Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 839

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
This page intentionally left blank
Altering Consciousness
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Volume 1: History, Culture, and the Humanities

Etzel Cardeña 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 Cardeña 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. Cardeña, 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 vii
Preface: Extending Our Knowledge of Consciousness ix
Charles T. Tart
Chapter 1 Altering Consciousness: Setting Up the Stage 1
Etzel Cardeña
Chapter 2 A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness:
The Integrative Mode of Consciousness 23
Michael Winkelman

Part I: Historical Perspectives


Chapter 3 Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from
Prehistory to Late Antiquity 45
Yulia Ustinova
Chapter 4 Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness
in the Christian Western Tradition 73
Moshe Sluhovsky
Chapter 5 Altered Consciousness from the Age of Enlightenment
Through Mid–20th Century 89
Etzel Cardeña and Carlos S. Alvarado
Chapter 6 Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness:
A 50-Year Retrospective 113
Julie Beischel, Adam J. Rock, and Stanley Krippner
vi Contents

Part II: Cultural Perspectives

Chapter 7 Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness 139


Jonathan Shear
Chapter 8 Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 159
Michael Winkelman
Chapter 9 Altered Consciousness in Society 181
Charles Whitehead
Chapter 10 Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness in
Contemporary Counterculture 203
Graham St John

Part III: The Humanities

Chapter 11 Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 229


Jennifer M. Windt
Chapter 12 Altered Consciousness in Religion 255
Antoon Geels
Chapter 13 Colored Inklings: Altered States of Consciousness
and Literature 277
Wendy E. Cousins
Chapter 14 Altered Consciousness in Performance: West and East 301
Phillip B. Zarrilli
Chapter 15 Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 327
Mark Levy
Chapter 16 Time Is the Key: Music and Altered States
of Consciousness 355
Jörg C. Fachner

About the Editors 377


Advisory Board 379
About the Contributors 381
Index 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 found-
ers of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as
William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated altera-
tions 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 stu-
dent turned psychologist.
Our two volumes are dedicated to these and the many other pioneers
of inquiry into consciousness who provided the foundations for the per-
spectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisi-
tions 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,
viii Acknowledgments

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 extraordi-
nary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Gómez 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 con-
sciousness 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 Cardeña), Blueberry, and Ninni-
fer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath.
And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie:
“ . . . somos más 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, cor-
rectly or not, so let me play that role to introduce this very important Alter-
ing 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 search-
ing 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 ordi-
nary consciousness. Most of our colleagues are here in the lamplight of
x Preface

“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 interest-
ing, sometimes nightmarish, occasionally lucid. What was this strange
world I was experiencing? Why was it so different from my ordinary wak-
ing 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 Freu-
dians 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 psy-
chology. 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 psy-
chotics and their helpers had to go there, but not us mature, smart, well-
adjusted 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. Voilà! 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
Preface xi

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 perfor-
mance, 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 stat-
istical 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 psy-
chologist 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 prac-
tices done by little people who sat cross-legged in the mud—and had no
scientific training at all! And Menninger? That was a psychiatric organiza-
tion heavily involved in psychoanalysis, that dark alley of suspicious char-
acter. 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
xii Preface

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 street-
lamp of ordinary consciousness cast on the consensus consciousness side-
walk, 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 psy-
chedelic 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 standard-
ized 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 any-
thing.” 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 standard-
ized script, no special “hypnotic powers” or the like on my part . . . For re-
ally talented volunteers, we used chemical lab ammonia that was 10 times
as strong.
My years of hypnosis research also repeatedly exposed me to the blind-
ness 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 spe-
cial 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
Preface xiii

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 peo-
ple are only mildly responsive or not at all responsive to an induction pro-
cedure. 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 non-
hypnotized group contained some people who were hypnotized to various
degrees. What a way to wipe out real differences! Etzel Cardeña 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 con-
sciousness. We are psychologists and should not be ashamed, as behavio-
rists 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 manu-
script 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, under-
ground temples, a person was brought into a special chamber. The cham-
ber 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 mir-
ror 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 impor-
tant 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
xiv Preface

had unfinished business with. After exploring the many psychological


aspects of this, the client entered a dimly lit room where a large, tilted mir-
ror 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. Simi-
larly, 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 induc-
tion 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 exclu-
sively on all those little effects when such powerful ones can be easily
evoked?” Research on hypnosis or psychedelics was but a tiny, tiny frac-
tion 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 ignor-
ing other aspects of mind that were important.
My own research efforts were focused on exploring the nature of hyp-
nosis, 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 Cardeña and Helen Crawford, later
became leading investigators of hypnosis. But by the late 60s I had become
Preface xv

well aware that dreams and hypnosis were part of the much larger spec-
trum 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, hypno-
sis, minor psychedelics like marijuana and major psychedelics like LSD,
mescaline and psilocybin, and some beginning psychophysiological stud-
ies 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 prob-
lems 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 text-
book 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
xvi Preface

volumes will replace it with much more extensive, sophisticated, and up-
to-date material. New research after the publication of ASCs has been
uneven, though.
For example, one of the most promising lines, research on the psycho-
logical and transpersonal effects of psychedelic drugs and their therapeu-
tic value when used properly, had been showing great promise, although it
was still in its infancy. Such research was essentially stopped by the hyste-
ria 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 mak-
ing 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 “sci-
entific” than the psychological, and I wish my colleagues were more sensi-
tive 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 psycholo-
gists have unrecognized hopes, fears, and biases of their own that partici-
pants 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 dis-
appeared. 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 parapsychologi-
cal 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
Preface xvii

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 test-
ing, 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 con-
sciousness. The result would be multiple, complementary kinds of under-
standings, 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 open-
minded. 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 person-
ally 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.
xviii Preface

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 dream-
ers have begun making more systematic observations within lucid dreams
and communicating about them in their ordinary waking state, so pos-
sibilities 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 col-
leagues 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 con-
sciousness, ordinary or altered, in the 1970s (Tart, 1975).1 I was dissatis-
fied 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 complex-
ity 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 . . . . ;-)
Preface xix

consciousness, changed their functioning, and had what I considered use-


ful 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 contri-
butions 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 cer-
tain 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 consen-
sus 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 con-
comitant 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.
xx Preface

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 dream-
ing. 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. Sci-
ence, 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 Cardeña

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 main-
taining 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 (Cardeña, 2009),

1
This chapter benefited from the lucid and loving suggestions of Sophie Reijman.
2
The standard abbreviation in this volume for “altered states of consciousness” both in sin-
gular 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.
2 Altering Consciousness

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 distinc-
tions (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 con-
sciousness 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 conscious-
ness (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 subjec-
tively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the
Altering Consciousness 3

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 con-


sciousness 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”
(Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), but ASC and anomalous experiences
are not synonymous concepts because although some anomalous experi-
ences constitute the baseline state for some individuals (e.g., strong synes-
thetic 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 none-
theless 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 influ-
ence on the theory and evaluation of ASC (e.g., Farthing, 1992; Pekala &
Cardeña, 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 propos-
als are neither new nor do they solve the problem. They write that a state of
consciousness refers to “background mechanisms outside the phenomenal
4 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
sciousness 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 phe-
nomenal contents of consciousness that misrepresent or create delusional
beliefs of the surrounding world and oneself” (pp. 141–142). This type
of naı̈ve realism is questionable (cf. Hoffman, 2009), and it completely
ignores one of the most interesting facts about hypnosis and similar proce-
dures, namely that, up to an extent, committing to that “delusional belief”
may bring about experiential and physiological changes that no longer
make it delusional (Cardeña & 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 phenomenologi-
cally 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 con-
sciousness 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 experi-
encing 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
Altering Consciousness 5

avoid having to actually define what it is that they are describing either in
this or in other cultures (Cardeña & 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 impor-
tant 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 Cardeña & 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 altera-
tions of consciousness, not always cast within psychopathology. Probably
6 Altering Consciousness

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 parapsy-
chological phenomena. James was influenced by his contemporary,
F. W. H. Myers, who developed a bold theory to account for ASC, psycho-
pathology, and parapsychology (Kelly et al., 2007). Nonetheless, with the
double-barrel shotgun of radical behaviorism (which rejected conscious-
ness altogether) in academia, and psychoanalysis (which was mostly inter-
ested 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 lit-
erature 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 “sci-
ence 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 theo-
retical 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 in-
stance, 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 conscious-
ness alterations in some disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder
Altering Consciousness 7

(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 synchro-
nicity. 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 (Cardeña, Lehmann, Jönsson, Terhune, & Faber,
2007). I do agree with my coeditor, however, that a neurophenomenolog-
ical approach matching careful phenomenological descriptions with neu-
ral 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, disre-
garding a clear description of the state of consciousness evaluated and
the limitations of brain imaging (see Sanders, 2009). Whichever classifica-
tion 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 con-
sciousness, 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 distin-
guish 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 sec-
ond, 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 con-
sciousness actually elicited by a hypnotic procedure may also be triggered
8 Altering Consciousness

by a very different context such as exposure to trauma (Cardeña, 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” (Cardeña, 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, depend-
ing 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 in-
stance, 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 (Cardeña 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 & Cardeña, 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 homo-
geneous and unchanging modality. This ignores the various changes occur-
ring from one moment to the next and the fact that a defining characteristic
of consciousness is its constant change (James, 1890). There are important
Altering Consciousness 9

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 (Cardeña, 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 tran-
sient 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
(Cardeña, 1989), support Tart’s proposal. Shamanistic healers also describe
that their transition into an ASC becomes much smoother and more con-
trollable with time (e.g., Cardeña, 1991, Winkelman, this volume). The
dynamic properties of such transitions can be evaluated neurophysiologi-
cally 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., Wren-
Lewis, 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. Cardeña et al., 2000; Tart, 1991), along the lines of neurophysiologi-
cal and psychological research on meditation (e.g., Cahn & Polich,
2006; Easterlin & Cardeña, 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
10 Altering Consciousness

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
[Cardeña & 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 mem-
bers 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 consis-
tent 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 hypno-
tizability, absorption, mental boundaries, and related constructs that have
been often associated with ASC (Cardeña & Terhune, 2008). Relatedly, spe-
cific neurotransmitters and alleles have also been associated with hypnotiz-
ability (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 Cardeña, Volume 2). To further
elucidate individual differences, research on trait(s) associated with the pro-
pensity 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 (Cardeña, 2005), every partici-
pant 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
Altering Consciousness 11

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 wak-
ing state as the foremost state to apprehend reality and any other varia-
tions 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 peo-
ple interpret shadows projected in a wall to be an accurate depiction of
reality. The image becomes crystal clear if we substitute biologically pre-
disposed 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 regard-
ing our ordinary or waking consciousness. For instance, Ornstein (1986)
reviewed different strands of research and concluded that waking con-
sciousness may be quite limited when events do not change or change
slowly. Hoffman (2009), a cognitive psychologist, has described how evo-
lution may select for a modeling of reality that differs to an extent from
what is “actually there.” And these critiques of naı̈ve 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].
12 Altering Consciousness

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 experi-


ence 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 expe-
rience.
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 (Cardeña, 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 contribu-
tions to the volumes of Altering Consciousness, the history of humankind
(and consciousness of sentient beings in general) cannot be fully under-
stood without seriously grappling with the biological and cultural impor-
tance 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 cul-
tural (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 rejec-
tion of the current scientific methods (which many experients of ASC
Altering Consciousness 13

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 publica-
tions. I follow with this introduction in which I set the stage for the vol-
umes 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 cur-
rently 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
14 Altering Consciousness

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 pos-
sibility of achieving a higher state of consciousness characterized by pure
being or potentiality, also experienced spontaneously by high hypnotiz-
ables in a secular setting (see Cardeña, 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 illus-
trates 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 expe-
riences 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 con-
sideration. Literature has often heeded Rimbaud’s call for a dérèglement 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.
Altering Consciousness 15

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 act-
ing traditions. I was particularly happy to see that he includes in his survey
the Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales in México, 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 Nicolás Núñez 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 delib-
erately sought to alter their ordinary state through shamanic and meditative
techniques, among other procedures. He also discusses the Spanish-
Mexican 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 Sánchez, Arcq, Engel,
Moreno Villareal, et al., 2008). Finally, Jörg Fachner gives a nuanced analy-
sis 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’Année dernière à 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
16 Altering Consciousness

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 exuber-
ant La Prosa del Observatorio (The Prose of the Observatory, 1972) of Julio
Cortázar. 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 ahı́, pulso de astros y anguilas, anillo de Moebius de una fig-
ura del mundo donde la conciliación es posible, donde anverso y reverso
cesarán de desgarrarse, donde el hombre podrá 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.)

References
Bakan, D. (1973). On method. Toward a reconstruction of psychological inquiry. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bakan, D., Merkur, D., & Weiss, D. S. (2009). Maimonides’ cure of souls. Medieval
precursor of psychoanalysis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Barber, T. X. (1976). Advances in altered states of consciousness & human potential-
ities. New York: Psychological Dimensions.
Baier, K. (2009). Meditation and contemplation in high to late medieval
Europe. In E. Franco (Ed.), Yogic perception, meditation and altered states of
consciousness (pp. 321–345). Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissen-
schaftern.
Berntson, G. G., Cacioppo, J. T., & Quigley, K. S. (1993). Cardiac psychophysiol-
ogy and autonomic space in humans: Empirical perspectives and conceptual
implications. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 296–322.
Bourguignon, E., & Evascu, T. (1977). Altered states of consciousness within a
general evolutionary perspective: A holocultural analysis. Behavior Science
Research, 12, 199–216.
Bunge, M. (1980). The mind–body problem: A psychobiological approach. New York:
Pergamon Press.
Altering Consciousness 17

Cahn, B. R., & Polich, J. (2006). Meditation states and traits: EEG, ERP, and neu-
roimaging studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 180–211.
Cardeña, E. (1989). The varieties of possession experience. Association for the
Anthropological Study of Consciousness Quarterly, 5(2–3), 1–17.
Cardeña, E. (1991). Max Beauvoir. An island in an ocean of spirits. In R. I. Heinze
(Ed.), Shamans of the XXth Century (pp. 27–32). New York: Irvington.
Cardeña, E. (1994). The domain of dissociation. In S. J. Lynn & J. W. Rhue
(Eds.), Dissociation: Clinical and theoretical perspectives (pp. 15–31). New York:
Guilford.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and
physically active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53,
37–59.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Cardeña, E., & Beard, J. (1996). Truthful trickery: Shamanism, acting and reality.
Performance Research, 1, 31–39.
Cardeña, E., & Krippner, S. (2010). Culture and hypnosis. In S. J. Lynn & I. Kirsch
(Eds.), Handbook of clinical hypnosis (2nd ed.) (pp. 743–771). Washington, D.C.:
American Psychological Association.
Cardeña, E., Lehmann, D., Jönsson, P., Terhune, D., & Faber, P. (2007). The neu-
rophenomenology of hypnosis. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention of the
Parapsychological Association, 17–30.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous
experience: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Cardeña, E., Maldonado, J., van der Hart, O., & Spiegel, D. (2009). Hypnosis. In
E. Foa, T. Keane, & M. Friedman (Eds.), Effective treatments for PTSD (2nd ed),
(pp. 427–457). New York: Guilford.
Cardeña, E., & Terhune, D. (2008). A distinct personality trait? The relationship
between hypnotizability, absorption, self-transcendence, and mental boundaries.
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Associa-
tion, 61–73.
Cloninger, C. R., Przybeck, T. R., & Svrakic, D. M. (1993). The tridimensional
personality questionnaire: U.S. normative data. Psychological Reports, 69,
1047–1057.
Cortázar, J. (1972). La prosa del observatorio. Retrieved August 20, 2010, from
www.literatura.org/Cortazar/prosa.html.
Davidson, R. J., & Goleman, D. J. (1977). The role of attention in meditation
and hypnosis: A psychobiological perspective on transformations of con-
sciousness. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 25,
291–308.
Deutsch, D. (1988). A musical paradox. Music Perception, 3, 275–280.
18 Altering Consciousness

Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness:


The transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 12,
231–256.
Easterlin, B., & Cardeña, E. (1998–1999). Perceived stress, cognitive and emo-
tional differences between short- and long-term Vipassana meditators. Imagi-
nation, Cognition and Personality, 18, 69–82.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Farthing, G. W. (1992). The psychology of consciousness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Fischer, R. (1986). Toward a neuroscience of self-experience and states of self-
awareness and interpreting interpretations. In B. W. Wolman & M. Ullman
(Eds.), Handbook of states of consciousness (pp. 3–30). New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold.
Forman, R. K. C. (1999). Mysticism, mind, consciousness. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Foulkes, D., & Vogel, G. (1965). Mental activity at sleep onset. Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 70, 231–243.
Gillespie, N. A., Cloninger, C. R., Heath, A. C., & Martin, N. G. (2003). The genetic
and environmental relationship between Cloninger’s dimensions of tempera-
ment and character. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 1931–1946.
Goleman, D. (1988). The meditative mind: The varieties of meditative experience
New York: Tarcher.
Hilgard, E. R., & Tart, C. T. (1966). Responsiveness to suggestion following wak-
ing and imagination instructions and following induction of hypnosis. Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, 71, 196–208.
Hobson, J. A. (2008). Normal and abnormal states of consciousness. In M.
Velmans & S. Schneider (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to consciousness
(pp. 101–113). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Hoffman, D. D. (2009). Nature and consciousness. Mindfield. The bulletin of the
Parapsychological Association, 1(1), 6–7.
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Holt.
James, W. (1958). The varieties of religious experience. New York: New American
Library. (Original work published 1902)
Kallio, S., & Revonsuo, A. (2003). Hypnotic phenomena and altered states of
consciousness: A multilevel framework of description and explanation. Con-
temporary Hypnosis, 20, 111–164.
Kelly, E. F., & Locke, R. G. (2009). Altered states of consciousness and psi: An histori-
cal survey and research prospectus. New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
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.
Kirsch, I. (1994). Defining hypnosis for the public. Contemporary Hypnosis, 11,
142–143.
Altering Consciousness 19

Kunzendorf, R. G., & Wallace, B. (Eds.). (2000). Individual differences in conscious


experience. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, G. (1973). Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy con-
cepts. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2, 408–508.
Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. New York: Knopf.
Lanius, R. A., Vermetten, E., Loewenstein, R. J., Brand, B., Schmahl, C., Bremner, J. D.,
& Spiegel, D. (2010). Emotion modulation in PTSD: Clinical and neurobio-
logical evidence for a dissociative subtype. American Journal of Psychiatry,
167, 640–647.
Lichtenberg, P., Bachner-Melman, R., Ebstein, R. P., & Crawford, H. J. (2004).
Hypnotic susceptibility: Multidimensional relationships with Cloninger’s tridi-
mensional personality questionnaire, COMT polymorphisms, absorption, and
attentional characteristics. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis, 52, 47–72.
Ludwig, A. M. (1966). Altered states of consciousness. Archives of General Psychiatry,
15, 225–234.
Lutz, A., & Thompson, E. (2003). Neurophenomenology: Integrating subjective
experience and brain dynamics in the neuroscience of consciousness. In A.
Jack & A. Roepstorff (Eds.), Trusting the subject. Vol. 1 (pp. 31–52). Exeter,
UK: Imprint Press.
Manguel, A. (2004). Con Borges [With Borges]. Madrid: Alianza Literaria.
Middlebrook, D. (2004). Her husband. Hughes and Plath: A marriage. London: Little
Brown.
Natsoulas, T. (1981). Basic problems of consciousness. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 41, 132–178.
Natsoulas, T. (1983). Concepts of consciousness. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 4,
13–59.
Oakley, D. A. (2008). Hypnosis, trance and suggestion: Evidence from neuroi-
maging. In M. R. Nash & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of hypnosis
(pp. 365–392). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ornstein, R. (1986). The psychology of consciousness (rev. ed.). New York: Penguin.
Pasricha, S., & Stevenson, I. (1986). Near-death experiences in India. Journal of
Nervous and Mental Disease, 174, 165–170.
Pekala, R., & Cardeña, E. (2000). Methodological issues in the study of altered
states of consciousness and anomalous experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J.
Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience. Examining the
scientific evidence (pp. 47–81). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological
Association.
Plato (L. Cooper, trans.). (1961). The collected dialogues of Plato. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Plato (B. Jowett, trans.). (2000). The republic. New York: Dover.
Putnam, F. W. (1988). The switch process in multiple personality disorder and
other state-change disorders. Dissociation, 1, 24–32.
20 Altering Consciousness

Putnam, F. W. (2005, November). States of being. Invited address presented at the


22nd Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Dissocia-
tion, Toronto, Canada.
Rock, A. J., & Krippner, S. (2007). Does the concept of “altered state of con-
sciousness” rest on a mistake? International Journal of Transpersonal Studies,
26, 33–40.
Ruy Sánchez, A., Arcq, T., Engel, P., Moreno Villareal, J., Kapan, J., Bogzaran, F.,
Lisci, S., & Gruen, W. (2008). Cinco llaves del mundo secreto de Remedios Varo
(Five keys to the secret world of Remedios Varo). México, DF: Artes de México.
Sanders, L. (2009). Trawling the brain: New findings raise questions about reli-
ability of fMRI as gauge of neural activity. Science News 176(13), 16–20.
Sluhovsky, M. (2007). Believe not every spirit: Possession, mysticism, and discern-
ment in early modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, Z. (2010). Generation why? The New York Review of Books. www.nybooks
.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why. Retrieved January 17th,
2011.
Tart, C. T. (Ed.). (1969). Altered states of consciousness. New York: Wiley.
Tart, C. T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton.
Tart, C. (1998). Integrating altered states of consciousness on their own terms: A
proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences. Ciéncia e Cultura. Journal of
the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science, 50, 103–116.
Tart, C. T. (1991). Influences of previous psychedelic drug experience on students
of. Tibetan Buddhism. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 23, 139–174.
Taylor, E. (1983). William James on exceptional mental states. The 1896 Lowell lec-
tures. New York: Scribner.
Tellegen, A. (1992). Notes on the structure and meaning of the MPQ absorption scale.
University of Minnesota. Typescript.
Terhune, D. B., & Cardeña, E. (2010). Differential patterns of spontaneous expe-
riential response to a hypnotic induction: A latent profile analysis. Conscious-
ness and Cognition, 19, 1140–1150.
Ustinova, Y. (2009). Caves and the ancient Greek mind. Descending underground in
the search for ultimate truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G., Kotchoubey, B., Kübler, A.,
Lehmann, D., Miltner, W. H. R., Ott, U., Pütz, P., Sammer, G., Strauch, I.,
Strehl, U., Wackermann, J., & Weiss, T. (2005). Psychobiology of altered states
of consciousness. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 98–127.
Velmans, M. (2009). How to define consciousness—and how not to define it.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, 139–156.
Wallace, B., & Fisher, L. E. (2000). Biological rhythms and individual differences
in consciousness. In R. G. Kunzendorf & B. Wallace (Eds.), Individual differ-
ences in conscious experience (pp. 337–349). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Walsh, R. (1990). The spirit of shamanism. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
Altering Consciousness 21

Wren-Lewis, J. (1988). The darkness of God: A personal report of consciousness-


transformation through an encounter with death. Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
28, 105–122.
Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner
(Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
Zaehner, R. C. (1973). Zen, drugs & mysticism. New York: Pantheon.
Zinberg, N. E. (Ed.). (1977). Alternate states of consciousness. Glencoe, IL: Free
Press.
This page intentionally left blank
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 experi-
ences of altered consciousness may vary in many ways, but it is commonal-
ities 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 perspec-
tive 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.
24 Altering Consciousness

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 influen-
ces 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 con-
sciousness 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 soci-
eties generally ignores them or subjects those who seek them to patholog-
ization, 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., Rätsch,
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
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 25

might legitimately claim that we still do not have a science of altered con-
sciousness.
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 explain-
ing 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 reflect-
ing 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 commu-
nity as a result of common education and training. The diversity of scien-
tific disciplines that study consciousness precludes the uniformity that a
paradigm presumes.
Kuhn proposed that competing schools of thought characterize scien-
tific 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
26 Altering Consciousness

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 spiri-
tual systems of explanation. Consciousness studies have no core set of val-
ues, 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 phenomenologi-
cal 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 sci-
entific revolutions that lead to radically new ways of understanding. Scien-
tific 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 con-
cepts. Kuhn noted these are relatively rare occurrences, but that they are
key to advances in science. Kuhn proposed that significant changes in sci-
entific 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 sys-
tem, 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 counterexam-
ples to the assumptions of the dominant paradigm and are generally key ele-
ments 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 devel-
opment of a new exemplar for the disciplinary matrix [see Beischel, Rock, &
Krippner, this volume].
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 27

Altered Consciousness as an Anomaly


Studies of both ordinary consciousness and AC have produced find-
ings 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 dis-
missed 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 main-
tained. 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 con-
sciousness, 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 unanim-
ity of opinion that would create a common paradigm, nor have the anoma-
lies demanded major changes in metaphysics, methodology, and values of
28 Altering Consciousness

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 contribu-
tions 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 phe-
nomenological 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 contrib-
uting to this emerging field was Charles Tart (e.g., 1975, 1977). His influen-
tial books and edited volumes contributed to the formation of an implicit
paradigm of ASC that has persisted for decades. This paradigmatic frame-
work for AC was explicitly linked to waking consciousness.
Tart defined states of consciousness (SoC) as conditions that differ qualita-
tively 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) concep-
tualized ASC in terms of differences from the baseline state of conscious-
ness, “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 frame-
work 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
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 29

transcendental, a set of significant human conditions that must be under-


stood 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 know-
ing (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 con-
sciousness. A mode of consciousness is a biologically based functional sys-
tem 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 con-
sciousness 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 conscious-
ness. Although learning and cultural factors produce variance in these
modes of consciousness in humans, their similar patterns cross-
culturally (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 function-
ally wired in multiple ways into brain structures, as illustrated in the brain’s
30 Altering Consciousness

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 neu-
ral 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 deter-
mined 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 inte-
grative. During the modes of deep sleep and dreams, a variety of SoC
may emerge, including pathological states such as somnambulism, noctur-
nal 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 coher-
ent pattern (see Winkelman, 2010, for review). Altered consciousness epi-
sodes 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 entrain-
ments 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
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 31

reflected in their production by a wide variety of natural agents (i.e., psy-


chedelic 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 underly-
ing “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 amine-
temporal-lobe limbic neurology . . . the mesolimbic serotonergic pathway
that extends from the median raphe nucleus in the mesencephalon, coex-
istent with part of the mesencephalic reticular formation regulating arousal
. . . to the septum and hippocampus” (pp. 381, 390). This produces hyper-
synchronous 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 run-
ning, 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, sero-
tonin has a significant role as a neuromodulator that regulates the activities
of many other neurotransmitter systems.Mandell proposed that the hippo-
campus is the focal point of the mechanisms that reduce the inhibitory
serotonin regulation of temporal lobe limbic function. The loss of inhibi-
tory 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 forma-
tion and the mediation of memory and emotions. The synchronous pat-
terns originating in the hippocampal-septal-reticular raphe circuits
32 Altering Consciousness

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 illus-
trated 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 involv-
ing neuronal linkages and feedback loops of the cortical areas of the fron-
tal 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 consciousness-
altering 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 informa-
tion to the frontal cortex from the environment and body. Psychedelics
disable this disinhibition process; this increases access to the flow of infor-
mation 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 pro-
poses 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, drug-
induced states, and meditation to illustrate their commonality in the dis-
ruption 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 33

The downregulation of certain mental faculties from conscious aware-


ness involves a subtraction of certain faculties or experiences, with a vari-
ety 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 dream-
ing or out-of-body experiences (OBE), involve a greater amount of down-
regulation of prefrontal mediated capacities [see Dieguez & Blanke, Vol-
ume 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 dysere-
gulation do so in distinct ways that produce unique phenomenological
characteristics of religious experiences. Dietrich proposes that these differ-
ent 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, fol-
lowed by lower-level systems. The dysregulation of the PFC allows a num-
ber 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, self-
awareness, the deliberate direction of attention, abstract and creative
thought, and planning. However, many alterations of consciousness, nota-
bly 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
34 Altering Consciousness

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 confir-
mation 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 condi-
tions 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 deafferenta-
tion 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 stimu-
lation 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 cogni-
tive features [see Cardeña & 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 cogni-
tive inhibition, which is associated with enhanced theta-wave production.
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 35

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 rela-
tionship with the hypnotist, expressed in the concept of rapport that
reflects the person’s cooperation with the hypnotist. This feature of hyp-
notic 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 illus-
trated 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 predomi-
nance 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 informa-
tion 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 hier-
archy, with the individual accepting a subordinate position and the impo-
sition of the will of a dominant other. Highly susceptible hypnotic subjects
experience a dominance of the limbic structures in an enhanced orienta-
tion to the emotional/motivation engagement with the hypnotist, reflect-
ing 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 conscious-
ness 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 alter-
native that controls the body, including physiological responses, percep-
tions, emotions, behaviors, and thoughts.
36 Altering Consciousness

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” (Cardeña & 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 inte-
grated 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 inter-
nally 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 asso-
ciated 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 sol-
utions 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 patho-
logical dimensions by examining how the social context interacts with
psychophysiological bases. Dissociation involves a regulation of atten-
tional 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 socio-
logical self becomes amplified. This sociological self, which functions in
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 37

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 integra-
tion involved in the possessing “other” in the context of dissociative iden-
tity 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 integra-
tion 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 process-
ing 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 thala-
mus; (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 deaffer-
entation are complementary and co-dependent processes. Typical
38 Altering Consciousness

alterations of consciousness occur with an enhanced integration of lower


brain processes that may simultaneously disengage other habitual pro-
cesses 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 emo-
tions, attachment, social relations and bonding, sense of self, and convic-
tions 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 func-
tions and material into self-conscious awareness. Key physiological mech-
anisms underlying integrative forms of consciousness are found in
activation of the paleomammalian brain, specifically the hippocampal-
septal circuits, the hypothalamus, and related brain structures that regu-
late emotions (MacLean, 1990). These effects contribute to a second char-
acteristic of integrative forms of consciousness, the ability to act on the
structures of earlier levels of consciousness by engaging operational struc-
tures of the unconscious and dissociated aspects of the self. This engage-
ment 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 manifes-
tation of altered consciousness involves imagetic representations known
as a presentational symbolism (Hunt, 1995). This system of visual symbol-
ism provides knowledge—one might even say wisdom—beyond that of
our rational language-based consciousness, exemplified in the out-of-
body experiences of shamans. Altered consciousness reflects this early
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 39

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 precon-
scious 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, nonver-
bal 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 neuro-
imaging. Psychological Bulletin, 132, 180–211.
Cardeña, 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. Dis-
sociation, 4(3), 165–177.
Crawford, H. (1994). Brain dynamics and hypnosis: Attentional and disatten-
tional 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 reli-
gious 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 pro-
cess 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.
40 Altering Consciousness

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: Univer-
sity 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., & Pissa-
galli, D. (2001). EEG brain sources of EEG gamma frequency during volition-
ally 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). Long-
term 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.
Rätsch, C. (2005). The encyclopedia of psychoactive plants: Ethnopharmacology and
its applications (Trans. J. Baker). Rochester, VT: Park Street Press. (Originally
published 1998, Enzyklopädie 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.
A Paradigm for Understanding Altered Consciousness 41

Seligman, R., & Kirmayer, L. (2008). Dissociative experience and cultural neuro-
science: 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 sys-
tem 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 under-
standing 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 bib-
liography: 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. Con-
sciousness and Cognition 18, 977–988.
Vollenweider, F. (1998). Recent advances and concepts in the search for biologi-
cal 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.
This page intentionally left blank
PART I

Historical Perspectives
This page intentionally left blank
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 psychol-
ogy, 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 writ-
ing changes the situation, of course, but less dramatically than one would
wish. Texts from the Ancient Near East seldom focus on alterations of con-
sciousness, 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
46 Altering Consciousness

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 manipula-
tion 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. Lewis-
Williams (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 47

Figure 3.1 Portion of a panel in the cave Les Trois Frères, 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 identifica-
tion of the vortex leading to the spirit world with caves and subterranean
passages, these natural features were regarded as entrances into the world
48 Altering Consciousness

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 experien-
ces, 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 in-
stance, various patterns interpreted above as referring to entoptic phe-
nomena 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 indi-
cated transitions between different realms of the cosmos (Lewis-Williams
& Pearce, 2005, pp. 250–280).
In late prehistoric southern Levant, comparable experiences of its Chal-
colithic 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 discov-
ered 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, dis-
covered at Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels (Germany) and at Isturitz
(France), are dated to 35,000–30,000 before present. These are sophisti-
cated 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 49

Figure 3.2 Gavrinis, engraved stone. Drawing by Y. Sokolovskaya, after a photo by


the author.

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, & Münzel, 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 Neo-
lithic 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 con-
sciousness as early as in prehistory [see Fachner, this volume].
One of the best-known ways to alter consciousness is the use of psycho-
active plants. Hunters-gatherers of the Palaeolithic were familiar with lots
50 Altering Consciousness

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 psy-
chedelic properties could hardly remain unknown. Discoveries of opium
poppy capsules among objects accompanying the dead buried in Cueva
de los Murciélagos at Albuñol in southern Spain provided undisputable evi-
dence 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 third-
millennia 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 sugar-
rich 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 51

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 archaeo-
logical 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 distinc-
tion between sacred and secular emerged (Merlin, 2003, pp. 295–296;
Sherratt, 1997, pp. 405–407). In any case, there is no doubt that prehis-
toric humans manipulated their minds by use of psychoactive substances.
It is most probable that they also employed other techniques, such as sen-
sory deprivation, and it is likely that experiences induced by various meth-
ods 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 in-
stance, 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 cop-
per 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 peo-
ples 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 indispu-
table 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.
52 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
tained opium. Although references to opium in Egyptian medical texts men-
tion 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 sug-
gest (Emboden, 1978, 1979, p. 12; Merlin, 2003, pp. 305–306).
Numerous artifacts featuring incised opium capsules attest to the popu-
larity 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 dream-
visions, 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 53

although these methods seem to have played a minor role in these civiliza-
tions. 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 (Bottéro, 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 indi-
vidually. 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).
54 Altering Consciousness

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 whirl-
wind 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 rush-
ing, 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 55

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 feel-
ings 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 expe-
rience 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 com-
prises 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
“Merkabah literature,” Sholem, 1987, pp. 19–24.
9
This section of the paper is largely based on my book: Ustinova, 2009b.
56 Altering Consciousness

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 oracu-
lar 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 divina-
tion 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 sanctu-
ary. 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 discov-
eries 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 sanctua-
ries, the lifestyle of the mouthpiece of the god comprised seclusion,
purifications, fasting, and other austerities, and indeed the strain of pos-
session 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 57

that drinking from the sacred pool at Claros inspires wonderful oracles
but shortens the life of the drinker (Pliny, Natural History 2. 232; Iambli-
chus, 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 for-
tunate to have a unique account of an experience in such a sanctuary. Tropho-
nius, 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 prepa-
ration for the consultation took several days and included not only prelimi-
nary 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 per-
haps 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 (Bonne-
chere, 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).
58 Altering Consciousness

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 enti-
tled 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 com-
munication 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 surround-
ings, passage through darkness to translucent and pure light, flight over
a magnificent country, visual and auditory hallucinations, mixture of joy-
fulness and awe when he heard voices that explained to him the mystery
of metempsychosis, and the final gift of precognition that allowed the pre-
diction 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 59

and philosophical ideas. The variance in the kind of hallucinations experi-


enced 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 expe-
rienced by inquirers or personnel. However, we do know that entering
caves regularly occurs as a major requirement for a prophetic séance, 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 indi-
vidual 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 eye-
opening, 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 desig-
nating rites that focus on introduction of a novice into a group of those
who already possess exclusive knowledge (Burkert, 1987).
60 Altering Consciousness

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 expe-
rience, 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 per-
haps 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 mys-
tery 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
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity 61

pious people; he observes the crowd of people living at this very time unini-
tiated 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 accor-
dance 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 near-
death 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 per-
ceived 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 ini-
tiate’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 effi-
cacy 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
62 Altering Consciousness

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 63

Figure 3.5 Initiation scene. Fragment of a Roman terracotta relief. Drawing by


Y. Sokolovskaya, after Kerényi, 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: “Every-
thing 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 mor-
tals 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
64 Altering Consciousness

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 enam-
oured 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 exis-
tence, and only then is he able to reach the real divine postcarnate knowl-
edge (Cornford, 1952, p. 58; Morgan, 1990, pp. 55–79).
The Greeks knew several ways to liberate their souls from the con-
straints 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 concen-
tration 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.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity 65

The Roman Empire


Traditional Roman piety did not welcome manipulations of conscious-
ness, 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 con-
tact with the divinity, beyond the limits of space and time. An Isiac initia-
tion 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 thresh-


old, 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 descrip-
tions 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.
66 Altering Consciousness

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 tem-
ple, 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 excep-
tional 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
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity 67

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 Intel-
lect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intel-
lect 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 notewor-
thy 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 sub-
jected to rational analysis and expressed in conventional literary form.

Conclusions
Since the Stone Age, human beings have manipulated their conscious-
ness. There is little doubt that psychotropic plants were used in the Neo-
lithic 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.
68 Altering Consciousness

drawing on the heritage of the entire Mediterranean world—as well as on


the inherent human drive to attain extreme experiences by means of con-
sciousness alteration.

References
Assmann, J., & Bommas, M. (Eds.). (2002). Ägyptische mysterien? [Egyptian mys-
teries?] Münster: Fink (Wilhelm).
Aune, D. E. (1983). Prophecy in early Christianity and the ancient Mediterranean
world. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Bahn, P. G. (1998). The Cambridge illustrated history of prehistoric art. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Beazley, J. D. (1963). Attic red-figure vase-painters. Oxford: Claredon Press.
Beltran, A. (Ed.). (1999). The cave of Altamira. New York: H. N. Abrams.
Bonnechere, P. (2003). Trophonios de Lébadée. Leiden: Brill.
Bottéro, J. (1974). Symptômes, signes, écritures [Symptoms, signs, writings].
In J.-P. Vernant (Ed.), Divination et rationalité [Divination and rationality]
(pp. 70–197). Paris: Seoul.
Bowden, H. (2005). Classical Athens and the Delphic oracle. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Burkert, W. (1987). Ancient mystery cults. Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Burkert, W. (2005). Mantik in Griechenland [Divination in Greece]. In Thesaurus
Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum [Thesaurus of Ancient Cults and Rites] (Vol. 3,
pp. 1–51). Los Angeles: Getty.
Chadwick, N. K. (1942). Poetry and prophesy. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Chauvet, J.-M., Brunel Deschamps, E., & Hillaire, C. (1995). La grotte Chauvet
[The cave of Chauvet]. Paris: Seuil.
Clinton, K. (1992). Myth and cult: The iconography of Eleusinian mysteries. Stock-
holm: P. Astroms Forlag.
Clottes, J., & Lewis-Williams, D. (1996). The shamans of prehistory. Trance and
magic in the painted caves. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Cole, S. G. (2003). Landscapes of Dionysos and Elysian Fields. In M. B. Cosmo-
poulos (Ed.), Greek mysteries (pp. 193–217). London-New York: Routledge.
Compton, T. M. (2006). Victim of the muses: Poet as scapegoat, warrior and hero in
Greco-Roman and Indo-European myth and history. Washington, DC: Center
for Hellenic Studies.
Conard, N. J., Malina, M., & Münzel, S. C. (2009). New flutes document the ear-
liest musical tradition in southwestern Germany. Nature, 460, 737–740.
Cornford, F. M. (1952). Principium sapientiae. The origins of Greek philosophical
thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cosmopoulos, M. B. (Ed.). (2003). Greek mysteries. London-New York: Routledge.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity 69

D’Errico, F., Henshilwood, C., Lawson, G., Vanhaeren, M., Tillier, A.-M., Soressi,
M., & Julien, M. (2003). Archaeological evidence for the emergence of lan-
guage, symbolism, and music—An alternative multidisciplinary perspective.
Journal of World Prehistory, 17, 1–70.
Delatte, A. (1934). Les conceptions de l’enthousiasme chez les philosophes présocra-
tiques [Conceptions of enthusiasm in the pre-Socratic philosophers]. Paris:
Les Belles Lettres.
Dillon, J. (1992). Plotinus at work on Platonism. Greece and Rome, 39, 189–204.
Dodds, E. R. (1973). The Greeks and the irrational. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press.
Dunand, F. (2000). Isis mère des dieux [Isis the mother of gods]. Paris: Errance.
Durand, J.-M. (1997). Les prophéties des textes de Mari [Prophecy in Mari texts].
In J.-G. Heintz (Ed.), Oracles et prophéties dans l’antiquité [Oracles and proph-
ecy in Antiquity] (pp. 115–134). Paris: De Boccard.
Emboden, W. (1978). The sacred narcotic lily of the Nile: Nymphaea caerulea.
Economic Botany, 32, 395–407.
Emboden, W. (1979). Narcotic plants. New York: Collier Books.
Flower, M. A. (2008). The seer in ancient Greece. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Garfinkel, J. (2003). Dancing at the dawn of agriculture. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Gilead, I. (2002). Religio-magic behavior in the Chalcolothic period of Palestine.
In E. D. Oren & S. Ahituv (Eds.), Aharon Kempinski memorial volume. Studies in
archaeology and related disciplines (pp. 103–128). Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion Uni-
versity of the Negev Press.
Grabbe, L. L. (1995). Priests, prophets, diviners, sages. A socio-historical study of reli-
gious specialists in ancient Israel. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International.
Graf, F., & Johnston, S. I. (2007). Ritual texts for the afterlife. Orpheus and the Bac-
chic gold leaves. London-New York: Routledge.
Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.
Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 315–352). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Griffith, F. L., & Thompson, H. (1904). The demotic magical papyrus of London and
Leiden. London: H. Grevel.
Griffiths, J. G. (1975). Apuleius of Madauros. The Isis-Book. Leiden: Brill.
Griffiths, J. G. (1986). The great Egyptian cults of oecumenical spiritual signifi-
cance. In A. H. Armstrong (Ed.), Classical Mediterranean spirituality (pp. 39–65).
New York: Crossroad.
Haldar, A. (1945). Associations of cult prophets among the ancient Semites. Uppsala,
Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksells.
Harner, M. (1990). The way of the shaman. San Francisco: Harper.
Heintz, J.-G. (Ed.). (1997). Oracles et prophéties dans l’Antiquité [Oracles and
prophecy in Antiquity]. Paris: De Boccard.
70 Altering Consciousness

Huffmon, H. B. (2000). A company of prophets: Mari, Assyria, Israel. In M.


