. These include the evolved capacities of hypnotic susceptibility, abilities for processing exogenous neurotransmitter analogues in psychedelics, and behaviors of music and dance, which contributed to the emergence of shamanism. Other ritual processes involve dreaming and inducing conditions that reflect challenges to survival (fasting, pain, sleeplessness, and extensive motor activity). These contribute to production of a key aspect of the shamanic alteration of consciousness, the soul flight and its out-of-body features that reflects key aspects of self development.
The Hypnotic Capacity McClenon’s (2002) proposed biological foundations for shamanism are derived from hereditary capacities of hypnotic susceptibility and its associated placebo effects, which have roots in ancient primate capacities that function to reduce aggression and stress. Phenomena associated with both hypnotizability and placebo effects include the propensity to have anomalous experiences of ghosts, soul flight, possession, mystical awareness, and similar phenomena, which are generally given spiritual interpretations (McClenon, 2002). Hypnotizability and increased suggestibility also facilitate the placebo effect, providing a basis for miraculous cures that enhance faith and survival. Carden˜a (1996) proposes that alterations in consciousness found in shamanism and deep hypnosis are likely the product of the same innate biological and cognitive dispositions, noting their substantial similarities in spite of the very different contexts. Carden˜a and Krippner (2010) note many parallels between shamanic and hypnotic phenomena, including: fantasy-prone and dissociative characteristics; family tendencies in susceptibility suggestive of genetic contributions; developmental paths involving injury, illness, and trauma; a tendency for artistic production and cognitive flexibility; spontaneous out-of-body experiences; and the use of monotonous procedures that focus attention and limit conscious awareness. Dissociative experiences involving a separation of the body from the environment are a key aspect of hypnosis that promotes an engagement with an alternate reality. This reality is generally interpreted in premodern cultures as a spirit world in which these powerful others can act upon our well-being through emotional impacts that can produce notable biological responses. Lynn (2005) proposed that dissociation was an adaptive ability. In bypassing ordinary self-related cognitive and self operations,
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dissociation makes us better capable to act in our own self-interests by avoiding our ordinary socialized ego states and their intimate linkages to the desires of social others. Dissociation as exemplified in spirit possession provides a further distancing from apparent self-interest. McClenon proposed that dissociation facilitated hominids’ ability to cope with stressful experiences, with the ability to dissociate a key to evocation of placebo responses that enhanced survival and reproduction, leading to selection for genotypes that could benefit from shamanic healing.
Exogenous Neurotransmitters in Human and Shamanic Evolution An enhanced human capacity for using exogenous neurotransmitterlike substances (Sullivan, Hagen, & Hammerstein, 2008) reflects selective effects of both natural opioids and the serotonin-mimicking psilocybin and psilocin [see various drug-related chapters, Volume 2]. A long-term evolutionary relationship between psychotropic substances and humans involves selective benefits of substance use and adaptations to environmental sources of consciousness-altering chemicals directly related to shamanism (Winkelman, 2010). There was an accelerated evolution of and selection for polypeptide precursors and genes involved in opioid regulation since the divergence of hominins from our hominid ancestors (Rockman et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2005). The uniquely human pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide precursor (PACAP) has a critical role in enhancing the biological activity of neuropeptides through increasing their affinity for receptor binding (Wang et al., 2005). The mammalian xenobiotic-metabolizing cytochrome P450 provides evidence of a deep evolutionary history of adaptation to plant toxins (Sullivan et al., 2008), while significant human and chimpanzee differences involving genes that enhance an ability to metabolize the plant toxins indicate that positive selection for CYP2D6 enabled human ancestors to metabolize opiates and other drugs, including serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The serotonergic agents, typified in psilocybin-containing mushrooms found worldwide, produce profound alterations of consciousness normally interpreted as involving the soul and the supernatural. There are humans–chimpanzee differences in serotonin binding with psychedelics (Pregenzer et al., 1997) that provide direct evidence that human serotonin systems evolved to more efficiently process this class of drugs. Raghanti et al. (2008) pointed to the wide range of evidence that indicates that the role of serotonin (5HT) in support of higher cognitive functions was modified in the course of human evolution and contributed to our cognitive specializations. This included development of cognitive
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capacities directly related to shamanism because the features of psychedelicinduced experiences are directly related to shamanism, such as: providing access to a spiritual world; producing an experience of the separation of one’s soul or spirit from the body; activating powers within and outside of the person, including the sense of the presence of spirits and their incorporation into one’s body; establishing relationships with animals; inducing an experience of transformation into an animal; provoking an ego death and transformation or rebirth; providing information through visions; producing healing; and inducing an enhancement of social cohesion (Winkelman, 2010).
The worldwide association of plant drugs that profoundly alter consciousness with shamanistic activities points to their intrinsic relationships involving the innate properties of our neurotransmission systems and altered consciousness. Spiritual traditions worldwide consider these exogenous sources of neurotransmitter substances to be the origin of deities and the reason for their spiritual and consciousness-transforming practices. These principles of altered consciousness are at the core of many, perhaps all spiritual traditions; consequently, we must address the nature of spirituality and altered consciousness in terms of the brain effects of the variety of agents and activities that provoke these experiences. The phenomenological similarities of drug (psilocybin) and natural mystical experiences illustrated by Griffiths and co-workers’ (2006) double-masked study tell us that there are common substrates in the brain and neurotransmitters that underlie experiences of altered consciousness, irrespective of their origins or interpretations. Understanding the relationships among natural and drug-induced alterations of consciousness requires an evolutionary perspective that reveals endogenous mechanisms reflecting ancient evolutionary adaptations. These adaptations enhanced our ability to utilize exogenous sources of neurotransmitter substances and to more fully exploit the advantages of altered consciousness involving effects on behavior, emotions, and cognition.
Dance and Music Shamanistic practices utilize singing or chanting, as well as drumming or other percussion, which are integrated with dance [see Fachner, and Zarrilli, this volume]. These practices reflect exaptations of capacities that
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derived from bipedalism, long-distance running, mimesis, and emotional vocal expressions, all of which have the ability to alter consciousness. The evolution of our uniquely human capacities for music and dance enhanced the ritual production of social cohesion found throughout the animal kingdom in an expanded capacity to bind groups together into a common social and personal consciousness (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2009). Human ritual dynamics engage one of the most fundamental of all human forms of communicative behavior—mimesis—deliberate imitation or enactment [see Whitehead, this volume]. These intrinsic rhythmic abilities provide the deeper evolutionary roots of musicality and dance in these expressions of a full-body capacity related to the inherent rhythm of bipedal movement (Merker, 2009). Music is the vocal complement to the behavioral expression of mimesis, a vocal–cognitive shift that expands the communicative power of behavior beyond the range of sight [see Previc, Volume 2]. Dance is a shamanic universal and mimetic practice associated with spiritual practices in cultures around the world. Dance was emergent from the uniquely human bipedal capacity, expanding ancient primate social communication and courtship behaviors. Bachner-Melman and coworkers (2005) found a special genotype for dance associated with more efficient serotonin transporters (SLC6A4) and arginine vasopressin (AVPR1a), an opioid widely associated with social communication and affiliative behavior in primates. Interaction between vasopressin and serotonin in the hypothalamus plays a key role in control of communicative behavior. The association of enhanced dance propensities with ASC and mystical experience indicates their co-evolution. Dance can alter consciousness through a variety of mechanisms (such as stimulating the release of opioids, producing rhythmic stimulation and the brain, and inducing exhaustion and collapse; see Winkelman, 2010). The association of serotonin and the opioid system with alterations of consciousness, as well as enhanced dance propensities, implicates their co-evolution involving enhanced social bonding. Music was at the basis of this expanded coordination of the mimetic capacity and a core feature of our ancient ritual capacities that increased the capacity for culture. Merker (2009) notes that humans alone have ritual culture, one in which the arbitrary form of doing things is obligatory for social participation. This arbitrariness is illustrated in the forms of music and song. Music, however, is a human universal, reflecting innate capacities for music processing and perception and capacities to affect emotions in ways that are transcultural. Music is found at the core of communal ritual in small-scale societies, where it is intrinsic to a broader range of expressive activities such as
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clapping, playing instruments, expressive gestures, and dancing that are central aspects of human group ritual behavior that express and facilitate affiliative intentions. Cross and Morley (2009) point to the unique power of music to enhance group cohesion in a number of ways, including the formation of group identity, synchronization of behavior and cognition, and group catharsis, the expression and release of emotions. Dissanayake (2009) proposes that music reflects adaptations that expanded mother– infant vocal interactional capacities involving an expression of the love bond between mother and infant and a modulation of dynamics of emotional cooperation. The evolution of musicality was a way for mothers to maintain a higher level of interaction with their dependent offspring. These dynamics of exchange integrating body movements, facial dynamics, and emotional expressions involve the same behaviors found in affiliative and submissive ritualizations of other primates and in the diverse forms of human expressive culture that expand the mother–infant communicative dynamics to enhance bonding of larger social groups. Music enhances adaptation through more effective devices for group coordination and formation of stronger emotional bonds among the members of a group. Music and its effects on emotions provide an intrinsic reward for engaging in these activities that enhance social functionality. This includes the ability of music to enhance hormone release, with effects on oxytocin that enhance social bonds (see Panksepp & Trevarthen, 2009). These hormonal effects have both individual and collective effects, coordinating and entraining the individual with the group. The intrinsic pulses of music and their coordination effects on the group create intuitive linkages and coordination and a common sense of intentionality. The pulse that underlies rhythm creates an inclusive sense of meaning that expands our consciousness and connectedness with others. Music enhanced social coordination by expanding exchange of information across diverse modalities (behavior, facial and emotional expressions, vocalizations), illustrating a capacity for the integration of consciousness and production of symbolism. Musical or protomusical behavior has the potential to make use of several cognitive capacities at once, relying on the integration and control of biological, psychological, social and physical systems; it gives the opportunity to practice and develop these integrated skills in a context of limited risk. Cross and Morley (2009) emphasize the role of music in “integrating important cognitive skills . . . [and] stimulation of fundamentally important human interactive capacities” (p. 77). The evolution of the human singing and musical capacities was clearly central to the evolution of the shamanic potentials and plays a
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fundamental role in inducing shamanic states of consciousness (SoC). Rhythmic auditory stimulation associated with drumming and music can elicit alpha and theta driving with a predominant activation in the theta range (see Maurer, Kumar, Woodside, & Pekala, 1997; Rogers & Walters, 1981; Vaitl et al., 2005; Winkelman, 2010, for review). Chanting is a vocal communication system that predated speech and functions in enhancing group solidarity by providing information about emotional states to other members of the group. Music’s effects reflect an information-processing capacity prior to language, a communication system rooted in primate vocalization systems and their social functions. Music induces physiological effects through activity in the amygdala and hippocampus of the paleomammalian brain, activating emotional processing centers (see Crowe, 2004). The rhythmic properties of music entrain neural oscillations that synchronize perception and action to the beat of the music, unifying perception, cognition, and behavior in a primordial form of psychointegration. Freeman (1995, 2000a, 2000b) characterizes the last half million years of human evolution as involving adaptations for enhanced social communication and involving self-regulatory processes of the limbic system that are based on dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin and vasopressin, basic mechanisms through which mammalian bonding processes were extended to larger groups. Given that our knowledge of the external world is limited to the representations produced within our brains, this solipsism can only be overcome with information about other minds. Freeman (1995) characterizes music and dancing as the quintessential human technology for bridging the solipsistic gulf with information signals from other brains. The basic biotechnology of information exchange and group formation involves rhythmic dancing, marching, clapping, music, and chanting, an ancient socialization mechanism for engaging our entire body into a group, a cooperative community. Rhythmically repeated motions make the intentions and behaviors of others predictable, with musical skills playing a central role in humans’ intellectual evolution through expanding consciousness of others. Consequently, this “other” consciousness must be understood as central to the nature of altered consciousness and involving changes in the experience of the self.
Ritual Induction Procedures: Engagement of Natural Drives Shamanistic methods of altering consciousness involve activities known for their ability to activate the sympathetic nervous system; when
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carried to the point of exhaustion and collapse, they produce a condition of parasympathetic dominance. Shamans undergoing training and preparation for ceremonies typically fast, endure exposure to temperature extremes and painful austerities, undergo sleep deprivation, experience extensive auditory stimuli (drumming and chanting), and exercise (such as prolonged dancing); they may also ingest psychoactive substances, particularly, psychedelics and tobacco. These processes inexorably lead to a collapse into a modified dream/sleep state in which the shaman remains conscious. This collapse into repose, a trophotropic (parasympathetic) dominant condition, is accompanied by a slowing of the brain wave discharges into more synchronized patterns involving entrainment of the frontal cortex by highly coherent slow-wave synchronized brain discharges involving alpha and theta brain wave patterns (see Winkelman, Introduction in this volume; Winkelman, 2010, for further review). Underlying principles involved in shamanic alteration of consciousness involve directly engaging natural drives, generally restricting them by forcing one to overcome or endure thirst and hunger, pain, cold or heat, sleeplessness, and celibacy, often under unpleasant conditions (solitude, isolation). Fasting
Restrictions on foods in general are typical preparations for shamanic activities. Training of the neophyte typically involves dietary restrictions for several weeks to a few months and may extend for as long as several years. Fasting can affect serotonin synthesis, resulting in hallucinations, dissociation, paranoia, and megalomania (Fessler, 2002). Fasting induces in the body a hypoglycemic state that can cause seizures and increases susceptibility to driving influences on the EEG reflecting effects on the pituitary and adrenal glands, which stimulate the hypothalamus and hippocampal-septal systems. Fessler proposed that severe dietary constriction results in an adaptive reduction of serotonin activity, which promotes increased risk-taking and impulsivity. Food deprivation produces depersonalization experiences as well [see Carden˜a, Volume 2] and can cause sleep disruption due to reduced levels of melatonin precursors; these disruptions can produce the visionary consciousness associated with shamanism. Sexual Abstinence
Shamans are typically expected to be celibate before and after their ceremonies, a restriction that may be imposed for years during training. These restrictions appear to have physiological bases associated with the physiological dynamics of both sexual orgasm and ecstatic altered states
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of consciousness (Davidson, 1980). Sexual activity requires a simultaneous increase in the activity of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. When a peak of sexual excitation is achieved, the sympathetic system collapses, exhausted, and the parasympathetic state becomes dominant. Shamanic practices induce similar patterns of excitation to collapse, a sympathetic activation followed by a parasympathetic dominant state. Prior sexual activity could be expected to preclude as profound a parasympathetic collapse. Consequently, sexual prohibitions can be seen as functional in facilitating more powerful alterations of consciousness. This is not, however the only dynamic of the relationship of sex to the alteration of consciousness [see Maliszewski et al., Volume 2]. Extreme Exertion and Physical Stress
Extreme physical activity is an important way of inducing alterations of consciousness. The extreme stimulation of the body by dancing can induce the release of endogenous opiates because the central opioid systems are activated by prolonged rhythmic activity and high-intensity exhaustive anaerobic exercise that can overwhelm temperature-regulation mechanisms, stimulating the release of endogenous opioids (Appenzeller, 1987). Dietrich and McDaniel (2004) integrated a range of research on how exercise stimulates the release of the endocannabinoids, the marijuana-like neurotransmitters found naturally in our brains. Exercise has a direct effect on the serum concentrations of the endocannabinoids, likely contributing to analgesia, sedation, and a sense of well-being. Stressful stimuli (burns, extreme cold and heat, deliberate injury, and toxic substances) also contribute to extreme stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in a parasympathetic dominant state and endorphin release (see Vaitl et al. 2005; Winkelman, 2010, for review). Social isolation, reduction of motor behavior, and muscular relaxation lead to a parasympathetic dominant state with increased cortical synchronization. Extensive, prolonged, and intense sensory stimulation can lead to the same effects as sensory deprivation through habituation and the complete blockage of perception of stimuli, leading to a profound alteration of consciousness.
Dreams and Shamanic Altered Consciousness Shamanic altered states inevitably incorporated dream processes by engaging in overnight rituals that first prevent sleep by hours of dancing drumming and singing; after exhaustion, the participants then collapse into vivid dreamlike states. Ritual has the potential to produce an
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activation of lucid dreams because REM sleep is enhanced by high levels of physical activity prior to sleep (Gackenbach & LaBerge 1988). Lucid dreams engage an interaction between waking and dream consciousness that can produce cognitive integration and therapeutic outcomes, reflecting a greater awareness of information-processing capacities of the unconscious involving pre-egoic and prelinguistic levels of symbolization (Laughlin, McManus, & d’Aquili, 1992). Hunt (1995) characterized dream cognition as involving the presentational symbolic intelligence, a form of analogic thought derived from a cross-modal fusion of visual imagery, spatial information, and body expressions. The hippocampal theta rhythm (3 to 6 cps brain waves) found during dreams is an indicator of a special type of information-processing during which the information from the primary sensory areas is integrated, processed, and transferred to the neocortex (Winson, 1985). REM sleep is a basic mammalian memory process for evaluating experience and forming strategies, reviewing experiences for their transfer from short-term to long-term memory (Graham, 1990; Winson, 1985). Brereton (2000) characterized shamanic use of dreaming as involving processes of risk-free construction and examination of options or scenarios. Dreams allow for a replaying of crucial experiences and resolving them through exploring alternate ways of addressing situations. Dreams also offer experiences of detachment from the physical body, epitomized in the shamanic out-of-body experiences.
Soul Flight and the Body A key aspect of the shamanic alteration of consciousness is reflected in the concept of out-of-body experiences, where some personal aspect is experienced as leaving the body and traveling to the spiritual world. The biological basis of these experiences is indicated by their cross-cultural distribution. Many basic features of the shamanic soul flight are paralleled in a natural transformation of consciousness illustrated in near-death or clinical death experiences (see Winkelman, 2010, for discussion). Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili (1992) illustrate how the experience of soul flight involves a natural symbolization of the shaman’s transformative experiences and a biologically based system of self-representation. The body is a universal system of representation, a neurocognitive model that humans use in organizing diverse forms of internal and external experiences. Hunt (1995) expanded on the out-of-body experience as a synesthesia based on visual images of the body and the human capacity to “take the role of the other”—communicative interactions in which one monitors messages from others to construct social perceptions regarding one’s self.
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The soul journey involves the capacity to take perspectives of others, manifested in seeing one’s own body as it would appear from another’s perspective. The taking of the role of the other toward one’s self provides for forms of awareness in a visual-spatial mode operating independent of the constraints of the physical body/world. This body-based sense of knowing is the most fundamental form of information processing of the body.
The Biological Bases of the OBE Shamanic soul flight is similar to a broader class of anomalous body and self experiences that also exhibit central OBE features such as flying, falling, floating, and spinning. OBEs reflect three aspects of abnormal self-representation: the self experience as lacking unity; the self as located in a different place than the physical body; and the visual perspective of seeing the world from a different perspective than the body (Metzinger, 2009; see also Blanke & Dieguez, Volume 2). The neural correlates of OBE indicated by studies of clinical and normal populations (see Blanke & Mohr, 2005; Blanke et al., 2005) implicate the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). The TPJ is adjacent to areas responsible for the integration of somatosensory information, providing low-level vestibular processing and mediation of interaction among the higher-level processes that underlie the production of a sense of the phenomenal self. Interference with this integration or the transfer of vestibular information to other parts of the brain can lead to altered senses of body ownership and disembodiment. According to Blanke’s research, those disposed to OBE also had interference with interconnections between the TPJ and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a functional disconnection between parietal and frontal areas that inhibit egocentric perspectives. While OBEs indicate a loss of connectivity of the motor, somatic, and balance functions of the TPJ area with the executive and ego PFC, these experiences are always visual experiences, illustrating that self-connectivity with visual regions persists. The self-image of the OBE is, however, not engaged with the actual visual field but with an imagined visual field that is also disconnected from actual body perception. The loss of this integration of information regarding balance and motor experience underlies the ability of the self and experienced false body to travel through space without the actual constraints of the physical body. Shamanic soul flight may result from the deactivation of normal vestibular system functions from the extensive dancing and drumming because excessive repetitive activities can overwhelm the ability of the vestibular system to manage input about movement. Functional areas of the TPJ can be overloaded by the excessive stimulation, a habituation typical
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of over-stimulation, which leads to shutdown of a sensory system. Such habituation allows body-processing and self-processing systems to operate free of actual body input. Metzinger (2009) noted that OBE phenomenological and functional properties correspond to the concept of mind. The two self-models present in OBE provide potentially adaptive features manifested in the proto-concept of the mind. OBEs model a visual representation of one’s own body from a third-person perspective that is not the focus of experience nor of self-identity. Rather, a second self-representation model—the astral self—that is removed from the body is the locus of the phenomenal perceiving self and subjective experience, including proprioceptive and spatial perceptions. It is this second self that provides an integrated representation of reality and has the attentional, experiential, kinesthetic qualities and the capacities of intentionality. This disembodied self has the first-person perspective from which the phenomenal world of spirits and supernatural powers is experienced. He also suggested that adaptive and functional features of the OBE derive from separating certain capacities from the physical self-model to preserve vital cognitive functions. The mental clarity associated with the OBE may reflect transient functional modularization that allows the information-processing systems to differentially distribute functions to different self-modules. For instance, when physical trauma cuts off somatosensory input, a separate sense of self can play the role of integrating higher cognitive functions such as attention, problem representation and solutions, and agency and volitional processes. In the OBE condition, intentional agent aspects of the person control higher cognitive functions independent of the limitations of the physical body. Metzinger contends that the OBE has undoubtedly been at the basis of humans’ postulation of spirits, souls, and other supernatural phenomena. OBEs are a subjective paradigm for construction of cognized models of the world that are fundamental to understanding the primordial nature of altered consciousness. The force of the OBE invariably leads to dualist perceptions of reality, seeing the material and mental aspects—body and soul—as separate, and concluding that consciousness exists apart from the physical body. These experience of one’s self as a soul-like entity are the basis of a neurophenomenological archetype and the reflection of a neurological potential that is at the core of human concerns with altered consciousness even today. Soul flight experiences reflect fundamental characteristics of human consciousness involving a theoretical selfawareness and self-modeling that moves beyond the primitive bodily processes and transcends the present moment to both experience the past and predict our future. Arzy, Molnar-Szakacs, and Blanke (2008) illustrated
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that this capacity for mental time travel primarily evolved for anticipating future events, reflecting selection for mental processing of future predictions and decision-making.
Shamanic Consciousness and Brain Systems The nature of the shamanic OBE suggests that the dynamics of altered consciousness are related to levels of the brain involved in body representation. Shamanic ritual activities lead to a separation of body and selfperspectives and reflect the ability of consciousness to operate apart from the body-basis from which it arose. This illustrates functions of altered consciousness involving an expansion of consciousness from the physiological bases from which it arose. The nature of altered consciousness is closely related to activities of the limbic brain [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. These responses are reflected in highly synchronized brain wave patterns, particularly in the theta range. These brain wave discharges have the net effect of stimulating the processes of the lower brain systems and integrating them into the frontal cortex. It suggests that shamanic altered consciousness be understood in terms of integrating the dynamics of the presymbolic mind into the advanced cognitive capacities of the frontal cortex. The triune brain model of MacLean (1990) provides a framework for explicating the functional effects of shamanic alterations of consciousness. A central feature involves the paleomammalian brain or limbic system, the focus of the synchronized brain wave production. The structures of this “emotional brain” play a vital role in subjective perception, using feelings for guiding behavior and providing for an integrated sense of self. The paleomammalian brain mediates patterns of social signaling that promote a sense of community and provide for cooperation—physically, socially, and mentally—in ways that enhance self-security, social relations, and bonding and attachment. This reflects fundamental aspects of altered consciousness, a connection with our emotions and relations with others. Shamanic alterations of consciousness provide contexts in which the intentions of the shaman and patient provide for a readjustment of these vital personal and social dynamics.
Conclusions: Paradigms of Shamanism The classic paradigms of shamanism emphasized a view of the practices and experiences as involving something delusory, even pathological. The rationalist metaphysic sought to discount the practices, explicitly
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contrasting their irrationality with the rationality of science. The methodologies were etic, using the outsider’s point of view, and generally “emetic,” rejecting altogether the validity of the shamanic worldview. Consequently, the methodologies employed were descriptive and at best second hand, describing the experiences of the “other,” but without sharing their experiences as a fundamental part of the research approach. The values assumed in this etic approach were those of materialist science, rejecting the validity of the alternative view of the world exposed by shamanism. An exemplar of this approach can be found in Silverman’s (1967) article that characterized shamanism as a form of psychosis. The anthropological engagement with shamanism gave rise to a diversity of new paradigms for understanding shamanism, the most important of these being emic, attempting to convey the shamanic other’s world view. Harner’s (1982) approach is explicitly emic in the sense that it accepts the indigenous views of reality of spirits, viewing the indigenous worldviews as a legitimate metaphysic. The methodologies are explicitly experiential, emphasizing shamanic journeying and clairvoyance/seeing as fundamental tools [see Luke, Volume 2]. The value system explicitly rejects modern rationalism and science as inadequate to explain shamanism, instead preferring glosses of foreign concepts and the Western spiritual traditions as better frameworks for understanding shamanism. The exemplars of this emic approach are epitomized in shamanic workshops that provide the Westerner with the tools for beginning a journey into this alternate reality. My paradigmatic approach or disciplinary matrix to understanding consciousness in general and shamanism in particular is “neurophenomenological,” based in an explicit effort to relate biological processes to phenomenological experience. Its metaphysic is idealist in the sense that it recognizes that all experiences, including those of the physical world and biological processes, are constructed, the product of the symbolic mind. It accepts the extraordinary experiences of consciousness and shamanism as symbolically real, withholding judgment regarding their ultimate ontological reality. The neurophenomenological approach requires plural methodologies, attempting to find a ground to mediate the biological realities of the brain and the phenomenological experiences of altered consciousness. It expands the value orientations of materialist science in valuing the experiences of altered consciousness as primary data which an integrated science of consciousness requires. The exemplars of this neurophenomenological framework are epitomized in the biological modes of altered consciousness that attempt to explain their phenomenological qualities and functional characteristics in terms of the alteration of brain functions.
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The concept of shamanism as a paradigm has cross-cultural support, as well as substantial concurring neurophenomenological evidence, that makes it a compelling universal framework for interpreting expressive culture (e.g., see Berman, 2008a, 2008b). The shamanic paradigm also provides a parsimonious framework for linking human religiosity with the ritual dynamics prevalent as communication systems in other species (Winkelman & Baker, 2008). These deep biological bases make the shamanic paradigm a compelling framework for the interpretations of altered consciousness as well.
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Malloch, S., & Trevarthen, C. (Eds.). (2009). Communicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Maurer, R., Kumar, L., Woodside, L., & Pekala, R. (1997). Phenomenological experience in response to monotonous drumming. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 40, 130–145. McClenon, J. (2002). Wondrous healing shamanism, human evolution and the origin of religion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Merker, B. (2009). Ritual foundations of human uniqueness. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship (pp. 281–300). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. New York: Basic Books. Panksepp, J., & Trevarthen, C. (2009). The neuroscience of emotion and music. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pregenzer, J., Alberts, G., Bock, J., Slightom, J., & Im, W. (1997). Characterization of ligand binding properties of the 5-HT1D receptors cloned from chimpanzee, gorilla and rhesus monkey in comparison with those from the human and guinea pig receptors. Neuroscience Letters, 3(17), 117–120. Raghanti, M., Stimpson, C., Marcinkiewicz, J., Erwin, J., Hof, P., & Sherwood, C. (2008). Differences in critical serotonergic innervation among humans, chimpanzees, and macaque monkeys: A comparative study. Cerebral Cortex, 18, 584–597. Rockman, M., Hahn, M., Soranzo, N., Zimprich, F., Goldstein, D., & Wray, G. (2005). Ancient and recent positive selection transformed opioid cisregulation in humans. PLoS Biology, 3, 2208–2219. Rogers, L., & Walters, D. (1981). Methods for finding single generators, with applications to auditory driving of the human EEG by complex stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 4, 257–265. Siikala, A. (1978). The rite technique of Siberian shaman. In Folklore fellows communication 220. Helsinki: Soumalainen Tiedeskaremia Academia. Silverman, J. (1967). Shamans and acute schizophrenia. American Anthropologist, 69, 21–31. Sullivan, R., Hagen, E., & Hammerstein, P. (2008). Revealing the paradox of drug reward in human evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B27, 1231–1241. Vaitl, D. N., Birbaumer, J., Gruzelier, G. A., Jamieson, B., Kotchoubey, A., Ku¨bler, D., et al. (2005). Psychobiology of altered states of consciousness. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 98–127. Wang Y., Qian, Y., Yang, S., Shi, H., Liao, C., Zheng, H., & Su, B. (2005). Accelerated evolution of the pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide precursor gene during human origin. Genetics, 170, 801–806. Winkelman, M. (1990). Shamans and other “magico-religious healers”: A crosscultural study of their origins, nature, and social transformation. Ethos, 18, 308–352.
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Winkelman, M. (1992). Shamans, priests, and witches. A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners. Anthropological Research Papers #44. Arizona State University. Winkelman, M. (2002). Shamanism and cognitive evolution. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12(1), 71–101. Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Winkelman, M., & Baker, J. (2008). Supernatural as natural: A biocultural approach to religion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Winkelman, M., & White, D. (1987). A cross-cultural study of magico-religious practitioners and trance states: Data base. In D. Levinson & R. Wagner (Eds.), Human relations area files research series in quantitative cross-cultural data: Vol. 3. New Haven, CT: HRAF Press. Winson, J. (1985). Brain and psyche: The biology of the unconscious. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Press.
CHAPTER 9
Altered Consciousness in Society Charles Whitehead Human beings are remarkably social creatures, and the minds of developing infants take shape in interactions with other people, notably the main caretaker in the early months [see Granqvist, Reijman, & Carden˜a, Volume 2]. What may be less readily appreciated is the degree to which human consciousness is molded by culture, producing potentially lifelong changes that may require nothing less than a conversion experience to shift them in any fundamental way, so much so that one person’s “normal state” may be someone else’s “altered state.” No account of altering consciousness in society would be complete without first discussing these enduring changes in consciousness, which are addressed in Part 1 of this chapter. Human societies also employ instrumental means of producing temporary shifts in consciousness, and these too vary cross-culturally, in part because they are shifts from a culturally variable norm. These short-term changes are discussed in Part 2, followed by their relationship to social structure (Part 3) and social change (Part 4). Culturally induced altered states in pre-industrial societies are commonly believed to be, and experienced as, spiritual in nature. Thus many pre-industrial societies are “polyphasic” (Laughlin, McManus, & d’Aquili, 1992), that is, they value altered states (ASC) as sacred and socially constructive, whereas the post-industrial West is “monophasic,” that is, it exclusively valorizes a waking state that is assumed to be predominantly “rational.” Culturally instituted ASC may be just as common in monophasic societies, but they are either not perceived as orthodox (for example, “speaking in tongues” is commonplace in charismatic but not Anglican churches) or are secularized (such as states induced by the social consumption of alcohol or the clinical use of hypnosis) or criminalized (as in the recreational use of drugs that are less traditional than—in the West—alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco). In Part 5, in the light of everything reviewed to that point, I discuss what we might infer about the nature of human spirituality.
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Long-Term Alterations in Consciousness Consciousness—the way we perceive and experience ourselves and the world—varies from one culture to another, often in quite bizarre ways. What seems bizarre to you, of course, depends on which culture you grew up in. If a Dorze warrior tells you that all the local leopards are devout Christians (Sperber, 1975, p. 3), you may well conclude that this person is deluded. But he will think the same of you if you tell him that there is no God and everything in the universe is meaningless and dead. Or, if a Temiar hunter tells you that the forest is full of spirits, and all people, animals, plants, mountains, and rivers have two souls (Jennings, 1995), you might think this is distinctly odd. But try telling him that there is no such thing as a soul or spirit, and that these are delusions created by chemicals in the brain—then the boot will be on the other foot. Each will think the other is deluded, and I happen to think you would both be right. So why do human cultures cause such profound alterations in our minds? The best answer I can come up with is that such changes are, or were at one time, necessary to achieve the unique level of cooperation seen in human groups. Biologists call this “generalized altruism.” According to selfish gene theory, only two kinds of cooperation can evolve genetically: kin-based altruism (it pays to help close kin because they have many of the same genes as you: Hamilton, 1964) and reciprocal altruism (it pays to help someone who will help you in return; Trivers, 1971). But humans are capable of risking and sacrificing their lives to save complete strangers from whom they expect nothing in return. Biologists might be wrong, of course; incidents have been reported that suggest generalized altruism in dolphins and elephants (Bates et al., 2008), which might be explained by the evolution of empathy in social mammals. However, large-scale cooperation is uniquely human, and it may be no coincidence that all human societies have formal systems of inflated kinship (from clan membership to nationality) and reciprocity (economic exchange, for example). To sustain such systems, all societies are necessarily governed by rules such as obligations (e.g., marriage) and prohibitions (e.g., the incest taboo), reinforced by material or supernatural sanctions. Rules, of course, exist to suppress or channel our “selfish” biological impulses in socially desirable ways. For this reason, human culture might be regarded as “antibiological.” Human systems of kinship and exchange have been associated with two quite distinct effects on consciousness. Classificatory kinship, for example, divides societies into lineage clans (Le´vi-Strauss, 1949/1969). The clan you belong to is regarded as your “kin”: Every member in your
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age group will be your “brothers” and “sisters,” their mothers will be your “mothers,” and so on. One or more other clans will be your “affines” (inlaws) and you and your siblings will marry someone from an affinal clan. Radcliffe-Brown (1931, p. 97), studying kinship in Australia, found that classificatory siblings have almost identical personalities. Mauss (1925/ 1967) notes that, in clan-based societies, individuals are identified with groups, groups themselves are regarded as “persons,” the gifts they exchange are perceived as continuous with the giver, and clan chiefs are conflated with their people, including dead ancestors and as-yet-unborn children. This expansion of the concept of personhood can take a form that Johansen (1954, p. 36) called “the kinship I.” For example, a Maori chief may relate the history and myths of his people using the first person singular pronoun throughout: referring to his ancestors not as “they” but as “I” and to mythic culture heroes such as Maui not as “he” but as “I.” The economic systems of clan-based societies take the form of gift exchange (Mauss, 1925/1967). Egalitarian societies (those without formal leaders or social hierarchy) generally exchange like for like. If I give you a pig with a patch over one eye, then, after a suitably respectful delay, you must give me a pig with a patch over one eye. This must be a different pig; to give my own pig back to me would be a deeply insulting rejection of my gift. More complex and hierarchical societies have competitive exchange systems in which gifts are supposedly given in a spirit of generosity and respect, but the covert intent is self-promotion and the humiliation, degradation, or ruin of your rivals. The “monster child” (Mauss, 1925/1967) of gift exchange is the potlatch system of northwest coastal America. A chief would invite his rivals to a feast, at which “honored guests” would be forced to witness an orgy of wealth destruction. This would oblige them, at some future date, to reciprocate with an even more reckless destruction of their own wealth. Failure to fulfil one’s obligations in this relentless system would lead to “loss of face,” dishonor, and, ultimately, social exclusion. Just as classificatory kinship involves inflated self-perceptions, so gift exchange is associated with fragmentation of the self. Leenhardt (1949/ 1979), for example, notes that Melanesians appear to have no coherent ego; rather, selfhood is defined in terms of multiple exchange relationships, as the hub of a wheel is defined by its spokes. Each relationship casts the person in a different role with a different set of attributes and attitudes. Because gifts are regarded as continuous with the giver, persons are further conceived as “partible” (Strathern, 1988). Moreover, the “useless trade goods” exchanged in competitive systems are regarded as “persons” in their own right (Mauss, 1925/1967). They
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have personal names, are believed to have human-like minds and emotions, and are held to be capable of articulate speech. The belief that non-human agents and objects have humanlike minds and motives is known as “animism.” The fact that gifts are regarded as persons suggests some linkage between animism and gift exchange. Animism commonly incorporates another belief known as “perspectivism” (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). That is, nonhuman agents not only have humanlike personalities but also perceive themselves and the world from a human perspective. For example, a jaguar lapping the blood of its prey sees itself as a human drinking manioc beer; a vulture eating rotten meat sees maggots as grilled fish. And, just as animals see themselves as human, they see humans as animals, and such perceptions depend on relations of carnivory. Jaguars and spirits eat humans, so they perceive us as whitelipped peccaries (animals that humans eat). Conversely, white-lipped peccaries see humans as jaguars or spirits. Further, the way animals, spirits, and humans see each other is not thought of as a matter of appearance versus reality: All these conflicting perceptions are realities. All beings live in a multitude of parallel universes, playing a different role in each, determined by the entity whose perspective creates that particular universe. Significantly, “other” humans, including affines, are seen as animal, and it seems likely that perspectivism is interlinked with the perspectival relationships of classificatory kinship (Viveiros de Castro, 1999): My kin will see me as “human” while my affines will see me as “animal”; and since sex is equated with “eating,” these perceptions likewise depend on relations of “carnivory.” Incest equates with cannibalism and both are regarded as abhorrent. Paradoxically, perspectival worldviews frequently include the belief that animals are actually humans wearing animal suits. This belief persists in hunting communities that regularly butcher meat, so it would seem that animal costume transforms the human all the way through to the bones. When a human dons an animal mask or costume in ritual, this is not thought to conceal a human identity, but to create an animal one. A perennial fear in people with such beliefs is of meeting an animal in human form. If the animal greets the person, and the person—mistaking the animal for a human—responds, then the person will be instantly transformed into an animal of that species (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Shape-shifting is not regarded as something miraculous but as an accident waiting to happen. For people with such beliefs, there is no essential body. Selfhood is perceived as profoundly unstable and readily transformed by a simple change of appearance or attitude.
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In sum, I have so far suggested that the emergence of large-scale cooperation in humans required formal systems of expanded kinship and reciprocity and that such systems in clan-based societies are commonly associated with inflated, fragmented, and mutable selfhood as well as culturally obfuscated views of reality. This raises the question of how these alterations in perception, belief, and experience are accomplished. It would be a mistake to suppose that cultural beliefs and attitudes are transmitted from one generation to the next entirely or even mainly by word of mouth. The whole way of life of a people conditions the sentiments and perceptions of its members. The anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1972/1977), for example, has shown that merely to walk through a Kabuli house is an object lesson in gender relations. The man’s room, where he greets and entertains visitors, is raised above the level of the rest of the house. His chair is beside the fireplace, with his gun, signifying his importance, leaning nearby. The woman’s kitchen is down a few steps and continuous with the place where animals are stabled. Among the Sambia in New Guinea, women and men move through the village along separate paths. Sambian houses are divided into a man’s space and a woman’s. If a woman trespasses in a man’s space or on a male path, she will pollute her husband or other men, causing them to fall sick or die, and would be regarded as a thoroughly “bad woman” (Herdt, 1987). One important factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and seems likely to influence self-perceptions is sexual modesty, which appears to be a cultural universal (Knight, 1991). A male chimpanzee, desiring to mate with a female, need only show his erect penis to indicate his interest. This would not be acceptable in any known human society, at least not in public. Though nudity may be obligatory in certain ceremonial or sacred contexts, human genitals are normally concealed—even in the heat of the Kalahari Desert, where the Bushmen do not wear clothes for comfort. Occasionally genitals may be emphasized, as in New Guinea, where men wear penis sheaths, or in the Ida festival, where men wear artificial vaginas on their heads (Gell, 1975), but they are never displayed in the natural manner of chimpanzees. No other species systematically alters the sensory qualities of bodies in so many culturally variable and ingenious ways as Homo sapiens (Power, 2010; Whitehead, 2010), including dress, coiffure, jewellery, cosmetics, body paint, soap, perfume, tattooing, cicatrization (making patterns of welts on the flesh by tiny knife cuts), and frank mutilation. Many of these alterations of the body are accomplished in or for ritual, and ritual is a major institutional means of altering consciousness. Rituals are sacred performances, commonly involving song, dance, pantomime, and the
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manipulation of sacred objects or images. Wearing animal costumes and pretending to be animals occurs in rites on every inhabited continent, and this is likely to be an ancient feature of animistic ritual. People generally believe in the potency of their rituals and, apparently, believe they can be truly transformed into animals. Such wholly-believed-in make-believe may well explain the origin of animism and perspectivism, and it implicates not only role-play (the ability to pantomime) but suggestibility. The capacity to pretend and to conform to group beliefs would appear to be prerequisites for human culture and essential if people are to believe in patent fictions of the kind noted above. European folktales, including many of the bedtime stories we read to our children, often feature talking animals and animal/human transformations. These tales reflect the perspectival worldview that once prevailed in pre-Christian Europe (Napier, 1985). Indeed, the Western scientific worldview seems to have evolved through a series of reactions against perspectivism (Whitehead, 2010). Examples include the proscription of graven images in the Ten Commandments, the emphasis on the spiritual essentialism of the individual in Islam and Christianity, and the physicalist notion of a universe that can be entirely understood without reference to consciousness. Although the scientific method is designed to overcome personal and cultural bias, as a political institution dependent on public respect, research funding, and job security, science tends to preserve cultural biases that support its own authority—such as individualism and the valuation of work over play—and even generates new ones of its own: notably physicalism, mentioned above. So many of the most basic “scientific” assumptions are as much the result of cultural obfuscation as are animistic and perspectival belief systems.
Temporary Alterations in Consciousness Many emotional and autonomic expressions, such as laughter and yawning, are contagious. That is, if other people are laughing or yawning, you are likely to do the same. Social contagion of this kind is common to many animals (Brown, 1991). In humans, a study has shown a positive relationship between emotional contagion and experiential features of hypnotizability, suggesting that aspects of hypnosis that are common to other altered states—such as dissociation (partial or complete isolation of one mental process from another)—may have a social origin or serve social functions (Carden˜a, Terhune, Lo¨o¨f, & Buratti, 2009).
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Another phenomenon that humans share with many higher animals, beside the daily sleep–wake cycle, is the “basic rest–activity cycle.” In humans, this is called the “daydream cycle,” because we know that we are daydreaming during these periods of relaxation. Human daydreaming tends to recur at approximately 90-minute intervals that appear to be continuous with our REM sleep cycle, REM being the sleep phase when dreaming is most continuous (Brown, 1991, p. 95). In humans, the daydream cycle has become adapted to serve a social function. It coincides with the so-called “chat cycle” that occurs during free-flowing human conversation. At 90-minute intervals, human conversation becomes particularly absorbing, spontaneous, and enjoyable. The same phenomenon occurs in other forms of free-flowing human co-action and is characterized by physiological rapport uniting the group. That is, physiological indices—such as heart rate, respiratory rate, pupil diameter, lip pallor, skin conductivity, and galvanic muscle response—tend to converge among participants in the group activity (Brown, 1991, pp. 46, 220). Rapport is an essential precondition for hypnotic induction. The daydream state itself resembles a hypnotic condition, when humans are most suggestible [see Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2]. These cyclical changes in consciousness are part of our biological heritage. Human cultures, however, have institutional methods of altering consciousness that exploit this heritage. Durkheimian anthropologists believe that all the “antibiological” features of human culture were initially generated in ritual. Certainly all known human societies have rituals, sacred or otherwise, and rituals are uniquely suited to exploiting human capacities of dissociation and suggestibility. Following an extensive study of rituals in India, Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960) concluded that all rituals are rites of passage, because they accompany or accomplish social transitions. Life crisis rites mark changes of state or station in the lives of individuals: birth, initiation, marriage, election to office, illness, and death. Calendrical rites mark the passage of society as a whole from one season to the next. Van Gennep further showed that rituals typically involve three phases: a separation phase in which people are formally separated from the everyday world of mundane activity; a transitional phase during which the intended transformation is accomplished; and an incorporation phase, or return to the mundane world transformed. The transitional phase takes place in a kind of limbo, a betwixt-andbetween world that van Gennep called “liminal” (from Latin limen, meaning “margin”). In the liminal phase of life crisis rites, the normative social order is usually suspended. During initiation, for example, all signs of
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status or rank are removed. The novitiates may be stripped naked, painted with mud or black pigment, and declared to be “invisible.” In calendrical rites, on the other hand, there is commonly a Saturnalian inversion of the normative order, with the humble temporarily elevated to dominate the powerful. Or again, if cannibalism is regarded as abhorrent in the everyday world, it becomes a sacrament during ritual—whether real cannibalism, as among the Avatip in New Guinea (Harrison, 1993), or make-believe cannibalism, as in Christian communion. The same can apply to incest. Among the Eskimos, the whole of the winter was regarded as “ritual time.” Married partners were separated, and sexual intercourse took place between “incestuous” couples (Rasmusson, 1976). Victor Turner (1969) coined the term “anti-structure” to describe the transitional topsy-turveydom of the liminal phase of ritual. However, he pointed out that in secular Western societies, where ritual participation is no longer mandated by awesome spiritual potencies, the antistructural functions of religion have been taken over by the subjunctive “what if ?” of leisure activities: entertainment, recreation, and the cultural arts (Turner, 1982). Without such anti-structural episodes, Turner believed, postindustrial societies could not continue to function. The theory of anti-structure holds that human life alternates between the structural role play of everyday life and the anti-structural role play of ritual or recreational activity. Furthermore, conflicts created by the inevitable contradictions within social structure cause friction, disputes, and “social dramas,” increasing entropy within the system. Anti-structural phases are necessary to maintain, repair, and reinvigorate human social orders. Also, when shifting circumstances require adaptive change in the normative system, anti-structural processes are again required; they are the source of new culture. Transformation and revitalization may be the principal functions of ASC, which frequently show a striking parallel to van Gennep’s three ritual phases. Sleep, for example, is bracketed by hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences. Several authors (Bateson, 1955; Huizinga, 1955; Jennings, 1995; Schechner, 1977; Turner, 1982; Winnicott, 1974) have noted that childhood play, in line with van Gennep’s transformative phase of ritual, takes place in a “transitional space” where the rules or demands of everyday reality are suspended. They also note that this is essential to enculturation. Childhood itself might be regarded as a “transitional space”—an extended period of irresponsibility in which children, shielded from the demands of adult society and survival, are free to explore and expand their own developmental possibilities and the affordances of the society and culture into which they have been born.
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All social play requires a shift in perception. For example, a play fight should not be confused with a real fight. Make-believe play in particular is dependent on dissociation, since two views of reality, one perceived and the other invented, must not be confused (Leslie, 1987). A child pretending that stones are sweets should not swallow the stones, mistaking them for sweets. Without dissociative ability, pretend play could hardly have evolved as it has. Perhaps the most signal achievement of human beings has been the discovery of institutional means of inducing collective anti-structural states, exploiting our innate powers of make-believe, dissociation, and suggestibility in the service of large-scale cooperation [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume].
Spiritual Experience and Social Structure Spiritual experiences—often referred to as “religious experiences” or “REs”—are altered states during which people feel and believe that they are in contact with some kind of sentient “otherness,” whether perceived as “God,” “nature,” “the universe,” “all humankind,” or some other natural or supernatural force or agency [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. Scientific investigation of REs began in the late 19th century, most famously by William James (1902/1985), who coined the term noetic to describe their revelatory quality, “feeling states” that are simultaneously “knowledge states.” Rudolf Otto (1917/1926) referred to their numinous character— inspiring feelings of supernatural awe and wonder. More systematic and statistical studies were pioneered by Alister Hardy (1979) and his successors. Many people found the results surprising. Even in the secular West, between a third and a half of the population has had at least one spiritual experience (Wulff, 2000). Furthermore, agnostics and atheists are as likely to have them as the devoutly religious, and they are slightly more common in better-educated or relatively well-adjusted individuals. Apparently, REs cannot be attributed to psychological compensation in the distressed or socially deprived (the “opium of the people” hypothesis). REs can have dramatic effects on those who experience them—people may abandon a prosperous business career to devote their energies to charitable work, take up art, or pursue some other newly discovered passion. There may be a conversion from atheism to religious faith, or— rarely—from faith to atheism (Hardy, 1979). A common consequence is that the person becomes more tolerant of and caring toward others, more spontaneous and energetic, less fearful of the future, and far less
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dependent on external supports for self-esteem such as wealth, praise, power, status, or fame. Although spiritual experiences are culturally variable, there also appear to be cross-cultural parallels, notably the encounter with sentient “otherness,” the sense of something bigger than the self, and common if not universal features such as transcending time or space. The prevalence and quality of REs correlate inversely with social complexity. Whereas many Westerners have one or more REs during their lives, in more egalitarian societies almost everyone may have comparable experiences, and may do so once or twice a week. Some aboriginal peoples hear spirit voices every day and claim to receive useful knowledge and advice from them (Krippner, 1999). Erika Bourguignon (1973) has compared the use of institutionalized ASC in 488 societies, that is, most of the societies for which we have any kind of ethnographic information at all. In contrast to the “monophasic” West, 90% of the societies in Bourguignon’s sample had one or more forms of institutionalized ASC, usually in ritual or religious contexts. A major category involves the experience of leaving the body and journeying to other places, either in this world or in some spiritual otherworld. For want of a better term, I will call such experiences “shamanic trance” [see Winkelman, this volume]. A shamanic trance is a voluntary and conscious state, clearly remembered afterward, in which the experient encounters supernatural entities or explores the natural or supernatural world, often with a view to achieving specific goals such as healing the sick, finding game, or conducting the souls of the dead to the underworld (Furst, 1977). A possession altered state, in contrast, is an involuntary and (at least reportedly) unconscious state in which a supernatural entity invades or “rides” the body, displacing the person’s typical personality. Bourguignon found that shamanic states occur most frequently in the most egalitarian and least stratified societies, whereas possession states are most frequent in complex and highly stratified societies. Complex societies frequently have a central religion linked to the central apparatus of social control, along with peripheral cults that are much more autonomous. In Brazil, for example, the central religion is Roman Catholicism, and peripheral cults include Umbanda and the Ayahuasca Church. Both types of religion can have possession practices. Central possession trance tends to be highly exclusive (only the legitimate priesthood can do it) and conservative (dedicated to maintaining the status quo). Peripheral cults tend to be more or less subversive since they provide an alternative source of spiritual authority that cannot be directly controlled by any kind of centralized government.
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Where possession may occur independently of any ritual context, it commonly serves to coerce support from more dominant others and has been described as a “weapon of the weak” (Lewis, 1989). For example, if a Sri Lankan wife is abused by her all-powerful husband, she can greatly improve her lot by becoming possessed by an unruly demon. Since all her actions when possessed are deemed to be beyond her control, she can embarrass her husband by behaving like a prostitute, shouting obscenities, and offering to copulate with all comers. The offending husband is then forced to hire exorcists and host a very expensive public exorcism, in which the wife’s problems will be ventilated and the husband obligated to improve his behavior in order to prevent any demonic relapse (Kapferer, 1991). Shamanic states vary with political inequality. In the most egalitarian societies—simple foragers and agriculturalists—they are much more democratic. Almost anyone is deemed capable of experiencing them and many seek them, use them to heal others, and so on (Jennings, 1995; Katz, 1982). With increasing degrees of gender or age-grade inequality, altered states becomes more the exclusive domain of one gender and/or specialized practitioners [see Winkelman, this volume]. The inverse relationship between the incidence and richness of spiritual experience and the complexity and inequity of social structure is consistent with Turner’s theory of anti-structure. Conceivably, we may be having spiritual experiences all the time, but some kind of imposed structure excludes this from everyday consciousness.
Social Change, Social Movements, and Charismatic Leadership Victor Turner (1982) observed that, just as art imitates life, so life imitates art. He inferred that the structural role play of the “social drama” and the anti-structural role play of the stage or ritual drama feed on and into each other in an endless cycle, and this is the engine of conflict resolution that maintains social stability or, when necessary, generates social change. Among the evidence reviewed by Turner, he cites research by Brian Sutton-Smith (1972) into phases of order and disorder in children’s and other games. Sutton-Smith inferred that disorder, for which he borrowed Turner’s term “anti-structure,” is the melting pot out of which all new culture emerges [see St John, this volume]. Psychological theories of creativity also implicate disorderly, nonrational, or playful processes: divergent thought, thinking outside the box, conceptual blending, humor, daydreaming, REM sleep, and so on. Otto
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Rank (1932/1989, p. 368) described creativity as an “assumptions breaking process,” and Michael Apter (2008) advanced a psychological parallel to Turner’s theory. In his “reversal theory,” Apter contrasts goal-directed thought (telic) with playful, self-motivated, thought (paratelic) and points out that the former cannot arrive at anything new because linear reasoning always remains trapped within its own premises. Playful thought, in contrast, conflates categorical oppositions and follows multiple nonrational paths, leading to serendipitous discoveries and novel ideas and concepts that could never have been predicted from a habitual set of fixed assumptions. Great ideas are never products of logic, but come “out of the blue” when not thinking purposefully at all, famous examples being Archimedes in his bath, Kekule´ in his reverie, and Newton seeing an apple fall. Dreaming and daydreaming may be the most valuable work a scientist ever does. Ongoing social change is not necessarily noticed as such by group members, who may think they are being faithful to a primordial template ordained in the mythic past by their revered ancestors (cf. Morphy, 1989). However, quite dramatic changes do occur, and these too always depend on ASC. Among shamanic peoples, all new ideas—new songs, dances, cures, technologies, and customs—are “given” to an individual in visions, dream visitations, or ritual trance states (Biesele, 1993; Jennings, 1995, pp. 139, 176–178; Roseman, 1991, pp. 52–79; Stephen, 1979). A striking case occurred among a group of Temiar aborigines who happened to live close to the edge of the rainforest, where they came into frequent contact with Malays. Following an influenza epidemic, crop failure, and worsening relations with Malays, who disapproved of the Temiars’ nonIslamic lifestyle, a highly respected healer received in a dream a new song and dance known as Chinchem, along with an entire system of reforms, including avoidance of eating pork and covering women’s breasts in public (Noone, 1939). The result was a considerable improvement in relations and trading opportunities with their Malay neighbors. Colonialism commonly involves severe tension between immigrant and indigenous populations. One recurring response to a colonial presence is the appearance of a cargo cult, most commonly in Melanesia and Micronesia, but also in South America and elsewhere (Burridge, 1960; Lawrence, 1964; Worsley, 1970). Typically, a charismatic prophet receives a revelatory vision or message from the sacred world that informs him that the cargos of wonderful goods delivered to the colonists are actually gifts from the ancestors, intended for their indigenous descendents or for all people to share equally but cunningly appropriated by the superior magic and greed of the foreigners. The aim of the cult is to get
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the ancestors to realize what is going on and redirect the cargo to the proper beneficiaries. One way of doing this is to copy the colonial “magic,” which might include such potent rituals as taking afternoon tea. Cargo cult activity in the Pacific increased greatly during and after World War II, when vast quantities of military goods and supplies passed through the islands. In the earliest cargo cults, the faithful would build wooden jetties where the ancestral ships could dock, but recent cults built airstrips, control towers, wooden headphones and radios with bamboo aerials, and “decoy” aeroplanes made out of timber, palm thatch, and bark, bound with vines (Burridge, 1960). They mimicked the landing signals used by ground staff and at night lit signal fires and torches to mark out the landing strip, all to attract the expected flood of riches from their bountiful ancestors. Quite dramatic alterations of consciousness are common in cargo cults. Participants whirl, shake, dance, chant, foam at the mouth, or couple promiscuously in a frenzied attempt to attract the desired cargo (Burridge, 1960). The Vailala Madness, one of the earliest well-documented cargo cults, gained its name from the behavior of its followers, which included speaking in tongues, fits of shaking, and similar phenomena (Worsley, 1970). Although the beliefs of cargo cultists are clearly based on a cultural misperception, their motivations are human universals: demands for recognition, dignity, equality, and justice. People who have a traditional ideology of giving and sharing cannot understand why White people, who have so much when they have so little, show no impulse to redress this inequity in a manner perceived as normal and human. Burridge (1960), following his own fieldwork in Melanesia, believed that cargo cults might provide useful insights into more dramatic social upheavals such as the French and Russian revolutions. Cargo cults exemplify a broader class of messianic, millenarian, or nativistic movements, having much in common with the Ghost Dance cults of North American and prophetic movements in Africa (Burridge, 1960). Jack Wilson (formerly Wavoka) has left us his own account of the vision in which he was given the Ghost Dance (Mooney, 1896). Wilson met God face to face in Heaven. There he saw his ancestors enjoying their favorite pastimes and a beautiful land filled with game. God instructed him on what to teach his people. They must love each other, work hard, and live in peace with Whites. They must not steal, lie, or fight and must forego the self-mutilation associated with mourning the dead. Wilson was convinced that if all Indians observed God’s teachings and performed the 5-day Ghost Dance at the prescribed intervals, there would be no
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disease or old age, and the dead would be reunited with the living. The entire Earth would be renewed, swept clean, and filled with food, happiness, and love. As the Ghost Dance spread widely across the American West, some interpretations acquired a more militant character, notably with the introduction of the Ghost Shirts. These garments, often decorated with birds, turtles, stars, and other spiritually important motifs, were believed to render the wearer bulletproof. Despite the peaceful nature of Jack Wilson’s original message, the “crazy” dancing spread alarm among U.S. authorities, which culminated in the massacre of more than 200 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890 (Brown, 1970). An earlier nativistic movement among the Iroquois, led by the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, influenced Anthony Wallace’s (1956) theory of revitalization movements, which he defined as a “deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture” (p. 265). Wallace, based on cross-cultural studies, theorized that these politico-religious movements are responses to severe stress caused by colonial, racial, or class oppression. They are usually founded by a spiritually inspired prophet or charismatic leader who predicts an imminent transformation of the world order, elimination of oppression, restoration of traditional values, and freedom from want. In Wallace’s view, all the “higher religions,” including Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, originated as revitalization movements. Egalitarian societies, by definition, lack leaders and resist any attempt by one person to dominate others (Erdel & Whiten, 1994; Katz, 1982; Jennings, 1995), although respected healers—those perceived as having outstanding abilities to deal with spiritual agencies—might be thought of as “charismatic” and can initiate social change, as in the Temiar case reported by Noone (1939). Max Weber (1978, p. 242) defined charisma, which he regarded as a chaotic phenomenon devoid of purpose or meaning, as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” E´mile Durkheim took the contrary view that charisma is not some property of an extraordinary individual but rather is projected onto an individual by his or her followers. “Theatrical theories” such as Durkheim’s make charisma a two-way relationship; the audience bestows the role onto the leader, and the leader acts the part accordingly. The power that the charismatic individual appears to exert is the result of “collective effervescence,” a state of transcendent excitement that occurs “whenever people are put into closer and more active relations with one another” (Durkheim, 1912/
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1965, pp. 240–241). The experience of the sacred, in Durkheim’s view, is the sense of transcendent liberation resulting from surrendering the egoistic biological self to a larger collective reality. On the other hand, it is certainly true that there are exceptional individuals who are more likely to become charismatic leaders than others. Genealogical research (Horrobin, 1998) shows that pronounced negative and positive traits occur repeatedly in specific human lineages. Individuals with schizophrenia and manic depression are regularly found in the same family descent groups as individuals with outstanding talents, including mathematical, scientific, and artistic ability, intense religious faith, and charismatic leadership. Charismatic leaders are of course always regarded by their followers as exceptional, but what is so regarded is culturally variable. It can be the case that the leader has exceptional energy, determination, courage, or fanaticism, or it could be virtually anything that seems “strange” such as epilepsy, behavior outside local norms, or, especially where children are regarded as prophets, pure simplicity and innocence (Wilson, 1975, p. 29). The literature on charisma lacks any consensus. There are so many divergent and conflicting views that one begins to wonder whether charisma refers to anything real or, perhaps, to a multiplicity of disparate phenomena. Is it appropriate to apply the same word to Buddha, Christ, or Jack Wilson, and also to Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, or Osama bin Laden? One difference between messengers of love and messengers of hate is that the former do not attempt to win converts (Ravindra, 2004). They preach only to “those who have ears to hear,” those who are actively seeking greater spiritual development and guidance. The more malignant forms of charisma occur in persons who are distinctly manipulative and seek to exert power over others. Whatever charisma may ultimately prove to be, Durkheim’s “collective effervescence,” Weber’s “meaningless” phenomenon, and Marx’s “opium of the people,” clearly implicate antistructural processes with unpredictable consequences and potential for creativity and change.
Final Thoughts In this chapter, I have reviewed some of the evidence that the plasticity of the human mind, its capacity for both enduring and transient alterations of consciousness, is a core prerequisite for human social and cultural functioning. While discussing long-term changes in consciousness, however, I did not speculate about the kind of consciousness we might have
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if not changed by culture. The fact that so many ASC are experienced as numinous, noetic, and spiritual is particularly intriguing. Did human religiousness evolve genetically, is it a product of culture, or is there perhaps a third alternative? Genealogical evidence (Horrobin, 1998) implicates some genetic influence on religiousness, while research in epileptic patients suggests that religious ideation may be hard wired in the temporal lobes (Ramachandran & Blakeslee, 1998, 175–177, 179–188, 285n–286n). Some cultural and cognitive anthropologists have proposed that religion might be explained by a genetically evolved “symbolic module” (Sperber, 1994), “neurognostic processes” (Laughlin et al., 1992) or a hominid “mimetic controller” (Winkelman, 2002). Social anthropologists, on the other hand, are more inclined to adopt the Durkheimian view that ritual is the necessary precursor of human culture, including religion. Different again are those scientists who (often covertly) hold spiritual beliefs (Barusˇs, 2008). For them, spirit has a much more profound ontological status. Such divergent views, however, may not be mutually incompatible. When observing Ndembu initiation rites, Victor Turner (1969) noted that, after all signs of personal distinction had been removed, and following a series of painful and humbling ordeals, the novitiates entered a state of intimate unity which he called communitas, in contrast to the normative state of everyday living which he called societas. The communitas state suggested to him a solution to an apparent paradox. Why is it, he asked, that people claim to discover “truth” in the world of artifice and pretence created by ritual (1982, p. 114) or by theatre and art (pp. 115–116)? The answer, he suggested, is that the actor dons a mask to expose the false mask of societas. Anti-structural genres cut through the “hypocrisy of culture.” The structured world of everyday life is itself artificial, but the “truth” experienced by artists, mystics, and others is some kind of bedrock reality. This cannot be a cultural product. Turner (1982, pp. 113–114) cites Burridge (1979) on the protoindividual that can become apparent in ritual liminality, and, in his earlier work (1969, p. 128), claims that, in the productions of prophets and artists, “we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalised and fixed in structure.” Ritually induced communitas is a spontaneous phenomenon, not something scripted into the traditional formalities of ritual. The suspension of societas enables people to experience something for themselves, not something they have acquired from their ancestors by cultural transmission. It is a discovery rather than an invention. Elsewhere, however, he implies that it is not genetically determined either. Turner (1969, p. 128) avers that communitas, even though it surely involves a release of instinctual energies, cannot be reduced to anything
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precultural such as a primordial “herd instinct.” In the several cultures that Turner examined, he found that what is universally valued in spontaneous communitas is honesty, openness, humility, equality, mutual forgiveness, freedom from pretentions, indifference to wealth, sexual restraint, and goodwill to all humankind. Such absolute selflessness, as I explained in section 1, is difficult to account for in exclusively genetic terms. Humans certainly have a remarkably thorough ability to identify with others: When we enjoy a novel or a movie, for example, we identify with the protagonists to such an extent that we care what happens to them almost as though it were happening to ourselves. Many authors have pointed out the continuity between storytelling and role play (Whitehead, Marchant, Craik, & Frith, 2009). Children role play just about anything that moves, and this is probably sufficient to account for our ability to “put ourselves in others’ shoes” (cf. Mead, 1934/1974). However, human cruelty also involves empathy, though not sympathy, and it is a far cry from enjoying a novel to communitas or the “oceanic” experience of mysticism. Turner notes the universalizing tendency of communitas and the cross-cultural appeal of spiritual teachings such as “goodwill to all humankind.” He expressly equates communitas with the sense of union, with nature, humankind, God, the cosmos, and so forth, which occurs in mysticism and the “flow” experiences of athletes, gamblers, and others when totally absorbed and at one with the activity they are engaged in (Csikszentmihalyi, 1974). Perhaps wisely, Turner avoids saying anything that might rouse the book-burning passions of the Senior Editor of Nature (cf. Anonymous [actually Maddox], 1981). But what Turner says implicates a “third force” affecting human behavior, something that is neither cultural nor exclusively genetic, but that transcends both. He also makes one particularly important point about communitas: it captures “the winged moment as it flies” (Turner, 1969, p. 132). Communitas is about the here and now, in contrast to societas, which is trapped in fossilized pasts, sedimented routines, and anxieties for the future. Yet communitas exists in contrast rather than in opposition to societas (1982, pp. 50–51). The two belong together in a figure-and-ground gestalt, or like yin and yang locked in an eternal dynamic of interaction. Without the one, there could not be the other. Nature has enriched us with the gift of self-determination, but in doing so, it has burdened us with the tribulations of self-consciousness. Reflectivity alienates us from ourselves by making us concerned about ourselves. It enables, even compels, us to live in our context-independent memories and plans for tomorrows that may never come. So we have lost the immediacy of our own lived realities. As D. H. Lawrence (1936) put it,
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we humans paint pictures of ourselves, then live according to the picture instead of from our spontaneous selves. This is “living from the outside in” and “truly the reversal of life.” Living in the spontaneous here and now is the central message of the Sermon on the Mount and all the great spiritual traditions that we know. Freedom from the self-obsessed ego turns people into “fountains of living waters.” Ravi Ravindra (2004), comparing the gospel of John with Indian mysticism, notes how Christ compares spirit to the wind: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Turner notes that monastic institutions—and even Marxism—that attempt to make of communitas a permanent state always fail, because institutions cannot persist without structure. Professor Ravindra (2005), in a keynote conference paper, commented: “Formal religions have very little to do with spirituality.” Human culture, for all the wrong reasons, including collective fictions and perceptual distortions, gave us the means to become free from our self-conscious selves, enabling us to discover our own spirituality. One might think that the suspension of cultural structure, and with it release from the fetters of self-consciousness, ought to return us to some primordial monkey-like condition, truly spontaneous perhaps, but dominated by the “tyranny of selfish genes.” But it does not. Rather, it accords a glimpse of what we might become. The idea that a state valuing pure selflessness could be arrived at by gradualistic steps seems logically incoherent to me, and even more so that this could be accomplished by selfish-gene mechanisms alone. Even the most trenchant physicalist must surely acknowledge at least that spirituality is an emergent phenomenon, irreducible to psychopharmacology.
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Jennings, S. (1995). Theatre, ritual and transformation: The Senoi Temiars. London: Routledge. Johansen, J. P. (1954). The Maori and his religion. Copenhagen: Munksgaard. Kapferer, B. (1991). A celebration of demons: Exorcism and the aesthetics of healing in Sri Lanka. Providence, RI, & Oxford: Berg; Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Katz, R. (1982), Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari !Kung. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Knight, C. (1991), Blood relations: Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Krippner, S. (1999). The varieties of dissociative experience: A transpersonal, postmodern model. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 18, 81–101. Laughlin, C. D., McManus, J., & d’Aquili, E. G. (1992). Brain, symbol and experience: Toward a neurophenomenology of human consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1936). The social basis of consciousness, by Trigant Burrow. In E. D. McDonald (Ed.), Phoenix: The posthumous papers of D. H. Lawrence (pp. 377–382). London: William Heinemann. Lawrence, P. (1964). Road belong cargo: A study of the cargo movement in the Southern Nadang District of New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leenhardt, M. (1979). Do Kamo: Person and myth in the Melanesian world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1949) Leslie, A. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.” Psychological Review, 94, 412–426. Le´vi-Strauss, C. (1969). The elementary structures of kinship. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. (Original work published 1949) Lewis, I. M. (1989). Ecstatic religion. London: Routledge. Mauss, M. (1967). The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. (Trans. W. D. Halls). London: Norton/Routledge. (Original work published 1925) Mead, G. H. (1974). Mind, self and society. C. W. Morris (Ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1934) Mooney, J. (1896). The Ghost Dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890. Part 2 of 14th Annual Report, Bureau of Ethnology (pp. 641–1136). Washington: Government Printing Office. Morphy, H. (1989). From dull to brilliant: The aesthetics of spiritual power among Yolngu. Man (NS), 24, 21–41. Napier, A. D. (1985). Masks, transformation, and paradox. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noone, H. D. (1939). Chinchem: A study of the role of dream experience in culture-contact amongst the Temiar Senoi of Malaya. Man, April, 57.
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Otto, R. (1926). The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine. Trans. J. W. Harvey. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger. (Original work published 1917) Power, C. (2010). Cosmetics, identity and consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17(7–8), 73–94. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1931). The social organization of Australian tribes. Oceania Monographs 1. Melbourne: Macmillan. Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. New York: William Morrow. Rank, O. (1989). Art and artist: Creative urge and personality development. Trans. C. Atkinson. New York: Norton. (Original work published 1932) Rasmussen, K. (1976). Intellectual culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. New York: AMS Press. Ravindra, R. (2004). The gospel of John in the light of Indian mysticism. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Ravindra, R. (2005). Knowing through the mind and knowing with the mind. In Reconstructing Consciousness, Mind and Being. 9th Annual Conference of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Association, Oxford, 18 September. Roseman, M. (1991). Healing sounds from the Malaysian rainforest: Temiar music and medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schechner, R. (1977). Ritual, play and performance. New York: Seabury Press. Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In L. A. Hirschfeld & S. A. Gelman (Eds.), Mapping the mind: Domain specificity in cognition and culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stephen, M. (1979). Dreams of change: The innovative role of altered states of consciousness in traditional Melanesian religion. Oceania, 50, 3–22. Strathern, M. (1988). The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1972). Games of order and disorder. In Forms of symbolic inversion. Symposium of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto, 1 December. Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–57. Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process. London: Penguin. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York: PAJ Publications. Van Gennep, A. L. (1960). The rite of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909) Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; 4(3), 469–488.
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Viveiros de Castro, E. (1999). The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. In the symposium Re-animating Religion: A Debate on the New Animism. 98th Annual Meeting of the AAA, Chicago, November. Wallace, A. F. C. (1956). Revitalization movements. American Anthropologist, 58, 264–281. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. I. Roth and C. Wittich (Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitehead, C. (2010). Cultural distortions of self- and reality-perception. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17(7–8), 95-118. Whitehead, C., Marchant, J. L., Craik, D., & Frith, C. D. (2009). Neural correlates of observing pretend play in which one object is represented as another. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 4, 369–378. Wilson, B. (1975). The noble savage: The primitive origins of charisma and its contemporary survival. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winkelman, M. (2002). Shamanism and cognitive evolution. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 12(1), 71–101. Winnicott, D. W. (1974). Playing and reality. London: Penguin. Worsley, P. (1970). The trumpet shall sound: A study of cargo cults in Melanesia. London: Paladin. Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experience. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
CHAPTER 10
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness in Contemporary Counterculture* Graham St John Introduction With a focus on virtual reality, techno-rave culture, and “psychedelic trance,” this chapter explores practices of consciousness alteration within contemporary countercultures. By contemporary, I mean the period from the 1960s to the present, with the chapter addressing the continuing legacy of earlier quests for consciousness expansion. Central to the discussion is the development and application of spiritual technologies (cyber, digital, and chemical) and the appeal of traditional cultures in the lifestyles of those sometimes referred to as “modern primitives.” I also pay attention to specific individuals, “techno-tribes,” cultural formations and events heir to and at the intersection of these developments, with special observations drawn from the Boom Festival—Portugal’s carnival of consciousness. Furthermore, the chapter considers the prevalence of DiY consciousness echoed in practices of modern shamanism. As the contiguity between altering consciousness and altering culture is explored, the chapter considers the psychological and political dimensions of that which has been variously held as “consciousness” among spokespersons and participants within visionary-, arts-, and techno-cultures.
*Portions of this chapter are adapted from “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival” by Graham St John. Published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1(1), 35–64, 2009.
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Psychedelic Experience and Consciousness It is necessary to begin with a discussion of the 1960s countercultural milieu, whose quest for and techniques of experience are a continuing legacy found in the conditions of ecstatic embodiment and visionary mindstates charted in this chapter. The 1960s saw the emergence of new and subversive forms of art, leisure, sexuality, and sociality. While “hippies” pursued a radical immanence rooted most immediately in the Beats and more epically in Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions, the “children of technique” were altering consciousness on a scale previously unknown. Psychotechnologies such as meditation and yoga, but also “acid rock,” chemical compounds, and psychoactive plants, enabled the new prometheans to lay claim to the possibility of the self’s encounter with the Other World, a gnosis we might identify as the epiphanous field of the sacred variously encountered in this period as the “source,” the “One,” “godhead,” “Great Spirit,” “Mother Nature,” or “Self”. Manifestations of a philosophia perennis, diverse symbolic guideposts enabled connection with the divine, offering continuing confidence in the evolution of consciousness that had been expressed since the late 19th century, especially in the work of the Theosophists, and articulated in the quest for “cosmic consciousness,” the term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in 1901 (see Lachman, 2003). For those seekers of transcendence and conscientious objectors championing heterodox poetic, spiritual, and ecological aesthetics, the term freak was an acceptable designation for the evolutionary (or indeed revolutionary) mutation from a condition of separation. Experimenting upon one’s mind was critical to this break. To be a “freak” thus presupposes the personal journey of transformation integral to the new spiritual pathways fermenting in this period. The spiritual transit typically implies movement from a condition of alienation (from inner god/ess, nature, the cosmos, consciousness) implicit to monotheism, possessive materialism, patriarchy, and patriotism, and a corresponding movement toward a resolution: realization, utopia, awareness, peace, unity. Importantly, in this trajectory the self possesses a mind not disconnected from body and spirit, the holistic departure from which was embodied in the teachings of the human potential movement (Kripal, 2007) and the integral movement. 1 For practitioners of this progressive and holistic 1
Among whom figure Sri Aurobindo (whose work provided the inspiration for the founding of the California Institute of Integral Studies), George Burr Leonard, who coined the term “human potential movement,” Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur and “Integral Transformative Practice” (with Burr Leonard), and Ken Wilber, who articulated “integral theory” and founded the Integral Institute.
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movement, what Henri Bergson (1944 [1907]) called the “life-force” and what has generally been regarded as “universal consciousness” could be accessed and reaffirmed through chosen activities in the phenomenal world like Transcendental Meditation, dance, and travel to places of spiritual significance. Radical immanence was practiced and cosmic consciousness achieved in alternative subcultural lifestyle trends exemplified by the followers of the Grateful Dead, members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, and, later, Burners, those inhabitants of the annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, who Gilmore (2010, p. 96) indicates are performing a “spirituality” that is fundamentally “experiential.” One of the chief ingredients in this development was LSD-25, the compound discovered in the late 1930s by Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann. With Hofmann as its unwitting midwife, this potent mind-altering substance (“acid”) was crucial to the birth of the “psychedelic” (“mindmanifesting”) movement and its aesthetic legacy (“psychedelia”), whose artistic expressions had, by the 1970s, permeated popular Western culture. LSD is a curious story, for it is, in its spectacular amplification of divergent predispositions, a neutral agent [see Nichols & Chemel, Volume 2]. The truth of this statement is well documented by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (1985), who illustrate that, over the course of the Cold War, the CIA explored LSD’s power as a tool for mind control, coveting its potential utility to alter consciousness (to produce “an exploitable alteration of personality”) to secure state interests and funded a nationwide network of psychiatrists and other operatives for whom LSD was a “psychotomimetic” (psychosis-mimicking) drug. For “hippies,” LSD was hailed as a chief means to enhance an already altered worldview that had percolated among those for whom the “imperialist United States of America” was the primary cause of discontent and target of disavowal. That is, psychedelics were enabling those already seeking alternative pathways to “turn on” to higher states of consciousness of the kind conveyed in the writings of Aldous Huxley. In The Doors of Perception (1954) (usually published with Heaven and Hell: 1956), and Island (1962), Huxley endorsed the view that mescaline and other psychedelics were integral to mystical experience in the modern era. Railing against a culture of conformity and acquiescence in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, newly circulating psychoactives were considered the shortest and most effective route to cosmic consciousness yet: an atomic blast of consciousness for an atomic age. Following on from the nitrous oxide-fuelled insights of William James in The Varieties of the Religious Experience (1902) and Bergson’s understanding of the mind as a “reducing valve” articulated in his Creative Evolution (1944 [1907]), Huxley divined that psychedelics
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enabled users to turn off the perceptual “screens” and “filters” that typically blind one to the Other World accessed by saints, seers, mystics, and prophets throughout history [see Geels, this volume; Beauregard, Volume 2]. He thus acknowledged the psychophysiological basis of these universal visionary mind states that were no less real and could be achieved without fasting or a lifetime of meditational training. Although Huxley saw the necessity for consciousness evolution with the assistance of LSD, as Jay Stevens illustrates in Storming Heaven (1989), the artistic, economic, and political elite was at odds with the likes of visionary poet Allen Ginsberg and maverick psychologist Timothy Leary, who used the mass media to promote LSD and facilitate consciousness change. For Leary, who would develop a model (the Eighth Circuit Model of Consciousness) in which psychedelics were integral to the evolution of consciousness (Leary, 1977), cosmic consciousness was not to be restricted to elites. Together with ex-Harvard colleagues Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner, Leary produced an instruction manual for consciousness expansion modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and inspired by a sojourn to India. As The Psychedelic Experience (Leary, Metzner, & Alpert, 1964) conveyed, LSD was configured as a kind of program for ego-death. As a manual that attempted to sequentialize the psychedelic experience such that a predictably enlightened outcome might be achieved, the manual was, in part, a programmatic counterpoint to the contemporaneous efforts of the celebrated author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, whose Merry Pranksters orchestrated the mid-1960s west coast Acid Tests. Enabling collective states of entrancement, the Acid Tests were a kind of “freak” rite of passage, the outcome of which held a degree of uncertainty—not unlike later rave and trance events. On the front lines of psychedelia, Kesey and his collaborators were change agents for whom consciousness alterants enhanced existing views, much the same way that LSD amplified the psychotic disposition of Charles Manson and his “family,” or “armed” various individuals and revolutionary cells associated with the Weather Underground. One of the critical moments in the birth of this movement was the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-in. Emerging out of the impulse toward cultural transformation building in San Francisco’s HaightAshbury district in the mid-1960s, this momentous event, in which more than 20,000 people participated, was held in Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. It was the nadir of the Summer of Love, and editor of the San Francisco Oracle Allen Cohen promoted the event as a meeting of the minds, namely the Berkeley radicals and the Haight-Ashbury hippies (Perry, 1984, p. 122)—in other words, the diverse membership of an
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emergent culture of consciousness. Although commentators predicted that this event would usher in a “consciousness revolution” in which “fear will be washed away; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empire will lie drying on deserted beaches; violence will be submerged and transmuted in rhythm and dance” (Allen Cohen in Perry, 1984, p. 122), with youth “sledgehammering at their shells until there was nothing left but the ubiquitous dust,” over the next year, LSD burnouts and heroin and methamphetamine addiction took their place alongside rapes and murders in the Haight. Although the universal consciousness revolution would thus remain illusory, by the late 1970s, psychedelia had become integral to the sensory indulgences and leisured life of Americans—an outcome that Leary took as his own legacy (Lee & Shlain, 1985, p. 292). Among those drawn to Golden Gate Park that day was a young man named Terence McKenna. As an anarchist metaphysician and ethnonaturalist, McKenna would come to hold enthusiasm for the role of plantderived psychoactives in human evolution [see Winkelman, Volume 1, Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, Volume 2]. Formative was an expedition to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazonas in March 1971, where Terence, together with his brother Dennis McKenna (who would become a world-renowned ethnobotanist), had gone in search of ayahuasca-using shamans and stumbled across Stropharia cubensis (psychoactive mushrooms; McKenna, 1993). In his so-called “stoned ape” theory of religion, McKenna (1992) speculated that tryptamines, principally hallucinogenic mushrooms, had performed a critical role in the evolution of consciousness and language, a view mooted by amateur ethnomycologist Robert Gordon Wasson and others (see Forte, 1997; Wasson, Kramrisch, Ruck, & Ott, 1992). Furthermore, in a co-authored work (McKenna & McKenna, 1993), the McKennas explored the ontological grounds for a theory of tryptamine-led revitalization later echoed in Jonathon Ott’s “Entheogenic Reformation” (Ott, 1995). Through the use of psychoactive plants, in particular psilocin-containing mushrooms, DMT, and the tryptaminecontaining entheogens of the Amazon, western humanity, so long disconnected from “the vegetal Goddess,” could revive “the Paleolithic world of natural magic” and community (McKenna, 1991). As a core component to his prophetic insights, DMT2 was regarded as a significant agent in the coming eschaton, the theory of which was formulated in the “novelty” math 2
DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a naturally occurring tryptamine found in many plants worldwide and is created in small amounts by the human body during metabolism. DMTcontaining plants are commonly used in several South American shamanic practices, and it is usually one of the main active constituents of the drink ayahuasca.
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of Timewave Zero (McKenna & McKenna, 1993). Although the East had been a popular destination among post-1960s spiritual seekers in the wake of Leary, the McKennas’ expedition illustrated how the lore, practice, artifacts, and psychotropes of Amerindian cultures have influenced those desiring departure from core Western values and practice. The popularity of the McKennas’ ideas also demonstrated the appeal of the shaman as anarchist. An advocate of what Des Tramacchi (2006) has called “selfshamanism,” with his mesmerizing Irish brogue, wit, and charm, Terence McKenna would become a draw-card within the world psychedelic community from the 1980s through to his early death in 2000. In one inspired mid-1990s presentation, he inveighed that “our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas . . . of consciousness,” and that the objective of the psychedelic experience was “to participate in the redemption of the human spirit,” charging neoshamanic experimentalists to “bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm.”
Cyberculture and Virtual Reality The popularization of altered states via the circulation of LSD in the 1960s is coincident with the emergence of the personal computer, and in particular the experience of mass altered consciousness facilitated by networked computers. This cyber-spatial consciousness is what had been dubbed “virtual reality,” the term science fiction author William Gibson applied to a disembodied networked experience that would leave fiction ten years after the publication of his Neuromancer (1984) as the Internet achieved widespread commercialization. Alongside LSD, the personal computer was imagined to enable a psychedelic experience by libertarian champions of altered states, principally Leary, who endorsed a “cyberdelic” thesis in which LSD and computers are integral to consciousness evolution (Leary, Horowitz & Marshall, 1994). In his premillennial cheerleading, Leary championed a “New Breed” of creative youth embracing psychedelics, cyberculture, and electronic music. At the high tide of extropianism, Douglas Rushkoff divulged (1994, p. 19) that the 1990s “cyberian counterculture” was “armed with new technologies, familiar with cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of consciousness . . . to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully,” his portrait of “Cyberia” a celebration of the “promethean spirit” integral to countercultures throughout the ages (Davis, 1998; Goffman, 2004). The PC revolution’s indebtedness to the utopian ideals of those for whom psychedelics
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had fired revelation is discussed by John Markoff (2005), and Fred Turner (2006) argues that “digital utopianism” is rooted in the psychedelic counterculture via Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth network and its retooling of technologies from LSD to computers in the quest for consciousness, wholeness, and liberation. Although computer-mediated utopianism would take form in multiplayer role-playing games that found an exemplar in Second Life, perhaps the crowning achievement of DiY (do-ityourself) techno-utopianism is the Burning Man Festival that, in a massive transmutation of the utopian subjunctivity (something that is imagined or at least has not happened yet) native to “virtual reality,” or perhaps more accurately “the metaverse” (the term used by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash), is annually rebooted on the hard white canvas of the Black Rock Desert, Nevada (Gilmore & Van Proyen, 2005). The countercultural approach to new information technologies was far more complementary to its idealism than is often recognized. Although many embraced Jacques Ellul’s interpretation in The Technological Society (1964) of an essentially “Manichean” technology or mistrusted the dehumanizing and centralizing “technocratic” bureaucracy railed against by Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), as Turner conveys, with countercultural appropriation of cybernetic and ecological discourse, the mythology of the personal and communally empowering computer evolved into a romantic/transcendentalist embrace of “machines of loving grace.” Indeed, the repurposing of cyber, chemical, and communications technologies was intended to inaugurate a New Consciousness post-1960s. Lifestyles characterized as “better living through circuitry” constituted a simultaneous phenomenological de´tournement of life under capital and a quest for an alternate world. Thus, here, altering consciousness would be implicit to altering social, cultural, and political structures. But although “Web 2.0” applications and technologies such as web applications, social networking sites, wikis, and blogs have facilitated interactive information sharing as well as user-centered design and collaboration, neoliberal globalization and state power have given rise to a “digital divide” and Internet surveillance, circumstances undermining the “digital utopia.” Criticism has also come from virtual reality pioneer Jaren Lanier. Earlier forecasting the revolutionary impact of the World Wide Web, Lanier (2010) grew to criticize what he called the “digital Maoism” associated with the likes of Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter and other virtual communities that are elevating the “wisdom of mobs” and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.
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Techno-Rave and DiY Consciousness Since the 1960s, the “consciousness” whose expansion has been the purpose of spiritual technologies has been a DiY consciousness, since it is almost always enabled through the repurposing and remixing of existing cosmologies, beliefs, artifacts, and tools. The do-it-yourself Self is entirely consistent with developments in which consumers are encouraged to achieve their potential via a selective pastiche of symbols and praxis. From the I-Ching to meditation and yoga and from the didjeridu to the djembe and medicine drum, techniques and instruments enabling altered mind states and entrancement were circulating among Westerners walking the aisles of the supermarket of consciousness. But although sampling from the art and rituals of world religions and shamanic practice facilitated access to hidden knowledge and enabled repertoires of authentic selfhood for disenchanted moderns, by the late 1980s an effusive sociality was at the centre of what in sections of the media was being hailed as the Second Summer of Love. I speak of the empathetic yet ephemeral sociality concentrated in the dance music phenomenon known as “rave.” While the 1980s might have been “peak oil” for the New Age industry, a period when therapeutic self-management workshops, salons, and seminars began employing teleologies of the self not incommensurate with corporate management-speak, in rave technologies were being harnessed, refit, and reapplied to orchestrate experiences of the sacred that were indelibly social. A unique crossroads of sound, vision, cybernetics, pharmacology, and embodiment in dance inaugurated, as many contemporaneous utopians claimed, a new consciousness revolution, or “rave-olution” (see St John, 2009a). Several important developments collided at this crossroads: new technologies of perception such as electronic synthesizers and computerbased samplers; the technique of the remix in music re/production and performance (Miller, 2008); consciousness alterants, principally ecstasy (MDMA), which came into mass circulation and ostensibly fostered spirituality, personal development, and life change (Takahashi, 2004, p. 151; see also Saunders & Doblin, 1996). New communications technologies, formerly the instant messaging service and the mobile phone and subsequently the Internet, enabled subterranean communications concerning production, performance, and a lifestyle that remained relatively covert and independent. As this compendium of techniques and prosthetics effectively enabled transient autonomous zones, from inner-city warehouse parties to massive “teknivals” emerging in Europe in the early 1990s, they were confirmation of the circulating ideas of radical libertarian Hakim
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Bey (1991). Despite the enthusiasm demonstrated by raving evangelists (Fritz, 1999), others remained pessimistic about the utopian possibilities of rave, arguing that regulation and standardization lead to the emergence of “pleasure prisons” (Reynolds, 1998). Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, across Europe and North America, in Australia, and elsewhere, in various electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs), an assemblage of electronic audio, visual, and communications technologies were thus enabling new aesthetics of mass virtuality. Scholars of religion, music, and culture have employed diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives in their investigations of these developments. Attention has been directed to a range of relevant themes, including the heuristics of conversion (Hutson, 2000), sacrifice and transgression (Gauthier, 2005), communitas and the “vibe” (St John, 2008, 2011a; Tramacchi, 2000), ritualization (Gerard, 2004; Sylvan, 2005), and millenarianism and revitalization movements (Olaveson, 2004; St John, 2004). Importantly, EDMCs contextualize the condition of ecstatic entrancement, a shifting (or nonsteady) state of altered consciousness proliferating in global dance cultures. Ecstatic entrancement does not simply refer to the state of ecstasy—associated with the Greek ekstasis, which means “to stand outside of oneself,” including one’s gendered identity (see Hemment, 1996)—but an entranced state, which implies the relinquishment of individual will and autonomy to an external power, higher energy, or extraordinary life force [see Ustinova, this volume]. The history of EDM scenes illustrates commerce between these tendencies that fuel new sociosensual spaces, cultures, and dance movements. Although there is a paucity of sustained efforts to understand such states, Hillegonda Rietveld (2004, p. 53) postulates transit to a “cyborg-like subjectivity” in postindustrial techno and house scenes in Detroit and London, which is the product of a sacrificial repetitive-beat ritual offering a temporary-yetrelived homeland for the alienated. Applying the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, for James Landau (2004, p. 113), the ecstatic condition of the unbound raving body is recognized as a “desubjectified cognitive state that can best be understood as a corporeal style of being, i.e. a nonreflective awareness autonomous in its ‘freedom’ from ideology, language and culture.” The collective alteration of consciousness among adolescent populations accessing a veritable pharmacopeia (e.g., LSD, ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine, GHB, 2CB, cocaine, mushrooms) has been much maligned, eliciting challenges from cultural critics who railed against the emergence of club scenes “full of dead souls, zombie-eyed and prematurely haggard”; in such contexts, “instead of togetherness, sullen moats
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of personal space reappear; smiley faces give way to sour expression” and participants “become connoisseurs of poisons, mix ‘n’ matching toxins to approximate the old high” (Reynolds, 1997, pp. 86–87). And moral panic concerning youth consumption of illicit consciousness alterants within these contexts has triggered potentially draconian legislation such as the RAVE Act (2003) in the United States, whose architects were apparently Reducing America’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy. In the history of rave, the raising or expanding of consciousness is as important as its relinquishment in trance. Through the 1990s and the following decade, techno-rave culture offered upgrades on the techniques of the human potential movement whose holistic practices had become consistent with utopian, ascensionist, and evolutionary fantasies implicated in the cybernetic revolution. As a form of body transcendence, mind releasing, and self-awakening alongside meditation and yoga, certain forms of raving appeared to be integral to an ongoing consciousness revolution, a praxis in the repertoire of techniques of self-realization. The crowning achievements in this development are what have been known as “consciousness clubs” or intentional parties, exemplified by Fraser Clark’s London club Megatripolis, one of the earliest postrave conscious parties (see St John, 2009a, Chapter 4). In 1995, Clark opened the short-lived club Megatripolis West in San Francisco, the location fitting given that the city hosted the original tribal gathering model. With events promoted as “Hyperdelic Carnivals,” “Cyborganic Be-Ins,” and the “Digital Be-In” (Hill, 1999), in the early 1990s San Francisco held status as a nexus for conscious raving. By 1997, something of a global be-in had manifested as the Earthdance International festival. Promoted as the Global Dance Party for Peace, Earthdance is a synchronized global dance festival that began as a Free Tibet movement fundraiser and by 2010 was being held in more than 300 locations in more than 50 countries with participating events giving at least 50% of their profits to charities specifically addressing peace, relief efforts, environment, and world youth.
Trance, Psytrance, and Neotrance Though it has grown to accommodate diverse music styles, Earthdance is rooted in psychedelic trance (or psytrance). Derived from parties held on the beaches of the former Portuguese province of Goa, India, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and incubated within “Goa trance” scenes developing in Goa and around the world from the mid-1990s, psytrance has proliferated globally (St John, 2010a). Demonstrating inheritance from
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the ecstatic and conscious pursuits of the 1960s, infused with the independent remixological practice endogenous to electronic music production and performance, harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, and evolving a multimedia psychedelic arts scene, psytrance is an EDMC whose larger international festivals are among the most culturally diverse music and dance events globally. From the 1960s, Goa became an experimental outpost for middle-class dropouts seeking experience through transcendent states of subjectivity characterized across the decades by disciplinary practice, ecstatic pleasure, and visionary states. A place where charas (handmade hashish) remained legal until the mid1970s, Goa became a laboratory of what Davis (2004) identifies as “spiritual hedonism”: an experience at the crossroads of the erotic/immanent and cognitive/transcendent. With “freaks” undertaking, as Anthony D’Andrea (2007) points out, the simultaneous “horizontal” (geo-spatial) and “vertical” (spiritual-psychedelic) journey from home/rational states, Goa was populated by self-exiled Westerners for whom travel to the Orient facilitated escape from the cage of Occidental rationality, enabling a mystical Orientation eventually packaged as trance tourism. Early Full Moon beach parties were spearheaded by California expatriate DJ Goa Gil, who became a sadhu (ascetic holy person) and advocated “recreating ancient tribal ritual for the twenty first century.” In his critique of Goa trance, Arun Saldanha (2007) argues that White “freaks” have been able to experience “tribal ritual” to the exclusion of brown-skinned natives. During the 1970s and 1980s, the experimental traveler-enclave fermented a distinct “Goa trance” sound and sensibility that would be transported around the world. Goa trance labels, albums, and events emerging in the mid-1990s would promote and package the trance experience as a transcendent journey adopting Oriental imagery and iconography to assist the journey. With the Goa aesthetic transportable, enthusiasts on the dance floor could consume the Goa experience, be exposed to the mystique, and access the metaphysical lore without ever having set foot in India. Over the next decade, as the genre exploded into various subgenres, scenes, and aesthetics, psytrance made an impact across western Europe, Israel, North America, Australia, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere, gaining popularity more recently in Russia, Brazil, and Mexico. In this period, psytrance would become fertile ground for the appropriation of symbols and praxis of Amerindian cultures, especially regarding consciousness alteration via the use of native herbs and their chemical analogues. From the United States to Germany and Australia and indeed among Brazilians, Mexicans, and Chileans of Portuguese and Spanish decent, countercultural participants have long found
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Amerindians to embody an originary power, a spiritual purity, a remedy for their alienated selves, circumstances challenged within academia where dubious claims to indigeneity (Kehoe, 1990) and “fakelore” (Niman 1997, pp. 131–148) are conflated with neocolonial practice (see Johnson, 1995; Root, 1996). Psytrance is not above reproach, for native cultures have been romanticized by artists and enthusiasts who sculpt fantasies using sound and images sampled from popular cultural sources in music and at festivals where generic natives have been the source to which initiates journey to obtain wisdom to remedy their modern afflictions. But while cultures with great variation may be homogenized in sonic fictions and consumer fantasies standardizing peoples according to primitivist specifications, appropriations should not be subject to blanket dismissal, because: (1) native millenarian discourses have been adopted and repurposed to the ends of Western countercultural movements seeking resolution to the crises of modernity (e.g., existential, ecological, and otherwise); (2) native plants and their analogues are known to initiate profound shifts in consciousness (Strassman, 2001; Strassman et al., 2008; and other entries on “entheogenic spirituality” such as Oroc, 2009), and; (3) native actors have become involved in manufacturing, selling, spending, and buying their own products. In relation to this last point, today ayahuasqueros (ayahuasca shamans) and other curanderos, vegetalistas, and perfumeros promote their services to Westerners who undertake journeys to, for example, the Peruvian Amazon (Razam, 2009). The practices of native inhabitants of the Central and South Americas have generated appeal among dissidents (Burroughs & Ginsberg, 1963), many of whom, following T. McKenna’s lead, and also the (dubious) works of Carlos Castaneda, went in search of what has more recently been identified as “entheogenesis” (literally, awakening the divine within), with the assistance of plants, fungi, and herbs such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT, and Salvia divinorum,3 all used by various indigenous inhabitants of Mexico and the Amazon, whose ethno-exotic status validates the power of such plants as virtuous tools to be employed in the service of mind travel. A growing thicket of “plant allies” used in world shamanic practices have become popular as “the ritual use of tobaccos, the Caribbean Cohoba snuff, morning glories, Datura entheogenic cacti, and the vast pharmacopeia of South American psychointegrator plants” formed the “constellation of 3
Also known as “diviner’s sage,” Salvia divinorum has a long and continuing tradition of use by indigenous Mazatec in Oaxaca, Mexico, where is it used by shamans to facilitate visionary states of consciousness during curing or divination sessions and is also used to treat ailments.
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New World entheogen use” (Tramacchi, 2006, p. 32). Within psytrance, ayahuasca shamanism (Metzner, 1999) gained in popularity in advance of its ostensible influence on Hollywood, notably in the film Avatar (see Davis, 2009). And as the popularity of DMT accelerated over the last decade, the “hyperspatial” effect of its ingestion would have a considerable bearing on psytrance music and culture, an impact that is clearly traceable to the work of McKenna, who remains the most sampled individual in music productions. With McKenna acting as posthumous guide to the psychosomatic and “hyperdimensional” frisson of DMT-space, psytrance and the wider visionary arts community have become fertile ground for neoshamanic experimentation. Psychoactive plants and compounds amplify the liminal qualities inherent to psytrance music, their popularity indicating that selftranscendence is a chief motivation for enthusiasts and event management and is given expression across personal, social, and cultural vectors. And by virtue of the intense occultic sociality of the experience, habitue´ s become involved in states of radical immanence that have long been associated with ecstatic dance cults (Baldini, 2010). Furthermore, the entire assemblage resounds with an expectancy of the kind animated by the recognition of mounting crisis (or crises) and that inspires the engineering of projects, organizations, and initiatives motivated to make transit into an alternative future, such as the cult of expectancy surrounding the 2012 movement (St John, 2011b). The psychedelic festival performs a crucial role in these transitions. From overnight parties to all-week festivals, often marking seasonal transitions or celebrating celestial events, these gatherings are the context for what I call neotrance, which indexes the complexity of altered personal, social, and political states contextualized by psychedelic festivals. These are events enabling participants from diverse national, cultural, and stylistic backgrounds to give expression to their difference while at the same time potentiating the experience of singularity. In the West, the expression and dissolution of difference is a circumstance traditionally conditioned by the festival of Carnival. In psytrance, the carnivalesque is apparent in dance festivals where the term tribe is adopted to connote a particular aesthetic, practice, technique, or language by which individuals or groups distinguish themselves from others, and/or designate the dissolution of such differences (St John, 2009b). We can observe the performance and dissolution of self on one of the planet’s largest outdoor dance floors at Portugal’s biennial Boom Festival. Initiated in 1997, the premiere event in global psytrance is held next to lake Idanha-a-Nova in the mountainous Beira Baixa province. Known as
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the Dance Temple, Boom’s main dance floor is a stage for the performance of a freak persona. Accommodating the creative recombination of aesthetics, undisciplined embodiment, and psychosomatic states, Boom is a freak theatre, a staging ground for what Victor Turner had called the “subjunctive mood” (Turner, 1984, p. 21), an experimental state or atmosphere where occupants (wearing outfits with theriomorphic [animallike], anime, superhero, mythical, and extraterrestrial themes, adopting stylized glyphs printed on clothing, badges, and personalized patches, and through innovative dance moves) indulge in alternate personas [see Whitehead, this volume]. Participants are illuminated under UV lights, caught in lasers, distorted by hypnagogic projections as they commit to the acrobatics of fire staff, glow-poi twirling, and club juggling. And in dreadlocked and shaven-hair aesthetics, multiple piercings, dermal anchors, tattoos, and other body modifications popularized in accordance with a “modern primitive” aesthetic (Vale & Juno, 1989), they become freaks on display. The queering of gender is also not uncommon, with females perfecting androgynous appearances and males adopting effeminate styles. Although the Temple is a context permitting participants to freak their bodies, it is also a context for self-immolation in the furnace of dance. With up to 40,000 bodies from more than 80 countries connected through persistent rhythms, intense consumption, body modifications, and self-abandonment, Boom orchestrates the individual participant’s connection to a subterranean carnivalesque body. The psychedelic festival enables new modes of identification through altered conditions of consciousness that are interpreted via narrative frameworks and folk themes apparent in vocal samples from various media sources (e.g., cinema, TV, documentaries, and radio) used in music production and in event decor and fashion. The main themes I have explored include the figures of the alien, the monster, and the indigene, who, from their various outer, abject, and ancient positions afford gnosis to disenchanted moderns. In the former, as chiefly expressed in the context of Goa (or “cosmic”) trance, the inner journey is facilitated by the sound apocalypse of self-discovery as analogized in the encounter with extraterrestrial aliens (St John, 2011c). Hosted within the subgenre of dark trance (or “darkpsy”), monsters, especially the living-dead zombie poached from horror cinema, burlesque the unpredictably re/animated condition of the trance dance floor (St John, 2011d). And, throughout the psytrance development, indigenes are embraced in the search for knowledge, consciousness, and re-enchantment (St John, 2012). In their adoption of a shifting assemblage of dress options, body modifications, hairstyles, adornments, and inscriptions, psytrance
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enthusiasts thus cobble identities from a cornucopia of religious, esoteric, and popular cultural sources. The psychedelic festival, then, permits its habitue´s the freedom to join one’s flame to the conflagration and to hold self-promotions on and off the dance floor. Affording this commotion of singularity and freakiness, Boom participants may experience fusion with or autonomy from others in extraordinary altered states of consciousness. Event management, in collaboration with DJs, producers, sound engineers, and visual and de´cor artists, optimize space, time, art, and other resources to realize this dynamic of spectacular self(less)ness, which lies at the root of what I have been calling neotrance. This concept, then, derives from the suspicion that traditional conceptions of “trance,” particularly “possession trance” and especially the analogy with what Emma Cohen (2008) calls “executive possession,” are ill-suited to recognise the experiential complexity of dance festal behavior and in particular the experience of trance endemic to the psychedelic festival, its music, and its dance. Although the psychophysiological impact of percussive and rhythmic music (but see Rouget, 1985) may hold across traditional and contemporary trance performance (Sylvan, 2002; Takahashi, 2005; Till, 2009), and although DJs (and scholars) invoke loose folk theories of divine guidance, conventional understandings of spirit possession tend to offer overstated, unfair, and misleading frameworks for understanding trance dance cultures associated with contemporary popular music [see Fachner, this volume]. Loose contrasts make for an easy dismissal of EDM cultures as comparatively meaningless. Commenting on raves, Georgina Gore (1997, pp. 137–138) claimed that, compared with possession trance within cults of the Southern Nigerian Bini, rave is “a rite of passage leading nowhere . . . It is a ritual without content, ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. It is a game of chance; its trance is aleatory and dizzying.” Rave might apparently exemplify the zombification of modern life, a disappearance from meaning, the zone entered by participants perhaps as pathological as that ascribed to the world of gamblers and casinos. Illustrating the results of an ethnographic approach to raves that would deliver us closer to the trance in question, Melanie Takahashi (2005) seeks to understand the alternative states of consciousness endogenous to these events. She argues that through DJ techniques, optimized audio-visual production, performance, and participant expectations at raves, “technological advancements may compensate for the lack of coherent cultural signifiers” vis-a` -vis “the sophisticated scripted process of initiation observed in ceremonial possession” (Takahashi 2005, p. 253). Ravers remain “horses,” only now they are ridden by the spirit of the optimized
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audio-visual assemblage channeled by the “shaman” DJ. Through these techniques and sound-art strategies, which Morgan Gerard (2004) calls “liminal techniques,” by comparison to other popular music forms/techniques, DJs are arguably better able to “control the means of perception” (Takahashi, 2005, p. 254). But while it makes sense to hold inquiry about the capabilities of newer and adapted technologies and chemicals to animate and energize participants and indeed communities of sound in EDMC events including psytrance, persistent analogical modeling with spirit possession becomes somewhat burdensome in itself. With the objective of revealing the sacred terrain of raving, Franc¸ois Gauthier harbors no such intellectual burden. He argues that rave “is not a possession trance, unless perhaps possession by ‘nothing.’” Ravers “do not feel ‘something’ (or indeed ‘nothing’) is overcoming them. On the contrary, it seems this overwhelming feeling originates from within, only they cannot say how or where” (Gauthier, 2004, p. 78). Further, the experience is “unhinged from a defined and institutionalized—and therefore— explicit religious system that could explicate its meaning. By contrast to a mystical experience, the techno trance is sought in itself and for itself, detached from any defined meaning, aim, or purpose.” “This trance,” Gauthier continues (2004, p. 79), “is the desire for pure instituancy, pure experimentation with an otherness that remains confused and diffuse—a pure gratuitous act, or a simple gesture of revolt.” This argument, I suggest, may be more accurate for rave as opposed to psytrance, since the latter is more typically a repository for those practicing and experimenting with alternative spiritual dispositions who are open to traverse human/spirit world boundaries outside mainstream religious practice and faith (principally that associated with Christianity). This is why organizers, such as those who orchestrated Morocco’s Rhythms of Peace festival, sought to associate their events, in that instance, with master practitioners of Moroccan Gnawa, or why Sufi dancers were billed for the opening ceremony at Soulclipse total solar eclipse festival in Turkey in March 2006, or why ceremonial dance is performed to didjeridus performed by Aboriginal custodians in the opening ceremony at Australia’s annual Rainbow Serpent Festival. In such cases, there is a strong desire to claim connections with traditional cultures and continuity with (imagined or real) forebears. Although such appropriations are not unproblematic, I simply want to reiterate the view that in psytrance dance floor participants oscillate between the performative edge, where participants enact fantastic and erotic personas often drawn from composite influences, and an experience approximate to dispossession, where trancers find release from a troubled and dispiriting lifeworld.
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Furthermore, infused with the ecstatic and utilitarian dimensions of the counterculture identified by Frank Musgrove as “the dialectics of utopia” (1974, p. 16), the psytrance festival accommodates diverse commitments in the wake of the 1960s consciousness explosion. Although dance floors are the context for dispossession from routine consciousness, the dance floor and wider festival grounds stage the performance of novel modes of consciousness associated with new social, cultural, and political initiatives. Because the festival is a vehicle for the ecstatic (selftranscendent), performative (self-expressive), as well as reflexive (conscious alternative) proclivities of the trance movement (St John, 2010b), it requires heuristics deviating from traditional (e.g., Winkelman, 1986) and Western (e.g. Taves, 1999) theories of trance. Although at one extreme, the party is a vehicle for getting “trashed” and “wasted,” at the other it accommodates an atmosphere of hope and expectancy. Where these events express desires for modes of sociality and states of consciousness perceived to have been lost or forgotten in the separation and isolation of the present, they mount a response to inherited sociocultural frameworks that render these events more than simply “parties.” Thus, while the popular tribal-trance designation may denote primitivist fantasies of the Other (Luckman, 2003), the terms tribe and trance are more than often adopted as generic signifiers for alternative community. The apparent role of dance events in raising consciousness and ecological awareness, facilitating intercultural harmony, delivering utopian dreams and global peace surface frequently in promotions. For instance, movement evangelists proclaim that psytrance holds the potential to “ultimately change the course of human consciousness,” and organizations like North Carolina’s Touch Samadhi and San Francisco’s Consortium of Collective Consciousness have pioneered strategies believed to facilitate necessary solutions for a troubled world. Boom is again exemplary. Although the event features a range of trance genres, it is not strictly a music or dance festival—it is what organizers regard as a “visionary arts and lifestyle festival,” or an innovation in “sustainable entertainment.” Boom hosts two arenas that are representative of the ecstatic and reflexive dimensions of trance. Operating over 7 days, featuring more than 100 DJs and fusion bands from many different nations performing a range of electronic trance genres and catering to approximately 5,000 to 6,000 people, the Dance Temple hosts a sophisticated audio-visual assemblage designed for enhancing expressive/transcendent states. At the same time, promoted as a “dynamic confluence of people, traditions, energy and information,” 4 Boom’s Liminal Village is an 4
From the first edition of the in-Village publication, the “liminal zine” Pathways.
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educational platform for the contemporary visionary arts culture. In 2006, the Liminal Village featured several zones including a “visionary art” gallery and a solar-powered bamboo temple, the “Omniplex,” the central structure in an alternative educational zone, its “interactive curriculum spotlighting emergent mythologies, integrative philosophies, and techniques for sustainable and holistic living.”5 With workshops, presentations, and “metacine” cinema zone, the complex was devoted to the transmission of ecological principles (as demonstrated by permaculture workshops), and a range of other ultimate concerns, including selfhealing modalities, psychedelic consciousness, and shamanism. That year, the Village hosted well-known Shipibo curandero Guillermo Are´valo, who leads ayahuasca retreats at his Peruvian botanical sanctuary, Espı´ritu de Anaconda. Offering a dedication to McKenna and the self-shamanizing theme, the Liminal Village represents a conscious effort to adopt a language, architecture, and vision of transformation using anthropological discourse forged in the study of ritual.6 Consciously emulating the demarcated and sacred zones of passage rites, facilitating the transmission of alternative cultural sacra, the Village is juxtaposed to the Temple, the vehicle for ecstatic states of dispossession. In his observations on the idea of the festival, 2008 Liminal Village presenter Erik Davis (2008, p. 54) described the festival as “an incubator of novelty . . . A petri dish of possibility where the future forms of community and consciousness are explored.” This is a good description of Boom and an appropriate juncture at which to conclude this chapter, for it suggests that festivals can themselves be spiritual technologies. As a context within which reflexive practice, ecstatic experience, and expressive arts have coexisted and coevolved, and as a premiere site for the exploration of altered states of mind, body, and culture in the contemporary, Boom is a carnival at the crossroads of consciousness exploration. Heir to the quest for experience, Boom bridges ritual and party in an effort to export its culture of consciousness from the crossroads into the everyday. In this achievement, it lies downstream from the countercultural confluence in San Francisco in 1967 and is a repository for the paradoxical culture of consciousness that evolved through the developments discussed in this chapter: psychedelia, virtual reality, and the rave and psytrance movements.
5
“Transmissions from the Edge”: Retrieved February 9, 2008, from http://boomfestival.org/. The universal experience of ritual “liminality,” the potent threshold first articulated by Arnold Van Gennep in his study of rites of passage (1960) and then developed by Victor Turner (1982). 6
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References Baldini, C. (2010). Dionysus returns: Tuscan trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae. In G. St John (Ed.), The local scenes and global culture of psytrance (pp. 170–185). New York: Routledge. Bergson, H. (1944 [1907]). Creative evolution. New York: Random House. Bey, H. (1991). TAZ: The temporary autonomous zone—ontological anarchy and poetic terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Burroughs, W. S., & Ginsberg, A. (1963). The Yage letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Cohen, E. (2008). What is spirit possession? Defining, comparing, and explaining two possession forms. Ethnos, 73(1), 101–126. D’Andrea, A. (2007). Global nomads: Techno and new age as transnational countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge. Davis, E. (1998). Techgnosis: Myth, magic, mysticism in the age of information. New York: Harmony Books. Davis, E. (2004). Hedonic tantra: Golden Goa’s trance transmission. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 256–272). London: Routledge. Davis, E. (2008). The festival is a seed. Pathways: Liminal Zine, (2), 50–54. Davis, E. (2009). Aya avatar: Drink the jungle juice. Retrieved January 3, 2011, from http://www.techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom2010-01-06-2204-0.txt. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society ( J. Wilkinson, Trans.). New York: Knopf. Forte, R. (1997). Entheogens and the future of religion. San Francisco, CA: Council on Spiritual Practices. Fritz, J. (1999). Rave culture: An insider’s overview. Victoria, B.C.: Smallfry Press. Gauthier, F. (2004). Rapturous ruptures: The “instituant” religious experience of rave. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 65–84). London: Routledge. Gauthier, F. (2005). Orpheus and the underground: Raves and implicit religion— from interpretation to critique. Implicit Religion, 8(3), 217–265. Gerard, M. (2004). Selecting ritual: DJs, dancers and liminality in underground dance music. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 167–184). London: Routledge. Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Gilmore, L. (2010). Theater in a crowded fire: Ritual and spirituality at Burning Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilmore, L, & Van Proyen (2005). AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Goffman, K. (2004). Counterculture through the ages. New York: Villard Books. Gore, G. (1997). Trance, dance and tribalism in rave culture. In H. Thomas (Ed.), Dance in the city (pp. 73–83). London: MacMillan Press. Hemment, D. (1996). E is for ekstasis. New Formations, 31, 23–38.
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Hill, D. (1999). Mobile anarchy: The house movement, shamanism and community. In T. Lyttle (Ed.), Psychedelics reimagined (pp. 95–106). New York: Autonomedia. Hutson, S. R. (2000). The rave: Spiritual healing in modern western subcultures. Anthropological Quarterly, 73(1), 35–49. Huxley, A. (1954; 1956). The doors of perception. Heaven and hell. New York: Harper & Brothers. Huxley, A. (1962). Island. New York: Bantam Books. James, W. (1902). The varieties of the religious experience: A study in human nature. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Johnson, P. C. (1995). Shamanism from Ecuador to Chicago: A case study in New Age ritual appropriation. Religion, 25(2), 163–178. Kehoe, A. (1990). Primal Gaia: Primitivists and plastic medicine men. In J. Clifton (Ed.), The invented Indian: Cultural fictions and government policies (pp. 193–209). New Brunswick: Transaction. Kripal, J. (2007). Esalen: America and the religion of no religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lachman, G. (2003). A secret history of consciousness. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books. Landau, J. (2004). The flesh of raving: Merleau-Ponty and the “experience” of ecstasy. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 107–124). London: Routledge. Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. New York: Knopf. Leary, T, Metzner, R., & Alpert, R. (1964). The psychedelic experience: A manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: University Books. Leary, T. (1977). Exo-psychology: A manual on the use of the human nervous system according to the instructions of the manufacturers. Los Angeles: Starseed/Peace Press. Leary, T, Horowitz, M., & Marshall, V.. (1994). Chaos & cyber culture. Berkeley, CA: Ronin. Lee, M., & Shlain, B. (1985). Acid dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the sixties rebellion. New York: Grove Press. Luckman, S. (2003). Going bush and finding one’s “tribe”: Raving, escape and the bush doof. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 17(3), 315–330. Markoff, J. (2005). What the Dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry. New York: Viking. McKenna, T. (1991). The archaic revival: Speculations on psychedelic mushrooms, the Amazon, virtual reality, UFOs, evolution, shamanism, the rebirth of the goddess, and the end of history. San Francisco: Harper. McKenna, T. (1992). Food of the gods: The search for the original tree of knowledge— A radical history of plants, drugs, and human evolution. New York: Bantam Books. McKenna, T. (1993). True hallucinations: Being an account of the author’s extraordinary adventures in the devil’s paradise. San Francisco: Harper. McKenna, T., & McKenna, D. (1993). The invisible landscape: Mind, hallucinogens, and the I Ching. New York: Harper Collins.
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Metzner, R. (Ed.). (1999). Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, consciousness, and the spirit of nature. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Miller, P. (Ed.). (2008). Sound unbound: Sampling digital music and culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Musgrove, F. (1974). Ecstasy and holiness: Counter culture and the open society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Niman, M. (1997). People of the rainbow: A nomadic utopia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Olaveson, T. (2004). “Connectedness” and the rave experience: Rave as new religious movement? In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 85–106). London: Routledge. Oroc, J. (2009). Tryptamine Palace: 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran desert toad. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Ott, J. (1995). The age of entheogens and the angel’s dictionary. Natural Products Co. Perry, C. (1984). The Haight Ashbury: A history. New York: Vintage Books. Razam, R. (2009). Aya: A shamanic odyssey. Icaro Publishing. Reynolds, S. (1997). Rave culture: Living dream or living death? In S. Redhead (with Derek Wynne and Justin O’Connor) (Ed.), The clubcultures reader: Readings in popular cultural studies (pp. 102–111). Oxford: Blackwell. Reynolds, S. (1998). Generation ecstasy: Into the world of techno and rave culture. New York: Little, Brown. Rietveld, H. (2004). Ephemeral spirit: Sacrificial cyborg and communal soul. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 46–61). London: Routledge. Root, D. (1996). Cannibal culture: Art, appropriation, and the commodification of difference. Boulder: Westview Press. Roszak, T. (1968). The making of a counter culture: Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rouget, G. (1985). Music and trance: A theory of the relations between music and possession. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rushkoff, D. (1994). Cyberia: Life in the trenches of hyperspace. London: HarperCollins. St John, G. (2004). Techno millennium: Dance, ecology and future primitives. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 213–235). London: Routledge. St John, G. (2008). Trance tribes and dance vibes: Victor Turner and electronic dance music culture. In G. St John (Ed.), Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance (pp. 149–173). New York: Berghahn. St John, G. (2009a). Technomad: Global raving countercultures. London: Equinox. St John, G. (2009b). Neotrance and the psychedelic festival. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1(1), 35–64. Retrieved January 3, 2011, from http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/11/35. St John, G. (Ed.). (2010a). The local scenes and global culture of psytrance. New York: Routledge. St John, G. (2010b). Liminal culture and global movement: The transitional world of psytrance. In G. St John (Ed.), The local scenes and global culture of psytrance (pp. 220–246). New York: Routledge.
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St John, G. (2011a). The vibe of the exiles: Aliens, afropsychedelia and psytrance. In T. C. van Veen (Ed.), Afrofuturism: Interstellar transmissions from remix culture. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. St John, G. (2011b). The 2012 movement, visionary arts and psytrance culture. In J. Gelfer (Ed.), 2012: Decoding the countercultural apocalypse. London: Equinox. St John, G. (2011c). Aliens are us: Space travel, neo-mysticism and psytrance. In A. Possamai (Ed.), Handbook of hyper-real spiritualities. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. St John, G. (2011d). Rave from the grave: Dark trance and the return of the dead. In C. James Rushton & C. Moreman (Ed.), They’re us: Zombies and humanity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland St John, G. (2012). Global tribe: Technology, spirituality and psytrance. London: Equinox. Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic white: Goa trance and the viscosity of race. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Saunders, N., & Doblin, R. (1996). Ecstasy: Dance, trance, and transformation. Oakland, California: Quick American Archives. Stephenson, N. (1992) Snow crash. New York: Bantam. Stevens, J. (1989). Storming heaven: LSD and the American dream. London: Paladin. Strassman, R. (2001). DMT—The spirit molecule: A doctor’s revolutionary research into the biology of near-death and mystical experiences. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Strassman, R. (with Slawek Wojtowicz, Luis Eduardo Luna, & Ede Frecska). (2008). Inner paths to outer space: Journeys to alien worlds through psychedelics and other spiritual technologies. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Sylvan, R. (2002). Traces of the spirit: The religious dimensions of popular music. New York: New York University Press. Sylvan, R. (2005). Trance formation: The spiritual and religious dimensions of global rave culture. New York: Routledge. Takahashi, M. (2004). The “natural high”: Altered states, flashbacks and neural tuning at raves. In G. St John (Ed.), Rave culture and religion (pp. 145–164). New York: Routledge. Takahashi, M. (2005). Spirituality through the science of sound: The DJ as technoshaman in rave culture. In M. J. Gilmour (Ed.), Call me the seeker: Listening to religion in popular music (pp. 239–266). London: Continuum. Taves, A. (1999). Fits, trances, & visions: Experiencing religion and explaining experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Till, R. (2009). Possession trance ritual in electronic dance music culture: A popular ritual technology for reenchantment. In C. Deacy (Ed.), Exploring religion and the sacred in a media age (pp. 169–187). Aldershot: Ashgate. Tramacchi, D. (2000). Field tripping: Psychedelic communitas and ritual in the Australian bush. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 15(2), 201–213.
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Tramacchi, D. (2006). Vapours and visions: Religious dimensions of DMT use. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Turner, V. (1984). Liminality and the performative genres. In J. J. MacAloon (Ed.), Rite, drama, festival, spectacle: Rehearsals towards a theory of cultural performance (pp. 19–41). Philadelphia: Institute for Study of Human Issues. Vale, V., & Juno, A. (1989). Modern primitives: Tattoo, piercing, scarification, an investigation of contemporary adornment and ritual. San Francisco: Re/search. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The rites of passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wasson, R. G., Kramrisch, S., Ruck, C., & Ott, J. (1992). Persephone’s quest: Entheogens and the origins of religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Winkelman, M. (1986). Trance states: A theoretical model and cross-cultural analysis. Ethos, 14(2), 174–203.
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PART III
The Humanities
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CHAPTER 11
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy Jennifer M. Windt Altered consciousness (AC) or altered states of consciousness (ASC) have been discussed throughout the history of philosophy and in different philosophical subdisciplines. This chapter is an introduction to some of the major philosophical problems raised by AC. My discussion of these problems is selective rather than exhaustive, both in terms of the types of alterations discussed and the questions asked, with a focus on Western philosophy and specifically epistemology, philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, and the history of ideas. My aim is mainly descriptive, explaining the various philosophical problems related to AC and the solutions proposed in the literature, illustrating their strengths and weaknesses, and pointing out their interconnections as well as directions for future research. I will also illustrate my own position on these matters. Because the concept of ASC has already been discussed in this volume [see Carden˜a, this volume], I do not develop my own definition here. The examples discussed in this chapter range from those typically regarded as ASC such as dreams, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), mystical experiences, and meditative states, to illusions and hallucinations, which according to some researchers should not be regarded as ASC (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2009). I include these examples in my discussion because their comparison with standard wakefulness is philosophically informative, especially in the philosophical discussion on perception (see section 2). Finally, pathological ASC are often similar to spontaneous or experimentally induced ASC in important respects. Therefore, my discussion of ASC includes both pathological and nonpathological cases.
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Epistemology: Does Altered Consciousness Present a Threat to Knowledge? ASC has given rise to two sorts of epistemological problems. The first is whether they are a source of knowledge, for instance, by providing insights that are not accessible during standard states of wakefulness (section 4). The second is whether ASC present a threat to knowledge and support skepticism about the external world and certain types of self-knowledge. The best-known version of the second problem is dream skepticism as formulated by Rene´ Descartes in the Meditations. Aiming to establish a secure foundation of knowledge based on rational enquiry (Williams, 1978), Descartes begins by critically examining all of his opinions to determine whether their truth can be doubted. Considering familiar cases of sensory illusions, he realizes that they are not sufficient to justify the more far-reaching form of doubt he has in mind, because there remain enough other cases in which it is “manifestly impossible to doubt” the evidence presented by sensory perception (Descartes, 1996, I.4). An example of such a “best-case scenario” of sensory perception (Stroud, 1984), which apparently leaves no room for doubt, is his experience of sitting by the fire in his dressing gown and holding a piece of paper in his hands (Decartes, 1996, I.5). Unless Descartes took himself to be mad—an assumption that would contradict the very project of purely rational enquiry (Frankfurt, 1970)—such best-case scenarios of sensory perception seem immune to the deceptive threat posed by illusions. At this point Descartes turns his attention to dreams: Though this be true, I must nevertheless here consider that I am a man, and that, consequently, I am in the habit of sleeping, and representing to myself in dreams those same things, or even sometimes others less probable, which the insane think are presented to them in their waking moments. How often have I dreamt that I was in these familiar circumstances, that I was dressed, and occupied this place by the fire, when I was lying undressed in bed? At the present moment, however, I certainly look upon this paper with eyes wide awake; the head which I now move is not asleep; I extend this hand consciously and with express purpose, and I perceive it; the occurrences in sleep are not so distinct as all this. But I cannot forget that, at other times I have been deceived in sleep by similar illusions; and, attentively considering those cases, I perceive so clearly that there exist no certain marks by which the state of waking can ever be distinguished from sleep, that I feel greatly astonished; and in amazement I almost persuade myself that I am now dreaming. (Descartes, 1996, I.5)
If even one’s realistic experience of sitting by the fire could be a dream, then we can never rule out the possibility that we are dreaming at any
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given moment. This allows Descartes to apply his radical doubt to all beliefs derived from sensory perception, including his beliefs about the external world as well as his own body. The dream problem recurs in the Sixth Meditation, where Descartes employs two strategies to reconcile the possibility of knowledge with the deceptive nature of dreams. First, he now realizes that there is indeed a considerable difference between dreaming and wakefulness: Dreams are not connected to the events of waking life and are prone to sudden changes. He concludes that he ought to reject all the doubts of those bygone days, as hyperbolical and ridiculous, especially the general uncertainty respecting sleep, which I could not distinguish from the waking state: for I now find a very marked difference between the two states. (Descartes 1996, VI.24).
Many of Descartes’s contemporaries reacted to his exposition of dream skepticism incredulously. Hobbes, for example, conceded the truth of the First Meditation but thought it “a pity that such a distinguished originator of fresh ideas should come out with this old stuff” (Hobbes, 1975–1999). To Descartes’s solution of dream skepticism, he responded by asking Whether it is certain that, if you dream that you are wondering whether you are dreaming or not, you cannot dream that your dream coheres with ideas of past events succeeding each other in a long chain. If this is a possibility, then things which seem to you in your dream to be events belonging to your past life can equally well be deemed genuine, no less than if you are awake. (Hobbes, 1975–1999).
This points to a deeper problem for Cartesian dream skepticism, namely that cognition itself may be corrupted in the dream state. Descartes’ second strategy for resolving the dream problem in the Fifth and Sixth Meditations can be summed up by saying that although attempts at rational thought are typically lacking in dreams, they are nonetheless reliable when they are based on clear and distinct ideas (see also Grundmann, 2002). “But although, in truth, I should be dreaming, the rule still holds that all which is clearly presented to my intellect is indisputably true” (Descartes, 1996, V.15).1
1
Descartes’s concession to Hobbes that “a dreamer cannot really connect the contents of their dream with the ideas of past events, although they can dream that they are making the connection” (Hobbes, 1975–1999) contradicts this point, as this would mean that rational thought is not, after all, recognizable in the dream state.
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Early dream research supported the view that dreams are typically single-minded and lack attempts at rational thought (Rechtschaffen, 1978). However, it is becoming increasingly clear that cognitive activities such as thinking and speaking occur relatively frequently not only in lucid dreams (in which the dreamer knows that she is currently dreaming and can often voluntarily control the dream; see LaBerge & Gackenbach, 2000) but also in nonlucid ones (Kahn & Hobson, 2005; Meier, 1993). Prelucid dreams, in which the dreamer wonders whether she is dreaming but concludes that she is not, are particularly interesting because they present evidence that reasoning itself can go astray in dreams (Brooks & Vogelsong, 1999; for a philosophical discussion, see Windt & Metzinger, 2007). In dreams, one can have the impression of engaging in rational thought or remembering something about one’s waking life and be completely wrong. Just as genuine instances of reasoning and remembering occur in dreams, so do instances of mock reasoning and mock memories, in which the dreamer merely has the impression of being rational. The phenomenology of knowing, thinking, and remembering seems to be particularly vulnerable to this type of corruption in the dream state, showing that the mere availability of cognitive capacities says nothing about their reliability. In many dreams, the “evidence of reason” is mere phenomenal evidence, without epistemic value. This, in turn, invites a deeper epistemological problem: Even though rational thought is possible in dreams, it may not be recognizable. If this analysis is correct, this presents an additional obstacle against solving the problem of dream skepticism and suggests that the threat posed by dreaming may be more extensive than Descartes believed. If we cannot distinguish between real reasoning and mock reasoning, we once more cannot rule out that we are dreaming at any given moment. Moreover, dreaming would not only render sensory knowledge of the external world dubitable but would also question one’s ability to recognize whether one’s current reasoning is reliable.2 In sum, the problem appears to be that once one takes the possibility of dream deception seriously, it becomes virtually insoluble, and indeed Descartes’s exposition of the problem has proven to be much more influential than his proposed solution. One thing that makes Cartesian dream skepticism so compelling is its appeal to everyday experience. This is a type of deception most people have experienced and thus can identify 2
One could attempt to deflate this by saying that if one only dreams that one reasons, one also only dreams that one is deceived; see for instance Sosa, 2007. However, this still means that one can’t tell the difference between real and dream reasoning and so does not solve the problem.
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with. Indeed, Descartes’s theoretical position about dreaming in the Meditations may have been inspired by several dreams he had himself as a young man (Hacking, 2002). False awakenings (realistic dreams of waking up) are another example of how dreams can give rise to feelings of confusion and uncertainty to the point of generating philosophical doubt. Bertrand Russell (1948, p. 186) wrote that It may be said that, though when dreaming I may think that I am awake, when I wake up I know that I am awake. But I do not see how we are to have any such certainty; I have frequently dreamt that I woke up; in fact once, after ether, I dreamt it about a hundred times in the course of one dream. [ . . . ] I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.
This shows that the classical philosophical problem of dream skepticism is much more than an armchair exercise of purely theoretical doubt. False awakenings, more so than other types of dreams, may actually be the paradigm example of vividly experienced doubt and tangible dream deception. It also shows why skeptical arguments relying on actual ASC, and dreams in particular, are more compelling than ones using thought experiments such as the brain in a vat (Putnam, 1981) or matrix-style scenarios in which subjects are kept in a state of permanent deception by evil scientists or computer programs (Grau, 2005). Although such examples may even be nomologically possible (it is not inconceivable that future neuroscientists might be able to appropriately stimulate a disembodied brain in a vat), they do not have everyday experience on their side. In contrast, it is the appeal to everyone’s commonplace experience that makes dream skepticism so compelling.
Philosophy of Perception: Why Altered Consciousness Presents a Problem for Philosophical Theories of Perception Illusions, hallucinations, and dreams not only give rise to the epistemological problem of external-world skepticism but also threaten our common-sense understanding of perception. Intuitively, perception is characterized by its openness to the world, because it seemingly puts us in immediate contact with mind-independent objects in the external world and provides direct access to reality (Crane, 2005). This position is often called direct or naı¨ve realism. The possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from genuine perception, however, presents an important challenge for our commonplace understanding of perception. Consequently, a philosophical theory of perception has to
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account both for the occurrence of hallucinations and the seeming openness of perception. Crane (2005) reconstructs the argument from hallucination as follows (see also Smith, 2002): i. It seems possible for someone to have an experience—a hallucination—which is subjectively indistinguishable from a genuine perception but where there is no mind-independent object being perceived. ii. The perception and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination are experiences of essentially the same kind. iii. Therefore it cannot be that the essence of the perception depends on the objects being experienced, since essentially the same kind of experience can occur in the absence of the objects. iv. Therefore the ordinary conception of perceptual experience—which treats experience as dependent on the mind-independent objects around us—cannot be correct.
Four main solutions to the resulting problem of perception have been proposed. For reasons of space, I do not discuss sense-datum and adverbial theory here, as they are no longer widely discussed in the current literature (see Crane, 2005, for details).
The Intentionalist or Representationalist Theory Intentionalism or representationalism holds that mental states are characterized by being directed at or representing something in the world (Brentano, 1874). In perception, we do not have direct access to the world but experience the content of inner representations. The phenomenal content, or the qualitative character of conscious experience, can be described in terms of intentional or representational content. In this respect, there is no difference between beliefs and perceptual states, and some philosophers hold that the latter can be described as propositional attitudes (Byrne, 2001) or a form of belief (Armstrong, 1968). One problem for this view, however, is that illusions, pseudohallucinations, or lucid dreams do not involve the belief that what is being experienced actually exists. Therefore, the phenomenal content of such states cannot be described in terms of false beliefs. To address this problem, Armstrong (1968) suggested that pseudohallucinations are more adequately described as the acquisition of potential rather than actual beliefs. However, one would still have to explain in exactly what sense lucid dreamers can be said to hold the potential belief that they are experiencing the real world, even though they
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currently realize that they are dreaming and are able to use this knowledge to engage in dream control. There are several problems for intentionalist theories of perception. First, there is the question of how to explain the possibility of misrepresentation. To understand how representation is possible, we first have to understand how misrepresentation is possible. According to Dretske (1994), for instance, interesting cases of misrepresentation stem from the nonderived representational capacities of the system in question and require a certain threshold of complexity. Another problem for representational theories is that it is controversial whether the qualitative aspects of phenomenal states can really be captured in terms of representational content. For pain experiences, for instance, there may be something over and above that which the pain sensation is directed at, namely the sheer ickiness of pain. Many philosophers think this is something for which no representational analysis is available (Block, 1997; Peacocke, 1983; Shoemaker, 1990; but see Tye, 2000). A more general objection is that intentionalism fails to explain the apparent openness of perception (McDowell, 1987). If the phenomenal character of perception is determined by representational content, how does this explain the subjective experience of having direct and unmediated perceptual access to the world? Presentational content (Metzinger, 2003) may be a solution to this problem. Perceptual presence itself can be described as a representational property by representing the object of perception as present. From the third-person perspective, this representational property says nothing about the actual presence of such mindindependent objects: The experience could also be a hallucination. The third premise of the argument from hallucination equivocates phenomenal and epistemological readings of experience: Phenomenal sameness is not sufficient for sameness on the third-person, epistemological level of description, and in this latter sense, hallucination and genuine perception are not the same kinds of experience. Presentational content thus provides a new way of conceptualizing the difference between perceptual and belief states in terms of different forms of representational content. Beliefs are experienced as representations. In thinking, you are always aware of the construction process and know that your thoughts are not constrained by the actual state of the environment but could be wrong. Unlike thoughts, perceptual states have not only representational but also presentational content. This is why perceptual states, unlike belief states, are experienced as providing immediate access to the world even when they do not, as in hallucination and dreams.
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Disjunctivism Unlike the intentional or representational theory, disjunctivism tries to uphold the commonplace, naı¨ve realistic view of perception (Byrne & Logue, 2009). To do so, it denies the “common kind assumption” (Martin, 2004), according to which hallucinations and genuine perception are fundamentally the same kind of mental event. The disjunctivist will argue, first, that subjective indistinguishability does not suffice for belonging to the same common kind. Subjective indistinguishability is all that hallucinations and genuine perception have in common. Their most fundamental common description is merely disjunctive: My experience of seeing the ocean is either a genuine perception of the ocean or a hallucination of the ocean. Nonetheless, each disjunct belongs to a more fundamental kind, namely perception or hallucination, and there is no more fundamental way of describing what they have in common. What the disjunctivist has to explain, then, is the subjective indistinguishability between hallucinations and genuine perception. Martin (2009) does this by introducing the distinction between how things seem epistemically and how they seem phenomenally. Hallucinations and perceptions are epistemically indistinguishable, because the person undergoing them is unable to tell whether he is hallucinating or perceiving. But it does not follow that hallucinations and genuine perception also have the same phenomenal character. Whereas the phenomenal character of genuine perception is determined by the perceptible properties of mind-independent objects, no such characterization is available for hallucinations, because no such objects exist. Hence, the two can be regarded as radically different types of states that are merely “yoked together” by the subjective report and their epistemic indistinguishability (Martin, 2009, p. 96). A central advantage of this view is the claim that perception is exactly what it naively and pretheoretically seems to be, namely a way of gaining direct access to the objects of perception. A positive account of hallucinations, however, is not the main goal of disjunctivism, and most disjunctivists focus on saying what hallucinations are not rather than what they are (Dancy, 1995). Some disjunctivists even claim that it is not like anything to hallucinate, a view that contradicts the commonplace view of hallucination (Smith, 2002). However, there are exceptions. Fish (2008, 2009) attempts to give a positive account of hallucinations that integrates empirical findings on hallucinations. Fish (2008) explains hallucinations by saying that they seem to feel the same as genuine perception because they are epistemically
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indistinguishable, even though they do not have the same phenomenal character. By contrast, Siegel (2008) claims that the epistemic account proposed by Martin and Fish fails because it cannot explain the positive facts of hallucinations, such as why one hallucination feels different from another. Another objection is voiced by Nudds (2009, p. 344), who argues that no positive account of the phenomenal character of hallucinations can be given within the framework of naı¨ve realism or disjunctivism and that the attempt to ground indistinguishability in phenomenal similarity is misguided. In sum, both intentionalism and disjunctivism are confronted with serious problems in trying to accommodate hallucinations within a theory of perception. My own position is that intentionalism is the more promising approach, in particular if an account of hallucinations can be defended that can plausibly explain the difference between perceptual states and beliefs, for instance by making use of the notion of presentational content. The main problem for intentionalism is not so much to explain hallucinations as to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual states in general. Once a general account of misrepresentation is available, there remains no special problem for hallucinations. There are convincing proposals for representational accounts of consciousness and selfconsciousness (see next section) that integrate empirical evidence from various neuropsychological syndromes, indicating that the content of experience results from complex information processing in the brain. In the face of this evidence, the intuitive plausibility of naı¨ve realism is weakened considerably. This also means that the main advantage of disjunctivism turns out to be an important shortcoming. Also, the failure of disjunctivism to give a positive account of hallucinations and its denial that hallucinations can have the same phenomenal character as genuine perception is unsatisfying. Finally, it is important to point out that the discussion of hallucinations in the philosophy of perception mostly focuses on the logical possibility of hallucinations that are subjectively indistinguishable from genuine instances of perception. Logical possibility is not the same as nomological possibility, as it does not yet show that such subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations actually do occur or that the majority of hallucinations can be described in this manner. Researching this question in detail is an important desideratum for future theoretical and empirical work on hallucinations. If there were good reasons to believe that realworld hallucinations typically do not resemble genuine perception in terms of their phenomenal character, the challenge posed to theories of perception by real-world hallucinations could be minimized and some of
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the discomfort involved in accepting that perception can go amiss would be dissolved.3 For an empirically plausible philosophical theory of perception—a goal that is becoming increasingly important in interdisciplinary consciousness research—such findings would, therefore, be relevant. Nonetheless, as long as subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations are at least logically possible, both the epistemological problem of dream skepticism and the problem of perception will persist.
Philosophy of Mind: What Can Altered Consciousness Tell Us about Consciousness and the Self? In recent years, philosophy of mind has been increasingly characterized by its interdisciplinary focus, and one consequence is that both ASC and pathological wake states are frequently discussed in the philosophical literature, especially in the context of self-consciousness. Here ASC typically serve as a contrast condition. The systematic analysis of ASC and the precise ways in which they differ from standard wake states can help identify unquestioned intuitions and background assumptions about consciousness and lead to theoretical insights and empirical predictions about potential dissociations between different dimensions of selfconsciousness. The self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) proposed by Metzinger (2003, 2004, 2009) is an example of such a strategy. Its central claim is that the folk-phenomenological notion of what it means to be or have a self should be rejected. SMT integrates findings from psychology and the cognitive neurosciences and formulates a number of conceptual constraints for a theory of self-consciousness. Instead of a self that is substantially distinct from the body, we have a self-model, which results from complex information-processing mechanisms and representational processes in the central nervous system. Ultimately, the self-model depends on processes inside the brain; it is a virtual simulation rather than something that could exist independently of such processes. The phenomenal self or the experience of selfhood is the content of the self-model, a representational entity that we fail to recognize as a model because it is 3
Of course, empirical research results supporting the phenomenal similarity between hallucinations and perception could also increase the bite of the problem. This would be the case if all or even some dreams can be conceptualized as global, multimodal hallucinations with the same phenomenal character as waking experience. It is interesting to note, however, that dreams are not typically discussed in the context of the problem of perception.
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phenomenally transparent. In standard situations, we only experience the content of the self-model but do not have access to the construction process and thus fail to experience its virtual character. The assumption that the phenomenal self, including the experience of being an embodied self, is a virtual simulation is supported by a number of ASC. A first example can be found in phantom limbs, or the experience that the missing limb is still present following amputation. Sometimes, patients also describe feeling pain in their phantom limb or complain that it is paralyzed and frozen in an uncomfortable position (Brugger, 2006; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998; for details on alterations of bodily consciousness, see Dieguez & Blanke, Volume 2). In healthy individuals, the virtual character of the bodily self can be demonstrated through a number of experimental manipulations. In the rubber-hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005), a fake rubber hand is placed in front of the participants while one of their real hands is concealed from view. The experimenter then strokes both the rubber hand and the concealed real hand simultaneously with a probe. As the seen strokes in the rubber hand are aligned with the felt strokes in the real hand, many participants report the sensation that the rubber hand is actually their own, sometimes including the sensation of a virtual arm connecting it with their shoulder. There are also behavioral measures of the illusion: When asked to close their eyes and point to the location of their hand, participants tend to mislocalize it toward the rubber hand (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). RHI is interesting because it shows that the sense of ownership (an automatic form of self-attribution that allows one to experience one’s body as one’s own) can be experimentally manipulated through conflicting visual and tactile input (Metzinger, 2009). When the location at which one visually observes the strokes is different from the location of tactile input, the sense of ownership shifts to the source of visual stimulation, giving rise to the sense of ownership for the rubber hand. According to SMT, this means that the rubber hand is transiently integrated into the phenomenal self-model, thus becoming part of the currently experienced bodily self. An analogue of RHI can also be created for the whole body (Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager et al., 2007). Through a head-mounted display, participants are presented with a visual image of themselves as seen from the back, which is projected to a point in virtual space in front of them. The experience is that of seeing oneself from behind. When participants are stroked on their backs and simultaneously see these strokes on the visual image of their own back in front of them, they often report the strange sensation of suddenly identifying with the virtual body and feeling that their
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location has shifted toward the observed strokes (Lenggenhager et al., 2007). When asked to return to the spot where they were standing during the illusion with their eyes closed, participants tend to drift toward the position of the virtual body. This suggests that the experiment targets two dimensions of subjective experience, namely self-identification or ownership for a body as a whole and self-location within a spatial frame of reference (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009). These can be dissociated from the origin of the visuospatial first-person perspective (1PP), or the position from which the person sees the virtual image of her body from behind. Again, conflicting visual and tactile information can lead one to mislocalize oneself in space and identify with a virtual body image. The position from which I visually observe the world can be dissociated from the position at which I feel myself to be, and I can feel a sense of ownership for a virtual body that is distinct from my real physical body. The conceptual distinction between self-identification, self-localization, and the visual 1PP may also be crucial for understanding the minimal conditions for the experience of selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009). Here, three types of full-body illusions are particularly interesting (Blanke & Mohr, 2005; Blanke et al., 2005): In out-of-body experiences (OBEs), the person has the experience of having left her body, and a visual image of the physical body is often observed from an elevated perspective. Some individuals report having a phantom body during their OBEs, while others report feeling like a disembodied point in space. OBEs can occur spontaneously, for instance during sleep onset, epileptic seizures, or stressful situations, such as after an accident or during an operation, but can also be induced through electrical stimulation at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). In autoscopic hallucination, the subject still feels localized in her own body but sees a virtual double of herself standing in front of her. In heautoscopy, there is also a visual double, but here, subjects report switching back and forth between their real and the illusory body [see also Carden˜a, Volume 2]. These three types of full-body illusions present different dissociations between the visual 1PP, self-localization, and self-identification. Blanke and Metzinger (2009, p. 12) conclude that, taken together, they show that global ownership–“functionally defined as availability of an integrated, transparent and global representation of the spatiotemporally situated body—is the simplest form of self-consciousness.” In contrast, agency, or the phenomenal-functional property of being able to control and experience oneself as the author of one’s thoughts and actions, is not necessary for self-consciousness [see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Carden˜a, Volume 2]. The core of our experience of selfhood, which is sufficient for minimal
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phenomenal selfhood, may be the “passive, multisensory and globalized experience of ‘owning’ a body,” and this can arise for one’s physical body or for a virtual one (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009, p. 12). The conceptual distinction between ownership and agency can also be applied to the theoretical analysis of hallucinations. The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are particularly interesting in this respect. They involve auditory hallucinations, typically of hearing voices, as well as thought insertion, in which patients report that someone else’s thoughts have been inserted into their mind, and thought control, in which patients report that an external agent has taken control of their thoughts (for a philosophical analysis, see Stephens & Graham, 2000). Although the phenomenon of thought control can be described as resulting from a disturbed sense of agency for one’s thoughts, thought insertion involves the additional loss of the sense of ownership for one’s thoughts, leading the patient to deny that her thoughts are her own. Auditory hallucinations of voices may result from a similar process of disturbances to the sense of ownership and agency for one’s cognitive processes, specifically inner speech. Many different theoretical models of auditory hallucinations have been suggested, ranging from disturbances in perceptual processing to higher-level cognitive disturbances in source monitoring and performing self-other distinctions (Stephens & Graham, 2000). Dreams are another example of how ASC can contribute to an empirically informed philosophical theory of self-consciousness. Most contemporary philosophers working on dreams (see for instance Ichikawa, 2009; Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Revonsuo, 2006) agree that dreams are conscious experiences because they are phenomenal states: There is something it is like to dream, and (contra Dennett, 1976; Malcolm, 1956, 1959) dreams give rise to consciously experienced imagery during sleep.4 According to SMT (Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Windt & Metzinger, 2007), most nonlucid dreams lack important layers of waking self-consciousness and thus should only be regarded as subjective experiences in a conceptually weak sense related to the cognitive 1PP, agency, and the narrative or autobiographical self: Nonlucid dreamers cannot form a stable cognitive relation to the dream world and often entertain delusional beliefs; they lack control over volition and attention and cannot remember important facts about their waking lives (Hobson, Pace-Schott, & Stickgold, 2000). False awakenings are a good counterexample because they show a strong degree of coherence with the 4
However, philosophers disagree as to whether dreams involve complex hallucinations or should rather be regarded as imaginative states comparable to daydreaming and waking fantasy (Ichikawa, 2009; McGinn, 2004; Sosa, 2007).