Nissinen (Ed.), Prophesy in its ancient Near Eastern context (p. 47–70). Atlanta,
GA: Society of Biblical Literature.
Jeanmaire, H. (1970). Dionysos. Histoire du culte de Bacchus [Dionysos. History of
the cult of Bacchus]. Paris: Payot.
Johnston, S. I. (2008). Ancient Greek divination. Oxford: Wiley & Blackwell.
Johnston, S. I., & Struck, P. T. (Eds.). (2005). Mantikê: Studies in ancient divina-
tion. Leiden: Brill.
Kapoor, L. D. (1995). Opium poppy—botany, chemistry, and pharmacology. New
York: Food Products Press.
Kerényi, C. (1976). Dionysos: Archetypal images of indestructible life. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Krikorian, A. D. (1975). Was the opium poppy and opium known in the Ancient
Near East? Journal of the History of Biology, 8, 95–114.
Kritikos, P. G., & Papadaki, S. P. (1967). The history of the poppy and of opium
and their expansion in antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean area. Bulletin on
Narcotics, 19(3, 4), 17–38; 5–10.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1965). Préhistoire de l’art occidentale [Prehistory of the
Western art]. Paris: Quadrige.
Lewis-Williams, D. (2002). The mind in the cave. London: Thames & Hudson.
Lewis-Williams, D., & Pearce, D. (2005). Inside the Neolithic mind. London:
Thames & Hudson.
Lorblanchet, M. (1995). Les grottes ornées de la préhistoire [Decorated prehistoric
caves]. Paris: Errance.
Mallon, A., Koeppel, R., & Neuville, R. (1934). Teleilat Ghassul I. Rome: Insitut
biblique pontifical.
Merkur, D. (1989). The visionary practices of Jewish Apocalyptists. Psychoanalytic
Study of Society, 14, 119–148.
Merlin, M. D. (2003). Archaeological evidence for the tradition of psychoactive
plant use in the Old World. Economic Botany, 57(3), 295–323.
Merrillees, R. S. (1962). Opium trade in the Bronze Age Levant. Antiquity, 36,
287–292.
Mithen, S. (2005). The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music, language, mind
and body. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Moody, R. A. (1976). Life after life: The investigation of a phenomenon—survival of
bodily death. New York: Bantam.
Morgan, M. L. (1990). Platonic piety. Philosophy and ritual in fourth-century Athens.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Murray, P. (1981). Poetic inspiration in early Greece. Journal of Hellenic Studies,
101, 87–100.
Nasrallah, L. (2003). An ecstasy of folly. Prophesy and authority in early Christianity.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nissinen, M. (Ed.). (2000). Prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context. Atlanta,
GA: Society of Biblical Literature.
Consciousness Alteration Practices in the West from Prehistory to Late Antiquity 71

Overholt, T. W. (1986). Prophecy in cross-cultural perspective. Atlanta, GA: Scholars


Press.
Parke, H. W. (1985). The oracles of Apollo in Asia Minor. London: Croom Helm.
Parke, H. W., & Wormell, D. E. W. (1956). The Delphic oracle. Oxford: Blackwell.
Price, S. (1999). Religions of the ancient Greeks. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Rist, J. M. (1977). Plotinus. The road to reality. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Robert, L. (1967). L’oracle de Claros [The oracle at Claros]. In C. Delvoye &
G. Roux (Eds.), La civilisation grecque [Greek civilization] (pp. 305–312).
Bruxelles: Renaissance du livre.
Rosenberger, V. (2001). Griechische Orakel. Eine Kulturgeschichte [The Greek
oracle. A cultural history]. Darmstadt: Theiss.
Rudenko, S. I. (1970). Frozen tombs of Siberia: The Pazyryk Burials of Iron-Age
Horsemen. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rudgley, R. (1993). The alchemy of culture. Intoxicants in society. London: British
Museum Press.
Ruspoli, M. (1986). Lascaux. Paris: Bordas.
Scarpi, P. (2002). Le religioni dei misteri [Mystery religions]. Milan: Arnoldo Mon-
dadori.
Schachter, A. (1981–1994). Cults of Boeotia. London: Institute of Classical Studies,
University of London.
Schuhl, M. P., & Hadot, P. (Eds.). (1971). Le Néoplatonisme [Neoplatonism].
Paris: CNRS.
Seaford, R. (2006). Dionysos. London-New York: Routledge.
Sherratt, A. (1997). Economy and society in prehistoric Europe. Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press.
Sholem, G. (1987). Origins of the kabbalah. Philadelphia: Jewish Publications Society.
Siegel, R. K., & Jarvik, M. E. (1975). Drug-induced hallucinations in animals and
man. In R. K. Siegel & L. J. West (Eds.), Hallucinations: Behavior, experience,
and theory (pp. 81–161). New York: Wiley.
Snell, B. (1960). The discovery of the mind. The Greek origins of the European
thought. New York: Harper.
Starr, C. G. (1968). Ideas of truth in early Greece. La Parola del passato, 23, 348–359.
Stuart, D. (2004). Dangerous garden. The quest for plants to change our lives.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tigerstedt, E. N. (1970). Furor poeticus: Poetic inspiration in Greek literature
before Democritus and Plato. Journal of the History of Ideas, 31(2), 163–178.
Ustinova, Y. (2002). “Either a daimon, or a hero, or perhaps a god”: Mythical res-
idents of subterranean chambers. Kernos, 15, 267–288.
Ustinova, Y. (2009a). Cave experience and ancient Greek oracles. Time and Mind,
2(3), 265–286.
Ustinova, Y. (2009b). Caves and the ancient Greek mind. Descending underground in
the search for ultimate truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
72 Altering Consciousness

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 rationalité [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 trans-
formed. 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 posses-
sion 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 condi-
tion 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 par-
ticipated 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 psycho-
logical 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,
74 Altering Consciousness

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 (Pócs,
1999; Pócs, 2005, with very detailed bibliography; but see also de Blécourt,
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 com-
municative 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 Cardeña,
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) par-
ticipated 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
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 75

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 tech-
niques were heretical. It is therefore not surprising that much of our knowl-
edge 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 over-
powering 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 pre-
Christian 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
76 Altering Consciousness

resulted from the control (whose exact nature was open to debate) of
demonic entities over the self. Although in cases of a unitive mystical expe-
rience 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 exor-
cists), 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 conscious-
ness 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 spec-
trum, 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 tech-
niques of discerning the differences between them, and then to processes
of legitimazing or delegitimazing of specific forms of ASC and the individ-
uals 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, corpo-
real experiences are perceived through the body and its real senses. An intel-
lectual unitive experience is the most reliable, while spiritual and corporeal
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 77

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 empha-
sized the Via negativa, the stripping away of all modes of thinking or under-
standing 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, uncommunica-
tive, 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 prac-
ticing 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 con-
templating 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
78 Altering Consciousness

(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 passion-
ate than men (Bynum, 1987). Their bodies, which had often been por-
trayed 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 pos-
sessed 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
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 79

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 natu-
ralist 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; Böcher, 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 pos-
sessed by demonic agents or was merely suffering from physical “organic”
affliction. It usually took a tacit understanding among the possessed indi-
vidual, 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
Cantimpré, 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 pen-
etrate 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 expand-
ing. In the growing body of literature on diabolic possession, more attention
was paid from the 15th century onward to its supernatural rather than sim-
ply physiological symptoms.
By the early 17th century, an official Roman Rite determined that the
knowledge of hidden secrets, together with additional supernatural
80 Altering Consciousness

symptoms, such as physical strength that exceeded the possessed person’s


age and gender, and the inability to tolerate the presence of Christian sym-
bols 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 diag-
nosis of possession. It is important to note, though, that popular under-
standing 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 unprec-
edented 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, includ-
ing 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 invol-
untary 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 pos-
sessed person and her immediate family, since they were the only ones
who could testify as to the precise circumstances of the first outburst of
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 81

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 theo-
logians 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 expe-
riences 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 con-
tinued 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, episte-
mological, 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 “wor-
thiness” 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.
82 Altering Consciousness

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, partici-
pate 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 multidi-
mensional process. By emphasizing the psychological rather than the
physical symptoms of diabolic possession, it changed its traditional con-
figuration; by associating its symptoms with the allegedly natural charac-
teristics 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 rep-
utation 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
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 83

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 prac-
titioners 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 parali-
turgical and magical techniques. Making the sign of the Cross over the pos-
sessed 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 “super-
stitious” 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 exor-
cismorum 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
84 Altering Consciousness

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 dia-
bolic possessions. Now, because of the growing morphological similarities
between the two forms of alteration of consciousness and the growing anxi-
ety concerning (mostly women’s) ecstatic forms of divine possession, exor-
cism 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 his-
torical 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 the-
ology 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 indi-
viduals, including women, to pursue new forms of religiosity and altera-
tion 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 philosophi-
cal 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.
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 85

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 expe-
riences 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.
Böcher, O. (1972). Christus exorcista: Dämonismus 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 & É. Pócs (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 medi-
eval 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.
86 Altering Consciousness

Caciola, N. (2003). Discerning spirits: Divine and demonic possession in the Middle
Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cardeña, E. (1996). “Just floating on the sky.” A comparison of shamanic and
hypnotic phenomenology. In R. Quekelbherge & D. Eigner (Eds.), 6th Jahr-
buch für Transkulturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie [6th yearbook of cross-
cultural medicine and psychotherapy] (pp. 367–380). Berlin: Verlag für Wis-
senschaft 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 reli-
gion 14 (pp. 12–19). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Blécourt, W. (2007). The return of the sabbat: Mental archaeologies, conjec-
tural histories or political mythologies? In J. Barry & O. Davies (Eds.), Witch-
craft 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 [Develop-
ments 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 supplica-
tions]. (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.
Spirit Possession and Other Alterations of Consciousness 87

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 società 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 etnolo-
gia Europea [European ethnology meetings] (pp. 49–81). Naples: Edizioni sci-
entifiche italiane.
Pócs, É. (1999). Between the living and the dead: A perspective on witches and seers in
the early modern age. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Pócs, É. (2005). Possession phenomena, possession-systems, some east-central
European examples. In G. Klaniczay & É. Pócs (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 dämonische 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 discern-
ment in early modern Catholicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sweetman, R. (1999). Thomas of Cantimpré: 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, efficacis-
simorum, 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 & É. Pócs (Eds.), Communicating with the spirits (pp. 215–233).
Budapest: Central European University Press.
Van Dam, W. C. (1970). Dämonen und Besessene: Die Dämonen 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’âme, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles [The inquiries of the
soul, 16th–18th centuries]. Paris: Champion.
Vita sanctae genovefae [The life of saint Genevieve]. Acta Sanctorum, January 3.
88 Altering Consciousness

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 santità tra medioevo ed età 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
(pp. 321–345). Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaftern.
Behringer, W. (1994). Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the phantoms
of the night. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Dämonishce besessenheit [Demonic possession]. (2005). Bielefeld: Akademie der
Diözese 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 Cardeña and Carlos S. Alvarado

Introduction
The alterations of consciousness, discernment strategies, and explanatory
models described in the previous chapter [see Sluhovsky, this volume] con-
tinued 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 per-
haps unparalleled since the Al-Andaluz period during the Arabic reign of
the Iberic peninsula in which rational and empirical concerns were harmo-
niously 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 corre-
sponding 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.
90 Altering Consciousness

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 convul-
sionaries 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 soufflé), the prophecy (la prophétie), and the gift
(le don)—besides physical manifestations including shivering, twitching
convulsively, leaping, foaming in the mouth, speaking in tongues (i.e., glosso-
lalia), 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 move-
ments are analyzed in detail by Garrett (1987) and the experiences and behav-
iors 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 (Cardeña, van Duijl,
Weiner, & Terhune, 2009; Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Cardeña,
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 explan-
ations 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 psychothera-
peutic strategies in his exorcisms (Peter, 2005), his explanation invoked
the metaphysical battle between good and evil. In contrast, Mesmer
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 91

developed in his medical dissertation a theory that purported to explain


possession and exorcism phenomena in terms of his conception of an all-
pervading 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 uni-
verse. Furthermore, the astronomical underpinnings of Mesmer’s theory,
although suspect nowadays, were in agreement with a nonreligious explan-
ation 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 disturb-
ance 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 heal-
ings 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 trav-
eled 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 extraor-
dinary singing,” and by the imitation of dogs, cats, and chickens (Paulet,
1784, p. 22). In addition, some individuals cried, laughed, had gastric dis-
turbances, 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 man-
ifestations 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
92 Altering Consciousness

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), prob-
ably mediated in part by an automatic emotional response, especially among
some suggestible individuals (Cardeña, Terhune, Lööf, & Buratti, 2009).
As Gauld (1992) observes, Mesmer would explicitly state what physi-
cal manifestations the person could expect, which besides less direct sug-
gestions probably had a strong effect on many individuals. Although it is
not possible to ascertain with accuracy the effectiveness of Mesmer’s treat-
ments, he seemed to have had success in relief of pain and general unease
and perhaps even in healing refractory medical cases. The two Royal
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 93

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 stu-
dent of Mesmer, A. M. J. Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825),
would introduce changes in practice that are the true predecessors of con-
temporary hypnotic practice. When he treated the peasant Victor Race for
a lung condition, Puységur noticed that he did not go into a mesmeric cri-
sis (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 asso-
ciation between mesmeric phenomena and sleep would be retained in the
later term hypnos, which refers to the Greek god of sleep.
Puységur 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 Puységur, 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 commu-
nications, heightened memory, alterations in the senses, apparent insen-
sibility 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 communi-
cation 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 with-
out 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).
94 Altering Consciousness

Many, but not all, of these observations might be explained by uncon-


scious sensory leakage, inferences, and similar ordinary mechanisms, but
carefully described cases such as Pierre Janet’s (1859–1947) patient
Mme. B (the pseudonym of Léonie 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 con-
nection between psi phenomena and hypnosis that “[A]n attitude of sus-
pended 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 (Cardeña, 2010).
In the early 19th century, Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge (1782–1844)
categorized six levels or degrees of the phenomenology of magnetic som-
nambulism: 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 hyp-
nosis” and disembodied and imaginal experiences during “middle hypnosis”
(Cardeña, 2005; Cardeña, Lehmann, Jönsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007).
Other authors recorded interesting somnambulistic manifestations in
their mesmeric participants. In France, the mesmerist Joseph Philippe
François Deleuze (1753–1835) wrote in his book Histoire Critique du Mag-
nétisme 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 indi-
cation 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 nor-
mal self to work in the theatre. Answering a question during her somnam-
bulistic state about why she wanted to be in the theatre, she said, “It is not
me, it is her . . . she is mad” (p. 177).
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 95

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 recol-
lected distinctly, however, a paragraph that he had recently read in the
normal state, and felt satisfied that that was the last one read. Again hypno-
tized, 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 control-


ling for implicit and explicit suggestions, amnesia is not a typical out-
come 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)
96 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
dition 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 sus-
tain at an even level than the alert one, owing to a stronger and more con-
tinuous 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 somnambu-


lism, 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
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 97

. . . 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 pro-
tracted 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 experien-
ces 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 phe-
nomena 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 & Cardeña, 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 fragmenta-
tion), exposure to trauma, and hypnotic capacity (for a review, see Cardeña & Gleaves,
2007), although this relationship seems to occur only in a subgroup of highly hypnotizable
individuals (Terhune, Cardeña, & Lindgren, 2011).
98 Altering Consciousness

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 pro-
posed 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, presum-
ably under the influence of discarnate spirits, talked at length about the
other world and about a variety of moral, philosophical, social, and sci-
entific 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 Spiritu-
alism (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
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 99

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 spi-
rit (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
100 Altering Consciousness

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 communi-


cations 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 corre-
sponding 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 con-
scious 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) with-
draws 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,
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 101

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 auto-
matic 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; Cardeña, 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’ con-
trols were disinhibited and undersocialized as compared with the medi-
ums’ 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 sub-
conscious 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, show-
ing 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
102 Altering Consciousness

of many classes of phenomena which occur in sane subjects without enter-


ing 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, speak-
ing; 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 hypno-
sis, 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 prepos-
session 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 fore-
most 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 hal-
lucinations 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 Sur-
vival 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)
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 103

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 real-
ity 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 cer-


tain persons, at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts
which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and share the objects of knowl-
edge 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
104 Altering Consciousness

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 Reli-
gious Experience provided the most cited justification for the study of alter-
ations 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 dissocia-
tion, 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 Théodore Flournoy (1854–
1920) gave a detailed case analysis of the medium Hélène Smith (1861–
1929, pseudonym of Catherine Elise Müller) 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).
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 105

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 frag-
mentarily, telepathic impressions. (Sidgwick, 1915, p. 330)

In Italy, psychiatrist Enrico Morselli (1852–1929) argued that medi-


ums 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 ele-
ments. 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 René Sudre (1880–1968) discussed


what he referred to as prosopopesis or the nonconscious tendency to imper-
sonate, as seen in mediumship, as well as in hypnosis, possession and
cases of double and multiple personality (Sudre, 1926). Relatedly, a dra-
matic aspect of spirit possession in other cultures was discussed by
Métraux (1955).
Besides them, many other eminent psychological clinicians and
researchers of the time from various countries took a keen interest in disso-
ciation, 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 & Cardeña, 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).
106 Altering Consciousness

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 Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934),
1906 Nobel prizewinner and a towering figure for his work on the neuron,
did research on hypnosis, mediumship, and parapsychological phenom-
ena, 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 influ-
enced 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” typi-
cally includes questioning the absolute value of rationality and the “given-
ness” of reality as presented by the senses, an idea present in Plato and
recurrent throughout history and in various places such as American tran-
scendentalism. 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.
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 107

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 contempo-
rary psychology. Nonetheless, any history of psychology will show that con-
sideration 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 deca-
des [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.

References
Ahern, G. (2009). Sun at midnight. Cambridge: James Clarke.
Aleman, A., & Larøi, F. (2008). Hallucinations: The science of idiosyncratic percep-
tion. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Alvarado, C. S. (1991). Iatrogenesis and dissociation: A historical note. Dissocia-
tion, 4, 36–38.
Alvarado, C. S. (1998). ESP and altered states of consciousness: An overview of
conceptual and research trends. Journal of Parapsychology, 62, 27–63.
Alvarado, C. S. (2004). On the centenary of Frederic W. H. Myers’s Human per-
sonality and its survival of bodily death. Journal of Parapsychology, 68, 3–43.
Alvarado, C. S. (2008). Aspects of the history of parapsychology: II. Charles
Richet’s (1850–1935) work in psychical research. Parapsychology Foundation
Lyceum. Retrieved June 28, 2010, from http://www.pflyceum.org/447.html.
Alvarado, C. S. (2009). Late nineteenth and early twentieth century discussions of
animal magnetism. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis,
57, 366–381.
Alvarado, C. S., Machado, F. R., Zangari, W., & Zingrone, N. L. (2007). Perspec-
tivas históricas da influência da mediunidade na construção de idéias psicológ-
icas e psiquiátricas [Historical perspectives on the influence of mediumship in
the construction of psychological and psychiatric ideas]. Revista de Psiquiatria
Clı́nica, 34(supp. 1), 42–53.
Bakan, D., Merkur, D., & Weiss, D. S. (2009). Maimonides’ cure of souls: Medieval
precursor of psychoanalysis. Albany: State University of New York Press.
108 Altering Consciousness

Barrett, D. (1990). Deep trance subjects: A schema of two distinct subgroups. In


R. G. Kunzendorf (Ed.), Mental imagery (pp. 101–112). New York: Plenum.
Belo, J. (1960). Trance in Bali. New York: Columbia University Press.
Berry, C. (1876). Experiences in spiritualism (2nd ed.). London: James Burns.
Bertrand, A. (1826). Du magnétisme animal en France [On animal magnetism in
France]. Paris: J. B. Baillière.
Billot, J. P. (1839). Recherches psychologiques sur la cause des phenomenes extraordin-
aires observes chez les modernes voyans: Improprement dits somnambules magneti-
ques, ou correspondance sur le magneétisme vital, entre un solitaire et M. Deleuze
[Psychological investigations on the cause of the extraordinary phenomena
observed in modern seers. Improperly called magnetic somnambules or the
correspondence on the vital magnetism between a solitary and M. Deleuze].
Paris: Albanel et Martin.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1955). Studies on hysteria. The standard edition of the com-
plete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth Press.
(Originally published 1895)
Cahagnet, L. A. (1851). The celestial telegraph, or, secrets of the life to come, revealed
through magnetism (1st American ed.). New York: J. S. Redfield.
Cardeña, E. (1989). The varieties of possession experience. Association for the
Anthropological Study of Consciousness Quarterly, 5(2–3), 1–17.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cardeña, E. (2010). Anomalous experiences during deep hypnosis. In M. Smith
(Ed.), Anomalous experiences: Essays from parapsychological and psychological
perspectives (pp. 93–107). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cardeña, E., & Gleaves, D. (2007). Dissociative disorders. In M. Hersen, S. M.
Turner, & D. Beidel (Eds.), Adult psychopathology & diagnosis (5th ed.,
pp. 473–503). New York: Wiley.
Cardeña, E., Lehmann, D., Jönsson, P., Terhune, D., & Faber, P. (2007). The
neurophenomenology of hypnosis. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention
of the Parapsychological Association, 17–30.
Cardeña, E., Terhune, D., Lööf, A., & Buratti, S. (2009). Hypnotic experience is
related to emotional contagion. International Journal of Clinical and Experimen-
tal Hypnosis, 57, 33–46.
Cardeña, E., Van Duijl, M. Weiner, L., & Terhune, D. (2009). Possession/trance
phenomena. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O’Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative
disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 171–181). New York: Routledge.
Cavendish, R. (1967). The black arts. New York: Putnam.
Chastenet de Puységur, A. M. J. (1820). Du magnétisme animal consideré dans ses
rapports avec diverses branches [On animal magnetism considered in its rela-
tionship with various branches] (2nd ed.). Paris: J. G. Dentu.
Chaves, J. F. (1997). Hypnosis in dentistry: Historical overview and critical
appraisal. Hypnosis International Monographs, 3, 5–23.
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 109

Cooper, R. (1867). Spiritual experiences, including seven months with the brothers
Davenport. London: L. Heywood.
Crabtree, A. (1988). Animal magnetism, early hypnotism, and psychical research
1766–1925: An annotated bibliography. New York: Kraus International.
Crabtree, A. (1993). From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic sleep and the roots of psycho-
logical healing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Darnton, R. (1968). Mesmerism and the end of enlightenment in France. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
De Certeau, M. (2000). The possession at Loudun (Michael B. Smith, Trans.)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, J. P. F. (1813). Histoire critique du magnétisme animal [Critical history of
animal magnetism]. Paris: Mame.
De Morgan, S. (1863). From matter to spirit. London: Longman, Green, Longman,
Roberts & Green.
Dingwall, E. J. (Ed.). (1967–1968). Abnormal hypnotic phenomena: A survey of
nineteenth-century case, (4 Vols.). London: J. & A. Churchill.
Dodds, E. R. (1973). The Greeks and the irrational. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press. (Original work published 1951).
Edelman, N. (1995). Voyantes, guérisseusses et visionnaires en France 1785–1914
[Seers, healers and visionaries in France 1785–1914]. Paris: Albin Michel.
Edmonds, J. W., & Dexter, G. T. (1853). Spiritualism (Vol. 1). New York: Partridge &
Brittan.
Edmonds, J. W., & Dexter, G. T. (1855). Spiritualism (Vol. 2). New York: Partridge &
Brittan.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1991). The story of Helene Preiswek: A critical study with new
documents. History of Psychiatry, 2, 41–52.
Esdaile, J. (1846). Mesmerism in India, and its practical application in surgery and
medicine. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.
Fairfield, F. G. (1875). Ten years with spiritual mediums. New York: D. Appleton.
Flournoy, T. (1900). From India to the planet Mars: A study of a case of somnambu-
lism. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Freud, S. (1923). A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis. The standard edition of
the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19). London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1936). A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis. The standard edition of
the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 22). London: Hogarth
Press.
Frigerio, A. (1989). Levels of possession awareness in Afro-Brazilian religions. Asso-
ciation for the Anthropological Study of Consciousness Quarterly, 5(2–3), 5–11.
Garrett, C. (1987). Spirit possession and popular religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Gauld, A. (1968). The founders of psychical research. New York: Schocken.
Gauld, A. (1992). A history of hypnotism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
110 Altering Consciousness

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: Trübner.
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. Proceed-
ings 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 expérimentale sur
les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine [The psychological automatism: An
experimental psychology essay on the inferior forms of human activity]. Paris:
Félix Alcan.
Janet, P. (1926). De l’angoisse a l’extase. Études sur les croyances et les sentiments
[From anxiety to ecstasy. Studies on beliefs and feelings]. Paris: Félix 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 phe-
nomena. 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.
Altered Consciousness: Age of Enlightenment Through Mid–20th Century 111

Laurence, J. R., & Perry, C. (1988). Hypnosis, will & memory: A psycho-legal
history. New York: Guilford.
Mesmer, F. A. (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal [Memories
on the discovery of animal magnetism]. Geneve: P. Fr. Didot le jeune, Librairie
Imprimeur de monsieur.
Métraux, 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., & Cardeña, 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 spiritualis-
tic 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 Psychi-
cal Research, 3, 1–63.
Myers, F. W. H. (1889). Automatic writing.—IV.—The daemon of Socrates. Pro-
ceedings 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 char-
acteristics 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 medi-
cine. Hamilton, NY: Edmonston.
Paulet, J. J. (1784). Mesmer justifié [Mesmer justified] (new ed.). Constance,
Switzerland: n.p.
Peter, B. (2005). Gassner’s exorcism—not Mesmer’s magnetism—is the real pre-
decessor 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.
112 Altering Consciousness

Sage, M. (1904). Mrs. Piper and the Society for Psychical Research. New York:
Scott-Thaw.
Sala, J., Cardeña, E., Holgado, M. C., Añez, C., Pérez, P., Periñán, R., & Capafons,
A. (2008). The contributions of Ramón 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 planète 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., & Cardeña, E. (1991). Disintegrated experience: The dissociative
disorders revisited. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 366–378.
Sudre, R. (1926). Introduction à la métapsychique 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., Cardeña, 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., Cardeña, 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 frame-
works. 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 sci-
entific 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 exem-
plifying 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
114 Altering Consciousness

in some cases. For example, The Psychology of Consciousness by G. William


Farthing, published in 1992, serves as a textbook for studying conscious-
ness and discusses ASC including dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, and
psychedelic drug use. In addition, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Exam-
ining the Scientific Evidence (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000), published
by the American Psychological Association (APA), dedicates entire chap-
ters to ASC including hallucinations, synesthesia, and lucid dreaming as
well as out-of-body, near-death, anomalous healing, and mystical experi-
ences. Also published by the APA, Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical
Analysis for Social Scientists by Imants Barušs (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 theoreti-
cal 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 phenome-
non 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, phe-
nomenological, 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, psy-
chiatrist Arnold Ludwig (1966) positively characterized the term altered
states of consciousness as
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 115

any mental state(s), induced by various physiological, psychological, or


pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjec-
tively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the individ-
ual) 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 associ-


ated 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 reju-
venation. 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 bur-
geoning 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 psychophysi-
ology 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, stu-
dents, certain personality types, groups with parapsychological interests).
116 Altering Consciousness

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 experi-
ence 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 infor-
mation (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 “fuzzi-
ness,” though some efforts at operationalization, including the Linton-
Langs 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.
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 117

In response to terminological problems regarding states of conscious-


ness, in 1975, Tart proposed the term discrete states of consciousness
(d-SoC), which he defined as a “unique configuration or system of psycho-
logical structures or subsystems . . . that maintains its integrity or identity
as a recognizable system in spite of variations in input from the environ-
ment 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 aware-
ness) that renders a system of psychological structures (content) recogniz-
able 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 “state-
specific 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 inva-
lidates 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 “state-
specific perceptions and logics” (1998, p. 103). For example, ordinary
waking states operate according to the logic of binary and linear segmenta-
tion (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
118 Altering Consciousness

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 psy-
chedelic drugs, sometimes in tandem (e.g., Lilly, 1972).

Psychedelics
Although it can be argued that the use of psychedelic—or “mind-
expanding”—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 demon-
strated marijuana’s effects on attention, memory, perception of time, crea-
tivity, 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 pro-
duced 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 situa-
tions 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 rec-
ognized 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
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 119

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 Hand-
book of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Holden, Grey-
son, & 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 encour-
age 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 religious-
type 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, alter-
ations of consciousness occur in which the possessing entities may speak
and engage in other observable behaviors (Bourguignon, 1976). Posses-
sion 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 physio-
logical parameters of dreaming were more thoroughly investigated during
the 1960s and ’70s. For example, Dement (1976) noted specific brain
120 Altering Consciousness

wave and respiration patterns during REM periods. The content of dreams
was also studied during this decade. Snyder (1970) and colleagues col-
lected 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 con-
sisted 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 puta-
tive psychokinesis).
Psychiatrist Roland Fischer (1971, 1972, 1976) also formulated a car-
tography 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 con-
structivist perspectives. This involved philosophers of religion addressing
the epistemology of ASC, especially mystical experiences. The key ele-
ments of the constructivist position were distilled in Steven Katz’s influen-
tial edited volume Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978). The
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 121

contributors argued that mystical experience is conceptually and linguisti-


cally “shaped” by the experient’s religious beliefs and values. Katz’s posi-
tion may be termed incomplete constructivism because he suggested that
not all aspects of mystical experience are shaped by one’s religious tradi-
tion. 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 acknowl-
edged 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 conscious-
ness event (PCE) as a waking state of consciousness devoid of phenomeno-
logical 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 con-
tent” (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 delin-
eated 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
122 Altering Consciousness

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 typ-
ically 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 sha-
mans 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 ques-
tionnaire that quantifies 12 major dimensions (altered state, rationality,
positive affect, arousal, self-awareness, memory, inward absorbed atten-
tion, 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 foun-
dations of earlier consciousness researchers in operationalizing three dif-
ferent states of consciousness (SoCs): identity or I-states that exhibit
nonsignificantly different “phenomenological intensity and pattern param-
eters” (Pekala, 1991, p. 231); discrete or D-states that exhibit a signifi-
cantly 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 Ques-
tionnaire (Abnormer Psychischer Zustand refers to altered or abnormal men-
tal states) to quantify ASC induced by hallucinogens and other stimuli
(e.g., sensory deprivation; Dittrich, von Arx, & Staub, 1985). This 66-item
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 123

questionnaire consists of three subscales: (1) oceanic boundlessness mea-


sures a positive state that may include depersonalization, ethereal happi-
ness, 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, halluci-
nations, and synesthetic phenomena. The validity of these three dimen-
sions 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 con-
sciousness 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 phe-
nomenology 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 con-
sciously 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 simultane-
ously 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
124 Altering Consciousness

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 dif-
ferent 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 Neg-
ative 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, Mackin-
non, Howard, Zeegers, & Copolov, 1995), which rates several characteris-
tics 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 sur-
vey 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 operation-
alized psychophenomenological approaches to experimentally investigate
whether an altered state effect had been induced and to empirically differ-
entiate 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 125

(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 tradi-
tional backgrounds (including Siddha and Kundalini yoga, Transcendental
Meditation, and Buddhism) and of different levels of experience. The core-
searchers’ 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 phenom-
ena 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 exper-
imental evidence suggesting that shamanic drumming facilitates theta activ-
ity 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 phenomenologi-
cal effects (e.g., self-awareness and absorption) compared to baseline. How-
ever, 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 prelimi-
nary data regarding a 126-item quantitative instrument (i.e., the Halluci-
nogen 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,
126 Altering Consciousness

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 phenom-
enological 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 schizo-
phrenic 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, Cardeña, et al.,
2004) and practitioners of ritual spirit possession (Cardeña, 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 inves-
tigate the phenomenological diversity of ASCs and experimental method-
ologies 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 127

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 psychol-
ogy” (Farthing, 1992, p. 334) and a number of standardized instruments
were developed in decades prior to 2000 to quantitatively measure hyp-
notic 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 Cardeña (2005) addressed various
methodological limitations of research from previous decades on the experi-
ence 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 physi-
cal activity on subjective experience, and integrating valid quantitative tech-
niques with qualitative methods such as experience sampling and
interview. (p. 41)

Cardeña 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 differ-
ent 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
128 Altering Consciousness

mediums’ experiences during mediumship readings. For example, Rock


and Beischel (2008) quantitatively analyzed seven credentialed nonde-
nominational, mental mediums’ experiences using the Phenomenology of
Consciousness Inventory (Pekala & Kumar, 1986), and found that read-
ings 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 reconceptu-
alizing 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 suc-
cumbing to stasis. Perhaps reconceptualizing altering consciousness as alter-
ing 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 mar-
ginal, 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 neuro-
phenomenological 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 (Cardeña, Lehmann, Jönsson,
Terhune, & Faber, 2007).
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 129

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 sig-
nificant changes in the definitions, methods, and theories that investiga-
tors 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 investi-
gating these and other similar phenomena using open minds, sound meth-
ods, and varied approaches.

References
Almond, P. (1982). Mystical experience and religious doctrine. New York: Mouton.
Alvarado, C. (2000). Out-of-body experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn,
& S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific
evidence (pp. 183–218). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Anand, B., Chhina, G., & Singh, B. (1961). Some aspects of electroencephalo-
graphic studies in yogis. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology,
13, 452–456.
Aserinsky, E., & Kleitman, N. (1953). Regularly occurring periods of eye motility
and concomitant phenomena during sleep. Science, 118, 273–274.
Banquet, J. P. (1973). Spectral analysis of the EEG in meditation. Electroencepha-
lography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 35, 143–151.
Barušs, I. (2003). Alterations of consciousness: An empirical analysis for social scien-
tists. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Bentall, R. P. (2000). Hallucinatory experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 85–120). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Blanke, O., & Arzy, S. (2005). The out-of-body experience: Disturbed self-
processing at the temporo-parietal junction. The Neuroscientist, 11, 16–24.
Bourguignon, E. (1976). Possession. San Francisco: Chandler & Sharp.
130 Altering Consciousness

Brown, D. P., & Engler, J. (1986). The stages of mindfulness meditation: A valida-
tion study. Part II: Discussion. In K. Wilber, J. Engler, & P. Brown (Eds.),
Transformations of consciousness: Conventional and contemplative perspectives on
development (pp. 191–218). Boston: Shambhala/New Science Library.
Brown, D., Forte, M., Rich, P., & Epstein, G. (1982–1983). Phenomenological
differences among self-hypnosis, mindfulness meditation, and imaging. Imagi-
nation, Cognition and Personality, 2, 291–309.
Bucknell, R. (1989). Buddhist meditation and mystical experience. Paper presented
to the 14th Annual Conference of the Australian Association for the Study of
Religions, Perth, Australia.
Cami, J., Farre, M., Mas, M., Roset, P. N., Poudevida, S., Mas, A., San, L., & de la
Torre, R. (2000). Human pharmacology of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphet-
amine (“ecstasy”): Psychomotor performance and subjective effects. Journal of
Clinical Psychopharmacology, 20, 455–466.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cardeña, E., Lehmann, D., Jönsson, P., Terhune, D., & Faber, P. (2007). The
neurophenomenology of hypnosis. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention
of the Parapsychological Association, 17–30.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (2000). Varieties of anomalous experience:
Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Cardeña, E., Van Duijl, M., Weiner, L., & Terhune, D. (2009). Possession/trance
phenomena. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O’Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative
disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 171–181). New York: Routledge.
Carter, D. M., Mackinnon, A., Howard, S., Zeegers, T., & Copolov, D. (1995).
The development and reliability of the Mental Health Research Institute
Unusual Perceptions Schedule (MUPS): An instrument to record auditory hal-
lucinatory experiences. Schizophrenia Research, 16, 157–165.
Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1980). Scales for rating psychotic and
psychotic-like experiences as continua. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 6, 477–489.
Clopton, P. L., Janowsky, D. S., Clopton, J. M., Judd, L. L., & Huey, L. (1979).
Marijuana and the perception of affect. Psychopharmacology, 61, 203–206.
Dement, W. C. (1976). Some must watch while some must sleep. New York: Norton.
Dittrich, A. (1998). The standardized psychometric assessment of altered states of
consciousness (ASCs) in humans. Pharmacopsychiatry, 31, 80–84.
Dittrich, A., von Arx, S., & Staub, S. (1985). International study on altered states
of consciousness (ISASC). German Journal of Psychology, 9, 319–339.
Farthing, G. W. (1992). The psychology of consciousness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Fischer, R. (1971). A cartography of ecstatic and meditative states. Science, 174,
897–904.
Fischer, R. (1972). On creative, psychotic and ecstatic states. In J. White (Ed.),
The highest state of consciousness (pp. 175–194). New York: Anchor Books.
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 131

Fischer, R. (1976). Transformations of consciousness II. The perception-


meditation continuum. Confinia Psychiatrica, 19, 1–23.
Forman, R. (1986). Pure consciousness events and mysticism. Sophia, 25, 49–58.
Friedman, H. (1983). The Self-Expansiveness Level Form: A conceptualization
and measurement of a transpersonal construct. Journal of Transpersonal Psy-
chology, 15, 37–50.
Gackenbach, J. (1988). The psychological content of lucid versus nonlucid
dreams. In J. Gackenbach & S. LaBerge (Eds.), Conscious mind, sleeping brain:
Perspectives on lucid dreaming (pp. 181–220). New York: Plenum.
Gifford-May, D., & Thompson, N. (1994). “Deep states” of meditation: Phenom-
enological reports of experience. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 26, 117–138.
Gimello, R. (1978). Mysticism and meditation. In S. T. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and
philosophical analysis (pp. 170–99). London: Sheldon Press.
Gouzoulis-Mayfrank, E., Heekeren, K., Neukirch, A., Stoll, M., Stock, C., Obradovic,
M., & Kovar, K.-A. (2005). Psychological effects of (s)-ketamine and
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT): A double-blind, cross-over study in healthy vol-
unteers. Pharmacopsychiatry, 38, 301–311.
Griffiths, R., Richards, W., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occa-
sion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Grof, S. (1975). Realms of the human unconscious: Observations from LSD research.
New York: Viking Press.
Holden, J. M., Greyson, B., & James, D. (2009). The handbook of near-death expe-
riences: Thirty years of investigation. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Houston, J. (1969). Phenomenology of the psychedelic experience. In R. E. Hicks
& P. J. Fink (Eds.), Psychedelic drugs. New York: Grune & Stratton.
Houston, J., & Masters, R. E. L. (1972). The experimental induction of religious-
type experiences. In J. White (Ed.), The highest state of consciousness (pp. 303–
321). New York: Anchor Books.
Katz, S. T. (1978). Language, epistemology, and mysticism. In S. T. Katz (Ed.),
Mysticism and philosophical analysis (pp. 22–74). London: Sheldon Press.
Kay, S. R., Opler, L. A., & Fiszbein, A. (1988). Reliability and validity of the Pos-
itive and Negative Syndrome Scale for schizophrenics. Psychiatry Research, 23,
276–286.
Kessler, G., & Prigge, N. (1982). Is mystical experience everywhere the same?
Sophia, 21, 39–55.
Krippner, S. (1972). Altered states of consciousness. In J. White (Ed.), The highest
state of consciousness (pp. 1–5). Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
LaBerge, S., & Dement, W. C. (1982). Voluntary control of respiration during
REM sleep. Sleep Research, 11, 107.
LaBerge, S., Greenleaf, W., & Kedzierski, B. (1983). Physiological responses to
dreamed sexual activity during lucid REM sleep. Psychophysiology, 20, 454–455.
132 Altering Consciousness

LaBerge, S., Nagel, L., Dement, W., & Zarcone, V. (1981). Lucid dreaming veri-
fied by volitional communication during REM sleep. Perceptual and Motor
Skills, 52, 727–732.
Launay, G., & Slade, P. D. (1981). The measurement of hallucinatory predisposi-
tion in male and female prisoners. Personality and Individual Differences, 2,
221–234.
Leary, T. (1967–1968). The religious experience: Its production and interpreta-
tion. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 1, 3–23.
Lilly, J. C. (1972). The center of the cyclone: An autobiography of inner space. New
York: Julian Press.
Linton, H. B., & Langs, R. J. (1962). Subjective reactions to lysergic acid diethyla-
mide (LSD-25). Archives of General Psychiatry, 6, 352–368.
Lofwall, M. R., Griffiths, R. R., & Mintzer, M. Z. (2006). Cognitive and subjective
acute dose effects of intramuscular ketamine in healthy adults. Experimental
and Clinical Psychopharmacology, 14, 439–449.
Ludwig, A. M. (1966). Altered states of consciousness. Archives of General
Psychiatry, 15, 225–234.
Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regula-
tion and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 163–169.
Lutz, A., & Thompson, E. (2003), Neurophenomenology: Integrating subjective
experience and brain dynamics in the neuroscience of consciousness. Journal
of Consciousness Studies, 10, 31–52.
Mathes, E. W., Zevon, M. A., Roter, P. M., & Joerger, S. M. (1982). Peak experi-
ence tendencies: Scale development and theory testing. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology, 22, 92–108.
Maupin, E. W. (1965). Individual differences in response to a Zen meditation
exercise. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29, 139–145.
Maxfield, M. (1994). The journey of the drum. ReVision, 16, 157–163.
Milstein, S. L., MacCannell, K. L., Karr, G., & Clark, S. (1974). Marijuana-
produced changes in cutaneous sensitivity and affect: Users and non-users.
Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior, 2, 367–374.
Moody, R. A. (1975). Life after life. New York: Bantam Books.
Moskowitz, H., Sharma, S., & Shapero, M. (1972). A comparison of the effects of
marihuana and alcohol on visual functions. In M. F. Lewis (Ed.), Current
research in marihuana (pp. 129–150). New York: Academic.
Noll, R. (1983). Shamanism and schizophrenia: A state specific approach to the
“schizophrenia metaphor” of shamanic states. American Ethnologist, 10, 443–459.
Noll, R. (1985). Mental imagery cultivation as a cultural phenomenon: The role of
visions in shamanism. Current Anthropology, 26, 443–461.
Oakley, D. A., & Halligan, P. W. (2009). Hypnotic suggestion and cognitive
neuroscience. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 264–270.
Osis, K. (1979). Insider’s view of the OBE: A questionnaire study. In W. G. Roll (Ed.),
Research in parapsychology 1978 (pp. 50–52). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 133

Osis, K., Bokert, E., & Carlson, M. L. (1973). Dimensions of the meditative expe-
rience. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 5, 109–135.
Pekala, R. J. (1985). A psychophenomenological approach to mapping and dia-
gramming states of consciousness. Journal of Religion and Psychical Research,
8, 199–214.
Pekala, R. J. (1987). The phenomenology of meditation. In M. A. West (Ed.), The
psychology of meditation (pp. 59–80). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Pekala, R. J. (1991). Quantifying consciousness: An empirical approach. New York:
Plenum.
Pekala, R. J., & Kumar, V. K. (1986). The differential organization of the struc-
tures of consciousness during hypnosis and a baseline condition. Journal of
Mind and Behavior, 7, 515–540.
Pekala, R. J., & Levine, R. L. (1982–1983). Quantifying states of consciousness
via an empirical-phenomenological approach. Imagination, Cognition, and Per-
sonality: The Scientific Study of Consciousness, 2, 51–71.
Pekala, R. J., Wenger, C. F., & Levine, R. L. (1985). Individual differences in phe-
nomenological experience: States of consciousness as a function of absorption.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 125–132.
Peters, L. (1989). Shamanism: Phenomenology of a spiritual discipline. Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, 21, 115–137.
Peters, L., & Price-Williams, D. (1980). Towards an experiential analysis of sha-
manism. American Ethnologist, 1, 397–418.
Riba, J., Valle, M., Urbano, G., Yritia, M., Morte, A., & Barbanoj, M. J. (2003).
Human pharmacology of ayahuasca: Subjective and cardiovascular effects,
monoamine metabolite excretion, and pharmacokinetics. Journal of Pharmacol-
ogy and Experimental Therapeutics, 306, 73–83.
Rock, A. J., & Beischel, J. (2008). Quantitative analysis of mediums’ conscious
experiences during a discarnate reading versus a control task: A pilot study.
Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 8, 157–179.
Rock, A. J., & Krippner, S. (2007a). Does the concept of “altered states of con-
sciousness” rest on a mistake? International Journal of Transpersonal Studies,
26, 33–40.
Rock, A. J., & Krippner, S. (2007b). Shamanism and the confusion of conscious-
ness with phenomenological content. North American Journal of Psychology, 9,
485–500.
Rock, A. J., & Krippner, S. (2011). States of consciousness redefined as patterns
of phenomenal properties: An experimental application. In D. Cvetkovic
& I. Cosic (Eds.), States of consciousness: Experimental insights into meditation,
waking, sleep and dreams. New York: Springer.
Romme, M., & Escher, A. (1989). Hearing voices. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 15, 209–216.
Roth, W. T., Tinklenberg, J., & Kopell, B. (1976). Subjective benefits and draw-
backs of marihuana and alcohol. In S. Cohen & R. C. Stillman (Eds.), The
therapeutic potential of marihuana (pp. 255–269). New York: Plenum.
134 Altering Consciousness

Saklani, A. (1988). Preliminary tests for psi-ability in shamans of Garhwal Hima-


laya. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 55, 60–70.
Shor, R. E., & Orne, E. C. (1962). Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility,
Form A. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Siegel, R. K. (1977). Hallucinations. Scientific American, 237, 132–140.
Siegel, R. K., & Jarvick, M. E. (1975). Drug-induced hallucinations in animals
and man. In R. K. Siegel & L. J. West (Eds.), Hallucinations: Behavior, experience
and theory (pp. 81–162). New York: Wiley.
Silverman, J. (1969). Shamans and acute schizophrenia. American Anthropologist,
69, 21–31.
Slade, P. D., & Bentall, R. P. (1988). Sensory deception: A scientific analysis of hallu-
cination. London: Croom-Helm.
Snyder, F. (1970). The phenomenology of dreaming. In L. Madow & L. H. Snow
(Eds.), The psychodynamic implications of the physiological studies on dreams
(pp. 124–151). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Snyder, T. J., & Gackenbach, J. (1988). Individual differences associated with
lucid dreaming. In J. Gackenbach & S. LaBerge (Eds.), Conscious mind, sleeping
brain: Perspectives on lucid dreaming (pp. 221–260). New York: Plenum.
Spanos, N. P., Radtke, H. L., Hodgins, D. C., Bertrand, L. D., Stam, H.,
& Dubreuil, D. L. (1983). The Carleton University Responsiveness to Sugges-
tion Scale: Stability, reliability, and relationships with expectancies and hypnotic
experiences. Psychological Reports, 53, 555–563.
Strassman, R. J., Qualls, C. R., Uhlenhuth, E. H., & Kellner, R. (1994). Dose-
response study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans: II Subjective effects
and preliminary results of a new rating scale. Archives of General Psychiatry,
51, 98–108.
Tart, C. T. (1967). A second psychophysiological study of out-of-the body expe-
riences in a gifted subject. International Journal of Parapsychology, 9, 251–258.
Tart, C. T. (1969a). Introduction. In C. T. Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness
(pp. 1–7). New York: Wiley.
Tart, C. T. (1969b). A further psychophysiological study of out-of-the body expe-
riences in a gifted subject. Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association, 6,
43–44.
Tart, C. T. (1971). On being stoned: A psychological study of marijuana intoxication.
Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books.
Tart, C. T. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science,
176, 1203–1210.
Tart, C. T. (1975). States of consciousness. New York: Dutton.
Tart, C. T. (1979). Measuring the depth of an altered state of consciousness, with
particular reference to self-report scales of hypnotic depth. In E. Fromm &
R. E. Shor (Eds.), Hypnosis: Developments in research and new perspectives
(2nd ed., pp. 567–601). New York: Aldine.
Reconceptualizing the Field of Altered Consciousness 135

Tart, C. T. (1998). Investigating altered states of consciousness on their own


terms: A proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences. Journal of the
Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science, 50, 103–116.
Tholey, P. (1988). A model for lucidity training as a means of self-healing and
psychological growth. In J. Gackenbach & S. LaBerge (Eds.), Conscious mind,
sleeping brain (pp. 263–287). New York: Plenum.
Van de Castle, R. (1971). The psychology of dreaming. New York: General Learning
Press.
Van Ommeren, M., Komproe, I., Cardeña, 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.
Walsh, R. (1978). Initial meditative experiences: Part II. Journal of Transpersonal
Psychology, 10, 1–28.
Walsh, R. (1993). Phenomenological mapping and comparisons of shamanic,
Buddhist, yogic, and schizophrenic experiences. Journal of the American
Academy of Religion, LXI, 739–769.
Weitzenhoffer, A. M., & Hilgard, E. R. (1959). Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility
Scale, Forms A and B. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Weitzenhoffer, A. M., & Hilgard, E. R. (1962). Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility
Scale, Form C. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Wilber, K. (1974). The spectrum of consciousness. Main Currents, 31, 3155–3159.
Wilber, K. (1975). Psychologia perennis: The spectrum of consciousness. Journal
of Transpersonal Psychology, 7, 105–132.
Wilber, K. (1977). The spectrum of consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
Winget, C., Kramer, M., & Whitman, R. (1972). Dreams and demography.
Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, 17, 203–208.
Winkelman, M. (1992). Shamans, priests, and witches: A cross-cultural study of
magico-religious practitioners. Tempe: Anthropological Research Papers,
Arizona State University.
Woodside, L. N., Kumar, V. K., & Pekala, R. J. (1997). Monotonous percussion
drumming and trance postures: A controlled evaluation of phenomenological
effects. Anthropology of Consciousness, 8, 69–87.
Wright, P. A. (1991). The use of the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory as a
measure of an altered state of consciousness during “shamanic journeying” accompa-
nied by live drumming. Unpublished manuscript. Saybrook University.
This page intentionally left blank
PART II

Cultural Perspectives
This page intentionally left blank
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 pro-
duce 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 proce-
dures, ancillary physical procedures, and behavioral procedures combin-
ing 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 tradi-
tions 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 nega-
tively, and major traditions often discourage it as damaging to aspects of the nervous sys-
tem responsible for the growth of higher states of consciousness.
140 Altering Consciousness

This chapter will describe important experiences, states of conscious-


ness, 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 funda-
mental inner nature, independent of all the contents of ordinary aware-
ness, 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 nat-
urally 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 natu-
ral 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 percep-
tion 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 141

all these terms. All the traditions naturally link the terms used to their pre-
ferred metaphysical beliefs. But all questions of metaphysics and terminol-
ogy 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 incompre-
hensible 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 spontane-
ously 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, includ-
ing, 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 corre-
lation between reported instances of the experience and cessation of per-
ceptible 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 tradi-
tional 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
142 Altering Consciousness

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 experien-
ces 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 corre-
sponding 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 com-
pletely empty, is necessarily devoid of any interesting content. The sim-
plest 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 exam-
ples 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 con-
sciousness.
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 143

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 cre-
ation 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
144 Altering Consciousness

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 percep-
tion, bliss, universal love, and unity with all of nature, are all quite
remarkable. They are precisely the kinds of things that often attract peo-
ple, 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 experien-
ces 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 fea-
ture 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 expe-
riences, external as well as internal.

The first thing that we can note is that all of these higher states of con-
sciousness are defined in terms of the relation of pure consciousness/emp-
tiness 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 expe-
riential 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 145

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 experi-
ential 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 disap-
peared, 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 medita-
tion 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 “over-
shadowing” experiences of daily life. This may at first occur episodically.
But in time, according to tradition after tradition, it can become experi-
enced 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 perma-
nently 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
146 Altering Consciousness

screen but direct expressions of its nature. But for our purposes it will be
enough simply to recognize the typical descriptions of the phenomeno-
logical nature of HS3, where everything, internal and external alike, is per-
ceived 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 experi-
enced 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 repre-
sents 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 agree-
ment 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 some-
what, 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 experien-
ces 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 con-
sciousness/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 experien-
ces. 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 147

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 con-
sciousness/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 conven-
tions 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 under-
stood 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, experi-
enced 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
148 Altering Consciousness

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 iden-
tifies the passages as describing the type of experiences characteristic of
the state HS2 above, where pure consciousness/emptiness—here identi-
fied 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 devel-
opment 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 sec-
tion 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 expres-
sions 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 “no-
self,” 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 149

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 seem-
ingly 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 dif-
ferent 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 experi-
ence, 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,
150 Altering Consciousness

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 begin-
ning 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 151

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 gen-
eral. 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 rec-
ognized experientially in the preverbal thinking of the kinds ordinary peo-
ple 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 phenom-
enal objects have disappeared, while one nevertheless remains awake. It is
in effect experience of the “space” of mind—the phenomenological mani-
fold. 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).
152 Altering Consciousness

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 straightfor-
ward: The pure consciousness/emptiness of the deepest level, L6, of the
levels map is the same pure consciousness/emptiness central to the defini-
tions 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 enliv-
ened 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 cre-
ation into myself and cherish it with the greatest love. Often I would have
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness 153

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 con-
ceptual 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 experi-


ences 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 for-
ward into Unknowingness and back into an infinity of Silence where indi-
vidual consciousness cannot even enter. (Zen)

The above examples should be enough to give an idea, at least in prin-


ciple, 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
154 Altering Consciousness

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 mir-
ror, 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 con-
trol 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 intellec-
tual and perceptual discrimination should be expected to enhance activ-
ity 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, real-
world results of the kinds they are supposed to explain have been reported
for millennia. Claims of such results have also become the subject of scien-
tific research.
X. The idea that higher states of consciousness might produce such
practical results, however, seems counter to the widespread understand-
ing 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
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness 155

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 Bhagavad-
Gita’s injunction that we should become established in pure conscious-
ness as the basis for performing action (yogastah kurukarmani). The fact
that this injunction is given to a warrior on the battlefield, where perfor-
mance 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, calligra-
phy, 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 “self-
actualization.”
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 proto-
cols are designed to examine.11 And in recent decades, thousands of stud-
ies 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 con-
tain 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 evi-
dence for such abilities, however, we need not deal with them here.
156 Altering Consciousness

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 follow-
ing 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 circu-
lation of energy throughout channels of the body. Transcendental Medita-
tion 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 dispas-
sionate 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 men-
tal faculties they use (attention, feeling, reasoning, visualization, memory,
bodily awareness, and so forth), the way these faculties are used (effort-
lessly, 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 dif-
ferent 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, contem-
porary 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.
Eastern Approaches to Altered States of Consciousness 157

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 cul-
ture, people nevertheless have often tended to lump all meditation proce-
dures 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 proce-
dures 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 subpopu-
lations 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 com-
mentary. 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.
158 Altering Consciousness

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. Psychophysiol-
ogy, 34, 39–46.
CHAPTER 8

Shamanism and the Alteration


of Consciousness
Michael Winkelman

The concept of shamanism provides an important paradigmatic frame-


work for understanding altered consciousness. Shamanism is a primordial
form of transcendence of ordinary consciousness that was found cross-
culturally, 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 alter-
ation 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 enter-
prises provided many accounts of what came to be recognized as shaman-
ism (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 dis-
persed. These early reports characterized shamanistic practices as repre-
senting 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 politi-
cal, economic, and societal reforms had radically transformed Siberian
160 Altering Consciousness

shamanistic practices. Integration of reports on practices among Finnish,


Hungarian, Turkish, and Native American cultures contributed to a grow-
ing recognition of core commonalities in spiritual healing practices world-
wide.
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 sha-
manism as involving “techniques of ecstasy” used for interaction with the
spirit world on behalf of the community, particularly for healing, protec-
tion, 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, disas-
ter, 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 assis-
tance 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,
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 161

reassembling each person with new capacities and powers that empow-
ered 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 sha-
mans 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 eth-
nological 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 estab-
lished 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 varia-
bles 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 deter-
mination 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 simi-
lar form of religious practitioner in foraging societies worldwide (labeled
as shamans), as well as identifying different types of magico-religious
162 Altering Consciousness

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 Ameri-
cas). This empirically derived group of shamans shares more characteris-
tics in common amongst themselves than they do with other magico-
religious practitioners. The empirical similarity shared by these practi-
tioners 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 characteris-
tics. This includes not only their personal features but their social charac-
teristics 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 practi-
tioners such as priests (Winkelman, 1992).
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 163

Shamanistic Healers
In addition to the shamans, other types of religious practitioners
(shaman/healers, mediums, and many healers) also shared the core char-
acteristic of shamanism suggested by Eliade (1964), namely altering con-
sciousness 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 practi-
tioners who have a central concern with ritual procedures for altering con-
sciousness. Shamanistic healers also share other central characteristics:
spiritual interpretations of therapeutic processes; the utilization of spirit
entities as projective mechanisms for representing the unconscious; sym-
bolic and ritual restoration of social relations; and removal of illness attrib-
uted 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 neces-
sary 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
164 Altering Consciousness

activities to alter consciousness and induce shamanic experiences reflect


elicitation of innate responses. These include the evolved capacities of hyp-
notic susceptibility, abilities for processing exogenous neurotransmitter
analogues in psychedelics, and behaviors of music and dance, which con-
tributed 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 aware-
ness, and similar phenomena, which are generally given spiritual interpre-
tations (McClenon, 2002). Hypnotizability and increased suggestibility
also facilitate the placebo effect, providing a basis for miraculous cures
that enhance faith and survival.
Cardeña (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. Cardeña and Krippner (2010) note
many parallels between shamanic and hypnotic phenomena, including:
fantasy-prone and dissociative characteristics; family tendencies in sus-
ceptibility 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 abil-
ity. In bypassing ordinary self-related cognitive and self operations,
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 165

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 pro-
posed 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 neurotransmitter-
like 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 environ-
mental 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 precur-
sor (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 chimpan-
zee 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 reup-
take inhibitors. The serotonergic agents, typified in psilocybin-containing
mushrooms found worldwide, produce profound alterations of con-
sciousness normally interpreted as involving the soul and the supernatu-
ral. 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
166 Altering Consciousness

capacities directly related to shamanism because the features of psychedelic-


induced 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 con-


sciousness with shamanistic activities points to their intrinsic relationships
involving the innate properties of our neurotransmission systems and
altered consciousness. Spiritual traditions worldwide consider these exog-
enous sources of neurotransmitter substances to be the origin of deities
and the reason for their spiritual and consciousness-transforming prac-
tices. 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 phe-
nomenological similarities of drug (psilocybin) and natural mystical expe-
riences illustrated by Griffiths and co-workers’ (2006) double-masked
study tell us that there are common substrates in the brain and neuro-
transmitters that underlie experiences of altered consciousness, irrespec-
tive of their origins or interpretations.
Understanding the relationships among natural and drug-induced alter-
ations of consciousness requires an evolutionary perspective that reveals
endogenous mechanisms reflecting ancient evolutionary adaptations. These
adaptations enhanced our ability to utilize exogenous sources of neurotrans-
mitter substances and to more fully exploit the advantages of altered con-
sciousness 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
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 167

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 imita-
tion 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 behav-
ior 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 sero-
tonin 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 co-
ordination 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
168 Altering Consciousness

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 emo-
tional 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 dynam-
ics, and emotional expressions involve the same behaviors found in affili-
ative and submissive ritualizations of other primates and in the diverse
forms of human expressive culture that expand the mother–infant com-
municative dynamics to enhance bonding of larger social groups. Music
enhances adaptation through more effective devices for group co-
ordination and formation of stronger emotional bonds among the mem-
bers of a group.
Music and its effects on emotions provide an intrinsic reward for en-
gaging 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 hor-
monal 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 co-
ordination and a common sense of intentionality. The pulse that underlies
rhythm creates an inclusive sense of meaning that expands our conscious-
ness and connectedness with others. Music enhanced social coordination
by expanding exchange of information across diverse modalities (behav-
ior, 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 sev-
eral cognitive capacities at once, relying on the integration and control of
biological, psychological, social and physical systems; it gives the opportu-
nity 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 impor-
tant 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
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 169

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 sys-
tem rooted in primate vocalization systems and their social functions. Music
induces physiological effects through activity in the amygdala and hippo-
campus of the paleomammalian brain, activating emotional processing cen-
ters (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 sys-
tem 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 infor-
mation 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
170 Altering Consciousness

carried to the point of exhaustion and collapse, they produce a condition


of parasympathetic dominance. Shamans undergoing training and prepa-
ration 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, par-
ticularly, 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 dis-
charges 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, Introduc-
tion 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, dis-
sociation, paranoia, and megalomania (Fessler, 2002). Fasting induces in the
body a hypoglycemic state that can cause seizures and increases susceptibil-
ity 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 adap-
tive reduction of serotonin activity, which promotes increased risk-taking
and impulsivity. Food deprivation produces depersonalization experiences
as well [see Cardeña, 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 cer-
emonies, 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
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 171

of consciousness (Davidson, 1980). Sexual activity requires a simultane-


ous increase in the activity of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous systems. When a peak of sexual excitation is achieved, the sympa-
thetic system collapses, exhausted, and the parasympathetic state becomes
dominant. Shamanic practices induce similar patterns of excitation to col-
lapse, 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 mecha-
nisms, stimulating the release of endogenous opioids (Appenzeller, 1987).
Dietrich and McDaniel (2004) integrated a range of research on how exer-
cise stimulates the release of the endocannabinoids, the marijuana-like neu-
rotransmitters 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 contrib-
ute 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 en-
gaging 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
172 Altering Consciousness

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, reflect-
ing a greater awareness of information-processing capacities of the uncon-
scious 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, review-
ing 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 cru-
cial 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). Laugh-
lin, 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 experien-
ces. 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.
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 173

The soul journey involves the capacity to take perspectives of others, man-
ifested in seeing one’s own body as it would appear from another’s per-
spective. 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 junc-
tion (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 under-
lie 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 inter-
ference 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 exec-
utive and ego PFC, these experiences are always visual experiences, illustrat-
ing 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 imag-
ined visual field that is also disconnected from actual body perception. The
loss of this integration of information regarding balance and motor experi-
ence 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 ves-
tibular system functions from the extensive dancing and drumming
because excessive repetitive activities can overwhelm the ability of the ves-
tibular system to manage input about movement. Functional areas of the
TPJ can be overloaded by the excessive stimulation, a habituation typical
174 Altering Consciousness

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 experi-
ence 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 repre-
sentation of reality and has the attentional, experiential, kinesthetic qual-
ities 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 modulariza-
tion that allows the information-processing systems to differentially distrib-
ute functions to different self-modules. For instance, when physical trauma
cuts off somatosensory input, a separate sense of self can play the role of inte-
grating 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 in-
dependent 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 self-
awareness and self-modeling that moves beyond the primitive bodily pro-
cesses and transcends the present moment to both experience the past and
predict our future. Arzy, Molnar-Szakacs, and Blanke (2008) illustrated
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 175

that this capacity for mental time travel primarily evolved for anticipating
future events, reflecting selection for mental processing of future predic-
tions 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 represen-
tation. Shamanic ritual activities lead to a separation of body and self-
perspectives 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 physio-
logical 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 pro-
cesses of the lower brain systems and integrating them into the frontal cor-
tex. 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 con-
sciousness, 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 prac-
tices and experiences as involving something delusory, even pathological.
The rationalist metaphysic sought to discount the practices, explicitly
176 Altering Consciousness

contrasting their irrationality with the rationality of science. The method-


ologies were etic, using the outsider’s point of view, and generally
“emetic,” rejecting altogether the validity of the shamanic worldview. Con-
sequently, the methodologies employed were descriptive and at best sec-
ond hand, describing the experiences of the “other,” but without sharing
their experiences as a fundamental part of the research approach. The val-
ues assumed in this etic approach were those of materialist science,
rejecting the validity of the alternative view of the world exposed by sha-
manism. 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 diver-
sity 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 shaman-
ism, instead preferring glosses of foreign concepts and the Western spiri-
tual 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 “neurophenome-
nological,” based in an explicit effort to relate biological processes to phe-
nomenological 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 ontologi-
cal reality. The neurophenomenological approach requires plural method-
ologies, 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 experi-
ences 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.
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 177

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 cul-
ture (e.g., see Berman, 2008a, 2008b). The shamanic paradigm also pro-
vides 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 sha-
manic paradigm a compelling framework for the interpretations of altered
consciousness as well.

References
Appenzeller, O. (1987). The autonomic nervous system and fatigue. Functional
Neurology, 2, 473–485.
Arzy, S., Molnar-Szakacs, I., & Blanke, O. (2008). Self in time: Imagined self-
location influences neural activity related to mental time travel. Journal of
Neuroscience, 28, 6502–6507.
Bachner-Melman, R., Dina, C., Zohar, A., Constantini, N., Lerer, E., Hoch, S., &
Ebstein, R. (2005). AVPR1a and SLC6A4 gene polymorphisms are associated
with creative dance performance. PLoS Genetics, 1(3), e42.
Berman, M. (2008a). The shamanic themes in Armenian folktales. Newcastle, UK:
Cambridge Scholars.
Berman, M. (2008b). The shamanic themes in Chechen folktales. Newcastle, UK:
Cambridge Scholars.
Blanke, O., & Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experiences, heautoscopy, and
autoscopic hallucination brain research. Brain Research Reviews, 50(1), 184–
199.
Blanke, O., Mohr, C., Michel, C., Pascual-Leone, A., Brugger, P., & Seeck, M.
(2005). Linking out-of-body experience and self processing to mental own
body imagery at the temporoparietal junction. Journal of Neuroscience, 25,
550–557.
Brereton, D. (2000). Dreaming, adaptation, and consciousness: The social map-
ping hypothesis. Ethos, 28, 379–409.
Cardeña, E. (1996). “Just floating on the sky.” A comparison of shamanic and
hypnotic phenomenology. In R. Quekelbherge & D. Eigner (Eds.),
6th Jahrbuch für Transkulturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie [6th Yearbook of
cross-cultural medicine and psychotherapy] (pp. 367–380). Berlin, Germany:
Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung.
Cardeña, E., & Krippner, S. (2010). The cultural context of hypnosis. In S. J.
Lynn, J. W. Rhue, & I. Kirsch (Eds.), Handbook of clinical hypnosis (2nd ed.,
pp. 743–771). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Cross, I., & Morley, I. (2009). The evolution of music: Theories, definitions and the
nature of the evidence. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Communicative
178 Altering Consciousness

musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship (pp. 61–81). Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Crowe, B. (2004). Music and soul making toward a new theory of music therapy.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Davidson, J. (1980). The psychobiology of sexual experience. In J. Davidson &
R. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of consciousness (pp. 271–332). New
York: Plenum.
Dietrich, A., & McDaniel, W. (2004). Endocannabinoids and exercise. British
Journal of Sports Medicine, 38, 536–541.
Dissanayake, E. (2009). Root, leaf, blossom or bole: Concerning the origin and
adaptive function of musicality. In S. Malloch & C. Trevarthen (Eds.), Commu-
nicative musicality: Exploring the basis of human companionship (pp. 17–30).
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. New York: Pantheon
Books. (Original work published as Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaı̈ques
de l’extase, 1951)
Fessler, D. (2002). Starvation, serotonin, and symbolism: A psychobiocultural
perspective on stigmata. Mind and Society, 3, 81–96.
Freeman, W. (1995). Societies of brains. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Freeman, W. (2000a). A neurobiological role of music in social bonding. In N.
Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music (pp. 411–424).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freeman, W. (2000b). How brains make up their minds. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Gackenbach, J., & LaBerge, S. (Eds.). (1988). Conscious mind, sleeping brain: New
perspectives on lucid dreaming. New York: Plenum.
Graham, R. (1990). Physiological psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can
occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial, sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Halifax, J. (1979). Shamanic voices. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Harner, M. (1982). The way of the shaman. New York: Bantam Books.
Hultkrantz, A. (1978). Ecological and phenomenological aspects of shamanism. In
V. Dioszegi & M. Hoppal (Eds.), Shamanism in Siberia (pp. 27–58). Budapest,
Hungary: Akademiai Kiado.
Hunt, H. (1995). On the nature of consciousness. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Laughlin, C., McManus, J., & d’Aquili, E. (1992). Brain, symbol, and experience: Toward
a neurophenomenology of consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lynn, C. D. (2005). Adaptive and maladaptive dissociation: An epidemiological
and anthropological comparison and proposition for an expanded dissociation
model. Anthropology of Consciousness, 16(2), 16–50.
MacLean, P. (1990). The triune brain in evolution. New York: Plenum.
Shamanism and the Alteration of Consciousness 179

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 com-
panionship (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). Characteriza-
tion of ligand binding properties of the 5-HT1D receptors cloned from chim-
panzee, 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, chimpan-
zees, 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 cis-
regulation 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 com-
munication 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., Kübler,
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). Accel-
erated evolution of the pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide pre-
cursor gene during human origin. Genetics, 170, 801–806.
Winkelman, M. (1990). Shamans and other “magico-religious healers”: A cross-
cultural study of their origins, nature, and social transformation. Ethos, 18,
308–352.
180 Altering Consciousness

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 Archaeo-
logical 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 develop-
ing infants take shape in interactions with other people, notably the main
caretaker in the early months [see Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardeña,
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 tempo-
rary 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 com-
monly 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 con-
structive, 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 monopha-
sic 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 con-
sumption 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.
182 Altering Consciousness

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, ani-
mals, 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 co-
operation 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 “anti-
biological.”
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 (Lévi-Strauss, 1949/1969).
The clan you belong to is regarded as your “kin”: Every member in your
Altered Consciousness in Society 183

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” (in-
laws) 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 gener-
osity and respect, but the covert intent is self-promotion and the humilia-
tion, 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, ulti-
mately, 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 relation-
ships, 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 atti-
tudes. 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
184 Altering Consciousness

have personal names, are believed to have human-like minds and emo-
tions, 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 “perspecti-
vism” (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 white-
lipped peccaries (animals that humans eat). Conversely, white-lipped pec-
caries 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 ver-
sus reality: All these conflicting perceptions are realities. All beings live in
a multitude of parallel universes, playing a different role in each, deter-
mined 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 rela-
tionships 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 rela-
tions 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 peren-
nial 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 ani-
mal 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 hap-
pen. 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.
Altered Consciousness in Society 185

In sum, I have so far suggested that the emergence of large-scale co-


operation 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 cul-
turally 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 per-
ceptions 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 vis-
itors, 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 wom-
an’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 arti-
ficial 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 per-
formances, commonly involving song, dance, pantomime, and the
186 Altering Consciousness

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 gener-
ally 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 impli-
cates 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 transforma-
tions. 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 per-
spectivism (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 val-
uation of work over play—and even generates new ones of its own: nota-
bly 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 (Cardeña, Terhune, Lööf, & Buratti, 2009).
Altered Consciousness in Society 187

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 con-
tinuous with our REM sleep cycle, REM being the sleep phase when
dreaming is most continuous (Brown, 1991, p. 95). In humans, the day-
dream cycle has become adapted to serve a social function. It coincides
with the so-called “chat cycle” that occurs during free-flowing human con-
versation. At 90-minute intervals, human conversation becomes particu-
larly absorbing, spontaneous, and enjoyable. The same phenomenon
occurs in other forms of free-flowing human co-action and is character-
ized 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 day-
dream 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 her-
itage. 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-and-
between world that van Gennep called “liminal” (from Latin limen, mean-
ing “margin”). In the liminal phase of life crisis rites, the normative social
order is usually suspended. During initiation, for example, all signs of
188 Altering Consciousness

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 can-
nibalism, 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 anti-
structural 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 struc-
tural role play of everyday life and the anti-structural role play of ritual or
recreational activity. Furthermore, conflicts created by the inevitable con-
tradictions 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 sys-
tem, 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 rit-
ual phases. Sleep, for example, is bracketed by hypnagogic and hypno-
pompic 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 affor-
dances of the society and culture into which they have been born.
Altered Consciousness in Society 189

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 pre-
tending 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, disso-
ciation, and suggestibility in the service of large-scale cooperation [see
Cardeña & 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 com-
pensation 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
190 Altering Consciousness

dependent on external supports for self-esteem such as wealth, praise,


power, status, or fame. Although spiritual experiences are culturally varia-
ble, 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 com-
plexity. 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 remem-
bered afterward, in which the experient encounters supernatural entities
or explores the natural or supernatural world, often with a view to achiev-
ing 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 autono-
mous. 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 cen-
tralized government.
Altered Consciousness in Society 191

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 hus-
band is then forced to hire exorcists and host a very expensive public exor-
cism, 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 special-
ized practitioners [see Winkelman, this volume].
The inverse relationship between the incidence and richness of spiri-
tual experience and the complexity and inequity of social structure is con-
sistent with Turner’s theory of anti-structure. Conceivably, we may be
having spiritual experiences all the time, but some kind of imposed struc-
ture excludes this from everyday consciousness.

Social Change, Social Movements, and Charismatic Leadership


Victor Turner (1982) observed that, just as art imitates life, so life imi-
tates 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 cul-
ture emerges [see St John, this volume].
Psychological theories of creativity also implicate disorderly, nonra-
tional, or playful processes: divergent thought, thinking outside the box,
conceptual blending, humor, daydreaming, REM sleep, and so on. Otto
192 Altering Consciousness

Rank (1932/1989, p. 368) described creativity as an “assumptions break-


ing 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 non-
rational 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, Kekulé 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 mem-
bers, 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’ non-
Islamic 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 pres-
ence 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 descend-
ents 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
Altered Consciousness in Society 193

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 sig-
nals 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 pro-
miscuously 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 rec-
ognition, 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
194 Altering Consciousness

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, happi-
ness, and love.
As the Ghost Dance spread widely across the American West, some
interpretations acquired a more militant character, notably with the intro-
duction of the Ghost Shirts. These garments, often decorated with birds,
turtles, stars, and other spiritually important motifs, were believed to ren-
der the wearer bulletproof. Despite the peaceful nature of Jack Wilson’s
original message, the “crazy” dancing spread alarm among U.S. author-
ities, 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 spir-
itually 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, origi-
nated 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 mean-
ing, 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.” Émile
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 indi-
vidual 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/
Altered Consciousness in Society 195

1965, pp. 240–241). The experience of the sacred, in Durkheim’s view, is


the sense of transcendent liberation resulting from surrendering the ego-
istic biological self to a larger collective reality.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that there are exceptional indi-
viduals 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 var-
iable. It can be the case that the leader has exceptional energy, determina-
tion, 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 cha-
risma refers to anything real or, perhaps, to a multiplicity of disparate phe-
nomena. 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 seek-
ing 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” phe-
nomenon, and Marx’s “opium of the people,” clearly implicate anti-
structural 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 altera-
tions of consciousness, is a core prerequisite for human social and cultural
functioning. While discussing long-term changes in consciousness, how-
ever, I did not speculate about the kind of consciousness we might have
196 Altering Consciousness

if not changed by culture. The fact that so many ASC are experienced as
numinous, noetic, and spiritual is particularly intriguing. Did human reli-
giousness 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 sug-
gests 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
(Barušs, 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 follow-
ing 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 sug-
gested 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 cre-
ated 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 cul-
ture.” 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 extern-
alised and fixed in structure.” Ritually induced communitas is a spontane-
ous phenomenon, not something scripted into the traditional formalities
of ritual. The suspension of societas enables people to experience some-
thing for themselves, not something they have acquired from their ances-
tors 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
Altered Consciousness in Society 197

precultural such as a primordial “herd instinct.” In the several cultures


that Turner examined, he found that what is universally valued in sponta-
neous communitas is honesty, openness, humility, equality, mutual for-
giveness, 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 mysti-
cism. Turner notes the universalizing tendency of communitas and the
cross-cultural appeal of spiritual teachings such as “goodwill to all human-
kind.” He expressly equates communitas with the sense of union, with
nature, humankind, God, the cosmos, and so forth, which occurs in mys-
ticism 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 exclu-
sively 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 rou-
tines, 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. Reflec-
tivity 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,
198 Altering Consciousness

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 blow-
eth 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 Ravin-
dra (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 primor-
dial 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 selfless-
ness 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, irre-
ducible to psychopharmacology.

References
Anonymous (Maddox, Sir J.). (1981). A book for burning? Nature, 293(5830),
245–246.
Apter, M. J. (2008). Reversal theory: Victor Turner and the experience of ritual. In
C. Whitehead (Ed.), The origin of consciousness in the social world (pp. 184–
203). Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Barušs, I. (2008). Beliefs about consciousness and reality: Clarification of the con-
fusion concerning consciousness. In C. Whitehead (Ed.), The origin of con-
sciousness in the social world (pp. 277–292). Exeter: Imprint Academic.
Bates, L. A., Lee, P. C., Njiraini, S., Poole, J. H., Sayialel, K., Sayialel, S., Moss, C.
J., & Byrne, R. W. (2008). Do elephants show empathy? In C. Whitehead
Altered Consciousness in Society 199

(Ed.), The origin of consciousness in the social world (pp. 204–225). Exeter:
Imprint Academic.
Bateson, G. (1955). A theory of play and fantasy. Psychiatric Research Reports, 1,
13–23.
Biesele, M. (1993). Women like meat: The folklore and foraging ideology of the Kala-
hari Ju/’hoan. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Witwatersrand University Press/
Indiana University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. R. Nice (Trans.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1972)
Bourguignon, E. (1973). Religion, altered states of consciousness, and social change.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Brown, D. (1970). Bury my heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian history of the Ameri-
can West. London: Pan.
Brown, P. (1991). The hypnotic brain: Hypnotherapy and social communication. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Burridge, K. (1960). Mambu: A Melanesian millennium. London: Methuen.
Burridge, K. (1979). Someone, no one: An essay on individuality. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
Cardeña, E., Terhune, D., Lööf, A., & Buratti, S. (2009). Hypnotic experience is
related to emotional contagion. International Journal of Clinical and Experimen-
tal Hypnosis, 57, 33–46.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1974). Flow: Studies of enjoyment. Chicago: University of
Chicago PHS Grant Report.
Durkheim, E. (1965). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free
Press. (Original work published 1912)
Erdal, D., & Whiten, A. (1994). On human egalitarianism: An evolutionary prod-
uct of Machiavellian status escalation? Current Anthropology, 35(2), 175–178.
Furst, P. T. (1977). The roots and continuities of shamanism. In A. T. Brodzky
(Ed.), Stones, bones and skin: Ritual and shamanic art (pp. 1–28). Toronto:
Society for Art Publication.
Gell, A. (1975). Metamorphosis of the cassowaries. London: Athlone Press.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I and II.
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16, 17–52.
Hardy, Sir A. (1979). The spiritual nature of man. Oxford: Clarendon.
Harrison, S. (1993). The masks of war. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Herdt, G. H. (1987). Guardians of the flutes: Idioms of masculinity. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Horrobin, D. F. (1998). Schizophrenia: The illness that made us human. Medical
Hypotheses; 50, 269–288.
Huizinga, J. (1955). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Boston:
Beacon Press.
James, W. (1985). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature.
London: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1902)
200 Altering Consciousness

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. Cam-
bridge 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 experi-
ence: 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.
Lévi-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.
Altered Consciousness in Society 201

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 Psychologi-
cal 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 represen-
tations. 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 inver-
sion. 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 perspecti-
vism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; 4(3), 469–488.
202 Altering Consciousness

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 contem-
porary survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Winkelman, M. (2002). Shamanism and cognitive evolution. Cambridge Archaeo-
logical 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. Cardeña, 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 leg-
acy of earlier quests for consciousness expansion. Central to the discus-
sion 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. Fur-
thermore, 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.
204 Altering Consciousness

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 leg-
acy found in the conditions of ecstatic embodiment and visionary mind-
states 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 prome-
theans 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 conscious-
ness that had been expressed since the late 19th century, especially in
the work of the Theosophists, and articulated in the quest for “cosmic con-
sciousness,” the term coined by Richard Maurice Bucke in 1901 (see Lach-
man, 2003). For those seekers of transcendence and conscientious
objectors championing heterodox poetic, spiritual, and ecological aes-
thetics, the term freak was an acceptable designation for the evolutionary
(or indeed revolutionary) mutation from a condition of separation. Exper-
imenting 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. Impor-
tantly, 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 inte-
gral movement. 1 For practitioners of this progressive and holistic
1
Among whom figure Sri Aurobindo (whose work provided the inspiration for the found-
ing 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.
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 205

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 spiri-
tual significance. Radical immanence was practiced and cosmic conscious-
ness 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) indi-
cates are performing a “spirituality” that is fundamentally “experiential.”
One of the chief ingredients in this development was LSD-25, the com-
pound discovered in the late 1930s by Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann.
With Hofmann as its unwitting midwife, this potent mind-altering sub-
stance (“acid”) was crucial to the birth of the “psychedelic” (“mind-
manifesting”) movement and its aesthetic legacy (“psychedelia”), whose
artistic expressions had, by the 1970s, permeated popular Western cul-
ture. 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 alter-
ation of personality”) to secure state interests and funded a nationwide
network of psychiatrists and other operatives for whom LSD was a “psy-
chotomimetic” (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 path-
ways 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 con-
formity 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
206 Altering Consciousness

enabled users to turn off the perceptual “screens” and “filters” that typi-
cally 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 conscious-
ness change. For Leary, who would develop a model (the Eighth Circuit
Model of Consciousness) in which psychedelics were integral to the evolu-
tion 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 entrance-
ment, 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 Haight-
Ashbury district in the mid-1960s, this momentous event, in which more
than 20,000 people participated, was held in Golden Gate Park on Janu-
ary 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
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 207

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 trans-
muted 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 mur-
ders 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 ethnonatur-
alist, McKenna would come to hold enthusiasm for the role of plant-
derived 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 mush-
rooms; 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 conscious-
ness 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 par-
ticular psilocin-containing mushrooms, DMT, and the tryptamine-
containing entheogens of the Amazon, western humanity, so long discon-
nected 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. DMT-
containing plants are commonly used in several South American shamanic practices, and it
is usually one of the main active constituents of the drink ayahuasca.
208 Altering Consciousness

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, prac-
tice, artifacts, and psychotropes of Amerindian cultures have influenced
those desiring departure from core Western values and practice. The pop-
ularity of the McKennas’ ideas also demonstrated the appeal of the shaman
as anarchist. An advocate of what Des Tramacchi (2006) has called “self-
shamanism,” with his mesmerizing Irish brogue, wit, and charm, Terence
McKenna would become a draw-card within the world psychedelic com-
munity 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 “cyber-
delic” thesis in which LSD and computers are integral to consciousness
evolution (Leary, Horowitz & Marshall, 1994). In his premillennial cheer-
leading, Leary championed a “New Breed” of creative youth embracing
psychedelics, cyberculture, and electronic music. At the high tide of extro-
pianism, Douglas Rushkoff divulged (1994, p. 19) that the 1990s “cyber-
ian counterculture” was “armed with new technologies, familiar with
cyberspace and daring enough to explore unmapped realms of conscious-
ness . . . to rechoose reality consciously and purposefully,” his portrait of
“Cyberia” a celebration of the “promethean spirit” integral to countercul-
tures throughout the ages (Davis, 1998; Goffman, 2004). The PC revolu-
tion’s indebtedness to the utopian ideals of those for whom psychedelics
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 209

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 exem-
plar in Second Life, perhaps the crowning achievement of DiY (do-it-
yourself) 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 dehu-
manizing 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 commu-
nications technologies was intended to inaugurate a New Consciousness
post-1960s. Lifestyles characterized as “better living through circuitry”
constituted a simultaneous phenomenological détournement of life under
capital and a quest for an alternate world. Thus, here, altering conscious-
ness 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.
210 Altering Consciousness

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 self-
hood 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 corpo-
rate 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 uto-
pians claimed, a new consciousness revolution, or “rave-olution” (see St
John, 2009a).
Several important developments collided at this crossroads: new tech-
nologies of perception such as electronic synthesizers and computer-
based 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 spir-
ituality, 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 sub-
sequently the Internet, enabled subterranean communications concerning
production, performance, and a lifestyle that remained relatively covert
and independent. As this compendium of techniques and prosthetics effec-
tively 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
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 211

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 entrance-
ment, 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 indi-
vidual will and autonomy to an external power, higher energy, or extraor-
dinary life force [see Ustinova, this volume]. The history of EDM scenes
illustrates commerce between these tendencies that fuel new socio-
sensual spaces, cultures, and dance movements. Although there is a pauc-
ity of sustained efforts to understand such states, Hillegonda Rietveld
(2004, p. 53) postulates transit to a “cyborg-like subjectivity” in postin-
dustrial techno and house scenes in Detroit and London, which is the
product of a sacrificial repetitive-beat ritual offering a temporary-yet-
relived 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 non-
reflective awareness autonomous in its ‘freedom’ from ideology, language
and culture.”
The collective alteration of consciousness among adolescent popula-
tions accessing a veritable pharmacopeia (e.g., LSD, ecstasy, metham-
phetamine, 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 prema-
turely haggard”; in such contexts, “instead of togetherness, sullen moats
212 Altering Consciousness

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 fol-
lowing decade, techno-rave culture offered upgrades on the techniques of
the human potential movement whose holistic practices had become con-
sistent with utopian, ascensionist, and evolutionary fantasies implicated in
the cybernetic revolution. As a form of body transcendence, mind re-
leasing, 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 “con-
sciousness 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 address-
ing 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 devel-
oping in Goa and around the world from the mid-1990s, psytrance has
proliferated globally (St John, 2010a). Demonstrating inheritance from
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 213

the ecstatic and conscious pursuits of the 1960s, infused with the inde-
pendent remixological practice endogenous to electronic music produc-
tion 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 cultur-
ally diverse music and dance events globally. From the 1960s, Goa
became an experimental outpost for middle-class dropouts seeking experi-
ence 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 mid-
1970s, Goa became a laboratory of what Davis (2004) identifies as “spiri-
tual 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 “re-
creating 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 tran-
scendent 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, gain-
ing popularity more recently in Russia, Brazil, and Mexico.
In this period, psytrance would become fertile ground for the appro-
priation of symbols and praxis of Amerindian cultures, especially regard-
ing 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
214 Altering Consciousness

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 roman-
ticized 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 coun-
tercultural 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 manufactur-
ing, 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 vision-
ary states of consciousness during curing or divination sessions and is also used to treat ail-
ments.
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 215

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 produc-
tions. 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 self-
transcendence 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, habitués
become involved in states of radical immanence that have long been asso-
ciated with ecstatic dance cults (Baldini, 2010). Furthermore, the entire
assemblage resounds with an expectancy of the kind animated by the rec-
ognition 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 festi-
vals, 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 contextual-
ized 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 singu-
larity. In the West, the expression and dissolution of difference is a cir-
cumstance 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
216 Altering Consciousness

the Dance Temple, Boom’s main dance floor is a stage for the performance
of a freak persona. Accommodating the creative recombination of aes-
thetics, undisciplined embodiment, and psychosomatic states, Boom is a
freak theatre, a staging ground for what Victor Turner had called the “sub-
junctive mood” (Turner, 1984, p. 21), an experimental state or atmos-
phere where occupants (wearing outfits with theriomorphic [animal-
like], 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 modi-
fications, and self-abandonment, Boom orchestrates the individual partic-
ipant’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 analo-
gized 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 unpredict-
ably 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
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 217

enthusiasts thus cobble identities from a cornucopia of religious, esoteric,


and popular cultural sources.
The psychedelic festival, then, permits its habitués 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 col-
laboration with DJs, producers, sound engineers, and visual and décor
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 psycho-
physiological 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 schol-
ars) invoke loose folk theories of divine guidance, conventional under-
standings of spirit possession tend to offer overstated, unfair, and
misleading frameworks for understanding trance dance cultures associ-
ated with contemporary popular music [see Fachner, this volume].
Loose contrasts make for an easy dismissal of EDM cultures as compa-
ratively 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 mean-
ing, 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, “techno-
logical advancements may compensate for the lack of coherent cultural
signifiers” vis-à-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
218 Altering Consciousness

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/tech-
niques, 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 ani-
mate 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, François
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 con-
trary, 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 sug-
gest, may be more accurate for rave as opposed to psytrance, since the lat-
ter is more typically a repository for those practicing and experimenting
with alternative spiritual dispositions who are open to traverse human/spi-
rit world boundaries outside mainstream religious practice and faith (prin-
cipally 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 Moroc-
can Gnawa, or why Sufi dancers were billed for the opening ceremony at
Soulclipse total solar eclipse festival in Turkey in March 2006, or why cer-
emonial dance is performed to didjeridus performed by Aboriginal custo-
dians 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.
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 219

Furthermore, infused with the ecstatic and utilitarian dimensions of


the counterculture identified by Frank Musgrove as “the dialectics of uto-
pia” (1974, p. 16), the psytrance festival accommodates diverse commit-
ments 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 (self-
transcendent), 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 designa-
tion 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 con-
sciousness and ecological awareness, facilitating intercultural harmony,
delivering utopian dreams and global peace surface frequently in promo-
tions. 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 “sus-
tainable entertainment.” Boom hosts two arenas that are representative of
the ecstatic and reflexive dimensions of trance. Operating over 7 days, fea-
turing more than 100 DJs and fusion bands from many different nations
performing a range of electronic trance genres and catering to approxi-
mately 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.
220 Altering Consciousness

educational platform for the contemporary visionary arts culture. In 2006,


the Liminal Village featured several zones including a “visionary art” gal-
lery 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 tech-
niques for sustainable and holistic living.”5 With workshops, presenta-
tions, 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 self-
healing modalities, psychedelic consciousness, and shamanism. That year,
the Village hosted well-known Shipibo curandero Guillermo Arévalo, who
leads ayahuasca retreats at his Peruvian botanical sanctuary, Espı́ritu de
Anaconda. Offering a dedication to McKenna and the self-shamanizing
theme, the Liminal Village represents a conscious effort to adopt a lan-
guage, architecture, and vision of transformation using anthropological
discourse forged in the study of ritual.6 Consciously emulating the demar-
cated 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 pre-
senter 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 coex-
isted 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 expe-
rience, 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: psyche-
delia, virtual reality, and the rave and psytrance movements.

5
“Transmissions from the Edge”: Retrieved February 9, 2008, from http://boomfestival.org/.
6
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).
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 221

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 counter-
cultures 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=chunkfrom-
2010-01-06-2204-0.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. Albu-
querque: 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.
222 Altering Consciousness

Hill, D. (1999). Mobile anarchy: The house movement, shamanism and commu-
nity. 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 extraordi-
nary 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.
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 223

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 reli-
gious 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: Read-
ings 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 dif-
ference. 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 pos-
session. 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 cul-
tural 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 psy-
trance (pp. 220–246). New York: Routledge.
224 Altering Consciousness

St John, G. (2011a). The vibe of the exiles: Aliens, afropsychedelia and psytrance.
In T. C. van Veen (Ed.), Afrofuturism: Interstellar transmissions from remix cul-
ture. 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: Equi-
nox.
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 tech-
noshaman 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 experi-
ence 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.
Spiritual Technologies and Altering Consciousness 225

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 per-
formance (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.
This page intentionally left blank
PART III

The Humanities
This page intentionally left blank
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, phi-
losophy of mind, and the history of ideas. My aim is mainly descriptive,
explaining the various philosophical problems related to AC and the solu-
tions proposed in the literature, illustrating their strengths and weak-
nesses, 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 Cardeña, 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 experien-
ces, 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 experimen-
tally induced ASC in important respects. Therefore, my discussion of
ASC includes both pathological and nonpathological cases.
230 Altering Consciousness

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 René Descartes in the Meditations. Aiming to establish a secure
foundation of knowledge based on rational enquiry (Williams, 1978), Des-
cartes 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 per-
ception (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 hold-
ing 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 sen-
sory 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 con-
sciously 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
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 231

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 pre-
sented 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.
232 Altering Consciousness

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 com-
pletely 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 par-
ticularly 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 episte-
mological problem: Even though rational thought is possible in dreams,
it may not be recognizable. If this analysis is correct, this presents an addi-
tional obstacle against solving the problem of dream skepticism and sug-
gests 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 Des-
cartes’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.
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 233

with. Indeed, Descartes’s theoretical position about dreaming in the Medi-


tations 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 confu-
sion and uncertainty to the point of generating philosophical doubt. Ber-
trand 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 tan-
gible 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 dis-
embodied 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 episte-
mological 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 naı̈ve 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
234 Altering Consciousness

account both for the occurrence of hallucinations and the seeming open-
ness of perception. Crane (2005) reconstructs the argument from halluci-
nation 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 expe-
riences 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—can-
not 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 adver-
bial theory here, as they are no longer widely discussed in the current lit-
erature (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 con-
tent, 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 philoso-
phers 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. There-
fore, 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
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 235

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 misrepre-
sentation. 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 cap-
tured in terms of representational content. For pain experiences, for in-
stance, there may be something over and above that which the pain
sensation is directed at, namely the sheer ickiness of pain. Many philoso-
phers 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 ap-
parent 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 unmedi-
ated 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 representa-
tional property says nothing about the actual presence of such mind-
independent objects: The experience could also be a hallucination. The
third premise of the argument from hallucination equivocates phenom-
enal 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 percep-
tion are not the same kinds of experience. Presentational content thus pro-
vides 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 presen-
tational 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.
236 Altering Consciousness

Disjunctivism
Unlike the intentional or representational theory, disjunctivism tries to
uphold the commonplace, naı̈ve 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 fun-
damentally 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 halluci-
nations 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 indistin-
guishability 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 per-
ceptions are epistemically indistinguishable, because the person under-
going 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 hallu-
cinations, 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 hallucina-
tions, however, is not the main goal of disjunctivism, and most disjuncti-
vists focus on saying what hallucinations are not rather than what they
are (Dancy, 1995). Some disjunctivists even claim that it is not like any-
thing to hallucinate, a view that contradicts the commonplace view of hal-
lucination (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
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 237

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 hallucina-
tions can be given within the framework of naı̈ve realism or disjunctivism
and that the attempt to ground indistinguishability in phenomenal simi-
larity 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 promis-
ing 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 hallucina-
tions as to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual states in gen-
eral. Once a general account of misrepresentation is available, there
remains no special problem for hallucinations. There are convincing pro-
posals for representational accounts of consciousness and self-
consciousness (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 naı̈ve realism is weak-
ened considerably. This also means that the main advantage of disjuncti-
vism 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 hallucina-
tions in the philosophy of perception mostly focuses on the logical pos-
sibility 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 real-
world 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
238 Altering Consciousness

the discomfort involved in accepting that perception can go amiss would


be dissolved.3 For an empirically plausible philosophical theory of percep-
tion—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 character-
ized 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 typi-
cally 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 self-
consciousness.
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 con-
straints for a theory of self-consciousness. Instead of a self that is substan-
tially distinct from the body, we have a self-model, which results from
complex information-processing mechanisms and representational pro-
cesses in the central nervous system. Ultimately, the self-model depends
on processes inside the brain; it is a virtual simulation rather than some-
thing that could exist independently of such processes. The phenomenal
self or the experience of selfhood is the content of the self-model, a repre-
sentational entity that we fail to recognize as a model because it is

3
Of course, empirical research results supporting the phenomenal similarity between hal-
lucinations 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 hallucina-
tions 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.
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 239

phenomenally transparent. In standard situations, we only experience the


content of the self-model but do not have access to the construction pro-
cess 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 con-
sciousness, 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 rub-
ber 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 vis-
ual 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, par-
ticipants 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 sen-
sation of suddenly identifying with the virtual body and feeling that their
240 Altering Consciousness

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 mislocal-
ize oneself in space and identify with a virtual body image. The position
from which I visually observe the world can be dissociated from the posi-
tion 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 con-
ditions 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 spontane-
ously, for instance during sleep onset, epileptic seizures, or stressful situa-
tions, 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
Cardeña, 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 experi-
ence oneself as the author of one’s thoughts and actions, is not necessary
for self-consciousness [see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardeña, Volume
2]. The core of our experience of selfhood, which is sufficient for minimal
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 241

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 symp-
toms 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 phe-
nomenon of thought control can be described as resulting from a dis-
turbed 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 empiri-
cally informed philosophical theory of self-consciousness. Most contempo-
rary 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).
242 Altering Consciousness

autobiographical self experienced in wakefulness. Lucid dreams


are another, and at least fully lucid dreams afford a vastly different interpre-
tation 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 func-
tional profile. This is related to a stable 1PP and the ability to form a con-
scious 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 stan-
dard 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 subjec-
tive experience will depend on the degree to which the phenomenal-
functional properties of agency and the 1PP are instantiated and on its
integration with the autobiographical self experienced in standard wakeful-
ness. Distinguishing different elements of dream lucidity may help under-
stand 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 sen-
sory 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 inte-
grated into the dream narrative. An interesting question is whether dreams
nonetheless give rise to the experience of having a body. Movement sensa-
tions are frequent in the dream state, but touch, pain, and thermal sensa-
tions are extremely rare (Hobson, 1988). The general conclusion that the
dream self is not only functionally disembodied with relation to the physi-
cal body, but also only phenomenally embodied in a weak sense seems
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 243

plausible (Windt, 2010). If it is true that dreams often lack a detailed body
representation including body parts, this may help elucidate the relation-
ship between bodily experiences and their functional and neurophysi-
ological 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 par-
ticularly 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 con-
sciousness 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 symp-
toms of psychosis, both on the phenomenal and the neurophysiological
levels of description, and differs in important ways from standard wake-
fulness (Hobson, 1999; see Windt & Noreika, in press, for a critical dis-
cussion). Nonetheless, Revonsuo’s approach is interesting, because it not
only shows how ASC can be used to inform a philosophical theory of con-
sciousness and the self but also suggests that the use of altered conscious-
ness as a model of standard wake states might lead to testable predictions.
Another theme that has been discussed in the context of pure con-
sciousness is meditative states. Neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson,
2003; Varela, 1996) attempts to bring together aspects of Husserlian phe-
nomenology with cognitive neuroscience. By training participants in intro-
spective 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 disci-
plined first-person approach (for a review of meditative practices from a
neuroscience perspective, see Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008).
244 Altering Consciousness

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 charac-
teristic 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 distinc-
tion 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 ini-
tiating 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 Aes-
culap 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, formu-
lated by the 16th-century Italian monk Augustinus Steuchus and later taken
up by Leibniz, says that the same eternal truths are discovered by the mys-
tics 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
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 245

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 dis-
cussed above, and there is a tension in the literature on altered conscious-
ness 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 opin-
ions, 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 illu-
mination 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,
246 Altering Consciousness

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 epis-
temology, 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 dis-
tinguish 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 “unpic-
turable 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).
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 247

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 awaken-
ing; 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. Indepen-
dently 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, & Newby-
Clark, 1999) found that reports of hallucinatory experiences during SP
are consistently grouped into three clusters: (1) vestibular-motor halluci-
nations, including sensations of floating, flying, falling, as well as auto-
scopy 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 cul-
tures 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 experi-
ences 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
248 Altering Consciousness

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 posi-
tion 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 folk-
phenomenological ancestor of the soul, and of the philosophical proto-
concept 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 ori-
gin of beliefs in old hags or theoretical positions such as mind–body dual-
ism 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 corre-
sponding 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
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 249

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 will-
ingness 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 disci-
plines can be mutually informative.
This requires openness not only toward the findings from other disci-
plines but also an integrative approach towards altered consciousness. In
particular, the comparison not only between standard states of wakeful-
ness 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 intoxica-
tion or spontaneously during sleep or at sleep onset, as well as OBEs,
which can occur spontaneously, following brain stimulation, during epi-
leptic 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 percep-
tion. 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]
250 Altering Consciousness

Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A materialist theory of the mind. London: Routledge &