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autobiographical self experienced in wakefulness. Lucid dreams are another, and at least fully lucid dreams afford a vastly different interpretation in terms of self-consciousness (Metzinger, 2003, 2009; Windt & Metzinger, 2007). Lucid dreamers, especially in lucid control dreams, are attentional, cognitive, and behavioral agents in a much stronger sense than nonlucid ones, related both to the phenomenology of agency and its functional profile. This is related to a stable 1PP and the ability to form a conscious cognitive model of one’s current relation to the dream world, enabling both the insight that one is currently dreaming and the ability to engage in dream control. Mnemonic processing is also enhanced compared to nonlucid dreams. All of this supports the view that fully lucid dreams are subjective experiences in a stronger sense than most nonlucid ones, in some cases even approaching the type of self-consciousness characteristic of standard wakefulness. Nonetheless, the contrast between lucid and nonlucid dreams should be considered as continuous rather than exclusive, and the degree to which a given nonlucid dream should be considered as a subjective experience will depend on the degree to which the phenomenalfunctional properties of agency and the 1PP are instantiated and on its integration with the autobiographical self experienced in standard wakefulness. Distinguishing different elements of dream lucidity may help understand the gradual transitions between lucid and nonlucid dreams as well as the different types of self-related processing involved (Noreika, Windt, Lenggenhager, & Karim, 2010; Windt & Metzinger, 2007). Another point that makes both lucid and nonlucid dreams interesting for self-consciousness has to do with the bodily self. Dreams provide an example of a rich and complex form of consciousness arising in a state of near-complete functional disembodiment. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in which the most vivid dreams occur, is characterized by the sensory input and motor output blockade (Hobson et al., 2000). As a result, the sleeping body is both paralyzed and deafferented during the dream state, meaning that internally experienced behavior is not enacted in the physical body (with the exception of patients with REM-sleep behavior disorder (RBD) who literally act out their dreams; see Schenck, 2005) and stimuli from the environment and the body are typically not integrated into the dream narrative. An interesting question is whether dreams nonetheless give rise to the experience of having a body. Movement sensations are frequent in the dream state, but touch, pain, and thermal sensations are extremely rare (Hobson, 1988). The general conclusion that the dream self is not only functionally disembodied with relation to the physical body, but also only phenomenally embodied in a weak sense seems
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plausible (Windt, 2010). If it is true that dreams often lack a detailed body representation including body parts, this may help elucidate the relationship between bodily experiences and their functional and neurophysiological correlates. It also suggests that the experience of fully embodied selfhood can be dissociated from other levels of self-related processing such as cognition, as in lucid dreams. Finally, Revonsuo’s (2000, 2006) work on consciousness gives a particularly prominent role to dreams. Going beyond the contrastive analysis between dreaming and standard waking consciousness (Windt & Noreika, in press), he suggests that dreaming “reveals consciousness in a very special, pure, and isolated form” (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 75) and thus can be used as a theoretical and research model of consciousness. Dreaming “depicts consciousness first and foremost as a subjective world-for-me” (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 75) and may not only reveal the universal features of conscious experience but also help investigate the neural correlates of consciousness independently of the potentially confounding factors of sensory input and motor output. Moreover, because dreams can be seen as offline simulations of waking consciousness, this means that consciousness itself is essentially a process of simulation: “[ . . . ] not only are dreams experiences but, in a way, all experiences are dreams” (Revonsuo, 2006, p. 55). Dreaming thus gives rise to the virtual reality metaphor of conscious experience. The modeling approach is controversial, and other researchers have suggested that dreaming can be regarded as a model of the positive symptoms of psychosis, both on the phenomenal and the neurophysiological levels of description, and differs in important ways from standard wakefulness (Hobson, 1999; see Windt & Noreika, in press, for a critical discussion). Nonetheless, Revonsuo’s approach is interesting, because it not only shows how ASC can be used to inform a philosophical theory of consciousness and the self but also suggests that the use of altered consciousness as a model of standard wake states might lead to testable predictions. Another theme that has been discussed in the context of pure consciousness is meditative states. Neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson, 2003; Varela, 1996) attempts to bring together aspects of Husserlian phenomenology with cognitive neuroscience. By training participants in introspective practice, the precision of first-person reports is supposed to be enhanced and their integration with empirical research results thereby facilitated (Thompson, 2006). A core idea is that meditative practice, which has a long tradition in Eastern culture, exemplifies such a disciplined first-person approach (for a review of meditative practices from a neuroscience perspective, see Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008).
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The interesting point here is that trained meditators are seen as experts regarding not just meditative states but conscious experience itself and are considered as scientific collaborators rather than only experimental participants. As in the discussion on dreaming as a model of waking consciousness, however, it is an open question whether insights from meditation research can actually be generalized to standard waking consciousness [see Shear, this volume].
Mystical Experiences and the History of Ideas: From Altered Consciousness as a Source of Knowledge to a Naturalized Account of Religious Beliefs, Myths, and the Concept of the Soul An old theme in both the philosophical and the popular discussion on ASC is whether they enable insights that cannot be accessed in standard wake states. In his introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley (2004, p. vii) writes that “knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.” As Huxley suggests, the insights conveyed by AC might be related to alterations in cognitive functioning or in the style of reasoning characteristic of AC. Indeed, before the 19th century, hallucinations were termed apparitions or visions, suggesting a close relationship to higher sorts of insight (Aleman & Larøi, 2008). Interestingly, there was no clear distinction between nocturnal dreams and visions in antiquity, and they were seen as tangible visits from the gods: Dreaming was the passive experience of seeing, or being shown, a dream. Dreams play an important role in initiating religious insights in the Bible and the Talmud, as well as in Indian tradition (Van de Castle, 1994). In ancient Greece, the practice of dream prophecy played a prominent role in religious life, in particular at the Aesculap shrines, as well as for medical practice [see Ustinova, and Geels and, this volume]. An even stronger variant of the notion that ASC provide access to deeper forms of knowledge has to do with perennial philosophy. This idea, formulated by the 16th-century Italian monk Augustinus Steuchus and later taken up by Leibniz, says that the same eternal truths are discovered by the mystics of all times and all cultures (Horgan, 2003; Huxley, 2004). These truths transcend time, place, culture, and personal identity and are only accessible during mystical experience [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. James (2003, p. 335) described mystical experience as the experience of intellectual enlightenment, elation, and joy. He also noted that in
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mystical experience, the eternal truths are apprehended in immediate experience rather than as a result of rational deliberation. A related point is that they are incommunicable, and according to James (2003): This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else. In this, as I have said, it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. (p. 341)
The idea that ASC could be a source of knowledge and insight nicely complements the epistemological problem of dream skepticism discussed above, and there is a tension in the literature on altered consciousness between viewing ASC as higher states of consciousness or, conversely, as pathological conditions, the latter point predominating in the psychological literature since the 19th century (Aleman & Larøi, 2008) [see Lukoff, Volume 2]. Rather than viewing them as opposites, the close conceptual relationship between madness, deeper forms of insight, and prophecies of divine origin was already highlighted by Plato in the Phaedrus. At the same time, the popular notion of ASC as conveying heightened insight has always provoked philosophical skepticism. Aristotle (2008) criticized the widespread trust of his contemporaries in prophetic dreams, commenting that the only way in which dreams could foretell future events was by coincidence and that this type of experience was most likely to befall “commonplace persons and not the most intelligent” [cf. Luke, Volume 2]. This theme was taken up by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The main goal of his chapter on enthusiasm is to show that revelation, by itself, is not reliable, as one can never be sure that it is a genuine revelation rather than a product of enthusiasm: Immediate revelation being a much easier way for men to establish their opinions, and regulate their conduct, than the tedious and not always successful labour of strict reasoning, it is no wonder, that some have been very apt to pretend to revelation [ . . . ]. Their minds being thus prepared, whatever groundless opinion comes to settle itself strongly upon their fancies is an illumination from the spirit of God, and presently of divine authority [ . . . ]. (Locke, 1997, IV. XIX, 5, 6)
The point is that the mere strength of one’s persuasions is not enough to justify revelation; without outward signs to convince one of the truth of one’s persuasions, or without their withstanding the test of reason,
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revelation is not to be had, or at least cannot be recognized (Locke, 1997, IV. XIX, 14, 15). Once more, phenomenal certainty—the experience of persuasion or knowing—is not the same as epistemic justification. However, if James’s comment on the incommunicableness of such mystical experiences is correct, the attempt to evaluate such insights in rational terms may itself be misguided. If they can only be justified through first-person experience and cannot be disproved through rational argument (James, 2003), such insights would lie outside the scope of epistemology, which focuses on rationally justifiable knowledge claims. From the perspective of rational inquiry, one would then have to remain silent on questions concerning the epistemic status of such insights. Whether or not they actually give rise to a deeper form of knowledge may be an unanswerable question. This is not to deny that ASC can be a meaningful source of personal insight. For instance, dreams and the practice of dream interpretation can certainly be personally meaningful in this way (Flanagan, 2000), even if they do not have intrinsic meaning, and the same could be true for many ASC. Even so, my aim here is more limited. Even if one does allow that certain ASC are a source of knowledge, saying that such insights are epistemically justified in terms of their phenomenal character alone is problematic, because it rests on a category mistake (Ryle, 2000). Also, it may be impossible to distinguish genuine insight during ASC from mere feelings of knowing, such as in delusional states. If at all, such insights present a completely different form of knowledge, and one that requires a separate explanation of its own. Aside from questions about the epistemological status of ASC, there is another tradition in philosophy that has to do with investigating the beliefs they have given rise to in the history of ideas. Commenting on the reality of the unseen, James (2003) remarked that the belief in objects that cannot be experienced with any of the senses is the foundation of many religious beliefs. Our natural tendency toward abstraction provides us with an “ontological imagination,” allowing us to experience such “unpicturable beings [ . . . ] with an intensity almost like that of an hallucination” (James, 2003, p. 63). Importantly, this type of experience is not unique to mystical or religious experience. Felt presence (FP), in which the person has the strong feeling of an agent being located in her immediate vicinity and which can arise independently of modality-specific hallucinations (Nielsen, 2007; but see Cheyne & Girard, 2007), is perhaps the best example for what James calls an undifferentiated “sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’” (James, 2003, p. 51).
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FP often occurs during sleep–wake transitions and sleep paralysis (SP; the experience of waking up and being unable to move, commonly explained by the persistence of REM-sleep muscular atonia after awakening; see Hishikawa & Shimizu, 1995). FP has also been associated with a number of conditions independently of sleep, including epileptic seizures and lesions, especially in the temporoparietal areas; it can be induced experimentally through electrical stimulation (Arzy et al., 2006) and occurs spontaneously in periods of heightened stress and emotional arousal (bereavement, accidents, post-partum, prolonged isolation, etc.; see Nielsen, 2007). It is very interesting, because it may allow researchers to investigate the neural correlates of such experiences and suggests a link between mystical experiences and hallucinatory phenomena. Independently of their epistemological status, an analysis of these examples can help give a naturalized account of why ASC have often been regarded as a source of knowledge in the history of ideas. Aside from FP, a number of other ASC are informative for the history of ideas. Again, the hypnagogic state between sleeping and wakefulness is particularly interesting. Cheyne (2003; Cheyne, Rueffer, & NewbyClark, 1999) found that reports of hallucinatory experiences during SP are consistently grouped into three clusters: (1) vestibular-motor hallucinations, including sensations of floating, flying, falling, as well as autoscopy and out-of-body feelings; (2) intruder experiences, involving the sense of presence as well as visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations; and (3) incubus experiences, in which people have the feeling of being choked by an incubus or an “old hag” sitting on their chest and experience trouble breathing, pressure, and sometimes pain. This last cluster may result from a sudden awareness of the shallow and rapid breathing pattern associated with REM sleep, giving rise to the impression of being choked. Reports of incubus and old hag attacks can be found in many different cultures and from many different times, and their highly stereotyped pattern suggests that this is a culturally invariant form of experience. Linking the phenomenological features of such experiences to REM sleep physiology thus may allow for a naturalistic explanation of myths and legends about alien abductions or evil witches coming in through the bedroom window at night to attack their sleeping victims. Such beliefs in supernatural beings might indeed have been fed and informed by such very real experiences of SP on the verge of sleep. A similar strategy is proposed by Metzinger (2005, 2009) in relation to OBEs. He suggests that OBEs are a highly stereotyped and culturally invariant type of experience and may be a neuroanthropological constant, or an experience that can be shared by all humans under certain
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conditions. The experience of leaving one’s body in OBEs, which is often described as highly realistic, may have given rise to a “protoconcept” of the mind, according to which the mind is separable from the body and may continue to live after death. This folk-phenomenological concept of a soul may also explain the intuitive attractiveness of the theoretical position of mind–body dualism: Taken as an ontological metaphor, the phenomenology of OBEs inevitably leads to dualism, and to the concrete idea of an invisible, weightless, but spatially extended second body. This, then, may actually be the folkphenomenological ancestor of the soul, and of the philosophical protoconcept of mind. (Metzinger, 2005, p. 81)
In addition to OBEs, the notion of the separability of mind and body may have also been fed by nocturnal dreams. Although dreams often lack the strong emotional impact and extremely realistic quality of OBEs, it may be this more pedestrian character that commends them for the widespread belief in the soul. Though often more impressive and impactful, OBEs are comparatively rare, whereas most people are at least occasionally able to recall dreams. This means that the protoconcept of the soul can truly appeal to everyone’s first-person experience of having glimpsed a world beyond the real one and having left their physical body behind during sleep. Of course, it is important to point out that such theories about the origin of beliefs in old hags or theoretical positions such as mind–body dualism say nothing about the epistemological status of these beliefs, nor do they support any ontological conclusions. They explain the intuitive appeal of such beliefs and maybe even our proneness to develop corresponding philosophical theories. At the same time, showing that such experiences as OBEs can be explained in neurophysiological terms and can even be induced experimentally through electrical stimulation cannot, from a strictly logical point of view, disconfirm the existence of a soul that is separable from the body (see Metzinger, 2005). But of course, having an experience of a certain type, no matter how convincing, also does not support ontological statements about the actual existence of a soul, as little as it licenses one to infer the actual existence of old hags or vicious incubi.
Conclusions: Studying Altered Consciousness—Altering Consciousness Research? As the above discussion has shown, ASC is a particularly good example of a topic that can profit from a multidisciplinary approach and reflects the
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ways in which consciousness research has in fact already been altered to include the perspectives of different disciplines. Analytic philosophy of mind in particular can offer a clarification of the concepts involved in such a project, help identify the implicit background assumptions, formulate research questions, and illustrate the broader theoretical implications of research results. At the same time, philosophical subdisciplines such as epistemology and philosophy of mind can integrate empirical research results and the philosophical discussion is marked by an increasing willingness to take such findings into account. In this way, the discussion of ASC may further the interdisciplinary integration between philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive neurosciences and shows how these disciplines can be mutually informative. This requires openness not only toward the findings from other disciplines but also an integrative approach towards altered consciousness. In particular, the comparison not only between standard states of wakefulness and ASC but also between pathological and nonpathological ASC is of interest. Particularly good examples are the comparison between schizophrenic hallucinations and those occurring during drug intoxication or spontaneously during sleep or at sleep onset, as well as OBEs, which can occur spontaneously, following brain stimulation, during epileptic seizures, and so on. As recently suggested in a study conducted by Hohwy and Paton (2010), it may also be possible to use experimentally induced ASC such as RHI to investigate the role of experience in delusion formation. The comparative study of pathological and nonpathological AC raises many interesting questions and may lead to a better understanding of both these alterations and standard states of wakefulness, as well as, possibly, new therapeutic interventions. In this way, the study of AC may itself be altered and broadened to a more integrative approach.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Thomas Metzinger and Sebastian Dieguez for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This chapter was supported by the Barbara-Wengeler Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.
References Aleman, A., & Larøi, F. (2008). Hallucinations. The science of idiosyncratic perception. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Aristotle (2008). On phrophesying by dreams. Translated by J. I. Beare. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/prophesying.html [15.1.2011]
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Descartes, R. (1996/1642). Meditations on a first philosophy. Internet edition by D. B. Manley & C. S. Taylor. Retrieved http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/ intro.html. [15.1.2011] Dretske, F. (1994). Misrepresentation. In S. Stich & T. Warfield (Eds.), Mental representation. A reader (pp. 157–173). Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ehrsson, H. H. (2007). The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences. Science, 317(5841), 1048. Fish, W. (2008). Disjunctivism, indistinguishability, and the nature of hallucination. In A. Haddock & F. MacPherson (Eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, action, knowledge (pp. 144–167). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fish, W. (2009). Perception, hallucination, and illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flanagan, O. (2000). Dreaming souls. Sleep, dreams, and the evolution of the conscious mind (Philosophy of Mind Series). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frankfurt, H. G. (1970). Demons, dreamers, and madmen: The defense of reason in Descartes’s Meditations. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Grau, C. (Ed.). (2005). Philosophers explore the matrix. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grundmann, T. (2002). Die Struktur des skeptischen Traumarguments. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 64, 57–81. Hacking, I. (2002). Dreams in place, historical ontology. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59, 245–260. Hishikawa, Y., & Shimizu, T. (1995). Physiology of REM sleep, cataplexy and sleep paralysis. Advances in Neurology, 67, 245–271. Hobbes, T. (1975–1999). Objections to Descartes’ Meditation, with Descartes’ replies. Translated by G. MacDonald Ross. Retrieved from http://www.philosophy .leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/modern/hobbes/objections/objects.html. [15.1.2011] Hobson, J. A. (1988). The dreaming brain. New York: Basic Books. Hobson, J. A. (1999). Dreaming as delirium: How the brain goes out of its mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hobson, J. A., Pace-Schott, E. F., & Stickgold, R. (2000). Dreaming and the brain: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 793–842; 904–1018; 1083–1121. Hohwy, J., & Paton, B. (2010). Explaining away the body: Experiences of supernaturally caused touch and touch on non-hand objects within the rubber hand illusion. PLoS One, 5(2), e9416. Horgan, J. (2003). Rational mysticism. Dispatches from the border between science and spirituality. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin. Huxley, A. (2004). The perennial philosophy. New York: Harper Perennial. Ichikawa, J. (2009). Dreaming and imagination. Mind & Language, 24(1), 103–121. James, W. (2003). The varieties of religious experience. A study in human nature. New York & London: Signet Classic.
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Nudds, M. (2009). Recent work in perception: Naı¨ve realism and its opponents. Analysis, 69, 334–346. Peacocke, C. (1983). Sense and content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Putnam, H. (1981). Brains in a vat. In: H. Putnam, Reason, truth and history (pp. 1–21). Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. Ramachandran, V. S., & Hirstein, W. (1998). The perception of phantom limbs: The D. O. Hebb lecture. Brain, 9, 1603–1630. Rechtschaffen, A. (1978). The single-mindedness and isolation of dreams. Sleep, 1, 97–109. Revonsuo, A. (2000). Prospects for a scientific research program on consciousness. In T. Metzinger (Ed.), Neural correlates of consciousness; Empirical and conceptual questions (pp. 57–75). Cambridge, London: MIT Press Revonsuo, A. (2006). Inner presence. Consciousness as a biological phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Revonsuo, A., Kallio, S., & Sikka, P. (2009). What is an altered state of consciousness? Philosophical Psychology, 22, 187–204. Russell, B. (1948). Human knowledge. Its scope and limits. London: George Allen and Unwin LTD. Ryle, G. (2000). The concept of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schenck, C. H. (2005). Paradox lost. Midnight in the battleground of sleep and dreams. Minneapolis, MN: Extreme Nights. Shoemaker, S. (1990). Qualities and qualia: What’s in the mind? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50 (Supplement), 109–131. Siegel, S. (2008). The epistemic conception of hallucination. In A. Haddock & F. MacPherson (Eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, action, knowledge (pp. 205–224). Oxford: Oxford University Press Smith, A. D. (2002). The problem of perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology: Apt belief and reflective knowledge. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Stephens, G., & Graham, G. (2000). When self-consciousness breaks. Alien voices and inserted thoughts. Cambridge, MA, & London: MIT Press. Stroud, B. (1984). The significance of philosophical scepticism. Oxford: Clarendon. Thompson, E. (2006). Neurophenomenology and contemplative experience. In P. Clayton (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of science and religion (pp. 226–235). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsakiris, M., & Haggard, P. (2005). The rubber hand illusion revisited: Visuotactile integration and self-attribution. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31, 80–91. Tye, M. (2000). Consciousness, color and content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Van de Castle, R. L. (1994). Our dreaming mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Varela, F. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, 330–350.
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Williams, B. (1978). Descartes: The project of pure enquiry. London & New York: Routledge. Windt, J. M. (2010). The immersive spatiotemporal hallucination model of dreaming. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 295–316. Windt, J. M., & Metzinger, T. (2007). The philosophy of dreaming and selfconsciousness: What happens to the experiential subject during the dream state? In D. Barrett & P. McNamara (Eds.), The new science of dreaming (Vol. 3, pp. 193–247). Westport, CT, and London: Praeger Perspectives/Greenwood Press. Windt, J. M., & Noreika, V. (in press). The contrastive analysis of dreaming and wakefulness: A novel approach. Consciousness and Cognition.
CHAPTER 12
Altered Consciousness in Religion Antoon Geels Mysticism can be regarded as an integral element of religion. It includes both a way of life and a “direct consciousness of the presence of God” (McGinn, 1992, p. xvi). Broadly defined thus, one can encounter mystical dimensions within all religions of the world. Taoism, Zen, and other types of Buddhism, as well as Hindu traditions like Kashmir Shaivism, Vaishnavism, and Advaita Vedanta, are basically mystical in the sense that they all strive for transcendence from this world of multiplicity. In the case of Theravada Buddhism, we would have to exchange the concept of God with “the ground of being” or similar expressions [see Shear, this volume]. Other traditions within world religion also have a firm mystical tradition. In the Islamic world, Sufism is still among the popular expressions of Islam, all the way from Morocco in the West to Indonesia in the East (Ernst, 1998). Within Judaism, we can observe an increasing interest in the Kabbalah, the Jewish expression of mysticism (e.g., Dan, 2002; Laenen, 2001). As far as Christianity is concerned, it is probably no exaggeration to state that there is a renewed interest in the great mystics of this tradition (Fanning, 2001). Thus, mysticism has been studied from a variety of perspectives. Let me take a very brief look at just a few of them, limited to viewpoints that are relevant to the psychology of religion. Some psychologists, speaking from a Freudian perspective, appear to be convinced of the reductionistic view that mystical experience is nothing but “a regression to early nursing experience” (Prince & Savage, 1972, p. 127), a sort of flashback to an original chaos that existed long before the differentiation between the self and the outside world, and long before language development; a regression to a time when the only way of relating to the world consisted of “sucking on the breast” (Prince, 1980, p. 340). Followers of Jung seem to agree with the regression hypothesis, but according to them, mystical experience can be described as “regression to the earlier pre-infantile level of the collective unconscious which is the matrix of man” (Owens, 1972, p. 142). Others, however, defend the position that this kind of experience has an adaptive dimension and has a
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potential for personality transformation. One of the possible consequences of such an experience is that the individual concerned thereby creates order in a life situation of crisis (Fingarette, 1963; Parsons, 1999). Quite another approach, again often reductionistic, comes from biology. There is a tendency to reduce mysticism to nothing but effects of specific brain activity, with the argumentation running like: “God exists, yes, but only in the brain.” Recently, several scholars emphatically stated that mystical experience and other types of religious behavior are deeply rooted in the biology of the brain (Joseph, 2002; Newberg & d’Aquili, 2001). There is an ongoing discussion between representatives of neuroscience and religion, giving rise to a new subject—neurotheology. A fundamental question, however, is “what we may legitimately deduce from the truth claims of religious experience from knowledge of its biological correlates” (Wulff, 1997, p. 112). Psychological approaches include that of Ralph W. Hood Jr., who has made a great impact on the scientific study of mystical experience. One of his methods was to construct the Religious Experience Episodes Measure (REEM) based on literary reports as presented in The Varieties of Religious Experience, the classical study of William James. The narratives cover a variety of religious experiences, including conversion experiences, visions, and experiences of divine guidance. Informants are then asked to what extent their experiences match the 15 short accounts presented in the instrument (Hood, 1970; see also Holm, 1982). Other examples of a psychological approach include the issue of personality traits such as hypnotizability, absorption, and self-transcendence (Carden˜a & Terhune, 2008), the relation between near-death experiences and mystical states of consciousness (Greyson, 2000), and that between “deep hypnosis” and mystical experiences (Carden˜a, 2005). Also relevant are psychological studies of meditation, including the work of the American psychiatrist Arthur J. Deikman (1971, 1976), who proposed that meditation entails a shift from an active to a receptive and deautomatized mode of consciousness [see Mishara & Schwartz, Volume 2]. Other scholars, especially those writing during the early years of the research into mysticism, have taken a great deal of trouble in order to distinguish different types of mystical experience. In his classical comparative study of the Indian mystic Shankara (8th century) and the German Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), Rudolph Otto (1926/1971) differentiated between the “soul-mysticism” of Eastern spirituality and the “Godmysticism” of the Western theistic traditions. The tripartite distinction of Ronald C. Zaehner is well known. Motivated by the provocative book of Aldous Huxley (1945)—who suggested that hallucinogenic drugs are
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shortcuts to the experience of divine presence—Zaehner (1957) did his utmost to show that Huxley’s experience should be regarded as an expression of “nature mysticism.” This type should be distinguished from both monistic mysticism and, most emphatically, from theistic mysticism, which Zaehner happened to regard as true (1957, p. xvi). Others have severely criticized these types of distinctions. Zaehner appears to have mixed up problems of classification with theological judgments (Smart, 1978, p. 13). Steven T. Katz, referring to Otto and Zaehner, does not mince matters. They all “manifest strong biases [ . . . ] which color their investigations from the outset and which significantly diminish the value of their results” (1978, p. 1f ). When mentioning Huxley and Zaehner, experimental studies focusing on the relation between drugs and mysticism also come to mind. Is there some truth in the statement of Lord Byron’s Don Juan that “the best of life is intoxication”? Can hallucinogenic drugs give rise to mystical experience? While some proponents of the biological perspective would say that modern medicine provides us with excellent pills that will erase God from our brain, advocates of the experimental approach (e.g. Pahnke, 1963) seem to suggest the opposite: Take a pill and experience “artificial paradise,” an expression taken from the French author Baudelaire (see also Geels, 2003b).
Definitions and Dimensions of Mysticism Scholarly approaches to the study of mysticism are too numerous to mention. In any academic investigation, however, it is customary to define the object of study. When we study classical definitions of mysticism, it is striking that many scholars usually define mystical experience (e.g., Clark, 1958; Leuba, 1925; Pratt, 1920); these three classical studies state that the mystical experience is not related to perception and regard it as a nonrational, intuitive experience. This can be regarded as an obscurum per obscurum procedure—in the definition of the problematic object, new obscure concepts are introduced, putting a veil, so to speak, over the area. It is important to note that the experiential dimension, although heavily emphasized, is not the only one, for good reasons. After all, the concept of mysticism covers more than just the special types of experiences reported by mystics. The concept seems to be just as general as the word religion and equally difficult to define. For that reason, we could apply the five dimensions of religion suggested by Glock and Stark (1965) to the area of mysticism. In the vast field of religious mysticism,
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one can therefore study (1) the experiential dimension, (2) the consequences of the mystical experience in the life of the individual, (3) different rituals or mystical exercises, (4) the intellectual aspect, that is, how the mystic interprets his or her experience, and, finally (5) the ideological dimension, that is, the religious tradition to which the mystic possibly belongs. We will now have a closer look at these five dimensions, with an emphasis on the experiential dimension. Mystical experience is the core of mysticism, at least from a psychological perspective. It has an enormous motivational potential, for example by changing people’s lives or by being the incentive for the mystic to continue on the long and arduous path of spiritual transformation. A fundamental question, often debated in scholarly studies of mysticism, is whether socalled revelatory experiences, visions, and voices, should be included in the study of mysticism. The classical study of Walter Stace excludes them from the category of mystical experiences because they “have the character of sensuous imagery,” whereas mystical experiences are nonsensuous (Stace, 1960, p. 49; see also Wainwright, 1981, p. 1ff ). Another reason, according to Stace, is that mystics themselves regard them as less important or even as an obstacle to spiritual maturity. However, neglecting visions for this reason would be just as inappropriate as if a psychologist neglected dreams for the dubious reason that the client regards them as trivial or meaningless (see Moore, 1978, p. 119f ). This prevalent attitude is the probable explanation of why there are so few psychological studies of religious visions, which appear to be more common among women than men. One of the major studies in this field is the monumental work of the Swedish scholar Ernst Arbman (1963, 1968, 1970), which definitely places religious visions in the study of mysticism. He even goes as far as to state: “Mysticism may be said to be tantamount to visionary-ecstatic religious practice or religiosity” (1963, p. 547). In this chapter, visions and voices will be included. The examples presented below do not appear within a Christian context, but the history of Christianity is rife with visionary experience (e.g., Christian, 1981; Dinzelbacher, 1981; Zimdars-Swartz, 1991). Religious visions belong to the category of kataphatic experiences, usually expressed in the language of personal relations. A second category is called apophatic experiences, expressed for example in the impersonal language of infinity. The two categories are not mutually exclusive. The abstract or impersonal God of Jewish mysticism, called Eyn Sof (“without end”) or Ayin (“nothingness”) is apophatic, while the outflow from this abstract principle, the 10 Sephirot, is described in kataphatic terms (“Wisdom,” “Understanding,” “Love,” etc.). The great Muslim mystic Ibn
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al-Arabi had numerous visions, at least according to his biographer (Addas, 1993). The Essence of God (dhat), however, is beyond all psychological content and can only be expressed in negations. This abstract God discloses himself through his attributes (sifat) and his works (af‘al). Attributes such as Life, Being, Desire, Power, Speech, Generosity, and Justice are just a few of the 99 “most beautiful” divine names, immanent in creation. The Power of God, for example, “is reflected passively in everything He has made and actively in suns, volcanoes, seas, bees, human beings, and other creatures” (Chittick, 1989, 8f.). Examples can easily be multiplied. We can now present a definition of mystical experience based on a study of Robert S. Ellwood (1980, p. 29), but with several additions, here marked in italics: (1) Mystical experience is experience in a religious or a profane context (2) that is immediately or subsequently interpreted by the experiencer as an encounter with a higher or ultimate divine reality (3) in a direct, according to the person, nonrational way (4) that engenders a deep sense of unity and of living during the experience on a level of being other than the ordinary. (5) This experience is accompanied by far-reaching consequences in the individual’s life.
There are many examples of experiences that could be regarded as mystical in a profane context (Laski, 1961; Maslow, 1964). The direct, nonrational encounter with a higher reality underlines the fact that most people report that the experience comes suddenly and that they were both surprised and overwhelmed by it. The dimension of unity appears to be one of the most common characteristics of the mystical experience of the apophatic type. According to Walter T. Stace, this is “the one basic, essential, nuclear characteristic, from which most of the others inevitably follow” (1960, p. 110). Although the experience itself may last only minutes, life may never be the same again. After these transforming minutes, the mystic usually reevaluates his or her life, dividing it into a “before” and an “after.” We are now touching upon the second dimension of mysticism, the consequential one. The sense of the presence of God or the ground of being leaves no person unaffected. A visionary experience of, for example, light or of Jesus or the Virgin Mary may lead to a radical change in life. In my studies of visions in contemporary Sweden (Geels, 1996, 2003a), some of the informants finished their secular jobs and started a spiritual career. Some of them studied theology and became priests in the Swedish church. Quite another type of consequence is the fact that an overwhelming vision
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creates order in chaos. Some of my informants were on the verge of committing suicide (Geels, 2008) [see Lukoff, Volume 2]. The third dimension of mysticism, of special relevance to the psychologist of religion, is related to behavior: the ritual dimension. Here the reference is to different techniques used in order to reach beyond the world of multiplicity. In the great mystical traditions, there exists a variety of techniques: isolation, meditation, contemplation, different types of prayer, mystical weeping, and techniques of visualization. Through contemplative devotion, attention (kavvanah), and meditative prayer, the Jewish mystic approaches the divine; Teresa of Avila describes the seven stages of prayer in her Interior Castle. A special type of repetitive prayer occurs not only in the Greek Orthodox tradition (the Jesus prayer) but also in Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, as well as in mystical Islam, where dervishes monotonously repeat the prayer La ilaha illa llah (“there is no god but God”) and other divine names. The fourth dimension is the intellectual one, the cognitive processing of the mystic as presented in his or her texts. An apparent paradox is the fact that although most mystics declare that the experience is ineffable, they nevertheless devote considerable time to its description and systematic analysis. Intellectual processing is closely related to the ideological dimension, or the tradition to which the mystic belongs such as branches of the Jewish Kabbalah, the Sufi tradition, Zen, Vedanta, and so forth. These traditions not only influence the experiences itself, they also color the descriptions presented by the mystics. What kind of relation does the mystic have to the religious tradition that he or she belongs to? Within their religious traditions, mystics not infrequently are regarded as radicals, drawing on the profound consequences of their personal, intense, transforming experiences. In some cases this leads to serious disputes with representatives of orthodoxy. The martyrdom of al-Hallaj in Islam, executed in Baghdad (922) for his extravagant utterances, is well known. He was far from the only mystic who was accused of heresy, especially during the period up to al-Ghazzali (d. 1111), when Sufism reached consolidation with the orthodox Muslim faith. Jewish Kabbalists have always been regarded with a certain suspicion, and Chassidim have been condemned on several occasions (Scholem, 1954/1971, 1974). In the context of Christianity, the German Meister Eckhart and the Dutch Jan van Ruusbroec had to defend themselves for uttering certain phrases that were seriously suspected of being pantheistic. A number of Eckhart’s statements were condemned in a bull in 1329, a year after his death. Cases like those mentioned above were probably in the mind of W. R. Inge, who in one of his last studies
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on mysticism, after nearly half a century of research, wrote that “institutionalism and mysticism have always been uneasy bedfellows” (1947/ 1969, p. 21). We should not forget, however, that most mystics within the great religions of the world do their utmost to be loyal and faithful interpreters of their own tradition.
Paradigms in the Scientific Study of Mystical Experience During the last decades, there has been a vehement debate on the nature of the mystical experience. The different viewpoints have been labeled as constructivism and its counterpart as decontextualism, deconstructivism, or postconstructivism (Forman, 1998b, p. 6). A third paradigm, called perennialism, dominated research during the greater part of the 20th century. The dominant perspective in the earlier scientific study of mysticism, ranging from William James (1902) to Walter T. Stace (1960), can be designated as perennialism. The perennial point of view is that the mystical experience has some transcultural, homogenous “core characteristics,” which afterward are shaped into a culturally defined conceptual framework (e.g., Huxley, 1944; James, 1902; Mare´chal, 1927; Pratt, 1920; Stace, 1960; Underhill, 1911). This was the dominant view during the first half of the 20th century. Some perennialists went even further by defending the position that there exist important doctrinal similarities between different interpretations of the experience (e.g., Otto, 1932). During the decades following the influential work of Stace, perennialism has been criticized for lack of literary criticism of primary texts and unproved assumptions about the similarities of the mystical experience. The strongest attack, however, came from an influential new perspective within the humanities and social sciences: constructivism. According to this new paradigm, all experiences, including religious, artistic, and mystical experiences, are constructed by the beliefs and linguistic backgrounds that the subject brings to them. The strongest weapon carrier of this view is Steven T. Katz, who is convinced that “there are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences” (Katz, 1983, p. 4). In order to defend his position, Katz attracted a considerable number of philosophers, all sharing this basic constructivist view. So far, four volumes have been edited by Katz (1978, 1983, 1992, 2000). A growing number of scholars put forward their alternative view in several other volumes. The first of them is called The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (1990), edited by Robert K. C.
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Forman, the foremost proponent of the alternative called deconstructivism. Just like his colleague, Forman gathered a great number of scholars, most of them philosophers of religion, who supported him. In his introductory essay, Forman convincingly criticizes the constructivist approach, stating that “the history of mysticism is rife with cases in which expectations, models, previously acquired concepts, and so on, were deeply and radically disconfirmed” (Forman 1990: 19f ). Forman presents a number of arguments, all refuting what he calls the conservative stand of constructivism. First, there are examples of “untrained and uninitiated” neophytes who have mystical experiences, which only in the course of time, months, or years later, were religiously interpreted. Forman mentions published reports of Richard M. Bucke (1901) and the more recent book of Bernadette Roberts (1982). In another study, he refers to interviews with a Zen Master who mentioned that he had his first mystical experiences 5 years before he took up Zen Buddhism or meditation of any kind. “His experience led him to explore Zen, not the other way around,” as the constructivist would have it (Forman, 1998b, p. 6). In addition to these cases, Forman presents interview data, collected by himself, and examples of classical mystics, who most often report being surprised over their experiences (1990, p. 19f). Constructivism, Forman concludes, cannot account for the existence of reports of so-called “pure consciousness events” (PCEs), defined as “wakeful contentless consciousness,” the existence of which has been established “beyond a reasonable doubt” (1990, p. 21). The position of Forman and others really reminds us of the older perennialist view, the idea that there is a common core in all mysticism. Forman gives this view a psychophysiological twist by suggesting a “perennial psychology,” a common structure—consciousness itself—that is not created by culture but “comes with the machinery of being human.” We all have an innate capacity to get in touch with this nonconceptual dimension. The title of his second edited volume, The Innate Capacity, points at this human aspect. “In consciousness itself and in the way it encounters the world intentionally, we may have something that transcends cultures and eras” (Forman, 1998b, p. 27f) Instead of emphasizing common denominators in mystical philosophy, Forman strikes a blow for similar psychological processes, uniting an 8th-century Korean with a 14thcentury Dominican friar (Forman probably refers to Meister Eckhart, of whom he has written an insightful study, published 1991) and contemporary meditators. From a psychological point of view, the paradigms mentioned above are not incompatible. The constructivist approach is a truism. A human’s
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view of reality, the Weltanschauung, is socially constructed and charged with personal, subjective meaning (e.g., Gergen & Gergen, 2003). Forman and his colleagues do not deny constructivism; they rather regard it as an insufficient way of studying the variety of mystical experience. The present author has devoted 5 years to studying the concept mors mystica, mystical death, in the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Geels, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003a). The idea that you must “die before you die” is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most important common denominators in the great mystical traditions of the world. In other words, traditions such as the Kabbalah, Sufism, Christian mysticism, and different branches of Buddhism and Hinduism all describe the long and arduous road to whatever they regard as their goal. The greater holy war, so many Sufis state, is the war against your own self. The weapons used in this struggle are the different spiritual exercises, especially repetitive prayer. The Sufis and other mystics do describe how we should deconstruct our empirical world in order to unveil a spiritual reality. These texts, however, are social constructions. A simple example of the mutual relation between construction and deconstruction is the well-known Buddhist concept Nibbana, which means extinction. Extinction of what? The answer is clear: of all psychological processes. After an experience of Nibbana, expressed differently, of course, in other traditions, the mystic returns to a empirical world, which is then reconstructed in accordance with the spiritual reality just experienced. Forman and some his colleagues talk about a “forgetting model,” another way of expressing the process leading to mystical death (1998a, p. 7; see also Franklin, 1998, p. 236f.). What is needed is a model of personality enabling us to understand different types of mystical experience, including visions and voices. Such a model should combine cognitive psychology with depth psychology. From the horizon of cognitive psychology, such an eclectic approach has been suggested by Ulric Neisser (1967; see also Geels, 2006). The heuristic value of such an approach, counting as it does with dynamic, associative ways of handling emotionally charged information, should enable us to understand new or unexpected features in reports of religious experience, whether it be Old Testament prophets combining, in their visions, contemporary iconographic elements with verbal data, or Christian mystics like John of the Cross, using sensuous, erotic imagery in his poetry while simultaneously stating that the mystical adept has to reach beyond the senses. The conclusion of all this is that the constructivist point of view is insufficient to analyze mystical experience. Humans construct most but not all of the time. It is the task of the psychologist of religion to describe
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those processes that lead to new and unexpected constructions of a world that, most of the time, can be consensually shared with other human beings. The model should also account for the possible negative effects of using spiritual exercises in mystical traditions.
A Model of Personality and the Varieties of Mystical Experience This model focuses on perceptual-cognitive processes without neglecting psychological functions that belong to depth psychology. It will be presented as succinctly as possible. The model will then be applied to the analysis of visions and the “pure consciousness event.” Following A. Rothstein (1981), and in connection with developments in object relations theory, M. Epstein (1988) distinguishes between the representational and functional aspects of the ego. With the help of the former, the individual constructs a differentiated view of himself and the outside world. Here we encounter again the constructivist perspective, impossible to neglect. This subsystem can be further divided into object- and selfrepresentations. The functional system consists of adaptive, defensive, mediating, and synthetic functions. The adaptive function is responsible for adaptation to reality. It has at its disposal a number of abilities or dispositions that are inherited, for example perception, memory, intelligence, and language. The defensive function of the ego also in one way serves our adaptation to the environment, more particularly to our psychological environment. In contrast to the former function, however, the ego’s defense mechanisms are not inherited but are acquired under the influence of the socio-cultural milieu. The mediating function corresponds to the classical psychoanalytical view of the ego, acting as a mediator between the id and the super ego, or between the id and the environment. An interesting function is the synthetic one, which is an “organ for equilibrium” that strives for balance in a constantly shifting psyche. The synthetic function “assimilates alien elements (both from within and from without), and it mediates between opposing elements and even reconciles opposites and sets mental productivity in train” (Nunberg, 1961, p. 122). The most important synthetic functions, according to Nunberg, can be summarized with the following concepts: assimilation, simplification, generalization, and unification. Nunberg emphasizes, however, that the synthetic function can use any psychic process in order to achieve its goal: equilibrium, order, and balance (p. 125). Even “hierarchies of values” can have a synthetic function. Religion can have an integrating or synthetic function (see Hartmann, 1958, p. 75ff.).
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The other large substructure in this ego-psychological model of humans is the representational system, or the process of relating to and representing objects. An object can be a thing, a person, or a happening. This theory belongs to the great landmarks of psychoanalysis during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. It is my impression that the distinction between the ego’s functional and representational systems no longer is a point of great controversy (Epstein, 1988; Hartmann, 1958; Jacobson, 1964; Rizzuto, 1979; Rothstein, 1981; Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962; Schafer, 1968). According to Rothstein, the two systems are related to each other in an important way. He mentions, for example, that this relation facilitates our understanding of “intrasystemic conflicts” (Rothstein, 1981, p. 440). Inner representations are closely related to memory, with the help of which we code, process, and store information, which can be retrieved in useful forms in specific situations. The end of this process is called a representation. This means that a representation cannot be regarded as an isolated happening. In the words of Rizzuto: “it is the result of the synthetic function of the ego organizing a multitude of memorial experiences. The final synthetic result of that most active process is a highly significant representation for the needs of a particular moment” (Rizzuto, 1979, p. 56). She mentions here another example of the relation between the functional and representational systems. The representational system consists of self- and object representations “in ever changing states of integration” (Rothstein, 1981, p. 440). The basic task of this system is to make us “psychologically viable people in the real world.” In other words, it serves the overall need of adaptation. During the course of development, a self- or I representation will be developed within this inner representational world. This means that, in this model, the I is not identical with the ego. The I is rather one component in a composite structure. The I is described as “the self-representation as agent.” The I is developed from the ego’s continuous sensation of itself (Epstein, 1988, p. 64; Rothstein, 1981, p. 440). Development means increased differentiation and integration [see Granqvist, Reijman, & Carden˜a, Volume 2]. During this process, the I is differently constructed in relation to other substructures of the ego. This implies that there is not one single I but multiple self-representations, actualized in different situations. This model of personality can be related to Hans-Carl Leuner’s concept of “autosymbolic representation of intrapsychic conflicts” (Leuner, 1977, 1978). According to him, this psychological process is often activated in situations of extreme emotional stress. From a psychoanalytical perspective, it belongs to the category of primary process activity, characterized
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for instance by a free flow of imagery and thoughts (Leuner, 1977, p. 74f.; see also Loewald, 1978). It can be used by the ego’s synthetic function, striving for homeostasis. Now, let us see if this model sheds more light on the analysis of visionary experiences. The first story belongs to my study of about 100 persons who reported visionary and auditory experiences. In addition, I will present a few examples of historical cases, firmly established within the great religions of the world (for additional examples, see Geels, 2003a).
Case Study I: Encounter with Jesus on the Top of a Bridge The Norwegian Reidar Amundsen is an excellent illustration of a life in utter chaos instantaneously transformed into a life of order after an overwhelming visionary and auditory experience of Jesus. He was born in Norway in 1930, the seventh child of a family living in poverty and starvation. Life was becoming more difficult for everybody when the Germans occupied the country during the Second World War. Reidar spent some time in a concentration camp just outside Oslo, stole a bicycle when the war ended, and was sentenced to 1 year in prison and a 10-year loss of civil rights. During his time in prison, he learned how to crack safes and came in touch with drugs. A short time after his release from prison, he blew his first safe. The years went by and Reidar went in and out of jail. During many occasions, he thought that “there must be a better life to live.” During the ’60s Reidar became a heroin addict. In 1965, when he was in prison, a group of young Christians visited the place on Christmas Eve. They sang and played music to the prisoners. To the surprise of most people, Reidar wished to talk with somebody in the group of youngsters. One of them read from the Bible about the sinner who received a second chance in life. The message appealed to Reidar. “I did not become a decided Christian that Christmas Eve, but something changed inside me.” A few years later, Reidar moved to Sweden. Eventually he settled down in Gothenburg in an area where many buildings were scheduled to be demolished, in the middle of dope nests. When he met an old friend from prison—his name was Jalle—he felt some consolation. Jalle had been saved inside jail. He told Reidar: “Do you know that Jesus loves you? He can save you too.” During the summer of 1970, he reached the absolute bottom of his life. “The craving for heroin burnt in my body. I had blood in my urine and
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faeces, and when I vomited there was blood.” He finally came to a doctor, who gave him 1 more month to live. Why do you drug addicts always come too late? the doctor wondered. Reidar then decided to inject a final dose of heroin and climbed up on the highest bridge in Gothenburg, ready to jump. How long had he been standing there? Hundreds of cars stopped in order to see what was going on. A police officer tried to talk to him, using a megaphone, while simultaneously trying to reach for Reidar. At this desperate moment he both heard and saw Jesus: In front of me I saw the outline of a face. Was I hallucinating again? But the outline became clearer. I did not see clear features, but I saw that there was a crown of thorns on top of the head and that the hair was curly and shining gold. It sort of radiated light from it, and I saw two hands, the palms of which were wounded, stretched out to me. And I heard a voice, so soft and fatherly loving, as I have never heard before. “Reidar, Reidar,” I heard. “You have tried everything in life. You have lost everything. There is nothing more left. The only thing you look forward to is to take your life. If you decide to do that, you will be lost eternally and there will be no memory of you. But you have forgotten to count with me. Put what is left of your life in my hands and I will heal and save you.”
Reidar does not know how he managed to climb down from the bridge. From that moment on, his life became organized. About 18 months later he married, and had two children. Reidar still visits prisons, but now as a pastor, preaching the gospel of Jesus. Bearing the model of personality in mind, a few general remarks on the psychology of visionary experience can be given. The acute crisis prior to the vision activates the synthetic function, which uses autosymbolic representations as a psychological process that is most suited for its goal: homeostasis, equilibrium. The result is a religious vision, establishing order in a chaotic system. In other words, religious visions can be understood as autosymbolic representations of intrapsychic conflicts, a dynamic process “chosen” by the synthetic function in order to establish homeostasis. It is striking that the content of the informants’ visions fit so well into their situations of disorder. The religious visions immediately establish order in chaos. The vision not only shapes the crisis, it solves it as well. Religious visions, or object representations like Jesus, Muhammad, the Goddess Kali, or Angels, are symbolic representations of order instead of chaos.1 1
A similar model has been proposed by Arieti (1976), who suggested a creative integration of primary and secondary thinking, leading to a “magic synthesis” in what he calls the tertiary process.
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In the case of Reidar, we can observe a childhood characterized by loneliness and an often-absent father. His longing for peace and harmony attracted him to the small group of young Christians, full of energy. Shortly prior to the vision, he met his old prison friend Jalle, who told him about the forgiving Christ. It is therefore not surprising that it is Christ that Reidar encounters in a vision. Christ spoke to him in a soft and fatherly voice, most probably related to the absent father. The vision and its auditory feature is naturally also related to his need of peace and harmony in his life. This harmony was established in a few transforming and integrating seconds, when the synthetic function used autosymbolic representations as a means to obtain homeostasis.
Case Study II: Encounter with Jesus in the Dormitory—Gertrud of Helfta (1256–1301) In Germany, southwest of Magdeburg, stood a Benedictine convent in a little place called Helfta. The convent was founded in 1229 and is known for having been the residence of several of the most important female mystics in Germany. One of them was Gertrud, later known as Gertrud the Great of Helfta. One of her main occupations was writing, especially on mystical themes, both in Latin and German. We know very little about Gertrud’s early life (see Marnau, 1993). It is highly conceivable that she was placed in the convent when her parents died when she was 5 years old. In the convent, she received an excellent education. The nuns studied not only great church fathers such as Augustine but also important contemporary authors such as the Victorines and Cistercian masters. In her autobiographical writings, we find some information about Gertrud’s conversion and spiritual experiences. Just like many other mystics, she divided her life into a “before” and an “after,” referring to her conversion. In Gertrud’s case, this means that her routine life in a Christian convent now was altered into a totally God-centered life. Gertrud was 25 years old when she had a visionary encounter with Jesus in a youthful figure, “about 16 years of age, handsome and gracious.”2 The time and place of her vision are important. She was in the dormitory, “as dusk was falling.” Gertrud had been worried for about a month. An older nun had just entered the room, and Gertrud bowed her head in veneration and respect, as is the custom. When she looked up again, she saw the youthful figure. “Courteously and in a gentle voice,” he spoke to her. “Why are you so sad? 2 The following account is based on Gertrud of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, book II, translated by M. Winkworth (1993, pp. 94ff).
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Is it because you have no one to confide in that you are sorrowful?” Despite the fact that Gertrud was located in the dormitory, it appeared to her that she was in the Choir, “in the corner where I usually say my tepid prayers.” Then she heard these words: “I will save you. I will deliver you. Do not fear.” And then Gertrud saw his hands, “tender and fine,” holding her hand, “as though to plight a troth.” Then the young Jesus added: “With my enemies you have licked the dust (cf. Ps. 72:9) and sucked honey among thorns. Come back to me now, and I will inebriate you with the torrent of my divine pleasure (Ps. 35:9).” In the passage following these words, the bridal mysticism of her writings is even more pronounced: As he was saying this, I looked and saw, between him and me, that is to say, on his right and on my left, a hedge of such length that I could not see the end of it, either ahead or behind. The top of this hedge was bristling with such large thorns that there seemed no way to get back to the youth. As I hesitated, burning with desire and almost fainting, suddenly he seized me and, lifting me up with the greatest ease, placed me beside him. But on the hand with which he had just given me his promise I recognized those bright jewels, his wounds, which have canceled all our debts. (Col. 2:14)
From now on she received numerous revelations. It is interesting to note that despite the cataphatic character of the vision described above, Gertrud now and then uses a type of language that clearly connects with the apophatic tradition. Writing about the necessity of following Christ, the soul can be led deeper into mystical union. Gertrud then formulates some phrases that have the clear mark of apophatic language, using concepts like the abyss and mystical death: Let me be submerged in the abyss of the sea of your most merciful goodness. Let me perish in the deluge of your living love, as a drop of the sea dies in the depth of its fullness. Let me die, let me die, in the outpouring of your immense mercy, as dies the spark of flame in the irresistible force of the flood.3
Gertrud became known as a humble and wise woman, often visited for spiritual guidance. Her spirituality centers around the concept of love, God’s love to mankind—He loved us first—and, as a result of this gift,
3
Gertrud of Helfta, Documenta spiritualum exercitionum, 4, quoted in McGinn (1998, p. 274).
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our love to God. But her writings are focused on the second person of the Trinity. God is love and Jesus is Gertrud’s spouse. Influenced by the Song of Songs, the Book of Esther, and the language of human love, Gertrud describes her spiritual experiences, sometimes in unvarnished erotic language. The bridegroom prefers to be alone with his bride, in the nuptial chamber, where they can “delight one another with the charm of intimate converse and tender embraces” (in Marnau, 1993: 32f; see also 28ff ). In her later writings, Gertrud did not ascribe her spiritual experiences such great importance. The more positive, tangible, cataphatic character of her descriptions altered into a more abstract, apophatic language. Could it be that one no longer is aware of one’s beloved in the kiss of embrace? Instead of using such tangible words, Gertrud prefers to speak about a sense of intimate, inspiring presence, a presence also to be experienced in events of everyday life—in different religious acts, in the sacraments, and in particular in holy communion (see Marnau, 1993, p. 40ff ). Bridal mysticism belongs to the marks of medieval spirituality. Jesus as a young man appeared to her in a troublesome life situation, but she does not mention the nature of her trouble. We will have to assume that she was a child of her time, influenced by what has been called the “new mysticism” (McGinn, 1998). It involved lively visualizations of the life of Jesus, especially the Passion. Considering these circumstances, it comes as no surprise that Gertrud’s trouble found a solution in a vision of Jesus. According to the proposed model of interpretation, the vision can be described as an autosymbolic representation of her need of consolation. The content of the vision is clearly related to the spirituality of her time: bridal mysticism and visualization as a main spiritual exercise.
Case Study III: A Trained Experience and Concluding Remarks The model can also be applied to other types of religious experience. The examples of visions, both contemporary and historical, illustrate spontaneous experiences, striking the visionary with surprise and wonder. How about trained experiences during, for example, meditation? Let me present a case that I know of well. It concerns a friend and colleague of mine, we can call him Frank, who during a period of his life devoted himself to Zen meditation. One day, when he already had quite a bit of experience, he was shocked by getting in touch with a terrible anger he did not know he possessed. He was about to break down all the furniture in the room. “What was the object of your anger?” I asked him. He then told me a story I partly knew. It was about a bad and long lasting relation to another
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colleague, working in the same field. The two scholars worked with two totally different approaches. They could not communicate. Our theoretical model can shed more light on the experience of anger. The one-pointedness of meditative practice, focusing for example on one’s breathing, means that the adaptive functions of the ego structure are partly shut down or inhibited. This means two things. First, the mediating functions weaken, they cannot adequately regulate the balance between the unconscious id and the superego. Second, this in turn means a weakening of defences. In such a state, the green light has been given for the constant pressure of the unconscious id towards the ego.4 Metaphorically speaking, when the defensive forces are absent, and when there is no one in the observation tower (the adaptive functions), and the negotiators rest (the mediating functions), then foreign powers (unconscious needs) can invade the landscape. In the case of Frank, it concerns a strong emotion, suppressed for years. Other emotions can, of course, also be actualized. In addition, meditative practice can also lead to creative solutions. A state of receptivity allows for other cognitive processes to break through, for example associative processes, so needed in creativity. Now, does this model also have a heuristic value when it comes to the so-called pure consciousness event? Yes, I think so. These experiences do occur spontaneously, as Robert K. C. Forman has shown in his books. In such cases, they are retrospectively interpreted. In most cases, however, they are reported by so-called classical mystics in the great mystical traditions. We again touch upon the concept of mystical death. A definition of this state of consciousness has been given by the Swedish scholar Ernst Arbman, who laid the foundations for a cross-cultural study of mystical death,5 quoting primarily Christian mystics. Arbman defines mystical death as: the deep absorption in the object of belief which completely wipes out the mystic’s waking consciousness or mental life, the whole of his normal human self, but at the same time makes him go through an incomprehensible inner transformation corresponding to his highest religious and ethical strivings and ideals.
4
Here I am using the word ego in the classical psychoanalytical sense, as a component in Freud’s structural model of personality. It is not to be equalled with the ego structure, which comprises all functions and representations of the personality. 5 See e.g. Arbman 1968, pp. 37ff, 133–189, and 379ff. Unfortunately, the monumental work of Arbman in three volumes did not receive the international attention it deserves.
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Arbman not only describes what Forman depicts as the pure consciousness event, he also mentions the other side of the picture: the transformed self, “perfect man” (Sufism) or “the true human being” (Meister Eckhart), or whatever that state has been called in the mystical traditions. However, Arbman did not present a psychological interpretation of mystical death. With the aid of the organismic model of the ego structure, as presented above, we can explain it. Mystics in different traditions do describe mystical death and spiritual transformation as the goals of the mystical life. In order to reach these goals, they use a whole range of spiritual exercises or techniques. These techniques usually aim at a narrowing of the field of awareness through meditation, prayer, isolation, or a combination of them. In terms of our model, these techniques lead to an inhibition not only of the ego’s adaptive functions but also of its defensive and mediating functions. This is a process of extinction or annihilation, resulting also in the inhibition of our inner representations and the experience of the I as an active agent. Most of us are aware of the fact that we do things best when we are not aware of doing them. The mystic describes a similar process, but more radical, and in a religious context. But the experience of “no-self” (Roberts, 1982) does not mean that the whole ego-structure has been inhibited. The experience of nothing (Meister Eckhart uses the medieval German word niht) is also a something (medieval German iht). From a scholarly perspective, Stace (1960) mentioned the vacuum-plenum paradox. This concept agrees with Eckhart’s distinction between iht and niht, or Saint John of the Cross’s speech about nada (nothing, a contentless state) and todo (everything, the transformed personality). If we return to the paradigms as described above, the conclusion is that Forman’s position can be fruitfully combined with the constructivist view as defended by Katz. Humans construct most of the time, but during exercises in for example relaxation or meditation, religiously motivated or not, we do our best to deconstruct. When we are successful and reach the goal of our strivings, the “ground” or perhaps “counterpoint” of our personality, we will eventually return to the world of phenomena—and reconstruct. The world will then not be the same. Even though Zen Buddhists can say things like “before enlightenment I chop wood and fetch water; after enlightenment I chop wood and fetch water,” underlining the continuity of spiritual development, they also mean to say that the enlightened person “touches the dead trees and lo! They come into bloom.”
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Forman, R. K. C. (Ed.). (1998a). The innate capacity. Mysticism, psychology, and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Forman, R. K. C. (Ed.). (1998b). Introduction. Mystical consciousness, the innate capacity, and the perennial psychology. In R. K. C. Forman (Ed.), The innate capacity. Mysticism, psychology, and philosophy (pp. 3–42). New York: Oxford University Press. Franklin, R. L. (1998). Postconstructivist approaches to mysticism. In R. K. C. Forman (Ed.), The innate capacity. Mysticism, psychology, and philosophy (pp. 231–245). New York: Oxford University Press. Geels, A. (1996). Religious visions in contemporary Sweden. In H. GrzymalaMoszczynska & B. Beit-Hallami (Eds.), Religion, psychopathology and coping (pp. 193–206). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi. Geels, A. (1998). Judisk mystik, ur psykologisk synvinel [Jewish mysticism: A psychological perspective]. Skelleftea˚, Sweden: Norma bokfo¨rlag Geels, A. (1999). Muslimsk mystik, ur psykologisk synvinkel [Muslim mysticism: A psychological perspective]. Skelleftea˚, Sweden: Norma bokfo¨rlag. Geels, A. (2000). Kristen mystik, ur psykologisk synvinkel [Christian mysticism: A psychological perspective]. Skelleftea˚, Sweden: Norma bokfo¨rlag. Geels, A. (2003a). Transforming moments. A psychological perspective on religions visions: Contemporary and historical cases. In J. A. Belzen & A. Geels (Eds.), Mysticism. A variety of psychological perspectives (pp. 235–262). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Geels, A. (2003b). William James, drugs, and mysticism. Temenos, 37–38, 71–86. Geels, A. (2006). The marriage of ego and id. Cognitive integration and its relation to mystical experience. Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 28, 219–252. Geels, A. (2008). The night is the mother of day: Methodological comments on three cases of religious visions as suicide prevention. In J. Belzen & A. Geels (Eds.), Autobiography and the psychological study of religious lives (pp. 95–114). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Gergen, M., & Gergen K. J. (2003). Social construction. A reader. London: Sage. Gertrud of Helfta. (1993). The herald of divine love (M. Winkworth, ed. & trans.). New York: Paulist Press. Glock, C. Y., & Stark, R. (1965). Religion and society in tension. Chicago: McNally. Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 315–352). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hartmann, H. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. New York: International Universities Press. Holm, N. G. (1982). Mysticism and intense experiences. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 21, 268–276. Hood, R. W. Jr. (1970). Religious orientation and the report of religious experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9, 285–291. Huxley, A. (1945). The perennial philosophy. New York: Harper & Row. Inge, W. R. (1947/1969). Mysticism in religion. London: Rider.
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Jacobson, E. (1964). Adolescent moods and the remodelling of psychic structure in adolescence. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 16, 164–183. James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. A study in human nature. New York: Longmans, Green. Joseph, R. (2002). Neurotheology. Brain, science, spirituality, religious experience. San Jose, CA: University Press. Katz, S. T. (Ed.). (1978). Mysticism and philosophical analysis. London: Sheldon Press. Katz, S. T. (Ed.). (1983). Mysticism and religious traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, S. T. (Ed.). (1992). Mysticism and language. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, S. T. (Ed.). (2000). Mysticism and sacred scripture. New York: Oxford University Press. Laenen, J. H. (2001). Jewish mysticism. An introduction. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Laski, M. (1961). Ecstasy. A study of secular and religious experiences. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Leuba, J. H. (1925). The psychology of religious mysticism. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Leuner, H. (1977). Guided affective imagery: An account of its development. Journal of Mental Imagery, 1, 73–91. Leuner, H. (1978). Basic principles and therapeutic efficacy of guided affective imagery (GAI). In J. L. Singer & K. S. Pope (Eds.), The power of human imagination (pp. 125–166). New York: Plenum. Loewald, H. W. (1978). Psychoanalysis and the history of the individual. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Mare´chal, J. (1927). Studies in the psychology of the mystics. London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne. Marnau, M. (1993). Introduction to Gertrud of Helfta: The Herald of Divine Love. M. Winkworth (Ed. and Trans.) (pp. 5–44). New York: Paulist Press. Maslow, A. (1964). Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. McGinn, B. (1992). The foundations of mysticism. London: SCM Press. McGinn, B. (1998). The flowering of mysticism. New York: Crossroad. Moore, P. G. (1978). Mystical experience, mystical doctrine, mystical technique. In S. T. Katz, (Ed.), Mysticism and philosophical analysis (pp. 101–131). London: Sheldon Press. Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Meredith. Newberg, A. B., & d’Aquili, E. G. (2001). Why God won’t go away: Brain science and the biology of belief. New York: Ballantine Books. Nunberg, H. (1961). Practice and theory of psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press. Otto, R. (1932). Mysticism East and West. New York: MacMillan.
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Otto, R. (1926/1971). West-O¨stliche Mystik. Mu¨nchen, Germany: Beck. Owens, C. M. (1972). The mystical experience: Facts and values. In J. White (Ed.), The highest states of consciousness (pp. 135–152). New York: Doubleday. Pahnke, W. N. (1963). Drugs and mysticism. An analysis of the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the mystical consciousness. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Parsons, W. B. (1999). The enigma of the oceanic feeling. New York: Oxford University Press. Pratt, J. B. (1920). The religious consciousness; A psychological study. New York: MacMillan. Prince, R. (1980). Cocoon work: An interpretation of the concern of contemporary youth with the mystical. In R. Wood (Ed.), Understanding mysticism (pp. 338–354). New York: Image Books. Prince, R., & Savage, C. (1972). Mystical states and the concept of regression. In J. White (Ed.), The highest states of consciousness (pp. 114–134). New York: Doubleday. Rizzuto, A.-M. (1979). The birth of the living God: A psychoanalytic study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, B. (1985). The experience of no-self. A contemplative journey. Boston & London. Rothstein, A. (1981). The ego: An evolving construct. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 62, 435–445. Sandler, J., & Rosenblatt, B. (1962). The concept of the representational world. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 17, 128–145. Schafer, R. (1968). Aspects of internalization. New York: International Universities Press. Scholem, G. G. (1954/1971). Major trends in Jewish mysticism. New York: Schocken. Scholem, G. G. (1974). Kabbalah. New York/Scarborough: New American Library. Smart, N. (1978). Understanding religious experience. In S. T. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and philosophical analysis (pp. 10–21). London: Sheldon Press. Stace, W. T. (1960). Mysticism and philosophy. London: MacMillan. Underhill, E. (1911/1926). Mysticism: A study in the nature and development of man’s spiritual consciousness. London: Methuen. Wainwright, W. J. (1981). Mysticism: A study of its nature, cognitive value and moral implications. Brighton, England: Harvester. Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt. Wiebe, P. H. (1997). Visions of Jesus: Direct encounters from the New Testament to today. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wulff, D. M. (1997). Psychology of religion. Classic and contemporary. New York: Wiley. Zaehner, R. C. (1957). Mysticism sacred and profane. London: Oxford University Press. Zimdars-Swartz, S. L. (1991). Encountering Mary. From La Salette to Medjugorje. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
CHAPTER 13
Colored Inklings: Altered States of Consciousness and Literature Wendy E. Cousins Science arose from poetry—when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Dawn of the Storytellers: A History of Writing The need to tell and hear stories seems to be an essential part of human nature, and the point sometime in the 4th millennium BCE when such stories began to be written down marks a distinct shift in human development. History is defined by the written word. The fact that it is written is the crucial illuminating aspect; behind that vast swathe of unrecorded prehistory lies a dark ocean of suppositions. Until a few thousand years ago, all of humanity was illiterate, yet the children of all human cultures are able to acquire literacy if given a chance. Literacy skills were a response to the invention of external symbols, entirely cultural in origin, but this literate culture had the capacity to capitalize on untapped cerebral potential and reprogram the human brain in its own image. Literacy is a cultural add-on to the normal preliterate state of the brain, yet it determines a great deal about how the normal operations of the individual conscious mind are carried out, affecting both the growth and synaptic richness of the brain. And the effects of literacy do not stop with the reorganisation of the individual brain; it transformed the collective architecture of cognition and how the larger human community thinks and remembers. For the first time, humans were able to separate the spoken from the speaker and thereby to assess the material of thought in a detached manner, furthering the scope for critical activity and rational thought (Goody, 1977). With consciousness liberated from the limitations of the brain’s biological memory systems by the existence of a system for external storage, humanity acquired an entire new realm of possibilities (Donald, 2001).
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The existence of writing changes things; it has enabled us to build a vast cultural storehouse of books, maps, legal manuscripts, text messages, timetables, twitter, calendars, computers, and the World Wide Web. The development of literacy effected a shift in human experience second only to the development of language itself by extending our capacity to think beyond the here and now. Individual awareness can be preserved and made accessible to the masses in a way that was never possible in preliterate societies in a form of everyday telepathy, for as Schopenhauer once said, “reading is thinking with other people’s minds.” Spells and other attempts to control the course of events are dependent upon the magic of words (Goody, 1977, p. 149). With text, writers may pass on their thoughts to a reader across the void of the centuries and the dead speak to the living. Small wonder that reading and writing were once skills regarded with awe as nonordinary aptitudes and that the popular imagination associated books with magic (Atwood, 2002). The phrase stream of consciousness to indicate the flow of inner experience was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890). Writers throughout the ages have described the altered states of consciousness (ASC) that arise when this stream is diverted from its normal courses, from the visions and dreams described by mystics in the earliest religious texts to modern accounts written by neuroscientists [see Ustinova, and Geels, this volume]. Sigmund Freud described Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians as his masters and maintained that the essential themes of his theories were based on the intuition of the poets (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 460). In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung (1933) also declared that it is obvious that psychology can be brought to bear on the study of literature, yet long before the development of modern psychology, humans had used literature to reveal the human psyche. Literary traditions in both the East and West have continually returned to the question of consciousness and description of its characteristics. The Vedic literature of India is one such textual reference point, as in Vedic Science the levels of the mind are correlated to the levels of language (Grace, 2007; Haney, 2002) [see Shear, this volume]. A lesserknown Western literary perspective (and from a mathematician at that) was put forward by Lewis Carroll, who believed that human beings were capable of various psychical states with varying degrees of consciousness and devised his own three-layer taxonomy of ASC, with a fine distinction between feeling “eerie” and “being in a trance”1 (Carroll, 1893). 1
Carroll’s three-layer taxonomy comprised the ordinary state, which precludes the admission of the fantastic, the liminal “eerie state” in which there is consciousness of both quotidian reality and the otherworldly, and the “trance” state in which only the extraordinary world is perceived.
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Actively engaging with literary works should uncover something important about the nature of human consciousness. This point of view is endorsed by Martin Heidegger in his Poetry, Language and Thought: If we reach and enter that course, it will lead thinking into a dialogue with poetry, a dialogue which is of the history of Being. Scholars of literary history inevitably consider that dialogue to be an unscientific violation of what such scholarship takes to be the facts. Philosophers consider the dialogue to be a helpless aberration into fantasy. But destiny pursues its course untroubled by all that. (Heidegger, 1971, p. 96)
From its earliest days, writing has been part of the human quest to express our being, and it is striking that the earliest writings tell stories of the development of conscious awareness and the fear of that consciousness ending at the moment of death. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale inscribed on stone tablets a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible, the poet tells of how Enkidu the wild man makes love to Shamhat the harlot priestess for 6 days and 7 nights, an event that awakens his consciousness as a human being rather than an animal, for “now he had reason, and wide understanding” (George, 2003). Similarly, in the Bible (Genesis 3:3), Adam and Eve partake of the forbidden fruit, their eyes are opened, and they realize that they are naked—another story of sudden consciousness and self-awareness, but followed in this instance by shame, a selfconscious emotion indicating the underlying presence of Theory of Mind Ancient scriptures may not give accurate accounts of the evolution of the species Homo sapiens, but perhaps they can shed more light on our awakening into conscious awareness. The creation of literature has been long thought to involve other, nonordinary states of mind. In the Ion, Plato suggests that poetry is art of divine madness, or inspiration. The Muse speaks and the poet is only her mouthpiece; the authorial voice is not that of the normal person but mysterious and other. Yet in The Philosophy of Composition (1846), Edgar Allan Poe poured cold water on this notion of writers composing in “a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition,” pointing instead to the “elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought . . . at the cautious selections and rejections—at the painful erasures and interpolations . . . which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.” Nevertheless, Freud returns to the idea of the writer operating outside a normative state of consciousness in his 1907 lecture Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. For Freud, there is an analogy between the activity of literary creation and the world of daydreams, play, and fantasy
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indulged in by children. He argues that the writer “creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously” (Freud,1908/1962, p. 144) and that readers derive pleasure from literature by identification with this fictional world and through experiencing the release of pent-up psychic tension brought about by the writer’s skill in freeing them to enjoy these daydreams without self-reproach or shame. Thus, the writer’s experience of imaginary worlds can also open doors for readers to experience their own kind of altered consciousness. A peculiar transitivity, one that confounds distinctions between self and other (Clark, 1997) and a possible explanation for the peculiar power of fiction to carry us away. Perhaps Blaise Pascal spoke for all authors when he wrote, “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves; we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine” (Pense´es no. 147).
The Gift of the Gods: Writing and Religious Experience Writing emerged independently in many different cultures and in numerous locations throughout the ancient world and was not the creation of any one people. Early myths attributed its invention to divine intervention. The Sumerians believed it was one of the arts of civilization brought from heaven by the goddess Inanna, while Egyptians believed it was the creation of the goddess Seshat, whose titles included Mistress of Books and Foremost in the Library, and it was taught to mortals by her masculine counterpart Thoth, later known to the Greeks as Hermes Trismegistus. Unsurprisingly, given these apparently divine origins, writing was profoundly interconnected with religion and associated with a priestly class who often carefully guarded this knowledge as a sacred or magic power. The divine word was revealed in the form of holy books. All major world religions produced sacred texts, often in highly unusual circumstances, which strongly suggest ASC. The Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai amidst thunder, lightning, and blaring of trumpets and we are told his face was shining as he returned with the tablets of stone. The Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in a cave on Mount Hira by the Angel Jibril (Gabriel), who left him “as though the words were written on my heart” and fearing for his sanity till relief and reassurance arrived in another message: “By the pen, and by that which they write, no madmen art thou.” The manner by which this second revelation occurred is not recorded, but when asked how the Qur’an was revealed to him, the Prophet told of two distinct ways:
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Sometimes it cometh unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message. And sometimes the Angel taketh the form of a man and speaketh unto me, and I am aware of what he saith. (cited in Lings, 1983, pp. 44–45)
The second Epistle of Peter claims that “no prophecy of Scripture . . . was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Likewise in the Book of Revelation, Saint John reports that prior to experiencing the first of his visions, he was “in the Spirit” when he heard a loud voice bidding him, “What thou seest, write in a book.” While the meaning of the expression “in the Spirit” is open to interpretation, it does seem to imply some altered state of awareness. Tradition has it that Saint John received his apocalyptic visions while living as a hermit in a cave on the island of Patmos. A state of isolation potentially resulting in the kind of sensory deprivation that facilitates the production of an ASC through the reduction of extroceptive stimulation and/or motor activity (Tart, 1990). At first glance it may seem paradoxical that ineffable religious ecstasy has so often led individuals to attempt to put ineffable experiences (which are by their very definition inexpressible) into words. Nevertheless, it is striking that the recipients of such spiritual favours often write copiously in their attempt to describe them. The incommunicable seems to create the drive to communicate, but why would descriptions of mystical and creative states be similar? James Joyce once commented that “I like the notion of the Holy Ghost being in the inkbottle” (Ellmann, 1976, p. 100). Alternatively, Alice Flaherty (2004) has proposed four possible explanations drawing on her dual experiences as a neurologist and as a person with both bipolar disorder and hypergraphia, the overwhelming urge to write. It may be that because creativity and mystical experience are both pleasing and culturally valued experiences, metaphors from one pleasure are freely used to describe another, just as love might be described as warm or sweet. A second hypothesis, the one shared by the previously mentioned saints and prophets, is that writing is driven by God. A third possibility is that literary and religious inspiration use a similar language because of the ancient link between the arts and religion. For the greater part of human history, most art has been sacred art. Finally, it may be that literature and religious experience arise from similar brain regions, a hypothesis that complements but does not necessarily replace the previous three explanations. Religiosity in general and dissociated states in particular, have been found to be associated with activity in the temporal lobes (Bear & Fedio,
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1977; Geschwind, 1983; Mandel, 1980) and hypergraphia sometimes also coupled with hyperreligiosity and hyposexuality has been described as characteristic behavior seen during an interictal phase in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (Waxman & Geschwind, 1975) [see Noirhomme & Laureys, Volume 2]. It has been suggested that hypergraphia occurs more frequently in patients with right-sided nondominant temporal lobe lesions (Roberts, Robertson, & Trimble, 1982). However, both language and rhythm are particularly associated with the contralateral left hemisphere, and it is possible that hypofunction in the right hemisphere may lead to disinhibition in the left hemisphere, with release of literary abilities (Mendez, 2005). Saint Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus has often been attributed to epilepsy; his prodigious letter writing to the churches he subsequently founded might also have its origin within the temporal lobes (Landsborough, 1987). Flaherty (2004) is persuaded that Lewis Carroll also had temporal lobe epilepsy and notes that several of his peculiarities, including his capacity for what he called looking glass writing, his love of violet ink, and the 98,721 letters he wrote from his late 20s until his death at the age of 65 also point to hypergraphia. His descriptions of hookah-smoking caterpillars and the surreal experiences induced by nibbling on a mushroom in the Alice books (Carroll, 1865, 1871) have also led to the conclusion that Carroll’s fascination with altered states may have been aided by his own empirical investigations into the chemistry of mind alteration (Plant, 1999, p. 94) [see Presti, Volume 2].
Fierce Chemistry: Writing on Drugs Drugs have also been used to alter brain chemistry and intensify the visionary experiences sought by the devout and the curious. Noting that some plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared, Shanon (2008) has even queried whether Moses may have been under the influence of hallucinogens when he brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai [see Mishor, McKenna & Callaway, Volume 2]. Portrayals of drug use in literature can be traced back to the earliest times, with Homer telling in the Odyssey how Helen of Troy had learned the use of narcotics during a visit to the land of the Pharaohs, a skill put to good use during a particularly depressing party when as “an antidote to grief” she slipped a substance called nepenthe, assumed to be either an opium or hemp derivative, into the wine of morose Greek soldiers, bidding them instead to “take ye joy in
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the telling of tales, and I will tell you one that fits the time . . .” Drugs have played a substantial role in shaping literary creation. In the East, numerous folktales from the Middle East and Central Asia make reference to hashish; it makes its appearance in the Thousand and One Nights, and 13th-century Sufi poets praise its “meanings and the state of illumination it can bring about” (Boon, 2002, p. 127). From the West, both Chaucer and William Shakespeare mention drugs in their works, and of particular interest is Shakespeare’s mention in Sonnet 76 of “Invention in a noted weed.” Thackeray (1999) argues that Shakespeare’s use of the term “weed” is not only a veiled reference to hemp but also a reference to the perception that the use of hallucinogenic compounds was a source of inspiration for the invention of verse. In Sonnet 38, Shakespeare appeals for a “Tenth Muse” in addition to the nine classical Muses as sources of inspiration, and it is suggested that this Tenth Muse was cannabis. Thackeray et al. (2001) claim to have found further support for this theory, with the chemical analysis of organic residues in clay pipes from StratfordUpon-Avon in England uncovering chemical indications of cannabis. Shakespeare may or may not have been a stoner, but in the early19th-century Romantic period, an explosion of drug use certainly erupted among writers. This phenomenon was perhaps most famously recorded by the essayist Thomas De Quincey in his largely autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821/1994), in which he gives an account of his early life and the growth and effects of his opium addiction. In a foreshadowing of Freud’s thoughts on literary creativity and dreams, De Quincey notes that the main phenomenon by which opium expressed itself to him permanently, and the sole phenomenon that was communicable, lay in the dreams and the peculiar dream scenery that followed its use: “Here is the briefest possible abstract of the total case—The final object of the whole record lay in the dreams. For the sake of those the entire narrative arose” (De Quincey, 1821/1994, p. 168). Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats all produced works while under the influence of opium and laudanum, a mixture of alcohol and opium derivatives, easily available without prescription. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge invited a friend to come for a visit, he coaxed him to bring along some drugs “and I will give a fair trial to opium, henbane, and nepenthe . . . By the bye,” he added, “I have always considered Homer’s account of nepenthe as a banging lie”2 (cited in Ebin, 1965, p. 103). Opium excited Coleridge’s fascination with the 2 A pun perhaps on the word “Bhang”—a preparation of cannabis used in India and Pakistan.
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potential for dreams to unlock the secrets of creativity and poetry, memory, and imagination. He became convinced that not all dreams could be explained away in terms of reflections and confused echoes of waking thoughts and experiences; the most intense seemed to have their source in a very different world. Writing in his Shakespearian Criticism, he noted that it was “not a mere dream but takes place when the waking state of the brain is recommencing, and most often during a rapid alternation, a twinkling, as it were, of sleeping and waking” (cited in Plant, 1999, p. 19). The intermediate states between waking and sleep that so fascinated Coleridge are now known to be conducive to hypnagogic (prior to sleep onset) and hypnopompic (upon arousal from sleep) hallucinations, both visual and auditory, often of a nature and intensity enough to convince the percipient of their reality (Sherwood, 2002). Coleridge famously claimed to have perceived the entire course of his phantasmagoric poem Kubla Khan upon awakening from an opiate-induced sleep whereupon, having a distinct recollection of the whole work, he took up his pen and began to write, getting only as far as line 54 before he was interrupted by the notorious person on business from Porlock (an individual whom De Quincey speculates might have been Coleridge’s physician delivering yet more laudanum). After being detained for more than an hour by this inconvenient visitor, on returning to his writing, the poet found that although he retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, with the exception of some 8 or 10 scattered lines and images, all the rest had been entirely and regrettably forgotten. Some authors have expressed scepticism over Coleridge’s account of the composition of Kubla Khan, suggesting that he fabricated the story in order to make more interesting to the public what was in reality only a fragment of a poem (Schneider, 1953). Hypnagogic imagery seems also to have had an influence on Coleridge’s contemporary Mary Shelley, no stranger to the use of laudanum herself. She revealed in a preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein that the story had come from just such a twilight zone between sleeping and wakefulness: When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think . . . I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.
Of course the use of drugs was not confined solely to English writers; 19th-century French writers such as The´ophile Gautier, Arthur Rimbaud,
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and Charles Baudelaire were to become collectively known as the Hashish Club, and the influence of drugs on literature stretched into the 20th century and beyond. The rapid development of pharmacological research in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries led to the discovery of new drugs and the synthesis of the active principles of familiar ones. Among these new drugs was mescaline, a drug derived from the peyote cactus, a plant with a long history of ritualistic and medicinal use by Native Americans [see Schaefer, Volume 2]. Mescaline was isolated in 1895 and synthesized in 1919 and became the latest successor to opium and cannabis as a creator of artificial paradises. Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis published accounts of their experiences with mescaline emphasizing its aesthetic and metaphysical properties and pointing out that the intellect was relatively unimpaired (Ellis, 1897, 1898; Mitchell, 1896). It has been proposed (Durr, 1970, p. vii) that the similarities between the world of psychedelic vision and the world of imaginative literature are so numerous and striking because they share a similar mode of being and of apprehension. The drug gained popularity in literary bohemia, inspiring Aleister Crowley and W. B. Yeats, but peyote had somewhat less of a visionary effect on William James who, when he sampled some, found its only effect was stomach cramps and vomiting. In a letter to his brother in 1896, he wrote, “I took one bud 3 days ago, vomited and spattered for 24 hours . . . I will take the visions on trust” (Skrupskelis & Berkeley, 1997). The rather more adventurous surrealist Antonin Artaud travelled to Mexico on a voyage of “shamanic tourism” and after participating in an all-night peyote ceremony with Tarahumara people came to value the “dangerous dissociations it seems Peyote provokes, and which I had for 20 years sought by other means” (Artaud, 1936/1988, p. 391); Coleridge, he felt, could be written off as a weakling because “He got scared.” It was Aldous Huxley who first drew attention of the wider reading public to the properties of psychedelic drugs. Although rumours persist that it was Aleister Crowley who first introduced him to peyote after dining together in Berlin in 1930, his experimentation with psychedelics began in earnest in The Doors of Perception3 (1954/2004). He relates his first experience of an afternoon under the influence of a single pill of mescaline and the startling shift in his conscious awareness:
3
The title is a reference to William Blake’s Swedenborg-inspired book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) in which he argues: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”
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I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object . . . . To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. (p. 5)
An hour an a half later, looking a simple flower arrangement in a glass vase could provoke the realisation that: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” Huxley argued that the human brain in its normal state functioned mainly as a filter to screen out the vast quantities of perceptual information not relevant to biological survival and that the mind was primarily a “reducing valve” that “excludes the total content of Mind at Large,” but when subjected to psychedelic drugs, glimpses of the infinite were possible. He believed that mescaline and lysergic acid were drugs of “unique distinction” that should be exploited for the “supernaturally brilliant” visionary experience they offered. Yet despite the hallucinogenic success of The Doors of Perception, Walt Disney still rejected his screenplay for the animated version of Alice in Wonderland (1951) because it used too many big words. Huxley’s faith in psychedelics remained strong and he died, as per his written request, with 100 micrograms of LSD running through his system. For the 1960s generation, Huxley represented a new freedom to explore other realities distinct from the Western industrial complex, an opportunity that was not lost on Peruvian writer Carlos Castaneda. Starting with The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his purported training in traditional Yaqui shamanic practices under the tutelage of sorcerer Don Juan Matus, a native expert in the cultivation and use of psychotropic plants as a means to reach states of “non ordinary reality.” The anthropologist Edith Turner described Castaneda’s work as a liberation for, “He has taken us—like Dante—through a dark passage out the other side into a state of enlightenment” (cited in Hardman, 2007). Even after investigative journalist and psychologist Richard de Mille (1976) wrote a devastating critique of Castaneda’s work, giving detailed evidence suggestive of hoax, his popularity did not wane. As one New Age author argued: “It hardly matters to the person interested in consciousness and states of perception whether Don Juan is real or not since the fiction, if it is that, is authentic” (Drury, 1989). An adept author, Castaneda had
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enchanted his public, and his invented tradition masterfully conjured up the experiences of those who had tried hallucinogens and those who experienced the impact of a more mystical and less rational view of the world (Hardman, 2007). Not every author has been quite so enthusiastic about psychedelics; stimulants such as tobacco and caffeine remained (and remain) longtime companions to literary endeavour. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during 6 days and nights of a (medically prescribed) cocaine high, and this story of a man who takes a drug to give life to a previously hidden side of his own character only to find it uncontrollable also carries the particular flavor of Stevenson’s own drug experience. Perhaps all writers on drugs become ghost writers for drugs—or stranger still—perhaps their drugs are ghost writing for them (Plant, 1999, p. 140). Arthur Koestler decided alcohol was a safer option: It warms one and brings one closer to people. Mushrooms whirl you inside, too close to yourself. They produce a temporary therapeutic psychosis. I never felt better. But there’s no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning forgot what it was. (Leary, 1983, p. 61)
It has been argued that alcohol can give writers confidence by helping overcome a form of literary “stage fright” caused by doubts about their ability to write (Goodwin, 1988, p. 186). Yet this is far from being a risk-free strategy. Ernest Hemingway, a confirmed alcoholic, once dubbed alcohol the Giant Killer of American Letters, and it is perhaps significant that five of the first seven American-born writers awarded the Nobel Prize for literature had problems with alcohol: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck (Oyebode, 2009). Thankfully, other addiction-free methods for altering consciousness were conveniently available.
Mesmeric Revelations: Writing and Hypnotic States Induced by suggestion, hypnosis serves as a noninvasive, drug-free method of achieving a shift in conscious awareness, including access to a particular state of mind hovering between sleep and wakefulness that authors have found to be conducive to creativity. Hypnosis and its antecedents, mesmerism and animal magnetism, have been incorporated into literary works ever since Franz Anton Mesmer’s charismatic career first
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commended them to persons of fashion [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume]. The Romantic era’s fascination for psychic displacements and disturbances is reflected in Shelley’s early poem A Magnetic Lady to her Patient (1832), in which he reverses the conventional gender roles and gives the woman dominion over the man. Sending her subject into a mesmeric sleep, she invokes amnesia as a cure for heartbreak, bidding her thwarted lover to “Sleep, sleep on! forget thy pain; My hand is on thy brow, My spirit on thy brain.” In a similar vein, Robert Browning published a 27-stanza poem (incidentally one of his shorter verses) entitled simply Mesmerism, a work shaped around the fluidic relationship between practitioner and hypnotic subject central to the shift in consciousness evoked by this “ method as strange as new”. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Edgar Allan Poe’s account of keeping a dying man in a state of suspended animation between life and death, was written with such extreme detail that many believed it to be an actual scientific report (South, 1846/2010). Hypnosis also serves as a theme in the two best-selling novels of the fin de sie`cle, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1895). In Dracula, the eponymous Count uses hypnotic abilities to satisfy his lust for blood and to control the mind of heroine Mina Harker. However, these powers are turned against him, when via hypnotic guidance from the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, Mina’s telepathic ability to read Dracula’s thoughts allows the vampire-hunters to track the fleeing monster across vast distances over land and sea. Finally cornered in his castle lair and knifed through the heart, Dracula crumbles to dust. In Trilby, a tone-deaf artist’s model becomes an operatic diva, performing in an amnesiac trance under the spell of the egotistical mesmerist Svengali and acquiring acclaim through a voice not entirely her own. When Svengali is stricken with a heart attack at a public performance, the hapless Trilby is unable to sing in tune and subjected to laughter, hisses, and cat-calls from the cheated audience. Apart from providing lurid subject matter for authors, hypnosis has been used as a method for stimulating literary creativity and has been suggested as a treatment for writer’s block (McGuinness, 1998; Stanton, 1986). In French surrealist circles, hypnosis also played a key role. The writer Andre´ Breton drew inspiration from psychoanalysis, particularly Freud’s emphasis on the importance of dreams and the unconscious, and French dynamic psychology, particularly Jean-Martin Charcot’s study of hypnosis and Pierre Janet’s observations of spiritualist mediums (Gibson, 1987). Breton defined surrealism as “a certain psychic automatism, a near equivalent to the dream state, whose limits are today quite
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difficult to define” (Breton, 1924/2005a, p. 729) and noted that in 1919, his attention had been called to the more or less fragmentary sentences that arise from unknown origins when sleep is near. Considering these fragments with their remarkable imagery to be first-rate poetic material, he and others began to contemplate how to induce such material into existence by voluntary means. Breton and Soupault’s publication Les Champs magnetiques (1920) was his first attempt. Before sitting down to write, both men tried to empty their minds of any conscious internal stimulation or external distraction and assumed as passive a state as possible to concentrate the mind on itself, awaiting the poetic phrases of an inner voice. When those phrases, came they immediately copied them down onto paper. At the end of the first day of this experiment, they had about 50 sheets of writing conveying “a very special sense of the picturesque.” Explicitly stating that the source of this “magical dictation” was the unconscious, Breton noted its elusiveness and its tendency to flee at the slightest intrusion from the outside world (Breton, 1922/2005b). Automatic writing (or psychography) is itself surprisingly difficult to define in a satisfactory manner, but it is generally considered to be the production of scripts that do not arise from the conscious thoughts of the writer. Considered by some to be evidence of spirit communication or incidents of thought transference (i.e., telepathy), alternatively, some psychologists and psychiatrists have considered automatic writing as a pathologic disturbance indicating evidence of an untoward splitting or dissociation of the personality. Breton also held some reservations about its employment; his own immoderate use of it had led to some disturbing hallucinatory experiences, and at times he detected the intrusion of conscious elements that defeated the purpose of the experiment. Following Freud, the surrealists made a regular practice of recording dreams for interpretation, but these too were suspect and susceptible to the failings of memory. Rene´ Crevel proposed hypnosis as a solution; he had been taught techniques of inducing an ASC or “hypnotic sleep” by a spiritualist medium, a certain Madam D., and had been impressed by the results. Although rejecting the principles of spiritualism outright and denying the possibility of communication with the dead, the surrealists were nevertheless fascinated by the mental phenomena involved. They determined to hold a se´ance. The proper conditions were created: darkness and silence in the room with a chain of hands across the table. Breton and two friends watched as Crevel entered a hypnotic state and began a declamatory diction, with sighs and the sing-song stressing of words and slurring of others. On awakening, Crevel reportedly had no recollection
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of what he had said, and the experiment was repeated without him. This time Robert Desnos, who had previously believed himself to be impervious to hypnosis,4 let his head drop onto his arms and began scratching the table compulsively. On “awakening” of his own volition, he was unaware of his behavior; however, the scratching was interpreted as indicating the desire to write. At the next session, in similar circumstances, Desnos was provided with pencil and paper and, without moving his head, began to write; interrogated by the others, he answered with cryptic phrases and drawings (Breton, 2005a). So began an extraordinary outbreak of altered states among the surrealists, an epoque des sommeils. Hypnosis, dreams, and automatisms seemed different paths converging on the ancient realm of visionaries and savages, poets and prophets, but events soon began to take a disquieting turn. Desnos could no longer be easily recalled from the fantastic otherworld. He sank at will into weird ASC, purported to be in telepathic communication with artist Marcel Duchamp in New York, and, in a fit of apparent somnambulism, chased a colleague with a knife intending to kill him. In a similar condition, Crevel was found leading 10 men and women into an attempt at collective suicide by hanging.5 The domain of the marvellous had become a state of possession and the experiment was called to a halt. However, lessons had been learned from these years of exploration, and in Manifesto of Surrealism (1924/2005b), Breton posited the existence of a surre´alite´ in which the contradictory states of dream and reality would one day be resolved and proclaimed an approach to literature that defied logic and satisfied the basic human yearning for the marvellous (Browder, 1967). The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes, entitled Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art, such as the following instructions for composition (Breton, 1924/2005a, p. 731): After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread
4
Breton records that Desnos had frustrated two public hypnotists (Messrs Donato and Be´ne´vol) several days previously. 5 An echo of the grisly events of Crevel’s fourteenth year, when his father hanged himself during a dinner party and the guests and the child were called in to look at the body.
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what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard. It is somewhat of a problem to form an opinion about the next sentence; it doubtless partakes both of our conscious activity and of the other, if one agrees that the fact of having written the first entails a minimum of perception. This should be of no importance to you, however; to a large extent, this is what is most interesting and intriguing about the Surrealist game. The fact still remains that punctuation no doubt resists the absolute continuity of the flow with which we are concerned, although it may seem as necessary as the arrangement of knots in a vibrating cord. Go on as long as you like. Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur . . .
The French surrealists were not alone in their experiments with hypnosis, dreams, and automatic writing. In previous decades, Irish writers in the circle surrounding the visionary poet George William Russell (AE) had learned from him meditative techniques to access ASC and used these to assist with their writing, although in their case it was with distinctly more supernaturalistic overtones. Writers as diverse as W. B. Yeats, the duo Somerville and Ross, and James Cousins were variously involved in mysticism, spiritualism, Theosophy, and ceremonial magic; automatic writing mediums Hester Dowden, Eileen Garrett, and Geraldine Cummins were also features of the Anglo-Irish literary scene (Cousins, 2008). James Joyce, with his disdain for the mystical overtones of the Celtic Twilight (which he punningly referred to as the “cultic toilette”), was a notable exception, but nevertheless his stream-of-consciousness style of writing owes something to this milieu. Geraldine Cummins, who had enjoyed some success as a playwright before achieving fame as one of the most prodigious automatic writing mediums, described the experience of such apparently spirit-directed communications in terms that might have sounded familiar to the French surrealists and yet harks back to the concept of ancient poets listening for their muse: I am in a condition of half-sleep, a kind of dream-state that yet, in its peculiar way, has more illumination than one’s waking state. I have at times distinctly the sensation of a dreamer who has no conscious creative control over the ideas that are being formulated in words. I am a mere listener, and through my stillness and passivity I lend my aid to the stranger who is speaking. It is hard to put such a psychological condition into words. I have the consciousness that my brain is being used by a stranger all the time. It is just as if an endless telegram is being tapped out on it. (Cummins, 1955, pp. 144–145)
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To produce the writing, she would sit at a table, cover her eyes with her left hand and concentrate on “stillness.” She would then fall into what was described as a light trance or dream state. Her hand would then begin to write. Usually, her “spirit control” (a rather imperious entity called Astor) would make some introductory remarks and announce that another entity was waiting to speak. Because of her ASC, and also because of the speed at which the writing was produced, an assistant would sit beside her and remove each sheet of paper as it was filled and quickly lift her hand to the top of the new page, where the writing would continue without break or punctuation. It is claimed that in one sitting, Cummins wrote 2,000 words in 75 minutes, whereas her normal compositions were laboriously put together, perhaps 800 words in 7 or 8 hours. Although Cummins laid some claim to her own modest abilities as a hypnotist, she noted the more remarkable hypnotic aptitude of her Dublin contemporary, W. B. Yeats (Cummins, 1951). Moving on from his youthful fin de sie`cle experimentation with hashish and mescaline and despite early misgivings with regard to hypnosis, Yeats had become somewhat of an expert in altered states and their practical applications for the poet in achieving inspiration. The influence of hypnotic techniques in Yeats’s writing is particularly apparent, with the use of subtle rhythm and repetition deliberately employed as a hypnotist might use the recurring flash of a bright object or a soothing pass of the hands to subordinate sense to the narcotic repetition of sound (Hoare, 1937, p. 98). In more recent decades, an analysis of the poetic techniques productive of the “trance-inductive effect” was conducted by Snyder and Shor (1983). These were found to be: freedom from abruptness, marked regularity of soothing rhythm, refrain and frequent repetition, ornamented harmonious rhythm to fix attention, vagueness of imagery, and fatiguing obscurities. In his poetic work, Yeats might be said to be master of all of these, yet not everyone was completely convinced of his hypnotic powers. When Max Beerbohm met the poet, he reported the pleasure was somewhat mixed, remarking, “I always felt rather uncomfortable, as though I had submitted myself to a mesmerist who somehow didn’t mesmerise me” (cited in Epstein, 2007). In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918/1959, pp. 343–346), Yeats also makes reference to his adaptation of druidic rites, and in an article entitled Irish Witch Doctors (1900/1993, p. 266), he revealed his knowledge of the Irish bardic practice of imbas forosnai (great science that enlightens), a rite that involved both incantation and sensory deprivation. Kept rather more private, at least during Yeats’s lifetime, was his collaboration with his mediumistic wife George, first through automatic writing and then through a succession of hypnotic “sleeps” during which messages were
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received from a variety of communicators who called themselves by many names: Thomas of Dorlowicz, Ameritus, Epilamia, Fish, Apple and Leaf. The importance of these scripts to Yeats’s imaginative thinking and poetic creativity was enormous (Maddox, 1999; Saddlemyer, 2004), but did the poet really believe he was communicating with spirits? In 1952, Mrs. Yeats reported that: Whereas, in the beginning, Yeats (and presumably herself) did think the messages spirit-sent, and therefore proof of communions between the living and dead, he saw them later as a dramatized “apprehension of the truth.” If not from the dead, from whom, from what, this “truth”? From their own higher selves. (Moore, 1954, pp. 277–278)
Here Comes Everybody: Writing and Fractured Identities The notion of multiple selves has fascinated writers since long before dissociative identity disorder (erstwhile known as multiple personality disorder) came to be defined as a psychiatric diagnosis, Poe’s tale of William Wilson (1845/1990) and Stevenson’s story of Jekyll and Hyde (1886) are well-known examples of this literary trope. Nor was Yeats the only writer to conjure up storytelling alternates; Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill (working with his partner David Jackson) did the same in the Changing Light at Sandover (1992), a trilogy invoking a cast of otherworldy narrators including Dante, Goethe, Blake, and even (perhaps appropriately) W. B. Yeats himself. Atwood (2002) has argued that all writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read, for with the passing of time, things have changed and the person who wrote the book is now a different person. You can never step into the same stream twice.6 In his supernatural tale The Private Life (1893), Henry James explored what he felt was the contrast of Robert Browning’s unremarkable personal presence in comparison to the glorious appeal of his poetry by creating an equally celebrated fictional writer whose cheerfully bland public persona is compensated for by a ghostly and private alter ego, writing alone in a
6
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939/2000) provides a literary exception as it both begins and ends in the middle of the same fragmented sentence with the famous invocation of the river Liffey: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” The river, consciousness and the narrative are circular and cyclical, potentially ever-repeating.
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darkened room, utterly absorbed in his brilliant work. Jorge Luis Borges took this metaphor of the literary double to its furthest, yet most personal, point when in a piece called Borges and I he went so far as to split himself—Borges—in two. The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things . . . I shall remain in Borges, not in myself . . . I do not know which one of us has written this page. (Borges, 1964, pp. 246–247)
It has been argued that writing serves to further the cause of skepticism and critical thinking because spells and incantation are dependent, at least in part, upon the unitary identity of the speaker and spoken for—a unity writing disrupts (Goody, 1977). Max Weber memorably remarked upon “the progressive disenchantment of the world,” but a powerful countercurrent to the forces of rationality is also evident (Landy & Saler, 2009), and the sense of wonder engendered by religion and myth in earlier times has not disappeared. In their explorations of multiplicity and fractured identity, it seems that Yeats, Merrill, and Borges created strategies for enacting a literary re-enchantment.
Conclusions The sheer variety of consciousness-altering techniques employed by such a diversity of authors across the ages may lead one to the tempting conclusion that the method of achieving an altered state is less important than the fact that such a state can be accessed and yet there is a paradox. In achieving the ASC that lift writers beyond their habitual state; apart
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from the perils of addiction, there is also the risk of loss of control and the will to write. The production of literature requires the clear direction of will and pure perseverance in producing text, and so in many ways the creation of literature is not so much an art as sheer craft. Producing something beautiful is not easy. A line may take hours, and yet unless it seems effortless, then all the labor comes to nothing (Yeats, 1903/2000, pp. 64–65). Yet moving beyond the requirements of artifice and endeavor, good writing demands something more from the artist. Literature is redeemed from triviality by the fact that it does not just describe the world around us, quotidian realities or the catalogues of information that might be found in encyclopedias, but because it engages with all the conditions to which the human spirit can come. All good writers express the state of their souls, even (and perhaps especially) if that soul is in a state of damnation (Chesterton, 1911/2008). Literature is an interim report from the consciousness of artists (Rushdie, 1991) and from their forays into altered states, writers have sent back dispatches from the furthest edges of conscious experience, but the work does not end there. Literature can itself induce ASC. The psychic dissolution of space that occurs when we read, the experience of being neither here nor there, the liminal state between the inside of a book and the outside world “simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together” (de Certeau, 1995, p. 159) can be extended to the point where through artistic form of language, frail humanity, subject to death, becomes capable of accessing, experiencing, and being something of an entirely different nature, something not subject to death (Grossman, 2009). A description that seems perilously close to St. Augustine’s description of God.7 Writing in the first century BCE, the Roman lyric poet Horace closed his third book of odes with the poem conventionally entitled The Poet’s Immortal Fame. In it he makes the claim that “I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time.” This implicit likening of literary achievement to spiritual transcendence and immortality is one of the most extravagant claims that Western culture has made for such an achievement (Braden & Taylor, 2000, p. 96). But more than two millennia later, rather than mere boast, the claim seems almost modest.
“O most high and most near, most secret, yet most present . . . wholly everywhere, and nowhere in space” (Confessions, Book VI).
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Acknowledgments I would like to express my thanks to the Perrott-Warrick Fund, administered by Trinity College, Cambridge, for their financial support and to the late Professor David Fontana for his wise and inspirational guidance and his luminous integrity. This work is dedicated to his memory.
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Haney, W. S. (2002). Culture and consciousness: Literature regained. London: Associated University Presses. Hardman, C. E. (2007). “He may be lying but what he says is true”: The sacred tradition of Don Juan as reported by Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist, trickster, guru, allegorist. In J. R. Lewis & O. Hammer (Ed.), The invention of sacred tradition (pp. 38–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language and thought. New York: Harper Row. Hoare, D. M. (1937). The works of Morris and of Yeats in relation to early saga literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huxley, A. (2004). The doors of perception. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1954) James, H. (1893). The private life. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http:// www.henryjames.org.uk/prival/home.htm. James, W. (1890). Principles of psychology. New York: Holt. Jung, C. (1933). Modern man in search of a soul. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Joyce, J. (2000). Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1939). Landsborough, D. (1987). St. Paul and temporal lobe epilepsy. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 50, 659–664. Landy, J., & Saler, M. (2009). The re-enchantment of the world: Secular magic in a rational age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Leary, T. (1983), Flashbacks, an autobiography. Los Angeles: JP Tarcher. Lings, M. (1983). Muhammad: His life based on the earliest sources. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Maddox, B. (1999). George’s ghosts: A new life of W. B. Yeats. London: Picador. Mandel, A. (1980). Toward a psychobiology of transcendence: God in the brain. In J. Davidson & R. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of consciousness (pp. 379–464). New York: Plenum Press. McGuinness, M. (1998). Hypnotherapy and writer’s block. Author, 104(4), 158. Mendez, M. F. (2005). Hypergraphia for poetry in an epileptic patient. Journal of Neuropsychiatry Clinical Neurosciences, 17, 560–561. Merrill, J. (1992). The changing light at Sandover: A poem. New York: Knopf. De Mille, R. (1976). Castaneda’s journey. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press. Mitchell, S. W. (1896). Remarks on the effects of Anhelonium [sic] lewinii (the mescal button). British Medical Journal, 1625–1629. Moore, V. (1954). The unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ search for reality. New York: Macmillan. Oyebode, F. (2009). Mindreading: Literature and psychiatry. London: Royal College of Psychiatrists. Pascal, B. (1660/2007). Pense´es. Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications. Plant, S. (1999). Writing on drugs. London: Faber & Faber. Plato (380 BCE). Ion Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http://classics.mit.edu/ Plato/ion.html.
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Poe, E. A. (1846). The philosophy of composition. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/poe/composition.html. Poe, E. A. (1990). Tales of mystery and imagination. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. (Original work published 1845). Roberts, J. K. A., Robertson, M. M., & Trimble, M. R. (1982). The lateralizing significance of hypergraphia in temporal lobe epilepsy. Journal of Neurolology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 45, 131–138. Rushdie, S. (1991). Imaginary homelands. London: Granta. Saddlemyer, A. (2004). Becoming George: The life of Mrs W. B. Yeats. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saint Augustine. (n.d.). Confessions, Book VI. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110106.htm. Schneider, E. (1953). Coleridge, opium and Kubla Khan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shanon, B. (2008) Biblical entheogens: A speculative hypothesis. Time and Mind: Journal of Archaeology Consciousness and Culture, 1, 51–74. Shelley, M. (1831). Frankenstein. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http:// www.rc.umd.edu/editions/frankenstein/1831v1/intro.html. Shelley, P. B. (1832). The magnetic lady to her patient. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Magnetic_Lady_to_Her_Patient. Sherwood, S. J. (2002). Relationship between the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states and reports of anomalous experiences. Journal of Parapsychology, 66, 127–150. Skrupskelis, I. K., & Berkeley, E. (Eds.). (1997). William and Henry James: Selected letters. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Snyder, E. D., & Shor, R. E. (1983). Trance-inductive poetry: A brief communication. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 31(1), 1–7. South, T. (2010). Early magnetism in its higher relations to humanity: As veiled in the poets and the prophets. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing. (Original work published 1846). Stanton, H. E. (1986). Writing block? Try self-hypnosis. College Teaching, 34(2), 75–79. Stevenson, R. L. (1886). The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Retrieved 14 January 2011 from http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/SteJekl.html. Stoker, B. (2000). Dracula. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. (Original work published 1897). Tart, C. T. (1990). Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed.). New York: Harper Collins. Thackeray, J. F. (1999). The tenth muse: Hemp as a source of inspiration for Shakespearean literature? Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, Occasional Paper, 1–9. Thackeray, J. F., Van Der Merwe, N. J. & Van Der Merwe, T. A. (2001). Chemical analysis of residues from seventeenth-century clay pipes from Stratford-UponAvon and environs. South African Journal of Science, 97, 19–21.
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CHAPTER 14
Altered Consciousness in Performance: West and East Phillip B. Zarrilli Altered Consciousness in Performance This essay addresses the complex question of altered (or alternate) states of consciousness (ASC) in performance. Given the clear limitations of a strictly materialist account of mind/brain/consciousness and the definitional problems surrounding consciousness (Austin, 1998; Block, 1995, 1997, p. 227; Carden˜ a, 2009; Di Benedetto, 2010; Nunn, 2009), for purposes of this essay, I assume that there are ordinary states of consciousness (or modes of conscious awareness) and that there are transition or borderline experiences between and among these ordinary states of consciousness (Austin, 1998; Tart, 1975b). Carden˜a (2009) explains how “we transit” between and within these states of consciousness and that such states organize experience, cognition, physiology, and behavior. In addition to ordinary states of consciousness and their borderlands, I also assume that there are what Austin describes as “extraordinary discrete alternate states of consciousness” that “are rare, highly valued, distinct states that represent a sharp break from other states of perception or intuition” (1998, pp. 306–307), and within which “new ‘logics’” and “new ways of perceiving” are experienced (Tart, 1975b, p. 28). This essay selectively addresses some of the complex patterns of alternate consciousness assumed in specific approaches to performer training and performance, patterns that reflect systemic “logics,” ways of perceiving and experiencing assumed to be different from ordinary consciousness and that may lead to a transformation of consciousness.
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What Is Performance? Derived from the Middle English verb parformen, performen, performance is the act or process of enactment, of bringing something to completion. In the field of contemporary performance studies (Schechner, 2006), performance refers to a broad spectrum of human activities including discrete genres where an act or process is brought to completion—ritual/shamanic performances—aesthetic performances across a range of activities including contemporary mind-altering, participatory “secular” festivals such as the Burning Man Festival (Bowditch, 2010; Di Benedetto, 2010); [see St John, this volume]; performances in everyday life (Goffman, 1959); embodied practices such as sports, martial arts, yoga, and other contemporary forms of body work; the use of drama techniques in applied/ therapeutic contexts (Woods, 2009); forms of imaginative play (Huizinga, 1970; Winnicott, 1971); and contemporary mediated performances, among others. In this essay, I focus on discrete types of live performance (ritual/ shamanic and aesthetic performances) and embodied practices used to train performers today. Ritual/shamanic and aesthetic performances are usually framed or set off from daily life in some way as a “time out of time.” They possess a structure and performance score shaped by performance conventions. A performance score consists of all the specific tasks/actions that constitute the visual, auditory, enacted, tactile elements made available in the performance by the performer(s) for the audience/participants. (In improvisatory performance, the score may be a set of “rules” that delimit and shape what it is possible for the performer to do.) When enacting a score, the performer embodies and deploys an optimal mode of embodied consciousness, a state that may be described as an extraordinary discrete ASC. Well-established genres of ritual/shamanic and aesthetic performance often have processes of initiation, training, or apprenticeship through which the performer is initiated, achieves virtuosic performance skills, and attains the ability to actualize the extraordinary ASC necessary for a “successful” performance. Although there are underlying biological commonalities to the states of awareness/consciousness discussed here, the nature of altered consciousness in performance is also shaped by cultural, contextual, aesthetic, and religio-philosophical factors. Depending on the cultural and historical context, the performer’s optimal mode of embodied consciousness may or may not be self-consciously articulated or reflected upon. Given the highly reflexive nature of aesthetic theatres and the desire of actors to create virtuosic performances, not surprisingly actors and critics across a broad spectrum of historical periods and genres have reflected
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on the nature and training of the actor or on the aesthetic principles that inform artistry and audience reception (see Cole & Chinoy, 1970, on Western acting; Hare, 2008, on Japanese noh; Ghosh, 1967, and Zarrilli, 2000, on the Natyasastra in India).
Research on Altered Consciousness in Performance Because achieving an ASC may be central to the efficacy of ritual/shamanic performances, anthropological, ethnographic, and ethnopsychological studies often focus on its nature and how the performers/participants actualize or are transported into these extraordinary states (Besmer, 1983; Goodman, Henney, & Pressel, 1974; Hobart, 2003; Kalweit, 1988; Kim, 1998; Laderman, 1993). Until recently, studies of aesthetic theatre in the West have only occasionally studied theatre as a phenomenon and focused directly on issues of consciousness. In the past, studies of Western literary theatre often assumed that meaning resided in dramatic texts, to be appropriately conveyed by the actors to an audience that would understand particular meanings. This limited semantic/semiotic view of performance did not provide an adequate account of the performance experience. In addition, the dominant view of theatre in the West has historically been framed within representational and mimetic discourses; therefore, considerations of acting have often conflated the self of the actor with that of the character and thereby also the everyday experience and emotions of the actor with those of the character. Arguably the most important historical study of Western theories and practices of acting is Roach’s examination (1993) of how historically variable scientific and medical discourses and paradigms have shaped theories and practices of acting. The issue of the actor’s awareness or consciousness is explicitly in the foreground when Roach discusses the actor’s “double consciousness” in Diderot’s “paradox” of acting, and in subsequent Western theories and practices (1993, p. 147ff.). Given that non-Western paradigms of acting are usually informed by nonrepresentational aesthetic theories and practices, there is a recognition that “aesthetic sentiments are not the same as moral, real-life emotions” (George, 1987, p. 156); therefore, non-Western acting processes are understood as potentially “open[ing] the doors to other states of being” (George, 1987, p. 156). Research on non-Western theories, practices, and aesthetics of acting often address issues relevant to the consciousness of the actor and audience (Quinn, 2005; Ortolani, 1995; Riley, 1997; Zarrilli, 2000). When Max Hermann in Germany began to focus in 1914 on theatre as an embodied phenomenal “event,” he called attention to the importance of
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addressing issues of the experience within the theatrical event (Carlson, 2008; Fischer-Lichte, 2008). This shift was reflected in theatre and performance practices of the 1960s as they moved away from a literary understanding of meaning residing in texts to a completely new, desemanticized understanding of how “meanings” arise during a performance event. As Fischer-Lichte explains, perception grasps something as something. Hence something is not first perceived as something to which meaning is subsequently attributed. Rather, meaning is generated in and through the act of perception (2008, p. 141). In the moment of experiencing a performance event, the spectators are affected physically by their perception throughout that event and the associations that arise from it. They are experiencing the performance as “phenomenal beings” and cannot, in the actual moment experiencing the event, “‘understand’ it” (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 156). Any attempt at “understanding,” interpretation, and/or criticism takes places retrospectively. In addition to Fischer-Lichte’s research, other researchers have utilized a post–Merleau-Ponty phenomenology to analyze the experience of the performer and/or audience (Fraleigh, 1987; Garner, 1994; States, 1971; Zarrilli, 2009). Some theatre scholars are drawing explicitly on recent developments in cognitive neuroscience to examine both the experience and consciousness of the actor or audience (Blair, 2008; Di Benedetto, 2010; McConachie & Hart, 2006; Soto-Morettini, 2010). The essays in McConachie and Hart explore a variety of models proposed by cognitive scientists on issues such as “theatricality, audience reception, meaning making, identity formation, the construction of culture, and processes of historical change” (2006, p. 19). Blair examines “how developments in cognitive neuroscience . . . might be used in a new generation approach to help the actor, in Stanislavsky’s words, reach ‘unconscious creativeness through conscious technique’” (2008, p. xii). Di Benedetto explores how “theories drawn from cognitive science and physiology affect live art practice” and the experience of those who attend performances and how “the senses shape our consciousness” (2010, pp. 1, 5). The most sustained of these contributions is Soto-Morettini’s interrogation of mainstream Western assumptions conceptualizing and questions about acting. She focuses on the difficulties of conceptualizing our inner life (2010, p. 90), the actor’s ‘self’ or multiples selves in performance (2010, pp. 91–103), and emotion (2010, pp. 115–155). She questions and reviews various models of consciousness assumed by paradigms/theorists of acting such as Stanislavsky and Chekhov (2010, pp. 69–70). Before addressing issues of consciousness in performance and performer training directly, I provide a brief overview of some of the complex
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issues of the historical relationship between ritual/shamanic performance and aesthetic theatre.
Ritual, Shamanism, and Theatre: An Historical and Cultural Perspective Ritual and shamanic performances share some features of aesthetic forms of theatre such as masking, costuming, impersonation, dance, music, narrative, and humor (George, 1987, 1998; Schechner, 2006; Zarrilli, 1990; Zarrilli et al., 2010). Rituals are often performed to be efficacious, that is, to allow access to certain powers or to effect a change or an end such as healing or initiation. Some ritual performances achieve their effects and also please the gods, ancestors, and/or humans gathered to participate or witness. To achieve their ends, rituals are performed by cultural specialists understood to possess the ability to access special powers to diagnose and/or heal an illness, read signs of the future, conquer an opponent or an enemy army, or uphold the universe itself. Therefore, many ritual specialists are understood to enter an ASC. In some cultures, these ritual specialists are known as shamans, a term deriving from the original Siberian Tungus word, saman, meaning “one who is excited, moved, raised” (Laderman, 1993, p. 7). Shaman refers to a traditional branch of religious specialists believed to be able to heal a variety of illnesses, counteract misfortune, or solve personal or social dilemmas after entering an ASC to communicate with powers in the unseen world [see Winkelman, this volume]. The issue of the performer’s consciousness is usually one of the important ways of differentiating ritual/shamanic performance from aesthetic performance. As Besmer states with regard to the ASC of the Hausa performer, When a medium enters possession-trance he is believed to be inhabited— in Hausa terms, ridden—by a supernatural being, and this is evidenced by one or more of the following: talking and acting like the possessing spirit; lapsing into a comatose state; speaking unintelligibly to the observer though subject to translation by adepts or musicians; exhibiting such physical symptoms as twitching, wild dancing, acrobatic displays, frothing at the mouth and nose, and heavy perspiring. During this time the medium’s own identity is “invisible,” and everything he does or says is attributed to the possessing identity, and [ . . . ] typically, when he returns to himself he is amnesic about the activity of the spirit which possessed him. (1983, p. 140)
Anthropologist E. L. Schieffelin describes Kaluli spirit possession se´ances in Papua New Guinea as “highly entertaining, even thrilling events”
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where “if anything, it is the spirits themselves who perform;” the spirits speaking through a medium have “more of the character of a telephone conversation” than the trappings of an aesthetic performance (1998, p. 203). Schieffelin provides the following description of the effects of the relationship between dancers and spectators in the Gisalo ceremony of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea: In Gisalo, the dancers sing nostalgic songs about the lands and rivers of their audience’s community. Members of the audience are moved so deeply they burst into tears, and then, becoming enraged, they leap up and burn the dancers on the shoulder blades with the resin torches used to light the performance. Indeed, this remarkable response could be interpreted as virtually necessary to the performance, since if the audience is not moved and the tension between the performers and audiences does not rise to the pitch of violence, the ceremony falls apart and is abandoned in the middle of the night [ . . . ] [A]fter a successful performance, the dancers pay compensation to those whom they made weep [ . . . ] It is real grief and rage that are evoked [ . . . ] The performers are held accountable for the painful emotions they evoke—and the retaliation upon them (and the compensation they must pay) return that account—as well as those emotions being an indication of the beauty and effectiveness of the performance. The dancers and song composers [ . . . ] are extremely pleased if they have managed to provoke numbers of the spectators to tears, despite the consequences to themselves. (1998, p. 203; 1976, pp. 21–25)
Those who gather at ritual/shamanic performances are often expected to participate in and/or be affected by the ritual. From this brief summary, it should be clear that ritual/shamanic performances have long been understood to create alternative realities and require their performers to enter an ASC. In contrast, the reality effects of theatre are aesthetic and in the West are considered “fictional.” The modes of alternative consciousness performers utilize to achieve aesthetic affects are similar to but usually different from, those of ritual/shamanic performance. George argues that the view of aesthetic theatre in the West has long been informed by a “classical western logocentrism” and that theatre creates its own forms of “a strange reality” in that “its space, time and persons are all radically different from those we experience in other realities” (1998, p. 13). Until recently, these “other realities have been ascribed some greater degree of truth” (1998, p. 13) than reality effects achieved aesthetically. Studies of theatre should therefore recognize the “complex cognitive feat” assumed in aesthetic performance:
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The ability to conceive of other worlds, alternative realities, and to perform them; to “see” one person as both character and actor and to adopt a split consciousness and a split affective system as well; to live in two planes of reality simultaneously, projecting oneself into other consciousnesses, other space-time matrices with different rules, which presuppose the ability to conceive of other consciousnesses and other “realities”; and to translate signs into cognitive operations, and it would not be at all difficult even on the basis of such a rudimentary listing of its presuppositions to derive a religious consciousness from a theatrical consciousness. (George, 1987, p. 156)
In aesthetic performances, the state of consciousness embodied when one creates theatre’s “strange realities” is different from ordinary states and, depending upon the context, may be considered altered or extraordinary. But in most genres of aesthetic performance, the performer’s consciousness is not understood to be altered in the same way as in spirit possession. Unlike the Hausa example above where another entity takes over, in aesthetic performance the performer is usually assumed to remain him- or herself, able to recall and reflect upon one’s performances. This distinction is of course not absolute, and there is a vast phenomenal territory ranging between the “amnesic” paradigm of forgetting at one end of the spectrum and the aesthetic paradigm’s assumption of remembering and reflection.
Between Ritual and Theatre: The Historical Problem Until recently, theatre historians accepted the argument that theatre was born out of ritual. This theory was put forward by a group of Cambridge University classics scholars known as “the Cambridge Anthropologists”: Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), Francis Cornford (1874–1943), and Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928). These arguments have been revealed as spurious, since they are based on a mistaken notion of social Darwinism. Underlying social Darwinism is the assumption that cultures have evolved, so they can be viewed hierarchically from the “primitive” culture at the bottom to the “great civilizations” at the top, with such Western genres as “tragedy” considered the pinnacle of theatrical culture. This theory of the “origins of theatre” is now thorough discredited (George, 1998; Noel, 1998; Rozik, 2002; Schechner, 2006; Zarrilli et al., 2010). The assumption that it is possible to find a single origin of “theatre” is in itself a problematic proposition. Theatre is not one “thing” but rather a complex set of human communicative activities involving, as does the practice of ritual, fundamental human desires to imitate, play, imagine, and structure the experiences of both actors/performers and audiences.
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Although the origins of all theatre are not in ritual or shamanic performances, in a few instances it may be argued with a certain degree of historical certainty that there is a direct relationship between early forms of ritual/shamanic practice and the development of a specific genre of aesthetic theatre that emerged, in part, from these earlier practices. The clearest example is Japanese noh theatre, discussed below.
Asian Psychophysical Modes of Altering Consciousness As Tart asserted long ago, direct experiential knowledge is central to many non-Western modes of psychophysical practice (1975b). The daily practice of psychophysical training processes in Asia is one of the primary means of attaining actualization of a certain type of virtue and/or self, as well as a potential means of transformation or enlightenment. Across Asia there exist an array of techniques for altering consciousness including yoga, Zen meditation, martial arts (Chinese taiqiquan; Kerala, India’s kalarippayattu), and performance genres such as India’s kutiyattam and kathakali and Japanese noh [see Maliszewki et al., and Shear, this volume]. As Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo explains, the concept of “personal cultivation” (shugyo) . . . is presupposed in Eastern thought as ‘the philosophical foundation’ because “true knowledge cannot be obtained simply by means of theoretical thinking, but only through ‘bodily recognition or realization’ (tainin or taitoku)’” (1987, p. 27). As exemplified in the Indian and Japanese descriptions offered below, an array of daily psychophysical practices are believed to actualize alternative, nonordinary, extraordinary modes of consciousness or awareness appropriate to the practice of that specific art/discipline.
Yoga-based South Asian Modes of Transforming the Bodymind The term yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root, yuj, meaning “to yoke or join or fasten . . . make ready, prepare, arrange, fit out . . . accomplish” (Monier-Williams, 1963, pp. 855–856). Yoga encompasses any ascetic, meditational, or psychophysiological technique that achieves a binding or uniting of the bodymind. A variety of yogic pathways developed historically in South Asia including karma yoga or the law of universal causality; maya yoga or a process of liberating oneself from cosmic illusion; nirvana yoga or a process of growing beyond illusion to attain at-onement with absolute reality; and hatha yoga or specific techniques of psychophysiological practice. Classical hatha yoga includes repetition of breath-control exercises and forms/postures (asana) combined with restraints/constraints
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on diet and behavior. These practices are understood to act on both the physical (sthula sarira) and subtle body (suksma sarira) most often identified with Kundalini-Tantric yoga. As early as the Rig Veda (1200 BCE), ascetic practices (tapas) are mentioned. The earliest use of the specific term yoga is in the Katha Upanisad, where the term means “the steady control of the senses, which, along with the cessation of mental activity, leads to the supreme state” (Flood, 1996, p. 95). Yoga’s psychophysical/spiritual practices have therefore never been “confined to any particular sectarian affiliation or social form” (Flood, 1996, p. 94). As a consequence, both yoga philosophy and practices are ubiquitous throughout Southern Asia (Feuerstein, 1980; Varenne, 1976; White, 1996), and inform all modes of embodied practice including Indian wrestling/martial arts and moving-meditation practices such as the Tibetan trul khor (“magic circle”), as well as the visual, plastic, and performing arts. From the earliest stages of its development, yoga developed as a practical pathway toward the transformation of consciousness (and self) and spiritual release (moksa) through renunciation by withdrawal from the world and the cycles of rebirth. Some yogic pathways provide a systematic attempt to control both the wayward body and the potentially overwhelming senses/emotions that can create disequilibrium in daily life. Rigorous practice therefore can lead to a sense of detachment (vairagya) through which the yogin withdraws completely from daily life and its activities and is understood to achieve a state of kalalita where s/he transcends time. However, yoga philosophy and its practices have also informed and been adapted by non-renunciants, those who keep both feet firmly in the spatio-temporal world. Traditionally, this included India’s martial artists in the service of rulers and a wide variety of performing artists who lived and acted in/upon the world. Performers were expected to bring pleasure and aesthetic joy both to the diverse gods of the Hindu pantheon and to those they were serving and entertaining. In contrast to the yoga practitioner-as-renunciant who withdraws from everyday life, for practitioners of psychophysical disciplines such as martial and performing artists, psychophysical techniques quiet the ego and the emotions so that the practitioner’s bodymind is transformed into an alternative, nonordinary consciousness better able to act within his or her respective sociocultural domain. Within the martial arts tradition of India’s Dhanur Veda (“the science of archery”), the yogic paradigm is a leitmotif in the earliest extant text (Agni Purana) dating from the 8th century (Pant, 1978, pp. 3–5). Circumscribed by rituals, the martial practitioner’s training progresses from preliminary body postures through
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mastery of specific weapons techniques to attaining single-point focus to ever-subtler aspects of mental and psychophysiological attainment where “having control of the hands, mind, and vision . . . .[one] conquers even the god of death (Yama)” (Dasgupta, 1993). This yogic pattern of transformation is part of the contemporary practice of Indian martial arts including Manipuri thang-ta and Kerala’s kalarippayattu (Zarrilli, 1998). A yogic paradigm also underlies the traditional Indian performer’s assumptions about the performer’s state of embodied consciousness. Consider the following example from the kutiyattam style of staging Sanskrit. In 2004, when Usha Nangyar began to instruct Gitanjali Kolanad about how to enact a set piece known as “head-to-foot” acting within this tradition, Usha instructed Gitanjali how to visualize and thereby “become” or transform into the goddess: Breathe through the eyes whenever there is a point of emphasis, as in this solo acting when visualizing the goddess. Close off all other avenues of breath—do not use your nostrils, but inhale/exhale through your eyes. Hold all the orifices closed, and close your ears. It is like “looking” as in yoga. (Zarrilli, in press a)
Usha’s instructions focus on the actor’s relationship to and use of the breath. In South Asia, the “breath,” “wind,” or “vital energy” (prana-vayu) is the conceptual and practical link between the gross, outer, physical body and inner experience of the subtle, yogic body. Taking the goddess “in” through the breath awakens, enlivens, and communicates the connection between the actor/character and the goddess before her in order to provide the audience with an experience that itself transports them into a nonordinary aesthetic reality. Only through long-term forms of psychophysical training is the Indian performer able to achieve the type of virtuosic alternative mode of embodied consciousness required to “become” (Zarrilli, 2000, in press a).
From Shamanism to Acting in Japanese Noh The earliest pre-Buddhist/pre-Chinese forms of performance in Japan are Shinto-inspired shamanistic propitiatory ceremonies and dances. Shinto is a set of utilitarian ritual practices intended to harness the natural forces of the environment in which it is assumed that everything (trees, birds, seas, animals, mountains, wind, etc.) has its own soul or spirit (kami), sometimes identified as a divinity. When Buddhism came to Japan,
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it did not displace Shinto; rather, Buddhas and kami were and are often worshipped side by side. In addition, contact with China also brought the influence of Daoism and Confucianism. The centrality of supernatural beings and ghosts and the traces of shamanic practices in the early development of noh theatre is seen in mugen noh—phantasmal or dream dramas (Ortolani, 1984, 1995). It was under the leadership of Kan’ami (1333–1384) and his son Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443) that noh evolved into a unique form of Japanese theatre and drama. In phantasmal noh, the shite (doer/central performer) often appears as a “restless” female spirit who remembers a past event through a dream or unsettling memory, encounters the waki (sideman/secondary performer, usually a wandering Buddhist priest) who reveals what is troubling her, and is pacified or transformed in some way. Inspired by a chapter in The Tale of Genji, Lady Aoi (c. 15th century as revised by Zeami) enacts the story of the mortally ill and pregnant wife of Prince Genji, Princess Aoi, represented on stage by an elaborate folded robe in the middle of the polished wooden floor. She has been possessed by the angry, restless spirit of Lady Rokujo, Genji’s former mistress, whose living spirit leaves her body when she sleeps. A female shaman performs a ritual to call forth the spirit possessing Lady Aoi. At the far end of the bridgeway (hashigakari), the curtain is lifted by stage attendants, and from the green room emerges the spirit of Lady Rokujo, performed by a male actor in an exquisitely carved female mask. Lady Rokujo eventually reveals her true identity: In this moral world ephemeral as lightning, I should hate nobody, nor should my life be one of sorrow. When ever did my spirit begin to wander? Who do you think this person is who appears before you now drawn by the sound of the catalpa bow! I am the vengeful spirit of Lady Rokujo. (Goff, 1991, p. 135) Since the female shaman only has sufficient power to call forth but not exorcise this invading spirit, a male Buddhist mountain priest (yamabushi) is summoned to perform the exorcism. At the conclusion of the play, her restless spirit is pacified. Although phantasmal noh dramatically enacts such transformation scenes, the actor-dancer’s state of consciousness in performance has been shaped by Zeami’s concerns with the development of the performer’s
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superior artistry informed by Buddhist and Daoist thought and practice. One of the fundamental aesthetic principles that Zeami utilized in shaping noh is yugen. Although yugen can not be translated, it has been described as “‘mystery and depth’ and as ‘what lies beneath the surface;’ the subtle, as opposed to the obvious; the hint, as opposed to the statement’” (Hare, 2008, p. 472). Phantasmal noh “may be likened to an echo chamber of allusions” (Quinn, 2005, p. 14). Ultimately, Zeami located the source of yugen in “the underlying sensibility of the actor himself, the informing, embodied intelligence that mediates all stage techniques” (Quinn, 2005, p. 10). As he developed his approach to noh performance, Zeami moved away from imitation and mimesis toward poiesis (production of something new). To embody, express, and enact this poiesis, Zeami developed a nuanced, subtle, and sophisticated process of cultivating and attuning the actor-dancer’s voice and bodymind through progressive stages of development. Following the pathway of Buddhist “meditation-based pedagogies [ . . . ], selfcultivation of the body can lead to a higher epistemological perspective [ . . . and] such a perspective, in turn, is ‘correlative with the ontological status of reality’” (Quinn, 2005, p. 17). The training and cultivation of the actor-dancer is, like Buddhist meditation, fundamentally a transformative process in that it creates a “new mode of being that is removed from everyday ego consciousness” (Quinn, 2005, p. 17). The transformation of the actor-dancer’s consciousness from ordinary modes of being/doing to an extraordinary state of being/doing in aesthetic performance is fundamental to noh training as developed by Zeami. According to him, the performer ideally reaches a state of nonduality where “striving for effects is something that is not part of the actor’s conscious orientation” (Quinn, 2005, p. 5). Although Shinto, Daoism, and shamanism played an historical role in the development of noh, for Zeami the noh performer’s ideal state of consciousness is a fully embodied state of nondual awareness/consciousness. To attain this state, “the actor must train until he reaches a level at which his innermost intent is beyond his own discriminating consciousness” (Quinn, 2005, p. 229), an active state of mushin (“no-mind”) that lies beyond active intellectualization and where the effects of a performance “are not the result of the actor’s conscious intention” (Quinn, 2005, p. 226). Zeami’s treatises and the example of noh illustrate the fact that performers and master teachers of embodied practices have long reflected on their processes and how best to achieve a “transformation” in and through long-term trainings that “cultivate” an optimal state of nondual bodymind awareness deployed in performance.
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Contemporary Performer Training: Psychophysical Techniques for Accessing Alternative States of Consciousness Since the late 19th century when the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) began the revolutionary process of developing a systematic approach to training the Western actor, a vast array of techniques and processes (yoga, Asian martial arts, songs, night running, dynamic exercises, or ritual/shamanic techniques) have been utilized to explore how the performer might transcend body–mind dualism and secure a dependable process for actualizing the ASC required of the performer. Stanislavsky’s use of the term psychophysical for acting was an innovative, historically limited, and not always successful attempt to solve the relationship between the “psycho” and “physical” elements of textually based character acting. Roach explains how: The Stanislavski System is a means of manipulating levels of consciousness to achieve certain specific effects on the body, especially the illusion of spontaneity. [ . . . ] He believed that an “inner dialogue” runs within us without interruption—a stream of consciousness sustained and constantly redirected by subconscious impulses and sensory stimuli . . . This is the life that the actor attempts to emulate by “living the role.” (1993, pp. 206–207)
In order to accomplish the task of “living the role,” Stanislavsky drew on two main sources, the work of psychologist Theodule Armand Ribot (1839–1916) and the limited versions of Indian yoga available in turnof-the-century Russia, filtered through then-popular occultism and spiritualism (Carnicke, 1993; White, 2006). Stanislavsky described how the actor’s “physical score,” once perfected, must go beyond “mechanical execution” to a “deeper” level of experience that is “rounded out with new feeling and [ . . . ] become[s], one might say, psychophysical in quality” (1961, p. 66). In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky described the actor’s optimal state of awareness or concentration as one in which he “reacts not only on his sight and hearing, but on all the rest of his senses. It embraces his mind, his will, his emotions, his body, his memory and his imagination” (1948, p. 465). Stanislavsky’s ideal was that “in every physical action . . . there is concealed some inner action, some feelings” (1961, p. 228). To help achieve this optimal state of awareness while “living” a role, Stanislavsky drew upon and adapted his limited knowledge of yoga exercises and principles to heighten the actor’s sensory awareness in
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performance. Arguably the most important material element Stanislavsky borrowed from yoga was prana, the breath(s), wind, vital energy, or lifeforce understood to circulate throughout the body “from your hands to your fingertips, from your thighs to your toes” creating thereby an “inner rhythm” (Carnicke, 1998, p. 141). Stanislavsky translated his work with prana into the actor’s ability to “radiate” feelings as a character to communicate with fellow actors-as-characters. After working with Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov (1891–1955) developed psychophysical exercises, “psychological gestures,” and “radiation” in order “to penetrate all the parts of the body with fine [ . . . ] vibrations” (Chekhov, 1991, p. 43). Byckling (2005) quotes Chekhov as saying that “the training of the body is [ . . . ] a training in awareness, in learning how to listen to the body, how to be led by it.” Chekhov’s actor works from body awareness to psychophysical composition. The actor senses and feels the form of the psychological gesture as she creates and inhabits it. Although utilizing limited elements and principles of yoga, Chekhov and Stanislavsky did so in order to develop the kind of alternative consciousness necessary for an actor to perform textually based character roles in mainstream aesthetic theatre. As Soto-Morettini explains, the kind of “second order intentional” thinking necessary to understand and analyze a dramatic text at the beginning of rehearsals must be forgotten once onstage (2010, p. 206). Actors are engaged in a dual form of forgetting; they both pretend to forget and they pretend to be the character (2010, p. 206). This “dual forgetting” is the “essential quality of acting” and requires of the actor “fictional immersion” (2010, p. 206). Quoting McGinn’s (2004), “fictional immersion occurs when the work disguises itself as reality, while never concealing the fact that it is a disguise” (SotoMorettini, 2010, p. 207).
Between Ritual and Aesthetic Performance: Artaud and Grotowski During the 20th century, a series of practitioners working away from mainstream Western realist theatre—Antonin Artaud (1896–1949) in France, Alexander Fersen (1911–2001) in Italy, Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), and Nicola´s Nu´n˜ez (1946–) in Mexico, among others— have drawn inspiration or specific techniques from ritual/shamanic practices in order to explore both alternative approaches to acting and/or processes of audience/performer communion. These explorations have often taken place over a lifetime in “laboratories,” spaces set aside for focused, in-depth development of the performer’s consciousness. Most practitioners divest their work of the traditional belief systems in which
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the source techniques were historically embedded as they attempt to achieve a “secular sacredness.” In his rebellion against textually based theatre, Artaud wanted to create a new actor who was an “athlete of the heart.” As Carden˜a explains, Artaud was one of the first if not the first theatre practitioner to explore the territory of the “performer as shaman” (1986, p. 299). Artaud’s vision of the performer was “as a master of the attainment and induction of altered states with the purpose of healing a degraded humanity” (p. 299). In a series of manifestos inspired in part by his encounter with Balinese dancers and visits to Mexico, Artaud called for actors to become “crude empiricists” who examine the “material aspect” of the expressive possibilities of their bodyminds. Artaud postulated that the actor, through breath control, would be able to place the breath in specific locations in the body in order to cause psychophysiological vibrations that would “increase the internal density and volume of his feeling” and “provoke . . . spontaneous reappearance of life” (in Cole & Chinoy, 1970, pp. 236, 239). Artaud assumed that these emotional states have “organic bases” locatable in the actor’s body; therefore, “for every mental action, every leap of human emotion, there is a corresponding breath which is appropriate to it” (p. 236). The actor’s task is to develop an “affective musculature which corresponds to the physical localizations of feelings” (p. 235), the actor must cultivate the “emotion in his body” (p. 239) by training the breath. As the actor becomes able to localize control of the breath, s/he will be able voluntarily to “apportion it out in states of contraction and release,” thereby serving as a “springboard for the emanation of a feeling . . . [Once trained] with the whetted edge of breath the actor carves out his character” (pp. 237, 239). In spite of the speculative specificity of his vision of the actor as an “athlete of the heart,” Artaud was never able to develop an actual psychophysical technique actualizing this vision. Although he always viewed his work as a continuation of the explorations of Stanislavsky, Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski embraced and actively engaged the territory between ritual and performance. As Wolford argues, “Grotowski is not so much a person of the theatre as one whose interests, for a certain period of time, passed through theatre, but always with an orientation toward elsewhere” (1998, p. 85). Schechner has described Grotowski’s projects, whether the early theatrical phase (training actors and making performances) or his later post-theatrical phases (Theatre of Sources, Objective Drama, Art as vehicle”), as informed by his pursuit of “spiritual, mystical, and yogic interests” even though this pursuit never grasped after “a definite and particular kind of spiritual knowledge” (1997, p. 463). The psychophysical processes of actor training he explored
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early in his career provided “a necessary structure for the performer’s inner search” where theatre became “a means rather than an end” (Wolford, 1998, p. 85). Since 1986, Grotowski focused on “art as vehicle,” carried out as a practical research program at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Pontedera, Italy. Grotowski described the work as focused on “’actions related to very ancient songs which traditionally served ritual purposes, and so can have a direct impact on—so to say—the head, the heart and the body of the doers’” (Wolford, 1988, p. 87). Grotowski also described the work as “a type of yoga, noting that while, in one sense, Art as vehicle is very much concerned with elements of performance craft, the interior goal of the work is analogous to that which is sought in meditative disciplines” (p. 88). This work is autotelic, focusing on the experience of the doers. It becomes “a tool by means of which the human being can undertake a work on her/himself” (Wolford, 1998, p. 88).
Mnemodrama: An Actor’s Version of the Ritual Journey of the Shaman One of the often overlooked pioneers exploring the territory between shamanic models of consciousness and acting is the Italian theatre director Alessandro Fersen (1911–2001). From 1957, when he established a theatre laboratory for research on acting, he began a lifelong journey of exploring the mythopoetic territory between ritual and theatre. John Green (1993) provides a comprehensive account of how Fersen’s years of practical research in the studio, inspired by “the ecstatic figures of the shaman, was eventually codified as mnemodrama—a studio-based exercise in which the actor progressively explores advanced steps in the ‘techniques of abandon’” (Fersen, quoted in Marranca, 1984, p. 22). The “memory” of the mnemodrama does not seep through the protective filters of consciousness: it has its own hallucinating nakedness, like meat skinned off its epidermis. It draws not just from the individual past, but also from an antenatal or ancestral past. Its behaviors have little in common with “remembering” or having memories. (Fersen, 1980, p. 74)
Fersen’s research was based in part on exposure to Carnival, Samba, and Candomble´ in Bahia, Brazil, and subsequent collaboration with Italian anthropologist Alfonso Di Nola. Fersen claims that in mnemodrama, the actor experiences an ASC where what one inhabits “is not a life, nor a second life” as a character, but “It is a second state of mind, which has an oneiric quality” (Fersen, in Marranca, 1984, p. 20).