Kegan Paul.
Arzy, S., Seeck, M., Ortigue, S., Spinelli, L., & Blanke, O. (2006). Induction of an
illusory shadow person. Nature, 443, 287.
Blanke, O., & Metzinger, T. (2009). Full-body illusions and minimal phenom-
enal selfhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(1), 7–13.
Blanke, O., & Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and auto-
scopic hallucination of neurological origin: Implications for neurocognitive
mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self-consciousness. Brain Research
Reviews, 50(1), 184–199.
Blanke, O., Mohr, C., Michel, C. M., Pascual-Leone, A., Brugger, P., Seeck, M.,
et al. (2005). Linking out-of-body experience and self-processing to mental
own-body imagery at the temporoparietal junction. Journal of Neuroscience,
25(3), 550–557.
Block, N. (1997). Inverted earth in Ned Block. In N. Block, O. Flanagan, &
Güven Güzeldere (Eds.), The nature of consciousness (pp. 677–693).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Botvinick, M., & Cohen, J. (1998). Rubber hands “feel” touch that eyes see.
Nature, 391(6669), 756.
Brentano, F. (1874/1911/1973). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Brooks, J. E., & Vogelsong, J. A. (1999). The conscious exploration of dreaming. Dis-
covering how we create and control our dreams. Bloomington, IN: First Books
Library.
Brugger, P. (2006). From phantom limb to phantom body: Varieties of extracor-
poreal awareness. In G. Knoblich, I. M. Thornton, M. Grosjean, & M. Shiffrar
(Eds.), Human body perception from the inside out (pp. 171–209). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Byrne, A. (2001). Intentionalism defended. Philosophical Review, 110, 199–240.
Byrne, A., & Logue, H. (Eds.). (2009). Disjunctivism. Contemporary readings.
Cambridge, MA, & London: MIT Press
Cheyne, J. A. (2003). Sleep paralysis and the structure of waking-nightmare hal-
lucinations. Dreaming, 13, 163–179.
Cheyne, J. A., & Girard, T. A. (2007). The nature and varieties of felt presence
experiences: A reply to Nielsen. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 984–991.
Cheyne, J. A., Rueffer, S. D., & Newby-Clark, I. R. (1999). Hypnagogic and
hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis: Neurological and cultural
construction of the night-mare. Consciousness and Cognition, 8, 319–337.
Crane, T. (2005). The problem of perception. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/.
[15.1.2011]
Dancy, J. (1995). Arguments from illusion. Philosophical Quarterly, 45, 421–438.
Dennett, D. C. (1976). Are dreams experiences? Philosophical Review, 73,
151–171.
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 251

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 hallucina-
tion. 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 con-
scious 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 super-
naturally 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.
252 Altering Consciousness

Kahn, D., & Hobson, J. A. (2005). State-dependent thinking: A comparison of


waking and dreaming thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 429–438.
LaBerge, S., & Gackenbach, J. (2000). Lucid dreaming. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn,
& S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific
evidence (pp. 151–182). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Lenggenhager, B., Tadi, T., Metzinger, T., & Blanke, O. (2007). Video ergo sum:
Manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science, 317(5841), 1096–1099.
Locke, J. (1997). An essay concerning human understanding. London: Penguin
Books.
Lutz, A., & Thompson, E. (2003). Neurophenomenology. Integrating subjective
experience and brain dynamics in the neuroscience of consciousness. Journal
of Consciousness Studies, 10(9–10), 31–52.
Lutz, A., Slagter, H., Dunne, J., & Davidson, R. (2008). Attention regulation and
monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169.
Malcolm, N. (1956). Dreaming and skepticism. Philosophical Review, 65, 14–37.
Malcolm, N. (1959). Dreaming. New York: Humanities Press.
Martin, M. G. F. (2004). The limits of self-awareness. Philosophical Studies, 120,
37–89.
Martin, M. (2009). The reality of appearances. In A. Byrne & H. Logue (Eds.),
Disjunctivism. Contemporary readings (pp. 91–116). Cambridge, MA, &
London: MIT Press.
McDowell, J. (1987). Singular thought and the extent of inner space. In J.
McDowell & P. Pettit (Eds.), Subject, thought and context. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
McGinn, C. (2004). Mindsight. Image, dream, meaning. Cambridge & London:
Harvard University Press.
Meier, B. (1993). Speech and thinking in dreams. In C. Cavallero & D. Foulkes
(Eds.), Dreaming as cognition (pp. 58–76). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Metzinger, T. (2003). Being no one. The self-model theory of subjectivity. Cambridge,
London: MIT Press.
Metzinger, T. (2004). Précis of “Being No One.” PSYCHE—An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Research on Consciousness, 11, 1–35. Retrieved from URL=http://
psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/symposia/metzinger/precis.pdf. [15.1.2011]
Metzinger, T. (2005). Out-of-body experiences as the origin of the concept of a
“soul.” Mind & Matter, 3(1), 57–84.
Metzinger, T. (2009). The ego tunnel. The science of the mind and the myth of the self.
New York: Basic Books.
Nielsen, T. (2007). Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social
imagery? Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 975–983.
Noreika, V., Windt, J. M., Lenggenhager, B., & Karim, A. A. (2010). New per-
spectives for the study of lucid dreaming: From brain stimulation to philo-
sophical theories of self-consciousness. International Journal of Dream
Research, 3(1), 36–45.
Altered Consciousness in Philosophy 253

Nudds, M. (2009). Recent work in perception: Naı̈ve 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 conscious-
ness. 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 conscious-
ness? 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 Univer-
sity 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: Visuotac-
tile 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.
254 Altering Consciousness

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 self-
consciousness: 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/Green-
wood 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, Vaish-
navism, 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 exag-
geration to state that there is a renewed interest in the great mystics of this
tradition (Fanning, 2001). Thus, mysticism has been studied from a vari-
ety of perspectives. Let me take a very brief look at just a few of them, lim-
ited 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 relat-
ing 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 posi-
tion that this kind of experience has an adaptive dimension and has a
256 Altering Consciousness

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 biol-
ogy. There is a tendency to reduce mysticism to nothing but effects of spe-
cific 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 neuro-
science and religion, giving rise to a new subject—neurotheology. A fun-
damental 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 Mea-
sure (REEM) based on literary reports as presented in The Varieties of Reli-
gious 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 (Cardeña & Terhune,
2008), the relation between near-death experiences and mystical states of
consciousness (Greyson, 2000), and that between “deep hypnosis” and
mystical experiences (Cardeña, 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 conscious-
ness [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 distin-
guish 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 “God-
mysticism” 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
Altered Consciousness in Religion 257

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 mys-
ticism, 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 experi-
ence? 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 para-
dise,” 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 nonra-
tional, intuitive experience. This can be regarded as an obscurum per obscu-
rum 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 experien-
ces 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,
258 Altering Consciousness

one can therefore study (1) the experiential dimension, (2) the consequen-
ces of the mystical experience in the life of the individual, (3) different rit-
uals 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 psychologi-
cal 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 so-
called 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 impor-
tant 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 mys-
ticism. He even goes as far as to state: “Mysticism may be said to be tanta-
mount 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; Din-
zelbacher, 1981; Zimdars-Swartz, 1991).
Religious visions belong to the category of kataphatic experiences, usu-
ally expressed in the language of personal relations. A second category is
called apophatic experiences, expressed for example in the impersonal lan-
guage 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
Altered Consciousness in Religion 259

al-Arabi had numerous visions, at least according to his biographer


(Addas, 1993). The Essence of God (dhat), however, is beyond all psycho-
logical content and can only be expressed in negations. This abstract God
discloses himself through his attributes (sifat) and his works (af‘al). Attrib-
utes 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 ordi-
nary. (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 mysti-


cal in a profane context (Laski, 1961; Maslow, 1964). The direct, nonra-
tional 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, essen-
tial, nuclear characteristic, from which most of the others inevitably fol-
low” (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
260 Altering Consciousness

creates order in chaos. Some of my informants were on the verge of com-


mitting suicide (Geels, 2008) [see Lukoff, Volume 2].
The third dimension of mysticism, of special relevance to the psycholo-
gist of religion, is related to behavior: the ritual dimension. Here the refer-
ence 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 monoto-
nously 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 tra-
ditions, mystics not infrequently are regarded as radicals, drawing on the
profound consequences of their personal, intense, transforming experien-
ces. 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 occa-
sions (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
Altered Consciousness in Religion 261

on mysticism, after nearly half a century of research, wrote that “institu-


tionalism 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, deconstruc-
tivism, 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 des-
ignated 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 frame-
work (e.g., Huxley, 1944; James, 1902; Maréchal, 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, perennial-
ism 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 mys-
tical experiences, are constructed by the beliefs and linguistic back-
grounds 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 posi-
tion, 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 Con-
sciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (1990), edited by Robert K. C.
262 Altering Consciousness

Forman, the foremost proponent of the alternative called deconstructi-


vism. Just like his colleague, Forman gathered a great number of scholars,
most of them philosophers of religion, who supported him. In his intro-
ductory essay, Forman convincingly criticizes the constructivist approach,
stating that “the history of mysticism is rife with cases in which expec-
tations, 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 conscious-
ness,” 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 per-
ennialist view, the idea that there is a common core in all mysticism. For-
man gives this view a psychophysiological twist by suggesting a “perennial
psychology,” a common structure—consciousness itself—that is not cre-
ated by culture but “comes with the machinery of being human.” We all
have an innate capacity to get in touch with this nonconceptual dimen-
sion. 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 14th-
century Dominican friar (Forman probably refers to Meister Eckhart, of
whom he has written an insightful study, published 1991) and contempo-
rary meditators.
From a psychological point of view, the paradigms mentioned above
are not incompatible. The constructivist approach is a truism. A human’s
Altered Consciousness in Religion 263

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 denom-
inators in the great mystical traditions of the world. In other words, tradi-
tions 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 per-
sonality enabling us to understand different types of mystical experience,
including visions and voices. Such a model should combine cognitive psy-
chology with depth psychology. From the horizon of cognitive psychol-
ogy, 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 emotion-
ally charged information, should enable us to understand new or unex-
pected features in reports of religious experience, whether it be Old
Testament prophets combining, in their visions, contemporary icono-
graphic 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
264 Altering Consciousness

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 neglect-
ing 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 self-
representations. 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 environ-
ment, 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 equi-
librium” that strives for balance in a constantly shifting psyche. The syn-
thetic 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.).
Altered Consciousness in Religion 265

The other large substructure in this ego-psychological model of


humans is the representational system, or the process of relating to and rep-
resenting 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 con-
troversy (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 syn-
thetic 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 con-
sists of self- and object representations “in ever changing states of integra-
tion” (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 compo-
nent 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, &
Cardeña, 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 perspec-
tive, it belongs to the category of primary process activity, characterized
266 Altering Consciousness

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 vision-
ary 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 peo-
ple, 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
Altered Consciousness in Religion 267

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 noth-
ing 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 repre-
sentations as a psychological process that is most suited for its goal: homeo-
stasis, equilibrium. The result is a religious vision, establishing order in a
chaotic system. In other words, religious visions can be understood as auto-
symbolic 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 situa-
tions 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.
268 Altering Consciousness

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 mys-
tics 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 educa-
tion. 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).
Altered Consciousness in Religion 269

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 pro-
nounced:

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 con-
cepts like the abyss and mystical death:

Let me be submerged in the abyss of the sea of your most merciful good-
ness. 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).
270 Altering Consciousness

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 lan-
guage. 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 mys-
ticism” (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 spon-
taneous 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
Altered Consciousness in Religion 271

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 func-
tions 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 tradi-
tions. 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 incomprehen-
sible inner transformation corresponding to his highest religious and ethi-
cal 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.
272 Altering Consciousness

Arbman not only describes what Forman depicts as the pure con-
sciousness event, he also mentions the other side of the picture: the trans-
formed 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 mysti-
cal 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 spiri-
tual exercises or techniques. These techniques usually aim at a narrowing
of the field of awareness through meditation, prayer, isolation, or a combi-
nation 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 expe-
rience 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) men-
tioned 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 “counter-
point” of our personality, we will eventually return to the world of phe-
nomena—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.”
Altered Consciousness in Religion 273

References
Addas, C. (1993). Quest for the red sulphur. The life of Ibn ‘Arabi. Cambridge:
Islamic Texts Society.
Arbman, E. (1963). Ecstasy or religious trance. Volume I: Vision and ecstasy. Stockholm:
Scandinavian University Books.
Arbman, E. (1968). Ecstasy or religious trance. Volume II: Essence and forms of
ecstasy. Stockholm: Scandinavian University Books.
Arbman, E. (1970). Ecstasy or religious trance. Volume III: Ecstasy and psychopatho-
logical states. Stockholm: Scandinavian University Press.
Arieti, S. (1976). Creativity: The magic synthesis. New York: Basic Books.
Bucke, R. M. (1901). Cosmic consciousness: A study in the evolution of the human
mind. New York: Dutton.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cardeña, E., & Terhune, D. (2008). A distinct personality state? The relationship
between hypnotizability, absorption, self-transcendence, and mental bounda-
ries. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Associa-
tion, 61–73.
Chittick, W. C. (1989). The sufi path of knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press.
Christian, W. A. (1981). Apparitions in late medieval and renaissance Spain. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Clark, W. H. (1958). The psychology of religion: An introduction to religious experi-
ence and behavior. New York: MacMillan.
Dan, J. (2002). The heart and the fountain. An anthology of Jewish mystical experien-
ces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deikman, A. (1971). Bimodal consciousness. Archives of General Psychiatry, 25,
481–489.
Deikman, A. (1976). Bimodal consciousness and the mystical experience. In
P. Lee (Ed.), Symposium on consciousness (pp. 67–88). New York: Viking.
Dinzelbacher, P. (1981). Vision und visionslitteratur im Mittelalter (Visions and liter-
ature on visions in the Middle Ages). Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann.
Ellwood, R. S. (1980). Mysticism and religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Epstein, M. (1988). The deconstruction of the self: Ego and “egolessness” in Bud-
dhist insight meditation. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20(1), 61–69.
Ernst, C. W. (1998). The Shambhala guide to Sufism. Boston/London: Shambhala.
Fanning, S. (2001). Mystics of the Christian tradition. London/New York: Routledge.
Fingarette, H. (1963). The self in transformation. New York: Basic Books.
Forman, R. K. C. (1990). The problem of pure consciousness. Mysticism and philoso-
phy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Forman, R. K. C. (1991). Meister Eckhart. The mystic as theologian. Rockport, MA:
Element Books.
274 Altering Consciousness

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. Grzymala-
Moszczynska & 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]. Skellefteå, Sweden: Norma bokförlag
Geels, A. (1999). Muslimsk mystik, ur psykologisk synvinkel [Muslim mysticism:
A psychological perspective]. Skellefteå, Sweden: Norma bokförlag.
Geels, A. (2000). Kristen mystik, ur psykologisk synvinkel [Christian mysticism:
A psychological perspective]. Skellefteå, Sweden: Norma bokförlag.
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 rela-
tion 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. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.
Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (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 experi-
ence. 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.
Altered Consciousness in Religion 275

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 Uni-
versity 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 Uni-
versity 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 imagina-
tion (pp. 125–166). New York: Plenum.
Loewald, H. W. (1978). Psychoanalysis and the history of the individual. New Haven
& London: Yale University Press.
Maréchal, 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.
276 Altering Consciousness

Otto, R. (1926/1971). West-Östliche Mystik. München, 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 disserta-
tion, Harvard University.
Parsons, W. B. (1999). The enigma of the oceanic feeling. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity 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 contempo-
rary 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.), Mysti-
cism 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. His-
tory is defined by the written word. The fact that it is written is the crucial illu-
minating 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 man-
ner, furthering the scope for critical activity and rational thought (Goody,
1977). With consciousness liberated from the limitations of the brain’s bio-
logical memory systems by the existence of a system for external storage,
humanity acquired an entire new realm of possibilities (Donald, 2001).
278 Altering Consciousness

The existence of writing changes things; it has enabled us to build a vast


cultural storehouse of books, maps, legal manuscripts, text messages, timeta-
bles, twitter, calendars, computers, and the World Wide Web. The develop-
ment 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, writ-
ers 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 imagi-
nation associated books with magic (Atwood, 2002).
The phrase stream of consciousness to indicate the flow of inner experi-
ence was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890). Writ-
ers 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 lesser-
known 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 admis-
sion 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 extraordi-
nary world is perceived.
Colored Inklings 279

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 his-
tory 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 priest-
ess 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 self-
conscious 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 awak-
ening into conscious awareness.
The creation of literature has been long thought to involve other, non-
ordinary 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 spe-
cies of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition,” pointing instead to the “elabo-
rate 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 liter-
ary 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
280 Altering Consciousness

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 fic-
tional world and through experiencing the release of pent-up psychic ten-
sion 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 con-
founds 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”
(Pensées 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 interven-
tion. The Sumerians believed it was one of the arts of civilization brought
from heaven by the goddess Inanna, while Egyptians believed it was the cre-
ation 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 pro-
foundly 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:
Colored Inklings 281

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 aware-
ness. 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 hypoth-
esis, 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 nec-
essarily 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,
282 Altering Consciousness

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 tem-
poral 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 dis-
inhibition 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, includ-
ing 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 caterpil-
lars 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 hallucino-
genic 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 depress-
ing 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
Colored Inklings 283

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. Thack-
eray et al. (2001) claim to have found further support for this theory, with
the chemical analysis of organic residues in clay pipes from Stratford-
Upon-Avon in England uncovering chemical indications of cannabis.
Shakespeare may or may not have been a stoner, but in the early-
19th-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 Confes-
sions 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 communi-
cable, 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 pre-
scription. 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.
284 Altering Consciousness

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 dis-
tinct 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 per-
son 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 work-
ing 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 Théophile Gautier, Arthur Rimbaud,
Colored Inklings 285

and Charles Baudelaire were to become collectively known as the Hashish


Club, and the influence of drugs on literature stretched into the 20th cen-
tury 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 Ameri-
cans [see Schaefer, Volume 2]. Mescaline was isolated in 1895 and syn-
thesized in 1919 and became the latest successor to opium and cannabis
as a creator of artificial paradises. Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis pub-
lished accounts of their experiences with mescaline emphasizing its aes-
thetic and metaphysical properties and pointing out that the intellect was
relatively unimpaired (Ellis, 1897, 1898; Mitchell, 1896). It has been pro-
posed (Durr, 1970, p. vii) that the similarities between the world of psyche-
delic 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 voy-
age of “shamanic tourism” and after participating in an all-night peyote
ceremony with Tarahumara people came to value the “dangerous dissoci-
ations 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 din-
ing 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 mes-
caline 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.”
286 Altering Consciousness

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 informa-
tion 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 pos-
sible. 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 culti-
vation 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
Colored Inklings 287

enchanted his public, and his invented tradition masterfully conjured up


the experiences of those who had tried hallucinogens and those who expe-
rienced 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) long-
time 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 uni-
verse 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 conscious-
ness 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 ante-
cedents, mesmerism and animal magnetism, have been incorporated into
literary works ever since Franz Anton Mesmer’s charismatic career first
288 Altering Consciousness

commended them to persons of fashion [see Cardeña & 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 mes-
meric 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 (inci-
dentally 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 siècle, 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. How-
ever, these powers are turned against him, when via hypnotic guidance
from the Dutch doctor Van Helsing, Mina’s telepathic ability to read Dra-
cula’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 sug-
gested as a treatment for writer’s block (McGuinness, 1998; Stanton,
1986). In French surrealist circles, hypnosis also played a key role. The writer
André 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 automa-
tism, a near equivalent to the dream state, whose limits are today quite
Colored Inklings 289

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 frag-
ments 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 elusive-
ness 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 pro-
duction 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 psy-
chologists and psychiatrists have considered automatic writing as a patho-
logic 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 con-
scious 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. René 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 séance. The proper conditions were created: dark-
ness 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
290 Altering Consciousness

of what he had said, and the experiment was repeated without him. This
time Robert Desnos, who had previously believed himself to be imper-
vious 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 indi-
cating 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 surre-
alists, 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 communica-
tion 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
surréalité 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 instruc-
tions for composition (Breton, 1924/2005a, p. 731):

After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the con-
centration 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
Bénévol) 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.
Colored Inklings 291

what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so com-
pelling 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 percep-
tion. 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 mysti-
cism, 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 pro-
digious 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 pecu-


liar way, has more illumination than one’s waking state. I have at times dis-
tinctly 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)
292 Altering Consciousness

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 youth-
ful fin de siècle 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 repeti-
tion 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
Colored Inklings 293

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 other-
worldy 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 supernatu-
ral tale The Private Life (1893), Henry James explored what he felt was the
contrast of Robert Browning’s unremarkable personal presence in com-
parison to the glorious appeal of his poetry by creating an equally cel-
ebrated 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, con-
sciousness and the narrative are circular and cyclical, potentially ever-repeating.
294 Altering Consciousness

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 hos-
tile 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, per-
haps 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 giv-
ing 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 counter-
current 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
Colored Inklings 295

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 con-
sciousness of artists (Rushdie, 1991) and from their forays into altered
states, writers have sent back dispatches from the furthest edges of con-
scious 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 out-
side, 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 lit-
erary 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.

7
“O most high and most near, most secret, yet most present . . . wholly everywhere, and
nowhere in space” (Confessions, Book VI).
296 Altering Consciousness

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my thanks to the Perrott-Warrick Fund, admin-
istered 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.

References
Artaud, A. (1988). The peyote dance. In S. Sontag (Ed.), Antonin Artaud, selected
writings. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published
1936)
Atwood, M. (2002). Negotiating with the dead; A writer on writing. New York:
Anchor Books.
Bear, D. M., & Fedio, P. (1977). Quantitative analysis of interictal behavior in
temporal lobe epilepsy. Archives of Neurology, 34, 454–467.
Blake, W. (1790), The marriage of heaven and hell.Retrieved14 January 2011
from http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=mhh.
Boon, M. (2002). The road of excess: A history of writers on drugs. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Borges, J. L. (1964). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings. New York: New
Directions.
Braden, G., & Taylor, A. B. (2000). Ovid, Petrarch and Shakespeare’s sonnets. In
A. B. Taylor (Ed.), Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the plays and
poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Breton, A. (2005a). Manifesto of surrealism. In L. S. Rainey (Ed.), Modernism: An anthol-
ogy (pp. 718–741). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (Original work published 1924).
Breton, A. (2005b). The mediums enter. In L. S. Rainey (Ed.), Modernism; An
anthology (pp. 742–745). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (Original work published
1922).
Breton, A., & Soupault, P. (1971). Les champs magnétiques [The Magnetic fields].
Paris: Gallimard. (Original work published 1920).
Browder, C. (1967). André Breton: Arbiter of surrealism. Geneva: Droze.
Browning, R. (1994). The poems of Robert Browning. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Classics.
Carroll L. (1865). Alice’s adventures in wonderland. London: Macmillan.
Carroll, L. (1871). Through the looking-glass, and what Alice found there. London:
Macmillan.
Carroll, L. (1893). Sylvie and Bruno concluded. New York: Macmillan.
Castaneda, C. (1968). The teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui way of knowledge. New
York: Ballantine Books.
Chesterton.G. K. (2008). Appreciations and criticisms of the work of Charles Dickens.
Middlesex: Echo Library. (Original work published 1821).
Colored Inklings 297

Clark, T. (1997). The theory of inspiration: Composition as a crisis of subjectivity in


romantic and post-romantic writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cousins, W. E. (2008). Ireland the anomalous state: Writing in the Celtic twilight
zone. Proceedings of the 51st Annual convention of the Parapsychological Associa-
tion, 333–337.
Cummins, G. (1951). Unseen adventures. Essex: Amber Press.
Cummins, G. (1955). The fate of Colonel Fawcett. London: Aquarian.
Donald, M. (2001). A mind so rare. New York: Norton.
De Certeau, M. (1995). Reading as poaching. In A. Bennett (Ed.), Readers and
reading (pp. 165–76). London and New York: Longman.
De Quincey, T. (1994). Confessions of an English opium-eater. Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Classics. (Original work published 1821)
Du Maurier, G. (1895). Trilby. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Durr, R. A. (1970). Poetic vision and the psychedelic experience. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press.
Drury, N. (1989). The elements of shamanism. Shaftesbury: Element Books.
Ebin, D. (1965). The drug experience: First person accounts of addicts, writers, scien-
tists and others. New York: Grove Press.
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. New York: Basic Books.
Ellis, H. (1897, June 5). A note on the phenomena of mescal intoxication. Lancet,
1540–1542.
Ellis, H. (1898). Mescal: A new artificial paradise. Contemporary Review, 73,
130–141.
Ellmann, R. (1976). Selected Joyce letters. New York: Viking.
Epstein, J. (2007). Narcissus leaves the pool. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Flaherty, A. W. (2004). The midnight disease: The drive to write, writer’s block, and
the creative brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Freud, S. (1962). Creative writers and day-dreaming. In S. Freud, The standard
edition of the complete psychological works. Vol. IX. London: Hogarth. (Original
work published 1908)
George, A. (2003). The epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian epic poem and other texts
in Akkadian. London: Penguin Books.
Geschwind, N. (1983). Behavioural changes in epilepsy. Epilepsia, 24(suppl 1),
S23–S30.
Gibson, J. (1987). Surrealism before Freud: Dynamic psychiatry’s “simple record-
ing instrument.” Art Journal, 46, 56–60.
Goodwin, D. W. (1988). Alcohol and the writer. Kansas City, MO: Andrews and
McMeel.
Goody, J. (1977). The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Grace, D. (2007). Relocating consciousness: Diasporic writers and the dynamics of
literary experience. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Grossman, A. (2009). True-love: Essays on poetry and valuing. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
298 Altering Consciousness

Haney, W. S. (2002). Culture and consciousness: Literature regained. London: Asso-


ciated 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, trick-
ster, 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 pub-
lished 1939).
Landsborough, D. (1987). St. Paul and temporal lobe epilepsy. Journal of Neurol-
ogy, 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 Col-
lege of Psychiatrists.
Pascal, B. (1660/2007). Pensées. 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.
Colored Inklings 299

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 sig-
nificance 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 communica-
tion. 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 pub-
lished 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-Upon-
Avon and environs. South African Journal of Science, 97, 19–21.
300 Altering Consciousness

Waxman S. G, & Geschwind, N. (1975). The interictal behavior syndrome of


temporal lobe epilepsy. Archives of General Psychiatry, 32, 1580–1588.
Yeats, W. B. (1993). Irish witch doctors. In R. Welch (Ed.), W. B. Yeats: Writings
on Irish folklore, legend and myth. London: Penguin. (Original work published
1900).
Yeats, W. B. (2000). Adam’s curse. The collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Hertford-
shire: Wordsworth Editions. (Original work published 1903).
Yeats, W. B. (1959). Per amica silentia lunae, Mythologies. New York: Touchstone.
(Original work published 1918).
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 defini-
tional problems surrounding consciousness (Austin, 1998; Block, 1995,
1997, p. 227; Cardeña, 2009; Di Benedetto, 2010; Nunn, 2009), for
purposes of this essay, I assume that there are ordinary states of conscious-
ness (or modes of conscious awareness) and that there are transition or
borderline experiences between and among these ordinary states of con-
sciousness (Austin, 1998; Tart, 1975b). Cardeña (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.
302 Altering Consciousness

What Is Performance?
Derived from the Middle English verb parformen, performen, perfor-
mance is the act or process of enactment, of bringing something to com-
pletion. In the field of contemporary performance studies (Schechner,
2006), performance refers to a broad spectrum of human activities includ-
ing discrete genres where an act or process is brought to completion—rit-
ual/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 con-
temporary 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 perfor-
mance by the performer(s) for the audience/participants. (In improvisa-
tory 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 con-
sciousness, 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 com-
monalities 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 cul-
tural and historical context, the performer’s optimal mode of embodied con-
sciousness 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
Altered Consciousness in Performance 303

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/sha-
manic performances, anthropological, ethnographic, and ethnopsycholog-
ical 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 appro-
priately conveyed by the actors to an audience that would understand par-
ticular meanings. This limited semantic/semiotic view of performance did
not provide an adequate account of the performance experience. In addi-
tion, 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 vari-
able 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 under-
stood 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
304 Altering Consciousness

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, deseman-
ticized understanding of how “meanings” arise during a performance
event. As Fischer-Lichte explains, perception grasps something as some-
thing. 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 asso-
ciations that arise from it. They are experiencing the performance as “phe-
nomenal 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 retrospec-
tively. In addition to Fischer-Lichte’s research, other researchers have uti-
lized 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 Stanislav-
sky’s words, reach ‘unconscious creativeness through conscious technique’”
(2008, p. xii). Di Benedetto explores how “theories drawn from cognitive sci-
ence 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 inter-
rogation 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 vari-
ous 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 per-
former training directly, I provide a brief overview of some of the complex
Altered Consciousness in Performance 305

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 under-
stood 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 impor-
tant ways of differentiating ritual/shamanic performance from aesthetic per-
formance. 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 spi-
rit; 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 medi-
um’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 séances


in Papua New Guinea as “highly entertaining, even thrilling events”
306 Altering Consciousness

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 rela-
tionship 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 perfor-
mance. Indeed, this remarkable response could be interpreted as virtually
necessary to the performance, since if the audience is not moved and the ten-
sion between the performers and audiences does not rise to the pitch of vio-
lence, 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 com-
posers [ . . . ] 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 conscious-
ness performers utilize to achieve aesthetic affects are similar to but usu-
ally 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:
Altered Consciousness in Performance 307

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 per-
formance 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 aes-
thetic 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 Cam-
bridge University classics scholars known as “the Cambridge Anthropolo-
gists”: 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 Darwin-
ism. 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.
308 Altering Consciousness

Although the origins of all theatre are not in ritual or shamanic perfor-
mances, in a few instances it may be argued with a certain degree of his-
torical certainty that there is a direct relationship between early forms of
ritual/shamanic practice and the development of a specific genre of aes-
thetic theatre that emerged, in part, from these earlier practices. The clear-
est 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 kalar-
ippayattu), and performance genres such as India’s kutiyattam and katha-
kali and Japanese noh [see Maliszewki et al., and Shear, this volume].
As Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo explains, the concept of “per-
sonal 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 recogni-
tion or realization’ (tainin or taitoku)’” (1987, p. 27). As exemplified in the
Indian and Japanese descriptions offered below, an array of daily psycho-
physical 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 histor-
ically 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 psychophysio-
logical practice. Classical hatha yoga includes repetition of breath-control
exercises and forms/postures (asana) combined with restraints/constraints
Altered Consciousness in Performance 309

on diet and behavior. These practices are understood to act on both the
physical (sthula sarira) and subtle body (suksma sarira) most often identi-
fied with Kundalini-Tantric yoga.
As early as the Rig Veda (1200 BCE), ascetic practices (tapas) are men-
tioned. 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 per-
forming arts.
From the earliest stages of its development, yoga developed as a practi-
cal 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 overwhelm-
ing 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 mar-
tial 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 cen-
tury (Pant, 1978, pp. 3–5). Circumscribed by rituals, the martial practi-
tioner’s training progresses from preliminary body postures through
310 Altering Consciousness

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. Con-
sider 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 tradi-
tion, 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 connec-
tion 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 psycho-
physical training is the Indian performer able to achieve the type of virtu-
osic 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,
Altered Consciousness in Performance 311

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 sha-
manic 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 per-
former, 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, rep-
resented 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 possess-
ing 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
312 Altering Consciousness

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 sen-
sibility 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 [ . . . ], self-
cultivation 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 transforma-
tive 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 funda-
mental to noh training as developed by Zeami. According to him, the per-
former 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 con-
sciousness 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.
Altered Consciousness in Performance 313

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 tech-
niques 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 innova-
tive, 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 turn-
of-the-century Russia, filtered through then-popular occultism and spir-
itualism (Carnicke, 1993; White, 2006). Stanislavsky described how the
actor’s “physical score,” once perfected, must go beyond “mechanical exe-
cution” 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 exer-
cises and principles to heighten the actor’s sensory awareness in
314 Altering Consciousness

performance. Arguably the most important material element Stanislavsky


borrowed from yoga was prana, the breath(s), wind, vital energy, or life-
force 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 commu-
nicate with fellow actors-as-characters.
After working with Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov (1891–1955)
developed psychophysical exercises, “psychological gestures,” and “radia-
tion” in order “to penetrate all the parts of the body with fine [ . . . ] vibra-
tions” (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 con-
sciousness 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 ana-
lyze 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” (Soto-
Morettini, 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 Nicolás Núñez (1946–) in Mexico, among others—
have drawn inspiration or specific techniques from ritual/shamanic prac-
tices 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
Altered Consciousness in Performance 315

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 Cardeña 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 danc-
ers and visits to Mexico, Artaud called for actors to become “crude empiri-
cists” 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 emo-
tion, 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 psycho-
physical technique actualizing this vision.
Although he always viewed his work as a continuation of the explora-
tions of Stanislavsky, Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski embraced
and actively engaged the territory between ritual and performance. As Wolf-
ord 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
316 Altering Consciousness

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 under-
take 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 thea-
tre laboratory for research on acting, he began a lifelong journey of explor-
ing the mythopoetic territory between ritual and theatre. John Green
(1993) provides a comprehensive account of how Fersen’s years of practi-
cal 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 aban-
don’” (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 Candomblé 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 sec-
ond life” as a character, but “It is a second state of mind, which has an
oneiric quality” (Fersen, in Marranca, 1984, p. 20).
Altered Consciousness in Performance 317

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). Ulti-
mately 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 Nicolás Núñez.
Núñez founded the Taller de Investigácion Teatral or Theatre Research Work-
shop (TRW) in 1975 at the National University in Mexico City. Since found-
ing TRW, Núñez and his collaborators have undertaken practical cross-
cultural research between ritual and theatre, actively exploring ASC accessed
by means of specific psychophysical techniques drawn from both pre-
Hispanic Mexican traditions such as the Náhuatl 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.
Núñez 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 Núñez, the actor and sha-
man 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 Núñez’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 long-
durational activities, abandoning end-gaining strategies and time-
consciousness. Conceptual activity is subdued, partly through intention,
and partly through the psycho-physically strenuous tools of running, ener-
getic 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)
318 Altering Consciousness

Núñez’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 non-
Western principles and techniques, cultivating a state of nondual aware-
ness 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 in-
depth 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, Soto-
Morettini 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 alter-
native 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 psycho-
physical training begins with breathing exercises and attentiveness to
the breath (2009). But these approaches also differ from forms of medi-
tation 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.
Altered Consciousness in Performance 319

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 con-
sciousness. 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 car-
ries 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 extraordi-
nary nondual phenomenal consciousness that are different from one’s ordi-
nary 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 struc-
ture 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, sedi-
mented 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
320 Altering Consciousness

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 dif-
ferent from one’s ordinary mode of consciousness, it is experienced as extraor-
dinary. Performer training and performing can therefore be described as a
special form of “P-consciousness with awareness” where the performer inhab-
its 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 pro-
cess the performer ideally never becomes self-conscious, the actor does not
think about what she is doing but remains within the “flow” of phenom-
enal consciousness as appropriate to the training or the dramaturgy of a
specific performance (see also Cardeña & 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 envi-
ronment 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 prac-
tice/act of performing.
Systems of actor training like those described above are designed to
shape the performer’s phenomenal consciousness to achieve an extraordi-
nary discrete alternate state of nondual consciousness. The phenomeno-
logical 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,
Altered Consciousness in Performance 321

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 qui-
etude, and the minimal work of Samuel Beckett. It is a fragmentary perfor-
mance 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,
322 Altering Consciousness

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 periph-
eral 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 respond-
ing 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 pro-
cess 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 envi-
ronment. 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
Altered Consciousness in Performance 323

is woven in the moment. Optimally, this process of embodied, aural attune-


ment absorbs and re-directs our energy and awareness in a process of tak-
ing 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/stage-
figures. (see Zarrilli, in press b)

Thus, in a “successful” performance, we reach an alternative state of


nondual awareness/consciousness.

References
Austin, J. H. (1998). Zen and the brain: Toward an understanding of meditation and
consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Besmer, F. E. (1983). Horses, musicians, & gods: The Hausa cult of possession-trance.
Zaria, Nigeria: Ahmado Bello University Press.
Blackmore, S. (2003). Consciousness: An introduction. Milton Park, Abingdon, UK.:
Hodder Education.
Blair, R. (2008). The actor, image, and action: Acting and cognitive neuroscience.
London: Routledge.
Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 18, 227–287.
Block, N. (1997). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. In N. Block,
O. Flanagan, & G. Guzeldere (Eds.), The nature of consciousness (pp. 375–415).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bowditch, R. (2010). On the edge of utopia: Performance and ritual at Burning Man.
Calcutta: Seagull Press.
Byckling, L. (2005, November 11–13). Unpublished printed notes in lecture
handout, “Theatre of the Future? Michael Chekhov and 21st Century Perfor-
mance,” delivered at a conference convened at Dartington Hall, UK.
Cardeña, E. (1986). The magical flight: Shamanism and theatre. In R. I. Heinze
(Ed.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Study of Shamanism
and Alternate Modes of Healing (pp. 291–304). San Rafael, CA: St. Sabina
Center.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Cardeña, E., & Cousins, W. E. (2010). From artifice to actuality: Ritual, shaman-
ism, hypnosis and healing. In J. Weinhold & G. Samuel (Eds.), The varieties of
ritual experience. Section in A. Michaels et al. (Eds.), Ritual dynamics and the sci-
ence of ritual, Volume II: Body, performance, agency and experience (pp. 315–329).
Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz.
324 Altering Consciousness

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. Unpub-
lished 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 halluci-
nation: Three field studies in religious experience. New York: Wiley.
Green, J. C. (1993). Mnemodrama: Alessandro Fersen’s para-shamanic training tech-
nique 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.
Altered Consciousness in Performance 325

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 Nicolás
Núñez. TDR: The Drama Review, 45, 42–63.
Middleton, D. K. (2008). “Secular sacredness” in the ritual theatre of Nicolás
Núñez. Performance Research, 13, 41–54.
Monier-Williams, M. (1963). A Sanskrit-English dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsi-
dass. (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: Cam-
bridge 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 Grotow-
ski sourcebook (pp. 458–492). London: Routledge.
Schechner, R. (2006). Performance studies. London: Routledge.
Soto-Morettini, D. (2010). The philosophical actor. Bristol: Intellect.
326 Altering Consciousness

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 tradi-
tion. 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 act-
ing 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 possibil-
ity: 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 Cardeña 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. (Cardeña, 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 per-
son. Of course, not all musicians are possessed, as the example of the com-
poser 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 his-
torians, and psychologists. The word inspiration, which basically means
to breathe in an exalted idea, has been much used in Romantic circles
328 Altering Consciousness

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” (Cardeña, 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 pat-
terns, images of retinal blood vessels, and the like. In an ASC, individuals
may be more susceptible to these phenomena than under normal condi-
tions, but entopic phenomena have not been of interest to most profes-
sional 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-Rudı́n,
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 dis-
tinction 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, psy-
chedelic substances, or dreaming. The shaman experiences that his or her
soul leaves the body and goes to the upper and lower world of nonordi-
nary reality and then returns with information for the spiritual and thera-
peutic 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
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 329

awareness of one’s surroundings in multiple dimensions usually accompa-


nies meditative states. Art induced by shamanic methods is different than
art engendered by meditative states. Usually, in shamanic art there is pro-
fusion 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 sha-
manic 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 tech-
niques 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 Dalı́, Remedios Varo, Alex Grey, Joseph Beuys, and
Sha Sha Higby are examples of modern artists who employ shamanic tech-
niques 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 pre-
carious 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 man-
ner, 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 halluci-
nogens are traditional induction techniques for shamans.
330 Altering Consciousness

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 invis-
ible” (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).
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 331

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 disclo-
sure 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 appre-
hension 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 interwo-
ven energy lines that may be invisible except in an ASC. This is the primor-
dial matrix of the Dreamings, the original creators who wove the fabric of
existence at the beginning of the Dreamtime, which signifies both this pri-
mordial time of creation and nonordinary reality. Like Starry Night, Squid
and Turtle Dreaming is replete with many levels of meaning, but the most sig-
nificant 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 pro-
longed 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
332 Altering Consciousness

Figure 15.2 Squid and Turtle Dreaming, 1972, Liwukang Burkutlatjpi, ochre on
bark, 92 × 52cm, South Australian Museum (Drawing of Squid and Turtle Dream-
ing by Malka Helfman for this article)

diminution of the internal dialogue—the projections that overlay experi-


ence—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
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 333

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 imag-
ined 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 simultane-
ously 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.
334 Altering Consciousness

Figure 15.4 The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Salvador Dalı́, 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 jour-


ney 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. Sal-
vador Dalı́ (1904–1989), for example, would always have paper and pen-
cil 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
Buñuel, he and Dalı́ shared their dreams of the night before in the morn-
ing and then tried to realize them during the day in their film.
For The Persistence of Memory (1931) (Figure 15.4), one of his best-
known paintings during his Surrealist period, Dalı́ developed a precise
and detailed style of realism in which he meticulously recorded the infor-
mation from a dream or a recurrent series of dreams of a landscape with
ants crawling on the surface of limp watches. According to Dalı́,
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 335

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. (Dalı́, 1969, p. 113)

This ambition was shared with other Surrealist painters of the dream, such
as Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, René 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 Dalı́’s style that, in conjunc-
tion with the content, transports the viewer to a timeless realm of nonordi-
nary reality. The numinosity of Dalı́’s painted realm in The Persistence of
Memory recalls shamanic places of power that I have experienced in sha-
manic 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
Dalı́’s, including dismemberments in nonordinary reality and other initia-
tory 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 Dalı́’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 rigor-
ous academic curriculum emphasizing drawing and composition. She was
not merely interested in recording the dream, however, unlike the other
“academic” Surrealists painters, including Dalı́, 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
336 Altering Consciousness

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 begin-
ning in the early 20th century among the Dadaists and the Futurists and
has been greatly expanded by contemporary artists. Although much of per-
formance art is purely secular, a significant number of artists have in effect
created sacred ritual dramas that compare to traditional performance
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 337

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, chant-
ing, 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 trans-
ported 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
338 Altering Consciousness

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 near-
death 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 com-
pletely 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 mani-
fest 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 con-
temporary 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 fur-
thered his efforts as an artist/shaman. Beuys’ hat has received more atten-
tion 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,
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 339

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 ges-
tures 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 Düsseldorf, on Novem-
ber 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 counter-


vailing force to rationality because of its relationship to the earth and fertil-
ity. 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
340 Altering Consciousness

Figure 15.7 I like America and America Likes Me, May 1974, Joseph Beuys, pho-
tograph 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 communi-
cated for 7 days with a live coyote that had just been taken from the wilder-
ness. 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
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 341

trauma of American relationships with the Indians, which is a form of sick-


ness, Beuys was taken directly from the airport to the gallery in an ambu-
lance, 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 lan-
guages 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)
342 Altering Consciousness

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 well-
crafted 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, accom-
panied 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 other-
worldly 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 intel-
lectual friends who practiced raja yoga as described in the book Sverkh-
sozhnanie 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,
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 343

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 abstrac-
tion, 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
344 Altering Consciousness

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 approximat-
ing 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. Accord-
ing 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 dis-
solve” (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 origi-
nal 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 sur-
rendering was solitude. “It is necessary to practice being quiet to empty
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 345

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
346 Altering Consciousness

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 intersect-
ing 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 abso-
lutely 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 dia-
gram, 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 remi-
niscent of the level plains of Saskatchewan where Martin grew up, as well
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 347

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 Chi-
nese 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 care-
fully 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
348 Altering Consciousness

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 projec-
tions 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 sculp-
ture. 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 appar-
ent 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 dis-
solves 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.
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 349

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 man-
dalas. 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.
350 Altering Consciousness

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 medi-
tation who has managed to find visual equivalents for her meditation prac-
tice 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.
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 351

Brunson describes her painting in relation to Kundalini meditation as


follows:

Kundalini is an open-eyed meditation based on rhythmic, cyclical breath-


ing that allows unfocused seeing and deep concentration. In deep medita-
tion, it’s sometimes possible to enter an “altered” state that has specific
physical and visual qualities. The sensations in Kundalini are ones of open-
ing 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 physi-
cal qualities of paint to mimic perceptual phenomena—blurring, overlap-
ping, 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 qual-
ities 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 dis-
tinguishing elements of her work. Brunson rightly argues that “the [paint-
ing] 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 medita-
tion 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 evanes-
cent, amorphous skeins of paint that seem to pulse in and out of the sur-
face 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 associa-
tions. In the Lattices, such as Braid (Figure 15.14), lines are more notice-
able 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.
352 Altering Consciousness

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, cul-
minating in the notion of postmodernist play. Artworks from this period
have also reflected popular culture, political ideologies, and the angst-
ridden 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.
Altered Consciousness and Modern Art 353

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 México.
Brunson, J. (2010). Statement. Retrieved January 17, 2010, from http://www
.jamiebrunson.com/paintings/lattices.html.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato?: Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. 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.
Dalı́, 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-Rudı́n, A. (2009, June 11–14). Hypnosis in contemporary art. Poster pre-
sented 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.
354 Altering Consciousness

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
Jörg 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)
356 Altering Consciousness

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 worship-
ing (Söhngen, 1967). For Rouget (1985), music creates emotional condi-
tions 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 vol-
ume].
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 Cardeña, 2009; Fachner, 2006a; Matussek,
2001; Meszaros, Szabo, & Csako, 2002; Pekala & Kumar, 2000; Winkel-
man, 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 con-
nected to rhythmic body movements, to dance, excitement, and hyperar-
ousal, 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 357

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, & Cardeña, 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 fre-
quency 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 driv-
ing (brain convulsions caused by rhythmic light emissions at a frequency of
predominantly 10 Hz). He argued that the volume and energy of low-
frequency 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 sec-
ond) would synchronize EEG frequency measured in cycles per second.
Neher (1961, p. 449) used strongly beaten drum beat frequencies per-
formed 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;
358 Altering Consciousness

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).
Time Is the Key 359

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 mono-
chord, 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 Arrién, “most individ-
uals 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 infor-
mation 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 indi-
vidual, as well as the specific sociocultural situation and attitudes of the per-
sons involved in performance in the therapeutic process (Fachner, 2007).
From a psychodynamic perspective, Strobel writes: “Strictly speaking, it is
360 Altering Consciousness

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 partici-
pants on a 7-point scale). Irrespective of imaginative qualities, highly hyp-
notizable 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 prefer-
ences 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 infor-
mation 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 struc-
tures involved in processing emotional stimuli. The activation pattern
(blood flow) of brain regions (increased: ventral striatum, dorsomedial
midbrain, insula, orbitofrontal cortex; decreased: amygdala, left hippo-
campus, 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
Time Is the Key 361

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 dopa-
mine 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 & Büchel, 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 brain-
stem 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. Pan-
ksepp 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 emo-
tional 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
362 Altering Consciousness

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 boun-
daries like returning chorus, a sudden change of musical registers, and so
forth. This study illustrates how music functions as “a catalyst of strong emo-
tions 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 spe-
cific moments inherent in the preferred or beloved music but are not nec-
essarily 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 physiologi-
cal 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 evolu-
tion 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 pri-
marily 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 commu-
nication medium (Cross & Woodruff, 2009) and a framework prior to
language that was utilized for communicating context-sensitive and com-
plex 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 evolu-
tion 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
Time Is the Key 363

elements whereby animal vocalizations of affective states are immediate


expressions with nonsymbolic means, not planned nor integrated. Win-
kelman (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 automati-
cally 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 flu-


ids, 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 stimula-
tion 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 Susceptibil-
ity (Shor & Orne, 1963) have been developed to preselect such individuals
and to measure the depth of hypnosis reached (Meszaros et al., 2002). How-
ever, it seems that different personality traits and physiological constitutions
may also have their root in genetic differences [see Cardeña & Alvarado, this
volume; Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardeña, Volume 2].
The genetic bases concerning dance were reported by Bachner-
Melman and collaborators (2005), who found that professional dancers
364 Altering Consciousness

(as compared to athletes and a control group) had greater facility for sero-
tonin transport and vasopressin response (serotonin is a neurotransmitter
that regulates blood pressure in the vessels [see Nichols & Chemel, Vol-
ume 2], and the arginine vasopressin receptor 1a regulates vasoconstric-
tion/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 atten-
tion to stimuli (especially to musical stimuli) that we hypothesize may pro-
vide 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, compar-
ing rest, listening to pop music, and remembering a previous dance. In men-
tally 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 experi-
enced 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
Time Is the Key 365

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 struc-
ture 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 transcrip-
tion 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 entrain-
ment, connectionism, and neurotransmitter changes to explain the obser-
vations. 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, &
Altenmüller, 2003; Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl, & Altenmüller, 2003). Ana-
lyzing 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 uncon-
trolled 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 differ-
ent before and after entering the state. Throughout the 28-hour perfor-
mance, 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 pro-
grams used for playing music function quite normally in altered states,
but de- or acceleration of tempo and loudness may occur.
366 Altering Consciousness

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 inten-
tion 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 sta-
tions 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 mean-
ingful 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 meaning-
ful 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 struc-
ture of the musical events. This includes the beat intervals with varying
accentuations, and interonset intervals of beats in the millisecond range
Time Is the Key 367

(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 percep-
tion of time is altered, which is a common characteristic of ASC (Ludwig,
1966); but what about music makes changes in time perception from nor-
mal states of consciousness?
The research literature on timing reflects the debate on subjective tim-
ing effects, especially when time is estimated (memorized) after an event
has happened. Pöppel (2000) has called it the time paradoxon—time peri-
ods with a dense event structure recalled in a narration are estimated as
prolonged when a lot of interesting things happened, even when the dura-
tion 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 informa-
tion 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 subjec-
tive 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 conscious-
ness (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)
368 Altering Consciousness

However, perception of time and music does not only depend on


expectation, learning, attention, and memory functions in a dynamic pro-
cess 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 inter-
weave 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 seroto-
nergic (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 reproduc-
ing 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 thalamo-
cortico-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 dif-
ferent 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].