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Fersen characterized the exercise he was creating as an actor’s version of the “shamanic ‘journey’” where the actor “abandons himself [ . . . ] to the unknowns of the possible event [ . . . ]” (Fersen, 1980, p. 75). Modeled on ritual practices, Fersen interprets his work as a dialectic operating between “abandon techniques” and “control techniques” (1980, p. 65). Ultimately for Fersen, his attempt to allow the actor’s process and experience of mnemodrama to touch textually based character acting failed because there was an “unsuccessful suture” between the two (Green, 1993).
Subsuming the Self into the Whole Another example of those working between ritual and aesthetic theatre is the lifelong work on communal co-presence of Mexico’s Nicola´s Nu´n˜ez. Nu´n˜ez founded the Taller de Investiga´cion Teatral or Theatre Research Workshop (TRW) in 1975 at the National University in Mexico City. Since founding TRW, Nu´n˜ez and his collaborators have undertaken practical crosscultural research between ritual and theatre, actively exploring ASC accessed by means of specific psychophysical techniques drawn from both preHispanic Mexican traditions such as the Na´huatl conchero (shell dance) and Tibetan Buddhist monastic Black Hat dance (Middleton, 2008, p. 43). TRW aims “to effect psychological, physiological, and spiritual change through the dissolution of negative psychophysical modes of behavior” (Middleton, 2008, p. 44) both in ritual dynamic training sessions and in performances. Nu´n˜ez describes the actor “as a sacred animal, alongside the bull, the deer, etc.” Actors/participants access “heightened states of being in which perception alters” (Middleton, 2008, p. 45). For Nu´n˜ez, the actor and shaman alike are able to “go into an altered state of consciousness [ . . . ] at will” and thus can “perceive reality directly with no interference of any kind of thinking” (quoted in Middleton, 2008, p. 45). Middleton describes Nu´n˜ez’s dynamics as follows: Attention is focused in the moment-by-moment somatic experience through intentionality, breathing technique or use of mantra. Receptive consciousness is engaged through the necessity to remain within longdurational activities, abandoning end-gaining strategies and timeconsciousness. Conceptual activity is subdued, partly through intention, and partly through the psycho-physically strenuous tools of running, energetic position, etc. Energies are dilated through physiological effects (such as adrenalin and endocrine release), and this in turn intensifies the somatic nature of the experience. (2008, p. 48)
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Nu´n˜ez’s dynamics as well as the participatory performances he creates with TRW are intended as “rituals of personal transformation” bringing together mythology, cosmology, and personal transformation (Middleton, 2001, 2008).
Cultivating a Nondual Bodymind Awareness/consciousness Often inspired by Artaud or Grotowski and influenced by nonWestern principles and techniques, cultivating a state of nondual awareness so central to Asian modes of embodied practice has become a main if unarticulated tenet of many approaches to performer training today (Hodge, 2010b; Zarrilli, 2002). Daily training in Japanese butoh (Fraleigh, 1999), Suzuki technique (Suzuki, 1986), Gardzienice Theatre Association techniques (Hodge, 2010a; Staniewski, 2004), or Zarrilli’s (2009) martial arts/yoga-based psychophysical training all provide indepth embodied experiences through which one can achieve the type of nondual state of consciousness/awareness required in meditation where one is both being attentive and not thinking (Blackmore, 2003). Their modus operandi may be compared with “concentrative meditation” (Blackmore, 2003). Citing recent cognitive scientific research, SotoMorettini differentiates between “attention training and [ . . . ] attention state training” (2010, p. 214). The former attempts to control thoughts while the latter “’induces a state of restful alertness, enabling a high degree of awareness of body, mind and external instructions’” (2010, p. 214). This is a state inducing or coming “very near a meditative state” (Soto-Morettini 2010, p. 215). Each approach to training in its own way awakens, shapes, focuses, and concentrates the performer’s energy, attention and awareness through specific psychophysical exercises/tasks. Butoh performer Hijikata Tatsumi developed butoh-fu in the 1970s as “modes of visualization” (Fraleigh & Nakamura, 2006) through which the performer could enter and sustain a dynamic embodied state of awareness. Gardzienice’s night running takes the performer into an alternative mode of openness to others and the environment when having to negotiate running without illumination (Hodge, 2010a; Staniewski, 2004). Like some forms of concentrated meditation, Zarrilli’s psychophysical training begins with breathing exercises and attentiveness to the breath (2009). But these approaches also differ from forms of meditation that take the meditator out of the world into a different reality. Here, the performer, like the martial artist, always remains responsive to the immediate environment.
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Phenomenal Consciousness and Performance Ned Block’s nuanced discussion of the differences and relationship between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness (1995, 1997) provides a useful way of describing aspects of the performer’s nondual consciousness. Block explains that “phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is something ‘it is like’ to be in that state” (1995, p. 227). P-conscious states “are sensations, whereas the paradigm A-conscious states are ‘propositional attitude’ states like thoughts, beliefs, and desires, states with representational content expressed by ‘that’ clauses” (1997, p. 384). Access consciousness serves more of a functional process than phenomenal consciousness because it carries specific types of information generally available for the organism. These are not absolute categories since thoughts may be P-conscious and sensations/experiences “often have representational content” (1997, p. 384). Performances and modes of performer training may be understood as practices that shape culturally and historically specific forms of extraordinary nondual phenomenal consciousness that are different from one’s ordinary states of consciousness. Although the performer’s phenomenal consciousness is shaped to embody/enact the performance at an optimal level of attainment such as in the example of the noh actor, since a performance score is a repeatable structure when the performer is not performing the score one can self-consciously review that score mentally. The performer uses access consciousness to review and reflect upon the performance of a score or structure or to reflect more generally on his or her artistry as an actor/dancer. When performing, a specific score is available as representational content at the periphery of one’s phenomenal consciousness even as one embodies/enacts that score. The representational content of the score in its entirety and of each task/ action that constitutes the whole is “available”; however, the performer ideally does not use access consciousness to become directly conscious of a task or action within the score as it is being performed. Block also calls our attention to what he calls “monitoring consciousness,” the notion that there is “some sort of inner perception” or “P-consciousness of one’s own states” (1997, p. 390). Because performer training techniques and performance are highly repetitive modes of embodiment, P-consciousness may be characterized as conscious awareness where an embodied, sedimented relationship to the performance or doing is experienced as a residue, an echo, or resonant “shadow.” At the periphery of P-consciousness in the act of doing is an inner perception, sensory awareness, or consciousness of the
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doing, sometimes described by performers as the feeling of the form. There is often a “what it is like for me” state viewed from the first-person perspective inside the process of embodying a specific performer training process and when enacting a specific performance score. This mode of inhabitation is different from one’s ordinary mode of consciousness, it is experienced as extraordinary. Performer training and performing can therefore be described as a special form of “P-consciousness with awareness” where the performer inhabits an awareness of the doing at the same time the actor remains completely inside the “feeling” of the doing. The “feeling of the doing” is the additional layer of resonance within the performer’s consciousness. For actors, it is the “listening” or “hearing” within oneself in the act of speaking. It is what makes a performance that may look like everyday life “more than” everyday life. Two caveats are in order. First, the description provided above is the optimal ideal assumed in virtuosic performance and therefore is often not achieved during initial training or in performance. Second, in this process the performer ideally never becomes self-conscious, the actor does not think about what she is doing but remains within the “flow” of phenomenal consciousness as appropriate to the training or the dramaturgy of a specific performance (see also Carden˜a & Cousins, 2010). The actor’s phenomenal consciousness has often been described as a “double consciousness” or “multiple consciousness,” apt descriptions of the “feeling of the form” and the presence of the score/structure at the periphery of phenomenal consciousness. The performer constantly adjusts this specific performance to the stimuli in the performance environment moment by moment (Blair, 2008; Yoo, 2007; Zarrilli, 2009). From the performers’ perspective inside this embodied process, as one practices, performs, or “plays” within the structure of a process, there is often a strong autotelic element to that engagement. One enjoys the practice/act of performing. Systems of actor training like those described above are designed to shape the performer’s phenomenal consciousness to achieve an extraordinary discrete alternate state of nondual consciousness. The phenomenological account that concludes this essay provides one example of how the actor shapes and focuses her or his energy, attention, and so on in order to enact a particular dramaturgy/performance score.
A Phenomenological Account of an Actor’s Performance Score Cocreated by Kaite O’Reilly, Jo Shapland, and Phillip Zarrilli, Told by the Wind premiered in Cardiff in 2010 and continues to tour internationally (see Figure 14.1). Inspired by but not attempting to reproduce its sources,
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Figure 14.1 TOLD BY THE WIND. Structure 5: Male and Female Figures move point/counterpoint within the earth square. (Photo courtesy of Ace McCarron.)
it draws on phantasmal Japanese noh dramas, Oto Shogo’s theatre of quietude, and the minimal work of Samuel Beckett. It is a fragmentary performance piece consisting of 10 structures, described by critics as “hypnotic,” a “meditation,” “dreamlike.” Throughout the performance, a Female and a Male Figure are onstage but never make direct visual contact. There is no dialogue per se, but Male Figure delivers fragments of suggestive text during 4 of the structures. Female Figure occasionally mouths words that either remain unsaid or are barely whispered and remain inaudible. Male Figure’s intermittent spoken text is delivered during approximately 11 minutes of the total running time. Except for the barely audible “white noise” in the background throughout the performance, there are lengthy periods in which no overt and little inadvertent sound is made by the actors. In the first structure, the two actors are discovered onstage: Female Figure is seated in the center stage-left chair, and Male Figure is seated in the upstage-right chair at a writing desk looking out the window frame in front of him, suspended in air. Their backs are to each other. Between them is a square of earth on a diagonal surrounded by evergreen branches. In silence, for approximately 3 minutes the two figures only make subtle,
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slight physical adjustments to their positions as they listen in the silence. This is my description of the actor’s work and consciousness in playing this nonverbal structure: When Jo Shapland and I step into the playing space and are seated to begin Structure 1, our initial performance task is to open and engage our peripheral awareness to the possible presence of an “other” in the environment. From my perspective inside the performance, the act of “opening” my peripheral awareness means using indirect visual focus, my eyes do not attempt to focus specifically on anything/anyone/anywhere. Because my visual focus is secondary and indirect, my energy and awareness open to and attend to the spatial environment surrounding me. The “other” to whom I am opening my awareness is not a specific individual, but rather a possibility or a question. This “other” is constituted by a series of embodied questions, such as “Is someone/something there?” “Is ‘she’ present?” “Is ‘she’ there?” “Where?” “There . . . there . . . or there?” I do not literally ask myself these questions in my mind, nor is this “other” or this “she” given a specific name, identity, or history. Rather, I psychophysically engage my embodied consciousness in subtly responding to the impulse of a “question” or “possible presence” if/when/as each question/possibility emerges in the moment of performance. It is important that this embodied process of questioning/probing remains indeterminate. My focus/attention should not “land” or resolve itself. It is a constant process of active searching/questioning. Half way through Structure 1, this initial probing becomes more specific as both Shapland and I attune our auditory awareness to our possible “other.” We actively engage psychophysically in what may be described as “attentive listening,” opening our ears to the sonority of the immediate environment. The psychophysical task here is to “let go” and abandon oneself completely to this state of deep, profound “listening” where all that exists is a question. Nancy asks, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens” and thereby encounters “sonority rather than the message?” (2007, p. 5). We are listening, but what is “there” remains a “secret”—unknown to each of us. There is no “message.” No “thing” and no “one” emerges as an answer to the psychophysical “questions” posed. Our embodied consciousness/ awareness is always “on the edge of meaning;” however “meaning” and understanding never emerge. As Nancy explains: To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge [ . . . ] (2007, p. 7). The kind of “listening” I describe here is not a passive act of the “ears” hearing, but an act of absorption so full that one’s embodied consciousness
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is woven in the moment. Optimally, this process of embodied, aural attunement absorbs and re-directs our energy and awareness in a process of taking in, searching, and questioning . . . We are “still” but not frozen; rather, each of us is animated from the inside-out by constantly being active and reactive. Our performative engagement with deep listening may be described as opening a space of possibility within us as performers/stagefigures. (see Zarrilli, in press b)
Thus, in a “successful” performance, we reach an alternative state of nondual awareness/consciousness.
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Carlson, M. (2008). Introduction: Perspectives on performance: Germany and America. In E. Fischer-Lichte, The transformative power of performance (pp. 2–10). London: Routledge. Carnicke, S. (1993). Stanislavski uncensored and unabridged. Drama Review, 37, 22–37. Carnicke, S. (1998). Stanislavski in focus. Amsterdam: Harwood. Chekhov, M. (1991). On the technique of acting. New York: Harper Perennial. Cole, T., & Chinoy, H. C. (Eds.). (1970). Actors on acting. New York: Crown. Dasgupta, G. (2003). “Dhanur Veda,: Chapters 249–252, in Agni Purana of Maharsi Vedavyasa. Varanasi: Chowkhambra Sanskrit Series, 1966. Unpublished translation. Di Benedetto, S. (2010). The provocation of the senses in contemporary theatre. New York: Routledge. Fersen, A. (1980). Il teatro, dopo [The theatre, since]. Bari: Laterza, Italy. Feuerstein, G. (1980). The philosophy of classical yoga. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). [Trans. Saskya Iris Jain]. The transformative power of performance: A new aesthetics. London: Routledge. Flood, G. (1996). An introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fraleigh, S. H. (1987). Dance and the lived body. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fraleigh, S. H. (1999). Dancing into darkness. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fraleigh, S., & Nakamura, T. (2006). Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. London: Routledge. Garner, S. (1994). Bodied spaces: Phenomenology and performance in contemporary drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. George, D. E. R. (1987). Ritual drama: Between mysticism and magic. Asian Theatre Journal, 4, 127–165. George, D. E. R. (1998). On origins: Behind the rituals. Performance Research, 3, 1–14. Ghosh, M. (Ed. and trans.). (1967). The Natyasastra (Vols. I, II). Calcutta: Graanthalaya Private. (Originally published 1951) Goff, J. (1991). Noh drama and the Tale of Genji. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goodman, F. D., Henney, J. H., & Pressel, E. (1974). Trance, healing, and hallucination: Three field studies in religious experience. New York: Wiley. Green, J. C. (1993). Mnemodrama: Alessandro Fersen’s para-shamanic training technique for the occidental performer. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Plymouth, U.K.: Plymouth University. Hare, T. (Translator and notes). (2008). Zeami: Performance notes. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Hobart, A. (2003). Healing performances of Bali. New York: Berghahn Books. Hodge, A. (2010a). Wlodimierz Staniewski: Gardzienice and the naturalized actor. In A. Hodge (Ed.), Actor training (pp. 268–287). London: Routledge. Hodge, A. (Ed.). (2010b). Actor training. London: Routledge. Huizinga, J. (1970). Homo ludens. New York: Harper. Kalweit, H. (1988). Dreamtime & inner space: The world of the shaman. Boston: Shambhala. Kim, T.-k. (1998). Korean shamanism-muism. Seoul: Jimoondang. Laderman, C. (1993). Taming the wind of desire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marranca, B. (1984). Interview with Alessandro Fersen. Performing Arts Journal, 24, 20. McConachie, B., & Hart, F. E. (Eds.). (2006). Performance and cognition: Theatre studies and the cognitive turn. London: Routledge. McGinn, C. (2004). Mindsight: Image, dream, and meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University. Middleton, D. K. (2001). At play in the cosmos: The theatre and ritual of Nicola´s Nu´n˜ez. TDR: The Drama Review, 45, 42–63. Middleton, D. K. (2008). “Secular sacredness” in the ritual theatre of Nicola´s Nu´n˜ez. Performance Research, 13, 41–54. Monier-Williams, M. (1963). A Sanskrit-English dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. (Originally published 1899) Nancy, J. L. (2007). Listening. New York: Fordham University Press. Noel, D. C. (1998). Book review of Shamanism by Mircea Eliade. Performance Research 3, 119–122. Nunn, C. (2009). Defining consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, 5–8. Ortolani, B. (1984). Shamanism in the origins of the No Theatre. Asian Theatre Journal, 1, 166–190. Ortolani, B. (1995). The Japanese theatre: From shamanistic ritual to contemporary pluralism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pant, G. N. (1978). Indian archery. Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan. Quinn, S. F. (2005). Developing Zeami: The noh actor’s attunement in practice. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Riley, J. (1997). Chinese theatre and the actor in performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roach, J. (1993). The player’s passion: Studies in the science of acting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rozik, E. (2002). The roots of theatre: Rethinking ritual and other theories of origin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Schechner, R. (1997). Exoduction: Shape-shifter, shaman, trickster, artist, adept, director, leader, Grotowski. In R. Schechner & L. Wolford (Eds.), The Grotowski sourcebook (pp. 458–492). London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (2006). Performance studies. London: Routledge. Soto-Morettini, D. (2010). The philosophical actor. Bristol: Intellect.
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Staniewski, W. (2004). Hidden territories: The theatre of Gardzienice. London: Routledge. Stanislavsky, K. (1948). My life in art (Trans. J. J. Robbins). New York: Theatre Arts Books. Stanislavsky, K. (1961). Creating a role (Trans. E. R. H. Hapgood). New York: Theatre Arts Books. States, B. O. (1971). Great reckonings in little rooms: On phenomenology of theatre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Suzuki, T. (1986). The way of acting. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Tart, C. T. (1975a). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton. Tart, C. T. (Ed.). (1975b). Transpersonal psychologies. New York: Harper & Row. Varenne, J. (1976). Yoga and the Hindu tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, D. G. (1996). The alchemical body: Siddha traditions in medieval India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, R. A. (2006). Stanislavski and Ramacharaka: The influence of yoga and turn-of-the-century occultism on The System. Theatre Survey, 47, 73–92. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock Publications. Wolford, L. (1998). Grotowski’s art as vehicle: The invention of an esoteric tradition. Performance Research, 3, 85–94. Woods, A. (2009). The use and function of altered states of consciousness within dance/ movement therapy. Unpublished master’s thesis, Drexel University, Philadelphia. Yoo, J. (2007). Moving ki in inner and outer space: A Korean perspective on acting process in The Water Station. Contemporary Theatre Review, 17, 81–96. Yuasa Yasuo. (1987). The body. Albany: State University of New York. Zarrilli, P. B. (1990). Introduction: The ritual traditions. In F. P. Richmond, D. L. Swann, & P. B. Zarrilli (Eds.), Indian theatre: Traditions of performance (pp. 120–129). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Zarrilli, P. B. (1998). When the body becomes all eyes: Paradigms and practices of power in kalarippayattu, a south Indian martial art. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Zarrilli, P. B. (2000). Kathakali dance-drama: Where gods and demons come to play. London: Routledge. Zarrilli, P. B., ed. (2002). Acting reconsidered. London: Routledge. Zarrilli, P. B. (2009). Psychophysical acting: An intercultural approach after Stanislavski. London: Routledge. Zarrilli, P. B. (in press a). Psychophysical approaches and practices in India: Embodying processes and states of “being-doing.” In P. B. Zarrilli, J. J. Daboo, & R. M. Loukes (Eds.), From Stanislavsky to physical theatre. London: Palgrave. Zarrilli, P. B. (in press b). “ . . . Presence . . . ” as a question and emergent possibility: A case-study from the performer’s perspective. In G. Giannachi & N. Kaye (Eds.), Presence in performances. London: Routledge. Zarrilli, P. B., McConachie, B., Fischer-Sorgenfrei, C., & Williams, G. J. (2010). Theatre histories: An introduction. London: Routledge.
CHAPTER 15
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art Mark Levy Plato noted in the Phadreus that poetic creation is a form of divinely inspired madness along with other manias including the erotic and the prophetic. As Etzel Carden˜a has noted, It could be argued that we have not gone further than Plato’s classification of the manias . . . Socrates states that when individuals are not in their usual senses, (which we could interpret as being in an ASC [altered state of consciousness]), they may have important and useful insights into reality. (Carden˜a, 2009, p. 313)
For Plato, poetry was a possession experience as the Gods spoke through the artist [see Ustinova, this volume], but he disliked visual art because he considered painting and sculpture to be copies of what are already copies of a higher reality that could not be apprehended through the senses. The Platonic paradigm for the poet became the Romantic notion of genius beginning in the early 19th century, in which music and the visual arts could result when the artist was possessed by higher creative forces. A play later turned into a popular movie that illustrates this Romantic notion genius is Amadeus (1984), in which Mozart becomes a mere scribe for the music that pours through his obviously imperfect person. Of course, not all musicians are possessed, as the example of the composer Salieri, with his well-crafted but pedantic musical ideas, attests in the movie. The relationship between altered states of consciousness (ASC) and works of art has not been sufficiently addressed by philosophers, art historians, and psychologists. The word inspiration, which basically means to breathe in an exalted idea, has been much used in Romantic circles
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and by modern artists as a lighter, less charged term than possession with its implications of spirit mediumship. Inspiration, along with possession, however, is mostly involuntary and artists, including Salieri in Amadeus, have agonized when it does not occur. In this chapter, I will discuss only a few of the artists and works of art that involve altered consciousness other than possession where the artist experiences being “taken over” by another entity. There are a small but significant number of visual artists from the early 19th century to the present, the period that defines Modern Art and Postmodern Art for most art historians, who have not waited for inspiration but have consciously cultivated ASC to achieve “important and useful insights into reality” (Carden˜a, 2009, p. 313). These artists have used dreaming, psychedelics, drumming, ritual, and meditation to induce ASC. Their styles or formal languages are mostly avant-garde, reflecting the experimental art of their respective periods, and typically do not imitate the styles of traditional religious or tribal art. There is also artwork influenced by entopic and similar phenomena or produced through hypnotic techniques. In regard to the former, under certain conditions when light meets the eye, it can render objects within the eye visible, producing floaters, blue fields, bowtie or hour glass patterns, images of retinal blood vessels, and the like. In an ASC, individuals may be more susceptible to these phenomena than under normal conditions, but entopic phenomena have not been of interest to most professional artists and have not had a direct or even indirect impact on the avant-garde stylistic imagery of modern art. Nor have hypnotic states been a matter of concern for most professional artists, although they have received serious attention by Ana Eva Iribas and others (Iribas-Rudı´n, 2009). In general, I would like to make a distinction in this article between two forms of the cultivation of ASC: shamanic states of consciousness (SSC) and meditative states of consciousness. It is a broad and fluid distinction and sometimes it overlaps, as in the cases of Vincent van Gogh and Alex Grey. For the most part, the SSC that I will be talking about here is the shamanic journey or “soul flight” that is induced by drumming, psychedelic substances, or dreaming. The shaman experiences that his or her soul leaves the body and goes to the upper and lower world of nonordinary reality and then returns with information for the spiritual and therapeutic benefit of the community [see Winkelman, this volume]. Roger Walsh in the Spirit of Shamanism (1990) has proposed that SSC are usually accompanied by rapid heartbeat, mental excitation, reduced awareness of one’s surroundings, and positive or negative emotions. On the other hand, the calming of the mind and emotions and acute
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awareness of one’s surroundings in multiple dimensions usually accompanies meditative states. Art induced by shamanic methods is different than art engendered by meditative states. Usually, in shamanic art there is profusion and/or succession of dreamlike images that may embody shape shifting, dislocations of time and space, connections with power animals and other spirit allies, and so forth. In art induced by meditation, there is often a reduction of imagery and sometimes no imagery, as in the genre of metaphysical abstraction. Through both meditative techniques and shamanic techniques of induction, however, it is possible to see light lines or energy lines. It is important to note here that I am making this broad distinction between art induced by meditative states and SSC as an art historian, artist, and a serious practitioner of both meditative and shamanic techniques of induction for more than three decades, not a scientist who has systematically verified the results through research. In this article, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalı´, Remedios Varo, Alex Grey, Joseph Beuys, and Sha Sha Higby are examples of modern artists who employ shamanic techniques of induction, whereas Kasmir Malevich, Agnes Martin, Robert Irwin, and Jamie Brunson are meditators. I have chosen these artists as representatives of some of the broad range of styles and approaches within these two general categories of altered states. For a more thorough analysis that included more artists, see my books, Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism and the Modern Artist (1993) and Void/in Art (2005).
Modern Artists and Shamanism To be sure, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was not aware of himself as a shaman. Although there is much speculation about van Gogh’s precarious mental health and physical condition, it is difficult to determine the exact nature of his mental states of consciousness from the existing documentation on his life. He was probably lucid when he drew and painted, and his correspondence shows that he would carefully think about and plan his paintings; he was able to apply paint directly from a tube to the canvas with a palette knife in an extraordinarily skillfully manner, unlike the typically unsophisticated painting and drawing styles of individuals afflicted by various disorders. Biographical accounts concur that he had erratic eating and sleeping habits and drank large amounts of absinthe, a beverage of alcohol mixed with wormwood and sometimes other psychoactive substances favored by artists and poets in late 19th-century France. No wonder he had visions! Sleep deprivation, fasting, and hallucinogens are traditional induction techniques for shamans.
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Figure 15.1 The Starry Night, 1889, Vincent van Gogh, Museum of Modern Art, New York, oil on canvas, 73.7–92.1 cm. (Drawing of The Starry Night by Malka Helfman for this article)
Moreover, van Gogh practiced prolonged looking, basically a meditative technique in which mental chatter eventually begins to dispel and there is a shift from looking—what I call habitual observation—to seeing. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was also an adept at this technique that for him involved special breathing techniques at the solar plexus. In his late letters, he said this focal point was a gateway “in regards to the visible, as well as the invisible” (Rilke, 1948, p. 320). G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) later developed a similar technique of prolonged looking, and this was taken up by the Surrealist artists Gordon Onlow Ford and Remedios Varo, who were actively involved in the study of Gurdjieff’s teachings. Although van Gogh does not mention any breathing techniques in his voluminous letters to his brother Theo, he says that the would often look at a landscape or still life from 7 in the morning to 6 in the evening without a break and at some point arrive at a state of “terrible lucidity” (Stone, 1967, p. 391). During one of his mescaline trips, which he recorded in the Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley found van Gogh’s painting of a chair to be an “astounding portrait of the Ding an Sich [Kant’s thing in itself]” (Huxley, 1963, pp. 28–29).
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And even the sober Martin Heidegger, in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, said that van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes “is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being” (Heidegger, 1964, pp. 665–666). For Huxley and Heidegger, van Gogh had somehow gotten beyond the normal realm of mediated perception that hides the essence of things. For me, van Gogh was able to embody what the Chinese would call the chi or the energy body of a thing. The chi body is a felt quality of aliveness that cannot be apprehended through normal perception. It is hard to describe verbally, although many viewers experience it in the presence of a van Gogh painting and even a reproduction. The chi body becomes more exaggerated and hence readily noticeable and describable in van Gogh’s later work such as Starry Night, 1889 (Figure 15.1), in which he depicts this landscape as a wavy field of incandescent and interconnected energy or light lines in varying intensities and configurations. To see the world as a universal matrix of interconnected vibrating lines is shamanic seeing that goes beyond normal sensory apprehension to reveal another level of reality. Of course, there are other levels of meaning in Starry Night, including a representation of the village of St. Remy or Nuenen, and symbols, such as the combined image of the sun and moon, which have engendered much scholarly interpretation. In the painting Squid and Turtle Dreaming (1972) (Figure 15.2) by the Australian aboriginal artist and shaman Liwukang Burkutlatjpi (born 1927), we observe cross-hatchings representing a similar net of interwoven energy lines that may be invisible except in an ASC. This is the primordial matrix of the Dreamings, the original creators who wove the fabric of existence at the beginning of the Dreamtime, which signifies both this primordial time of creation and nonordinary reality. Like Starry Night, Squid and Turtle Dreaming is replete with many levels of meaning, but the most significant aspect of these two paintings is the energy transmitted from the painted lines. An aboriginal friend of mine, on seeing a reproduction of Squid and Turtle Dreaming, remarked, “when I feel these lines my gut is happy.” The light lines in the Aboriginal painting are also the product of prolonged looking. It is an aspect of the “strong eye” technique that was first mentioned by the anthropologist A. P. Elkin in his pioneering work on aboriginal shamanism, Aboriginal Men of High Degree (1945). Although Elkin only relates “the strong eye” to the aboriginal shaman’s ability to see spirits, several different aboriginal informants who did not wish to be quoted have elaborated it to me. The “strong eye” practice entails standing in a particular pose while trying to maintain nonfocused attention on a landscape over an extended period of time. Nonfocused attention causes
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Figure 15.2 Squid and Turtle Dreaming, 1972, Liwukang Burkutlatjpi, ochre on bark, 92 × 52cm, South Australian Museum (Drawing of Squid and Turtle Dreaming by Malka Helfman for this article)
diminution of the internal dialogue—the projections that overlay experience—bringing about seeing instead of looking, a technique goes far beyond normal vision. The experience of energy lines is also common in advanced forms of meditation such as Kundalini. In deep meditation, opaque objects are seen to dissolve into energy lines that radiate from the
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Figure 15.3 Theologue, 1986, Alex Grey, acrylic on linen, 152.4 × 457.2 cm. (Drawing of Theologue by Malka Helfman for this article)
chakras along the central spinal channel. On a still more profound level of meditation, however, these lines further dissolve into a continuous field of formless vibrating energy. Alex Grey (born 1953) has attempted to depict the energy lines of the penultimate stages of Kundalini meditation in Theologue (1986) (Figure 15.3), which he describes as: During deep meditation, I entered a state where all energy systems in my body were completely aligned and flowing: it was in this state that I imagined Theologue—the Union of Human and Divine Consciousness Weaving the Fabric of Space and Time in Which the Self and the Surroundings are Embedded. (Grey, 1990, p. 93)
In Theologue, Grey shows a yogi in the full lotus posture with the hands in dhyana mudra, the position of complete meditative absorption. A grid of energy lines issues from his glowing subtle body system of chakras and nadis connections between the chakras. Superimposed on the lines are flames symbolizing the fire of the Kundalini shakti (energy), and in the far distance are semitransparent mountains that appear to both simultaneously emerge and dissolve from the grid. As Grey explains, “I was seeing both the perceptual grid of my mind on which space and time are woven, and the universal mind which was both the source and the weaving loom. At this moment, faintly, Himalayan mountains appeared” (Grey, 1990, pp. 94–95). He confided to me that this “deep meditation” that enabled him to see the light lines was an LSD trip but that subsequently he was able to eventually reach a similar level of experience through Tibetan meditation techniques.
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Figure 15.4 The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Salvador Dalı´ , Museum of Modern Art, New York, oil on canvas, 24.1 × 33 cm (Drawing of Persistence of Memory by Malka Helfman for this article)
Dreaming in shamanic cultures is considered to be “soul flight,” a journey into nonordinary reality and through which the shaman retrieves information for the community. There are several techniques that promote shamanic dreaming, including dream incubation and lucid dreaming— the ability to become reflectively conscious of the dream without waking up. Simply recording dreaming in artwork, in a journal, or among friends is a way of remembering dreams and was promoted by the Surrealists. Salvador Dalı´ (1904–1989), for example, would always have paper and pencil by his bedside and even a canvas and brushes in easel where he would record images from his dreams of the night. For the film Un Chien Andalou (1929), a collaborative effort with the avant-garde filmmaker Louis Bun˜uel, he and Dalı´ shared their dreams of the night before in the morning and then tried to realize them during the day in their film. For The Persistence of Memory (1931) (Figure 15.4), one of his bestknown paintings during his Surrealist period, Dalı´ developed a precise and detailed style of realism in which he meticulously recorded the information from a dream or a recurrent series of dreams of a landscape with ants crawling on the surface of limp watches. According to Dalı´,
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my sole ambition is to materialize by means of the most imperialist fury of precision the images of concrete irrationality. The world of imagination and concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, consistent, durable, as persuasively cognoscitively and communicable thick as the world of exterior reality. (Dalı´, 1969, p. 113)
This ambition was shared with other Surrealist painters of the dream, such as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Rene´ Magritte, and Max Ernst. For these Surrealists, dreams were as real as or more real than ordinary reality. Indeed, there is a hyperlucidity and intensity in Dalı´’s style that, in conjunction with the content, transports the viewer to a timeless realm of nonordinary reality. The numinosity of Dalı´’s painted realm in The Persistence of Memory recalls shamanic places of power that I have experienced in shamanic journeys and dreams and to my mind accounts for the continuous ongoing attention given to this painting since its creation. Remedios Varo’s painting is also replete with numinous places from nonordinary reality but has a broader range of shamanic themes than Dalı´’s, including dismemberments in nonordinary reality and other initiatory references, dreams within dreams, visitations from animal and other spirits allies, journeys to the upper and lower world, shape shifting, and so forth [the covers for both volumes include reproductions of Varo’s works]. Like Dalı´’s, Varo’s style is very precise; her father was an engineer who made meticulous drawings of hydraulic systems and she trained at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, which offered a rigorous academic curriculum emphasizing drawing and composition. She was not merely interested in recording the dream, however, unlike the other “academic” Surrealists painters, including Dalı´, who also trained at the San Fernando Academy. In The Encounter (1962) (Figure 15.5), Varo shows a woman meeting an owl figure—a probable shamanic power ally. Simultaneously, two other possible allies, a human face and a bird, appear in her belly and leg regions. Fariba Bogzaran, an expert on art and dreaming, argues, “Whether she painted these images before or after having this dream remains a mystery. If she was not painting her dreams, could it be that she was dreaming her paintings?” (Bogzaran, 2008, p. 173). Perhaps Varo’s artwork is the product of waking dream, a kind of shamanic journey in an ASC akin to what C. G. Jung called the active imagination? It is known that Varo worked actively with night dreams, so it is likely that she had “big dreams” with shamanic content. Bogzaran notes that she was part of a dream group that included her friends, the painter Leonora Carrington and Eva Sulzer, who shared each other’s night
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Figure 15.5 The Encounter, 1962, Remedios Varo, Private Collection, vinyl paint on cardboard, 64 × 44 cm (Drawing of The Encounter by Malka Helfman for this article)
dreams. Varo’s The Fern Cat (1957) makes reference to one of Sulzer’s dreams. With Leonora Carrington, Varo even concocted various exotic dishes in her kitchen to ward off bad dreams! Performance art, which I shall define as live multimedia art by artists who are mostly oriented toward the visual arts, emerged as a genre beginning in the early 20th century among the Dadaists and the Futurists and has been greatly expanded by contemporary artists. Although much of performance art is purely secular, a significant number of artists have in effect created sacred ritual dramas that compare to traditional performance
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art genres. Indeed, in genres such as the Wayang Kulit (the shadow puppet play) in Indonesia, the Noh performance in Japan, the masquerades in Africa, and so forth, performers use percussion, repetitive gestures, chanting, and the like to move themselves and their audiences from ordinary to nonordinary states of reality. In the Wayang, for example, the audience and the performers may enter into an ASC and experience being transported to the magical spirit realm of the puppets for healing and insights into the future. As I discuss in “Wayang Kulit: Indonesia’s Shadow Puppet Plays as a Model for Performance” (1989), this puppet play functions as a sacred ritual.
Figure 15.6 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, November 26, 1965, Joseph Beuys, photograph of the performance at the Galerie Alfred Schmela, Dusseldorf
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During the Second World War, as tail gunner for a Stuka plane, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), was shot down in the Crimea and rescued by a group of Tartar nomads, who wrapped him in fat and felt to preserve his body heat. These actions saved his life. Later, Beuys recognized that his neardeath experience was a shamanic initiation and his role was to be an artist/shaman. “So when I appear as a kind of shamanistic figure or allude to if, I do it to stress my belief in other priorities, and the need to come up with a completely different plan for working with substances. For instance in places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of enchanter to appear,” Beuys exclaimed. (Tisdall, 1979, p. 23)
Although there is an ongoing debate about the authenticity of his Crimean experience and his subsequent role as an artist/shaman, Beuys’ critics fail to recognize that it is not unusual for traditional shamans to fabricate aspects of their identity to enhance the healing effects of their work, and there is no doubt that many individuals had a profound healing experience in conjunction with Beuys’s work. Shamanic authenticity in tribal societies is judged by the shaman’s ability to affect the recipient(s) in both the nonordinary and ordinary levels of reality, and Beuys’ work has that effect on some people. Although many of Beuys’ sculptures manifest an interest in shamanism, particularly those where he references his own healing experience by working with the nontraditional materials of felt and fat, he believed that performance art was his most effective medium as an artist/shaman. Beuys always appeared for his performances wearing a fisherman’s vest, heavy boots, and a crumpled businessman’s hat. This was his shamanic outfit. Although this outfit was not particularly strange by contemporary standards, it contributed to the aura of mystery around him; it became, to use a phrase of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, part of the “coefficient of weirdness” (Malinowski, 1935, p. 220) that furthered his efforts as an artist/shaman. Beuys’ hat has received more attention from the press than any other element of his costume. Following the Aachen meeting between Valery Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt in September of 1978, the German telecasters spent more time discussing the hat of Beuys, who was present at their state lunch, than on reporting the political and economic agreements. According to Mircea Eliade, in his pioneering book Shamanism,
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By the mere fact of donning it [the hat], or manipulating the objects that deputize for it, the shaman transcends profane space and prepares to enter into contact with the spirit world. Usually this preparation is almost a concrete introduction into that world: for the costume is donned after many preliminaries and just on the eve of shamanic trance. (Eliade, 1964, p. 147)
For the most part, Beuys’ performances involved the use of repetitive gestures and/or sounds over a lengthy time period, presumably putting both him and his audience in an ASC. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Figure15.6), at the Galerie Alfred Schmela (in Du¨sseldorf, on November 26, 1965), Beuys rhythmically tapped the iron sole attached to his shoe on the hard stone floor as he walked around the gallery gesticulating in front of his pictures. This tapping may have induced a sonic ASC since his explanations to the hare, lasting some 3 hours, were mute. Beuys explained that How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare was a complex tableau about the problem of language, and about the problems of thought, of human consciousness and the consciousness of animals. This is placed in an extreme position because this is not just an animal but also a dead animal. Even this dead animal has a special power to reproduce . . . even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition that some human beings with their stubborn rationality. (Tisdall, 1979, pp. 103, 105)
The hare was important in the context of this performance as a countervailing force to rationality because of its relationship to the earth and fertility. Moreover, Beuys applied a mask of honey and gold to his head that symbolized his transformation and moving out of the realm of reason—a necessary prerequisite to understanding the hare’s language. “Using honey on my head,” argued Beuys, “I am naturally doing something that is concerned with thought. The human capacity is not to give honey, but to think—to produce ideas. In this way the deathlike character of thought is made living again. Honey is doubtlessly a living substance. Human thought can also be living.” (Adriani, Konnerts, & Thomas, 1979, p. 32)
Shamans often converse in ASC with their power animals and the animals respond using body language or sounds or taking the shamans to places of power in nonordinary reality. In the shamanic worldview, animals have
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Figure 15.7 I like America and America Likes Me, May 1974, Joseph Beuys, photograph of the perfomance at the Rene Block Gallery in New York
wisdom and can convey this wisdom by nonverbal means if asked in the proper ritual way. In another performance, I Like America and America Likes Me (Figure 15.7), May 1974, at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, Beuys communicated for 7 days with a live coyote that had just been taken from the wilderness. Beuys said about this work, I believe I made contact with the psychological trauma point of the United States’ energy constellation; the whole American trauma with the Indian, the Red man . . . You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote, and only then can the trauma be lifted. (Adriani et al., 1979, p. 28)
Beuys knew that for the American Indian, especially the Pueblo Indians, the coyote is one of the most powerful animals—a trickster that symbolizes their own marginal status in American society. Beuys also believed that the tendency of White Americans to reduce native cultures to marginality extended beyond the boundaries of the United States to other cultures and that the Vietnam war was a direct result of this attitude. To emphasize the
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trauma of American relationships with the Indians, which is a form of sickness, Beuys was taken directly from the airport to the gallery in an ambulance, completely wrapped in felt. Over the next 7 days, Beuys repeated over and over a series of complex rituals with the coyote accompanied by sounds made by Beuys by hitting a metal triangle attached to his waist. Some witnesses attest that a deep level of communication took place between Beuys and the coyote, which greatly moved them. Sha Sha Higby (born 1952) spent several years studying traditional performance genres in Asia, although she transforms the ancient languages of these genres into her own unique and contemporary language. In 1972 she stayed in Japan for 1 year, absorbing ideas from the Japanese Noh and Butoh—an extremely slow, primordial, and visceral form of dance that emerged in Japan following the Second World and in which
Figure 15.8 Clouds of Tea, December 2009, Sha Sha Higby, at Live Oak Theatre, Berkeley (Photograph of costume, permission and image courtesy of the artist)
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the performers are almost naked [see Zarrilli, this volume]. From 1977 to 1982, she was in Indonesia studying various forms of Javanese puppetry. In the first stage of Higby’s artistic process, she takes between 6 months to a year to create a costume made of a wide variety of materials including shells, carved wood, sticks, twigs, feathers, rhinestones, paper, silk, gold leaf, ceramic pieces, fiber, leather, water buffalo hides, glass spine as a supporting mechanism, and so forth. The masks alone involve the application of 50 coats of lacquer consisting of powdered eggshells and glue. These techniques are largely the result of her apprenticeship with a master Japanese mask maker for Noh in Kyoto. Although the masks are highly refined, the equally wellcrafted costumes are much more earthy and organic. Mask and costume, however, mesh together into a funky latticework of abstract shapes that can include puppets as Higby moves. As she is almost completely absorbed by the mask and the costume—a kind of wearable environment, in the words of one critic—“she is transformed into a primordial being or soul from the lower world, manipulating puppets as if they were humans” (Zimmer, 1986, p. 6). Her performances also involve gradually entering and/or shedding the costume—a ritual metaphor for birth, death, and metamorphosis that occurs in both the ordinary realm and the nonordinary realm in an ASC (Figure 15.8). This is produced by extremely slow movements and the repetitive effects of the music written and performed by her husband, Albert Goldman. A fairly recent performance of Higby’s, Folded Under a Stone Sleeping, accompanied by her husband’s music, can be seen on YouTube at http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF66U4EGfy0. Notwithstanding the slow unfolding of Higby’s work, the viewer is greeted by succession of otherworldly images that seem to be in a constant state of metamorphosis like those in a shamanic journey.
Modern Artists and Meditation Kasmir Malevich’s (1878–1935) reductivist paintings mirror his own practice of meditation, in which he attempted to gradually reduce his own sensations and dissolve into the Void. In the 1960s, he would be acknowledged as one of the precursors of the art movement known as Minimalism to which Agnes Martin has been related too by critics and art historians. Malevich was a member of a small circle of artists and intellectual friends who practiced raja yoga as described in the book Sverkhsozhnanie I putti k ego distizheniuu (The Super Consciousness and the Ways to Achieve It) by M. V. Loyzehnski, first published in 1911. The author shows how prolonged states of nonconceptual awareness bring about various levels of samadhi (see Douglas, 1989, pp. 186–187). Unfortunately,
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Figure 15.9 Suprematist Composition, White on White, 1918, Kasmir Malevich, Museum of Modern Art, oil on canvas, 79.4 × 79.4 cm (Drawing of Suprematist Composition by Malka Helfman for this article)
however, there are very few references to Malevich’s meditation practice in his own voluminous writings. One clue in his writing is his desire to “purify his senses” and “transform himself into a zero” (Malevich, 1969, p. 119). Malevich was the founder of the early 20th-century art movement known as Suprematism, which means the supremacy of pure sensations over both perceptions and feelings. Malevich described The Black Square (1915), a monochromatic black square on a white ground, as follows: “the square- sensation, the white field, the Void beyond sensation” (Herbert, 1964, p. 96). In this pioneering work of metaphysical abstraction, there are just the sensations embodied in the minimal color, texture, and geometrical elements, of the rough matte texture of the black square superimposed on the more refined surface of the white background. For
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Malevich, The Black Square was the new icon of the time that he hoped would replace the traditional Russian icon in the upper corner of a room. Malevich was well aware that “there are no traditional [Russian] icons in which the Saint is a zero” (Douglas, 1975, p. 128). The Black Square is the embodiment of the absolute, the formless Void that Malevich probably apprehended in a state of samadhi (see Shear, this volume). “If anyone has comprehended the absolute he has encountered Nothing,” wrote Malevich (1969, p. 224). In Suprematist Composition, White on White (1918) (Figure 15.9), a white square tilted on a diagonal ground, Malevich goes even further in approximating the experience of the void in samadhi. The sensation of black on white is much stronger than the sensation of white on white, where sensation is more rarefied. To be sure, the opportunity for Malevich to obtain knowledge of Eastern philosophy and meditation practices in Russia during the early 20th century was limited. Agnes Martin (1912–2004) had much more of Eastern philosophy available to her in translation during the second half of the 20th century. In a letter to the British art historian Daniel Clarke, Martin wrote, My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual teachers, especially Lao Tzu . . . My next strongest influence is the Sixth patriarch [of Zen Buddhism] Hui Neng . . . I have also read and been inspired by the sutras of the other Buddhist masters and Chuang Tzu who was very wise and amusing. (Clarke, 1988, p. 231)
Hui Neng spoke of the nondiscriminating wisdom of pure perception, an idea that reverberates through Martin’s writings: “When your eyes are open you see beauty in everything” (in Haskell, 1992, p. 17). To attain this level of pure perception, it is necessary to first examine one’s own mind. According to Martin, “When [at first] you look into your own mind you find it covered by a lot of rubbishy thoughts”(Martin, 1992, p. 154) and then “by bringing my thoughts to the surface of the mind, I can watch them dissolve” (Martin, 1992, p. 41). This methodology is very similar to the first stages of Vipassana meditation. In it, the naming of thought as thought helps to go beyond thoughts to a deeper level of mind. For Martin, this was the artist’s path as well. “You have to penetrate these [rubbishy ideas] and hear what your [deeper] mind is telling you to do. Such work is original work . . . My main intention is the destruction of the ego” (Martin, 1992, pp. 41, 154). Martin learned than an important requisite for deep listening and surrendering was solitude. “It is necessary to practice being quiet to empty
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Figure 15.10 The Rose, 1964, Agnes Martin, oil, red and black pencil, sizing on canvas, Art Gallery of Ontario, 180.34 × 180.34 cm (Drawing of The Rose by Malka Helfman for this article)
the mind,” said Martin in a film interview (Lance, 2003). For many years, she lived alone on a mesa near Cuba, New Mexico, where she built her own adobe buildings and lived without electricity, running water, or a telephone. The nearest house was 6 miles away. “I became as wise as a Chinese hermit,” she said (in Simon, 1996, p. 89). “To discover conscious mind in a world where intellect is held valuable requires solitude, quite a lot of solitude” (Martin, 1992, p. 117). Martin’s goal was to find an abstract vehicle to convey the essence of pure mind in painting. The subject of painting therefore is not in the objective world: “Not nature but the dissolution of nature” (Martin, 1992, p. 117). She wrote that her artistic paradigm was “two late Tang
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dishes, one with a flower image, one empty—the empty form goes all the way to heaven” (Martin, 1992, p. 35). Beginning in Martin’s painting in the early 1960s, the empty form that goes all the way to heaven was a grid of thin imperfectly straight horizontal and vertical lines on a flat monochromatic surface (Figure 15.10). In the major part of Martin’s oeuvre, the tiny rectangles created by the intersecting lines are in Martin’s words “non hieratic and non-relational . . . holding every part of the surface in perfect equilibrium” (in Haskell, 1992, p. 142). Also, as Martin maintained, “in art as in reality, the plurality of varied and similar forms annihilates the existence as forms as entities. Similar forms do not show contrast but are in equivalent opposition. Therefore they annihilate themselves more completely in their plurality” (Michelson, 1967, p. 46). Moreover, the little rectangles also counterbalance the square formats of the paintings, in effect erasing the overall grid. “My formats,” Martin pointed out, “are square but the grids never are absolutely square, they are rectangles a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” (in Alloway, 1973, p. 62)
The effect of Martin’s painting is very similar to Tantric yantras, as she acknowledged in an interview (Simon, 1996, p. 87). The Shri Yantra diagram, a classic visualization diagram or yantra used in Tantric meditation practice, has a balance of four triangles going up and four triangles going down (Figure 15.11). The upward-pointing triangles represent male energy and the downward-pointing triangles represent female energy. This creates an equilibrium that calms and focuses the mind so that the meditator can enter the Void, symbolized by the bindu point at the center of the intersecting triangles. Eventually, after prolonged looking, the thinly drawn and slightly quivering rectangles in Martin’s painting, which are fragile to begin with, dissolve. As the more perceptive critics have noted, Martin’s lines are nonmarks rather than marks. These critics have linked these nonmarks to her attempts at egolessness. Also, like the meditative experience of the Shri Yantra where the triangles also eventually dissolve, the experience of her work, in the words of art critic Roberta Smith, “is prolonged, slow and perceptual, a revelatory experience in time” (Smith, 1975, p. 73). Unlike the Shri Yantra, however, the repetition of squares or rectangles in Martin’s painting creates the feeling of an endless field, obliquely reminiscent of the level plains of Saskatchewan where Martin grew up, as well
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Figure 15.11
(Drawing of the Shri Yantra by Malka Helfman for this article)
as the deserts of New Mexico. These fields open and expand the mind of the viewer in preparation for the experience of the Void. While this kind of expansion does not happen in the Shri Yantra diagram, it occurs in Chinese landscape painting and Zen gardens, where an attempt is made to create the illusion of infinite space. Also, unlike the Shri Yantra diagram, the space anterior to the grids in Martin’s works is not empty but is carefully painted, giving her work a presence not found in the Shri Yantra. Of course, the Shri Yantra is primarily a diagram to assist the meditative process and is only secondarily a work of art. Critics have compared Martin’s pale fields to a Taoist womb matrix, but for me Martin’s spatial fields are an approximation of the etheric or chi body of Taoism that connects to the uncovered block, the ultimate Void matrix of Taoism, but is not this matrix. In Taoism, the energy or
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chi body is a condensation of this ultimate matrix, more like a “breath” or a “vapor” than the clear, formless Taoist Void that is referenced by the blank empty space of the paper or silk in traditional Chinese painting. In fact, the art critic Hilton Kramer aptly characterized Martin’s fields as a “vapor,” where “color is almost drained of color” (Kramer, 1976, p. 23). I am not saying that Martin was consciously aware of the chi body but that her paintings present a kind of intermediary void that connects with the Void rather than the primordial matrix itself. She was attempting to find an “empty form that goes all the way to heaven.” By clearing away the rubbish in her mind, it is entirely possible that Martin made contact with both the chi body and the Void/Tao. From 1962 to 1964, Robert Irwin (born 1928) isolated himself in his Los Angeles studio, painting “a total of twenty lines over two days of very, very intense activity, I mean I essentially spent twelve and fifteen hours a day in the studio, seven days a week” (Weschler, 1982, p. 70). He further told his principal biographer, Lawrence Weschler, “I started spending the time just sitting there looking. I would look for an hour, sleep for half an hour. It was a pretty hilarious sort of activity” (in Weschler, 1982, p. 73). Irwin later recognized this process of looking as being similar to Zen meditation because he had to transcend his own boredom and restlessness as well as his mental and emotional projections to make progress. Eventually the lines on the canvas merged with the energy lines of the room and then Irwin found that he was connected to the underlying field of pure vibrating energy. Irwin’s Disk series of 1967 is an attempt to recapitulate this experience of the Void in sculpture. Untitled (Figure 15.12) is a white-painted Plexiglas circle measuring 53 inches (134.62 in diameter). The depth increases from 2.5 inches at the center to 1/16 inch at the edges. The disk is suspended by a hidden armature extending 2 inches from the wall and is lit by four lamps of equal intensity that create a horizontal shadow about 10 feet wide at the center of the disk. For the observer to actually see the piece, he or she has to slow down the mind and emotions and surrender boredom and restlessness. After some time, the disks gradually lose their material structure and figure becomes indistinguishable from ground. The apparent interchangeability of substance and void is the result. To my mind, the disks are successful embodiment of the famous line of the Heart Sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Also, the energy-filled empty white space that emerges as the disk dissolves is an effective simulation of samadhi. Indeed, Irwin has created a mandalalike device that tends to eliminate itself as an object while giving the viewer an aesthetic simulacrum of the Void.
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Figure 15.12 Untitled, disk, Robert Irwin, 1968, Acrylic Lacquer on Plastic, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 134.62 × 132.62 × 60.96 cm (Drawing of Untitled by Malka Helfman for this article)
Let us compare Irwin’s mandala to a traditional Tibetan mandala of Chakrasambhara in union with his consort Vajravarahi, symbolizing the fusion of energy and wisdom in the ultimate Void (Figure 15.13). Of course, Irwin’s formal sculptural language is abstract, avant-garde, and not representational like the Tibetan mandala, which was conceived according to standard formulae for mandalas and the representation of deities in mandalas. Yet, for the Tibetan mandala to work, the adept has to be initiated by a guru into the complex visualization practices of Chakrasambhara, while an uninitiated individual can get a simulacrum of the meditative experience of the ultimate Void if he or she takes the time to contemplate Irwin’s disk.
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Figure 15.13 Chakrasambhara Mandala, 18th century, water based colors on cloth, collection of Mark Levy, 68.60 × 68.60 cm (Photograph by Mark Levy)
To my knowledge, Jamie Brunson’s (born 1955) practice of meditation is more systematic and intense than that of the other artists whose work I have discussed thus far in this article. She is an adept of Kundalini meditation who has managed to find visual equivalents for her meditation practice in her artwork, albeit in the traditional medium of painting. Kundalini meditation involves breathing techniques that open the so-called chakra centers of energy and consciousness that comprise the subtle body. In Kundalini meditation, a form of Tantric practice, the adept opens the subtle body though pranayama techniques and then merges his or her internal energies with the Void.
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Brunson describes her painting in relation to Kundalini meditation as follows: Kundalini is an open-eyed meditation based on rhythmic, cyclical breathing that allows unfocused seeing and deep concentration. In deep meditation, it’s sometimes possible to enter an “altered” state that has specific physical and visual qualities. The sensations in Kundalini are ones of opening or expanding—as if the boundaries between oneself and the external world were dissolving. Simultaneously, it’s possible to feel enveloped with a sense of absolute union, as if one were part of a massive web that connects everything to everything else. I chose lattices and veils as forms to represent the experience because they’re the closest visual analogues I could find. In this body of work I’ve taken a process-oriented approach, using the physical qualities of paint to mimic perceptual phenomena—blurring, overlapping, dissolving edges, and radiance—that come from meditation. (Brunson, 2010)
The experience of the subtle body realm as it moves into the Void body, at the very edge of the senses, is an exquisite visual spectacle in continual metamorphosis, and the forms, which are indistinguishable from the qualities of the paint and paint application, mirror the experience of this realm. Brunson has developed a highly refined paint formula including a mix of oil paint, alkyd medium, and refined beeswax on canvas stretched over panels to create the deliquescent saturations of the surface that are the distinguishing elements of her work. Brunson rightly argues that “the [painting] process demands a level of consciousness and presence that reflects the engagement that meditation practice similarly demands” (Brunson, 2010). Brunson’s paintings are the product of the overlap between meditation and shamanic seeing as an underlying web of energy is revealed. In the Veils, this display of energy is not manifest in actual lines but evanescent, amorphous skeins of paint that seem to pulse in and out of the surface of the painting. In meditation, the Kundalini adept becomes aware of the spanda or vibration of the subtle body and links this vibration to the spanda of primordial Void. An allusion to this linkage is an element of the Veils, although this series, like Brunson’s other bodies of work, also functions as an open-ended metaphor that allows for multiple associations. In the Lattices, such as Braid (Figure 15.14), lines are more noticeable as microcosmic cellular forms coalesce into tubes reminiscent of the internal channels of energy, particularly the central and side channels that go up the spine and become noticeable to the Kundalini adept as she wakes up the subtle body through pranayama.
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Figure 15.14 Braid, Jamie Brunson, oil and alkyd on paper, Andrea Schwartz Gallery, 57.15 × 57 × 22.5 cm (Permission and image courtesy of the artist)
Conclusions The tendency of visual works in the period from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been to celebrate the idea of art for art’s sake, culminating in the notion of postmodernist play. Artworks from this period have also reflected popular culture, political ideologies, and the angstridden zeitgeist of the modern and postmodern eras. The artists in this chapter, however, are exceptional mainly because they offer a respite from the materialist fixation on ordinary reality that characterizes much of this period of art history. There are many more artists who are involved in shamanic practice and meditation than I have been able to mention here. Hopefully we are now at the beginning of a groundswell of meaningful spiritual paradigms that will characterize twenty-first-century art.
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References Adriani, G., Konnertz, W., & Thomas, K. (1979). Joseph Beuys: Life and work. (P. Leah, trans.). Woodbury, CT: Barron. Alloway, L. (1973). Agnes Martin. Artforum, 11, 32–36. Bogzaran, F. (2008). Dreams of alchemy. Five keys to the secret world of Remedios Varo. Mexico City: Artes de Me´xico. Brunson, J. (2010). Statement. Retrieved January 17, 2010, from http://www .jamiebrunson.com/paintings/lattices.html. Carden˜a, E. (2009). Beyond Plato?: Toward a science of alterations of consciousness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation. Clarke. D. (1988). The influence of Oriental thought on postwar American painting and sculpture. New York: Garland. Dalı´, S. (1969). Conversations with Dali. (J. Neugroschel, trans.). New York: Dutton. Douglas, C. (1975). Suprematism: The sensible dimension. Russian Review, 34, 266–281. Douglas, C. (1989). Beyond reason: Malevich, Matiushin and their circle. The spiritual in art: Abstract painting (1890–1955). New York: Abbeville. Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. (W. Trask, trans.) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Elkin, A. P. (1945). Aboriginal men of high degree. New York: St. Martin’s. Grey, A. (1990). Sacred mirrors. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International. Haskell, B. (1992). Agnes Martin. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Heidegger, M. (1964). In R. Hofstater & R. Kuhns (Eds.), Philosophies of art and beauty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herbert, R. (1964). Modern artists on art. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Huxley, A. (1963). The doors of perception and heaven and hell. New York: Harper and Row. Iribas-Rudı´n, A. (2009, June 11–14). Hypnosis in contemporary art. Poster presented at the international conference Toward a Science of Consciousness 2009. Investigating Inner Experience. Brain, Mind, Technology. Hong Kong. Levy, M. (1989). Wayang Kulit: Indonesia’s shadow puppet plays as a model for performance. High Performance, 46, 38–52. Levy, M. (1993). Technicians of ecstasy: Shamanism and the modern artist. Putney, VT: Bramble. Levy, M. (2005). Void/in art. Putney, VT: Bramble Malevich, K. (1969). Essays on art. T. Andersson (Ed.; X. Gloweacki & A. McMillan, trans). Copenhagen: Borden. Malinowski, B. (1935). Coral gardens and their magic, Vol. II (pp. 213–222). New York: American Book. Martin, A. (1992). Writings/Shriften. Winterthur, Switzerland: Editions Canz. Michelson, A. (1967). Agnes Martin: Recent paintings. Artforum, 5, 46–47.
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Rilke, R. (1948). Letters: 1910–1926. (J. Green & H. Norton, trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. Simon, J. (1996). Perfection of the mind: An interview with Agnes Martin. Art in America, 84, 82–84, 124. Smith, R. (1975). Reviews: Agnes Martin. Artforum, 13, 72–73. Stone, I. (1967). Dear Theo. New York: New American Library. Tisdall, C. (1979). Joseph Beuys. New York: Guggenheim Museum. Walsh, R. (1990). The spirit of shamanism. Los Angeles: Tarcher. Weschler, L. (1982). Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zimmer, E. (1986, October 24). Higby dances out of this world. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, p. 6.
CHAPTER 16
Time Is the Key: Music and Altered States of Consciousness Jo¨rg C. Fachner Music and consciousness are things we do. . . . Achieving consciousness, from the Latin con (with) and scire (to know), is the central activity of human knowledge. At the heart of the word is a concept of mutuality, knowing with others. Our consciousness is a mutual activity; it is performed. (Aldridge, 2006, p. 10)
Introduction In this chapter, I will summarize the literature on how music and altered states of consciousness (ASC) are connected. Essential aspects include induction and expression of emotions and rhythmic body movements to music and how an altered experience of music is connected to states of altered temporality. Winkelman (2000) stressed the human capacity for experiencing ASC as a fundamental biological function. Studies on brain functions of altered music experience and temporality (Fachner, 2006b, 2009; Shanon, 2001) convey the natural bases of these phenomena, which have been utilized in shamanistic practice for ages. As Rouget suggested: To shamanize, in other words to sing and dance, is as much a corporeal technique as a spiritual exercise. Insofar as he is at the same time singer, instrumentalist, and dancer, the shaman, among all practitioners of trance, should be seen as the one who by far makes the most complete use of music. (Rouget, 1985, p. 319)
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Music and the Alteration of Consciousness Music functions in many different contexts to alter consciousness, while the same music can be listened to without altering consciousness per se (Becker, 1994). Music can be fast, loud, and with a steady beat, as for example in gospel music, leading to religious rapture, or the music can be slow, solemn, and spherical to accompany contemplative worshiping (So¨hngen, 1967). For Rouget (1985), music creates emotional conditions and structures time processes of symbolic events, especially in ceremonial settings in which it is intended to alter consciousness states for individual or group ritual purposes [see Ustinova, and Zarrilli, this volume]. Rouget’s groundbreaking book Music and Trance. A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession differentiates between trance (from Latin transire for “passing through”) and ecstasy (from Latin exstasis for “to be out or stand out of stasis”). For him, “trance is always associated with a greater or lesser degree of sensory overstimulation—noises, music, smells, agitation— ecstasy, on the contrary, is most often tied to sensorial deprivation—silence, fasting, darkness” (Rouget, 1985, p. 10) (see Table 16.1). The literature includes many different and partly contradictory definitions of the terms trance and ecstasy (also see Carden˜a, 2009; Fachner, 2006a; Matussek, 2001; Meszaros, Szabo, & Csako, 2002; Pekala & Kumar, 2000; Winkelman, 1986). Rouget’s concepts of trance and ecstasy are linked to the amount of body movement to music. Trance music in Rouget’s terminology is connected to rhythmic body movements, to dance, excitement, and hyperarousal, and in certain rituals it may also lead to possession trance. Ecstasy,
Table 16.1
Differentiation of ecstasy and trance according to Rouget, 1985, 11.
Ecstasy
Trance
Immobility
Movement
Silence
Noise
Solitude
In company
No crisis
Crisis
Sensory deprivation
Sensory overstimulation
Recollection
Amnesia
Hallucination
No hallucination
Time Is the Key
meanwhile, happens in hypoarousal and immobility and seems to be more concerned with pure mental activity, like meditation, contemplation, and the like. A recent inquiry on out-of-body experiences has shown that such ASC occur more often in immobility, when lying down supine or sitting (Zingrone, Alvarado, & Carden˜a, 2010), when the focus of attention can turn inward, and more afferent information is processed, a finding that corroborates Rouget’s concept of ecstasy [see Winkelman, Volume 2]. Although the everyday connotation of the terms trance and ecstasy may have diametrical or similar meanings when connected to music (Hess, Fachner, & Rittner, 2009; Rittner, Fachner, & Hess, 2009), in the techno music genre, trance still stands for dance and excitation and ecstasy refers to a meditative “chill-out” music, representing the relaxation state after exhaustive dancing (Hutson, 2000; Penman & Becker, 2009; Weir, 1996) [see St John, this volume].
Trance Mechanics: How to Explain Trance? Neher (1961, 1962) proposed that epilepsy-like phenomena witnessed in ceremonial drumming and healing rituals are based on the causal effects of a certain sound and tempo. Successive elements are: (1) a distinct frequency spectrum, dominated by low and loud bass frequencies of drums (Neher, 1962, pp. 152–153); (2) repetition of distinct rhythmic patterns (“monotonous drumming”) to ensure that such frequency spectra occur; and (3) a certain tempo (beats per minute) of such drum beat sequences in order to entrain brainwave patterns. This would explain the extreme cases of unusual behavior in ceremonies involving drumming. Neher proposed that this was the consequence of an auditory driving effect analogous to the epilepsy-inducing effect of photic driving (brain convulsions caused by rhythmic light emissions at a frequency of predominantly 10 Hz). He argued that the volume and energy of lowfrequency sound information traveling bottom-up the afferent auditory pathways would induce sensory overstimulation and entrain other sensory modalities and trigger convulsions. The drumbeat frequency (beats per second) would synchronize EEG frequency measured in cycles per second. Neher (1961, p. 449) used strongly beaten drum beat frequencies performed at 3, 4, 6, and 8 Hz (beats per second), which in his homology would be analogue to the EEG’s theta range (3–8 Hz), while photic driving was used in the range of alpha waves (8–13 Hz/flashes per second). The 8 to 13 beats per second are difficult to realize on drums by one player alone because of the extremely quick pulsating sequence (cf. Neher, 1961, p. 449;
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1962, pp. 153–154). A group of players would be able to produce such pulsations by weaving their beats together. Nowadays, computer technology and appropriate music hardware (sampler, sequencer, sound modules, etc.) may permit such constant modes of play. Neher’s ideas were taken up again in the rave culture in order to explain the altered states of consciousness occurring in the context of techno music and rave parties through sound (bass frequencies), repetition (loops and sequences), and tempo (bpm) of rhythmic patterns (Cousto, 1995; Hutson, 2000; Weir, 1996). Rouget believed such experimental attempts to explain a universal “trance mechanism” with reference to constant low-pitch drumbeats alone to be incomplete, since the laboratory situation in Neher’s experiment could not be compared to other settings. The auditory stimuli used in the lab, which were constant in form and intensity, have in practice very little in common with the constantly varying stimuli provided by drums played in possession events. Further, Rouget stressed that ritual leaders and musicians do not enter ASC unintentionally but willingly using known cultural techniques. “If Neher were right, half of Africa would be in a trance from the beginning of the year to the end” (Rouget, 1985, p. 175). The person must have a specific aim and must be intellectually prepared for the experience (Rouget, 1985, pp. 315–326). For example, the possessed individual must identify with the respective form of divine being pertinent to his or her culture and possibly attract the spirit through characteristic movements (pp. 35, 103, 105–108). Neher’s work on “auditory driving” has inspired a lot of discussions, critics, and enthusiasm (for a review, see Turow, 2005) and was a first experimental attempt to explore entrainment (a coupling of inner rhythms through external timers), a conformity of body movements, breath, heart beat, and nerve activity triggered and synchronized by rhythm. Although there is evidence that brainwaves entrain to external rhythmic stimulation (Becker, 1994; Fachner, 2006a; Maxfield, 1990; Turow, 2005; Wright, 1991), Neher’s interpretation (gained visually—not quantitatively—from the ongoing EEG) that certain drumbeat tempo entrains equivalent EEG cycles still calls for sound replication.1
Music Therapy, Emotion and ASC In one branch of music therapy theory discourse, the roots of music therapy are traced back to shamanic practices (Aigen, 1994; Crowe, 1
A symposium on Brainwave Entrainment to External Rhythmic Stimuli organized by Turow in 2006 gathered researchers on this topic, but no explicit replication of Neher’s results was presented (see http://stanford.edu/group/brainwaves/2006/index.html).
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2004; Fachner, 1998, 2007; Hanser, 2009), the core of which are a variety of techniques such as drumming, dance, and music to alter consciousness. The question of how music induces ASC remains unsolved in discussions of the effect of music in music therapy and psychology (Ruud, 2001). The effects of music in settings with a goal-directed therapeutic intervention are based on models of modern music therapy (there are at least five major models) and accordingly are a reflection of practice-related issues (Aldridge, 1996). Whether the music itself has certain healing properties or whether the therapeutic relationship in music is effective is an ongoing discussion in music therapy research reflecting paradigmatic discourse of biomedical and social science approaches in medicine: Is it the medicine or the person that administers it that provides help (Fachner, 2007)? In our topic here, we may also ask if it is the music itself that has certain properties that per se induce ASC and healing or if music just accompanies rituals that intend to induce ASC [see Mishara & Schwartz, Volume 2].
Sound and ASC In music therapy approaches using ASC (see Aldridge & Fachner, 2006; Bonny, 1980; Hess, Fachner, & Rittner, 2009; Rittner, Fachner, & Hess, 2009), the therapist strives for a “non conventional, healing state of consciousness” (Haerlin, 1998, p. 238) in single or group sessions with monochrome sound instruments such as sound bowls, gongs, and monochord, and pulsation instruments such as drums and rattles. Timmermann (2009) emphasizes the significance of a monotonous repetition of sounds as a core element of ASC induction. The duration of sounds appears to be important for the effects on the client. According to Arrie´n, “most individuals need 13 to 15 minutes in order to be influenced or carried away by drums” (Haerlin, 1998, p. 239). Haerlin writes that the main effect of ASC-inducing instruments is the “induction of an empty trance matrix that reduces the noise of thought and more or less suspends the normal and pathological frame of beliefs and references” (p. 240). Techniques that alter the focus of attention, and thereby consciousness, offer a way to empty the contents of memory (Dietrich, 2003), allowing for new information to enter (Matussek, 2001), safely guided by the therapist. However, proposals that base ASC induction on the absorbing sounds of instruments alone overlook the influence of set and setting, the uniqueness of situation and context, and the personality and history of the receiving individual, as well as the specific sociocultural situation and attitudes of the persons involved in performance in the therapeutic process (Fachner, 2007). From a psychodynamic perspective, Strobel writes: “Strictly speaking, it is
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not only the sound, but the therapist via the sound who affects the client, and the client re-influences the therapist with his responses” (Strobel, 1988, p. 121).
Absorption, Imagery, and Musical Experiences Listening to music as a sensual, aesthetic experience can completely absorb people and completely cut off other sensory input, but absorption seems to be linked to music preference, imagery, and hypnotizability. Snodgrass and Lynn (1989) looked for correlations between persons with high, medium, and low susceptibility to hypnosis (measured with the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A) and their degree of imaginative absorption while listening to highly and less imaginative music (imaginativeness of 12 pieces of classical music rated by 49 participants on a 7-point scale). Irrespective of imaginative qualities, highly hypnotizable persons reported markedly more absorption than persons with low susceptibility to hypnosis. All test participants clearly revealed higher imaginative performance with highly imaginative pieces compared to less imaginative ones. Differences in imaginative performance were found between persons with high hypnotic susceptibility while listening to highly imaginative music, but not with less imaginative music. Highly hypnotizable “fans” of classical music showed significant correlations between absorption and hypnotizability, a finding that was replicated by Kreutz and coworkers (2008), showing the influence of musical preferences on the intensity of emotions and absorption skills.
Music and Emotions in the Brain Some very special pieces of music may send shivers down the spine; it is exactly these shivers or chills felt in listening to our favorite music that were used by Blood and Zatorre (2001) to demonstrate that musical information involves brain structures involved in conveying emotion. Listening to our favorite melody, we register changes not only in the activity of the autonomous nervous system, heart beat, muscle tension, skin resistance, and depth of breathing but particularly in the blood flow in brain structures involved in processing emotional stimuli. The activation pattern (blood flow) of brain regions (increased: ventral striatum, dorsomedial midbrain, insula, orbitofrontal cortex; decreased: amygdala, left hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex) shows a surprising similarity to activity patterns induced by drugs with a primarily euphoric effect similar to that of cocaine. This suggests that the perception of favorite music
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interacts directly with structures associated with emotions (Blood & Zatorre, 2001) [see Presti, Volume 2]. Menon and Levitin were able to show sequences of brain processes and their connectivity patterns involved when listening to music, that is, the succeeding time process of how and when the different centers of the brain become active when the “brain is on music” (Levitin, 2008). Menon and Levitin (2005) proposed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain not easily visible in Blood and Zatorre’s PET scans, initiates dopamine release in response to music [see Previc, Volume 2]. They found that, starting from the auditory centers, the cascade of activation initializes changes in parts of the frontal cortex, the mesolimbic reward centers, and finally the nucleus accumbens, releasing waves of dopamine. As expected, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia, regions of the brain involved in dopamine, motor, and timing processes analyzing rhythm and meter in music, became active as well. Phasic increases in dopamine release happen when meaningful objects are in the focus of attention; the higher the personal meaning and valence of the object in focus, the more dopamine is released (Yacubian & Bu¨chel, 2009). A skilled musician (or shaman) may organize the sounds and rhythms played to culminate at a certain important point in the ritual and trigger endogenous processes (Katz & de Rios, 1971). Goldstein (1980) has already shown that the amount of “chills” can be diminished by administering opioid receptor antagonists such as naloxone to weaken the impact of the emotional experience of music. Opioid receptors with a high density in the brainstem region around the inferior collicolus “may mediate attachments we develop to certain beloved sounds” (Panksepp & Bernatzky, 2002, p. 137), enabling us to focus our emotions on certain beloved objects. An intense night in a club under the influence of certain club-specific music and drugs will be remembered and stored as such a beloved sound and will act later as a cue for seeking these intense events again. Panksepp has described the “generalized incentive-seeking system centered on mesolimbic and mesocortical dopamine circuits” (p. 135) that are activated when musical expectancies are coming into play and are important for the processing of time passages for rhythmic body movements. A study on religious and deep listeners (people who have strong emotional reactions, like goosebumps or crying or are otherwise deeply moved when listening to their favorite music) in comparison to controls showed stronger responses in heart rate and galvanic skin response when listening to self-selected, preferred music (Penman & Becker, 2009). Deep listeners described their experiences in transcendent terms and responses occurred
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parallel to differing parts of the music that were of high subjective valence for the listeners. This occurrence was not locked to specific parts of the music; there was no straight connection of strong emotions to musical boundaries like returning chorus, a sudden change of musical registers, and so forth. This study illustrates how music functions as “a catalyst of strong emotions that may lead to trancing” (Penman & Becker, 2009, p. 64). Physiological reactions (chills) are connected to reward circuits in the brain. They intensify the personal experience and mediate the meaning of the musical events, which are time-locked in their occurrence with specific moments inherent in the preferred or beloved music but are not necessarily locked to specific musical elements such as certain keys, harmonies, tempos, or loudness.
The Role of Music in Evolution and Information Transfer and Social Bonding Matussek (2001) proposes that the cultural matrix and the physiological effects of music complement each other functionally to produce a state of amnesia and a willingness to assimilate new information. Freeman (2000) proposes that music and dance were related to the cultural evolution of human behavior and forms of social bonding. He saw connections in the cultural transmission of knowledge during ASC caused by chemical and behavioral forms of induction. Alterations of consciousness produced in this manner served to break through habits and beliefs about reality and increase alertness for new and more complex information. In times of primarily oral information transfer, memorization techniques were required to stimulate all senses for storing and processing that information. Musical abilities in particular seemed to be important for an effective transfer of knowledge. Human musical expressive abilities evolved as a prelinguistic communication medium (Cross & Woodruff, 2009) and a framework prior to language that was utilized for communicating context-sensitive and complex emotional codings in an ongoing symbolic frame of reference in group interactions. Winkelman (2002, p. 78) stressed psychoemotional group bonding processes engaged by chanting, an affective vocalization and rhythmic medium that played a central role in human cognitive evolution through engaging biological competences that create empathy, group solidarity, and cohesion. Vocalizations communicate affective states and may mark territorial claims. Chanting provides a communication medium prior to speech, extending forms of affective vocalizations shared with other primates as well. The difference in musical expression in humans and animals involves referential symbolism and classification of musical
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elements whereby animal vocalizations of affective states are immediate expressions with nonsymbolic means, not planned nor integrated. Winkelman (2002) further stresses the advantage of music in strengthening group cohesion and identity. Rhythm in particular provides an external stimulation that coordinates and synchronizes group performances through a rhythmo-affective semantics and expression (2002, pp. 79, 80).
ASC, Music, and (Rhythmic) Body Movements During drumming as well as dancing, the rhythmic movements of the body synchronize through the rhythm of the music. This occurs automatically during prolonged activity, without effort or control. This may give the impression that one becomes united or “one with the rhythm.” For many rave dancers, this is a well-known experience (Hutson, 2000). Aaronson refers to the rave party as a “ritual space of rhythmic cohesion” in which rhythm, sound, and light effects evoke a bodily expression of figurative and abstract dances inscribing music into spaces “that go beyond the bounds of social class” (Aaronson, 1999, pp. 231, 232) in the sense of an embodied idealism (Rill, 2006). Rhythmic body movements are accompanied by recurrent shifts in body fluids, especially in the blood. In addition, respiration tends to synchronize with movements and induces the heart rate oscillations known as respiratory sinus arrhythmia. In this way, rhythmic movements may result in a respiratory– cardiovascular synchronization with increased blood pressure oscillations that stimulate the carotid baroreceptors. The effects of baroreceptor stimulation are not confined to a slowing of the heart rate; they also reduce cortical arousal and excitability, augment pain thresholds, reduce muscular reflexes, and increase theta activity, as has been shown in previous work. (Vaitl et al., 2005, p. 107)
It is a known fact from hypnosis research that there are personalities that are more hypnotizable and susceptible to hypnosis than others. Therefore, psychometric tools such as the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (Shor & Orne, 1963) have been developed to preselect such individuals and to measure the depth of hypnosis reached (Meszaros et al., 2002). However, it seems that different personality traits and physiological constitutions may also have their root in genetic differences [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, this volume; Granqvist, Reijman, & Carden˜a, Volume 2]. The genetic bases concerning dance were reported by BachnerMelman and collaborators (2005), who found that professional dancers
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(as compared to athletes and a control group) had greater facility for serotonin transport and vasopressin response (serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates blood pressure in the vessels [see Nichols & Chemel, Volume 2], and the arginine vasopressin receptor 1a regulates vasoconstriction/expansion due to specific amino acid activity). The different interplay of serotonin transporters and vasopressin receptors may enhance dancers’ “social communication skills, courtship, and spiritual facets” (p. 394) as dancers compared to athletes and control group had higher scores on the Tellegen Absorption Scale and the Reward Dependence Factor of Cloninger’s Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire. Serotonin activity in particular is linked to ASC, and Altered serotonin levels in carriers of the SLC6A4 promoter region allele might predispose such individuals to a greater ability for imagery and attention to stimuli (especially to musical stimuli) that we hypothesize may provide part of the “hard wiring” that talented and devoted individuals need to perform in an art form that combines a unique combination of both musical and physical skills. (p. 399)
Taking a closer look at brain processes involved in dancing, Park and coworkers (2002) reported changes in the EEG in the case of a male Salpuri dancer, a traditional dance formerly performed by shamans in Korea, comparing rest, listening to pop music, and remembering a previous dance. In mentally recalling an altered state (sinmyung, expressing spiritual cleansing or purification) of the dance, frontal and occipital low alpha (8–10 Hz) and theta frequencies increased, as compared to power values at rest. Theta increases were mostly obvious in the frontal midline, an increase that is normally seen in relaxed concentration and heightened awareness (Mitchell, McNaughton, Flanagan, & Kirk, 2008). Park supposes that the Salpuri dancer reaches the ASC “through suppression of frontal cortex functions and activation of subcortical functions” (Park et al., 2002, p. 961). This means that a state-dependent recall of ASC experiences seems to be characterized by the dominance of theta frequencies. Similar results were reported by Oohashi and collaborators (2002), who recorded the EEG of a participant who experienced Kerauhan, a possession trance that occurred during a dedicatory ritual drama called Calonarang in Bali. In the trance phase analysis, Oohashi and coworkers found a distinct power increase of EEG theta and alpha frequencies that differed clearly from patterns found in epileptic discharges and mental disorders. There are very few musicological studies on the music that is played while being in or getting into ASC. Katz and De Rios (1971) transcribed
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songs whistled in the Peruvian ayahuasca ceremonies and explained the function of the songs as helpers for the shaman and their clients to control the visions evoked by the “perception of the speed of the healer’s music” (p. 325). Music’s function was compared to a “jungle gym,” giving a structure to control ASC and provide “a series of paths and banisters to help them negotiate their way” (De Rios & Janiger 2003, p. 161) [see Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, Volume 2]. Becker (1994) described the stages of the music used in a Rangda/ Barong ritual in Pagoetan in Bali. Transcribing the music of a certain part of the ritual, Becker demonstrated that “short, loud temporal cycles with no melodic elaboration are used in Balinese gamelan music to indicate the presence of demons and fighting” (Becker, 1994, p. 48). Her transcription exemplifies how the pulsating rhythms of drums and cymbals, the sounds of gongs and gangsa, become “all rhythmically synchronized, become one with the rhythmic synchrony experienced throughout the central nervous system of the trancer” (p. 49). Becker interpreted the effect of music on ASC and discussed a coherent framework of rhythmic entrainment, connectionism, and neurotransmitter changes to explain the observations. But only Oohashi et al.’s EEG study (2002) correlated ASC-related brain changes over the time course of an authentic ritual performance. Another musicological study correlated EEG, MIDI, and audio data of a 28-hour piano performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (Kohlmetz, Kopiez, & Altenmu¨ller, 2003; Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl, & Altenmu¨ller, 2003). Analyzing the music performance data (MIDI and audio recordings) during the ASC period (between the 15th and 18th hours of performing the piece), an increasing acceleration and disintegration of tempo and uncontrolled changes in loudness, which had previously remained stable over a period of 14 hours, was observed. Overall, however, the sensor-motor performance during the ASC remained remarkably stable. The pianist was still able to play the piano, but the way he played the piece was different before and after entering the state. Throughout the 28-hour performance, EEG frequency slowing was observed in the left posterior hemisphere, indicating less activity in the left parietal and more activity in right parietal lobes. Summarizing, rhythmic body movements in dance may induce ASC by suppressing cortical and enhancing subcortical functions while slowing and increasing alpha and theta brainwaves. The serotonergic system may act differently in those experienced with dancing and ASC, leading to an increased imagery and attention for musical stimuli, while motor programs used for playing music function quite normally in altered states, but de- or acceleration of tempo and loudness may occur.
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The connection of ASC and music is dependent upon the personal intention that is communicated with or attributed to preferred music. Whether music becomes meaningful and intense while experiencing or performing it depends on the situation or setting and the personal intention attached. Further, in the process of performing music, it may depend on personal kairological (see below) processes that evoke an immediate meaning and call for activity (as in Oohashi et al.’s work). Again, this stresses that the connection of music and ASC is connected to certain stations or stages in the time course of the ASC experienced.
ASC, Music, and Altered Temporality Music is the art of time processes and requires time to be heard. Brown, Merker, and Wallin (2000, p. 17) discussed the neurobiology of metric timekeeping as a key evolutionary research question, as metrics are central for language and music. Alterations of time perception, whether induced by drugs, rhythmic body movements, intense emotions, absorption, or being hypnotized, change the focus of attention or meaningful sequences attached to it during rituals, which is crucial for the induction of ASC through music. The drum has been central to discussions regarding timekeeping and entraining “movements to an external timekeeper, such as beating a drum” (Wallin, Merker, & Brown, 2000, p. 17). As Rouget (1985) and Eliade (1964) described, the shaman has to build his drum, sanctify it in a ritual according to his or her cosmology, and load it with the energy and tradition needed for the shamanic journey. It is played constantly during the treatment process, and the way it is played marks the stations on the shamanic journey. This stresses that ritual purposes and meaningful intentions are connected to the playing. Therefore, the main role of music seems to be to organize and synchronize time structures of group processes in which certain stations in the ritual and intensity stages of the process are phase-locked with specific content. The information units are encoded and symbolized in gestures, in mimesis (compare Winkelman 2002, p. 80), as reflected in rhythmic abilities and coherent movements of the body in drumming and dancing and its ritual-specific figurations that synchronize with the musical structure and the rhythms played. Rhythm and tempo organize the external entraining sequences of information to be transferred by ordering the sounds in their timely occurrence in rituals through rhythmo-affective semantics. Rhythm organizes the time structure of the musical events. This includes the beat intervals with varying accentuations, and interonset intervals of beats in the millisecond range
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(elaborated upon in Neher’s research), the length of melody tones or vocalizations, and short phrasings in the second to minute range, and, when sharing a certain tempo, the group temporal process into a shared time structure. This seems to be more intense and effective when perception of time is altered, which is a common characteristic of ASC (Ludwig, 1966); but what about music makes changes in time perception from normal states of consciousness? The research literature on timing reflects the debate on subjective timing effects, especially when time is estimated (memorized) after an event has happened. Po¨ppel (2000) has called it the time paradoxon—time periods with a dense event structure recalled in a narration are estimated as prolonged when a lot of interesting things happened, even when the duration in physical time is objectively short. It seems that “time judgments can distort, recalibrate, reverse, or have a range of resolutions depending on the stimulus and on the state of the viewer” (Eagleman et al., 2005, p. 10,370). Tse has proposed a simple countermodel, arguing that the brain “has access to the approximate constant rate of its own information processing” (in Eagleman et al., 2005, p. 10,369). For example, if one bit of information processed is interpreted as one unit of objective time, then, in moments of shifted or increased attention, two or three bits of information would be counted again as one unit of objective time, “creating the illusion that time and motion had slowed down” (p. 10,369). Our sense of subjective time fluctuates in relation to clock time according to the amount of information we receive per second. Only a specific, individually, and situation-relevant excerpt of sensory data is accessible to our consciousness (upper limit are around 15–20 bits/second). Determining what constitutes a bit of information in music is the crux of our problem. Basically, it depends on the individual, how well he knows the given musical style, his ability to codify musical events, and his ability to concentrate during the performance. Ostensibly, a note would be a bit of information. But in an extreme case—e.g., an exceptionally familiar recording—the first bar might be grasped as one gesture, which in turn would identify the entire piece, so it might be listened to in huge chunks (i.e., a minimal number of bits.) At the other extreme, one note might be heard as a composite of onset transients and sine tones with individual envelope shapes. More commonly, a chord, an arpeggio, or even an entire cadential gesture could be heard as one bit of information. Experience and training thus have a direct relation to the amount of “information” that can be grasped from a musical phrase. (Mountain, 1989, p. 4)
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However, perception of time and music does not only depend on expectation, learning, attention, and memory functions in a dynamic process of chunking information units and their duration in the passage of time. As already outlined when discussing intense emotions above, a wide variety of endocrine and neurotransmitter activity changes in ASC interweave with these processes, enabling altered scaling of auditory events, such as loudness (Globus, Cohen, Kramer, Elliot, & Sharp, 1978). Studies that offer a physiological explanation are based on drug research and emphasize the role of various neurotransmitter processes, such as serotonergic (Wittmann et al., 2007), cannabinoid (Fachner, 2009; Mathew et al., 2002), dopamine, and cholinergic (Meck, 1996; Rammsayer, 1999) interactions with perception and action in an altered temporality (Shanon, 2001). Studies on patient populations and drugs indicate variations in scaling of musical events caused by de- and acceleration of internal clock speed and internal representation of perceived elements when reproducing or estimating time intervals in the millisecond-to-second and the second-to-minute range (Buhusi & Meck, 2005; Meck, 2005). Generally, task-related and activated neural networks (discussed are thalamocortico-striatal circuits, i.e., basal ganglia, supplementary motor cortex, prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex) serve as a timekeeper and detect coincidences in synchronous brain activation and processing of different neural populations (Meck, 2005). Clock, memory, and decision stages can be separated. Clock speed (pacemaker) can be influenced by dopaminergic manipulations, whereas memory processes (representation of time durations) can be influenced by cholinergic manipulations. Meck illustrates this by a given oscillation of baseline clock-speed at 100 pulses, which are learned to have a chronological duration of 20 seconds. If clock speed is accelerated by pharmacological agents, the 100 pulses will be accumulated “earlier in physical time than during the baseline training” (Meck, 1996, p. 236), while decrease of clock speed will be accumulated later than physical time. Summarized, this means faster clock speed makes events last shorter while slower clock speed makes events last longer. This model of an internal clock may help to explain how state-dependent endogenous neurotransmitter activity in ASC alter the scaling of auditory units and mediate, for example, in- and decrease of tempo (and loudness2) reported in experimental performance studies sketched above [see Kokoszka & Wallace, Volume 2].
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Globus et al. (1978) and Iannone et al. (2006) have shown that loudness scaling is state dependent and can be pharmacologically altered.
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To summarize, an altered temporality results in a different metric scaling of sensory events in the musical time-space and has an impact on perceptual and attentional processes (Fachner, 2000, 2009, 2011). Thus, we may expect that, if the information in the time course of music rituals becomes meaningful for the listener or performer, the brain will offer various strategies to zoom into specific parts of the music in order to process basic musical features, such as pitch, timbre, and pulse, as well as higher-level musical features, such as tonality, meter, and form, focused in a state of hypofrontality or enhanced sensory perception. Dietrich (2003, 2004) describes the function of frontal cortex in ASC, proposing that hypofrontality (a reduction of frontal cortex activity) results in a flooding of information in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex. This results in a state of consciousness primarily concerned with reception and processing of sensory information, with less activity in the frontal and more activity in the posterior parts of the brain, namely in the temporal, parietal, and occipital areas. Further, in hypofrontal states, the perceptual, sensual bottom-up processing of the brain dominates the limited capacity of the working memory system located in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. From a perspective of hierarchically organized functional neuroanatonomy, this area involving working memory, temporal integration, and sustained and directed attention (Dietrich, 2004) is functionally changed during ASC in order to process an increased amount of sensual information, which may only be possible in an altered temporality and focus of attention. As the memory buffer reaches his limit, we may forget the ingredients of complexity experienced in ASC. Aldridge (1989a) states that we are “patterned frequencies in a matrix of time” who improvise their identity out of a personal set found within the situational settings in which we are located. The experience of time is kairological (from the Greek kairos, a god of the right moment to decide), which signifies personal, individual time, and also a chronological structure oriented to the geophysical concept of time as conventional time by the clock. Kairological time emerges from personal perception of time and time intervals and signifies the right time for doing something, deciding, or acting in the here and now (Aldridge, 1996). Anticipation of what is coming up next and what is needed to be perceived is surely of vital interest for humans so that it is not only important in terms of “where to place attention, but also when” (Eagleman et al., 2005, p. 10,370).
Conclusion Music and ASC are connected in various ways. One of the most determining influences seems to be the context, the personal set and
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socioecological setting, cultural beliefs, and the intentions of inducing ASC [see Whitehead, this volume]. Is music, then, only the soundtrack of a context in which participants aim to get into ASC, using music as a vehicle for their intentions? Well, participants project their intentions onto the music, but it needs to have the structure to serve them, such as: continuous intensifications, mainly of tempo and volume; the deliberate use of accelerando and crescendo (compare Rouget, 1985, pp. 82–86), but also extreme consistence and monotony in the case of ecstasy; long duration (hours); simple forms; minimal variations in many repetitions, Bordun, or ostinati; and no precise motifs, but steps, tonal variations, slow glissandi, and a narrow tonal range. Acoustic stimuli of trance are certain transitory developments and accentuations, for example, slowly and consistently growing and fading volume. Music therapy research stressed that there is no music that has a clear deterministic effect on physiology, but music can be used as a timeframe for communicative events (Aldridge, 1989b). Music has diverse therapeutic and also hedonistic meanings because the effects depend on processes of involvement, experience, and degree of information on the induction, references, meaning, and purpose of ASC in the specific context (Fachner, 2006a). Music creates conditions and orders the time structure for intentions that favor the onset of ASC, that regulate form and development and make them more predictable and easier to control. The significance of ASC depends on the respective cultural context and symbolic expression. Each ASC induced in such contexts receives its power from music at the individual stages associated with the function and meaning of ASC in rituals and ceremonies. The function of music here is to create a special emotional atmosphere, to stimulate processes of identification within social groups, and to be either ASC inducing (invocation) or ASC accompanying or guiding. This depends on cultural beliefs, and therefore there are as many different combinations of music and ASC as there are cultural beliefs and music that express their interests. The individually different degree of hypnotizability seems to be an important factor determining the personal onset time, quality, and depth of ASC. In hypnosis and suggestion, music may serve as a contextualizing factor, helping focus on the music-related induction that absorbs and denies external objects. Induction-specific vigilance changes combined with the intensified, narrowed, or broadened focus of attention might result in a different emotional profile of meaning experienced with music and its symbolic, metaphoric, and physical content. Electrophysiological studies have revealed theta changes as indicative for ASC (Fachner, 2006a, 2006b; Park et al., 2002; Winkelman, 2000). Chemically induced ASC, together with music, can be studied as psychophysiological models
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of ASC and altered temporality and might help to understand ASC processes in vivo. Cognitive processing of music changes its modes of awareness on musical elements during ASC. Rhythm, pitch, loudness, and timbre and their sound staging in the perceptive field of a person seem to culminate in a certain sound which, corresponding to the cultural cognitive matrix, induces ASC (Fachner, 2006a). Rouget (1985) proposed that music features such as repetition, long duration, monotony, volume, and density do not provide clear causal explanations for ASC induction, but the connection of time and space perception alteration resulting from music is important (Christensen, 1996). Therefore, rhythm remains the target of discussion for music-related ASC induction.
References Aaronson, B. (1999). Dancing our way out of class through funk, techno or rave. Peace Review, 11, 231–236. Aigen, K. (1994). The roots of music therapy: Towards an indigenous research paradigm. UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, MI. Aldridge, D. (1989a). A phenomenological comparison of the organisation of music and the self. Arts in Psychotherapy, 16(2), 91–97. Aldridge, D. (1989b). Music, communication and medicine: Discussion paper. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 82, 743–746. Aldridge, D. (1996). Music therapy and research in medicine: From out of the silence. London: Jessica Kingsley. Aldridge, D. (2006). Music, consciousness and altered states. In D. Aldridge & J. Fachner (Eds.), Music and altered states: Consciousnes, transcendence, therapy and addictions (pp. 9–14). London: Jessica Kingsley. Aldridge, D., & Fachner, J. (Eds.). (2006). Music and altered states: Consciousness, transcendence, therapy and addictions. London: Jessica Kingsley. Bachner-Melman, R., Dina, C., Zohar, A. H., Constantini, N., Lerer, E., Hoch, S., et al. (2005). AVPR1a and SLC6A4 gene polymorphisms are associated with creative dance performance. Public Library of Science Genetics, 1, 394–403. Becker, J. (1994). Music and trance. Leonardo Music Journal, 4, 41–51. Blood, A. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, 98, 11,818–11,823. Bonny, H. (1980). GIM Therapy: Past, present and future implications (GIM Monograph Vol. 3). Salina, KS: Bonny Foundation. Brown, S., Merker, B., & Wallin, N. L. (2000). An introduction to evolutionary musicology. In N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music (pp. 3–24). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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About the Editors
ETZEL CARDEN˜A, Ph.D., holds the endowed Thorsen Chair of Psychology at Lund University in Sweden, where he directs the Center for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology (CERCAP). His empirical and theoretical work has received awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, and the University of Texas. His more than 200 publications include the book Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, to which Science News dedicated a cover story. His webpage is at http:// cercaplund.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-cercap.html. MICHAEL WINKELMAN, M.P.H., Ph.D., received his doctorate from the School of Social Sciences, University of California Irvine, in 1985. Among his publications are Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing (2010), Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion (with John Baker, 2008), and Psychedelic Medicine (edited with Tom Roberts, 2007). He retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, in 2009 and currently lives in the central highlands of Brazil, where he is developing permaculturebased intentional communities.
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Advisory Board
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., is Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in San Francisco, California. In 2002 he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology as well as the Award for Distinguished Contributions for Professional Hypnosis from the Society of Psychological Hypnosis. In 2010, three of his co-edited books were published: Perchance to Dream: The Frontiers of Dream Psychology; Mysterious Minds: The Neurobiology of Mediums, Mystics, and Other Remarkable People; and Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion. In 2010, an updated edition of his co-authored book Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, was published. Dr. Krippner is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (from which he received its Lifetime Achievement award) and the Parapsychological Association (which gave him its Outstanding Career Award). Robert Turner worked on MRI with Peter Mansfield at the University of Nottingham, 1984–1988. Between 1988 and 1993, at the NIH he developed the neuroscience techniques of diffusion weighted MRI and BOLD functional MRI. In 1994 he moved to London as cofounder of the Functional Imaging Laboratory. In 2006 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, as Director of Neurophysics. Max Velmans is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London and has been involved in consciousness studies for around 30 years. His main research focus is integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness, and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding
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Consciousness (2000) was short-listed for the British Psychological Society Book of the Year award in 2001 and 2002 and is now in its second (2009) edition. Other publications include The Science of Consciousness: Psychological, Neuropsychological and Clinical Reviews (1996), Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: New Methodologies and Maps (2000), How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains? (2003), and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2007). He was a cofounder and, from 2004–2006, Chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.
About the Contributors
Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D., is scholar in residence at Atlantic University, assistant professor of Research at the University of Virginia, and Research Faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. His research work has centered on out-of-body experiences and the history of parapsychology. Alvarado is the recipient of the Parapsychological Association’s 2010 Outstanding Career Award. Julie Beischel, Ph.D., is director of research at the Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential. She received her doctorate in pharmacology and toxicology (minor: microbiology and immunology) in 2003 from the University of Arizona. She is a member of the Society for Scientific Exploration and the Parapsychological Association. Wendy E. Cousins, Ph.D., is a graduate of Queens University Belfast and Course Director for postgraduate programmes in Health & Well-being at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. She is a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the Transpersonal and the Consciousness & Experiential Psychology Sections of the British Psychological Society. Jo¨rg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland. Dr. Fachner has authored a doctoral thesis (2001) on cannabis, EEG, and music perception, and various publications on music and altered states, music therapy, addictions, drug culture, and the social pharmacology of music. Antoon Geels, Ph.D., trained in history of religions and specialized in psychology of religion, in which he now holds a chair at Lund University, Sweden. He is also an honorary professor in the psychology of
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non-Western religions at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His primary area of research is the comparative psychological study of mystical experience and techniques. Mark Levy, Ph.D., is currently the senior professor of Art History at California State University, East Bay. He has written many articles for national and international publications and two books, Technicians of Ecstasy: Shamanism and the Modern Artist and Void/in Art, about the significance of emptiness in Eastern and Western art. Dr. Adam J. Rock is head of research and development at Phoenix Institute of Victoria. He is a Founding International Board Member of the International Transpersonal Association and an editorial board member of numerous scholarly journals. Dr. Rock has published extensively in the areas of shamanism and altered states. Graham St John is a research associate at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. An anthropologist of contemporary religion, performance, festivals, and movements, Graham’s latest book is Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox, 2009). His Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance is forthcoming with Equinox. (For more information see www.edgecentral.net). Jonathan Shear, Ph.D. from U.C., Berkeley, teaches philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since the 1960s his work has focused on the significance of Eastern meditation experiences and related scientific research. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and Woodrow Wilson Fellow and was Founding Managing Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Professor Moshe Sluhovsky teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in religious history of Europe. His latest book is Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment of Sprits in Early Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., is generally credited with reviving the study of consciousness with his 1969 classic Altered States of Consciousness. Author of more than 200 articles in the professional journals, his 1975 classic Transpersonal Psychologies helped establish that field. His latest, The End of Materialism, explores the scientific foundations of paranormal aspects of consciousness to show it is reasonable to be both scientifically and spiritually oriented.
About the Contributors
Professor Yulia Ustinova teaches ancient history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Main publications: The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God, (Brill, 1999) and Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth, (Oxford University Press, 2009), as well as many articles on various aspects of religion and culture in the Mediterranean area. Charles Whitehead is an anthropological neuroscientist interested in bridging the conceptual gulf dividing biological from social anthropology, which he sees as related to the conflict between scientism and spirituality. He obtained his Ph.D. in anthropology and neuroscience at University College London in 2003, has edited two volumes on Social Approaches to Consciousness, and has published extensively on related subjects. Jennifer M. Windt is an assistant lecturer/researcher in theoretical philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. In her Ph.D. thesis and in previous publications, she has focused on dreaming and consciousness, integrating empirical findings from psychology and neuroscience with philosophy of mind and epistemology. Phillip B. Zarrilli is professor of Performance Practice at the Drama Department, University of Exeter. A professional actor and director working internationally, he is Artistic Director of THE LLANARTH GROUP (Wales). His most recent books are Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski (2009) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (2010).
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Index
(“f” indicates a figure; “n” indicates a note; “t” indicates a table) “Abandon techniques,” acting, 317 Aboriginal Men of High Degree (Elkin), 331 Absorption, 5, 10 Access consciousness, performance, 319 Acting, double consciousness, 303 Actors: Asian training modes, 318; cognitive neuroscience, 304; modern training, 313–18; noh performance ideal, 312; phenomenal/access consciousness, 319 Adaptive function, ego, 264 Advaita Vedanta: ASC experience, 141, 142; ASC states, 146, 147, 149; mystical dimension, 255, 260 Aesthetic performance: described, 302–3, 307; research, 303; and ritual performance, 305–6, 307 Affective mysticism, 77 Affective transcendence, 77 Afro-Caribbean religions, state of consciousness, 90 Age of Enlightenment, reactive religious movements, 89–90 Agency, SMT, 240, 241 Aggregate vs. general function, 10 Al-Andaluz period, rational/empirical philosophy, 89 Alcohol use, literary authors, 287
Alcoholic beverages, Neolithic period, 50–51 Alert state, hypnosis, 95, 96 Allison, R., 37 Alpert, Richard, 206 Alpha brain waves, meditation, 33 Altamira caves, 46 Alterations of Consciousness (Barusˇs), 114 Altered pattern of phenomenal properties, 2, 128 Altered State Theory of Hypnosis (Kallio and Revonsuo), 3 Altered States (movie), 6, 15 Altered states of consciousness (ASC): Ancient Greece practices, 55–65; Ancient Middle East practices, 52–55; animal magnetism, 90–93; biological basis, 196; classifying, 5–7; consciousness/self, 238–244; contemporary actor training, 313–18; culturally induced, 181–86; cyberculture/virtual reality, 208–9; diabolic spirit possession, 76, 79–80; divine spirit possession, 75, 76–78; early counterculture, 203–8; Eastern approaches, 139–57; Eastern performance traditions, 310–12; Enlightenment religious movements, 89–90; epistemological issues, 230–33; evolutionary origins, 163–64, 164–16; hypnotic somnambulism, 93–97, 102; and individual differences, 9–11; and
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Index induction procedures, 7–8; integration, 30; mediumship, 97–103; modern art, 327–54; and music, 356–71; in performance, 301–2; mystical experience, 244–48; new millennium research, 126–29; 1960s research, 114–16, 204; 1970s research, 116–21; 1980s research, 121–24; 1990s research, 124–26; perception, 233–38; performance research, 303–4; phenomenal/access consciousness, 319–20; physical science anomalies, 27; pre-Christian European shamanism, 74–76; prehistoric practices, 46–51; principal functions, 188; proto-historic practices, 51–52; recent publications, 113–14; religious experiences (REs), 189–91; religious literature, 280–82; religious mysticism, 255–72; ritual/aesthetic performances, 305–7; Roman Empire practices, 65–67; scientific status, 24–25; shamanism, 159–63, 165–77, 190; social change, 192–97; study of, 11–13; techno-rave/DiY consciousness, 203, 210–12; temporary alterations, 186–89; terminology, 2–5, 114–15; trance/psytrance, 212–20; transition states, 9; 20th-century survey, 102–7; universal manifestation, 23, 24; written works/literature, 278–79, 282–94 Altered States of Consciousness (Tart), 115 Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device (ASCID), 119 Altering phenomenology, 128 Alvarado, Carlos, 14 Amadeus, 327, 328 American Psychological Association (APA), ASC publications, 114 American Society for Psychical Research, J. B. Rhine, 106 American transcendentalism, expansion of consciousness, 106 Amnesia: dissociation in, 36; hypnotic induction, 95 Amundsen, Reidar, vision of Jesus, 266–68
Ancient Greece, practices, 55–65, 62f, 63f Ancient Middle East, practices, 52–55 Anger, ego-psychological model, 271 Animal magnetism, 90–91; literary trope, 287–88 Animal spirits, shamanism, 160 Animals: perspectival worldview, 184, 186; shamanic power, 339–40 Animism, defined, 184 Anomalies: AC physical science 27; in science, 26 “Anomalous experiences,” 3, 12 Anthroposophy, expansion of consciousness, 107 Antistructural episodes, cultural change, 188, 196 Apter, Michael, “reversal theory,” 192 Apuleius, on Isis initiation, 65, 66 APZ-OAV Questionnaire, 122–23, 127 Arbman, Ernst: consciousness, 271; mystical death, 271–72; religious visions, 258 Are´valo, Guillermo, 220 Aristotle: on initiation rites, 60, 62; on prophetic dreams, 245 Aronofsky, Darren, 15 Arousal, 1970s research, 120 Art: meditative induction, 329; shamanic state induction, 329 Artaud, Antonin: actor training, 314, 315, 318; narcotic use, 285 Asian tradition, altering consciousness techniques, 308 Auditory drive, ritual trances, 357–58 Auditory hallucinations: 1980s research, 124; SMT, 241 Aurobindo, Sri, 204 n.1 Automatic writing: Breton’s use, 289; and mediumship, 98–99; William James, 103–4 Automaticity, Tart, 107 Ayahuasca shamanism, 214, 215, 282 Ayin (“nothingness”), 258 Baal-Shem Tov, emergence of, 90 Bacchus (Dionysus Bacchus), 61 Barusˇs, Imants, 114
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Index Baudelaire, Charles, 257; narcotic use, 284–85 Beerbohm, Max, 292 Being, Vedanta tradition, 140 Beischel, Julie, 14 Berger, Hans, ACS research, 106 Bergson, Henri: “life-force,” 204–5; “reducing valve,” 205 Berlioz, Hector, 15 Bertrand, Alexandre, 95 Beuys, Joseph, shamanic techniques, 329, 337f, 338, 339–41, 340f Bey, Hakim, 210–11 Bhagavad-Gita, pure consciousness, 155 Bible, spirit possessions in, 79 Biological cycles, and ASC, 10–11 Black Square, The (Malevich), 343–44 Blake, William, 285 n.3; perception, 106 Block, Ned, 319 Body, SMT, 239–41, 242 Book of Revelations, 281 Boom Festival, counterculture, 203, 215–16, 219–20 Borges, Jorge Luis, 14; literary double, 294 Borges and I (Borges), 294 Bourdieu, Pierre, Kabuli gender relations, 185 Bourguignon, Erika, institutionalized ASC, 190 Braid (Brunson), 35, 352f Brain: and dancing, 364; information processing, 367; literacy skills, 277; musical stimulation, 360–61, 362, 364–65; mystical roots, 256; shamanic, 175; time perception, 368 “Breath stops,” 141 Breton, Andre´, 288–89, 290–91 Breuer, Joseph, 105 Bridal mysticism, 269, 270 Bright light, initiation rites, 60, 65 Browning, Robert, 288 Brunson, Jamie, meditative induction, 329, 350–51 Bucke, Richard Maurice, 204; mystical experience, 262 Buddhism: East-Asian ASC experience, 139; in Japan, 310–11; mystical
dimension, 255, 260, 263; meditation mystical states, 121 Bun˜uel, Louis, 334 Burkutlatjpi, Liwukang, 331 Burning Man Festival, 205, 209, 302 Butoh training, actors, 318 Butsugen, ASC state, 149 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 257; narcotic use, 283 Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The (film), 15 Caciola, Nancy, 76 Calendrical rites, rituals, 187, 188 Calonarang, ritual drama, 364 “Cambridge Anthropologists,” 307 Camisard prophets, emergence of, 90 Carden˜a, Etzel, 164, 315; hypnosis research, 127; on manias, 327 Cargo cult, social change, 192–93 Carrington, Leonora, surrealist painter, 335–36 Carroll, Lewis, 278, 278 n.1, 282 Castaneda, Carlos, 214, 286–87 Caves and subterranean passages, 47 Chakrasambhara Mandala, 349, 350f Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill), 293 Chanting, shamanism, 169 Charas (hash), 213 Charcot, Jean-Martin, influence of, 288; work of, 101 Charisma, defined, 194 Charismatic exorcists, 82–83 Charismatic leaders, social change, 192, 194–95 Chastenet, A. M. J., Marquis de Puyse´gur, 93 “Chat cycle,” 187 Chavet caves, 46 Chekhov, Michael, 314 Chi body, visual arts, 331, 347, 348 Childhood, as “transitional space,” 188 Chinchem, 192 Chlysti, emergence of, 90 Christianity: and definitions of ASC, 5; mystical dimension, 255, 260 Clark, Fraser, 212 Claros, mantic preparations, 56, 57 Clerical exorcists, 83
388
Index Clinical psychology, and definitions of ASC, 5, 6 Cloud of Tea (Higby), 341f Clowde of Unknowyng, The, spiritual exercises, 77–78 Cognitive neuroscience, actor’s experience, 304 Cohen, Allen, 206–7 Cohen, Emma, 217 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, narcotic use, 283–84, 285 “Collective effervescence,” 194, 195 Comford, Francis, Cambridge anthropologist, 307 Communication: and mediumship, 98–100; prelinguistic, 362–63 Communitas states, Ndembu rite, 196–97; and permanence, 198 Comstock, C., 37 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (De Quincey), 283 Consciousness: brain mechanisms, 30–32; culturally variant, 182; derivation of, 355; and dreams, 243; Eastern tradition, 140, 144; expansion of, 106; in transit states, 301; mapping research, 120–21; meditative states, 243–44; modes of, 29–30; 1980s research, 121–22; noh performance ideal, 312; phenomenal/access, 319; recent publications, 113–14, 115; reformatting terms, 128; techniques of experience, 204; term, 2; 20th-century research, 106; written works/literature, 278–79 “Consciousness at large,” 103 “Consciousness clubs,” 212 Consortium of Collective Consciousness, 219 Constructivism, and mystical experience, 120–21, 261–64 Contemporary counterculture, 1960s legacy, 204–5 “Control techniques,” acting, 317 Corporal mystical experience, 76–77 Corta´zar, Julio, 16 “Cosmic consciousness,” 204 Counterculture, psychedelics, 205–8
Cousins, James, altered states, 291 Cousins, Wendy, 14 Crawford, H., 34 Creative Evolution (Bergson), 205 Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (Freud), 279–80 Creativity, defined, 191–92 Crevel, Rene´, 289–90 Cronenberg, David, 15 Cross-cultural perspective, 23 Crowley, Aleister, narcotic use, 285 Culture, and ASC, 24 Cummins, Geraldine, altered states, 291–92 Cyberculture, early counterculture, 208 “Cyberdelic thesis,” 208 “Cyberia,” 208 Daimonion of Socrates (Plutarch), 58, 59 Dalı´, Salvador, shamanic induction techniques, 329, 334f Dance: genetic basis, 363–64; psytrance culture, 215–18; shamanism, 166–67, 169 Dancing: brain activity, 364; scenes in prehistoric art, 49; uncontrollable, 91–92 D’Andrea, Anthony, 213 d’Aquili, E., 24, 34 Davis, Erik, 220 “Daydream cycle,” 187 Daydreams, and dissociation, 36 De Exorcismis (1998), 85 De Mille, Richard, 286 De Morgan, Sophia, 99 De Quincey, Thomas, 283 Deafferentation, 34, 37 Deconstructivism, mystical experience, 261–62 Decontextualism, mystical experience, 261; 1980s research, 121 Deep hypnotic state, 95, 96 Deep sleep, 29 Defensive function, ego, 264 Deikman, Arthur J., 256 Deir Alla, Jordan, prophecy inscription, 53 Deleuze, Joseph Philippe Franc¸ois, 94 Delphi, mantic preparations, 56
389
Index “Delusional belief,” 4 Democritus, on poetic inspiration, 63 Demotic Magical Papyrus, Egypt, 66 De´re`gelment de tous les sens (Rimbaud), 14 Descartes, Rene´: dream skepticism, 230–31, 233–34; philosophy of, 89 Description of Greece, Pausanias, 57 Desnos, Robert, 290 Dexter, George T., 98–99, 100 Diabolic spirit possession, 76, 79–80 “Dialectics of utopia,” 219 Didyma, mantic preparations, 56 Dietrich, A., 32, 33 “Digital Maoism,” 209 Digital utopianism, 208–9 Dionysiac mysteries, 60, 61–63, 62f, 63f Direct realism, philosophy of perception, 233 Disciplinary matrix, paradigm elements, 25 Discrete state of consciousness, 3 Discriminative intellect, Eastern tradition, 150, 151 Discursive thinking, Eastern tradition, 150, 151 Disjunctivism, mental states, 236–37 Disk series (Irwin), 348 Dissociation, 8, 34; defined, 36; and integration, 37; make-believe, 189; and mediumship, 101, 102; shamanism, 164–65 Dissociative identity disorder, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 Divergent concepts, social sciences, 25 Divine madness, 55 Divine spirit possession, 75, 76–78 DiY consciousness, early counterculture, 203, 209, 210–12 Don Juan (Byron), 257 Donne di fuori, 74 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 205, 285–86, 330 Dopamine, 31 “Double consciousness,” acting, 303, 320 Double personality, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 Dowden, Hester, 291 Dracula (Stoker), 288 Dream incubation, shamanism, 159
Dream skepticism, epistemological concerns, 230–33 Dreaming: 1970s research, 119; REM sleep, 29, 30 Dreams: and consciousness, 243; epistemological concerns, 230–33; philosophy of perception, 233; religious life, 244; and selfconsciousness, 241–43; shamanism, 171–72; surrealism, 289–90 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 15 Drugs, shamanism, 165–66 Drumming: altered temporality, 366–67; body synchronization, 363; ritual trance, 357–58; shamanic, 125, 166 Du Maurier, George, 288 Dualistic mystical state, 9 Durkheim, E´mile: on charisma, 194; on ritual, 196; on the sacred, 195 Earthdance, 212 Eastern civilization: ASC experience, 140–44, 148; ASC practical effects, 153–57; ASC states (maps), 144–50; ASC’s role, 139; inner awareness levels, 150–53 Ecstasy, 5, 31; bodily movements, 356t, 357; Latin ex stasis, 77; sensory deprivation, 356; visionary experience, 53 Ecstatic entrancement, 211 Edelman, Nicole, 98 Edmonds, Judge John W., 98–99, 100 Ego, functions of, 264 Ekstro¨m, Hjalmar, 265 Electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs), 211, 213, 215–17 Eliade, Mircea, shamanism, 160–61, 163, 338–39 Elkin, A. P., 331 Ellis, Havelock, narcotic use, 285 Ellul, Jacques, 209 Ellwood, Robert S., 259 Embodied metaphors, prehistoric art, 48 “Emotional brain,” 175 Emotional response “gating,” 31 Emotions, and music, 168, 356, 360–62
390
Index Empirical research, 1980s instruments, 122–23 Emptiness: Buddhist experience, 140, 142; Eastern ASC states, 144–45 Encounter, The (Varo), 335 Enlightenment, 9 Enlivenment, Eastern tradition, 154 Entheogen drugs, 24 “Entheogenic Reformation,” 207, 214 Enthousiasmos, Greek divine possession, 56 Enthusiasm, spirit possession, 53 Entrainment, defined, 358 Epic of Gilgamesh, 279 Epistemology, ASC issues, 230 Epoques des sommeils, 290 Ergotropic arousal, 120 Ernst, Max, surrealist painter, 335 Ersatz-death, Ancient Greek mystery rites, 60 Esalen Institute, 204 n.1 Esdaile, James, 97 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 245 “Executive possession,” 217 Exemplars, paradigm elements, 25 Exertion, shamanism, 171 Exogenous neurotransmitters, shamanism, 165–66 Exorcism, 82–84 Exorcism, animal magnetism, 91 Experimental metaphysics, and mediumship, 98 Extrovertive mystical experience” (EME), 146 n.4 Eyn Sof (“without end”), 258 Ezekiel’s visions, 54–55 Fachner, Jo¨rg, 15 Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The (Poe), 288 Farthing, G. William, consciousness, 113 Fasting, shamanism, 170 Father Hell, 91 Faulkner, William, 287 Feedback loops, cortico-striato-thalamocortical, 32
Felt presence (FP), religious belief, 246–47 Fern Cat, The (Varo), 336 Fersen, Alexander, actor training, 314, 316–17 Fischer, Roland, arousal studies, 3, 120 Flaherty, Alice: on Lewis Carroll, 281; on writing, 281 Flournoy, The´odore, 104, 105 Folded Under a Stone Sleeping (Higby), 342 Ford, Gordon Onlow, 330 “Forgetting model,” mysticism, 263 Forman, Robert K. C.: mystical experience, 261–63, 271, 272; mystical studies, 9, 121 Fo-yen Ch’ing-yuan, 149 Frankenstein (Shelley), 284 Franklin, Benjamin, magnetism, 91 Freak, counterculture, 204, 213 Frecska, E., 37 Free Spirits Antinomists, 78 French Encyclopedists, philosophy of, 89 Freud, Sigmund: ASC themes, 105; on literary sources, 278; on mysticism, 255; on writing, 279–80 Frontal limbic interaction, in hypnosis, 35 Frontal lobe synchronization, 6, 23, 30 Frontal-subcortical circuits, 32 Gamma high-frequency brain waves, 30; in meditation, 33 “Gao trance,” 212, 213, 216 Gardzienice Theater Association techniques, 318 Garrett, Eileen, altered states, 291 Gassner, Johann Joseph, 90, 91 Gathering of the Tribes for Human Be-in, 206–7 Gauthier, Franc¸ois, 218 Gautier, The´ophile, narcotic use, 284–85 Geels, Antoon, 14 Gender, cultural beliefs, 185 “Generalized altruism,” 182 Geometric motifs, Tuleilat Ghassul, 48, 50f Gerard, Morgan, 218 Gertrud the Great of Helfta, 268–70 Ghost Dance cults, social change, 193–94
391
Index Ghost Shirts, 194 Gibson, William, 208 Gift (le don), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Gift exchange, clan-based society, 183–84 Gil, DJ Goa, 213 Ginsberg, Allen, LSD, 206 Global Dance Party for Peace, 212 “God-mysticism,” 256 Goldman, Albert, 342 Gore, Georgina, on raves, 217 Great Awakening, religious movement, 90 Green, John, 316 Gregory, William, 95, 96–97 Grey, Alexander, shamanic induction techniques, 329, 333f, 333 Grof, Stanlislav, unconscious, 120 Grotowski, Jerzy, actor training, 314, 315–16, 318 Guardia, Helena, 15 Gurdjieff, George, I., 330; “The Work,” 107 Gurney, Edmund, 102; hypnosis, 95–96 Hallucination: defined, 124; hypnagogic state, 247; 1980s research, 123–24; phenomenology of, 102; philosophy of perception, 233–38; selfhood, 240, 241 Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS), research, 125–26, 127 Hallucinogenic drugs, new millennium research, 126–27 Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, The (Holden et al.), 119 Handsome Lake, Iroquois revival, 194 Hard/complete constructivism, 121 Hardy, Alister, REs studies, 189–90 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 307 Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, 363 Hashish Club, members of, 284–85 Hataphatic experience, religious visions, 258 Hatha yoga, 308–9 Heidegger, Martin, 279, 331 Hemingway, Ernest, 287 Hemp seeds: Neolithic sites, 50; Scythian funeral rites, 51 Henosis, unit, 67
Herbert, R., 33 Hermann, Max, theater as “event,” 303–4 Herodotus, Scythian funeral rite, 51 Higby, Sha Sha, shamanic techniques, 329, 341–42 Highly hypnotizable people, 8, 9, 14, 34, 35 Hippies, counterculture, 204 Hippocampus, 31 Histoire Critique du Magne´tisme Animal (Deleuze), 94 Hobbes, Thomas, on dream skepticism, 231 Hobson, J. A., 7 Hodgson, Richard, 100–1 Hoffman, D. D., 11 Hofmann, Albert, 205 Homer, 282 Hood, Ralph W., REEM, 256 Horace, 295 Houston, Jean, ASCID, 119 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (Beuys), 337f, 339 Hughes, Ted, 14 Hui Neng, 344 Hull, Clark L., 106 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Myers), 102 Human Personality, Myers’s articles, 103 “Human potential movement,” 204 n.1 Humans, bodily alterations, 185–86 Hunter-gatherer societies, shamanism, 162 Huxley, Aldous: on knowledge, 244; on psychedelics, 205–6, 256–57, 285–86; on van Gogh painting, 330 Hyperfrontal states, sensory processing, 369 Hypergraphia, 281, 282 Hypnos, god of sleep, 93 Hypnosis, 4, 6, 7, 8; defined, 127; as dissociation, 34–35; literary trope, 287–88; and mediumship, 97–98; and music, 360, 363; propensity, 10; and psi phenomena, 94; and psychiatric diagnosis, 97 n.2; shamanism, 164; social contagion, 186; standardized
392
Index instruments, 127; 20th-century research, 106 “Hypnotic sleep,” 289–90 Hypnotic somnambulism, 93–97 Hypnotic state of consciousness, 7; investigation of, 95 Hypnotic susceptibility, 35 Hysteria, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 I Like America and America Likes Me (Beuys), 340f Ibn al-Arabi, 258–59 Ideological revolutions, 27 Illusions: philosophy of perception, 233; selfhood, 240–41 Imbas forosnai, 292 Incarnate knowledge, Socrates on, 64 Incomplete constructivism, 121 Incorporation phase, rituals, 187 Incubus experience, hypnagogic state, 247 India, performance tradition, 310 Induction procedures, and ASC, 6, 7–8 Inge, W. R., mysticism, 260–61 Initiation rites, Greek mystery cults, 59–61 Innate Capacity, The (Forman), 262 “Inner self helper,” 37 Inspiration, romantic poets, 327–28 Integral Institute, 204 n.1 “Integral Transformative Practice,” 204 n.1 Integrative mode of consciousness, 13, 23, 28, 29; biological bases, 30–32; characteristics, 38 Intellectual mystical experience, 76 Intentionalism, mental states, 234–35, 237 Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila), 260 International Study on Altered States of Consciousness (Dittrich), 123 Interpretation, individual differences, 10 “Introvertive mystical experience” (IME), 146 n.4 Intruder experience, hypnagogic state, 247 Intrusion and intervention, diabolic possession, 78 Ion (Plato), 279 Iribas, Ana Eva, 328
Irish Witch Doctors (Yeats), 292 Irwin, Robert, meditative induction, 329, 348–49 Isabella, hypnotic state, 96 Ishtar cult, prophecy, 53 Isis mysteries, Greco-Roman, 65 Islam, mystical dimension, 255, 258–59, 260 Island (Huxley), 205 James, Henry, fragmented identities, 293–294 James, William, 6, 11, 13; consciousness, 103–4, 205; mystical experience, 244–45, 256; narcotic use, 285; “noetic” states, 189; perennialism, 261; on religious belief, 246; stream of consciousness, 278 Janet, Pierre, Mme. B., 94; ASC works, 104; influence of, 288; on mediumship, 101 Jansenist convulsionaries, emergence of, 90 Japan, performance art, 310–12 Jesus, visionary encounters, 266–68 Joyce, James, 281, 291, 293 n.6; stream of consciousness, 104 Judaism, mystical dimension, 255, 258, 260 Jung, Carl G.: on literature, 278; on mediumship, 99; on mysticism, 255 Kabbala, Jewish mystical tradition, 255, 260, 263 Kairological time, 369 Kallio, S., 3, 4 Kant, Immanuel, philosophy of, 89 Karma yoga, 308 Kashmir Shaivism, mystical dimension, 255 Katha Upanisad, yoga, 309 Katz, Steven T.: constructivist approach, 261, 272; mystical experience, 120–21, 257 Keats, John, narcotic use, 283 Kerauhan, possession trance, 364 Kesey, Ken, 206 Kinship systems, cultural impact, 182–85
393
Index Kirmayer, L., 36 Kluge, Carl Alexander Ferdinand, magnetic somnambulism, 94 Koestler, Arthur, 287 Kolanad, Gitanjali, 310 Kramer, Hilton, 348 Krippner, Stanley, 14; ASC definition, 116 Kubla Khan (Coleridge), 284 Kuhn, Thomas, 25, 26, 27; ASC paradigms, 113 Kundalini, 9 L’Anne´e dernie`re a` Marienbad (film), 15 L’Automatisme Psychologique (Janet), 101 La Prosa del Observatoria (Corta´zar), 16 Landau, James, 211 Lanier, Jaren, 209 Las Ruinas Circulares (Borges), 14 Lascaux caves, 46 Lattices (Brunson), 351 Laughlin, C., 24 Laureys, Steven, 7 Lawrence, D. H., 197–98 Lay individuals, exorcism, 82 Leary, Timothy, LSD, 206, 207, 208 Leboulanger, Le´onie, 94 Lee, Martin, 205 Leibniz, Baruch: perennialism, 244; philosophy of, 89 Leonard, George Burr, 204 n.1 Leonard, Gladys Osborne, medium, 100, 101 Les Champs magnetiques (Breton/Soupault), 289 Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism (Gregory), 95 Leuner, Hans-Carl, 265 Levy, Mark, 14 Lewis, Sinclair, 287 Lewis-Davis, D. 46, 47 Life After Life (Moody), 118 Life crisis rites, rituals, 187 “Life-force,” 204–5 Lilly, John C., 118 Liminal phase, rituals, 187–88 Liminal Village, Boom Festival, 219–20 Lineage clans, kinship systems, 182–83 Literacy, invention of, 277
Literature: fractured identities, 293–94; mesmeric revelations, 287–93; narcotics/alcohol influence, 282–87; religious writing, 280–82 Locke, John, knowledge, 245 Louis XVI, King of France, and Mesmer, 92–93 Loyzehnski, M. V., 342 LSD, discovery of, 205 Lucid dreaming, 16; 1980s research, 123 Lucid dreams: shamanism, 171–72; SMT, 242, 243 Ludwig, Arnold M., 2–3, 6; ASC term, 114–15 Luna, E., 37 Lynch, David, 15 MacLean, P., 38 “Magical flight,” 74 Magico-religious practitioners, 1990s research, 126 Magnetic Lady to her Patient, A (Shelly), 287 Magritte, Rene´, surrealist painter, 335 Mahayana Buddhism: emptiness, 348; no-self-doctrine, 148 n.5 Make-believe, dissociation, 189 Making of a Counter Culture, The (Roszak), 209 Malevich, Kasmir, meditative induction, 329, 342–45, 343f Malevolence-benevolence spectrum, spirit possession, 76 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 338 Mandell, A., 31 Mania, Greek madness, frenzy, 56, 61 Manias, Plato’s types, 5 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton), 290–91 Marijuana, 1970’s research, 118 Markoff, John, 208–9 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake), 285 n.3 Martial arts, yoga training, 309–10 Martin, Agnes, meditative induction, 329, 342, 345–48 Mass psychogenic illness, Mesmer, 91–92 Masters, Robert, ASCID, 119 Maternal bond, music, 168
394
Index Maya yoga, 308 McKenna, Dennis, 207–8 McKenna, Terence, 207–8 McManus, J., 24 Mead, Europe, 51–52 Mediating function, ego, 264 Mediation: brain dynamics, 33–34; and procedures, 8 Medically unexplained epidemic illness, Mesmer, 91–92 Meditation: art induction, 329; Eastern practices, 156–57; Eastern tradition, 140, 141–42; ego-psychological model, 270–71; new millennium research, 128; 1990s research, 124–25; psychology of religion, 256; states classification, 5 Meditations (Descartes), 230, 231 Meditative states, consciousness, 243–44 Medium, performance, 305 Mediums, 100, 104, 105; new millennium research, 127–28 Mediumship: defined, 98; early study of, 97–103, 104, 105; and spiritualism, 98–99; 20th-century research, 106 Meister Eckhart: “God-mysticism,” 256; mystical dimensions, 260 Memory, literacy skills, 277 Menghi, Girolamo, exorcist, 83 Mental Health Research Institute Unusual Perceptions Schedule (MUPS), 124 Mental vortex, 57 n.10, 65 Merkabah literature,” Sholem, 55 n.8 Merrill, James, 293 Mescaline, literary bohemia, 285–86 Mesmer, Franz Anton; animal magnetism, 90–93, 92f; literary influence, 287–88 Mesmerism, 90–93, 92f, 97 n.2; literary trope, 287–93 Mesmerism (Browning), 288 Mesmerism in India (Esdaile), 97 Messiaen, Olivier, 15 Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 65, 66 “Metaverse,” 209 Methodists, emergence of, 90 Metzner, Ralph, 206 “Mimetic controller,” 196
Mind: OBE “protoconcept,” 248; philosophy of, 238–40 Minimalism, visual arts, 342, 345 Mitchell, Weir, narcotic use, 285 Mnemodrama, actor training, 316 Modalities of experiencing, 2 Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung), 278 “Modern primitives,” 203 “Modern spiritualism,” 98 Monophasic cultures, waking consciousness, 24 “Monophasic,” 181, 190 Monroe, Robert, OBE research, 116 Moody, Raymond (NDE), 1970s research, 118–19 Mors mystica, 263 Morselli, Enrico, 105 Mu¨ller, Catherine Elise, 104 Multiple personality: and hypnosis, 97 n.2; literary trope, 293–94 Murphy, Michael, 204 n.1 Murray, Gilbert, Cambridge anthropologist, 307 Musgrove, Frank, 219 Music: altered consciousness, 355, 356t, 356–57, 366; altered temporality, 366– 69; brain activity, 360–61; and hypnosis, 360; information transfer, 362; prelinguistic communication, 362–63; shamanism, 167–69; trance mechanics, 357–58 Music and Trance. A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (Rouget), 356, 360 Music therapy, 358–60 Musical tradition, Upper Paleolithic, 48–49 My Life in Art (Stanislavsky), 313 Myers, Frederic W. H., 6, 10; on mediumship, 101–2; works of, 102–3 Mystai, Greek rite participants, 59, 60 Mystic initiation, Ancient Greece, 60 Mystical death: defined, 271; ”forgetting model,” 263; Gertrud of Helfta, 269 Mystical experience: classical studies, 257; consequential dimension, 258, 259–60; defined, 259; ideological dimension, 258, 260; intellectual dimension, 258,
395
Index 260; and knowledge, 244–48; personality model, 264; religious dimension, 258–59; ritual dimension, 258, 260; scientific studies, 261–64 Mysticism: defined, 255, 257; 1980s research, 121; psychology of religion, 255–56; religious case studies, 266–72; types of experience, 256–57. See also Religious mysticism Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Katz), 120–21 Naı¨ve realism, philosophy of perception, 233 Nangyar, Usha, 310 Narcotics, in literary sources, 282–87 “Nature mysticism,” 256–56 Near-death experiences (NDE), 1970s research, 118–19 Neotrance, 215 Neurobiology, metric timekeeping, 366 “Neurognostic process,” 196 Neuromancer (Gibson), 208 Neurophenomenological approach, 7, 29, 38; shamanism, 176–77 Neuroscience: and ACS research, 106; new millennium research, 128 Neurotransmitters: shamanism, 165–66; time perception, 368 Newberg, A., 34 Nibbana (extinction), 263 Nirvana yoga, 308 “Noetic” states, 189 Noh theater, performance art, 311–12, 337; Sha Sha Higby, 341–42 Noirhomme, Quentin, 7 Noland, Christopher, 16 Nonbeing, Buddhist tradition, 140 Numinous character, awe/wonder, 189 Nu´n˜ez, Nicola´s, 15; actor training, 314, 317–18 O’Neill, Eugene, 287 O’Reilly, Kaite, performance score, 320 Odyssey (Homer), 60, 282–283 Old Testament prophets, shamanistic type, 53–54
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 206 Opium: Mediterranean protohistoric cultures, 52; poppy domestication, 50 Origin of the Work of Art, The (Heidegger), 331 Ornstein, R., 11 Ott, Jonathon, 207 Otto, Rudolf: mystical types, 256; numinous character, 189 Out-of-body experience (OBEs), 33; biological basis, 173–75; ecstasy, 53; new millennium research, 128; 1960s research, 115–16; Old Testament, 54, 55; as “protoconcept,” 248; Timarchus, 58; selfhood, 240; shamanism, 159, 172–73 Ownership, SMT, 240, 241 Ozturk, E., 36 Paradigm shifts, 26 Paradigms, features of, 25 Parapsychology, J. B. Rhine, 106 Parasympathetic dominance, shamanism, 169–70 Pascal, Blaise, on imaginary life, 280 Patara, mantic preparations, 56 Peak Experiences Scale (PES), 123 Pekala, Ronald, 122 Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats), 292 Perception: See Sensory perception Perennial Philosophy (Huxley), 244 Perennialism: mystical experience, 261, 262; philosophy of, 261, 244 Performance: defined, 302; Eastern models, 310–12; phenomenal/access consciousness, 319; western/ nonwestern practices, 303 Performance art: defined, 336; genres, 336–37 Performance event, theater, 303–4 Performance score, 302; phenomenological account, 320–21 Permanent changes, in consciousness, 9 Persistence of Memory (Dali), 334f, 334–35 Personal significance, and ASC, 29, 30 Personality, ego-psychological model, 265 “Perspectivism,” animism, 184
396
Index Phaedrus (Plato), 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 245, 327 Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, & Podmore), 102 Phantom limbs, 239 Phenomenal consciousness, performance, 319 Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI), 122 Philosophia perennis, 204 Philosophy: consciousness/self, 238–44; epistemological concerns, 230–33; mysticism/knowledge, 244–48; sensory perception, 233–38 Philosophy of Composition, The (Poe), 279 Physical stress, shamanism, 171 Piper, Leonora, medium, 100–1, 105 Pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide precursor (PACAP), 165 Placebo effect, shamanism, 164 Plath, Sylvia, 14 Plato, 2, 5, 11, 55; deep knowledge, 245; expansion of consciousness, 106; on initiatory madness, 59; on poetic inspiration, 63; on poetry, 279, 327 Plotinus, on out-of-body experience, 66–67 Plutarch, mystery rites, 58, 59, 60–61 Poe, Edgar Allan, 279; multiple identities, 293; psychic displacement, 288 Poet’s Immortal Fame, The (Horace), 295 Poetic inspiration, divine madness, 63 Poetry, Language and Thought (Heidegger), 279 Polanski, Roman, 15 Polyphasic void cultures, ASC, 24 “Polyphasic,” 181 Popper, Karl, 27 Possession: animal magnetism, 91; and dissociation, 37 Possession trance: movement, 357–57, 364; 1970s research, 119; REs, 190–91 Postconstructivism, mystical experience, 261 Posttraumatic stress disorder, 7 Potlatch system, gift exchange, 183 Pre-Christian European shamanism, 74–76
Prefrontal cortex (PFC), dysregulation, 32–33 Prehistoric art and practices, 46–51, 47f, 49f, 50f Preparadigmatic period, science/ideology change, 28 Principles of Psychology (James), 103–4, 278 Private Life, The (James), 293 Problem of Pure Consciousness, The (Forman), 261–62 Propensity, to ASC, 10 Prophecy: Afro-Caribbean religions, 90; ancient Greece, 56; ancient Israel, 53 Prosopopesis, defined, 105 Protohistoric practices, 51–52 Pseudo-Dionysian transcendence, 77 Psi phenomenon, 20th-century research, 106 Psychedelic Experience (Leary et al.), 206 Psychedelic festivals, value of, 216–19 Psychedelic-induced experiences, shamanism, 165–66 “Psychedelic trance,” contemporary counterculture, 203 Psychedelics: early counterculture, 205–8; mechanisms, 32; 1960s legacy, 205–6; 1970s research, 118; psytrance, 214–15; veritable pharmacopeia, 211 Psychiatric diagnosis, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 Psychic displacements, Romantic era, 288 Psychoactive substances: expansion of consciousness, 106; prehistoric period, 49–51 Psychoanalysis, 6 Psychogenic amnesia, 97 n.2 Psychoid experiences, 1970s research, 120 Psychological self, and sociological self, 36–37 “Psychological” signs, demonic possession, 80, 85 Psychology of Consciousness, The (Farthing), 113 Psychology of religion, approaches of, 255–56 Psychophysical training, acting, 313
397
Index Psytrance, early counterculture, 212–15, 218–19 Pure bliss, Eastern tradition, 150, 152–53 Pure consciousness: Eastern ASC states, 144–45; Eastern experience, 140, 142; Eastern tradition, 150, 152 Pure consciousness event (PCE), 121; defined, 262; personality model, 264, 271, 272 Pure individuality (ego), Eastern tradition, 150, 151–52 Putnam, F. W., 12 Qur’an, revelation of, 280–81 Race, Victor, 93 Radical behaviorism, 6 Rainbow Serpent Festival (Australia), 219 Raja yoga, 342 Ramo´n y Cajal, Santiago, ACS research, 106 Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep: daydreaming, 187; 1970s research, 119–20; self-consciousness, 242–43; and shamanism, 171–72 Rapture, affective transcendence, 77 Rationality, philosophical exploration, 89 RAVE Act (2003), 212 Rave culture, techno-music, 358 Raves, critiques, 217–18 Ravindra, Ravi, 198 Reality, and consciousness, 11 Realms of the Human Unconscious (Grof), 120 Reason, in dreams, 232 Reciprocal altruism, 182 Religion: five dimensions, 257–61; mystical dimension, 255; and mysticism, 255; and origin of writing, 280; psychology of, 255–56; and shamanist practices, 161–62; “stoned-ape” theory, 207 Religious context, prehistoric psychoactive substance use, 51 Religious Experience Episodes Measure (REEM), 256 Religious experiences (REs), biological basis, 196; and social structure, 189–91
Religious movements, Age of Enlightenment, 89–90 Religious mysticism: case studies, 266–72; experiential dimension, 258–59; psychology of religion, 255–57 Representational system: egopsychological model, 265–66; meditation case study, 270–71; visions case studies, 266–70 Representationalism, mental states, 234–35 Republic, The (Plato), 11 Resnais, Alain, 15 Respiratory activity, Eastern ASC experience, 141 Revelation, Locke’s view of, 245 Revenants, possessing souls, 78 Revitalization movements, defined, 194 Revonsuo, A., 3, 4 Reward Dependence Factor, 364 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 106 Rhythmic movements; synchronizing role, 363; trance, 356, 365–66 Rhythms of Peace festival (Morocco), 218 Ribot, Theodule Armand, 313 Richards, Thomas, actor training, 316 Richet, Charles, ACS research, 106 Rietveld, Hillegonda, 211 Rig Veda, ascetic practices, 309 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 330 Rimbaud, Arthur, 14, 106; narcotic use, 284–85 Ring, Kenneth, NDE, 119 Rites of passage, rituals, 187 Ritual induction procedures, shamanism, 169–71 Ritual/shamanic performance: and aesthetic performance, 305–6, 307; described, 302, 305–6; research, 303 Rituale Romanum, demonic possession guide, 80, 83 Rituals: “antibiological” features, 187; mystical dimension, 260; and performance, 305; phases of, 187–88; shamanism, 160–61, 163, 166–67; trance behavior, 357–58, 365 Roberts, Bernadette, mystical experience, 262
398
Index Rock, Adam, 14 Rock art, existing communities, 46 Roman Empire, 46; practices, 65–67 Romantic poets: genius notion, 327; narcotic use, 283–84; psychic displacement, 288 Roszak, Theodore, 209 Rouget, G., 53; on music, 355, 356 Rubber-hand illusion (RHI), 239 Rules, society, 182 Rushkoff, Douglas, 208 Russell, George William, 291 Russell, Ken, 6, 15 Sacred texts, revelation of, 280 Sacred, Durkheim’s view, 195 Saints’ shrines, exorcism, 83 Saldanha, Arun, 213 Samadhi meditation, hypoarousal, 120 Samadhi, SSS, 117 Saman, 305 San, southern Africa, 46 Sar, V., 36 Sardou, Victorien, 99 Satanic/demonic agent possession, 78; physical signs, 79, 80 Satie, Erik, 365 Schieffelin, E. L., 305–6 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 278 Schwartz, T., 37 Scientific revolution, paradigm shifts, 26 Scriabin, Alexander, 15 “Secular sacredness,” actor training, 314–15 Seeress of Prevost, 94 Self: and consciousness in Western Christian tradition, 73–74; Eastern traditions, 147–48, 148 n.5; SMT model, 238–42 Self-consciousness, SMT, 241–42 Self-Expansiveness Level Form (SELF), 123 Self-identification, conceptualist distinction, 240 Self-localization, conceptualist distinction, 240 Self-model theory (SMT), subjectivity, 238–42
Self-representation, ego-psychological model, 265 “Self-shamanism,” 208 Self-transcendence, 10 Seligman, R., 36 Senses, Eastern tradition, 150, 151 Sensory perception: ASC threats, 233; Descartes, 230–31; intentionalism/ representationalism, 234–35 Separation phase, rituals, 187 Serotonin, 31; in dancers, 364 Sexual abstinence, shamanism, 170–71 Sexual modesty, cultural universal, 185 Shakers, emergence of, 90 Shakespeare, William, drug references, 283 Shakespearian Criticism (Coleridge), 284 Shaman, term, 159, 162, 305 Shamanic states of consciousness (SSC), physiological symptoms, 328–29 Shamanic trance, REs, 190, 191 Shamanism: biological foundations, 164; classic 159–61; cross-cultural features, 160–62; defined, 159; healers, 163; music use, 355; 1980s research, 121–22; 1990s research, 125; soul journey, 33 Shamanism (Eliade), 160, 338–39 Shankara: ASC state, 149; “soul mysticism,” 256 Shape-shifting, perspectival worldview, 184 Shapland, Jo, performance score, 320, 322 Shear, Jonathan, 14 Shelley, Mary, narcotic use, 284 Shelley, Percy Bysshe: narcotic use, 283; psychic displacement, 288 Sherratt, A., intoxicating beverages, 51 n.2 Shinto religion, 310–11 Shlain, Bruce, 205 Shri Yantra diagram, 346, 347f, 347 Sidgwick, Eleanor, 105 Sights and Sounds (Spicer), 99 Sleep and dream research, 1 Sleep/wake cycle, 29 Slow-wave brain pattern, agents, 31 Sluhovsky, Moshe, 13 Smith, He´le`ne, medium, 104
399
Index Social bonding, and music, 362 Social contagion, and hypnosis, 186 Social Darwinism, Cambridge anthropologists, 307 “Social drama,” 191 Social play, shift in perception, 189 Society, rules, 182 Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 102, 106 Sociological self, and psychological self, 36–37 Socrates, 2, 5, 55; postcarnate knowledge, 64 Somnambulism: defined, 93; investigations of, 93–95; and “modern spiritualism,” 98 Soul, folk-phenomenological concept, 248 Soul flight: shamanism, 159, 160, 172–75; visual artists, 328, 334 “Soul-mysticism,” 256 Speaking in tongues (glossolalia), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Spectrum of consciousness, 120 Spicer, Henry, 99 Spiral motifs, Neolithic period, 48, 49f Spirit of Shamanism (Walsh), 328 Spirit possession, 74; as dissociation, 34, 36–37; diabolic, 76, 79–80; discernment, 80–82; divine, 75, 76–78; exorcism, 82–84; 1970s research, 119; performance, 305–6 Spirits, shamanism, 160 Spiritual experiences, and social structure, 189 Spiritual mystical experience, 76–77 Spiritual technologies, contemporary counterculture, 203 Spiritualism (Edmonds/Dexter), 98, 99 Spiritualization, demonic possession, 80, 82 Squid and Turtle Dreaming (Burkutlatjpi), 331, 332f St. Augustine, on union with the divine, 76 St. John, Graham, 14 St. Vitus’s dances, 91 Stace, Walter T.: mystical experiences, 146 n.4, 258, 259; perennialism, 261
Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 313–14 Starry Night (van Gogh), 330f, 331 States of consciousness (SoC), 2, 28, 30 “State-specific sciences” (SSS), 117 Stein, Gertrude, 104 Steinbeck, John, 287 Steiner, Rudolph, Anthroposophy, 107 Stephenson, Neal, 209 Steuchus, Augustinus, 244 Stevens, Jay, 206 Stevenson, Robert Louis: multiple identities, 293; narcotic use, 287 Stoker, Bram, 288 Storming Heaven (Stevens), 206 Storytelling, human nature, 277 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 287, 293 Strassman, Rick, HRS, 125 Stream of consciousness, inner experience, 278; literary style, 104 Stream of though, William James, 104 Stress, shamanism, 171 “Strong eye” technique, 331 Stropharia cubensis (psychoactive mushrooms), 207 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 25 Studies on Hysteria (Freud/Breuer), 105 Subconscious, and mediumship, 101–2, 105 Subjectivity, SMT, 238–39 Subliminal mind, defined, 103 Sudre, Rene´, prosopopesis, 105 Sufism, mystical dimension, 255, 260, 263 Sulzer, Eva, 335–36 Suprematist Composition, White on White (Malevich), 343f, 344 Surrealism: altered states, 288–92; visual artists, 334–35 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 191 Suzuki, D. T., on Eastern ASC state, 149 Suzuki technique, actor training, 318 Symphonie Fantastique, 15 Synchronous brain states, 7 Synthetic functions, ego, 264
400
Index Takahashi, Melanie, 217 Tale of Genji, Lady Aoi, The, 311 Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales, 15, 317 Tantric meditation, 346 Taoism: Agnes Martin’s paintings, 347–48; mystical dimension, 255; practices, 156 Tart, Charles Theodore, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 28, 29; on automaticity, 107; 1960s research, 115, 116; 1970s research, 117–18 Tatsumi, Hijikata, 318 Teaching of Don Juan, The (Castaneda), 286 Technicians of Ecstasy (Levy), 329 “Techniques of ecstasy,” 160 Technological Society, The (Ellul), 209 Techno-rave culture, early counterculture, 203, 210–12 Techno-tribes, contemporary counterculture, 203 Telepathic communication, 20th-century research, 106 Tellegen Absorption Scale, 364 Temporal lobe, and hypergraphia, 281–82 Teresa of Avila, 83–84, 260 Theater: origins of, 307–8; performance event, 303–4 Theater Research Workshop (TRW), 317–18 “Theatrical theories,” 194 Theogony (Hesiod), 63 Theologue (Grey), 333, 333f Theosophists, cosmic consciousness, 204 Theravada Buddhism: ASC states, 146, 148 n.5; mystical dimension, 255; practices, 156 Theta slow-wave brain waves, 23, 30, 31; in meditation, 33 Thomas Aquinas, divine/demonic possession, 79 Thomas of Cantimpre´, 79 Thousand and One Nights, 283 Three-variable (AIM) model (Hobson), 7 Timarchus, at Trophonius, 58 Time paradoxon, 367 Time, and music, 356, 367–69 Told by the Wind, 320–23, 321f Tomczyk, Stanislawa, medium, 101
Torah, revelation of, 280 Touch Samadhi, psytrance, 219 Trance: bodily movements, 356t, 356–57; definitions, 4–5; early counterculture, 212–15; mechanics in ritual behaviors, 357; mediumship, 98, 99–101; postures in 1990s research, 125; ravers, 218; sensory overstimulation, 356 “Trance-inductive effect,” 292 Transcendent experiences, 8 Transcendent states, physiological mechanisms, 31 Transcendental Meditation (TM): ASC experience, 141, 142, 143–44; ASC states, 146–47; practices, 156 Transitional phase, rituals, 187–88 Transitions, in consciousness, 9 Trauma: and ASC, 8; and dissociation, 36 Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, 364 Trilby (Du Maurier), 288 Triune brain, 38 Trophonius, oracular center at Lebadeia, 57, 58, 59 Trophotropic arousal, 120 Troubridge, Una, 101 Trul khor (“magic circle”), 309 Tuleilat Ghassul, geometric motifs, 48, 50f Turner, Edith, 286 Turner, Fred, 208–9 Turner, Victor: “antistructure,”188, 191; “social drama,” 191; “subjunctive mood,” 216; on monastic institutions, 198; Ndembu rite, 196–97 Un Chien Andalou, 334 Unio mystica, union with divine, 77 “Universal consciousness,” 204–5 Untitled (Irwin), 348, 349f Ustinova, Yulia, 13 Vailala Madness, cargo cult, 193 Vaishnavism, mystical dimension, 255 Vaitl, D., 7, 9 Vampyr, 15 van Gennep, Arnold, Indian rituals, 187–88
401
Index van Gogh, Vincent, shamanic induction techniques, 329–31, 330f Van Ruusbroec, Jan, 260 Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Carden˜a et al.), 114 Varieties of Religious Experience (James), 104, 205, 256 Varo, Remedios, 15; shamanic induction techniques, 329, 330, 335–36, 336f Vasopressin receptors, in dancers, 364 Vedanta tradition, ASC experience, 139, 140, 141 Vedic literature, and language, 278 Veils (Brunson), 351 Velmans, M., 4 Vexations (Satie), 365 Via negative, union with divine, 77 Virtual reality, early counterculture, 203, 208–9 Visions: ego-psychological model, 266–70; mystical experience, 258 Visual artists: cultivation of ASC, 328; meditative states, 328; shamanistic consciousness, 328 Visual hallucinations, 1970s research, 117 Visuospatial first-person perspective (1PP), selfhood, 240, 241, 242 Void/in Art (Levy), 329 Vollenweider, Franz, 32 Voltaire, philosophy of, 89 Waking consciousness, 1, 11, 29 Wallace, Anthony, revitalization movements, 194 Walsh, Roger, 126, 328 Warnings (l’avertissement), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Wasson, Robert Gordon, 207 Wayang Kulit, performance art, 337 “Weapon of the weak,” 191 Wearable environment, 342 Weber, Max, charisma, 194 Weschler, Lawrence, 348 Western Christian tradition: demonic possession, 79–80; divine possession, 76–78; exorcism, 82–84; self and consciousness, 73–74 Western pre-Christian shamanism, 74–76
Western tradition, performance, 303–4, 306 Whisper of inspiration (le souffle´), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Whitehead, Charles, 14, 24 Whitley, D. S., 48 Wiene, Robert, 15 Wilber, Ken, 204 n.1; spectrum of consciousness, 120 Wilson (Wavoka), Jack, 193, 194 Windt, Jennifer, 14 Wine, Europe, 52 Winkelman, Michael, 7, 13, 14 Women: demonic possession, 80; discernment of possession, 81–82; medieval mystics, 78; religious visions, 258 Wordsworth, William, narcotic use, 283 “Work, The” (Gurdjieff), 107 Wounded Knee (1890), 194 Writer’s block, hypnosis, 288 Writing: origins, 280; value of, 278, 279–80 Yantras, 346 Yasuo, Yuasa, personal cultivation, 308 Yeats, W. B., altered states, 291, 292–93; narcotic use, 285 Yoga Sutras, ASC experience, 141 Yoga: actor’s performance, 310; ASC experience, 139, 140–41; ASC states, 146; martial arts, 309–10; practices, 156; term, 308; transactional process, 308–9; Western actor training, 313–14 Yugen, noh theater, 312 Zaehner, Ronald C., mysticism types, 256–57 Zarrilli, Phillip B., 15; acting techniques, 318; performance score, 320 Zazen, hypoarousal, 120 Zeami Motokiyo, 311–12 Zen Buddhism: ASC experience, 140–41, 142–43, 144; ASC states, 146–47; mystical dimension, 255, 260; practices, 156 Zinberg, N. E., 11
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Altering Consciousness
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Altering Consciousness Multidisciplinary Perspectives Volume 2: Biological and Psychological Perspectives
Etzel Carden˜a and Michael Winkelman, Editors
Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Altering consciousness : multidisciplinary perspectives / Etzel Carden˜a and Michael Winkelman, editors. p. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–38308–3 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–313–38309–0 (ebook) 1. Consciousness. I. Carden˜a, Etzel. II. Winkelman, Michael. BF311.C2773 2011 154.4—dc22 2010054086 ISBN: 978–0–313–38308–3 EISBN: 978–0–313–38309–0 15 14 13 12 11
1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments Preface Kenneth S. Pope Introduction Etzel Carden˜a
vii ix xiii
Part I: Biological Perspectives Chapter 1
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace
Chapter 2
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness David E. Presti
Chapter 3
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space with Special Reference to Shamanic Ecstasy Fred Previc
3 21
43
Chapter 4
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms Mario Beauregard
63
Chapter 5
DMT and Human Consciousness Zevic Mishor, Dennis J. McKenna, and J. C. Callaway
85
Chapter 6
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness David E. Nichols and Benjamin R. Chemel
Chapter 7
Peyote and Meaning Stacy B. Schaefer
121 147
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Chapter 8
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 167 Andrea E. Bla¨tter, Jo¨rg C. Fachner, and Michael Winkelman
Chapter 9
189 Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner, Gregory Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso
Chapter 10 Altered Consciousness and Human Development Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and Etzel Carden˜a
211
Part II: Psychological Perspectives Chapter 11 Altered States of Bodily Consciousness Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke
237
Chapter 12 Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys
263
Chapter 13 Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology Etzel Carden˜a
279
Chapter 14 Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders David Lukoff
301
Chapter 15 Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing: 327 An Embodied Social Neuroscience Perspective Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz Chapter 16 Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness David Luke About the Editors Advisory Board About the Contributors Index
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375 377 379 385
Acknowledgments
We want to acknowledge first the forebears of these books, the men and women who across many thousands of years have descended into dark caves, led community rituals, and explored consciousness-altering plants in order to encounter anew the world and their selves. We recognize our pioneers in Plato in the West, Pantanjali in the East, and other exemplars of first-rate intellects who laid the groundwork for integrating the insights of alterations of consciousness into our views of reality. Among the founders of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated alterations of consciousness into their theories of human mind and behavior. Even during the decades-long exile of consciousness by behaviorism, some brave souls dared to engage in research on altered states, among them Stanley Krippner, Arnold Ludwig, Robert Ornstein, and Jerome Singer in psychology, E. E. Evans-Wentz, Erika Bourguignon, Michael Harner, Joseph Long, and Charles Laughlin in anthropology, and Albert Hofmann in pharmacology. Among those who helped to point out the importance of studying alterations of consciousness as a basic element of human experience, the leading figure in establishing them as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry was Charles T. Tart, an erstwhile engineering student turned psychologist. Our two volumes are dedicated to these and the many other pioneers of inquiry into consciousness who provided the foundations for the perspectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisitions editor who made Altering Consciousness possible, and our many contributors, without whom these volumes would not have seen the light of day. We especially would like to thank Julie Beischel, Cheryl Fracasso,
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David E. Nichols, and Moshe Sluhovsky, who came to the rescue when it looked as if we might not be able to include some important topics. We are also very fortunate to have been the recipients of the generosity of Anna Alexandra Gruen, who gave us permission to use the extraordinary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Go´ mez del Campo, who made it happen.
Dedications Michael dedicates these volumes to the next generation of investigators who will take the foundations of a multidisciplinary science of altered consciousness described here and produce a more comprehensive paradigm for understanding these inherent aspects and potentials of human nature. Etzel dedicates Altering Consciousness to: My dear departed, Ma (May Buelna de Carden˜a), Blueberry, and Ninnifer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath. And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie: “ . . . somos ma´s que dos piezas de rompecabezas, le dijo la arena al mar, somos algo nuevo y distinto.”
Preface Kenneth S. Pope This book is a remarkable achievement, bringing together what is known in a field that has been fragmented, marked by fitful starts and stops, and often misunderstood. The editors and authors demonstrate courage and a unique intelligence in creating this resource. The volume moves us forward in our understanding, expanding our vistas. Why have we as scientists, clinicians, and scholars had such a difficult time approaching the biological and psychological study of altering and altered states of consciousness? This preface seemed a good opportunity to suggest a few possibilities. Science loves that which can be precisely measured. Scientific journals pour forth numbers representing behaviors, doses, distances, durations, weights, speeds, and other measurables. But consciousness challenges us to define it in any precise, useful, noncircular way. The stream of consciousness as it occurs in “real life” and is actually experienced has been elusive for novelists as well as scientists. Virginia Woolf (2005) wrote that “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (p. 899). As if this were not hazy enough to evoke pity and fear—not to say a prompt rejection from many editors of scientific journals—William James acknowledged additional layers of complexity when he described his use of nitrous oxide to push the “semi-transparent envelope” and alter his consciousness: One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How
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to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. (James, 2008, p. 283)
This lack of formulas and maps has often served as a Do Not Enter sign for conventional scientific investigation. During one period, human consciousness itself seemed to almost cease to exist as a research topic for U.S. psychologists. As Roger Brown (1958) wrote: “In 1913 John Watson mercifully closed the bloodshot inner eye of American psychology. With great relief the profession trained its exteroceptors on the laboratory animal” (p. 93). Yet another problem in understanding altered states of consciousness has been the struggle to answer the question: Altered from what? What is “normal waking consciousness”? What may be normal for some may be altered (from “normal”) for others. What has appeared in the popular arts and other media as exotic “altered states” of consciousness may represent normative traits or enduring states for many. The search for an objective, neutral definition and description of an inherently subjective phenomenon is made even more daunting because each attempt represents a specific point of view. In “Through the Looking Glass: No Wonderland Yet! (The Reciprocal Relationship Between Methodology and Models of Reality),” Rhoda Unger (1983) wrote, “Description is always from someone’s point of view and hence is always evaluative.” A third source of complexity and misunderstandings can be found in an altered state of Unger’s statement quoted above: Description is always from a cultural context and hence is always evaluative, drawing on that culture’s evaluative assumptions and approaches. We tend to be aware of cultural contexts, influences, assumptions, and approaches when we read descriptions from cultures not our own. We are far more apt to overlook cultural factors when they spring from our own culture. In theory we all know that our culture can profoundly influence how we view, understand, and describe a phenomenon. But in practice, all of us trip up at least some of the time. A remarkable book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Fadiman, 1997), illustrates the potential costs of overlooking the influences of culture and context on everyone involved. The book describes the efforts of a California hospital staff and a Laotian refugee family to help a Hmong child whose American doctors had diagnosed her with epilepsy. Everyone involved had the best of intentions and worked hard to help the girl, but a
Preface
lack of awareness of cultural differences had tragic effects. The book quotes medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman: As powerful an influence as the culture of the Hmong patient and her family is on this case, the culture of biomedicine is equally powerful. If you can’t see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else’s culture? (p. 261)
A fourth factor that may have led some to turn away from this area is anxiety or fear evoked by the stereotype of perceived danger linked to various methods of altering consciousness. Some of the substances—such as 3,4Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (also known as MDMA or ecstasy)— used to alter consciousness can have significantly negative consequences under some conditions and have been criminalized in some jurisdictions. It is worth noting, however, that a randomized, controlled pilot study, reported during the writing of this preface, “demonstrates that MDMAassisted psychotherapy with close follow-up monitoring and support can be used with acceptable and short-lived side effects in a carefully screened group of subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD” (Mithoefer, Wagner, Mithoefer, Ilsa, & Doblin, 2010). The area may also frighten some as dangerous to a scientific or academic career. For them, the career trajectory of Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert is not a fascinating journey of exploration and discovery but a cautionary tale. Academic pioneers in exploring various hallucinogens first hand, Leary and Alpert traveled to Cuernavaca to take psilocybin and were among the members of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary said that a few hours of using psilocybin taught him more about his brain and its potential than he had learned in a decade and a half of studying psychology and conducting traditional psychological research (Ram Das: Fierce Grace, 2003). Harvard fired both Leary and Alpert, who later became Ram Dass, in 1963. Finally, consciousness-altering substances may seem dangerous for their perceived potential to control human behavior. Aldous Huxley explored this theme in Brave New World (2006a; see also 2006b). The novel presents a government that uses the hallucinogen soma to control the citizens. The novel’s presentation of a consciousness-altering substance as dangerous gains force in light of Huxley’s own courageous exploration of consciousness-altering substances to open “the doors of perception” (see, e.g., Huxley, 2009).
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These are only a few possible reasons that scientists, clinicians, and scholars have avoided, discounted, neglected, or misunderstood this area. My impulse to be more comprehensive in listing and exploring these barriers to understanding is immediately doused by my belief that no one ever bought a book to read the preface.
References Brown, R. (1958). Words and things. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Fadiman, A. (1997). The spirit catches you and you fall down: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Huxley, A. (2006a). Brave new world. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (Originally published 1932). Huxley, A. (2006b). Brave new world revisited. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (Originally published 1958). Huxley, A. (2009). Doors of perception. Heaven and hell. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (Originally published 1954). James, W. (2008). Varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. Rockville, MD: ARC Manor. (Originally published 1902). Mithoefer, M. C., Wagner, M. T., Mithoefer, A. T., Ilsa, J., & Doblin, R. (2010). The safety and efficacy of ±3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: The first randomized controlled pilot study. Journal of Psychopharmacology. Retrieved August 15, 2010, from http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/ 2010/07/14/0269881110378371.full.pdf+html. Ram Dass: Fierce grace. (2003). DVD directed by Mickey Lemle; produced by Bobby Squires, Buddy Squires, Mickey Lemle, Jessica Brackman, & Linda K. Moroney. New York: Zeitgeist Films. Unger, R. K. (1983). Through the looking glass: No wonderland yet! (The reciprocal relationship between methodology and models of reality). Psychology of Women Quarterly, 8(1), 9–32. Woolf, V. (2005). Modern fiction. In L. Rainy (Ed.), Modernism: An anthology (pp. 897–901). Carleton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing. (Originally published 1919).
Introduction
1
Etzel Carden˜a In the preface to this volume, Ken Pope, not only a foremost ethicist in psychology but also a pioneer in the study of consciousness (e.g., Pope & Singer, 1978) and a very compassionate person, offers his perspective on various reasons why the study of such a central phenomenon as altered states of consciousness (ASC) has been almost completely ignored by psychology and related disciplines. Setting some of the foundations for the biological processes underlying ASC, Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace discuss the various biological rhythms that may affect consciousness, including a possible continuation of the sleep and dream cycle throughout the day. Also foundational is David Presti’s chapter on neurochemistry and altered consciousness in which, after giving their proper due to neurochemical impulses, he calls for an expansion of what he calls the “standard model” (following the terminology in physics) to understand the relationship between consciousness and biological processes. After these general introductions, Fred Previc focuses on the dopaminergic network of the nervous system and how it gives rise to experiences of distant space and time that may underlie shamanic and other alterations of consciousness characterized by a sense of being in a different plane of reality. Mario Beauregard concentrates on transcendent experiences and proposes a sophisticated model of their connection to brain sites and functions. Calling for a neurophenomenological approach to the study of ASC (see also Carden˜a, 2009), he suggests that transcendence can be associated with different mechanisms (e.g., hyper- or hypoactivation of the prefrontal cortex) and networks of brain functions rather than just specific areas (e.g., the temporal lobe) or mechanisms (e.g., hypofrontality). The next four chapters deal with powerful psychoactive drugs in some way or other. Erudite and comprehensive overviews of biopharmacological and psychological aspects of the ubiquitous psychedelic agent DMT and of the culture-transforming substance LSD are authored by Zevic 1
The standard abbreviation in this volume for “altered states of consciousness” both in singular and plural is ASC. Also note that to help cross-reference relevant chapters in the two-volume set there are editorial square brackets [ ] throughout the volume.
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Mishor, Dennis McKenna, and J. C. Callaway, and David Nichols and Benjamin Chemel, respectively. In her chapter, Stacy B. Schaefer underlines the cultural and psychological aftereffects of the ingestion of peyote among the Huicholes, a group she has studied for decades and that I was fortunate to come across (particularly a most special shaman) while I still lived in Me´xico. Finally, the interdisciplinary team of Andrea Bla¨tter, Jo¨rg Fachner, and Michael Winkelman tackles the biological, psychological, and sociocultural aspects of addiction, especially as it relates to alterations of consciousness. Various of the afore-mentioned authors also discuss how the usual account that posits that brain mechanisms cause psychological processes belies a far more complicated picture. Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner, Gregory Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso discuss East and West approaches to sexuality and ASC, besides presenting the results of a study on the phenomenology of sexual experience in a Western sample. Their chapter is a good transition to the following section of this volume, which focuses on psychological and neurological aspects of ASC. Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and I describe how the various developmental stages across the lifespan are associated with typical and different forms of “ordinary consciousness” and the propensity to experience ASC. An incredible array of altered states of bodily consciousness, both spontaneous and induced by experimental or pathological processes, is the topic covered by Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke. In the following chapter, Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys review the literature on neurological conditions that can affect basic levels of wakefulness and arousal, including sleep, comatose states, epilepsy, and locked-in syndrome, brought to public awareness by the excellent French film, based on a first-person account, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Moving from mostly neurological to mostly psychological processes, in my chapter on ASC in emotion and psychopathology, I review how alterations in consciousness can affect emotions and vice versa and then discuss the plethora of alterations of consciousness found in psychopathology. In their chapter on healing, Aaron Mishara and Michael Schwartz provide an overview of the research on ASC associated with different types of healing and propose a model for how the self mediates this connection. David Lukoff describes the area of what has been called spiritual emergencies, the juncture of psychopathological phenomena that may be part of a spiritual process, and reviews the literature showing that by and large, unusual (anomalous) experiences, including potentially psi or parapsychological phenomena, are not necessarily associated with
Introduction
psychopathology. A potential explanation for this is controlled research that provides evidence that psi phenomena may in some cases be accurate perceptions of events, and that they are often experienced during ASC, as David Luke discusses in the final chapter. A couple of recent major studies published in two of the best and most demanding psychological journals reinforce his points (cf. Bem, 2011; Storm, Tressoldi, & Di Risio, 2010). Finally, some words about a chapter you will not find in Volume 2. We had commissioned a contribution on physical activity and ASC, but the assignee did not honor his commitment so at least I want to suggest some readings that may partly fill that lacuna. Vaitl et al. (2005) show that relaxation, which is a common but not necessary component of most meditation and hypnotic practices, is predominantly associated with reductions in cortical activity (particularly beta brain waves) in the prefrontal region, enhanced left cingulated activity, and decreased sympatho-adrenergic tone. On the other extreme is vigorous physical activity, related to spirit possession, various rituals, and performance, and which may differ in subtle or not-so-subtle ways from ASC induced by quiescence (see Carden˜a, 2005, Zarrilli, Volume 1). In fact, my first taste of an intense waking ASC occurred in the midst of very conscious and demanding physical activity in experimental theatre groups [see Zarrilli, Volume 1], experiences that at that point my psychological studies failed almost completely to illuminate. Also, besides the “runners’ high,” some marathon runners mention out-of-body and other dissociative experiences (Morgan, 1993), and those who run even longer (sometimes much longer) distances than a marathon, the “ultrarunners,” have reported alterations of a sense of time, boundless energy, unitive experiences, and related phenomena (Jones, 2004). Although endorphins have been postulated as correlates of these physical activity-related changes, endocannabinoids (internally produced compounds chemically similar to cannabis) may have a stronger link (Dietrich & McDaniel, 2004). At the end of this comprehensive tour on the domain of ASC, it should be evident that we cannot understand the transcendent joys or the terrifying nightmares of the human experience without taking stock of the varieties of human consciousness. With that wave to William James’s always inspiring phrase, I give the last word to the eminent American poet Theodore Roethke (1961), who experienced ASC related to both his encounters with psychological disintegration and his sense of unity with the world. In his poem A Dark Time, he talks of madness as “nobility of the soul/At odds with circumstance” and of a final insight in which “The mind enters itself . . . And one is One, free in the tearing wind.”
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References Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 407–425. Carden˜a, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physically active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59. Carden˜a, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of consciousness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation. Dietrich, A., & McDaniel, W. (2004). Endocannabinoids and exercise. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 38, 536–541. Jones, P. (2004). Ultrarunners and chance encounters with “absolute unitary being.” Anthropology of Consciousness, 15, 39–50. Morgan, W. P. (1993). Hypnosis and sport psychology. In J. W. Rhue, S. J. Lynn, & I. Kirsch (Eds.), Handbook of clinical hypnosis (pp. 649–670). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Pope, K. S., & Singer, J. L. (Eds.). (1978) The stream of consciousness. New York: Plenum. Roethke, T. (1961). The collected poems of Theodor Roethke. New York: Doubleday. Storm, L., Tressoldi, P. E., & Di Risio, L. (2010). Meta-analysis of free-response studies, 1992–2008: Assessing the noise reduction model in parapsychology. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 471–485. Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G., Kotchoubey, B., Ku¨bler, A., Lehmann, D., Miltner, W. H. R., Ott, U., Pu¨tz, P., Sammer, G., Strauch, I., Strehl, U., Wackermann, J., & Weiss, T. (2005). Psychobiology of altered states of consciousness. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 98–127.
PART I
Biological Perspectives
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CHAPTER 1
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace Introduction: Commonly Observed Cyclical Changes in Consciousness A state of consciousness depends both on its content and on its form. It is a way of experiencing. Altered states of consciousness (ASC) are ones in which the content, form, or quality of experience is significantly different from ordinary states of consciousness and that do not contain symptoms of any mental disorders (Kokoszka, 2000) [but see Carden˜a, this volume]. In these states, an extraordinary content is experienced, the manner of experiencing is unusual, or both of these situations may simultaneously exist. An extraordinary experience may be subjective (i.e., from the point of the experiencing participant) or it may be made from a theoretical approach describing or presuming what is contained in an ordinary state of consciousness (Kokoszka, 2007). However, research as well as common everyday experiences indicate that a state of consciousness is not a stable phenomenon. Its stability appears to be related to experiencing a feeling of one’s own identity. Eventually, fluctuations in states of consciousness are constrained within a narrow range and are thus not experienced as altered states. It is well documented that states of consciousness within the individual are not stable (Kokoszka, 2007). Their content, form, and quality (modality) undergo continuous alterations. This chapter focuses on alterations that
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appear to result from fluctuations in cyclical, biological rhythms. For genetic reasons, these biological rhythms oscillate in endogenous ways. Some data indicate that a biological zeitgeber (German for “time giver” or “time synchronizer”) is localized in subthalamic structures, specifically the zona incerta (Jones, 2008). This is a horizontally elongated region of gray matter cells. However, other brain structures are also involved in these processes. Chronobiology divides biological rhythms into three types: infradian (with periods longer than 28 hours), circadian (with periods between 20 and 28 hours), and ultradian (with periods from a few milliseconds to 20 hours). Biological rhythms are synchronized by cyclical environmental changes including day/night changes, seasonal changes, times when one arises from sleep, times when one consumes meals, and times when one engages in social activities (Wallace, 1993; Wallace & Fisher, 2000). The most powerful synchronizer is the presence of light in the environment. We begin with a review of literature related to the influence of biological rhythms on states and ASC, and then discuss these rhythms in terms of existing theories of such states.
Biological Rhythms That Can Influence States and Altered States of Consciousness Infradian Rhythms Infradian rhythms include many slow rhythms with periods of approximately 1 month (e.g., menstrual cycles) or longer (e.g., seasonal depression or seasonal affective disorder—SAD). The impact of seasons of the year on some people’s state of mind is obvious. For example, the beginning of winter is associated with a diminished mood for engaging in activity and a general decrease in energy. Spring is associated with increased energy and an improved mood for engaging in all types of activities. In addition, spring appears to be associated with increased sexual desire that affects the reproductive cycle of many animals, synchronized by changes in the amount of daylight (Prendergast, 2005). Unfortunately, this issue has received little attention with respect to impact of increased daylight on sexual activity and birth rate in humans. However, it has been reported that the highest sperm count among men is found in the spring, and the lowest is found in the summer (Gyllenborg et al., 1999). Also, seasonal differences in the frequency of suicide attempts have been found among men. Spring and summer were found to be the times of highest frequency for those between the ages of 15 to 34, and for those over 65. And Valtonen, Suominen, and coworkers (2006) reported
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
that suicide attempts for those suffering from mood disorders peaked during autumn and were lowest during the winter. However, it is worth mentioning that these studies were conducted in Finland, where the day/ night cycles differ from other parts of the world. It would be interesting to see if these results could be replicated in other countries.
Circadian Rhythms The sleep/wake cycle falls into this category. The result of this extensively researched cycle indicates that it is approximately 24 hours in length and it is influenced by two separate processes. The first is an endogenous, biological clock that drives this cycle. The second is sleep propensity as determined by one’s history of sleep and wakefulness periods and the duration of previous sleep episodes. These two interactive processes determine sleep at night and wakefulness during daytime hours (PandiPeruamal et al., 2009). Changes in the secretion of some hormones (e.g., cortisol as secreted by the adrenal gland and related to reactions to stress, shift work, and long journeys that disturb rhythms responsible for adaptation to the environment and normal functioning such as jet lag; see Rosmond, Dallman, & Bjorntorp, 1998) are also influenced by circadian rhythms. Similarly, some neurotransmitters are influenced by circadian rhythms (e.g., melatonin as secreted by the pineal gland; Benlouci et al., 2005, considered the zeitgeber for regulating time of different functions including sleep and wakefulness).
Ultradian Rhythms The REM (rapid eye movements)/NREM (non-REM) cycle is the most documented ultradian rhythm, lasting approximately 90 minutes (Hobson, 2001). Sleep usually ensues with a loss of awareness of the environment. However, an individual may preserve reflective consciousness and experience visual imagery, described as the first stage of NREM sleep (Hobson, 2001). During this period, level of activation decreases and that, in turn, alters the state of consciousness, which leads to the next NREM stage. In Stage 2 NREM, thalamocortical transmission of external and internal signals are blocked, and larger brain waves and quick bursts of activity are present. In Stage 3 NREM, brain waves are slow and quite large. At this point, it is difficult to awaken the sleeper. It usually takes several minutes and the sleeper experiences confusion and disorientation with a strong tendency to fall sleep again. Finally, in Stage 4 NREM (where it is also difficult to awaken
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Figure 1.1
Human brain wave activity during wakefulness and sleep.
the sleeper), the brain waves are quite large and produce a slow, jagged EEG pattern (see Figure 1.1) [see Noirhomme & Laureys, this volume]. Following the completion of the four NREM stages (in order), there is a staircase-like return to Stage 3, then Stage 2, and Stage 1. This then sets the scenario for the appearance of the first REM stage. It is characterized by an increase in brain wave activity, approximating that which occurs during wakefulness. This is accompanied by horizontal eye movements under the eyelids (Dement & Kleitman, 1957) and vivid dreams. During the night, REM stages have a tendency to become longer and more intense. Many sleepers report having the impression that they are awake. Further, there are reports of hallucinoid dreaming after awakening in this stage (Lavie, 1992). The sleeper’s thought processes may seem logical, but only in a dream situation, without insight as to his or her true state of mind or consciousness. More recently, the sleep/wake cycles and REM/NREM cycles have been explained in terms of the AIM model of consciousness (Hobson, 2007).
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
With this three-axes model, it is possible to track brain-mind waking, sleeping, and abnormal states as a continuous succession of points. Wakefulness, NREM sleep, and REM sleep occupy specific regions of a state space. In this environment, wakefulness and REM are clearly differentiated. AIM is an acronym for activation, information (input) source, and modulation. Activation refers to a rate of information processing. In essence, the cortex is activated if brain wave activity is low voltage and high frequency. Activation is measured as the power of the high-frequency component. It can also be measured by imaging brain regions (via blood flow) or by reaction times. Information (input) source varies from external to internal as a function of input–output information flow and by internal stimulus generation. In order for the brain to process external data, the individual must be awake and internal stimuli must be suppressed. During REM, the opposite takes place; internal stimuli are activated and the individual must be asleep. Modulation is an estimate of the mixture of chemical influences arising from adrenergic (e.g., serotonin) and cholinergic (e.g., acetylcholine) brainstem neurons. Modulation determines how information is processed. Hobson also refers to the modulation component as memory. Thus, the strength of modulation determines whether the brain records conscious experiences (as would be the case while one is awake) or fails to record experiences (as occurs when one is dreaming). In addition to the 90-minute ultradian cycle that appears when examining REM/NREM activity, Kokoszka (2007) reports evidence for similar cycles in wakefulness. As examples, Kripke and Sonnenschein (1978) showed the existence of an ultradian cycle for the production of imagery (both in and outside the laboratory). Lavie, Levy, and Collidge (1975) reported finding an ultradian cycle for the strength in the perception of visual illusions. Ultradian cycles have also been reported for accuracy of motor coordination (Gopher & Lavie, 1980), time of behavioral reactions (Orr, Hoffman, & Hegges, 1974), quality of task performance (Sterman, 1985), use of cognitive styles (Klein & Armitage, 1979), and perception of the spiral aftereffect (Lavie, Levy, & Collidge, 1975). Some physiological and psychophysiological functions also appear to be affected by ultradian rhythms including EEG (Geretz & Lavie, 1983; Kripke & Sonnenschein, 1978; Manseau & Broughton, 1984; Okawa, Matousek, & Petersen, 1984), renal secretion (Brandenberger, Simon, & Follenius, 1987), gastric motility (Lavie & Kripke, 1981), cortical alertness (Merica & Fortune, 2004), respiratory and heart rate (Stein, Lundequam, et al., 2006), and human sexual responses and activity (Carmichael, Warburton, Dixen, & Davidson, 1994).
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Vividness of visual imagery (as measured by the self-rated VVIQ; Marks, 1973) also appear to vary according to an ultradian cycle (Wallace, Turosky & Kokoszka, 1992; Wallace & Kokoszka, 1995), and in a follow-up study (Kokoszka, Domoslawski, Wallace, & Borzym, 2000), not only was an ultradian cycle present for imagery vividness (with an approximate length between 3 and 12 hours), but a circadian period was present as well (between 11 hours and 3.5 days). It was further found that cycles of vividness were similar to diurnal variations in hypnotic susceptibility (Wallace, 1993). For example, for those classified as day persons (those most alert or active during daylight hours), hypnotizability (as measured by the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility: Form A; Shor & Orne, 1962) was greatest between 10 AM and 2 PM. Night persons showed the greatest susceptibility at 1 PM and between 6 PM and 9 PM. Finally, Erickson and colleagues speculated the existence of a 90- to 120-minute ultradian “trance” period during which they believed parasympathetic dominance and relaxation were optimal for inducing hypnosis (Erickson & Rossi, 1979; Erickson, Rossi, & Rossi, 1976; Rossi, 1991). To date, however, there has not been empirical support found for this hypothesis.
Theoretical Explanation The previously described rhythms are naturally occurring and associated with normal psychobiological functioning. However, their impact on states of consciousness is more complex, especially if they can cause or be associated with ASC. The assessment of the impact of biological rhythms on states of consciousness depends on the accepted definition of consciousness and its altered states (Wallace, Kokoszka, & Turosky, 1993). Unfortunately, there is no commonly accepted definition of consciousness. For pragmatic reasons, we will limit our definition to deal only with biological rhythms from a meta-theoretical point of view. In doing so, we wish to consider the following issues and questions: (a) When are rhythmic changes experienced and/or recognized as altered states of consciousness? (b) What is the nature of biologically produced states of consciousness versus those induced by other means? (c) Which theoretical concepts have the strongest support for explaining variability in states of consciousness?
Biological Rhythmic Changes and ASC There is no research on this topic, but clinical experience suggests that an individual can recognize typical and unusual experiences during sleep
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
as well as during daydream episodes. This suggests that there may be qualitatively different experiences during sleep and wakefulness. Also, most individuals can usually distinguish typical from unusual night dreams; similarly, they can distinguish normal from anomalous experiences during wakefulness (see Kokoszka, 2007). With respect to unaltered states of consciousness, Kokoszka (1988, 2007) describes four types: (a) REM sleep, (b) NREM sleep, (c) OWSC or an ordinary waking state of consciousness, and (d) DWSC or a differentiated waking state of consciousness. REM sleep has previously been described; it occurs after the typical four NREM stages and is associated with the production of dream activity. NREM sleep includes the four stages that precede REM sleep. OWSC is basically a state of alertness characterized by a dominance of mental activity, especially activity from the left hemisphere of the brain. This type of activity does not generally involve the presence or use of imagery. There is also a dominance of stimulus reception from the external environment and a dominance of physical or mental activity over more internal events such as contemplation or daydreaming. Neurologically, this activity is accompanied by a high percentage of beta EEG activity (see Figure 1.2). DWSC is characterized by a sense of restfulness and, as such, is accompanied by less mental activity than OWSC. Unlike OWSC, DWSC is accompanied by heavy reliance on imagery, associated with a passive state of mind or the dominance of contemplation or other internal activity over action. Some have speculated that many of the activities in DWSC are controlled by the right hemisphere or at least that the right hemisphere appears to show more involvement during this state of consciousness (e.g., Bakan, 1969). DWSC may also be accompanied by the appearance of a slower alpha EEG wave (Springer & Deutsch, 1997). As described at the beginning of this chapter, ASC can be defined as qualitatively different from the ordinary states of consciousness according to the experiences of the individual and/or accepted theory of states of consciousness. Our definition of ASC does not include pathology and, therefore, may be considered idiosyncratic and similar to the concept of “anomalous experience” (see Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Eventually, the evaluation of the state of consciousness depends on the subjective opinion of an individual or on the accepted theory of consciousness. Descriptions of night dreams and spontaneous ASC in wakefulness imply that in both states there are experiences that are within and beyond the normal range for the individual.
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Figure 1.2
Recording from the left frontal lobe during stages of wakefulness and sleep.
Biologically Produced versus Induced States of Consciousness Changes in states of consciousness produced by biological rhythms and those induced by other means create a challenging topic for discussion. To distinguish between the two may not be an easy task. On one hand, there is a view that DWSC (with an accompanying passive state of mind, contemplation, and dominance of activity from internal sources of stimulation) is usually inhibited for cultural reasons. On the other hand, in congruence with biophysiological and mystical approaches, and in a theoretical manner that is similar to that proposed by Kokoszka (1988, 2007), four fundamental conditions or modes of consciousness have been proposed
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
(Winkelman, 2010): (1) waking consciousness, (2) deep sleep, (3) REM (rapid eye movement) sleep (dreaming), and (4) a spiritual, transpersonal, or transcendental consciousness, referred to as integrative consciousness. However, if one accepts the view that consciousness is the processing of information at various levels of awareness (Wallace & Fisher, 2003), then ASC are characterized by mental processes that are higher or lower than normal. The organization of these mental processes was previously discussed, and they have been elaborated upon by Kokoszka (2007). They have also been mapped by Clark (1993) in a general tool to plot mental states. However, his complex model is anchored on a number of competing theoretical models rather than on descriptive categories. Although one might argue that the model proposed by Kokoszka (2007) suffers from some of the same problems, a multidimensional scaling to classify alterations in consciousness may be fruitful (see Carden˜a, 2009). And regardless of the potential weakness of the model approach, it is clear that changes in consciousness from variations in biological rhythms are not usually related to changes in the organization of mental processes.
Theoretical Concepts and Explanations of Various States of Consciousness The most comprehensive model for explaining changes in states of consciousness resulting from variations in biological rhythms was proposed by Kleitman (1963, 1982). He referred to his model as the basic rest–activity cycle (BRAC). He suggested the existence of an ultradian rhythm that causes cyclical, approximately 90-minute, changes in imaging activity during sleep (reflected in the commonly known stages of sleep), with analogous phenomena during wakefulness. Kleitman (1982) cites about 50 articles supporting his hypothesis. However, there is no firm evidence that cycles observed during wakefulness are regulated by the same underlying neural mechanism that is responsible for REM/NREM cycles (Lavie, 1992). The approximate 90-minute rhythmicity reported by Kleitman (1982) was not found in experiments with an activity-recording apparatus (Kripke, Mullaney, Wyborney, & Messin, 1978; Okudaira, Kripke, & Webster, 1984). As a result, it has been suggested that the notion of a single, basic oscillator particularly related to activity should be revised. Also, the 90minute cycle was not correlated with REM activity during sleep (Lavie & Kripke, 1981). Studies showing the existence of REM in real time (Globus, 1966) were conducted only on two cases and they were not confirmed by other studies (Dirlich, Zulley, & Schultz, 1977; Mealey & Carman, 1978).
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Finally, experiments that showed the existence of 90-minute oscillations in cognitive styles (Klein & Armitage, 1979) were not replicated (Kripke, Fleck, Mullaney, & Levy, 1983). This was also the case for studies presenting cyclical activity of imagination (Kripke, Mullaney, & Fleck, 1985; Kripke & Sonnenschein, 1978). Arguments presented against BRAC are equivocal and disputable. Results indicating an absence of the BRAC were interpreted as suggesting a modification rather than a rejection of Kleitman’s concept because there are 90- to 100-minute periodicities in various other physiologic functions, even if not in activity (Okudaira et al., 1984). In the nonreplication of the Klein and Armitage (1979) and Kripke and Sonnenschein (1978) experiments, there may be a strong argument against the hypothesis of a biologically determined tendency for changes in states of consciousness. However, all experiments were conducted with small sample sizes (8–12), a possible problem with the failure to replicate. Also, contemporary psychology indicates that vividness of imagery is an ability that is differentiated in the population (Marks, 1973), and when imagery vividness is not taken into account, failures to replicate may occur (Wallace, 1990). Moreover, replication of studies on cognitive styles by Kripke et al. (1983) differs from the original in several aspects, including the fact of a financial incentive for good performance. Finally, the concept of a protective mechanism of the BRAC may explain where the cyclical activity of imagery utilization may be hidden.
Protective Mechanisms of the BRAC and Metabolism of Information It seems obvious that in Western culture, natural rhythmicity, if it exists, is suppressed during wakefulness and that spontaneous states of vivid imagery are regarded as unusual and abnormal. This gives rise to fear and hesitancy that interrupts those states. If we accept the hypothesis that ultradian rhythmicity of imagery is a biological reality, human culture should accommodate it in some way. Natural, everyday observations show the occurrence of situations in which people experience states of consciousness with spontaneous, vivid imagery and a passive state of mind, not only without fear of anxiety, but with a feeling of rest. Irrational ASC cause fear, whereas rationally explained states may be experienced with pleasure and restfulness. According to the metabolism of information model (Kokoszka, 2007), the inflow of information is as necessary to life and proper functioning of the organism as is the inflow of energy. The amount of information must be maintained within certain limits. An insufficiency of information causes
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
functional disruptions in the organism and may even lead to death by making the inflow of energy (nourishment) impossible. An excess of information leads to overload, fatigue, and disturbances in information metabolism that may have consequences similar to those brought about by the insufficiency of information. The sleep–waking rhythm may be connected with proportional changes between the sensitivity threshold for interoceptive and exteroceptive stimuli. The BRAC stems from changes in activity of the cerebral hemispheres and from the cyclic dominance of either for the reception of information coming from external (environment and body) or internal sources of stimulation. In case of any disruption in the optimal range of inflow of information, we theorize the existence of two main protective mechanisms: natural proactive mechanisms and culturally protective mechanisms.
Natural Protective Mechanisms of Metabolism of Information These mechanisms are characterized, according to the model, by a reduction of goal-oriented activity of imagery production. This results in a paucity of any activity of imagination or in the reorganization of cognitive processes into a culturally acceptable form. In case of a shortage of physical input for information processing, imagery production increases. The most spectacular supporting data come from experiments involving sensory deprivation (see Suedfeld, 1980; Zubek, 1969). Another natural protective mechanism includes the thoughtless phenomenon. This is a specific kind of staring, characterized by cognitive absence, that according to Kokoszka (2007) may be considered as an intermediate state between an OWSC and a DWSC. This intermediate state may be considered a daily analog of REM sleep that lasts for a relatively short period of time. For cultural reasons, it is stopped when spontaneous imaging activity increases. We can speculate that the rest phase of BRAC reveals itself during this phenomenon and that it promotes some degree of rest. Physiological manifestations may also be considered a natural protective mechanism. Rossi (1986) postulates that the rest phase of BRAC has its own manifestation in different physiological reaction-like changes of respiratory shift such as yawning, hiccups, heartburn, or sounds from the gastrointestinal tract. Other physiological manifestations may include crossing one’s arms or legs, leaning the head or body to one side, wiggling the neck, the legs, or other body parts, and eye blinking. In case of excess perceived stimulation, the control center becomes disorganized and perception is finally disturbed. This leads to a phenomenon
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analogous to that caused by a paucity of information. This can be observed mainly in a state of overfatigue.
Culturally Protective Mechanisms of the Metabolism of Information The metabolism-of-information model enables reconsideration of some popular forms of resting as protective mechanisms. This enables maintenance of an optimal range of stimulation coming from internal versus external sources and the occurrence of psychophysiological phenomena combined with the rest phase of the BRAC. The use and abuse of exogenous agents like alcohol and other consciousness-altering drugs lead to disorganization of information metabolism and goal-oriented activities (Grilly, 2005). This results in a limitation of the inflow of stimulation from external sources. Nicotine and caffeine, on the other hand, facilitate the occurrence of the thoughtlessness phenomenon, or passive, vivid states of imagination. Other culturally protective mechanisms include relaxation practices like meditation and autogenic training (Dillbeck & Orme-Johnson, 1987). They may be considered means of intentionally limiting information inflow. Also, the application of endogenous agents by means of physical fatigue can lead to disorganization of information metabolism. The feeling of fatigue might explain nonlogical experiences. All of the aforementioned situations have some attributes in common. They all involve sensations with spontaneous use of vivid imagery much like Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992) activities that pattern consciousness, what they called flow. In addition, these situations are accompanied by a relatively passive, nonlinear attitude of mind and an inner consent toward irrationality. The intensity and degree of extraordinariness of experiences in these situations are commonly recognized and culturally accepted. All of them are experienced as a form of rest (Dillbeck & Orme-Johnson, 1987). The passive state of mind seems to be an essential psychological factor of the rest phase in the BRAC. The protective mechanisms lead to the DWSC. However, we can speculate that the observed data represent a much more complicated psychophysiological phenomenon that may mask obvious parameters of DWSC.
Support for Protective Mechanisms of the BRAC and Information Metabolism It should be mentioned that the concept of protective mechanisms of the BRAC and information metabolism is compatible with the concepts of the ultradian healing response and the ultradian stress syndrome (Rossi,
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness
1991). Moreover, it explains cases when the ultradian healing response does not occur regularly in a 90-minute rhythm and is not accompanied by the ultradian stress syndrome. This syndrome could be considered the result of extreme and prolonged deprivation of the rest phase of the BRAC (i.e., absence of effective protective mechanisms). Support for the concept of protective mechanisms (see Kokoszka, 1990, 1993a, 1993b) also comes from Duchniewska and Kokoszka (2003). Participants in this study reported that throughout the day there was an increase in the spontaneous use of imagery. Examples were: (a) a situation in which one was staring at something while not doing anything in particular, (b) travelling by different means of transportation (by bus, tram, subway, or car), (c) using the toilet, (d) taking a short rest after physical exertion, (e) relaxing in the bathtub or in the shower, (f) lying in bed just before sleep, (g) sunbathing, (h) being at the beautician or hairdresser, (i) standing in a long queue in a shop, and (j) waiting for somebody or something (for a bus, an important phone call, or a green light). Additional endeavors that led to the use of protective mechanisms included attending a meeting in the workplace, participating in a long conversation, participating in school activities, reading a book, a newspaper, or a long letter, watching television, being present at an exhibition in a museum, listening to the radio, and looking at pictures in a magazine. Other situations included taking a long walk, dancing at a party, riding a bicycle, playing basketball, engaging in sexual activity, eating a meal, taking a short nap, consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, and utilizing classical relaxation techniques. There were also considerable differences in phenomenology between the experiences considered by participants as the most and the least detached from their interest environment. Whereas only the experience of “having no thoughts” appeared more often in the state of the least detached, many other experiences were often reported during detachment. These results indicate that states considered as mechanisms of information metabolism were reported by all participants with a mean frequency close to that predicted by the BRAC (approximately 10 cycles within a presumed period of 15 to 17 hours of wakefulness in a day). Most often these mechanisms were classified as purposeful overstimulation, thoughtlessness, and fatigue.
Circadian Deregulation in Pathological Conditions Disturbances in biological rhythms are characteristic of mood and sleep disorders (see Kupfer & Monk, 1988; Morgan, 1996; Pandi-Perumal et al.,
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2009). The most common of these are various sleep disturbances such as: jet lag (which affects individuals traveling across a number of time zones); shift work variation (where individuals switch between day work hours and night work hours, or vice versa); the delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS), which affects the normal time of sleep onset and offset and a peak period of alertness occurs during the middle of the night; the advanced sleep phase syndrome (ASPS), which results in difficulty in staying awake in the evening and staying asleep in the morning; and the non–24-hour sleep–wake syndrome, which causes sleep to occur later and later each day, resulting in a continuously moving peak alertness time.
Conclusions Variations in states and altered states of consciousness resulting from biological rhythms are well documented, and such variations are considered to be normal. We discussed a number of different types of rhythms including those labeled infradian, ultradian, and circadian. Their role in behavior and behavioral disorders requires considerably more investigation. Research on them in wakefulness is difficult, but it is incumbent on science to study their complexity and the produced interactions that occur between internal rhythms, external environmental cues, personality characteristics, and general life events. By continuing to study biological rhythms, science may eventually be able to answer many questions about various sleep disorders, mood disorders, and states and altered states of consciousness.
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Mealey, L., & Carman, G. J. (1978). REM sleep across 52 consecutive nights of a restricted sleep-wake regimen. Sleep Research, 7, 309. Merica, H., & Fortune, R. (2004). State transitions between wake and sleep, and within the ultradian cycle, with focus on the link to neuronal activity. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 8, 473–485. Morgan, D. R. (1996). Sleep secrets for shiftworkers and people with off-beat schedules. Duluth, MN: Whole Person Associates. Okawa, M., Matousek, M., Petersen, I. (1984). Spontaneous vigilance fluctuation in the daytime. Psychophysiology, 21, 207–211. Okudaira, N., Kripke, D. F., & Webster, J. B. (1984). No basic rest–activity cycle in head, wrist or ankle. Physiology and Behavior, 32, 843–845. Orr, W. C., Hoffman, H. J., & Hegges, F. W. (1974). Ultradian rhythms in extended performance. Aerospace Medicine, 45, 995–1000. Pandi-Perumal, S. R., Moscovitch, A., Srinivasan, V., Spence, D. W., Cardinali, D. P., & Brown, G. M. (2009). Bidirectional communication between sleep and circadian rhythms and its implications for depression: Lessons from agomelatine. Progress in Neurobiology, 88, 264–271. Prendergast, B. J. (2005). Internalization of seasonal time. Hormones and Behavior, 48, 503–511. Rosmond, R., Dallman, M. F., & Bjorntorp, P. (1998). Stress-related cortisol secretion in men: Relationships with abdominal obesity and endocrine, metabolic, and hemodynamic abnormalities. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 83, 1853–1859. Rossi, E. (1986.) Altered states of consciousness in everyday life: The ultradian rhythms. In B. Wolman & M. Ullman (Eds.), Handbook of states of consciousness (pp. 97–132). New York: Van Reinhold Nostrand. Rossi, E. L. (1991). The twenty-minute break: Reduce stress, maximize performance, and improve health and emotional well-being using the new science of ultradian rhythms. Universal City, CA: Tarcher. Shor, R. E., & Orne, E. C. (1962). Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility: Form A. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press. Springer, S. P., & Deutsch, G. (1997). Left brain/right brain:Perspectives from cognitive neuroscience (5th ed). New York: Freeman. Stein, P. K., Lundequam, E. J., Clauw, D., Freedland, K. E., Carney, R. M., & Domitrovich, P. P. (2006, August 30). Circadian and ultradian rhythms in cardiac autonomic modulation. Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Magazine, 1, 429–432. Sterman, M. B. (1985). The basic rest activity cycle revisited: Some new perspectives. Experimental Brain Research, Supplementum, 12, 186–200. Suedfeld, P. (1980). Restricted environmental stimulation: Research and clinical applications. New York: Wiley Interscience. Valtonen, H. M., Suominen, K., Mantere, O., Leppamaki, S., Arvilommi, P., & Isometsa, E. (2006). Prospective study of risk factors for attempted suicide among patients with bipolar disorders. Bipolar Disorders, 8, 576-585.
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Wallace, B. (1990). Imagery vividness, hypnotic susceptibility, and the perception of fragmented stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 354–359. Wallace, B. (1993). Day persons, night persons, and variability in hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 827–833. Wallace, B., & Fisher, L. E. (2000). Biological rhythms and individual differences in consciousness. In R. G. Kunzendorf & B. Wallace (Eds.), Individual differences in conscious experience (pp. 337–349). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wallace, B., & Fisher, L. E. (2003). Consciousness and behavior (4th ed. reprint). Prospect Height, IL: Waveland Press. Wallace, B., & Kokoszka, A. (1995). Fluctuations in hypnotic susceptibility and imaging ability over a 16-hour period. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 43, 20–33. Wallace, B., Kokoszka, A., & Turosky, D. (1993). Historical and contemporary thoughts on consciousness and its altered states. In J. Brzezin´ski, S. Di Nuovo, T. Marek, & T. Maruszewski (Eds.), Creativity and consciousness: Philosophical and psychological dimensions. Poznan´ studies in the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities (Vol. 31, pp. 232–253). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wallace, B., Turosky, D. L., & Kokoszka, A. (1992). Variability in the assessment of imagery vividness. Journal of Mental Imagery, 16, 221–230. Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO Publishers. Zubek, J. P. (Ed.). (1969). Sensory deprivation: Fifteen years of research. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
CHAPTER 2
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness David E. Presti Consciousness, Chemistry, and the Mind-Body Problem Consciousness is a word that some say can have many meanings, and scientists, philosophers, and others can and do spend countless hours debating its definition. On the other hand, one could say that everyone knows what consciousness is. Its etymological root is “to know with.” Operationally, at least for the purposes of facilitating dialogue, it is convenient to define consciousness as the capacity to be aware—aware of mental processes such as perceptual experiences (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, temperature, pain), mental images, thoughts, emotions, and one’s sense of self. It is awareness of what it is like to “be” a particular person, or animal, or organism, or (who’s to say at this point) thing (Nagel, 1974). Discussions of consciousness generally focus on human consciousness, since this is the only consciousness we actually know, from our own internal, personal experience and from communicating through language with other humans about their experiences. One sometimes speaks of “ordinary consciousness” as the awareness that accompanies “ordinary” waking life, as if there is anything merely ordinary about such an awesome phenomenon. Be that as it may, we can perhaps find it convenient to distinguish between various states of consciousness: an ordinary waking consciousness and various states of altered or nonordinary—though still waking—consciousness, such as states associated with lack of sleep or the presence of certain intoxicants, or states such as those facilitated by immersion in music, ecstatic dance, hypnotic induction, and the like. There are states associated with yogic practices—for example, the awakening of kundalini—and there are a variety of meditative states, from light relaxation to vividly luminous
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inward-focused attention (Wallace, 2006) [see Chapters by Carden˜a & Alvarado, Fachner, Shear, & Zarrilli, Volume 1]. There are states of consciousness that characterize dream sleep and also other stages of nondreaming deep sleep (Wangyal, 1998). And there can be consciousness associated with certain experiences that sometimes occur under conditions of cardiac arrest or other circumstances of nearness to death (Greyson, 2000). A vast amount of empirical data, accumulated especially over the last 2 centuries, suggests that our mental processes (we will call the collection of mental phenomena our mind) and our awareness of such phenomena (our consciousness) are intimately related to the material substance of our body and in particular of our brain. That there is a profound and intimate relationship between mind and body is unquestioned. Just how this relationship is manifested—how it is that the physical processes of the matter and energetics of the brain and body are related to the subjective experiences of the mind—is a deep mystery. This so-called mind–body problem is in many ways as deeply mysterious now as it was centuries ago when Rene´ Descartes (1596–1650) struggled with it. Some say it is the greatest mystery in all of contemporary science. The great experimental psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) wrote in his classic 1890 text The Principles of Psychology that If the brain be injured, consciousness is abolished or altered, even although every other organ in the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh, or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to have the second. (1890, p. 4)
James thus appreciated that chemical substances can have powerful effects on the body and on the mind (such substances are called drugs). For example, in his discussion of time perception in The Principles of Psychology, James speaks to the remarkable effects of Cannabis: In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the apparent time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere the end is reached the beginning seems already to date from indefinitely long ago. We enter a short street, and it is as if we should never get to the end of it. (James, 1890, pp. 639–640)
Even to this day, these effects have not been sufficiently studied to glean what insights into the nature of our perception of time might be provided.
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Among the few intoxicating chemicals and plants he encountered, James was most impressed with nitrous oxide. Synthesized by the great pioneer of modern chemistry, Joseph Priestly (1733–1804), its psychoactive properties were extensively studied by another pioneer chemist, Humphry Davy (1778–1829), who in 1800 published an impressive book that represents the first careful investigation of a specific identified chemical substance on human mental processes. Introduced into medicine and dentistry as an anesthetic in the mid-1800s, nitrous oxide was brought to James’ attention via an essay by Benjamin Paul Blood (1832–1919), reviewed by James shortly after its publication (Blood, 1874; James, 1874). Several years later, in 1882, James was struggling to understand the philosophical writings of Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). In a paper submitted to the journal Mind, James concluded that he found Hegel’s philosophical stance difficult to accept. Then, while his paper was in press, James happened to imbibe nitrous oxide and experience during the gas-induced intoxication profound revelations concerning the truths of Hegel’s ideas. So moved was he by these new insights that he composed an addendum to his paper and sent it to Mind, where it was published in conjunction with the initially written article. In this addendum he wrote that: The keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel. . . . (James, 1882, p. 206)
Twenty years later, when James delivered the Gifford Lectures in Natural Philosophy and Religion at the University of Edinburgh, the insights gained from his experiences with nitrous oxide remained of great import. His comments on this remain one of the most eloquent passages ever written about altered consciousness: One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, while all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which
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leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (James, 1902, lectures 16–17, p. 388)
William James very clearly appreciated that to better understand the mind and its relation to the body, any and all phenomena of relevance to these questions ought to be investigated. How could one hope to understand the nature of mind and how could one hope to adequately address the mind–body problem without taking very seriously the investigation of such profound altered states of consciousness (ASC)? And the powerful effects of certain drugs on mental processes also suggest there is something profoundly chemical about the brain and the brain–mind connection.
Molecular Neurochemistry and the Structure of the Synapse Drugs that impact consciousness are called psychoactive drugs. Such drugs include the widely ingested substances caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine; other plant-based intoxicants such as cannabinoids, opioids, and cocaine; synthetic pharmaceuticals such as amphetamine, benzodiazepines, and barbiturates; psychedelics such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, and psilocybin; and psychiatric medications such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, and other mood stabilzers [see various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume]. In the century since William James lived and spoke and wrote, a vast amount of detailed information has accumulated as to precisely how various drugs interact with physical processes in the nervous system. These interactions provide powerful probes into the chemical functioning of the brain and the connections between brain chemistry and mental processes, and thus may help to illuminate the mind–body problem and the nature of consciousness. The effects of psychoactive drugs on the brain are generally described in terms of the chemical interactions between the drugs and the various molecular components of nerve cells, with the primary sites of interaction being at chemical synapses, a particular kind of connection between cells. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. (Cetacean—dolphin and whale—brains may be equally complex.) Its complexity is manifest in the large number of component cells, currently
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estimated to be in the neighborhood of one trillion (1012). These trillion cells consist of approximately 100 billion (1011) nerves cells or neurons of various types, and 5 to 10 times that number of glia cells of various types. Signals are passed between cells at connections called synapses, which are of either an electrical or a chemical nature. Electrical synapses consist of so-called gap junctions between cells, channel proteins allowing the passage of electrically charged ions directly from one cell to another, thereby permitting certain kinds of signal information to rapidly propagate between cells. Chemical synapses are narrow gaps between cells at which neurotransmitter molecules carry signal information from one cell to another. There are hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections within the human brain. Each and every chemical synapse is a signaling structure regulated by a variety of complex processes. Briefly, the signaling scenario goes something like what is shown in Figure 2.1. A nerve impulse, represented as a transient change in membrane voltage from negative to positive and back again, caused by the flow of Na+ (sodium) ions into the cell followed by the flow of K+ (potassium) ions out of the cell, propagates along the length of an axon to the axon termini. There, voltage-gated Ca++ (calcium) channels are triggered to open, Ca++ ions flow into the axon, and a cascade of processes occurs, resulting in the movement of neurotransmitter storage vesicles to the cell membrane. The vesicles fuse with the cell membrane and release their contents of neurotransmitter molecules (thousands of molecules per vesicle) into the synaptic cleft, the narrow gap (circa 25 nanometers) between one neuron and the next. Neurotransmitter molecules rapidly diffuse throughout the synaptic cleft and interact with various proteins embedded in the membranes of the axon terminal and nearby neurons and glia. Some such proteins are neurotransmitter receptors where the binding of neurotransmitter molecules shifts the shape of the protein and produces a specific effect. The receptor may be of the ionotropic or ligand-gated ion-channel type, where neurotransmitter binding opens a channel through the protein, selectively allowing a particular type of ion to flow across the cell membrane. This produces an immediate effect on membrane voltage that can either increase or decrease the excitability of the cell receiving the signal. Or, the receptor may be of the metabotropic or GPCR (G-protein coupled receptor) type, where the binding of neurotransmitters and the resulting shift in shape of the receptor protein facilitates the binding of another protein, called a G-protein, to the intracellular surface of the GPCR (see Figure 2.2). Once bound to the GPCR, the G-protein shifts in shape and becomes “activated,” exchanging a bound GDP (guanosine diphosphate) for GTP (guanosine triphosphate) and breaking into two
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Figure 2.1 Chemical synapse in action. A nerve impulse propagates along the axon via the opening and closing of voltage-gated sodium and potassium ionchannel proteins. When the impulse reaches the axon terminal, storage vesicles containing neurotransmitter molecules are induced to fuse with the boundary membrane of the axon and release neurotransmitter molecules into the synaptic cleft. Neurotransmitters rapidly diffuse throughout the cleft and interact with receptor proteins on the postsynaptic neuron, the presynaptic axon terminal, or other nearby neurons or glial cells (not shown). Reuptake transporters rapidly remove neurotransmitter molecules from the cleft. These transporter proteins are located on the presynaptic axon terminal and may also be located on the postsynaptic dendrite and on nearby glial cells. In many situations, and in particular for the neurotransmitter glutamic acid, local reuptake rapidly and efficiently removes neurotransmitter from the synaptic cleft. In some situations, in particular for some of the monoamine neurotransmitters, reuptake may not take place in the local region of the synaptic cleft, allowing the released neurotransmitter to diffuse away and have effects distributed over a larger region of the brain (socalled “volume conduction”).
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Figure 2.2 G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) transduction pathway. When a neurotransmitter molecule binds to a GPCR, the resulting shift in shape of the receptor protein facilitates the binding of an intracellular G-protein to the GPCR. The G-protein then becomes “activated,” exchanges a bound GDP for a GTP, and splits into two components. These component proteins may then interact with various cellular “effector” enzymes and alter the activity of the latter. Shown here is the activation of the enzyme adenylate cyclase, with the result that many molecules of cyclic-AMP will be generated. cAMP molecules can then diffuse throughout the cell and activate specific protein kinases, enzymes that catalyze the attachment of phosphate groups to other “substrate” proteins. Among such substrates may be ion-channel proteins: Phosphorylation alters the opening and closing properties of the channels and thus effects changes in the voltage across the cell membrane, thereby impacting the excitability of the cell. Among the other substrates of kinases are transcription factors, proteins that enter the cell nucleus, bind to the DNA, and regulate the transcription of genes.
component proteins. These component proteins then move within the cell and interact with other specific “effector” proteins, altering the activity of proteins with which they interact. Several detailed scenarios have been described for GPCRs, including the ability of specific activated Gproteins to do one of the following things: interact with adenylate cyclase enzyme and stimulate or inhibit the synthesis of intracellular cAMP (cyclic
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adenosine monophosphate); interact with phospholipase C enzyme to stimulate the cleavage of the membrane lipid phosphatidylinositol into IP3 (inositol triphosphate) and DAG (diacylglycerol); or interact with phospholipase A2 to generate arachidonic acid (AA). More such scenarios are likely to be discovered in the future. Molecules such as cAMP, IP3, DAG, and AA function as intracellular messenger molecules and have the capacity to trigger other processes. For example, cAMP may interact with protein kinase enzymes that function to phosphorylate (attach a phosphate group to) specific substrates within the cell. Thus, cAMP may activate protein kinase enzymes that go on to regulate several cellular processes, most notably: ion-channel opening and closing and thus membrane voltage and the excitability of the cell, the activation and inactivation of various enzymes involved in cell metabolism, and the turning on and off of genes via transcription-factor proteins. These genes include those coding for reuptake transporters, receptors, Gproteins, and other proteins involved in signaling at synapses, and for nerve-growth factors regulating neurogenesis and the growth of dendrites and axons. Thus, the effects of GPCRs may be varied and amplified. These are systems of profound versatility! In order to prepare the synapse to receive the next signal when it comes, it is necessary that neurotransmitters be rapidly removed from the synaptic cleft so that new signals may be differentiated from old ones. Located in the membrane of the presynaptic axon terminal are specific reuptake transporter proteins that move neurotransmitters from the synaptic cleft back into the interior of the axon terminal. In some cases, enzymes are present that rapidly inactivate neurotransmitters by catalyzing a specific chemical alteration. At many synapses, one postsynaptic action of certain neurotransmitters is to trigger the synthesis of particular molecules that diffuse back across the synaptic cleft and have effects at the presynaptic axon terminal, either by binding to receptors or interacting in other ways with cellular chemistry. These retrograde signals are intimately involved in the regulation of signal activity at synapses via feedback effects that can alter the strength of the synapse (Regehr, Carey, & Best, 2009). Chemical synapses thus have a stunning capacity to finely regulate the signaling activity between cells. The level of detail already appreciated is extraordinary and there is every reason to anticipate that as more is learned about the fine structure and activity of the brain, ever more sophisticated regulatory strategies will be elucidated. Ionotropic receptors mediate relatively rapid signals that have immediate excitatory and inhibitory effects on neurons via changes in membrane voltage. GPCRs can also
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have acute effects on cell excitability, for instance, by modulating the opening and closing of ion channels, both postsynaptically and presynaptically. The properties of the G-protein coupling and intracellular transduction also permit these effects to be amplified beyond what could be achieved with ionotropic receptors. GPCR receptors can also have longterm effects on synaptic activity via effects on gene transcription. For example, the synthesis of various growth-factor proteins can be modulated, with impact on neurogenesis, dendrite growth and branching, the formation of dendritic spines, and the growth and branching of axons. Thus, new synapses can be formed, and existing synapses can become more elaborate and strong, or become weaker and even deconstruct. Expression of metabolic enzymes can have an impact on the quantity of neurotransmitter synthesized and loaded into storage vesicles, as well as how rapidly the neurotransmitter is degraded. Regulation of the expression of neurotransmitter receptors, uptake transporters, and the components of the various steps involved in intracellular G-protein coupling pathways allows for nuanced tuning of the strengths of synapses. These processes of changing the patterns and strengths of synapses in the brain are collectively referred to as neuroplasticity. Such processes are intimately involved in learning and memory formation, to the extent that memory is hypothesized to reside in the activity of networks of neuronal connectivity. Activation of particular brain circuits will likely always have an impact on modulating their longer-term strength, often via the effects of ubiquitous GPCRs. The most abundant neurotransmitter in the human brain is glutamic acid (or glutamate), a molecule that has excitatory signaling effects when acting at ionotropic glutamate receptors. The second most abundant neurotransmitter in the human brain is gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA), a molecule that has inhibitory effects when acting at ionotropic GABAA receptors. Each of these neurotransmitters is released by billions of neurons and has effects at trillions of synapses. Other well-known neurotransmitters in the human brain are the monoamines, so-called because their molecular structures contain a single amine (-NH2) group: serotonin (5HT or 5-hydroxytryptamine), norepinephrine, dopamine, and histamine. Each of these neurotransmitters is produced by specific clusters of cells in the brainstem: serotonin in the raphe nuclei, norepinephrine in the locus coeruleus, dopamine in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmentum, and histamine in the tuberomammillary nucleus of the hypothalamus. In each case, the number of cells producing and releasing these monoamines as neurotransmitters is relatively small, on the order of a hundred thousand or so (Iverson, Iverson, Bloom, & Roth, 2009). These
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cells, however, send their axons throughout large parts of the cerebral cortex and other parts of the brain and these neurotransmitters thus have an impact on billions of neurons. At many locations, these transmitters likely operate via so-called volume conduction, wherein the reuptake of the transmitter does not occur in the very local region of release, allowing the transmitter to diffuse more widely and have effects on many different target cells (Descarries & Mechawar, 2000). Several dozen additional molecules are presently known to function as neurotransmitters in the human brain. Among them are acetylcholine, glycine, adenosine, adenosine triphosphate, nitric oxide, endocannabinoids such as anandamide and 2-arachidonylglycerol (2AG), more than a dozen different opioid peptides or endorphins, substance P, oxytocin, vasopressin, and other neuropeptides. Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), tryptamine, octopamine and other so-called trace amines may also function as neurotransmitters in the human brain (Jacob & Presti, 2005; Premont, Gainetdinov, & Caron, 2001). The dominant receptors for glutamate and GABA are of the ionotropic type, allowing glutamate and GABA to have rapid excitatory and inhibitory effects on neuronal activity. Acetylcholine (acting at the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor), serotonin (acting at the 5HT3 receptor), ATP acting at purine 2X receptors, and glycine are the other neurotransmitters presently known to have ionotropic receptors. In addition to their ionotropic effects, glutamate, GABA, and ATP also act at GPCRs. Muscarinic acetylcholine receptors and all the serotonin receptors other than 5HT3 are GPCRs. All other known neurotransmitter receptors—dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine, adenosine, opioid, cannabinoid, and so forth—are GPCRs. Thus, the effects of many neurotransmitters, as well as drugs that act via these neurotransmitter receptors, can have rapid effects on neuronal excitability, as well as longerterm modulatory effects on excitability, metabolism, gene transcription, and synaptic connectivity.
Pharmacology and Altered Consciousness Pharmacology is the study of how drugs interact with the body. The etymology of this word captures the complex nature of drugs, as the Greek word pharmakon means both medicine and poison at the same time. The most widely used psychoactive drug in the world is caffeine, usually ingested by way of the following plants: tea (Camellia sinensis), coffee (Coffea arabica), and cacao (Theobroma cacao, source of chocolate). Other caffeine-containing plants include kola, yerba mate, and guarana. These
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days, a great deal of caffeine consumption also occurs by way of a variety of caffeinated soft drinks and energy-drink products. Caffeine acts as an antagonist at receptors for adenosine, a neurotransmitter that has an inhibitory function in the brain. Adenosine appears to be generated throughout the brain via the enzymatic conversion of the ubiquitous energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). When adenosine acts at adenosine receptors, it has an inhibitory effect on neuronal signaling, an effect that is likely to take place primarily at glutamatergic synapses. It has been hypothesized that adenosine neuronal signaling may play an important role in the cycle of sleep and wakefulness (Jones, 2009). By antagonizing adenosine receptors and thus blocking adenosine’s normal inhibitory effects, caffeine produces excitatory effects in the nervous system. The increased excitation in the brain is correlated with the experiential effects of caffeine: increased wakefulness and alertness. Related molecules such as theophylline, found in tea, and theobromine, found in cacao, act in a similar fashion. Other drugs that act as nervous-system stimulants include cocaine from the coca plant (Erythroxylum coca), ephedrine from the Ephedra plant, and the synthetic pharmaceutical amphetamine, a chemical cousin of ephedrine. Other pharmaceutical chemical relatives of amphetamine include methamphetamine and methylphenidate. These various drugs act primarily at the uptake transporters for the monoamine neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, blocking reuptake of released neurotransmitter (in the case of cocaine) and causing leakage of neurotransmitter out of the axon terminal via the reuptake transporter (in the case of amphetamine and related chemicals). In all cases, there is enhanced activity at synapses using dopamine and norepinephrine and a resulting arousal of cortical activity. Alcohol is an example of a drug that has an opposite effect on consciousness to that of the stimulants described above. Decreased arousal and increased relaxation are the hallmarks of low doses of alcohol and other sedative-hypnotic drugs, a category that also includes barbiturates (such as the pharmaceuticals phenobarbital, secobarbital, thiopental, and others), benzodiazepines (diazepam, lorazepam, alprazolam, and many others), and general anesthetics (diethyl ether, halothane, sevoflurane, propofol, and others). All these sedative-hypnotics produce, in a dose-dependent manner, further decreased arousal, amnestic effects (“blacking out”), sleep or other loss of waking consciousness, and death from shut-down of parts of the brain controlling vital functions of the body. Sedative-hypnotic drugs all appear to have as a primary mechanism of action binding to one of several locations on ionotropic GABAA receptors and enhancing the flux of Cl- ions through the channel that results from the binding of GABA to the
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receptor. Thus, the inhibitory action of GABA on neuronal excitability is increased, and this is correlated behaviorally with decreased arousal, sedation, and loss of waking consciousness (Franks, 2008). Opioids are molecules that act on the body like opium from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. Morphine and codeine are the primary psychoactive constituents of opium. Effects of opioids include profound analgesia (reduced perception of pain), cough suppression, sedation, and hallucinatory dreaminess. Slowing of respiration can result in death if the dose is sufficiently large. Opioid receptors are GPCRs that have been classified into several subtypes (mu, delta, kappa) based on their pharmacology, protein structure, and distribution in the brain. Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), with its primary psychoactive constituent, nicotine, is one of the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world. From a shamanic perspective, tobacco is considered among the most powerful of plants, and from a pharmacological perspective, nicotine is among the most poisonous of chemicals to which humans are routinely exposed. The effects of tobacco on consciousness are subtle and profound: mentally stimulating and focusing, anxiolytic (reducing anxiety), and grounding. Nicotine acts as an agonist at nicotinic acetylcholine receptors found throughout the brain. These are ionotropic positive-ion channels that have excitatory effects on neurons. The seed from the Southeast Asian palm tree Areca catechu also ranks among the most widely used psychoactive substances in the world. The areca nut is frequently referred to as betel nut, deriving from the fact that it is often chewed together with leaves from Piper betel, a plant of the same genus as black pepper. Not widely known in Europe and the Americas, the areca nut is used by millions of people daily in India, Taiwan, Thailand, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Like all plant substances, it contains numerous molecular constituents, a number of which are likely to have physiological activity. The alkaloid arecoline is thought to be the primary psychoactive substance in the areca nut, and its major identified neurochemical effect is agonist action at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. The psychoactive effects are a combination of mental alertness and body relaxation. Preparations from the Cannabis plant, such as marijuana and hashish, have been consumed for their medicinal and consciousness-altering effects for millennia. Cannabis contains a variety of molecules called cannabinoids, which are found nowhere else in the plant world. The most psychoactive of these constituents has been identified as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and the interaction of THC with the nervous system is via agonist actions at the cannabinoid receptor, CB1. This receptor, discovered in 1989, is the most abundant GPCR in the mammalian brain and is often
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located on presynaptic axon terminals. Endogenous neurotransmitter ligands, the endocannabinoids, are thought to be produced in postsynaptic axon terminals and carry signals from the postsynaptic cell to the presynaptic cell, a form of signaling termed retrograde. Retrograde signaling by endocannabinoids is believed to play an important role in adjusting the strengths of synapses throughout the brain (Chevaleyre, Takahashi, & Castillo, 2006). Thus, a large variety of plants and chemicals have long been appreciated and used by humans for altering consciousness. In many instances, these alterations of consciousness have anxiety-reducing effects, at least over the short term. This can contribute to a desire to repeat the experience, and with repetition, the neural circuitry associated with the behaviors related to intoxication is strengthened, making the behaviors more robust and reinforced. If the drive toward intoxication develops into a compulsive behavior having adverse effects on one’s ability to function, it is termed addiction. Many drugs having the potential to produce addiction have been found to directly or indirectly increase the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in brain regions known as the reward-reinforcement pathways, connecting the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens and the frontal cortex (Hyman, Malenka, & Nestler, 2006) [see Bla¨tter, Fachner, & Winkelman, this volume]. Undoubtedly the most interesting and complex of the chemicals having effects on consciousness are the psychedelics. The various terms used to describe this class of substances—psychedelic (mind revealing), hallucinogen (generating hallucinations), psychotomimetic (mimicking psychosis), entheogen (generating god within)—speak to the complexity of their effects, perhaps most succinctly described as a generalized amplification of mental experience. Feelings, thoughts, and perceptions become intensified and available to conscious awareness in ways not ordinarily experienced. These ASC may also be characterized by a diminution of Freudian psychological defenses, allowing material not ordinarily available to conscious awareness to become more accessible. It is this property that contributes to the psychotherapeutic utility of the psychedelics (Grof, 2008). Many psychedelic plants and fungi have long histories of therapeutic use by indigenous cultures. In such cultures, the medicine people, healers, or shamans may employ psychedelic plants or fungi to catalyze therapeutic processes [see Winkelman, Volume 1]. Among such agents are Psilocybe mushrooms, containing psilocybin and psilocin; Virola (Epen˜a) and Anadenanthera (Yopo) snuffs from the Amazon, containing DMT; Psychotria and other DMTcontaining plants from the Amazon, mixed together with the Banisteriopsis caapi ayahuasca vine to make ayahuasca brew or yage´; Tabernanthe iboga
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from west-central Africa, containing ibogaine; and peyote, San Pedro, and other cacti from the Americas, containing mescaline (Schultes, Hofmann, & Ra¨tsch, 2001) One of the most famous psychedelic chemicals is LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, first made by Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) in 1938 as one of a series of chemical derivatives of ergotamine isolated from ergot fungus. He remade it again in 1943 and at that time discovered its potent psychoactive effects. Hofmann quickly appreciated that he had discovered something very profound (Hofmann, 2005). In the 1940s people were not thinking of the brain as a neurochemical system. That a tiny amount of chemical could have such a stunning impact on consciousness was a pivotal event in the early development of biological psychiatry and of molecular neuroscience. The effects of LSD on consciousness, the identification of signaling actions of serotonin, and the similarity of molecular structure between serotonin and a portion of the LSD molecule led to the first speculations on relating brain chemistry and mental illness (Nichols & Nichols, 2008; Woolley & Shaw, 1954). The primary neurochemical action of LSD and other classical psychedelics like psilocin, DMT, and mescaline is believed to be as an agonist at 5HT2A receptors (Nichols, 2004; Vollenweider et al., 1998). These GPCR serotonin receptors are widely distributed throughout the brain and large numbers are found on the dendrites of cortical pyramidal cells. Many appear to be located extrasynaptically, consistent with the idea that some of the effects of serotonin on cortical activity are mediated by volume conduction (Nichols & Nichols, 2008). Other serotonin receptor subtypes, especially 5HT2C and 5HT1A, may also play significant roles in the actions of psychedelics. Dopamine receptors and trace amine receptors, as well as other neurotransmitter receptors, are also likely to be involved in the effects of psychedelic substances on the brain. Although the consciousness-altering effects of various classical psychedelics (LSD, psilocin, DMT, mescaline, etc.) have a great deal in common, there are also many subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences. Eventually it may be possible to connect the subjective signatures of different psychedelic drugs to their differing neurochemical effects in the brain. For example, serotonin and other agonists at the 5HT2A receptor activate two different intracellular signaling pathways: phospholipase C (producing IP3 and DAG as intracellular messengers) and phospholipase A2 (producing AA as an intracellular messenger). The relative activation of these two pathways varies widely among different agonists at the 5HT2A receptor (for example: serotonin, LSD, psilocin, 5-methoxy-DMT, etc.; Nichols, 2004). The implications of this are presently unknown, and it may well be
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that such differences are relevant to understanding the different subjective signatures of the various classical psychedelics. As more is learned about the molecular actions of these substances, it may be increasingly possible to formulate hypotheses as to how neurochemical differences are related to mental-state effects. To round out the present discussion of pharmacology and alterations of mental experience, there are several more examples of substances that have profound effects on consciousness. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), popularly known by the street name “ecstasy,” has mind-revealing qualities reminiscent of psychedelics, that is, intensification of thoughts and feelings. However, its overall consciousness-altering characteristics are distinct enough to warrant a separate category, often including enhanced feelings of connection with others, reduced anxiety, and enhanced ability to verbalize feelings. Chemically related to methamphetamine, MDMA also produces central nervous system stimulation, euphoria, and sympathetic nervous system stimulation. Although MDMA has been found to interact with a variety of neurochemical systems, its primary effect appears to be facilitating the release of serotonin (as well as dopamine and norepinephrine) from axon terminals via leakage through reuptake transporters. Salvia divinorum, a plant from the mint family having a history of shamanic use in southern Mexico, produces profound alterations of consciousness when ingested. Although hallucinogenic in nature, the character of the ASC is very different from that produced by the classical psychedelics. The primary psychoactive chemical component was identified in the early 1980s as salvinorin A, a nonalkaloid molecule more recently identified to be a highly selective agonist at the kappa-opioid receptor (Roth et al., 2002; Valde´s, 1994). Not much is yet known about the functions of the kappa-opioid receptor in the brain. Among its endogenous ligands are the dynorphin peptides, from the opioid peptide (endorphin) family. How activation of kappa-opioid GPCRs is related to such profound alterations of consciousness is, at this time, completely obscure. A variety of solanaceous plants, including Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), Mandragora officinarum (mandrake), Datura (devil’s weed), and Brugmansia (angel’s trumpet), produce powerful alterations of consciousness characterized by intense hallucinatory activity. The major psychoactive chemicals in these plants are thought to be atropine and scopolamine, compounds that have potent antagonist actions at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. Ketamine is a drug used in human and veterinary surgical procedures. It is called a dissociative anesthetic and is said to remove body awareness from
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consciousness. In subanesthetic doses, it produces a hallucinogenic state in humans that is again in a class of its own and that has been described by some as a state in which mentality takes on an abstract geometric spatial quality that morphs in concert with thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. What an interesting window into the properties of consciousness! The primary neurochemical effect that has been identified for ketamine is noncompetitive antagonist action at ionotropic NMDA-type glutamate receptors, found throughout the brain. And what about nitrous oxide (N2O), the intoxicant that so impressed William James many years ago? It is widely used in medicine and dentistry for its analgesic and anesthetic properties. Its dominant neurochemical effects in the brain are antagonist actions at NMDA-glutamate receptors (similar to ketamine) and increasing the release of endogenous opioid peptides (Emmanouil & Quock, 2007; Jevtovic-Todorovic et al., 1998). How such molecular actions are connected with the ability of N2O to facilitate the induction of profound alterations of consciousness is as much a mystery now as it was in 1882 when William James experienced his gas-induced insights. I have discussed how various molecules having hallucinogenic or psychedelic effects interact with receptors of various types—5HT2A and other receptors for serotonin and receptors for trace amines, acetylcholine, opioid peptides, and glutamate—and facilitate the onset of powerful altered states of consciousness. How is this possible? What is going on? This remains a complex and poorly understood arena, but there is reason to believe that interesting and fruitful ideas will develop as more details of the neural circuitry are elucidated. One particularly profound effect of the classical psychedelics is their ability to produce very powerful memories of circumstances experienced during periods of intoxication. Experiences of insight and transcendence may have lifelong positive benefits (Griffiths et al., 2008), and experiences of anxiety or panic may have long-term negative impact. This suggests that the classical psychedelics have a particularly powerful impact on neuroplasticity. Perhaps this phenomenon might eventually be understood in terms of agonist actions at 5HT2A receptors and subsequent impact on cortical excitability (Be´¨ıque et al., 2007) as well as local synaptic plasticity. Much of what is known about the specific relationships between brain chemistry and behavior comes from the study of psychopharmacology, and this is likely to remain one of the most valuable—indeed, perhaps the most valuable—probes of physical aspects of the mind–brain connection. There is reason to believe that it will be possible to paint ever- moredetailed scenarios connecting brain chemistry and circuitry with aspects of
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our actions, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. Yet the ultimate link connecting mental experience with physical properties of the brain remains a deep mystery, in many ways as much so now as centuries ago.
The Mind-Body Problem and Future Directions in the Neuroscience of Mind A vast quantity of information about the molecular and cellular structure and function of the human brain has accumulated. This corpus of knowledge fits beautifully into a descriptive scenario that has developed in the physical sciences over the last several centuries. From Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and Einstein to Darwin, DNA, and contemporary molecular biology and neuroscience, the explanatory framework of biophysical science provides a stunningly powerful description of nature, from the distant expanses of intergalactic space to the molecular and cellular structure and function of living organisms in general and the human brain in particular. It is thus compelling and reasonable to continue pushing the limits of investigating and describing the interactions of psychoactive drugs with the molecular and cellular components of the nervous system and attempting to connect these molecular and cellular effects with mental experience and behavior. This will undoubtedly shed light on the still mysterious question of how physical processes in the brain are related to mental experiences. The conventional stance in contemporary neuroscience is that somehow physical processes in the brain (and body) will provide a sufficient explanatory framework for mentality and that someday, when enough is known about the structure and function of the brain, it will become clear just how this is so. Importing a term used to describe certain widely accepted explanatory scenarios in cosmology and in elementary-particle physics, I will call this notion the Standard Model in the neuroscience of mind—that a more complete understanding of physical processes in the brain and body will be sufficient to determine a solution to the mind–body problem. Standard Model arguments include (but are not limited to) stances such as: Mental experiences are somehow identical to neurobiological processes, and mental experiences somehow emerge from underlying neurobiological processes (Sperry, 1980), and mental experiences are higher-order interpretations of neurobiological processes (Searle, 2000). The key property of consciousness that serves to distinguish it from all other kinds of phenomena is its subjectivity, the fact that it is an irreducibly first-person phenomenon (Nagel, 1974). How can physical processes involving the stuff of matter and energy produce a subjective experience?
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(Here physical means describable in terms of mathematical properties ascribed to coordinates in space and time: matter, energy, trajectories, forces, field strengths, and so forth.) Some argue that it may never be possible to account for first-person, subjective phenomena in terms of thirdperson, objective, physically describable properties and that an expanded explanatory framework will be required (Chalmers, 1996; Rosenberg, 2004) [see Beauregard, this volume]. It ought not be surprising that the quest to understand our own capacity for awareness is a daunting task. If we are able to say anything coherent about the scientific understanding of consciousness, it ought to be that our current analysis of it is likely to be at a very primitive place. Certainly consciousness is somehow related to the brain. However, despite all the detailed information we have about the structure and function of the brain, there are no compelling reasons to believe we are anywhere close to appreciating just how consciousness is actually related to the brain. The effects of various drugs both on the brain (in the domain of chemical and cellular processes in the nervous system) and on mentality (in the domain of subjective experience) are likely to continue to be among the best probes available in the investigation of this mind–brain connection. And although many pieces of information fit together quite elegantly— such as the structure and dynamic functioning of neuron synapses and intercellular signaling and how drug effects at synapses and on brain circuits correlate with effects of drugs on mental experience—it could well be that a better next step toward understanding consciousness will involve a radical revisioning of the connection between mind and brain, something rather different from the Standard Model. There is ample precedent for this in the history of science. Newtonian physical principles provide an excellent (and often perfectly adequate) description of many phenomena, from the falling of apples to the behavior of ocean tides to the movements of the moon and planets. However, following the development of special and general relativity by Albert Einstein, it is now appreciated that relativistic physics provides a revisioned and more powerful descriptive framework for these phenomena and much more. Indeed, contemporary physics already contains the foundation for such an expansion. Quantum mechanics, the universally accepted physical description of matter and energy, was developed during the 1920s and constituted a radical revisioning of our conception of physical reality. The most widely accepted interpretations of quantum mechanics, put forth by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, John von Neumann, and others posit an irreducible role for measurement or interaction in defining the properties of a system. It can be compellingly argued that this provides
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a place to begin to address consciousness and mentality from an expanded perspective (Rosenblum & Kuttner, 2006; Stapp, 2007, 2009). (This is a complex and controversial subject, requiring another long conversation.) Within the domain of the contemporary empirical science of mind are numerous anomalous phenomena that strongly suggest an expanded framework will be required in order to take the next big steps in addressing the mind–body problem (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Kelly et al., 2007). (Another contentious subject deserving of a long conversation.) Everything the Standard Model provides on the neurochemistry of consciousness and on altered consciousness will still apply and will contribute to characterizing how the substrate of the brain contributes to the subjective experiences of mentality. And more will be possible. Even in this anticipated future expanded framework, insights and information are likely to be gained by continued exploration of the effects of drugs on the brain and the mind.
References Be´ı¨que, J.-C., Imad, M., Mladenovic, L., Gingrich, J. A., & Andrade, R. (2007). Mechanism of the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor-mediated facilitation of synaptic activity in prefrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 104, 9870–9875. Blood, B. P. (1874). The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy. http://books .google.com/books?id=oBgQAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=blood +anaesthetic+revelation+and+the+gist+of+philosophy&source=bl&ots=n4w6 SD4FCz&sig=rCslTTf4xNSspMaZD_OTUcDcRAU&hl=en&ei=zuswTYLZB4TG sAOw17CDBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDcQ6 AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false. Carden˜a, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Chevaleyre, V., Takahashi, K. A., & Castillo, P. E. (2006). Endocannabinoidmediated synaptic plasticity in the CNS. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 29, 37–76. Descarries, L., & Mechawar, N. (2000). Ultrastructural evidence for diffuse transmission by monoamine and acetylcholine neurons of the central nervous system. Progress in Brain Research, 125, 27–47. Emmanouil, D. E., & Quock, R. M. (2007). Advances in understanding the actions of nitrous oxide. Anesthesia Progress, 54, 9–18. Franks, N. P. (2008). General anesthesia: From molecular targets to neuronal pathways of sleep and arousal. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 370–386.
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Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 315–352). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., Johnson, M. W., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2008). Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22, 621–632. Grof, S. (2008). LSD psychotherapy. Sarasota, FL: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. (Originally published 1980) Hofmann, A. (2005). LSD, my problem child: Reflections on sacred drugs, mysticism, and science. Sarasota, FL: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. (Originally published 1979) Hyman, S. E., Malenka, R. C., & Nestler, E. J. (2006). Neural mechanisms of addiction: The role of reward-related learning and memory. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 29, 565–598. Iverson, L. L., Iverson, S. D., Bloom, F. E., & Roth, R. H. (2009). Introduction to neuropsychopharmacology. New York: Oxford University Press. Jacob, M. S., & Presti, D. E. (2005). Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: An anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine. Medical Hypothesis, 64, 930–937. James, W. (1874). Review of “The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philosophy.” Atlantic Monthly, 33, 627–628. James, W. (1882). On some Hegelisms. Mind, 7, 186–208. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Holt. James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. London: Longmans, Green, & Company. Jevtovic-Todorovic, V., Todorovic, S. M., Mennerick, S., Powell, S., Dikranian, K., Benshoff, N., Zorumski, C. F., & Olney, J. W. (1998). Nitrous oxide (laughing gas) is an NMDA antagonist, neuroprotectant and neurotoxin. Nature Medicine, 4, 460–463. Jones, B. E. (2009). Glia, adenosine, and sleep. Neuron, 61, 156–157. Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M., & Greyson, B. (2007). Irreducible mind: Toward a psychology for the 21st century. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Nagel, T. (1974). What is like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450. Nichols, D. E. (2004). Hallucinogens. Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 101, 131–181. Nichols, D. E., & Nichols, C. D. (2008). Serotonin receptors. Chemical Reviews, 108, 1614–1641. Premont, R. T., Gainetdinov, R. R., & Caron, M. G. (2001). Following the elusive trace amines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 98, 9474–9475. Regehr, W. G., Carey, M. R., & Best, A. R. (2009). Activity-dependent regulation of synapses by retrograde messengers. Neuron, 63, 154–170. Rosenberg, G. (2004). A place for consciousness: Probing the deep structure of the natural world. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Rosenblum, B., & Kuttner, F. (2006). Quantum enigma: Physics encounters consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press. Roth, B. L., Baner, K., Westkaemper, R., Siebert, D., Rice, K. C., Steinberg, S., Ernsberger, P., & Rothman, R. B. (2002). Salvinorin A: A potent naturally occurring nonnitrogenous kappa opioid selective agonist. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 99, 11,934–11,939. Schultes, R. E., Hofmann, A., & Ra¨tsch, C. (2001). Plants of the gods: Their sacred, healing, and hallucinogenic powers. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts. (Originally published in 1979). Searle J. (2000). Consciousness. Annual Reviews of Neuroscience, 23, 557–578. Sperry, R. W. (1980). Mind–brain interaction: Mentalism, yes; dualism, no. Neuroscience, 5, 195–206. Stapp, H. P. (2007). Mindful universe: Quantum mechanics and the participating observer. Berlin: Springer. Stapp, H. P. (2009). Mind, matter and quantum mechanics (3rd ed.). Berlin: Springer. Valde´s, L. J. III. (1994). Salvia divinorum and the unique diterpene hallucinogen, salvinorin (divinorin) A. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 26, 277–283. Vollenweider, F. X., Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen, M. F. I., Ba¨bler, A., Vogel, H., & Hell, D. (1998). Psilocybin induces schizophrenia-like psychosis in humans via a serotonin-2 agonist action. NeuroReport, 9, 3897–3902. Wallace, B. A. (2006). The attention revolution: Unlocking the power of the focused mind. Boston: Wisdom. Wangyal, T. (1998). The Tibetan yogas of dream and sleep. Ithaca: Snow Lion. Woolley, D. W., & Shaw, E. (1954). A biochemical and pharmacological suggestion about certain mental disorders. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 40, 228–231.
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CHAPTER 3
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space with Special Reference to Shamanic Ecstasy Fred Previc Introduction An altered state of consciousness (ASC) generally refers to any condition that differs from the normal waking state. Deviations can range from the mild (e.g., after ingestion of a stimulant or depressant or analgesic) to the extreme (as in coma). Altered states can be induced either during the normal sleep– wake cycle, by accident or trauma (as in hypoxia and fever), in psychotic states associated with disorders such as temporal-lobe epilepsy and schizophrenia, and by a large variety of drugs (Previc, 2006) [see also chapters by Carden˜a, Kokoszka & Wallace, Presti, and Noirhomme & Laureys, this volume]. The most intriguing and arguably widely studied ASC are those that involve distortions of reality, hereafter referred to as altered states of consciousness with distorted reality (ASCDRs). These include a wide range of states involving different experiences and means of induction, from sensory hallucinations and dreamlike experiences to meditative and mystical states and even dissociative states in which out-of-body sensations and spirit possessions may occur. Even within each of these categories, there is considerable variability; for example, mystical experiences may range from heightened awareness and a mild noetic feeling to a profound loss of one’s sense of time and personal space (see Wulff, 2000). All mammals presumably experience some form of altered consciousness, based on a slowing of the EEG from the typical waking beta state, and many are presumed to experience ASCDRs after ingesting hallucinogenic drugs, as judged by grasping attempts at nonexistent objects in space. However, humans alone intentionally enter ASCDRs, whether by physical and behavioral activities (e.g., meditation, exhaustive dancing, sensory
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isolation) or by ingestion of drugs (as in some shamanic rituals and other contexts), whereas hallucinogenic drugs are rarely self-administered by primates and may even be mildly aversive (Fantegrossi, Woods, & Winger, 2004; but see Samorini, 2002). Why humans are especially prone to seek ASCDRs may best be explained by the high dopamine content of the human brain, which orients us to extrapersonal space and, as will be discussed later, may be the common denominator of all ASCDRs.
The Dopaminergic Mind and the Origin of Human Consciousness Most theories concerning when and how human intelligence and consciousness first arose focus on the role of expanded brain size or genetic mutations. However, Previc (2009) argued that characteristic human behavior evolved out of mostly epigenetic factors (influences such as direct placental transmission that can affect or override genetic expression) that led to an elevation of dopamine in the human brain. This is significant because dopamine, the most widely studied neurotransmitter in the brain, has been implicated in a number of processes that are fundamental to modern human behavior. These include motivation, goal directedness, exploratory behavior, reward prediction, stimulus associations, and at least six cognitive abilities crucial to human intelligence: motor programming, working memory, cognitive shifting, abstract representation, temporal processing speed, and generativity/creativity (Previc, 1999, 2009). Working memory is considered to be the most fundamental cognitive ability and the single best predictor of the general intellectual factor g (Kyllonen & Christal, 1990). Together with cognitive shifting and other strategic abilities, working memory underlies what has been termed “executive intelligence” (Previc, 1999). Such strategic ability is associated with yet another dopaminergic trait—internal locus of control, the belief that the individual is in control of his or her own fate (DeClerk, Boone, & De Brabander, 2006). Strategic focus requires an inhibition of extraneous thoughts as well as a dampening of sympathetic emotional responses, consonant with dopamine’s primarily parasympathetic action on the body in lowering blood pressure, reducing temperature, increasing peripheral vasodilation, and reducing oxygen consumption (Previc, 2009). The parasympathetic action of dopamine is a major clue in accounting for the parasympathetic dominance found in the majority, if not all, ASCDRs. According to Previc (2009), all of these critical cognitive skills are related to operations carried out in extrapersonal space. For example, motor programming, motivation, goal directedness, stimulus associations, and
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reward prediction are much more useful in acquiring distant reward objects than in consuming nearby objects in our immediate (peripersonal) space. Similarly, the human ability to engage in abstract representation, time travel, and distant conceptualizations (such as heaven, eternity, the soul, etc.) represents an extension of brain systems involved in exploring the most distant regions of physical space (Previc, 2009). That dopamine is involved in extrapersonal space is confirmed by the contraction of nearby space as well as an exaggerated emphasis on the upper visual field (where distant space is mostly found) in the hyperdopaminergic disorder of schizophrenia, whereas reduced dopamine (as in Parkinson’s disease) results in upper visual-field deficits (Previc, 1998). Evidence from rodents points to a whole constellation of similar upper-field behaviors (e.g., dorsiflexion, climbing, rearing) caused by dopaminergic drugs (Previc, 1998). As will be discussed later, dopamine’s role in extrapersonal space (and distant time) is a major reason for its role in mediating the out-of-body themes occurring during many ASCDRs [see also Dieguez & Blanke, this volume]. Dopamine is a catecholamine that, like the similarly structured transmitter noradrenaline, is considered a stimulant in the central nervous system. Dopamine is found primarily in two major systems emanating from the brainstem: (1) the nigrostriatal, coursing from the substantia nigra to the corpus striatum (containing the caudate nucleus and putamen, the most densely innervated dopaminergic structures in the brain); and (2) the mesolimbic, emanating more ventrally and medially from the ventral tegmental area and projecting to the nucleus accumbens or ventral striatum (Previc, 2009). These systems, also known as the dorsolateral and ventromedial ones, respectively, have in turn their own set of extensive and reciprocal cortical connections (Previc, 2009). Although both systems are oriented toward extrapersonal space, the nigrostriatal one is more involved in focused, cognitive processes, while the somewhat more chaotic mesolimbic system tends to be more involved in motivation and goal directedness and, when disinhibited, is the more likely site of dopaminemediated ASCDRs.
Dopamine and Other Transmitters Mediating Altered States of Consciousness One element common to all ASCDRs is that they involve a disinhibition of dopaminergic extrapersonal brain systems located in the ventral cortex (Previc, 2009), particularly a “limbic” circuit coursing from the medial temporal lobe to the ventral striatum (Mandell, 1980; Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001). The extrapersonal predominance is reflected in
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the dearth of tactile and proprioceptive (bodily) sensations, a bias toward the upper visual field, and an emphasis on extrapersonal themes (e.g., out-of-of-body experiences) in ASCDRs. For example, dreams often involve floating sensations, as do hallucinations occurring just prior to and following sleep (Girard, Martius, & Cheyne, 2007), and deep hypnosis is associated with a loss of body sensations (Carden˜a, 2005). As examples of the upper-field biases, eye movements tend to roll upward in sleep, hypnotic, meditative, and hypoxic states (Previc, 2006; Schmidt, 1996; Tebecis & Provins, 1975), hallucinations prior to sleep tend to be biased toward the upper right visual field (Girard et al., 2007), and religious visions and positive symbolism tend to be upwardly biased (Previc, 2006). The out-of-body or “ecstatic” sensation—derived from the Greek word ekstasis, “to stand outside oneself”—tends to be the most perceptually distant of the hallucinations (Girard et al., 2007). The extrapersonal effect of the consciousness-altering drugs is further evidenced by their tendency to distort space perceptions by de-emphasizing near space (Fischer, Hill, Thatcher, & Scheib, 1970) and by activating upper-field systems associated with distant space through raising apparent eye level (Krus, Resnick, & Raskin, 1966). These effects are similar to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, in which excessive dopamine leads to, among other perceptual and thought disorders, a diminution of near space and a perceived flattening of the 3-D world (see Previc, 1998). Although there are many differences among the ASCDRs, these differences may be more superficial than real. For example, most dreams tend to be visual whereas schizophrenic hallucinations tend to be auditory; however, intense, narrative dreams known as “apex” dreams are very similar to the schizophrenic experience (Hunt, 1982). Also, ASCDRs involving spirit and other “possessions” differ from more active ASCDRs associated with meditation and prayer, yet meditation elevates dopamine levels (Kjaer et al., 2002) just as some possession disorders are linked to dopaminergic psychosis and are treated by antipsychotic drugs that block dopamine (Goff et al., 1991). Other phenomenological evidence for a commonality of all ACSDRs is the similarity of drug-induced states with mystical and psychotic states. For example, Griffiths et al. (2006) replicated earlier results of Pahnke (1969) in showing that the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin closely replicates the features of the mystical state and produces similarly longlasting mental and spiritual changes in individuals. Furthermore, endogenous and hallucinogen-induced psychoses are highly similar in the reality distortions experienced (Gouzoulis-Mayfrank et al., 1998). There is also neuroanatomical evidence for a commonality of all ASCDRs. Dreams, most hallucinations, and mystical experiences all
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involve a greater activation of the ventral brain pathways housed in the medial temporal and medial and lateral prefrontal areas (Previc, 2006). Posterior sensory and body-centered brain regions, especially in the parietal lobe, are generally quieted in dreams and mystical states, while damage to the parieto-temporal region (particularly on the right side) can create out-of-body sensations (Blanke & Arzy, 2005). The posterior cortical silencing may explain why sensory isolation is capable of inducing hallucinations and even out-of-body illusions (Previc, 2006; Zuckerman, 1969), especially in the context of serotonergic, noradrenergic, and cholinergic deactivation in primary and secondary sensory areas (see below). Finally, dreams, mystical, and other altered states may all involve varying preponderances of activity in the left hemisphere (Previc, 2006). At first glance, the neurochemistry of dreams, hallucinations, and other altered states contradicts the notion that there is a common neural substrate for all ASCDRs. Indeed, altered levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT), glutamate, gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), and the opioids and cannabinoids have all been shown to produce altered states of consciousness. Yet the plethora of neurochemical involvements obscures the common neurochemical profiles found in these states. For example, dreaming involves deactivation of the serotonergic and noradrenergic systems and continued activation of the dopaminergic and cholinergic systems (Solms, 2000). Dopaminergic drugs such as the precursor L-dopa and the D1 and D2 receptor agonist apomorphine are known to create hallucinations, as when used with Parkinson’s patients to treat their motor dysfunction. Serotonergic neuronal activity in the raphe nucleus is also decreased by psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and many other hallucinogens (Previc, 2006), whereas elevated 5-HT levels are protective against hallucinations (Previc, 2006). Cholinergic antagonists such as scopolamine and atropine can also produce dreamlike visions and hallucinations (Perry & Perry, 1995). Glutamate antagonism by such drugs as ketamine, phencyclidine, and ibogaine creates dissociative (out-of-body) and other types of hallucinations (Corlett et al., 2009, Previc, 2006). GABA is also involved in hallucinations but in a more complex way: GABA agonists can prevent hallucinations in alcohol-induced delirium tremens and in the Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which visual loss creates a condition akin to sensory isolation (Paulig & Mentrap, 2001), but GABA agonists such as Zolpidem can also foster a dreamlike hypnotic state (Markowitz, Rames, Reeves, & Thomas, 1997). Finally, the natural opiates have an even more complex involvement in ASCDRs: Although some kappa agonists like salvinorin A are hallucinogenic, possibly because of dopamine coactivation, both opiate
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agonists and antagonists have been used to treat psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia, with mixed results (Schmauss, Yassouridis, & Emrich, 1997; Welch & Thompson, 1997). The euphoria and even increased social bonding that can follow the achievement of an ecstatic or transcendent state may more be more dependent on opiate action than on the altered state itself. Despite the plethora of transmitter involvements in ASCDRs, a unifying concept is that all of the drugs that create altered states of reality may ultimately lead to elevated levels of dopamine in the brain. Serotonergic systems interact with dopaminergic ones in many parts of the brain in a mostly inhibitory manner (see Kapur & Remington, 1996; Mandell, 1980; Previc, 2006), with reduced serotonin levels leading to elevated dopamine levels, thereby explaining why drugs such as LSD can model dopaminergically mediated psychosis. GABA-agonistic drugs such as Zolpidem increase dopamine levels in the brainstem (Heikkinen, Mo¨ykkynen, & Korpi, 2009) while anticholinergic drugs such as atropine elevate dopamine levels in the basal ganglia and septo-hippocampal area (see Mandell, 1980; Perry & Perry, 1995; Previc, 2006). Various antiglutamate drugs also are known to elevate brain dopamine levels in the basal ganglia and to mimic schizophrenic psychosis (Corlett, Frith, & Fletcher, 2009; Vollenweider et al., 2000), although the ketamine-enhanced release of dopamine in the striatum has not always been found, perhaps because the dosages were too low (Rabiner, 2007). Opioid interactions with dopamine are even more profound, as natural opiates such as the enkephalins are most densely located in the striatum (Schmauss & Emrich, 1985) and are co-located with dopamine terminals and physiologically show strong reactions with dopamine. Finally, cannabinoids are known to cross-sensitize dopaminergic neurons to other dopaminergic drugs, which may help explain their exacerbation of psychosis (Luzi et al., 2008). Recent evidence suggests that most if not all hallucinogenic drugs, including the opiate antagonist salvinorin A, stimulate dopamine D2 receptors in vitro in a manner consistent with their hallucinogenic potential (Seeman, Guan, & Hirbec, 2009). However, there is only mixed evidence that blocking dopaminergic transmission reduces the effects of hallucinogens (Carlson & Wagner, 2005; Keith, Mansbach, & Geyer, 1991), so it cannot be firmly concluded that ecstatic effects can only be produced by dopaminergic activation. Nor should it be concluded that all drug-induced altered states and effects on the central nervous system are identical. A drug with antiserotonergic effects may stimulate dopamine, but the high density of serotonergic neurons in the temporal lobe visual areas will ensure that more visual hallucinations will occur with antiserotonergic drugs than with other hallucinogens.
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Moreover, hallucinogenic drugs often affect transmitters that have, to varying degrees, emotional or motivational side effects. For example, any hallucinogen that stimulates opioid receptors will produce a feeling of euphoria and reduced sensitivity to pain, while combined dopaminergic and noradrenergic action creates more of a stimulant action and less of a hallucinogenic one than does dopaminergic activation alone. The stimulant amphetamine, for example, has less of a hallucinogenic potential than the dopaminergic precursor L-dopa, although the former can lead to mystical experiences and delusions and hallucinations with chronic use that can both resemble and worsen the psychosis of schizophrenia. Another drug, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, excites both dopamine and serotonin as well as noradrenaline and oxytocin in stimulating both extrapersonal and peripersonal systems. Although MDMA ironically goes by the street name of ecstasy, its experience is different from that of the classic hallucinogens in that it enhances tactile and emotional sensations (dependent on peripersonal and sympathetic systems), which runs counter to the original definition of ecstasy as an out-of-body experience. Even if many transmitters may be involved in ASCDRs, dopamine is the only transmitter unequivocally elevated during such states. The dopaminergic basis of the ASCDRs is further strengthened by a parasympathetic predominance in sleep (Harris, 2005) and in many (but not all) drug-induced hallucinogenic states, because dopamine has a primarily parasympathetic influence in bodily functions and inhibits sympathetic emotional arousal systems in the amygdala and posterior cortex (Mandell, 1980; Previc, 2009). Parasympathetic dominance is present in virtually all out-of-body and other ASCDRs, whether elicited actively by meditation, drugs, sweating, prolonged dancing (which exhausts the sympathetic resources), hypoxia, or even trauma (see reviews by Mandell, 1980; Sierra & Berrios, 1998; Winkelman, 2010). Parasympathetic dominance has also been shown in acute hyperdopaminergic clinical states (Henry et al., 2010), whereas antidopaminergic drugs (neuroleptics) used to treat psychosis cause sympathetic effects such as hypertension and hyperthermia (Previc, 1999). The parasympathetic dominance is consistent with the greater consciousness-altering role of the more extrapersonally oriented and dopaminergically dominant left hemisphere, which exerts a predominant parasympathetic action and is less involved than the sympathetically dominant right hemisphere in emotional regulation (Previc, 2009). In summary, there is considerable evidence that dopaminergic activation occurs in all hallucinogenic states and is the primary neurochemical correlate of these states.
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The Neural Basis of Altered States of Consciousness in Shamanism The neurochemical and parasympathetic contributions to ASCDRs are highlighted in shamanism, a combined practice of religious ritual, healing, and communal bonding (Winkelman, 2004, 2010; also Volume 1). One of the prominent components of shamanism is the ecstatic experience—also referred to as the “shamanic state of consciousness” (Krippner, 2002)— which is manifested in such experiences as “soul flight” and “out-of-body journeying.” Variations of the ecstatic experience were found in all 47 of the societies reviewed by Winkelman (1990) in his cross-cultural studies, and shamanic themes are prominently reflected in prehistoric rock art (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988). The ecstatic experience can be limited to one or a few individuals or extend to the entire group, depending on the society and ritual involved. Although drugs are not the only means of producing ASCDRs during shamanic rituals, they are or have been widely used in hunter-gatherer cultures, with the notable exception of some (such as the Inuits) who have limited access to plants. Shamanism has been described as the original “neurotheology” (Winkelman, 2004), and the involvement of dopamine in shamanic ecstasy (see below) parallels the more general involvement of dopamine in religious experience and practice (Previc, 2006). The shamanistic practices used to create the ecstatic state by means other than drugs include sweating, exhaustive dancing, rhythmic chanting and drumming, sleep deprivation, emotional stress, and sensory isolation (Winkelman, 2010), consistent with the link between dopamine and parasympathetic activity. Dopamine stimulates peripheral vasodilation in order to lower our temperature (Previc, 1999), so it would be elevated in such venues as sweat lodges, used by the Navajos to create ecstatic experiences. Rhythmic drumming in the 3 to 6 Hz range purportedly excites hippocampal theta waves, which occur during REM sleep, meditation, and in orienting to distant stimuli (see Previc, 1998) and are accompanied by increased dopamine in the medial septal area (see Mandell, 1980). Prolonged dancing can lead to “sympathetic exhaustion” and elevate dopamine and endorphin levels in the brain (Winkelman, 2010). Aboriginals in Australia and the modern San peoples of Africa do not rely on hallucinogens during religious rituals (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988) but on hyperventilation, sleep deprivation, fasting, and dreams to attain “otherworldly” experiences. Hyperventilation reduces blood flow to the brain and leads to hypoxia-induced hallucinations and even psychosis (Allen & Agus, 1968), and just one night of sleep deprivation is known to dramatically increase D2 receptor binding in the striatum (Volkow et al., 2009). Sensory isolation can lead to
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hallucinations and even psychosis (Corlett et al., 2009), and it has been speculated that prolonged periods of time spent in darkened caves may have helped inspire some shamanic prehistoric rock art (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988; Whitley, 2008). Another widely used route to the shamanic ecstatic experience is the use of hallucinogens. Over one hundred such drugs are known to be used by shamans, typically from plant or fungus extracts. Because of their use in religious rituals, these have been variously termed “food of the gods,” “plants of the gods,” or entheogens (see Perry, 2002, for a review). The hallucinogens used by shamans across the world affect a large number of neurotransmitter systems, principally cholinergic and serotonergic ones. Psilocybin, obtained from mushrooms and currently used in North American and some Oceanic shamanic rituals, is known to mimic the action of LSD on serotonin receptors, as does mescaline from the peyote cactus (also used by Mexican and North American shamans; see Perry, 2002). Extracts from sacred vine species used by North and South American natives such as Virola, Turbina, and the “soul vine” Banisteriopsis, the source of the powerful hallucinogen ayahuasca, are also believed to have mostly serotonergic effects (Perry, 2002; Previc, 2006) [see also Mishor, McKenna, & Callaway, this volume]. Anticholinergic drugs used in rituals mostly act at the muscarinic cholinergic synapse, although some also act on nicotinic receptors. Scopolamine (from the Datura plants used by Navajo shamans in the southwestern United States) and atropine (widely used around the world both in hunter-gatherer cultures as well as in ancient and even medieval civilizations) are two of the most powerful muscarinic drugs with hallucinogenic properties. Ibogaine, an antiglutamatergic and partial opiate agonist derived from the root bark of the Iboga plant, is used by West African shamans in initiation and other religious rituals. Salvinorin A, derived from the sage plant Saliva divinorum and used by shamans in Mexico, is a kappa-opioid agonist that has a high affinity for the dopamine D2 receptor (Seeman et al., 2009). The Amaritia muscaria mushroom, found in the shade of birch and other trees in northern arboreal forests and used by Siberian shamans, has as its main psychoactive ingredient muscimol, which acts like other benzodiazepines at GABA receptor sites (Perry, 2002) and is one of the various drugs hypothesized to be the “soma” of the ancient Vedic texts. Marijuana, derived from the cannabis sativa plant, was believed to have been used extensively by shamans in China and central Asia (Perry, 2002). Interestingly, no plant species that mainly and directly stimulates dopamine is known to be used by modern shamans for its hallucinogenic properties, although ancient Egyptian and Mayan priests are believed to have made use of the water lily (nymphaea; Emboden, 1989), which contains apomorphine.
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Although some hallucinogens used by shamans activate systems that are involved in mood, sometimes creating pleasant effects, they can also produce negative psychological effects, including anxiety, depression, and even psychosis in some cases (Whitley, 2008), consistent with their dopaminergic actions and the dopamine excess in psychosis. Many of these drugs lead to hallucinogenic experiences at doses approaching toxic levels and they, like other toxic drugs, lead frequently to nausea and vomiting. Undoubtedly, part of the shamanic role would be to help regulate and monitor the ingestion of these potentially dangerous drugs. Along with their hallucinogenic effects, grimacing and reduced social grooming and other indicants of social isolation are produced by apomorphine and psilocybin in primates (Schlemmer, Narasimhachari, & Davis, 1980; Siegel, 1974), even though in humans they may be consumed in group settings during shamanic rituals and stimulate group cohesion in their aftermath. Not surprisingly, the hallucinogens do not approach the stimulants, opiates, and other mood-altering drugs in terms of their addictive potential (Fantegrossi et al., 2004). Chimpanzees and gorillas have been known to consume hallucinogenic plants among the more than100 plants in their diet, but they do so sparingly and for primarily medicinal purposes (Cousins & Huffman, 2002), just as other nonhuman primates do not self-administer LSD and other hallucinogens in laboratory settings (Fantegrossi et al., 2004). Even many hunter-gatherers (e.g., the Kung San!) who once may have ingested plant extracts to induce altered states now rely on behavioral means of doing so (Lewis-Williams & Dowson, 1988). Hence, despite some psychological healing and social bonding flowing from the ecstatic experience, as well as possibly a greater perceived control over animal spirits—analogous to the dopaminergic “internal locus of control”—the risks and efforts associated with hallucinogen ingestion and other shamanic practices require that a larger purpose underlie their use in shamanism—namely, to achieve the ecstatic state. As a Mexican shaman described her psilocybin state: This is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And this is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and saints, a world where everything has happened and everything is known. The world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. (Marı´a Sabina, in Perry, 2002)
The shamanic experience is consistent with studies of psilocybin in the United States (Griffiths et al., 2006; Pahnke, 1969), which have produced
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mystical effects that left a profound mark on the participants, even leading some to describe those effects as the most profound experience of their lives (Griffiths et al., 2006). However, even in the controlled and supportive environment of the latter study, 31% of participants experienced negative side effects such as fear and anxiety after ingesting the hallucinogen (Griffiths et al., 2006). That individuals would engage in prolonged activities or in many cases suffer psychological and physical stress or danger to achieve the ecstatic experience and the supernatural knowledge supposedly gained is consistent with the capability of other dopaminergic extrapersonal endeavors (e.g., fighting in the name of abstract concepts, working for years in solitude to achieve scientific breakthroughs, etc.) to override peripersonal and bodily needs (Previc, 2009).
Origins of the Shamanic Consciousness and Modern Mind It is unlikely that ecstatic experiences induced by the hallucinogens could be nearly as profound without the pre-existing expansion of our consciousness of extrapersonal space provided by the dopaminergic mind. The origin of shamanism most likely parallels the origin of dopaminergically mediated human consciousness, not only because of a need for an expanded extrapersonal orientation but also because of the symbolic capacity required to interpret shamanic rituals (Winkelman, 2010). Dopaminergic systems have undergone a dramatic reorganization and expansion in primates relative to other mammals such as rodents (Berger, Gaspar, & Verney, 1991). Whereas dopamine predominates in relatively few regions of the rodent brain, such as the anterior ones involved in motor control, it is much more widely distributed in primates. Even in primates, however, dopamine more densely innervates frontal and prefrontal areas involved in motor control and is sparsely represented in the sensory areas of the brain, which explains why diminished nondopaminergic sensory processing during isolation can disinhibit dopaminergic activity and produce ASCDRs (Previc, 2006; Zuckerman, 1969). Dopaminergic transmission also appears to be predominant in the left hemisphere, which in most humans houses our advanced intellectual abilities and also may be the major locus of most altered-reality states (Previc, 2009). Neuroanatomical evidence suggests that dopaminergic systems are more salient in human brains than in those of monkeys and even apes. For one, the cerebral cortex and the striatum—both extremely rich in dopamine—show the highest brain progression indices in humans relative to chimpanzees (Rapoport, 1990). Also, the dopaminergic-rich anterior
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cingulate gyrus, a structure activated in numerous studies during meditation (see Previc, 2006), has in humans markedly increased in size and number of large dopaminergic spindle neurons relative to apes (Allman et al., 2001). Although a recent study showed there is no fundamental increase in dopamine neuronal density in human prefrontal cortex relative to that of the chimpanzee, some subtle axonal changes were noted (Raghanti et al., 2008a). However, there is even less evidence for evolutionary expansions/changes from chimpanzee to humans in glutamatergic, cholinergic, and serotonergic systems (Perry & Perry, 1995; Raghanti et al., 2008b, c; Rapoport, 1990). Although changes in gene sequencing of dopaminergic as well as serotonergic, opioid, and other receptors has been documented in humans as compared to apes, Preuss (2006) points out that such sequencing differences are difficult to correlate with any specific behavioral changes. Previc (1999, 2009) argues that elevation of dopamine levels in humans occurred in two major stages: (1) the emergence of Homo habilis around 2 million years ago; and (2) the emergence of fully modern humans around 80,000 years ago (80 kya) in Southern Africa. Homo habilis was the first hominid species to engage in extensive stone tool making and to be specialized for endurance activities such as running, as evidenced by changes in the skeletal anatomy and foot (Bramble & Lieberman, 2004). The enhanced endurance capabilities and tools would have allowed Homo habilis to travel large distances to scavenge or engage in other activities to procure meat, which is believed on the basis of dentation and archaeological evidence to have been part of its diet (Previc, 1999). Meat would have provided Homo habilis with a rich source of tyrosine, the precursor to dopamine, and dopamine would correspondingly have improved thermal tolerance and endurance capability (Gilbert, 1995; Previc, 1999). The second major increase in dopamine leading to modern human behavior occurred more than 100,000 years after the establishment of the modern human anatomy and gene pool and therefore may be ascribed to epigenetic factors. The most likely of these factors was an improved diet (including marine fauna rich in essential amino acids and iodine that boost dopamine transmission) and a rise in human longevity and population (Previc, 2009). The first unambiguous evidence of modern human intelligence circa 80 kya is manifested in manufacturing artifacts (e.g., carved bone tools, pyrolithic blades), elaborate lithic geometric designs, and decorative beads and ochre-colored ornaments found at Blombos Cave, Klasies River, and other sites along the coast of South Africa (Brown et al., 2009; Henshilwood et al., 2001; Jacobs & Roberts, 2009).
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Despite their hierarchical social structures and limited use of ritual dancing, there is no evidence that chimpanzees display anything comparable to shamanism. Beginning with Homo neanderthalis, some evidence exists for ritualistic burials (Winkelman & Baker, 2008), but it is limited and certainly a far cry from the conceptual sophistication required of the shamanic consciousness. By contrast, there is clear evidence in rock art and cave paintings of shamanic themes (e.g., animal–human therianopes) in various parts of the world by 35 kya, including Fumane Cave in Italy (Broglio et al., 2009) and Chauvet Cave in France (Valladas et al., 2001). These dispersed artistic renderings suggest that the shamanic tradition must have been well established before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, but how far it extends back in time is a matter of speculation. The modern human anatomy and gene pool were established at least around 200 kya, but there exists only sparse and disputable evidence of behavioral modernity for the next hundred thousand or more years (Jacobs & Roberts, 2009; Mellars, 2006; Previc, 2009). The absence of evidence could be explained by many extraneous factors, including rock-art physical decay, but there is also evidence of absence in that, even as recently as 90 kya genetically modern humans created few advanced artifacts in the Levant region of the Middle East, from which they eventually disappeared (Mellars, 2006). It is believed that the gene pool common to almost all non-Africans (as well as most Africans) possibly originated from a mixture of South African and East African populations and is believed to have entered Southwest Asia around 65 kya (Behar et al., 2008). It seems likely that the South African clade (group of biological species sharing a common ancestor) that merged with the East African populations before leaving Africa migrated from South Africa after the first extensive artifacts indisputably ascribable to modern humans were deposited less than 80 kya at Blombos Cave and other sites along the South African coast (see Jacobs & Roberts, 2009; Previc, 2009). There is no evidence for shamanism at this time, but in Rhino Cave, located in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, tenuous evidence for spirit worship exists in the form of a giant python-shaped rock.1 Although there is uncertainty as to when the shamanic consciousness emerged, its demise can be traced to the rise of agriculture approximately 10 kya in the Middle East, which led to a further extension of 1
The python is marked by a large number of intentionally made cuts; evidence of burned spears, dated to 77 kya years ago, is located in a pit below (http://news.nationalgeographic .com/news/2006/12/061222-python-ritual.html). Sheila Coulson, one of the archaeologists excavating Rhino Cave, even speculates that nearby rooms once may have been occupied by shamans, but this is unsupported by any physical evidence.
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dopaminergic consciousness into upper space (Previc, 2009). Whereas the hunter-gathers sought to access ancestral and animal spirits that could be connected to earthly objects, the reliance on agriculture increased the importance of weather and climate and the cyclical control thereof and witnessed the emergence of solar, rain, and similar celestial deities (Previc, 2009). Population increases and a less nomadic lifestyle resulting from cultivated food supplies further led to the emergence of stratified societies in which priests and priestesses controlled spiritual access for large populations. Although some shamanic hallucinogens and practices (e.g., chanting) continued to be used by the ancient civilizations, even these would eventually become prohibited, thereby further diminishing the role of shamans in spiritual activities.
Conclusion Most or all altered states of reality involve a triumph of extrapersonal over peripersonal activity and are accompanied by elevated dopamine in the ventral corticiolimbic regions of the brain, especially in the left hemisphere. The ecstatic experience, created either by behavioral practices or hallucinogenic drugs and manifested in soul flights, out-of-body journeys, and other phenomena, is a cardinal feature of shamanism. Shamanistic practices and drugs designed to invoke the ecstatic experience increase dopaminergic and parasympathetic activity and would be largely lacking in purpose without an expanded appreciation and consciousness of distant space and time provided by dopaminergic systems in the brain. Hence, the evolution of the dopaminergic mind, providing the capability of abstract, symbolic, and distant concepts and believed to have reached its modern status no more than 80 kya, appears to have been the major impetus for the rise of shamanic consciousness.
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Winkelman, M. (2004). Shamanism as the original neurotheology. Zygon, 39, 193–217. Winkelman, M. (2010). The integrative mode of consciousness. In M. Winkelman (Ed.), Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness and healing. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Winkelman, M., & Baker, J. R. (2008). Supernatural as natural: A biocultural approach to religion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Wulff, D. (2000). Mystical experience. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Zuckerman, M. (1969). Hallucinations, reported sensations, and images. In J. P. Zubek (Ed.), Sensory deprivation: Fifteen years of research (pp. 85–125). New York: Appleton-Century-Croft.
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CHAPTER 4
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms Mario Beauregard Introduction The past decade has witnessed an increasing interest in understanding the brain mechanisms mediating transcendent experiences (TEs). These experiences extend or lie beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Mystical experiences represent one particularly interesting type of TEs. Characterized by altered or expanded consciousness, mystical experiences relate to a fundamental dimension of human existence and are frequently reported across all cultures and religious/spiritual traditions (Hardy, 1975; Hay, 1990). For James (1902), the main characteristics of a mystical experience are: (1) ineffability: the quality of eluding any adequate account in words; (2) noetic quality: it is experienced as a state of deep knowledge or insight unknown to the discursive intellect; (3) transiency: this experience cannot be sustained for long; (4) passivity: the feeling that, after the experience sets in, one is no longer in control and is perhaps even in the grasp of a superior power or presence. According to Stace (1960), mystical experiences involve the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a oneness or a One into which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. Stace distinguishes between extrovertive and introvertive mystical experiences: In extrovertive experience, nature, art, music, or mundane objects facilitate mystical consciousness and are transfigured by awareness of the One; in introvertive experience, the One is found at the bottom of the human self. Stace further proposes that the main aspects of mystical experiences are: (1) the disappearance of all the mental objects of ordinary consciousness and the emergence of a unitary or pure consciousness; (2) a sense of objectivity or reality; (3) feelings of peace, bliss, and joy; (4) the feeling of having
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encountered the sacred or the divine (sometimes identified as “God”); and (5) a transcendence of space and time. TEs can be triggered by the ingestion of mind-altering drugs and natural substances, shamanic practices, meditation, hypnosis (Carden˜a, 2005), and near-death experiences (NDEs; Levin & Steele, 2005). They can also result from regular religious/spiritual practice. Additionally, these experiences can occur without any apparent reason (Levin & Steele, 2005). TEs often lead to profound transformative changes in attitudes and behavior, that is, changes in one’s worldview, belief system, relationships, and sense of self (Stace, 1960; Waldron, 1998). In the second section of this chapter, I review data suggesting a role for the temporal lobe and the limbic system in TEs. In the following section, I examine the findings of brain imaging studies of TEs conducted to date. In the fourth section, I discuss neuroimaging data and phenomenology of TEs in relation to the mind–brain problem. Finally, in the last section, I provide a few concluding remarks and propose new opportunities for expanding the neuroscience of transcendence.
Role of the Temporal Lobe and the Limbic System in Transcendent Experiences Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Clinical observations suggest an association between temporal-lobe epilepsy (TLE) and TEs during (ictal), after (postictal), and in between (interictal) seizures (Devinsky & Lai, 2008). Howden (1872–1873) first observed a man who had a religious conversion after a generalized seizure in which he experienced being transported to “Heaven.” Afterward, Mabille (1899) described a patient who, following a seizure, reported that God had given him a mission to bring law to the world. A few years later, Spratling (1904) reported a religious aura or a premonitory period of hours or several days associated with religiosity in 52 of 1,325 patients with epilepsy (4%). Boven (1919) described the case of a 14-year-old boy who, after a seizure, recounted having seen God and the angels. More recently, Dewhurst and Beard (1970) reported six patients with TLE who underwent sudden and often lasting religious conversions in the postictal period. Some of these patients had prior or active psychiatric disorders. There was an obvious temporal relationship between conversion and first seizure or increased seizure frequency in 5 patients. Studies have shown that between 0.4 percent and 3.1 percent of TLE patients had ictal TEs, while postictal TEs occurred in 2.2 percent of patients with TLE. Ictal
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TEs occur most often in patients with right TLE, whereas there is a predominance of postictal and interictal TEs in TLE patients with bilateral seizure foci. Of note, many of the epilepsy-related religious conversion experiences occur postictally (Devinsky & Lai, 2008). From an experiential perspective, ictal religious experiences during seizures can be accompanied by intense emotions of God’s presence, the sense of being connected to the infinite (Alajouanine, 1963), hallucinations of God’s voice (Hansen & Brodtkorb, 2003), visual hallucination of a religious figure (Karagulla & Robertson, 1955), or repetition of a religious phrase (Ozkara et al., 2004). It has been suggested that some of the greatest religious figures in history (e.g., Saint Paul, Muhammad, Joan of Arc, Joseph Smith) probably suffered form TLE (Saver & Rabin, 1997). Naito and Matsui (1988) described an elderly woman whose seizures were characterized by joyful visions of God. Interictal electroencephalography (EEG) revealed spike discharges in the left anterior and middle temporal areas during sleep. Morgan (1990) reported the case of a patient whose seizures were associated with feelings of ineffable contentment and fulfillment, visualizing a bright light recognized as the source of knowledge, and sometimes visualizing a bearded young man resembling Jesus Christ. A computed axial tomography (CAT) scan displayed a right anterior temporal astrocytoma. Following anterior temporal lobectomy, the ecstatic seizures vanished. Along the same lines, Picard and Craig (2009) described the case of a 64-year-old right-handed woman who has had epileptic seizures with an ecstatic aura. During her ecstatic epileptic seizures, she reported experiencing immense joy above physical sensations as well as unimaginable harmony with life, the world and the “All.” Cerebral MRI showed a meningioma in the left temporal pole region. An interictal EEG revealed left anterior temporofrontal epileptiform activity. Ogata and Miyakawa (1998) examined 234 Japanese epileptic patients for ictus-related religious experiences. Three (1.3%) patients were found to have had such experiences. All 3 cases had TLE with postictal psychosis and interictal experiences with hyperreligiosity. Patients who had ictusrelated or interictal religious experiences did not believe only in Buddhism (a traditional religion in Japan) but rather in a combination of Buddhism and Shintoism, new Christian sects, contemporary Japanese religions, and/or other folk beliefs. Interestingly, the content of their religious experiences was related to their religious beliefs. This finding emphasizes the importance of considering psychological factors (such as beliefs) in addition to neurobiological aspects when the relationship between epilepsy and religion/spirituality is discussed.
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Interictal Personality Syndrome of TLE Waxman and Geschwind (1975) suggested that hyperreligiosity is a core feature of a distinctive interictal personality syndrome of TLE (also called the Geschwind syndrome). A heightened state of religious conviction, an increased sense of personal destiny, intense philosophical and cosmological concerns, and strong moral beliefs usually characterize interictal religiosity. The putative temporal-lobe personality type is also characterized by hypermoralism, deepened affects, humorlessness, aggressive irritability, and hypergraphia. Support for this hypothetical syndrome was provided by Bear and Fedio (1977), who found that religiosity trait scores were significantly higher in TLE patients than in healthy control participants. In keeping with this, Roberts and Guberman (1989) found that 60 percent of 57 consecutive patients with epilepsy had excessive interests in religion. Subsequent studies using religion questionnaires, however, failed to find any differences about interictal religiosity between patients with TLE versus idiopathic generalized epilepsy or between patients with epilepsy and normal control participants (Tucker, Novelly, & Walker, 1987; Willmore, Heilman, Fennell, & Pinnas, 1980). It has been proposed that differences in religiosity measures and in control group selection account for some of the discrepancy among studies (Saver & Rabin, 1997). Interestingly, Wuerfel and collaborators (2004) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate mesial temporal structures in 33 patients with refractory partial epilepsy, comparing 22 patients without and 11 patients with hyperreligiosity. High ratings on the religiosity scale were correlated with a significantly smaller hippocampus in the right hemisphere. The hippocampal atrophy may reflect the duration and severity of hyperreligiosity. This does not necessarily mean that the right hippocampus is the critical cerebral structure for religious experience (Devinsky & Lai, 2008).
The Limbic-marker Hypothesis Saver and Rabin (1997) have theorized that temporolimbic discharges underlie each of the core features of TEs (e.g., the noetic and the ineffable; the sense of having touched the ultimate ground of reality; the sense of incommunicability of the experience; the experience of unity, timelessness, and spacelessness; and feelings of positive affect, peace, and joy). The limbic system integrates external stimuli with internal drives and is part of a distributed neural circuit that marks the valence (positive or
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negative) of stimuli and experiences (Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991). Saver and Rabin (1997) posited that temporolimbic discharges may mark experiences as: (1) depersonalized or derealized, (2) crucially important and self-referent, (3) harmonious—indicative of a connection or unity between disparate elements, and (4) ecstatic—profoundly joyous. According to the limbic-marker hypothesis, the perceptual and cognitive contents of a TE are comparable to those of ordinary experience, except that they are tagged by the limbic system as of deep importance, as united into a whole, and/or as joyous. Therefore, descriptions of the contents of the TE resemble descriptions of the contents of ordinary experience, and the feelings associated with them cannot be captured fully in words. As in the case of strong emotions, these limbic markers can be named but cannot be communicated in their full visceral intensity, resulting in a report of ineffability. The temporal lobe and the limbic system may not be the only cerebral structures involved in TEs. About this question, Devinsky and Lai (2008) hypothesized that alterations in frontal functions in the right hemisphere may contribute to increased religious interests and beliefs as a personality trait. This hypothesis is based on the finding that dramatic changes in self, defined as a change in political, social, or religious views, can be seen in patients with a dysfunction affecting selectively the right frontal lobe (Miller et al., 2001).
Stimulation of the Temporal Lobe Persinger (1983) speculated that TEs are evoked by transient, electrical microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe, and that it is possible to experimentally induce TEs by stimulating the temporal lobe with weak electromagnetic currents. Persinger and Healey (2002) tested this hypothesis by exposing 48 university students to weak (100 nanoTesla to 1 microTesla) complex, pulsed electromagnetic fields. These fields were applied in one of three ways: over the right temporoparietal region, over the left temporoparietal region, or equally across the temporoparietal regions of both hemispheres of the brain (one treatment per group). Fields were applied for 20 minutes while participants were wearing opaque goggles in a very quiet room. A fourth group was exposed to a sham field condition—that is, participants were not exposed to an electromagnetic field, although all participants were told that they might be. Beforehand, the Hypnosis Induction Profile (HIP; Spiegel, Aronson, Fleiss, & Haber, 1976) was administered to participants (psychology students), to test for suggestibility.
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Two-thirds of the participants reported a sensed presence under the influence of the electromagnetic fields, but 33 percent of the control (shamfield) group reported a sensed presence too. In other words, Persinger and Healey (2002) found that twice as many participants reported a sensed presence under the influence of the electromagnetic field as those who reported one without an electromagnetic field. About half of these participants stated that they felt “someone else” in the chamber. Another approximate half of the group described a sentient being who moved when they tried to “focus attention” upon the presence. About one-third of participants attributed the presence to a deceased member of the family or to some cultural equivalent of a “spirit guide.” In the study, those who had received stimulation over the right hemisphere or both hemispheres reported more unusual phenomena than those who had received stimulation over the left hemisphere. Persinger and Healey (2002) concluded that the experience of a sensed presence can be manipulated by experiment, and that such an experience may be the source for phenomena attributed to visitations by spiritual entities. A research team at Uppsala University in Sweden, headed by Granqvist (Granqvist et al., 2005), mirrored Persinger’s experiment by testing 89 undergraduate students, some of whom were exposed to the electromagnetic fields and some of whom were not. Using Persinger’s equipment, the Swedish researchers could not reproduce his key results. They attributed their findings to the fact that they ensured that neither the participants nor the experimenters interacting with them had any idea who was being exposed to the electromagnetic fields. Granqvist and colleagues made sure that their experiment was double masked by using two experimenters for each trial. The first experimenter, who was not told about the purpose of the study, interacted with the participants. The second experimenter switched electromagnetic fields off or on without advising either the first experimenter or the participant. So if the volunteer had not already been told that a TE was likely at Granqvist’s laboratory, the study experimenters were not in a position to provide that clue. Study participants included undergraduate theology students as well as psychology students. Neither group was asked for prior information on spiritual or paranormal experiences, nor was any participant told that there was a sham-field (control) condition. Rather, volunteers were told only that the study investigated the influence of weak electromagnetic fields on experiences and feeling states. Personality characteristics that might predispose a person to report an unusual experience were used as predictors for which participants would report one. These characteristics included absorption (the ability to become completely absorbed in an
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experience), signs of abnormal temporal-lobe activity, and a “New Age” lifestyle orientation. No evidence was found for a “sensed presence” effect of weak electromagnetic fields. The characteristic that significantly predicted the outcomes was personality. Of the three participants who reported strong spiritual experiences, two were members of the control group. Of the 22 who reported “subtle” experiences, 11 were members of the control group. Those participants who were rated as highly suggestible on the basis of a questionnaire filled out after they completed the study reported paranormal experiences whether the electromagnetic field was on or off while they were wearing the stimulation helmet. Granqvist and colleagues also noted that they found it difficult to evaluate the reliability of Persinger’s findings because no information on experimental randomization or masking was provided, which left his results open to the possibility that psychological suggestion was the best explanation. Taken together, the clinical studies of epileptic patients suggest that the temporal lobe and the limbic system are involved in the experiential aspect of TEs. However, the relationship between these brain regions and TEs is still poorly understood because (1) most people who have these experiences are not epileptics, and (2) very few epileptics report TEs during seizures. In addition, the experimental induction of such experiences by stimulating the temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic currents does not appear easily achievable when psychological suggestibility is controlled using a randomized, double-masked, placebo approach.
Brain Imaging Studies of Transcendent Experiences The first brain imaging study of a religious experience was conducted by Azari and collaborators (Azari et al., 2001). These researchers studied a group of six self-identified religious participants who attributed their religious experience to biblical Psalm 23. These participants, who were members of a Free Evangelical Fundamentalist Community in Germany, all reported having had a conversion experience (related to the first verse of biblical Psalm 23, which states, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not be in want”), and interpreted biblical text literally as the word of God. Religious participants were compared to six nonreligious individuals. The texts used for the different tasks were “religious” (first verse of biblical Psalm 23), “happy” (a well-known German children’s nursery rhyme), and “neutral” (instructions on using a phone card from the Du¨sseldorf telephone book).