2
Globus et al. (1978) and Iannone et al. (2006) have shown that loudness scaling is state
dependent and can be pharmacologically altered.
Time Is the Key 369

To summarize, an altered temporality results in a different metric scal-


ing of sensory events in the musical time-space and has an impact on per-
ceptual 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 vari-
ous 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, pro-
posing 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 struc-
ture 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, decid-
ing, 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
370 Altering Consciousness

socioecological setting, cultural beliefs, and the intentions of inducing ASC


[see Whitehead, this volume]. Is music, then, only the soundtrack of a con-
text 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 inten-
sifications, mainly of tempo and volume; the deliberate use of accelerando
and crescendo (compare Rouget, 1985, pp. 82–86), but also extreme consis-
tence 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 vol-
ume. 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 involve-
ment, 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 indi-
vidual stages associated with the function and meaning of ASC in rituals
and ceremonies. The function of music here is to create a special emo-
tional 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
Time Is the Key 371

of ASC and altered temporality and might help to understand ASC pro-
cesses 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 fea-
tures such as repetition, long duration, monotony, volume, and density
do not provide clear causal explanations for ASC induction, but the con-
nection 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 para-
digm. 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 cor-
relate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceed-
ings 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 Mono-
graph 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.
372 Altering Consciousness

Buhusi, C. V., & Meck, W. H. (2005). What makes us tick? Functional and neural
mechanisms of interval timing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 755–765.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Christensen, E. (1996). The musical timespace. A theory of music listening. Aalborg,
Denmark: Aalborg University Press.
Cousto, H. (1995). Vom Urkult zur Kultur: Drogen und Techno [From ancient
cult to culture—Drugs and techno] (1st ed.). Solothurn, Switzerland: Nacht-
schatten.
Cross, I., & Woodruff, G. E. (2009). Music as a communicative medium. In
R. Botha & C. Knight (Eds.), The prehistory of language (pp. 113–144). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Crowe, B. J. (2004). Music and soulmaking: Toward a new theory of music therapy.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.
De Rios, M. D., & Janiger, O. (2003). LSD, spirituality, and the creative process.
Rochester, VT: Park Street.
Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: The
transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 231–256.
Dietrich, A. (2004). Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of
flow. Consciousness and Cognition, 13, 746–761.
Eagleman, D. M., Tse, P. U., Buonomano, D., Janssen, P., Nobre, A. C., & Hol-
combe, A. O. (2005). Time and the brain: How subjective time relates to neu-
ral time. Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 10369–10371.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy (Rev. and enl. ed.).
New York: Bollingen Foundation.
Fachner, J. (1998). A look at the basics of communication from the stance of
music therapy. In C. E. Gottschalk-Battschkus & C. Rätsch (Eds.), Ethnothera-
pies (1st ed., Vol. 14, pp. 209–214). Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und
Bildung Amand Aglaster Berlin.
Fachner, J. (2000). Cannabis, Musik und ein veränderter metrischer Bezugsrahmen
[Cannabis, music and a changed metric frame of reference]. In H. Rösing &
T. Phleps (Eds.), Populäre Musik im kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurs [Popular
music in the discourse of cultural studies] (Vol. 25/26, pp. 107–122). Karben,
Germany: CODA.
Fachner, J. (2006a). Music and altered states of consciousness: An overview. In
D. Aldridge & J. Fachner (Eds.), Music and altered states: Consciousness, tran-
scendence, therapy and addictions (pp. 15–37). London: Jessica Kingsley.
Fachner, J. (2006b). Music and drug induced altered states. In D. Aldridge &
J. Fachner (Eds.), Music and altered states: Consciousness, transcendence, therapy
and addictions (pp. 82–96). London: Jessica Kingsley.
Fachner, J. (2007). Wanderer between worlds—Anthropological perspectives on
healing rituals and music. Music Therapy Today, 8, 166–195. Retrieved 11th
January 2011 from http://www.musictherapytoday.com.
Time Is the Key 373

Fachner, J. (2009). Out of time? Music, consciousness states and neuropharmacologi-


cal mechanisms of an altered temporality. Paper presented at the 7th Triennial
Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 16-20
August at University of Jyväskylä, Finland . Retrieved 11th January 2011 from
http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-2009411245
Fachner, J. (2011). Drugs, altered states, and musical consciousness: Reframing
time and space. In E. Clarke & D. Clarke (Eds.), Music and consciousness (in
Press). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Freeman, W. (2000). A neurobiological role of music in social bonding. In N. L.
Wallin, B. Merker & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music (pp. 411–424).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Globus, G. G., Cohen, H. B., Kramer, J. C., Elliot, H. W., & Sharp, R. (1978).
Effects of marihuana induced altered state of consciousness on auditory per-
ception. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 10, 71–76.
Goldstein, A. (1980). Thrills in response to music and other stimuli. Physiological
Psychology, 8, 126–129.
Haerlin, P. (1998). The use of music instruments in psychotherapy in order to
alter states of consciousness. Psychotherapeut, 43, 238–242.
Hanser, S. B. (2009). From ancient to integrative medicine: Models for music
therapy. Music and Medicine, 1, 87–96.
Hess, P., Fachner, J., & Rittner, S. (2009). Verändertes Wachbewusstsein [Altered
Waking Consciousness]. In H. H. Decker-Voigt, P. Knill, & E. Weymann
(Eds.), Lexikon Musiktherapie (pp. 550–557). Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe.
Hutson, S. R. (2000). The rave: Spiritual healing in modern western subcultures.
Anthropology Quarterly, 73, 35–49.
Iannone, M., Bulotta, S., Paolino, D., Zito, M., Gratteri, S., Costanzo, F., et al.
(2006). Electrocortical effects of MDMA are potentiated by acoustic stimula-
tion in rats. BMC Neuroscience, 7(1), 13.
Katz, R., & De Rios, M. D. (1971). Whisteling in Peruvian ayahuasca healing ses-
sions. Journal of American Folklore, 84, 320–327.
Kohlmetz, C., Kopiez, R., & Altenmüller, E. (2003). Stability of motor programs
during a state of meditation: Electrocortical activity in a pianist playing “Vexations”
by Erik Satie continuously for 28 hours. Psychology of Music, 31(2), 173–186.
Kopiez, R., Bangert, M., Goebl, W., & Altenmüller, E. (2003). Tempo and loud-
ness analysis of a continuous 28-hour performance of Erik Satie’s composition
“Vexations.” Journal for New Music Research, 32, 243–258.
Kreutz, G., Ott, U., Teichmann, D., Osawa, P., & Vaitl, D. (2008). Using music to
induce emotions: Influences of musical preference and absorption. Psychology
of Music, 36, 101–126.
Levitin, D. (2008). This is your brain on music. London: Atlantic Books.
Ludwig, A. M. (1966). Altered states of consciousness. Archives of General Psychia-
try, 15, 225–234.
Mathew, R. J., Wilson, W. H., Turkington, T. G., Hawk, T. C., Coleman, R. E.,
DeGrado, T. R., et al. (2002). Time course of tetrahydrocannabinol-induced
374 Altering Consciousness

changes in regional cerebral blood flow measured with positron emission


tomography. Psychiatric Research: Neuroimaging, 116, 173–185.
Matussek, P. (2001). Berauschende Geräusche. Akustische Trancetechniken im
Medienwechsel [Intoxicating (rushing) sounds. Acoustic trance techniques in
changing mediums]. In A. Hiepko & K. Stopka (Eds.), Rauschen. Seine Phäno-
menologie zwischen Sinn und Störung [Rushing. Its phenomenology between
sense and distortion] (pp. 225–240). Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen &
Neumann.
Maxfield, M. C. (1990). The journey of the drum. Effects of rhythmic drumming on
EEG and subjective experience. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Transper-
sonal Psychology, Menlo Park, CA.
Meck, W. H. (1996). Neuropharmacology of timing and time perception. Cogni-
tive Brain Research, 3(3–4), 227–242.
Meck, W. H. (2005). Neuropsychology of timing and time perception. Brain and
Cognition, 58, 1–8.
Menon, V., & Levitin, D. J. (2005). The rewards of music listening: Response and
physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system. Neuroimage, 28(1), 175–184.
Meszaros, I., Szabo, C., & Csako, R. I. (2002). Hypnotic susceptibility and alter-
ations in subjective experiences. Acta Biologica Hungarica, 53, 499–514.
Mitchell, D. J., McNaughton, N., Flanagan, D., & Kirk, I. J. (2008). Frontal-
midline theta from the perspective of hippocampal “theta.” Progress in Neurobi-
ology, 86(3), 156–185.
Mountain, R. S. (1989, November 10–13). Factors that influence our perception
of time in music. Convergence, conference of the Canadian Electroacoustic Society.
Retrieved June, 22, 2010, from http://www.armchair-researcher.com/writings/
articles/time89.pdf.
Neher, A. (1961). Auditory driving observed with scalp electrodes in normal sub-
jects. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 13, 449–451.
Neher, A. (1962). A physiological explanation of unusual behavior in ceremonies
involving drums. Human Biology, 34, 151–160.
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.
Panksepp, J., & Bernatzky, G. (2002). Emotional sounds and the brain: The
neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation. Behavioural Processes,
60(2), 133–155.
Park, J. R., Yagyu, T., Saito, N., Kinoshita, T., & Hirai, T. (2002). Dynamics of
brain electric field during recall of Salpuri dance performance. Perceptual and
Motor Skills, 95, 955–962.
Pekala, R. J., & Kumar, V. K. (2000). Operationalizing “trance” I: Rationale
and research using a psychophenomenological approach. American Journal of
Clinical Hypnosis, 43, 107–135.
Penman, J., & Becker, J. (2009). Religious ecstatics, “deep listeners,” and musical
emotion. Empirical Musicology Review, 4(2), 49–70.
Time Is the Key 375

Pöppel, E. (2000). Grenzen des Bewusstseins. Wie kommen wir zur Zeit und wie
entsteht Wirklichkeit? [Limits of consciousness. How do we get to time and
how is reality contructed?] Frankfurt a. Main: Insel.
Rammsayer, T. H. (1999). Neuropharmacological evidence for different timing
mechanisms in humans. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 52B(3),
273–286.
Rill, B. (2006). Rave, communitas, and embodied idealism. Music Therapy Today,
7(3), 648–661. Retrieved 11th January 2011 from http://www.music
therapytoday.com
Rittner, S., Fachner, J., & Hess, P. (2009). Trance. In H. H. Decker-Voigt, P. Knill,
& E. Weymann (Eds.), Lexikon Musiktherapie (pp. 538–541). Göttingen,
Germany: Hogrefe.
Rouget, G. (1985). Music and trance. A theory of the relations between music and pos-
session. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ruud, E. (2001). Music therapy—History and cultural contexts. Voices, 1(3).
Retrieved 11th January 2011 from https://normt.uib.no/index.php/voices/
article/view/66/53
Shanon, B. (2001). Altered temporality. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 35–58.
Shor, R. E., & Orne, E. C. (1963). Norms on the Harvard Group Scale of Hyp-
notic Susceptibility, Form A. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis, 11, 39–47.
Snodgrass, M., & Lynn, S. J. (1989). Music absorption and hypnotizability.
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 37, 41–54.
Söhngen, O. (1967). Theologie der Musik [Theology of music]. Kassel, Germany:
Stauda.
Strobel, W. (1988). Sound—Trance—Healing. Musiktherapeutische Umschau, 9,
119–139.
Timmermann, T. (2009). Ethnologische Aspekte in der Musiktherapie [Ethnologi-
cal aspects of music therapy]. In H. H. Decker-Voigt & E. Weymann (Eds.),
Lexikon Musiktherapie (2nd ed., pp. 123–126). Göttingen, Germany: Hogrefe.
Turow, G. (2005). Auditory driving as a ritual technology: A review and analysis.
Unpublished Religious Studies Honors Thesis, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G. A., Kotchoubey, B., Kübler, A.,
et al. (2005). Psychobiology of altered states of consciousness. Psychological
Bulletin, 131, 98–127.
Wallin, N. L., Merker, B., & Brown, S. (2000). The origins of music. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Weir, D. (1996). Trance: From magic to technology. Ann Arbor, MI: Trans Media.
Winkelman, M. (2000). Shamanism: The neuroecology of conscioussness and healing.
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Winkelman, M. (2002). Shamanism and cognitive evolution. Cambridge Archeo-
logical Journal, 12, 71–101.
Winkelman, M. J. (1986). Trance states: A theoretical model and cross-cultural
analysis. Ethos, 14, 174–203.
376 Altering Consciousness

Wittmann, M., Carter, O., Hasler, F., Cahn, B. R., Grimberg, U., Spring, P., et al.
(2007). Effects of psilocybin on time perception and temporal control of
behaviour in humans. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 21, 50–64.
Wright, P. (1991). Rhythmic drumming in contemporary shamanism and its rela-
tionship to auditory driving and risk of seizure precipitation in epileptics.
Anthropology of Consciousness 2(3–4): 7–14.
Yacubian, J., & Büchel, C. (2009). The genetic basis of individual differences in
reward processing and the link to addictive behavior. In J.-C. Dreher &
L. Tremblay (Eds.), Handbook of reward and decision making (pp. 345–360).
Burlington, VT: Academic Press.
Zingrone, N. L., Alvarado, C. S., & Cardeña, E. (2010). Out-of-body experiences
and physical body activity and posture: Responses from a survey conducted in
Scotland. Journal of Mental and Nervous Disease, 198, 163–165.
About the Editors

ETZEL CARDEÑA, 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 Reli-
gion (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 permaculture-
based intentional communities.
This page intentionally left blank
Advisory Board

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., is Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Say-


brook University in San Francisco, California. In 2002 he received the
American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contribu-
tions 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 Remark-
able 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 Parapsy-
chological Association (which gave him its Outstanding Career Award).

Robert Turner worked on MRI with Peter Mansfield at the University of Not-
tingham, 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 phi-
losophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness,
and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding
380 Advisory Board

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, as-


sistant 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 parapsychol-
ogy. 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 phar-
macology 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.

Jörg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of


Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyväskylä,
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 psy-


chology of religion, in which he now holds a chair at Lund University,
Sweden. He is also an honorary professor in the psychology of
382 About the Contributors

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 signifi-
cance 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 contempo-
rary 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 con-
sciousness with his 1969 classic Altered States of Consciousness. Author of
more than 200 articles in the professional journals, his 1975 classic Trans-
personal 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 383

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 philoso-


phy, 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 find-
ings from psychology and neuroscience with philosophy of mind and
epistemology.

Phillip B. Zarrilli is professor of Performance Practice at the Drama Depart-


ment, 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).
This page intentionally left blank
Index

(“f” indicates a figure; “n” indicates a note; Alcoholic beverages, Neolithic period,
“t” indicates a table) 50–51
Alert state, hypnosis, 95, 96
“Abandon techniques,” acting, 317 Allison, R., 37
Aboriginal Men of High Degree Alpert, Richard, 206
(Elkin), 331 Alpha brain waves, meditation, 33
Absorption, 5, 10 Altamira caves, 46
Access consciousness, performance, 319 Alterations of Consciousness (Barušs), 114
Acting, double consciousness, 303 Altered pattern of phenomenal properties,
Actors: Asian training modes, 318; 2, 128
cognitive neuroscience, 304; modern Altered State Theory of Hypnosis (Kallio
training, 313–18; noh performance and Revonsuo), 3
ideal, 312; phenomenal/access Altered States (movie), 6, 15
consciousness, 319 Altered states of consciousness (ASC):
Adaptive function, ego, 264 Ancient Greece practices, 55–65;
Advaita Vedanta: ASC experience, 141, Ancient Middle East practices, 52–55;
142; ASC states, 146, 147, 149; animal magnetism, 90–93; biological
mystical dimension, 255, 260 basis, 196; classifying, 5–7;
Aesthetic performance: described, 302–3, consciousness/self, 238–244;
307; research, 303; and ritual contemporary actor training, 313–18;
performance, 305–6, 307 culturally induced, 181–86;
Affective mysticism, 77 cyberculture/virtual reality, 208–9;
Affective transcendence, 77 diabolic spirit possession, 76, 79–80;
Afro-Caribbean religions, state of divine spirit possession, 75, 76–78;
consciousness, 90 early counterculture, 203–8; Eastern
Age of Enlightenment, reactive religious approaches, 139–57; Eastern
movements, 89–90 performance traditions, 310–12;
Agency, SMT, 240, 241 Enlightenment religious movements,
Aggregate vs. general function, 10 89–90; epistemological issues, 230–33;
Al-Andaluz period, rational/empirical evolutionary origins, 163–64, 164–16;
philosophy, 89 hypnotic somnambulism, 93–97, 102;
Alcohol use, literary authors, 287 and individual differences, 9–11; and
386 Index

induction procedures, 7–8; integration, Ancient Greece, practices, 55–65, 62f, 63f
30; mediumship, 97–103; modern art, Ancient Middle East, practices, 52–55
327–54; and music, 356–71; in Anger, ego-psychological model, 271
performance, 301–2; mystical Animal magnetism, 90–91; literary trope,
experience, 244–48; new millennium 287–88
research, 126–29; 1960s research, Animal spirits, shamanism, 160
114–16, 204; 1970s research, 116–21; Animals: perspectival worldview, 184,
1980s research, 121–24; 1990s 186; shamanic power, 339–40
research, 124–26; perception, 233–38; Animism, defined, 184
performance research, 303–4; Anomalies: AC physical science 27; in
phenomenal/access consciousness, science, 26
319–20; physical science anomalies, “Anomalous experiences,” 3, 12
27; pre-Christian European shamanism, Anthroposophy, expansion of
74–76; prehistoric practices, consciousness, 107
46–51; principal functions, 188; Antistructural episodes, cultural change,
proto-historic practices, 51–52; 188, 196
recent publications, 113–14; religious Apter, Michael, “reversal theory,” 192
experiences (REs), 189–91; religious Apuleius, on Isis initiation, 65, 66
literature, 280–82; religious mysticism, APZ-OAV Questionnaire, 122–23, 127
255–72; ritual/aesthetic performances, Arbman, Ernst: consciousness, 271;
305–7; Roman Empire practices, mystical death, 271–72; religious
65–67; scientific status, 24–25; visions, 258
shamanism, 159–63, 165–77, 190; Arévalo, Guillermo, 220
social change, 192–97; study of, 11–13; Aristotle: on initiation rites, 60, 62; on
techno-rave/DiY consciousness, 203, prophetic dreams, 245
210–12; temporary alterations, Aronofsky, Darren, 15
186–89; terminology, 2–5, 114–15; Arousal, 1970s research, 120
trance/psytrance, 212–20; transition Art: meditative induction, 329; shamanic
states, 9; 20th-century survey, 102–7; state induction, 329
universal manifestation, 23, Artaud, Antonin: actor training, 314, 315,
24; written works/literature, 278–79, 318; narcotic use, 285
282–94 Asian tradition, altering consciousness
Altered States of Consciousness (Tart), 115 techniques, 308
Altered States of Consciousness Induction Auditory drive, ritual trances,
Device (ASCID), 119 357–58
Altering phenomenology, 128 Auditory hallucinations: 1980s research,
Alvarado, Carlos, 14 124; SMT, 241
Amadeus, 327, 328 Aurobindo, Sri, 204 n.1
American Psychological Association Automatic writing: Breton’s use, 289; and
(APA), ASC publications, 114 mediumship, 98–99; William James,
American Society for Psychical Research, 103–4
J. B. Rhine, 106 Automaticity, Tart, 107
American transcendentalism, expansion Ayahuasca shamanism, 214, 215, 282
of consciousness, 106 Ayin (“nothingness”), 258
Amnesia: dissociation in, 36;
hypnotic induction, 95 Baal-Shem Tov, emergence of, 90
Amundsen, Reidar, vision Bacchus (Dionysus Bacchus), 61
of Jesus, 266–68 Barušs, Imants, 114
Index 387

Baudelaire, Charles, 257; narcotic use, dimension, 255, 260, 263; meditation
284–85 mystical states, 121
Beerbohm, Max, 292 Buñuel, Louis, 334
Being, Vedanta tradition, 140 Burkutlatjpi, Liwukang, 331
Beischel, Julie, 14 Burning Man Festival, 205, 209, 302
Berger, Hans, ACS research, 106 Butoh training, actors, 318
Bergson, Henri: “life-force,” 204–5; Butsugen, ASC state, 149
“reducing valve,” 205 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 257;
Berlioz, Hector, 15 narcotic use, 283
Bertrand, Alexandre, 95
Beuys, Joseph, shamanic techniques, 329, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The (film), 15
337f, 338, 339–41, 340f Caciola, Nancy, 76
Bey, Hakim, 210–11 Calendrical rites, rituals, 187, 188
Bhagavad-Gita, pure consciousness, 155 Calonarang, ritual drama, 364
Bible, spirit possessions in, 79 “Cambridge Anthropologists,” 307
Biological cycles, and ASC, 10–11 Camisard prophets, emergence of, 90
Black Square, The (Malevich), 343–44 Cardeña, Etzel, 164, 315; hypnosis
Blake, William, 285 n.3; perception, 106 research, 127; on manias, 327
Block, Ned, 319 Cargo cult, social change, 192–93
Body, SMT, 239–41, 242 Carrington, Leonora, surrealist painter,
Book of Revelations, 281 335–36
Boom Festival, counterculture, 203, Carroll, Lewis, 278, 278 n.1, 282
215–16, 219–20 Castaneda, Carlos, 214, 286–87
Borges, Jorge Luis, 14; literary Caves and subterranean passages, 47
double, 294 Chakrasambhara Mandala, 349, 350f
Borges and I (Borges), 294 Changing Light at Sandover (Merrill), 293
Bourdieu, Pierre, Kabuli gender Chanting, shamanism, 169
relations, 185 Charas (hash), 213
Bourguignon, Erika, institutionalized Charcot, Jean-Martin, influence of, 288;
ASC, 190 work of, 101
Braid (Brunson), 35, 352f Charisma, defined, 194
Brain: and dancing, 364; information Charismatic exorcists, 82–83
processing, 367; literacy skills, 277; Charismatic leaders, social change, 192,
musical stimulation, 360–61, 362, 194–95
364–65; mystical roots, 256; shamanic, Chastenet, A. M. J., Marquis de
175; time perception, 368 Puységur, 93
“Breath stops,” 141 “Chat cycle,” 187
Breton, André, 288–89, 290–91 Chavet caves, 46
Breuer, Joseph, 105 Chekhov, Michael, 314
Bridal mysticism, 269, 270 Chi body, visual arts, 331, 347, 348
Bright light, initiation rites, 60, 65 Childhood, as “transitional space,” 188
Browning, Robert, 288 Chinchem, 192
Brunson, Jamie, meditative induction, Chlysti, emergence of, 90
329, 350–51 Christianity: and definitions of ASC, 5;
Bucke, Richard Maurice, 204; mystical mystical dimension, 255, 260
experience, 262 Clark, Fraser, 212
Buddhism: East-Asian ASC experience, Claros, mantic preparations, 56, 57
139; in Japan, 310–11; mystical Clerical exorcists, 83
388 Index

Clinical psychology, and definitions of Cousins, James, altered states, 291


ASC, 5, 6 Cousins, Wendy, 14
Cloud of Tea (Higby), 341f Crawford, H., 34
Clowde of Unknowyng, The, spiritual Creative Evolution (Bergson), 205
exercises, 77–78 Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
Cognitive neuroscience, actor’s (Freud), 279–80
experience, 304 Creativity, defined, 191–92
Cohen, Allen, 206–7 Crevel, René, 289–90
Cohen, Emma, 217 Cronenberg, David, 15
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, narcotic use, Cross-cultural perspective, 23
283–84, 285 Crowley, Aleister, narcotic use, 285
“Collective effervescence,” 194, 195 Culture, and ASC, 24
Comford, Francis, Cambridge Cummins, Geraldine, altered states,
anthropologist, 307 291–92
Communication: and mediumship, Cyberculture, early counterculture, 208
98–100; prelinguistic, 362–63 “Cyberdelic thesis,” 208
Communitas states, Ndembu rite, 196–97; “Cyberia,” 208
and permanence, 198
Comstock, C., 37 Daimonion of Socrates (Plutarch), 58, 59
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Dalı́, Salvador, shamanic induction
(De Quincey), 283 techniques, 329, 334f
Consciousness: brain mechanisms, 30–32; Dance: genetic basis, 363–64; psytrance
culturally variant, 182; derivation of, culture, 215–18; shamanism, 166–67,
355; and dreams, 243; Eastern 169
tradition, 140, 144; expansion of, 106; Dancing: brain activity, 364; scenes in
in transit states, 301; mapping research, prehistoric art, 49; uncontrollable,
120–21; meditative states, 243–44; 91–92
modes of, 29–30; 1980s research, D’Andrea, Anthony, 213
121–22; noh performance ideal, 312; d’Aquili, E., 24, 34
phenomenal/access, 319; recent Davis, Erik, 220
publications, 113–14, 115; “Daydream cycle,” 187
reformatting terms, 128; techniques of Daydreams, and dissociation, 36
experience, 204; term, 2; 20th-century De Exorcismis (1998), 85
research, 106; written works/literature, De Mille, Richard, 286
278–79 De Morgan, Sophia, 99
“Consciousness at large,” 103 De Quincey, Thomas, 283
“Consciousness clubs,” 212 Deafferentation, 34, 37
Consortium of Collective Deconstructivism, mystical experience,
Consciousness, 219 261–62
Constructivism, and mystical experience, Decontextualism, mystical experience,
120–21, 261–64 261; 1980s research, 121
Contemporary counterculture, 1960s Deep hypnotic state, 95, 96
legacy, 204–5 Deep sleep, 29
“Control techniques,” acting, 317 Defensive function, ego, 264
Corporal mystical experience, 76–77 Deikman, Arthur J., 256
Cortázar, Julio, 16 Deir Alla, Jordan, prophecy inscription, 53
“Cosmic consciousness,” 204 Deleuze, Joseph Philippe François, 94
Counterculture, psychedelics, 205–8 Delphi, mantic preparations, 56
Index 389

“Delusional belief,” 4 Dream skepticism, epistemological


Democritus, on poetic inspiration, 63 concerns, 230–33
Demotic Magical Papyrus, Egypt, 66 Dreaming: 1970s research, 119; REM
Dérègelment de tous les sens (Rimbaud), 14 sleep, 29, 30
Descartes, René: dream skepticism, Dreams: and consciousness, 243;
230–31, 233–34; philosophy of, 89 epistemological concerns, 230–33;
Description of Greece, Pausanias, 57 philosophy of perception, 233;
Desnos, Robert, 290 religious life, 244; and self-
Dexter, George T., 98–99, 100 consciousness, 241–43; shamanism,
Diabolic spirit possession, 76, 79–80 171–72; surrealism, 289–90
“Dialectics of utopia,” 219 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 15
Didyma, mantic preparations, 56 Drugs, shamanism, 165–66
Dietrich, A., 32, 33 Drumming: altered temporality, 366–67;
“Digital Maoism,” 209 body synchronization, 363; ritual
Digital utopianism, 208–9 trance, 357–58; shamanic, 125, 166
Dionysiac mysteries, 60, 61–63, 62f, 63f Du Maurier, George, 288
Direct realism, philosophy of Dualistic mystical state, 9
perception, 233 Durkheim, Émile: on charisma, 194; on
Disciplinary matrix, paradigm ritual, 196; on the sacred, 195
elements, 25
Discrete state of consciousness, 3 Earthdance, 212
Discriminative intellect, Eastern tradition, Eastern civilization: ASC experience,
150, 151 140–44, 148; ASC practical effects,
Discursive thinking, Eastern tradition, 153–57; ASC states (maps), 144–50;
150, 151 ASC’s role, 139; inner awareness
Disjunctivism, mental states, 236–37 levels, 150–53
Disk series (Irwin), 348 Ecstasy, 5, 31; bodily movements, 356t,
Dissociation, 8, 34; defined, 36; and 357; Latin ex stasis, 77; sensory
integration, 37; make-believe, 189; and deprivation, 356; visionary
mediumship, 101, 102; shamanism, experience, 53
164–65 Ecstatic entrancement, 211
Dissociative identity disorder, and Edelman, Nicole, 98
hypnosis, 97 n.2 Edmonds, Judge John W., 98–99, 100
Divergent concepts, social sciences, 25 Ego, functions of, 264
Divine madness, 55 Ekström, Hjalmar, 265
Divine spirit possession, 75, 76–78 Electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs),
DiY consciousness, early counterculture, 211, 213, 215–17
203, 209, 210–12 Eliade, Mircea, shamanism, 160–61, 163,
Don Juan (Byron), 257 338–39
Donne di fuori, 74 Elkin, A. P., 331
Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 205, Ellis, Havelock, narcotic use, 285
285–86, 330 Ellul, Jacques, 209
Dopamine, 31 Ellwood, Robert S., 259
“Double consciousness,” acting, 303, 320 Embodied metaphors, prehistoric art, 48
Double personality, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 “Emotional brain,” 175
Dowden, Hester, 291 Emotional response “gating,” 31
Dracula (Stoker), 288 Emotions, and music, 168, 356,
Dream incubation, shamanism, 159 360–62
390 Index

Empirical research, 1980s instruments, Felt presence (FP), religious belief,


122–23 246–47
Emptiness: Buddhist experience, 140, Fern Cat, The (Varo), 336
142; Eastern ASC states, 144–45 Fersen, Alexander, actor training, 314,
Encounter, The (Varo), 335 316–17
Enlightenment, 9 Fischer, Roland, arousal studies, 3, 120
Enlivenment, Eastern tradition, 154 Flaherty, Alice: on Lewis Carroll, 281; on
Entheogen drugs, 24 writing, 281
“Entheogenic Reformation,” 207, 214 Flournoy, Théodore, 104, 105
Enthousiasmos, Greek divine Folded Under a Stone Sleeping (Higby), 342
possession, 56 Ford, Gordon Onlow, 330
Enthusiasm, spirit possession, 53 “Forgetting model,” mysticism, 263
Entrainment, defined, 358 Forman, Robert K. C.: mystical
Epic of Gilgamesh, 279 experience, 261–63, 271, 272; mystical
Epistemology, ASC issues, 230 studies, 9, 121
Epoques des sommeils, 290 Fo-yen Ch’ing-yuan, 149
Ergotropic arousal, 120 Frankenstein (Shelley), 284
Ernst, Max, surrealist painter, 335 Franklin, Benjamin, magnetism, 91
Ersatz-death, Ancient Greek mystery Freak, counterculture, 204, 213
rites, 60 Frecska, E., 37
Esalen Institute, 204 n.1 Free Spirits Antinomists, 78
Esdaile, James, 97 French Encyclopedists, philosophy of, 89
Essay Concerning Human Understanding Freud, Sigmund: ASC themes, 105; on
(Locke), 245 literary sources, 278; on mysticism,
“Executive possession,” 217 255; on writing, 279–80
Exemplars, paradigm elements, 25 Frontal limbic interaction, in hypnosis, 35
Exertion, shamanism, 171 Frontal lobe synchronization, 6, 23, 30
Exogenous neurotransmitters, Frontal-subcortical circuits, 32
shamanism, 165–66
Exorcism, 82–84 Gamma high-frequency brain waves, 30;
Exorcism, animal magnetism, 91 in meditation, 33
Experimental metaphysics, and “Gao trance,” 212, 213, 216
mediumship, 98 Gardzienice Theater Association
Extrovertive mystical experience” (EME), techniques, 318
146 n.4 Garrett, Eileen, altered states, 291
Eyn Sof (“without end”), 258 Gassner, Johann Joseph, 90, 91
Ezekiel’s visions, 54–55 Gathering of the Tribes for Human Be-in,
206–7
Fachner, Jörg, 15 Gauthier, François, 218
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Gautier, Théophile, narcotic use, 284–85
The (Poe), 288 Geels, Antoon, 14
Farthing, G. William, consciousness, Gender, cultural beliefs, 185
113 “Generalized altruism,” 182
Fasting, shamanism, 170 Geometric motifs, Tuleilat Ghassul,
Father Hell, 91 48, 50f
Faulkner, William, 287 Gerard, Morgan, 218
Feedback loops, cortico-striato-thalamo- Gertrud the Great of Helfta, 268–70
cortical, 32 Ghost Dance cults, social change, 193–94
Index 391

Ghost Shirts, 194 Herbert, R., 33


Gibson, William, 208 Hermann, Max, theater as “event,” 303–4
Gift (le don), Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Herodotus, Scythian funeral rite, 51
Gift exchange, clan-based society, 183–84 Higby, Sha Sha, shamanic techniques,
Gil, DJ Goa, 213 329, 341–42
Ginsberg, Allen, LSD, 206 Highly hypnotizable people, 8, 9,
Global Dance Party for Peace, 212 14, 34, 35
“God-mysticism,” 256 Hippies, counterculture, 204
Goldman, Albert, 342 Hippocampus, 31
Gore, Georgina, on raves, 217 Histoire Critique du Magnétisme Animal
Great Awakening, religious movement, 90 (Deleuze), 94
Green, John, 316 Hobbes, Thomas, on dream
Gregory, William, 95, 96–97 skepticism, 231
Grey, Alexander, shamanic induction Hobson, J. A., 7
techniques, 329, 333f, 333 Hodgson, Richard, 100–1
Grof, Stanlislav, unconscious, 120 Hoffman, D. D., 11
Grotowski, Jerzy, actor training, 314, Hofmann, Albert, 205
315–16, 318 Homer, 282
Guardia, Helena, 15 Hood, Ralph W., REEM, 256
Gurdjieff, George, I., 330; “The Work,” Horace, 295
107 Houston, Jean, ASCID, 119
Gurney, Edmund, 102; hypnosis, 95–96 How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
(Beuys), 337f, 339
Hallucination: defined, 124; hypnagogic Hughes, Ted, 14
state, 247; 1980s research, 123–24; Hui Neng, 344
phenomenology of, 102; philosophy of Hull, Clark L., 106
perception, 233–38; selfhood, 240, 241 Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily
Hallucinogen Rating Scale (HRS), Death (Myers), 102
research, 125–26, 127 Human Personality, Myers’s articles, 103
Hallucinogenic drugs, new millennium “Human potential movement,” 204 n.1
research, 126–27 Humans, bodily alterations, 185–86
Handbook of Near-Death Experiences, The Hunter-gatherer societies,
(Holden et al.), 119 shamanism, 162
Handsome Lake, Iroquois revival, 194 Huxley, Aldous: on knowledge, 244;
Hard/complete constructivism, 121 on psychedelics, 205–6, 256–57,
Hardy, Alister, REs studies, 189–90 285–86; on van Gogh
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 307 painting, 330
Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Hyperfrontal states, sensory
Susceptibility, 363 processing, 369
Hashish Club, members of, 284–85 Hypergraphia, 281, 282
Hataphatic experience, religious Hypnos, god of sleep, 93
visions, 258 Hypnosis, 4, 6, 7, 8; defined, 127; as
Hatha yoga, 308–9 dissociation, 34–35; literary trope,
Heidegger, Martin, 279, 331 287–88; and mediumship, 97–98; and
Hemingway, Ernest, 287 music, 360, 363; propensity, 10; and
Hemp seeds: Neolithic sites, 50; Scythian psi phenomena, 94; and psychiatric
funeral rites, 51 diagnosis, 97 n.2; shamanism, 164;
Henosis, unit, 67 social contagion, 186; standardized
392 Index

instruments, 127; 20th-century Irish Witch Doctors (Yeats), 292


research, 106 Irwin, Robert, meditative induction, 329,
“Hypnotic sleep,” 289–90 348–49
Hypnotic somnambulism, 93–97 Isabella, hypnotic state, 96
Hypnotic state of consciousness, 7; Ishtar cult, prophecy, 53
investigation of, 95 Isis mysteries, Greco-Roman, 65
Hypnotic susceptibility, 35 Islam, mystical dimension, 255,
Hysteria, and hypnosis, 97 n.2 258–59, 260
Island (Huxley), 205
I Like America and America Likes Me
(Beuys), 340f James, Henry, fragmented identities,
Ibn al-Arabi, 258–59 293–294
Ideological revolutions, 27 James, William, 6, 11, 13; consciousness,
Illusions: philosophy of perception, 233; 103–4, 205; mystical experience,
selfhood, 240–41 244–45, 256; narcotic use, 285;
Imbas forosnai, 292 “noetic” states, 189; perennialism, 261;
Incarnate knowledge, Socrates on, 64 on religious belief, 246; stream of
Incomplete constructivism, 121 consciousness, 278
Incorporation phase, rituals, 187 Janet, Pierre, Mme. B., 94; ASC works,
Incubus experience, hypnagogic state, 247 104; influence of, 288;
India, performance tradition, 310 on mediumship, 101
Induction procedures, and ASC, 6, 7–8 Jansenist convulsionaries,
Inge, W. R., mysticism, 260–61 emergence of, 90
Initiation rites, Greek mystery cults, Japan, performance art, 310–12
59–61 Jesus, visionary encounters, 266–68
Innate Capacity, The (Forman), 262 Joyce, James, 281, 291, 293 n.6; stream of
“Inner self helper,” 37 consciousness, 104
Inspiration, romantic poets, 327–28 Judaism, mystical dimension,
Integral Institute, 204 n.1 255, 258, 260
“Integral Transformative Practice,” 204 n.1 Jung, Carl G.: on literature, 278; on
Integrative mode of consciousness, 13, 23, mediumship, 99; on mysticism, 255
28, 29; biological bases, 30–32;
characteristics, 38 Kabbala, Jewish mystical tradition, 255,
Intellectual mystical experience, 76 260, 263
Intentionalism, mental states, Kairological time, 369
234–35, 237 Kallio, S., 3, 4
Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila), 260 Kant, Immanuel, philosophy of, 89
International Study on Altered States of Karma yoga, 308
Consciousness (Dittrich), 123 Kashmir Shaivism, mystical
Interpretation, individual differences, 10 dimension, 255
“Introvertive mystical experience” Katha Upanisad, yoga, 309
(IME), 146 n.4 Katz, Steven T.: constructivist approach,
Intruder experience, hypnagogic 261, 272; mystical experience,
state, 247 120–21, 257
Intrusion and intervention, diabolic Keats, John, narcotic use, 283
possession, 78 Kerauhan, possession trance, 364
Ion (Plato), 279 Kesey, Ken, 206
Iribas, Ana Eva, 328 Kinship systems, cultural impact, 182–85
Index 393

Kirmayer, L., 36 Literature: fractured identities, 293–94;


Kluge, Carl Alexander Ferdinand, mesmeric revelations, 287–93;
magnetic somnambulism, 94 narcotics/alcohol influence, 282–87;
Koestler, Arthur, 287 religious writing, 280–82
Kolanad, Gitanjali, 310 Locke, John, knowledge, 245
Kramer, Hilton, 348 Louis XVI, King of France, and Mesmer,
Krippner, Stanley, 14; ASC definition, 116 92–93
Kubla Khan (Coleridge), 284 Loyzehnski, M. V., 342
Kuhn, Thomas, 25, 26, 27; ASC LSD, discovery of, 205
paradigms, 113 Lucid dreaming, 16; 1980s research, 123
Kundalini, 9 Lucid dreams: shamanism, 171–72; SMT,
242, 243
L’Année dernière à Marienbad (film), 15 Ludwig, Arnold M., 2–3, 6; ASC term,
L’Automatisme Psychologique (Janet), 101 114–15
La Prosa del Observatoria (Cortázar), 16 Luna, E., 37
Landau, James, 211 Lynch, David, 15
Lanier, Jaren, 209
Las Ruinas Circulares (Borges), 14 MacLean, P., 38
Lascaux caves, 46 “Magical flight,” 74
Lattices (Brunson), 351 Magico-religious practitioners, 1990s
Laughlin, C., 24 research, 126
Laureys, Steven, 7 Magnetic Lady to her Patient,
Lawrence, D. H., 197–98 A (Shelly), 287
Lay individuals, exorcism, 82 Magritte, René, surrealist painter, 335
Leary, Timothy, LSD, 206, 207, 208 Mahayana Buddhism: emptiness, 348;
Leboulanger, Léonie, 94 no-self-doctrine, 148 n.5
Lee, Martin, 205 Make-believe, dissociation, 189
Leibniz, Baruch: perennialism, 244; Making of a Counter Culture,
philosophy of, 89 The (Roszak), 209
Leonard, George Burr, 204 n.1 Malevich, Kasmir, meditative induction,
Leonard, Gladys Osborne, medium, 329, 342–45, 343f
100, 101 Malevolence-benevolence spectrum, spirit
Les Champs magnetiques (Breton/Soupault), possession, 76
289 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 338
Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Mandell, A., 31
Magnetism (Gregory), 95 Mania, Greek madness, frenzy, 56, 61
Leuner, Hans-Carl, 265 Manias, Plato’s types, 5
Levy, Mark, 14 Manifesto of Surrealism (Breton), 290–91
Lewis, Sinclair, 287 Marijuana, 1970’s research, 118
Lewis-Davis, D. 46, 47 Markoff, John, 208–9
Life After Life (Moody), 118 Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Blake),
Life crisis rites, rituals, 187 285 n.3
“Life-force,” 204–5 Martial arts, yoga training, 309–10
Lilly, John C., 118 Martin, Agnes, meditative induction, 329,
Liminal phase, rituals, 187–88 342, 345–48
Liminal Village, Boom Festival, 219–20 Mass psychogenic illness, Mesmer, 91–92
Lineage clans, kinship systems, 182–83 Masters, Robert, ASCID, 119
Literacy, invention of, 277 Maternal bond, music, 168
394 Index

Maya yoga, 308 Mind: OBE “protoconcept,” 248;


McKenna, Dennis, 207–8 philosophy of, 238–40
McKenna, Terence, 207–8 Minimalism, visual arts, 342, 345
McManus, J., 24 Mitchell, Weir, narcotic use, 285
Mead, Europe, 51–52 Mnemodrama, actor training, 316
Mediating function, ego, 264 Modalities of experiencing, 2
Mediation: brain dynamics, 33–34; and Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung), 278
procedures, 8 “Modern primitives,” 203
Medically unexplained epidemic illness, “Modern spiritualism,” 98
Mesmer, 91–92 Monophasic cultures, waking
Meditation: art induction, 329; Eastern consciousness, 24
practices, 156–57; Eastern tradition, “Monophasic,” 181, 190
140, 141–42; ego-psychological model, Monroe, Robert, OBE research, 116
270–71; new millennium research, Moody, Raymond (NDE), 1970s research,
128; 1990s research, 124–25; 118–19
psychology of religion, 256; states Mors mystica, 263
classification, 5 Morselli, Enrico, 105
Meditations (Descartes), 230, 231 Müller, Catherine Elise, 104
Meditative states, consciousness, 243–44 Multiple personality: and hypnosis, 97
Medium, performance, 305 n.2; literary trope, 293–94
Mediums, 100, 104, 105; new millennium Murphy, Michael, 204 n.1
research, 127–28 Murray, Gilbert, Cambridge
Mediumship: defined, 98; early study of, anthropologist, 307
97–103, 104, 105; and spiritualism, Musgrove, Frank, 219
98–99; 20th-century research, 106 Music: altered consciousness, 355, 356t,
Meister Eckhart: “God-mysticism,” 256; 356–57, 366; altered temporality, 366–
mystical dimensions, 260 69; brain activity, 360–61; and
Memory, literacy skills, 277 hypnosis, 360; information transfer,
Menghi, Girolamo, exorcist, 83 362; prelinguistic communication,
Mental Health Research Institute Unusual 362–63; shamanism, 167–69; trance
Perceptions Schedule (MUPS), 124 mechanics, 357–58
Mental vortex, 57 n.10, 65 Music and Trance. A Theory of the Relations
Merkabah literature,” Sholem, 55 n.8 between Music and Possession (Rouget),
Merrill, James, 293 356, 360
Mescaline, literary bohemia, 285–86 Music therapy, 358–60
Mesmer, Franz Anton; animal magnetism, Musical tradition, Upper Paleolithic,
90–93, 92f; literary influence, 48–49
287–88 My Life in Art (Stanislavsky), 313
Mesmerism, 90–93, 92f, 97 n.2; literary Myers, Frederic W. H., 6, 10; on
trope, 287–93 mediumship, 101–2; works of, 102–3
Mesmerism (Browning), 288 Mystai, Greek rite participants, 59, 60
Mesmerism in India (Esdaile), 97 Mystic initiation, Ancient Greece, 60
Messiaen, Olivier, 15 Mystical death: defined, 271; ”forgetting
Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 65, 66 model,” 263; Gertrud of Helfta, 269
“Metaverse,” 209 Mystical experience: classical studies, 257;
Methodists, emergence of, 90 consequential dimension, 258, 259–60;
Metzner, Ralph, 206 defined, 259; ideological dimension,
“Mimetic controller,” 196 258, 260; intellectual dimension, 258,
Index 395