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Participants were scanned with positron emission tomography (PET) during various conditions: reading silently or reciting biblical Psalm 23; reading silently or reciting the children’s nursery rhyme; reading silently the set of instructions; and while lying quietly. The PET images revealed a significant activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the religious participants during the religious state (relative to other readings) as compared with nonreligious participants. During the religious state, the religious participants showed additional loci of activation, including the dorsomedial frontal cortex and the right precuneus. Limbic areas did not show regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) changes. According to Azari and colleagues (2001), these results strongly support the view that religious experience is a cognitive attributional phenomenon, mediated by a pre-established neural circuit, involving dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal, and medial parietal cortex. Religious attributions are based on religious schemata that consist in organized knowledge about religion and religious issues and include reinforced structures for inferring religiously related causality of experienced events (Spilka & McIntosh, 1995). Azari and coworkers (2001) proposed that the dorsolateral prefrontal and medial parietal cortices were probably involved in the participants’ own religious schemata, whereas the dorsomedial frontal cortex was implicated in the felt immediacy of religious experience. Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, and d’Aquili (2003) used single-photonemission computed tomography (SPECT) to scan three Franciscan nuns while they performed a “centering prayer” to open themselves to the presence of God. This prayer involved the internal repetition of a particular phrase. Compared to baseline, the prayer condition scan showed increased rCBF in the prefrontal cortex, inferior parietal lobes, and inferior frontal lobes. There was a strong inverse correlation between the rCBF changes in the prefrontal cortex and in the ipsilateral superior parietal lobule. Newberg et al. (2003) hypothesized that increased frontal rCBF reflected focused concentration, whereas changed rCBF in the superior parietal lobule was related to an altered sense of space experienced by the nuns during prayer. In this pilot study, there was no attempt to analyze and quantify in a rigorous and systematic manner the nuns’ subjective experiences during their “centering prayer.” In other words, Newberg and colleagues could not determine whether focusing attention on a phrase from a prayer over a period of time really led the nuns to feel the presence of God. With respect to the involvement of the parietal cortex in spirituality, Urgesi, Aglioti, Skrap, and Fabbro (2010) reported that selective damage
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to left and right inferior posterior parietal regions—associated with the surgical removal of brain gliomas (i.e., cancer types affecting the cerebral tissue)—induced in several patients a specific increase of selftranscendence (as measured with the Temperament and Character Inventory; Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994). This finding indicates that changes of neural activity in posterior parietal areas may produce fast modulations of a stable personality trait related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Newberg, Wintering, Morgan, and Waldman (2006) also utilized SPECT to investigate changes in cerebral activity during glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”). This unusual mental state is associated with specific religious traditions. Glossolalia is one of the “gifts of the Spirit” according to Saint Paul and, hence, some fundamentalist religious traditions see it as a sign of being visited by the Spirit. This belief is based on the Pentecost experience in which, according to the Acts of the Apostles, the Apostles “spoke in the tongues” of all those present and made themselves understood to everybody, whereby later on just babbling something became synonymous with glossolalia. In this state, the individual seems to be speaking in an incomprehensible language over which he or she claims to have no voluntary control. Yet the individual perceives glossolalia to have great personal and religious meaning. In their study, Newberg and colleagues examined five practitioners (women) of glossolalia. Participants described themselves as Christians in a Charismatic or Pentecostal tradition who had practiced glossolalia for more than 5 years. Structured clinical interviews excluded current psychiatric conditions. Glossolalia was compared to a religious singing state since the latter is similar except that it involves actual language (English). Earphones were used to play music to sing and to perform glossolalia (the same music was used for both conditions). Several significant rCBF differences were noted between the glossolalia and singing state. During glossolalia (compared to the religious singing state), significant decreases were found in the prefrontal cortices, left caudate, and left temporal pole. Decreased activity in the prefrontal lobe is consistent with the participants’ description of a lack of volitional control over the performance of glossolalia. Newberg et al. (2006) proposed that the decrease in the left caudate may relate to the altered emotional activity during glossolalia. Recently, we sought to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience (as understood in the Christian sense) in a group of contemplative nuns using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; Beauregard & Paquette, 2006). Fifteen Carmelite nuns took part in the study. Blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal changes were measured during a
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mystical condition, a control condition, and a baseline condition. In the mystical condition, participants were asked to remember and relive the most intense mystical experience ever felt in their lives as a member of the Carmelite Order. This strategy was adopted given that the nuns told us before the onset of the study that “God can’t be summoned at will.” In the control condition, participants were instructed to remember and relive the most intense state of union with another human ever felt in their lives while being affiliated with the Carmelite Order. The week preceding the experiment, participants were requested to practice these two tasks. The baseline condition was a normal restful state. Immediately at the end of the scan, the intensity of the subjective experience during the control and mystical conditions was measured using numerical rating scales ranging from 0 (no experience of union) to 5 (most intense experience of union ever felt). Self-report data referred solely to the experiences lived during these two conditions, not to the original experiences recalled to self-induce the control and mystical states. The phenomenology of the mystical experience during the mystical condition was assessed with the Mysticism Scale (Hood, 1975). As regards the phenomenology of the subjective experience during the mystical condition, several participants mentioned that, during the mystical condition, they felt the presence of God, His unconditional and infinite love, as well as plenitude and peace. All participants reported that, from a first-person perspective, the experiences lived during the mystical condition were different than those used to self-induce a mystical state. The nuns also reported the presence of visual and motor imagery during both the mystical and control conditions. Additionally, the participants experienced a feeling of unconditional love during the control condition. The mystical versus baseline contrast produced significant loci of BOLD activation in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior parietal lobule, and superior parietal lobule, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem. A few loci of activation were also seen in the extra-striate visual cortex. Based on the studies indicating a relationship between TEs and the temporal lobe, we posited that the right middle temporal activation noted during the mystical condition was related to the subjective impression of contacting a spiritual reality. We also proposed that the caudate activations reflected feelings of joy and unconditional love since the caudate nucleus has been systematically activated in previous functional brain imaging studies implicating positive emotions such as happiness (Damasio et al., 2000),
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms
romantic love (Bartels & Zeki, 2000), and maternal love (Bartels & Zeki, 2004). Concerning the brainstem, there is some empirical support for the view that certain brainstem nuclei map the organism’s internal state during emotion (Damasio, 1999). Given this, it is conceivable that the activation in the left brainstem was linked to the somatovisceral changes associated with the feelings of joy and unconditional love. As for the insula, this cerebral structure is richly interconnected with regions involved in autonomic regulation (Cechetto, 1994). It contains a topographical representation of inputs from visceral, olfactory, gustatory, visual, auditory, and somatosensory areas and is thought to integrate representations of external sensory experience and internal somatic state (Augustine, 1996). The insula has been found to be activated in several studies of emotional processing and appears to support a representation of somatic and visceral responses accessible to consciousness (Critchley, Wien, Rotshtein, Ohman, & Dolan, 2004; Damasio, 1999). It is plausible that the left insular activation noted in our study was related to the representation of the somatovisceral reactions associated with the feelings of joy and unconditional love. In addition, we suggested that the left medial prefrontal cortical activation was linked with conscious awareness of those feelings. Indeed, the results of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex is involved in the metacognitive representation of one’s own emotional state (Lane & Nadel, 2000). This prefrontal area receives sensory information from the body and the external environment via the orbitofrontal cortex and is heavily interconnected with limbic structures such as the amygdala, ventral striatum, hypothalamus, midbrain periaqueductal gray region, and brainstem nuclei (Barbas, 1993; Carmichael & Price, 1995). In other respects, brain imaging findings (Lane, Fink, Chau, & Dolan, 1997; Lane, Reiman, et al., 1998) support the view that the activation of the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex reflected that aspect of emotional awareness associated with the interoceptive detection of emotional signals during the mystical condition. This cortical region projects strongly to the visceral regulation areas in the hypothalamus and midbrain periaqueductal gray (Ongur, Ferry, & Price, 2003). Regarding the medial orbitofrontal cortex, there is mounting evidence that this prefrontal cortical region codes for subjective pleasantness (Kringelbach, O’Doherty, Rolls, & Andrews, 2003). The medial orbitofrontal cortex has been found to be activated with regard to the pleasantness of the taste or smell of stimuli (de Araujo, Rolls, Kringelbach, McGlone, & Phillips, 2003; Rolls, Kringelbach, & de Araujo, 2003) or music (Blood & Zatorre, 2001). It has reciprocal connections with the cingulate and insular cortices
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(Carmichael & Price, 1995; Cavada, Company, Tejedor, Cruz-Rizzolo, & Reinoso-Suarez, 2000). The right medial orbitofrontal cortical activation noted in the mystical condition was perhaps related to the fact that the experiences lived during the mystical state were emotionally pleasant. Given that the right superior parietal lobule is involved in the spatial perception of self (Neggers, Van der Lubbe, Ramsey, & Postma, 2006), it is conceivable that the activation of this parietal region reflected a modification of the body schema associated with the impression that something greater than the participants seemed to absorb them. Moreover, there is evidence that the left inferior parietal lobule is part of a neural system implicated in the processing of visuospatial representation of bodies (Felician, Ceccaldi, Didic, Thinus-Blanc, & Poncet, 2003). Therefore, the left inferior parietal lobule activation in the mystical condition was perhaps related to an alteration of the body schema. In keeping with this, there is some evidence indicating that the right inferior parietal lobule is crucial in bodily consciousness and the process of self/other distinction (Ruby & Decety, 2003). However, the inferior parietal lobule plays an important role in motor imagery (Decety, 1996). It is thus plausible that the activations in the right and left inferior parietal lobules were related to the motor imagery experienced during the mystical condition. Last, concerning the loci of activation found in the extra-striate visual cortex during this condition, it has been previously shown that this region of the brain is implicated in visual mental imagery (Ganis, Thompson, & Kosslyn, 2004). It is likely that the BOLD activation in visual cortical areas was related to the visual mental imagery reported by the nuns. We also used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure spectral power and coherence in the Carmelite nuns during the same type of mystical state (Beauregard & Paquette, 2008). EEG activity was recorded from 19 scalp locations during a resting state, a control condition, and a mystical condition. In the mystical condition compared to control condition, electrode sites showed greater theta power at F3, C3, P3, Fz, Cz and Pz, and greater gamma1 power was detected at T4 and P4. Higher delta/beta ratio, theta/alpha ratio, and theta/beta ratio were found for several electrode sites. Additionally, FP1-C3 pair of electrodes displayed greater coherence for theta band while F4-P4, F4-T6, F8-T6, and C4-P4 pairs of electrodes showed greater coherence for alpha band. These results indicate that mystical experiences are mediated by marked changes in EEG power and coherence. These changes implicate several cortical areas of the brain in both hemispheres (Beauregard & Paquette, 2008).
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms
Transcendent Experiences and the Mind–Brain Problem Physicalism is the mainstream metaphysical view of modern neuroscience with respect to the mind–body problem, the explanation of the relationship that exists between mental processes and bodily processes. According to this view, consciousness and mental events (e.g., thoughts, emotions, desires) can be reduced to their neural correlates, that is, the brain electrical and chemical processes whose presence necessarily and regularly correlates with these mental events. Physicalist philosophers and neuroscientists believe that mental events are equivalent to brain processes. Standing against this metaphysical belief, James (1902) noted that neural correlates of TEs do not yield a causal explanation of mental events because they cannot explain how neural processes become mental events. Indeed, correlation does not entail causation. And the external reality of “God” or ultimate reality can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed by neural correlates. Newberg and colleagues (Newberg, d’Aquili, & Rause, 2001) submitted that the most important criterion for judging what is real is the subjective vivid sense of reality. They argued that individuals usually refer to dreams as less real than waking (baseline) reality when they are recalled within baseline reality. In contrast, TEs (e.g., “cosmic consciousness” states, religious visions, NDEs) appear more real to the experiencers than waking (baseline) reality when they are recalled from baseline reality. A major problem with this criterion is its subjectivity. This problem is well illustrated by the fact that individuals suffering from psychosis are unable to distinguish personal subjective experience from the reality of the external world. They experience hallucinations as being very real. From a neuroscientific point of view, a more satisfactory approach to evaluate the “objective” ontological reality of TEs is to determine whether it is possible for a human being to have such an experience during a state of clinical death, when her/his brain is not functioning. In this state, vital signs have ceased: The heart is in ventricular fibrillation, there is a total lack of electrical activity on the cortex of the brain (flat EEG), and brainstem activity is abolished (loss of the corneal reflex, fixed and dilated pupils, and loss of the gag reflex). The thought-provoking case of a patient who apparently underwent a profound TE while her brain was not functioning has been reported by cardiologist Michael Sabom (1998). In 1991, 35-year-old Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds began to suffer dizziness, loss of speech, and difficulty moving. A CAT scan revealed that she had a giant basilar artery aneurysm (a grossly swollen blood vessel in the brain stem).
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If it burst, it would kill her. But attempting to drain and repair it might kill her too. Her doctor offered no chance of survival using conventional procedures. Reynolds heard about neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. He was a specialist and pioneer in a rare and dangerous technique called hypothermic cardiac arrest, or Operation Standstill. He would take her body down to a temperature so low that she was clinically dead, but then bring her back to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in. At a low temperature, the swollen vessels that burst at the high temperatures needed to sustain human life become soft. Then they can be operated upon with less risk. Furthermore, the cooled brain can survive longer without oxygen, though it obviously cannot function in that state. So for all practical purposes, Reynolds would actually be clinically dead during the surgery. But if she didn’t agree to it, she would soon be dead anyway with no hope of return. So she consented. As the surgery began, her heart and breathing ceased, the blood was completely drained from her head and her EEG brain waves flattened into total silence (indicating no cerebral activity—during a cardiac arrest, the brain’s electrical activity disappears after about 10 seconds, cf. Clute & Levy, 1990). Her brain stem became unresponsive (her eyes had been taped shut and her ears had been blocked by molded ear speakers), and her temperature fell to 15 °C. When all of Reynolds’s vital signs were stopped, the surgeon began to cut through her skull with a surgical saw. She reported later that at that point, she felt herself “pop” outside her body and hover above the operating table. From her out-of-body position, she could see the doctors working on her lifeless body. She described, with considerable accuracy for a person who knew nothing of surgical practice, the Midas Rex bone saw used to open skulls. Reynolds also heard and reported later what was happening during the operation and what the nurses in the operating room had said. At a certain point, she became conscious of floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. Deceased relatives and friends were waiting at the end of this tunnel, including her long-dead grandmother. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving Light and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the Light (the breathing of God) (Sabom, 1998). The anecdotal case of Pam Reynolds strongly challenges the physicalist doctrine in regard to the mind–brain problem. This case suggests that mental processes and events can be experienced at the moment that the brain seemingly no longer functions (as evidenced by a flat EEG) during a period of clinical death. This case also suggests that TEs can occur when
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the brain is not functioning, that is, these experiences are not necessarily delusions created by a defective brain. In other words, it would be possible for humans to experience a transcendent reality during an altered state of consciousness in which perception, cognition, identity, and emotion function independently from the brain. This raises the possibility that when a TE happens while the brain is fully functional, the neural correlates of this experience indicate that the brain is de facto connecting with a transcendent level of reality. Solid scientific research is required to tackle this fascinating issue. It should be noted that since Pam Reynolds did not die, there were likely residual brain processes not detectable by EEG that persisted during the clinical death period at sufficient levels so as to permit return to normal brain functioning after the standstill operation. Yet it is difficult to see how the brain could generate higher mental functions in the absence of cortical and brainstem activity. Scientific research is clearly needed to investigate the possibility that a functioning brain may not be essential to higher mental functions and TEs. It is noteworthy that NDEs are reported by approximately 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors (Greyson, 2003; Parnia, Waller, Yeates, & Fenwick, 2001; van Lommel, van Wees, Meyers, & Elfferich, 2001). More than a century ago, William James (1898) proposed that the brain may serve a permissive/transmissive/expressive function rather than a productive one in terms of the mental events and experiences it allows (just as a prism—which is not the source of the light—changes incoming white light to form the colored spectrum). Following James, Henri Bergson (1914) and Aldous Huxley (1954) speculated that the brain acts as a filter or reducing valve by blocking out much of and allowing registration and expression of only a narrow band of perceivable reality. Bergson and Huxley believed that over the course of evolution, the brain has been trained to eliminate most of those perceptions that do not directly aid our everyday survival. This outlook implies that the brain normally limits the human capacity to have a TE. A significant alteration of the electrical and chemical activity of the brain would be necessary for the occurrence of a TE (Beauregard & O’Leary, 2007).
Conclusion and Future Directions There is increasing consensus that cortico-cortical interactions and thalamocortical interactions play a crucial role in the integration of widely distributed neural activity across brain regions and the generation of conscious experience (Tononi & Edelman, 1998). Regarding this issue,
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Vollenweider (1994) posited that cortico-striatal pathways exert a modulatory influence on thalamic gating (or filtering) of sensory information from the body and environment to the cortex (Vollenweider, 1994). According to this stance, thalamic gating deficits should result in sensory overload with excessive processing of exteroceptive and interoceptive stimuli. Additionally, Vollenweider and Geyer (2001) hypothesized that serotonergic psychedelics (e.g., psilocybin) produce an overloading inundation of the cortex [see Nichols & Chemel, this volume]. This increased flow of information may cause the sensory flooding, cognitive fragmentation, and ego dissolution noted in altered states of consciousness induced by these drugs. The fact that serotonergic hallucinogens produce a marked activation of the prefrontal cortex (hyperfrontality) as well as other overlapping changes in cortical, striatal, and thalamic regions (Vollenweider, Leenders, et al., 1997) is consistent with this viewpoint. Taking a stand against this hypothesis, Dietrich (2003) postulated that alterations of consciousness implicate a temporary down-regulation of higher-level brain functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC; hypofrontality) and other cortical regions. In line with such a view, Newberg et al. (2001) proposed that “functional deafferentation” (cutting off) of input into the posterior superior parietal lobule, a cerebral structure involved in the creation of a three-dimensional body image in space, could produce a sense of pure space and obliteration of the self-other distinction [see Previc, this volume]. The neuroimaging studies reviewed in this chapter provide empirical support to both these outlooks (hyper- vs. hypoactivation of the prefrontal cortex and other cerebral structures). Indeed, the results of these studies indicate that altered states of consciousness and TEs can be correlated with either activation or inhibition of various cortical and subcortical brain regions. These results also suggest that several brain areas and networks mediate the main features of these experiences (e.g., perceptual, cognitive, emotional, spiritual). This conclusion should not come as a surprise given that TEs are complex and multidimensional, that is, they implicate changes in perception, self-awareness, cognition, and emotion. It is important to note that TEs can be triggered in many different ways and can be quite distinct from an experiential perspective (e.g., a state of cosmic consciousness induced by LSD-25 vs. an encounter with a “Being of Light” during sensory deprivation). It is highly probable that phenomenologically different TEs are mediated by distinct neuroelectrical, neurochemical, and neurometabolical substrates. In other words, many different neurophysiological mechanisms may support TEs. Future neuroimaging studies are awaited to confirm this view. Correlating subjective (first-person, phenomenological) data and objective (third-person, neurophysiological)
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data represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of transcendence (Newberg & Lee, 2005). The use of first-person methods—which are disciplined practices individuals can use to increase their sensitivity to their own mental experiences at various time-scales and produce more refined descriptive reports—intensify self-awareness (Lutz & Thompson, 2003). Given this, the collection of first-person data from phenomenologically trained individuals of different religious/spiritual traditions should be used to interpret the neurophysiological processes pertaining to some types of TEs. Although the segregation principle states that some functional processes specifically engage well localized and specialized brain regions, it is now widely believed that higher mental functions emerge through integration of information flows across distributed cerebral structures (Frackowiak et al., 2004; Varela, Lachaux, Rodriguez, & Martinerie, 2001). In this perspective, it is not only a collection of brain areas that is hypothesized to process functional tasks, but rather large-scale networks or sets of brain regions dynamically interacting with one another (e.g., the temporal lobe with the prefrontal cortex). Accordingly, future neuroimaging studies of TEs and altered states of consciousness should entail the measurement of functional connectivity within dynamic, large-scale brain networks. Such measurement may significantly improve our knowledge and understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena.
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Lane, R. D., Reiman, E. M., Axelrod, B., Yun, L. S., Holmes, A., & Schwartz, G. E. (1998). Neural correlates of levels of emotional awareness. Evidence of an interaction between emotion and attention in the anterior cingulate cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 525–535. Levin, J., & Steele, L. (2005). The transcendent experience: Conceptual, theoretical, and epidemiological perspectives. Explore, 1, 89–101. Lutz, A., & Thompson, E. (2003). Neurophenomenology. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 31–52. Mabille, H. (1899). Hallucinations religieuses dans l’e´pilepsie [Religious hallucinations in epilepsy]. Annales Me´dicopsychologiques, 9–10, 76–81. Miller, B. L., Seeley, W. W., Mychack, P., Rosen, H. J., Mena, I., & Boone, K. (2001). Neuroanatomy of the self: Evidence from patients with frontotemporal dementia. Neurology, 57, 817–821. Morgan, H. (1990). Dostoevsky’s epilepsy: A case report and comparison. Surgical Neurology, 33, 413–416. Naito, H., & Matsui, N. (1988). Temporal lobe epilepsy with ictal ecstatic state and interictal behavior of hypergraphia. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 176, 123–124. Neggers, S. F., Van der Lubbe, R. H., Ramsey, N. F., & Postma, A. (2006). Interactions between ego- and allocentric neuronal representations of space. Neuroimage, 31, 320–331. Newberg, A., d’Aquili, E., & Rause, V. (2001). Why God won’t go away. New York: Ballantine Books. Newberg, A., & Lee, B. Y. (2005). The neuroscientific study of religious and spiritual phenomena: Or why God doesn’t use biostatistics. Zygon, 40, 469–489. Newberg, A., Pourdehnad, M., Alavi, A., & d’Aquili, E. G. (2003). Cerebral blood flow during meditative prayer: Preliminary findings and methodological issues. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97, 625–630. Newberg, A. B., Wintering, N. A., Morgan, D., & Waldman, M. R. (2006). The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study. Psychiatry Research, 148, 67–71. Ogata, A., & Miyakawa, T. (1998). Religious experiences in epileptic patients with a focus on ictus-related episodes. Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 52, 321–325. Ongur, D., Ferry, A. T., & Price, J. L. (2003). Architectonic subdivision of the human orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 460, 425–449. Ozkara, C., Sary, H., Hanoglu, L., Yeni, N., Aydogdu, I., & Ozyurt, E. (2004). Ictal kissing and religious speech in a patient with right temporal lobe epilepsy. Epileptic Disorders, 6, 241–245. Parnia, S., Waller, D. G., Yeates, R., & Fenwick, P. (2001). A qualitative and quantitative study of the incidence, features and aetiology of near death experiences in cardiac arrest survivors. Resuscitation, 48, 149–156.
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Persinger, M. A. (1983). Religious and mystical experiences as artefacts of temporal lobe function: A general hypothesis. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 57, 1255– 1262. Persinger, M. A., & Healey, F. (2002). Experimental facilitation of the sensed presence: Possible intercalation between the hemispheres induced by complex magnetic fields. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 190, 533–541. Picard, F., & Craig, A. D. (2009). Ecstatic epileptic seizures: A potential window on the neural basis for human self-awareness. Epilepsy and Behavior, 16, 539– 546. Roberts, J. K., & Guberman, A. (1989). Religion and epilepsy. Psychiatry Journal University of Ottawa, 14, 282–286. Rolls, E. T., Kringelbach, M. L., & de Araujo, I. E. (2003). Different representations of pleasant and unpleasant odours in the human brain. European Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 695–703. Ruby, P., & Decety, J. (2003). What you believe versus what you think they believe: A neuroimaging study of conceptual perspective-taking. European Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 2475–2480. Sabom, M. (1998). Light and death: One doctor’s fascinating account of near-death experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. Saver, J. L., & Rabin, J. (1997). The neural substrates of religious experience. Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 9, 498–510. Spiegel, H., Aronson, M., Fleiss, J. L., & Haber, J. (1976). Psychometric analysis of the Hypnotic Induction Profile. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 24, 300–315. Spilka, B., & McIntosh, D. N. (1995). Attribution theory and religious experience. In R. W. Hood (Ed.), Handbook of religious experience (pp. 421–445). Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press. Spratling, W. P. (1904). Epilepsy and its treatment. Philadelphia: WB Saunders. Stace, W. T. (1960). Mysticism and philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Tononi, G., & Edelman, G. M. (1998). Consciousness and the integration of information in the brain. Advances in Neurology, 77, 245–279. Tucker, D. M., Novelly, R. A., & Walker, P. J. (1987). Hyperreligiosity in temporal lobe epilepsy: Redefining the relationship. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 175, 181–184. Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S. M., Skrap, M., & Fabbro, F. (2010). The spiritual brain: Selective cortical lesions modulate human self-transcendence. Neuron, 65, 309–319. van Lommel, P., van Wees, R., Meyers, V., & Elfferich, I. (2001). Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: A prospective study in the Netherlands. Lancet, 358, 2039–2045. Varela, F. J., Lachaux, J.-P., Rodriguez, E., & Martinerie, J. (2001). The brainweb: Phase synchronization and large-scale integration. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 229–239.
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Vollenweider, F. X. (1994). Evidence for a cortical-subcortical dysbalance of sensory information processing during altered states of consciousness using PET and FDG. In: A. Pletscher & D. Ladewig (Eds.), 50 Years of LSD: State of the art and perspectives of hallucinogens (pp. 67–86). London: Parthenon. Vollenweider, F. X., & Geyer, M. A. (2001). A systems model of altered consciousness: Integrating natural and drug-induced psychoses. Brain Research Bulletin, 56, 495–507. Vollenweider, F. X., Leenders, K. L., Scharfetter, C., Maguire, P., Stadelmann, O., & Angst, J. (1997). Positron emission tomography and fluorodeoxyglucose studies of metabolic hyperfrontality and psychopathology in the psilocybin model of psychosis. Neuropsychopharmacology, 16, 357–372. Waldron, J. L. (1998). The life impact of transcendent experiences with a pronounced quality of noesis. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 30, 103–134. Waxman, S. G., & Geschwind, N. (1975). The interictal behavior syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 32, 1580–1586. Willmore, L. J., Heilman, K. M., Fennell, E., & Pinnas, R. M. (1980). Effect of chronic seizures on religiosity. Transactions of the American Neurological Association, 105, 85–87. Wuerfel, J., Krishnamoorthy, E. S., Brown, R. J., Lemieux, L., Koepp, M., Tebartz van Elst, L., et al. (2004). Religiosity is associated with hippocampal but not amygdala volumes in patients with refractory epilepsy. Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 75, 640–642.
CHAPTER 5
DMT and Human Consciousness Zevic Mishor, Dennis J. McKenna, and J. C. Callaway Introduction N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a potent psychedelic agent found in many plants and animals and is remarkably similar in its molecular structure to the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT). DMT has been utilized extensively in South America as a psychoactive sacrament in the form of smoking mixtures, snuffs, pastes, clysters, and orally active brews for at least hundreds of years and possibly longer. This drug is a key component of an advanced indigenous technology that has only recently been noticed by modern science. Its consumption has not been merely a curiosity but rather a vital part of many medico-religious practices over a long period of time and across a wide geographic range. More recently, following scientific experimentation with the pure chemical in the late 1950s, DMT entered the awareness of modern experimental medicine and the popular culture. As a tryptamine derivative, DMT is thought to derive its psychoactivity primarily via the serotonergic neurotransmitter system. Unlike other serotonergic agents such as psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD, however, DMT occurs widely throughout the natural world. It is found in the barks, leaves, and flowers of numerous plant species and is synthesized in the bodies of mammals. DMT and two of its analogues, 5-hydroxy-DMT (bufotenine) and 5-methoxy-DMT (5-MeO-DMT), are currently the only psychedelics known to be produced endogenously within the human body, although their roles in the healthy human remain unclear. DMT may be a neurotransmitter in its own right and might be responsible for inducing dream visions during normal rapid eye movement (REM) sleep [see Kokoszka & Wallace, this volume]. Upon being smoked, snuffed, injected, or ingested (the later route in combination with other compounds that render it orally active), exogenous
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DMT facilitates powerful changes in awareness, perceptions, emotions, and cognition. Multicolored geometric images and transcendent feelings of oneness with the universe are some of the common phenomenological features associated with the DMT state. There have also been reports of contacts with external entities during the experience facilitated by this drug, although the ontological interpretation of such experiences is subject to speculation and debate.
History—DMT Enters the Modern World Early Use in the New World Table 5.1 gives a timeline, beginning with the earliest evidence found in South America and continuing to the present, of the utilization of DMT and its associated technologies for the modification of consciousness. One of the earliest indications for the consumption of DMT as a consciousnessmodifying drug comes from the Inca Cueva site located in northwestern Argentina, radiocarbon dated to approximately 2080 BCE. The site contained two smoking pipes made from puma bone, together with Anadenanthera colubrina (Vell.) Brenan seed remnants, a tree known to express relatively high quantities of both DMT and other tryptamine derivatives. This find was congruent with an extensive modern ethnographic record describing the wide use of A. colubrina seeds in South America for the preparation of psychoactive smoking mixtures and snuffs, known by names including vilca and cebil (Aschero & Yacobaccio, 1994; Torres et al., 1991). The next earliest site that contains evidence for the smoking of Anadenanthera seeds is a rock shelter near Inca Cueva known as Huachichocana, radiocarbon dated to approximately 1450 BCE. This site included four stone smoking pipes and crushed seeds (Distel & Alicia, 1980). The oldest evidence in all of South America for the snuffing of plant preparations consists of several whale-bone snuff trays and bird-bone tubes, unearthed at Huaca Prieta on the central Peruvian coast, dated to approximately 1200 BCE (Torres, 1996). In historic times, during his second voyage to the New World embarking in October of 1493, Christopher Columbus requested his friar, Ramo´n Pane´, to prepare a report on the natives of Hispaniola (today the island comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Pane´’s report described the shamanic use of cohoba, a psychoactive snuff derived from a native plant. As would be established centuries later, cohoba is prepared from the DMT-containing seeds of the Anadenanthera peregrina (L.) Speg. tree (of the same genus as A. colubrina above) and is very similar to the yopo
Table 5.1 DMT and Ayahuasca Timeline. Significant events and milestones in the human discovery and utilization of DMT and the Ayahuasca beverage Date
Entry
ca. 20,000– 15,000 BCE
Arrival of the first humans in the Americas. This date is highly uncertain; the chronology of human migration into the continent has been subject to increasing controversy in recent years.
ca. 5500 BCE
Oldest ceramics in South America found at the Taperinha shell midden/Pedra Pintada cave complex near Monte Alegre, Brazil.
ca. 3200 BCE
Ground peyote material found in the Shumla Caves near the Rio Grande, Texas.
ca. 2080 BCE
Two puma-bone smoking pipes, together with Anadenanthera colubrina seed remnants, found at Inca Cueva in northwestern Argentina.
ca. 1450 BCE
Four stone smoking pipes and crushed Anadenanthera seeds found at Huachichocana, a rock shelter near Inca Cueva in Argentina.
ca. 1200 BCE
Whale-bone snuff trays and bird-bone tube unearthed at Huaca Prieta on the central Peruvian coast, constituting the earliest evidence for snuffing in all of South America (the active ingredients being snuffed here, however, remain unclear).
ca. 100–800 CE Moche civilization utensils depicting elaborately dressed lords drinking potions from large vessels unearthed in northern Peru. The utensils were also decorated with Anadenanthera leaves, suggesting the existence of an early “proto-Ayahuasca” brew in which the methylated tryptamines in Anadenanthera species were rendered orally active with -carbolines. ca. 500–1000
Gas chromatography/mass spectrometric hair analyses from human mummies from the Tiwanaku civilization in the Azapa Valley of northern Chile reveal the presence of harmine, indicating that Banisteriopsis caapi may have been consumed (although not necessarily as part of an Ayahuasca brew) at least as early as this time. (Continued)
Table 5.1 (Continued) Date
Entry
1493
Friar Ramo´n Pane´, commissioned by Christopher Columbus, observes the natives of Hispaniola using a psychoactive snuff prepared from Anadenanthera peregrina.
1737
Jesuit account of “an intoxicating potion ingested for divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which deprives one of his senses and, at times, of his life”
1851
English botanist Richard Spruce encounters the Ayahuasca brew amongst the Tukano peoples of the Rio Uapes in Brazil and proceeds to collect flowering specimens of Banisteriopsis caapi.
1858
First published phenomenological reports of the Ayahuasca experience, by Manuel Villavicencio, give an account of the visions of “great cities,” “lofty towers,” and “beasts of prey” that he experienced following consumption of the drink.
1930s
Santo Daime (“Saint Give unto Me” in Portuguese), the first syncretic sect utilizing Ayahuasca as a sacrament, emerges in Brazil.
1931
Canadian chemist Richard Manske, in order to produce chemical standards for investigating the North American strawberry shrub, modifies tryptamine and synthesizes, amongst other compounds, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
1945
Barquinha (“Little Boat” in Portuguese), another Ayahuasca syncretic sect, founded in Brazil.
1946
Gonc¸alves de Lima publishes findings about his extraction of DMT (which he named “nigerine”) from the root bark of Mimosa hostilis. The bark of this plant was used to prepare the psychoactive brew jurema, but Gonc¸alves de Lima could not say with certainty that DMT was the active ingredient.
1955
Fish, Johnson, and Horning extract DMT from Anadenanthera peregrina (then known as Piptadenia peregrina); however, they are also unable to conclude that it is the active psychoactive ingredient.
April 1956
Stephen Sza´ra self-administers probably the first ever injection of DMT, an intramuscular dose of 75 mg. Within
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Table 5.1 (Continued) Date
Entry several minutes he begins to experience psychedelic effects and realizes they are similar to those that have been described for LSD and mescaline.
1956–1970
Chemistry, pharmacology, and psychedelic actions of DMT and its analogues are studied in laboratories all over the world. Hundreds of academic papers are published in leading scientific journals.
1961
Unia˜o do Vegetal (“Union of Vegetal,” where Vegetal refers to Ayahuasca), a third syncretic sect, recreated in Brazil.
1962
Julius Axelrod reports on the endogenous production of dimethyl-indole compounds in rabbit lung.
1965
Presence of DMT and bufotenine reported in human blood, and the finding published in the journal Nature.
1967
The basic principle that DMT contained in Ayahuasca is rendered orally active by inhibiting its metabolism is hypothesized for the first time by ethnobotanist Bo Holmstedt.
1968
U.S. Bureau of Drug Abuse Control notes in its publication Microgram that DMT is available on the street, both as a powder and “impregnated on marihuana and tea.”
1970–1971
Controlled Substances Act passed in the United States, followed closely by the United Nation’s Convention on Psychotropic Substances. DMT is classified as a Schedule 1 drug, and an era of unrestricted access and research is thereby ended.
1972
Enzymes required to convert tryptamine to DMT have by now been positively identified in the human brain.
1980s
Brothers Terrance and Dennis McKenna, through public talks and written publications, play an instrumental role in raising awareness in modern Western cultures of DMT, Ayahuasca, and other psychoactive tryptamines.
1980
The basic principle that DMT contained in Ayahuasca is rendered orally active by inhibiting its metabolism is (Continued)
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Table 5.1 (Continued) Date
Entry confirmed for the first time by Jeremy Bigwood, through his ingesting of a capsule containing DMT mixed with the harmala alkaloid harmaline.
1980–present
Conception and application of “Ayahuasca analogues,” admixtures that replace Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis with alternate sources, often plants native to continents other than South America or simply pure chemicals, of MAOI and DMT respectively.
1990s
Rise of “Ayahuasca tourism,” the practice of Westerners visiting South American countries, especially Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, to participate in both urban and rural Ayahuasca ceremonies run by Mestizos.
1990
Rick Strassman begins to conduct the first new academic research in the United States in more than two decades on the effects of psychedelic drugs on humans. Over a period of 5 years, he administers more than 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers.
1993
The Hoasca Project, measuring the physiological and subjective psychoactive effects of Ayahuasca on 15 volunteers, conducted in Manaus, Brazil.
snuff used by the natives of the Orinoco River basin in Colombia and Venezuela. Considering these and other pieces of evidence, it may be concluded that DMT-containing plants have been insufflated by humans in the New World for a very long time. The earliest European references to the New World use of orally ingested beverages that most probably contained DMT are found in the writings of Jesuits traveling in the Amazon basin and its surrounding regions. These Jesuit accounts are typically disparaging and even fearful; one from 1737, for example, describes “an intoxicating potion ingested for divinatory and other purposes and called ayahuasca, which deprives one of his senses and, at times, of his life” (Rudgley, 1998, p. 26). The term Ayahuasca refers to what is known today to be a powerful DMTcontaining beverage and also identifies a key plant in this decoction, the Malpighiaceaous woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi (Spruce ex Griseb.) Morton (Figure 5.1).
DMT and Human Consciousness
Figure 5.1 The Malpighiaceaous woody liana Banisteriopsis caapi, an essential ingredient of the Ayahuasca brew (PHOTO LOCATION: near Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i. CREDIT: J.C. Callaway).
Scientific Investigations The story of the modern scientific discovery of DMT begins with various 19th-century explorers and botanists conducting fieldwork in the Amazon region. In 1851, an English botanist, Richard Spruce, encountered a similar version of the Ayahuasca brew. In this case it was prepared by the Tukano peoples of the Rio Uapes in Brazil and was known to them as ca’api. Spruce proceeded to collect flowering specimens from the plant, which was later named Banisteriopsis caapi (Schultes, 1982). Modern chemists would show much later that this vine was not the DMT-containing component but rather provided another alkaloid necessary to make DMT orally active. The first published phenomenological reports of the Ayahuasca experience belong to the Ecuadorian geographer Manuel Villavicencio, who in 1858 gave an account of visions of “great cities,” “lofty towers,” and “beasts of prey” that he experienced after consuming the drink (Villavicencio, 1858). In 1931, the Canadian chemist Richard Manske was investigating chemicals occurring in the poisonous North American strawberry shrub.
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He modified tryptamine in order to synthesize several derivatives as standards to analyze the phytochemistry of this shrub. One of these derivatives was new to modern science, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT for short. As far as is known, DMT was synthesized, analyzed, and subsequently placed into storage as a reference compound; nobody yet suspected its psychedelic properties (Strassman, 2001). Arguably the first solid clue to the psychoactivity of DMT came in 1946, when the Brazilian chemist Gonc¸alves de Lima (1946) published findings about his extraction of DMT (which he named “nigerine”) from the root bark of the South American tree Mimosa hostilis Benth. The bark was used in Brazil to prepare a psychoactive brew called jurema. DMT, however, comprised only one of several alkaloids identified in M. hostilis, and Gonc¸alves de Lima could not say with certainty which one/s were the psychoactive ingredient/s. Nine years later, Fish, Johnson, and Horning also extracted DMT from a plant, this time the aforementioned A. peregrina (although then classified under the genus Piptadenia instead of the modern classification of Anadenanthera); like Gonc¸alves, however, they could not say with certainty that DMT was the active psychedelic component. Subsequently, the presence of DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, 5-MeO-N-methyltryptamine, and bufotenine were reported in various species of Phalaris grasses. In the early 1950s, Stephen Sza´ra, a Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist with a keen interest in psychoactives, sought to obtain a quantity of the newly publicized drug LSD-25 from its manufacturer, the Swiss company Sandoz Laboratories. Presumably because he was working from behind the Iron Curtain, Sandoz denied Sza´ra’s request and refused to send him a sample. Intent on pursuing his investigations of consciousness-modifying compounds and following clues contained in the few existing reports about DMT, Sza´ra synthesized this chemical in his own laboratory. In April of 1956, he gave himself what was probably the first ever intramuscular injection of the drug, self-administering 75 mg of DMT. Within several minutes he began to experience bodily feelings and visual sensations similar to those that others had described for LSD and mescaline [see Nichols & Chemel, this volume]. He wrote, “I got very, very excited. It was obvious this was the secret” (Sza´ra, 1989, p. 239). This “secret” was the realization that orally administered DMT (at least up to the 150 mg total dose Sza´ra had earlier ingested separately) had no psychoactive effects whatsoever. Instead, the drug had to be injected to manifest its psychedelic actions (S. Sza´ra, personal communication, February 2010). Since that experiment, other scientists went on to study the chemical properties, pharmacological actions, and psychedelic effects of DMT in laboratories in many parts of the world. A literature search reveals that
DMT and Human Consciousness
between 1956 and 1970, hundreds of academic papers covering various aspects of DMT and its analogues were published in the leading scientific journals of the day. This research, unfortunately, came to an abrupt halt in the early 1970s when the Controlled Substances Act was passed in the United States, followed closely by the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971. Both actions classified DMT as a Schedule 1 drug (the most restrictive category), with no medical use and a high potential for abuse. An era of unrestricted scientific access to this compound was thus effectively ended. It is currently publicly unknown whether DMT was investigated, along with many other psychedelic drugs, in secret government research projects such as MKULTRA run by the CIA.
Endogenous DMT Interwoven with the history of the modern discovery of DMT, and unique to it and its analogues, is the story of its detection in the human body. In the early 1960s, scientists demonstrated the presence of bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT in human urine. In a short communication to the journal Nature, Franzen and Gross (1965) reported the presence of DMT and bufotenine, amongst other tryptamines, in human urine and blood. By 1972, the enzymes required to convert tryptamine to DMT had been positively identified in the human brain (Saavedra & Axelrod, 1972). These studies revealed that a powerful psychedelic, which had been used by humans for millennia for the modification of consciousness, was also naturally present in the healthy human body.
Phenomenology: The Experience of the DMT State Regarding the experience of the DMT state, Terence McKenna (1992, p. 258) wrote, Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to
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be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose.
Phenomenological facets that may undergo radical changes during a psychedelic experience include the overall atmosphere of the experience; affect (emotions); bodily feeling; sensory perception (including auditory, tactile, and visual modalities); ideation (philosophical thoughts or insights about oneself and the universe); the spiritual facet (including religious and noetic sentiments); and consciousness (relating to personal identity, the relationship between oneself and the world, and the experience of time; Shanon, 2002). The following descriptions of the possible phenomenologies of a DMT trip and an Ayahuasca experience are based on personal encounters, trip reports written by users, and the published academic literature, including Shanon (2002) and Strassman (2001).
The DMT Trip Upon injection or inhalation, a sudden rush may be experienced, a feeling that one is being propelled somewhere with a mighty force. A dance of light plays in front of the eyes, and a mighty roar may be heard. A pressure is felt all over the body and one is transported into a novel mental realm. Swirling discs of pure light or incredibly intricate geometric patterns may appear. Feelings of sheer amazement, confusion, euphoria, fear, and joy may be felt, one after the other, or all at the same time. The perception of time is often lost. One may believe one is about to die or is already dead. The feeling of being surrounded by an intelligent awareness or awarenesses, as one “breaks through” into a different realm, can be very strong. Often there is the experience of entities, other beings, machines—elves, gnomes, aliens, or whatever label one chooses for them. There are visions and perceptions of incredibly beautiful objects, of machines and technologies beyond one’s wildest imagination, fashioned not only of the stuff of the physical world but also of more subtle energies, even of the matrix of language and thoughts themselves. There may be insights into the nature of the world or into death, experienced as a gestalt or through visions involving anonymous people, loved ones, or archetypal beings. One may feel a mystical union with the cosmos, a sense that all is as it should be, because all is one. And throughout the experience are the lights, the colors and the geometric shapes, the sounds, hums, squeaks and buzzes, and the feeling of weirdness and amazement, so great, that “the danger is the possibility of death by astonishment” (T. McKenna, 1990).
DMT and Human Consciousness
The Ayahuasca Experience The brew is brown and murky, strong tasting, bitter, and sometimes fermented. It has a heady essence reminiscent of the forest and the soil, of rotting trees and other plant matter. After perhaps half an hour, vague stirrings and tightness in the stomach build up. Sitting in the dark, tantalizing visual effects begin to appear, just on the edges of one’s awareness: spots and whorls of light, and the beginnings of color bursts, perceived through closed eyelids. The tightness in the stomach grows, until it becomes nausea, and the body heaves and vomits, propelling outwards with immense force what can feel like the entirety of one’s insides, ridding the body of the brown muck which has gone into it over a lifetime, along with whatever else the brew can pull out. Vomiting bile is also possible. The trauma of purging is often replaced by a feeling of well-being, of lightness and cleanliness, assisted perhaps by the singing or drumming of the person presiding over the session. During the Ayahuasca experience, visions most commonly appear when the eyes are closed, brilliant, impossibly complex, multicolored designs in three dimensions and sometimes more, forming pulsating and shifting worlds of pure light. Beings who may interact with the psychonaut in different ways may be encountered. Primordial events may be witnessed, or rather, may see birth and expression within oneself; the Big Bang, the Biblical Creation of the world, or the coming apart of a soul in a twisting array of multicolored lights. Ancient civilizations, exquisite works of art, castles and palaces, as well as natural landscapes and animals, both mythical and real, may form the content of one’s visions. Opening the eyes generally interrupts these visions and reaffirms one’s physical surroundings, although in some cases visions may be experienced when the eyes are open. Sometimes there is a desire to communicate with other people, other times a torrent of silent bliss; often there is a feeling of pure delight, as one awaits the next enchantment. The ideational, spiritual, and consciousness-related experiences described for a DMT trip are common to the Ayahuasca inebriation. One may realize that there is no qualitative difference between a thought and the physical world, that both are simply part of a continuum. Insights about, or oneness with, the world and the cosmos are common.
The Molecular Structure of DMT and Its Widespread Occurrence in Nature Chemical Structure Pure N,N-dimethyltryptamine is a white crystalline solid at room temperature (Figure 5.2). As indicated by its name, its molecular structure
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Figure 5.2 Erowid.org)
DMT crystals under magnification. (Photo by Stevek1, # 2009
consists of two methyl groups (CH3) attached to the aliphatic nitrogen (N) of a tryptamine backbone. Tryptamine itself is built around an indole ring, a structure consisting of a six-carbon benzene ring fused to a five-carbon, nitrogen-containing pyrrole ring (Table 5.2). DMT varies only slightly in its structure from the neurotransmitter serotonin, which lacks the two extra methyl groups and has an additional hydroxyl group at position 5 on the indole ring. DMT is also very similar in its molecular structure to three other psychedelic tryptamines; bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT). Bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT contain an additional hydroxy and methoxy group, respectively, at position 5 on the indole ring. By contrast, psilocin, an orally active psychedelic agent produced by many species of Psilocybe, or “magic” mushrooms, and also in closely related genera, contains a hydroxy group on position 4 of the indole ring (Table 5.2).
Table 5.2 Important Psychoactive Tryptamines. Chemical structures and typical threshold dosages for DMT, bufotenine, 5-MeODMT and psilocin. These psychoactive dimethyl-tryptamines closely resemble the neurotransmitter serotonin in their molecular structures and bind primarily to serotonergic (5-HT) receptors to exert their effects. All except psilocin occur naturally in the bodies of mammals, including humans; psilocin (along with psilocybin, its more stable precursor) is found mainly in the fungal kingdom and is the only dimethyl-tryptamine conclusively shown to be orally active. Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise specified, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound) Name
Chemical Structure
Oral Administration
Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection
Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine)
DMT (N,Ndimethyltryptamine)
0.5/kg body-weight in combination with MAOI
10–20
5–10
0.2 salt/kg body-weight
(Continued)
Table 5.2 (Continued) Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise specified, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound) Name
Chemical Structure
Oral Administration
Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection
?
4–8
40
4?
5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-DMT)
0.1/kg body-weight in combination with MAOI
2–5
5–10
2
98
Bufotenine (5-hydroxy-DMT)
Table 5.2 (Continued) Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise specified, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound) Name Psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT)
Chemical Structure
Oral Administration 20–30 of the phosphorylated prodrug form, psilocybin
Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection —
—
?
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Occurrence in Nature The widespread occurrence of DMT in nature, in contrast to many other plant-based psychedelics, is remarkable. It is present on all continents except (as far as is known) Antarctica and is found in both the plant and animal kingdoms. To date its presence has not been reported in fungi or in prokaryotic organisms. An extensive discussion of plant families, genera, and species that contain DMT may be found in Shulgin and Shulgin (1997). Examples include reed canary grass (Phalaris arundinacea L.), the bamboo-like giant cane (Arundo donax Georgi), numerous species of the genus Acacia, several species of the genus Virola, Psychotria viridis Ruı´z & Pavo´n (Figure 5.3; a plant belonging to the coffee family and the leaves of which are typically used as a source of DMT for Ayahuasca), and Diplopterys cabrerana (Cuatrec.) B. Gates (a Malpighiaceaous liana used as another DMT-containing plant additive in the northwest Amazon). DMT and several of its analogues have also been identified as endogenous neurochemicals produced by rabbits, mice, rats, and humans. Indeed, DMT and the biochemical machinery required for its synthesis have been detected in all mammals investigated for its presence to date. The DMT analogues bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT, and psilocin are found, along with DMT itself, in many of the aforementioned species and are also produced in a number of other interesting plants and animals. The “magic” mushrooms found in the genus Psilocybe, for example, almost all contain both psilocin and psilocybin (once in the body, the latter is rapidly metabolized to yield the former). Bufotenine, and in some cases 5-MeO-DMT, is found in many species of toads (the word “bufotenine” itself is derived from the genus name Bufo, or the “true toads”).
Pharmacology and Neurophysiology: The Interaction between DMT and Humans Means of Administration Exogenous DMT may be effectively administered by inhalation of the freebase as a vapor (through sublimation or “smoking”), insufflation of a salt form (“snuffing” or “snorting”), anal administration as a solution or suppository, or injection of an aqueous solution. DMT may also be consumed orally, although this method of administration results in a considerably different psychoactive effect. When smoked, the vaporized compound is quickly absorbed by the alveoli of the lungs, diffusing rapidly through the alveolar capillaries to enter the bloodstream. From the pulmonary circulation, DMT then passes through the blood–brain barrier into the central
DMT and Human Consciousness
Figure 5.3 Psychotria viridis leaves, a typical source of DMT for the Ayahuasca brew. The vine growing amongst the psychotria leaves is the Banisteriopsis caapi liana (PHOTO LOCATION: Nu´cleo Samau´ma near Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil. CREDIT: J.C. Callaway)
nervous system (CNS) to interact directly with serotonin receptors. This novel receptor interaction, relative to ordinary serotonin, drives the psychedelic effects that are so well recognized for this molecule. When snuffed as one of its many possible salts, DMT is absorbed through the nasal mucosa and similarly reaches the CNS via local circulation. Water-soluble salts of DMT may also be injected, either into a muscle (intramuscularly; IM), just under the skin (subcutaneously; SC), directly into a vein (intravenously; IV), or directly into the peritoneal cavity of rodents (intraperitoneally; IP) [see Presti, this volume].
Oral Consumption of DMT: The Harmala Alkaloids and Monoamine Oxidase Inhibition Orally ingested DMT presents a special case, as DMT on its own is not orally active. This is because the drug is rapidly metabolized by the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO), which breaks down endogenous monoamines (the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, and noradrenaline). MAO in general exists as two isozymes: MAO-A and MAO-B. It is
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MAO-A that exclusively metabolizes and thereby deactivates both serotonin and DMT; the aliphatic nitrogen atom (the “monoamine”) of both serotonin and DMT is vulnerable to oxidation by MAO-A, forming inactive, watersoluble metabolites that are eventually excreted in the urine. Interestingly, the hydroxyl group on position 4 of psilocin’s indole ring has the ability to form an intramolecular hydrogen bond with its own aliphatic amine; this electrostatic bond protects psilocin from oxidation by MAO and thus renders it orally active. The DMT contained in Ayahuasca is made orally active by a group of compounds, provided by the B. caapi vine, called harmala alkaloids. These are a specific subset of a much larger chemical family known as -carbolines, and their narrow range of bioactivity should not be confused with the many other biochemical actions represented by this larger group. The main harmala alkaloids in B. caapi, which are concentrated in the woody cortex of the vine, are harmine and tetrahydroharmine. In Ayahuasca, harmine serves as a potent inhibitor of MAO (a MAOI); more accurately, it is a specific, competitive, and reversible inhibitor of MAOA. As a competitive inhibitor, it binds to the MAO-A isozyme at the same site as endogenous monoamine substrates, thereby blocking the metabolism of these substrates by MAO-A for several hours. Being reversible means the enzyme is returned to its original state once harmine is eventually removed by other metabolic processes. This mechanism is quite different from that which underlies the class of antidepressants known as “suicide” (irreversible) inhibitors of MAO, where the enzyme is permanently bound to the inhibitor and its effects therefore persist until the drug is discontinued and new MAO produced. The idea that DMT could become orally active by inhibiting its metabolism was first suggested by ethnobotanist Bo Holmstedt in 1967. This hypothesis was subsequently verified in 1980 by Jeremy Bigwood through his ingesting sufficient amounts of another harmala alkaloid, harmaline, combined with DMT in a capsule. The harmala alkaloids, because they are compounds that raise serotonin levels, may be considered to be psychoactive in their own right, but only through the increased activity of serotonin. Their psychoactivity is, at best, a secondary effect and not psychedelic. In the case of Ayahuasca, harmine is essential for allowing the oral activity of DMT, while in conjunction with other psychedelic tryptamines such as psilocin and psilocybin, both harmine and harmaline can modify the resulting psychoactive effects by increasing serotonergic activity. In this case, as with DMT, these tryptamines must compete with increased levels of serotonin for active receptor sites in the brain.
DMT and Human Consciousness
Hypertensive Crisis A common misconception regarding the use of harmala alkaloids is that foods containing tyramine (such as red wine, broad beans, hard cheeses, and other fermented products) are contraindicated, as their consumption together with MAOIs may lead to a hypertensive crisis. An excess of tyramine in the body may indeed lead to this condition; however, tyramine is degraded primarily by MAO-B, while the harmala alkaloids inhibit primarily the A-isoform of this enzyme (MAO-A). Following the consumption of Ayahuasca, the peak plasma concentration of harmine in blood may typically reach 0.5 µmol/L (Callaway et al., 1996). Yet a recent study indicated that the concentration required for harmine to inhibit half the activity of MAO-B (its IC50) may be on the order of 20 µmol/L (Samoylenko et al., 2010); this is about 40 times greater than the typical plasma level. Therefore, there is no in vitro or other empirical evidence to support the current cultural myth that consumption of Ayahuasca in conjunction with tyramine-rich foods can, in and of itself, lead to a hypertensive crisis.
Dosage and Duration of Effects For an IV injection of DMT, 0.2 mg drug/kg of bodyweight typically marks the psychedelic threshold, while 0.4 mg/kg and above may be considered a “high” dose. A normal dose of smoked DMT may consist of 20 to 40 mg of the pure crystal form, while more than this is likely needed to produce a “strong” trip. Most studies, including those performed with cats, monkeys, and human beings, have reported little or no physical tolerance to DMT. This means that repeated administrations of the drug over short periods of time do not significantly diminish its acute psychedelic effects. Following his original IM injection, Sza´ra (1989) reported the time of onset for nonordinary visual sensations as 3 to 4 minutes. IV injection, by contrast, results in a more rapid onset; depending on dosage, psychedelic effects may begin suddenly within 30 seconds after injection and peak after 2 to 5 minutes (Strassman, 1996). Smoked DMT also produces a fast and sudden onset, with effects typically experienced within 15 to 30 seconds following the first of two or three inhalations. The total duration of effects for both smoked and ingested DMT is usually about 30 minutes. In contrast, following a typical Ayahuasca dose, MAO-A inhibition by harmala alkaloids may last for 8 to 12 hours, leading to a psychedelic experience normally lasting about 4 to 5 hours. With Ayahuasca, there is also considerable attenuation of the acute effects when compared to DMT administered by other routes, probably because of the slowness of oral absorption and also the
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increased levels of serotonin after MAOI. This serotonin must subsequently compete with DMT for similar receptor sites in the brain.
Pharmacological Mechanisms of Action The neurotransmitter receptors that have consistently been shown to be associated with psychedelic activity are activated by serotonin. The binding characteristics of typical psychedelics such as psilocin, 5-MeODMT, and LSD to what is today known as the 5-HT2A receptor subtype were shown in a landmark study to be positively correlated with the psychoactivity of these drugs (Glennon, Titeler, & McKenney, 1984). The high affinities of a further sample of psychedelics to the same receptor were subsequently demonstrated by McKenna, Repke, Lo, and Peroutka (1990). As a result of these and other studies, the very definition (from a pharmacological perspective) of a psychedelic drug (such as DMT, LSD, or mescaline, as opposed to other visionary psychoactives, such as tropane alkaloids) has become associated with either full or at least partial agonist action, at low concentrations, at the 5-HT2A receptor site. It has become increasingly clear, however, that psychedelics interact with other serotonergic receptor subtypes, as well as other neurotransmitter systems, such as the dopaminergic. The action of any one specific drug, therefore, may be thought of as a chord played upon a musical instrument; the drug activates a group of receptors and secondmessengers (“notes”), each of which is not usually unique to that drug but that together produce an experience distinct to it [see Previc, this volume]. Although a controversial early study (Deliganis, Pierce, & Peroutka, 1991) reported that DMT was a 5-HT2A antagonist, further experiments eventually confirmed its agonistic properties for this receptor site, similar to other psychedelics (Keiser et al., 2009). DMT has also been shown to be an agonist at 5-HT2C (Smith, Canton, Barrett, & Sanders-Bush, 1998) and 5-HT1A (Deliganis et al., 1991) receptors. In the case of the latter, for DMT and 5-HT1A, such an interaction in humans may possibly just modulate or actually inhibit psychedelic activity (Strassman, 1996). Overall, such efforts basically show how little is yet known about the receptor pharmacology of psychedelic agents. More recently, two putative nonserotonergic mechanisms have been proposed as having some involvement in the psychoactivity of DMT. First, DMT has been demonstrated to be a potent agonist at one type of trace amine (TA) receptor. TAs are a recently discovered class of G proteincoupled receptors. Jacob and Presti (2005) suggested that DMT may
DMT and Human Consciousness
interact with this receptor, especially at endogenous or low exogenous levels, to modulate emotional states. Second, researchers have more recently proposed DMT to be the first endogenous agonist for the sigma-1 receptor, which is also a nonserotonergic receptor that is found in various areas of the brain (Fontanilla et al., 2009). The majority of pharmacological studies so far on DMT have sought to determine the mechanisms underlying its psychoactivity through its direct actions on known neurotransmitter receptors. Some studies, however, suggest that DMT may also act through more indirect pathways that affect neuronal function. A few reports have suggested that DMT and/or its analogues (including bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT) act as SSRIs (Nagai, Nonaka, & Kamimura, 2007). A recent cell-based study, however, has proposed that DMT is not such a reuptake blocker but rather is itself transported (in competition with serotonin) into the cell and also packaged for later release. This mechanism has been proposed to explain how very low levels of endogenous DMT might still activate the sigma-1 receptor, but is as yet only speculative (Cozzi et al., 2009). It is currently unknown specifically what neurochemical interactions are required to elicit the unique consciousness-modifying effects of DMT or any other psychedelic, how this vivid mental content becomes conscious, or even why our species has the capacity for such an experience in the first place. Whatever the intricacies involved in the CNS interactions between DMT, neurotransmitters, and their receptors, additional knowledge of these variables can only constitute the first stages in understanding and explaining how a molecule mediates its psychedelic actions. Further stages involve an anatomical and systems-level explanation; exactly where in the brain does DMT bind to these receptors, and which neural pathways and circuits does it thereby modulate? As is the case with other psychedelics, the answers to these questions are still in their formative stages. The serotonin-rich raphe nuclei of the brainstem, the locus coeruleus of the pons (also located within the brainstem), and the cerebral cortex have all been implicated as sites through which serotonergic psychedelics may mediate their effects (Aghajanian & Marek, 1999). DMT-specific research of this type in humans, however, has yet to be conducted. In the future, modern imaging technologies, newer and more sensitive pharmacological techniques (compared to those utilized in the 1950s and ’60s), and modern genetics and bioinformatics technologies are all likely to yield new and valuable insights regarding the mechanisms by which DMT modifies consciousness.
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Endogenous DMT: The Psychedelic Within Biosynthesis DMT is produced in the body via a biosynthetic pathway that originates with the essential dietary amino acid tryptophan. Tryptophan is decarboxylated (a COOH group removed) by an enzyme called aromatic amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) to yield tryptamine. A second enzyme, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase (INMT), then attaches two methyl groups, donated by a different substrate in successive rounds, to the aliphatic nitrogen, thereby producing DMT. The exact location where this synthesis occurs, however, remains unclear. Strassman (2001) has suggested that DMT may be produced in the human pineal gland; however, this hypothesis remains speculative.
Function DMT may be classified as a neurotransmitter in its own right, considering that it is a normal constituent of mammalian brains and according to criteria such as its potential synthesis by neurons, storage in vesicles and removal by specific metabolic processes. Some of the earliest speculations regarding the role of DMT in the human body did not concern normal, healthy functions but rather pathology in the form of psychoses. Osmond and Smythies (1952) proposed a “transmethylation hypothesis,” suggesting that endogenous “schizotoxins” may be responsible for the socalled positive symptoms seen in schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis. At the time, psychedelics were commonly referred to as “psychotomimetics” or “psychotogens”—compounds that either mimicked or created psychoses respectively. The subsequent discovery of DMT as an endogenous psychedelic agent aroused strong speculation about its potential role as a “schizotoxin”; however, despite early reports that claimed differences in the presence and metabolism of DMT in schizophrenics compared to controls, further studies proved contradictory, and in some cases the differences between patient and control groups were statistically insignificant (Callaway, 1996). In the healthy human, DMT may be involved in the production of the dream visions that are experienced during rapid-eye-movement sleep (REMS; Callaway, 1988). The periodic nature of REMS suggests that dreaming may be the result of a metabolic cycle involving serotonin, melatonin, and other endogenous tryptophan products that include pinoline (an endogenous SSRI and a weak MAOI) and DMT. As the eyes are closed and the amount of light falling onto the retina is reduced, sleep-inducing
DMT and Human Consciousness
enzymatic activity is increased in the pineal and, accordingly, more melatonin produced. As the brain descends deeper into sleep, pinoline and DMT production may also be increased. Rising levels of pinoline and DMT, in a manner reminiscent of the mechanisms facilitated by Ayahuasca, eventually trigger the REM phase and its associated dream visions. A negative feedback mechanism involving pinoline, by virtue of its ability to inhibit the reuptake of serotonin, subsequently increases synaptic serotonin levels in the brain. This increased serotonin concentration induces the sleep cycle to move in the opposite direction, toward a lighter sleep or to waking. This model could be tested by monitoring the blood serum and/or cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of these tryptophan metabolites throughout the circadian cycle, with an expectation of higher DMT and pinoline concentrations during sleep, particularly during the REM phases of sleep.
Technology and Culture—DMT and the Modification of Human Consciousness Traditional Indigenous Usage Prior to its isolation and identification with 20th-century technologies as a pure compound, consciousness-modifying preparations that contained DMT as their active ingredient were used extensively by indigenous peoples living in South America. Not only was DMT systematically sought and identified in a wide variety of plants throughout the continent, but extremely novel and effective delivery systems were developed in order to experience its unique psychoactive effects. This is an impressive example of human innovation and it must be mentioned again that DMT is not active orally, so a plant containing the drug could not simply be picked and eaten to produce a psychoactive experience. Many other plants throughout the Americas do offer such an effect, literally right off the stalk, yet it seems clear that indigenous peoples have been very selective and dedicated, over long periods of time and across a wide geographic range, in their development of a technology to exploit their botanical resources specifically to obtain DMT. The products of this technology were consumed by the smoking or snuffing of plant preparations, the administration of aqueous solutions as enemas, the licking of pastes, the imbibing of the Ayahuasca beverage, and the consumption of jurema. Despite drugs being used for occasional diversion and pleasure, their utilization overall was a technology for ritualized ceremony and not merely for personal gratification [see Schaefer, this volume]. Practitioners of Ayahuasca technology employed it for the diagnosis and treatment of illness, warfare, hunting magic, divination,
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remote viewing, magical attack or defense, or other matters involving “spirits” that are thought to reside in every part of nature (Luna, 1984).
Products Derived from Anadenanthera and Virola Species DMT-containing snuffs, produced from the seeds of the genus Anadenanthera, have already been mentioned in a historical context. These snuffs include vilca and cebil, produced from the species A. colubrina, and also cohoba and yopo, from the species A. peregrina. The second major DMT-containing genus that has been utilized to provide active methylated tryptamines for snuffing mixtures is Virola. The resins, usually dark red in color, obtained from this genus contain both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT and are used for their psychoactive effects by indigenous people throughout the Colombian Vaupe´s region, the Orinoco River and Rı´o Negro River basins, and in both the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon regions. Some of the species typically used include V. theiodora Warb., V. calophylloidea Markgr., and V. elongata Warb. The groups in the Orinoco and Rı´o Negro regions, collectively known as the Waika, call these snuffs by several names, including epana, ebena, and nyakwana. In other parts of Brazil, the name parica is used as a more general label for snuffs. Amongst the Waika, the reported use of Virola snuff was not restricted to specialized practitioners but encouraged for all males over the age of 14. By contrast, in the Colombian Vaupe´s region, these snuffs were reported to have been used by shamans only, for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, for divination and prophecy, and for other medico-religious purposes (Schultes, Hofmann, & Ra¨tsch, 1979).
Preparation and Administration of Snuffs The methods used for preparing Virola snuffing mixtures vary depending on the group but usually involve stripping the bark from the tree, heating the bark over a low fire to force the resin to the surface, scraping the resin into a container, and then evaporating it over a low fire until the mixture is reduced to a reddish-brown syrup. The syrup is then dried, pulverized (sometimes together with the dried leaves of other plants, such as the herb Justicia pectoralis Jacq.), and sifted to form a fine powder for snuffing. An important admixture to both Anadenanthera and Virola snuffs, used by some but not all groups, was either wood ash or mineral lime (calcium hydroxide). The former was obtained by burning the wood of specific plant species, including Theobroma cacao L. (from which chocolate is produced)
DMT and Human Consciousness
or Elizabetha princeps Schomb. ex Benth (a majestic tree from the Fabaceae or legume family), while the latter was produced by burning seashells. Ash and lime provide the snuff with a basic pH, which allows the active alkaloids to be absorbed more quickly into the nasal cavity. Snuff products are often administered by one person using a tube to blow the powder into the nostrils of another. Plotkin (1994, p. 264) describes a personal experience during his time with a Yanomamo tribe in the remote northern Amazon forest: . . . I placed the tube’s bowl in my right nostril. The shaman held the other end between his lips and blew, starting off slowly and finishing with a mighty blast. The force of the blast threw me backward from my squatting position. Immediately a warm sensation flooded me—my nostril, my sinus, my head, my limbs were all aflame. . . . [following another administration of the snuff moments later into the other nostril] The force seemed to propel the drug from the shaman’s tube directly into my bloodstream and then into my very soul.
Orally Active Virola Preparations Amongst several tribes, including the Witoto and the Bora of the Amazonian region of Colombia and Peru, Virola preparations are consumed orally in the form of pellets. These are produced by stripping the inner layers of the tree bark, scraping off the resinous sap and boiling it to a thick consistency, and combining various admixtures to produce a malleable paste. The paste is then rolled into a pellet and allowed to dry. The pellet is placed in the mouth between the cheek and the gum to achieve buccal absorption, thereby bypassing the liver and GI tract and avoiding MAO degradation. This gradual progression, as revealed in the archaeological record, from simple preparations from readily available plant materials for smoking in a pipe to more advanced psychedelic snuffs and orally active preparations, represents a technological evolution driven by desire, empirical observations, and systematic experimentation over thousands of years in South America. This innovative progression in drug delivery technologies demonstrates a keen awareness of three pharmaceutical principles that are still important in pharmacology today: that a crude plant substance can be refined for higher potency, that adding ash or mineral lime can liberate alkaloids for more rapid and efficient absorption, and that the human nasal cavity can absorb much more of this material than the lungs (Torres & Repke, 2006).
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Preparation and Origins of Ayahuasca The term Ayahuasca derives from the Quechua language and may variously be translated to mean “vine of death,” “vine of enlightenment,” or, more accurately, “vine of the soul” (Schultes & Raffauf, 1992). The brew, which is known by dozens of names including yage´ and ca’api, is one of the most complex drug delivery systems known to humankind. As a product prepared by Ayahuasqueros (Ayahuasca masters) in small groups across much of lowland South America, almost endless variations exist for its wide range of potential constituents and methods of production. In its most rudimentary form, Ayahuasca combines the MAOI B. caapi vine (the single constant ingredient in all versions), with the leaves of a DMTcontaining plant (Callaway, Brito, & Neves, 2005). The most widely used such plant is P. viridis (also known as chacruna), while D. cabrerana (chaliponga), belonging to same family as B. caapi itself, is used primarily in the northwest Amazon. One piece of evidence for the antiquity of Ayahuasca use is gas chromatography/mass spectrometric hair analysis from human mummies belonging to the Tiwanaku civilization (ca. 500–1000 CE) in northern Chile (Ogalde, Arriaza, & Soto, 2009). This analysis revealed the presence of the harmala alkaloid harmine, a possible indicator that B. caapi was being consumed at least as early as this time (but not necessarily as part of an Ayahuasca brew). The validity of this study, however, must be confirmed more rigorously. Interestingly, the B. caapi vine is not known to be a native plant of the region, suggesting the existence of plant trade networks for this durable product extending from as far away as the Amazon to the Chilean coast. Pots and ladles depicting elaborately dressed lords drinking potions from large vessels with deer head-shaped lids have been unearthed from the Moche civilization in northern Peru (ca. 100–800 CE). These utensils were also decorated with Anadenanthera leaves, suggesting the existence of an early “proto-Ayahuasca” brew (C. Torres, personal communication, February 2010), which perhaps did not utilize P. viridis or D. cabrerana as the DMT-containing ingredient but instead rendered the methylated tryptamines present in Anadenanthera species orally active, possibly with imported B. caapi. Generally speaking, however, the origins of Ayahuasca and the details of its antiquity are yet to be clarified. The preparation of Ayahuasca typically involves pounding the B. caapi vine to separate the fibrous plant material and create more surface area for better extraction of the desired alkaloids, and then boiling the resulting macerate in water together with DMT-containing leaves and any other
DMT and Human Consciousness
desired admixture. The final product, usually a brown liquid or dark paste, may have numerous variations in terms of both its viscosity and subsequent potency, depending on the method of preparation used. Additional ingredients for the production of Ayahuasca, according to the traditions of each group and very often of a particular individual, may be drawn from a wide variety of plant families. Ingredients are also added depending on the purpose intended for a specific brew, for example, divination versus healing. The most common plant family from which additives are taken for Ayahuasca is the Solanaceae. These plants contain various compounds, including nicotine, scopolamine, and atropine, which modulate adrenergic and cholinergic neurotransmission and may modulate, sometimes substantially, the phenomenological experience of an Ayahuasca session. Ayahuasca is an amazing ethnopharmacological accomplishment. The Amazonian rainforest contains an enormous number of plant species and therefore a far greater number of potential pairings for an active brew; accordingly, the chances of a DMT-containing plant being combined with a MAOI, as a result of accident or trial and error, must be exceedingly small. In terms of its possible origins, Richard Spruce (1873) is reported to have observed natives chewing B. caapi stems, perhaps to obtain a mild serotonergic buzz from the harmala alkaloids contained therein, or, as is also likely, for basic hygienic purposes. These purposes may have included antibacterial dental care and/or intestinal worm removal by the absorbed harmala alkaloids (Hassan, 1967). If a DMT-containing leaf was simultaneously chewed or even consumed in a simple tea of just leaves around the same time, a coincidental modulation of the psychoactive effects may have been noticed and the matter further investigated. In terms of the explanations for the origins of Ayahuasca according to the traditions of the indigenous peoples themselves, the mystery of the brew usually constitutes a fundamental part of group mythology. The discovery of this “tea” is frequently attributed to supernatural events involving the spirit world and is often intrinsically linked to a central creation myth for the human species as a whole (Shanon, 2002).
Applications and Uses of Ayahuasca Technology The use of Ayahuasca is steeped in mysteries and traditions that provide complete cosmological and practical frameworks for its practitioners. A key principle for most practitioners is the idea that the beverage reveals a true underlying nature of reality. In the traditional setting, the role of the
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Ayahuasca shaman is to enter the spirit realm and bring useful knowledge back to the ordinary world, where it is subsequently applied. Knowledge is typically expressed through song (which constitutes an integral part of most Ayahuasca ceremonies), narrative, artistic expression with geometric designs, fragrances, and other means. Ayahuasca is considered by vegetalistas (those who use these plants for such purposes) to be especially important for the diagnosis and treatment of illness. On a physical level, the beverage typically induces strong vomiting, tremors, and occasionally diarrhea, and accordingly has been called by the Spanish name la purga: the purge. This effect is thought to clear the body of toxins and other undesirable substances and, far from being considered an unfortunate side effect, is often an important part of the healing process. The role of Ayahuasca in healing, however, is considered to go far deeper than its purely physical actions. Use of the brew is intrinsically linked to an indigenous worldview that considers illness to be the result of processes occurring within an ordinarily unseen “spirit” world. In this sense, illness may result from someone firing a magical dart at the victim or through the loss of one’s soul for various reasons. In such cases, the effects of Ayahuasca reveal these underlying realities. The psychedelic state induced by the brew supposedly allows the practitioner to manipulate causal factors and influence outcomes in this spirit realm, thereby effecting change in the ordinary physical world of the patient and/or the community (McKenna, Luna, & Towers, 1995).
Into the Modern World A relatively recent development in South America, in what may be seen as a transference of technology, has been the emergence of syncretic sects around these ancient indigenous plant practices that utilize the Ayahuasca beverage as a sacrament. This began in the early 1930s with the Santo Daime (“Saint Give unto Me” in Portuguese) and continued with the Barquinha (“Little Boat”) in 1945 and the Unia˜o do Vegetal (UDV, the “Union of Vegetal,” where Vegetal refers to Ayahuasca) in 1961. These sects originated in or near Acre in Amazonian Brazil, where rubber tappers encountered indigenous tribes and experimented with Ayahuasca brews. The tappers then shared this technology with family and friends and eventually, during the 20th century, it spread at a rapid rate to major towns and cities across and outside of the country. Many elements of indigenous Ayahuasca ceremonies are maintained as revered rituals yet are also combined with religious practices and traditions from the Old World such as Catholic, patriarchal elements from Christianity in the case of the Santo
DMT and Human Consciousness
Daime and a Protestant version in the UDV. Umbanda and other African elements have been incorporated to form the Barquinha practice of this ancient technology. Beginning in the 1960s, DMT began to make its way into mainstream modern awareness. Some sources initially referred to it as the “businessman’s trip” because of its relatively short-lived and thus convenient effects compared to other psychedelics (enabling one, in theory, to take a DMT journey during a lunch break at work). In the 1980s, through public talks and written publications, Terence and Dennis McKenna played an instrumental role in raising awareness of DMT, Ayahuasca, and other psychoactive tryptamines in modern Western cultures. Both in the past and today, although not as popular as LSD or psilocybin-containing mushrooms, nor as readily available or as convenient to use, DMT continues to constitute an important technology for the modification of human consciousness. The most common method of administration is by smoking the crystalline form of the drug as the freebase through an enclosed glass pipe. Recently, reports have emerged of a smoking preparation called changa, which consists of DMT mixed together with a MAOI-containing plant and various other herbs, and is therefore akin to a smoked form of Ayahuasca. This contemporary observation provides further evidence that such technology continues to evolve now that it has “escaped” from South America and been transmitted to other cultures [see St John, Volume 1]. The last couple of decades have witnessed an increased interest in Ayahuasca from the modern world, particularly in its use as a tool for personal healing and insight. This interest has given rise to the phenomenon of “Ayahuasca tourism” and, more generally, “drug tourism,” the practice of Westerners visiting South American countries, especially Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, to participate in both urban and rural psychoactive ceremonies that are run by Mestizos (persons of mixed Amerindian and European ancestry). The modern encounters with DMT in an urban setting, along with the use of Ayahuasca in either a traditional or syncretic context, have also inspired distinct genres of visual art (such as the works of Alex Grey) and music [see Levy, Volume 1]. Ayahuasca has recently been utilized in a fusion of traditional and modern contexts to treat a number of physical, psychological, and psychosomatic illnesses. One such application has been the treatment of alcohol and other drug addictions. The success in the use of the brew, itself shown to be nonaddictive, in this context supports the idea that psychedelics, as visionary tools for self-exploration and healing, are an underexplored area for both scientists and therapists alike. One example of Ayahuasca usage
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in an applied, quasi-institutional setting is the Takiwasi Center for the Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Addiction. The Center operates as a charity and was opened in 1992 near the Peruvian city of Tarapoto in the Andean foothills. It accepts small groups of voluntary participants, typically with addictions to alcohol and/or cocaine, and in some cases to other drugs as well. Treatment involves physical detoxification, psychological counseling, and the use of Ayahuasca, in settings ranging from brief communal sessions to isolation in the forest. Success rates from the Takiwasi project, as indicated by a follow-up study, have been encouraging. In its first 7 years, the Center facilitated 211 courses of treatment, consisting of 175 first-time and 36 returning patients. Between 60 and 70 percent of these patients benefited from the program, and almost a third of all patients were furthermore determined to have had their “problems apparently resolved thanks to a true structural change manifested upon several life levels” (Mabit, 2002, p. 31).
Modern Ayahuasca Analogues An interesting modern development in Ayahuasca technology has been the concept and application of “Ayahuasca analogues,” admixtures that replace B. caapi and P. viridis with alternate sources of MAOI and DMT respectively. The seeds of Syrian Rue (Peganum harmala L.), for example, have been employed as a plant-derived MAOI, as have modern pharmaceutical drugs. Various Acacia species have been used as a source of DMT. Ott (1994) lists more than 60 each of MAOI- and DMT-containing plants, pointing out that based on these lists alone, there are several thousand possible combinations for a MAOI/DMT preparation. Because of differences in DMT content, the presence of other methylated tryptamines and the exact MAOIs (harmala or otherwise) used, it is likely that each combination yields its own semi-unique psychedelic experience.
Conclusion Jonathan Ott (1994) was one of the first modern researchers to appreciate and emphasize the fact that DMT, obtained from a wide variety of plant species, has been utilized by culturally diverse and apparently unconnected groups of people, spread over a wide time span and large geographical areas, for the modification of human consciousness. This utilization constituted a central feature of those indigenous cultures and cosmologies and apparently dates back thousands of years. In the modern world, in the space of a few short decades, the drug has taken its place as a powerful and
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sometimes unique psychedelic, consumed in a variety of ways by modern psychonauts, to journey deep into an as-yet-unexplained region of the mind and/or soul. DMT, predictably, has given rise to several key questions. One relates to its presence in the human body. Why did natural selection give rise to the synthesis of this compound in mammals in the first place, and what functions does DMT serve in Homo sapiens today? A more fundamental issue concerns the chain of causation between the molecular actions of DMT, about which some information is known, its effects on the brain at a systems level, about which only a little is currently understood in the modern world, and the phenomenological experiences it induces, where (in this leap from molecules to mind) there exists almost only speculation. The attempt to make this leap, not only for DMT but for other visionary psychoactives as well, raises deep and perennial questions regarding the limitations (or perhaps the fallacy) of attempting to use the brain as an ultimate target for explaining this phenomenological experience, which is simultaneously hypothesized to emerge from the physical stuff of the brain itself. Of course, the very assertion that it is the brain explaining this experience, or even that it is a brain reading these words printed on this page, belongs, ad infinitum, to the same paradoxical space. In other words, to use the mind to study and understand the mind may be much like using a mirror to engage in psychotherapy with oneself. Whatever the arguments regarding the how of these experiences, it is quite unclear even why human beings have a capacity in the first place to experience these modified states of consciousness and their associated content. Questions regarding the ontology of the DMT experience constitute their own realm of enquiry, one intrinsically linked to matters concerning the nature of the world and reality itself. These questions are relevant to other psychedelics, too, but are especially pertinent to DMT because of the nature of the phenomenological experiences it induces: the feeling of being propelled into another “dimension,” perceptions of contact with other beings and their novel technologies, and, in some cases, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), and even alien abductions (Strassman, 2001). One approach to the question of the ontological status of the DMT state is that the drug, through its actions on the brain, is revealing a hidden part of the psyche; regions that are ever-present in the mind yet not readily accessible during day-to-day consciousness. In other words, the psychedelic agent may simply modify the boundary between conscious and unconscious processes. How the revealed content is then “assembled” into images and experiences may depend on the individual’s specific set and setting, and, more importantly, on the Zeitgeist of his or her times. Prehistoric shamans may have
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encountered forest animals and mythical beings in their Ayahuasca visions, yet today, following contact with European civilization, their modern counterparts also meet aircraft, submarines, and even futuristic spacecraft (Luna, 1986). A different approach, in contrast, argues that DMT enables a cognizance of aspects contained in the external world. These aspects are not readily accessible through ordinary consciousness but may be perceived under the influence of the drug. In other words, DMT provides access to alternate realities, dimensions, or whatever label one chooses for them. This argument raises a fundamental question, concerning “what is I, and what is not I?” (DeKorne, 1994). Posed as it is within the framework of human logical-rational thinking and language (of which these very words too are a product), the question is intrinsically flawed and will probably never have a definitive “answer.” Depending on how it is handled, however, it may lead to useless word games or to valuable new insights and realizations. As to whether DMT merely draws back the curtain on the labyrinths of our own psyche or opens a portal of some kind to another dimension or reality, the answer may be both at the same time. Perhaps both answers are not separate but rather each a different facet of the same thing. Perhaps, furthermore, human beings will simply never be able to fully understand that “thing.” The modern world has inherited a precious legacy from the ethnobotanical lore of the indigenous peoples of South America, not only in terms of the Ayahuasca brew but also, indirectly, of the DMT molecule itself. Whether “plant” or “molecular” teacher, this drug can reveal regions not normally experienced in day-to-day reality, help people discover a fuller sense of awe and wonder at the world, and facilitate insights into their own personal lives. These insights may help both the individual and societies as a whole transcend fundamental issues and challenges and ultimately help make the world a more harmonious place in which to live. Whatever its future role, DMT has been and will continue to constitute a prized and specialized instrument within the consciousness-modifying toolbox of humankind.
References Aghajanian, G., & Marek, G. (1999). Serotonin and hallucinogens. Neuropsychopharmacology, 21(2), 16–23. Aschero, C., & Yacobaccio, H. (1994). 20 an˜os despue´s: Inca Cueva 7 reinterpretado (20 years later: Inca Cueva 7 reinterpreted). Paper presented at the Resu´menes del XI Congreso Nacional de Arqueologı´a Argentina, San Rafael, Argentina.
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Callaway, J. (1988). A proposed mechanism for the visions of dream sleep. Medical Hypotheses, 26, 119–124. Callaway, J. (1996). DMTs in the human brain. Yearbook for ethnomedicine, 4, 45–54. Callaway, J., Brito, G., & Neves, E. (2005). Phytochemical analyses of Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 37, 145–150. Callaway, J., Raymon, L., Hearn, W., McKenna, D., Grob, C., Brito, G., et al. (1996). Quantitation of N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala alkaloids in human plasma after oral dosing with ayahuasca. Journal of Analytical Toxicology, 20, 492–497. Cozzi, N., Gopalakrishnan, A., Anderson, L., Feih, J., Shulgin, A., Daley, P., et al. (2009). Dimethyltryptamine and other hallucinogenic tryptamines exhibit substrate behavior at the serotonin uptake transporter and the vesicle monoamine transporter. Journal of Neural Transmission, 116, 1591–1599. DeKorne, J. (1994). Psychedelic shamanism: The cultivation, preparation and shamanic use of psychotropic plants. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited. Deliganis, A., Pierce, P., & Peroutka, S. (1991). Differential interactions of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) with 5-HT1A and 5-HT2 receptors. Biochemical Pharmacology, 41, 1739–1744. Distel, F., & Alicia, A. (1980). Hallazgo de pipas en complejos precera´micos del borde de la Puna Jujen˜a (Republica Argentina) y el empleo de alucino´genos por parte de las mismas culturas [Finding of pipes in preceramics places at the edge of Puna Jujen˜a (Argentina) and the use of halucinogens by those cultures]. Estudios Arqueolo´gicos, 5, 55–75. Fontanilla, D., Johannessen, M., Hajipour, A., Cozzi, N., Jackson, M., & Ruoho, A. (2009). The hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is an endogenous sigma-1 receptor regulator. Science, 323(5916), 934–937. Franzen, F., & Gross, H. (1965). Tryptamine, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, N,Ndimethyl-5-hydroxytryptamine and 5-methoxytryptamine in human blood and urine. Nature, 206(988), 1052. Glennon, R., Titeler, M., & McKenney, J. (1984). Evidence for 5-HT2 involvement in the mechanism of action of hallucinogenic agents. Life Sciences, 35, 2505–2511. Gonc¸alves de Lima, O. (1946). Observac¸o˜es sobre o “vinho de Jurema” utilizado pelos indios Pancaru´ de Tacaratu´ (Pernambuco) [Observations on the “vinho de Jurema” used by the Pancaru´ Indians of Tacaratu´ (Pernambuco)]. Ariquivos do Instituto de Pesquisas Agrono´micas, 4, 45–80. Hassan, I. (1967). Some folk uses of Peganum harmala in India and Pakistan. Economic Botany, 21, 284–284. Jacob, M., & Presti, D. (2005). Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsidered: An anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine. Medical Hypotheses, 64, 930–937. Keiser, M. J., Setola, V., Irwin, J. J., Laggner, C., Abbas, A. I., Hufeisen, S. J., et al. (2009). Predicting new molecular targets for known drugs. Nature, 462(7270), 175–181.
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Luna, L. (1984). The concept of plants as teachers among four mestizo shamans of Iquitos, northeastern Peru. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 11, 135–156. Luna, L. (1986). Vegetalismo. Shamanism among the mestizo population of the Peruvian Amazon. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Mabit, J. (2002). Blending traditions: Using indigenous medicinal knowledge to treat drug addiction. MAPS Newsletter, 12(2), 25–32. McKenna, D., Luna, L., & Towers, G. (1995). Biodynamic constituents in Ayahuasca admixture plants: An uninvestigated folk pharmacopoeia. In S. von Reis & R. Schultes (Eds.), Ethnobotany: Evolution of a discipline (pp. 349–361). Portland, OR: Dioscorides Press. McKenna, D., Repke, D., Lo, L., & Peroutka, S. (1990). Differential interactions of indolealkylamines with 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor subtypes. Neuropharmacology, 29, 193–198. McKenna, T. (1990). Partial transcription of a taped workshop with ethnobotanist, shamanologist, and psychedelico, Terence McKenna. Time and Mind. Retrieved January, 2010 from http://deoxy.org/timemind.htm. McKenna, T. (1992). Food of the gods. The search for the original tree of knowledge. London: Rider. Nagai, F., Nonaka, R., & Satoh Hisashi Kamimura, K. (2007). The effects of nonmedically used psychoactive drugs on monoamine neurotransmission in rat brain. European Journal of Pharmacology, 559, 132–137. Ogalde, J., Arriaza, B., & Soto, E. (2009). Identification of psychoactive alkaloids in ancient Andean human hair by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. Journal of Archaeological Science, 36, 467–472. Osmond, H., & Smythies, J. (1952). Schizophrenia: A new approach. British Journal of Psychiatry, 98, 309–315. Ott, J. (1994). Ayahuasca analogues: Pangaean entheogens. Kennewick, WA: Natural Products Company. Plotkin, M. (1994). Tales of a shaman’s apprentice: An ethnobotanist searches for new medicines in the Amazon rain forest. New York: Penguin Books. Rudgley, R. (1998). The encyclopedia of psychoactive substances. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Saavedra, J., & Axelrod, J. (1972). Psychotomimetic N-methylated tryptamines: Formation in brain in vivo and in vitro. Science, 175(4028), 1365–1366. Samoylenko, V., Rahman, M., Tekwani, B., Tripathi, L., Wang, Y., Khan, S., et al. (2010). Banisteriopsis caapi, a unique combination of MAO inhibitory and antioxidative constituents for the activities relevant to neurodegenerative disorders and Parkinson’s disease. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 127, 357–367. Schultes, R. (1982). The beta-carboline hallucinogens of South America. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 14, 205–219. Schultes, R., Hofmann, A., & Ra¨tsch, C. (1979). Plants of the gods. New York: McGraw-Hill. Schultes, R., & Raffauf, R. (1992). Vine of the soul. Medicine men, their plants and rituals in the Colombian Amazonia. Oracle, AZ: Synergetic Press.
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Shanon, B. (2002). The antipodes of the mind: Charting the phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience. Great Britain: Oxford University Press. Shulgin, A., & Shulgin, A. (1997). Tihkal: The continuation. Berkeley, CA: Transform Press. Smith, R., Canton, H., Barrett, R., & Sanders-Bush, E. (1998). Agonist properties of N,N-dimethyltryptamine at serotonin 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C receptors. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior, 61, 323–330. Spruce, R. (1873). On some remarkable narcotics of the Amazon Valley and Orinoco. August Geographic Review, 1(55), 184–193. Strassman, R. (1996). Human psychopharmacology of N,N-dimethyltryptamine. Behavioural Brain Research, 73, 121–124. Strassman, R. (2001). DMT: The spirit molecule. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. Sza´ra, S. (1989). The social chemistry of discovery: The DMT story. Social Pharmacology, 3, 237–248. Torres, C. (1996). Archaeological evidence for the antiquity of psychoactive plant use in the Central Andes. Annali dei Musei Civici-Rovereto, 11, 291–326. Torres, C., & Repke, D. (2006). Anadenanthera: Visionary plant of ancient South America. Binghamton, UK: Haworth Press. Torres, C., Repke, D., Chan, K., McKenna, D., Llagostera, A., & Schultes, R. (1991). Snuff powders from pre-Hispanic San Pedro de Atacama: Chemical and contextual analysis. Current Anthropology, 32, 640–649. Villavicencio, M. (1858). Geografı´a de la Repu´blica del Ecuador [Geography of Ecuador]. New York: Craighead.
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CHAPTER 6
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness David E. Nichols and Benjamin R. Chemel Introduction The current paradigm of neuroscience considers the entire spectrum of human consciousness to be the result of complex events within the nervous system. It stands to reason that if research can help us to understand the neurochemical processes associated with memory and perception, it also should shed light on the underlying causes and physiological nature of a wide variety of altered states of consciousness (ASC). Of particular interest would be understanding the nature of mystical states, one of the most profound ASC, which can be produced by hallucinogens like LSD (LSD-25: d-lysergic acid diethylamide). As far as we know, mystical states of consciousness depend on processes of neuronal translation that are similar, if not identical, to those responsible for converting stimuli from our everyday environment into conscious perception [see Beauregard, this volume; Geels, and Shear, Volume 1].
Psychedelic/Hallucinogenic Agents Let’s first define the materials we intend to discuss. These substances are generally known by the catchall name hallucinogens, but they also have been referred to as psychedelic, psychotomimetic, and more recently entheogenic, generally taken to mean “mind manifesting,” “mimicking psychosis,” and “generating the god within,” respectively. We shall use these terms
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interchangeably. The definition of these substances that best sets the stage for the ensuing discussion appeared in perhaps the most authoritative overall reference book on pharmacology, known popularly as “Goodman and Gilman.” There one reads the feature that distinguishes psychedelic agents from other classes of drugs is their capacity reliably to induce or compel states of altered perception, thought, and feeling that are not (or cannot be) experienced otherwise except in dreams or at times of religious exaltation. (Jaffe, 1985, pp. 563– 564)
The complex range of phenomena produced by hallucinogens varies more so than for any other class of drugs and is highly influenced both by the mental state and expectations (“set”), and external environment (“setting”) of the user. As a result of this variability, the subjective effects produced by hallucinogens may differ considerably from person to person and even in the same individual on different occasions. Nevertheless, the following effects are common: altered perception of reality and self; intensification of mood; visual or auditory hallucinations, including vivid eidetic imagery and synesthesia; distorted sense of time and space; enhanced profundity and meaningfulness; and a ubiquitous sense of novelty. At low doses, effects on visual perception are often quite striking. At higher doses (but sometimes even at low doses), perception of ordinary reality may suddenly cease, and an alternate reality or “visionary state” can be perceived as completely real. Following the loss of an objective physical framework within which to compare this experience, such visionary states seem completely real. Without external environmental cues to serve as reference points, they are perceived as outside the framework of time and space. Often referred to as a “peak experience,” it is this state, rather than simple alterations of sensory perceptions, that leads to the experience of transcendental or mystical states. These peak experiences do not routinely occur following hallucinogen ingestion, but they are the type of drug effect that most closely mimics spontaneous visionary states and are of greatest relevance to our discussion here. The late Daniel X. Freedman (1968), one of the foremost pioneers of clinical LSD research, gained the impression from his many studies that: one basic dimension of behavior latently operative at any level of function and compellingly revealed in LSD states is “portentousness”—the capacity of the mind to see more than it can tell, to experience more than it can explicate, to believe in and be impressed with more than it can rationally
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justify, to experience boundlessness and “boundaryless” events, from the banal to the profound. (p. 331)
And later in his essay we read, “The sense of truth is experienced as compellingly vivid but not the inclination to test the truth of the senses” (p. 331). Here Freedman is saying that LSD produces profound experiences accompanied by a belief in their truth. The idea that hallucinogens are capable of inducing religious experiences will be met with stiff resistance by certain readers. For some, the notion of a drug-induced spiritual encounter is by definition invalid, inauthentic, or superficial, and for them only through spontaneous rapture can one truly experience the nature of the Divine. The notable religious scholar Huston Smith (Smith, 1964, p. 524) refuted skeptics by stating: refusal to admit that drugs can induce experiences descriptively indistinguishable from those which are spontaneously religious is the current counterpart of the seventeenth century theologians’ refusal to look through Galileo’s telescope or, when they did, their persistence in dismissing what they saw as machinations of the devil. When the fact that drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible, discussion will move to the more difficult question of how this new fact is to be interpreted.
LSD was discovered in 1943, but throughout history humans have ingested psychoactive materials, principally plants and plant extracts, to provide altered states of consciousness (ASC). The contemporary shamanic uses of approximately 150 psychoactive plants have been verified by field research conducted early in the last century (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). It seems quite probable that at the dawn of human existence, our early ancestors discovered the mind-altering potential of certain plants during the exploration of their environment for food. The psychological effects produced by the ingestion of these substances could have profoundly impacted the worldview of ancient humans. Although a matter for speculation, spiritual thought may have first arisen as a direct result of the prehistoric use of mind-altering plants. Evidence for the ritualistic ingestion of hallucinogenic plants comes from the many explorers and anthropologists who have reported the intact use of psychoactive plants into present times. These indigenous uses seem to be vestiges of ancient traditions that existed largely in secrecy. Practitioners often suffered centuries of religious and political repression by
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Europeans, who despised native shamanic practices, believing them to be inspired by the devil (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). The most detailed contributions to this field of study come from Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes. By exhaustively studying the enthnographic uses of plants in Mexico and the Amazon Basin, he became the world’s foremost expert on the anthropological use of psychoactive plants in the New World. Schultes’s botanical work performed in the deserts and jungles of the Americas was furthered in the laboratory of Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann, who was the first to isolate and identify the active components in many of the hallucinogenic plants used by shamans. After his accidental discovery of the potent hallucinogen LSD, Hofmann became very interested in natural products that shared the visionary potential of LSD. He subsequently demonstrated that psilocybin and certain ergot alkaloids similar in structure and activity to LSD were the principal active components in Teonana´catl and Ololiuqui, respectively. These were plant materials used by South American natives to produce an ASC where they could commune with their gods.
Scientific Study of Psychedelic Agents The discovery of the psychoactive properties of LSD in 1943 ushered in a new area of study of the mind, what might be called the “golden age” of psychedelic research. During the 1950s and early 1960s, hallucinogens, primarily LSD, were administered to thousands of volunteers in hundreds of clinical research studies, notably for psychotherapy, treatment of alcoholism, and to relieve suffering in terminally ill patients (Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1979). Although the majority of this research was technically appropriate for the times, a subset of academic researchers abandoned accepted research approaches, adopted nontraditional methodologies, and became outspoken advocates for their widespread use. The widespread use of hallucinogens quickly became a highly charged political issue, accompanied by popularly held negative attitudes that were often promoted by the media. Concern over the safety and alleged risks to society posed by hallucinogens eventually resulted in federal legislation in 1970 that outlawed the possession of most hallucinogens. Today, most hallucinogens are classified as Schedule I Controlled Substances, which by legal definition have a high potential for abuse, a lack of demonstrated safety, and no accepted medical uses. Being classified as “illegal drugs” had profound effects on how society, science, and medicine approached these substances.
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Nonetheless, support for the idea that hallucinogens are capable of producing transcendent visionary or spiritual states has been provided as a byproduct of several academic studies. One such study treated alcoholics with large doses of LSD that produced transcendent experiences in many subjects and apparently led to increased sobriety (Aaronson & Osmond, 1970). It has been suggested that the more profound the psychedelic experience, the greater and more lasting the improvement (Fox, 1967). Additional and more generalized studies designed to evaluate the range of effects produced by psychedelics (primarily LSD and mescaline) suggest that anywhere from 24 to 95 percent of the personal accounts included varying degrees of religious components (Batson & Ventis, 1982). One of the well-documented examples that psychedelics provoke mystical experiences took place in the spring of 1962. Walter Pahnke, a Ph.D. student, conducted a groundbreaking scientific study to examine the similarities between psychedelic and spontaneous religious experiences. In the experiment, 20 graduate students of theology, who were naı¨ve to psychedelic drug use, volunteered to participate in a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment. Pahnke hypothesized that the hallucinogen psilocybin (from Teonana´catl), when administered in a religious setting to those who were religiously inclined, could reliably induce experiences that were indistinguishable from spontaneous mystical experiences (Pahnke, 1963). In the basement chapel of a Boston University Church, pills containing either an active placebo (nicotinic acid) or 30 mg of synthetic psilocybin were randomly distributed to the volunteers. As the experiment proceeded, they listened to the Good Friday church service that was being conducted directly above them. Following the service, the participants were interviewed about their personal experiences, and a written account and an extensive questionnaire were provided by each of the participants in the days following the experiment. Similar techniques were used as a means of evaluation 6 months after the experiment. Using common characteristics of mystical experiences derived by reviewing either published accounts or reviews of spontaneous religious experiences, Pahnke trained objective evaluators to discriminate written descriptions of authentic mystical experiences (Pahnke & Richards, 1969). The personal accounts of the test and control volunteers were then assessed. The characteristics of religious experience used in this study were feelings of unity or ego loss, transcendence of space and time, a deeply felt positive mood, sacredness, a noetic sense of an ultimate truth or reality, paradoxicality, ineffability, transiency, and a persistent integration of the experience into one’s life. Pahnke (1963) reported that in every
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measure, participants who received psilocybin scored significantly higher on the mystical scale than the control group. An extension and confirmation of this early experiment was recently completed by Griffiths, Richards, McCann, and Jesse (2006) in 30 normal volunteers in a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. In that study, psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences in the majority of volunteers, with personal meaning sustained out to at least a 14-month follow-up time. Employing hallucinogens in dying patients is so far the best documented and successful modern medical application of these substances. As a result of his extensive experience conducting LSD sessions, Stanislav Grof proposed that a “confrontation with death in a ritual context” can both eliminate the fear of death and lead to personal transformation. The experiences of death and rebirth that can be induced by psychedelics can sometimes lead to radical changes in the patient’s attitude toward death and dying, resulting in relief of pain and distress (Grof & Grof, 1980). These changes largely parallel those that are observed following a so-called near-death experience (Noyes, 1980) and further emphasize the potential similarity between an actual physical encounter with death and the perception of one that may be induced by an hallucinogen. Despite the promise generated by research studies, human research on hallucinogens ceased around 1970, but there has been a recent resurgence in interest in therapeutic applications for psychedelic agents. A study directed by Charles S. Grob (Grob et al., 2011) examined the ability of a combination of psilocybin and psychotherapy to alleviate the anxiety and depression that accompany dying. Significant improvements in mood were observed in several of the instrument subscales, and some of the patients related profound experiences that gave them a new perspective on their impending deaths.
Hallucinogens and Consciousness We now shift the focus from historical/psychological phenomena to the neuropharmacology of hallucinogens and specifically to how transcendent or mystical experiences might be produced from a neurochemical perspective. We caution, however, that the ice beneath our feet is thin as we move in that direction. Unfortunately, most of what we know about the human pharmacology of hallucinogens dates from 40 to 50 years ago, and almost none of that is mechanistic. Clinical trials were rudimentary, cognitive science was nonexistent, and there were few pharmacologically specific drugs with which
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to probe the mechanistic basis for the effects of hallucinogens. Numerous rodent studies did continue, however, and certain parallels in brain function allow discussions in that context. The problem confronted at the outset, however, is our lack of understanding of the nature of human consciousness. How can one discover how drugs alter consciousness without understanding consciousness itself? There is still no clear understanding of what it is and how it originates out of brain. Nevertheless, there seems to be a consensus that an intact thalamocortical system is necessary (Izhikevich & Edelman, 2008; Plum, 1991; Tononi, 2004). We shall use that idea as a basic foundation for subsequent discussion. Tononi (2004) has proposed that consciousness arises from the brain’s ability to integrate information in a way that is contingent on connectivity within functionally specialized regions of the thalamocortical system. He argues that the quality of consciousness is determined by informational relationships that causally link its elements and the distinct activity states of these elements at any given moment. Massimini and coworkers (2005) recently provided evidence in support of this hypothesis by showing that the loss of consciousness that occurs during NREM sleep may be related to a breakdown in cortical effective connectivity. In parallel reasoning, Vollenweider and Geyer (2001) propose that hallucinogens disrupt information processing in cortico-striato-thalamocortical (CSTC) feedback loops, leading to an inability to screen out or “gate” extraneous stimuli and to attend selectively to salient features of the environment. Hallucinogens may disrupt thalamic gating of sensory and cognitive information and lead to “overload” of cortical processing capacity by stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors located in several components of the CSTC, including the prefrontal cortex, striatum, nucleus accumbens, and thalamus. Thus, even if we do not understand how a thalamocortical network might generate consciousness, we can still discuss ways that hallucinogens may alter processing in interacting brain structures that impinge on the network, and from that knowledge perhaps construct a framework within which to relate what is known about the psychopharmacological effects of hallucinogens. Executive decisions are made in the frontal cortex, where other important elements of personality are determined. Incoming sensory information, as well as affective tags and access to memories, converge in the frontal cortex where the totality of incoming data is continuously integrated in some way to form what we experience as “consciousness.”
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One distinction between the effects of hallucinogens and other substances that alter consciousness is that the effects of hallucinogens are typically remembered clearly and vividly. During a psychedelic experience, consciousness and the self remain intact, memory continues to function, and one is aware of what is happening even if it lies outside the realm of ordinary experience. Afterward, during ordinary consciousness, the experient can remember the subjective details. These characteristics apply irrespective of whether the experience is spontaneous or induced by a psychedelic. Based on Tononi’s concepts, it seems reasonable to infer that the basic integrative process of consciousness has not been disrupted, but rather some of the interactive brain elements involved in producing consciousness have been altered. In ordinary waking consciousness, the incoming sensory streams bring information about the external environment. Adaptive responses to the environment are necessary for survival of the species, and we would expect that coincident but irrelevant sensory cues will largely be absent at the level of conscious awareness, having been filtered out of the information that is integrated into consciousness. One can anticipate that if the incoming information for integration into consciousness is diverted from environmental responses to interoceptive or subjective cues, then the quality of consciousness will be altered because the informational relationships that causally link the elements of the thalamocortical network have changed (Tononi, 2004). That is, the quality of consciousness will change in a way that represents a shift from an external adaptive state to one that is internally reflective. We will remain conscious, but the quality of our consciousness will change. If consciousness is normally focused on the everyday world, then any direct awareness of our subjective state, in place of its object, would be experienced as anomalous. A psychedelic model consistent with this reasoning would view ASC as the subjective reflections or by-products of general mental activity, resulting when the “known object” of focal awareness is replaced by features of the “knowing medium” (Hunt & Chefurka, 1976). Even if we alter the informational relationships of the elements involved in generating consciousness, what we experience may still be perceived as completely real. It may be experienced as real by the person and indistinguishable from consensus reality because there is no objective relativistic framework with which to compare it. Thus, one characteristic of a genuine mystical experience is that it must be perceived as being completely real. After an altered state experience has ended, however, if the memory of the experience remains intact during ordinary waking consciousness, the person will be able to assess the extent to which the ASC differed from waking consciousness.
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We have spent some time attempting to convey the idea that it is possible for psychedelics to alter one’s perception of reality, and that during the experience we may not perceive it is anything other than completely real. A visionary or transcendental state must be perceived as completely real for it to be considered authentic. It is important to accept this premise because if a transcendent or religious experience did not have the quality of seeming completely real, it would be perceived as illusion or hallucination and would have no lasting impact. Transcendental or visionary states have the quality of being ineffable; there is no language that can adequately convey the richness of the experience. Similarly, psychedelics can produce a powerful and profound sense that something ominous or momentous is about to occur or is occurring, producing awe and amazement. These descriptors are the same as those we might find attached to a visionary experience and resemble Rudolph Otto’s “numinous” (Otto, 1958). We propose that a feeling of portentousness is a product of frontal cortical activity. It is only in humans where reflection and introspection can occur, and conscious decisions made to carry out specific behaviors. The rationale for making complex decisions will be based on subjective comparisons of the predicted outcomes of different choices and a ranking of the acceptability of those outcomes in the context of one’s value systems. Some choices will have more profound implications than others, and it is only through our understanding of those consequences that we make such decisions. Therefore, if we assume that the ability to place experiential events into Freedman’s continuum, ranging from the banal to the profound, results from comparisons derived through cortical functions, it would seem logical that attaching to an experience a sense of “portentousness” (a descriptor that must lie at the extreme end of the ranking system) must derive from processes that involve the frontal cortex. With this brief background on how psychedelics modify perceptions and feelings, the question begs to be asked: But how do they do that? We shall now proceed to a discussion of how such experiences might be produced by the interaction between psychedelic molecules and certain brain systems.
The Neuropharmacology of Hallucinogens Hallucinogens are classified into three structural groups: tryptamines, phenethylamines, and ergolines. Tryptamines include psilocybin, psilocin, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and bear a close structural similarity to serotonin (Figure 6.1). LSD and related tetracyclic compounds are called
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Figure 6.1 Chemical structures of the neurotransmitter serotonin, and several psychedelics.
ergolines and can be considered to be special cases of tryptamines because they have a tryptamine as their core framework. Mescaline, DOI, and 2-CB are examples of phenethylamines. All three structural classes of hallucinogens seem to exert their effects on human consciousness by interacting with similar brain targets. DMT, psilocybin, and mescaline occur naturally in certain plants and fungi. LSD is semi-synthetic, being produced by chemical processes from ergot alkaloids. DOI and 2C-B are examples of totally synthetic psychedelic molecules. The neurotransmitter system of particular importance to the present discussion involves serotonin as the chemical transmitter substance. Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT) is an evolutionarily ancient neurotransmitter. In the mammalian brain, it all originates from small groups of cells in a phylogenetically old area of the upper brainstem/midbrain known as the raphe nuclei. These raphe cells send projections to higher brain centers, releasing serotonin into terminal fields of a variety of important structures. The earliest hypothesis for the cellular action of hallucinogens was based on the observation that LSD dramatically reduced the firing rate of raphe cells. One characteristic of these cells is that they fire in a regular rhythmic rate that is correlated with level of vigilance. During sleep their firing rate decreases, and during REM sleep they cease firing altogether.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness
Early experiments found that LSD potently suppressed the firing of cells in the dorsal raphe nucleus (Aghajanian, Foote, & Sheard, 1968, 1970; Aghajanian, Haigler, & Bloom, 1972). Other tryptamine hallucinogens also inhibit dorsal raphe cell firing (Aghajanian et al., 1970; Aghajanian & Haigler, 1975; deMontigny & Aghajanian, 1977). Thus, Aghajanian and Haigler (1975) hypothesized that this suppressant effect on raphe cells might be the basis for hallucinogen action. This idea was attractive because raphe cells send serotonergic projections throughout the forebrain and are the source of serotonin afferents in the prefrontal cortex (Moore, Halaris, & Jones, 1978). These ideas had relevance to an early study reported by Torda (1968). She recorded EEGs and obtained dream records from two volunteers during 11 consecutive nights. During control nights, participants received 10-minute intravenous saline infusions, which started 30 minutes after the onset of their third REM episode. On alternate nights, they received intravenous infusion of 5 mcg per minute of LSD. Volunteers were awakened during their fourth and fifth REM episodes and asked to report what was on their minds. In all cases, they reported that they were dreaming. On control nights, the average latency to the fourth REM period and dreaming was about 90 minutes, but with LSD infusion, the latency to this REM episode was shortened to 10 to 19 minutes. Problems soon developed with the raphe cell suppression hypothesis, however, largely because phenethylamine hallucinogens such as mescaline lacked this effect (Aghajanian, Foote, & Sheard, 1970; Haigler & Aghajanian, 1973). Furthermore, the nonhallucinogenic ergoline lisuride also potently suppressed raphe cell firing (Rogawski & Aghajanian, 1979). This hypothesis was, therefore, not tenable. Although suppression of raphe cell firing may not be the primary mechanism of action for hallucinogens, it is probably an important component. Raphe cells release serotonin into the cortex, and any change in firing rate would alter cortical serotonergic tone. The main effect of physiologically released serotonin in the prefrontal cortex is to inhibit pyramidal cells (Puig, Artigas, & Celada, 2005). Thus, a reduction in the rate of raphe cell firing would lead to increased excitability of cortical pyramidal cells. Today there seems to be a fairly clear consensus that the key site for hallucinogen action is a particular type of serotonin receptor known as the 5-HT2A subtype (reviewed in Nichols, 1997; Aghajanian & Marek, 1999a; Nichols, 2004). This conclusion was largely developed by correlation of rat behavioral responses to hallucinogens with their affinities and efficacies at the 5-HT2 receptor (Glennon, Titeler, & McKenney, 1984; Glennon, Young, & Rosecrans, 1983; Titeler, Lyon, & Glennon, 1988). More
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compelling evidence for this conclusion has been provided by two clinical studies that demonstrated that the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin could be blocked by preadministration of 5-HT2A-selective antagonists (Carter et al., & Vollenweider, 2005; Vollenweider, Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen, Babler, Vogel, & Hell, 1998). An explanation for low-dose visual effects produced by psychedelics may lie in the high expression of 5-HT2A receptors in primate primary visual cortex (V1; Watakabe et al., 2009). Effects of 5-HT2A agonists on V1 neurons would lead to corruption of visual processing. Most recent attention on the action of hallucinogens has focused on the frontal cortex. Numerous anatomical localization studies demonstrated that 5-HT2A receptors are expressed most highly in cortical regions of mammals (e.g., McKenna & Saavedra, 1987; Pazos, Cortes, & Palacios, 1985; Pazos, Probst, & Palacios, 1987). In the rat prefrontal cortex, these receptors were primarily localized to pyramidal and local circuit interneurons (Miner, Backstrom, Sanders-Bush, & Sesack, 2003). Interestingly, 5-HT2A receptors also were expressed on the surface of dendritic neuronal outgrowths in regions that did not form direct synaptic junctions, suggesting that serotonin may exert at least some of its actions through volume transmission mechanisms. Based on their results as well as previous data, Miner and coworkers (2003) proposed that cortical 5-HT innervation is largely nonjunctional and that the entire cortical volume may be within reach of this neurotransmitter. Thus, some of the physiological actions of 5-HT in the cortex may be constantly exerted, with more or less efficacy, at the various 5-HT receptors expressed in the region, providing widespread, global, and/or sustained influence in the neocortex. In vivo PET imaging of 5-HT2A receptors has shown highest density in the anterior cingulate, followed by the parietal, orbitofrontal, temporal, occipital, and frontal cortices (van Dyck et al. 2000). Of these areas, the anterior cingulate appears to be a key site, at least in rats. Microinjections of LSD into the anterior cingulate of rats trained to discriminate the effects of LSD from saline led to complete substitution for the LSD cue (Gresch, Barrett, Sanders-Bush, & Smith, 2007). Systemic administration of a 5-HT2A receptor antagonist completely blocked this discrimination. Hallucinogens also enhance the release of the excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate in the cortex. Some controversy still centers, however, on the details of the mechanism whereby hallucinogens increase cortical glutamate. It was initially believed that the glutamate was released from thalamic afferents to the cortex. Lambe and Aghajanian (2001) proposed an indirect role for 5-HT2A receptor-modulated glutamate release that involved the release of a retrograde messenger. Such a substance could be produced as
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a result of receptor activation, diffuse out from the postsynaptic membrane and act on presynaptic terminals of glutamatergic neurons. More recently, however, Beique and collaborators (2007) have presented compelling evidence that the cortical glutamate release characteristic of hallucinogens is produced by activation of 5-HT2A receptors on a subpopulation of large neurons in the deep layers of the prefrontal cortex. In studies by Franz Vollenweider and his colleagues, positron emission tomography (PET) studies with [ 18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) were coupled with Dittrich’s APZ questionnaire (Dittrich, 1998), a rating scale for ASC. Various changes in mood and perception were correlated with changes in cerebral metabolic rate of glucose (CMRglu; Vollenweider et al., 1997). Administration of psilocybin produced a global increase in CMRglu bilaterally in areas of the cortex that are known to express a high density of 5-HT2A receptors. Their data indicate that 5-HT2A receptor activation leads to a hyperfrontal metabolic pattern, which was correlated with a depersonalization/derealization syndrome, thought disturbances, and mania-like symptoms.
Connecting Neuropharmacology with Consciousness Pyramidal cells, the principal neurons in the cortex, receive inputs from a variety of brain areas, integrate them, are largely responsible for creating a coherent reality from the incoming data, and send signals back out to subcortical areas to coordinate their activity. Current thinking is that brain function is fundamentally related in a general way to thalamocortical interconnectivity and particularly to rhythmic oscillations of “thalamocortical loops” (Llina´s et al., 2005). Indeed, it is presently thought that large-scale thalamocortical networks are necessary for consciousness (e.g., Izhikevich & Edelman, 2008; Llina´s & Ribary, 2001; Llina´s, Ribary, Contreras, & Pedroarena, 1998; Seth, Izhikevich, Reeke, & Edelman, 2006). An appreciation of how cortical and thalamic cells are regulated is crucial to understanding consciousness before one can understand how psychedelics can alter consciousness. It should first be noted that overall regulation of waking/sleep cycles (i.e., consciousness) appears to be largely driven by midbrain aminergic neurons, which, when active, promote waking and inhibit slow wave and/or rapideye-movement (REM) sleep (Hobson, 2009) [see Kokoszka & Wallace, this volume]. Brain areas most relevant to the actions of psychedelics include the midbrain dorsal raphe nuclei (DRN), which are serotonergic cells, the locus coeruleus (LC), which is noradrenergic, and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which is dopaminergic.
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The resting membrane potential of prefrontal cortical neurons is very negative, with alternating periods of membrane depolarization (“UP” states) and hyperpolarization (“DOWN” states) of large neuronal ensembles (Contreras & Steriade, 1995; Mukovski, Chauvette, Timofeev, & Volgushev, 2007). During activated states (waking and REM sleep), EEG recordings are characterized by low-amplitude, high-frequency oscillatory activity (30–50 Hz; the “gamma” band; Destexhe, Contreras, & Steriade, 1999; Ribary et al., 1991). It has been proposed that spatially restricted fast oscillations are an essential step in cortical processing of inputs because they allow formation of temporally coherent but spatially segregated clusters of neuronal activity (Contreras & Llina´s, 2001; Gray & Singer, 1989; Steriade, Contreras, Amzica, & Timofeev, 1996). Pyramidal cell discharge decreases or increases with stimulation of 5-HT1A or 5-HT2A receptors, respectively (Amargos-Bosch et al., 2004; Puig, Celada, az-Matiax, & Artigas, 2003; Puig, Artigas, & Celada, 2005). The basis for these effects is rooted in the localization of these receptors in the cortex; 5-HT2A receptors are highly expressed on pyramidal cells, where their activation increases excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs; Aghajanian & Marek, 1999b). Electrophysiological studies have demonstrated that 5-HT2A receptors localized on cortical pyramidal cells have excitatory effects on projection neurons in the neocortex (Araneda & Andrade, 1991; Ashby, Jr., Edwards, & Wang, 1994). 5-HT2A receptors also are expressed by GABAergic interneurons in the PFC (Puig et al., 2010; Santana et al., 2004), where their activation appears to modulate GABA release, thereby regulating pyramidal cell activity. By contrast, 5-HT1A receptors are densely expressed on the initial axon segment of the pyramidal cell (DeFelipe et al., 2001), where they hyperpolarize the cell membrane and inhibit action potential generation. Thus, activation of 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors on pyramidal cells has opposing functional effects on cell discharge. Further, 5-HT1A receptors have higher affinity for serotonin than 5-HT2A receptors so that serotonin released into cortical fields predominantly downregulates pyramidal cell activity through stimulation of 5-HT1A receptors (Puig et al. 2003; Puig et al., 2005). Serotonin is released into cortical fields by afferent projections from the dorsal raphe nuclei, which fire at a steady rate during wakefulness, decrease their firing during slow-wave sleep, and virtually cease activity during REM sleep (Monti & Jantos, 2008). The decreased release of 5-HT that results from slowed raphe cell firing therefore removes tonic inhibition of cortical cells that arises through 5-HT1A receptor stimulation, leading to increased excitability of pyramidal cells. Tryptamine
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hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocin also have high affinity for 5-HT1A receptors and suppress raphe cell firing through direct activation of somatodendritic 5-HT1A receptors in the raphe. Hallucinogenic phenethylamines such as mescaline or DOI lack activity at 5-HT1A receptors and thus have no effect when infused directly into the raphe (Penington, 1996). When given systemically, however, they also suppress raphe cell firing and decrease extracellular 5-HT in the frontal cortex (Wright, Garratt, & Marsden, 1990). Inhibition of raphe cell firing by phenethylamine hallucinogens may be mediated by stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors that activate inhibitory GABAergic interneurons in the raphe, thus indirectly inhibiting raphe cell firing (Liu, Jolas, & Aghajanian, 2000). LC neurons display slow irregular firing during quiet wakefulness but change to sustained activation if the organism becomes stressed or excited. LC firing also decreases markedly during slow-wave sleep and virtually ceases during REM sleep (e.g., Page & Valentino, 1994). In response to novel or behaviorally relevant stimuli, however, LC neurons display transient activation and burst firing (Aston-Jones & Bloom, 1981; Grant, Aston-Jones, & Redmond, 1988; Sara & Segal, 1991; Vankov, HerveMinvielle, & Sara, 1995). Administration of LSD, mescaline, or phenethylamine hallucinogens to anesthetized rats decreased spontaneous activity of LC cells but enhanced activation of LC neurons evoked by sensory stimuli (Aghajanian, 1980; Rasmussen & Aghajanian, 1986). Chiang and Aston-Jones (1993) have proposed that systemic administration of 5-HT2A agonists suppresses LC firing indirectly, by tonic activation of an inhibitory GABAergic input to the LC, and proposed that the facilitating effect on sensory inputs was mediated through glutamate receptors in the LC. Thus, hallucinogens enhance stimuli-driven activity of LC cells, which in turn causes release of NE onto a1 receptors expressed on cortical cells. Sometimes described as a “novelty detector,” the LC has been viewed as enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio in modulating postsynaptic activity throughout the brain. The suppression of basal activity concomitantly with enhanced responding to external sensory stimuli would amplify this effect (see Marek & Aghajanian, 1998, and references therein). Thus, effects of hallucinogens on LC neurons might suggest that sensory events ordinarily not considered unusual could be perceived as having increased novelty. Indeed, it is well known that under the influence of hallucinogens, ordinary objects can seem new or novel, as if being seen for the first time. 5-HT2A and a1-adrenergic receptors have a similar regional and laminar distribution in the cortex, with heaviest expression in layer Va (Marek & Aghajanian, 1999), and activation of either 5-HT2A or a1-adrenergic receptors modulates cortical pyramidal cells and interneurons in a parallel fashion
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(Marek & Aghajanian, 1994, 1996, 1999), leading to increased cortical cell excitability. Dopaminergic projections from the VTA to the prefrontal cortex also may be involved in controlling membrane potential states that define assemblies of excitable pyramidal neurons in the cortex (Lewis & O’Donnell, 2000). Stimulation of the VTA with trains of stimuli resembling burst firing evoked a long-lasting transition of pyramidal cells to the up state, an effect that was blocked by a D1 dopamine receptor antagonist (Lewis & O’Donnell, 2000). The VTA receives 5-HT afferents from the raphe and, important to this discussion, VTA dendrites express 5-HT2A immunoreactivity and tyrosine hydroxylase colocalization (Doherty & Pickel, 2000). Nocjar, Roth, and Pehek (2002) also found that 5-HT2A receptors were colocalized, in part, to tyrosine hydroxylase-containing cells throughout all subnuclei of the VTA. Thus, hallucinogens also have stimulating effects on dopaminergic cells in the VTA, leading to alterations in extracellular dopamine in cortical fields. Thus, psychedelic drugs have a multifaceted pharmacology, acting directly on 5-HT2A receptors in cortical pyramidal cells to excite them while at the same time acting on cells in the DRN, the LC, and the VTA, all of which send monoamine projections to the cortex that ultimately lead to increased excitability of cortical cells. 5-HT 2A receptors also can positively modulate glutamatergic transmission in the prefrontal cortex (Aghajanian & Marek, 1997; Beique et al., 2007; Ceglia et al., 2004; Scruggs, Patel, Bubser, & Deutch, 2000). Cortical cell function is also modulated by interneurons, where GABAmediated inhibition determines the spread of cortical activation by sculpting precise activity patterns (Llina´ s et al., 2005). As is the case with pyramidal cells, GABA interneurons consist of at least two populations, one of which expresses 5-HT2A receptors and the other, 5-HT1A receptors. When the DRN is stimulated, however, the majority of responses elicited in GABAergic fast-spiking interneurons (FSi) are inhibitions. Manipulations of FSi activity modulate the amplitude of gamma waves (Cardin et al., 2009), allowing the serotonergic system to finely tune the amplitude of gamma oscillations during cognitive tasks. How does this information all fit together in a model of hallucinogen effects on cortical function? Although the functional circuitry of the cortex is not yet well understood, results by Sanchez-Vives and McCormick (2000) from experiments using ferret prefrontal cortical slices have suggested that the basic operation of cortical networks is the generation of self-maintained depolarized states that are tightly regulated through interaction with local GABAergic neurons and intrinsic membrane
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conductances. The ability of cortical networks to generate persistent and recurring activities even in the absence of ongoing subcortical inputs could be a process that underlies perceptual influences on sensory information processing. Clearly, changes in cortical cell sensitivity induced by psychedelics would dramatically affect these cortical networks. Serotonin 5-HT2A receptors also are localized in areas of the thalamus and in the reticular nucleus of the thalamus. Although very few functional studies with hallucinogens have been carried out in these areas, the thalamus may be the second most important site of action for hallucinogens. The thalamus, along with the amygdala, represents the major source of glutamate afferents innervating the neocortex, and hallucinogens increase glutamate levels in cortex. The thalamus not only processes somatosensory inputs but also receives afferents from both the DRN and the LC (Asanuma, 1992). Essentially all incoming sensory information is processed through the thalamus, with modulation by the reticular nucleus of the thalamus, which has afferents from specific thalamic nuclei and associated cortical areas. Many thalamic nuclei as well as the reticular nucleus express 5-HT2A receptors. Alterations in the firing mode of thalamic neurons are associated with dramatic changes in the neuron’s responsiveness to peripheral stimuli (McCormick & Bal, 1997). Hallucinogens not only perturb thalamic functioning but also lead to increased concentrations of cortical glutamate. Thus, hallucinogens reduce the signal-to-noise ratio in the information stream arriving at the cortex from thalamic terminals. In rat brains, significant levels of 5-HT2A receptor mRNA are found in the reticular nucleus of the thalamus (Cyr, Landry, & Di Paolo, 2000). Synaptic inputs to the reticular nucleus arise from the other thalamic nuclei, and send inhibitory projections back into the thalamus, apparently serving a negative-feedback regulatory role in thalamic function, as a sort of “searchlight” of attention (Crick, 1984; Sherman & Guillery, 1996) and to control elements of signal-to-noise or quality of information being sent to the cortex (see Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001, and references therein). In particular, the thalamic reticular nucleus can direct “attention” through its inhibitory GABAergic input to all other thalamic nuclei and assists in organizing activity in specific thalamic nuclei according to characteristics of sensory input and attentional demands (Behrendt, 2003; Smythies, 1997). It is thus in the thalamus, and in particular the reticular nucleus of the thalamus, that we find what might be a gate or filter for determining which information is sent to the cortex. Dysfunction in the reticular nucleus would lead to loss of sensoryspecific inhibition of specific thalamic nuclei and further impairment of
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the signal-to-noise ratio. “Noise” could then predominate over stimulusspecific activity, with relay cells being recruited into thalamocortical circuits without receiving adequate sensory input. The combination of increased thalamic relay cell excitability and reticular thalamic nucleus dysfunction could lead to activation of thalamocortical circuits and the formation of coherent assemblies of thalamocortical oscillations that would be independent of afferent sensory inputs, potentially giving rise to underconstrained perception, such as hallucinations or dream imagery (Behrendt, 2003).
Simplified Summary of the Mechanism Discussions Hallucinogens appear to exert their effects at the molecular level mainly by stimulating serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. In the prefrontal cortex, these receptors are localized on pyramidal cells and certain fastspiking GABA interneurons. Hallucinogens reduce the firing of raphe cells either directly by stimulation of 5-HT1A receptors or indirectly by 5-HT2A receptor activation of inhibitory GABA interneurons. Cessation or reduction of raphe cell firing would lead to decreased serotonergic tone, which would include reduced activation of inhibitory cortical axonal 5-HT1A receptors, enhancing cortical cell excitability. Activation of 5-HT2A receptors in the LC and VTA also leads to increased NE and DA release, respectively, also resulting in enhanced excitability of cortical cells. Pyramidal cell conductance caused by spontaneous network activity in vivo is remarkably well balanced between excitation and inhibition. This proportion is maintained and remains stable during fluctuations in total membrane conductance. This proportionality is the result of the interaction between recurrent excitation and feedback inhibition, which scales with the level of activity present in the local network. This stable, balanced activity keeps neurons at a noisy and elevated level of depolarization near their firing threshold (Haider, Duque, Hasenstaub, & McCormick, 2006). One can now begin to appreciate that the overall effect of hallucinogens on brain function is extremely complex, involving multiple interactive neurotransmitter systems. Keep in mind that these discussions are at a very rudimentary level of understanding. Nevertheless, we can conclude that hallucinogens produce marked alterations within all three of the ascending brainstem monoamine activating systems, increase cortical cell excitability, perturb thalamic gating functions, and induce action potentials in cortical cells through increased glutamate release. One could envision, therefore, that hallucinogens greatly enhance sensitivity/excitability of cortical processing while at the same time altering
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glutamate release from thalamic afferents that normally signal incoming sensory information to be processed. That is, the signal-to-noise ratio in the cortex for incoming sensory inputs from the thalamus would be very low. Such reasoning is generally consistent with empirical observations that the low-dose effects of hallucinogens include greatly amplified or distorted incoming sensory stimuli. Probably the most important idea to keep in mind is that hallucinogens render the cortex hyperexcitable, while at the same time the normal sensory information that it should be processing has been degraded or, at high doses, possibly eliminated altogether by changes in thalamic gating functions. We posit that the cortex may “fill in” or extrapolate missing information, creating sensory constructs where none exist. What quality of consciousness will be generated under these conditions? We would propose that affective components derived from elements of the limbic system (e.g., the hippocampus and amygdala) will replace external sensory information. Signals arising from introspective and interoceptive processes, virtually imperceptible during waking consciousness, may then represent a significant portion of the incoming data available for processing during the actions of a hallucinogen. Memories, emotions, and ideas will then rise to the level of conscious awareness. The external world may be effectively shut out, with one being surrounded by a sensory “vacuum.” With the cortex in a hyperexcitable state, but receiving input only from limbic structures, memory stores, and phylogenetically old brain structures in the core of the brain, what will fill that void? We have arrived at the present limits of our ability to speculate.
Conclusions Although we may not yet be able to define the underlying functional basis for consciousness, we can say that psychedelics perturb key brain structures that inform us about our world, tell us when to pay attention, and interpret what is real. Psychedelics activate very ancient brain systems that project to all of the forebrain structures that are involved in memory and feeling; they sensitize systems that tell us when something is novel. The mind is truly one of the last great frontiers of science. It is a genuine tragedy that hallucinogens cannot be more easily used in research to help elucidate the neurochemical basis of consciousness. Coupled with measures of subjective states, cognitive tests, and new brain scanning technologies, hallucinogens could be extremely powerful tools to help us understand who we are and how that identity is tied to the functions of our brains. As a modern society, we must be open to the possibilities
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presented by these substances, not only for research on consciousness but also for their ability to reconnect us with primary spiritual experiences that are largely absent from modern religions. Sadly, delving too deeply into these questions may provide knowledge that many people simply do not wish to know, and perhaps that is part of the fear of theses substances.
References Aaronson, B. S., & Osmond, H. (1970). Psychedelics: The uses and implications of hallucinogenic drugs. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Aghajanian, G. K. (1980). Mescaline and LSD facilitate the activation of locus coeruleus neurons by peripheral stimuli. Brain Research, 186, 492–498. Aghajanian, G. K., Foote, W. E., & Sheard, M. H. (1968). Lysergic acid diethylamide: Sensitive neuronal units in the midbrain raphe. Science, 161, 706–708. Aghajanian, G. K., Foote, W. E., & Sheard, M. H. (1970). Action of psychotogenic drugs on single midbrain raphe neurons. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapy, 171, 178–187. Aghajanian, G. K., & Haigler, H. J. (1975). Hallucinogenic indoleamines: Preferential action upon presynaptic serotonin receptors. Psychopharmacology Communication, 1, 619–629. Aghajanian, G. K., Haigler, H. J., & Bloom, F. E. (1972). Lysergic acid diethylamide and serotonin: Direct actions on serotonin-containing neurons in rat brain. Life Science International, 11, 615–622. Aghajanian, G. K., & Marek, G. J. (1997). Serotonin induces excitatory postsynaptic potentials in apical dendrites of neocortical pyramidal cells. Neuropharmacology, 36, 589–599. Aghajanian, G. K., & Marek, G. J. (1999a). Serotonin and hallucinogens. Neuropsychopharmacology, 21, 16S–23S. Aghajanian, G. K., & Marek, G. J. (1999b). Serotonin, via 5-HT2A receptors, increases EPSCs in layer V pyramidal cells of prefrontal cortex by an asynchronous mode of glutamate release. Brain Research, 825, 161–171. Amargos-Bosch, M., Bortolozzi, A., Puig, M. V., Serrats, J., Adell, A., Celada, P., et al. (2004). Co-expression and in vivo interaction of serotonin1A and serotonin2A receptors in pyramidal neurons of prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 14, 281–299. Araneda, R., & Andrade, R. (1991). 5-Hydroxytryptamine2 and 5-hydroxytryptamine 1A receptors mediate opposing responses on membrane excitability in rat association cortex. Neuroscience, 40, 399–412. Asanuma, C. (1992). Noradrenergic innervation of the thalamic reticular nucleus: A light and electron microscopic immunohistochemical study in rats. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 319, 299–311. Ashby, C. R. Jr., Edwards, E., & Wang, R. Y. (1994). Electrophysiological evidence for a functional interaction between 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors in the rat medial prefrontal cortex: An iontophoretic study. Synapse, 17, 173–181.
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Aston-Jones, G., & Bloom, F. E. (1981). Nonrepinephrine-containing locus coeruleus neurons in behaving rats exhibit pronounced responses to nonnoxious environmental stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience, 1, 887–900. Batson, C. D., & Ventis, W. L. (1982). The religious experience: A socialpsychological perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Behrendt, R. P. (2003). Hallucinations: Synchronisation of thalamocortical gamma oscillations underconstrained by sensory input. Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 413–451. Beique, J. C., Imad, M., Mladenovic, L., Gingrich, J. A., & Andrade, R. (2007). Mechanism of the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2A receptor-mediated facilitation of synaptic activity in prefrontal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, 104, 9870–9875. Cardin, J. A., Carlen, M., Meletis, K., Knoblich, U., Zhang, F., Deisseroth, K., et al. (2009). Driving fast-spiking cells induces gamma rhythm and controls sensory responses. Nature, 459, 663–667. Carter, O. L., Pettigrew, J. D., Hasler, F., Wallis, G. M., Liu, G. B., Hell, D., & Vollenweider, F. X. (2005). Modulating the rate and rhythmicity of perceptual rivalry alternations with the mixed 5-HT2A and 5-HT1A agonist psilocybin. Neuropsychopharmacology, 30, 1154–1162. Ceglia, I., Carli, M., Baviera, M., Renoldi, G., Calcagno, E., & Invernizzi, R. W. (2004). The 5-HT receptor antagonist M100,907 prevents extracellular glutamate rising in response to NMDA receptor blockade in the mPFC. Journal of Neurochemistry, 91, 189–199. Chiang, C., & Aston-Jones, G. (1993). A 5-hydroxytryptamine2 agonist augments gamma-aminobutyric acid and excitatory amino acid inputs to noradrenergic locus coeruleus neurons. Neuroscience, 54, 409–420. Contreras, D., & Llina´s, R. (2001). Voltage-sensitive dye imaging of neocortical spatiotemporal dynamics to afferent activation frequency. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 9403–9413. Contreras, D., & Steriade, M. (1995). Cellular basis of EEG slow rhythms: A study of dynamic corticothalamic relationships. Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 604–622. Crick, F. (1984). Function of the thalamic reticular complex: The searchlight hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 81, 4586–4590. Cyr, M., Landry, M., & Di Paolo, T. (2000). Modulation by estrogen-receptor directed drugs of 5-hydroxytryptamine-2A receptors in rat brain. Neuropsychopharmacology, 23, 69–78. DeFelipe, J., Arellano, J. I., Gomez, A., Azmitia, E. C., & Munoz, A. (2001). Pyramidal cell axons show a local specialization for GABA and 5-HT inputs in monkey and human cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 433, 148–155. deMontigny, C., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1977). Preferential action of 5-methoxytryptamine and 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine on presynaptic serotonin
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Haigler, H. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1973). Mescaline and LSD: Direct and indirect effects on serotonin-containing neurons in brain. European Journal of Pharmacology, 21, 53–60. Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protoconsciousness. Nature Reviews of Neuroscience, 10, 803–813. Hunt, H. T., & Chefurka, C. M. (1976). A test of the psychedelic model of altered states of consciousness. The role of introspective sensitization in eliciting unusual subjective reports. Archives of General Psychiatry, 33, 867–876. Izhikevich, E. M., & Edelman, G. M. (2008). Large-scale model of mammalian thalamocortical systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 3592–3598. Jaffe, J. H. (1985). Drug addiction and drug abuse. In A. G. Gilman, L. S. Goodman, T. W. Rall, & F. Murad (Eds.), Goodman and Gilman’s The pharmacological basis of therapeutics (7th ed., pp. 532–581). New York: Macmillan. Lambe, E. K., & Aghajanian, G. K. (2001). The role of Kv1.2-containing potassium channels in serotonin-induced glutamate release from thalamocortical terminals in rat frontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 9955–9963. Lewis, B. L., & O’Donnell, P. (2000). Ventral tegmental area afferents to the prefrontal cortex maintain membrane potential “up” states in pyramidal neurons via D1 dopamine receptors. Cerebral Cortex, 10, 1168–1175. Liu, R., Jolas, T., & Aghajanian, G. (2000). Serotonin 5-HT(2) receptors activate local GABA inhibitory inputs to serotonergic neurons of the dorsal raphe nucleus. Brain Research, 873, 34–45. Llina´s, R., & Ribary, U. (2001). Consciousness and the brain. The thalamocortical dialogue in health and disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 929, 166–175. Llina´s, R., Ribary, U., Contreras, D., & Pedroarena, C. (1998). The neuronal basis for consciousness. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B Biological Sciences, 353, 1841–1849. Llina´s, R., Urbano, F. J., Leznik, E., Ramirez, R. R., & van Marle, H. J. (2005). Rhythmic and dysrhythmic thalamocortical dynamics: GABA systems and the edge effect. Trends in Neuroscience, 28, 325–333. Marek, G. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1994). Excitation of interneurons in piriform cortex by 5-hydroxytryptamine: Blockade by MDL 100,907, a highly selective 5-HT2A receptor antagonist. European Journal of Pharmacology, 259, 137–141. Marek, G. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1996). Alpha 1B-adrenoceptor-mediated excitation of piriform cortical interneurons. European Journal of Pharmacology, 305, 95–100. Marek, G. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1998). Indoleamine and the phenethylamine hallucinogens: Mechanisms of psychotomimetic action. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 51, 189–198. Marek, G. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1999). 5-HT2A receptor or a1-adrenoceptor activation induces excitatory postsynaptic currents in layer V pyramidal cells of the medial prefrontal cortex. European Journal of Pharmacology, 367, 197–206.
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Massimini, M., Ferrarelli, F., Huber, R., Esser, S. K., Singh, H., & Tononi, G. (2005). Breakdown of cortical effective connectivity during sleep. Science, 309, 2228–2232. McCormick, D. A., & Bal, T. (1997). Sleep and arousal: Thalamocortical mechanisms. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 20, 185–215. McKenna, D. J., & Saavedra, J. M. (1987). Autoradiography of LSD and 2,5-dimethoxyphenylisopropylamine psychotomimetics demonstrates regional, specific cross-displacement in the rat brain. European Journal of Pharmacology, 142, 313–315. Miner, L. A., Backstrom, J. R., Sanders-Bush, E., & Sesack, S. R. (2003). Ultrastructural localization of serotonin2A receptors in the middle layers of the rat prelimbic prefrontal cortex. Neuroscience, 116, 107–117. Monti, J. M., & Jantos, H. (2008). The roles of dopamine and serotonin, and of their receptors, in regulating sleep and waking. Progress in Brain Research, 172, 625–646. Moore, R. Y., Halaris, A. E., & Jones, B. E. (1978). Serotonin neurons of the midbrain raphe: Ascending projections. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 180, 417–438. Mukovski, M., Chauvette, S., Timofeev, I., & Volgushev, M. (2007). Detection of active and silent states in neocortical neurons from the field potential signal during slow-wave sleep. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 400–414. Nichols, D. E. (1997). Role of serotoninergic neurons and 5-HT receptors in the action of hallucinogens. In H. G. Baumgarten & M. Gothert (Eds.), Serotoninergic neurons and 5-HT receptors in the CNS (pp. 563–585). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. Nichols, D. E. (2004). Hallucinogens. Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 101, 131–181. Nocjar, C., Roth, B. L., & Pehek, E. A. (2002). Localization of 5-HT(2A) receptors on dopamine cells in subnuclei of the midbrain A10 cell group. Neuroscience, 111, 163–176. Noyes, R., Jr. (1980). Attitude change following near-death experiences. Psychiatry, 43, 234–242. Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy; an inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational (J. W. Harvey, trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Page, M. E., & Valentino, R. J. (1994). Locus coeruleus activation by physiological challenges. Brain Research Bulletin, 35, 557–560. Pahnke, W. N. (1963). Drugs and mysticism. An analysis of the relationship between psychedelic drugs and the mystical consciousness. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University). Pahnke, W. N., & Richards, W. A. (1969). Implications of LSD and experimental mysticism. In C. T. Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness (pp. 399–428). New York: Wiley. Pazos, A., Cortes, R., & Palacios, J. M. (1985). Quantitative autoradiographic mapping of serotonin receptors in the rat brain. II. Serotonin-2 receptors. Brain Research, 346, 231–249.
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CHAPTER 7
Peyote and Meaning Stacy B. Schaefer Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a psychoactive plant core to the religious beliefs and practices of certain indigenous cultures in Mexico and North America. Peyote is pivotal in the cognitive foundation that defines the collective reality of the groups that consume it. This article provides historical, cultural, scientific, and phenomenological interpretations for the altered states of consciousness experienced from ingestion of this unassuming small spineless cactus. Huichol Indians of Mexico are well attuned to the attributes of peyote. Of all the indigenous groups in Mexico and the United States, they have the longest history of continuous peyote use. Today, in the 21st century, peyote remains for many Huichols an extraordinary catalyst for individual growth and cultural identity. The Native American Church, a more recent peyote religion with syncretistic characteristics incorporating elements of Christianity, also reveres peyote for its power to enable individuals to experience altered states of consciousness (ASC) that can be life transforming. The approach taken here emphasizes Huichol peyote traditions, with some references to Native American Church Peyote Ways, as a highly evolved system for achieving ASC that are culturally defining to its members. It is a system with a sophisticated framework structured so that individuals are informed by these experiences and can integrate them into their consciousness as meaningful expressions of their collective cultural worldview.
Landscape and History of Peyote Use Peyote occurs naturally from the Chihuahuan desert of San Luis Potosı´, Mexico, north to the border regions of west Texas and into the Tamaulipan Thorn Scrub of south Texas. Recognized by ancient indigenous peoples for its ability to assuage hunger and thirst and stave off exhaustion, it was also revered for its power to connect humans to the mystic realm of the gods.
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The earliest evidence of peyote use comes from two archaeological sites, one in the Lower Pecos region of southwest Texas and the other a rock shelter near Coahuila, Mexico. The rock shelter specimens have a radiocarbon date to 6,000 B.C.E.1 Further evidence of possible peyote use in the Lower Pecos River Region is suggested by stylized themes found on rock art that have been interpreted as representing visionary peyote experiences these indigenous people felt compelled to reproduce (Boyd & Dering, 1996). There is a strong link between desert dwelling hunter-gatherers, their knowledge and use of peyote, and the migrations of people and trade in peyote that reached beyond the Chihuahuan desert (Sahagu´ n, 1950–1969). At the time Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the ritual use of peyote had spread to a wide range of indigenous peoples, including agriculturalists in Central Mexico such as Aztecs, Tarascans, and Tlaxcalans (Stewart, 1987, p. 17). Peyote was seen by the Spanish clergy as a diabolical plant, evoking hallucinations that came from the blasphemous world of the devil himself. Priests prepared a catechism to be used when conducting confessions with Indians: “Hast thou eaten the flesh of man? Hast thou eaten the peyote? Do you suck the blood of others? Do you adorn with flowers places where idols are kept?” (Taylor, 1944, pp. 176–177). Efforts to eradicate peyote use were integral to the Catholic Church’s campaign to destroy indigenous religion and forever change the worldview of these peoples, a task they never entirely accomplished. Peyote use survived and continues to provide to some indigenous groups an intrinsic connection between native religious tenets and phenomenological experiences induced by this mescaline-containing plant. The Native American Church with its chapters and its affiliates, the most prominent being the Native American Church of Oklahoma, the Native American Church of North America, and the Native American Church of Navajoland, boasts 1
Furst (1989) provides a radiocarbon date of 5,000 B.C. for a string of dried peyotes found in a rock shelter in the Chihuahua desert of west Texas. Further dating of ancient peyote come from two archaeological specimens in the collection of the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Texas, of the dried tops of peyote presumably found in Shumla Cave No. 5 along the Rio Grande in Texas. These specimens have been dated through thin-layer chromatography and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry to 5,700 years ago (El-Seedi et al., 2005). Peyote specimens from Shumla Caves and Shelter CM-79 near Cuatro Cie´negas in Coahuila, Mexico, have been radiocarbon dated to 5,195 years BP and 835 BP, respectively, Interestingly, peyote specimens from the Shumala Caves have been discovered to be composed of a mixture of peyote with other plant material and appear to have been intentionally made as peyote effigies (Terry et al., 2006). Martin Terry, Department of Biology at Sul Ross University, is carrying out a populations genetics study on peyote growing from south and west Texas into northern Mexico (personal communication, June 26, 2010).