260; and knowledge, 244–48; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey),
personality model, 264; religious 206
dimension, 258–59; ritual dimension, Opium: Mediterranean protohistoric
258, 260; scientific studies, 261–64 cultures, 52; poppy domestication, 50
Mysticism: defined, 255, 257; 1980s Origin of the Work of Art, The (Heidegger),
research, 121; psychology of religion, 331
255–56; religious case studies, 266–72; Ornstein, R., 11
types of experience, 256–57. See also Ott, Jonathon, 207
Religious mysticism Otto, Rudolf: mystical types, 256;
Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis numinous character, 189
(Katz), 120–21 Out-of-body experience (OBEs), 33;
biological basis, 173–75; ecstasy, 53;
Naı̈ve realism, philosophy of new millennium research, 128; 1960s
perception, 233 research, 115–16; Old Testament, 54,
Nangyar, Usha, 310 55; as “protoconcept,” 248; Timarchus,
Narcotics, in literary sources, 58; selfhood, 240; shamanism, 159,
282–87 172–73
“Nature mysticism,” 256–56 Ownership, SMT, 240, 241
Near-death experiences (NDE), 1970s Ozturk, E., 36
research, 118–19
Neotrance, 215 Paradigm shifts, 26
Neurobiology, metric timekeeping, 366 Paradigms, features of, 25
“Neurognostic process,” 196 Parapsychology, J. B. Rhine, 106
Neuromancer (Gibson), 208 Parasympathetic dominance, shamanism,
Neurophenomenological approach, 7, 29, 169–70
38; shamanism, 176–77 Pascal, Blaise, on imaginary life, 280
Neuroscience: and ACS research, 106; Patara, mantic preparations, 56
new millennium research, 128 Peak Experiences Scale (PES), 123
Neurotransmitters: shamanism, 165–66; Pekala, Ronald, 122
time perception, 368 Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats), 292
Newberg, A., 34 Perception: See Sensory perception
Nibbana (extinction), 263 Perennial Philosophy (Huxley), 244
Nirvana yoga, 308 Perennialism: mystical experience, 261,
“Noetic” states, 189 262; philosophy of, 261, 244
Noh theater, performance art, 311–12, Performance: defined, 302; Eastern
337; Sha Sha Higby, 341–42 models, 310–12; phenomenal/access
Noirhomme, Quentin, 7 consciousness, 319; western/
Noland, Christopher, 16 nonwestern practices, 303
Nonbeing, Buddhist tradition, 140 Performance art: defined, 336; genres,
Numinous character, awe/wonder, 189 336–37
Núñez, Nicolás, 15; actor training, 314, Performance event, theater, 303–4
317–18 Performance score, 302;
phenomenological account, 320–21
O’Neill, Eugene, 287 Permanent changes, in consciousness, 9
O’Reilly, Kaite, performance score, 320 Persistence of Memory (Dali), 334f, 334–35
Odyssey (Homer), 60, 282–283 Personal significance, and ASC, 29, 30
Old Testament prophets, shamanistic Personality, ego-psychological model, 265
type, 53–54 “Perspectivism,” animism, 184
396 Index

Phaedrus (Plato), 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 245, Prefrontal cortex (PFC), dysregulation,
327 32–33
Phantasms of the Living (Gurney, Myers, & Prehistoric art and practices, 46–51, 47f,
Podmore), 102 49f, 50f
Phantom limbs, 239 Preparadigmatic period, science/ideology
Phenomenal consciousness, performance, change, 28
319 Principles of Psychology (James),
Phenomenology of Consciousness 103–4, 278
Inventory (PCI), 122 Private Life, The (James), 293
Philosophia perennis, 204 Problem of Pure Consciousness, The
Philosophy: consciousness/self, 238–44; (Forman), 261–62
epistemological concerns, 230–33; Propensity, to ASC, 10
mysticism/knowledge, 244–48; sensory Prophecy: Afro-Caribbean religions, 90;
perception, 233–38 ancient Greece, 56; ancient Israel, 53
Philosophy of Composition, The (Poe), 279 Prosopopesis, defined, 105
Physical stress, shamanism, 171 Protohistoric practices, 51–52
Piper, Leonora, medium, 100–1, 105 Pseudo-Dionysian transcendence, 77
Pituitary cyclase-activating polypeptide Psi phenomenon, 20th-century research,
precursor (PACAP), 165 106
Placebo effect, shamanism, 164 Psychedelic Experience (Leary et al.), 206
Plath, Sylvia, 14 Psychedelic festivals, value of, 216–19
Plato, 2, 5, 11, 55; deep knowledge, 245; Psychedelic-induced experiences,
expansion of consciousness, 106; on shamanism, 165–66
initiatory madness, 59; on poetic “Psychedelic trance,” contemporary
inspiration, 63; on poetry, 279, 327 counterculture, 203
Plotinus, on out-of-body experience, Psychedelics: early counterculture, 205–8;
66–67 mechanisms, 32; 1960s legacy, 205–6;
Plutarch, mystery rites, 58, 59, 60–61 1970s research, 118; psytrance,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 279; multiple identities, 214–15; veritable pharmacopeia, 211
293; psychic displacement, 288 Psychiatric diagnosis, and
Poet’s Immortal Fame, The (Horace), 295 hypnosis, 97 n.2
Poetic inspiration, divine madness, 63 Psychic displacements, Romantic era, 288
Poetry, Language and Thought (Heidegger), Psychoactive substances: expansion of
279 consciousness, 106; prehistoric period,
Polanski, Roman, 15 49–51
Polyphasic void cultures, ASC, 24 Psychoanalysis, 6
“Polyphasic,” 181 Psychogenic amnesia, 97 n.2
Popper, Karl, 27 Psychoid experiences, 1970s research,
Possession: animal magnetism, 91; and 120
dissociation, 37 Psychological self, and sociological self,
Possession trance: movement, 357–57, 36–37
364; 1970s research, 119; REs, 190–91 “Psychological” signs, demonic
Postconstructivism, mystical possession, 80, 85
experience, 261 Psychology of Consciousness, The (Farthing),
Posttraumatic stress disorder, 7 113
Potlatch system, gift exchange, 183 Psychology of religion, approaches of,
Pre-Christian European shamanism, 255–56
74–76 Psychophysical training, acting, 313
Index 397

Psytrance, early counterculture, 212–15, Religious movements, Age of


218–19 Enlightenment, 89–90
Pure bliss, Eastern tradition, 150, 152–53 Religious mysticism: case studies, 266–72;
Pure consciousness: Eastern ASC states, experiential dimension, 258–59;
144–45; Eastern experience, 140, 142; psychology of religion, 255–57
Eastern tradition, 150, 152 Representational system: ego-
Pure consciousness event (PCE), 121; psychological model, 265–66;
defined, 262; personality model, 264, meditation case study, 270–71;
271, 272 visions case studies, 266–70
Pure individuality (ego), Eastern tradition, Representationalism, mental states,
150, 151–52 234–35
Putnam, F. W., 12 Republic, The (Plato), 11
Resnais, Alain, 15
Qur’an, revelation of, 280–81 Respiratory activity, Eastern ASC
experience, 141
Race, Victor, 93 Revelation, Locke’s view of, 245
Radical behaviorism, 6 Revenants, possessing souls, 78
Rainbow Serpent Festival (Australia), 219 Revitalization movements, defined, 194
Raja yoga, 342 Revonsuo, A., 3, 4
Ramón y Cajal, Santiago, ACS research, Reward Dependence Factor, 364
106 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 106
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep: Rhythmic movements; synchronizing role,
daydreaming, 187; 1970s research, 363; trance, 356, 365–66
119–20; self-consciousness, 242–43; Rhythms of Peace festival (Morocco), 218
and shamanism, 171–72 Ribot, Theodule Armand, 313
Rapture, affective transcendence, 77 Richards, Thomas, actor training, 316
Rationality, philosophical exploration, 89 Richet, Charles, ACS research, 106
RAVE Act (2003), 212 Rietveld, Hillegonda, 211
Rave culture, techno-music, 358 Rig Veda, ascetic practices, 309
Raves, critiques, 217–18 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 330
Ravindra, Ravi, 198 Rimbaud, Arthur, 14, 106; narcotic use,
Reality, and consciousness, 11 284–85
Realms of the Human Unconscious Ring, Kenneth, NDE, 119
(Grof), 120 Rites of passage, rituals, 187
Reason, in dreams, 232 Ritual induction procedures, shamanism,
Reciprocal altruism, 182 169–71
Religion: five dimensions, 257–61; Ritual/shamanic performance: and
mystical dimension, 255; and aesthetic performance, 305–6, 307;
mysticism, 255; and origin of writing, described, 302, 305–6; research, 303
280; psychology of, 255–56; and Rituale Romanum, demonic possession
shamanist practices, 161–62; guide, 80, 83
“stoned-ape” theory, 207 Rituals: “antibiological” features, 187;
Religious context, prehistoric psychoactive mystical dimension, 260; and
substance use, 51 performance, 305; phases of, 187–88;
Religious Experience Episodes Measure shamanism, 160–61, 163, 166–67;
(REEM), 256 trance behavior, 357–58, 365
Religious experiences (REs), biological Roberts, Bernadette, mystical
basis, 196; and social structure, 189–91 experience, 262
398 Index

Rock, Adam, 14 Self-representation, ego-psychological


Rock art, existing communities, 46 model, 265
Roman Empire, 46; practices, 65–67 “Self-shamanism,” 208
Romantic poets: genius notion, 327; Self-transcendence, 10
narcotic use, 283–84; psychic Seligman, R., 36
displacement, 288 Senses, Eastern tradition, 150, 151
Roszak, Theodore, 209 Sensory perception: ASC threats, 233;
Rouget, G., 53; on music, 355, 356 Descartes, 230–31; intentionalism/
Rubber-hand illusion (RHI), 239 representationalism, 234–35
Rules, society, 182 Separation phase, rituals, 187
Rushkoff, Douglas, 208 Serotonin, 31; in dancers, 364
Russell, George William, 291 Sexual abstinence, shamanism, 170–71
Russell, Ken, 6, 15 Sexual modesty, cultural universal, 185
Shakers, emergence of, 90
Sacred texts, revelation of, 280 Shakespeare, William, drug
Sacred, Durkheim’s view, 195 references, 283
Saints’ shrines, exorcism, 83 Shakespearian Criticism (Coleridge), 284
Saldanha, Arun, 213 Shaman, term, 159, 162, 305
Samadhi meditation, hypoarousal, 120 Shamanic states of consciousness (SSC),
Samadhi, SSS, 117 physiological symptoms, 328–29
Saman, 305 Shamanic trance, REs, 190, 191
San, southern Africa, 46 Shamanism: biological foundations, 164;
Sar, V., 36 classic 159–61; cross-cultural features,
Sardou, Victorien, 99 160–62; defined, 159; healers, 163;
Satanic/demonic agent possession, 78; music use, 355; 1980s research,
physical signs, 79, 80 121–22; 1990s research, 125; soul
Satie, Erik, 365 journey, 33
Schieffelin, E. L., 305–6 Shamanism (Eliade), 160, 338–39
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 278 Shankara: ASC state, 149; “soul
Schwartz, T., 37 mysticism,” 256
Scientific revolution, paradigm shifts, 26 Shape-shifting, perspectival worldview,
Scriabin, Alexander, 15 184
“Secular sacredness,” actor training, Shapland, Jo, performance score, 320, 322
314–15 Shear, Jonathan, 14
Seeress of Prevost, 94 Shelley, Mary, narcotic use, 284
Self: and consciousness in Western Shelley, Percy Bysshe: narcotic use, 283;
Christian tradition, 73–74; Eastern psychic displacement, 288
traditions, 147–48, 148 n.5; SMT Sherratt, A., intoxicating beverages, 51 n.2
model, 238–42 Shinto religion, 310–11
Self-consciousness, SMT, 241–42 Shlain, Bruce, 205
Self-Expansiveness Level Form Shri Yantra diagram, 346, 347f, 347
(SELF), 123 Sidgwick, Eleanor, 105
Self-identification, conceptualist distinc- Sights and Sounds (Spicer), 99
tion, 240 Sleep and dream research, 1
Self-localization, conceptualist distinction, Sleep/wake cycle, 29
240 Slow-wave brain pattern, agents, 31
Self-model theory (SMT), subjectivity, Sluhovsky, Moshe, 13
238–42 Smith, Hélène, medium, 104
Index 399

Social bonding, and music, 362 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 313–14


Social contagion, and hypnosis, 186 Starry Night (van Gogh), 330f, 331
Social Darwinism, Cambridge States of consciousness (SoC), 2,
anthropologists, 307 28, 30
“Social drama,” 191 “State-specific sciences” (SSS), 117
Social play, shift in perception, 189 Stein, Gertrude, 104
Society, rules, 182 Steinbeck, John, 287
Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Steiner, Rudolph, Anthroposophy, 107
102, 106 Stephenson, Neal, 209
Sociological self, and psychological self, Steuchus, Augustinus, 244
36–37 Stevens, Jay, 206
Socrates, 2, 5, 55; postcarnate Stevenson, Robert Louis: multiple
knowledge, 64 identities, 293; narcotic use, 287
Somnambulism: defined, 93; Stoker, Bram, 288
investigations of, 93–95; and “modern Storming Heaven (Stevens), 206
spiritualism,” 98 Storytelling, human nature, 277
Soul, folk-phenomenological concept, 248 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The
Soul flight: shamanism, 159, 160, 172–75; (Stevenson), 287, 293
visual artists, 328, 334 Strassman, Rick, HRS, 125
“Soul-mysticism,” 256 Stream of consciousness, inner
Speaking in tongues (glossolalia), experience, 278; literary style, 104
Afro-Caribbean religions, 90 Stream of though, William James, 104
Spectrum of consciousness, 120 Stress, shamanism, 171
Spicer, Henry, 99 “Strong eye” technique, 331
Spiral motifs, Neolithic period, 48, 49f Stropharia cubensis (psychoactive
Spirit of Shamanism (Walsh), 328 mushrooms), 207
Spirit possession, 74; as dissociation, 34, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The
36–37; diabolic, 76, 79–80; (Kuhn), 25
discernment, 80–82; divine, 75, 76–78; Studies on Hysteria (Freud/Breuer), 105
exorcism, 82–84; 1970s research, 119; Subconscious, and mediumship,
performance, 305–6 101–2, 105
Spirits, shamanism, 160 Subjectivity, SMT, 238–39
Spiritual experiences, and social Subliminal mind, defined, 103
structure, 189 Sudre, René, prosopopesis, 105
Spiritual mystical experience, 76–77 Sufism, mystical dimension, 255,
Spiritual technologies, contemporary 260, 263
counterculture, 203 Sulzer, Eva, 335–36
Spiritualism (Edmonds/Dexter), 98, 99 Suprematist Composition, White on White
Spiritualization, demonic possession, (Malevich), 343f, 344
80, 82 Surrealism: altered states, 288–92; visual
Squid and Turtle Dreaming (Burkutlatjpi), artists, 334–35
331, 332f Sutton-Smith, Brian, 191
St. Augustine, on union with the Suzuki, D. T., on Eastern ASC
divine, 76 state, 149
St. John, Graham, 14 Suzuki technique, actor training, 318
St. Vitus’s dances, 91 Symphonie Fantastique, 15
Stace, Walter T.: mystical experiences, 146 Synchronous brain states, 7
n.4, 258, 259; perennialism, 261 Synthetic functions, ego, 264
400 Index

Takahashi, Melanie, 217 Torah, revelation of, 280


Tale of Genji, Lady Aoi, The, 311 Touch Samadhi, psytrance, 219
Taller de Investigaciones Teatrales, 15, 317 Trance: bodily movements, 356t, 356–57;
Tantric meditation, 346 definitions, 4–5; early counterculture,
Taoism: Agnes Martin’s paintings, 212–15; mechanics in ritual behaviors,
347–48; mystical dimension, 255; 357; mediumship, 98, 99–101;
practices, 156 postures in 1990s research, 125; ravers,
Tart, Charles Theodore, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 13, 218; sensory overstimulation, 356
28, 29; on automaticity, 107; 1960s “Trance-inductive effect,” 292
research, 115, 116; 1970s research, Transcendent experiences, 8
117–18 Transcendent states, physiological
Tatsumi, Hijikata, 318 mechanisms, 31
Teaching of Don Juan, The (Castaneda), 286 Transcendental Meditation (TM): ASC
Technicians of Ecstasy (Levy), 329 experience, 141, 142, 143–44; ASC
“Techniques of ecstasy,” 160 states, 146–47; practices, 156
Technological Society, The (Ellul), 209 Transitional phase, rituals, 187–88
Techno-rave culture, early counterculture, Transitions, in consciousness, 9
203, 210–12 Trauma: and ASC, 8; and dissociation, 36
Techno-tribes, contemporary Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire,
counterculture, 203 364
Telepathic communication, 20th-century Trilby (Du Maurier), 288
research, 106 Triune brain, 38
Tellegen Absorption Scale, 364 Trophonius, oracular center at Lebadeia,
Temporal lobe, and hypergraphia, 281–82 57, 58, 59
Teresa of Avila, 83–84, 260 Trophotropic arousal, 120
Theater: origins of, 307–8; performance Troubridge, Una, 101
event, 303–4 Trul khor (“magic circle”), 309
Theater Research Workshop Tuleilat Ghassul, geometric motifs,
(TRW), 317–18 48, 50f
“Theatrical theories,” 194 Turner, Edith, 286
Theogony (Hesiod), 63 Turner, Fred, 208–9
Theologue (Grey), 333, 333f Turner, Victor: “antistructure,”188, 191;
Theosophists, cosmic consciousness, 204 “social drama,” 191; “subjunctive
Theravada Buddhism: ASC states, 146, mood,” 216; on monastic institutions,
148 n.5; mystical dimension, 255; 198; Ndembu rite, 196–97
practices, 156
Theta slow-wave brain waves, 23, 30, 31; Un Chien Andalou, 334
in meditation, 33 Unio mystica, union with divine, 77
Thomas Aquinas, divine/demonic “Universal consciousness,” 204–5
possession, 79 Untitled (Irwin), 348, 349f
Thomas of Cantimpré, 79 Ustinova, Yulia, 13
Thousand and One Nights, 283
Three-variable (AIM) model (Hobson), 7 Vailala Madness, cargo cult, 193
Timarchus, at Trophonius, 58 Vaishnavism, mystical dimension, 255
Time paradoxon, 367 Vaitl, D., 7, 9
Time, and music, 356, 367–69 Vampyr, 15
Told by the Wind, 320–23, 321f van Gennep, Arnold, Indian rituals,
Tomczyk, Stanislawa, medium, 101 187–88
Index 401

van Gogh, Vincent, shamanic induction Western tradition, performance,


techniques, 329–31, 330f 303–4, 306
Van Ruusbroec, Jan, 260 Whisper of inspiration (le soufflé),
Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Cardeña Afro-Caribbean religions, 90
et al.), 114 Whitehead, Charles, 14, 24
Varieties of Religious Experience (James), Whitley, D. S., 48
104, 205, 256 Wiene, Robert, 15
Varo, Remedios, 15; shamanic induction Wilber, Ken, 204 n.1; spectrum of
techniques, 329, 330, 335–36, 336f consciousness, 120
Vasopressin receptors, in dancers, 364 Wilson (Wavoka), Jack, 193, 194
Vedanta tradition, ASC experience, 139, Windt, Jennifer, 14
140, 141 Wine, Europe, 52
Vedic literature, and language, 278 Winkelman, Michael, 7, 13, 14
Veils (Brunson), 351 Women: demonic possession, 80;
Velmans, M., 4 discernment of possession, 81–82;
Vexations (Satie), 365 medieval mystics, 78; religious
Via negative, union with divine, 77 visions, 258
Virtual reality, early counterculture, 203, Wordsworth, William, narcotic use, 283
208–9 “Work, The” (Gurdjieff), 107
Visions: ego-psychological model, Wounded Knee (1890), 194
266–70; mystical experience, 258 Writer’s block, hypnosis, 288
Visual artists: cultivation of ASC, 328; Writing: origins, 280; value of,
meditative states, 328; shamanistic 278, 279–80
consciousness, 328
Visual hallucinations, 1970s research, 117 Yantras, 346
Visuospatial first-person perspective Yasuo, Yuasa, personal cultivation, 308
(1PP), selfhood, 240, 241, 242 Yeats, W. B., altered states, 291, 292–93;
Void/in Art (Levy), 329 narcotic use, 285
Vollenweider, Franz, 32 Yoga Sutras, ASC experience, 141
Voltaire, philosophy of, 89 Yoga: actor’s performance, 310; ASC
experience, 139, 140–41; ASC states,
Waking consciousness, 1, 11, 29 146; martial arts, 309–10; practices,
Wallace, Anthony, revitalization 156; term, 308; transactional process,
movements, 194 308–9; Western actor training,
Walsh, Roger, 126, 328 313–14
Warnings (l’avertissement), Afro-Caribbean Yugen, noh theater, 312
religions, 90
Wasson, Robert Gordon, 207 Zaehner, Ronald C., mysticism types,
Wayang Kulit, performance art, 337 256–57
“Weapon of the weak,” 191 Zarrilli, Phillip B., 15; acting techniques,
Wearable environment, 342 318; performance score, 320
Weber, Max, charisma, 194 Zazen, hypoarousal, 120
Weschler, Lawrence, 348 Zeami Motokiyo, 311–12
Western Christian tradition: demonic Zen Buddhism: ASC experience, 140–41,
possession, 79–80; divine possession, 142–43, 144; ASC states, 146–47;
76–78; exorcism, 82–84; self and mystical dimension, 255, 260;
consciousness, 73–74 practices, 156
Western pre-Christian shamanism, 74–76 Zinberg, N. E., 11
This page intentionally left blank
Altering Consciousness
This page intentionally left blank
Altering Consciousness
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Volume 2: Biological and Psychological Perspectives

Etzel Cardeña 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 Cardeña 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. Cardeña, 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 vii
Preface ix
Kenneth S. Pope
Introduction xiii
Etzel Cardeña

Part I: Biological Perspectives

Chapter 1 Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered


States of Consciousness 3
Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace
Chapter 2 Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 21
David E. Presti
Chapter 3 Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant
Space with Special Reference to Shamanic Ecstasy 43
Fred Previc
Chapter 4 Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 63
Mario Beauregard
Chapter 5 DMT and Human Consciousness 85
Zevic Mishor, Dennis J. McKenna, and J. C. Callaway
Chapter 6 LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human
Consciousness 121
David E. Nichols and Benjamin R. Chemel
Chapter 7 Peyote and Meaning 147
Stacy B. Schaefer
vi Contents

Chapter 8 Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of


Consciousness 167
Andrea E. Blätter, Jörg C. Fachner, and Michael Winkelman
Chapter 9 Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 189
Michael Maliszewski, Barbara Vaughan, Stanley Krippner,
Gregory Holler, and Cheryl Fracasso
Chapter 10 Altered Consciousness and Human Development 211
Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and Etzel Cardeña

Part II: Psychological Perspectives

Chapter 11 Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 237


Sebastian Dieguez and Olaf Blanke
Chapter 12 Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 263
Quentin Noirhomme and Steven Laureys
Chapter 13 Altered Consciousness in Emotion and
Psychopathology 279
Etzel Cardeña
Chapter 14 Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 301
David Lukoff
Chapter 15 Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing:
An Embodied Social Neuroscience Perspective 327
Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz
Chapter 16 Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered
Consciousness 355
David Luke

About the Editors 375


Advisory Board 377
About the Contributors 379
Index 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 found-
ers of modern psychology and anthropology there were notables such as
William James and Andrew Lang who articulated and incorporated altera-
tions 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 per-
spectives developed here. We thank Debbie Carvalko, the senior acquisi-
tions 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,
viii Acknowledgments

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 extraordi-
nary images of Remedios Varo in our covers, and of Judith Gómez 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 con-
sciousness 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 Cardeña), Blueberry, and Ninni-
fer, whose living presence will accompany me to my dying breath.
And to my beloved princesa holandesa Sophie:
“ . . . somos más 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 con-
sciousness 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 applica-
tion and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final
which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How
x Preface

to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary


consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot fur-
nish 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 con-
sciousness 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 re-
present 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 Meth-
odology 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 con-
texts, 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 cul-
ture 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 xi

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 fam-
ily 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 anxi-
ety or fear evoked by the stereotype of perceived danger linked to various
methods of altering consciousness. Some of the substances—such as 3,4-
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (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 MDMA-
assisted 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 aca-
demic career. For them, the career trajectory of Harvard psychologists
Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert is not a fascinating journey of explora-
tion 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 sub-
stance as dangerous gains force in light of Huxley’s own courageous explo-
ration of consciousness-altering substances to open “the doors of
perception” (see, e.g., Huxley, 2009).
xii Preface

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 bar-
riers 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 psycho-
therapy in subjects with chronic, treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress
disorder: The first randomized controlled pilot study. Journal of Psychopharma-
cology. 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 recip-
rocal 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).
1
Introduction
Etzel Cardeña

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 psy-
chology and related disciplines.
Setting some of the foundations for the biological processes underlying
ASC, Andrzej Kokoszka and Benjamin Wallace discuss the various bio-
logical rhythms that may affect consciousness, including a possible con-
tinuation of the sleep and dream cycle throughout the day. Also
foundational is David Presti’s chapter on neurochemistry and altered con-
sciousness 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 dopami-
nergic 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 func-
tions. Calling for a neurophenomenological approach to the study of ASC
(see also Cardeña, 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 biopharmacologi-
cal 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.
xiv Introduction

Mishor, Dennis McKenna, and J. C. Callaway, and David Nichols and


Benjamin Chemel, respectively. In her chapter, Stacy B. Schaefer under-
lines 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 México. Finally, the interdisciplinary team of Andrea Blätter, Jörg
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 psycho-
logical 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 transi-
tion to the following section of this volume, which focuses on psychologi-
cal and neurological aspects of ASC.
Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman, and I describe how the various devel-
opmental 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 spontane-
ous 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 neurologi-
cal conditions that can affect basic levels of wakefulness and arousal, includ-
ing 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 alter-
ations in consciousness can affect emotions and vice versa and then dis-
cuss 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 dif-
ferent types of healing and propose a model for how the self mediates this
connection. David Lukoff describes the area of what has been called spiri-
tual 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 xv

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 relax-
ation, 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
Cardeña, 2005, Zarrilli, Volume 1). In fact, my first taste of an intense wak-
ing ASC occurred in the midst of very conscious and demanding physical
activity in experimental theatre groups [see Zarrilli, Volume 1], experien-
ces that at that point my psychological studies failed almost completely to
illuminate. Also, besides the “runners’ high,” some marathon runners men-
tion out-of-body and other dissociative experiences (Morgan, 1993), and
those who run even longer (sometimes much longer) distances than a mar-
athon, 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 (Die-
trich & 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 terrify-
ing nightmares of the human experience without taking stock of the vari-
eties of human consciousness. With that wave to William James’s always
inspiring phrase, I give the last word to the eminent American poet Theo-
dore 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.”
xvi Introduction

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.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. 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., Kübler,
A., Lehmann, D., Miltner, W. H. R., Ott, U., Pütz, 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
This page intentionally left blank
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 Cardeña, 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
4 Altering Consciousness

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 pro-
cesses. 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 approx-
imately 1 month (e.g., menstrual cycles) or longer (e.g., seasonal depres-
sion 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 5

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 exten-
sively 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 (Pandi-
Peruamal 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 environ-
ment 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., melato-
nin 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 experi-
ence 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
6 Altering Consciousness

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 7

With this three-axes model, it is possible to track brain-mind waking,


sleeping, and abnormal states as a continuous succession of points. Wake-
fulness, 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 modula-
tion. 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 exam-
ining 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).
8 Altering Consciousness

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 vivid-
ness 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 associ-
ated 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 conscious-
ness and its altered states (Wallace, Kokoszka, & Turosky, 1993). Unfortu-
nately, 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 con-
sider 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 9

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 differenti-
ated 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 Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Eventu-
ally, 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.
10 Altering Consciousness

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, contem-
plation, 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 11

(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 Cardeña, 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 pro-
posed 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 evi-
dence 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 90-
minute 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).
12 Altering Consciousness

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 present-
ing 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 modifica-
tion 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 deter-
mined tendency for changes in states of consciousness. However, all experi-
ments 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, fail-
ures 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 con-
sciousness 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 13

functional disruptions in the organism and may even lead to death by


making the inflow of energy (nourishment) impossible. An excess of infor-
mation 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 hemi-
spheres and from the cyclic dominance of either for the reception of infor-
mation 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 cogni-
tive 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 inter-
mediate 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 protec-
tive 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 dis-
organized and perception is finally disturbed. This leads to a phenomenon
14 Altering Consciousness

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 ver-
sus external sources and the occurrence of psychophysiological phenom-
ena 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 thought-
lessness 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 informa-
tion inflow. Also, the application of endogenous agents by means of physi-
cal 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 extraordi-
nariness 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 essen-
tial 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 15

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 some-
thing (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 con-
versation, 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 relaxa-
tion 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 infor-
mation metabolism were reported by all participants with a mean fre-
quency 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.,
16 Altering Consciousness

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 includ-
ing 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 disor-
ders, mood disorders, and states and altered states of consciousness.

References
Bakan, P. (1969). Hypnotizability, laterality of eye movements, and functional
brain asymmetry. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 28, 927–932.
Benloucif, S., Guico, M. J., Reid, K. J., Wolfe, L. F., L’hermite-Baleriaux, M., &
Zee, P. C. (2005). Stability of melatonin and temperature as circadian phase
markers and their relation to sleep times in humans. Journal of Biological
Rhythms, 20, 178–188.
Brandenberger, G., Simon, C., & Follenius, M. (1987). Night–day differences in the
ultradian rhythmicity of plasma rennin activity. Life Sciences, 40, 2325–2330.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous
experience: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness 17

Carmichael, M. S., Warburton, V. L., Dixen, J., & Davidson, J. M. (1994). Rela-
tionship among cardiovascular, muscular, and oxytocin responses during
human sexual activity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 23, 59–79.
Clark, A. (1993). Sensory qualities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, I. S. (1992). Optimal experience:
Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Dement, W. C., & Kleitman, N. (1957). Cyclic variations in EEG during sleep
and their relation to eye movement, body motility, and dreaming. Electroen-
cephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 9, 673–690.
Dillbeck, M. C., & Orme-Johnson, D. (1987). Physiological differences between
transcendental meditation and rest. American Psychologist, 42, 879–881.
Dirlich, G., Zulley, J., & Schultz, H. (1977). The temporal pattern of REM sleep
rhythm. In International Society for Chronobiology, XII international conference
proceedings (pp. 483–493). Milan: Il Ponte.
Duchniewska, K., & Kokoszka, A. (2003). The protective mechanisms of the
basic rest–activity cycle as an indirect manifestation of this rhythm in waking:
Preliminary report. International Journal of Neuroscience, 113, 153–163.
Erickson, M., & Rossi, E. (1979). Hypnotherapy: An exploratory casebook. New
York: Irvington.
Erickson, M., Rossi, E., & Rossi, I. (1976). Hypnotic realities. New York: Irvington.
Geretz, J., Lavie, P. (1983). Biological rhythms in arousal indices: A potential con-
founding effect in EEG biofeedback. Psychophysiology, 20, 690–695.
Globus, G. G. (1966). Rapid eye movement cycle in real time. Archives of General
Psychiatry, 15, 654–659.
Gopher, D., & Lavie, P. (1980). Short-term rhythms in the performance of simple
motor tasks. Journal of Motor Behavior, 12, 207–209.
Grilly, D. M. (2005). Drugs and human behavior (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn and
Bacon.
Gyllenborg, J., Skakkebaek, N. E., Nielsen, N. C., Keiding, N., & Giwercman, A.
(1999). Secular and seasonal changes in semen quality among young Danish
men: A statistical analysis of semen samples from 1927 donor candidates
during 1977–1995. International Journal of Andrology, 22, 28–36.
Hobson, J. A. (2001). The dream drugstore: Chemically altered states of conscious-
ness. Cambridge, MA: Bradford.
Hobson, J. A. (2007). States of consciousness; normal and abnormal variations. In
P. D. Zelazko, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook
of consciousness (pp. 435–444). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, E. G. (2008). The thalamus. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Klein, R., & Armitage, R. (1979). Rhythm in human performance: 1 1/2 hour
oscillation in cognitive style. Science, 204, 1326–1328.
Kleitman, N. (1963). Sleep and wakefulness (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kleitman, N. (1982). Basic rest–activity cycle—22 years latter. Sleep, 4, 311–317.
18 Altering Consciousness

Kokoszka, A. (1988). An integrated model of the main states of consciousness.


Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 7, 285–294.
Kokoszka, A. (1990). An evolutionary leveled model of the main states of con-
sciousness. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 10, 329–343.
Kokoszka, A. (1993a). A rationale for psychology of consciousness, in creativity
and consciousness. In J. Brzezinski, S. DiNuovo, T. Marek, & T. Maruszewski
(Eds.), Creativity and consciousness: Philosophical and psychological dimensions.
Poznań studies in the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities (Vol. 31,
pp. 313–322). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kokoszka, A. (1993b). Information metabolism as a model of consciousness.
International Journal of Neuroscience, 68, 165–177.
Kokoszka, A. (2000). Altered states of consciousness. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Ency-
clopedia of psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 122–124). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association and New York: Oxford University Press.
Kokoszka, A. (2007). States of consciousness: Models for psychology and psycho-
therapy. New York: Springer.
Kokoszka, A., Domosławski, J., Wallace, B., & Borzym, A. (2000). Preliminary
evidence for diurnal fluctuations in visual imagery. International Journal of
Neuroscience, 101, 1–7.
Kripke, D. F., Fleck, P. A., Mullaney, D. J., & Levy, M. L. (1983). Behavioral ana-
logs of the REM-nonREM cycle. Advances in Biological Psychiatry, 11, 72–79.
Kripke, D. F., Mullaney, D. J., & Fleck, P. A. (1985). Ultradian rhythms during
sustained performance. Experimental Brain Research, Supplementum, 12,
201–216.
Kripke, D. F., Mullaney, D. J., Wyborney, V. G., & Messin, S. (1978). There’s no
basic rest–activity cycle. In F. D. Stott, E. B. Raftery, P. Sleight, & L. Goulding
(Eds.), Proceedings of the second international symposium on ambulatory monitor-
ing (pp. 105–113). London: Academic Press.
Kripke, D. F., & Sonnenschein, D. (1978). A biologic rhythm in waking fantasy.
In K. Pope & J. Singer (Eds.), The stream of consciousness (pp. 321–332).
New York: Plenum.
Kupfer, D. J., & Monk, T. H. (1988). Biological rhythms and sleep disorders. New
York: Guilford.
Lavie P. (1992). Ultradian cycles in sleep propensity: Or Kleitman’s BRAC revis-
ited. In D. Lloyd & E. L. Rossi (Eds.), Ultradian rhythms in life processes
(pp. 283–302). London: Springer-Verlag.
Lavie, P., & Kripke, D. F. (1981). Ultradian circa 1 ½ hours rhythmicity: A multi-
oscillatory system. Life Sciences, 29, 2445–2450.
Lavie, P., Levy, C. M., & Collidge, F. L. (1975). Ultradian rhythms in the percep-
tion of the spiral aftereffect. Physiological Psychology, 3, 144–146.
Manseau, C., Broughton, R. J. (1984). Bilaterally synchronous ultradian EEG
rhythms in awake adult humans. Psychophysiology, 20, 690–695.
Marks, D. F. (1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British
Journal of Psychology, 64, 17–24.
Sleep, Dreams, and Other Biological Cycles as Altered States of Consciousness 19

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 sched-
ules. 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 ago-
melatine. 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, meta-
bolic, 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 cogni-
tive 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 perspec-
tives. 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.
20 Altering Consciousness

Wallace, B. (1990). Imagery vividness, hypnotic susceptibility, and the percep-


tion of fragmented stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58,
354–359.
Wallace, B. (1993). Day persons, night persons, and variability in hypnotic sus-
ceptibility. 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 differ-
ences 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. Brzeziński, S. Di Nuovo,
T. Marek, & T. Maruszewski (Eds.), Creativity and consciousness: Philosophical
and psychological dimensions. Poznań 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 scien-
tists, 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 con-
sciousness as the capacity to be aware—aware of mental processes such as
perceptual experiences (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, tem-
perature, 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 conscious-
ness” 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 intox-
icants, 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
22 Altering Consciousness

inward-focused attention (Wallace, 2006) [see Chapters by Cardeña &


Alvarado, Fachner, Shear, & Zarrilli, Volume 1]. There are states of
consciousness that characterize dream sleep and also other stages of non-
dreaming 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 rela-
tionship is manifested—how it is that the physical processes of the matter
and energetics of the brain and body are related to the subjective experien-
ces 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 René
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 hem-
orrhage, 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 Psychol-
ogy, 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 begin-
ning 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.
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 23

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 proper-
ties 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 com-
ments 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
24 Altering Consciousness

leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard


them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary con-
sciousness. 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 nico-
tine; other plant-based intoxicants such as cannabinoids, opioids, and
cocaine; synthetic pharmaceuticals such as amphetamine, benzodiaze-
pines, 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 vari-
ous 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 pro-
cesses, 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 pri-
mary 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 com-
plexity is manifest in the large number of component cells, currently
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 25

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 neurotrans-
mitter 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 trig-
gered 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 dif-
fuse 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 bind-
ing of neurotransmitter molecules shifts the shape of the protein and produ-
ces 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
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 ion-
channel 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 post-
synaptic 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 particu-
lar 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 (so-
called “volume conduction”).
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 27

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 mole-
cules of cyclic-AMP will be generated. cAMP molecules can then diffuse through-
out the cell and activate specific protein kinases, enzymes that catalyze the
attachment of phosphate groups to other “substrate” proteins. Among such sub-
strates may be ion-channel proteins: Phosphorylation alters the opening and clos-
ing 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 G-
proteins to do one of the following things: interact with adenylate cyclase
enzyme and stimulate or inhibit the synthesis of intracellular cAMP (cyclic
28 Altering Consciousness

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 func-
tion 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 open-
ing and closing and thus membrane voltage and the excitability of the cell,
the activation and inactivation of various enzymes involved in cell metabo-
lism, and the turning on and off of genes via transcription-factor proteins.
These genes include those coding for reuptake transporters, receptors, G-
proteins, 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 trans-
porter 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 chemis-
try. 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 inhibi-
tory effects on neurons via changes in membrane voltage. GPCRs can also
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 29

have acute effects on cell excitability, for instance, by modulating the


opening and closing of ion channels, both postsynaptically and presynap-
tically. The properties of the G-protein coupling and intracellular trans-
duction also permit these effects to be amplified beyond what could be
achieved with ionotropic receptors. GPCR receptors can also have long-
term effects on synaptic activity via effects on gene transcription. For
example, the synthesis of various growth-factor proteins can be modu-
lated, 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 expres-
sion of neurotransmitter receptors, uptake transporters, and the compo-
nents 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 mono-
amines, 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, nor-
epinephrine 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
30 Altering Consciousness

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, gly-
cine, 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, octop-
amine and other so-called trace amines may also function as neurotransmit-
ters 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 acetylcho-
line 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, gluta-
mate, 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, adeno-
sine, 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 longer-
term 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, usu-
ally 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
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 31

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 signal-
ing, 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 sys-
tem. The increased excitation in the brain is correlated with the experien-
tial 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 ephed-
rine. 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 conscious-
ness 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 sev-
eral locations on ionotropic GABAA receptors and enhancing the flux of
Cl- ions through the channel that results from the binding of GABA to the
32 Altering Consciousness

receptor. Thus, the inhibitory action of GABA on neuronal excitability is


increased, and this is correlated behaviorally with decreased arousal, seda-
tion, 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 pharma-
cology, protein structure, and distribution in the brain.
Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), with its primary psychoactive constitu-
ent, 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, nic-
otine is among the most poisonous of chemicals to which humans are rou-
tinely exposed. The effects of tobacco on consciousness are subtle and
profound: mentally stimulating and focusing, anxiolytic (reducing anxi-
ety), 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
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 33

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 presynap-
tic cell, a form of signaling termed retrograde. Retrograde signaling by endo-
cannabinoids 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 rein-
forced. 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 Blätter, 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), entheo-
gen (generating god within)—speak to the complexity of their effects, per-
haps 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 psycho-
therapeutic 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, con-
taining psilocybin and psilocin; Virola (Epeña) and Anadenanthera (Yopo)
snuffs from the Amazon, containing DMT; Psychotria and other DMT-
containing plants from the Amazon, mixed together with the Banisteriopsis
caapi ayahuasca vine to make ayahuasca brew or yagé; Tabernanthe iboga
34 Altering Consciousness

from west-central Africa, containing ibogaine; and peyote, San Pedro, and
other cacti from the Americas, containing mescaline (Schultes, Hofmann,
& Rätsch, 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 piv-
otal event in the early development of biological psychiatry and of molecu-
lar 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 spec-
ulations on relating brain chemistry and mental illness (Nichols & Nichols,
2008; Woolley & Shaw, 1954).
The primary neurochemical action of LSD and other classical psyche-
delics 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 sub-
types, 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 psyche-
delics (LSD, psilocin, DMT, mescaline, etc.) have a great deal in common,
there are also many subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences. Even-
tually 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 (produc-
ing IP3 and DAG as intracellular messengers) and phospholipase A2 (pro-
ducing AA as an intracellular messenger). The relative activation of these
two pathways varies widely among different agonists at the 5HT2A recep-
tor (for example: serotonin, LSD, psilocin, 5-methoxy-DMT, etc.; Nichols,
2004). The implications of this are presently unknown, and it may well be
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 35

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. Methylenedioxymethamphet-
amine (MDMA), popularly known by the street name “ecstasy,” has
mind-revealing qualities reminiscent of psychedelics, that is, intensifica-
tion 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 metham-
phetamine, 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 pri-
mary 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 sha-
manic use in southern Mexico, produces profound alterations of conscious-
ness 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; Valdés, 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 acti-
vation 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 (man-
drake), Datura (devil’s weed), and Brugmansia (angel’s trumpet), produce
powerful alterations of consciousness characterized by intense hallucina-
tory 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
36 Altering Consciousness

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 pri-
mary neurochemical effect that has been identified for ketamine is noncom-
petitive 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 psy-
chedelic 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 memo-
ries of circumstances experienced during periods of intoxication. Experi-
ences 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 phe-
nomenon might eventually be understood in terms of agonist actions
at 5HT2A receptors and subsequent impact on cortical excitability (Béı̈que
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- more-
detailed scenarios connecting brain chemistry and circuitry with aspects of
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 37

our actions, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions. Yet the ultimate link con-
necting 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 struc-
ture 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 con-
temporary molecular biology and neuroscience, the explanatory frame-
work 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 con-
tinue 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 some-
how 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) stan-
ces 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?
38 Altering Consciousness

(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 pos-
sible to account for first-person, subjective phenomena in terms of third-
person, 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 capac-
ity 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 con-
sciousness 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 cir-
cuits 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, some-
thing 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, fol-
lowing the development of special and general relativity by Albert Ein-
stein, 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 founda-
tion 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
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 39

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 address-
ing the mind–body problem (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Kelly
et al., 2007). (Another contentious subject deserving of a long conversa-
tion.) Everything the Standard Model provides on the neurochemistry of
consciousness and on altered consciousness will still apply and will con-
tribute 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
Béı̈que, 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 Sci-
ences 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.
Cardeña, 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). Endocannabinoid-
mediated synaptic plasticity in the CNS. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 29, 37–76.
Descarries, L., & Mechawar, N. (2000). Ultrastructural evidence for diffuse trans-
mission 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.
40 Altering Consciousness

Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.


Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (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 Psycho-
pharmacology, 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 recon-
sidered: An anxiolytic role for dimethyltryptamine. Medical Hypothesis, 64,
930–937.
James, W. (1874). Review of “The anaesthetic revelation and the gist of philoso-
phy.” 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.
Neurochemistry and Altered Consciousness 41

Rosenblum, B., & Kuttner, F. (2006). Quantum enigma: Physics encounters con-
sciousness. 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., & Rätsch, 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.
Valdés, 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., Bäbler, 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 sugges-
tion about certain mental disorders. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences USA, 40, 228–231.
This page intentionally left blank
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 schizo-
phrenia, and by a large variety of drugs (Previc, 2006) [see also chapters
by Cardeña, 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 mysti-
cal 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 conscious-
ness, based on a slowing of the EEG from the typical waking beta state,
and many are presumed to experience ASCDRs after ingesting hallucino-
genic 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
44 Altering Consciousness

isolation) or by ingestion of drugs (as in some shamanic rituals and other


contexts), whereas hallucinogenic drugs are rarely self-administered by pri-
mates 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 con-
sciousness 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, work-
ing memory underlies what has been termed “executive intelligence”
(Previc, 1999). Such strategic ability is associated with yet another dopami-
nergic 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 dopa-
mine’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 domi-
nance 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
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 45

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., dorsi-
flexion, climbing, rearing) caused by dopaminergic drugs (Previc, 1998).
As will be discussed later, dopamine’s role in extrapersonal space (and dis-
tant 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 trans-
mitter 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 puta-
men, 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 cha-
otic mesolimbic system tends to be more involved in motivation and goal
directedness and, when disinhibited, is the more likely site of dopamine-
mediated ASCDRs.

Dopamine and Other Transmitters Mediating Altered States of Consciousness


One element common to all ASCDRs is that they involve a disinhibi-
tion 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; Vollen-
weider & Geyer, 2001). The extrapersonal predominance is reflected in
46 Altering Consciousness

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 hypno-
sis is associated with a loss of body sensations (Cardeña, 2005). As exam-
ples 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 perceptu-
ally distant of the hallucinations (Girard et al., 2007). The extrapersonal
effect of the consciousness-altering drugs is further evidenced by their ten-
dency 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 symp-
toms 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 differ-
ences may be more superficial than real. For example, most dreams tend
to be visual whereas schizophrenic hallucinations tend to be auditory; how-
ever, 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 long-
lasting mental and spiritual changes in individuals. Furthermore, endog-
enous 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
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 47

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 corti-
cal 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 cholin-
ergic 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, sero-
tonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT), glutamate, gamma aminobutyric
acid (GABA), and the opioids and cannabinoids have all been shown to pro-
duce 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 halluci-
nations (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, phencycli-
dine, 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
48 Altering Consciousness

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 ulti-
mately 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 dopa-
mine levels in the brainstem (Heikkinen, Möykkynen, & 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 recep-
tors 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 antisero-
tonergic effects may stimulate dopamine, but the high density of serotonergic
neurons in the temporal lobe visual areas will ensure that more visual halluci-
nations will occur with antiserotonergic drugs than with other hallucinogens.
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 49

Moreover, hallucinogenic drugs often affect transmitters that have, to varying


degrees, emotional or motivational side effects. For example, any hallucino-
gen 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 exam-
ple, 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-methylenedioxymethamphet-
amine, or MDMA, excites both dopamine and serotonin as well as noradrena-
line 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 predomi-
nance in sleep (Harris, 2005) and in many (but not all) drug-induced hallu-
cinogenic states, because dopamine has a primarily parasympathetic
influence in bodily functions and inhibits sympathetic emotional arousal sys-
tems 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 hyperdo-
paminergic 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 hemi-
sphere, 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 corre-
late of these states.
50 Altering Consciousness

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 para-
sympathetic 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 dopa-
mine 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 depriva-
tion, fasting, and dreams to attain “otherworldly” experiences. Hyperventila-
tion 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
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 51

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 reli-
gious 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 recep-
tors, as does mescaline from the peyote cactus (also used by Mexican and
North American shamans; see Perry, 2002). Extracts from sacred vine spe-
cies 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 choliner-
gic 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 civiliza-
tions) 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). Inter-
estingly, 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.
52 Altering Consciousness

Although some hallucinogens used by shamans activate systems that are


involved in mood, sometimes creating pleasant effects, they can also pro-
duce negative psychological effects, including anxiety, depression, and even
psychosis in some cases (Whitley, 2008), consistent with their dopaminer-
gic 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 mon-
itor the ingestion of these potentially dangerous drugs. Along with their hal-
lucinogenic 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 sur-
prisingly, 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 hallu-
cinogenic 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 mush-
room takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything
is known. (Marı́a 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
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 53

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 support-
ive environment of the latter study, 31% of participants experienced nega-
tive side effects such as fear and anxiety after ingesting the hallucinogen
(Griffiths et al., 2006). That individuals would engage in prolonged activ-
ities or in many cases suffer psychological and physical stress or danger to
achieve the ecstatic experience and the supernatural knowledge suppos-
edly gained is consistent with the capability of other dopaminergic extrap-
ersonal 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 dopaminergi-
cally 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 pri-
mates, 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 sen-
sory processing during isolation can disinhibit dopaminergic activity and
produce ASCDRs (Previc, 2006; Zuckerman, 1969). Dopaminergic trans-
mission 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
54 Altering Consciousness

cingulate gyrus, a structure activated in numerous studies during medita-


tion (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 evolu-
tionary 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 special-
ized 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 dopa-
mine would correspondingly have improved thermal tolerance and endur-
ance 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 man-
ifested 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).
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 55

Despite their hierarchical social structures and limited use of ritual


dancing, there is no evidence that chimpanzees display anything compa-
rable 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 eventu-
ally 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 biologi-
cal 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.
56 Altering Consciousness

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 popu-
lations. Although some shamanic hallucinogens and practices (e.g., chant-
ing) continued to be used by the ancient civilizations, even these would
eventually become prohibited, thereby further diminishing the role of sha-
mans 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 hemi-
sphere. 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 dis-
tant 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.