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the largest number of members of an indigenous peyote-centered religion. In 1996, membership in the Church was estimated to be well over 300,000, with members from many tribes throughout the United States and Canada (Anderson, 1996, p. 48). This peyote religion is syncretistic and combines pan–Native American beliefs and practices with Christianity. It arose as a revitalization movement, as a response to the decimation of the Native American population and the concentrated effort of the United States government to assimilate the remaining indigenous population into the dominant western culture. In Mexico, Huichol Indians have maintained their ancient peyote traditions over the centuries, adapting and incorporating changes into their practices so that even in contemporary times, peyote remains a steadfast part of their cultural identity. In Huichol culture, a deep, personal understanding of peyote and its mind-altering effects is based on informed participation that brings an emic perspective grounded in a cultural framework with which to interpret phenomenological experiences. Similarly, Native American Church members have an interpretive cognitive structure in place to provide meaning to the ASC they experience. Western scientists bring an etic view to peyote studies; they are intrigued by peyote’s pharmacology, neurochemical activity, and its physical and psychological effects in human beings. As adeptly discussed by Carden˜a (2009), the western scientific perspective seriously lacks conceptual models as well as a concise vocabulary to adequately discuss the study of consciousness. Carden˜a’s discussion of the term different modalities of experiencing in place of altered states of consciousness can be readily applied to peyote experiences. Both emic and etic approaches are examined together in the following sections; the phenomenological perspective of peyote-enhanced modalities of experiencing is emphasized.
Pharmacology and Brain Neurochemistry Peyote contains more than 60 alkaloids, and more than half of these chemical compounds are classified as phenylethylamines or tetrahydroisoquinolines. Mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine), the most abundant alkaloid in peyote, is credited with inducing mind-altering experiences. When ingested, mescaline in peyote functions like naturally occurring neurotransmitters in the brain. Depending on the dosage, mescaline can activate, inhibit, or block chemical transmission of impulses between nerve cells at synaptic sites in the central nervous system [see Presti, this volume]. This in turn affects how impulses are transmitted in the brain and how the brain processes these signals. Mescaline has the same basic
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chemical structure as the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. Norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter to which mescaline is most similar, is abundantly concentrated in the limbic system of the brain, the site where emotions such as love, hate, joy, and sadness are stimulated. Norepinephrine can also induce greater clarity of thought and plays an important role in regulating behavioral responses to sensory stimulus as norepinephrine neurons descend to the spinal cord, influencing the muscles in the arms and legs (Snyder, 1996, pp. 146, 205). The serotonin system affects sleep, mood, appetite, and depression, as well as sensory-motor processes, Serotonin causes the secretion of growth hormones and acts as a vasoconstrictor, stimulating the smooth muscles. Dopamine neurons are linked to motor abilities and serve to maintain thoughts and perceptions in accord with the reality of one’s mundane environment (Snyder, 1996, p. 209) [see Nichols & Chemel, and Previc, this volume]. Recent pharmacological research on isoquinoline compounds in peyote and other cacti provides an additional dimension to the complex nature of such neurochemical interactions. Although more studies are needed, the results so far indicate that alkaloids that may be orally inactive could become active through their interactions with isoquinolines or other monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOs) in the tissue of peyote and other cacti (Bruhn et al., 2008; Shulgin & Perry, 2002). The interaction of peyote alkaloids with the nerve cells of the brain heightens and alters input to the senses. Within 3 hours of peyote ingestion, geometric patterns in brilliant colors are perceived in constant kaleidoscope-like movement. These designs, sometimes referred to as phosphenes, are believed to arise, in part, from the discharge of neurons within the eye. If the dosage of peyote is strong, a second phase is experienced in which one feels as if in a lucid dream. Anthropomorphic and naturalistic images of people, animals, plants, and landscapes are perceived. The fact that phosphenes can be seen in total darkness has prompted some scientists to theorize that the more complex imagery comes from the central nervous system (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975, pp. 142–144). Such complex imagery may result from sensory input that is reduced or altered while one remains aware. In this state, it is proposed that stored memory-perceptions are released and experienced as dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations (Siegel & Jarvik, 1975, pp. 287–311; West, 1962, pp. 275–291). As scientists still ponder the trigger mechanisms for this phenomenon, it is fascinating to consider that the imagery that arises from ingesting visionary plants such as peyote may be caused by some dual input model that is generated from the geometry of the eye as well as from the central nervous system (Horowitz, 1978, p. 293). To add an anthropological perspective to this
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discussion, it is quite plausible that figurative images that arise during inebriation from psychoactive substances are projections of preexisting models that are culturally determined (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1978, p. 47).2 One Huichol man described his experience in their sacred desert region, Wirikuta. I felt I saw the fire turn into tissue paper . . . the form of the fire disappeared and I saw only tissue paper in the glowing form of flowers like the ones we make when we are going to sacrifice a calf. There were many colors of this flowerlike tissue paper. Then in the very center of the fire I saw in the distance a person; afterwards the mara’akame (shaman) told me it was Tatewari Grandfather Fire. I saw the entrance to the temple, even though we were in Wirikuta, and I entered the temple. I saw vines that hang from the rafters in the temple roof to make the four directions. From there, in the very center I saw Haramara (the goddess of the Pacific Ocean) in motion, then I saw Chapala (a large lake south of Guadalajara where the goddess Rapauwieyeme lives) in motion. (Schaefer, 1996a, pp. 156, 158)
Auditory sensations such as sounds of the wind, music, and song, along with voices, are amplified and are perceived differently. These are the sensations experienced by a shaman renowned for his musical abilities as a violin player, For about the first hour I don’t feel anything. Then my voice will start to feel strange and I won’t understand very well what people are speaking. Then I will have a very strong urge to play music, so I will play my violin. I will listen to music coming out of the air, pure air. Then I’ll be feeling that the air is coming down, like a cloud that is being lowered onto the earth. Soon I’ll be able to hear anything very close and clear, but I’ll hear things differently than they normally sound. (Valadez, 1986, p. 21)
Olfactory and gustatory senses are also affected by peyote inebriation, as are experiences that enhance the sense of touch to one’s skin. Personal accounts from Huichols and Native American Church members of their experiences while in ceremony include the stimulation of memories that arise from the smell of burning copal in the case of the Huichol, and cedar, in Native American Church meetings. The olfactory system includes neuromodulators 2
See Thurston (1997) for an outstanding review of the literature on hallucinogenic imagery.
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that regulate storage of information related to the olfactory experience (Wilson, 2006). Olfactory information is processed through the primary olfactory cortex, forming a direct link with the amygdala, which is involved in experiencing emotion and emotional memory, and the hippocampus, which is implicated in memory (Herz & Engen, 1996). Further research may reveal that stimulation of the olfactory system while in a peyoteinduced state may further potentiate stored memory perceptions and the release of emotions that are associated with these memories. One woman who is a member of the Native American Church shared: My mother said that when I was born that my grandfather put up a tipi and prayed for me, my tracks on this mother earth. Now, my life as an adult, I go into the tipi. [During the meeting] somebody would do something, throw cedar on the fire, and it would trigger off a memory, like my (past) relatives are there, their presence is there and I can see my relatives that have died.
Altogether, these physiological sensations make the experiences unforgettably distinctive and profound. As we have seen within Huichol and Native American Church traditions, when peyote is consumed within a ritualized context and under the guidance of a religious specialist, the experiences can be so exceptionally out of the ordinary that they are life transforming. Experiences from hallucinogen-producing substances under supportive conditions within western culture can also evoke experiences that have been reported to be so personally meaningful and spiritually significant that participants carry memories of these mystic experiences with them more than a year after they occurred (Griffiths et al., 2008).
Tobacco and Peyote as Psychointegrative Plants Tobacco, particularly Nicotiana rustica, used by Huichols in conjunction with peyote ingestion, is another plant that must be discussed. Nicotine, the active substance in tobacco, can function similarly to naturally occurring hormones produced by the brain. Nicotine, like mescaline, can activate, inhibit, or block the transmission at synaptic receptor sites in the central nervous system. Nicotine is also able to trigger the release of norepinephrine. In addition to effecting clear, focused thought, nicotine can produce effects such as excitement, restlessness, and wakefulness. In both Huichol and Native American Church peyote ceremonies, the use of tobacco is also highly ritualized and is smoked during crucial times to prepare individuals for the ceremony and bring greater control to the
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peyote experience when specific tasks are required or clear thinking is desired (Schaefer, 1996a, 2005, pp. 188–191). The interaction of peyote and tobacco is explained by one Huichol shaman: You pray . . . that you will get something from it (the peyote) that you will gain more knowledge, see things, not get nauseous or vomit . . . and then when you smoke the makutse (Nicotiana rustica) you will not feel so empeyotado. Even if you eat lots of peyote, you will not feel it that much . . . it makes one feel it very gently, that’s how the people do it . . . .Because if you eat peyote you feel differently, sometimes (the peyote) is gentle, sometimes it is very heavy . . . and then you hear things from far away, people talking from far over there. But with the makutse no, it lessens the feeling of being drunk with the peyote . . . so that you come down, that’s why they smoke . . . you get the urge to smoke when you eat peyote.
A member of the Native American Church recounts her experience in the role of the Water Woman. In the morning, the Water Woman smokes tobacco and prays aloud in front of everyone in the tipi before serving the water she has brought. You know when you go into prayer, it is like chaos. I did not know what I really was going to pray about. The main thing that kept coming to me was the peyote. I ate peyote all night, so I was peyote-affected. So I started talking about the fire, and the fireplace that it is the process of life and it led up to the peyote . . . .And the prayer just came out and it linked. You know, it related to the whole altar there . . . and then I prayed for the people.
It should be noted that these indigenous peoples who consume peyote and tobacco do so for both the visionary experiences and healing powers inherent in these plants [see Winkelman, Volume 1]. Tobacco may improve mental prowess, in Alzheimer’s patients and the motor ability of people suffering from Parkinson’s disease (Jones et al., 1992; Morens et al., 1995). Laboratory studies point to antibiotic qualities of peyote, the alkaloid hordenine inhibits the growth of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that is resistant to penicillin (McCleary, Sypherd, & Walkington, 1960, pp. 247–49). It is also recognized to have analgesic properties (Anderson, 1996; Schaefer, 1996a). Virtually all the medical studies of peyote report that it is not addicting, has beneficial qualities in rehabilitation from alcohol and drug abuse, and has many additional salubrious properties (Halpern et al., 2005; Schultes, 1938).
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The concept of psychointegrative plants proposed by Winkelman (1996) corresponds well to peyote and tobacco and their effects on brain systems and consciousness. According to him, psychointegrative plants integrate three brain systems functioning in humans beings: the R-complex or reptilian brain, the paleomammalian brain, and the neomammalian brain. The reptilian brain corresponds to the cognition required for the body’s behavioral actions, which also include habitual routines. This brain system regulates large amounts of dopamine. The paleomammalian brain manages the limbic system and functions to integrate emotion and memory for processing sensory and motor functions. It is also the center where feelings of attachment, emotional security, and identity are stimulated, and it serves a crucial role in linking the R-complex and the frontal cortex. The neomammalian brain is associated with the neocortex that surrounds the brain, housing the vast majority of neurons in the human central nervous system (MacLean, 1990). To date, no formal studies have examined the interaction of tobacco with visionary substances such as peyote. Nevertheless, “it is suspected that nicotine augments the psychoactive effects of other drugs by promoting neurotransmitter release—the same could be true for mescaline” (N. Benowitz, personal communication, March 21, 2001.3 If nicotine does indeed potentiate the neurochemical actions of peyote, then their interaction could have the capacity to integrate all three brain system processes. The mescaline in peyote and nicotine in tobacco both interact with norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine neurons that result in inhibiting feelings of depression, boredom, and habituation. These interactions foster instead feelings of renewal and revitalization, fundamental ingredients necessary for a mystic or core religious experience (Mandell, 1977; Winkelman, 1996, p. 43).
Huichol Cultural Knowledge and Peyote Experiences The essence of Huichol culture lies in the hands of the shamans. The roles they play in Huichol peyote traditions cannot be overstated. Wise from their own personal experiences with peyote over many years, they serve as botanists, healers, pharmacologists, psychologists, and religious specialists. Shamans are well versed in holistic aspects necessary to prepare the bodies and minds of individuals for their peyote journeys into other realms of consciousness. As noted elsewhere (Furst, 1969, 1972; Myerhoff, 1974; Schaefer, 1996a, 2002), pilgrims participate in a purification ritual before leaving 3
Neal Benowitz, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, has been carrying out extensive studies for more than 20 years on the effects of tobacco on the human system.
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their mountain homelands on the journey to the peyote desert. They must confess their sexual transgressions to the entire group as the leading shaman ties knots in a cord made from plant fibers for every name a pilgrim mentions. Standing in front of the fire, the shaman passes this knotted cord over each individual’s body and then throws it into the fire. A ritual name is given to each pilgrim, marking his or her entrance into another reality, a change from mundane to sacred time. Together the pilgrims are unified for the entire journey and for subsequent peyote ceremonies until the season changes and the agricultural cycle begins. Physical and psychological preparations ready Huichols for their peyote experiences. Everyone fasts throughout the pilgrimage, eating only small amounts of food and drinking little water only late in the day or early evening. Most pilgrimages take place anywhere from December to March, one of the coldest and windiest times of the year in the desert. These environmental factors also contribute to changes in the neurochemistry in the brain that influence sensory perceptions. The desert is a dry, dusty landscape with thorny shrubs, agaves, and cacti; one must walk with great caution to avoid serious injury in this environment. Firewood is scarce and the nights can be bitterly cold. The day can be extremely bright from the sun or bitingly windy from sandstorms. The alteration of consciousness through fasting and exposure to the desert elements prepares the pilgrims physically and psychologically for a transformative experience. The leading shamans help guide the pilgrims on their journey. As previously noted, tobacco is used judiciously to regulate the peyote experience. Sometimes other plants are ingested along with the peyote. Upon the direction of a shaman, some eat slices of a barrel cactus they call maxa kwaxi along with peyote. It is eaten so that one does not become too “empeyotado.” Slices of Ariocarpus retusus are sometimes consumed with peyote, as are the grated pieces of the yellow root of the plant uxa, (Mahonia trifoliolata) used for face painting (Bauml, Voss, & Collings, 1990).4 4
This species of barrel cactus belongs to either the genus Ferocactus or Echinocactus and is commonly referred to as visnaga (James A. Bauml, personal communication, September 12, 1994). To date, no botanical identification or chemical analysis has been reported for this particular species. However, Alexander Shulgin (personal communication, December 29, 1995) informed me that in the appendix of his cactus species tabulation he notes that other varieties of cactus including Echinocactus caespitosus, Echinocactus horizontalis, Echinocactus polycephalus, and Echinocactus texensis show positive tests for isoquinoline and phenethylamine alkaloids. Several Huichols have discussed with Bauml and me these desertdwelling plants and their personal experiences when ingesting them with peyote. More research is needed to fully understand the depth of plant knowledge Huichols have regarding the environment in Wirikuta and the effects that are achieved by using admixture plants with peyote.
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One Huichol shaman discussed his experience combining uxa and peyote: (The uxa) this you feel with the peyote. You feel more, but it is different, it is not like smoking makutse . . . it does not lower the strength like with makutse . . . when you combine (uxa and peyote) it is as if they elevate you, they raise you up zzzzzooooommmm. That’s how I felt. I saw the whole world very small, very round. I was moving as if I were the sun, that’s the way I saw everything. I saw the gods, where they come from and where they reside, I saw everything. That’s what happened to me when I ate uxa (with peyote).
Shamans and experienced pilgrims know how to determine the dosage strength of peyote and advise others on which peyotes and how many to consume for reaching an optimum “peak experience.” As native botanists and pharmacologists, they also know what additional plants may be optimal for an individual to consume. One never knows, however, how the journey will turn out. In the event that a pilgrim has an uncomfortable or disturbing “trip,” the leading shaman will assist the individual, providing counsel, interpretation, even a healing to help the pilgrims integrate the experience into a meaningful, transformative event that they will carry with them throughout their lifetime.
Peyote, Cultural Symbols, and Meaning Key symbolic elements serve as enculturating forces that lay the foundation of Huichol cultural identity and worldview. These symbols are introduced to Huichol children and are reinforced throughout their lives in daily and ritual existence. Peyote and the peyote pilgrimage are omnipresent in Huichol culture. Myths, rituals, songs, formal speech, even casual discourse orally convey the knowledge, experiences, and meaning of peyote in the consciousness of members. Brilliantly colored designs in Huichol embroidered clothes, bags, and woven belts, as well as beaded and yarn art for outside consumption, are visually stimulating reminders of peyote in the cultural lives of the community. In fact, women are expected to duplicate the bright geometric designs they experience from peyote into their embroidery (Eger, 1978). These designs are considered communication from the gods and a gift that must be visually shared. Huichol artwork for commercial sale, be it yarn or beaded art, also vividly portrays visual themes from peyote experiences. Dreams associated with peyote and their interpretations by family shamans bring subconscious
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messages revolving around this sacred plant as well as peyote-induced experiences to the forefront of one’s waking life. Young children are encouraged to eat small amounts of peyote. Rarely, if ever, are they required to eat more than they are ready to try. Some children are drawn to peyote and will eat enough of it to definitely have an altered experience. Usually the amount of peyote consumed by children increases when they reach pre-teen to teenage years. By then, if not personally, then vicariously they are well clued in to the corpus of core symbols that are fundamental to Huichol worldview and identity. One powerful element is the deer god Kauyumarie, the tutelary spirit of the shaman and guide for those seeking wisdom, knowledge, and luck from the peyote. One Huichol man described the powerful experience he had as a teenager encountering Kauyumarie on the pilgrimage. I made some votive arrows for Kauyumarie, the deer god, to leave where there is peyote in Wirikuta. They were for Kauyumarie because he knows everything, he knows everything about the world . . . When I arrived to Wirikuta I left one of the arrows . . . the other peyoteros [pilgrims] took out a large gourd bowl and filled it with peyote. They told me that since this was my first trip to Wirikuta I had to eat all of the peyote in the bowl. I wanted to know about god, how the world began, and how the sun first appeared, how the fire, the maize, the earth, and the god of rain first appeared . . . I continued eating [peyote]. Then I finished. One of the votive gourd bowls [on the ground] was decorated inside with beads in the figure of a deer. In two or three hours, I looked at the votive bowl and the deer inside the bowl was really large. How can that be? I continued eating more [peyote], and as I was looking into the votive bowl the deer grew in size and jumped out of the bowl. It was standing on the ground and moved in front of us. Then I found a large peyote, I was looking at it and there was a little deer on top of the peyote where the white tufts of the plant are. It was a tiny little deer—how can that be? I’m seeing deer everywhere, why? I remembered hearing from my grandfather . . . say that this is the way that you always begin to learn. And with the peyote it is the same. Well, the peyote was really, really large . . . the deer passed very close by me. I was in the middle of the peyote where the white tufts are. I [must have] flown up there, I was seated in the middle of the peyote and I flew higher up, to the mountaintop of Cerro Quemado [an inactive volcano above Wirikuta where offerings are left]. I was standing up there and I was looking at the whole world—the ocean looked really small. I not only saw the ocean but all the animals that live in the ocean, whales, snakes, mermaids . . . everything. [The deer told me] . . . you should be calm . . . then I was back down below in Wirikuta.
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A female shaman related a peyote experience in which the deer god, Kauyumarie, appeared. I saw a . . . deer where the peyote was. The deer acted like it was drunk. . . . Then white foam started to come from its mouth, the kind of foam that comes from grinding peyote. It was coming out of its mouth . . . but the deer was talking to me. I didn’t hear her very well until she saw me and we looked each other right in the eye.
These peyote visions powerfully manifest Huichol core symbols, providing vivid experiences to individuals in which they actually interact with their gods and participate in cosmological realms that structure Huichol collective worldview. Such profound experiences reverberate at the core of one’s existence; individuals become cognizant that these entities exist in dimensions one can access through peyote and in dreams. Eventually, they become an integral part of one’s waking reality.
Peyote and Perinatal Cognitive Development Over centuries of peyote use, Huichols have acquired a deep understanding of the ASC that peyote brings. Many Huichols are experienced “travelers” who have developed techniques to maximize the peyote experience and have evolved a fine-tuned cultural framework in which to understand and provide meaning to the journey. This last section examines the traditional practice of some Huichols who consume peyote while pregnant and then while nursing and the implications this may have on the cognitive development of their children. Scientific research on the effects of mind-altering substances ingested during pregnancy was undertaken in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. This was at a time when misinformation, such as the health dangers of such substances, was circulating. It was especially alleged that LSD caused chromosomal damage that could influence future generations. Mescaline was also included in these studies, including experiments with pregnant rats, mice, hamsters, and monkeys that were injected with varying doses of mescaline and then “sacrificed” to examine the results (Greber, 1967; Maickel & Snodgras, 1973; Shah, Neely, Shah, & Lawrence, 1973; Taska & Schoolar, 1972). Evidence collected in these research projects indicated that mescaline could cross the placental barrier, although the fetus did not receive as high a dose as the mother did. Once the mescaline entered the fetus, its movement to the central nervous system did not appear to be restricted. Brain tissue of the fetus rapidly accumulated mescaline in high
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concentrations, possibly because of the partially developed blood–brain barrier in the fetus. The younger the fetus was, the greater the amount of mescaline that passed to the brain. It was also noted that the metabolism of mescaline in the fetal brain was slower than in the brain of the mother.5 Some Huichol women consume peyote throughout their pregnancies; others do so after the first trimester. Miscarriages, according to some women, have been attributed to consuming peyote in the early stages of pregnancy. Other Huichol women claim that shamans can safeguard the mother and fetus from harm through prayer, healings, and offerings to the gods. Since babies in utero also receive doses of peyote via their mothers’ ingestion of the cactus, it is challenging to consider what effects this has on the cognitive development of the fetus. From 3 months onward, the primary sensory areas in the neocortex of a fetus’s brain begin to develop; the first area is tactile, then visual, followed by the auditory center. By 24 weeks, many of the neurons in the brain have developed. The eyes are sensitive to light and the fetus reacts to sound. In the third trimester of prenatal development, there is rapid brain development that causes sensory and behavioral capacities to expand (Berk, 2006, p. 86). Much more is known about the cognitive development of infants and newborns; it is assumed that this information can be applied to the second and third trimesters of a fetus. One can imagine the kinds of sensory stimuli a fetus experiences from the peyote. If hearing becomes more acute, sounds from within the womb may take on different dimensions; consider what a mother’s beating heart may sound like under such conditions. The cells in the retina of the eye and the optic nerve and other pathways that relay messages along the cells in the visual cortex continue to develop even after birth. Newborns can perceive light and show a preference for and processing of large, bold patterned forms (Berk, 2006, p. 155). By 2 months of age, they have adultlike focusing abilities and perceive colors across the entire spectrum (Berk, 2006, p. 161). Researchers theorize that internal and/or external stimulation of the neocortex of the fetus may help with the connection of neurons in the brain. It has been theorized that the reason newborns sleep so 5
It is crucial to understand that the animal experiments did not precisely replicate the dose/response of peyote consumption, nor its effects on a human mother and her fetus. Peyote contains many more alkaloids besides mescaline. Additionally, human beings ingest peyote, they do not inject it. Differentiating factors also exist between research animals and human beings, the dosage of mescaline administered, and the stage of fetal development. In only one laboratory experiment congenital malformations of the fetus were found; this was with hamsters that were injected with a large dose on the eighth day of pregnancy (Greber, 1967)
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much, and that 50% of newborn’s sleep time is REM sleep, is because REM provides the stimulation necessary for central nervous system development in young infants. Some believe that REM sleep provides stimulation that the infant does not get from the environment because it spends little time in an alert state (Berk, 2006, p. 130; DiPietro, Hoddgson, Costigan, & Hilton, 1996; de Weerd & van den Bossche, 2003). The earlier the stimulation, the better the child’s central nervous system will develop, including cognitive abilities, reflex abilities, musical abilities, and so forth.6 Thus, peyote consumed by the mother may have a stimulating effect on the baby. Some Huichol women allege that the fetus can definitely feel the effects of peyote; after a quiet period, fetuses can become very active and move in the womb. Some women say that the baby is “dancing inside.” As for communication between mother and fetus, one female shaman who specializes in fertility and childbirth explained, The baby naturally is much purer than others, the gods are helping it, like the fire and the deer, like the shaman who blesses the fire and blesses the sun . . . for this reason when the mother eats peyote she knows everything that is happening and the baby knows, too.
She goes on to say that The baby feels the same as the mother . . . when a woman is pregnant even the baby inside receives messages from the deer, messages from the peyote . . . the baby always feels the same as a person . . . the baby cannot talk, it communicates without words, only with its iyari (heart memory, a kind of soul).
One man, speaking for his wife said, “When a pregnant woman eats peyote, she and her baby get ‘drunk’ with the peyote. My wife said that when this happened to her, the baby got real quiet.” He clarified that the two do communicate, not with words but through their thoughts, telepathically. My wife said that when this happened to her that she and the baby went up to the sky, to Niwetuka (the goddess who cares for the souls). The baby is
6
Personal communications (October, 6, 1996) with Gary Montgomery, Ph.D., professor of psychology who has focused his research on child development at the University of TexasPan American.
Peyote and Meaning
still inside the mother’s womb, but its iyari goes to Niwetuka. The mother’s iyari goes there, too.
Afterward, he said, when the effects of the peyote had worn off, the iyari of the fetus returns to its place in the womb and that of the mother returns to her body. Another female shaman told of her sister’s peyote experience in the eighth month of her pregnancy. At first it hurts. Then the baby inside is real quiet. Then it moves around a lot. The baby is empeyotado also but does not know how to communicate well. My sister said that when she was pregnant and empeyotada that although the baby was inside of her she saw it right in front of her eyes. She didn’t talk with the baby. She communicated with the gods to see that everything was all right, that the baby was formed well and there was nothing wrong with it.
The children of female shamans may receive more peyote than children of women who are not. Shamans tend to consume more peyote than others. One shaman shared her peyote experience in Wirikuta when she was 2 months pregnant with her son. (In Wirikuta) I thought we would eat a lot of peyote, to see what we could encounter to learn more about our customs. So I ate eight large peyote, and the peyote was strong, I got dizzy and then empeyotada. I never thought that I was pregnant. Kauyumarie (the deer messenger) appeared like a person, and told me how I was feeling . . . He was talking to me from his heart . . . I think that Kauyumarie was talking to (my son in my womb). I didn’t think the baby would be a boy. Afterwards the shamans said that he was given to me in Wirikuta by the gods, with our goddess Uili Uvi, the mother of peyote, so that our customs will not be lost . . . That is why he was born, why they gave him to me in Wirikuta, with me eating peyote, that’s why he is peyote. I think he is peyote. He likes to eat peyote a lot . . . that’s how (some) are born.
It is interesting to contemplate these perinatal experiences. According to Stanislav Grof, perinatal experiences transcend biology and have important psychological, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions. The existence of authentic perinatal experiences, he argues, cannot be denied. The frequency of memories of their occurrence is of paramount clinical significance (Grof, 1988a, 1988b). If memories from womb experience are part of a human being’s unconscious, it is interesting to contemplate how
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peyote-related perinatal experiences could influence cognitive development and enable individuals’ access to dimensions of human consciousness generally unchartered in Western culture. Given the fact that Huichols, like their ancestors, have been practicing their peyote traditions for thousands of years, consuming this cactus does not appear to be a maladaptive trait. Huichols themselves say that their peyote customs come from their gods and are orchestrated by the wise old shamans; the health and well-being of their people and the fate of their children lie in the hands of the ancient ones. A female shaman explained it this way: I always like to eat peyote. It doesn’t matter if I am pregnant . . . If I feel well I like to eat it. There in Wirikuta the people pray to the gods and for some the gods give them the prize, (a child) that has the design of a shaman . . . a clearer of fields . . . or a deer hunter . . . That’s how they are born, I think that it happens like this because it is a custom that will never be lost.
Conclusion Western science has much to learn from cultures such as the Huichols, who, over the centuries, have acquired an intimate knowledge of peyote and its effects. They have developed and fine-tuned an elaborate worldview that provides members with tools, rituals, set, and setting to explore and advance their understanding of consciousness and human existence. The introduction of peyote to babies while in the womb or as children may create distinct pathways in their cognitive development. Exposure to peyote and its psychoactive principles when young enables Huichols to perceive the world through a variety of lenses. Through their peyote customs, Huichols gain a strong sense of cultural identity that lasts throughout their lifetimes, an identity that is well informed about consciousness and modified states of experiencing internally and externally the many dimensions of the universe that surrounds them.
References Anderson, E. F. (1996). Peyote: The divine cactus. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bauml, J. A., Voss, G., & Collings, P. (1990). Short communications, uxa identified. Journal of Ethnobiology, 10, 99–101. Berk, L. E. (2006). Child development. Boston: Pearson Education.
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Boyd, C. E., & Dering, J. P. (1996). Medicinal and hallucinogenic plants identified in the sediments and pictographs of the Lower Pecos, Texas archaic. Antiquity, 7, 256–275. Bruhn, J. G., El-Seedi, H. R., Stephanson, N., Beck, O., & Shulgin, A. T. (2008). Short communication, ecstasy analogues found in cacti. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 40, 219–222. Carden˜a, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of consciousness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation. de Weerd, A. W., & van den Bossche, A. S. (2003). The development of sleep during the first months of life. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 7, 179–191. DiPietro, J. A., Hoddgson, D. M., Costigan, K. A., & Hilton, S. C. (1996). Fetal neurobehavioral development. Child Development, 67, 2553–2567. Eger, S. (1978). Huichol women’s art. In K. Berin (Ed.), Art of the Huichol Indians (pp. 35–53). New York: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Harry N. Abrams. El-Seedi, H., De Smet, P. A., Beck, O., Possnert, G., & Bruhn, J. G. (2005). Prehistoric peyote use: Alkaloid analysis and radiocarbon dating of archaeological specimens of Lophophora from Texas. Journal of Ethnopharmacology, 101, 238–242. Furst, P. T. (1969). To find our life: The peyote hunt of the Huichols of Mexico [Video]. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Media Division. Furst, P. T. (1972). To find our life: Peyote among the Huichol Indians of Mexico. In P. T. Furst (Ed.), Flesh of the gods: The ritual use of hallucinogens (pp. 136–184). New York: Praeger. Furst. P. T. (1989). Review of Peyote religion: A history, by Omer Stewart. American Ethnologist, 16, 386–387. Greber, W. (1967). Congenital malformations induced by mescaline, lysergic acid diethylamide, and bromolysergic acid in the hamster. Science, 157, 265–266. Griffiths, R. R., Richards. W. A., Johnson, M. W., McCann, U. D., & Jesse, R. (2008). Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 22, 621–632. Grof. S. (1988a). Human survival and consciousness evolution (M. L. Valier, Ed.). Albany: State University of New York Press. Grof, S. (1988b). The adventure of self-discovery: Dimensions of consciousness and new perspectives in psychotherapy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Halpern, J. H., Sewell, A. R., Hudson, J. I., Yurgelun-Todd, D., & Pope, H. G. Jr. (2005). Psychological and cognitive effects of long-term peyote use among Native Americans. Biological Psychiatry, 58, 624–631. Herz, R. S., & Engen, T. (1996). Odor memory: Review and analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 3, 300–313. Horowitz, M. J. (1978). Image formation and cognition. Appleton-Century-Crofts and Fleschner.
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Jones, G. M., Sahakian, B. J., Levy, R., Warburton, D. M., & Gray, J. A. (1992). Effects of acute subcutaneous nicotine on attention, information processing and short-term memory in Alzheimer’s disease. Psychopharmacology, 108, 485–494. MacLean, P. D. (1990). The triune brain in evolution: Role in paleocerebral functions. New York: Plenum. Maickel, R. P., & Snodgras, W. R. (1973). Psychochemical factors in maternal– fetal distribution of drugs. Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, 26, 218–230. Mandell, A. (1977). The neurochemistry of religious insight and ecstasy. In K. Berin (Ed.), Art of the Huichol Indians (pp. 71–81). New York: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Harry N. Abrams. McCleary, J. A., Sypherd, P. S., & Walkington, D. L. (1960). Antibiotic activity of an extract of peyote Lophorphora williamsii (Lemaire) Coulter. Economic Botany, 14, 247–249. Morens, D. M., Grandinetti, A., Reed, L., White, L. R., & Ross, G. W. (1995). Cigarette smoking and protection from Parkinson’s disease: False association or etiologic clue? Neurology, 45, 1041–1051. Myerhoff, B. G. (1974). Peyote hunt: The sacred journey of the Huichol Indians. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1978). Beyond the Milky Way: Hallucinatory imagery of the Tukano Indians. L. A. UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 42, University of California, Los Angeles. de Sahagu´n, B. (1950–1969). Florentine Codex: A general history of the things of New Spain (C. E. Dibble and A. J. Anderson, trans.). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and School of American Research, Santa Fe. Schaefer, S. B. (1996). The crossing of the souls: Peyote, perception, and meaning among the Huichol Indians. In S. B. Schaefer & P. T. Furst (Eds.), People of the peyote: Huichol Indian history, religion and survival (pp. 138–168). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Schultes, R. E. (1938). The appeal of peyote (Lophphora williamsii) as a medicine. American Anthropologist, 40, 698–725. Shah, N. S., Neely, A. E., Shah, K. R., & Lawrence, R. S. (1973). Placental transfer and tissue distribution of Mescaline-14C in the mouse. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 182, 489–493. Shulgin, A. T., & Perry, W. E. (2002). The simple plant isoquinolines. Berkeley, CA: Transform Press. Siegel, R., & Jarvick, M. (1975). Drug-induced hallucinations in animals and man. In R. Siegel & L. West (Eds.), Hallucinations: Behavior, experience and theory (pp. 81–161). New York: Wiley. Snyder, S. (1996). Drugs and the brain. New York: Scientific American Library. Stewart, O. C. (1987). Peyote religion: A history. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Taska, R. J., & Schoolar, J. C. (1972). Placental transfer and fetal distribution of Mescaline-14C in monkeys. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 182, 427–432.
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Taylor, N. (1944). Come and expel the green pain. Scientific Monthly, 58, 174–184. Terry, M., Steelman, K., Guilderson, D., Dering, P., & Rowe, M. (2006). Lower Pecos and Coahuila peyote: New radiocarbon dates. Journal of Archaeological Science, 33, 176–184. Thurston, L. (1997). Entopic imagery in people and their art. M.A. thesis, N.Y. University. Retrieved July 3, 2010, from http://home.comcast.net/~markk2000/ thurston/thesis.html Valadez, S. (1986) Dreams and visions from the gods: An interview with Ulu Temay, Huichol shaman. Shaman’s Drum, 6, 18–23. West, L. J. (1962). A general theory of hallucinations and dreams. In L. J. West (Ed.), Hallucinations (pp. 275–291). New York: Grune & Stratton. Wilson, D. A. (2006). Learning to smell: Olfactory perception from neurobiology to behavior. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Winkelman, M. (1996). Psychointegrator plants: Their roles in human culture and health. Yearbook of Cross-Cultural Medicine and Psychotherapy, 5, 9–53.
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CHAPTER 8
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness Andrea E. Bla¨tter, Jo¨rg C. Fachner, and Michael Winkelman Drugs, Addiction, and Altered Consciousness One of the foremost methods for producing altered states of consciousness (ASC) is the consumption of drugs (Tart, 1969). The basic form of communications for neurons, the basic building blocks of our nervous systems, is electro-chemical, allowing exogenous drug sources to play a role similar or identical to that of our central nervous system. Major bodily neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, monoamines, noradrenalin, serotonin, GABA, anandamide, and dopamine (Maisto, Glizio, & Connors, 2004, p. 45; see Presti and various chapters on psychoactive substances, this volume) have exogenous analogues found in drugs such as tobacco, opium, cocaine, and cannabis. When a drug has a similar chemical structure to that of an endogenous neurotransmitter, the drug can bind with the receptor cells, duping the receptor cells into reacting as if the original neurotransmitter was stimulating the neuron. Drugs can increase or decrease the synthesis of neurotransmitters, they can interfere in the transport, storage or release of neurotransmitters, and they can influence the breakdown of neurotransmitters, block the reuptake, or manipulate activity or blockage (Maisto et al., 2004). As Previc [this volume] shows, these exogenous stimulants of our endogenous reward systems can play a major role in a variety of cognitive and emotional processes. Using and misusing drugs is an old phenomenon and seems to be a biological universal of humankind like eating, drinking, sex, and aggression.
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Drug consumption can have many dysfunctional effects, from acute intoxication leading to bodily or mental damage to psychopathologies, economic and social loss, accidents, and criminality. On the other hand, many commonly used drugs have a variety of adaptive advantages. Smith (1999) reviews evidence that fitness benefits accrued to our ancestors as a consequence of their ability to respond to these psychoactive substances. Across the diverse classes of plant drugs there are effects of enhanced vigilance, the ability to ignore pain in the interest of survival activities, increased access to mating opportunities, reduction of apprehension and stress, feelings of detachment and euphoria, increased endurance and self-confidence, enhanced sensory and mental acuity, reduction of defensiveness, and reduction of depression and self-defeating activities. Clearly many adaptive mechanisms could have been involved in humans’ physiological and cultural adaptations to environmental sources of consciousness-altering chemicals that provide relaxation, strength, anxiety reduction, pain endurance, enhanced bonding, nutrients, and many other effects. Sullivan and Hagen (2002) review evidence of a long-term evolutionary relationship between psychotropic plant substances and humans’ cognitive capacities that indicate there were selective benefits of substance use. They characterize these benefits in terms of the ability of plants to provide neurotransmitter analogues that served as substitutes for endogenous transmitters that are rare or otherwise limited by dietary constraints. These are primarily in the monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin, as well as acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and dopamine that are crucial for normal brain function and require dietary precursors. These neurotransmitters are central to managing stress, exerting selective pressures for metabolic systems that utilize these exogenous sources of precursors for these neurotransmitters. Although drug taking is a universal phenomenon, it manifests a wide range of culturally learned patterns that dramatically affect drug reactions, including addiction (Bla¨tter, 1990; Schivelbusch, 2002; Vo¨lger & von Welck, 1982). These cultural set and setting factors partly determine drug experiences, including alterations of consciousness and addictions. Although basic biological mechanisms involved in addictions are illustrated in the many animals that can share our drug preferences and dependencies (McGovern, 2009; McKim, 1991; Siegel, 1979, 1989), reactions to drugs are nonetheless variable. Some, but never all of the people who try a drug, develop a habit, resisting or adopting occasional consumption patterns, but because of compelling biological effects most users tend to take more than one kind of drug (e.g., coffee and alcohol, betel and tobacco), and many do so daily. Users are generally aware of the risks from the drugs they
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are taking, but for some the risks do not deter the addictive impulses. For example, the recognized horrors of the addictive experience are ignored by the user in the repeated search for the noted pleasurable effects associated with the high of a cocaine rush. To the outsider, the drug-intoxicated users do not always seem to be in pleasurable states. People who try drugs often first get dizzy or sick, some even vomit. Users have to learn to like their intoxicated states of consciousness (Becker, 1963). Some writers1 have described the addict’s dramatic indifference toward everything but his or her favorite drug and refer to the paradox of addiction: Intoxication is not an euphoric or pleasurable state anymore (Diekhoff, 1982; Plant 1999). Consequently, some cultivate highly polytoxicomanic daily consumption patterns of stimulants to work and depressants to relax, a typical feature of modern societies. Consumption of drugs and their effects on consciousness are at the core of one of the most serious problems of modern societies, that of addictions.
The Constructions of Addiction Across time and cultures, views of what constitutes addiction and its causes have varied widely. Protestant (Calvinistic) conceptions of addiction provided the roots of the modern view of addiction (Nolte, 2007, p. 52). This Reformation perspective of addiction as a moral failing was succeeded by different phases leading to the systematization and institutionalization of the modern medical concept of addiction. The contemporary view of addiction as a phenomenologically perceivable disease with many facets has evolved, but although religious-scientific discourse transformed into medico-scientific discourse, the main ingredients have remained the same. The drunkard of Reformation times was defined as ill because he did not live a holy life; the drunkard of the industrial era is defined as ill because he does not meet standard norms such as productivity, functionality, and success, the keywords both of Calvinism and capitalism (Nolte, 2007, p. 53). The addict of today suffers from a multifaceted and varied disease of compulsions and wanting with fixations as diverse as sex, gambling, food, fetishes, and of course a bewildering variety of natural and synthetic substances.
1
Several artists (see Volume 1) have described their experiences with drugs and addiction. William Burroughs, Aleister Crowley, Thomas de Quincey, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards, to name just a few, have used drugs for inspiration and were known for their excessive consumption (Diekhoff, 1982; Fachner, 2006; Plant, 1999; Shapiro, 2003).
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In the 19th century, the addictions of alcohol were expanded to the opiates, which since then have been recognized as dependency forming. In the course of time, more substances were included under addiction theory. Since the second half of the 20th century, a dematerialization of addiction has taken place and immaterial dependences (e.g., gambling, sex, work) have proliferated. A new sensibility for nonsubstance addictions has come to public consciousness, and a new field of social problems emerged (Schetsche, 2007) in this new phase of the concept of addiction (Nolte, 2007, p. 54). Since 1990, another change has been visible, mainly in European politics in the trend toward a more accepting drug policy of risk reduction, especially in case of opiate addicts (Valentine, 2007; WHO, UNODC, & UNAIDS, 2004), but the farewell to the radical goal of abstinence in favor of risk reduction strategies has not yet reached other areas, like tobacco or cannabis consumption (Hess, Kolte, & SchmidtSemisch, 2004). Since the second half of the 20th century, addiction has been perceived as one of the great social problems of modern societies, and in the 21st century, nearly every behavioral problem has been thought of as an addiction. Nonetheless, the concepts of addiction and dependence remain vague and value bound. By WHO standards, the term addiction was officially replaced by dependence in 1974 because of the negative connotation of the term addiction. In its popular meaning, addiction “carries a moral tone of reproach, suggesting weakness or absence of the will and lack of discipline” (Luik, 1996, p. 23). In this sense, addiction involves a value judgment and, strictly speaking, is no more of a scientific term than dependence. Today the two terms are used virtually synonymously, as we do in this paper. The dominant medical models of addiction have come to emphasize a genetic susceptibility, absolving both the individual addict and society of responsibility for the problems. This biological dependency model ignores both the set and setting dynamics of dependence as well as the underlying philosophy of the dominant treatment models. The medical view of dependence as reflected in the medical classificatory systems Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and International Classification of Diseases (ICD10) frames addiction as a psychopathological disorder characterized by a habitual behavior with main features of tolerance, withdrawal, and craving. The DSM-IV definition of dependence is based on a spectrum of possible criteria ranging from acute intoxication to withdrawal with attacks of sudden cramps. There is no consistent picture of dependence, but there are many different types and widely varying degrees. Dependence therefore is a multifactor phenomenon that is not
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limited to a single substance or object or situation. Notably, the medical definitions of drug dependence, abuse, and habituation are based on descriptions of habitual behavior, and they do not specify the role of drugs (Maisto, Galizio, & Connors, 2004, p. 15ff ). Drug-related behaviors and experiences such as physical and psychological dependence (requiring the drug to function), tolerance (requiring increasing doses of the drug to achieve the same effect), abuse, withdrawal syndromes (negative symptoms after discontinuing the use of the drug), craving, and cognitive and psychotic disturbances used in DSM-IV for diagnostic purposes remain vague and imprecise and include a moral, disapproving tone. The one collective and most important feature of addiction is craving, the strong, sometimes irresistible desire to consume a drug, a rather subjective feature not measurable in clinical settings; it remains an extremely vague concept. There are no objectively observable behavioral standards, and craving might be applied to any significant behavioral change (Luik, 1996, p. 27) as a kind of focused consciousness. The core biological concept of addiction implies that an entire set of feelings and behaviors is the unique result of one biological process (Peele, 1985), but it is difficult to separate physical and psychological dependence from overpowering desire and habituation. Many critics conclude that the definitions of dependence employ terms that are virtually indefinable and heavily value laden. Only physical tolerance can be a straightforward measure of addiction, while psychological dependence is less inevitably manifested and more susceptible to the elements of set and setting (Peele, 1985; Zinberg, 1984). Although addiction is a heterogeneous group of pathologies or disliked behaviors that exceed simple generalities (Luik, 1996, p. 21), there are nonetheless noteworthy commonalities in the dominant perspectives of medicine and science. One is the conviction that addiction, including tolerance, withdrawal, and craving, involves biochemical processes that leave the organism no choice but to act in the stereotypical ways of addiction. This process is thought to be inexorable, universal, and irreversible, independent of individual group, cultural, or situational variations, whether animal or human, whether child or adult (Peele, 1985, p. 1).
Total Drugs Effect and Set and Setting In contrast to the medical emphasis on the biological effects of drugs, the concepts of environment, setting, expectations, and culture are central constructs in addiction theories of the social sciences (Dollinger & SchmidtSemisch, 2007; Maisto et al., 2004; Uchtenhagen & Zieglga¨ nsberger,
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2000). Acceptance and use of a certain psychotropic substance in a population, a subcultural group, an occupational group, and so forth involve learned behaviors determined by personal characteristics and sociocultural factors (Becker, 1963; Bla¨tter, 2007). Expectations shape personal behavior and experiences, and drug use involves significant others that facilitate access and participate in producing the experience. Use, abuse, and addiction are seen as phenomena of conformance to a behavior that is (sub)culturally accepted and assisted (Becker, 1963). Even the felt effects of consumption are culturally formed (Bla¨tter, 2000, 2007). Individual and cultural variations in responses to drugs reflect “total drug effects,” how the physiological effects of substances are mediated by personal, social, and cultural influences. Helman (1994) makes the distinction between macro and micro context effects. Macro context drug effects involve influences from the sociocultural system; these include social, political, economic, and moral factors and influences from family, other users, advertising, and sales processes. These are illustrated by the greater effectiveness of brand-name analgesics over unlabeled sources of the same drug (Moerman, 2000). Micro context effects are reflected in “set” and “setting” influences. These involve the expectations of the recipient, including attitudes, knowledge, and cognitive preferences of the person (the “set” as in mindset) and the social and physical context (“setting”) of the drug consumption or medication. These psychodynamic effects are investigated as part of placebo effects, where nonpharmacological factors include arbitrary drug attributes such as color and shape, the physical setting in which the drug is administered, and the prescriber’s characteristics such as status and personality. The finding that drug effects, addiction, and dependence are situationally, socially, and culturally determined questions the disease view of addiction (Peele, 1985, p. 128). Nonbiological factors, such as personality, cognitive and developmental factors, cultural, social, situational, and ritualistic aspects, influence the reaction to drugs (Bla¨tter, 2007). Situational factors reflect a reality of desire, that drug effects cannot be separated from the situation in which the drug is taken. The rituals that accompany use and addiction are important elements in continued use and show the important ritualistic aspect of use and dependence.
The Paradox of the Biomedical Concept of Addiction There is a paradox in the medical approach to addiction in that practice does not follow ideology. Although addiction is seen in the medical framework as a physical and biological condition, the dominant treatment models
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of American biomedicine have come to follow the Alcoholics Anonymous (1976, 1987) approaches that do not share the medical concept of addiction. The underlying ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), reputed to be the most widespread and effective treatment system in the United States, advocates the perspective that addiction is a spiritual disease and that consequently the addict is powerless in the face of the addiction and can only escape through a surrender to a higher spiritual power, however one conceptualizes that power. The AA approach explicitly conceptualizes addiction in terms of altered consciousness, with its 12-step program including changes in consciousness and a spiritual awakening as fundamental to overcoming addiction. The AA recovery process emphasizes the importance of an alteration of consciousness, calling for “a new state of consciousness and being” (Alcoholics Anonymous, 1987, p. 106) designed to replace the self-destructive pursuit of alcohol-induced altered states with a positive, life-enhancing approach. The engagement of biomedicine with this alternate framework is so complete that the American Medical Association will only accept as adequate programs for physician rehabilitation that are so extensive in terms of frequency of meetings and other features (availability of followup, support systems) that the only program that may fulfill all of the requirements is AA/NAC (Alcoholics Anonymous/Native American Church) (Houck, 1998). How can we reconcile a biomedical model with a treatment program that calls for a spiritual awakening and modification of consciousness as fundamental to resolution of addiction?
Dependence as an Acquired State of Consciousness Metzner described the relationship of addiction and dependence to the dynamics of consciousness in general and the alteration of consciousness in particular. He proposed a model of consciousness as a “spherical field of awareness, that surrounds us and moves with us wherever we go” (Metzner, 1994, p. 5). Awareness and attention can be thought of as a kind of beam that can focus on a very narrow point or can take in a much wider range and area of the total circle of potential consciousness. In terms of this 360° circle of potential awareness and attention, a usual baseline state of consciousness might engage 30° to 60°, with a constant narrowing and widening of focus (Metzner, 1994, p. 6). For instance, expansion of consciousness unfolds every morning, when we wake up. Metzner refers to mother–infant bonding and especially breastfeeding as natural human experiences in which extreme selective narrowing of consciousness occurs (Metzner, 1994, p. 7).
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Dependence is a contracted state of consciousness that appears as a compulsive behavior that is fixed and repetitive. The addictive lifestyle becomes more and more ritualistic and restricted, and attention and behavior become isolated from interpersonal and occupational relations. Some ASC such as transcendence and ecstasy involve an expanded awareness of consciousness that seems to exceed the normal baseline condition of awareness, exemplified in mystical experiences of connection with the entire universe [see Beauregard, Volume 2]. In this model, addiction is represented by an extremely narrow, focused scope or even point of consciousness. In contrast, ASC are time-limited states in which the patterns of thought, feeling, and mood of perception and sensation are altered from the ordinary baseline conditions. From a neurophysiological perspective (Tassi & Muzet, 2001), both dependent and transcendent ASC may be produced by a variety of induction methods, not only drugs but also behaviors such as sleep or sensory deprivation, meditation, and so forth. Additionally, Tassi and Muzet (2001, p. 185) noted a wide range of physiological states of consciousness, reflecting spontaneously changing levels of vigilance, arousal, and biological rhythms. Human states of consciousness are constantly changing, undergoing periodic fluctuations during the 24-hour circadian cycle and the regular modulation of physiological processes shifts in states of consciousness between waking, sleeping, and dreaming. A similar periodicity of ASC is seen in a second endogenous cycle, the 90-minute ultradian cycle of doing and resting, a shift from left-brain to right-brain predominance reflecting differential sympathetic and parasympathetic activation (Rossi, 1991; see Kokoszka & Wallace, this volume). These fluctuations of consciousness are natural and inevitable, with health, well-being, and creativity linked to the ability to tune into and utilize naturally occurring and artificially induced modulations of consciousness (Metzner, 1994, p. 4). Modulating consciousness with external stimuli is a pervasive and natural human drive. Humans have developed a variety of catalysts and triggers of ASC, including foods, sounds, rhythms, visual stimuli, movements, breathing exercises, hypnosis, meditation, shamanistic practices, religious rituals, and mainly drugs that can capture our capacities for addiction. Our addictive tendencies must be understood in relationship to our similarly pervasive tendency to deliberately seek ASC. When an external stimulus, like a drug or a certain behavior, has the ability to produce an immediate, effective, and pleasant modification of mood and sensation, there is a high likelihood for repetition and a potential for the development of attachment and dependence (Metzner, 1994, p. 4). When a behavior becomes so habitual as to dominate the individual
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life to the disadvantage of interpersonal and occupational functioning, the diagnosis of addiction or dependence is given. Dependence, compulsions, and attachments are an extreme of normal experience but an inevitable part of human experience, beginning with mother–infant bonding. Dependence, compulsions, and attachments, whether or not they involve drugs, involve a fixation of attention and a narrowing of perceptional focus. This disposition to fixate and focus attention is extremely useful and beneficial where there is a need to reduce pain, fear, or anxiety. Addictive drugs are potent modifiers of mood and sensation because they involve a very rapid need satisfaction and anxiety reduction. Psychoactive drugs can shift the focus of attention from anxiety to relaxation, and because they bring these changes effectively and rapidly, consumers quickly learn how to use them to escape painful conditions. Fixation and dependence can then easily develop. Awareness is disengaged from other aspects of our experience of reality, particularly unpleasant aspects. Means that can immediately and effectively satisfy needs may lead to attachment or addiction processes. In focusing attention on the means, the experience of craving or wanting begins. The power to instantly alter consciousness, especially to move it from painful to pleasurable, can be generalized from the physiological drug effect to the drug induction behavior. In the subsequent repetition of the relieving acts over time, a kind of ritual behavior develops. The ritual aspect of addiction and compulsion is significant; ingestion of drugs that produce dependence is generally associated with ritualistic behavior. Development of fixed rituals is essential for the formation of addictive behavior (Metzner, 1994). Compulsive repetition is described for alcohol, opiate, and cocaine consumers, and ritualistic ingestion is quite obvious in the well-known cases of socially sanctioned and commercially promoted addictive substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. Ingestion rituals are also evident in food addictions and in the case of activity addictions such as compulsive sexual activity, gambling, shopping, or working. These patterns reflect an ability of ritual to reduce anxiety and change consciousness through absorption in routine tasks (Metzner, 1994, p. 8). Indeed, ritual is a cross-cultural pattern used to alter consciousness with deep biogenetic roots in primate rituals that function to reduce aggression and enhance relaxation (Winkelman, 2010). Moreover, rituals are important, too, when it comes to learning controlled, nonaddictive consumption patterns for highly addictive substances. Studies of controlled use of heroin (Zinberg, 1984) and cocaine (DeCorte, 2000) have illustrated the possibilities of using these substances regularly without developing tolerance, withdrawal, and dependence by following strict
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rules of rare collective ingestion. These findings emphasize the importance of factors beyond the physiological effects in explaining addictions and the alterations of consciousness sought. Although the search for transcendence and expanded or heightened states of consciousness may involve drugs, it is not usually characterized by dependence. Generally, the consciousness-expanding psychedelics do not lead to addiction (McKim, 1991; Nichols, 2004). Their effects are too unpredictable, varied, subtle, and delayed to allow the immediate pain or tension relief the addict seeks (Metzner, 1994). Furthermore, in contrast to the narrowing focus of addiction, psychedelics tend to produce experiences that widen the focus of attention beyond the boundaries of the ordinary or baseline state. They represent the opposite of the addictive contractions of consciousness. However, transcendent experiences themselves, whether induced by drugs or other means, can also become the object of addiction with a similar state regularly involved and to the exclusion of other interests (Metzner, 1994, p. 9). This seems to be a rare exception. In contrast is the widely noted ability of psychedelics to counter addictions (see Winkelman, 2009b). Calabrese (2007) maintains that many addiction professionals consider the Native American Church (NAC) to be the only effective treatment of alcoholism among Native Americans. NAC members consume peyote in an all-night meeting during which all the community may participate in singing, prayers, chanting, and drumming. Peyote contains mescaline, with stimulant properties similar to ephedrine and amphetamines, and has additional effects mediated through the serotonergic system (McKim, 1991). Peyote produces a physical and psychological afterglow (see Halpern, 1996, for review) that has been noted to be conducive to therapeutic interventions by increased openness to communication regarding one’s problems. Pharmacological effects are not the only treatment mechanism. The effectiveness of the NAC as addiction treatment includes a variety of supportive psychotherapeutic modalities: a master guide, marathon group sessions, ego-reduction techniques, social networks, and self-actualization (Calabrese, 1997, 2007; Wiedman, 1990). The NAC also addresses addiction through social psychological mechanisms, forming a sense of community that promotes a new identity and a social support group that does not use nor tolerate alcohol use. The NAC brings hope to Native American communities, instilling a moral code of devotion to family and obligation to the community and producing feelings of spirituality and unity (Aberle, 1966). Peyotism provides Native Americans with religious healing, transcendence, release from guilt, guidance, and a sense of purpose.
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Heggenhougen (1997) suggests that therapeutic effects involve managing cultural alienation experienced by young Native Americans, providing a context for a ritual death and rebirth, and construction of a positive identity with one’s culture. Jilek (1994) conveys the peyotists’ perspective that the peyote ritual combats alcoholism through reducing physical and mental stress and enhancing mental and physical strength through contact with the supernatural. Calabrese (1997, 2007) describes the Peyote Way as a cultural psychiatry that increases suggestibility and leaves adults more open to education and mental health interventions. In this sense, peyote rituals heal by shaping consciousness in ways that facilitate symbolic healing processes. Calabrese (2007) also notes that unlike many traditional etiologies that attribute personal misfortune to supernatural causes (e.g., witches, taboo violations), the Peyote Way instead places the causal factors in a lack of personal responsibility for one’s own behavior. Psychedelics can help patients open their consciousness and widen their awareness (see coverage of addiction treatment programs with ibogaine, LSD, and ayahuasca; Winkelman, 2009a, 2009b; Winkelmann & Roberts 2007b). Under the influence of these substances, which Winkelman (2007) calls psychointegrators, people can acquire spiritual insight, learn to recognize and identify their own restricted and destructive patterns of addictive behavior, and switch to new, healthier perspectives and behaviors. These effects are dependent on set and setting but have cross-cultural manifestations that reflect physiological mechanisms. The interrelationship of drug addiction, ASC, and spirituality is a theme repeated across cultures (Heggenhougen, 1997; Jilek, 1994; Winkelman, 2001, 2009a, 2009b). The universality of spiritual practices associated with ASC suggests a need for experiencing alterations of consciousness that are intrinsically linked to concepts of spirituality. The association of drug addiction with our drive for seeking alterations of consciousness involves a common biological basis in the brain for rewarding and addicting experiences, particularly in relation to others. The concept of meaningful social connections links spiritual states and our addictions in our deep-seated need and desire for social bonding, a function of our paleomammalian brain where the predominance of opioids are found (cf. MacLean, 1990).
The Reward System and ASC Recent findings in the neurobiology of addiction research using brainimaging techniques provide insights into the development of addiction involving anatomic and functional connections between hippocampal
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and amygdala structures that modulate emotions and regulate affects. A common quality of all psychoactive drugs is that they alter the evaluation of sensory input and its conceptual comparison and assessment with known information (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). This happens through drug-specific individual activation and inhibition of the interaction among the midbrain, cerebrum, and cerebellum. One of the basic functions of the hippocampal structures seems to be the generation of reasonable internal world-models and the comparison of expected and incoming data. Metzner (1994) discussed the effect of drugs on contracted and expanded consciousness using a circle model of “potential awareness” (p. 5ff). Awareness is narrowed under the influence of addictive drugs or expanded under the influence of psychedelic drugs. The model is based on the potential sum of sensory information reaching the brain structures, throttled by regulatory mechanisms in the neuronal pathways. The mesolimbic system of the midbrain changes the evaluation parameters through emotional coloring of sensory data. This “paleomammalian brain” process provides the emotional dynamics of life, memory, and the basic sense of social self. This area of the brain managing our emotional and social life is also the primary anatomical location for the receptors involved in drug responses: our endogenous reward system. At the center of neurobiological theories of addiction is the concept of the endogenous reward system. Anatomically, it includes connections of neurons that lead from the tegmentum (area ventralis tegmentalis, origin of dopaminergic mesolimbic neurons) and project into the nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, and other areas of the brain (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). The nucleus accumbens is the center of the reward system, with numerous opiate receptors as well as dopaminergic neurocytes. Those are modulated by endorphins, the endogenous opiate of the brain (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). The human brain contains various kinds of opiate receptors, (e.g., -, -, ´-, and -receptors enkephalines and dynorphin) with different functions. Activating ´-receptors, for example, leads to a euphoric feeling, while activating -receptors triggers fear and dysphoria. Endorphins are neuropeptides able to dock at the various kinds of opiate receptors in the brain. Precursory proteins, from where the endorphins emerge, are found in notably high density in all areas of the brain where emotions and motivation are modulated (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Another neuropharmacological system involves an endogenous cannabinoid receptor system that is evolutionarily highly conservative and has a high density of receptors in diverse parts of the human and animal brain (Iversen, 2008). These anandamides appear to increase release of dopamine
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in the reward system, as does cannabis use (Mechoulam, Hanus, & Martin, 1994). Other substances like cocaine, amphetamines, and MDMA also lead primarily to increased release of dopamine in the reward system. Following dopaminergic release, endorphins are also released in the reward system. Psychoactive substances, as well as physical stimuli or behavioral patterns perceived as pleasurable, have reinforcing properties that can be ascribed to the neuronal reward system. The complex systems of neurotransmitters interacting with the nervous system to arouse euphoria are not yet satisfactorily understood. The reward system theory postulates that reaching pleasurable or euphoric states is the major goal of drug users and addicts; further, that emotional assessment of occurrences leads to the preference for states that are perceived as pleasant by the nervous system. Psychoactive drugs as well as specific behavioral patterns can activate the rewarding system and are therefore used to close the cycle of motivationsearch-fulfillment (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Eating chocolate or a refreshing drink with some sugar, as well as various other activities, can also activate the reward system (Small, Zatorre, Dagher, Evans, & JonesGotman, 2001).
Dopamine: Pleasure, Lust, and Desire Pleasure, lust, and desire are essential evolutionary programs that guarantee reproduction and satiation and are mediated by the feeling that something we like has happened (Esch & Stefano, 2004). Intense emotions connected to pleasure, lust, and desire connotate the valence and meaning of an experience and inform about the salience of an event being different from normal. Depending on the stimulus, we may develop an increasing desire to experience this intensity again. However, pleasure and desire are regulated in different ways. Pleasure is the state in which we feel satiated, happy, and fine, and which we seek. Desire, or lust, is the drive that brings us to this state but has a mechanism of its own. In pleasure, desire, and lust, the dopamine system is active in a tonic and a phasic way. First, the tonic component of dopamine release in the prefrontal cortex of the brain regulates the readiness to react to stimuli. Second, there is an increase in dopamine release (phasic) when meaningful objects are in the focus of attention; the more dopamine is released, the higher is the personal meaning and valence of the object in focus. All drugs of abuse increase dopamine release and therefore affect these two ways of dopaminergic functioning (Yacubian & Bu¨chel, 2009). As a result of unconscious sensory input changes under the influence of the drugs
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taken, a variety of possible neurotransmitter interactions will start to modulate the experience of pleasure. Although pleasure is mainly mediated by the dopamine system, a longing for satisfying experiences like the taste of chocolate remains even when dopamine release is inhibited. Pleasure involves a variety of neurotransmitters and endocrinological communicators (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2008). Although the opioid system is mainly responsible for pain reduction, the endocannabinoid system seems to enhance sensory experience and therefore enhance the longing for pleasure (Esch & Stefano, 2004; Mahler, Smith, & Berridge, 2007).
Opiate and Dopamine Interaction In the case of opiates, external neurotransmitters seem to stimulate the mesolimbic dopaminergic system more than endogenous neurotansmitters (endorphins) do. Repeated application of opiates leads to tolerance with the decrease of several pharmacological effects like analgesia, respiratory depression, and emetic effects. Tolerance is reversible and declines after a few days. Tolerance and withdrawal symptoms are explained by accelerated metabolism, restriction, and decoupling of receptor systems and neurobiological adjustment on diverse levels, for instance raised sympathetic tonus and alteration of calcium channels on cellular level. The opiates change intracellular transduction of signals and lead to a change in transcription rates and changed activity of the relating neuronal circuits (Kamphausen, 2009). Although tolerance and withdrawal disappear rather quickly, behavioral changes can be very robust. Even after a longer period of abstinence, the risk of relapse persists. This may be explained by persistent neuroplastic changes (see below) including CREB and DeltaFoS–B-mediated triggering of the craving processes (Ammon-Treiber, Mayer, & Ho¨llt, 2006). One possibility for the development of addiction then is that repeated stimulation leads to a change in motivation and amplifying mechanisms, mediated via neurobiological adaptation of drugs with a solid internal assessment: that is, drug effects are determined from the drug action itself. Moreover, it has been shown that release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens seems to correlate more with the anticipation of reward than with reward in itself. The repeated application of opiates leads to a raised longing rather than to a heightened award (Ammon-Treiber et al., 2006, p. 53). Neuroanatomically, some pathway seems to lead from the prefrontal cortex directly to the temporal lobes and hippocampus, where comparative functions of sensory stimulus (bottom-up) and internal representation
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(top-down) data take place (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Within this context, there are two possibilities to develop addiction: a. Drugs with a relative solid internal assessment (like opiates) are to a large extent independent of situational cues. They have a hermetic or closed, context-independent, and immediate effect on pain and tension while acting on the primary mesolimbic centers of assessment and induce pleasurable states with the accordant reinforcement properties, independent of contextual or situational cues. b. Drugs with a contextual bonding and assessment (like cannabis and hallucinogens) are more situational in their effect. Emotions and perceptions mediated by the hippocampal comparator systems modulate the drug effect much more than drugs with a solid internal assessment (Emrich & Schneider, 2006, p. 16).
There are differences in the degree and frequency of striving and fulfilling rewarding bodily activations. If the frequency of events becomes very high, as observed in lab rats that could not resist acting to receive the next electrical activation of their reward centers, then the body is in danger, whether it is from an overdose of sugar and cacao, 3 liters of whisky, or a big dopamine release in getting the next big share from a complex financial deal. The financial crisis in 2008 suggests that those who were making big money exhibited the same pattern of loss of control and irresponsibility as addicted drug users. Neuro-economical research has shown that expecting to make monetary profit and being able to possess expensive cultural objects such as expensive sports cars induces a strong activation in the reward system, namely in the ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, and orbitofrontal cortex (Elliott, Newman, Longe, & Deakin, 2003; Erk, Spitzer, Wunderlich, Galley, & Walter, 2002; Knutson, Westdorp, Kaiser, & Hommer, 2000), areas that influence decision-making processes by valencing expected rewards and their intensity. This illustrates a fundamental feature of addiction, its relationship to some extrinsic system of reward and evaluation.
Drug Sensitization and Neuroplasticity When it comes to drugs, the separation of pleasure and desire is the most tricky trap for the consumers on their way from drug use to abuse. Addiction research has identified the two “culprits” for this process of drug sensitization. While dopamine levels rise after drug ingestion, a protein that serves as a nuclear transcription factor abbreviated as CREB (stands for cAMP [cyclic adenosine monophosphate] response element-
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binding) is released, and this leads to a reduced sensitivity of the reward system to the drug. Another transcription factor called DeltaFos-B then comes into action and acts like a drug memory concerning the amount of reward the drug has offered (McClung et al., 2004). This memory trace increases its somatic impact with the amount of drug use. As the CREB release is terminated after drug action, the DeltaFos-B activity and its corresponding information stays stable, inducing a memory trace that makes the consumer long again for that experience (Esch & Stefano, 2004). However, this process of sensitization also happens with other rewarding pleasure experiences like sex or satiation after food. The context of drug use and the experiences of the rewards—the social setting and psychological state—contribute associations to the experience of both pleasure and dependence. The brains of cocaine addicts activate the same way when watching someone else use coke as when they themselves use it; even just seeing the paraphernalia may stimulate the brain’s reward centers. Drugs act directly on the neurotransmitter systems of the brain; therefore, the remaining drug memory trace is very strong. Opioid and dopamine signal pathways bypass orbitofrontal control functions, and the memory traces induced by DeltaFos-B alert the pleasure-seeking system when cues associated with the drug experience are present (Esch & Stefano, 2004). If this cue has become certain music or an associated lifestyle and arouses the person within a state-dependent recall (Fachner, 2006, 2010), the desire or craving (the narrowed scope of searching for immediate satisfaction) starts again.
Conclusions: Addiction as Culturally Shaped Consciousness The contemporary problems of addiction are socially fashioned phenomena, emerging with modernity. The social-constructivist approaches illustrate that the effects of drugs and the experiences of dependence and addiction are not merely physiological processes but rather social products. Addiction is a multifaceted phenomenon that takes place along a continuum and is not limited to single substances or objects but is a compulsive behavior, and consequently it involves a narrowed scope of awareness. Generally, socio-cultural learning is crucial to use patterns, making the concepts of set and setting central to explanations for vulnerability to addictive behavior and cultural differences in addiction potential to substances. Neurobiology gives insight into the basic physiological mechanisms that promote pleasure-seeking behavior. The similarity between
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endogenous and external neurotransmitters suggests a biological function for the human striving to enhance and constrict consciousness and reach especially pleasurable states. Transcendent or ecstatic experiences and psychedelic drugs represent the opposite of the addictive contractions and involve a widening of the focus of attention beyond the boundaries of the ordinary or baseline state. As their effects are too unpredictable, varied, subtle, and delayed, they do not foster dependence and this may be because they are serotonin rather than dopamine based. With regard to ASC, the view of addiction as the tunnel perspective of a heavily constricted state of consciousness is central for understanding and treatment. The disposition to fixate and focus consciousness on pleasurable states can be useful and beneficial where there is a need to reduce pain, fear, or anxiety, but it bears the danger of habituation and dependence. Searching for transcendence and expanded states of consciousness is a pervasive and natural human activity. In psychedelics therapies, patients widen their awareness with the help of drug effects. They may get acquainted with spiritual insight and learn to overcome addictive patterns of behavior. In successful cases, they may adopt new, healthier perspectives, while their addictive tendencies mature out. Thus, spiritual perspectives become crucial tools in a maturation process that links isolated and addiction-prone individuals into broader social and symbolic networks. These provide meaningful connections that assure well-being and self-comfort in ways that precludes a need to rely upon external sources of chemical reward.
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CHAPTER 9
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner, Gregory Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso One thing [is] missing . . . in the whole of the sexological literature, is a good set of phenomenological studies. We simply do not have a literature comparing one sexual subjective consciousness with another. We do not have reports on how male or female sexuality feels to the particular person . . . I think we are ready now to try to get the feeling, the consciousness, of what the sexual feeling is like from the inside. Maslow, 1965, p. 135
Introduction The topic of human sexuality has held a prominent position throughout history. A variety of different perspectives has been applied to the understanding of sexual behaviors, including psychobiology (Davidson, 1980; Passie et al., 2005), phenomenological and existential psychology (Kockelmans, 1987; Koestenbaum, 1974; Valle, 1998), and humanistic and transpersonal psychologies (Boorstein, 1996, 1997; Frankl, 1966, 1978; Friedman, 1992; Hart & Tomlinson, 1970; Holbrook, 2008; Kleinplatz, 2001a; Wade, 2004; Washburn, 1994). In human sexuality research, contributions of content, method, and approach from humanistic psychology (Farber, Brink, & Raskin, 1996; Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989; Maslow, 1987; May, 1969; Rowan, 1988) as well as experiential orientations (Kleinplatz, 1998, 2001b; Wade, 2004) have enriched our understanding of the human aspect of sexual activity. Historical surveys of sexual behavior have revealed the ubiquity of the human preoccupation with sex both substantially and historically (de Riencort, 1974; Lewinsohn, 1958; Sussman, 1976;
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Taylor, 1953). To a great extent, the degree to which the different patterns of sexuality were either accepted or condemned has reflected specific cultural beliefs that were adhered to within a given time and setting (e.g., Bloch, 1933; Jensen, 1976; Sussman, 1976). There is a great deal of material that supports the cultural relativity of sexual practices and beliefs in our culture today (e.g., Gould, 1976). A review of the historical trends and contemporary attitudes held toward sexuality quickly illustrates the developmental sequences that have led to the current state of sexual expression, be it behavioral or attitudinal, in many parts of the world (e.g., Brecher, 1976; Sussman, 1976). Present cultural trends demonstrate many social changes, and there is little question that these changes have an impact on the ways we view or conceptualize sexual behavior. New scientific discoveries, changes in the legal statutes concerning sexual behavior, and humanity’s increased awareness of its own psychological nature have all contributed to the growing demands for new modes and perspectives of sexual expression. To this day, there is considerable ongoing research in human sexuality, most notably in the areas of physiology (Guyton & Hall, 2000) and biochemistry (Haselton, 2006). Unfortunately, in the process of refining empirical strategies in biological research, the trend toward further elucidating the psychological and phenomenological dimensions of sexuality has been largely ignored. Given this state of affairs, some of us undertook a research study in the early 1980s to explore this area of study. To put this work in perspective, a review of writings in this area will be briefly discussed, highlighting both phenomenological and psychophysiological perspectives. These include the works of Rudolph Von Urban (1949, 1958), Marghanita Laski (1961), Andrew Greeley (1977), Charles Tart (1978), Julian Davidson (1980), Jenny Wade (2004), Torsten Passie and colleagues (2003, 2004, 2005), and Lisbeth Jane Holbrook (2008). A brief overview of sexual activity as an altered state of consciousness (Davidson, 1980, Tart, 1975) will be presented, including views from early psychological theories (Freud, 1905, 1933; Reich, 1980/1933), and a synopsis of sexual practices found in some Hindu tantric, Buddhist tantric, and Taoist traditions.
Phenomenological Dimensions of Sexuality: Preliminary Investigations Rudolph Van Urban was a psychiatrist who, in the course of his clinical work, collected case reports of people’s experiences during sexual intercourse. In his book, Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness, he recorded not only case histories exhibiting sexual dysfunction but also unusual
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experiences couples had with each other through what he called differences in bioelectrical potentials that were exchanged during sexual union (Von Urban, 1949). Among the phenomena reported were enhanced visual and tactile sensations, shifts in emotional states, and intense feelings of ecstasy. Later, Von Urban outlined specific procedures that people could use during sexual intercourse to achieve these experiences, a method he referred to as karezza. In the course of his clinical work, he offered these techniques to his clients. Von Urban was the first person to record very small numbers of detailed descriptions of people’s experiences in this area. Unfortunately, his writings (Von Urban, 1949, 1958) did not attract much attention. Marghanita Laski’s contribution to this area was to survey individual descriptions of ecstasy and to isolate those events that triggered these experiences (Laski, 1961). Among the triggers in her group of participants (18 women and 8 men), she found that sexual love was the most important factor responsible for inducing ecstatic states within a significant percentage of her research participants. Ecstasies triggered by sexual love were characterized by strong feelings of release or renewal, a decrease in feelings of indifference and of one’s self-identity, and a comparatively low gain of feelings of knowledge. Unfortunately, her study had a number of drawbacks: It included only a small number of research participants and they were not randomly selected for her study; her analyses were largely descriptive rather than quantitative; and the self-reports given by her participants lacked specific details or descriptions of the experiences. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, Laski must be credited with at least exploring this neglected area of study. A third set of studies in this area was conducted by Andrew M. Greeley and William C. McCready involving some 2,300 research participants (Greeley, 1977). These investigators explored the relationship between (a) marital condition and satisfaction and (b) three types of mystical experiences: those triggered by lovemaking, childbirth, and a third variety that was termed a “light experience.” Greeley and McCready found that 6 percent of their sample reported experiencing ecstasy only during lovemaking, while 1 percent of their sample reported visualizing lights while also experiencing ecstasy during lovemaking. The largest group of people reported having these lovemaking experiences were married (the majority of them happily married), although unmarried men more often reported having ecstatic experiences than unmarried women. Unfortunately, this study had a number of limitations: The limited number of people reporting their ecstatic experience, the lack of detail concerning the nature of the experiences reported, and methodological issues concerning the validity and reliability of the respondents’ reports.
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A study conducted by Wade (2004) was designed to explore the nature and frequency of transcendent sexual experiences. Consisting of 53 females and 38 males who participated in person in semistructured interviews, this investigation revealed a variety of transcendent experiences among some of the participants. Among these experiences were merging with partners, body shape alterations, experiencing the sense of a field or force between partners, and becoming one with nature. These types of experiences also impacted on the participants by enhancing relationships, personal growth, healing from past traumas, and experiencing sex as sacred. As Wade indicated, this study was purposive rather than representative and no attempt was made to focus on quantitative analyses or assess an entire range of altered-state sexual experiences. More recently, Holbrook (2008) conducted a pilot study to explore the psychological characteristics associated with altered states of consciousness (ASC) during transcendent sexual states among 13 participants (9 women and 4 men). Utilizing a questionnaire approach, Holbrook identified 11 ASC commonly reported during sexual activity that included changes in thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and body image as well as feelings of grace, unity, a sense of absorption, and nonconsensual reality, the last factor appearing to correlate more with an individual’s developmental focus as opposed to the sexual experiences per se. Aside from a very limited number of participants, respondents were selected from a group of people actively engaged in the practice of meditation and yoga, limiting generalization of findings to the population at large.
Early Psychological Theories: Unconscious Aspects of Sexuality Sigmund Freud A brief review of Freud’s work is relevant here since he theorized that sexual repression leads to neurosis (Freud, 1905, 1933). From this theoretical lens, Freud suggested that the personality is made up of both conscious and unconscious parts that are composed of the id, ego, and superego. The id is the largely unconscious part that seeks pleasure, immediate gratification, and is driven by sex and aggression. As Freud (1933) famously stated, “We call it . . . a cauldron full of seething expectations” (p. 74). In contrast, the ego is the mostly conscious part of the personality that operates by the “reality principle” and is driven by reason yet has the goal of satisfying the id’s instincts. The third part of the personality is the superego, which represents morality and our sense of right and wrong. According to Freud (1905, 1933), anxiety is experienced when the
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ego feels threatened by conflicting desires of the id and superego. As a result, defense mechanisms serve to reduce these “forbidden drives” (i.e., sexual and aggressive). Freud also proposed that there are five psychosexual stages of development where sensual pleasure is obtained through different erogenous zones at specific ages. These five stages are the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. In short, Freud suggested that sensual pleasure is experienced through the mouth during the oral stage (0–2 years), the anus during the anal stage (2–4 years), and through the genitals and sexual fantasies during the phallic stage (around 4 years old). During the phallic stage, the Oedipus complex arises, during which time the child is attracted to the opposite-sex parent and must learn to overcome conflicting feelings against the same-sex parent. According to Freud, if these conflicts are resolved, the child will move to the latency phase that occurs between the ages of 5 and 12, then onto the genital stage during puberty. However, if conflicts are not resolved during any of these stages, Freud suggested that developmental arrest may occur, marked by sensual preoccupation with specific erogenous zones and rigid personality characteristics (e.g., sucking for the oral stage, over- or undercleanliness for the anal phase). Freud also provided a psychoanalytic interpretation of sadistic and masochistic sexual practices (Lewinsohn, 1958). Whatever one may think of the psychoanalytic perspective, there is little doubt that these practices can induce ASC. Sadism is the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by inflicting pain or humiliation on a sexual partner, while masochism is the practice of deriving pleasure from experiencing pain and humiliation inflicted by others or by oneself. Both practices can lead to extreme alterations in consciousness, often of an ecstatic nature. One variation of the latter, auto-erotic asphyxiation, is the practice of cutting off one’s air supply to heighten sexual pleasure, a procedure that can cause injury or death if it goes out of control.
Wilhelm Reich Wilhelm Reich expanded on Freud’s concept that the ego is “bodybased” (i.e., based on erogenous zones), and portrayed psychological defense mechanisms as both internal cognitive processes and external manifestations that he referred to as “body armoring” (Reich, 1980/1933). Reich described body armoring as “chronic muscle tensions that protect the ego from being overwhelmed with unacceptable feelings” (cited in Friedman, 2005, p. 1) and considered that through therapeutic touch and other means a liberation of the natural “orgasmic reflex” could be achieved.
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Conceptual Models: Sexuality and ASC In contrast to the abovementioned investigations, Charles T. Tart, a research psychologist, proposed a more sophisticated methodological approach toward investigating the phenomenological and psychological experiences during sexual intercourse. Based upon previous investigations in the area of consciousness studies, particularly his own investigation of marijuana intoxication (Tart, 1971), Tart proposed a systems approach to understanding sexual behavior in terms of ASC. The basic premise of his work was that high sexual arousal, interacting with social, cultural, and psychological factors, can induce a radical, transient reorganization of consciousness that differs from ordinary, waking awareness. He referred to this experience as the “sexual discrete altered state of consciousness” (Tart, 1978). Tart’s systems approach is primarily phenomenological (as opposed to the study of “objective facts” such as frequency of intercourse, etc.). He pointed out that people engage in sexual activity primarily in order to have certain kinds of experiences and, therefore, investigations should be approached from this perspective. In this context, sexual experiences can be viewed in what could be termed basic awareness patterns interacting with psychological structures (components of the mind/body performing one or more related psychological functions). According to this model, the “nature” of sexual experiences can be determined by outlining experimental criteria useful in detecting different states of consciousness (Tart, 1978). Categories that could be used in such an analysis would include emotions, memory, identity, cognition, perception, space-time sense, and the like. By comparing and contrasting the nature and quality of experiences that occur during sexual intercourse to those observed during the ordinary waking state, the phenomenology of sexual experiences can be explored empirically.
Orgasm as an Altered State of Consciousness Julian Davidson (1980) suggested that orgasm could be classified as an ASC since it has several features in common with mystical states. Utilizing Tart’s (1975) definition of an ASC as a qualitative departure from customary experience, Davidson proposed that orgasm meets this criterion since it represents a temporary shift in space/time orientation, departure from ordinary consciousness, and “letting go.” As he (Davidson, 1980) described it: Destabilizing conditions occur in the case of orgasm. These include intense physical stimulation, exercise, rhythmic motion, and focused attention
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all of which tend to disrupt the normal state of consciousness and stop the internal dialogue that is a condition of its maintenance. Major physiological changes that operate here include vasomotor and muscular events and, generally, strong autonomic nervous system activation, which resemble destabilizing events for many other ASCs. The capacity to “let go” of inhibition and self consciousness is necessary to some extent for orgasm, as it seems to be for “mystical” (and other) ASCs. (p. 293)
Although the orgasm itself is generally short lived, Davidson (1980) pointed out that some people are able to prolong this ASC, particularly women who have reported successive, multiple orgasms extending over a relatively long period of time.
Psychophysiological Models for Understanding Sexuality and ASC Davidson (1980) suggested that sexual experiences are transactional in nature, containing both sensory and cognitive components. Physiological and biological changes that occur during sexual arousal and are well documented include hormonal changes (increased testosterone in men, estrogen in women), decreased central nervous system activity, muscular contractions, vascular changes, (e.g., increased blood flow to the sexual organs), and increased limbic system activity. Interestingly, Davidson proposed that the limbic system is a more primitive system (the oldest in evolutionary terms) and its dominance during transcendent sexual states may contribute to the sense of timelessness, absorption, and “letting go” of one’s sense of boundaries [see Beauregard, this volume]. From another view, Torsten Passie and colleagues (2003, 2004) suggested that hyperventilation may be correlated to ASC experienced during sexual arousal. From this perspective, accelerated breathing and involuntary groaning during sexual arousal lead to physiological changes that can induce a state of hyperventilation (increased heart rate, decreased oxygen flow to the brain, decreased central nervous system activity). It is well known that hyperventilation is associated with ASC (Masters & Johnson, 1966, reported similar findings) and may serve as a mechanism that intensifies and/or induces transcendent states of sexual experiences. Increased prolactin secretion may also play a role in ecstatic states and ASC experienced during and after sexual activity (Passie, Hartmann, Schneider, Emrich, & Kruger, 2005). Studies examining the physiological effects of MDMA (a drug commonly known as ecstasy) found that increased prolactin accounted for euphoric states reported and for a decrease in sexual
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desire (although users felt extremely sensual). Interestingly, Passie and colleagues (2005) found this to be similar to the postorgasmic state, which also showed an increase in prolactin secretion.
Transpersonal Categories of ASC Triggered by Sexual Activity Stanislav Grof (1985), a transpersonal psychiatrist, has suggested that sexual activity can lead to two types of transpersonal experiences that he referred to as oceanic sex and tantric sex. Oceanic sex consists of a playful and mutually nourishing flow and exchange of energies resembling a dance. The aim here is to experience a loss of one’s own boundaries, a sense of fusion and melting with the partner into a state of blissful unity. By contrast, in tantric sex, the goal is an experience of transcendence and enlightenment, wherein the genitals and sexual energy are used simply as convenient vehicles to reach this state of consciousness. In this latter category, the genital union is used to activate libidinal forces but does not result in orgasmic discharge and ejaculation.
Religious and Spiritual Practices The role of sexuality in meditation and spiritual practice is one area where an understanding of the complexities of body practices and their integration and role within meditation/spiritual practice warrant attention to detail that is generally overlooked by contemporary popular writers. We provide here a synopsis of the role that sexual practices had within Daoist yoga, Hindu tantrism, and Buddhist tantrism. More intricate details can be found in Maliszewski (1993) [see Shear, Volume 1]. To begin, there are several features shared in the sexual practices of all three traditions: There is an esoteric physiology tradition that involves directing an internal energy up along the spinal column to the top of the head through such practices as deep breathing and cultivating air in the navel region. Concentration and visualization exercises are used to accomplish the desired goal. Finally, retention of semen by the male is also deemed to be important. However, a theme underlying the esoteric sexual practice was that it constituted one technique useful in achieving enlightenment. As the earliest dating of these practices traces back to China, our discussion begins there.
Religious Daoism/Daoist Yoga The early (philosophical) Daoists were concerned with the individual merging with the flow of life in its external flux and becoming one with
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Dao. Adhering to doctrines of purity, stillness, and nonaction, they were very suspicious of rituals, techniques of “salvation,” and against the performance of any sexual practices. Different factions or groups, which fall within scholarly designations of religious Daoism and Daoist yoga developed later in time and embraced sexual practices (Wile, 1992). Goals of the practitioner could vary, ranging from a householder trying to find a way to satisfy the needs of multiple wives without self-destructing to others simply seeking to achieve a state of superior physical health via arousing and circulating the qi to those seeking “immortality” (changsheng bulao). Central to the Daoist practices was the role of coitus reservatus and the participation of multiple partners. As to specific techniques, the circulation of qi along circuits (meridians) and different centers was the core practice. Mind was directed to the dantian (“elixir field”) and, with the diaphragm relaxed, the person was expected to initially experience a sensation of centering of fullness of qi in the lower abdomen. Through mental focus and mediation, the qi would pass through “three passes” or gates via the du meridian in the back, beginning at the coccyx and traveling upward through three additional points at the fontanel, the perineum, and the center of the brain or crown of the head. Deep diaphragmatic breathing, specific postures, visualizations, and sphincter control were involved in this process. Distinct from practices in the other religious traditions, the qi was then directed down the ren meridian beginning in the eyebrows, entering the mouth, and traveling down the throat, past the heart and stomach and back to the dantian. Today this practice is generally called the “microcosmic orbit.” Without this phase of the practice, it was held that medical problems could develop (Wile, 1992). As to those seeking the most rarefied experiences, the goal sought by these practitioners was “immortality,” which was viewed as a transcendent state. The techniques associated with sexual practices developed largely because people were not achieving the desired results through solo practices. Immortality involved the creation of an etheric replica of one’s self. The replica is similar to a clone of the original but is the product of the union of yin and yang within the body of the practitioner. It gestates in the middle of the body for a certain period of time. It then begins to exit through the crown of the head. It first tentatively takes a few “astral” steps outside of the body and gradually, with practice, it is able to freely roam the universe and become the equivalent of an “astral body.” At this point, the practitioner can drop the dense, physical body and become an “immortal.” For this school of thought, this constituted experiencing the Dao (Wile, 1992).
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Hindu Tantra Tantra is a spiritual practice associated with achieving enlightenment and transcendent states through the use of rituals, art, meditation, visualization, mantras, breathing techniques, yogic postures, and sexual asanas (Johari, 1986; Padoux, 1981). According to Johari (1986), both Hindu and Buddhist Tantra are believed to have originated from India in the 7th century as a rebellion against prevailing Hindu beliefs that limited or forbid the practice of sex, although its origins and main goals are still debated among scholars. Both of these traditions emphasize the importance of female deities (e.g., sakti), engage in the ritualistic use of meat, wine, and meditation to unify with the chosen deity, and use mantra, mandalas, and symbolic speech and diagrams. Although spiritual beliefs for each tradition are slightly different, both have the goal of attaining enlightenment through the use of these practices. The ritual in Hindu tantrism that used sexual intimacy as a vehicle for achieving transcendence was known as maithuna. Maithuna was employed to hasten the awakening of kundalini. Kundalini referred to the female energy existing in latent form. The goal was to awaken this energy to unite with Siva, the Pure Consciousness pervading the universe (Mookerjee, 1991). Through yogic techniques, this energy is raised up along a central channel or nadi through six centers (cakras) of the body to the crown of the head, leading to a state of “liberation” and transcendence. A detailed description of the “esoteric physiology” involved in these practices appeared in Eliade (1969) and specific features of the maithuna ritual appeared in Bharati (1965) and Marglin (1980). Within this practice, there are a number of interrelated goals that may be achieved. These include raising the kundalini, experiencing liberation, experiencing the divinity of the act, and so on. Eventually, there is no need to have sexual intercourse with a physical woman. One can visualize having intercourse with a woman, visualize the union of Shiva and Sakti and the topmost cakra, imagine the kundalini rising and piercing the cakras, or visualize the union through use of symbolic (geometric) figures.
Tibetan Buddhism Within Tibetan scholarship, there has been the question of whether or not taking a consort is a metaphorical, visualized practice or a concrete ritual (see Maliszewski, 1993). To this end, descriptions of the esoteric physiology appear in Gyatso (1982) and a somewhat disguised description of the sexual process can be found in Mullin (1981). Within Tibetan
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Buddhism, nearly one fifth of the practices involve use of a human consort. Voidness and compassion must be experienced before the sexual ritual; otherwise it remains on the level of an ordinary couple practicing yoga. A monk must first practice visualization of a consort (male and female together) alone in meditation. Significantly, it is important to note that the experience emerging from use of a consort is much more advanced than full realization of the Void (Maliszewski, 1993). As with Hindu tantra, there is an emphasis placed upon directing energy into the central channel transversing the spine. Directing of the prana in to the central channel (avadhuti) depends upon internal and external circumstances. When one reaches this level of practice, one is close to the attainment of Buddhahood. The man must refrain from ejaculation. Seminal fluid is directed up the central channel instead of outward. If the yogi releases, he needs to begin all over again: retake initiations, purify himself, and perform all the preliminaries. The state of mind achieved through the ritual is maintained after the practice, the physical union serving as a “boost.” The term given to this mind state is the “great union beyond learning” (mislobpai zung’ jug). According to Tibetan doctrine, the final goal of Buddhahood cannot be achieved without this practice (Maliszewski, 1993).
The Need to Explore Psychological and Phenomenological Dimensions of Sexuality As can be seen from the literature reviewed, very few studies have assessed the phenomenological aspects of sexual experience to any significant degree. The few works outlined earlier provided us with preliminary information as to the type of data that may be gleaned from future research conducted in this field. Regrettably, although some theoretical writings have touched upon this topic briefly (e.g., Eliade, 1971; Greeley, 1974; Lewis, 1969, 1971, 1977; Parrinder, 1980; Sargant, 1974), there has been no formal attempt to explore the specific topic of psychological and phenomenological dimensions of sexuality in any depth. To overcome this drawback, a detailed inventory called The Psychological Dimensions of Sexual Experience Inventory, Form I, was developed to explore a number of psychological dimensions experienced during sexual activity that could assess both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The Psychological Dimensions of Sexual Experience Inventory (PDOSEI), Form I (Maliszewski & Vaughan, 1978) is a comprehensive self-report inventory designed to investigate various components of sexual experience. It consists of five major sections that investigate several aspects of psychological functioning: (1) attributes of alternate states of consciousness, (2)
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ecstatic states and transcendent experiences, (3) personal and interpersonal modes, (4) dimensions of sexuality, and (5) miscellaneous factors. Scales in the first test sections are used to explore participants’ reports in the areas of cognitive processes (i.e., thinking, concentration/attention, reflection), emotions, spatial and temporal senses, and sensations/perceptions. The ecstatic states and transcendent experiences sections contain items descriptive of intense sexual experience. Scales in the personal and interpersonal modes section are used to evaluate psychological issues related to matters of identity, self-concept, individual differences, and interpersonal relationships. The dimensions of sexuality section contains items that note the physiological and behavioral factors associated with phenomenological reports. Specific test item descriptors were derived from an exhaustive literature review across the fields of anthropology, psychology, comparative religions, medicine, biology, and other specialized areas. These were selected to address the quality, variety, and frequency of particular experiences during sexual intimacy. Frequency of occurrence is rated along a 7-point category system to reduce central tendency error (Guilford, 1954), a problem observed in other phenomenologically based questionnaires (Tart, 1971). Details concerning semantics, item construction, and technical format of the test followed the design noted in an earlier test developed to assess the phenomenology of meditation (see Maliszewski, Twemlow, Brown, & Engler, 1981). Some test items were answered along a 4-stage continuum of when the experience occurred temporally, complementing Masters and Johnson’s (1966) 4-stage physiological sexual response cycle. In brief, Masters and Johnson (1966) outlined four stages or phases in the physiological sexual response cycle for both men and women: excitement, plateau, orgasmic, and resolution. The excitement phase is the first stage brought on by psychological stimulation, physiological stimulation, or both, lasting from several minutes to several hours. The plateau phase emerges when sexual stimulation is continued and involves an intensification of sexual tension just prior to orgasm and is generally maintained from 30 seconds to several minutes. Orgasm is the third phase, characterized by those seconds where an involuntary climax (orgasm) is reached. The final resolution phase is marked by a return of the sexual system to its unstimulated, resting, usual state. For purposes of this study, these four terms were changed to reflect more of a psychological focus—arousal, amplification, orgasm, and postlude—and were also defined in the PDOSEI. The conceptual foundation of the questionnaire itself evolved out of the theoretical position developed by Tart (1975) that evaluates the qualities and components of psychological experience by comparing these
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features to the experiences of some normative baseline—in this case, the ordinary waking state of consciousness. Any descriptive deviations that appear as a result of this comparative analysis may be said to characterize phenomenological experiences occurring during sexual intercourse. As to section II of the PDOSEI, ecstatic states and transcendent experiences, definitions of these terms appear in the inventory itself. Ecstatic states are defined as those states of consciousness characterized by an overwhelming sense of joy or rapture. Ecstasy is defined (from the Greek ekstasis: being beside oneself ) as (1) an emotional state so intense that one is carried beyond rational thought or self-control; (2) rapture associated with mystical experience. Transcendent experiences are those intense periods in consciousness lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience and characterized by an expansion of one’s awareness that exceeds an individual’s customary or familiar concept of self-identity. Addressing indices of reliability or validity, test items within the miscellaneous factors section were actually a repetition of select items found in earlier scales of the inventory and were utilized for the purpose of establishing some preliminary estimates of reliability. Validity estimations were focused on the attempt to eliminate the possible biases of clinical psychopathology and social desirability (response sets). This was accomplished by administering two additional tests, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC) and Goldberg’s modified versions of the MMPI. Crowne and Marlowe (1960) defined social desirability as “the need of subjects to obtain approval by responding in a culturally appropriate and acceptable manner” (p. 353). The scale developed by Crowne and Marlowe (1964) to measure “faking good” is widely used to assess and control for response bias in self-report research (Barger, 2002). In brief, the Marlowe-Crowne scale is a forced-choice self-report inventory consisting of 33 different statements. This inventory has been shown to have satisfactory reliability and validity (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964). The link between social desirability and sexual behaviors has been empirically investigated on numerous occasions (Schultheiss, Dargel, & Rhode, 2003). Because of the private nature of sexual behaviors, the influence of socially desirable responding on self-report measures has been a matter of concern. Some research participants may become embarrassed or threatened when asked to provide information about their sexual encounters (Meston, Heiman, Trapnell, & Paulhus, 1998). However, under anonymous testing conditions, Wiederman and Whitley (2002) found that participants were “more willing to admit personal, potentially embarrassing information about their sexuality when they are completing an anonymous questionnaire compared with when they believe others
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have access to their answers” (p. 44). The respondents in the present inquiry completed their questionnaires anonymously. Goldberg’s initial modification of the MMPI (Goldberg, 1965) consists of 210 test items derived from the original MMPI. Its basic purpose is to establish an index for discriminating neurotic and psychotic MMPI profiles. Furthermore, it also serves the purpose of indicating the general level of maladjustment. The original MMPI (consisting of more than 500 test items) was far too time consuming to employ in the study, and this was the central reason for deciding to utilize the Goldberg Index. In addition, to disguise the connotations associated with clinical evaluations, the Goldberg variant was termed simply the Self-Rating Behavioral Inventory (SRBI). This test has been found to be effective in classifying profiles diagnostically (see Graham, 1987). Several Goldberg indices were later developed, discriminating psychiatric from sociopathic and “normal” from “deviant” (non-normal) profiles (terminology used by Goldberg, 1972). This investigation used all three indices.
Experimental Design The design of this study was a survey conducted (a) for the purpose of eliminating those test items from the questionnaire that people do not experience or that they have difficulty understanding; (b) to test the reliability and validity of the PDOSEI, Form I; and (c) to provide preliminary pilot information as to the types of sexual experiences reported by a sample of people in the United States (Maliszewski, Vaughan, Krippner, & Holler, 2008). The PDOSEI, Form I, and three validity scales were administered in a counterbalanced order to 98 participants (41 males, 57 females) recruited from friends, professional colleagues, and personal acquaintances of the principal researchers. All respondents in the study were told that the objectives of the study were to determine the types of experiences people have during sexual intercourse and elucidate personality factors that may influence or determine the nature of such experiences. Demographic variables included age, marital status, education, and income.
Data Analyses A number of the items within the scales of the PDOSEI, Form I, are presented in terms of the frequency with which they were experienced as well as at different stages or periods during sexual intercourse. Descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. Pearson r scores were calculated to determine the degree of interrelatedness among items of the sexual
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response cycle for the entire sample, as well as by gender. Reliability coefficients were derived by correlating items within the questionnaire with retest correlations ranging from .12 (p < .05) to .69 (p < .01). The test– retest reliability coefficients were significant. As for validity, participants’ scores for the Marlowe-Crowne scale (1964) indicated limited impact of the social desirability factor on test responses. For the Goldberg indices, mean scores similarly fell at lower levels for neurotic vs. psychotic and normal vs. deviant, indicating that the participant pool did not consist of individuals with severe psychiatric problems despite their endorsing reports of nonordinary states of consciousness.
Results For all four stages, arousal through postlude, females’ scores were higher than males’ scores. Females’ mean scores ranged from .14 to .20, while males’ mean scores varied from .12 to .18. The maximum mean scores were in the orgasm stage (mean ¼ .19) and the minimum were in the arousal stage (.13). Correlations among the stages differed for arousal and the other three stages. Correlation between arousal and other stages was moderate, with values varying from mean ¼ 0.51 to 0.58. Correlation of amplification stage with the two following stages (i.e., arousal and orgasm) was higher (r ¼ .86 and .83, respectively), and so was correlation of orgasm with postlude (r ¼.83). The correlation pattern of the 41 male participants was similar. However, there was one noticeable difference for the 57 females. Correlation between arousal and other stages was considerably lower than for men. Correlations among other stages were similar to males. This suggests that ecstatic states and transcendent experiences among women were less strongly related to similar experiences during the preliminary arousal state than they were among males. In other words, a male’s experience of ecstasy may have been more closely related to similar feelings during arousal than occurred for females. Furthermore, results from components and parameters of the sexual alterations of consciousness showed that the highest level of agreement as evinced by highest mean values for males was found on items related to the alteration of consciousness being different from sleep (mean ¼ 0.74), that while entering this alteration of consciousness respondents were physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean ¼ 0.70) and that this state is different from drowsiness (mean ¼ 0.67). As was the case for males, for females, the highest level of agreement was found on the item related to the alteration of consciousness being different from sleep (mean ¼ 0.73). The next highest scores for females were found on the item stating that while in the waking
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state, you find that you are physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean ¼ 0.68), and entering a sexual state of consciousness, you find that you are physiologically aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean ¼ 0.67). Of the paired differences between males and females, the most significant differences were found on questions related to ecstatic states or transcendent experiences being triggered by vaginal and anal stimulation. Additionally, for the question related to entering into an ASC during sexual intercourse that is experienced as being distinct from the normal waking state, males had a mean score of 0.40 and females had a score of 0.54. Thus, females had higher levels of agreement than males. When examining at what point during the sexual response cycle respondents tended to experience an alteration of consciousness, males and females reported that this tended to occur during the arousal phase (Maliszewski, et al. 2008). Results from the present inquiry showed that both males (70%) and females (86%) had experienced ecstatic states and transcendent experiences during sexual intimacy. In the case of the transpersonal component, a high percentage of both males and females reported experiencing a sense of unity with their partner while simultaneously maintaining their personal identities. This pattern was consistent across all ecstatic experience and transcendent state items for all four phases of the sexual response cycle. Although females tended to have slightly more frequent levels of arousal, amplification, orgasm, and postlude than males, these differences were not significant. When examining the intercorrelations of the phases of the sexual response cycle for variables related to transpersonal and ecstatic states, statistically significant findings were revealed across all four phases of the sexual response cycle, which suggests a positive interrelationship along the continuum of sexual responses for both males and females. This interrelationship posits that high levels of sexual response in one phase of the sexual response cycle predict high levels of response in other phases as well. For males, arousal was most strongly correlated with amplification, whereas for females arousal and postlude had the highest correlation. Males may have utilized arousal and its subsequent amplification to tap into transcendent experiences more than females, who may have relied on the coalescence of feelings triggered by arousal then expressed more deeply during postcoital musings, which may have been used to access transcendent and ecstatic experiences. The association between arousal and amplification and the fact that they are sequential in the sexual response cycle may provide insight into the pattern through which males experience transcendent and ecstatic experiences. To the extent that females’ scores appear to associate arousal and postlude with ecstatic states
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and transcendent experiences, the intermediary phases (i.e., amplification and orgasm) may be less important than the beginning and ending of the sexual experience to more deeply access these experiences. Females tended to have more ecstatic states and transcendent experiences without drugs or alcohol, while males tended to have more experiences with substance use. Further, females tended to have more ecstatic experiences in nature and during prayers than did males, but both were almost equal in experiencing these states in accidents or near-death experiences. Although males and females tended to have low frequencies on items that assessed ecstatic states during sexual intercourse, both genders scored almost identical frequencies on items across all phases of the sexual response cycle, and for orgasm they did score identically. In examining why male and female respondents reported that the sexual state of consciousness is different from sleep, it appears that the shifts in consciousness fostered during sexual arousal are qualitatively different from similar shifts in consciousness associated with sleep. It further appears that respondents are psychologically insightful enough at attenuating these differences, particularly when differentiating the feelings and affect associated with drowsiness. It is also interesting to note that when respondents reported entering the sexually induced alteration of consciousness, they were not only psychologically aroused but physically (i.e., sexually) aroused as well, which gives rise to the association frequently reported between the so-called “mind” and “body” that occur during ASC. One aspect of sexual alterations of consciousness where males and females differed was in the association of this state with drowsiness, with males reporting a high frequency and females less so. While females had higher levels of agreement than males about entering an ASC during sexual intercourse distinct from the ordinary waking state, both males and females tended to experience an ASC during arousal more than any other stage in the sexual response cycle. Some of the implications of these findings include that males and females display greater similarities in terms of experiencing ecstatic states and transcendent experiences during sexual intercourse than previously thought. Consideration should also be given to the social context in which these data were obtained. The possibility that females’ scores were more similar to males’ scores in terms of sexual functioning may have been an outgrowth of the more sexually permissive attitudes during the late1970s prior to the AIDS epidemic.
Summary Most sex researchers acknowledge that sexual experiences and other factors associated with sexuality are ultimately mental events. However,
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most empirical studies and literature surveys have largely ignored this issue. To date, there have been few serious attempts directed to a comprehensive exploration of the psychological, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human sexual experience, ironically in areas that concern people’s motives for engaging in sexual relations in the first place. We have provided a cursory overview of surveys, pilot studies, conceptual writings, and other essays that have provided some preliminary details as to the nature of consciousness and sexual experience. So long as the phenomenological dimensions of human sexuality are ignored or given only minor credence, humanity’s understanding of sexuality will remain, at best, incomplete. This chapter has attempted to remedy some of these shortcomings with a summary of current literature and a preliminary empirical analysis of extensive data collected that analyzes several components of sexual phenomenological experience.
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Frankl, V. E. (1966). Self-transcendence as a human phenomenon. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 6, 97–107. Frankl, V. E. (1978). The unheard cry for meaning: Psychotherapy and humanism. New York: Simon & Schuster. Friedman, H. L. (2005). Wilhelm Reich: An apologia. Florida Psychologist, 56, 18–21. Friedman, M. (1992). Dialogue and the human image: Beyond humanistic psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In Standard edition (Vol. 7, pp. 125–243). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In Standard edition (Vol. 22, pp. 3–182). London: Hogarth Press. Goldberg, L. R. (1965). Diagnosticians vs. diagnostic signs: The diagnosis of psychosis vs. neurosis from the MMPI. Psychological Monographs, 79(9), 1–28. Goldberg, L. R. (1972). Man vs. mean: The exploitation of group profiles for the construction of diagnostic classification systems. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 79, 121–131. Gould, R. E. (1976). Sociocultural roles of male and female. In B. J. Sadock, H. I. Kaplan, & A. M. Freedman (Eds.), The sexual experience (pp. 280–288). Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Graham, J. R. (1987). The MMPI: A practical guide (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford. Greeley, A. M. (1974). Ecstasy: A way of knowing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Greeley, A. M. (1977). Memorandum: Mystical experiences and marital condition, July 7, 1977. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, unpublished manuscript. Grof, S. (1985). Beyond the brain: Birth, death, and transcendence in psychotherapy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Guilford, J. P. (1954). Psychometric methods. New York: McGraw-Hill. Guyton, A. C., & Hall, J. E. (2000). Textbook of medical physiology. Philadelphia: Saunders. Gyatso, G.K. (1982). Clear light of bliss: Mahamudra in Vajrayana Buddhism. London: Wisdom. Hart, J. T., & Tomlinson, T. M. (1970). New directions in client-centered therapy. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Haselton, M. G. (2006). Conditional expression of women’s desires and men’s mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle. Hormones and Behavior, 49, 509–518. Holbrook, L. J. (2008). Psychological characteristics of altered states of consciousness experienced during transcendent sex. Dissertation International Abstracts, 69(5), DAI-B. (Pub. No. AAT 3307969. Retrieved June 17, 2010, from Proquest Dissertations and Theses database. Jensen, G. D. (1976). Cross-cultural studies and animal studies of sex. In B. J. Sadock, H. I. Kaplan, & A. M. Freedman (Eds.), The sexual experience (pp. 289–302). Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
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Johari, H. (1986). Tools for tantra. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International. Kirschenbaum, H., & Henderson, V. L. (1989). The Carl Rogers reader. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Kleinplatz, P. J. (1998). Sex therapy for vaginismus: A review, critique, and humanistic alternative. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 38, 51–81. Kleinplatz, P. J. (2001a). On the outside looking in: In search of women’s sexual experience. Women and Therapy, 24, 123–132. Kleinplatz, P. J. (2001b). New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives. New York: Brunner-Routledge. Kockelmans, J. J. (1987). Phenomenological psychology: The Dutch school. Boston: Nijhoff. Koestenbaum, P. (1974). Existential sexuality: Choosing to love. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Laski, M. (1961). Ecstasy. London: Cresset Press. Lewis, I. (1969). Spirit possession in northern Somaliland. In J. Beattie & J. Middleton (Eds.), Spirit mediumship and society in Africa. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lewis, I. (1971). Ecstatic religion. New York: Penguin. Lewis, I. (1977). Symbols and sentiments. New York. Academic Press. Lewinsohn, R. A. (1958). A history of sex customs. London: Green. Maliszewski, M. (1993). The phenomenology of meditation: A reassessment of models, templates and traditions. Institute of Noetic Sciences, unpublished monograph. Maliszewski, M., & Vaughan, B. (1978). Psychological dimensions of sexual experience inventory, Form I. Chicago: Unpublished psychological test. Maliszewski, M., Twemlow, S. W., Brown, D. P., & Engler, J. M. (1981). A phenomenological typology of intensive meditation: A suggested methodology using the questionnaire approach. ReVision, 4(2), 3–27. Maliszewski, M., Vaughan, B., Krippner, S., & Holler, G. D. (2008). Transcendent parameters of human sexual experience among 102 questionnaire respondents from the United States. Paper delivered at the Annual Convention of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, November 9, 2008, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Marglin, F.A. (1980). Wives of the god-king: The rituals of the Hindu temple courtesans. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Brandeis University, Department of Anthropology. Maslow A. H. (1965). A critique and discussion: Part I. In J. Money (Ed.), Sex research: New developments (pp. 135–146). New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Maslow, A. H. (1987). Motivation and personality. New York: Harper & Row. May, R. (1969). Love and will. New York: Norton. Masters, W. H., & Johnson, V. E. (1966). Human sexual response. Boston: Little, Brown. Meston, C. M., Heiman, J. R., Trapnell, P. D., & Paulhus, D. L. (1998). Socially desirable responding and sexuality self-reports. Journal of Sex Research, 35, 148–157. Mookerjee, A. (1991). Kundalini: The arousal of the inner energy. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books.
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Mullin, G.H. (trans). (1981). Bridging the sutras and tantras. Dharamsala: Tushita Books. Padoux, A. (1981). A survey of tantric Hinduism for the historian of religions. History of Religions, 20, 345–360. Parrinder, G. (1980). Sex in the world’s religions. New York: Oxford University Press. Passie, T., Hartmann, U., Schneider, U., & Emrich, H. M. (2003). On the function of groaning and hyperventilation during sexual intercourse: Intensification of sexual experience by altering brain metabolism through hypnocapnia. Medical Hypothesis, 60, 660–883. Passie, T., Wagner, T., Hartmann, U., Schneider, U., & Emrich, H. M. (2004). Acute hyperventilation syndromes induced by sexual intercourse: Evidence of a psychophysical mechanism to intensify sexual experience. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 33, 525–526. Passie, T., Hartmann, U., Schneider, U., Emrich, H. M., & Kruger, T. H. C. (2005). Ecstasy (MDMA) mimics the post-orgasmic state: Impairment of sexual drive and function during acute MDMA-effects may be due to increased prolactin secretion. Medical Hypothesis, 6, 899–903. Reich, W. (1980). Character analysis (3rd ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. (Original work published 1933) Rowan, J. (1988). Ordinary ecstasy: Humanistic psychology in action. New York: Routledge. Sargant, W. W. (1974). The mind possessed. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Schultheiss, O. C., Dargel, A., & Rhode, W. (2003). Implicit motives and sexual motivation and behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 224–230. Sussman, N. (1976). Sex and sexuality in history. In B. J. Sadock, H. I Kaplan, & A. M. Freedman (Eds.). The sexual experience (pp. 7–70). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. Tart, C. T. (1971). On being stoned: A psychological study of marijuana intoxication. Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books. Tart, C. T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton. Tart, C. T. (1978). Sex and drugs as altered states of consciousness. Unpublished manuscript. Taylor, G. (1953). Sex in history. London. Thames and Hudson. Valle, R. (Ed.). (1998). Phenomenological inquiry in psychology: Existential and transpersonal dimensions. New York: Plenum. Von Urban, R. (1949). Sex perfection and marital happiness. New York: Dial Press. Von Urban, R. (1958). Beyond human knowledge: A consideration of the unexplained in man and nature. London: Rider. Wade, J. (2004). Transcendent sex. New York: Paraview. Washburn, M. (1994). Transpersonal psychology in psychoanalytic perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press. Wiederman, M. W., & Whitley, B. E. (2002). Handbook for conducting research on human sexuality. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Wile, D. (1992). Art of the bedchamber: The Chinese sexual yoga classics including women’s solo meditation texts. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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CHAPTER 10
Altered Consciousness and Human Development Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and Etzel Carden˜a Introduction Human development is highly multifaceted, even at the normative level, with biological, neurological, perceptual, relational, cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of development unfolding along somewhat differential time schedules. Moreover, these various aspects of development are all very likely to affect the states of consciousness experienced by the individual in different life periods. At the most general level, development may be defined as advances in complexity, differentiation, and integration (Carlson, Yates, & Sroufe, 2009). Relatedly, no conceptualization of human development is complete without serious consideration of individual differences. Naturally, such individual differences in paths of development are also related to alterations in consciousness (e.g., some states are experienced by some individuals more than others). Matters are complicated further by the absence of an agreed-upon taxonomy for states of consciousness, a term associated with “conceptual vagueness and obfuscation” (Carden˜a, 2009, p. 305). This is highly unfortunate, as knowledge about the emergence of different states of consciousness, understood developmentally as “discontinuous ensembles of self-organizing variables” (Wolff, 1987, p. 21), may be foundational for a fuller understanding of child and adult development in general. This chapter will describe the general organization of the normative state of consciousness at different stages of development, along with specific altered states of consciousness (ASC) more prone to occur in the different phases of life: infancy and toddlerhood, early and middle childhood,
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adolescence, adulthood, and old age. We will also discuss relevant genetic and environmental factors on the propensity to enter ASC (e.g., the heritability for dissociation, as well as how the attachment quality between children and their primary caregivers can influence the risk for dissociation later in life). This chapter, however, does not cover the different issue of proposed frameworks for how modes of consciousness may manifest different levels irrespective of age (e.g., Wilber, 1998, p. 43). Wilber has also proposed a developmental scheme in which there is a chronological sequence: magic (2–5 years), mythic (6–11 years), rational (11 onward), and vision logic (adulthood, if at all; 1998, p. 109). However, matters are far more complicated than this scheme. For instance, Gopnik (2009) has reviewed the literature showing that although infants and children engage in a lot of counterfactual, fantasy thought from early on they are also engaging in establishing causal events in their surroundings.
Genetic Predispositions A review of anomalous experiences and related constructs such as hypnotizability and dissociation strongly suggests that some individuals are more likely than others to experience a variety of alterations of consciousness, irrespective of whether they also manifest psychopathology or not (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Cross-cultural research has suggested that such phenomena as shamanism “runs in families” (cf. Halifax, 1980) and it is likely that this marked, cross-cultural individual difference has a genetic component. A diathesis for dissociation and hypnotizability has been proposed (e.g., Butler et al., 1996) and there is evidence for a genetic contribution to dissociation (Becker-Blease et al., 2004; Jang, Paris, Zweig-Frank, & Livesley, 1998), hypnotizability (Morgan, 1973), and absorption (Tellegen et al., 1988). Hypnotizability has also been associated with the COMT gene (Lichtenberg, Bachner-Melman, Ebstein, & Crawford, 2004). Furthermore, hypnotizability has been related to the construct of mental boundary thinness and the character trait of selftranscendence (Carden˜ a & Terhune, 2008). The latter shows a 90% unique variance when analyzed along other major character/temperament constructs (Gillespie, Cloninger, Heath, & Martin, 2003). Thus, different strands of evidence support some type of heritability for the propensity to alter one’s consciousness, although a number of questions remain unanswered, including to what extent various related constructs (e.g., absorption, dissociation, schizotypy) are manifestations of one or more latent variables and how they manifest across the lifespan.
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States of the Infant and Toddler In early infancy, states of consciousness are often treated as more or less synonymous with behavioral states, which are in turn closely associated with states of arousal. This is probably explained by the unusually close association among them at such an early period of development, resulting from a relative lack of differentiation (e.g., because of the infant’s limited self-regulatory skills, behaviors and experiences cannot be easily distinguished). For example, it is assumed that a smiling infant is very likely to experience joy and a crying infant to experience distress, but, as Daniel Stern (1985) rightfully points out, knowing the subjective world of the infant is impossible; we can only speculate about it. Relatedly, Alison Gopnik (2009) has recently reviewed the literature on early development and, based on behavioral and neurophysiological indicators, proposes that early in life the general state of waking consciousness of a baby and very young child is characterized by very large and undifferentiated attention to most things in the surrounding world, which produces an intense but fairly uncontrollable experience (“lantern consciousness”). As the child grows up, that experiential intenseness, driven by the manifold changes in the environment, gives place to a more focused and controlled attention (“spotlight consciousness”), but with a concomitant loss of experiential intensity. Gopnik also shows that although babies and toddlers have memory, can plan, and have a sense of self (mostly somatic; see also Stern, 1985), they only begin to have a sense of self across time, both with respect to their past and probable mental occurrences, around 4 years of age. When they are younger, they may deny that they had past psychological experiences, not anticipate which ones they are likely to have, and rely on their caretakers’ verbalizations to describe what they may have experienced (see Natsoulas, 1983, for a discussion of the sense of consciousness across time). Before an extended self, their experience may be of one intense moment after another, without much organization or coherence [see Schaefer, this volume, for a discussion of possible peyote effects on the developing fetus].
Arousal States of the Neonate, Differentiation, and the Emergence of Basic Emotions When conceptualizing the states of the neonate, it is common to simply distinguish between different states of arousal, ranging from regular “deep” sleep (non-REM or State I) and irregular dream sleep (REM or State II), via alert inactivity (drowsiness or State III) to quiet alertness (State IV), to waking activity (bursts of uncoordinated motor activity) and crying (State V;
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Wolff, 1987). Moreover, these states are believed to be universal and present in all healthy newborns. The amount both of sleep in general and of the proportion of REM versus non-REM sleep changes dramatically throughout life. At birth, the neonate sleeps about 16 hours, about half of them in REM sleep, but by the teen years the typical person sleeps only about 8 hours, one fourth of which are REM sleep; the decreased proportion of REM sleep and decrease or disappearance of deep sleep (i.e., stages 3 and 4) will continue throughout the lifespan (Hobson, 1995). A central principle in psychobiological conceptions of development is that the ontogenetic maturation of many psychobiological systems is characterized by increased complexity and differentiation (e.g., Bowlby, 1969/ 1982; Hinde, 1966). For example, presuming the accessibility of a lactating mother, the newborn’s eating builds entirely on primitive reflexes, most notably the sucking reflex. Although eating in adulthood has the same biological function of obtaining nourishment, it usually requires the enactment of a considerably more complex plan hierarchy, consisting of a number of behaviors that are in themselves unrelated to eating (e.g., writing a grocery list, driving to the grocery store, etc.). At the same time, the sucking reflex has since long disappeared, while sucking itself is still available in the adult’s behavioral repertoire, but now under volitional control and subjected to more differential usage (e.g., sucking on a popsicle). Although “states of consciousness” are by no means conceptually synonymous with psychobiological systems, the increased complexity and differentiation of such systems may well be intertwined with and have consequences for how states of arousal/behavior/consciousness unfold from infancy onward. For example, brainwaves and sleep stages become far more complex and differentiated in both REM and non-REM sleep after birth and during the first years of life (Hobson, 1995). Also, over the course of the first months of life, the waking states described by Wolff (1987) and others will come to be further differentiated. Changes in attentiveness and social signaling during these states are one example of such differentiation. Newborns display quiet, simple attention, mostly without emotional expressions, in face-to-face communication with their smiling mothers (Lavelli & Fogel, 2005). Gradually, faint smiles emerge. Smiling often seems to occur randomly at first but is especially likely during REM sleep, when the baby is full, or when gently caressed (Emde, 1991). However, from about 2 to 3 months of age, when the object of the infant’s attention is a source of pleasure, such as a smiling mother, the infant expresses clear and unmistakable delight, evident in social smiling (i.e., a broad, unmistakable grin, with eyes fixated on the interaction partner) and—shortly thereafter—full laughter (Sroufe & Waters, 1976).
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Moreover, although associated with “waking activity,” these behavioral expressions are presumably linked to consciousness experiences (emerging experiences of love and joy) that differ markedly from the neonate’s state of mere waking activity. In a similar vein, the newborn’s expression of generalized distress, characteristic of unregulated crying (State V), will branch off during the course of the first year of life to more discrete expressions of anger, fear, and occasionally sadness (increasing from about 6 months of age). Thus, the same “arousal state” from the newborn period is now associated with very different mental events (in these cases, emotional expressions and experiences). Besides increased complexity and differentiation, another maturational principle of psychobiological systems is likely to affect the development of states of consciousness, namely increased selectivity, or a general move from novelty to familiarity preference. The development of attachment during the first year of life is probably the best-known example of this from the psychobiological literature (Bowlby, 1969/1982). In the process of developing selective attachments to caregivers, the infant moves from a kind of socially “promiscuous” responsiveness (e.g., smiling) to whoever happens to interact with him or her during the first few months of life to an increasingly salient preference for the familiar caregivers, coupled with stranger anxiety, during the second half of the first year. A direct implication of this process is that pleasant experiences (such as joy, happiness, and love) will be increasingly experienced when the infant is in contact with the caregivers, especially with caregivers who are sensitive to the infant’s needs, whereas unpleasant feelings, such as fear, weariness, and anger, will be increasingly associated with strangers as well as caregivers who fail to meet the infant’s needs.
Attentional Shifting, Self-Regulatory Skills, and Temperament With the development of self-regulatory skills (i.e., strategies to modify the intensity of emotional experience and expression), the growing infant will also increasingly make his or her own contribution to the states experienced and expressed. Already in the first few months of life, infants may shift their attention from unpleasant to pleasant stimuli. However, newborns are very inflexible attention shifters; their gaze occasionally gets fixated even on unpleasant stimuli, which often results in full crying. From about 4 months of age, they gain more flexibility in shifting attention (Hood, Atkinson, & Braddick, 1998) and will from then on more actively contribute to what information enters the sensory channels and, consequently, what they will experience.
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If they are also fortunate enough to be cared for by accepting and sensitive caregivers, they will typically come to learn that distress that cannot be avoided by shifting attention can nevertheless be managed so that it does not become overwhelming. This reassurance is initially accomplished by the caregiver’s comforting behaviors but will get increasingly internalized with maturation (Cassidy, 1994; Stern, 1985). Partly for these reasons, the intensity of distress signals is typically attenuated from the newborn’s relatively ungraded high-intensity crying to the growing infant’s and toddler’s more graded distress responses (i.e., they take more time to build up to full crying). In other words, the states experienced and their behavioral expressions will increasingly come under the developing individual’s own control. Children whose self-regulation skills fail to develop favorably during the first 2 years of life are sometimes thought to possess a “difficult temperament” (Thomas & Chess, 1977), characterized by, for example, impulsivity (associated with states of frustration and urgency), negative emotionality (associated with states of anger and distress), or marked behavioral inhibition to novelty (i.e., amygdala-based hyperreactivity, associated with states of fear and weariness; Buss & Plomin, 1984; Kagan, 1984; Rothbart, 2003). Although temperamental dispositions are at least partially malleable by contextual factors, such as an environment that provides a “goodness of fit” with the child’s disposition (Thomas & Chess, 1977), they are also moderately heritable (Wachs & Bates, 2001). Furthermore, these dispositions tend to become increasingly stable and predictive of other aspects of development with maturation. For example, temperament inhibition (i.e., a failure to down-regulate fear responses) during the second year of life has been found to predict social anxiety in adulthood (Schwartz, Snidman, & Kagan, 1999). Thus, a failure to develop self-regulation skills is not just associated with unfavorable high-intensity experiential states but may also pave the way for later adjustment problems.
Emotional Contagion and the Development of Self and Self-Conscious Emotions Another characteristic of human infants is their hypersensitivity to others’ states, as observed in studies of mimicry and emotional contagion. Thus, when infants hear another infant crying, they may well break down in full crying themselves. This is currently believed to be an expression of the activation of the mirror neuron system, which humans are held to share with some other primates (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006). Presumably because of their relatively undeveloped capacity for self–other distinctions, infants are especially prone to emotional contagion. However, a tendency
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for the self to be affected by the states of others naturally lingers throughout the life cycle (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). The comparatively “basic” emotional contagion phenomenon may in fact be a developmental precursor not just of empathy but also of suggestibility in general, including hypnotizability (cf. Carden˜a, Terhune, Lo¨o¨f, & Buratti, 2009). Self-awareness unfolds during the first 2 years of life from a presumably mere implicit capacity for self–other distinctions in the case of the neonate (e.g., he/she rotates more reliably when another person touches the baby’s cheeks rather than the baby him/herself; Rochat & Hespos, 1997), via the 4- to 6-month-old’s gradual realization that the hands and other body parts do not only belong to the self but can actually be volitionally controlled by the self, to the toddler’s explicit realization that the self is what is reflected in a mirror (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; see also Gopnik, 2009). In the wake of such increases in self-awareness comes a capacity for self-control/regulation (as described above) and the experience of being an intentional agent. Also, unlike the infant, the toddler will typically start to experience self-conscious states of pride, shame, selfdoubt, and embarrassment, which build upon and are believed to reflect complex combinations of the “basic” emotions that gradually unraveled during infancy (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989). However, it should be understood that not only does self-development affect states of consciousness. Even more importantly, states of consciousness also affect and indeed partly organize self-development. From a developmental perspective, organization and integration of experiences in general, including states of consciousness, is what defines the self (Loevinger, 1976). Daniel Stern has vitally contributed to our understanding of the experiential states of the infant and how they are intertwined with the developing self. His (1985) contention that the experience of self not only requires that the individual distinguish the self from others but also identify the self with others highlights the intersubjective nature of much of the young infant’s experiential states. Indeed, the affective valence of the experiences of “being with another” (at the beginning, usually the mother) may be a foundation for the infant’s development of a sense of self and other(s). In favorable conditions, the infant sees him/herself in the caregiver’s gaze of reverie. This is presumably associated with a pleasant affective tone (i.e., a vitality affect) on part of the infant. Moreover, consistently responsive caregiving throughout infancy is likely to enable the recognition of consistency in the self and affective experience across time and context, whereas aberrant, abusive, or neglecting caregiving may thwart the developing organization of the self, which may instead wind up as fragmented (Carlson et al., 2009).
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Disorganized Attachment and the Emergence of Dissociation As noted by Carlson and colleagues (2009), if the development of core self processes advances toward greater complexity and differentiation without complementary integration, pathological dissociation may ultimately result. Dissociation has been defined as a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, and perception (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and is clearly a complex, multifaceted construct. Several scholars have suggested a distinction between dissociation as experiential detachment and as cognitive compartmentalization (Brown, 2006; Carden˜a, 1994). In the former case, the individual experiences an ASC characterized by a sense of separation/detachment from certain aspects of everyday experience, whether it be their body (e.g., an out-of-body experience), their sense of self (depersonalization), or the surrounding world (derealization). Individuals experiencing detachment may report feeling spaced out, unreal, or as if they are in a dream. Compartmentalization, on the other hand, refers to a deficit in the ability to deliberately access or control normally accessible processes or actions, such as recalling basic personal information (e.g., selective amnesia) or self-identifying previous or current behaviors. Although such examples of pathology-related dissociation tend to be noted later in development (when most other individuals have developed a firmly integrated sense of self), a disorganized infant–caregiver attachment bond may underlie proto-dissociative states already in the infant-to-toddler period and foreshadow a propensity for pathological dissociative states later in development (Silberg & Dallam, 2009). Disorganized (D) attachment is thought to represent a breakdown in attachment-related patterning during stress (Main & Morgan, 1996), possibly stemming from a fragmented self system (Carlson et al., 2009). Using the strange situation procedure (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978), D attachment is identified in behavioral expressions that are displayed in the presence of the caregiver, such as prolonged freezing with an unresponsive facial expression, simultaneous displays of opposite behaviors (such as approaching the attachment-figure with one part of the body while moving away with another), and direct indices of apprehension of the caregiver (Main & Morgan, 1996). According to a meta-analysis, the prevalence of D attachment in the general population is about 15%, and considerably higher in clinical and at-risk samples (van IJzendoorn, Schuengel, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1999). Disorganized attachment is conceptually aligned with Bowlby’s (1973, 1980) idea of segregated processes, which are believed to result from
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inescapable fear/trauma that overloads the individual’s defense system (see also Carden˜a, 1994, for a sense of dissociation as psychological defense). As described by Hesse and Main (2006), an important reason for why this might happen within the child’s relationship with caregivers is because of the behavioral paradox in which children find themselves when their caregivers are simultaneously the source of alarm (e.g., being abusive, frightening, or dissociative) and the only possible solution to it (because the offspring relies on the attachment figures to deal with potential danger; e.g., Hesse & Main, 2006). Long prior to Bowlby’s description of segregated systems, however— and dating back to Breuer and Freud’s studies of hysteria (1895/1957)— psychoanalysts have held that trauma-related fear may provoke dissociation, understood as a primitive defense mechanism. More recently, Liotti (1992) suggested specifically that infants whose relationship with the attachment figure produces a behavioral paradox of the kind described above are prone to later episodes of dissociation. Early D attachment would then comprise two aspects of dissociation: “an unusual quality of conscious experience (i.e., a trance-like state) and the simultaneous multiple representations of aspects of reality normally construed as unitary” (Liotti, 2006, p. 58). Liotti’s (1992) hypothesis was supported by long-term, longitudinal studies showing that infant-toddler D attachment status was indeed related to a higher occurrence of dissociative states and behaviors throughout childhood and adolescence (Carlson, 1998), especially following intervening trauma (Ogawa, Sroufe, Weinfield, Carlson, & Egeland, 1997). Various other strands of research with adolescents and adults also show that the discontinuity in experience brought about by traumatic events will also produce acute or chronic dissociative experiences (Carden˜ a, Butler, & Spiegel, 2003).
Early (2 to 6 Years) and Middle (6 to 12 Years) Childhood Although a greater expansion of cognitive and experiential capacities occurs in infancy and toddlerhood than during any other life period, the psychological worlds of infants and (to a lesser extent) toddlers are relatively concrete (cf. Piaget’s, 1926/1930, idea of sensorimotor cognition, but see Gopnik, 2009). As the growing child increasingly starts to rely on language, mental representations, mentalizing abilities, and symbolic thinking, new psychological avenues emerge, and with them a greater capacity for counterfactual thinking (Gopnik, 2009). For example, metacognitive capacities are typically under steady development in the preschool years.
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By age 4 to 6, most children correctly solve false belief tasks, indicating a functional theory of mind or a mentalizing ability that enables them to distinguish between the knowledge contained by their minds vis-a`-vis the minds of others (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). This ability makes the child considerably more socially skilled. Also, via a combination of greater mentalizing abilities and symbolic thinking, the child is now better able to imagine the existence of and attribute agency to unobservable others (e.g., Barrett, Richert, & Driesenga, 2001). Consequently, and at least as far as adult researchers are concerned, the child becomes “fantasy-prone;” the children’s psychological world, and imaginative play in particular, is now typically populated by ghosts, goblins, fairies, and imaginary peers. Such objects of imagination may both give rise to positive (e.g., a sense of companionship through an imaginary peer) and negative (e.g., the childhood fear of ghosts) experiential states. Notably, because such imaginary figures tend to be normative during this age period, a pathological process of dissociative development may be difficult to distinguish from normal imaginative involvement (Silberg & Dallam, 2009). However, like the transitional objects described in object relations theory, imaginary figures tend to be short lived, distinguished from reality, and to have passed their due dates by middle childhood (Hoff, 2004–2005). An exception is the object of religious belief (e.g., gods or spirits), for which there is certainly no evidence of waning with maturation (see below). With that one exception aside, it is notable that treating such imaginary figures as real will ultimately be a hallmark of serious psychopathology, including hallucination, delusion, and frank psychosis, by adolescence and adulthood (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Early childhood is also typically an age of conscience formation and moral awakening (e.g., Gibbs, 2003), although some type of moral judgment is already present earlier on (Gopnik, 2009). States of moral indignation now naturally start to manifest themselves, especially when the child’s own perceived rights are being violated (e.g., a toy is taken by another child). At the other side of the coin, self-conscious feelings such as guilt, remorse, and regret for one’s own perceived transgressions also start to develop. Although feelings of guilt are generally conducive to the development of empathy and the sense of self as moral agent (Hoffman, 2000), malevolent parenting discipline, such as prolonged love withdrawal, may lead to developmentally unfavorable feelings of shame on the child’s part (Mills, 2005). Also probably related to conscience formation, the work by Coles (1990) in his interviews with children of different ages shows that they can keenly try to clarify spiritual, religious, and existential issues of concern to them and that their questions and thoughts can be nuanced
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and sophisticated. It is thus not too surprising that even young children report transcendental “near-death experiences” occurring even with their limited exposure to cultural and religious influences (Greyson, 2000). Largely because of continued neurological developments in frontal and cortical areas, early childhood is also typically associated with substantial gains in sustained attention, effortful control, and executive functioning (e.g., behavioral inhibition, working memory, planning; Barkley, 1997; Rothbart, 2003). As a consequence, children of these ages acquire an increased capacity for remaining focused and concentrated on any task at hand while excluding competing, task-irrelevant information from ongoing processing. Thus, the seed for a state of absorption (i.e., “episodes of ‘total’ attention that fully engage one’s representational . . . resources,” Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974, p. 268) is sown during the course of the preschool years. Not coincidentally, preschool children tend to remain engaged with one activity for longer bouts of time than earlier in development (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000), and their playing often consists of prolonged bouts of make-believe play. Children who have failed to make such a normative gain in sustained attention and executive functioning by school age are potential candidates for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Barkley, 1997). Thus, both metacognitive capacities and episodes of absorption will typically increase in this life period. However, when all (or most) processing resources are occupied, as in absorbed states, the usual metacognitive monitoring of one’s perceptions and thoughts is likely counteracted (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974). Perhaps for this reason, later in development a propensity for absorption is one of the most reliable personality predictors of suggestibility in general and hypnotizability in particular (Roche & McConkey, 1990). Although not immune to methodological criticisms, research suggests that hypnotic responsiveness can be first measured around 5 years of age, reaches a peak in the preteen years, and then diminishes slightly (Olness & Kohen, 1996) but remains fairly stable throughout adulthood (Piccione, Hilgard, & Zimbardo, 1989). This statement hides some complexities, however, in that some hypnotic suggestions such as posthypnotic amnesias may not be even comprehensible to a very young child, while at the same time younger children may become more absorbed in their fantasy lives than older children. Research on the lifespan of dissociation, a related but by no means identical construct to hypnotizability, shows a similar developmental line. Dissociation has been posited to be higher in younger children of around 5 to 6 years of age and then to generally decline with age for both
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traumatized and nontraumatized children (Putnam, 1997). However, a different review of studies proposes that dissociation peaks in early adolescence (Vanderlinden, van der Hart, & Varga, 1996). A way to integrate these seemingly disparate conclusions is to distinguish different phenomena subsumed under the complex construct of dissociation (e.g., depersonalization episodes become more common in adolescence; see below). In any case, it seems that in childhood dissociation may be a normative reaction to disruption and distress, whereas in later years chronic dissociation is a likely indicator of psychopathology (Ogawa et al., 1997). Dissociation may also interact with other phenomena such as use of drugs during teen years (Tolmunen et al., 2007). As noted, traumatic events such as abuse from caregivers may provoke dissociative responses. In view of the false memories preschool children are prone to report when inadequately interrogated, it is of interest to note that some of the children who are most likely to be interrogated (i.e., those who have actually suffered abuse) are the very children who are most easily suggestible and thus most likely to experience false memories as real after being exposed to misleading questioning (Bruck & Melnyck, 2004), but they may also be open to suggestions that something did not happen when it actually did (Carden˜a et al., 2003). Although younger children have typically already initiated some extrafamilial activities and relationships (e.g., peer relations in preschool), in middle childhood they increasingly turn to the outer worlds of school, leisure activities, and friendships. Naturally, the extent to which they succeed with these extrafamilial activities and relationships has implications for various other aspects of development, not least for the sense of self as competent or inferior (Erikson, 1998). Children who do well in school and are liked by peers also tend to feel good about and take pride in themselves, whereas those less fortunate may come to suffer a range of negative effects related to poor self-esteem (Harter, 1999). In particular, from middle childhood on, friendships come to be identified with trust and companionship (Hartup, 1996). For socially isolated children who fail to develop any satisfactory friendships, loneliness may start to emerge during this life period. This is especially likely when the relationships with parents also fall short of emotional reassurance (Cassidy & Berlin, 1999). Unless circumstances change favorably, lonely children may well wind up as adolescents suffering from emotional alienation, characterized by a global inability to feel connected. Of course, subgroups of deviants who are defined by disconnectedness (e.g., Goth, Satanists, criminals) may still offer a sense of connection, with potentially negative implications for the surrounding.
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Adolescence (12 to 19 Years) Adolescence is a developmental phase particularly associated with experimentation with what may be considered to be risky behaviors, such as careless sex and use of drugs. With the increased production of sex hormones associated with puberty comes an enormous upsurge in sexual urges (Halpern, Udry, & Suchindran, 1997). By whatever means accomplished, whether through solitary sex or sexual activity with someone else, most adolescents are also “hit from below” by the novelty of orgasms. They are characterized by intense pleasure coupled with tension release and succeeded by a sense of calm and emotional harmony (i.e., homeostasis), in part caused by the release of neurohormones such as oxytocin which can lead to ASC [see Maliszewski et al., this volume]. The combination of strong sexual urges and the novel, addictive pleasures of orgasm will, not surprisingly, keep many adolescents busy trying to find a mate or else prescribing and realizing self-induced sexual pleasure (cf. Lauman, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). Other risky behaviors can also lead to ASC, such as the use or abuse of various drugs (Hibell, 2001). For example, alcohol temporarily attenuates anxiety, sedatives induce an unusually profound sense of calm, central stimulants inflate the sense of the self as powerful, and psychedelic drugs may yield dramatic ASC, including a sense of connection with everything [see various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume] Without ignoring biologically, socially, and culturally determined individual differences, the development of the adolescent brain partly explains the tendency to experiment with drugs, and risky decision making in general, that seems so characteristic of adolescence. The most important changes in the adolescent brain related to risky behavior, and thus to drug use, involve the remodeling of the prefrontal cortex (Spear, 2000) and the increase in dopamine activity in the context of an immature serotonergic system (Chambers, Taylor, & Potenza, 2003). Behavior is preceded by the making of a decision, do I or don’t I, which involves considering the possible consequences of an action. In this process, the prefrontal cortex is assumed to play a crucial part, and damage in this brain area has been associated with the inability to distinguish between a positive and a negative future outcome (Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1996). Coupled with greater behavioral capabilities, the relative immaturity of the prefrontal cortex in adolescents and the remodeling involving a decline in its relative size, with some neural connections lost and others added, may indicate why decisions made by adolescents tend to be riskier than those made by adults.
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In their turn, dopamine and serotonin have been called “the accelerator and the brakes,” respectively, “in the drive to risky behavior, particularly in the area of drug use and abuse” (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). Dopamine has been associated with novelty seeking and plays an essential role in the brain’s reward circuitry. The increase in dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex during (early) adolescence suggests that rewarding stimuli are experienced as more rewarding, which might be an explanation of the increase in sensation seeking during this developmental stage (Steinberg, 2008). And all this takes place in the context of a relatively immature serotonergic system; studies suggest that a more mature serotonergic system would have an inhibitory control function (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). We hasten to add here that although the emergence of drug use and sexual behaviors may be characterized as “risky” in terms of future adaptation and development, we have no desire to express alarmism surrounding their occurrence in adolescence. For example, according to data from the San Francisco Bay area, experimentation with (as opposed to frequent usage of and complete abstinence from) drugs such as alcohol and marijuana may be associated with favorable adolescent development, and sensitive parenting in childhood may be a precursor of drug experimentation in adolescence (Shedler & Block, 1990). It has also been noticed that most sensation seeking by adolescents is realized in the company of peers (Steinberg, 2008). Although relationships with parents typically still tend to be the principal attachment throughout adolescence, concurrent with reinitiated and intensified autonomy strivings, adolescents gradually transfer the components of attachment from parents to peers, most typically love partners and close friends, with whom they prefer to spend increasing amounts of time and to whom they start to turn when distressed (Zeifman & Hazan, 2008). The immense influence that peers have on the adolescent individual could be related to the influence of gonadal steroids on the increase of receptors for oxytocin, for this might lead to a heightened salience of peer relations (Steinberg, 2008), because oxytocin is associated with social bonding and the memory and recognition of social stimuli (Winslow & Insel, 2004). Perhaps that is why the drug use of peers has been commonly acknowledged as a strong predictor of the adolescent’s own drug use (Bauman & Ennett, 1996). Adolescence may be associated with emotional turbulence, especially for those with a history of insecure attachment (Allen, 2008). Not coincidentally perhaps, a century of research indicates that adolescence also represents an “age of religious awakening” (Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975), which may also include ritually induced ASC [see St John, Volume 1]. As
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already William James (1902) observed, there is something in religion that appeals to adolescents’ sentiment such that although the cognitive machinery required for a belief in unobservable agents is set in motion already in early childhood, it is typically not until adolescence that the emotional fuel required for deep religious feelings is poured into that machine. Neurological support for this conjecture has been offered by Alcorta and Sosis (2005). The religious rites of passage, as they observed, generally consist in creating new symbolic cognitive schema and connect these to emotions like fear and awe [see Whitehead, Volume 1]. Conditioning the association of these emotions with the symbolic cognitive schema will result in the sanctification of symbols, such as places and words. The authors propose that adolescence is a sensitive phase for the learning of emotionally intense symbolic systems, explained by specific changes in the adolescent brain. More specifically, the initiation of an attachment-like relationship with a transcendent being may be especially likely during adolescence to young adulthood, particularly for individuals who may find in God an appealing attachment surrogate to other unsatisfactory or even absent attachment figures (e.g., Granqvist & Kirkpatrick, 2008). Consequently, if experienced at any point in life, transcendent states of consciousness in general and religious experiences in particular (e.g., sudden religious conversions) tend to occur during adolescence or young adulthood and often in times of trouble (Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975). Once a perceived relationship with the divine has developed, it may well become a central motive (e.g., a perceived moral compass, but see Epley et al., 2009) around which the individual organizes other aspects of his/her life and experiences (cf. Allport’s, 1950, idea of “intrinsic” or “mature” religiousness). Also, by adolescence, dissociation tends to take a more clearly differentiated, adult form with full-fledged experiences of depersonalization, derealization, and selective amnesia (Silberg & Dallam, 2009). Consequently, dissociation-related expressions associated with adulthood emerge more often in adolescence than previously in development. They include self-mutilation during emotional numbing (Yates, Carlson, & Egeland, 2008), disordered body perception in anorexia nervosa (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), and a spirituality that may center around various ASC (Granqvist, Fransson, & Hagekull, 2009). Music is heavily consumed by adolescents and young adults. In its many different forms, music, and especially repetitive music, is a wellestablished facilitator of ASC (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993) [see Fachner, Volume 1], either on its own or in combination with psychoactive drugs, as it happens in raves.