References
Allen, T. E., & Agus, B. (1968). Hyperventilation leading to hallucinations.
American Journal of Psychiatry, 125, 632–637.
Allman, J. M., Hakeem, A., Erwin, J. M., Nimchinsky, E., & Hof, P. (2001). The
anterior cingulate cortex. The evolution of an interface between emotion and
cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 935, 107–117.
Behar, D. M., Villems, R., Soodyall, H., Blue-Smith, J., Pereira, L., Metspalu, E.,
Scozzari, R., Makkan, H., Tzur, S., et al. (2008). The dawn of human matrilin-
eal diversity. American Journal of Human Genetics, 82, 1130–1140.
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 57

Berger, B., Gaspar, P., & Verney, C. (1991). Dopaminergic innervation of the cer-
ebral cortex: Unexpected differences between rodents and primates. Trends in
Neurosciences, 14, 21–27.
Blanke, O., & Arzy, S. (2005). The out-of-body experience: Disturbed self-
processing at the temporo-parietal junction. Neuroscientist, 11, 16–24.
Bramble, D. M., & Lieberman, D. E. (2004). Endurance running and the evolu-
tion of Homo. Nature, 432, 345–352.
Broglio, A., De Stefani, M., Gurioli, F., Pallecchi, P., Giachi, G., Higham, T., &
Brock, F. (2009). L’art aurignacien dans la décoration de la Grotte de Fumane.
L’Anthropologie, 113, 753–761.
Brown, K. S., Marean, C. W., Herries, A. I. R., Jacobs, A., Tribolo, C., Braun, D.,
Roberts, D. L., Meyer, M. C., & Bernatchez, J. (2009). Fire as an engineering
tool of early modern humans. Science, 325, 859–862.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Carlson, K. M., & Wagner, G. C. (2005). Effects of phencyclidine on schedule-
controlled responding following neurotoxic lesions of the striatum. Life Sci-
ence, 77, 372–285.
Corlett, P. R., Frith, C. D., & Fletcher, P. C. (2009). From drugs to deprivation: A
Baysian framework for understanding models of psychosis. Psychopharmacol-
ogy, 206, 515–530.
Cousins, D., & Huffman, M. A. (2002). Medicinal properties in the diet of goril-
las: An ethno-pharmacological analysis. African Study Monographs, 23, 65–89.
DeClerck, C. H., Boone, C., & De Brabander, B. (2006). On feeling in control: A
biological theory for individual differences in control perception. Brain and
Cognition, 62, 143–176.
Emboden, W. (1989). The sacred journey in dynastic Egypt: Shamanistic trance
in the context of the narcotic water lily and the mandrake. Journal of Psychoac-
tive Drugs, 21, 61–75.
Fantegrossi, W. E., Woods, J. H., & Winger, G. (2004). Transient reinforcing
effects of phenylisopropylamine and indolealkylamine hallucinogens in rhesus
monkeys. Behavioral Pharmacology, 15, 149–157.
Fischer, R., Hill, R., Thatcher, K., & Scheib, J. (1970). Psilocybin-induced con-
traction of nearby space. Agents and Actions, 1, 190–197.
Gilbert, C. (1995). Optimal physical performance in athletes: Key roles of dopa-
mine in a specific neurotransmitter/hormonal mechanism. Mechanisms of Age-
ing and Development, 84, 83–102.
Girard, T. A., Martius, D. L., & Cheyne, J. A. (2007). Mental representation of
space: Insights from an oblique distribution of hallucinations. Neuropsycholo-
gia, 45, 1257–1269.
Goff, D. C., Brotman, A. W., Kindlon, D., Waites, M., & Amico, E. (1991). The
delusion of possession in chronically psychotic patients. Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, 179, 567–571.
58 Altering Consciousness

Gouzoulis-Mayfrank, E., Habermeyer, E., Hermle, L., Steinmeyer, A., Kunert, H.,
& Sass, H. (1998). Hallucinogenic drug-induced states resemble acute endog-
enous psychoses: Results of an empirical study. European Psychiatry, 13, 399–406.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can
occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial, sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Harris, C. D. (2005). Neurophysiology of sleep and wakefulness. Respiratory Care
Clinics of North America, 11, 567–586.
Heikkinen, A. E., Möykkynen, T. P., & Korpi, E. R. (2009). Long-lasting modula-
tion of glutamatergic transmission in VTA dopamine neurons after a single
dose of benzodiazepine agonists. Neuropsychopharmacology, 34, 290–298.
Henry, B. L., Minassian, A., Paulus, M. P., Geyer, M. A., & Perry, W. J. (2010). Heart
rate variability in bipolar mania and schizophrenia. Psychiatry Research, 44, 168–176.
Henshilwood, C. S., d’Errico, F., Marean, C. W., Milo, R. G., & Yates, R. (2001).
An early bone tool industry from the Middle Stone Age at Blombos Cave,
South Africa: Implications for the origins of modern human behaviour, sym-
bolism and language. Journal of Human Evolution, 41, 631–678.
Hunt, H. T. (1982). Forms of dreaming. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 54, 559–563.
Jacobs, Z., & Roberts, R. J. (2009). Catalysts for Stone Age innovations: What
might have triggered two short-lived bursts of technological and behavioral
innovation in southern Africa during the Middle Stone Age? Integrative and
Communicative Biology, 2, 191–193.
Kapur, S., & Remington, G. (1996). Serotonin–dopamine interaction and its
relevance to schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 466–476.
Keith, V. A., Mansbach, R. S., & Geyer, M. A. (1991). Failure of haloperidol to
block the effects of phencyclidine and dizocilpine on prepulse inhibition of
startle. Biological Psychiatry, 30, 557–566.
Kjaer, T. W., Bertelsen, C., Piccini, P., Brooks, D., Alving, J., & Lou, H. C. (2002).
Increased dopamine tone during meditation-induced change of conscious-
ness. Cognitive Brain Research, 13, 255–259.
Krippner, S. C. (2002). Conflicting perspectives on shamans and shamanism:
Points and counterpoints. American Psychologist, 57, 962–977.
Krus, D., Resnick, O., & Raskin, M. (1966). Apparent eye-level test. Archives of
General Psychiatry, 14, 419–427.
Kyllonen, P. C., & Christal, R. E. (1990). Reasoning ability is (little more than)
working-memory capacity?! Intelligence, 14, 389–433.
Lewis-Williams, J. D., & Dowson, T. A. (1988). The signs of all times: Entoptic
phenomena in Upper Paleolithic art. Current Anthropology, 29, 201–245.
Luzi, S., Morrison, P. D., Powell, J., di Forti, M., & Murray, R. M. (2008). What is
the mechanism whereby cannabis use increases risk of psychosis? Neurotoxi-
cology Research, 14, 105–112.
Mandell, A. J. (1980). Toward a psychobiology of transcendence: God in the
brain. In J. M. Davidson & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of conscious-
ness (pp. 379–464). New York: Plenum.
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 59

Markowitz, J. S., Rames, L. J., Reeves, N., & Thomas, S. G. (1997). Zolpidem and
hallucinations. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 29, 300–301.
Mellars, P. (2006). Why did modern human populations disperse from Africa ca.
60,000 years ago? A new model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
103, 9381–9386.
Pahnke, W. N. (1969). Psychedelic drugs and mystical experience. International
Psychiatry Clinics, 5, 149–162.
Paulig, M., & Mentrup, H. (2001). Charles Bonnet’s syndrome: Complete remis-
sion of complex visual hallucinations treated by gabapentin. Journal of Neurol-
ogy, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 70, 813–814.
Perry, E. K. (2002). Plants of the gods. In E. K. Perry, H. Ashton, & A. Young
(Eds.), Neurochemistry of consciousness: Neurotransmitters in mind. Advances in
Consciousness Research, 36, 205–225.
Perry, E. K., & Perry, R. H. (1995). Acetylcholine and hallucinations: Disease-
related compared to drug-related alterations in human consciousness. Brain
and Cognition, 28, 240–258.
Preuss, T. M. (2006). Who’s afraid of Homo sapiens? Journal of Biomedical Discov-
ery and Collaboration, 29, 1–7.
Previc, F. H. (1998). The neuropsychology of 3-D space. Psychological Bulletin,
124, 123–164.
Previc, F. H. (1999). Dopamine and the origins of human intelligence. Brain and
Cognition, 41, 299–350.
Previc, F. H. (2006). The role of the extrapersonal brain systems in religious activ-
ity. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 500–539.
Previc, F. H. (2009). The dopaminergic mind in human evolution and history. Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rabiner, E. A. (2007). Imaging of striatal dopamine release elicited with NMDA
antagonists: Is there anything there to be seen? Journal of Psychopharmacology,
20, 1–6.
Raghanti, M. A., Stimpson, C. D., Marcinkiewicz, J. L., Erwin, J. M., Hof, P. R.,
& Sherwood, C. C. (2008a). Cortical dopaminergic innervation among
humans, chimpanzees, and macaque monkeys: A comparative study. Neurosci-
ence, 155, 203–220.
Raghanti, M. A., Stimpson, C. D., Marcinkiewicz, J. L., Erwin, J. M., Hof, P. R.,
& Sherwood, C. C. (2008b). Cholinergic innervation of the frontal cortex:
Differences among humans, chimpanzees, and macaque monkeys. Journal of
Comparative Neurology, 506, 409–424.
Raghanti, M. A., Stimpson, C. D., Marcinkiewicz, J. L., Erwin, J. M., Hof, P. R.,
& Sherwood, C. C. (2008c). Differences in cortical serotonergic innervation
among humans, chimpanzees, and macaque monkeys: A comparative study.
Cerebral Cortex, 18, 584–597.
Rapoport, S. I. (1990). Integrated phylogeny of the primate brain, with
special reference to humans and their diseases. Brain Research Reviews, 15,
267–294.
60 Altering Consciousness

Samorini, G. (2002). Animals and psychedelics: The natural world and the instinct to
alter consciousness. South Paris, ME: Park Street Press.
Schlemmer, R. F., Jr., Narasimhachari, N., & Davis, J. M. (1980). Dose-dependent
behavioural changes induced by apomorphine in selected members of a primate
social colony. Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, 32, 285–289.
Schmauss, C., & Emrich, H. M. (1985). Dopamine and the action of opiates: A
reevaluation of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. With special con-
sideration of the role of endogenous opioids in the pathogenesis of schizo-
phrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 20, 1211–1231.
Schmauss, C., Yassouridis, A., & Emrich H. M. (1987). Antipsychotic effect of
buprenorphine in schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 1340–1342.
Schmidt, D. (1996). Syncopes and seizures. Current Opinion in Neurology, 9, 78–81.
Seeman, P., Guan, H.-C., & Hirbec, H. (2009). Dopamine D2 High receptors
stimulated by phencyclidines, lysergic acid diethylamide, salvinorin A, and
modafinil. Synapse, 63, 698–704.
Siegel, R. K., Brewster, J. M., & Jarvik, M. E. (1974). An observational study of
hallucinogen-induced behavior in unrestrained Macaca mulatta. Psychophar-
macologia, 40, 211–223.
Sierra, M., & Berrios, G. E. (1998). Depersonalization: Neurobiological perspec-
tives. Biological Psychiatry, 44, 898–908.
Solms, M. (2000). Dreaming and REM sleep are controlled by different brain
mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 843–1121.
Tebecis, A. K., & Provins, K. A. (1975). Hypnosis and eye movements. Biological
Psychology, 3, 31–47.
Valladas, H., Clottes, J., Geneste, J. M., Garcia, M. A., Arnold, M., Cachier, H.,
& Tisnérat-Laborde, N. (2001). Palaeolithic paintings. Evolution of prehistoric
cave art. Nature, 413, 479.
Volkow, N. D., Tomasi, D., Wang, G. J., Telang, F., Fowler, J. S., Wang, R. L.,
Logan, J., Wong, C., Jayne, M., & Swanson, J. M. (2009). Hyperstimulation
of striatal D2 receptors with sleep deprivation: Implications for cognitive
impairment. Neuroimage, 45, 1232–1240.
Vollenweider, F. X., & Geyer, M. A. (2001). A systems model of altered con-
sciousness: Integrating natural and drug-induced psychoses. Brain Research
Bulletin, 56, 495–507.
Vollenweider, F. X., Vontobel, P., Oye, I., Hell, D., & Leenders, K. L. (2000).
Effects of (S)-ketamine on striatal dopamine: A [11C]raclopride PET study of
a model psychosis in humans. Psychiatry Research, 34, 35–43.
Welch, E. B., & Thompson, D. F. (1997). Opiate antagonists for the treatment of
schizophrenia. Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapy, 19, 279–283.
Whitley, D. S. (2008). Cave paintings and the human spirit. The origin of creativity
and belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.
Winkelman, M. (1990). Shaman and other “magico-religious” healers: A cross-
cultural study or their origins, nature and social transformations. Ethos, 18,
308–352.
Dopamine, Altered Consciousness, and Distant Space 61

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. Cardeña, 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.
This page intentionally left blank
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 experi-
ences extend or lie beyond the limits of ordinary experience. Mystical expe-
riences represent one particularly interesting type of TEs. Characterized by
altered or expanded consciousness, mystical experiences relate to a funda-
mental 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 dis-
tinguishes 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 objec-
tivity or reality; (3) feelings of peace, bliss, and joy; (4) the feeling of having
64 Altering Consciousness

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 natu-
ral substances, shamanic practices, meditation, hypnosis (Cardeña, 2005),
and near-death experiences (NDEs; Levin & Steele, 2005). They can also
result from regular religious/spiritual practice. Additionally, these experi-
ences can occur without any apparent reason (Levin & Steele, 2005).
TEs often lead to profound transformative changes in attitudes and behav-
ior, 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
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 65

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), hallucina-
tions of God’s voice (Hansen & Brodtkorb, 2003), visual hallucination of
a religious figure (Karagulla & Robertson, 1955), or repetition of a reli-
gious 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 electroencephalog-
raphy (EEG) revealed spike discharges in the left anterior and middle tem-
poral 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 sensa-
tions 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 ictus-
related 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 expe-
riences was related to their religious beliefs. This finding emphasizes the
importance of considering psychological factors (such as beliefs) in addi-
tion to neurobiological aspects when the relationship between epilepsy
and religion/spirituality is discussed.
66 Altering Consciousness

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 hyper-
moralism, 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 stud-
ies 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 reso-
nance 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, timeless-
ness, 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
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 67

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 cogni-
tive 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 expe-
rience, 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, result-
ing 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 nanoTe-
sla 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 gog-
gles 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.
68 Altering Consciousness

Two-thirds of the participants reported a sensed presence under the in-


fluence of the electromagnetic fields, but 33 percent of the control (sham-
field) group reported a sensed presence too. In other words, Persinger and
Healey (2002) found that twice as many participants reported a sensed pres-
ence 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 atten-
tion” upon the presence. About one-third of participants attributed the pres-
ence 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 electromag-
netic fields and some of whom were not. Using Persinger’s equipment,
the Swedish researchers could not reproduce his key results. They attrib-
uted their findings to the fact that they ensured that neither the partici-
pants 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 par-
ticipants. 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
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 69

experience), signs of abnormal temporal-lobe activity, and a “New Age”


lifestyle orientation.
No evidence was found for a “sensed presence” effect of weak electro-
magnetic fields. The characteristic that significantly predicted the out-
comes 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 Persing-
er’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 experien-
ces by stimulating the temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic currents
does not appear easily achievable when psychological suggestibility is con-
trolled 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 reli-
gious experience to biblical Psalm 23. These participants, who were mem-
bers 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 Düsseldorf telephone book).
70 Altering Consciousness

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 sup-
port the view that religious experience is a cognitive attributional phe-
nomenon, 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 rein-
forced 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 dorso-
medial frontal cortex was implicated in the felt immediacy of religious
experience.
Newberg, Pourdehnad, Alavi, and d’Aquili (2003) used single-photon-
emission computed tomography (SPECT) to scan three Franciscan nuns
while they performed a “centering prayer” to open themselves to the pres-
ence 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 ana-
lyze 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
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 71

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 self-
transcendence (as measured with the Temperament and Character Inven-
tory; Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994). This finding indi-
cates that changes of neural activity in posterior parietal areas may
produce fast modulations of a stable personality trait related to transcen-
dental 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 spe-
cific religious traditions. Glossolalia is one of the “gifts of the Spirit”
according to Saint Paul and, hence, some fundamentalist religious tradi-
tions 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 them-
selves 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 tradi-
tion who had practiced glossolalia for more than 5 years. Structured clini-
cal 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 expe-
rience (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 oxy-
gen level dependent (BOLD) signal changes were measured during a
72 Altering Consciousness

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 rang-
ing 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 mysti-
cal 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 condi-
tion 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 experi-
enced a feeling of unconditional love during the control condition. The
mystical versus baseline contrast produced significant loci of BOLD activa-
tion 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 tem-
poral 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 stud-
ies implicating positive emotions such as happiness (Damasio et al., 2000),
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 73

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 regu-
lation (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 experi-
ence 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; Dama-
sio, 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 activa-
tion was linked with conscious awareness of those feelings. Indeed, the
results of functional neuroimaging studies indicate that the medial pre-
frontal 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 periaque-
ductal 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 acti-
vation of the left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex reflected that aspect of
emotional awareness associated with the interoceptive detection of emo-
tional 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 corti-
cal 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
74 Altering Consciousness

(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 modi-
fication of the body schema associated with the impression that some-
thing 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). There-
fore, 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 plau-
sible that the activations in the right and left inferior parietal lobules
were related to the motor imagery experienced during the mystical con-
dition. 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 mys-
tical state (Beauregard & Paquette, 2008). EEG activity was recorded from
19 scalp locations during a resting state, a control condition, and a mysti-
cal 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 elec-
trode 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 indi-
cate 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 75

Transcendent Experiences and the Mind–Brain Problem


Physicalism is the mainstream metaphysical view of modern neurosci-
ence with respect to the mind–body problem, the explanation of the rela-
tionship 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 pro-
cesses. 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 conscious-
ness” 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 brain-
stem 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).
76 Altering Consciousness

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 temper-
ature so low that she was clinically dead, but then bring her back to a nor-
mal 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 con-
scious 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
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 77

the brain is not functioning, that is, these experiences are not necessarily
delusions created by a defective brain. In other words, it would be pos-
sible for humans to experience a transcendent reality during an altered
state of consciousness in which perception, cognition, identity, and emo-
tion function independently from the brain. This raises the possibility that
when a TE happens while the brain is fully functional, the neural corre-
lates 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 Berg-
son (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 tha-
lamocortical interactions play a crucial role in the integration of widely dis-
tributed neural activity across brain regions and the generation of
conscious experience (Tononi & Edelman, 1998). Regarding this issue,
78 Altering Consciousness

Vollenweider (1994) posited that cortico-striatal pathways exert a modula-


tory 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. Addi-
tionally, 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 infor-
mation 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 activa-
tion 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 net-
works mediate the main features of these experiences (e.g., perceptual,
cognitive, emotional, spiritual). This conclusion should not come as a sur-
prise 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 phenom-
enologically different TEs are mediated by distinct neuroelectrical, neuro-
chemical, 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)
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 79

data represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of transcendence


(Newberg & Lee, 2005). The use of first-person methods—which are disci-
plined 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 pro-
cesses specifically engage well localized and specialized brain regions, it
is now widely believed that higher mental functions emerge through inte-
gration 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 neuroimag-
ing 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.

References
Alajouanine, T. (1963). Dostoiewski’s epilepsy. Brain, 86, 209–218.
Augustine, J. R. (1996). Circuitry and functional aspects of the insular lobe in pri-
mates including humans. Brain Research Reviews, 22, 229–244.
Azari, N. P., Nickel, J., Wunderlich, G., Niedeggen, M., Hefter, H., Tellmann, L.,
et al. (2001). Neural correlates of religious experience. European Journal of
Neuroscience, 13, 1649–1652.
Barbas, H. (1993). Organization of cortical afferent input to the orbitofrontal area
in the rhesus monkey. Neuroscience, 56, 841–864.
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport, 11,
3829–3834.
Bartels, A., & Zeki, S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic
love. Neuroimage, 21, 1155–1166.
Bear, D., & Fedio, P. (1977). Quantitative analysis of interictal behavior in tem-
poral lobe epilepsy. Archives of Neurology, 34, 454–467.
Beauregard, M., & O’Leary, D. (2007). The spiritual brain. New York: Harper Collins.
Beauregard, M., & Paquette, V. (2006). Neural correlates of a mystical experience
in Carmelite nuns. Neuroscience Letters, 405, 186–190.
80 Altering Consciousness

Beauregard, M., & Paquette, V. (2008). EEG activity in Carmelite nuns during a
mystical experience. Neuroscience Letters, 444, 1–4.
Bergson, H. (1914). Presidential address. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, 27, 157–175.
Blood, A., & Zatorre, R. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music corre-
late with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 98, 11,818–11,823.
Boven, W. (1919). Religiosité et épilepsie[Religiosity and epilepsy]. Schweiz
Archives of Neurological Psychiatry, 4, 153–169.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Carmichael, S. T., & Price, J. L. (1995). Limbic connections of the orbital and
medial prefrontal cortex in macaque monkeys. Journal of Comparative Neurol-
ogy, 363, 615–641.
Cavada, C., Company, T., Tejedor, J., Cruz-Rizzolo, R. J., & Reinoso-Suarez, F.
(2000). The anatomical connections of the macaque monkey orbitofrontal cor-
tex, a review. Cerebral Cortex, 10, 220–242.
Cechetto, D. F. (1994). Identification of a cortical site for stress-induced cardiovas-
cular dysfunction. Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science, 29, 362–373.
Cloninger, C. R., Przybeck, T. R., Svrakic, D. M., & Wetzel, R. D. (1994). The Tem-
perament and Character Inventory (TCI): A guide to its development and use.
St. Louis, MO: Center for Psychobiology of Personality, Washington University.
Clute, H. L., & Levy, W. J. (1990) Electroencephalographic changes during brief
cardiac arrest in humans. Anesthesiology, 73, 821–825.
Critchley, H. D., Wien, S., Rotshtein, P., Ohman, A., & Dolan, R. J. (2004). Neural
systems supporting interoceptive awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 189–195.
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making
of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Damasio, A. R., Grabowski, T. J., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Ponto, L. L., Parvizi,
J., et al. (2000). Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of
self-generated emotions. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1049–1056.
Damasio, A. R., Tranel, D., & Damasio, H. (1991). Somatic markers and the guid-
ance of behaviour. In H. Levin, H. Eisenberg, & A. Benton (Eds.), Frontal lobe
function and dysfunction (pp. 217–228). New York: Oxford University Press.
de Araujo, I. E., Rolls, E. T., Kringelbach, M. L., McGlone, F., & Phillips, N. (2003).
Taste-olfactory convergence, and the representation of the pleasantness of fla-
vour, in the human brain. European Journal of Neuroscience, 18, 2059–2068.
Decety, J. (1996). Do imagined and executed actions share the same neural sub-
strate? Cognitive Brain Research, 3, 87–93.
Devinsky, O., & Lai, G. (2008). Spirituality and religion in epilepsy. Epilepsy and
Behavior, 12, 636–643.
Dewhurst, K., & Beard, A. W. (1970). Sudden religious conversions in temporal
lobe epilepsy. British Journal of Psychiatry, 117, 497–507.
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 81

Dietrich, A. (2003). Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness:


The transient hypofrontality hypothesis. Consciousness and Cognition, 12,
231–256.
Felician, O., Ceccaldi, M., Didic, M., Thinus-Blanc, C., & Poncet, M. (2003).
Pointing to body parts: A double dissociation study, Neuropsychologia, 41,
1307–1316.
Frackowiak, R. S. J., Friston, K. J., Frith, C. D., Dolan, R. J., Price, C. J., Zeki, S.,
Ashburner, J., & Penny, W. (Eds.). (2004). Human brain function (2nd ed.).
London: Academic Press.
Ganis, G., Thompson, W. L., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2004). Brain areas underlying vis-
ual mental imagery and visual perception: An fMRI study. Cognitive Brain
Research, 20, 226–241.
Granqvist, P., Fredrikson, M., Unge, P., Hagenfeldt, A., Valind, S., Larhammar,
D., et al. (2005). Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by
suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic
fields. Neuroscience Letters, 379, 1–6.
Greyson, B. (2003). Incidence and correlates of near-death experiences in a car-
diac care unit. General Hospital Psychiatry, 25, 269–276.
Hansen, B. A., & Brodtkorb, E. (2003). Partial epilepsy with “ecstatic” seizures.
Epilepsy and Behavior, 4, 667–673.
Hardy, A. (1975). The biology of God. New York: Taplinger.
Hay, D. (1990). Religious experience today: Studying the facts. London: Mowbray.
Hood Jr., R. W. (1975). The construction and preliminary validation of a measure
of reported mystical experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 14,
21–41.
Howden, J. C. (1872–1873). The religious sentiments in epileptics. Journal of
Mental Science, 18, 491–497.
Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception. New York: Harper & Row.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature.
New York: Longmans, Green.
James, W. (1960). Human immortality: Two supposed objections to the doctrine.
In G. Murphy & R. O. Ballou (Eds.), William James on psychical research
(pp. 279–308). New York: Viking. (Original work delivered as a lecture, 1898)
Karagulla, S., & Robertson, E. E. (1955). Psychical phenomena in temporal lobe
epilepsy and the psychoses. British Medical Journal, 1, 748–752.
Kringelbach, M. L., O’Doherty, J., Rolls, E. T., & Andrews, C. (2003). Activation
of the human orbitofrontal cortex to a liquid food stimulus is correlated with
its subjective pleasantness. Cerebral Cortex, 13, 1064–1071.
Lane, R. D., Fink, G. R., Chau, P. M. L., & Dolan, R. J. (1997). Neural activation
during selective attention to subjective emotional responses. NeuroReport, 8,
3969–3972.
Lane, R. D., & Nadel, L. (2000). Cognitive neuroscience of emotion. New York:
Oxford University Press.
82 Altering Consciousness

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, theoreti-
cal, 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’épilepsie [Religious halluci-
nations in epilepsy]. Annales Médicopsychologiques, 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). Inter-
actions between ego- and allocentric neuronal representations of space. Neuro-
image, 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 spiri-
tual 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 epi-
lepsy. 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 expe-
riences in cardiac arrest survivors. Resuscitation, 48, 149–156.
Transcendent Experiences and Brain Mechanisms 83

Persinger, M. A. (1983). Religious and mystical experiences as artefacts of tempo-


ral 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 representa-
tions 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 Experi-
mental Hypnosis, 24, 300–315.
Spilka, B., & McIntosh, D. N. (1995). Attribution theory and religious experi-
ence. 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 tempo-
ral 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 Neurosci-
ence, 2, 229–239.
84 Altering Consciousness

Vollenweider, F. X. (1994). Evidence for a cortical-subcortical dysbalance of sen-


sory 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 con-
sciousness: 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 pro-
nounced 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 Associ-
ation, 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 struc-
ture 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 sero-
tonergic 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
86 Altering Consciousness

DMT facilitates powerful changes in awareness, perceptions, emotions, and


cognition. Multicolored geometric images and transcendent feelings of one-
ness 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 consciousness-
modifying drug comes from the Inca Cueva site located in northwestern
Argentina, radiocarbon dated to approximately 2080 BCE. The site con-
tained two smoking pipes made from puma bone, together with Anade-
nanthera 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 Anadenan-
thera 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 con-
sists 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 embark-
ing in October of 1493, Christopher Columbus requested his friar, Ramón
Pané, to prepare a report on the natives of Hispaniola (today the island
comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Pané’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– Arrival of the first humans in the Americas. This date is
15,000 BCE 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 Ramón Pané, 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 Gonçalves 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 Gonçalves 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 Szára self-administers probably the first ever
injection of DMT, an intramuscular dose of 75 mg. Within

88
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 União 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)

89
90 Altering Consciousness
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 con-
cluded 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 DMT-
containing 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 91

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.
92 Altering Consciousness

He modified tryptamine in order to synthesize several derivatives as stan-


dards 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 Gon-
çalves 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 Gonçalves 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 Anade-
nanthera); like Gonçalves, 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 Szára, 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 Szára’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, Szára synthesized this chemical in his own laboratory. In April of
1956, he gave himself what was probably the first ever intramuscular injec-
tion 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” (Szára, 1989, p. 239). This “secret” was the realization that orally
administered DMT (at least up to the 150 mg total dose Szára had earlier
ingested separately) had no psychoactive effects whatsoever. Instead, the
drug had to be injected to manifest its psychedelic actions (S. Szára, per-
sonal 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 93

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 inves-
tigated, 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 bufoten-
ine 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
94 Altering Consciousness

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 psy-


chedelic 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 relation-
ship 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 feel-
ing 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 aware-
nesses, 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 technol-
ogies 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, expe-
rienced as a gestalt or through visions involving anonymous people, loved
ones, or archetypal beings. One may feel a mystical union with the cos-
mos, 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 aston-
ishment” (T. McKenna, 1990).
DMT and Human Consciousness 95

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 rot-
ting 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 differ-
ent 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. Some-
times there is a desire to communicate with other people, other times a tor-
rent 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 inebria-
tion. 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 tem-
perature (Figure 5.2). As indicated by its name, its molecular structure
96 Altering Consciousness

Figure 5.2 DMT crystals under magnification. (Photo by Stevek1, # 2009


Erowid.org)

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 addi-
tional hydroxy and methoxy group, respectively, at position 5 on the
indole ring. By contrast, psilocin, an orally active psychedelic agent pro-
duced 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-MeO-
DMT 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)

Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous


Name Chemical Structure Oral Administration (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection

Serotonin
(5-hydroxytryptamine)

DMT 0.5/kg body-weight in 10–20 5–10 0.2 salt/kg


(N,N- combination with MAOI body-weight
dimethyltryptamine)

(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)

Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous


Name Chemical Structure Oral Administration (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection

Bufotenine ? 4–8 40 4?
(5-hydroxy-DMT)
98

5-MeO-DMT 0.1/kg body-weight in 2–5 5–10 2


(5-methoxy-DMT) combination with MAOI
Table 5.2 (Continued)

Average Threshold Dosage for Visionary Effects (unless otherwise


specified, all doses are in mg and refer to the freebase compound)

Vaporization Insufflation Intravenous


Name Chemical Structure Oral Administration (Smoking) (Snuffing) Injection

Psilocin 20–30 of the — — ?


(4-hydroxy-DMT) phosphorylated pro-
drug form, psilocybin
99
100 Altering Consciousness

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 conti-
nents 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 Ruı́z &
Pavón (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 bio-
chemical machinery required for its synthesis have been detected in all mam-
mals 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 metabo-
lized 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 con-
sumed orally, although this method of administration results in a consider-
ably 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 circula-
tion, DMT then passes through the blood–brain barrier into the central
DMT and Human Consciousness 101

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: Núcleo Samaúma near São 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 psyche-
delic 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 noradrena-
line). MAO in general exists as two isozymes: MAO-A and MAO-B. It is
102 Altering Consciousness

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, water-
soluble 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 ren-
ders 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 -carbo-
lines, 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 Aya-
huasca, harmine serves as a potent inhibitor of MAO (a MAOI); more
accurately, it is a specific, competitive, and reversible inhibitor of MAO-
A. As a competitive inhibitor, it binds to the MAO-A isozyme at the same
site as endogenous monoamine substrates, thereby blocking the metabo-
lism of these substrates by MAO-A for several hours. Being reversible
means the enzyme is returned to its original state once harmine is eventu-
ally removed by other metabolic processes. This mechanism is quite dif-
ferent from that which underlies the class of antidepressants known as
“suicide” (irreversible) inhibitors of MAO, where the enzyme is perma-
nently 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 metabo-
lism 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 103

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 tyra-
mine in the body may indeed lead to this condition; however, tyramine is
degraded primarily by MAO-B, while the harmala alkaloids inhibit pri-
marily the A-isoform of this enzyme (MAO-A). Following the consumption
of Ayahuasca, the peak plasma concentration of harmine in blood may typ-
ically 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. There-
fore, 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 con-
sidered 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 pro-
duce 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, Szára (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 last-
ing about 4 to 5 hours. With Ayahuasca, there is also considerable attenua-
tion of the acute effects when compared to DMT administered by other
routes, probably because of the slowness of oral absorption and also the
104 Altering Consciousness

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-MeO-
DMT, 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 psy-
choactivity 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 phar-
macological perspective) of a psychedelic drug (such as DMT, LSD, or mesca-
line, 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 second-
messengers (“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). Over-
all, 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 protein-
coupled receptors. Jacob and Presti (2005) suggested that DMT may
DMT and Human Consciousness 105

interact with this receptor, especially at endogenous or low exogenous lev-


els, to modulate emotional states. Second, researchers have more recently
proposed DMT to be the first endogenous agonist for the sigma-1 recep-
tor, 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 ana-
logues (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 con-
scious, 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 knowl-
edge 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 path-
ways and circuits does it thereby modulate? As is the case with other psy-
chedelics, 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.
106 Altering Consciousness

Endogenous DMT: The Psychedelic Within


Biosynthesis
DMT is produced in the body via a biosynthetic pathway that origi-
nates 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 ali-
phatic nitrogen, thereby producing DMT. The exact location where this
synthesis occurs, however, remains unclear. Strassman (2001) has sug-
gested 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, consider-
ing 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,” sug-
gesting that endogenous “schizotoxins” may be responsible for the so-
called positive symptoms seen in schizophrenia and other forms of psy-
chosis. At the time, psychedelics were commonly referred to as “psychoto-
mimetics” 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 poten-
tial 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 dream-
ing 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 107

enzymatic activity is increased in the pineal and, accordingly, more melato-


nin 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 con-
tained 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 exam-
ple 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 ritual-
ized 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,
108 Altering Consciousness

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 Vaupés region, the Orinoco River and Rı́o 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 Rı́o 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 Vaupés region, these snuffs were reported to have been
used by shamans only, for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, for div-
ination and prophecy, and for other medico-religious purposes (Schultes,
Hofmann, & Rätsch, 1979).

Preparation and Administration of Snuffs


The methods used for preparing Virola snuffing mixtures vary depend-
ing on the group but usually involve stripping the bark from the tree, heat-
ing 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 mix-
ture is reduced to a reddish-brown syrup. The syrup is then dried, pulver-
ized (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 109

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 observa-
tions, and systematic experimentation over thousands of years in South
America. This innovative progression in drug delivery technologies demon-
strates 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).
110 Altering Consciousness

Preparation and Origins of Ayahuasca


The term Ayahuasca derives from the Quechua language and may vari-
ously 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 yagé and ca’api, is one of
the most complex drug delivery systems known to humankind. As a prod-
uct 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 DMT-
containing plant (Callaway, Brito, & Neves, 2005). The most widely used
such plant is P. viridis (also known as chacruna), while D. cabrerana (chali-
ponga), 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 chro-
matography/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 con-
firmed more rigorously. Interestingly, the B. caapi vine is not known to
be a native plant of the region, suggesting the existence of plant trade net-
works 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 111

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. Addi-
tional ingredients for the production of Ayahuasca, according to the tradi-
tions 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, div-
ination versus healing. The most common plant family from which addi-
tives 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 psychoac-
tive effects may have been noticed and the matter further investigated. In
terms of the explanations for the origins of Ayahuasca according to the tra-
ditions of the indigenous peoples themselves, the mystery of the brew usu-
ally constitutes a fundamental part of group mythology. The discovery of
this “tea” is frequently attributed to supernatural events involving the spi-
rit 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 pro-
vide 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
112 Altering Consciousness

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 vomit-
ing, 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 psy-
chedelic 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 Bar-
quinha (“Little Boat”) in 1945 and the União do Vegetal (UDV, the “Union
of Vegetal,” where Vegetal refers to Ayahuasca) in 1961. These sects origi-
nated in or near Acre in Amazonian Brazil, where rubber tappers encoun-
tered indigenous tribes and experimented with Ayahuasca brews. The
tappers then shared this technology with family and friends and eventu-
ally, 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 com-
bined 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 113

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 “business-
man’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 instru-
mental role in raising awareness of DMT, Ayahuasca, and other psychoac-
tive 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 conven-
ient 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 free-
base 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 pro-
vides further evidence that such technology continues to evolve now that
it has “escaped” from South America and been transmitted to other cul-
tures [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 per-
sonal 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, Colom-
bia, and Brazil, to participate in both urban and rural psychoactive cer-
emonies that are run by Mestizos (persons of mixed Amerindian and
European ancestry). The modern encounters with DMT in an urban set-
ting, 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 psycho-
somatic 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
114 Altering Consciousness

in an applied, quasi-institutional setting is the Takiwasi Center for the


Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Addiction. The Center operates as a char-
ity and was opened in 1992 near the Peruvian city of Tarapoto in the
Andean foothills. It accepts small groups of voluntary participants, typi-
cally 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 com-
munal 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 appa-
rently 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 pharma-
ceutical 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 thou-
sand 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 appreci-
ate 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 consti-
tuted 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
DMT and Human Consciousness 115

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 experi-
ence, 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 consti-
tute their own realm of enquiry, one intrinsically linked to matters con-
cerning 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
116 Altering Consciousness

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 cogni-
zance 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, how-
ever, 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 lab-
yrinths 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 ethnobo-
tanical 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 soci-
eties as a whole transcend fundamental issues and challenges and ulti-
mately 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. Neuropsycho-
pharmacology, 21(2), 16–23.
Aschero, C., & Yacobaccio, H. (1994). 20 años después: Inca Cueva 7 reinterpretado
(20 years later: Inca Cueva 7 reinterpreted). Paper presented at the Resúmenes
del XI Congreso Nacional de Arqueologı́a Argentina, San Rafael, Argentina.
DMT and Human Consciousness 117

Callaway, J. (1988). A proposed mechanism for the visions of dream sleep. Medi-
cal 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 Banisteriop-
sis 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 Toxicol-
ogy, 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 mono-
amine transporter. Journal of Neural Transmission, 116, 1591–1599.
DeKorne, J. (1994). Psychedelic shamanism: The cultivation, preparation and sha-
manic use of psychotropic plants. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.
Deliganis, A., Pierce, P., & Peroutka, S. (1991). Differential interactions of dime-
thyltryptamine (DMT) with 5-HT1A and 5-HT2 receptors. Biochemical Phar-
macology, 41, 1739–1744.
Distel, F., & Alicia, A. (1980). Hallazgo de pipas en complejos precerámicos del
borde de la Puna Jujeña (Republica Argentina) y el empleo de alucinógenos
por parte de las mismas culturas [Finding of pipes in preceramics places at
the edge of Puna Jujeña (Argentina) and the use of halucinogens by those cul-
tures]. Estudios Arqueológicos, 5, 55–75.
Fontanilla, D., Johannessen, M., Hajipour, A., Cozzi, N., Jackson, M., & Ruoho,
A. (2009). The hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is an endog-
enous sigma-1 receptor regulator. Science, 323(5916), 934–937.
Franzen, F., & Gross, H. (1965). Tryptamine, N,N-dimethyltryptamine, N,N-
dimethyl-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 involve-
ment in the mechanism of action of hallucinogenic agents. Life Sciences, 35,
2505–2511.
Gonçalves de Lima, O. (1946). Observações sobre o “vinho de Jurema” utilizado
pelos indios Pancarú de Tacaratú (Pernambuco) [Observations on the “vinho
de Jurema” used by the Pancarú Indians of Tacaratú (Pernambuco)]. Ariquivos
do Instituto de Pesquisas Agronómicas, 4, 45–80.
Hassan, I. (1967). Some folk uses of Peganum harmala in India and Pakistan. Eco-
nomic Botany, 21, 284–284.
Jacob, M., & Presti, D. (2005). Endogenous psychoactive tryptamines reconsid-
ered: 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.
118 Altering Consciousness

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 Peru-
vian 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 Aya-
huasca 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. Neuro-
pharmacology, 29, 193–198.
McKenna, T. (1990). Partial transcription of a taped workshop with ethnobota-
nist, 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 non-
medically 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: Natu-
ral 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 anti-
oxidative 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., & Rätsch, 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.
DMT and Human Consciousness 119

Shanon, B. (2002). The antipodes of the mind: Charting the phenomenology of the aya-
huasca experience. Great Britain: Oxford University Press.
Shulgin, A., & Shulgin, A. (1997). Tihkal: The continuation. Berkeley, CA: Trans-
form 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. Phar-
macology 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.
Szára, S. (1989). The social chemistry of discovery: The DMT story. Social Phar-
macology, 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). Geografı́a de la República del Ecuador [Geography of
Ecuador]. New York: Craighead.
This page intentionally left blank
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 pro-
found ASC, which can be produced by hallucinogens like LSD (LSD-25:
d-lysergic acid diethylamide). As far as we know, mystical states of con-
sciousness 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 entheo-
genic, generally taken to mean “mind manifesting,” “mimicking psychosis,”
and “generating the god within,” respectively. We shall use these terms
122 Altering Consciousness

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; inten-
sification 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 nov-
elty. At low doses, effects on visual perception are often quite striking.
At higher doses (but sometimes even at low doses), perception of ordi-
nary reality may suddenly cease, and an alternate reality or “visionary
state” can be perceived as completely real. Following the loss of an objec-
tive 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 frame-
work 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 experien-
ces 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
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 123

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 experien-
ces accompanied by a belief in their truth.
The idea that hallucinogens are capable of inducing religious experi-
ences 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 rap-
ture can one truly experience the nature of the Divine. The notable reli-
gious scholar Huston Smith (Smith, 1964, p. 524) refuted skeptics by
stating:

refusal to admit that drugs can induce experiences descriptively indistin-


guishable 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 dis-
missing what they saw as machinations of the devil. When the fact that
drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible, discus-
sion 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 sha-
manic uses of approximately 150 psychoactive plants have been verified
by field research conducted early in the last century (Schultes & Hof-
mann, 1992). It seems quite probable that at the dawn of human exis-
tence, 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. Practi-
tioners often suffered centuries of religious and political repression by
124 Altering Consciousness

Europeans, who despised native shamanic practices, believing them to be


inspired by the devil (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992). The most detailed con-
tributions 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 inter-
ested 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 compo-
nents in Teonanácatl 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 alcohol-
ism, 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 outspo-
ken advocates for their widespread use. The widespread use of hallucino-
gens 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 hallucino-
gens eventually resulted in federal legislation in 1970 that outlawed the
possession of most hallucinogens. Today, most hallucinogens are classi-
fied 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.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 125

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 alco-
holics 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 psyche-
delic 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 experien-
ces. In the experiment, 20 graduate students of theology, who were naı̈ve
to psychedelic drug use, volunteered to participate in a double-blind,
placebo-controlled experiment. Pahnke hypothesized that the hallucino-
gen psilocybin (from Teonanácatl), 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 syn-
thetic 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 writ-
ten 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 integra-
tion of the experience into one’s life. Pahnke (1963) reported that in every
126 Altering Consciousness

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, psilo-
cybin 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 docu-
mented 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 transcen-
dent 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 non-
existent, and there were few pharmacologically specific drugs with which
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 127

to probe the mechanistic basis for the effects of hallucinogens. Numerous


rodent studies did continue, however, and certain parallels in brain func-
tion allow discussions in that context.
The problem confronted at the outset, however, is our lack of under-
standing 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 origi-
nates 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 hal-
lucinogens disrupt information processing in cortico-striato-thalamo-
cortical (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 accum-
bens, 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 impor-
tant elements of personality are determined. Incoming sensory informa-
tion, as well as affective tags and access to memories, converge in the
frontal cortex where the totality of incoming data is continuously inte-
grated in some way to form what we experience as “consciousness.”
128 Altering Consciousness

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, conscious-
ness 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 expe-
rience. Afterward, during ordinary consciousness, the experient can remem-
ber 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 infor-
mation 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 expe-
rienced as anomalous. A psychedelic model consistent with this reasoning
would view ASC as the subjective reflections or by-products of general men-
tal 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 com-
pletely real. After an altered state experience has ended, however, if the
memory of the experience remains intact during ordinary waking con-
sciousness, the person will be able to assess the extent to which the ASC
differed from waking consciousness.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 129

We have spent some time attempting to convey the idea that it is pos-
sible 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 hallucina-
tion 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 experi-
ence. 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 portentous-
ness 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 dif-
ferent 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 logi-
cal that attaching to an experience a sense of “portentousness” (a descrip-
tor 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
130 Altering Consciousness

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 hallucino-
gens 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 psyche-
delic molecules.
The neurotransmitter system of particular importance to the present dis-
cussion involves serotonin as the chemical transmitter substance. Serotonin
(5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT) is an evolutionarily ancient neurotransmit-
ter. 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 131

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 fore-
brain 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 awak-
ened 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 mesca-
line 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 hallu-
cinogens, it is probably an important component. Raphe cells release sero-
tonin 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 hal-
lucinogen 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
132 Altering Consciousness

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 vis-
ual 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 interneu-
rons (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, sug-
gesting that serotonin may exert at least some of its actions through vol-
ume transmission mechanisms. Based on their results as well as previous
data, Miner and coworkers (2003) proposed that cortical 5-HT innerva-
tion 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 neurotransmit-
ter glutamate in the cortex. Some controversy still centers, however, on the
details of the mechanism whereby hallucinogens increase cortical gluta-
mate. 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
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 133

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 evi-
dence 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 acti-
vation 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 sub-
cortical areas to coordinate their activity. Current thinking is that brain
function is fundamentally related in a general way to thalamocortical inter-
connectivity and particularly to rhythmic oscillations of “thalamocortical
loops” (Llinás et al., 2005). Indeed, it is presently thought that large-scale
thalamocortical networks are necessary for consciousness (e.g., Izhikevich
& Edelman, 2008; Llinás & Ribary, 2001; Llinás, Ribary, Contreras, &
Pedroarena, 1998; Seth, Izhikevich, Reeke, & Edelman, 2006). An appreci-
ation of how cortical and thalamic cells are regulated is crucial to under-
standing 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 rapid-
eye-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.
134 Altering Consciousness

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 ensem-
bles (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 segre-
gated clusters of neuronal activity (Contreras & Llinás, 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 pyrami-
dal 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 hyperpo-
larize the cell membrane and inhibit action potential generation. Thus,
activation of 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors on pyramidal cells has oppos-
ing 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
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 135

hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocin also have high affinity for 5-HT1A
receptors and suppress raphe cell firing through direct activation of soma-
todendritic 5-HT1A receptors in the raphe. Hallucinogenic phenethyl-
amines 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, Gar-
ratt, & 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 tran-
sient activation and burst firing (Aston-Jones & Bloom, 1981; Grant,
Aston-Jones, & Redmond, 1988; Sara & Segal, 1991; Vankov, Herve-
Minvielle, & Sara, 1995). Administration of LSD, mescaline, or phenethyl-
amine 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 recep-
tors modulates cortical pyramidal cells and interneurons in a parallel fashion
136 Altering Consciousness