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Adulthood and Aging As the aspects of development that form the foundation for most states of consciousness are sufficiently developed well before adulthood, the adult period of development will typically encompass fewer novel states than did previous developmental periods. In addition, development becomes increasingly heterogeneous (Nelson & Dannefer 1992), implying that individual, cultural, and subcultural differences make it increasingly difficult to characterize ASC in the adult. Nevertheless, some states will typically crystallize themselves, and some will be experienced in new situations or in relation to novel objects. For instance, there is some evidence that the likelihood of having a unitive, mystical experience increases with age (Wulff, 2000). Creativity-related states of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) or “peak experiences” (Maslow, 1976), are likely to get increasingly common in young adulthood in the context of work and career aspirations, especially in areas such as competitive sports, arts, and science. Such states presumably build upon basic capacities for sustained attention, executive functioning, and absorption (Privette, 1983), which made notable improvements already in early childhood but may now be increasingly employed as required by the new tasks that face young adults. Flow states are clearly self-organizing in that they potentiate optimal performance. Young adulthood (roughly 20–30) may also be especially conducive to such states because, as compared with previous periods of development, formal operational (i.e., abstract) thinking has typically been firmly established (Piaget, 1926/1930) and the individual has normally succeeded in reaching some level of autonomy. Also, as compared with later periods of adulthood, there are generally fewer competing demands that require the young adult’s attention and investment (most notably children and spouse), although building a family may later on become the focus of the individual. Further increases in heterogeneity in late adulthood make it difficult to arrive at a normative yet non-stereotypical conceptualization of states of consciousness in the elderly. Yet there seems to be cross-cultural consensus that a selfless balance between cognition and emotion known as “wisdom” is more likely to emerge with increasing age (Jeste et al., 2010). On the other hand, most elders have decreased sensory acuity, information processing speed, and working memory capacity (Hedden & Gabriele, 2004). This state of lessened sensory acuity may well be selforganizing to the extent that it inadvertently affects the aging person’s perceptions of him- or herself (“I’m old,” “I’m a social plague”) and leads to a restriction of engagement in activities that were formerly enjoyed.
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Consequently, as sensory acuity lessens, the elderly report lower selfefficacy, more loneliness and depressive symptoms, and smaller social networks (e.g., Kramer, Kapteyn, Kuik, & Deeg, 2002). In spite of such general declines in sensory and cognitive functions, most elderly people are capable of experiencing at least low to moderate levels of the states of consciousness that they acquired a capacity for earlier in the lifespan, as well as to manage and enjoy their everyday activities. However, pathological aging such as dementia, which results from progressive structural damage to the brain (most notably the cortical regions), is a contrary example. Initially, dementia is associated with memory loss, states of spatial disorientation, distorted body perception, and depression (Yaari & Corey-Bloom, 2007). As dementia progresses, metacognition, autobiographical memory, and executive functioning are decreased, and generalized distress, delusions, and basic arousal states (such as alert inactivity and crying) may ensue (Gwyther, 2001), which illustrates that although prospective differentiation, increased complexity, and integration are the norm in (healthy) development, the progression of dementia represents a reversed process. Although the loss through death of loved ones may occur at any point in the life cycle, it is clearly overrepresented among the elderly. Thus, grief or mourning is close to normative for the elderly, in particular following the death of a spouse, typically the principal attachment figure of adulthood (Bowlby, 1980). Loss of a principal attachment figure is a powerful stressor, indeed a potentially traumatic event. Consequently, spousal bereavement is associated with depression as well as with elevated risks for suicide (Rosenzweig, Prigerson, Miller, & Reynolds, 1997). To proceed favorably in terms of promoting adaptation to a life without the spouse, the mourning process requires that bereaved individuals eventually accommodate information regarding the permanence of the spouse’s death into their representational world (Bowlby, 1980). Otherwise, the individual is at risk of remaining unresolved or disorganized with respect to the loss; for example, they may display continued searching for the spouse and slip into states of disbelief regarding the spouse’s death (Main, Goldwyn, & Hesse, 2003). Research and theorizing on aging has consistently documented that many (but by no means all) elders also experience profoundly “positive” states. For example, research relating to Erikson’s idea (1998) of “ego integrity” (or wisdom) as a favorable developmental outcome of aging indicates that elderly who have attained ego integrity report high levels of psychological well-being such as an upbeat mood, self-acceptance, and marital satisfaction (James & Zarrett, 2007). In particular, with the integrity-related realization that one’s own life is part of an extended chain
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of human existence, death may lose its sting (Vaillant, 2002). Relatedly, religious beliefs and spirituality often gain increased importance for the elderly (Krause, 2006) and may offer additional benefits to the states experienced such as a sense of the interrelatedness of all things, of life as meaningful, and of security within a transcendent realm. The term gerotranscendence (Tornstam, 1997) has been coined in the literature to characterize the states of inner calm and serenity, of peace of mind when engaging in quiet reflection and reminiscence, which characterizes favorable development in the very final stages of life. This term refers to nothing less than a cosmic and transcendent perspective, directed forward and outward, beyond the individual’s self, and is consistent with the postulate that a transcendent stage of development may include but go beyond rationality rather than being just a regression to a prerational state (see Wilber, 1998, p. 90) [see also Beauregard, this volume]. At the very end of the day, some people who are about to die (Osis & Haraldsson, 1977) or who have encountered near-death experiences (NDEs), which may happen at any age but are more likely as the individual suffers a serious illness, report that as the brain discharges its final electrical impulses before “closing shop,” an ASC ensues associated with a profound sense of promise. This state is marked by, among other phenomena, a sense of peace and painlessness, unconditional love, and an experience of light at the end of a tunnel. A purely neurophysiological deficit explanation for NDEs may be inadequate to explain all the available data (Greyson, 2000), so a fair and comprehensive explanation remains a challenge for the future. It is, however, paradoxical that for some, the vast expansion of consciousness present after birth may have some parallel with their experiences at the moment of dying.
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Kramer, S. E., Kapteyn, T. S., Kuik, D. J., & Deeg, D. J. (2002). The association of hearing impairment and chronic diseases with psychosocial health status in older age. Journal of Aging and Health, 14, 122–137. Krause, N. (2006). Religion and health in late life. In J. E. Birren & K. W. Schaie (Eds.), Handbook of the psychology of aging (6th ed., pp. 499–518). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Lauman, F. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & Michaels, S. (1994). The social organization of sexuality: Sexual practices in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lavelli, M., & Fogel, A. (2005). Developmental changes in the relationship between the infant’s attention and emotion during early face-to-face communication: The 2-month transition. Developmental Psychology, 41, 266–280. Lewis, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the acquisition of self. New York: Plenum. Lewis, M., Sullivan, M. W., Stanger, C., & Weiss, M. (1989). Self development and self-conscious emotions. Child Development, 60, 146–156. Lichtenberg, P., Bachner-Melman, R., Ebstein, R. P., & Crawford, H. J. (2004). Hypnotic susceptibility: Multidimensional relationships with Cloninger’s tridimensional personality questionnaire, COMT polymorphisms, absorption, and attentional characteristics. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 52, 47–72. Liotti, G. (1992). Disorganized/disoriented attachment in the etiology of the dissociative disorders. Dissociation, 5, 196–204. Liotti, G. (2006). A model of dissociation based on attachment theory and research. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 7, 55–73. Loevinger, J. (1976). Ego development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Main, M., Goldwyn, R., & Hesse, E. (2003). Adult attachment scoring and classification systems. Unpublished manuscript. University of California at Berkeley. Main, M., & Morgan, H. (1996). Disorganization and disorientation in infant Strange Situation behavior: Phenotypic resemblance to dissociative states. In L. Michelson & W. Ray (Eds.), Handbook of dissociation: Theoretical, empirical, and clinical perspectives (pp. 107–138). New York: Plenum. Maslow, A. H. (1976). Religions, values, and peak experiences. New York: Penguin. Mills, R. S. L. (2005). Taking stock of the developmental literature on shame. Developmental Review, 25, 26–63. Morgan, A. H. (1973). The heritability of hypnotic susceptibility in twins. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 82, 55–61. Natsoulas, T. (1983). Concepts of consciousness. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 4, 13–59. Nelson, E. A., & Dannefer, D. (1992). Aged heterogeneity: Fact or fiction? The fate and diversity in gerontological research. The Geronotologist, 32, 17–23. Ogawa, J. R., Sroufe, L. A., Weinfield, N. S., Carlson, E., & Egeland, B. (1997). Development and the fragmented self: Longitudinal study of dissociative
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PART II
Psychological Perspectives
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CHAPTER 11
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke Introduction: The Bodily Self Concepts such as consciousness and the self have proven notoriously difficult to define and have yielded enormous amounts of literature in a large array of disciplines (e.g., Bermu´dez, Marcel, & Eilan, 1995; Metzinger, 2003). Recently, these concepts have been approached from the biological side by investigating their neurobiology and more generally how they are grounded in the organism and its physiology (i.e., the body). Neuroscientists, neurologists, experimental psychologists, and philosophers have joined forces and developed several lines of research trying to understand how the central nervous system dynamically represents the body and provides a basis for the sense of self. As the self, in the wider sense, is a manifold concept of staggering complexity, investigating the bodily self is often considered a fruitful approach to break down its minimal constituents and determine how extended aspects of the self are grounded on the body (e.g., Blanke & Metzinger, 2009; Damasio, 1999). An important strategy has been to exploit the insights offered by the scientific study and phenomenological accounts of persons undergoing altered perceptions of their bodies. Such understanding of the bodily self and its neural mechanisms may also provide clues about the nature of altered states of consciousness (ASC), which often involve bodily manipulations in their induction (e.g., drug intake, exhaustion, fasting, body posture) and a modification of body representations as a consequence (illusions, hallucinations, and delusions involving body parts or the whole body, as well as its spatial location). Before we describe specific cases of alterations of the bodily self in clinical neurology and other states of
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altered consciousness, we first discuss the nature of the bodily self and introduce the concept of altered states of bodily consciousness. The bodily self is a more restricted concept than the notion of embodiment, which can be defined as the idea that cognitive functions such as perception, language, reasoning, and social interaction are grounded on bodily processing (Gibbs, 2006). By contrast, the bodily self as a theoretical concept refers to those aspects of the self that can be associated with the structure and functions of the individual’s body. Culture, society, personal memories, and politics can probably be “embodied” to some extent, but the bodily self only relates to an organism’s more basic properties, such as how we localize our own body in the environment, perceive its ongoing posture and movement, detect changes in internal homeostasis, experience its actions to be self-generated, and identify its parts as selfbelonging (Bermu´dez et al., 1995; Legrand, 2006). The bodily self is historically associated to other concepts such as corporeal awareness, cenesthesia, the body schema, and the body image. Generally, all these notions refer to how the body is consciously or unconsciously experienced and represented. The brain is constantly receiving and sending, as well as updating, information from and to the body. Giving rise to the bodily self thus involves the dynamic integration of visual, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular, auditory, olfactive, visceral, and motor information, as well as higher-order representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and knowledge about bodies in general. This integration is achieved not by a single system in the brain but by a wide array of subsystems and bodily representations that, when impaired, can lead to altered states of bodily consciousness. The very idea of the bodily self is closely tied to clinical neurology. The concept was born out of the observation of neurological disturbances affecting how some patients perceived their own body. French otologist Pierre Bonnier (1905) coined the word asche´matie in 1905 precisely to refer to such disorders following severe vestibular impairments. The schema of the body, according to Bonnier, is a general sense of space, mostly unconscious, that transcends sensory modalities. This sense allows one to locate one’s own body in the environment, feel the space it is occupying, know its current posture, and localize tactile sensations on its surface. Some neurological symptoms, Bonnier realized, seemed to suggest that such a sense existed and was disturbed in specific occurrences. Other authors independently presented similar ideas. British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes (1911–1912) notably highlighted the importance of motor mechanisms and the ability of the body schema to automatically and involuntary
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update its representations by integrating ongoing movements and postural changes. These authors located the body schema, or what they called “an organized model of ourselves,” in the parietal lobe.1 Although terminology has differed widely ever since these early proposals, the bodily self and its neural basis have to a large extent continued to be studied through manifestation of its disorders. Throughout this chapter, we use the term altered states of bodily consciousness to refer to disturbances of the bodily self. In such states, the person does not perceive his or her own body accurately, that is, the current state of the physical body is misrepresented (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2009). Erroneous representations of the body differ widely as to their content. They can involve a specific body part, half of the body, the entire body, or the internal organs. Following neurological damage or interference to one hemisphere, symptoms often tend to be unilateral. Sometimes, however, disorders can extend bilaterally and even to the entire body. It is thus important, from a neuroscientific point of view, to ascertain the exact territory of the altered perceptions of the body, as this can point to the involvement of specific neural mechanisms. Sometimes, the body is the only aspect undergoing an alteration, while perception of the environment or other persons is spared. On other occasions, however, altered states of bodily consciousness seem to involve an extension of the bodily self to external objects, other persons, or even one’s surroundings. Indeed, dissolution of bodily boundaries, loss of ego, oceanic boundlessness, regressive, primitive, and infantile states (e.g., Mogar, 1990/1965) are not infrequent manifestations of mystical states, epileptic seizures, and psychiatric conditions referred to as ego-psychopathology (Scharfetter, 1981) [see Carden˜a, this volume]. The distinctions between self and other, self and object, as well as between self and world, and their disturbance during altered states of bodily consciousness, might thus also be associated with specific underlying neural mechanisms (e.g., Maravita & Iriki, 2004). Independently of the content of the bodily misrepresentation, the person’s awareness of such bodily illusions can vary. Patients can also behave quite differently according to how they perceive (or fail to perceive) unusual body experiences. Three broad categories might help disentangle very 1
Whereas body schema is somewhat closer to our use of bodily self, the term body image has often been used to refer to the conscious apraisal of one’s body, involving visual, mnesic, verbal, emotional, sexual, social, and cultural information pertaining to one’s own body. Both terms—body schema and body image—were and still are often used interchangeably (for a recent discussion, see de Vignemont, 2010).
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different experiential approaches from each other: A person might be indifferent to what he or she is experiencing, critical about the illusory or unusual nature of his or her experiences, or delusional about certain specific beliefs concerning the bodily self (Dieguez, Staub, & Bogousslavsky, 2007). Neurological patients who are indifferent do not notice that their perception and experience of their bodily self is anomalous. Such disorders are thus found only when an external person (e.g., the clinician) specifically investigates and detects the disorder. Thus the patient may be asked, for example, to move a limb or to describe her current bodily experience and only then respond in a way that is indicative of an altered state of bodily consciousness. In some cases, patients cannot even be brought to realize that they are misguided about their perceptions and beliefs concerning their bodies. This is the case of neurological patients who ignore their paralysis (anosognosia) or fail to pay any attention to the existence of half of their body (hemiasomatognosia). In other instances, patients are critical of the alteration of the bodily self they are undergoing, and a rational evaluation as well as a generally accurate perception of the illusory nature of the experience can be achieved. For instance, patients retaining full awareness during migraine or seizure episodes may be able to describe in some detail, even during such experiences, how they perceive their bodies as abnormal. Finally, patients presenting delusional alterations of bodily consciousness hold false beliefs that are impervious to any attempt at correction. Such patients not only perceive and report that something is wrong about their bodies but also claim that the alteration is actually happening or really has happened. Examples include reduplication of body parts, disownership of one’s body parts, and claims of being invaded by bugs or having one’s internal organs rotting. In the next sections, we describe in more detail such instances of altered states of bodily consciousness.
Neurological Alterations of Bodily Consciousness In what follows, we present selected examples of altered states of bodily consciousness caused by neurological disease. These disorders provide relatively “pure” instances of altered states of bodily consciousness, which have been extensively described and studied since the end of the 19th century, and furthermore allow a unique window into the neurological basis of bodily consciousness (Blanke, Arzy, & Landis, 2008; Dieguez, Staub, & Bogousslavsky, 2007).
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Phantom Limbs, Illusory Movements, Supernumerary Phantom Limbs The phantom limb phenomenon is present, transiently or permanently, in the majority of amputees (Brugger, 2005; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998). Persons with phantom limbs vividly experience the presence of a limb that is physically absent. This is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the existence of a body schema implemented as a cerebral body representation. Indeed, it has been reported that cortical damage can dispel phantom limbs (Appenzeller & Bicknelle, 1969) and that experimental manipulations of the vestibular system (Andre´, Martinet, Paysant, Beis, & Le Chapelain, 2001) or stimulation of premotor cortex (Bestmann et al., 2006) can modify phantom limb experiences. Research on phantom limbs suggests the causal involvement of a plastic reorganization of somatosensory and motor areas, a multilayered and innate network underlying bodily experience dubbed the “neuromatrix,” cross-callosal hemispheric interactions, as well as complex multimodal interactions (Giummarra, Gibson, Georgiou-Karistianis, & Bradshaw, 2007). Nonamputated individuals can also experience phantom limbs in the form of illusory movements. These refer to the experience that some hemiplegic patients have of performing movements without actually moving. When confronted with their failure to move, most patients acknowledge their mistake, but some will vehemently maintain that a movement has been performed despite evidence to the contrary (Ramachandran, 1995). These patients are often unaware of their paralysis (see below, anosognosia) or present unilateral neglect (Feinberg, Roane, & Ali, 2000). It is unclear, however, whether these claims reflect a genuine illusory movement or a verbal confabulation. Indeed, illusory movements are sometimes accompanied by delusional claims, such as when a patient not only claims having performed a movement but having seen his arm move or being able to perform and hear sounds of clapping, or even being able to touch the clinician’s nose (Ramachandran, 1995). In nondelusional patients with hemiplegia, illusory movements can be induced by providing a false visual feedback using a fake hand placed where the patient thinks his real hand lies, whereas patients unaware of their paralysis tend to perceive selfgenerated movements in the fake hand even when the latter remains motionless (Fotopoulou et al., 2008). Hemiplegic patients presenting disorders of the body schema also tend to experience movements in their paralyzed limb when looking at mirror-reflected movements of their contralateral healthy limb (Zampini, Moro, & Aglioti, 2004). Lesions associated to illusory movements involve predominantly the right hemisphere
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and most often the frontal and parietal but also the temporal cortex (Feinberg et al., 2000). It is also possible to induce illusory movements by stimulating electrically the right temporo-parietal junction (Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, 2002), in which case the illusion may have not only sensorimotor but also visual characteristics such as “seeing” that one’s own limbs are approaching one’s face. Such phenomena should be distinguished from supernumerary phantom limbs, a condition defined as the perceptual experience of an additional body part, felt as an entity sharing properties of a real body part and occupying a different place in space. Unlike patients with illusory movements, patients with supernumerary phantom limb distinctly experience a “third arm.” Some can critically evaluate the feeling as an illusion, but others will entertain the delusion that they actually own an additional limb or even experience more numerous duplications of arms or legs and perceive these multiple limbs as real. In the latter case, the term delusional reduplication of body parts has been proposed (Weinstein, Kahn, Malitz, & Rozanski, 1954). Most supernumerary phantom limbs involve a somesthetic perception of an immobile limb, localized separately but on the same side as the paralyzed limb (Antoniello, Kluger, Sahlein, & Heilman, 2009). Movements of such phantoms are usually rare and most often automatic or involuntary. It can also happen that the “extra limb” simply mimics the movements of the contralateral real limb or follows with some delay the movements of the ipsilateral real limb (McGonigle et al., 2002). There are, however, two cases in the literature describing intentional supernumerary phantoms in which the patients, paralyzed on one side, nevertheless experienced the movement of a phantom limb whenever (and only when) they wished to move it (Khateb et al., 2009; Staub et al., 2006). What is more, one of these patients also claimed to be able to see the phantom and “use” it to scratch her own face (Khateb et al., 2009), pointing to multimodal pathomechanisms [mechanisms by which a pathological conditions occurs] and similarities to heautoscopy, exosomesthesia, and asomatoscopy (see below). Lesions have involved the right basal ganglia (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1993), the right subcortical capsulolenticular region (Khateb et al., 2009), the left anterior choroidal artery territory (Staub et al., 2006), the right frontomesial cortex (McGonigle et al., 2002), and parietal structures in the case of delusional reduplications (Weinstein et al., 1954). A few functional neuroimaging studies have been conducted in such patients, showing activity in the supplemental motor area during phantom movements mimicking movements of the duplicated limb (McGonigle et al., 2002), abnormal activity in subcortical thalamocortical loops during intentional movements of the phantom (Staub et al.,
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2006), and activity in somatosensory and visual areas correlating with the patient’s claim of being able to feel and see her intentionally moved supernumerary phantom limb (Khateb et al., 2009). Given the variety of phenomenological profiles, it is unlikely that a single explanation can account for all cases of supernumerary phantom limb. Purely postural phantoms probably can be explained as the result of a conflict between impaired current proprioceptive afferences, caused by thalamo-cortical disconnections, and a spared internal representation of the body. Kinesthetic phantoms may best be conceptualized as the result of preserved motor efferences and action planning in the context of defective multimodal integration (Khateb et al., 2009). Additional pathomechanisms involving other modalities and higher cognitive functions could be involved in cases with delusional beliefs. The diversity of phantom limb phenomena, whether arising from amputation or brain damage, points to a complex and highly efficient network of body-related brain functions that smoothly provide a coherent bodily self in healthy persons.
Tactile Hallucinations and Mislocalizations Whereas visual and auditory hallucinations have been defined according to the absence of an external object giving rise to a percept, tactile hallucinations have led to conceptual problems, as it is not easy to objectively ascertain the absence of itches, numbness, and aches (Berrios, 1982). For instance, amputees can feel so-called “referred sensations” in a nonexisting limb concomitantly with a brush to specific body parts (Cronholm, 1951; Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1998). Although the sensation is felt in a nonexisting limb, the regularity of the phenomenon argues against a hallucination. Unusual or altered tactile experiences have frequently been reported in the neurological literature. Like visual hallucinations, tactile misperceptions range from the simple to the elaborate. Parkinson’s disease and related disorders are a frequent etiology of simple tactile hallucinations (Fe´ne´lon, Thobois, Bonnet, Broussolle, & Tison, 2002), whereas in advanced dementia, psychiatric conditions, substance abuse, and cerebrovascular disease, patients sometimes present with delusional parasitosis, the type of abovementioned “bugs” hallucinations, also called Ekbom’s syndrome or dermatozoic hallucination (de Leon, Antelo, & Simpson, 1992). The absence of tactile awareness from one body part is a frequent accompanying feature of many disorders discussed in this chapter. Socalled paresthesias, most notably, are a frequent first alert to patients undergoing a neurological event. These involve tinglings, pins and
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needles, numbness, and alterations in the experience of weight, size, temperature, and motricity, even in the absence of motor disorders. In turn, such feelings can lead to an experience of alienation from one’s body parts and even partial depersonalization, perhaps underlying rare cases of apparently healthy persons who wish to be amputated (Blanke, Morgenthaler, Brugger, & Overney, 2009). Neurologists have also observed mislocalizations of touch following brain damage. The phenomenon of alloesthesia refers to the perceptual transfer, usually from left to right (in the case of right-sided brain damage), of tactile sensations (Bender, 1970). Such patients are usually not aware of their mistakes. Although alloesthesia is most often caused by large lesions in the temporo-parietal areas of the right hemisphere, similar tactile mislocalizations are easily induced in about a quarter of healthy participants under laboratory conditions (Marcel et al., 2004). Perhaps more strikingly, touch can sometimes be experienced outside of one’s body. This is what some rare reports have referred to as exosomethesia. This experience can happen under a variety of conditions, for instance during testing for alloesthesia (Shapiro, Fink, & Bender, 1952) and in Tourette’s syndrome (Karp & Hallett, 1996). As mentioned earlier, amputees sometimes report tactile sensations in their phantom limbs. However, there is at least one instance of “phantom exosomesthesia” in which an amputee has reported a referred touch as arising from slightly outside of the phantom (Cronholm, 1951). Some persons otherwise healthy also report feeling touch when they see someone else being touched, a synesthetic experience related to empathic tendencies (Banissy & Ward, 2007). However, it does not seem that these individuals actually feel touch as if it arose in the other person (i.e., they feel it in their own body concomitantly to the touch they see on the other person). It is nevertheless relatively easy to induce the experience of touch as arising from objects or fake body parts, usually by inducing visuo-tactile conflicts (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), but also after practice with an extended tool (Maravita & Iriki, 2004) and the induction of spatially contiguous tactile inputs (Miyazaki, Hirashima, & Nozaki, 2010). A feeling of numbness seemingly arising from someone else’s finger can also be achieved simply by simultaneously touching one’s own finger together with another person’s finger (Dieguez, Mercier, Newby, & Blanke, 2009).
Bodily Transformations (Illusory Amputation, Size Changes, Disconnections) Some neurological patients can experience the sensation that a part of their body has vanished. These are cases of “sensation of absence” or “true
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness
sensation of amputation” (as opposed to amputees who feel a phantom limb and have an experience of bodily completeness and therefore do not feel their amputation as an absence), and are part of what Frederiks (1963a) named conscious hemiasomatognosia (see below, hemiasomatognosia and anosognosia), meaning a critical awareness that something is lacking from one’s bodily experience. This symptom has also been described in the visual modality, whereby a patient reports being unable to see a specific part of her body (asomatoscopy) following restricted damage to the right premotor and motor cortices (Arzy, Overney, Landis, & Blanke, 2006). Similar phenomena involve the feeling that a limb is detached from the body, as if it were floating at some distance from the trunk (Podoll & Robinson, 2002), or that the body is split in two halves (Heydrich, Dieguez, Grunwald, Seeck, & Blanke, 2010). Such experiences are usually short lived and happen mostly during epileptic seizures, migraine events, or vascular stroke (He´caen & Ajuriaguerra, 1952) affecting premotor, primary motor, or parietal cortex, as well as subcortical structures of either hemisphere. These illusions can appear in isolation, without any accompanying neurological symptoms. Other phenomena are characterized by more diffuse sensations of alienness, disconnection, or absence of body parts from the rest of the body, which are felt as numb, anesthetized, or empty. These forms have been called hemi-depersonalization (Heydrich et al., 2010; Lhermitte, 1939), as an analogy to full-fledged depersonalization, which usually involves the entire bodily self. The terms micro- and macrosomatognosia refer to alterations in the perception of size and weight of certain body parts (Frederiks, 1963b). Thus, a limb can be experienced as shrunken to the size of a baby’s hand or grotesquely immense (sometimes also referred to as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome; Todd, 1955). Again, such illusions are typically found in migraine and epilepsy, as well as damage to sensorimotor structures in either hemisphere.
Hemiasomatognosia, Anosognosia The term hemiasomatognosia was coined by French neurologist Jean Lhermitte (1939) to refer to unawareness of a body part or a hemibody. Frederiks (1963a) tried to clarify some conceptual issues by distinguishing between conscious and “nonconscious hemiasomatognosia. “Conscious” hemiasomatognosia refers to patients who perceive their body as incomplete or amputated while realizing that what they experience is an illusion (see above, Bodily transformations), whereas “nonconscious” hemiasomatognosia
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refers to the disappearance of body parts from one’s awareness, the patient being unable to notice or report this disappearance. Subforms of nonconscious hemiasomatognosia are currently known as personal neglect, motor neglect, or anosognosia for hemiplegia. In all these conditions, there is indifference, forgetfulness, or unawareness for parts of one’s own body. Personal neglect refers to the classical picture where a patient forgets to comb, shave, or make up the left side of his or her face. Motor neglect refers to patients who underuse or fail to use altogether their left limbs despite having no motor impairment. Conversely, patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia behave as if they were not paralyzed, as they ignore their left hemibody altogether and/or deny that there is anything wrong with it. Nevertheless, anosognosia for hemiplegia is a complex phenomenon, with patients differing widely as to their explicit and implicit insight of being paralyzed (Cocchini, Beschin, Fotopoulou, & Della Sala, 2010). For instance, some patients deny their impairment but nevertheless never act as if they were not paralyzed, while others might admit being paralyzed but still attempt actions that are impossible for them. Recent lesion-mapping analyses comparing patients with righthemispheric damage with and without anosognosia have highlighted the specific involvement of the right posterior insula (Baier & Karnath, 2008; Karnath, Baier, & Na¨gele, 2005) and an additional network of sensorimotor areas including the somatosensory, primary motor, and premotor cortices, as well as the inferior parietal lobule (Berti et al., 2005). Anosognosia is a multifaceted syndrome involving defective awareness of motor control, impaired integration of multimodal information, and disturbances of attentional and cognitive monitoring (Orfei et al., 2007).
Somatoparaphrenia German neurologist Joseph Gerstmann sought to distinguish between particular cases of hemiasomatognosia and used the term somatoparaphrenia for strongly delusional instances (Gerstmann, 1942). Somatoparaphrenia thus refers to false beliefs concerning a body part or a hemibody, the most frequent being disownership of one’s hand (whereby patients repeatedly claim that their own left hands do not belong to them, or more explicitly that they belong to someone else, the doctor, a nurse, a roommate, or some undetermined person; review in Vallar & Ronchi, 2009). However, such delusions can vary considerably, suggesting that the notion covers various disorders. Some patients will deny the ownership of a limb without attributing it to someone else explicitly. Others will state spontaneously that their
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limb belongs to someone specific, even someone altogether absent from the current environment or already dead. Some patients will elaborate their claim by stating that their limb has vanished or has been stolen, sometimes leading to complaints to the hospital staff. The strength of the delusion can also vary, some patients being able to acknowledge that there is something bizarre about their belief and others maintaining their claims despite overwhelming counter-evidence. Moreover, there are two types of misattribution in somatoparaphrenia: Parts of one’s own body can be attributed to someone else or, conversely, parts of someone else’s body can be attributed to oneself (Gertmann, 1942). Patients with somatoparaphrenia can display strong emotional reactions—for instance, they can fall from their bed after trying to “kick out” what they think is an alien limb. Similarly, patients presenting with misoplegia can display hatred of the paralyzed limb that borders on the delusional but without presenting explicit feelings of disownership (Loetscher, Regard, & Brugger, 2006). Some cases of somatoparaphrenia suggest an association with other disorders of the body schema such as supernumerary phantom limbs, when a limb is disowned while an “extra” one is present, or the feeling of a presence, when the disowned limb is perceived as a whole person lying nearside in the bed. Most of the reported cases of somatoparaphrenia involve the left side of the body following a right-sided stroke. Lesions generally involve an extended fronto-temporo-parietal network, with a predominance of posterior areas, such as the temporo-parietal junction, the posterior insula, as well as subcortical structures (Vallar & Ronchi, 2009). Involvement of medial frontal and orbitofrontal areas seems to distinguish delusional types of disownership from mildest types of limb estrangement (Feinberg et al., 2010). Interestingly, the posterior insula is the most commonly involved area in both somatoparaphrenia and anosognosia for hemiplegia (Baier & Karnath, 2008). Although these two disorders can be separated, this finding nevertheless suggests that, at both the clinical and anatomical level, awareness of action and ownership of body parts are tightly linked (Baier & Karnath, 2008).
Whole-body Hallucinations, Vestibular Hallucinations, Autoscopic Phenomena We now turn to altered states of bodily consciousness involving the entire body. Most of the disorders described in the previous sections, as well as others we haven’t addressed here, can conceptually be extended to the entire body (see Blanke et al., 2008; Dieguez et al., 2007).
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Almost four centuries ago, Descartes was greatly impressed by accounts of phantom limbs in amputees, which might have led him to wonder about the potential results of a “radical amputation” in the fourth part of his Discourse on the Method (1637) (as suggested by Ferret, 1998, pp. 161–162). Would amputation of the whole body unleash a “phantom body,” just like an amputated arm “releases” a phantom limb (see also Mitchell, 1905/1866)? Later, Lhermitte (1939) proposed the concept of “complete asomatognosia” to refer to an extreme form of depersonalization (sometimes called Cotard’s syndrome) as a full-body analogy to his concept of hemiasomatognosia. In such cases, patients may go as far as to claim to be nonexistent or dead (Young & Leafhead, 1996). The extension of altered states of bodily consciousness from body parts to the whole body seems to require the involvement of the vestibular system. Vestibular disturbances are indeed known to induce dissociations between the experienced and the actual posture, movement, and orientation of the body. In the tilt-room illusion, for instance, patients might feel a complete disconnect between the actual position of their bodies and the orientation of their surroundings, which can appear tilted as far as 90° (Tiliket, Ventre-Dominey, Vighetto, & Grochowicki, 1996). More diffuse disturbances are also found in patients with vestibular disturbances and healthy participants undergoing caloric vestibular stimulation [water or air irrigation into the auditory canal], a procedure that stimulates the vestibular system and induces symptoms comparable to depersonalization (Sang, Ja´uregui-Renaud, Green, Bronstein, & Gresty, 2006). Interestingly, caloric vestibular stimulation has been shown to activate brain areas involved in several altered states of bodily consciousness, including the right temporo-parietal junction and posterior insula (Fasold et al., 2002) and also to alleviate such symptoms (Bisiach, Rusconi, Vallar, 1991). Bodily mislocalizations, hallucinations of body parts, and supernumerary phantom limbs have recently been linked to autoscopic phenomena (Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck, 2004; Brugger, 2002). This group of disorders involves multimodal illusions inducing the experience of more or less complete duplicata of one’s own body. An autoscopic hallucination is one where experiencers perceive a visual double of themselves in extrapersonal space. However, such visual perception of one’s body can also involve mislocalizations of the bodily self. Thus, during heautoscopy, a person can experience the bodily self alternatively, or even at the same time, in the physical and the seen body. In neurological patients undergoing this Doppelga¨nger experience, an involvement of the left temporoparietal junction and the left mesiobasal temporal lobe has been found (Blanke & Mohr, 2005). In an out-of-body experience, a person feels her
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self as spatially localized outside of the physical body and experiences seeing the latter from an elevated perspective (see below). Another related illusion, referred to as the feeling of a presence, is characterized by a closely “projected” double that is not visible (Brugger, Regard, & Landis, 1997). The “presence” of a person can be felt sideways, behind, or in front of one’s physical body, and may even involve multiple “presences” (Brugger, Blanke, Regard, Bradford, & Landis, 2006). Such a feeling of presence has been induced by cortical electrical stimulation of the posterior part of the left superior and middle temporal gyrus (Arzy, Seeck, Ortigue, Spinelli, & Blanke, 2006). For both heautoscopy and the feeling of presence, damage to or abnormal activity in parietal and temporallimbic structures, and a resulting vestibular dysfunction, have been posited as plausible pathomechanisms underlying such complex experiences.
Out-of-body and Near-death Experiences The out-of-body experience (OBE) can be defined as a waking experience combining disembodiment, elevated perspective, and autoscopy. However, specific features, such as how the “disembodied self” is perceived, the modalities involved, the ability to move, and so forth, can vary widely across persons (Alvarado, 2000), suggesting multiple etiologies and mechanisms. The neural correlates of such extraordinary experiences are beginning to be understood, highlighting the roles of multisensory integration and vestibular processes. An OBE was recently induced by cortical electrical stimulations during presurgical investigations for intractable epilepsy (Blanke et al., 2002). At lower intensities, stimulation of the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) induced simple vestibular illusions, whereas stronger intensities at the same region induced an OBE (see also De Ridder, Van Laere, Dupont, Menovsky, & Van de Heyning, 2007). The rTPJ, and especially the angular gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, was later found to be the critical overlapping region in a group of brain-damaged and epileptic patients with OBE (Blanke et al., 2004; Blanke & Mohr, 2005), and was involved in a task where healthy participants had to mentally project themselves out of their body to resolve a task of laterality (Blanke et al., 2005). Studies of persons with sleep paralysis reporting OBE-like experiences and related disorders, as well as healthy persons with an experience of OBE (about 5–10% of the general population report at least one such experience during a lifetime; Alvarado, 2000), suggest that neural mechanisms related to REM intrusion (Nelson, Mattingly, & Schmitt, 2007), the vestibular and motor system (Cheyne & Girard, 2009), emotions (Nielsen,
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2007), synesthetic tendencies (Terhune, 2009), as well as personality factors such as absorption, dissociation, schizotypy, and body image dissatisfaction (reviewed in Blanke & Dieguez, 2009) are associated with the experience of disembodiment and altered states of bodily consciousness involving the whole body. Such mechanisms are also likely involved in OBEs that occur under stressful events or extreme medical situations, so-called “near-death experiences” (Blanke & Dieguez, 2009; Holden, Greyson, & James, 2009). In addition to disembodiment, such experiences may be associated with the experience of a passage through darkness or a “tunnel,” the perception of a “divine” light, a “panoramic” review of one’s life memories, and encounters with “spirits” or deceased relatives. As one early observer put it, the NDE, by its very nature, seems “made to astonish; fast, unexpected, extraordinary, usually poorly understood, it takes the appearance of an internal marvel; it gives rise to illusions and legends” (Egger, 1896, p. 367). Mild disturbances of the temporal lobe and altered sleep patterns have been found in a restricted sample of persons with NDE (Britton & Bootzin, 2004), as well as a higher prevalence of REM intrusions in waking life than in a control group (Nelson, Mattingly, Lee, & Schmitt, 2006), pointing to similar sleep-related mechanisms as for OBEs. Nevertheless, at this stage it is difficult to envision a neurocognitive account of NDEs as there is a dearth of systematic empirical neuroscientific research on this class of phenomena, perhaps due to its paranormal overtones and the lack of a consistent and operational definition. Indeed, a number of conditions have been reported to induce similar experiences, most often involving some alteration of the bodily self and not being necessarily life-threatening, such as syncope (Lempert, Bauer, & Schmidt, 1994), intracranial brain stimulation (Vignal, Maillard, McGonigal, & Chauvel, 2007), the perception of danger (Noyes & Kletti, 1977), and psychological stress (Siegel, 1984). All in all, it seems that the OBE in neurological patients, healthy persons, and under life-threatening situations, is associated with a disintegration of sensory modalities, notably vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive information, together with a variety of factors reflecting cognitive, emotional, and perhaps cultural factors, leading to failures of self-localization and displacement of the first-person perspective.
Behavioral and Experimental Alterations of Bodily Consciousness We cover in this section a variety of “classical” altered states of consciousness and how they affect the bodily self, as well as experimental methods developed to study the bodily self in the laboratory.
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Mystical States Altered states of consciousness associated with mystical states or meditation have been reported to induce alterations of bodily consciousness from times immemorial. In these states, ”dissolution of the ego” or “pure consciousness” are often reported, referring to an experienced merging of the self and bodily self with external space and accompanied by a felt transcendence from spatial and temporal constraints, a sense of sacredness and ineffability, and an overall positive mood (Pahnke & Richards, 1990/ 1966; Wulff, 2000). Such states can also be close to, or even cause, OBEand NDE-like episodes. An involvement of the limbic system, associated to a sudden release of endorphins (Prince, 1982) or in the form of ecstatic epileptic seizures of temporal lobe origin (Picard & Craig, 2009), has been highlighted as a neurobiological correlate of such experiences. A recent investigation of the impact of brain damage on the personality trait “transcendent self” also suggests the importance of the temporo-parietal junction (Urgesi, Aglioti, Skrap, & Fabbro, 2010), an area also involved in other cases of altered bodily awareness of body parts (such as anosognosia and somatoparaphrenia) as well as illusory full-body perceptions (such as out-of-body experiences). Physical and environmental factors can also be involved, as experiences of bodily dissolution and separation of the self and body have been reported during physical exhaustion of runners (Morgan, 2002) and in high-altitude mountaineers (Brugger, Regard, Landis, & Oelz, 1999).
Hypnosis Hypnosis is perhaps the most compelling area of overlap between neurology and ASC, at least historically [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, Volume 1]. Early investigation of “hysteric” patients suggested an influence of hypnosis on bodily function and experience. At least in certain persons, neurological-like symptoms have been relieved or induced by different methods of hypnosis. Most notably, anaesthesia/analgesia and paralysis during hypnosis have been the focus of much attention and recently been revived in neuroscientific research (Cojan et al., 2009). Hypnotic induction of altered states of bodily consciousness has also been incorporated as a tool in the cognitive neurosciences of belief formation in healthy participants (e.g., Cox & Barnier, 2010). We also note that hypnosis has been used to induce OBEs (Irwin, 1989). Although the mechanisms underlying hypnosis are far from understood, these findings point to the importance of suggestibility and higher-order belief systems, as well as the influence
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of conducive bodily states (e.g., quiescence, Carden˜a, 2005), as part of the etiology of altered states of bodily consciousness.
Drugs Drugs have probably been the most salient artificial inducer of ASC throughout history, and complex alterations of the bodily self have long been reported following intoxication by a wide array of substances [see Presti, this volume]. For instance, Havelock Ellis vividly described the bodily experiences of a mescal user, who reported feelings of heaviness in one leg while the rest of the body seemed to dematerialize, the back of his head splitting in two and releasing flows of vivid colors, wind rushing through his hair, sensations of lightness and contraction, visual hallucinations of parts of his own body, and the feeling of being inside his own body and looking through it as through a thin transparent skin (in Lhermitte, 1939, pp. 167–168). In addition to feelings of “dissolution” and various forms of transformations, “getting high” often involves the sensation of levitating and flying, as well as leaving one’s body, as described by French poet and painter Henri Michaux in his monograph on the effects of marijuana (Michaux, 1967, pp. 132–135). Indeed, apart from well-known effects such as distortion of sense of time, increase in self-confidence, heightened awareness, and complex mental associations (Hastings, 1990/1969), marijuana is also well known to influence bodily consciousness. Charles Tart (1971) conducted a survey of marijuana users that showed a very wide range of bodily self alterations: Users sometimes experience their whole body as bigger or smaller than usual, the shape of their body as strangely altered, the body felt as numb, as well as full-blown OBEs. The “Good Friday” experiment conducted by Pahnke in 1962 (see follow-up by Doblin, 1991) demonstrated that psilocybin, unlike a placebo, allowed inducing mystical states along with alterations of bodily consciousness sometimes similar to OBEs and NDEs. More recently, Griffiths and collaborators replicated this finding in a better-controlled setting, and participants likewise reported experiences of unity with their surroundings, loss of self, somaesthetic hallucinations and sensations similar to OBEs and NDEs (Griffiths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006). Reporting on the effects of LSD, Pahnke and Richards (1990/1966) also described a wide range of bodily effects, such as “intriguing somatic sensations, feeling as though [the] body is melting, falling apart, or exploding into minute fragments” (p. 493), “changes in kinesthetic and cutaneous reception” and “claims of merging with floorboards or feeling unity with the walls of a
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room” (p. 497). Finally, anesthetics are also known to induce alterations of bodily consciousness for body parts (including feelings of disownership; Paqueron et al., 2003), as well as OBEs and NDEs (Corazza & Schifano, 2010).
Experimental Procedures Experiments in sensory deprivation have been used as a powerful scientific tool for investigating the interactions between bodily awareness and cognition. In such studies, participants lie in an isolation tank, deprived of as many sensory signals as possible (Zubek, 1969). The effects of such experiments have been compared to medical conditions involving sensory and motor impairments (Jackson, Pollard, & Kansky, 1962) and more recently to the effects of mind-altering drugs (Mason & Brady, 2009). Altered states of bodily consciousness have also been reported during such conditions, with illusory movements, complex tactile hallucinations, feelings of a presence, depersonalization, and OBEs (Heron, 1957). As is the case with other ASC, it is known that OBEs are favorably induced when lying down or relaxing (Zingrone, Alvarado, & Carden˜a, 2010), an important observation in the light of accounts of the OBE in terms of vestibular hallucination (Schwabe & Blanke, 2008). Individuals claiming to be able to deliberately self-induce OBEs have also used a variety of sensory deprivation and meditation methods (reviewed in Blackmore, 1982). More recently, laboratory investigations have delineated controlled approaches to induce, or at least mimic, some aspects of OBEs. Most notably, visuo-tactile conflicts have been exploited to investigate the OBE (Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger, & Blanke, 2007). These studies have used virtual reality as a method to provide participants with visual perceptions of their own bodies (via a recording camera feeding a head-mounted display) while experiencing tactile sensations congruent or incongruent with those applied to their visual double. Measures of self-location and subjective reports about self-identity in such experiments have revealed the importance of congruent visuo-tactile information for the bodily self (review in Aspell & Blanke, 2009). These paradigms have been inspired by experimental approaches to modify bodily consciousness of body parts. The rubber-hand illusion, for instance, operates under similar visuo-tactile conflicts, whereby a person looks at a fake hand being stroked by a brush while feeling the same sensation on her real (and hidden) hand. In such circumstances, it is often reported that the felt brushes seem to be located onto the fake hand, and objective measures reveal that participants experience their real hand to
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be located closer to the fake hand than it really is (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). Interestingly, feelings of illusory ownership during the rubberhand illusion have been found to correlate with objective changes in temperature in the real hand (Moseley et al., 2008), suggesting that similar processes underlie experimentally-induced illusory ownership in healthy persons and a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions involving altered states of bodily consciousness (reviewed in Moseley et al., 2008). Coupled with clinical investigations, the experimental study of full-body illusions provides a very promising approach for understanding the neurocognitive processes underlying the bodily self and altered states of bodily consciousness.
Conclusion In this chapter, we have covered a wide array of altered states of bodily consciousness. Perhaps most striking is the sheer phenomenological variety of these bodily experiences. Misrepresentations of the physical body can involve selected body parts, half of the body, or the entire body and self. Whereas some of them are critically perceived as illusory by the experient, even sought after in some cases, others can be outright delusional. Their content can involve varied phenomena such as mislocalizations, illusory movements, presence of nonexistent body parts, disappearance of body parts, size and shape transformations, denial of ownership, incorporation of external objects, merging of boundaries, complete disembodiment, and denial of impairment. At this stage, an encompassing theoretical framework to explain and reliably induce such states is not available. It is indeed difficult to assess to what extent these complex misrepresentations, which can occur after neurological damage or in psychiatric conditions but also spontaneously and under experimental circumstances, are comparable. Nevertheless, the distinction between altered states of bodily consciousness involving body parts and the whole body (Dieguez et al., 2007) and the segregation of the bodily self into three core constituents (namely, the first personperspective, self-location, and self-identification) suggest preliminary frameworks (Blanke & Metzinger, 2009). Notably, a network in the right hemisphere involving the temporo-parietal junction, the posterior insula, and the basal ganglia, as well as premotor and primary sensory structures, has been identified to be crucially involved in the integration of body parts and representations of the whole body, as well as the calibration of an egocentric spatial frame of reference allowing one to coherently locate one’s
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body with respect to gravity and the surrounding environment. Future work should allow scientists to fine-grain these observations and disentangle the systems underlying specific alterations of the bodily self. A worthwhile question, for instance, would be whether body parts and whole-body alterations can be mapped unto an anatomo-functional continuum or whether they arise from different processes altogether. Most importantly, any insights have been and will be the result of investigations carried out from a wide range of perspectives, including analytical philosophy, phenomenology, clinical neuropsychology, experimental psychology, and the cognitive neurosciences. New therapeutic methods and creative experimental paradigms, incorporating pharmacological improvements, brain–computer interfaces, as well as robotic and virtual reality technology, will also emerge in the near future. Merged with the insights offered by approaches and traditions often considered as outside the reach of science, such as hypnosis, shamanism, mysticism, religious rituals, and the use of mind-altering drugs, the study of altered states of bodily consciousness holds the potential to offer important scientific insights about the brain processes involved in creating our everyday experience of the self. Conversely, careful theoretical and conceptual work on the bodily self can guide our understanding and the development of experimental approaches to ASC at large.
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Index shaman and pilgrims, 154–56; symbols and visions, 156–57 Huichol Indians: Mexico, 147; plant knowledge, 155 n.4 Human development: adolescence, 223–26; adulthood, 226; complexity and differentiation, 214, 215, 218; consciousness, 211–12; early childhood, 219–22; infant and toddler, 213, 215–19; late adulthood, 226–28; middle childhood, 222; self-awareness, 217; self-regulation, 215, 216 Human sexuality: cultural relativity of practices, 190; studies of, 189–90. See also Sexuality Hunt, H. T., 291, 318–19 Husserl, Edmund G., 329, 330, 346 Huxley, Aldous, 77 Hypertensive crisis, tyramine-rich foods, 104 Hyperventilation, 56; sexuality and ASC, 195 Hypnagogic sleep stage, 360, 361, 367 Hypnopompic sleep stage, 360 Hypnosis, 331, 335–36; bodily consciousness in, 251–52; and emotion, 281–82; ESP experience, 363–64; fMRI studies, 334; healing effects, 335 Hypnosis Induction Profile (HIP), 68 Hypnotic responsiveness, 221 Hypnotic susceptibility, ultradian cycle, 8 Hypnotizability, 338; genetic component, 212 Hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76 Iatrogenic problems, misdiagnosed VSEs, 317 Ictal period, temporal lobe epileptic seizure, 64, 65 Ictus-related religious experience, TLE, 64–65 Igoga plant, 51 Illusory amputation, 244–45 Illusory movements, 241 Imaginary figures, childhood, 220 Immortality, daoist yoga, 197 Inca Cueva site, Argentina, 86
Infant and toddler cognitive development, 213, 215–19 Information, AIM model of consciousness, 7 Information processing, and imagery production, 13 Infradian biological rhythm, 4–5 Inner hero’s journey, shamanism, 335, 342 Inner voices, 315 Institut fu¨r Grenzgebiete der Psychologie, ASC therapeutic recommendations, 295 Integrated consciousness, transcendental, 11 Interictal period, temporal lobe epileptic seizure, 64, 65 Interictal personality syndrome, TLE, 66 “Internal” awareness, 263–64 Internal locus of control, 44 International Classification of Diseases (ICD10) drug dependence, 170 Intoxication, 33 Intracellular messenger molecules, 28 Ion-channel opening and closing, 28 Ionotropic receptors, 28, 29, 30; and nicotine, 32 Isoquinolines, cacti, 150 Jackson, M. C., 317 Jaffe, J. H., 122 James, William, 22, 36, 63, 75, 225, 279, 355; on altered consciousness, 39; pre/transpersonal fallacy, 318 Jet lag, 16 Johari, H., 198 Johnson, V. E., 200 Jung, Carl G., 343; pre/transpersonal fallacy, 318; rebirth of self, 343; spiritual themes, 303–4 Jurema, bark beverage, 89t, 92, 107 Kabbalistic practice, 313 Kafka, Franz, 343, 344 n.1 Kallio, S., 340, 341 Karezza, sexual method, 191 Kauyumarie, Huichol deer god, 157, 158, 161
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Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory ownbody perceptions. Nature, 419, 269–270. Bonnier, P. (1905). L’asche´matie [Aschematia]. Revue Neurologique, 54, 605–609. Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands “feel” touch that eyes see. Nature, 391, 756. Britton, W. B., & Bootzin, R. R. (2004). Near-death experiences and the temporal lobe. Psychological Science, 15, 254–258. Brugger, P. (2002). Reflective mirrors: Perspective taking in autoscopic phenomena. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 7, 179–194. Brugger, P. (2005). From phantom limb to phantom body: Varieties of extracorporeal awareness. In G. Knoblich, I. Thornton, M. Grosjean, & M. Shiffrar (Eds.), Human body perception from the inside out (pp. 171–209). New York: Oxford University Press. Brugger, P., Blanke, O., Regard, M., Bradford, D. T., & Landis, T. (2006). Polyopic heautoscopy: Case report and review of the literature. Cortex, 42, 666– 674. Brugger, P., Regard, M., & Landis, T. (1997). Illusory reduplication of one’s own body: Phenomenology and classification of autoscopic phenomena. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 2, 19–38. Brugger, P., Regard, M., Landis, T., & Oelz, O. (1999). Hallucinatory experiences in extreme altitude climbers. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology, 12, 67–71. Carden˜a, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physically active. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59. Cheyne, J. A., & Girard, T. A. (2009). The body unbound: Vestibular-motor hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. Cortex, 45, 201–215. Cocchini, G., Beschin, N., Fotopoulou, A., & Della Sala, S. (2010). Explicit and implicit anosognosia or upper limb motor impairment. Neuropsychologia, 48, 1489–1494. Cojan, Y., Waber, L., Schwartz, S., Rossier, L., Forster, A., & Vuilleumier, P. (2009). The brain under self-control: Modulation of inhibitory and monitoring cortical networks during hypnotic paralysis. Neuron, 62, 862–875. Corazza, O., & Schifano, F. (2010). Near-death states reported in a sample of 50 misusers. Substance Use and Misuse, 45, 916–924. Cox, R. E., & Barnier, A. J. (2010). Hypnotic illusions and clinical delusions: Hypnosis as a research method. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 15, 202–232. Cronholm, B. (1951). Phantom limbs in amputees: A study of changes in the integration of centripetal impulses with special reference to referred sensations. Acta Psychiatrica et Neurologica Scandinavica (Supplementum), 72, 1–310. Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. London: Heinemann. De Leon, J., Antelo, R. E., & Simpson, G. (1992). Delusion of parasitosis or chronic tactile hallucinosis: Hypothesis about their brain physiopathology. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 33, 25–33.
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CHAPTER 12
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys For neurologists, consciousness can be reduced to its two main components, namely wakefulness (i.e., the level of consciousness or arousal or vigilance) and awareness (i.e., the contents of consciousness of the environment and of self; see Figure 12.1). You need to be awake to be aware [but see discussion on lucid dreaming, below]. There is, of course, an irreducible philosophical limitation in knowing for certain whether any other being possesses a conscious perception. There is, at present, no validated objective consciousness meter. Consciousness is a subjective first-person experience, and its bedside evaluation is limited to mainly measuring the patient’s motor responsiveness. Wakefulness is neuroanatomically supported by the function of the subcortical arousal systems in brainstem, midbrain, and both thalami. Clinically, wakefulness can be scored by assessing eye opening. Awareness is thought to be supported by the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex and its subcortical connections, but its underlying neural code remains to be elucidated (Laureys, 2005a). Awareness can be further reduced to “external” or sensory awareness (i.e., auditory, visual, or somatosensory perception of the environment coming through the senses) and “internal” or self-awareness (i.e., stimulus-independent thoughts, inner speech, and mental imagery; Vanhaudenhuyse, Demertzi, et al., 2010). The clinical quantification of awareness is limited to evaluating patients’ motor responsiveness to commands and nonreflex or “willed” behavior, such as eye tracking or oriented responses to painful stimulation. “Internal” or self-awareness is a more ill-defined concept that can be assessed by using auto-referential stimuli, such as the patients’ responses to presentation of their own face in the mirror or voicing of their names
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Figure 12.1 llustration of the two major components of consciousness: the level of consciousness (i.e., arousal or wakefulness) and the content of consciousness (i.e., awareness), and the way they correlate within the different physiological, pharmacological and pathological modulations of consciousness. Rapid eye movement sleep (REM) is a state of sleep propitious for dreaming. (Adapted from S. Laureys. (2005). The neural correlate of (un)awareness: Lessons from the vegetative state. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, 556–559. Used by permission of Elsevier.)
(Majerus, Gill-Thwaites, Andrews, & Laureys, 2005) [see Dieguez & Blanke, this volume]. An example of the relationship between the two components of consciousness is the transition from conscious waking to deep sleep: The less aroused we get, the less aware we become of our surroundings and ourselves (see Figure 12.1). Patients in pathological or pharmacological coma (i.e., general anesthesia) are unconscious because they cannot be awakened. Vegetative state (now called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome; Laureys et al., 2010), absence seizures, and complex partial seizures are unique dissociated states of consciousness (i.e., patients are seemingly awake but lack any behavioral evidence of voluntary or willed behavior). Minimally conscious patients are unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings but demonstrate nonreflex movements or command following. The locked-in
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syndrome is an infrequent condition in which patients awaken from their coma fully aware and conscious but remain mute and paralyzed; it is called pseudocoma because patients superficially look unconscious but in reality are fully aware although unable to show it because of severe paralysis. Some epileptic patients (e.g., absence and complex partial seizures) may present transient loss of awareness (meaning they show no command following) while seemingly awake and making automatic movements. In contrast to unconscious states such as general anesthesia and deep sleep (in which impairment in arousal cannot be disentangled from impairment in awareness), pathological disorders of consciousness are characterized by a dissociation of arousal and awareness, offering a unique lesional approach to identifying the neural correlates of awareness. Besides the clinical evaluation already mentioned, scientists now use functional neuroimaging techniques (positron emission tomography, functional magnetic resonance imaging, magneto/electro-encephalography) to track neural changes that correlate with changes in the level and content of consciousness and identify the “neural correlates of consciousness.” In the following sections, we will present the three main clinical types of altered states of consciousness (ASC): physiological, pharmacological, and pathological alterations of consciousness. Our normal sleep–wake cycles can be considered as a daily physiological change in conscious states. Pharmacologically induced unconsciousness is commonly named deep sedation or general anesthesia. The last category of ASC refers to pathologic altered conscious states, such as epileptic loss of consciousness and comatose, vegetative, and minimally conscious states that can be seen after severe brain injury of various origins.
Physiological Alterations in Consciousness Normal altered states of consciousness like sleep and dreaming are discussed elsewhere in this book [see Kokoszka and Wallace, this volume]. In the following section, we summarize the most relevant facts for the discussion on the functional neuroanatomy of pathological loss of consciousness. For centuries, scientists assumed that consciousness ceased at sleep onset and resumed only when we woke up. Dreaming was assumed to occur only during the process of awakening. Because memory is so severely affected by sleep, it was difficult to get reliable and valid descriptions of mental activity during sleep. Nowadays, this view does not prevail anymore and sleep is no longer considered a homogeneous uniform entity but is divided into cycles where the sleeper passes through several stages classified
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as either non–rapid-eye-movement sleep (NREM) or rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM). The former can be further divided into light and deep NREM sleep or slow-wave sleep. It is now clear that consciousness undergoes qualitative and quantitative changes in parallel to these different sleep stages. Consciousness decreases from wakefulness to deep NREM sleep, where consciousness is dulled. However, during dreaming, which takes place during the lighter stages of NREM sleep and, most markedly, during REM sleep when dreaming assumes its most florid character, the content of consciousness may come close to wakeful experience (Hobson, 2005). Neuroimaging techniques showed that the regional activation of the brain during NREM and REM sleep stages is very different from each other and from wakefulness (Maquet et al., 2005). During NREM sleep, as compared to wakefulness, the global brain activity decreases to roughly 60% of normal values. But, although consciousness is dulled and the brain appears globally deactivated, the deactivation is only relative and the brain is still capable of some information processing. During REM sleep, vigorous brain activation occurs but sensory inputs and motor outputs are simultaneously blocked, putting the brain “off-line.” Neuroimaging studies in sleep have emphasized the critical role of a frontoparietal network (Figure 12.2). They have demonstrated the presence of preserved activity levels in the individual network components during sleep but also that sleep-induced changes in consciousness are reflected in reduced functional connectivity between frontal and posterior areas of this network. The level of activity and connectivity in the network does not fall at sleep onset, presumably because thoughts do not abruptly cease but rather decrease gradually as a person falls asleep (Horovitz et al., 2009). Few imaging studies have been done during unusual sleep such as somnambulism or lucid dreaming. Somnambulism occurs during deep sleep and the person presents transient nonresponsiveness but partially preserved arousal and semipurposeful behavior such as walking. In the only patient studied with imaging techniques so far, it was reported that “large areas of frontal and parietal association cortices remained deactivated during sleepwalking” (Bassetti, Vella, Donati, Wielepp, & Weder, 2000, pp. 484–485). Lucid dreaming is a dissociated state with aspects of waking and dreaming combined where a healthy person is aware of being in a dream and “controls” his or her actions during the dream. Lucid dreaming occurs during REM sleep from which it differentiates by showing changes in electrophysiological activity in the frontal regions (Voss, Holzmann, Tuin, & Hobson, 2009). Lucid dreamers are able to reason clearly, to remember the conditions of waking life, and to remember all lucid dream experiences (Holzinger, LaBerge, & Levitan, 2006).
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Figure 12.2 The wide frontoparietal network supposed to be involved in consciousness. The network encompasses the polymodal associative cortices: lateral and medial frontal regions bilaterally, parieto-temporal and posterior parietal areas bilaterally, posterior cingulate and precuneal cortices. The internal awareness network, also known as the default mode network, includes the more active areas at rest. The level of consciousness is linked to activity in both internal and external networks and in the thalami as well as the connectivity between them. (Adapted from S. Laureys. (2007). Eyes open, brain shut. Scientific American, 296, 84–89).
Pharmacological Alterations in Consciousness Sedative anesthetic agents aim at inducing unconsciousness but also amnesia, immobility, and areflexia. They can be separated into three main categories: the classic anesthetic agents, the dissociative anesthetic agents, and the minimally sedative agents. Classic anesthetic agents such as
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propofol or sevoflurane are able to induce graded states of sedation and combine alterations of wakefulness and awareness. Dissociative anesthetic agents such as ketamine or nitrous oxide are able to blunt out conscious processes while maintaining signs of wakefulness. Finally, minimally sedative agents induce graded alterations of wakefulness while preserving several cognitive brain functions (P. Boveroux et al., 2008). At lowsedative doses, anesthetic agents cause a state similar to drunkenness. Anesthetized healthy individuals present distorted time perception, increased sleepiness, and depersonalization. Furthermore, they show reduced response to pain and loss of memory. Anesthetists then can increase slightly the anesthetic dose until the person fails to move in response to a command and is therefore considered unconscious. During surgical operation, higher anesthetic doses are used to prevent movement and response to painful stimulations. In rare cases (about 0.1–0.2% and currently decreasing in frequency), fluctuation of the awareness level of patients caused by overly light anesthesia, increased anesthetic requirement, or failure of drug delivery systems can lead to awareness under anesthesia. If neuromuscular blockers are used, then patients cannot communicate their awareness, which can lead to pain, anxiety, or delayed psychiatric symptoms (Serfontein, 2010). The experts think that anesthetic agents alter brain activity by interacting with ion channels that regulate synaptic transmission and membrane potentials. Anesthetic agents increase inhibition or decrease excitation, resulting in a hyperpolarization of the neurons. The various anesthetic agents affect differently key regions of the brain and spinal cord (Alkire, Hudetz, & Tononi, 2008). Neuroimaging studies on ASC induced by anesthesia have shown that activity in primary sensory cortices (the cortices that perceive external stimulations and transmit these stimulations to higher-order processing cortices) are often unchanged during anesthesia. Higher-order areas react differently to anesthesia. A recent study has shown that propofol-induced loss of consciousness correlates with a selective alteration of connectivity inside the frontoparietal network that is also impaired in normal sleep (P. Boveroux et al., 2010, Figure 2). The thalamus has long been suggested as a “consciousness switch” because of the consistent reduction of activity observed during anesthesia. Nevertheless, thalamic activity does not decrease with all anesthetics and, therefore, anesthetic effects on the thalamus may be largely indirect (Alkire et al., 2008). Despite the daily use of general anesthesia, it seems our understanding of pharmacological loss of consciousness remains at present incomplete.
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Pathological Alterations of Consciousness Epilepsy Epilepsy is not a singular disease entity but a variety of disorders resulting from pathological neuronal activity (i.e., seizures) that can occur in different brain areas. The origin and the spread of the seizure determine the resulting brain alteration. Epilepsy may result from many different causes. Epileptic seizures are characterized by transient signs or symptoms caused by abnormal excessive or synchronous neuronal activity in the brain. Seizures are unpredictable and interrupt normal brain function affecting sensory, motor, and autonomic function; consciousness; emotional states; memory; cognition; or behavior. Not all seizures affect all of these factors, but all influence at least one (Fisher et al., 2005). Electroencephalography is often used to establish the diagnosis as epileptic seizures are accompanied by marked electroencephalographic patterns. Three main types of seizures can cause impaired consciousness, namely absence seizures, generalized tonic-clonic seizures, and complex partial seizures. Absence seizures present as brief episodes of staring and unresponsiveness while awareness briefly vanishes, often accompanied by eye blinking and lip smacking. Their duration is usually less than 10 seconds. These seizures occur most commonly in childhood. Their severity varies from one person to the next depending of the impaired brain networks. Simple repetitive motor tasks are less impaired than tasks requiring complex decision making. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown widespread deactivations in fronto-parietal associative cortices during absence seizures (Blumenfeld & Taylor, 2003) . Generalized tonic-clonic seizures can be divided into primarily generalized, in which there is no obvious focal onset, and secondarily generalized, in which seizures begin in a focal brain region and then spread. In the starting phase, there are sustained muscle contractions accompanied by high brain activity. Usually, after 10 to 20 seconds, this is followed by rhythmic contractions of the limbs. After a few minutes, clinical and electroencephalographic seizure activity usually stops abruptly and the patient remains deeply lethargic, unresponsive, and with markedly suppressed electroencephalographic activity for a variable period of time. Generalized tonic-clonic seizures cause impaired consciousness through involvement of widespread brain regions (Blumenfeld & Taylor, 2003). Temporal lobe seizures originate in limbic structures of the medial temporal lobe, such as the hippocampus and the amygdala. Although awareness can be spared at the beginning of the seizure, they often
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terminate with impaired awareness and are called complex partial seizures. Otherwise, if they terminate without impaired consciousness, they are called simple partial seizures. Loss of responsiveness and awareness in complex partial seizures usually persists for up to several minutes, and epileptic patients may show oral and manual automatisms (e.g., picking, fumbling, and cycling). They are followed by amnesia for the episode. Simple partial seizures stay in the temporal lobe while complex partial seizures show marked bilateral deactivation in frontal and parietal association cortex. By contrast, simple partial seizures (where patients remain conscious) are not accompanied by these widespread changes. Complex partial seizures can propagate to the rest of the brain to produce a secondarily generalized tonic-clonic seizure (Englot & Blumenfeld, 2009) [see Carden˜a, this volume, for some specific changes in the content of consciousness during seizures].
Coma and Related Disorders of Consciousness Progress in medicine has increased the number of patients who survive severe brain damage. Different clinical entities are encountered on the gradual recovery from coma. Restoration of spontaneous or elicited eyeopening (in the absence of voluntary motor activity) marks the transition from coma to vegetative state, now called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome. The passage from the vegetative to the minimally conscious state is marked by reproducible evidence of “voluntary behavior.” Emergence from the minimally conscious state is signaled by the return of functional communication. Note that our clinical evaluation of cognition depends upon motor responsiveness. The locked-in syndrome is the extreme example of intact cognition with nearly complete motor deficit (only permitting eye-coded communication; Laureys, 2005a). Brain Death
Brain death is death determined by brain or neurological criteria. Death is defined as the permanent cessation of the critical functions of the organism as a whole (i.e., neuroendocrine and homeostatic regulation, circulation, respiration, and consciousness). Most countries, including the United States, require death of the whole brain including the brain stem, but some (e.g., UK and India) rely on the death of the brain stem only, stating that the brain stem is at once the through-station for nearly all hemispheric input and output, the center generating arousal (an essential condition for conscious awareness), and the center of breathing. Clinical
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diagnostic criteria of brain death, however, are widely accepted and are based on the loss of all brain stem reflexes and the demonstration of continuing termination of respiration (by carefully performing an apnea test) in an irreversibly comatose patient. There should be an evident cause of coma and confounding factors such as hypothermia and drug intoxication should be excluded. Confirmatory tests include a “flat” electroencephalogram and absence of arterial circulation to the brain shown by arteriography or echo-Doppler techniques. Brain death is most often caused by a massive brain lesion (e.g., trauma, intracranial hemorrhage, anoxia) that increases intracranial pressure, causing the intracranial circulation to cease and damaging the brain stem because of herniation. Functional imaging studies have shown an “empty skull” sign (i.e., only the skin surrounding the skull shows preserved metabolic activity on functional brain scans) confirming the absence of all neural activity (Laureys, 2005b). The frontoparietal network linked to consciousness in sleep and anesthesia studies was deactivated in brain death when studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (Boly et al., 2009). Coma
Coma is characterized by the absence of arousal and thus also of consciousness. It is a state of unarousable unresponsiveness in which the patient lies with the eyes closed and has no awareness of self and surroundings. The patient lacks the spontaneous periods of wakefulness and eye-opening induced by stimulation that can be observed in the vegetative state. To be clearly distinguished from syncope, concussion, or other states of transient unconsciousness, coma must persist for at least 1 hour. In general, comatose patients who survive begin to awaken and recover gradually within 2 to 4 weeks. Coma can result from bilateral widespread hemispheric cortical or white matter damage or from more focal brainstem lesions, affecting the subcortical reticular arousing systems. The prognosis depends on the etiology, the patient’s general medical condition, age, clinical signs, and results from complementary examinations. Traumatic etiology is known to have a better outcome than nontraumatic, especially anoxic cases. In the latter case, as for cardiac arrest survivors, after 3 days of observation a bad outcome is heralded by the absence of papillary or corneal reflexes, stereotyped or absent motor response to noxious stimulation, absent cortical responses of somatosensoryevoked potentials, and biochemical markers, such as high levels of serum neuron-specific enolase.
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Vegetative State or Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome
Following severe brain damage and coma, some patients may awaken (that is, open the eyes) but remain unresponsive, only showing reflex movements. In Europe, this clinical syndrome was initially termed apallic syndrome and coma vigil, but it was later redefined as vegetative state (VS). Since its description more than 35 years ago, an increasing number of functional neuroimaging and event-related potential studies have shown that it sometimes may be difficult to make strong claims about “vegetative” patients’ awareness. This situation is further complicated when they have underlying deficits in verbal or nonverbal communication functions, such as aphasia, agnosia, or apraxia (Majerus, Bruno, Schnakers, Giacino, & Laureys, 2009). It appears that part of the healthcare, media, and lay public continues to feel some unease regarding the unintended denigrating “vegetable-like” connotation seemingly intrinsic to the term VS. The European Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness therefore recently proposed an alternative name (Laureys et al., 2010). Hence, physicians have recently offered to refer to these patients as being in unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) a more neutral and descriptive term pertaining to patients showing a number of clinical signs (hence syndrome) of unresponsiveness (that is, without response to commands or oriented voluntary movements) in the presence of wakefulness (that is, eye opening). In contrast to coma, which is an acute condition lasting no more than some days or weeks, UWS can be a chronic condition lasting years or becoming permanent. The vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome may be a transition to further recovery or may be permanent. Permanent vegetative state is a term that refers to patients whose chances for recovery are close to zero. This is the case when the condition lasts more than 1 year after traumatic or 3 months after nontraumatic (anoxic) injury. The VS has been characterized as persistent when a patient is in this state for more than 1 month. As both terms are abbreviated as PVS, we suggest avoiding these terms and, instead, using unresponsive wakefulness syndrome with the etiology and the time spent in the condition. At present, there are no validated prognostic markers for individual patients except that the chances for recovery depend on patient’s age, etiology, and time spent in the UWS. In the vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, global metabolic activity decreases to about 50% of normal levels. Furthermore, neuroimaging studies have identified the frontoparietal network previously presented in sleep and anesthesia as the network showing metabolic dysfunction as compared with the conscious resting state in healthy controls (Figure 12.2) (Laureys, 2005a).
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology
Minimally Conscious State
The minimally conscious state was defined in 2002 by the Aspen Neurobehavioral Conference Workgroup to subcategorize patients above the VS/UWS but unable to functionally communicate their thoughts and feelings. Minimally conscious state patients show inconsistent but discernible signs of behavioral activity that is more than reflexive in at least one of the following behavioral ways: (1) purposeful behavior, including movements or affective behavior that occurs in contingent relation to relevant environment stimuli and is not caused by reflexive activity, such as: pursuit eye movement or sustained fixation occurring in direct response to moving or salient stimuli, smiling or crying in response to verbal or visual emotional but not neutral stimuli, reaching for objects, demonstrating a relationship between object location and direction of reach, touching or holding objects in a manner that accommodates the size and shape of the object, and vocalizations or gestures occurring in direct response to the linguistic content of questions; (2) following simple commands; (3) gestural or verbal yes/no response, regardless of accuracy; and (4) intelligible verbalization. Emergence from the minimally conscious state is defined by the ability to exhibit functional interactive communication or functional use of objects. Given that the criteria for the minimally conscious state have only recently been introduced, there are few clinical studies of patients in this condition. Similar to the vegetative state, traumatic etiology has a better prognosis than nontraumatic anoxic brain injuries. Preliminary data show that the overall outcome in the minimally conscious state is more favorable than in the vegetative state. At present, no time intervals for permanent minimally conscious state have been agreed on. Akinetic mutism (a condition characterized by severe poverty of movement, speech, and thought without associated arousal disorder or descending motor tract impairment) is an outdated term that should be avoided and is now considered to be a subcategory of the minimally conscious syndrome. Neuroimaging studies on the minimally conscious state show that overall cerebral metabolism is decreased to values slightly higher than but comparable to those observed in the VS/UWS (Laureys, Perrin, Schnakers, Boly, & Majerus, 2005). Nevertheless, minimally conscious state patients can show brain activities similar to the activity of a healthy brain in response to sensory stimuli. Furthermore, the activity inside the frontoparietal network and the connectivity between the different areas of the network was found to be negatively correlated with the degree of clinical consciousness impairment, ranging from healthy controls and
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locked-in syndrome to minimally conscious, “vegetative,” and then coma patients (Vanhaudenhuyse, Noirhomme et al., 2010). The Locked-In Syndrome
The term locked-in syndrome was introduced in 1966 to reflect the quadriplegia and anarthria (loss of the motor ability to speak) brought about by the disruption of corticospinal and corticobulbar pathways, respectively. It is defined by (1) the presence of sustained eye opening (bilateral ptosis should be ruled out as a complicating factor); (2) preserved awareness of the environment; (3) aphonia or hypophonia; (4) quadriplegia or quadriparesis; and (5) a primary mode of communication that uses vertical or lateral eye movement or blinking of the upper eyelid to signal yes/no responses. The locked-in syndrome describes patients who are awake and fully aware but have no means of producing speech, limb, or facial movements, resembling patients in a VS/UWS. Locked-in syndrome most commonly results from lesions to the brainstem. Since there is only a motor output problem, locked-in syndrome is not a disorder of consciousness, but it is included here as it can be misdiagnosed as one. Based on motor capacities, lockedin syndrome can be divided into three categories: (1) classic locked-in syndrome, characterized by quadriplegia and anarthria with eye-coded communication; (2) incomplete locked-in syndrome, characterized by remnants of voluntary responsiveness other than eye movement; and (3) total locked-in syndrome, characterized by complete immobility including all eye movements, combined with preserved consciousness. Neuroimaging studies have shown that locked-in syndrome patients have brain activity similar to that of healthy individuals (Laureys, Pellas, et al., 2005). Awareness in Coma and Related Conditions
Awareness during coma and disorders of consciousness has only recently been studied. Few reports exist and they do not distinguish coma from VS/UWS or minimally conscious states. Most patients have no memory of their coma and stay at the intensive care setting. A few patients reported being asleep or in a pleasant state. Some reported sensory memories (e.g., voices, sounds, visual perceptions, touch) or hallucinations that supposedly occurred either at the time of the insult or during coma (Thonnard, Vanhaudenhuyse, & Laureys, 2009). Monti, Vanhaudenhuyse, and collaborators (Monti et al., 2010) used functional MRI and instructed seemingly unconscious brain-damaged patients to follow simple commands. They enrolled more than 50 patients of different etiology, asking them to perform mental imagery tasks (e.g. “imagine playing tennis” [activating
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology
motor areas] and “imagine walking around your house” [activating parahippocampal brain regions]). Four out of 23 clinically “vegetative” patients showed fMRI signs of command following and hence of consciousness. In addition to showing proof of consciousness, fMRI can now be used to communicate with some (very exceptional) patients. Indeed, one clinically noncommunicative patient studied in the Lie`ge University Hospital was shown to correctly answer five out of six simple questions regarding the names of his family members (Monti et al., 2010). Evidently, these data should be seen as clarifications of the condition rather than as a practical means to truly assure long-term communication.
Can We identify the “Neural Correlate of Consciousness”? A first hypothesis tested by researchers was that awareness is lost when overall cortical activity falls below a certain threshold. Exploring states of modulated arousal like sleep or anesthesia, investigators have shown a drop in global brain metabolism to around half of normal values in deep anesthesia as well as in deep sleep. However, in rapid-eye-movement sleep (where dreaming occurs), brain metabolism returns to normal waking values. Furthermore, in the vegetative/unresponsive state, global metabolic activity also decreases to about 50% of normal level in some patients who subsequently recover, but global metabolic rates for glucose metabolism did not show substantial changes. Moreover, some awake healthy volunteers have global brain metabolism values comparable to those observed in some patients in a VS/UWS. Inversely, some well-documented vegetative/unresponsive patients have shown close to normal global cortical metabolism (Laureys, 2005a). Hence, the relationship between global levels of brain function and the presence or absence of awareness is not absolute. It seems that some areas in the brain are more important than others for its emergence. Can these awareness regions be identified? Several neuroimaging studies have identified not one brain region but a wide frontoparietal network encompassing the polymodal associative cortices: lateral and medial frontal regions bilaterally, parieto-temporal and posterior parietal areas bilaterally, and posterior cingulate and precuneal cortices (Figure 12.2). Awareness seems not to be exclusively related to activity in the frontoparietal network, but equally important is the relation of awareness to the functional connectivity within this network and with the thalami. Functional disconnections in long-range cortico-cortical (between latero-frontal and midline-posterior areas) and cortico-thalamo-cortical (between nonspecific thalamic nuclei
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and lateral and medial frontal cortices) pathways have identified states of altered consciousness. Consciousness can be viewed as the emergent property of the collective behavior of widespread thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network connectivity. The above-presented studies on physiological (e.g., sleep), pharmacological (e.g., general anesthesia), and pathological alterations of consciousness (e.g., coma and related conditions) provide evidence in favor of this hypothesis [cf. Beauregard, this volume]. Once conscious sensory content is established, it is distributed widely to a decentralized ‘‘audience’’ of expert networks, or executive interpreters (Baars, 1988, 2005). Consequently, conscious perception involves widespread frontoparietal brain sources, and unconscious sensory processing leads to much more limited and disconnected brain activation. Synchronized specialized brain regions are thought to share their information into a common workspace, which is a complex network of cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical functional connections. Other cerebral systems would permit those synchronized neural networks to put their own elements of the mental content forward, in the front of the scene of consciousness. Mental content would, therefore, be the result of converging information from lowerorder functional neural assemblies toward higher-order assemblies, a hypothesis currently being tested in neural modeling studies (Seth, Dienes, Cleeremans, Overgaard, & Pessoa, 2008).
References Alkire, M. T., Hudetz, A. G., & Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness and anesthesia. Science, 322(5903), 876–880. Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baars, B. J. (2005). Global workspace theory of consciousness: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 45–53. Bassetti, C., Vella, S., Donati, F., Wielepp, P., & Weder, B. (2000). SPECT during sleepwalking. Lancet, 356(9228), 484–485. Blumenfeld, H., & Taylor, J. (2003). Why do seizures cause loss of consciousness? Neuroscientist, 9(5), 301–310. Boly, M., Tshibanda, L., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Noirhomme, Q., Schnakers, C., Ledoux, D., et al. (2009). Functional connectivity in the default network during resting state is preserved in a vegetative but not in a brain dead patient. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 2393–2400. Boveroux, P., Bonhomme, V., Boly, M., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Maquet, P., & Laureys, S. (2008). Brain function in physiologically, pharmacologically, and pathologically altered states of consciousness. International Anesthesiology Clinics, 46(3), 131–146.
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Boveroux, P., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Lauwick, S., Bruno, M. A., Noirhomme, Q., Faymonville, M. E., et al. (2010). Within- and between-networks resting state fMRI connectivity reflects the level of consciousness during anesthesia Anesthesiology, 113, 1007–1009 Englot, D. J., & Blumenfeld, H. (2009). Consciousness and epilepsy: Why are complex-partial seizures complex? Progress in Brain Research, 177, 147–170. Fisher, R. S., van Emde Boas, W., Blume, W., Elger, C., Genton, P., Lee, P., et al. (2005). Epileptic seizures and epilepsy: Definitions proposed by the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) and the International Bureau for Epilepsy (IBE). Epilepsia, 46, 470–472. Hobson, J. A. (2005). Sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. Nature, 437(7063), 1254–1256. Holzinger, B., LaBerge, S., & Levitan, L. (2006). Psychophysiological correlates of lucid dreaming. Dreaming, 16(2), 88–95. Horovitz, S. G., Braun, A. R., Carr, W. S., Picchioni, D., Balkin, T. J., Fukunaga, M., et al. (2009). Decoupling of the brain’s default mode network during deep sleep. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, 11,376–11,381. Laureys, S. (2005a). The neural correlate of (un)awareness: Lessons from the vegetative state. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(12), 556–559. Laureys, S. (2005b). Science and society: Death, unconsciousness and the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 899–909. Laureys, S., Celesia, G. G., Cohadon, F., Lavrijsen, J., Leo´n-Carrio´n, J., Sannita, W. G., et al. (2010). Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome: A new name for the vegetative state or apallic syndrome. [Debate paper]. BMC Medicine, 8:68 Laureys, S., Pellas, F., Van Eeckhout, P., Ghorbel, S., Schnakers, C., Perrin, F., et al. (2005). The locked-in syndrome: What is it like to be conscious but paralyzed and voiceless? Progress in Brain Research, 150, 495–511. Laureys, S., Perrin, F., Schnakers, C., Boly, M., & Majerus, S. (2005). Residual cognitive function in comatose, vegetative and minimally conscious states. Current Opinion in Neurology, 18, 726–733. Laureys S. (2007). Eyes open, brain shut. Scientific American, 296(5), 84–9. Majerus, S., Bruno, M. A., Schnakers, C., Giacino, J. T., & Laureys, S. (2009). The problem of aphasia in the assessment of consciousness in brain-damaged patients. Progress in Brain Research, 177, 49–61. Majerus, S., Gill-Thwaites, H., Andrews, K., & Laureys, S. (2005). Behavioral evaluation of consciousness in severe brain damage. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 397–413. Maquet, P., Ruby, P., Maudoux, A., Albouy, G., Sterpenich, V., Dang-Vu, T., et al. (2005). Human cognition during REM sleep and the activity profile within frontal and parietal cortices: A reappraisal of functional neuroimaging data. Progress in Brain Research, 150, 219–227. Monti, M. M., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Coleman, M. R., Boly, M., Pickard, J. D., Tshibanda, L., et al. (2010). Willful modulation of brain activity in disorders of consciousness. New England Journal of Medicine, 362, 579–589.
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Serfontein, L. (2010). Awareness in cardiac anesthesia. Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology, 23(1), 103–108. Seth, A. K., Dienes, Z., Cleeremans, A., Overgaard, M., & Pessoa, L. (2008). Measuring consciousness: Relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(8), 314–321. Thonnard, M., Vanhaudenhuyse, A., & Laureys, S. (2009). Les expe´riences de mort imminente et les souvenirs de la pe´riode de coma: Re´els ou imagine´s? [Near-death experience and memories during coma: Real or imaginary?] (Master thesis report). Lie`ge: University of Lie`ge. Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Demertzi, A., Schabus, M., Noirhomme, Q., Bredart, S., Boly, M., et al. (2010). Two distinct neuronal networks mediate the awareness of environment and of self. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 1–9. Vanhaudenhuyse, A., Noirhomme, Q., Tshibanda, L. J., Bruno, M. A., Boveroux, P., Schnakers, C., et al. (2010). Default network connectivity reflects the level of consciousness in non-communicative brain-damaged patients. Brain, 133 (Pt 1), 161–171. Voss, U., Holzmann, R., Tuin, I., & Hobson, J. A. (2009). Lucid dreaming: A state of consciousness with features of both waking and non-lucid dreaming. Sleep, 32(9), 1191–1200.
CHAPTER 13
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology1 Etzel Carden˜a Solo chi ama conosce (Only those who love know). From Alibi by Elsa Morante (1958)
Altered Consciousness and Emotions The quotation from the Italian poet Elsa Morante makes a poetic case for the importance of emotions in at least some types of knowledge and, by extension, consciousness. In the West, this notion can be traced back to Plato’s discussion of erotic mania, which encompassed a transcendent form of love [see my introduction to Volume 1 and Ustinova, Volume 1]. His manias can be interpreted as divinely inspired altered states of consciousness (ASC), and the link between an intense emotion and altered consciousness is preserved in the word ecstasy. In common parlance it describes an overwhelming emotion and etymologically refers to coming out of quiescence or out of one’s body. In this way it has been used in the context of ASC such as classical shamanic (Carden˜a, 1996; Rouget, 1985; see also Winkelman and Fachner, Volume 1) or unitive, mystical types of experiences (Laski, 1980; see also Beauregard, this volume). Despite variations in religious traditions (Lewis, 1989), their mystical strands seem to share ASC associated with extreme joy or serenity and acceptance, but also with great fear and enormous despondency, an example being what San Juan de la Cruz called “la noche oscura del alma” (dark night of the soul; see below). At the advent of psychology as a science, the pioneers of clinical psychology and some authors like William James contributed to the study of both 1
This chapter has benefitted from the astute reading of Martina Belz, Ken S. Pope, and Sophie Reijman
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emotions and consciousness, but the ascent of behaviorism and consequent disregard of subjective experience prevented further inquiries. Even during the dominance of behaviorism in psychology, however, there were dissenting voices that had the temerity to discuss emotions and consciousness as fundamental aspects of sentient beings, Silvan Tomkins (e.g., 1962–1963) being one of the foremost. He discussed positive and negative emotions, how they link to the will and conscious experience, and how psychodynamic and behavioral approaches can contribute to their understanding. Nonetheless, until recently much work within psychology and the neurosciences had failed to consider, as the consciousness pioneer Bernard Baars (2000, p. 11) puts it, that “we are conscious, and that our lives are shaped and defined by emotions.” This situation has started to change. The traditional view of emotions posits them as heterarchical systems consisting of cognitive appraisal, internal and external somatic responses, behaviors and action tendencies, and a subjective, experiential component (Frijda, 1986). A broader analysis shows that they can also be seen as organizing interpersonal systems right from birth through the various interactions with the primary caregivers (Trevarthen, 1994) and the ensuing forms of attachment, which have an impact throughout the lifespan (Van IJzendoorn, 1997; see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Carden˜a, this volume). I have also discussed (Carden˜a, 2008) evidence from various sources including controlled research suggesting that strong emotions are related to reputed parapsychological phenomena (psi; see Luke, this volume). Of particular importance to this chapter is the mostly anecdotal evidence of potential psi events in so-called “crisis situations” involving the potential or actual demise of a person close to the individual having the experience (Targ, Schlitz, & Irwin, 2000), thus involving intense emotions. Also, although not completely consistent, there is evidence that people emotionally close to each other may perform better in psi tasks than strangers (e.g., Sabell, Clarke, & Fenwick, 2001), and that emotional stimuli are more likely to produce psi phenomena than neutral ones (e.g., Bem, 2011; Radin & Schlitz, 2005). Most emotional episodes rarely effect a sufficient qualitative change in the organization of consciousness to qualify as ASC. Emotional episodes of great intensity, however, may induce important alterations in consciousness, although they have not typically been researched with that focus in mind. For instance, intense fear or panic is associated not only with psychopathology but also with dissociative alterations in consciousness (see below). At the other extreme, intense love can bring about extreme absorption in the beloved, a sense of unboundariedness, alterations in the sense of time, and so on (Wade, 2000; see also Maliszewki et al., this volume).
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The other side of the equation, namely ASC producing notable emotional experience, has produced considerably more research. Hobson (1994) found that, in order, the three most common emotions present in dreams were anxiety or fear, joy-elation, and anger, with more than half of all dreams presenting strong emotions and a bit more than two-thirds of all dreams having an unpleasant emotional tone. In contrast with this preponderance of negative emotions, the great majority of reports from near-death experiences (NDEs) include a sense of unconditional love, bliss, and joy, although some NDEs can produce distress (Greyson, 2000). Similarly, the majority of mystical experiences, which refer to a sense of transcendence and connectedness, are described as blissful or subsuming some type of equanimity that has a very positive emotional valence, a “peace that passeth understanding,” although not every mystical experience is interpreted positively (Wulff, 2000). In a similar vein, a temporary lack of discursive reasoning and even of a recognizable content of consciousness is considered highly desirable in many meditative practices (cf. Forman, 1999: see also Shear, Volume 1, and Beauregard, this volume), but an emotional state without any clear content may be distressing. In a self-account of schizophrenia, Hyllyer (1926, in Landis, 1964, p. 321) described an experience in which she “came as close . . . as I ever have to a state of emotion unaccompanied by thought, I simply felt . . . a feeling of being lost . . . lost in mind and body and soul . . . there was a sickening, acute moment, then a welding. The emotion became me.” Positive mystical experiences have been reported as well after the ingestion of psychedelic drugs, although of course toxic levels of a substance, psychological disturbance, or negative set or setting can produce bad occurrences or “trips” [see the various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume]. With a group of individuals selected for psychological balance, Griffiths, Richards, McCann, and Jesse (2006) found that ingesting psilocybin produced what the majority of volunteers rated as one of the five most meaningful experiences in their lives, from which we can infer that they had a deep emotional experience. In this well-designed study, the results could not be explained by a placebo effect and were corroborated by people close to the experients. With respect to procedures that may evoke an ASC and are associated with emotional changes, hypnotic “virtuosos” (i.e., the around 2–3% of the population that is most responsive to hypnotic suggestions) reported spontaneous mystical-type experience of connectedness with everything, love, euphoria, serenity, “being at home,” and so on when they experienced being in a “very deep state” (Carden˜a, 2005). This is not likely to have been the effect of the simple induction of counting from 1 to 30 in
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a hypnotic context, without additional suggestions, because low and medium hypnotizables do not report these experiences (Carden˜a, Lehmann, Jo¨nsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007). However, these findings need to be qualified insofar as there is a small subgroup of high hypnotizables who are also highly dissociative and tend to be more distressed, have a greater trauma history than their nondissociative counterparts, and report negative rather than positive emotions (Terhune & Carden˜a, 2010). With respect to another set of techniques that engage attentional resources and that have been associated with ASC, namely meditation, there is research reporting very similar descriptions to those obtained under deep hypnosis (Gifford-May & Thompson, 1994, see also Holroyd, 2003), although meditation can also produce negative effects (e.g., Otis, 1984). Finally, there are also accounts of very intense emotional experiences in the shamanism literature (Halifax, 1980; see also Carden˜a, 1996, and Winkelman, Volume 1).
Altered Consciousness and Psychopathology The concept of psychopathology is conceptually as complex and equivocal as that of ASC. Besides the difficulty of establishing such basic issues as the border between “normal” variation and actual pathology, there are political and ethical aspects as to who determines what is functional or dysfunctional. For instance, Sophie Scholl and her White Rose fellow students engaged in behavior (i.e., distributing flyers against the Nazi regime) that might be considered very dysfunctional (it caused their arrest) and distressing (it caused their torture and death and distressed the law-abiding citizens around them). Yet, we nowadays admire their courage and moral stand and have problems understanding the “normality” of majority groups that implicitly or explicitly participate in or condone massacres or, more mildly, engage in routine behaviors that injure them or others (e.g., unhealthy behaviors such as abuse of various substances or habits; see Bla¨ tter, Fachner, and Winkelman, this volume), or alienate them from their surrounding reality (e.g., the compulsive use of cell phones to “remain in touch with others” while disregarding everyone else in the vicinity). Erich Fromm in The Sane Society (1955) made a persuasive point that societies as a whole can be diagnosed, and we could certainly add the banalization of human experience and the disregard for other sentient beings and our environments as a form of shared pathology (Carden˜a, 1996). Although some bizarre and extreme manifestations such as extreme lack of hygiene and talking out loud to no one while being unresponsive to other individuals may be considered dysfunctional across cultures
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(Murphy, 1976), one cannot disregard the sociocultural context in which such behaviors occur. For instance, the act of eating feces in adulthood is typically an indication of severe psychopathology, but it was also used by John Waters to convey a rational artistic point in his 1972 film Pink Flamingos. And although chronically hearing or seeing something that no one else does may be an indicator of schizophrenia, about one third of individuals who experience auditory hallucinations do not evidence pathology (Bentall, 2000). There is consistent evidence that having unusual experiences is not by itself an indication of psychopathology; other aspects of the experience such as how controllable, chronic, and organized it is must be taken into consideration (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). The putative association between ASC or peculiar experiences with dysfunction and suffering may be explained in a variety of ways (Berenbaum, Kerns, & Raghavan, 2000, p. 33); thus, there is no reason to assume that unusual experiences, in the absence of indicators of psychopathology such as unexplainable or uncontrolled dysfunction and suffering, are pathological. For instance, the majority of shamans and other religious practitioners that experience visions or being possessed by spirits seem to be psychologically at least as healthy as their cultural counterparts (e.g., Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Carden˜a, 2008; Van Ommeren, Komproe, Carden˜a, et al., 2004), although some individuals with severe, chronic pathology such as schizophrenia may experience destructive types of hallucinations or of being possessed by other entities. To help distinguish between these types of phenomena, Menezes Jr. and Moreira-Almeida (2010) propose that the following characteristics help us differentiate nonpathological spiritual experiences from psychotic ones: absence of psychological suffering and of social and occupational problems, the experience is short-lived and the person retains the capacity to evaluate its unusualness, control over the experience, a positive personal and social outcome, and absence of psychiatric comorbidities. Determining what differentiates a pathological from a nonpathological ASC both at the time and longitudinally is an important question that deserves much further attention from the field. The list by Menezes Jr. and Moreira-Almeida is a good first step, but it can be challenged and qualified in a number of ways. For instance, mystics generally mention that what happens to them is a gift rather than something they can control, ASC may change the baseline state of consciousness of an individual rather than just being short-lived (e.g., Wren-Lewis, 1998), and anomalous experiences may coexist with, without being the cause of, psychiatric comorbidities (Berenbaum, Kerns, & Raghavan, 2000; James, 1902/1961). The first necessary step to understand better the elements of a pathological experience
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is to conduct far more thorough phenomenological evaluations. For example, despite a considerable overlap in other dimensions, the auditory hallucinations of those who did not meet criteria for a formal diagnosis had less negative and more controllable voices than those of individuals fulfilling diagnostic criteria (Bentall, 2000). It is also important to situate an ASC longitudinally and in the context of the person’s attributions, as some manifestations may emerge or become distressing particularly in the context of ongoing stressful events or negative evaluations by the person or others (Bentall, 2000). In what follows, I will concentrate on alterations of consciousness as the or a major manifestation of a psychopathological process, but it should be borne in mind that the same content in consciousness may be found in nonpathological and sometimes even desirable experiences, as I will also illustrate. In Table 13.1, I list the major topics I will discuss later, providing examples from both psychiatric conditions and nonpathological processes. I also give a brief definition of the diagnostic labels used in the table. There are neurological conditions, including seizure disorders, and various other pathologies of the central nervous system that can produce some of the ASC discussed below, but they are not the focus of this chapter.
Diagnostic Taxonomies Various models to organize the vast region of human dysfunction and suffering known as psychopathology have been offered. These models may be considered as different, potentially valid and not mutually exclusive perspectives on a very complex domain, with none being able to encompass all valid views on pathology. For this chapter on altered consciousness, explanatory models that emphasize hypothesized psychological or neurological processes, such as psychodynamic, neurobiological, or behavioral processes, are not as relevant as those that describe immediate conscious experience (cf. Sims, 1995). A phenomenological, descriptive approach to psychopathology favors descriptions of experience as it is lived by an agent and was developed by the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) in his General Psychopathology (1913/1963). In it, he privileged the form of symptoms (e.g., the way that individuals hold a delusional belief, such as it being central to their notion of reality and being impermeable to any discussion) rather than their content (e.g., believing that there is some kind of improbable conspiracy against the group that the person belongs to), an approach that is congenial with looking at states of consciousness according to their systemic properties rather than their content (cf. Tart, 1975). R. D. Laing (1927–1989) is
Table 13.1
Presence of ASC in Pathological and Nonpathological Contexts
CONDITIONS* PATHOLOGICAL Dissociative dx. PTSD Sleep paralysis Panic attack Borderline p. d. Schizotypal p. d. Somatoform dx Psychosis Mood dx NONPATHOLOGICAL Spirit possession/ Ritual ASC Meditation Mystical/visionary Hypnosis Trauma reaction Erotism
No- or narrow Cs.
Changes in body Delirium image Depers. Fusion
xx x
x x
x
xx x
No agency
Id Strong changes emotions Halluc.
Trans.
x
xx
?
xx x ? x x x
x x ?
?
x x x
?
x x xx x x
xx x x x x ? x
xx x x x x
x ? ?
x
x x
? x x xx x
x xx
? xx x
xx x
x ? ?
xx x xx xx
x ? x
?
x x
?
x x
x xx
xx x
? ?
xx x ? xx
x xx x xx ? x xx
x xx ? xx x ?
xx xx x xx ?
? ?
? (Continued)
Table 13.1 (Continued) • Key to abbreviations Cs. = consciousness, depers. = depersonalization, Id = identity, Halluc. = hallucinations, Transc. = transcendent experiences, dx = diagnosis, p.d.= personality disorder. X= present, xx= characteristic, ? = present some times • * Refers only to psychiatric, not neurological, conditions. • / Including also the related phenomena of channeling and “trance mediumship.” • The pathological disorders included are: ° A. Dissociative disorders (disruptions in the integrated functions of memory, identity, or perception, such as dissociative amnesia and fugue, depersonalization, and dissociative identity disorder). ° B. Posttraumatic conditions (posttraumatic and acute stress disorders, characterized by re-experiencing, avoidance, hyperarousal, and dissociative symptomatology following a severe stressor or trauma). ° C. Sleep paralysis (a parasomnia characterized by inability to perform voluntary movements while psychologically awake, anxiety, and the sense of a presence during the transitions between being awake and asleep, sometimes followed by an OBE; see Hufford, 2005). ° Panic attack (intense fear and somatic and cognitive reactions in the absence of a real danger, present as a syndrome or a symptom in other anxiety disorders). ° Borderline personality (chronic impulsivity and instability of mood, relationship, and self-image). ° Schizotypal personality (chronic cognitive or perceptual distortions, odd behavior, and interpersonal deficits). ° Somatoform (physical symptoms suggesting but not actually explained by a medical condition, such as paralyses or unusual sensations). ° Psychosis (this label includes various diagnoses such as the various forms of acute or chronic schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder involving major dysfunction in many psychological processes such as thought and emotions, along with failures in reality testing). ° Mood (this label includes various forms of major depression and manic or bipolar conditions and recurrent mood shifts or cyclothymic disorder, which can also sometimes impair reality testing). ° (For more complete descriptions see APA, 2000; Carden˜a & Gleaves, 2007).
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another major author who emphasized that how a particular mental content is lived by the person may be more revealing than how it may seem to an external observer (Laing, 1967). In the following sections, I will not discuss pathology that does not directly and importantly affect the person’s state of consciousness, such as most personality, learning, or other disorders.
Loss or Narrowing of Consciousness Various disorders are related to narrowing or loss of consciousness [for neuropathologies producing problems in consciousness see Dieguez & Blanke, Noirhomme & Laureys, this volume]. Perhaps the clearest case is when a person becomes unconscious, losing muscle tone and becoming unresponsive to the environment in the absence of a medical reason. An example is a case of mass unexplained medical illness among Bhutanese refugees, in which a number of teenagers fainted or felt they were about to faint (Van Ommeren, Sharma, Komproe, et al., 2001). Similarly, in cases of pseudoepileptic seizures, individuals without a neurological condition may nonetheless become unconscious or exhibit convulsions, confusion, or other alterations of consciousness such as feeling that they or the environment are unreal or feel dreamlike, or go into a “trance,” defined here as having an unusually narrow or lack of awareness of the surroundings, perhaps accompanied by unresponsiveness (Litwin & Carden˜ a, 2000). These manifestations can be symptomatic of various psychopathologies and earlier on were described as manifestations of “hysteria,” that included entering dream-like or hypnotic-like states (cf. Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895 on “hypnoid states”; Carden˜a & Alvarado, Volume 1). A drastic change in the clarity of consciousness, or delirium, is characterized by severe cognitive disorganization including confusion, incoherent thought and speech, and hallucinations. It can occur in chronic or brief reactive (to traumas or severe stressors) psychosis (also called bouffe´e de´lirante aigue¨, sometimes described cross-culturally in relation to spirit possession), or in response to psychoactive drug intoxication or deprivation (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). However, there are also nonpathological examples for at least some of these manifestations, including losing muscle tonus and becoming unresponsive in the middle of a ritual (e.g., Oohashi et al., 2002). Furthermore, a narrowing in the focus or range of consciousness can be voluntarily induced in hypnosis or meditation or be a general response to a traumatic event (Carden˜a & Spiegel, 1993).
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Alterations in the Sense of the Self Many if not most of the experiences described below can occur as part of a neurological condition such as a seizure disorder, a reaction to a traumatic event, intense physical activity, or as part of a hypnotic, meditative or similar attempt to alter consciousness (Carden˜a, 2005; Carden˜a & Spiegel, 1993; Gabbard, Twemlow, & Jones, 1982). They are also found in psychiatric disorders, particularly psychotic, posttraumatic (i.e., posttraumatic and acute stress disorders), dissociative, and somatoform disorders, and sleep paralysis. In out-of-body experiences (OBEs), individuals situate their awareness outside of their bodies, sometimes with associated features such as autoscopy or seeing the physical body from a distance (Alvarado, 2000; see also Dieguez & Blanke, this volume). There are also other alterations in sensation of different parts of the body, such as sensing that a part of the body has changed in size or become numb, tingling, or painful, as in the case of some victims of sexual abuse who may not be able to sense a part of their bodies or find urinating painful (Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Van Dyck, Van der Hart, & Vanderlinden, 1998). Depersonalization (derealization when it refers to others or the environment) involves experiences in which the person does not feel quite real or authentic or as if s/he were in some way dead or living in a dream (Simeon, Knutelska, Nelson, & Guralnik, 2003). One of the saddest examples is the account by the extraordinary performer Spalding Gray, who wrote before committing suicide after enduring chronic pain caused by a car accident: “All that is left of me is this horrid, lingering awareness that knows there is no longer any solid configuration of me . . . It is a true horror. It’s the making of a haunted ghost” (Duke, 2004). Incidentally, people suffering from psychotic disorders or the neurological Cotard syndrome may experience that they are actually dead. Depersonalization and derealization episodes are typically associated with an altered sense of the bodily self, and sensory phenomena such as colors seeming less vibrant and changes in the sense of time; they can occur in reaction to various stressors (such as in panic disorder), trauma, or to ingesting psychoactive drugs (Carden˜a & Gleaves, 2007; see Presti, this volume). It bears mentioning that self-injurious behavior, characteristic of borderline personality but also present in many other conditions such as eating, substance and dissociative disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the psychoses, is sometimes motivated by the attempt to feel something instead of just numbness and unreality (Osuch, Noll, & Putnam, 1999). Of course there are also socially accepted reasons
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to engage in self-injurious behavior including, decoration (e.g., wearing very high heels for years or the epidermic damage caused by tattoos and scarification), sexuality [see Maliszewski et al., this volume], and the induction of ASC related to spiritual practices (cf. Carden˜a, 1999). In autoscopy, heautoscopy, or “doppelga¨nger” experiences, the person sees an image or “double” of him/herself and may even interact with it. This phenomenon occurs rarely among psychiatric or neurological conditions but has inspired major writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, and Edgar Allan Poe. In fusional experiences, the person feels that s/he has merged or is part of another, whether a person or a superior being, and may coexperience thoughts, sensations, and feelings. This phenomenon may be part of a schizophrenic process in which the person feels that a frightening and uncontrollable blurring of the boundaries between self and others occur, as in this citation from a patient, “All moving, rushing inside my head . . . They are swinging round, pushing the head out” (Reed, 1988, p. 113). This phenomenon occurs often in conjunction with paranoid ideation in which, as one person confided me, her sense that an ex-boss wanted to harm her included her notion that he could hypnotize telepathically everyone she came in contact with, including me. However, the blurring of identity that the baby or infant can experience with the main caregiver is a normative part of development, and fusional experiences are prized within erotic (Wade, 2000; see also Maliszewki et al., this volume) and mystical experiences, which are typically associated with psychological health (Wulff, 2000). Our developmental history and perhaps the evidence for psi phenomena and possible interconnectedness among beings may help explain some of these experiences, which are more common among individuals who are considered to have thin mental boundaries between themselves and others and among their states of consciousness (Hartmann, 1991). In pathological alterations in the sense of agency, the person experiences that s/he cannot control parts of or the whole body, in the absence of a medical condition that could explain this experience. Consultationliaison services in hospitals include some of these cases, as one in which a soldier was referred to me because she experienced an inability to move her arm, despite a lack of any injury that could justify such a symptom. During a hypnotic procedure she spontaneously moved the arm without a problem. Uncontrolled frenetic movement is another variation of somatoform disorders. As with sensory alterations, these types of paralyses or uncontrolled movements were richly described earlier in the context of “hysteria” (e.g., Breuer & Freud, 1893–1895).
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In nonpathological situations, these experiences may occur as part of hypnotic manipulations (e.g., Oakley & Halligan, 2009) or of participating in some activities such as dance and acting (Carden˜a, 1997; see also St John, and Zarrilli, Volume 1). Similarly, in alterations in the sense of attribution, the individual experiences that someone or something else controls his or her body, thoughts, and emotions. As part of a pathological process, this experience can be very distressing, as when people during psychotic episodes believe that their limbs are controlled by alien implants or that someone else is inserting thoughts in their minds (Reed, 1988). Pathological cases of spirit possession and dissociative identity disorder (DID) are characterized by recurrent and dysfunctional alternations of identities and amnesia and are related to a variety of other distressing symptoms (Carden˜a & Gleaves, 2007). Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that the experience of otherattribution in ritual spirit possession and the related phenomenon of “trance mediumship” and channeling are usually sought after and not dysfunctional (e.g., Hastings, 1991; Moreira-Almeida et al., 2008). The experience of having alternate identities or being taken over by another entity can take many forms and has occurred throughout history. This is not too surprising considering the fact that a sense of a unique, private, and long-term consistent identity is a developmental achievement (Gopnik, 2009), and that the Western sense of a separate, individual identity may not be normative in communal cultures [see Sluhovsky, and Whitehead, Volume 1], and is subject to ontological questioning.
Pathological Mood Alterations The mood disorders can include episodes of such severe sadness or the opposite extreme of elation (mania) that the whole state of consciousness becomes altered and may even impair reality testing. Custance (1952, in Landis, 1964, pp. 262, 267) provides a good example of how her severe depression affected her state of consciousness: My consciousness has as it were, regressed to the earliest stage of the simple organism which, finding its environment unpleasant, wants to get away at all costs . . . I seem shut into myself, withdrawn from real contact with the outer worlds . . . I cannot get my mind to work; instead of associations “clicking into place” everything is an inextricable jumble.
It is also pertinent to mention here the “dark night of the soul” experience, which can happen as a transitional stage in a mystic’s life. Roberts (1933, in Hunt, 2007, p. 214) recounts:
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Suddenly I was aware that all life around me had come to a complete standstill. Everywhere I looked, instead of life, I saw a hideous nothingness invading and strangling the life out of every object . . . a world being choked to death by an insidious void . . . a scene of death, dying, and decay.
Hunt proposes that these experiences are similar to those found in the anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) in chronic psychosis (or, I would add, also in major depression). According to him, as part of spiritual development, they may lead to an enhancement of Being, whereas they represent a decay of that sense of Being when they are a symptom of a psychopathological process [see Lukoff, this volume]. Also relevant here is Forman’s discussion (1999) of episodes of “pure consciousness” in the context of meditative practice where, paradoxically, experiential emptiness in the context of an organized, purposeful practice to alter consciousness can lead to an actual enhancement of the sense of being alive [see also Shear, Volume 1]. Similarly, Mishara and Schwartz [this volume] propose that a transient dissolution of the self may lead to a greater overall integration. At the other end, extreme elation or mania, a variation of bipolar disorder, transforms the whole state of consciousness to bring about delusions of power and grandeur (“in a sense I am God. I see the future, plan the universe”), a heightened sense of reality (“the outer world makes a much more vivid and intense impression than usual”), a sense of revelation (“The sense of being intimately in tune with the ultimate stuff of the universe”), overwhelming emotions and loss of inhibition, and even flight of ideas and incoherence (“essential to fix my exact position (fly on the pipe) in the space-time continuum, at any rate by what the sailors call D. R. (dead reckoning)”) (in Landis, 1964, pp. 285–294). Another emotion, extreme fear or panic, can bring about periods of depersonalization and other changes in consciousness such as the following report: “(A panic attack) surges with an indescribable intensity of Horror. Home again becomes immeasurable distance, only more immeasurable. And the distance of three blocks . . . is, I feel, an infinity of street in the sun . . . I sometimes feel faint” (Leonard, 1939, in Landis, 1964, p. 247).
Alterations in Perception/Hallucinations Schizophrenia is often portrayed in TV shows and films as involving dramatic visual and auditory hallucinations and far-fetched delusions, but one should speak of different types of schizophrenia or, at least, different types of symptoms (APA, 2000). Negative symptoms involve a diminution of
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abilities such as lack of motivation, anhedonia, poor hygiene, and so on. In contrast, positive symptoms are intensifications of the normal processes of beliefs and imagery in the case of delusions and hallucinations, respectively. Also present in the psychoses may be perceptual changes such as static objects seeming to vibrate, move, become flat, or change colors. Delusions involve beliefs that are central to the individual’s psychological make-up, are bizarre, impervious to contradictory evidence, and bring about dysfunctional behaviors (Sims, 1995); however, nonpathological beliefs can also evidence irrationality, ego centeredness, and imperviousness to countervailing evidence, (Greenwald, 1980). Hallucinations are generally defined as uncontrolled, percept-like experiences in the absence of a “real object.” Bentall (2000) wrote that it is advisable to see hallucinations within a continuum rather than as events occurring only to a few disturbed individuals. Indeed, hypnotic suggestions among responsive individuals show that it is relatively easy to induce these experiences among psychologically healthy people. Bentall also mentions that hallucinatory experiences have been experienced by some very influential religious and historical figures, and they have also been reported in the context of possible parapsychological phenomena. They may be discrete, as in just seeing one figure that is not there, or involve all or most psychological processes as in flashbacks in which the person has a full experience of being somewhere else and becomes partially or fully unresponsive to the surroundings. Hallucinations can affect any of the senses, but auditory hallucinations are far more frequent than visual ones. One of the most important autobiographies in the history of psychopathology, that of Daniel-Paul Schreber, on which Freud based his theory of paranoia, provides an example (Landis, 1964, p. 119): “During several nights when I could not go to sleep, a recurrent crackling noise in the wall of our bedroom became noticeable . . . having heard similar noises innumerable times since then.” Polanski’s 1965 film Repulsion eerily portrays a woman having a similar hallucination. Davidson (1912, in Landis, 1964, p. 117) describes a visual hallucination: “I first saw thick clouds of a dark purple colour roll past . . . while from my left, rays of bright golden light came down through the clouds . . . Then . . . there appeared . . . the figure of a young man.” Hallucinations, or visionary experiences, may also occur in individuals without any psychopathology, spontaneously or as part of their religious experience [see Geels, Volume 1], or among psychologically healthy individuals grieving after the loss of an important person (APA, 2000, p. xxxiv). Hypnotic suggestions among the highly responsive can also produce suggested positive (i.e., perceiving a stimulus that is not present) and
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negative hallucinations (i.e., not perceiving a stimulus that is present), besides spontaneously occurring intense imagery.
Pathological Transitions in States of Consciousness Tart (1975) proposed that the transition from one state of consciousness into another may produce a transient psychophysiological disorganization, a hypothesis for which there is evidence from different phenomena. They include switches between different identity states in DID (Putnam, 1988), transitions between being awake and being asleep (Foulkes & Vogel, 1965), and between being in the normal state and being possessed by a spirit (Carden˜a, 1998, 1989; see also Carden˜a, Volume 1). Narcolepsy is a neurological example of a disorder in which there is an abrupt and uncontrolled transition between being awake and asleep. Herbert Spiegel (1974) discussed a more psychological problem in which a group of extremely highly hypnotizable people (“grade 5”) may transit uncontrollably between their “waking” state and one involving extreme suggestibility and hypnotic-like experiences. Another phenomenon of pathological consciousness transition is sleep paralysis, the experience during which the person is awake but unable to move for a period of time, associated with a frightening sensed presence or hallucination of someone on top of the individual or nearby, and accompanied sometimes by an OBE (Hufford, 2005). The event is usually explained in terms of incomplete awakening from rapid-eve-movement (REM) sleep, during which the body is immobilized, as happens during REM sleep, although the person otherwise seems to be awake. A theory for alien abduction experiences that seems to explain many but probably not all cases is that they are reconstructions from sleep paralysis episodes (Appelle, Lynn, & Newman, 2000). Chronic sleep paralysis probably involves both neurological and psychological factors because it is associated with posttraumatic stress disorder and panic attacks (Hinton, Pich, Chhean, & Pollack, 2005). It bears mentioning also that not all episodes of sleep paralysis are distressing or pathological (Hufford, 2005). Another pathological condition that can be analyzed as problems with transitions among psychobiological states is PTSD in which people may cycle between being extremely aroused even by innocuous stimuli and becoming experientially detached or numb to themselves and the surroundings as a compensatory mechanism, which has been explained as the under and/or overmodulation of affect and underlying brain structures (Lanius et al., 2010). The extreme emotional shifts among people with borderline personality disorders, who may go from feeling elation to
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despondency in a matter of moments, may be also analyzed in these terms. As with having a coherent identity, the regulation of moods and states of consciousness is an important developmental milestone that may go awry when problems such as insecure attachment and trauma occur. Finally, cyclothymic disorder, involving chronic, fluctuating hypomanic and depressive moods, may be seen as a form of chronic mood dysregulation with associated consciousness changes. After this survey of ASC within psychopathology, I would like to also briefly mention some new approaches on how distressing, but not necessarily pathological, ASC may be dealt therapeutically when necessary. For a number of years now (cf. Kramer, 1993), clinical professionals have been aware that some individuals who may not evidence any pathology may become seriously distressed after they have encountered an unexpected ASC, anomalous, or exceptional human experience (EHE). Sometimes the complaint is not about altered consciousness but an event in the environment such as a putative haunting or psychokinetic experience. Although the evidence shows that most people who experience ASC, whether spontaneously or in a ritual setting, are psychologically healthy (Carden˜ a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Moreira-Almeida et al., 2008), it is still the case that some individuals may have problems making sense of their anomalous experiences or events, or may experience ASC as part of their psychopathology (see above). It does not help that in many industrialized societies the mere report of such phenomena as telepathy may be considered to be indicative of psychopathology (e.g., of schizotypal personality disorder or of schizophrenia; APA, 2000), despite the evidence that such beliefs do not necessarily imply psychopathology and in fact have some empirical basis (Targ et al., 2000; Luke, this volume). The recommendations by Targ and collaborators (2000, p. 243) concerning complaints of putative psi events remain pertinent for complaints related to ASC and exceptional human experiences (EHE): a. Assess how the client interprets the experience and what may be the meaning of the experience in his or her life, identifying recent major stressors or life events; b. Identify positive and negative preconceptions and educate the client about the phenomena in general (which requires that the therapist consult the scientific research on the topic, rather than just sputter out preconceptions, either for or against these phenomena), pointing out that they may not be very reliable sources of information; and c. Normalize the experience when appropriate.
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Belz (in print) has also discussed recently diagnostic and therapeutic issues related to distressing ASC and EHE and how they are treated by the Counseling Department of the Institut fu¨r Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene a clinic devoted to these problems in Freiburg. This is an area that deserves much greater attention by both clinicians and researchers, and one of the major motivations for this chapter has been not only to look at the various links between ASC and psychopathology but also to point out how ASC occurring in nonpathological contexts could be easily mistaken as indicators of dysfunction. Putnam (2005) made a strong case that clinical psychology and psychiatry must pay far more attention to states of consciousness, both because they are necessary to understand certain forms of pathology and because one of the major tasks in therapy is to modify the clients’ consciousness, of which the current reliance on such techniques as mindfulness and mentalization are primary examples. ASC are part and parcel of the human experience, both in pathology and in health, as the various contributions to these two volumes attest. A clinical science of altered consciousness is fundamental to understanding what may go wrong in a person’s mind but also what may bring about recovery and provide greater existential joy and meaning.
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Litwin, R., & Carden˜a, E. (2000). Demographic and seizure variables, but not hypnotizability or dissociation, differentiated psychogenic from organic seizures. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 1, 99–122. Menezes Jr., A., & Moreira-Almeida, A. (2010). Religion, spirituality, and psychosis. Current Psychiatric Research, 12, 174–179. Moreira-Almeida, A., Lotufo Neto, F., & Carden˜ a, E. (2008). Comparison between Brazilian Spiritist mediumship and dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 196, 420–424. Morante, E. (1988). Alibi. Italy: Garzanti. (Originally published 1958) Murphy, J. M. (1976). Psychiatric labeling in cross-cultural perspective. Science, 191, 1019–1028. Nijenhuis, E. R. S., Spinhoven, P., Van Dyck, R., Van der Hart, O., & Vanderlinden, J. (1998). Degree of somatoform and psychological dissociation in dissociative disorders is correlated with reported trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 11, 711–730. Oakley, D. A., & Halligan, P. W. (2009). Hypnotic suggestion and cognitive neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 264–270. Oohashi, T., Kawai, N., Honda, M., Nakamura, S., Morimoto, M., Nishina, E., et al. (2002). Electroencephalographic measurement of possession trance in the field. Clinical Neurophysiology, 113, 435–445. Osuch, E. A., Noll, J. G., & Putnam, F. W. (1999). The motivation for self-injury in psychiatric inpatients. Psychiatry, 62, 334–346. Otis, L. S. (1984). Adverse effects of transcendental meditation. In D. H. Shapiro & R. N. Walsh (Eds.), Meditation: Contemporary and classical perspectives (pp. 201–208). New York: Aldine. Putnam, F. W. (1988). The switch process in multiple personality disorder and other state-change disorders. Dissociation, 1, 24–32. Putnam, F. W. (2005, November). States of being. Invited address presented at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation, Toronto, Canada. Radin, D., & Schlitz, M. (2005). Gut feelings, intuition, and emotions: An exploratory study. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 11, 85–91. Reed, G. (1988). The psychology of anomalous experience (rev. ed.). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. Rouget, G. (1985). Music and trance: A theory of the relations between music and possession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sabell, A., Clarke, C., & Fenwick, P. (2001). Inter-subject EEG correlations at a distance: The transferred potential Proceedings of the 44th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 419–422. Simeon, D., Knutelska, M., Nelson, D., & Guralnik, O. (2003). Feeling unreal: A depersonalization disorder update of 117 cases. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 64, 990–997. Sims, A. (1995). Symptoms in the mind. An introduction to descriptive psychopathology (2nd ed.). London: W. B. Saunders.
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Spiegel, H. (1974). The grade 5 syndrome: The highly hypnotizable person. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 22, 303–319. Targ, E., Schlitz, M., & Irwin, H. J. (2000). Psi-related experiences. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 219–252). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tart, C. T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton. Terhune, D. B., & Carden˜a, E (2010). Differential patterns of spontaneous experiential response to a hypnotic induction: A latent profile analysis. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 1140–1150. Tomkins, S. (1962–1963). Affect-imagery-consciousness (Vols. 1 and 2). New York: Springer. Trevarthen, C. (1994, May 2). Conversations with a two-month-old. New Scientist, 230–235. Van IJzendoorn, M. (1997). Attachment, emergent morality, and aggression: Toward a developmental socioemotional model of antisocial behaviour. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 21, 703–727. Van Ommeren, M., Komproe, I., Carden˜a, E., Thapa, S. B., Prasain, D., de Jong, J., & Sharma, B. (2004). Mental illness among Bhutanese shamans in Nepal. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 192, 313–317. Van Ommeren, M. V., Sharma, B., Komproe, I., Sharma, G. K., Carden˜a, E., de Jong, J. T., Poudyal, B., & Makaju, R. (2001). Trauma and loss as determinants of medically unexplained epidemic illness in a Bhutanese refugee camp. Psychological Medicine, 31, 1259–1267. Wade, J. (2000). The love that dares not speak its name. Transpersonal knowing: Exploring the horizon of consciousness. In H. Tobin, P. Nelson, & K. Puhakka (Eds.), Transpersonal knowing: Exploring the horizon of consciousness (pp. 271–302). Albany: State University of New York Press. Wren-Lewis, J. (1988). The darkness of God: A personal report of consciousnesstransformation through an encounter with death. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 28, 105–122. Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experiences. In E. Carden˜a, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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CHAPTER 14
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders David Lukoff Overlap of Mental Disorders and Visionary Spiritual Experiences Several descriptive categories have been proposed for psychotic-like episodes that have potential for positive outcomes: problem-solving schizophrenia (Boisen, 1962); positive disintegration (Dabrowski, 1964); creative illness (Ellenberger, 1970); spiritual emergencies (Grof & Grof, 1989); mystical experience with psychotic features (Lukoff, 1985), metanoiac voyages (Laing, 1972); and visionary states (Perry, 1977–1978). In this chapter, the term visionary spiritual experience (VSE) will be used to encompass such experiences [see Geels, Volume 1]. The term visionary is used in the anthropological and religious literature to refer to a mental condition that leads an individual to propose radical changes for the entire culture. Such visionary experiences have led to major social movements and are more likely to occur in societies undergoing rapid and devastating social change, such as with the Iroquois Indian leader Handsome Lake. In the late 1700s, he spent 6 months in a state of catatonia accompanied by visions. Following these experiences, he underwent a personal transformation, communicated his visions and new insights to others, and synthesized old and new beliefs into a new religion and way of living that revitalized the culture (Wallace, 1956). However, in most cases, a VSE does not transform the culture but adds a new dimension to the individual’s spiritual life. Spirituality is used to refer to an inner experience of connection to something greater than oneself, a personal sense of the sacred and meaningful. People in the midst of a VSE often traverse the range of the world’s religions and cultural history in the form of spiritual content and experiences that are similar to hallucinations and delusions (explored in more depth below). When they return,
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they often view the episode as a part of their spiritual awakening and an initiation for their spiritual journey. Jungian analyst John Perry (1998) noted that after a VSE: “What remains . . . is an ideal model and a sense of direction which one can use to complete the transformation through his own purposeful methods” (pp. 34–35).
Historical and Cross-cultural Similarities Psychotic and religious experiences have been associated since the earliest recorded history, and undoubtedly before. The Old Testament uses the same term, madness, to describe the behavior of prophets and to explain a punishment for the disobedient (Rosen, 1968). Socrates declared, “Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift” (Dodds, 1951, p. 61) [see Ustinova, Volume 1]. Based on a cross-cultural survey, anthropologist Prince (1992) concluded that, Highly similar mental and behavioral states may be designated psychiatric disorders in some cultural settings and religious experiences in others . . . Within cultures that invest these unusual states with meaning and provide the individual experiencing them with institutional support, at least a proportion of them may be contained and channeled into socially valuable roles. (p. 289)
Anthropological accounts show that babbling confused words, displaying curious eating habits, singing continuously, dancing wildly, and being “tormented by spirits” are elements in some shamanic initiatory crises. In shamanic cultures, some spiritual crises are interpreted as an indication of an individual’s destiny to become a shaman rather than a sign of mental illness (Halifax, 1979). Although shamans seem to be psychologically healthier than most members of their communities (Van Ommeren et al., 2004), Walsh (1990) and Silverman (1967) have both noted that some shamans’ initiatory crises have involved a psychotic episode. Individuals in Western cultures occasionally experience similar problems that lead them into the allied health professions (Lukoff, 1991) [see Winkelman, Volume 1]. In Asian cultures, spiritual problems are distinguished from psychopathology. For example, a well-known pitfall of spiritual practice recognized in many Asian traditions is “false enlightenment,” associated with delightful or terrifying visions, especially of light (Epstein & Topgay, 1982) [see Shear, Volume 1]. When Asian spiritual traditions are transplanted into Western contexts, such problems still occur (Epstein, 1990). In ancient Western as
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well as traditional cultures, some people have been esteemed for their visionary experiences and enjoyed privileged status as shamans, prophets, visionaries, or saints, as was Handsome Lake described above.
Phenomenological Similarities The similarity between psychotic symptoms and mystical experiences has received acknowledgment and discussion in the mental health field (Arieti, 1976; Boisen, 1962; Buckley, 1981; James, 1902/1958). Both involve escaping the limiting boundaries of the self, which leads to an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood meltdown [see Mishara & Schwartz, this volume]. The need to transcend the limiting boundaries of the self has been postulated to be a basic neurobiological need of all living things (Newberg, D’Aquili, & Rause 2001). However, in persons with psychotic disorder, “the sense of embodied self is transcended before it has been firmly established . . . disintegration and further fragmentation are the likely results” (Mills, 2001, p. 214). Campbell (1972) maintained that the psychotic individual, the mystic, the yogi, and the LSD user are all plunged into the same deep inward sea. However, The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing—and following stage by stage—the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim: whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. (p. 216)
Clarke (2001) suggests that psychosis and profound spiritual experiences initially follow a common process, which can encompass euphoria, bewilderment, and horror. But in high states of arousal, the cognitions of ordinary consciousness become less accessible. In Ken Wilber’s (1980) spectrum model of consciousness, psychosis is neither prepersonal (infantile and regressive) nor transpersonal (transcendent and absolute), but is depersonal—an admixture of higher and lower elements. Wilber (1980) writes: “[Psychosis] carries with it cascading fragments of higher structures that have ruinously disintegrated” (p. 64). Thus, he continues, psychotic persons “often channel profound spiritual insights” (p. 108). Similarly, Jung acknowledges that fragments of archetypal spiritual themes and symbols occur frequently in the experiences of psychotic persons but points out that “the associations are unsystematic, abrupt, grotesque, absurd and correspondingly difficult if not impossible to understand” ( Jung, 1960, pp. 262–263). However, Perry (1974), who
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founded an innovative treatment facility for persons having first psychotic episodes, views psychosis more positively as a renewal process in which the psyche is seeking to fundamentally reorganize itself.
Types of Visionary Spiritual Experiences Anomalous experiences include a variety of unusual events that appear to challenge our understanding of the world, such as mystical experiences, near-death experiences, alien encounters, psychic experiences, lucid dreaming, and psychedelic drug experiences. These nonordinary experiences have often been ignored or ridiculed by mainstream psychology, even though interest in exceptional mental states dates back to William James on Exceptional Mental States: The 1896 Lowell Lectures (Taylor, 1983). The more recent Varieties of Anomalous Experiences: Examining the Scientific Evidence, published by the American Psychological Association (Carden˜a, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), examined 10 types of anomalous experiences, and most of the authors reported little relationship between anomalous experiences and psychopathology. Indeed, many of these experiences have been associated with claims of positive life changes following the experience. However, the relationship between psychopathology and anomalous experience is complex and multifaceted. Berenbaum, Kerns, and Raghavan (2000) posit that there are four reasons why anomalous experiences could be associated with psychopathology: (a) the two overlap, (b) anomalous experience contributes to psychopathology, (c) psychopathology contributes to anomalous experience; and (d) there, are “third variables” that contribute to both anomalous experience and psychopathology (p. 32). Even when no psychopathology is present, anomalous experiences such as mystical, psychic, and near-death experiences that often include religious and spiritual content can be distressing and lead to contact with mental health professionals. Four anomalous experiences are included as spiritual problems in the typology in this chapter: mystical, near-death, alien abduction, and psychic experiences. Meditation and spiritual practice-induced episodes and possession are also covered.
Mystical Experience Studies of this phenomenon date back to William James, who saw mystical experience as being at the core of religion and maintained that such experiences led to the founding of the world’s religions ( James, 1902/1958). Definitions used in research and clinical publications vary
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considerably, ranging from “upheaval of the total personality” (Neumann, 1964) to those that include “everyday mysticism” (Scharfstein, 1973). For clinical purposes, a mystical experience can be defined as a transient, extraordinary experience marked by: • • • • • • •
feelings of unity sense of harmonious relationship to the divine euphoria sense of noesis (access to the hidden spiritual dimension) loss of ego functioning alterations in time and space perception sense of lacking control over the event
Surveys assessing the incidence of what can be considered mild mystical experience in the general population show that it has been rising over the past few decades. For more than 30 years, the Gallup Poll has posed the question: “Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or a power—whether you call it God or not—which is different from your everyday self?” Affirmative answers have continuously increased: 27% in 1973, 42% in 1986, 54% in 1990, and 70% in 2001 (Gallup, 2002). Yet Wulff (2000) has pointed out that the actual prevalence of mystical experiences may be considerably lower than these figures suggest. Studies that have examined the actual content of reported experiences have found that many of the responses were uncodable, and people often took the expression “lift out” simply to mean feeling uplifted in a metaphorical sense, and they equated feeling “close to a powerful, spiritual, force” with the belief that God is always near (Thomas & Cooper, 1980). Yet, historically, psychological theory and diagnostic classification systems have tended to either ignore or pathologize such intense spiritual experiences [see Carden˜ a, this volume]. Some clinical literature has described the mystical experience as symptomatic of ego regression, borderline psychosis, a psychotic episode, or temporal lobe dysfunction (Lukoff, 1985). Freud reduced the “oceanic experience” of mystics to “infantile helplessness” and a “regression to primary narcissism” (Freud, 1927/1989). Even transpersonal psychologists such as Maslow (1973) and Wilber (1984) have used the termed metapathologies, and William James (1902/1958) coined the term theopathies to describe the problematic dimensions that can be stirred up by intense spiritual/mystical experiences. F. W. H. Myers can be given credit for the initial insight that the subliminal can give rise to mystical as well as psychopathological content (Myers, 1892). Myers postulated a limen or threshold, below which the
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subliminal self is found. In persons prone to mystical experience, the subliminal self is relatively large and active and the margin of the conscious field relatively leaky and permeable. However, Wulff (2000) cites research and supports a more favorable view—according to which, even though pathology may indeed mark some mystics’ lives, mystical experience per se is not pathological but a factor for growth. This idea finds substantial support in the contemporary empirical and transpersonal literatures. There are, first, of all, several studies suggesting that measures of mystical experience tend not to be correlated with measures of pathology (Wulff, 2000, p. 410). A survey found that most clinicians do not currently view mystical experiences as pathological (Allman, De La Roche, Elkins, & Weathers, 1992). To some degree, this may reflect a change that is partly attributable to Abraham Maslow. His studies of peak experiences, which he considered religious experiences for many individuals, validated their importance and nonpathological nature. In addition, studies have found that people reporting mystical experiences scored lower on psychopathology scales and higher on measures of psychological well-being than controls (Wulff, 2000). Mystical experiences can be overwhelming for individuals who do not have a strong sense of ego. In addition, another risk observed following an ecstatic mystical experience is ego inflation, in which the individual develops highly grandiose beliefs or even delusions about his or her own spiritual stature and attainment (Rosenthal, 1990). Individuals in the midst of intense mystical experiences have been hospitalized and medicated when less restrictive interventions could have been utilized (Chapman & Lukoff, 1996; Lukoff & Everest, 1985). The DSM-IV-TR highlights the need for cultural sensitivity when clinicians assess for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations different from their own (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 306): Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice).
Near-death Experience The near-death experience (NDE) is a subjective event experienced by persons who come close to death or who confront a potentially fatal situation and escape uninjured. Since 1975 when Raymond Moody first focused public attention on the NDE in his book Life After Life, the NDE has been the focus of considerable scientific research (Greyson, 1993, 1997; Ring, 1990).
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The NDE typically follows a characteristic temporal sequence of stages including: • • • • • • •
peace and contentment entering a transitional region of darkness seeing a brilliant light passing through the light into another realm of existence strong positive affect dissociation from the physical body transcendental or mystical elements
The person often feels unconditionally accepted and forgiven by a loving source. Life review is also common, and the person returns with a mission or “vision,” believing that there is still more to be done in this life. Greyson (2000) has pointed out the many similarities to the prototypical features of shamanic soul flight, OBE, and deep hypnotic experiences. Modern medical technology has resulted in many persons experiencing NDEs. Near-death experiences are reported by 35% of individuals who come close to death. Gallup Polls estimated that about 5% of the adult American population, approximately 13 million American adults, have had a NDE with at least some of the features described above, making it a clinically significant and pervasive phenomenon (Gallup, 2002). The nonpathological nature of the NDE is documented by the growing literature on its aftereffects—in particular, positive attitude and value changes, personality transformation, and spiritual development. Ring (1990) has conducted studies on NDE and found that these changes occur within 5 years and are stable over time. Despite generally positive outcomes, significant intrapsychic and interpersonal difficulties frequently arise in the wake of an NDE. Intrapsychic problems associated with NDE include: • anger or depression related to losing the near-death state • difficulty reconciling the NDE with previous religious beliefs, values, or lifestyle • the fear that the NDE might indicate a mental disorder
Interpersonal problems associated with NDE include: • difficulty reconciling attitudinal changes with the expectations of family, friends, and colleagues at work • a sense of isolation from those who have not had a similar experience • a fear of ridicule or rejection from others
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• difficulty communicating the meaning and impact of the NDE (Greyson, 1997)
The many published scientific articles and first-person accounts of NDEs have resulted in greater sensitivity to these experiences. NDEs are recognized as fairly common occurrences in modern intensive care units (ICUs), as is the need to differentiate between NDEs and ICU psychoses (which do occur often as a side effect of medical treatments). With this increased awareness of NDEs, ICU staff are less likely to misdiagnose and inappropriately “treat” NDEs with antipsychotic medication. The inclusion of a new diagnostic category (Religious or Spiritual Problem) in the DSM-IV permits differentiation of NDEs and similar experiences from mental disorders and may lead to research into more effective treatment strategies (Greyson, 1997, p. 327). Some NDEs become very distressing and meet the criteria for DSM-IV Adjustment Disorder (Greyson & Bush, 1992). But often the level of distress warrants the diagnosis of a V Code rather than of a mental disorder.
Psychic Experiences Psychic experiences are a hypothetical construct relating to the presumed transfer of information or energy for which there is arguably objective evidential support (Targ, Schlitz, & Irwin, 2000) [see Luke, this volume]. Thus most definitions define it negatively, after excluding other reasonable explanations. Examples include: • • • •
clairvoyance (experiences of remote events) telepathy (communication without apparent physical means) precognition (visions or dreams that provide formerly unknown information) synchronistic events (meaningful coincidences of two apparently unrelated events) • after-death communications • poltergeist phenomena (physical disturbances in a house with no apparent physical cause)
Extrasensory perception has been the subject of scientific research for more than 100 years and continues to the present (Krippner, 1991; Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan, 2003). Although the scientific status of psychic experiences has been the subject of much debate, there is no question that most people have such experiences. Gallup polls show that a majority of American adults have extrasensory experiences, and the
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percentage is increasing (from 58% in 1973 to 67% in 1986; Gallup, 2002). Unfortunately, both sensationalism in tabloid media and commercialism (e.g., fee-based psychic hotlines) are associated with this topic. A study of 212 adults and 91 high school students found that reports of psychic experiences were correlated with reports of transcendental spiritual experiences, and more than 90% of the respondents with transcendent experiences considered them valuable (Kennedy & Kanthamani, 1995). Psychic experiences are considered to be genuine abilities by many, including the influential theorist of psychotherapy, Jerome Frank, who considered it a skill possessed by the best therapists (Frank & Frank, 1991). Psychic experiences are associated with many spiritual practices and altered states of consciousness, but practitioners in most spiritual traditions are taught that these are distractions from the true path of spiritual development (Caplan, 1999). Although claims of psychic abilities and experiences are not in themselves evidence of mental disorder (Targ & Hastings, 1987), psychic experiences are also reported by people in psychotic and dissociative states. Thus, differential diagnosis is a key issue. Confusion and the fear that “I’m going crazy” are common reactions to spontaneous psychic experiences (Tart, 1995). Some people report feeling isolated from others because they are afraid to talk about these experiences with their friends and family. Most people who have psychic experiences are able to integrate them without any professional help, but some do seek assistance from a therapist in understanding such events and coping with their reactions to them (E. Targ et al., 2000). Hastings (1983) suggested that “The focus of this counseling, given therapeutic purposes, rather than research purposes only, should be to assist the person to a [sic] experience of balance, integration, and judgment relating to apparent or genuine parapsychological experience” (p. 143). He described seven steps for working with someone who has had a disturbing psychic experience: 1. Ask the person to describe the experience or events. 2. Listen fully and carefully, without judging. 3. Reassure the person that he or she is not “crazy” or “insane” (if this is appropriate). 4. Identify or label the type of event. 5. Give information about what is known about this type of event. 6. Where possible, develop reality tests to discover if the event is genuine or if there are nonpsychic alternative explanations. 7. Address the psychological reactions that result from the experience.
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Alien Abduction Experiences The chapter on alien abduction experiences in Varieties of Anomalous Experience included this definition: Alien abduction experiences (AAEs) are characterized by “subjectively real memories of being taken secretly and/or against one’s will by apparently non-human entities, usually to a location interpreted as an alien spacecraft (i.e., a UFO)” (Appelle, Lynn, & Newman, 2000, p. 254). In addition to reports from the United States, accounts from England, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Australia show the same content themes: capture, examination, communication with aliens, otherworldly journey, theophany (receipt of spiritual messages), and return to earth (Mack, 1999). Gallup Polls reveal how widespread beliefs are in UFO-related phenomena. Fifty percent of a representative sample of the U.S. population taken in 1999 reported that they believe there is life on other planets, which is up from 34% in 1966. UFO sightings are also reported by millions of people in the United States. When the Gallup Poll asked a representative national sample: “Have you, yourself, ever seen anything you thought was a UFO?” 12% answered Yes (Gallup & Jones, 2000). In 1997, a Time/CNN poll found that 22% of Americans believe that the earth has been visited by space aliens (cited in Appelle, Lynn, & Newman, 2000). There are now thousands of cases of alien encounter published, and researchers have studied more than 1,700 cases. Based on an extrapolation from a group of students, another researcher suggested that 15 million Americans may have had such experiences. But after citing these statistics, Appelle and coauthors (2000) concluded, “Even if the numbers are much lower than some of these estimates, it is clear that many thousands of Americans believe they have been adducted by aliens” (p. 256). Both positive and problematic effects have been reported by alien abduction experiencers, including a range of physical and psychological after-effects such as injuries, eye problems, skin burns, gastrointestinal distress, and equilibrium and balance problems. Anxiety and recurring nightmares have also been frequently reported. Other symptoms and potential problems following AAEs include irritability, intrusive thoughts about aliens and abduction, labile mood, disorientation, derealization, and depersonalization (Bullard, 1989b). Although psychopathology is present in some people who report alien abduction experiences (Lukoff, 1988), assessment by both clinical examination and standardized tests has found that, as a group, abduction experiencers are not different from the general population in terms of prevalence of psychopathology. Many report that their lives have been
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radically altered on a deep spiritual level by their encounters with aliens. They have developed a heightened reverence for nature and human life and transformed their lives in ways similar to what happens after an NDE (Ring, 1990; Spanos, Cross, Dickson, & Dubreuil, 1993). However, it should be noted that one study (Stone-Carmen, experients 1994) found a high level of suicide attempts (57%) among AAE experients. Some individuals who have had AAEs seek therapy to help them integrate their anomalous experiences. Hypnotizing patients to obtain a fuller account of the experience is controversial, and aggressive use of suggestive memory recovery procedures can increase distress and feelings of helplessness (Bullard, 1989a). The risk of providing therapy can be minimized and positive outcomes best assured when the focus of treatment deals with educating clients about possible explanations for the AAE, encouraging them to understand the AAE in terms of its meaning in their lives, and otherwise working on coping strategies that transcend the inevitable inconclusiveness about the AAE’s objective reality (Appelle et al., 2000, p. 271).
Meditation and Spiritual Practice-related Experiences Beginning in the 1960s, interest in Asian spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation, qigong, and Tai Chi increased. Intensive meditation practices can involve meditating for 12 or more hours a day over a period of weeks or months. Asian traditions recognize a number of pitfalls associated with intensive meditation practice, such as altered perceptions that can be frightening and “false enlightenment” associated with delightful or terrifying visions (Kornfield, 1993). Teachers of these practices are aware of the risk of problems associated with them: Whereas spiritual masters have been warning their disciples for thousands of years about the dangers of playing with mystical states, the contemporary spiritual scene is like a candy store where any casual spiritual “tourist” can sample the “goodies” that promise a variety of mystical highs. (Caplan, 1999, p. 17)
People can and do make use of books and audiovisual material to practice on their own without the supervision of a knowledgeable teacher. Anxiety, dissociation, depersonalization, agitation, and muscular tension have been reported in western meditation practitioners (Walsh & Roche, 1979). Transient psychotic-like episodes associated with qigong practice are well-documented as a culture-bound syndrome that is similar to
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conditions associated with intensive practice of yoga and meditation (Shan, 2000). The DSM-IV-TR emphasizes the need to distinguish between psychopathology and meditation-related experiences: Voluntarily induced experiences of depersonalization or derealization form part of meditative and trance practices that are prevalent in many religions and cultures and should not be confused with depersonalization disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 488). Stanislav and Christina Grof founded the Spiritual Emergency Network in 1980 to identify individuals experiencing psychological distress associated with spiritual practices and spontaneous spiritual experiences (Grof & Grof, 1989). Treatment typically involves discontinuation of the spiritual practice, at least temporarily, and engaging in alternative “grounding” activities such as taking walks in nature, hot baths, and working in a garden (Kornfield, 1993). Another concern in this area was documented by Oliver Sacks (1995) in “The Last Hippie,” where he describes the case of a man suffering from the effects of a growing brain tumor with anterograde amnesia that prevented him from remembering anything that has happened since the late 1960s, yet he was treated by fellow members of Hare Krishna as having achieved a state of enlightenment as evidenced by his losing worldly concern and his freedom from desire.
Possession In possession states, a person enters an altered state of consciousness and feels taken over by a spirit, power, deity, or other person who assumes control over his or her mind and body. Generally, the person has no recall of these experiences in the waking state. The deliberate induction of possession states has been part of valued religious rituals in many cultures (Behrend & Luig, 2000), and research has found that people who experience possession in the midst of a ritual do not have more pathology (actually may be healthier) than the people at large. In a comparison of Brazilian Spiritistic mediums and North American dissociative identity disorder, (DID) patients, The mediums differed in having better social adjustment, lower prevalence of mental disorders, lower use of mental health services, no use of antipsychotics, and lower prevalence of histories of physical or sexual childhood abuse, sleepwalking, secondary features of DID, and, symptoms of borderline personality. (Moreira-Almeida, Neto, & Carden˜a, 2008, p. 420)
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The deliberate induction of possession states is part of valued religious rituals in many ancient cultures including ancient Egypt and Greece (where the Delphi oracle spoke through women possessed by spirits) and the earliest forms of Kabbalistic practice. Possession is a central feature of Haitian Vodou ceremonies where specific deities are invited to “ride” the bodies of the worshipers during ceremonies. Possession also appears in early Christianity in a positive light, particularly in the form of “speaking in tongues.” Many contemporary forms of evangelical Christianity consider it desirable to be possessed by the Holy Spirit, with physical manifestations that include shaking and speaking in tongues. Bizarre behavior such as choking, projectile vomiting, frantic motor behavior, wild spasms, and contortions along with grotesque vocalizations can be a frightening experience both for the person possessed and for others witnessing it. The oldest theories about the etiology of mental disorders identify spirit possession as the causal agent, and many religions offer rituals and healings to protect participants from unwanted possession. One of the signs of Christ’s divinity was his ability to cast out demons from people who were possessed. Possession experiences can be pathological when there is impairment in social or occupational functioning or marked distress. Some people reporting possession feel their behavior is beyond their control. Possession and possession trance are listed under the diagnosis Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified: Possession trance, a single or episodic alteration in the state of consciousness characterized by the replacement of customary sense of personal identity by a new identity. This is attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, deity, or other person. (American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 279)
Although possession is a common experience in many cultures (Prince, 1992), in Western industrialized societies, such experiences are not normative. A patient’s report of possession experiences can lead to an inappropriate diagnosis of a dissociative or psychotic disorder, particularly among members of immigrant groups (Carden˜a et al., 1994). Treatment should include social integration of the experience within their community. If the individual is connected with a group whose practices include possession, then collaboration with leaders of that religious community should be part of the treatment plan.
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Emerging Patterns in Contemporary Spiritual Experience and Crises The connection between spiritual development and psychological problems was first noted by Roberto Assagioli (1989), who described how persons may become inflated and grandiose as a result of intense experiences associated with spiritual practices: “Instances of such confusion are not uncommon among people who become dazzled by contact with truths too great or energies too powerful for their mental capacities to grasp and their personality to assimilate” (p. 36). Transpersonal psychologists, which represent only a minority of the mental health field, have taken a position that psychosis can be a natural developmental process with both spiritual and psychological components. They have pointed out and discussed the similarity between psychotic symptoms and spiritual experiences (Lukoff, 1988; Perry, 1998) and have argued that psychotic experiences are better understood as crises related to the person’s efforts to break out of the standard ego-bounded identity: “Trials of the soul on its spiritual journey” (House, 2001, pp. 124–125). Stanislav and Christina Grof (1989) coined the term spiritual emergency in 1980 to describe this and other similar episodes: [Spiritual emergencies] are critical and experientially difficult stages of a profound psychological transformation that involves one’s entire being. They take the form of nonordinary states of consciousness and involve intense emotions, visions and other sensory changes, and unusual thoughts, as well as various physical manifestations. These episodes often revolve around spiritual themes; they include sequences of psychological death and rebirth, experiences that seem to be memories from previous life times, feelings of oneness with the universe, encounters with various mythological beings, and other similar motifs. (back cover)
Differences Between VSEs and Psychotic Symptoms Hallucinations
Auditory and visual hallucinations have played an essential role in religion for thousands of years. Accounts range from Biblical prophets and saints to shamans, as well as Socrates’s famous Daemon voice that guided him. Later, psychiatrists have retroactively diagnosed all of them as having had mental disorders (Leuder & Thomas, 2000). However, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) specifically notes that clinicians assessing for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations different from their own must take cultural differences into account: “In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may
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be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice” (p. 281). In a study of visual hallucinations among Hispanic clinic patients, Lata (2005) found that psychotic phenomena may occur in connection with spiritual experiences. Visions of loved ones of saints, angels, Jesus, and Mary occur often. Several surveys have shown that more than half of the normal population has some experience with voice hallucinations (Posey & Losch, 1983), and approximately 10% of the general population have the experience of hearing a comforting or advising voice that is not perceived as being one’s own thoughts (Barret & Etheridge, 1992). Voices and visions frequently occur in people during bereavement, life-threatening situations, and stressful traumatic situations such as sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, illness, and solitary confinement (Forrer, 1960). Inner voices have played a significant role in the lives of many noted individuals, including Carl Jung, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Winston Churchill (Liester, 1996). Hearing inner voices is often experienced as helpful by people who are experiencing a spiritual awakening (Heery, 1989). Thus hallucinations per se are not a reliable indicator of a mental disorder.
Delusions
The DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) notes that “Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another” (p. 281). Research has confirmed the overlap between psychotic and spiritual experiences. Peters, Joseph, and Garety (1999) assessed the incidence of delusions using a standard interview and rating criteria among members of new religious movements (NRMs, such as “Moonies”), nonreligious people, Christians, and patients hospitalized for psychotic disorders. They found that those in the NRM group could not be distinguished from the inpatients by their beliefs but could by their mood, adjustment, and higher level of distress. Detailed cases show that psychotic symptoms can occur in the context of spiritual experiences (Lukoff, 1988; Lukoff & Everest, 1985). Greenberg, Witzum, and Buchbinder (1992) described four young men who explored Jewish mysticism and became psychotic. Their hallucinations, grandiose and paranoid delusions, and social withdrawal were indistinguishable from those of many mystics. They concluded that a diagnosis of psychosis rests on factors such as duration of the state, ability to control entry into the state, and deterioration of habits, rather than on the phenomenology of the state itself. Thus empirical studies comparing individuals who are
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both religious and deluded call into question diagnostic criteria for delusions that emphasize the content (i.e., bizarreness or falsity) of beliefs to classify them as pathological (Brett, 2002). Delusions and spiritual experiences cannot be distinguished by form and content but need to be assessed in the light of the cultural values and beliefs of the individual. In addition, holding a delusion with absolute conviction is not a sign of pathology in itself because all beliefs that are personally significant tend to be held with absolute conviction (Maher, 1988). A feature of normal cognition is a confirmation bias that allows us to be impervious to contradictory evidence and only notice information that confirms our preexisting beliefs (Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984). Altered Structure of Experience
Delusions can be differentiated from spiritual beliefs not by content but by such factors as how much they interfere with one’s life, and their emotional impact (Peters et al., 1999). Greenberg and associates (Greenberg et al., 1992) conclude that a diagnosis of psychotic disorder rests on factors such as duration of the state, ability to control entry into the state, and deterioration of habits, rather than on the phenomenology of the state itself. VSEs are usually transient and resolve completely, without leaving residual social difficulties or isolation; in contrast, psychotic disorders generally persist for a long period and involve ongoing impairment and social withdrawal (Jackson & Fulford, 1997; Peters, 2001; Saver & Rabin, 1997). Similarly, Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism provide conceptualizations of mystical states of mind that could permit psychotic experiences to be distinguished not only by emotional and behavioral consequences but also by real differences in the states themselves, such as: loss of subject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less ability to maintain equanimity; an inability to return to the ontological framework of consensus reality; psychological isolation; preoccupation with the mental realm; and neglect of self-care (Brett, 2002).
Implications for Clinical Practice Differential Diagnosis between Psychotic Disorders and VSEs The most likely DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) diagnoses that would be considered in presentations of VSE encountered in mainstream healthcare settings are Brief Psychotic Disorder and Schizophreniform Disorder, which are psychotic disorders of less than 1 month
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or 6 months, respectively. The inclusion in the DSM-IV of a new diagnostic category called Religious or Spiritual Problem (V62.89) in 1994 marked the acknowledgment that distressing religious and spiritual experiences are often nonpathological problems. The definition reads: This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of other spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized church or religious institution. (American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 685; also DSM-IV-Text Revision, 2000, p. 1393)
The proposal for this new category evolved from the transpersonal psychology literature on spiritual emergency (Lukoff, Lu, & Turner, 1998). Although this category includes problems that often involve less distress, such as converting to a new faith and questioning one’s faith, the authors (Lukoff, 2007; Lukoff & Lu, 2005) have argued in previous publications that VSEs warrant the DSM-IV diagnosis of Religious or Spiritual Problem even when there may be psychotic symptoms present, including hallucinations and delusions. In this way, Religious or Spiritual Problem is comparable to the category Bereavement, for which the DSM-IV notes that even when a person’s reaction to a death meets the diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Episode, the diagnosis of a mental disorder is not given because the symptoms result from a normal reaction to the death of a loved one. Similarly, in VSEs, transient hallucinations, delusions, disorientation, and interpersonal difficulties occur so frequently that they should be considered normal and expectable reactions. Iatrogenic problems may occur if VSEs are misdiagnosed and mistreated as psychotic disorders. The clinician’s initial assessment can significantly influence whether the experience is integrated and used as a stimulus for personal growth or repressed as a sign of mental disorder, thereby intensifying an individual’s sense of isolation and blocking his or her efforts to understand and assimilate the experience. Instead of unusual subjective experiences being embraced in our culture as an opportunity and invitation to enlarge a person’s circle of being, they are routinely psychopathologized and pharmaceutically suppressed. In an interview study, “the most subjectively frightening aspect of their experience was psychiatric hospitalization itself” ( Jackson, 2001, p. 189). The pathologizing and stigmatizing medical approach may account for the surprising finding that the cure rate and level of dysfunction of persons with psychotic disorders
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is considerably lower in nonindustrial societies (Kirkness, 1997, p. 41). This warning notwithstanding, there is also a high degree of agreement on recognition of severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia across different cultures (Murphy, 1978). Wilber (1993) warned of the “pre/trans fallacy” wherein regressive prepersonal experiences are mistaken by the individual or by others as transpersonal experiences. According to Wilber, this has been perpetuated “since both prepersonal and transpersonal are, in their own ways, nonpersonal, then prepersonal and transpersonal tend to appear similar, even identical, to the untutored eye” (p. 125). He reports that while some have reduced the transpersonal to the prepersonal (e.g., Freud), transpersonal therapists have an opposing tendency to elevate prepersonal experiences to the transpersonal level (e.g., Jung). Similarly, William James warned, “That region contains every kind of matter: ‘seraph and snake’ abide there side by side” (1902/1958, p. 419). Moreover, it is possible that spiritual states may transmute into psychotic disorders depending on the response by the individual. Barnhouse (1986) has pointed out that the pathological significance of spiritual language can seldom be determined by the immediate content alone, especially if differential diagnosis with psychotic disorders is being considered. She suggests that a religious history be part of the standard evaluation. Greenberg and Witzum (1991) have proposed the following criteria to distinguish between normative strictly religious beliefs and experiences from psychotic symptoms. Psychotic episodes: (1) are more intense than normative religious experiences in their religious community; (2) are often terrifying; (3) are often preoccupying; (4) are associated with deterioration of social skills and personal hygiene; and (5) often involve special messages from religious figures. Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism provide conceptualizations of mystical states of mind that could permit psychotic experiences to be distinguished not only by emotional and behavioral consequences but also by real differences in the states themselves, such as: loss of subject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less ability to maintain equanimity; an inability to return to the ontological framework of consensus reality; psychological isolation; preoccupation with the mental realm; and neglect of self-care (Brett, 2002). Hunt (2007) notes that there are areas of overlap that make differential diagnosis based on cross-sectional data such as an admission evaluation unreliable: The spiritual path of direct mystical/numinous, experience can at some point entail a “metapathological” crisis of loss of meaning, nihilistic despair,
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and death of feeling that are also part of the inner dynamics of the deletion of presence extending from the early onset phases of schizophrenia to its chronic terminus in anhedonia and social withdrawal. (p. 227)
Thus altered states that are at the heart of many intense spiritual experiences need to be carefully evaluated so they aren’t confused or confounded with psychopathology, which can include acknowledging areas of overlap.
Treatment of VSEs Some residential treatment approaches have addressed spiritual dimensions of psychosis. Perry (1974) founded Diabysis, a Jungian-based group treatment home for people experiencing a first psychotic episode. He encouraged clients to express and explore the symbolic aspects of their psychotic experiences. Therapy, conducted thrice weekly, consisted of listening to clients and helping them interpret the powerful and spiritual symbols within their hallucinations and delusions. Medications were rarely used. Perry reported that severely psychotic clients became coherent within 2 to 6 days without medication. The outcomes appeared better for those who had had fewer than three previous psychotic episodes. Diabysis closed down in 1980 because of budget cutbacks in the mental health system. A similar program, Soteria House, located in San Jose, California, provided more empirical support for this model. Soteria House ran from 1971–1983 and roomed six clients, with three to four staff on premises at one time. The staff was trained to view psychotic experiences as a developmental stage that can lead to growth and often contains a spiritual component of mystical experiences and beliefs. Medication was typically not prescribed unless a client showed no improvement after 6 weeks (only 10% of clients used medication at Soteria), because it was believed to stunt the possible growth-enhancing process of the psychotic episode (Mosher & Menn, 1979). Outcomes from Soteria were compared to a traditional program, a community mental health center inpatient service consisting of daily pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy, and group therapy. Clients’ length of stay was longer at Soteria than in the comparison program (mean of 166 days versus 28 days). But most patients recovered in 6 to 8 weeks without medication (Mosher, Hendrix, & Fort, 2004). A recent meta-analysis of data from two carefully controlled studies of Soteria programs found better 2-year outcomes for Soteria patients in the domains of psychopathology, work, and social functioning compared to similar clients treated in a psychiatric hospital (Bola & Mosher, 2003). Soteria
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or Soteria-based houses are currently operating in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, and some other countries (Mosher et al., 2004). Treatments that address the altered state experiences of many intense spiritual experiences, here called VSEs, have been developed and can serve as the foundation of a sensitive approach to working with individuals who have, by choice or accident, entered into these states.
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CHAPTER 15
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing: An Embodied Social Neuroscience Perspective Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) as Healing? Despite the vast literature on complementary approaches to medicine and some compelling, though still modest, empirical evidence for the implicated healing mechanisms (e.g., Ospina et al., 2007), little is known as to why healers in very diverse communities in the world deliberately induce altered states of consciousness (ASC) in themselves and/or their patients and what might be the mechanisms invoked in such efforts. It is presently believed that humans for at least 5,000 years have deliberately altered their state of consciousness, presumably to heal medical complaints and mental distress (Ospina et al., 2007). The methods and procedures for inducing ASC include meditation, mindfulness, shamanistic ritual practices, narrative and narrative therapies, and psychoactive substances. We propose that these deliberately manipulated ASC are paradoxically healing and that the mechanisms involve networks in the brain that have been recently identified as subserving social cognition and the feelings of belonging to a community (Fiske, 2010). By relating hypnosis, which may induce ASC, and other consciousness alterations to the social brain, we are not reverting to the socio-cognitive-social influence theories of hypnosis (as reviewed by Lynn, Kirsch, & Hallquist, 2008; Spiegel, 2008). Such theories do not
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require the presence of an ASC and therefore do not address the question of why many practictioners, both previously and currently, hold the view that deliberately inducing ASC is healing. Altered states of consciousness comprise a wealth of diverse, loosely related experiences. In their recent review, Vaitl and coworkers (2005) include the following experiences as ASC: states of drowsiness, daydreaming, hypnagogic states, sleep and dreaming, near death experiences, extreme environmental conditions (pressure, temperature), starvation and diet, sexual activity and orgasm, respiratory maneuvers, sensory deprivation, sensory homogenization and overload, rhythm-induced states (drumming and dancing), relaxation, meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback, psychotic disorders, epilepsy, coma and vegetative state, and pharmacologically induced states. Moreover, one could easily argue for the inclusion of spiritual transcendent experiences, social and sleep deprivation (see Mishara, 2010a), and dissociative states. That is, ASC comprise a diverse range of human experiences that have been viewed as both pathological and healing [see Carden˜a, this volume]. Given the scope and heterogeneity of such experiences, they are difficult to define conceptually (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2005; Rock & Krippner, 2007) [see Carden˜a, Volume 1]. Classic definitions that require that the individual identify the experience as an ASC are inadequate “. . . for the simple reason that ASCs may well occur without the subject having any idea, either at the time of the experience or later” (Revonsuo et al., 2005). Although we agree with Revonsuo and colleagues’ proposed redefinition of ASC as “an alteration in the informational or representational relationships between consciousness and the world,” we nevertheless add the following caveat. Definitions of altered states as deviations from normal baseline consciousness, presumed to more or less “accurately” represent the world, are problematic when trying to ascertain the healing properties of ASC that may occur in meditation, hypnosis, shamanistic practices, narrative, and related therapies. Definitions of ASC as “distortions” of our otherwise relatively “accurate” grasp of reality are unsatisfactory in that they rule out the possibility that such states may enable a heightened or expanded awareness of reality or at least “alternative reality.” Philosophic phenomenology (Mishara & Schwartz, 1995, 1997) offers a means of circumventing this dilemma by proposing a neutral definition: ASC involve the suspension, disruption, or bracketing of the “natural attitude,” our usual commonsense ways of constructing reality. In the everyday “natural attitude,” we assume reality is “obviously” given to us. Recent findings in cognitive science/neuroscience, however, support the view that our everyday experience of a consensual reality is far from
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accurate and is rather based on a host of human commonsense assumptions about accessing a consensual reality [see Windt, Volume 1]. Phenomenological approaches to the study of consciousness as subjectively constituting (i.e., “constructing”) its own reality allow for systematic distortions of accuracy in our experience as an adaptive function of keeping the person meaningfully embedded in self–world interactions (Mishara & Corlett, 2009; von Weizsa¨ cker 1950). That is, perceptual “illusions” (Bridgeman & Hoover, 2008) and cognitive distortions (cognitive “heuristics”) are systematically integrated into our everyday experience of reality as if they were a kind of glue that holds it together. Naı¨ ve realism (Ramsperger, 1940), the bias that one’s own perspective on reality is objective, resembles what Husserl, the phenomenological philosopher, described as the natural attitude, the attitude we naturally assume in our everyday experience. The latter is shaped or informed by “common sense” as our default, everyday approach to experiencing the world. Common sense has a protective function in maintaining an unquestioned, “natural” relationship between internal experience and external “reality.” Our mental health is preserved by a certain resistance to losing common sense (Blankenburg, 2001; Mishara, 2001). An ASC deviates from the everyday naı¨ve natural attitude of constructed-consensual reality not by misrepresenting the self-world relationship but by transforming or suspending it in its usual sense, what we later describe as a metaphoric “journey.” As noted, the very term common sense comprises a social factor (often supporting the status quo or habitually accepted consensus [see Whitehead, Volume 1]. As Fiske (2010) indicates, individuals tend to endorse meanings that are consensual or held by the group in order to enhance the experience of belonging in that group, and the sense of belonging is powerfully rewarded by the neurocircuitry underlying social experience in the human brain. Recent findings in the rapidly developing field of social neuroscience support the view that the human brain evolved to be a “social brain” (Dunbar, 1998; Weidner, 2010). It is our view that the healing effects of ASC (deliberately induced in shamanistic and the other healing practices described in this chapter) depend on the neurocircuitry of the human social brain [see Winkelman, Volume 1]. We introduced the above caveat to counter the currently prevailing definitions of ASC as distorting “reality” because it provides a more neutral account of the altered state as deviating from the “normal,” not necessarily in a pathological sense but as possibly transcending it in a manner that could provide an alternative view of reality. The organization of self–world relationship (and the preservation of its coherence) is mediated by the dynamic Gestalt meaning of the perception, which is experienced as an ongoing living connectedness between embodied self and environment (von
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Weizsa¨cker, 1950). Husserl had demonstrated that our everyday default attitude is a habitual, relatively limited awareness of what comprises the “reality” of this self–world relationship, the naı¨ve realism of the natural attitude. The effectiveness of shamanic and other healing practices may be precisely to introduce ASC as a group or shared experience in a manner that runs counter to what we, as Western contemporaries, tenaciously hold onto as “common sense.” Furthermore, understanding the therapeutic effects derived from healing ritual practices that alter consciousness (whether these involve meditation, hypnosis, shamanism, or narrative therapies) requires a model that recognizes how the variety of procedures for alteration of consciousness may engage similar or overlapping neural mechanisms or networks. The research concerning the healing practices that deliberately induce ASC, however, is burdened by methodological problems. Krippner and Achterberg (2000) caution that terms such as “healer and healing are extremely subjective, and their demonstrated effectiveness depends on the criteria used for one’s restoration to health, yet another elusive concept” (p. 360). The claim that ASC-induction (in healers and/or patients) is a primary means of healing in numerous societies relies on a definition of healing that differs from the biomedical view of being “cured” of disease. Some cultures regard healing to take place “if that person has been spiritually restored before death” (Krippner & Achterberg, pp. 359–360). This definition clearly deviates from the biomedical concept of outcomes that can be operationalized. That is, “healing events (i.e., treatment outcomes)” are different in kind from “healing experiences (i.e., the subjective aspects of treatment, including its attributed meanings, its ritual context, and the client’s feelings).” Although it is possible to establish correlations between patient beliefs or attributions about what they believe to be healing and actual healing outcomes, such correlations say little about the underlying processes, mechanisms or what actually contributes to healing. The researcher should be careful to define whether the outcome measures amount to what may be regarded a cure, an abatement of medical conditions, or, rather, a reduction of emotional distress. That is, ASC may enhance different types of healing. However, there are limitations to such approaches, especially with regard to claims of cure. For example, many of the studies of shamanistic healing indicate that it is effective for somatizing patients with low energy, anxiety, and depression but less effective for infections and tumors. Krippner and Achterberg (2000) remark, however, that cases of so-called “spontaneous remission” (O’Regan, & Hirshberg, 1993) resulting from such practices simply index healing processes whose mechanisms are still not understood: “When the term spontaneous remission is
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used, it is with the implicit understanding that no cure is spontaneous in the sense that it lacks a causal agent but, rather, that the putative cause is unknown” (p. 358). Currently, notwithstanding these limitations, the efficacy of meditation and hypnosis are better studied than shamanism. Because the role of the social brain in the healing effects of ASC is particularly evident in shamanistic rituals, we will examine shamanism after discussing the research concerning meditation, mindfulness, and hypnosis [see Shear, Volume 1].
Meditation, Mindfulness, and Hypnosis: Healing Effects and Mechanisms It is generally believed that meditation is a spiritual and healing practice that has been prevalent in some parts of the world for more than 5,000 years (Ospina et al., 2007). As a complementary mind–body therapeutic strategy for a variety of health-related problems, its popularity is dramatically increasing in Western countries (Horowitz, 2010). Although quite heterogeneous in methods and techniques, a common feature is a rootedness in the silence and stillness of compassionate, nonjudgmental present-moment awareness (Fortney & Taylor, 2010). Mindfulness meditation is the mental ability to focus on the monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Apart from hypnosis, meditation is the most widely studied alternative treatment (Dakwar & Levin, 2009). In a meta-analysis commissioned by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM/NIH), Ospina et al. (2007) identified five broad categories of meditation practices (mantra meditation, mindfulness meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, and qigong). Nevertheless, the reviewers point out that it is difficult to find common components (and thus underlying healing mechanisms) among these different approaches. Awareness and control of breathing is universal, yet there is no single common approach to breathing. Although the control of attention is universal, how it is controlled and which components of attention are targeted varies: Concentrative techniques involve focusing on a specific sensory or mental stimulus to the exclusion of anything else: breath, for example, or an object in space. Diffuse practices, by contrast, involve allowing thoughts, feelings, and sensations to arise while maintaining a nonjudgmental, detached, and accepting attitude to them, as well as a heightened perceptual stance attentive to the entire field of perception. (Dakwar & Levin, 2009, p. 255)
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Most meditation practices are both concentrative and diffuse. Interestingly, Ospina and coworkers (2007) observe that it is not known to what extent spirituality or belief play a role in meditation’s healing effects. That is, its healing effects may be independent from spiritual belief or so-called placebo effects. However, other authors maintain that its spiritual components may be one of the vital “mechanisms of action” (Dakwar & Levin, 2009). Ospina et al. (2007) conclude that most of the studies are compromised by poor methodological quality (e.g., naturalistic, nonrandomized, without control groups, interventions and outcomes not well operationalized). In her qualitative review, Horowitz (2010) observes that since Ospina et al.’s (2007) sobering meta-analysis, several more recent randomizedcontrol trials have been implemented. She reports a large (n ¼ 201) 5-year prospective randomized controlled trial (Schneider et al., 2009) that found that meditation is associated with meaningful reductions in blood pressure, myocardial infarction, stroke, and all-cause mortality. She also provides evidence for the association of breathing meditation with improvements in type 2 diabetes. Moreover, a study that compared the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) in women breast cancer patients to an assessment-only control group found that MBSR was associated with reduced plasma cortisol levels, improved quality of life/coping ability, more enduring natural-killer (NK) cell activity, and increased cytokine production levels in breast cancer patients (Witek-Janusek, Albuquerque, Chroniak, Durazo-Arvizu, & Mathews, 2008). MBSR has also been found to reduce chronic pain in patients with arthritis, back/neck pain, and various comorbid conditions but to be less effective with patients with headache/migraine and fibromyalgia. It is effective in rheumatoid arthritis patients, women with menopausal symptoms, patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), patients with memory loss, and improving the immune status of HIV-1 infected adults (Horowitz, 2010). Although the evidence-based practice of meditation as intervention for psychiatric disorders is still inconclusive, it has been used to reduce depression, anxiety, drug abuse, and self-injurious behaviors (Dakwar & Levin, 2009). Meditation may also contribute to health and wellness by playing a preventative role in reducing stress and burnout and increasing general abilities to cope with aversive events (Fortney & Taylor, 2010). MBSR may be useful in psychiatric conditions characterized by excessive ruminations such as obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence, and major depression (Chisea, Brambilla, & Serretti, 2010). If similar mechanisms are implicated in intrusive imagery across disorders (Brewin, Gregory, Lipton, & Burgess, 2010), then such training
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may be effective by targeting the possibly related mechanisms in these disorders. Nonjudgmentally, mindfully accepting intrusive thoughts or imagery from a putative “observer” position (Brewin et al., 2010) may have healing consequences in diverse disorders characterized by intrusive symptoms (see our own account of the healing effects of narrative below). Still, even when the evidence for meditation’s healing effects is supported by higher-quality studies, the healing mechanisms remain unclear. Because meditation, as well as many of the other practices of altering one’s own mental state discussed in this contribution, has direct effects on the physiology/ neurophysiology of the practicant, there is confusion about whether the healing effects are secondary to the physiologic changes rather than the individual’s beliefs about the practice. For example, the analgesic effects of mindful states in experienced Zen meditators suggest that pain modulation is in part explained by changes in respiratory rates (Grant & Rainville, 2009). This recalls Krippner and Achterberg’s (2000) discussion of the dual approach to healing outcomes vs. subjective beliefs about the healing and whether there is some ill-defined interaction between mental and physical healing in which the patient’s beliefs may optimize already-triggered physiologic processes. This lack of clarity, however, may be an artifact of the mind– body dualism presupposed by Western biomedical approaches to healing (Mishara & Schwartz, 1997; Schwartz & Wiggins, 2010). Furthermore, as Horowitz (2010) observes, Practicing meditation was formerly thought to induce passive relaxation states primarily by producing changes in the autonomic nervous system. However, recent findings from electroencephalogram (EEG) and neuroimaging studies suggest that meditation is associated with active states of consciousness that involve cognitive restructuring, learning, and changes in the structure of the brain itself. (p. 264)
Moreover, by attending to phenomena in a nonevaluative way, Zen and mindfulness-based meditation effectively dampen “the automatic cascade of cognitive and emotional associations” (Dakwar & Levin, 2009, p. 264). Some functional neuroimaging studies of mindfulness meditation (MM) and beginning phases of Zen meditation show activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), while other studies show increased activation in the more rostral ACC and the proximal medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC; Chisea et al., 2010). However, Farb and coworkers (2007) observed a decrease rather than an increase of the activity of the mPFC during MM. Interestingly, similarly mixed functional neuroimaging
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findings are also associated with hypnosis induction, including both increased and reduced ACC activity (McGeown et al., 1999). Although ASC are heterogeneous in nature and presumably in terms of their underlying mechanisms, we believe that the mixed functional neuroimaging findings point to a fundamental but overlooked paradox of the healing effects of the induced ASC of meditation, mindfulness, and hypnosis. Chisea and colleagues (2010) claim that the mechanisms underlying MM share similarities with other treatments, including psychotherapy and the placebo effect. They argue that all three recruit “ ‘top-down’ processes dependent on frontal cortical areas that generate and maintain cognitive expectancies” (p. 112). Moreover, the increased PFC activation may indicate “a higher ability to detach from negative states by engaging frontal cortical structures to dampen automatic amygdala activation” (p. 113). We believe, however, that such accounts are incomplete precisely because they do not take into account what we identify here as the paradoxically healing effects of deliberately induced ASC for the purpose of healing. Let us examine a possible role of ACC activation during MM (Chisea et al., 2010) and hypnosis (Rainville et al., 1999). The ACC is often active in an “early search” phase for task-appropriate responses or when the task is novel and more difficult (Holroyd & Coles, 2002). ACC involvement appears to diminish when a task has become learned or automated or an effective strategy has been adopted (Mishara et al., 2006). In their computational model, Reynolds, Zacks, and Braver (2007) propose that our current context of goals and representations is largely impervious to updating until a prediction error signals the need for updating. Updating of PFC representations may be gated by phasic dopamine signals from midbrain dopamine neurons triggered by encountering unexpected rewards, or unexpected lack of reward, which may terminate in the ACC. The latter is “rich” in projections from the midbrain dopamine system (Paus, 2001), which putatively generates the prediction error signal (Holroyd & Coles, 2002) [see Previc, this volume]. Interestingly, Spiegel (2008) reviews evidence that trait hypnotizability in individuals “robustly” correlates with levels of homovanillic acid, a dopamine metabolite, in the cerebrospinal fluid. Although the precise role of the activation of ACC and PFC structures during MM, hypnosis, and related methods of ASC induction is not known, we propose that it reflects an initial effortful reduction of “mind wandering,” required in both the mindful returning to the present moment and attending to the current task demands of hypnotic induction. Subsequent phases of induction may require less direct control or engagement of these attentional processes. Spiegel (2008) defines hypnosis as “highly focused attention with suspension of peripheral
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awareness.” It involves the “deactivation of vigilance characteristic of posterior antentional systems,” mediated by parietal/occipital areas. However, it is interesting to note that the neural correlates for attentional networks overlap with those frontal parietal networks recruited for eye movement (reviewed by Mishara, 2010a). Therefore, the reduction of peripheral awareness and reduced orienting to external environment subserved by the posterior attentional system described by Spiegel (2008) may involve the disabling of what has been described in the neurologic tradition as the “body schema” of possible movements. As elaborated below, the body schema underlies the experience of a voluntary motoric-agentic self, which includes eye movements associated with executive attention and inhibiting saccades to distracting stimuli (Mishara, in press a). In hypnosis and related ASC, the body schema then becomes detached from its preattentive binding with body image, the conscious experience of a perceptual-social self (see below; Mishara, 2007a). We therefore propose a second phase in the induction of ASC in hypnosis and related states almost antithetical to the initial phase of effortfully directing attention back on task. This is symbolized by the imagery of the death and rebirth of self, the mythological inner hero’s journey often invoked in shamanic narratives and related healing traditions. By examining the neural processes underlying hypnosis and their putative role in shamanistic healing, we find support for this hypothesis below. Moreover, this paradox reflects the fundamental, existential structure of self as a self experienced in time, a “dialectical” self that only becomes itself by giving itself up, that continually transcends itself and its current perspective (Mishara, 2007a).
Hypnosis in the Ritual Enactment of Reciprocal-Mimetic ASC Contribute to the Healing Effects of Shamanism Shamanism is “a practice in which a person deliberately alters her consciousness for the purpose of interacting with spirits in order to serve the community in which she finds herself” (Barusˇs, 2003, p. 136). The most common role of shamans in their service to the community is healing, which may require soul journeys and death and rebirth experiences (Winkelman, 2004) [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, Winkelman, Volume 1]. Because a self-induced ASC is central to shamanic practices, the findings concerning the neural correlates or neural activity implicated in hypnosis as an ASC, as we will see, are directly relevant to shamanistic healing. Operationally, hypnosis refers to a change in baseline mental activity after an induction procedure and is typically experienced at the subjective level as an increase in absorption, focused attention, disattention to extraneous
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stimuli, and a reduction in spontaneous thought (Oakley, 2008). There is a “becoming absorbed and allowing suggestions or spontaneous subjective phenomena to affect experience” (Carden˜a, 2008, p. 252). Benham and Younger (2008) caution with regard to the empirical findings of the healing effects of hypnosis: For while hypnosis has been examined in relation to immune, cardiovascular, integumentary, digestive, nervous and endocrine systems, the scope of questions asked and the array of methodologies used to investigate them have resulted in an assortment of studies that fail to advance the field systematically (p. 422)
In demonstrating the role of the social brain in the hypnotic ACS of healing, we propose a theory of narrative enactment or dramatic performance: Narrative, that is, any act of narration (e.g., storytelling), may be characterized as the ability to frame imaginary time within real time (Mishara, 1995, 2010a). In this model, the narrator actually induces an ASC by focusing and narrowing the audience’s as well as the narrator’s own attention on scenes in imaginary time. The act of narrating requires an ongoing shifting between internal and external perspectives or reference frames with regard to the experience of one’s own body. In fact, narrative framing, or entrancement (i.e., absorption, or “attentional captivation,” in what is portrayed or presented) is common to the arts, even when language is not the primary experience [see Zarrilli, Volume 1]. Performance and visual arts also require a “framing” that involves a suspending or “bracketing” of the current “actual” environment (Mishara, 2010a). Notably, responsiveness to proprioceptive stimulation and ability to shift reference frames is greater in high responders to hypnosis (Carli, Manzoni, & Santarcangelo, 2008), a point to which we will return when giving an account of shamanistic healing as an expression of the social brain. Regarding this capacity for ASC absorption in narrative framing, Donald (1991) had conjectured that a capacity for “using the whole body as a communication device” had emerged prelinguistically during the period of homo erectus by means of what he calls “mimetic culture,” the ability to tell stories through gesture and dance. Whether the details of Donald’s account of cognitive evolution turn out to be correct is not critical to the current argument. We wish only to emphasize the human body’s ability to “double” itself in mimetic narrative as both the current body expressing and the symbolic (pantomimed) content it refers to (e.g., one’s own body crawling like the snake or the panther). Furthermore, this occurs in the context of the
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narrative and is an early form of experiencing the embodied self from both internal and external viewpoints, as doubled. When we speak or gesture, we hear our own voice and partially see our bodily gestures. That is, we take an external, doubled perspective on ourselves to communicate with others (Mishara, 2009, 2010a) [see Cousins, Volume 1]. As we indicate below, the shamanic symbolism of rebirth reflects the structure of human self as socially embodied. The anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1963) describes the shaman’s practice of placing a tuft of down into his mouth, biting his own tongue and then spitting out the bloody feather as if it were the pathological “foreign body” extracted from the patient. To cure the patient, he must somehow believe his own “performance” to be convincing. Carden˜a and Cousins (2010) observe that the “sleight of hand” or trickery often found in shamanic healing is nevertheless “an illusion that becomes real for the self and the audience.” It is one component of a triad that includes the “acting” body of the shaman (as if in a theatrical performance) and the importance of the presence of other people. One example of such mutual hypnotic-trance induction between the shaman and audience is found among the nomadic Rabaris in western India. The shaman (bhopa or bhopi) acts as a means of communication between the Rabaris and the Mataji or mother goddess. After a period of listening to intense drumming, the shaman starts to shake, and, as a result, falls over (sometimes fainting), and is caught by members of the audience, indicating a possessed state [see Fachner, Sluhovsky, St John, Volume 1]. Another indication of such transformed mental state is when the shaman starts to unravel (in a distracted manner) his brightly red turban or chiri. Not only is the shaman the only member of the community permitted to wear such a red turban, but also removal of the turban is considered to break the modesty code. It is here tolerated to indicate the exceptionality of the shaman’s state as it is displayed to the community. The unraveled chiri may function as a physical link between the everyday, mundane world and the realm of the goddess that the bhopa thereby accesses, perhaps in a temporary form of axis mundi. To further facilitate the ASC, the bhopa may use the chiri as a sort of flail to whip himself and ingest opium water quaffed from the palm of the hand of an attendant Rabari (Dr. Eiluned Edwards, Nottingham Trent University, personal communication). We interpret such practices to indicate the shaman’s use of a mimetic, hypnotic state induction in self and audience as a means of optimizing the brain’s healing powers. That is, the mimetic performative function is central to the healing mechanisms of the human brain as it has evolved to become a social brain.
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Carden˜a’s (2008) proposal that emotions are transpersonal systems whereby hypnosis involves emotional contagion processes lends support to this view. Carden˜a, Terhune, Lo¨o¨f, and Buratti (2009) found significant correlations between emotional contagion (the propensity to automatically imitate the emotional expressions of others) and hypnotizability. These findings support the view that the hypnotic ASC employed in shamanic ritual performance may in part have its healing effects by appealing to the powerful feelings of belonging to a community during ritual enactment. This whole process triggers the neural circuitry of reward in the human social brain. As Abram (2005) observes, however, the feeling of solidarity in shamanic ritual is not merely a connectedness with the surrounding human community but also with “the more than human earth” (p. 172), that is, a deep connectedness between one’s own embodied being and all other life. Interestingly, highly hypnotizable individuals, in contrast with those less hypnotizable, report during hypnosis “a sense of being connected with everything and having very positive emotions” (Carden˜a, 2008). These observations resonate with psychotomimetic drug studies that attempt to model the phenomenology of schizophrenic psychosis in healthy individuals by establishing common denominators between drug-induced ASC and the endogenous psychotic experiences of patients with schizophrenia (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2000). Psychoactive drugs (e.g., indoleamine hallucinogens, such as LSD or psilocybin, and dissociative anesthetics, such as ketamine) are administered to healthy individuals in acute challenge studies. The following dimensions are found to be present in the ASC of the drug-challenged healthy individuals and acutely psychotic patients: (1) feelings of “oceanic boundlessness” whereby the boundaries between self and universe are experienced to dissolve, an experience that is associated with positive emotions; (2) “dread of ego dissolution,” whereby, in contrast to “oceanic boundlessness,” the loss of selfboundaries is associated with “arousal, anxiety, and paranoid feelings of being endangered”; (3) “visionary restructuralization,” which refers to “auditory and visual illusions, hallucinations, synaesthesias, and changes in the meaning of various percepts.” Moreover, these dimensions have been validated cross-culturally. Neuroimaging experiments using FDG-PET during the psychotomimetic challenge vs. placebo control in healthy individuals indicate that the first dimension is associated with changes in metabolic activity in the frontal-parietal areas, occipital cortex, and striatum. The second is associated with changes in the thalamus and the third with changes as in “oceanic boundlessness,” but with additional activity in temporal cortex (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001; Vollenweider, Leenders, Øye, Hell, & Angst, 1997) [see Beauregard, Presti, this volume]. These findings
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parallel similar metabolic activity in acutely psychotic schizophrenic patients and are particularly interesting for the present analysis because these dimensions are associated with ASC in the shamanic initiation and ritual healing. As we will discover, the dissolution of self (i.e., “oceanic boundlessness” coupled with “visionary restructuralization”) paradoxically leads to greater integration as expressed by the rebirth imagery as a “symbol of transformation,” often invoked during the shamanic rituals. Moreover, this “transformation” engages the “deepest” levels of self-processing ( Jung, 1969). Our claim is that the ASC involved in shamanic healing effects do not merely involve hypnosis but rather that the hypnotic induction involves a group experience in which symbolic meanings well-known to the community (i.e., both healer and patient) are invoked and engaged. The healer attaches the patient’s emotions to the transactional symbols particularized from the general myth and then manipulates these symbols to emotionally transform the patient. More specifically, patients’ subjective states including emotions and bodily sensations become symbolically “objectivized” and are incorporated into pre-existing cultural patterns. (Lee, Kirmayer, & Groleau, 2010, p. 59)
Furthermore, this symbolic meaning is embodied in the community ritual performance. To the extent to which the symbols employed invoke shared mythical narratives (Dow, 1986; Lee et al., 2010; Levi-Strauss, 1963), they mobilize unconscious processes of healing, which are comparable to more contemporary healing processes found in Depth Psychological and experiential individual and group psychotherapies (Safran & Muran, 2000). It is the ritual performance itself as a communal act that allows its suggestive healing power to enter the individual and the other audience participants precisely as a group experience. By casting this complex phenomenology and implicated neural processes under the simplifying “placebo effect,” both a service and disservice are accomplished. This terminology should not deflect from the careful phenomenology of the subjective experience of the implicated ASC as a transformative experience of embodied self in terms of the spatial, temporal, agentic, and intersubjective dimensions of experience during the healing process (Mishara & Schwartz, 1997) [see Dieguez and Blanke, this volume]. Carden˜a (2005) conducted a phenomenological study of “depth” of hypnosis in very high hypnotizables. Depth correlated with experiences of changes in embodiment (e.g., “floating out of the body,” “flying”), time sense (“time becoming ‘still’ or ‘slowing down’”), and agency (“diminished
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self-awareness in motor activity”). In the last case, the finding that “repetitive activity does not have to be attended . . . once the whole organism becomes attuned to the specific rhythm and then maintains residual unreflective awareness” (pp. 47, 52) has direct relevance for ritual shamanic mimetic healing. We believe that a similar phenomenological investigation of the experience of ASC of the healer and audience would help elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of shamanic healing. In summary, we claim that the healing mechanisms of the shamanic ASC as mimetically induced hypnotic state involve a collective group experience. These mechanisms cannot be reduced to any one single factor (e.g., parasympathetic relaxation, symbolic meaning, or group processes), but rather, all these factors contribute in concert to healing. This is so precisely because the human brain has evolved both in its cognitive architecture and its underlying neural circuitry to be an “embodied” social brain.
Brain Connectivity, Hypnosis, and the Healing Effects of Shamanic ASC Using EEG measurements with a hypnotic virtuoso volunteer, Fingelkurts, Fingelkurts, Kallio, and Revonsuo (2007) found alterations in local and remote functional connectivity between brain areas. That is, the “number of remote functional connections among different cortical areas was significantly lower during hypnosis than during the baseline [which] . . . is consistent with transient hypofrontality and left-hemisphere inhibition” (p. 1460). Interestingly, the authors comment, “a similar picture of disrupted functional connectivity (estimated by the same method of EEG structural synchrony) has been found in subjects with schizophrenic disorders” (p. 1460). In the previous section, we described Vollenweider and Geyer’s (2001) findings that (1) feelings of dissolution of the self’s boundaries (e.g., oceanic boundlessness) and (2) “visionary restructuralization” are present both in acute psychosis and in healthy individuals during psychoactive drug challenge. We believe that these dimensions are not only associated with ASC in psychotomimetic drug models of acute psychosis but are also present in the healing effects of ASC in shamanic ritual enactments. Fingelkurts et al. (2007) interpret their findings to mean that “separate cognitive modules and subsystems may be temporarily incapable of communicating with each other normally” (p. 1452). This recalls cognitive definitions of dreaming. Dreaming has been characterized as “single-minded” (Rechtschaffen, 1978). In waking consciousness, we usually are able to reflect on, compare, or recall experiences or thoughts apart from the current one we are experiencing. It is not that these processes are completely
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excluded during dreaming—a counterexample is lucid dreaming. It is rather that they are massively attenuated so that dreaming is isolated from other capacities or functions of consciousness. One finds a similar inability to transcend one’s current perspective, to reflect on, monitor, or consider alternative views during the acute psychosis of schizophrenia. As in dreaming, one is trapped in the “now” (Mishara, 1995; 2007b; 2010b; 2010). Moreover, recent evidence of functional and structural abnormalities and reductions in large-scale cortical connectivity in schizophrenia may be reflected phenomenologically in the “delusional dreamlike” states of acute psychosis (Mishara, 2010c). But how does this help us understand the ASC of shamanic and other kinds of healing? Randal, Geekie, Lambrecht, and Taitimu (2008) write: During shamanic initiation crisis, some trance states could be seen by Western psychiatric discourse as psychotic states with extreme distress. For example, a Tamang shamanic apprentice in Nepal who is possessed by voices will shake convulsively, be confused, not eat, have distorted visions and seek solitude. (p. 337)
However, in contrast to the auditory verbal hallucinations associated with schizophrenic psychosis, which is largely an experience of being removed socially (Hoffman, 2007), the true ancestral voices [in shamanic initiation] would be those which in the eyes of the community are accurate, for example, in helping find herbs and lost cattle, or in diagnosing and healing illnesses. The shamanic crisis is . . . similar to a spiritual emergency, a “mystical experience with psychotic features,” a “hero’s journey.” (Randal et al., 2008, pp. 338–339)
Just as there is apparent similarity to psychosis, there is a close relationship between dream experiences and shamanistic practices (Law & Kirmayer, 2005). In sleep and anesthetics, there is a reduction of consciousness associated with a breakdown of cortical connectivity and thus of integration of information (Alkire, Hudetz, & Tononi, 2008). Tononi (2008) defines this breakdown as a reduction in “the ability of different cortical regions to interact effectively” (p. 232). Presumably, such reduced cortical connectivity also occurs in hypnosis, as suggested by Fingelkurts and coworkers (2007) and, as we propose here, in the ASC of shamanic healing. The Rabari shamanic ritual fainting reported above, for example, supports this view.
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In describing their “integrated information theory” of consciousness, Tononi and Laureys (2008) write: . . . you lie in bed with eyes open and experience pure darkness and silence . . . the informativeness of what you just experienced lies in not how complicated it is to describe but in how many alternatives you have ruled out . . . whether you think or not of what was ruled out (and you typically don’t) you actually gained access to a large amount of information. This point is so simple that its importance has been overlooked. (pp. 402–403)
Each conscious experience generates a large amount of information by ruling out alternatives. Interestingly, the phenomenological psychiatrist Wyss (1973) made a similar observation. By being aware of the actual present, one “suppresses” alternatives. Although “wakefulness” is not a copy of reality, it is a current shaping (Gestaltung) in which perceiving, imagining, remembering, and thinking modalities of experience are able to be kept separate from one another. It is only when consciously controlled, effortful processing is reduced that consciousness turns inward (disconnecting from the actual current external environment) in a loss of perspective (Aperspektivita¨t). Wyss connects inner experience with a boundless loss of perspectivity in which the possible overwhelms the actual: The inner appears to wakeful awareness as the inter-weaving of thoughts, volition, moods, images, feelings which penetrate one another and are experienced as lacking independence, but somehow, everything is interconnected with everything else—on the basis of the aperspectival structure of interweaving of what is possible. (p. 188, our translation)
Nir and Tononi (2010) observe: “The most obvious difference between dreaming and waking consciousness is the profound disconnection of the dreamer from their current environment” (p. 100). However, this disconnection, the aperspectival, the overwhelming of the actual by the inner (Wyss, 1973) with an attendant confusion between experiential modalities (e.g., perceiving, remembering, imagining) are also found during acute drug intoxication, psychosis, hypnotic narrative framing (Mishara, 1995), and—as we argue here—in shamanic healing. The shamanic metaphoric “hero’s journey” during initiation (Randal et al., 2008) is a temporary suspending of current reality to undertake a confrontation with the inner world. Here there is an overwhelming of the actual by the boundless
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possibilities of inner experience, where perceiving, imagining, remembering, and thinking no longer remain separate experiential modalities. The discovery of the inner as boundless and dangerous is also reflected in Jung’s (1969) work in which the self comes to terms with this inner boundlessness by means of a metaphoric journey of rebirth. The journey to the interior of the self as descent to an underworld or endless journey is also suggested by Kafka’s stories (Mishara, 2010a). In our account of the healing factors of ACS in shamanism, we find ourselves confronted with the following paradox. How can what appears as a loss of cortical large-scale integration in hypnosis (Fingelkurts et al., 2007), which we propose to be also central to shamanic healing, lead to psychological integration, that is, the incorporation of new symbolic material and positive suggestions, that contribute to both mind and body healing? How can a reduction in cortical neural integration lead to the increased integration of symbolic mental and physical healing?
Self and Narratives in ASC In shamanic ritual, the self and its attendant feelings of control and agency as understood in our Western commonsensical views are temporarily suspended, given up in a process of healing, symbolized by the hero’s journey as confronting the inner realm of the possible (Wyss’ loss of loss of perspective (Aperspektivita¨t)) in a rebirth of self. Jung’s (1969) observations about the symbolism of self as a process of rebirth overlap with the phenomenologic-existential view of self as ongoing selftranscendence or self-displacement of one’s current perspective. Jung’s contemporary, Viktor von Weizsa¨cker, neurologist, phenomenologist, sense physiologist, and celebrated founder of psychosomatic medicine in Germany, writes that we only come to awareness of self not as a prereflective given but reflectively: We only first really notice our own subjectivity when it is threatened to dissolve in crisis. . . . The subject is not a firm possession but must be acquired anew at each moment to “possess” it. . . . The unity of the subject is only first constituted in its ongoing incessant reestablishing itself in crisis and its own infirmity. (von Weizsa¨cker, 1950, p. 173, our translation)
Mishara (2010a) describes a similar symbolism of rebirth as metaphoric inner journey in Kafka’s writings: The self, which comes to expression
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in symbolic hypnagogic or dream images, is at once a self-transcendent and a self-regenerating process. The evolving “structure of human self” (Mishara, 2010 a) is reflected in the “rebirth” symbolism.1 During the narration, The self simultaneously takes on the roles of the narrator and the narrated self of the traumatic event. The process of separating these selves, letting go, and sense of completion is still under way. . . .Straus, a phenomenological psychiatrist, wrote that we experience distance not in terms of objective space but in terms of our own momentary ability for movement. It is for this reason that we have no distance in the dream because the dream landscape moves with us and encloses us within its horizon. We are always in the present in the dream, enveloped within the immanence of our own bodies, in a private universe. (Mishara, 1995, p. 188)
The ability to seamlessly shift frames between a narrating subject who somehow stands outside the narrative, shaping its course, and one that is embedded within the development of unfolding scenes may have its neural basis in the opposition body schema/body image, that is, being a body subject and having a body experienced by others.2 To narrate about oneself
1
Integrating classical philological scholarship and archaeology, Knight (1936) traces the history (and prehistory) of the labyrinthine symbol beginning with the spiral shapes carved into stone before and inside prehistoric burial caves in which the dead were placed in fetal position to indicate a journey of rebirth after death. Mishara (2010a) describes how the labyrinth later serves as a symbol of “rebirth” of the human self in Kafka’s writings [see Ustinova, volume 1]. 2 The neurologic opposition of body schema vs. body image (originally proposed by Head, 1920; Head & Holmes, 1911) is not easy to grasp. Consider the following exercise: Ask a friend to close his eyes and draw the face of a clock on his forehead, the hands of which say 3 o’clock from your perspective. Ask him what time it is. He may respond either 3 or 9 o’clock depending on whether he reports from your (external) or his (internal) perspective (see Mahoney & Avener, 1977). What is of interest is the ambiguity of the situation; your friend may report his bodily experience either from your or his perspective. The two systems, kinesthetic (9 o’clock from his perspective) and perceptual, are organized in terms of two different reference frames or coordinate systems. The first, body schema, is egocentric, or body centered, and the second, body image, is computed from an allocentric or object-centered frame of reference. These two attitudes correspond roughly to “being a body self,” a body schema, or “I,” and having a body, a body image or social self as “me” (discovering that my body has an outside perceived by others precisely by empathizing with their perspective). The duality of both being/having a body-self is required for social roles. “The fact that we are able to take both an internal-vital (i.e., proprioceptive-vestibular-interoceptive) and external (exteroceptive, social-objectifying) relationship to our own bodies is the precondition for any vulnerability to the disruption of self-experience in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states” (Mishara, 2010b, p. 621).
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is an act of self-transcendence because one experiences oneself as both active narrating subject and narrated object (as if seen from others’ point of view). This reflects a fundamental paradox of human existence that we articulated above: I can only become myself by letting myself go, by transcending what I just was (von Weizsa¨cker, 1950). The act of narrating requires an ongoing shifting between internal and external perspectives or reference frames with regard to one’s own body. The narrating I is egocentric in that, like movement, the next steps in a narrative are computed in egocentric coordinates, like considering chess moves or an anticipated route in advance. However, the narrator narrates a self already embedded in scene-based allocentric coordinates and becomes entranced like his audience in the unfolding of these scenes from the standpoint of the protagonist. The narrator must shift back and forth from being absorbed in the narrative unfolding of his/her own story to quick decision processes of “where” to go next, which narrative path to take. The latter process occurs in terms of what we have been referring to as the egocentric reference frame of an on line body schema. Recently, the first-person perspective has gained considerable attention in neuroscience without its advocates being able to state exactly how first-person awareness is supported by the complex circuitry underlying the social brain, or if it has components that can be fractionated and mapped onto the brain in functional neuroimaging studies (Mishara, 2007b). What is often missing from these discussions is the role of narrative autobiographic remembering. Such remembering is not a direct awareness of an already first-person engaged or embedded perspective (an initial viewpoint dependency first computed in an egocentric coordinate system), but rather the ability to shift perspectives to empathically imagine how others experience the “self,” a shifting away from the default, viewpoint-dependent “egocentric” frame of reference (Byrne, Becker, & Burgess, 2007). Similarly, Decety (2007) writes, “people are fundamentally egocentric and have difficulty going beyond their own perspective when anticipating what others are thinking or feeling” (p. 258; recall the definition of naı¨ve realism as our default reality, above). Remembering requires a shifting to an allocentric, viewpoint-independent frame of reference that situates one’s own embodied self in relation to a community of others, whether these be living, dead, spirits, or totemic. This leads to the controversial conclusion that what is uniquely human is not a putative first-person perspective, a hypothetical prereflective self-awareness somehow present (to itself) in engaged agency (a body schema, that, as we know, contra claims of reflective access to prereflective self-awareness [see Mishara, 2010a] occurs largely unconsciously) but rather the ability
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to reflect on ourselves, to narrate our experience to others and thus transcend our temporary current online perspective. It is also this ability that, we contend, leads to shamanic use of ASC during ritual enactment as healing. Hence, what is uniquely human may not be, as many assume, the ability to say “I,” but the ability to reflectively access a “me,” an external relationship to my own bodily self as the precondition of a social relationship to others. What is generally neglected in the literature is that any claims about self must be made from a reflective perspective that requires that the experience be retrospectively mediated by a change of reference frame, whether the experience be held in working memory or already converted into an episodic memory, what Husserl called the “retention” of the just past experience (Mishara, 2007a, 2010a, 2010b). In the phenomenologist Plessner’s (1965; 1980–1985) terms, what is uniquely human is not the so-called “I” (centric being) but the ec-centric relation to bodily self, being able to experience one’s bodily self from outside, as others might experience it, the foundations of uniquely human social cognition (Mishara, 2009). It is also this ability to consider oneself from an observer’s perspective that enables conscious episodic memory, the ability to narrate one’s experience, the “time travel” of autonoetic episodic remembering, the ability to have explicit retrospective and prospective episodic memories (Tulving, 2002). The neuroscience that supports being able to be both a centered self and the ability to envision oneself from an ec-centric (allocentric) perspective is complex and implicates ongoing transformation of reference frames between a motoric body schema and a perceptually based body image. While online egocentric representations are continuously updated by self-motion, allocentric representations play a role in spatial memory even over very short delays and distances (Burgess, Becker, King, & O’Keefe, 2001). It is not possible to reflect on, narrate, or impart an experience (even if it be through nonverbal performance in a prelinguistic mimetic culture as in Donald’s [1991] theory of cognitive evolution) without displacing our initially centric experience, by taking up a position that situates the embodied self in a shared community experience, which implies many viewpoints different from my own. That is, an initially egocentric, viewpoint orientation (Brewin et al., 2010; Byrne et al., 2007; Decety, 2007) must be translated into an allocentric frame of reference. Although the “hippocampus is specifically involved in storing allocentric (or viewpoint-independent) representations,” an “imageable egocentric representation is then produced in the precuneus via translation in the posterior cortex, making use of current head direction” (Burgess et al.,
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2001, p. 1499). That is, the body-centered or egocentric coordinates of an online, short-lived body schema, mediated by the parietal cortex (the intraparietal sulcus subserving the “translation” between reference frames), may “update” head direction cells providing “point of view” to recollected scenes otherwise mapped in allocentric coordinates (Byrne et al., 2007; Mishara, in press b). Speculatively, out-of-body experiences may involve the lack of coordination between vestibular sensations (presumably mediated by the putative vestibular cortex in humans), head direction cells, and their spatial mapping in the allocentric space of remembered or constructed scenes (Mishara, 2010b).
Narrative as Model for the ASC in Shamanistic Healing But how can reduced cortico-cortical connectivity heal through experiences of body-self symbolized by death-rebirth journey symbolism, a journey between worlds populated by spirits? We have already indicated that responsiveness to proprioceptive stimulation and ability to shift reference frames is greater in high responders to hypnosis (Carli et al., 2008). As in narrative or other kinds of mimetic performance in social contexts, the deliberate employment of ASC in shamanic healing requires a shift of embodied perspectives in both the shaman-healer and the patient. Such experiences involve disengaging the motoric self from the perceptual self, the body schema from the body image (Mishara, 2010a, 2010b). That is, shamanism heals paradoxically or in terms of a dialectic of three stages: (1) effortful, mindful directing attention back on task; (2) a temporary loss or reduction of consciousness, an interrupting of the human ability to transcend-integrate current experience, only to (3) optimize this same ability in subsequent reflective awareness. This process is symbolized in the shamanic death and rebirth of the socially embodied self. The mutual ASC induction between shaman and patient (not unlike the much weaker form of the joint absorption of the storyteller and audience) requires not only a shift in embodied perspectives but also utilization of the networks of the brain that enable social cognition, the ability to empathize and exchange perspectives with others fundamental to healthy functioning (Blankenburg, 2001). The shamanic narrative of the self as an inner journey of rebirth is the healing movement of self-transcendence. Although the analogy may at first not seem obvious, giving into a narrative absorption as an ASC resembles the lapse of embodied control during laughter as Plessner describes it: “Paradoxically, we are brought closer to our physical-body, and yet severed from internal connection or
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control, as if a bystander who must endure while the bodily automatism compulsively runs its ‘opaque’ (undurchsichtig) course” (Plessner, 1970, p. 25). By giving way, the person “at once forfeits the relation to his body and reestablishes it” (Plessner, 1970, p. 66). Here, the regaining of control with regard to one’s bodily self precisely through giving it up resembles the dialectical-paradoxical movement of ASC in medical and psychological healing.
Conclusions We have described diverse ways that healing and ASC are associated and have examined healing and shamanic practices, meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, acute psychosis and its psychomimetic drug models, narratives, community rituals through the lens of the social brain, and social neuroscience. One achieves integration in mental and physical healing paradoxically through first yielding to its loss in a temporary dissolution of embodied self and the feeling of being in control in the ASC. The phemenological psychiatrist, Wyss (1973) connects inner experience, especially when controlled processing decreases as in ASC, with a boundless and sometimes dangerous loss of perspectivity in which the possible overwhelms the actual. The shamanic metaphors of inner journey and rebirth refer to the paradoxical healing power of the ASC and may help elucidate the structure of the human self and how the self may play a role in its own healing in meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, and narrative.
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Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G., Kotchoubey, B., Ku¨bler, A., et al. (2005). Psychobiology of altered states of consciousness. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 98–127. Vollenweider, F. X., & Geyer, M. A. (2001). A systems model of altered consciousness: Integrating natural and drug-induced psychoses. Brain Research Bulletin, 56, 495–507. Vollenweider, F. X., Leenders, K. L., Øye, I., Hell, D., & Angst, J. (1997). Differential psychopathology and patterns of cerebral glucose utilisation produced by (S)- and (R)-ketamine in healthy volunteers using positron emission tomography (PET). European Neuropsychopharmacology, 7, 25–38. Weidner, K. E. (2010) Evolution, facial expression, recognition, and social relationships. Unpublished paper, Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Weizsa¨cker, V. von. (1950). Der Gestaltkreis. Theorie der Einheit von Wahrnnehmen und Bewegen [The Gestalt-circle. A theory of unity between perception and movement]. 4. Aufl. Stuttgart, Georg Thieme Verlag. Winkelman, M. (2004). Shamanism as the original neurotheology. Zygon, 39, 193–217. Witek-Janusek, L., Albuquerque, K., Chroniak, K. R., Durazo-Arvizu, R., & Mathews, H. L (2008). Effect of mindfulness-based stress reduction on immune function, quality of life and coping in women newly diagnosed with early stage breast cancer. Brain Behavior, and Immunity, 22, 969–981. Wyss, D. (1973). Beziehung und Gestalt [Relationship and gestalt]. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
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CHAPTER 16
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness David Luke Introduction Even before 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research was created, formalizing the field, parapsychological research has been intimately associated with altered states of consciousness (ASC), such as those associated with mesmerism and mediumistic trance (Alvarado, 1998), and this relationship has continued to the present day. Some of the earliest psychical researchers posited models to account for the importance of ASC in the production of such extraordinary phenomena. Frederick Myers (1903) indicated how changes of state induced what he called automatisms, such as telepathy, whereby material from subliminal consciousness moved to the supraliminal part, an idea influential on the thinking of many scholars of consciousness from William James onward (Kelly et al., 2007). Psychical research paved the way for parapsychology, or the study of anomalous psychology, which is the scientific investigation of psi and related anomalous phenomena. Psi, as defined by Thalbourne (2009), is a general term used either as a noun or adjective to identify extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK). In this context, ESP is defined as “paranormal cognition; the acquisition of information about an external event, object, or influence (mental or physical; past, present or future) in some way other than through any of the known sensory channels” (p. 206). This includes concepts that are more specifically called clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, though in practice it may be difficult to discern the difference between them. A basic concern is how to distinguish clairvoyance, as knowledge about an objective feature of the world, from telepathy, a representation of that information from someone else’s mind. PK is defined simply as “paranormal action; the influence of the mind on a physical system that cannot be entirely accounted for by the mediation of
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any known physical source” (p. 208). Such physical systems may include living organisms, and so PK incorporates psi-mediated healing and hexing as well. Parapsychologists also study other ostensibly paranormal or anomalous phenomena, some of which may have a psi component, and these include near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, supposed pastlife recall, apparitions, hauntings, poltergeists (often considered to be a type of PK), and mediumship (putative communication with the dead). The region of overlap between anomalous phenomena, including psi, and ASC falls within the remit of other aligned fields of research too, such as transpersonal psychology, which tends to focus more on subjective experience than objective measurement and so is a healthy hermeneutic and normative complement to parapsychology’s positivist approach to this area of study. This chapter considers a number of different ASC and their relationship to spontaneous or actively induced anomalous events, such as with the attempted production of psi under laboratory conditions. Often, the specific states themselves have not been clearly defined either phenomenonologically or physiologically, but rather only the induction procedure is known, such as with those states possibly arising following meditation, the ingestion of psychoactive substances, or hypnosis, if they do produce ASC [see Carden˜a, Volume 1]. In some cases, however, the anomalous experience is the state because the experience is defined by the phenomenological characteristics of the experience, such as with sleep paralysis or near-death experiences, the latter of which, arguably, may occur even in the absence of life-threatening circumstances (Greyson, 2000). Following the trend in the greater part of the extant experimental literature, and because of the limitations of space, the present chapter focuses on the induction procedures that have been attempted, (e.g., hypnosis) rather than spontaneous states (e.g., near-death experiences). One consideration is that those anomalous experiences occurring under nonexperimental conditions cannot conclusively be considered to be genuinely as they seem. There may be any number of cognitive errors occurring that cause the individual to misinterpret the event, be they caused by individual knowledge, beliefs, misjudgements of probability, misperception, misremembering, confabulation, or the context of the situation (Pekala & Carden˜a, 2000). Nevertheless, researchers should be wary of simply labelling as hallucination those perceptions in altered states that they do not understand (Shanon, 2003). Further, those experiences occurring under nonexperimental conditions offer an insight into the conditions under which, for instance, genuine psi may occur. Studying nonexperimental experiences also provides a naturalistic context in which to understand these experiences and the influence that altered states may have on them.
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Such research has led to the development of laboratory studies designed to maximise the detection of psi by mimicking these naturalistic circumstances (Tart, 1977), thereby increasing the ecological validity of such research (Roe, 2010). The following review considers the occurrence of anomalous experiences and psi under both experimental and nonexperimental conditions and in various ASC, although the focus in parapsychology, at least, has been primarily on the induction procedure, not the state. Indeed, researchers often have defined the states, operationally, as the state of mind that results from a specific procedure, and therefore somewhat circularly (Roe, 2010).
Origins of ASC and Anomalous Experience That anomalous experiences may be evolutionarily beneficial to the organism deserves consideration, and there exist explanatory models that propose that psi is an adaptive trait because it can afford the avoidance of accidents in favorable circumstances (e.g., Stanford, 1990) and that anomalous experiences provide health advantages via hypnosis and the placebo effect that favor those who can access altered states more easily (McClenon, 2002). The association between altered states and anomalous events goes back to the earliest historical periods, such as the prophetic dreams of visionaries in the Old Testament, accounts of psychic powers occurring through meditation in the yoga sutras, and divination in the oracular tradition of Delphi in ancient Greece [see Shear, and Ustinova, Volume 1]. The visionary seeresses at Delphi, the pythia, would divine the future in an altered state apparently caused by psychoactive fumes issuing from the rock fissures or possibly via ingestion of psychoactive plants of the Solanaceae family (Devereux, 2008). Certain psychoactive plants have long been taken by indigenous peoples in a ritual context for the express purpose of accessing altered states conducive to clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, out-of-body travel, psychic diagnosis, psychic healing, and spirit communication. Archaeological evidence suggests that such practices have existed the world over for millennia, incorporating numerous plants and virtually every living culture ever studied anthropologically (Luke & Friedman, 2010) [see Winkelman, Volume 1]
Psychedelically Induced States A psychedelic substance, as opposed to other psychoactive substances, has been defined as that “which, without causing physical addiction, craving, major physiological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia,
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more or less reliably produces thought, mood, and perceptual changes” (Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1998, p. 9). The recent rediscovery and use of psychedelic substances in the developed world during the last century has generated numerous accounts in the literature of the spontaneous occurrence of anomalous or ostensibly paranormal phenomena with the recreational, clinical, and experimental use of these substances (Luke, 2008) [see various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this volume]. Most of the clinical observations come from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapeutic sessions rather than from research designs, and at one time it was estimated that ESP occurs with good supporting evidence in about 2% of such therapy sessions, which is a considerably higher incidence than that reported from nonpsychedelic psychotherapy (Luke & Friedman, 2010). A consistent trend in the literature indicates that anomalous experiences tend to occur far more with psychedelics than with other psychoactive substances. This finding also appears to be rooted in the traditional divinatory and shamanic use of psychedelic plants reported in the historical, anthropological, and ethnobotanical record and is further echoed by several surveys, mostly conducted with modern urbanites (Luke, 2008; Luke & Kittenis, 2005). The surveys consistently indicate that those reporting anomalous experiences are significantly more likely to have used psychedelic substances, with more frequent use associated with a greater likelihood of an experience. Of those reporting the use of psychedelics, percentages for reported psi experiences actually occurring under the influence ranged from 18% (psi experiences on “mind-expanding” drugs in India; Usha & Pasricha, 1989a, 1989b) up to 83% (telepathy experiences on cannabis in California; Tart, 1993). The most common experiences were telepathy but also often precognition. Perhaps surprisingly, only rarely were psychedelics found to be related to the occurrence of psychokinesis, but they were cited as a fairly common cause in out-of-body experiences, a phenomenon that seems to occur with most every substance of this type, but particularly with dissociative drugs such as the NMDA-antagonist ketamine. Other reported experiences include entity encounters, apparitions, mediumship, seeing auras, NDEs, interspecies communication, alien abductions, early life, past life, genetic, ancestral, and phylogenic experiences, and most every other type of anomalous experience (Grof, 2009; Luke & Kittenis, 2005). Furthermore, a weak but consistent relationship was also found between the reported use of psychedelics, paranormal experiences, and kundalini experiences, possibly indicating that endogenous psychedelics such as N,N-dimethyltryptmine (DMT) have a role to play in the spontaneous occurrence of both types of experience (Luke, 2008).
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Consistent, albeit weak, correlations between the use of psychedelics and both the belief in the paranormal and the inverse fear of the paranormal were also found. The relationship with paranormal experiences, belief, and fearlessness tended to be either greatly reduced or reversed with respect to the nonpsychedelic substances of cocaine, heroin, and alcohol, supporting the same trend in individual reports. That there is virtually no recorded folkloric use of these nonpsychedelic substances for psychic purposes compared to the widespread shamanic use of psychedelic substances is further testament to the unique power of this class of drugs for inducing subjective paranormal experiences at the very least (Luke & Kittenis, 2005). Regrettably, very little of the survey research has considered the seemingly paranormal phenomenology of differing drugs but instead has just lumped together psychedelic drugs as a whole, obscuring large differences in neurobiological action. Subsequently, a taxonomic approach would be a welcome advance (Carden˜a, 2009) in that it would classify how different substances have a tendency to give rise to particular types of anomalous experience. For instance, in one study (Luke & Kittenis, 2005) psilocybinand/or psilocin-containing mushrooms were shown to primarily give rise to plant entity encounter experiences whereas ketamine gave rise to OBEs, though such differences may be due to psychocultural as well as neurobiological influences. However, this nomothetic method covers only a fraction of the phenomenological terrain required to map the states and experiences that these substances can induce. With such a limited amount of research actually having been conducted here, the lack of phenomenological mapping of the individual states in relation to the particular anomalous experiences is clearly a major limitation, both with psychedelics and with other induction procedures, and this is a necessary direction for future research (Carden˜a, 2009). Although it is recognized that subjective reports are not scientifically rigorous in establishing the veridical nature of these experiences, they enhance our understanding and offer a rich phenomenological spectrum of evidence around which to orient further research. Furthermore, the similarity in reports between those occurring spontaneously in exploratory, therapeutic, and accidental contexts and those induced intentionally in the traditional ritual context gives further credence to the shamanic use of these substances for paranormal purposes. With regard to controlled research on the efficacy of psychedelics to induce ESP, there have been only 17 separately published experimental projects that have been conducted, primarily with LSD or psilocybin, but also with mescaline, marijuana, Amanita muscaria, and, recently, ayahuasca.
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The results of these experiments, which began in the 1950s, varied in their degree of success, most likely in relation to the methodology involved (for a review, see Luke, 2008). The most successful experiments tended to utilize participants experienced with the use of psychedelics and also utilized freeresponse testing procedures with open-ended mentation regarding their internal state rather than forced-choice guessing scenarios that tend to be repetitive and thus rather boring “under the influence.” In retrospect, it is easy to see how the more naı¨vely designed projects lost any hope of sensibly testing for anything, let alone psi, once their inexperienced participants began succumbing to the mystical rapture of their first trip. Overall, few conclusions can be drawn concerning the induction of genuine psi with psychedelics because of the lack of systematically controlled experiments, although, at best, the results suggest a promising line of enquiry. Furthermore, this approach is useful for understanding the neurobiological processes that may be at work during anomalous experiences, whether they are genuinely paranormal or not. Indeed, there exist some well-evidenced and -reasoned conjectures about the role of psychedelic tryptamines, beta-carbolines, and NMDA-antagonists in the function of OBEs, NDEs, and apparent psi experiences (Luke & Friedman, 2010). Nevertheless, the neurochemical changes need to be mapped to the phenomenology of the experience (the state) and the personality traits of the individual before any real headway can be made, though this may be premature given the dearth of research in recent years.
Sleep States Although psychedelically induced states in humans vary considerably and have been neglected as an area of study since the late 1960s, the psychophysiology of sleep states has been more thoroughly explored and these states are seemingly more predictable in form . Furthermore, the differing states produced, often relating to the different stages of sleep, are more clearly identified than with other induction procedures. However, sleep differs from these other states in that it is natural, regular, and unavoidable, so it is not strictly induced as with other procedures [see Kokoszka & Wallace, this volume]. Those stages entering and exiting sleep, hypnagogic and hypnopompic respectively, are characterized by experiences of increased mental imagery (in up to 75% of survey respondents; Sherwood, 2002), decreased awareness of mental content, increased internal absorption, loss of volitional control over mentation, reduced awareness of the environment, and reduced reality testing. Both transitional sleep stages are related to anomalous experiences,
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specifically ESP, apparitions, mediumship, OBEs, past life visions, and entity encounters (Sherwood, 2002). Sleep paralysis, a fairly common sleep disorder whereby people believe themselves to be awake but unable to move, also tends to occur during hypnagogia at least once in the life of 40 to 50% of normal people. In addition to the usual anomalous experiences occurring during hypnagogia, sleep paralysis has been associated with psychokinetic and neardeath experiences (Sherwood, 2002). Evaluating the occurrence of psi phenomena, Sherwood (2002) considers that hypnagogia may be both conducive to anomalous experiences and misinterpreted as involving paranormal processes or agencies. There have been only a handful of experiments exploring the production of psi in these states, yet the results were positive and possibly better than dream states for inducing psi in the laboratory (Sherwood, 2002). Nevertheless, much further research in this area is required. Moving into the less ambiguous middle sleep stages, much has been done to identify their characteristics. Although it was once considered that dreams almost only occur in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, it is now known from naturalistic studies that non-REM sleep also produces dreams almost as often as during REM, although the dreams tend to be qualitatively different (e.g., Stickgold, Pace-Schott, & Hobson, 1994). In a review of case collections of independently verified psi experiences, 33 to 68% involved dreams, and in about a further 10% of cases, the percipient was in a “borderland” awake/sleep state. Considering cases of telepathy, approximately 25% involved dreams, whereas in precognition cases, in which a future event is partially or totally foreseen, approximately 60% involved dreams (Van de Castle, 1977). Females are approximately twice as likely as males to be the percipient, whereas males are the agent in approximately 60% of cases. Surveys from Europe, the United States, Africa, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and India indicate that ostensible psychic dream experiences are universal phenomena and are typically reported by 36 to 76% of respondents (Alvarado, 1998; Van de Castle, 1977). However, the mean percentage of people reporting ESP in dreams (51.3%) does not differ significantly from those (48.7%) reporting waking ESP experiences according to one review (Alvarado, 1998), although the frequency of experience in either state may differ. Unlike the individual reports of psychedelically induced anomalous experiences, many of the case study collections reviewed by Van de Castle (1977) have been filtered so that only those cases that have independent verification have been included. Nevertheless, corroboration does not negate the possibility that the dreams are just unlikely chance occurrences. However, Van de Castle (1977) notes that psychic dreams are frequently
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unusually vivid and intense, though clearly this does not make them unarguably genuine. Fortunately, there have been a host of experimental approaches to researching psychic dreaming since Weserman’s (1819) apparently partially successful attempt to induce specific dream images in people naı¨ve to his attempts. The most concerted program of research in recent years was instigated by Montague Ullman and collaborators at the Maimonides Medical Centre in Brooklyn in 1962. The Maimonides dream laboratory protocol made use of the recently discovered production of dreams during REM and employed EEG to monitor the percipient’s sleep stages. Once the percipient was asleep, a target image was selected using a randomized process in a distant room from the percipient, and a “sender” would concentrate on psychically transmitting the image to the percipient in the sound-proof room. Percipients were woken during each REM sleep period and then, under the free-response design, described their dreams in as much detail as possible, each of which was recorded. In the morning, the percipients would typically judge 8 or 12 art prints, one of which was a duplicate of the target, and they would select the one that most resembled their dreams of the previous night. Several independent judges would also be sent the dream transcripts and images and would rank them for correspondence. Rank scores were reduced to binary hits or misses (Van de Castle, 1977). The Maimonides program produced more than 50 research articles, condensed for a popular book (Ullman, Kripnner, & Vaughan, 2002), and the entire research output has been independently reviewed by several researchers (Radin, 1997; Sherwood & Roe, 2003; Van de Castle, 1977) with positive conclusions. Overall, the 15 studies returned a combined hit rate of 63% compared to the chance rate of 50%, which, with more than 300 trials, was highly significant (r ¼ .33, p ¼ .13 × 10−7; Radin, 1997). Despite some contentions from critics, which were successfully rebutted, no plausible counterexplanations exist for the results (Roe, 2010; Sherwood & Roe, 2003). However, few exact replications have been attempted because of a lack among later researchers of the resources that were available to the Maimonides team. Alternatively, a number of controlled but simplified conceptual replications have been conducted without EEG monitoring by having percipients dream at home. These later studies also incorporate clairvoyance designs, without a sender, and precognition designs, where the target is selected after the judging procedure. In a review of 21 studies since 1977, the combined results of more than 400 trials were positive overall but with a smaller effect size (r ¼ .14) than the combined Maimonides studies (Sherwood & Roe, 2003). Nevertheless, there may be some good reasons why the Maimonides series was more
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successful than the later studies. Aside from waking up percipients during REM, participants in the Maimonides experiments had been previously screened for ability, whereas those in later studies were unselected. The laboratory environment was also suspected to provide a stronger motivational factor for success (Roe, 2010). Overall, however, the Maimonides and post-Maimonides dream ESP research has demonstrated the weak but consistent ability of individuals to demonstrate psi during dreaming.
Hypnotically Induced States Even though Mesmer’s methods differed considerably from those used in hypnosis currently (Carden˜a, 2010), ever since mesmerism began in the late 18th century, hypnotic-like induction has been associated with the production of anomalous phenomena (Alvarado, 1998) [see Carden˜a & Alvarado, Volume 1]. Early reports included clairvoyance, distant medical diagnoses, and mediumistic communication with the dead; indeed, psi phenomena were once regarded as criteria of deep trance (Honorton, 1974). More recent surveys typically indicate that reported anomalous experience correlates with hypnotizability (Stokes, 1997), although dissociative ability appears to be more important (Pekala, Kumar & Mercano, 1995). Highly hypnotizable participants in a deep hypnotic state report, without any suggestions, spontaneous experiences similar in nature to aspects of the NDE and OBE, such as experiencing a bright light, a sense of pervading well-being, and floating out of the body (Carden˜a, 2010). Given the long relationship with anomalous experiences, a number of controlled psi experiments utilizing hypnosis were conducted throughout the latter part of the 20th century. The one direct experimental attempt to affect PK ability through hypnosis was so methodologically flawed as to be unlikely to have fairly tested for PK (Gissurarson, 1997); thus, only hypnosis in relation to ESP is here considered. In a meta-analytic review of 25 ESP studies contrasting hypnosis with a comparison condition, Stanford and Stein (1994) found that, cumulatively, the hypnotic condition was significant (z ¼ 8.77), whereas the comparison condition was not (z ¼ .34). Success was unrelated to methodological rigor, thereby ruling out the counterargument of a few badly conducted experiments skewing the results, but it does appear that some of the experiments were flawed and that a couple of experimenters who conducted multiple studies were responsible for most of the successful results. Furthermore, much of the difference in performance was caused by the comparison condition exhibiting “psi missing”—the selection of the correct target image at significantly
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below-chance expectation—possibly indicating that factors other than hypnosis were causing the psi effect (Stanford & Stein, 1994). One explanation of the psi-missing effect and the differences across experimenters is that of an experimenter psi effect, as occurs in other areas of psi research, although this hypothesis needs formal testing (Carden˜a, 2010). Further, if the experimental difference is assumed to be caused by the hypnotic induction, questions still remain as to whether the apparent ESP performance increase is caused by general induction factors (e.g., relaxation) or to statetrait interactions, such as the hypnotic context and hypnotizability (Carden˜a, 2010).
Meditation Reaching back before Mesmer to antiquity, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras describe how psychic powers, called Siddhis, are a common side effect of yoga but a distraction on the path to liberation. Such practices therefore drew the attention of parapsychologists during the early 1970s (e.g., Honorton, 1974). Somewhat supporting Patanjali’s claims, a random survey found that the practice of meditation was significantly associated with reports of OBEs, apparitions, and aura vision (Palmer, 1979). As discussed, surveys have also produced consistent correlations between the report of anomalous phenomena generally and kundalini-type experiences, which constitute a syndrome of anomalous phenomena that may occur through the practice of yoga or spontaneously (Luke, 2008). Theorizing why psi might be associated with meditation and other ASC, Honorton (1974) proposed the process of relaxation, the passive state of mind, the inward turning of attention, and an openness to others as “psi-conducive.” Consequently, some researchers turned their attention toward meditation of all varieties and conducted controlled psi experiments. Honorton (1977) reviewed 16 studies testing either ESP or PK published during the period between 1970 and 1976 and found 9 of these to be independently significant, with all studies combined being highly significant also (p ¼ 6 × 10 −12). Honorton’s findings in support of the psi-conducive nature of meditation were later confirmed with a review of six ESP studies conducted between 1978 and 1992, four of which were significantly positive (Schmeidler, 1994). Reviewing the eight studies published between 1971 and 1988 investigating PK—whereby psi is indicated by significantly improbable deviations in random event generator (REG) output during test periods—7 of the studies produced positive effects, typically significantly different than control conditions (Braud, 1990). This trend of a positive relationship between meditation, sometimes tested
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in groups, and significant RNG deviations has continued in recent experiments (e.g., Ivtzan, 2008; Nelson et al., 1996, 1998; Radin, Rebman, & Cross, 1996; Radin et al., 2008; Rowe, 1998). However, Braud (1990) notes that the earlier methodologies did not allow for the ultimate discernment of the appropriate psi-conducive factor, whether it was prior meditation history, the immediate effects of the meditation session, the meditator’s personality and reasons for meditating in the first place, or a combination of these factors. Addressing these limitations to some degree, during the early 1990s, a new test paradigm termed the attention focusing facilitation experiment (AFFE) received repeated independent investigation in a series of 12 conceptually identical studies conducted between 1993 and 2006. The protocol assesses the ability of one meditator to assist a distant meditator in focusing attention on a candle by monitoring the periods in which the distant meditators indicated with a button press their awareness of being distracted. A meta-analysis of the 12 studies revealed a small but highly significant distant facilitation effect (d ¼ .11, p ¼ .009), which was superior to control periods and independent of both the investigator and the degree of methodological rigor, thereby bypassing ordinary methodological criticisms and supporting a psi interpretation for the effect (Schmidt, in press). Despite the positive findings, whether either the helper or helpee meditators were actually in an altered state is unknown, and the findings might be at best considered as the result of having meditated, rather than as a consequence of being in a meditative state (Roe, 2010). Further, the actual term meditation was used in its loosest definition in the AFFE studies, as it merely involved maintaining one’s attention on the task and has been described as “protomeditational” in nature (Schmidt, in press). The earlier studies, however, used a variety of different forms of meditation including mandala gazing, pranayama, kundalini yoga, mantra yoga, karma yoga, Zen meditation, and transcendental meditation, as well as meditation practices developed by the researchers or those known and preferred by the participants. Clearly, different techniques may result in very different ASC, if at all, and meditation research generally has been criticized for assuming that all meditation techniques are the same (e.g., Schmidt, in press). More recently, Roney-Dougal has conducted psi experiments informed by her own ethnographic research conducted during 6 years living in ashrams and monasteries in India. Consequently, she has begun to investigate which types of meditation practice are most psi conducive. The main consistently significant effect overall, however, is that years of meditation correlates positively with psi performance (Roney-Dougal & Solfvin, 2006; Roney-Dougal, Solfvin, & Fox, 2008), with an apparent
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shift in scores occurring after about 15 to 20 years of concerted meditation (Luke, 2009).
Ganzfeld Induction Growing out of observations that ASC and perhaps even just relaxation are conducive to psi, a new methodology was adopted in the early 1970s to reduce the percipient’s sensory input so that attention could be turned inward to mental content and imagery. The technique, called ganzfeld (meaning whole field), involves covering the eyes of the percipients with half ping-pong balls to diffuse the red light being used. White or pink noise is played through headphones and the percipients rest in a comfortable chair and describe their imagery into a microphone, often after a period of systematic relaxation. The reduced and homogenized sensory input was thought to induce “sensory hunger” and be conducive to the flow of spontaneous creative ideation and imagery (Roe, 2010). Typically, while the percipient’s mentation was being recorded, a sender in a remote location would be attempting to psychically transmit a particular image or film clip to them, and after the session, the mentation would be blind judged on its similarity to the target and three decoys. Between 1974 and 2003, there were more than 100 formal ganzfeld experiments performed at numerous laboratories, and various metaanalyses of those have been conducted, though few methodologies in parapsychology have caused as much controversy (Palmer, 2003). The ongoing debate concerning the outcome of the ganzfeld studies is complex and will be only very briefly summarized here. The original meta-analysis controversy centered on the methodology being used up until the mid-1980s, the outcome of which greatly improved the research protocol and resulted in the development of an artifact-free automated technique termed the auto-ganzfeld (Hyman & Honorton, 1986). The following auto-ganzfeld meta-analysis a few years later produced positive and highly significant results overall (Bem & Honorton, 1994), which satisfied critics at that time that the statistical effect was genuine, though it was argued by them that there must be some other, albeit unknown, explanation for the effect. A new controversy emerged with an updated meta-analysis a few years later that found no significant psi effect in the auto-ganzfeld (Milton & Wiseman, 1999). This negative review was heavily criticized by other researchers (e.g., Bem, Palmer, & Broughton, 2001), particularly for the inclusion of “process-oriented” studies exploring novel aspects of the ganzfeld protocol, such as a study with particularly negative results that
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explored the use of auditory targets instead of the standard visual ones. Indeed, some of the studies included in the Milton and Wiseman metaanalysis were specifically designed to “destroy test” the ganzfeld protocol and had predicted impoverished results through the negative manipulation of salient variables, and so arguably these should not have been included in the meta-analysis (Roe, 2010). In response to this, a number of independent judges were asked to rate the Milton and Wiseman metaanalysis studies for standardness as ganzfeld studies, revealing a significant positive correlation between study standardness and degree of success (Bem, Palmer, & Broughton, 2001). Further, when those studies rated below the mean on standardness were excluded, the meta-analysis once again became highly significant. In addition, a further 10 studies have been published during the period between 2000 and 2004 that provide a combined positive hit rate that is marginally significant (Roe, 2010). Clearly, although the ganzfeld effect is detectable and arguably replicable, it is barely large enough to consistently deflect critical accusations of nonrepeatability, and so the debate continues. The latest addition to this debate sheds some light on the utility of the ganzfeld procedure in comparison to other ASC induction procedures. Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio (2010) conducted a meta-analysis comparing homogenous free-response ESP studies published between 1992 and 2008, finding that the combined effect of the 29 ganzfeld studies from that period was indeed significant (Stouffer Z ¼ 5.48, p ¼ 2.13 × 10−8) and higher than the combined effect of 16 comparable nonganzfeld ASC induction free-response studies, utilizing either meditation, dream psi, relaxation or hypnosis (Stouffer Z ¼ 3.35, p ¼ 2.08 × 10−4). However, the difference between the ganzfeld and other ASC induction procedure studies was not significant. Nevertheless, compared to the combination of 14 standard non-ASC free response studies (Stouffer Z ¼ –2.29, p ¼ .989), the ganzfeld database was significantly more effective in eliciting psi, although the ASC database was not, indicating that the ganzfeld process at least is more psi conducive than normal waking consciousness. Further, Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio (2010) report a highly significant meta-analysis statistic for all the108 published ganzfeld studies up to 2008 (Stouffer Z ¼ 8.31, p < 10−16), perhaps affirming the effectiveness of ganzfeld psi for the time being. One concern salient to the current chapter is that few of the ganzfeld studies have investigated the actual state of the percipient following induction, and it was generally assumed that the procedure generated a state comparable to the dreamlike hypnagogia (Roe, 2010). However, when the brain state of the ganzfeld was explored using EEG, it was found that
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it most resembled a relaxed waking state, equivalent to an increase in internal absorption (Wackermann et al., 2002). There were also wide differences among individuals, indicating that no one homogenous state was achieved with the technique. Nevertheless, the ganzfeld procedures in these EEG studies were not identical to typical sessions, lacking the initial systematic relaxation exercise and possibly not allowing enough time for habituation to the discomfort of wearing EEG electrodes (Parker, 2005). Fortunately, a few ganzfeld studies have investigated the specific phenomenological characteristics associated with ESP scoring, finding significant positive relationships with the loss of body awareness and the spontaneity of imagery in particular. A positive relationship with ESP was also found with the level of relaxation, prevalence of disconnected thought, amount of regressive imagery, dream likeness of the mentation, bizarreness of mental activity, and the abundance and clarity of the visual imagery (Alvarado, 1998). These features certainly share some of the same phenomenological topography as hypnagogia and other altered states; however, oppositely, the perception of slowed time and changes in body image were negatively related to ESP scores (Alvarado, 1998). This line of investigation, pursuing the phenomenological correlates of ESP, provides the basis for a richer understanding of altered states and psi, though the greatest advances are likely to come through the additional consideration of traits, as well as states, and how they interact as potentially psiconducive factors (Carden˜a, 2009).
States and Traits Positive relationships have been found between the report of spontaneous anomalous experiences and several trait variables, such as openness to experience, schizotypy, and transliminality (Alvarado, 1998; Thalbourne & Maltby, 2008), and hypnotizability, dissociation, and perhaps the trait of self-transcendence (Carden˜a & Terhune, 2008). Similarly, certain personality types have been demonstrated to fare better in the ganzfeld, such as those who are high in creativity, extraversion, and positive schizotypy (Simmonds-Moore & Holt, 2007). The notion of boundary thinness, defined as an increased connectivity within neural and cognitive systems, has been proposed as an umbrella term for the “anomaly-prone” personality trait cluster of transliminality, temporal lobe lability, boundary thinness, and positive schizotypy (Simmonds-Moore, in press). Furthermore, under this rubric, boundary thinness might as also be considered as a state
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and a trait, much like schizotypy, indicating a conceptual move toward interactionism, the combined study of personality, states, the situation, and other moderating factors on behavior (Carden˜a, 2009; SimmondsMoore, in press; Simmonds-Moore & Holt, 2007). Indeed, one of the explanations offered for the different outcomes in many psi studies is the possible variety in optimal psi-conducive interactions between states and traits, and so interactionism provides a more sophisticated avenue of enquiry than simply considering either states or traits alone. However, exploratory research looking at the interaction between ganzfeld/nonganzfeld and schizotypy subtypes in terms of psi performance (SimmondsMoore & Holt, 2007), for instance, has not been successful in discerning differences. This approach may be become more illuminating in the future, but such complex approaches to phenomena with as small an effect size as laboratory ESP may be too ambitious at the present time without larger-scale studies.
Summary and Conclusion Clearly there are a number of states and induction methods that have not been considered here that also deserve attention, though they are beyond the scope of this brief review. A longer list would, of course, include phenomena such as nonpsychedelic shamanic inductions (Krippner, 2005; Luke, 2010), mediumistic states (Gauld, 1982), spirit possession states (Stevenson, 1995), near-death states (Greyson, 2000), out-ofbody experiences (Alvarado, 2000), sleep-deprived or fatigued states, and a variety of other nonordinary experiences (Kelly & Locke, 2009). However, while such “states” may be conducive to anomalous experiences, there has been a very limited consideration of their capacity to demonstrate testable phenomena, such as psi, under controlled conditions. In consideration of the techniques that are covered in this chapter, it would appear that such induction methods are conducive, at the very least, to a variety of anomalous experiences. Furthermore, most of these induction methods, with the exception of the poorly studied psychedelic substances, have been demonstrated to produce psi under controlled laboratory conditions beyond chance expectation. Nevertheless, only the hypnosis research has considered the induction procedure in relationship to an ordinary state control condition in sufficient quantity to yield a metaanalysis, the results of which indicate the apparent advantage of hypnosis, but there is a concern that this finding is partly caused by below-chance scoring in the control condition, which may be attributable to the effect
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of the experimenter’s own psi on the data. Similarly, comparing the results of a meta-analysis of ordinary-state free-response ESP studies with the significant auto-ganzfeld meta-analysis, the ganzfeld effect size was superior to that of the non-ASC studies, but both significantly (Storm et al., 2010) and not significantly so (Milton, 1997; but see Storm et al., 2010). Such findings may be explainable by the small scale of the results being compared, but they are still somewhat discouraging for the hypothesis that ASC, other than the ganzfeld, are more conducive to psi, at least in the laboratory. Nevertheless, some researchers remain optimistic about the relationship of ASC to ESP and indicate that such research would benefit hugely from procedures that assess the degree to which the percipient is actually in an altered state (Carden˜a, 2009; Roe, 2010). In some cases, the degree of shift in consciousness has correlated with ESP task performance, so this would seem a valuable variable to monitor, although such an omission is just one of a number of pitfalls common to ASC research generally. Other concerns include the conflation of states with induction procedures, illdefined terminology, and the overlooking of individual differences and the mutability of altered states (Carden˜ a, 2009). Potentially, however, the study of psi and altered states can bear much fruit in helping us to better understand the nature of both anomalous phenomena and ASC, and therefore consciousness itself. Indeed, a good deal of the research on ASC thus far has addressed ostensible anomalous events and/or has been conducted by parapsychologists. The implications of this research for consciousness studies per se are potentially enormous, as the findings frequently challenge the materialist assumptions regarding the fundamental nature of the relationship between brain and mind. It is here, in the research at the limits of consciousness, that the most profound questions concerning ontology are being asked.
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About the Editors
ETZEL CARDEN˜A, Ph.D., holds the endowed Thorsen Chair of Psychology at Lund University in Sweden, where he directs the Center for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology (CERCAP). His empirical and theoretical work has received awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, and the University of Texas. His more than 200 publications include the book Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, to which Science News dedicated a cover story. His webpage is at http:// cercaplund.blogspot.com/2010/01/about-cercap.html. MICHAEL WINKELMAN, M.P.H., Ph.D., received his doctorate from the School of Social Sciences, University of California Irvine, in 1985. Among his publications are Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing (2010), Supernatural as Natural: A Biocultural Approach to Religion (with John Baker, 2008), and Psychedelic Medicine (edited with Tom Roberts, 2007). He retired from the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, in 2009 and currently lives in the central highlands of Brazil, where he is developing permaculturebased intentional communities.
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Advisory Board
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., is Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in San Francisco, California. In 2002 he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology as well as the Award of Distinguished Contributions for Professional Hypnosis from the Society of Psychological Hypnosis. In 2010, three of his co-edited books were published: Perchance to Dream: The Frontiers of Dream Psychology; Mysterious Minds: The Neurobiology of Mediums, Mystics, and Other Remarkable People; and Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion. In 2010, an updated edition of his co-authored book Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, was published. Dr. Krippner is a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (from which he received its Lifetime Achievement award) and the Parapsychological Association (which gave him its Outstanding Career Award). Robert Turner worked on MRI with Peter Mansfield at the University of Nottingham, 1984–1988. Between 1988 and 1993, at the NIH he developed the neuroscience techniques of diffusion weighted MRI and BOLD functional MRI. In 1994 he moved to London as cofounder of the Functional Imaging Laboratory. In 2006 he joined the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, as Director of Neurophysics. Max Velmans is currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London and has been involved in consciousness studies for around 30 years. His main research focus is integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness, and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding
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Consciousness (2000) was short-listed for the British Psychological Society Book of the Year award in 2001 and 2002 and is now in its second (2009) edition. Other publications include The Science of Consciousness: Psychological, Neuropsychological and Clinical Reviews (1996), Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: New Methodologies and Maps (2000), How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains? (2003), and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2007). He was a cofounder and, from 2004–2006, Chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.
About the Contributors
Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is currently associate researcher at the Universite´ de Montre´al (Departments of Psychology and Radiology, Neuroscience Research Center). He is the author of more than 100 publications in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. His groundbreaking work on the neurobiology of mystical experience has received international media coverage. Professor Olaf Blanke is director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the E´cole Polytechnique Fe´de´rade de Lausanne. Andrea E. Bla¨tter, Dr. phil., Dipl. Psych., works in Hamburg, Germany, as anthropologist, clinical psychologist, and hypnotherapist. She is a research associate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Addiction Research (ZIS) and assistant professor at the Institut fu¨r Ethnologie. Dr. J. C. Callaway is a medicinal chemist who suggested in 1988 that DMT might be responsible for the visions in normal dream sleep. He did the analytical work for the Hoasca project (1993), which was the first clinical study of ayahuasca. He also identified yuremamine, a novel DMT substrate, in Mimosa bark (2005). Benjamin R. Chemel, Ph.D., is a botanist with a doctorate in medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Purdue University. His doctoral research employed LSD and other ergolines to explore the structural requirements of D1 dopamine receptor ligands in order to guide the design of novel therapeutics. Sebastian Dieguez has studied psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He specialized in cognitive neuroscience and worked as a
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clinical neuropsychologist before joining the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain Mind Institute of the Lausanne Technological Institute (EPFL), where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in neuroscience. Jo¨rg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyva¨skyla¨, Finland. Dr. Fachner has authored a doctoral thesis (2001) on cannabis, EEG, and music perception, and various publications on music and altered states, music therapy, addictions, drug culture, and the social pharmacology of music. Cheryl Fracasso, M.S., is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Saybrook University. She serves as faculty member at the University of Phoenix, research assistant at Saybrook University for Stanley Krippner, and associate managing editor with the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies. Pehr Granqvist got his Ph.D. from Uppsala University, 2002, and is an associate professor in developmental psychology at Stockholm University, Sweden. His research has applied attachment theory to the psychology of religion. For example, he has suggested that a propensity for experiencing absorption mediates a relation between disorganized attachment and certain spiritual experiences. Gregory Holler, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in psychology from Saybrook University in 2005. His background and research interests are in human sexuality. He was trained as a marriage and family therapist. Dr. Holler works as a senior clinician and behavior consultant in San Francisco, CA. Andrzej Kokoszka, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of psychiatry, Head of the II Department of Psychiatry, Medical University of Warsaw, Poland, CBT therapist, group analyst, psychologist, and professor at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities. He wrote a series of articles on consciousness, reformulated in the book States of Consciousness: Models for Psychology and Psychotherapy. Steven Laureys, M.D., Ph.D., heads the Coma Science Group, www .comascience.org, Department of Neurology and Cyclotron Research Center of the University and University Hospital of Lie`ge, Belgium. He is a senior research associate at the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research and invited professor at the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences.
About the Contributors
David Luke, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich, London, and currently also the president of the Parapsychological Association. He has studied ostensibly paranormal phenomena and techniques of consciousness alteration from South America to India, from the perspective of scientists, shamans, and Shivaites. David Lukoff, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and a licensed psychologist in California. He is author of 80 articles and chapters on spiritual issues and mental health and helped develop the DSM-IV category of Religious or Spiritual Problem. Dennis J. McKenna is currently an assistant professor in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. His research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has recently completed a 4-year project investigating Amazonian ethnomedicines as potential treatments for cognitive disorders. Michael Maliszewski, Ph.D., received his degree from the University of Chicago. He is currently affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He developed and directed the world’s largest behavioral medicine program in Chicago for nearly a decade and has been involved in consciousness research for more than 40 years. Aaron L. Mishara serves as clinical faculty at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. He researches and publishes on altered states of consciousness in both hypnagogic hallucinations and neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder. At the Yale Whitney Humanities Center, he codirects working groups on the interdisciplinary study of literature, embodied cognition, and neuroscience. Webpage: http://www.thechicagoschool.edu/content.cfm/faculty_profile _page_details?facultyID=480. Zevic Mishor grew up in both Australia and Israel, completing an undergraduate degree (physiology and psychology) and two master’s degrees (neuroscience and social anthropology) at the University of Oxford. In 2011 he will begin an anthropology Ph.D. at Sydney University, researching shamanism amongst the Shipibo peoples of northern Peru. David E. Nichols, Ph.D., is the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology and a Distinguished Professor of
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About the Contributors
Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Purdue University. He is a prolific researcher of psychoactive chemicals and is considered one of the world’s top authorities on the medicinal chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics. Quentin Noirhomme is a researcher at the Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre and Neurology department, University and University Hospital of Lie`ge. His work focus is on developing new diagnosis and prognosis tools for patients in altered states of consciousness. Kenneth S. Pope, Ph.D., ABPP, is a licensed psychologist. A Fellow of the Association for Scientific Psychology, he provides free psychology resources at kspope.com, free disability resources at kpope.com, and information on special-needs dogs and cats at kenpope.com. His most recent book is Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling: A Practical Guide, 4th Edition (with Melba Vasquez). David E. Presti is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has taught in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for 20 years. He also teaches neuroscience to Tibetan monks in India in a program of study inspired by the Dalai Lama. Fred Previc, Ph.D., is a lecturer at Texas A&M – San Antonio and a consultant for Wyle, Inc. For more than 25 years, he performed research with the Air Force Research Laboratory and various contractors in San Antonio. His Ph.D. is in experimental psychology and his expertise is primarily in cognitive neuroscience, human factors, and aviation psychology. Sophie Reijman is doing a research master in developmental psychopathology at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, after earlier studies at the University of Valencia, Spain. She has collaborated in several investigations on attachment in early childhood as well as adult attachment representations, a topic on which she continues to work, and is co-author of several publications and presentations. Stacy B. Schaefer, professor of anthropology at California State University, Chico, has conducted ethnographic research among Huichol Indians in Mexico since 1977. She co-edited, with Dr. Peter Furst, People of the Peyote: Huichol Indian History, Religion and Survival (University of New Mexico Press, 1996), and is author of To Think With a Good Heart: Wixa´rika, Women, Weavers and Shamans (University of Utah Press, 2002).
About the Contributors
Michael A. Schwartz, M.D., is clinical professor, Texas A&M Health Science Center, College of Medicine, staff psychiatrist at Austin State Hospital, Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, Founding President of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and a recipient of the Dr. Margrit E´gne´r Prize from the University of Zurich. Barbara Vaughan, Ph.D., received her degree from Union Graduate School. She trained in sex therapy at the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis, MO. She is currently retired from private practice and resides in Chicago. Benjamin Wallace is professor of psychology at Cleveland State University. He is the author/co-author of eight books on the topics of consciousness, imagery, and perception. He has contributed more than 130 articles to various journals on issues dealing with hypnosis, ultradian rhythms, prism adaptation, and imagery utilization in information processing.
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Index
(“f”indicates a figure; “n” indicates a note; “t” indicates a table) AA/NAC (Alcoholics Anonymous/Native American Church), addiction program, 173 Abram, D., 338 Absence seizures, 264f, 269 Acetylcholine, 30; and nicotine, 32 Achterberg, J. 330, 333 Activation, AIM model of consciousness, 7 Addiction, 33, 170; AA model, 173; constructions of, 169–71; contracted state of consciousness, 176, 183; and drug consumption, 168–69; endogenous reward system, 180–81; medical model, 170–71; psychedelics treatment, 114–15, 153, 176, 177; sensitization neurochemistry, 181–82; socio-cultural learning, 182 Adjustment Disorder (DSM-IV), NDEs, 308 Adolescent cognitive development, 223–26 Adulthood cognitive development, 226 Advanced sleep phase syndrome (ASPS), 16 Aghajanian, G. K., 132 AIM (activation/information/modulation) model of consciousness, sleep/wake cycle, 6–7 Akinetic mutism, 273
Alcohol, sedative-hypnotic, 31 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), alteration of consciousness approach, 173 Alcorta, C. S., 225 Alibi (Morante), 279 Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, 245 Alien abduction experiences (AAEs), 293, 310–11 Allocentric perspective, 346 Alloesthesia, 244 a1-adrenergic receptor sites, 135 Alterations in mood, 290–91 Alterations in sense of agency, 289 Alterations in sense of attribution, 290 Alterations in sense of self, 288–90 Altered states of consciousness (ASC): adolescent risky behavior, 223; biological rhythm impact, 8; and bodily self, 237–40; and development, 211–12; definition, 328; dissociation, 218–19; and drug consumption, 167–68; and emotions, 279–82; and ESP, 355, 370; experiences of, 328; genetic predisposition, 212; and healing, 327–31; late adulthood, 228; and LSD, 121, 123; nonpathological, 283–84, 285t–86t; orgasm as, 194–95; pathological, 269–75, 285t–86t; and peyote, 147, 149; pharmacological, 267–68; physiological, 265–67; and psychopathology, 282–94, 285t–86t; range, 43; reward system, 177–79; in
386
Index sexual activity, 191–92; stability, 3–4; subjective reflections, 128; therapeutic recommendations, 294, 295; timelimited, 174; young adults, 226 Altered states of consciousness with distorted reality (ASCDRs): differences, 46–47; and dopamine, 45, 46, 48; range, 43–44 Altered structure of experience, in VSEs, 316 Alternations in perception, 291–93 Alvarado, C. S., 361, 363, 368 Amaritia muscaria, 51 American Psychiatric Association, on possession trance, 313 Amygdala, glutamate, 137; and olfactory information, 152 Anadenanthera: leaves, 86, 87t, 88t, 93, 109, 111; snuff, 33, 109–10 Anesthetics, and bodily consciousness, 253 Anhedonia, 291 Anomalous experiences, 356–57; history, 357; and sleep, 360–63; trait variables, 368–69. See also Extrasensory perception, Parapsychology, Psi phenomena Anosognosia, 241, 245, 246 Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), in meditation, 333, 334 Anticholinergic drugs, in shamanistic practice, 51 Anticipation of reward, and dopamine, 180 Apallic syndrome, 272 Aperspektivita¨t, loss of perspective, 342, 343 Areca nut, 32 Asomatoscopy, 245 Aspen Neurobehavioral Conference Workgroup, 273 Assagioli, Roberto, 314 Atropine: in shamanistic practice, 51; in South American Solanaceae, 112 Attachment: development infancy, 215; disorganized, 218 Attention control, in meditation, 331 Attention focusing facilitation experiment (AFFE), psi effects, 365
Attention shifting, infancy, 215 Auto-ganzfeld, 366 Autogenic training, information inflow limitation, 14 Autoscopy, 249, 288, 289 Avadhuti, 199 Awareness: consciousness content, 264f; internal self/external sensory, 264, 267f; regions, neuroimaging studies, 267f, 275 Axelrod, Julius, 90t Ayahuasca, 88t, 92, 103, 108; in alcohol and drug addiction treatment, 113–14; brew preparation, 110–12; current applications and uses, 111–12; experience, 96; healing use, 112; modern analogues, 114; syncretic sects, 112–13 “Ayahuasca tourism,” 90t, 113 Ayahuasqueros, 110 Azari, N. P., 69, 70 Baars, Bernard, 280 Banisteriopsis caapi, 88t, 91, 101; harmala alkaloids, 103 Barbiturates, sedative-hypnotic, 31 Barnhouse, R. T., 318 Barquinha, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112 Barrel cactus, 155 n.4 Basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC): consciousness, 11–12; protective mechanisms, 12–15 Beique, J. C., 133 Belonging, sense of, 329, 338 Belz, M., 295 Benham, G., 336 Bentall, R. P., 292 Bereavement (DSM-IV), normal reaction, 317 Bergson, Henri, 77 Beta state, typical waking in mammals, 43 Betel nut (Areca seed), 32 Bharati, A., 198 Bigwood, Jeremy, 90t, 102 Biological rhythms, 4; disturbances, 15–16 Bodily consciousness: and ASC, 237–40, 288; and drugs, 252–53; experimental
387
Index procedures, 253–54; in hypnosis, 251–52; in mystical states, 251; near-death-experiences, 250; neurological disorders, 240–49; out-of-body experience, 249–50; and parietal lobe, 74 “Body armoring,” Reich, 193 Body schema; in hypnosis and meditation, 335; vs. body image, 344 n.2, 344–45 BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signal changes, 71, 72, 74 Borderline personality disorders, emotional shifts, 293–94 Boundary thinness, 368–69 Bowlby, J., 218 Brain: complexity, 25; signaling structure, 25, 26f Brain death, 270–71 Brain imaging studies: conscious awareness of emotion, 73–74; future directions, 77–79; positive emotions, 72–73; religious experience, 69–72 Brain-mind connection, chemical nature, 25, 36 Brain waves, sleep cycles, 6f Braver, T. S., 334 Breathing control, in meditation, 331 Breuer, J., 219 Brief Psychotic Disorder (DSM-IV-TR), VSEs, 316 Buchbinder, J., 315, 316 Bufotenine (5-hydroxy-DMT): chemical structure, 99t; endogenous, 85, 90t, 94, 101 Burroughs, William, 169 n.1 Caffeine, stimulant, 30–31 Cakras, 198 Calabrese, Joseph, 176, 177 Campbell, Joseph, 303 Cannabinoids, 32; and dopamine, 48 Caplan, M., 311 Carden˜a, Etzel, 149, 312, 337, 338, 339–40 Caregiver, source of child’s stress, 219 Carlson, E. A., 218 Carmelite nuns, brain imaging participation, 71–72, 74
Cave paintings, shamanistic themes, 56 Cerebral cortex, body schema, 241 Changa, smoking, 113 Channeling, 290 Charles Bonnet syndrome, visual loss, 47 Chemical synapses, 25, 26f Chemical synapses, signaling activity, 27–28 Chisea, A., 334 Christians in a Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition, brain imaging participation, 71 Chronobiology, 4 Circadian biological rhythm, 4, 5; deregulation disturbances, 15–16 Clapton, Eric, 169 n.1 Clarke, I., 303 Classic anesthetic agents, 267–68 Coca plant, stimulant, 31 Cognitive abilities, and dopamine, 44 Cohoba snuff, 86, 108 Coles, R., 220 Collective ingestion, 176 Coma, 264, 271; awareness in, 274–75 Coma vigil, 272 “Common sense,” 329, 330 Compartmentalization, 218 Complex partial seizures, 270 Compulsive repetition, 175 Confirmation bias, normal cognition, 316 Conscious hemiasomatognosia, 245 Consciousness: biologically produced vs. induced states, 10–11; defined, 21; infant and toddler, 213; levels of, 264f; neuropharmacology of, 133–38; subjective first-person experience, 263; subjectivity, 37–38; and thalamocortical system, 127; thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network, 267f, 276 Context-independent drugs, and addiction, 181 Contextual bonding and assessment, and addiction, 181 Cortical connectivity, 340–41 Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC) feedback loops, 127 Cortisol, circadian rhythm influence, 5
388
Index Cotard syndrome, 288 Coulson, Sheila, 55 n.1 Cousins, W. E., 337 Craving, 171 Creativity-related states, young adulthood, 226 CRED (cAMP response element binding), and addiction, 181–82 Culture, and drug use, 171, 172 Cyclothymic disorder, 294 Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I. S., 14 Dakwar, E., 331 Daoist yoga, 196–97 “Dark night of the soul,” 290–91 Davidson, Julian, 194 Davy, Humphrey, 23 De la Cruz, San Juan, 279 de Lima, Gonc¸alves, 88t, 92 de Quincey, Thomas, 169 n.1 Decety, J., 345 Deep sedation, 265, 268 Deep sleep, unconscious state, 264f, 265 Delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS), 16 Delirium tremens, hallucinations and GABA, 47–48 Delirium, 287 Delphi oracle, 313, 358 DeltaFoS-B, and addiction, 182 Delusional parasitosis, 243 Delusional reduplication of body parts, 242–43, 248 Delusions, 292, 315–16; cultural impact, 315 Dementia, late adulthood, 227 Dependence: contracted state of consciousness, 174, 176; medical definitions, 170–71 Depersonalization, 218, 288; and vestibular disturbances, 248 Depression, 290 Derealization, 218, 288 Descartes, Rene´, 22, 248 Designs, peyote ASC, 150, 156 Di Risio, L., 367 Diabysis, treatment home, 310
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), drug dependence, 170 Diet, epigenic intelligence factor, 55 Dietrich, A., 78, 133 “Difficult temperament,” self-regulation failure, 216 Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 248 Disorganized attachment, 218–19 Dissociation: in adolescence, 225; as defense, 219; defined, 218; developmental line, 221–22 Dissociative anesthetic agents, 268 Dissociative identity disorder (DID), 290, 312 “Divine” light, 250, 253 DMT (dimethyltryptamine), 30, 33, 34, 85–86, 129, 358; administration, 101–2; chemical structure, 97f, 98t, 130F; dosage and duration of effects, 103–4; endogenous, 94, 106–7; experience, 95–96; history, 86, 91–92; mechanisms of action, 105–6; and monoamine oxidase (MAO), 102, 103; occurrence in nature, 100; oral consumption, 101–2; scientific investigations, 92–94; and serotonin receptor site, 85, 104; timeline, 87t– 91t; traditional indigenous usage, 107–8 Donald, M., 336 Dopamine, 29, 150; adolescent brain, 224; brainstem source, 45; elevation in ASCDRs, 48, 49; and extrapersonal space, 45, 53; in dreaming, 47; in human brain processes, 44; parasympathetic action, 44, 49; and pleasure, 179–80 Dopaminergic system: and consciousness, 44; expansion in humans, 53–56; meditation studies, 334 Doppelga¨nger experience, 249, 289 Dramatic performance, in shamanism, 336, 337 Dreaming, 266, 340, 341; and DMT, 107–8 Dreams: neurochemistry, 47; REM and NREM sleep, 361; and strong emotion, 281
389
Index Drugs: and addiction, 168–69; bodily consciousness impact, 252–53; dysfunction effects/adaptive advantages, 168 DWSC (differentiated waking state of consciousness), 9 Early childhood cognitive development, 219–22 Ecstasy, emotion, 279; in sexual activity, 191 Ecstasy, drug. See MDMA Edwards, Eiluned, 337 EEG (electroencephalography), mystical condition measurement, 74 “Ego integrity,” late adulthood, 227–28 Egocentric representations, 346 Ekbom’s syndrome, 243 Ekstasis, defined, 46 Electrical synapses, 25 Eliade, M., 198 Ellis, Havelock, 252 Emotional contagion, 338; infancy, 216–17 Emotions: and ASC, 280–82; and ecstasy, 279; traditional view, 280 Endocannabinoids, 33; receptor system, 178–79 Endogenous DMT, 85, 94, 101; biosynthesis, 107; function, 107–8. See also Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT Endogenous reward system, 178 Endorphins, 30, 178 Entheogens, 33, 121 Entrancement, 336 Environment, and drug use, 171 Ephedrine, stimulant, 31 Epigentic factors, human evolution, 44, 58 Epilepsy, 269–70 Ergolines, tetracyclic compounds, 129–30 Ergot alkaloids, 124 Ergot fungus, 34 Erikson, Erik, 227 Euphoria, and opioid receptors, 48, 49 European Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness, 272 Evangelical Christian possession, 313
Exceptional human experience (EHE), 294; therapeutic recommendations, 294, 295 Excitement phase, sexual response cycle, 200 “Executive intelligence,” 44 Exogenous agents use, 14 Exosomia, 244 Expanded awareness, psychedelic, 178 Expectations, and drug use, 171, 172 Experience, temporolimbic markers, 67 Experimental procedures, bodily consciousness, 253–54 Experimental sexuality study: data analyses, 202–3; design, 202; results, 203–5 Extrapersonal space, human cognitive skills, 45 Extrasensory perception (ESP), 355, 308–9. See also Psi phenomena Fake hand illusion, 253–254 “False enlightenment,” meditation practice, 311 Farb, N. A. S., 333 Fasting, 51 Fear: and depersonalization, 291; and dissociation, 280 Fetal peyote exposure, 159–60 Fingelkurts, A. A., 340, 341 First-person perspective, neuroscience, 345 Fiske, S. T., 329 5-HT2a serotonin receptor sites, 131–32, 135, 137; and hallucinogens, 138 5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-DMT), chemical structure, 99t; endogenous, 85, 94, 100 Fixed rituals, in addictive behavior, 175 fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging): awareness in vegetative state, 275; hypnosis, 334; mindfulness meditation (MM), 333; mystical experience, 71–72 Forman, R. K. C., 291 Frederiks, J. A. M., 245 Free Evangelical Fundamentalist Community, brain imaging participation, 69 Freedman, Daniel X., 122–23
390
Index Freud, Sigmund: on hysteria, 219; paranoia theory, 292; pre/transpersonal fallacy, 318; on sexual repression, 192–93 Fromm, Erich, 282 Frontal lobe: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 132; and portentousness, 129 Furst, P. T., 148 n.1 Fusional experiences, 289 Gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA): and hallucinations, 47–48; inhibitory effects, 29; interneurons, 135, 137; receptors, 30; and sedative-hypnotics, 31–32 Ganzfeld induction, 366–68 Geekie, J., 341 General anesthesia, unconscious state, 264f, 265, 268 Generalized tonic-clonic seizures, 269 Gerotranscendence, 228 Gerstmann, Joseph, 246 Geschwind syndrome, 66 Gesture and dance, in shamanism, 336, 337 Geyer, M. A., 127, 338, 340 Gilman, A. G., 122 Global brain metabolism, and awareness, 275 Glossolalia, 71 Glutamic acid (glutamate): excitatory signaling, 29; and hallucinogens, 132; receptors, 30 Goldberg, L. R., 201, 202 Goodman, T. W., 122 Gopnik, Alison, 213 GPCR (G-protein coupled receptor), 25–28, 29, 30; and opioids, 32; and psychedelics, 34–35; and THC, 32–33; transduction, 27f Granqvist, P., 68 Gray, Spalding, 288 Greeley, Andrew M., 191 Greenberg, D., 315, 316, 318 Grey, Alex, 113 Greyson, B., 307 Grief and mourning, late adulthood, 227 Griffiths, R., 126, 252
Grob, Charles S., 126 Grof, Christina, 312, 314 Grof, Stanislav, 126, 161, 196, 312, 314 Haitian Vodou, 313 Hallucinations, 292, 293; cultural impact, 314–15; neurochemistry, 47 Hallucinogens, 33, 121–22; and consciousness, 126–29; and dopamine, 48–49; dying patient application, 126; indigenous use, 123–24; mechanism summary, 138–39; negative effects, 52–53; neuropharmacology, 129–33; and religious experience, 123; in shamanistic practice, 51–52 Handsome Lake, Iroquois leader, 301 Harmala alkaloids, 110, 111; and serotonin, 102–3 Hastings, A., 309 Haunting, 294 Healey, F., 67 Healing, and shared symbols, 339 Heautoscopy, 242, 248, 249, 289 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 23 Heggenhougen, C., 177 Helman, C., 172 Hemiasomatognosia, 245 Hemi-depersonalization, 245 Hess, E., 219 High-altitude mountaineers, and mystical states, 251 Higher power, AA, 173 Hindu tantra, 198, 318 Hippocampus, in allocentric representations, 346 Histamine, 29 Hoasca Project, 91t Hobson, J. A., 281 Hofmann, Albert, 34, 124 Holbrook, Lisbeth Jane, 192 Holmstedt, Bo, 90t, 102 Homo habilis, tool making, 54 Homo neanderthalis, ritualistic burials, 55 Honorton, C., 364 Horowitz, C. B., 332, 333 Huichol culture: ASC meaning, 149; peyote use in pregnancy, 158–62;
392
Index Ketamine: dissociative anesthetic, 36, 268; out-of-body experiences, 358, 359 Kleitman, Nathan, 11, 12 “Knowing medium,” ASC, 128 “Known object,” focal awareness, 128 Kokoszka, A., 13 Krippner, S. 330, 333 Kundalini, 198, 358 Lambe, E. K., 132 Lambrecht, I., 341 Landis, C., 290, 291, 292 “Lantern consciousness,” infancy, 213 Laski, Marghanita, 191 Lata, J., 315 Late adulthood cognitive development, 226–28 Laureys, Steven, 342 L-dopa, 47, 49 Left hemisphere: dopaminergic transmission, 54; dreams, 47; emotional regulation, 49 Levine, F. R., 331 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 337 Lhermitte, Jean, 245, 252 Life After Life (Moody), 306 Ligand-gated ion-channel receptor, 25 Limb ownership denial, 246–47 Limbic-marker hypothesis, TEs, 66–67 Liotti, G. 219 Locked-in syndrome, 264f, 264–65, 274 Locus coeruleus (LC), 133, 135 LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 34; and bodily consciousness, 252–53; chemical structure, 130f; discovery, 123, 124; ergot alkaloid product, 130 Lucid dreaming, 264f, 266, 341 Macro and micro context effects, 172 Magic consciousness, 2 to 5 years, 212 Maimonides Medical Centre, psi research, 362, 363 Main, M., 219 Maithuna, 198 Maliszewski, M., 196 Malpighiaceaous woody liana, 92f, 100 Mammals, typical waking EEG, 43 Manske, Richard, 89t, 91
Marglin, F. A., 198 Marijuana: and bodily consciousness, 252; in shamanistic practice, 56 Marlow-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC), 201, 203 Maslow, Abraham H., 189 Masochism, psychoanalytic perspective, 193 Massimini, M., 127 Masters and Johnson, sexual response cycle, 200 McCready, William C., 191 McKenna, Dennis, 90t, 112 McKenna, Terrance, 90t, 94–95, 96, 114 MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine; Ecstasy), 35; prolactin increase, 196; tactile and emotional sensations, 49 Medical models of addiction, 170 Meditation: and emotion, 282; ESP experience, 364–66; healing effects, 331–35; information inflow limitation, 14; practices, 311–12, 331; psi-conducive nature, 364; and sexuality, 196; spiritual component, 332 Mediumship, 290, 356 Membrane conductance, 136–37 Memory, in peyote ASC, 152 Menezes, Jr., A., 283 Mescaline, 34, 51; chemical structure, 130f, 150; in peyote, 149; phenethylamine, 130; pregnancy studies, 158–59 Mesmer, Franz A., 363, 364 Mesolimbic system, emotion, 178; endorphins, 180 Metabolism of information model, 12–13; protective mechanisms, 14 Metabotropic receptor, 25 Metzner, R., 173, 178 Michaux, Henri, 252 Micro-and macro-somatognosia, 245 Middle childhood cognitive development, 222 Milton, J., 367 Mimetic culture, 336, 337
393
Index Mind-body problem, 22; and neuroscience, 37; and transcendent experiences, 75–77 Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), 332 Mindfulness meditation (MM), fMRI studies, 333 Miner, L. A., 132 Minimally conscious state, 273–74 Minimally sedative agents, 268 Mirror neuron system, 216 Mishara, Aaron L., 291, 343, 344 n.1 Mislocalizations, tactile, 243, 244, 248 Misoplegia, 247 MMPI, Goldberg modifications, 201, 202, 203 Modulation, AIM model of consciousness, 7 Monoamine oxidase (MAO), 103 Monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), 103, 104, 112; and peyote, 150 Monoamines (-NH2), 29–30 Montgomery, Gary, 160 n.6 Monthly biological rhythms, 5 Monti, M. M., 274 Mood alteration, hallucinogens, 52 Mood disorders, 290–91 Moody, Raymond, 306 Moral indignation, childhood, 220 Morante, Elsa, 279 Moreira-Almeida, A., 283, 312 Motor neglect, bodily consciousness, 246 Mullin, G. H., 198 Muscarinic drugs, in shamanistic practice, 51 Muzet, A., 174 Myers, Frederick, 355 Mystical experiences: bodily consciousness in, 251; characteristics, 63–64; and emotion, 281; and fusion, 289; in sexual activity, 191 Mysticism Scale, 72 Mythic consciousness, 6 to 11 years, 212 Naı´ve realism, 329, 345 Narcolepsy, 293 Narrative autobiographic remembering, 345
Narrative enactment, in shamanism, 336 Narrowing awareness, addictive drugs, 178 Narrowing of consciousness, 287 National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM/NIH), 331 Native American Church, 147, 148–49; addiction program, 173, 176 Natural opiates, and dopamine, 48 Natural rhythmicity, suppressed in wakefulness, 12 Near-death-experiences (NDEs), 126, 228, 306–8; and emotion, 281; interpersonal problems, 308–9; and mystical states, 251; temporal sequence, 307 Neomammalian brain, neocortex, 154 Neonate, arousal states, 213–15 Neuroimaging experiments, psychotomimetic drugs, 338 Neuroimaging studies, TEs, 69–75, 78 “Neuromatrix,”241 Neuromuscular blockers, anesthesia, 268 Neuropeptides, 30 Neuroplasticity, 29 Neurotheology, shamanism as, 50 Neurotransmitters, 29–30; circadian rhythm influence, 5; and DMT, 106; and exogenous analogues, 167; receptors, 30; synapse, 25, 26f New religious movements, belief assessment, 315 Newberg, A., 71, 75, 78 Nicotine: nicotinic acetylcholine agonist, 32; in peyote ceremonies, 152–53; in South American Solanaceae, 112 Nir, Y., 342 Nitrous oxide, 268; NMDA-glutamate receptors, 36; psychoactive properties, 23 NMDA-glutamate receptors, and ketamine, 36 Nocjar, C., 136 Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome, 16 Nonconscious hemiasomatognosia, 245–46 Nonexperimental experiences, 356–57
394
Index Nonhuman primates, hallucinogen avoidance, 52 Nonpathological ASC, characteristics, 283, 285t–86t Noradrenaline, 45; in dreaming, 47 Norepinephrine, 29; and mescaline, 150 NREM (non-REM) sleep, 9, 266; cycle, 5–6 “Oceanic boundlessness,” 338, 339, 340 Oceanic sex, 196 Ololiuqui, 124 Opiates, endogenous receptors, 178 Opioids, analgesia/sedation, 32 Ordinary waking consciousness, external adaptive state, 128 Orgasm: as ASC, 194–195; sexual response cycle phase, 200 Orgasmic reflex, Reich, 193 Ospina, M. B., 332 Ott, Jonathan, 114 Otto, Rudolph, 129 Out-of-body experience, 249–50, 288; under hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76; and mystical states, 251 “Out-of-body journeying,” 50 Out-of-body sensations: in ASCRs, 47; and dopamine, 45, 46 OWSC (ordinary waking state of consciousness), 9 Oxytocin, 30 Pahnke, Walter N., 125, 252 Pain modulation, meditation, 333 Paleomammalian brain, limbic system, 154, 178 Pane´, Ramo´n, 86, 88t Panic, and depersonalization, 291 Paradoxically healing, ASC as, 327 Parapsychology, 355–356. See also Psi phenomena Parasympathetic dominance, dopamine, 45, 46, 49–50 Paresthesias, 243–44 Parkinson’s disease, 45, 47; tactile hallucinations, 243 Passie, Torsten, 195, 196 Passive state of mind, 14
Past life recall, 356 Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, psi side effects, 364 Pathologically altered consciousness, 269–75 “Peak experiences,” young adulthood, 226 Perception of self, and parietal lobe, 74 Peripersonal space, 45 Permanent minimally conscious state, 273 Permanent vegetative state (PVS), 272 Perry, John, 302, 304, 319 Persinger, M. A., 67, 68 Personal neglect, bodily consciousness, 246 PET (positron emission tomography) images: cerebral metabolic rate of glucose (CMRglu), 133; religious experience, 70 Peyote: and alcohol and drug abuse treatment, 153, 176; antibiotic qualities, 153; auditory, olfactory and gustatory sensations, 151–52; Huichol Indians’ use, 147–49; pharmacology and neurochemistry, 149–52; preparation, 155–56; pregnancy use, 158–62; Spanish clerical reaction to, 148; visual imagery, 150–51 Phantom limb phenomenon, 241 Pharmacological altered consciousness, 267–68 Pharmakon (Greek medicine and poison), 30 Phenethylamines, 129, 130; peyote alkaloids, 149 Phosphenes, ASC images, 150 Physicalism, mind-body problem, 75, 76 Physiological states of consciousness, 174 Physiologically altered consciousness, 265–67 Pink Flamingos, film, 283 Plateau phase, sexual response cycle, 200 Plato, erotic mania, 279 Pleasure and desire, neurochemistry, 179–80, 181 Plessner, H., 346, 347–48 Portentousness, and frontal lobe activity, 129
395
Index Positive emotions, and brain structures, 72–73 Possession, 312–13 Postictal period, temporal lobe epileptic seizure, 64, 65 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): depersonalization, 288; emotional shifts, 293 Prana, 199 Precognition: and dreaming, 361; psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, 358 Prefrontal cortex (PFC): adolescent remodeling, 223; awareness of emotions, 73; in meditation, 348 Prenatal experience, 161–62 Prepersonal experiences, 318 “Presence” experience, 249 Previc, Fred, 167 Priestly, Joseph, 23 Prince, R. H., 302 Principles of Psychology, The (James), 22 Protective mechanisms: cultural practices, 14; exogenous agents use, 14; information inflow balance, 13–14; meditation, 14; natural rhythmicity, 12–13; physiological, 13 Psi, defined, 355 Psi phenomena, 355–56; in crisis situations, 280; ganzfeld induction, 366–68; and hypnosis, 363–64; and meditation, 364–66; psychedelically induced, 357–60; and sleep, 360–63; states and traits, 368–69; therapeutic recommendations, 294, 309 Psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT), 47, 51, 100; chemical structure, 100t; U.S. studies, 53 Psilocybe mushrooms, 33, 101 Psilocybin, 124, 126; and bodily consciousness, 252; chemical structure, 130f; entity encounter experiences, 359 Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, ESP occurrence, 358 Psychedelic experience, facets, 95 Psychedelics, 33, 34, 121–22; addiction treatment, 113–14, 153, 176; and ESP,
358–60; positive and negative impacts, 36; scientific study, 124–26 Psychic experiences, 308; therapeutic recommendations, 294, 309 Psychoactive drugs, 24; and neuronal reward system, 179 Psychobiological systems, neonate, 214 Psychointegrative plants, 154 Psychokinesis (PK), 294, 355–56; and hypnosis, 363 Psychological Dimensions of Sexual Experience Inventory (PDOSEI), 199–200, 202; ecstatic states, 201 Psychopathology: ASC presence, 285t–86t; diagnostic taxonomies, 284, 287; mood alterations, 290–91; narrowing of consciousness, 287; sense of self alterations, 288–90; sociocultural context, 283 Psychopharmacology, 36–37 Psychosexual stages of development, Freud, 193 Psychotherapy, and addiction treatment, 176 Psychotic-like episodes, positive outcomes, 301 Psychotic/mystical/religious experience, 302–3; differences between, 314–16, 318; phenomenology, 303–4; spiritual emergencies, 314 Psychotomimetic drugs, 33; experience dimensions, 338 Psychotria viridis, 100, 101f Putnam, F. W., 295 Pyramidal cells: cortex, 133; 5-HT2a receptor sites, 134; and hallucinogens, 138 Qi, circulation in daoist yoga, 197 Qigong, 311 Rabaris, shamanism, 337, 341 Randal, P, 341 Raphe nuclei, 133, 135; and hallucinogens, 138; REM sleep, 130; tryptamine hallucinogens, 131 Rational consciousness, 11 years +, 212 Reactive psychosis, 287
396
Index Reality, visionary state, 129 Reich, Wilhelm, orgasmic reflex, 193 Religion, adolescent appeal, 224, 225 Religious attributions/experience, brain imaging experiment, 70 Religious experience, and TLE, 64, 65 Religious or Spiritual Problem (DSM-IV), NDEs, 308, 317 REM (rapid eye movements) sleep, 264f, 266, 293; cycle, 5; and DMT, 106–7; newborns, 160, 213, 214; and raphe cell rhythmic rate, 130; state of consciousness, 9 Reptilian brain, behavior and habit, 154 Repulsion (film), 292 Resolution phase, sexual response cycle, 200 Retrograde signaling, synapse, 28, 33 Retrospective perspective, 346 Reuptake transport, 26f, 27 Revonsuo, A., 340, 341 Reward-reinforcement pathways, 33 Reynolds, J., 334 Reynolds, Pam, 75, 76, 77 Rhino Cave, Botswana, 55–56, 56 n.1 Rhythmic drumming, 50 Richards, Keith, 169 n.1 Right hemisphere, and TEs, 67 Ring, K., 307 Risky behavior: dopamine and serotonin, 224; prefrontal cortex, 223 Ritualistic ingestion, 175 Rock art, shamanistic themes, 55–56 Roney-Dougal, S., 365 Rossi, E. 13, 14 Rubber-hand illusion, 253 Running, and mystical state, 251 Sabina, Marı´a, 53 Sabom, Michael, 75 Sacks, Oliver, 312 Sadism, psychoanalytic perspective, 193 Sakti, female deities, 198 Salvia divinorum, 35, 51 San people, ASC practices, 51 Sanchez-Vives, M. V., 136 Sane Society, The (Fromm), 282 Santo Daime, Ayahuasca sect, 86t, 113
Schizophrenia, 45, 49, 291–292; cortical connectivity, 341; experience dimensions, 338; metabolic activity, 339 Schizophreniform Disorder (DSM-IV-TR), VSEs, 316 “Schizotoxins,”107 Schizotypy, 368, 369 Scholl, Sophie, 282 Schreber, Daniel-Paul, 292 Schultes, Richard Evans, 124 Schwartz, Michael A., 291 Scopolamine: in shamanistic practice, 51; in South American Solanaceae, 111 Seasonal biological rhythms, 4 Self: alterations in sense of, 288–90; rebirth of, 343, 344 Self-awareness, development in toddler, 217 Self-injurious behavior, 288, 289 Self-Rating Behavior Inventory (SRBI), 202 Self-regulatory skills, infancy, 215, 216 Self-transcendence, 212 Self-world relationship, and reality, 330 “Sensation of absence,” 244–45 Sense of self across time, 213 “Sensed presence,” in temporal lobe, stimulation experiments, 68, 69 Sensitization, pleasure experiences, 181–82 Sensory acuity, late adulthood, 226, 227 Sensory deprivation experiments, 13; bodily consciousness, 253 Sensory isolation, 50 Serotonergic psychedelics, cerebral cortex sites, 105 Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5HT), 29, 150; adolescent brain, 224; chemical structure, 98t, 130f; and DMT, 85, 101, 104; dopamine inhibition, 48; in dreaming and hallucinations, 47; 5-HT2a receptor sites, 131–32; and LSD, 34; and raphe nuclei, 29, 47, 105, 130, 134 “Set,” of user, 122, 168, 172, 182 “Setting,” of user, 122, 168, 172, 182 Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness (Van Urban), 190
397
Index Sexuality: and ASC, 191–95; experimental study, 202–5; phenomenological dimensions, 199–202; and social desirability, 201–2; studies of, 189–90; transpersonal experiences, 196–99 Shamanism: and dream experiences, 341; genetic component, 212; healing effects, 335–40; Huichol culture, 154–56; mutual hypnotic-trance, 337; narrative in, 347; neurochemical contributions, 50; nondrug practices, 50; transactional symbols, 339 Sherwood, S., 361 Shift work variation, 16 Shiva, pure consciousness, 198 Shulgin, A., 100 Shumala Caves, 148 n.1 Siddhis, yoga psychic powers, 364 Sigma-1 receptor, 105 Simmonds-Moore, C., 368, 369 Simple partial seizures, 270 Sleep, 265–66; deprivation, 51; and psi phenomena, 360–63. See also Dreaming, REM sleep Sleep paralysis, 293; OBE-like experiences, 249; and psychokinesis, 361 Sleep/wake cycle, 5; AIM model, 6–7; disturbances, 15–16 Smith, E. O., 168 Smith, Huston, 123 Snuff products, 108–9 “Social brain,” 329, 331, 336, 345 Social neuroscience, 329 Social science models of addition, 171–72 Society for Psychical Research, 355 Sociocultural context, psychopathology, 283 Socrates: Daemon voice guide, 314; on madness, 302 Solanaceae plants, 35, 357 Somatoform disorders, 289 Somatoparaphrenia, 246–47 Somnambulism, 266 Sosis, R. 225 Soteria House, 319–20 “Soul flight,” 50
“Soul vine,” South American hallucinogens, 51 Speaking in tongues, 313 SPECT (single-photon emission tomography) images, religious practice, 70 Spetzler, Robert, 76 Spiegel, D., 334, 335 Spiegel, Herbert, 293 Spiritual emergencies, defined, 314 Spiritual Emergency Network, 312 Spiritual experiences, visionary, 301–2 Spiritual practices, 311–312; and sexuality, 196–99 Spirituality: defined, 301; and parietal cortex, 70–71 “Spotlight consciousness,” childhood, 213 Spousal bereavement, late adulthood, 227 Spruce, Richard, 88t, 91, 111 Stace, W. T., 63 State-dependent recall, 182 Stern, Daniel, 213, 217 Storm, L, 367 Strassman, Rick, 90t Strategic focus, 44–45 Subjectivity, and reality, 75 Suicide, seasonal rhythm, 4–5 Sullivan, J. R., 168 Supernumerary phantom limb phenomenon, 242, 248 Suyominen, K., 5 Symbolic thinking, childhood, 220 “Sympathetic exhaustion,” dancing, 51 Syncretic sects, Ayahuasca, 113–14 Sza´ra, Sephen, 89t, 92, 93, 103 Tactile hallucinations, 243 Tai Chi, 311 Taitimu, M., 341 Takiwasi Center for the Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Addiction, 114 Tantra, spiritual practice, 198 Tantric sex, 196 Targ, E., 294 Tart, Charles T., 194, 200, 252, 293 Tassi, P., 174 Telepathy: and dreaming, 361; psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, 358
398
Index Temperament and Character Inventory, 71 Temporal lobe: stimulation experiments, 67–69; TEs, 72 Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), 64–65; and religiosity, 66 Temporal lobe seizures, 269–70 Teonana´catl, 124, 125 Tetrahydroisoquinolines, peyote alkaloids, 149 Thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network, consciousness, 267f, 276 Thalamo-cortical interconnectivity, 5, 77, 128, 133 Thalamus: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 137; and hallucinogens, 139; reticular nucleus dysfunction, 137–38 Thalbourne, M., 355, 368 THC (delta-9-tetrahydorcannabinol), 32 Therapeutic recommendations, psychic experiences, 294, 309 Thoughtless phenomenon, 13 Tibetan Buddhism, 198–99, 318 Time perception, 22 Tobacco: and peyote interaction, 152–54, q56; use in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, 153 Tolerance, 171; opiates, 180 Tomkins, Silvan, 280 Tononi, G., 127, 128, 342 Torda, C., 131 “Total drug effects,” 172 Tourette’s syndrome, 244 Trace amines (TA), 30; receptors and DMT activity, 104–5 Trance, 287; possession, 313 Transactional symbols, shamanistic ritual, 339 Transcendent experiences (TEs), 63–64; brain imaging studies, 69–75, 78; clinical observations, 64–65; with flat EEG, 77; future neuroimaging studies, 79–80; limbic-marker hypothesis, 65–66; and mind-brain problem, 75–77; temporal lobe stimulation experiments, 67–69; triggers, 64, 78 Transcendent self, and brain damage, 251 Transcendental spiritual experiences, 309
Transcendental state, reality of, 129 Transition states, pathological, 293–95 Transliminality, 368 Transpersonal emotions, 338 Transpersonal experiences, 318; and sexuality, 196 Transpersonal psychology, 314, 317, 356 Trauma, and dissociation, 219, 222 Tressoldi, P. E., 367 Tryptamines, 85, 93, 97, 129; endogenous, 94 Tukano peoples, Brazil, 92 “Tunnel” passage, 250 UFO-related phenomena, prevalence, 310 Ullman, Montague, 362 Ultradian biological rhythm, 4, 5–8; imagery, 7, 8, 11–12 Ultradian healing response, 14 Unconscious state, 264 Unia˜o do Vegetal, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112 Unity (oneness), in mystical experiences, 63 Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS), 264, 272 Upper visual field, and dopamine, 45, 46 Urgesi, C., 70 U.S. Schedule 1 Controlled Substances, hallucinogens, 93, 124 Uxa plant, and peyote ingestion, 155, 156 Vaitl, D., 328 Valonen, H. M., 5 Van de Castle, R. I., 361, 362 Van Urban, Rudolph, 190 Vanhaudenhuyse, A., 274 Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Appelle, Lynn & Newman), 304, 310 Vaughn, B., 196 Vegetalistas, medicinal Ayahuasca, 112 Vegetative state (VS), 264, 272 Ventral tegmental area (VTA), 133, 136 Vestibular disturbances, and depersonalization, 248, 249 Villavicencio, Manuel, 88t, 92 Virola (Psycotria viridis), 33, 51, 91t, 100; pellets, 109; snuff, 108–9
399
Index Vision logic consciousness, adulthood, 212 Visionary restructuralization, 338, 339, 340 Visionary spiritual experience (VSE), 301; clinical practice implications, 316–19; cross-cultural, 302–3; difference from psychotic, 314–16; mystical, 304; near-death experience, 306–8; phenomenology, 315; psychic, 308–14; treatment, 319–20 Visual imagery vividness, ultradian cycle, 8, 11 Vollenweider, Franz, X., 78, 127, 133, 338, 340 Volume conduction, neurotransmitters, 30, 34 Von Weizsa¨cker, Viktor, 343, 345 Wade, Jenny, 192 Wakefulness, 263, 264f, 266, 272; and suppressed information, 342 Wake/sleep cycles, regulation, 133 Water lily, Mayan in shamanistic practice, 52
Waters, John, 283 Weserman, H. M., 362 Whitley, B. E., 201–2 Whole body amputation, 247–48 Wiederman, M. W., 201–2 Wilber, Ken, 212, 303, 318 Winkelman, Michael, 154 Wirikuta, sacred Huichol desert region, 151, 157, 161, 162 “Wisdom,” late adulthood, 226 Wiseman, R., 366, 367 Withdrawal, 171, 180 Witzum, E., 315, 316, 318 Wolff, P. A., 214 Wyss, D., 342 Yoga, 311 Younger, J., 336 Zacks, J. M., 334 Zeitgeber (“time giver”), 4, 5 Zen Buddhism, 318 Zona incerta, 4
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