(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 assem-
blies 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 immunoreac-
tivity 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 GABA-
mediated inhibition determines the spread of cortical activation by sculpt-
ing precise activity patterns (Llinás 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. Manipula-
tions 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 sug-
gested that the basic operation of cortical networks is the generation of
self-maintained depolarized states that are tightly regulated through inter-
action with local GABAergic neurons and intrinsic membrane
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 137

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 infor-
mation 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 thala-
mus 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 somatosen-
sory 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 per-
turb 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 char-
acteristics 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 sensory-
specific inhibition of specific thalamic nuclei and further impairment of
138 Altering Consciousness

the signal-to-noise ratio. “Noise” could then predominate over stimulus-


specific activity, with relay cells being recruited into thalamocortical cir-
cuits 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 cor-
tex, these receptors are localized on pyramidal cells and certain fast-
spiking 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 reduc-
tion 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 recep-
tors in the LC and VTA also leads to increased NE and DA release, respec-
tively, 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 interac-
tion 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 hallucino-
gens 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 poten-
tials in cortical cells through increased glutamate release.
One could envision, therefore, that hallucinogens greatly enhance sen-
sitivity/excitability of cortical processing while at the same time altering
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 139

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 dis-
torted 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 sen-
sory 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 lim-
bic 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 genu-
ine 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
140 Altering Consciousness

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 diethyla-
mide: Sensitive neuronal units in the midbrain raphe. Science, 161, 706–708.
Aghajanian, G. K., Foote, W. E., & Sheard, M. H. (1970). Action of psychoto-
genic drugs on single midbrain raphe neurons. Journal of Pharmacology and
Experimental Therapy, 171, 178–187.
Aghajanian, G. K., & Haigler, H. J. (1975). Hallucinogenic indoleamines: Prefer-
ential action upon presynaptic serotonin receptors. Psychopharmacology Com-
munication, 1, 619–629.
Aghajanian, G. K., Haigler, H. J., & Bloom, F. E. (1972). Lysergic acid diethyla-
mide 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 postsy-
naptic potentials in apical dendrites of neocortical pyramidal cells. Neurophar-
macology, 36, 589–599.
Aghajanian, G. K., & Marek, G. J. (1999a). Serotonin and hallucinogens. Neuro-
psychopharmacology, 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 asynchro-
nous 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-hydroxytrypt-
amine 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.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 141

Aston-Jones, G., & Bloom, F. E. (1981). Nonrepinephrine-containing locus


coeruleus neurons in behaving rats exhibit pronounced responses to non-
noxious environmental stimuli. Journal of Neuroscience, 1, 887–900.
Batson, C. D., & Ventis, W. L. (1982). The religious experience: A social-
psychological 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., & Vol-
lenweider, 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 gluta-
mate 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 aug-
ments gamma-aminobutyric acid and excitatory amino acid inputs to noradre-
nergic locus coeruleus neurons. Neuroscience, 54, 409–420.
Contreras, D., & Llinás, R. (2001). Voltage-sensitive dye imaging of neocortical
spatiotemporal dynamics to afferent activation frequency. Journal of Neurosci-
ence, 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. Neuropsycho-
pharmacology, 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-methoxy-
tryptamine and 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine on presynaptic serotonin
142 Altering Consciousness

receptors: A comparative iontophoretic study with LSD and serotonin. Neuro-


pharmacology, 16, 811–818.
Destexhe, A., Contreras, D., & Steriade, M. (1999). Spatiotemporal analysis of
local field potentials and unit discharges in cat cerebral cortex during natural
wake and sleep states. Journal of Neuroscience, 19, 4595–4608.
Dittrich, A. (1998). The standardized psychometric assessment of altered states of
consciousness (ASCs) in humans. Pharmacopsychiatry, 31(Suppl. 2), 80–84.
Doherty, M. D., & Pickel, V. M. (2000). Ultrastructural localization of the seroto-
nin2A receptor in dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area. Brain
Research, 864, 176–185.
Fox, R. (1967). Is LSD of value in treating alcoholics? In H. A. Abramson (Ed.),
The use of LSD in psychotherapy and alcoholism (pp. 477–495). New York:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Freedman, D. X. (1968). On the use and abuse of LSD. Archives of General Psy-
chiatry, 18, 330–347.
Glennon, R. A., Titeler, M., & McKenney, J. D. (1984). Evidence for 5-HT2
involvement in the mechanism of action of hallucinogenic agents. Life Science,
35, 2505–2511.
Glennon, R. A., Young, R., & Rosecrans, J. A. (1983). Antagonism of the effects of
the hallucinogen DOM and the purported 5-HT agonist quipazine by 5-HT2
antagonists. European Journal of Pharmacology, 91, 189–196.
Grant, S. J., Aston-Jones, G., & Redmond, D. E., Jr. (1988). Responses of primate
locus coeruleus neurons to simple and complex sensory stimuli. Brain Research
Bulletin, 21, 401–410.
Gray, C. M., & Singer, W. (1989). Stimulus-specific neuronal oscillations in ori-
entation columns of cat visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences U S A, 86, 1698–1702.
Gresch, P. J., Barrett, R. J., Sanders-Bush, E., & Smith, R. L. (2007). 5-Hydroxy-
tryptamine (serotonin) 2A receptors in rat anterior cingulate cortex mediate
the discriminative stimulus properties of d-lysergic acid diethylamide. Journal
of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 320, 662–669.
Griffiths, R., Richards, W., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can occa-
sion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Grinspoon, L., & Bakalar, J. B. (1979). Psychedelic drugs reconsidered. New York:
Basic Books.
Grob, C. S., Danforth, A. L., Chopra, G. S., Hagerty, M., McKay, C. R., Halberstadt,
A. L., & Greer, G. R. (2011). A pilot study of psilocybin treatment for anxiety in
advanced-stage cancer patients. Archives of General Psychiatry, 68, 71–78.
Grof, S., & Grof, C. (1980). Beyond death: The gates of consciousness. London:
Thames and Hudson.
Haider, B., Duque, A., Hasenstaub, A. R., & McCormick, D. A. (2006). Neocort-
ical network activity in vivo is generated through a dynamic balance of excita-
tion and inhibition. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4535–4545.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 143

Haigler, H. J., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1973). Mescaline and LSD: Direct and indi-
rect effects on serotonin-containing neurons in brain. European Journal of Phar-
macology, 21, 53–60.
Hobson, J. A. (2009). REM sleep and dreaming: Towards a theory of protocon-
sciousness. 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. Good-
man, 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 potas-
sium 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 pre-
frontal 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.
Llinás, R., & Ribary, U. (2001). Consciousness and the brain. The thalamocorti-
cal dialogue in health and disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
929, 166–175.
Llinás, R., Ribary, U., Contreras, D., & Pedroarena, C. (1998). The neuronal basis
for consciousness. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B Bio-
logical Sciences, 353, 1841–1849.
Llinás, 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 exci-
tation 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 acti-
vation induces excitatory postsynaptic currents in layer V pyramidal cells of the
medial prefrontal cortex. European Journal of Pharmacology, 367, 197–206.
144 Altering Consciousness

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 mecha-
nisms. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 20, 185–215.
McKenna, D. J., & Saavedra, J. M. (1987). Autoradiography of LSD and 2,5-dime-
thoxyphenylisopropylamine 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). Ultra-
structural 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 mid-
brain 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. Psychia-
try, 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 physiologi-
cal 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 disserta-
tion, 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.
LSD and the Serotonin System’s Effects on Human Consciousness 145

Pazos, A., Probst, A., & Palacios, J. M. (1987). Serotonin receptors in the human
brain—IV. Autoradiographic mapping of serotonin-2 receptors. Neuroscience,
21, 123–139.
Penington, N. J. (1996). Actions of methoxylated amphetamine hallucinogens on
serotonergic neurons of the brain. Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology and
Biological Psychiatry, 20, 951–965.
Plum, F. (1991). Coma and related global disturbances of the human conscious
state. In A. Peters & E. G. Jones (Eds.), Normal and altered states of function
(pp. 359–425). New York: Plenum.
Puig, M. V., Artigas, F., & Celada, P. (2005). Modulation of the activity of
pyramidal neurons in rat prefrontal cortex by raphe stimulation in vivo:
Involvement of serotonin and GABA. Cerebral Cortex, 15, 1–14.
Puig, M. V., Celada, P., az-Mataix, L., & Artigas, F. (2003). In vivo modulation of the
activity of pyramidal neurons in the rat medial prefrontal cortex by 5-HT2A
receptors: Relationship to thalamocortical afferents. Cerebral Cortex, 13, 870–882.
Puig, M. V., Watakabe, A., Ushimaru, M., Yamamori, T., & Kawaguchi, Y.
(2010). Serotonin modulates fast-spiking interneuron and synchronous activ-
ity in the rat prefrontal cortex through 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A Receptors. Journal
of Neuroscience, 30, 2211–2222.
Rasmussen, K., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1986). Effect of hallucinogens on spontane-
ous and sensory-evoked locus coeruleus unit activity in the rat: Reversal by
selective 5-HT2 antagonists. Brain Research, 385, 395–400.
Ribary, U., Ioannides, A. A., Singh, K. D., Hasson, R., Bolton, J. P., Lado, F., et al.
(1991). Magnetic field tomography of coherent thalamocortical 40-Hz oscillations
in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, 88, 11,037–11,041.
Rogawski, M. A., & Aghajanian, G. K. (1979). Response of central monoaminer-
gic neurons to lisuride: Comparison with LSD. Life Science, 24, 1289–1297.
Sanchez-Vives, M. V., & McCormick, D. A. (2000). Cellular and network mecha-
nisms of rhythmic recurrent activity in neocortex. Nature Neuroscience, 3,
1027–1034.
Santana, N., Bortolozzi, A., Serrats, J., Mengod, G., & Artigas, F. (2004). Expres-
sion of serotonin1A and serotonin2A receptors in pyramidal and GABAergic
neurons of the rat prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 14, 1100–1109.
Sara, S. J., & Segal, M. (1991). Plasticity of sensory responses of locus coeruleus
neurons in the behaving rat: Implications for cognition. Progress in Brain
Research, 88, 571–585.
Schultes, R. E., & Hofmann, A. (1992). Plants of the gods: Their sacred, healing, and
hallucinogenic powers. Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press.
Scruggs, J. L., Patel, S., Bubser, M., & Deutch, A. Y. (2000). DOI-induced activa-
tion of the cortex: Dependence on 5-HT2A heteroceptors on thalamocortical
glutamatergic neurons. Journal of Neuroscience, 20, 8846–8852.
Seth, A. K., Izhikevich, E., Reeke, G. N., & Edelman, G. M. (2006). Theories and
measures of consciousness: An extended framework. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences U S A, 103, 10,799–10,804.
146 Altering Consciousness

Sherman, S. M., & Guillery, R. W. (1996). Functional organization of thalamo-


cortical relays. Journal of Neurophysiology, 76, 1367–1395.
Smith, H. (1964). Do drugs have religious import? Journal of Philosophy, 61, 517–530.
Smythies, J. (1997). The functional neuroanatomy of awareness: With a focus on
the role of various anatomical systems in the control of intermodal attention.
Consciousness and Cognition, 6, 455–481.
Steriade, M., Contreras, D., Amzica, F., & Timofeev, I. (1996). Synchronization
of fast (30–40 Hz) spontaneous oscillations in intrathalamic and thalamocort-
ical networks. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 2788–2808.
Titeler, M., Lyon, R. A., & Glennon, R. A. (1988). Radioligand binding evidence
implicates the brain 5-HT2 receptor as a site of action for LSD and phenyliso-
propylamine hallucinogens. Psychopharmacology Berlin, 94, 213–216.
Tononi, G. (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC
Neuroscience, 5, 42.
Torda, C. (1968). Contribution to serotonin theory of dreaming (LSD infusion).
N.Y. State Journal of Medicine, 68, 1135–1138.
Van Dyck, C. H., Tan, P.-Z., Baldwin, R. M., Amici, L. A., Garg, P. K., Ng, C. K.,
Soufer, R., Charney, D. S., & Innis, R. B. (2000). PET quantification of 5-
HT2A receptors in the human brain: A constant infusion paradigm with [18F]
altanserin. Journal of Nuclear Medicine, 41, 234–241.
Vankov, A., Herve-Minvielle, A., & Sara, S. J. (1995). Response to novelty and
its rapid habituation in locus coeruleus neurons of the freely exploring rat.
European Journal of Neuroscience, 7, 1180–1187.
Vollenweider, F. X., & Geyer, M. A. (2001). A systems model of altered con-
sciousness: 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.
Vollenweider, F. X., Vollenweider-Scherpenhuyzen, M. F., Babler, A., Vogel, H., &
Hell, D. (1998). Psilocybin induces schizophrenia-like psychosis in humans via
a serotonin-2 agonist action. NeuroReport, 9, 3897–3902.
Watakabe, A., Komatsu, Y., Sadakane, O., Shimegi, S., Takahata, T., Higo, N.,
et al. (2009). Enriched expression of serotonin 1B and 2A receptor genes in
macaque visual cortex and their bidirectional modulatory effects on neuronal
responses. Cerebral Cortex, 19, 1915–1928.
Wright, I. K., Garratt, J. C., & Marsden, C. A. (1990). Effects of a selective 5-HT2
agonist, DOI, on 5-HT neuronal firing in the dorsal raphe nucleus and 5-HT
release and metabolism in the frontal cortex. Br.J Pharmacol, 99, 221–222.
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 col-
lective 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 expe-
rience 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 conscious-
ness as meaningful expressions of their collective cultural worldview.

Landscape and History of Peyote Use


Peyote occurs naturally from the Chihuahuan desert of San Luis Potosı́,
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.
148 Altering Consciousness

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 indige-
nous 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 (Sahagún,
1950–1969). At the time Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the ritual use of
peyote had spread to a wide range of indigenous peoples, including agri-
culturalists in Central Mexico such as Aztecs, Tarascans, and Tlaxcalans
(Stewart, 1987, p. 17). Peyote was seen by the Spanish clergy as a diaboli-
cal plant, evoking hallucinations that came from the blasphemous world
of the devil himself. Priests prepared a catechism to be used when con-
ducting 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 cam-
paign to destroy indigenous religion and forever change the worldview of
these peoples, a task they never entirely accomplished. Peyote use sur-
vived and continues to provide to some indigenous groups an intrinsic
connection between native religious tenets and phenomenological experi-
ences 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 Ciénegas in Coahuila,
Mexico, have been radiocarbon dated to 5,195 years BP and 835 BP, respectively, Interest-
ingly, 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 Uni-
versity, is carrying out a populations genetics study on peyote growing from south and west
Texas into northern Mexico (personal communication, June 26, 2010).
Peyote and Meaning 149

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 incorporat-
ing 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 inter-
pret 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, neuro-
chemical activity, and its physical and psychological effects in human
beings. As adeptly discussed by Cardeña (2009), the western scientific
perspective seriously lacks conceptual models as well as a concise vocabu-
lary to adequately discuss the study of consciousness. Cardeña’s discus-
sion 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 experi-
encing 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 tetrahydroiso-
quinolines. Mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamine), the most abun-
dant 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, mesca-
line 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
150 Altering Consciousness

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 nor-
epinephrine 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 vasocon-
strictor, 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 inges-
tion, geometric patterns in brilliant colors are perceived in constant
kaleidoscope-like movement. These designs, sometimes referred to as phos-
phenes, 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
Peyote and Meaning 151

discussion, it is quite plausible that figurative images that arise


during inebriation from psychoactive substances are projections of pre-
existing 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 disap-
peared 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 sen-
sations 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 lis-
ten 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.
152 Altering Consciousness

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 peyote-
induced 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 unforget-


tably 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 conjunc-
tion with peyote ingestion, is another plant that must be discussed. Nico-
tine, 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
Peyote and Meaning 153

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 empeyo-
tado. 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, some-
times 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 talk-
ing 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 bac-
terium 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 rehabilita-
tion from alcohol and drug abuse, and has many additional salubrious
properties (Halpern et al., 2005; Schultes, 1938).
154 Altering Consciousness

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 reptil-
ian brain, the paleomammalian brain, and the neomammalian brain. The
reptilian brain corresponds to the cognition required for the body’s behav-
ioral actions, which also include habitual routines. This brain system regu-
lates 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 attach-
ment, 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. Beno-
witz, 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, sero-
tonin, 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 con-
sciousness. As noted elsewhere (Furst, 1969, 1972; Myerhoff, 1974; Schae-
fer, 1996a, 2002), pilgrims participate in a purification ritual before leaving
3
Neal Benowitz, Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biopharmaceutical Sciences, Uni-
versity of California, San Francisco, has been carrying out extensive studies for more than
20 years on the effects of tobacco on the human system.
Peyote and Meaning 155

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 men-
tions. 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 neurochem-
istry 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 pre-
pares 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 phenethyl-
amine alkaloids. Several Huichols have discussed with Bauml and me these desert-
dwelling plants and their personal experiences when ingesting them with peyote. More
research is needed to fully understand the depth of plant knowledge Huichols have regard-
ing the environment in Wirikuta and the effects that are achieved by using admixture
plants with peyote.
156 Altering Consciousness

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 maku-
tse . . . 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 opti-
mal 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, provid-
ing 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 foun-
dation 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 omni-
present in Huichol culture. Myths, rituals, songs, formal speech, even cas-
ual 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
Peyote and Meaning 157

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 chil-
dren 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 per-
sonally, then vicariously they are well clued in to the corpus of core sym-
bols 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.
158 Altering Consciousness

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, provid-


ing 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 under-
standing of the ASC that peyote brings. Many Huichols are experienced
“travelers” who have developed techniques to maximize the peyote experi-
ence and have evolved a fine-tuned cultural framework in which to under-
stand 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 cogni-
tive 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 indi-
cated 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
Peyote and Meaning 159

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 tri-
mester 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 new-
borns; 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 pat-
terned 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 stimula-
tion 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)
160 Altering Consciousness

much, and that 50% of newborn’s sleep time is REM sleep, is because REM
provides the stimulation necessary for central nervous system develop-
ment 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 com-
munication 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 communi-
cates 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, tele-
pathically.

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 Texas-
Pan American.
Peyote and Meaning 161

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 noth-
ing 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 impor-
tant psychological, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions. The existence
of authentic perinatal experiences, he argues, cannot be denied. The fre-
quency of memories of their occurrence is of paramount clinical signifi-
cance (Grof, 1988a, 1988b). If memories from womb experience are part
of a human being’s unconscious, it is interesting to contemplate how
162 Altering Consciousness

peyote-related perinatal experiences could influence cognitive develop-


ment and enable individuals’ access to dimensions of human conscious-
ness 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 mal-
adaptive 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 world-
view 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 con-
sciousness 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 identi-
fied. Journal of Ethnobiology, 10, 99–101.
Berk, L. E. (2006). Child development. Boston: Pearson Education.
Peyote and Meaning 163

Boyd, C. E., & Dering, J. P. (1996). Medicinal and hallucinogenic plants identi-
fied 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.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. 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). Pre-
historic 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 attri-
bution 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.
164 Altering Consciousness

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 Muse-
ums 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 Sahagún, 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). Albuquer-
que: 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 Thera-
peutics, 182, 427–432.
Peyote and Meaning 165

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. Uni-
versity. 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.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 8

Addiction and the Dynamics of


Altered States of
Consciousness
Andrea E. Blätter, Jörg 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 commu-
nications 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 neurotransmit-
ters 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 endog-
enous neurotransmitter, the drug can bind with the receptor cells, duping
the receptor cells into reacting as if the original neurotransmitter was stimu-
lating the neuron. Drugs can increase or decrease the synthesis of neuro-
transmitters, they can interfere in the transport, storage or release of
neurotransmitters, and they can influence the breakdown of neurotransmit-
ters, 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.
168 Altering Consciousness

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 vigi-
lance, 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 defen-
siveness, and reduction of depression and self-defeating activities. Clearly
many adaptive mechanisms could have been involved in humans’ physio-
logical 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 evolu-
tionary 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 endog-
enous transmitters that are rare or otherwise limited by dietary constraints.
These are primarily in the monoamine neurotransmitters such as sero-
tonin, 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 pres-
sures for metabolic systems that utilize these exogenous sources of precur-
sors 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 (Blätter, 1990; Schivelbusch, 2002; Völger & 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
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 169

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 associ-
ated 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 addic-
tion 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 institu-
tionalization of the modern medical concept of addiction. The contempo-
rary view of addiction as a phenomenologically perceivable disease with
many facets has evolved, but although religious-scientific discourse trans-
formed 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 produc-
tivity, functionality, and success, the keywords both of Calvinism and
capitalism (Nolte, 2007, p. 53). The addict of today suffers from a multi-
faceted and varied disease of compulsions and wanting with fixations as
diverse as sex, gambling, food, fetishes, and of course a bewildering vari-
ety 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).
170 Altering Consciousness

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 addic-
tions 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, & Schmidt-
Semisch, 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 con-
notation 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 Clas-
sification of Diseases (ICD10) frames addiction as a psychopathological dis-
order 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 with-
drawal 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
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 171

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 symp-
toms 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 col-
lective 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 depen-
dence from overpowering desire and habituation. Many critics conclude
that the definitions of dependence employ terms that are virtually inde-
finable and heavily value laden. Only physical tolerance can be a straight-
forward measure of addiction, while psychological dependence is less
inevitably manifested and more susceptible to the elements of set and set-
ting (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 tol-
erance, 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, inde-
pendent 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 con-
structs in addiction theories of the social sciences (Dollinger & Schmidt-
Semisch, 2007; Maisto et al., 2004; Uchtenhagen & Zieglgänsberger,
172 Altering Consciousness

2000). Acceptance and use of a certain psychotropic substance in a popula-


tion, a subcultural group, an occupational group, and so forth involve
learned behaviors determined by personal characteristics and socio-
cultural factors (Becker, 1963; Blätter, 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 (Blätter, 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 dis-
tinction 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 recipi-
ent, including attitudes, knowledge, and cognitive preferences of the per-
son (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 set-
ting 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). Nonbiolog-
ical factors, such as personality, cognitive and developmental factors, cul-
tural, social, situational, and ritualistic aspects, influence the reaction to
drugs (Blätter, 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 ele-
ments 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 frame-
work as a physical and biological condition, the dominant treatment models
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 173

of American biomedicine have come to follow the Alcoholics Anonymous


(1976, 1987) approaches that do not share the medical concept of addic-
tion. 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 conse-
quently the addict is powerless in the face of the addiction and can only
escape through a surrender to a higher spiritual power, however one con-
ceptualizes that power. The AA approach explicitly conceptualizes addic-
tion in terms of altered consciousness, with its 12-step program including
changes in consciousness and a spiritual awakening as fundamental to over-
coming 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 follow-
up, 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).
174 Altering Consciousness

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 aware-
ness 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 con-
sciousness. 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 induc-
tion 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 biologi-
cal 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 con-
sciousness 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 predomi-
nance 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, move-
ments, 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 poten-
tial for the development of attachment and dependence (Metzner, 1994,
p. 4). When a behavior becomes so habitual as to dominate the individual
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 175

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 percep-
tional 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 rit-
uals are also evident in food addictions and in the case of activity addic-
tions 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 con-
sciousness 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, nonaddic-
tive consumption patterns for highly addictive substances. Studies of con-
trolled 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
176 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
trast 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 them-
selves, whether induced by drugs or other means, can also become the
object of addiction with a similar state regularly involved and to the exclu-
sion of other interests (Metzner, 1994, p. 9). This seems to be a rare excep-
tion. In contrast is the widely noted ability of psychedelics to counter
addictions (see Winkelman, 2009b).
Calabrese (2007) maintains that many addiction professionals con-
sider 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 thera-
peutic 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 addic-
tion through social psychological mechanisms, forming a sense of commu-
nity 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, tran-
scendence, release from guilt, guidance, and a sense of purpose.
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 177

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 iden-
tity 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 heal-
ing processes. Calabrese (2007) also notes that unlike many traditional eti-
ologies 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 behav-
iors. 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 con-
sciousness that are intrinsically linked to concepts of spirituality. The
association of drug addiction with our drive for seeking alterations of con-
sciousness 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 brain-
imaging techniques provide insights into the development of addiction
involving anatomic and functional connections between hippocampal
178 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
sciousness using a circle model of “potential awareness” (p. 5ff). Aware-
ness 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, throt-
tled by regulatory mechanisms in the neuronal pathways.
The mesolimbic system of the midbrain changes the evaluation param-
eters 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 sys-
tem, 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 dynor-
phin) with different functions. Activating ´-receptors, for example, leads
to a euphoric feeling, while activating -receptors triggers fear and dys-
phoria. 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 canna-
binoid 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
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 179

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 pat-
terns perceived as pleasurable, have reinforcing properties that can be
ascribed to the neuronal reward system. The complex systems of neuro-
transmitters 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 motivation-
search-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, & Jones-
Gotman, 2001).

Dopamine: Pleasure, Lust, and Desire


Pleasure, lust, and desire are essential evolutionary programs that guar-
antee reproduction and satiation and are mediated by the feeling that
something we like has happened (Esch & Stefano, 2004). Intense emo-
tions 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 meaning-
ful 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 & Büchel, 2009). As a result
of unconscious sensory input changes under the influence of the drugs
180 Altering Consciousness

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 long-
ing for satisfying experiences like the taste of chocolate remains even when
dopamine release is inhibited. Pleasure involves a variety of neurotrans-
mitters and endocrinological communicators (Berridge & Kringelbach,
2008). Although the opioid system is mainly responsible for pain reduc-
tion, 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 neurotansmit-
ters (endorphins) do. Repeated application of opiates leads to tolerance
with the decrease of several pharmacological effects like analgesia, respira-
tory 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 sym-
pathetic tonus and alteration of calcium channels on cellular level. The opi-
ates 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 Delta-
FoS–B-mediated triggering of the craving processes (Ammon-Treiber,
Mayer, & Höllt, 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 dopa-
mine in the nucleus accumbens seems to correlate more with the anticipa-
tion 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 compara-
tive functions of sensory stimulus (bottom-up) and internal representation
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 181

(top-down) data take place (Emrich & Schneider, 2006). Within this con-
text, 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 act-
ing on the primary mesolimbic centers of assessment and induce pleasur-
able 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 percep-
tions 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 fulfill-
ing 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 finan-
cial deal. The financial crisis in 2008 suggests that those who were making
big money exhibited the same pattern of loss of control and irresponsibil-
ity 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 funda-
mental 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 pro-
tein that serves as a nuclear transcription factor abbreviated as CREB
(stands for cAMP [cyclic adenosine monophosphate] response element-
182 Altering Consciousness

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 cor-
responding 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 reward-
ing 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 cen-
ters. Drugs act directly on the neurotransmitter systems of the brain; there-
fore, 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 sys-
tem when cues associated with the drug experience are present (Esch &
Stefano, 2004). If this cue has become certain music or an associated life-
style 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 phe-
nomena, 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 prod-
ucts. Addiction is a multifaceted phenomenon that takes place along a
continuum and is not limited to single substances or objects but is a com-
pulsive behavior, and consequently it involves a narrowed scope of aware-
ness. 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 sub-
stances.
Neurobiology gives insight into the basic physiological mechanisms
that promote pleasure-seeking behavior. The similarity between
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 183

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, var-
ied, 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 pleas-
urable 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 depen-
dence. 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 pat-
terns of behavior. In successful cases, they may adopt new, healthier per-
spectives, while their addictive tendencies mature out. Thus, spiritual
perspectives become crucial tools in a maturation process that links iso-
lated 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 sour-
ces of chemical reward.

References
Aberle, D. (1966). The Peyote religion among the Navaho. Chicago: Aldine.
Alcoholics Anonymous (1976). Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: AA World
Services.
Alcoholics Anonymous (1987). Twelve steps and twelve traditions. New York:
AA World Services.
Ammon-Treiber, S., Mayer, P., & Höllt, V. (2006). Pharmakologische Aspekte
der Opiatabhängigkeit [Pharamacological aspects of opiate addiction]. In H.
M. Emrich & U. Schneider (Eds.), Facetten der Sucht. Von der Neurobiologie
zur Anthropologie [Facets of addiction. From neurobiology to anthropology],
(pp. 51–63). Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.
Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: Free
Press.
Berridge, K. C., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2008). Affective neuroscience of pleasure:
Reward in humans and animals. Psychopharmacology, 199, 457–480.
184 Altering Consciousness

Blätter, A. (1990). Kulturelle Ausprägungen und die Funktionen des Drogengebrauchs


[Cultural patterns and functions of drug consumption] (1st ed.). Hamburg,
Germany: Wayasbah Verlag.
Blätter, A. (2000). Psychosoziale Faktoren der Substanzwirkung [Psychosocial
factors of substance effects]. In A. Uchtenhagen & Zieglgänsberger (Eds.),
Suchtmedizin. Konzepte, Strategien und therapeutisches Management. [Addiction
medicine. Concepts, strategies and therapeutic management] (pp. 145–149).
München: Urban & Fischer.
Blätter, A. (2007). Soziokulturelle Determinanten der Drogenwirkung [Sociocul-
tural determinants of drug effects]. In B. Dollinger & H. Schmidt-Semisch
(Eds.), Sozialwissenschaftliche Suchtforschung [Addiction research in social sci-
ence] (pp. 83–96). Wiesbaden, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Calabrese, J. (1997). “Spiritual healing and human development in the Native
American Church: Toward a cultural psychiatry of peyote.” Psychoanalytic
Review, 84, 237–55.
Calabrese, J. (2007). The therapeutic use of peyote in the Native American
Church. In M. Winkelman & T. Roberts (Eds.), Psychedelic Medicines (Vol. 2,
pp. 29–42). Westport, CT: Preager Perspectives.
DeCorte, T. (2000). The taming of cocaine. Cocaine use in European and American
cities. Brussels: VUB University Press.
Diekhoff, R. (1982). Rausch und Realität—Literarische Avantgarde und Drogen-
konsum von der Romantik bis zum Surrealismus [Rush (intoxication) and
reality —Writers avant-garde and drug consumption from Romanticism to
Surrealism]. In G. Völger & K. von Welck (Eds.), Rausch und Realität. Drogen
im Kulturvergleich [Rush (intoxication) and reality. Drugs in intercultural com-
parison] (pp. 692–753). Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt.
Dollinger, B. & Schmidt-Semisch, H. (Eds.) (2007). Sozialwisenschaftliche Sucht-
forschung [Social science addiction research]. Wiesbaden, Germany, VS.
Elliott, R., Newman, J. L., Longe, O. A., & Deakin, J. F. (2003). Differential
response patterns in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex to financial reward
in humans: A parametric functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Jour-
nal of Neuroscience, 23(1), 303–307.
Emrich, H. M., & Schneider, U. (2006). Facetten der Sucht. Von der Neurobiologie
zur Anthropologie [Facets of addiction. From neurobiology to anthropology].
Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang.
Erk, S., Spitzer, M., Wunderlich, A. P., Galley, L., & Walter, H. (2002). Cultural
objects modulate reward circuitry. Neuroreport, 13, 2499–2503.
Esch, T., & Stefano, G. B. (2004). The neurobiology of pleasure, reward pro-
cesses, addiction and their health implications. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 25
(4), 235–251.
Fachner, J. (2006). Music and drug induced altered states. In D. Aldridge & J.
Fachner (Eds.), Music and altered states: Consciousness, transcendence, therapy
and addictions (pp. 82–96). London: Jessica Kingsley.
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 185

Fachner, J. (2010). Music therapy, drugs and state-dependent recall. In


D. Aldridge & J. Fachner (Eds.), Music therapy and addictions (pp. 18–34).
London: Jessica Kingsley.
Halpern, John (1996). The use of hallucinogens in the treatment of addiction.
Addiction Research 4(2), 177–189.
Heggenhougen, C. (1997). Reaching new highs: Alternative therapies for drug
addicts. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Helman, C. (1994). Culture, health and illness. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
Hess, H., Kolte, B., & Schmidt-Semisch, H. (2004). Kontrolliertes Rauchen. Tabak-
konsum zwischen Verbot und Vergnügen [Controlled smoking. Tobacco con-
sumption between prohibition and pleasure]. Freiburg, Germany: Lambertus.
Houck, B. (1998). Caught in their own web: Addicted physicians and the disease con-
cept of addiction. Master’s thesis, School of Human Evolution and Social
Change, Arizona State University.
Iversen, L. L. (2008). The science of marijuana (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Jilek, W. (1994). Traditional healing and the prevention and treatment of alcohol
and drug abuse. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 31, 219–258.
Kamphausen, G. (2009). Unwerter Genuß. Zur Dekulturation der Lebensführung
von Opiumkonsumenten [Worthless indulgence. On deculturation of the life-
style of opiate consumers]. Bielefeld, Germany: Transscript.
Knutson, B., Westdorp, A., Kaiser, E., & Hommer, D. (2000). FMRI visualization of
brain activity during a monetary incentive delay task. Neuroimage, 12(1), 20–27.
Luik, J. (1996). “I can’t help myself”: Addiction as ideology. Human Psychophar-
macology, 11(S23), 21–32.
MacLean, P. (1990). The triune brain in evolution. New York: Plenum.
Mahler, S. V., Smith, K. S., & Berridge, K. C. (2007). Endocannabinoid hedonic
hotspot for sensory pleasure: Anandamide in nucleus accumbens shell enhan-
ces “liking” of a sweet reward. Neuropsychopharmacology, 32, 2267–2278.
Maisto, S. A., Galizio, M., & Connors, G. J. (2004). Drug use and abuse.
Wadsworth, CA: Thompson.
McClung, C. A., Ulery, P. G., Perrotti, L. I., Zachariou, V., Berton, O., & Nestler,
E. J. (2004). DeltaFosB: A molecular switch for long-term adaptation in the
brain. Brain Research, 132(2), 146–154.
McGovern, P. (2009). Uncorking the past. Berkeley: University of California Press.
McKim, W. (1991). Drugs and behavior: An introduction to behavioral pharmacology.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Mechoulam, R., Hanus, L., & Martin, B. R. (1994). Search for endogenous ligands
of the cannabinoid receptor. Biochemical Pharmacology, 48, 1537–1544.
Metzner, R. (1994). Addiction and transcendence as altered states of conscious-
ness. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 26(1), 1–17.
Moerman, D. (2000). Cultural variations in the placebo effect: Ulcers, anxiety,
and blood pressure. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 14(1), 51–72.
186 Altering Consciousness

Nichols, D. E. (2004). Hallucinogens. Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 101(2),


131–181.
Nolte, F. (2007). “Sucht”—zur Geschichte einer Idee [“Addiction”—about the
history of a concept]. In B. Dollinger & H. Schmidt-Semisch (Eds.), Sozialwis-
senschaftliche Suchtforschung [Social science addiction resesarch] (pp. 47–58).
Wiesbaden, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Peele, S. (1985). The meaning of addiction. Compulsive experience and its interpretation.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Plant, S. (1999). Writing on drugs. London: Faber and Faber.
Rossi, E. (1991). The 20-minute break. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
Schetsche, M. (2007). Sucht in wissenssoziologischer Perspektive [Addiction in
the perspective of the sociology of knowledge]. In B. Dollinger & H.
Schmidt-Semisch (Eds.), Sozialwissenschaftliche Suchtforschung [Social science
addiction resesarch] (pp. 113–130). Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaf-
ten.
Schivelbusch, W. (2002). Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft- Eine
Geschichte der Genußmittel [Paradise, taste and reason. A history of recreational
drugs]. Frankfurt: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag.
Shapiro, H. (2003). Waiting for the man: The story of drugs and popular music (2nd
ed.). London: Helter Skelter.
Siegel, R. (1979). Natural animal addictions: An ethological perspective. In
J. Keehn (Ed.), Origins of madness: Psychopathology in animals (pp. 29–60).
New York: Pergamon Press.
Siegel, R. (1989). Intoxication: Life in pursuit of artificial paradise. London: Simon
& Schuster.
Small, D. M., Zatorre, R. J., Dagher, A., Evans, A. C., & Jones-Gotman, M. (2001).
Changes in brain activity related to eating chocolate: From pleasure to aver-
sion. Brain, 124(Pt 9), 1720–1733.
Smith, E. O. (1999). Evolution, substance abuse, and addiction. In E. Trevathan,
J. Smith, & J. McKenna (Eds.), Evolutionary medicine (pp. 375–405). New
York: Oxford University Press.
Sullivan J. R. & Hagewnm E.H. (2002). Psychotropic substance-seeking: evolu-
tionary pathology or adaption? Addiction, 97, 389–400.
Tart, C. T. (1969). Altered states of consciousness: A book of readings. New York:
Wiley.
Tassi, P., & Muzet, A. (2001). Defining the states of consciousness. Neuroscience
Biobehavioral Reviews, 25(2), 175–191.
Uchtenhagen, A. & Zieglgänsberger, W. (Eds.) (2000). Suchtmedizin [Addiction
medicine]. München Germany: Urban & Fischer.
Valentine, K. (2007). Methadone maintenance treatment and making up people.
Sociology, 41, 497–514.
Völger, G., & von Welck, K. (Eds.). (1982). Rausch und Realität. Drogen im Kultur-
vergleich [Rush (intoxication) and reality. Drugs in intercultural comparison].
Hamburg, Germany: Rowohlt.
Addiction and the Dynamics of Altered States of Consciousness 187

WHO, UNODC, & UNAIDS. (2004). Position paper. Substitution maintainance.


Therapy in the management of opioid dependence and HIV/AIDS prevention.
Geneva: WHO.
Wiedman, D. (1990). Big and Little Moon Peyotism as health care delivery
systems. Medical Anthropology, 12, 371–87.
Winkelman, M. (2001). Alternative and complementary medicine approaches to
substance abuse: A shamanic perspective. International Journal of Drug Policy,
12, 337–51.
Winkelman, M. (2007). Therapeutic bases of psychedelic medicines: Psychointe-
grative effects. In M. Winkelman & T. Roberts (Eds.), Psychedelic medicine (Vol.
1, pp. 1–19). Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood.
Winkelman, M. (2009a). Shamanistic harm reduction practices. In A. Browne-
Miller (Ed.), The Praeger international collection on addictions (Vol. 3,
pp. 247–265). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Winkelman, M. (2009b). Sacred medicines for harm reduction and substance
abuse rehabilitation. In A. Browne-Miller (Ed.), The Praeger international collec-
tion on addictions (Vol. 3, pp. 377–401). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Winkelman, M. (2010). Shamanism: A biopsychosocial paradigm of consciousness
and healing. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Winkelman, M., & Roberts, T. (Eds.). (2007). Psychedelic medicine: New evidence
for hallucinogenic substances as treatments (Vols. 1 and 2). Westport, CT:
Praeger/Greenwood.
Yacubian, J., & Büchel, C. (2009). The genetic basis of individual differences in
reward processing and the link to addictive behavior. In J.-C. Dreher &
L. Tremblay (Eds.), Handbook of reward and decision making (pp. 345–360).
Burlington, VT: Academic Press.
Zinberg, N. E. (1984). Drug, set, and setting: The basis for controlled intoxicant use
(1st ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
This page intentionally left blank
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 compar-
ing 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 his-
tory. A variety of different perspectives has been applied to the understand-
ing 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;
190 Altering Consciousness

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 cul-
tural 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 inter-
course. In his book, Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness, he recorded not
only case histories exhibiting sexual dysfunction but also unusual
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 191

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 impor-
tant factor responsible for inducing ecstatic states within a significant per-
centage 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 expe-
riences: those triggered by lovemaking, childbirth, and a third variety that
was termed a “light experience.” Greeley and McCready found that 6 per-
cent of their sample reported experiencing ecstasy only during lovemak-
ing, 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 report-
ing their ecstatic experience, the lack of detail concerning the nature of
the experiences reported, and methodological issues concerning the valid-
ity and reliability of the respondents’ reports.
192 Altering Consciousness

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 inter-
views, 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 conscious-
ness (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 develop-
mental 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 theo-
retical lens, Freud suggested that the personality is made up of both con-
scious 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 expec-
tations” (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 person-
ality is the superego, which represents morality and our sense of right and
wrong. According to Freud (1905, 1933), anxiety is experienced when the
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 193

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 develop-
ment 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 alter-
ations in consciousness, often of an ecstatic nature. One variation of the
latter, auto-erotic asphyxiation, is the practice of cutting off one’s air sup-
ply 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 “body-
based” (i.e., based on erogenous zones), and portrayed psychological
defense mechanisms as both internal cognitive processes and external man-
ifestations 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.
194 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
sciousness” (Tart, 1978). Tart’s systems approach is primarily phenom-
enological (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 aware-
ness 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, percep-
tion, 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 rep-
resents 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
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 195

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 inhib-
ition 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 doc-
umented include hormonal changes (increased testosterone in men, estro-
gen 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 pro-
posed that the limbic system is a more primitive system (the oldest in evo-
lutionary 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) sug-
gested that hyperventilation may be correlated to ASC experienced during
sexual arousal. From this perspective, accelerated breathing and involun-
tary groaning during sexual arousal lead to physiological changes that
can induce a state of hyperventilation (increased heart rate, decreased oxy-
gen 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 inten-
sifies and/or induces transcendent states of sexual experiences. Increased
prolactin secretion may also play a role in ecstatic states and ASC experi-
enced 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 prolac-
tin accounted for euphoric states reported and for a decrease in sexual
196 Altering Consciousness

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
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 197

Dao. Adhering to doctrines of purity, stillness, and nonaction, they were


very suspicious of rituals, techniques of “salvation,” and against the perfor-
mance of any sexual practices. Different factions or groups, which fall
within scholarly designations of religious Daoism and Daoist yoga devel-
oped 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 (meri-
dians) 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, visualiza-
tions, 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 trav-
eling 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 prac-
tices. 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).
198 Altering Consciousness

Hindu Tantra
Tantra is a spiritual practice associated with achieving enlightenment
and transcendent states through the use of rituals, art, meditation, visuali-
zation, 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 impor-
tance 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 hav-
ing 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 rit-
ual (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
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 199

Buddhism, nearly one fifth of the practices involve use of a human con-
sort. Voidness and compassion must be experienced before the sexual rit-
ual; 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 circum-
stances. When one reaches this level of practice, one is close to the attain-
ment 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 learn-
ing” (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 signifi-
cant 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 phe-
nomenological dimensions of sexuality in any depth. To overcome this
drawback, a detailed inventory called The Psychological Dimensions of Sex-
ual 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 psycho-
logical functioning: (1) attributes of alternate states of consciousness, (2)
200 Altering Consciousness

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 descrip-
tive 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 relation-
ships. 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 liter-
ature review across the fields of anthropology, psychology, comparative reli-
gions, 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 con-
cerning semantics, item construction, and technical format of the test fol-
lowed 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: excite-
ment, 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 intensifica-
tion 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 unstimu-
lated, 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 qual-
ities and components of psychological experience by comparing these
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 201

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 experi-
ences, 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 associ-
ated 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 mis-
cellaneous factors section were actually a repetition of select items found
in earlier scales of the inventory and were utilized for the purpose of estab-
lishing some preliminary estimates of reliability. Validity estimations were
focused on the attempt to eliminate the possible biases of clinical psycho-
pathology and social desirability (response sets). This was accomplished
by administering two additional tests, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desir-
ability 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 influ-
ence 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
202 Altering Consciousness

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 pro-
files. 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 diag-
nostically (see Graham, 1987). Several Goldberg indices were later devel-
oped, 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 expe-
rience or that they have difficulty understanding; (b) to test the reliability and
validity of the PDOSEI, Form I; and (c) to provide preliminary pilot informa-
tion 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 var-
iables 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. Descrip-
tive and inferential statistics were calculated. Pearson r scores were calcu-
lated to determine the degree of interrelatedness among items of the sexual
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 203

response cycle for the entire sample, as well as by gender. Reliability coef-
ficients 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 con-
siderably lower than for men. Correlations among other stages were simi-
lar to males. This suggests that ecstatic states and transcendent
experiences among women were less strongly related to similar experien-
ces 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 physiologi-
cally aroused (i.e., sexually aroused; mean ¼ 0.70) and that this state is differ-
ent 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
204 Altering Consciousness

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 differ-
ences were found on questions related to ecstatic states or transcendent expe-
riences 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
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 205

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 experi-
ences without drugs or alcohol, while males tended to have more experi-
ences 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 expe-
riences. 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 con-
sciousness fostered during sexual arousal are qualitatively different from sim-
ilar shifts in consciousness associated with sleep. It further appears that
respondents are psychologically insightful enough at attenuating these differ-
ences, 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 con-
sciousness 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,
206 Altering Consciousness

most empirical studies and literature surveys have largely ignored this
issue. To date, there have been few serious attempts directed to a compre-
hensive exploration of the psychological, cultural, and spiritual dimen-
sions 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 phenom-
enological 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 short-
comings with a summary of current literature and a preliminary empirical
analysis of extensive data collected that analyzes several components of
sexual phenomenological experience.

References
Barger, S. D. (2002). The Marlowe-Crowne affair: Short forms, psychometric struc-
ture, and social desirability. Journal of Personality Assessment, 79, 286–306.
Bharati, A. (1965). The tantric tradition. London: Rider.
Bloch, I. (1933). Anthropological studies in the strange sexual practices of all races in
all ages, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental, primitive and civilized. New
York: Anthropological Press.
Boorstein, S. (1996). Transpersonal psychotherapy. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Boorstein, S. (1997). Clinical studies in transpersonal psychotherapy. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Brecher, E. M. (1976). History of human sexual research and study. In B. J. Sadock,
H. I. Kaplan, & A. M. Freedman (Eds.), The sexual experience (pp. 71–78).
Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1960). A new scale of social desirability indepen-
dent of psychopathology. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 24, 349–354.
Crowne, D. P., & Marlowe, D. (1964). The approval motive. Studies in evaluative
dependence. New York: Wiley.
Davidson, J. M. (1980). The psychobiology of sexual experience. In J. M. David-
son & R. J. Davidson (Eds.), The psychobiology of consciousness (pp. 271–332).
New York: Plenum.
de Riencort, A. (1974). Sex and power in history. New York: David McKay.
Eliade, M. (1969). Yoga: Immortality and freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Eliade, M. (1971). Spirit, light, and seed. History of Religions, 11, 1–30.
Farber, B. A., Brink, D. C., & Raskin, P. M. (1996). The psychotherapy of Carl
Rogers. New York: Guilford.
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 207

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 edi-
tion (Vol. 22, pp. 3–182). London: Hogarth Press.
Goldberg, L. R. (1965). Diagnosticians vs. diagnostic signs: The diagnosis of psy-
chosis 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 Psychol-
ogy, 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 manu-
script.
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 con-
sciousness 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.
208 Altering Consciousness

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 experi-
ence inventory, Form I. Chicago: Unpublished psychological test.
Maliszewski, M., Twemlow, S. W., Brown, D. P., & Engler, J. M. (1981). A phe-
nomenological 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.
Altering Consciousness Through Sexual Activity 209

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 func-
tion of groaning and hyperventilation during sexual intercourse: Intensifica-
tion 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 Sex-
ual 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 sex-
ual 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.
This page intentionally left blank
CHAPTER 10

Altered Consciousness and


Human Development
Pehr Granqvist, Sophie Reijman,
and Etzel Cardeña

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 develop-
ment 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” (Cardeña,
2009, p. 305). This is highly unfortunate, as knowledge about the emer-
gence 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,
212 Altering Consciousness

adolescence, adulthood, and old age. We will also discuss relevant genetic
and environmental factors on the propensity to enter ASC (e.g., the herit-
ability 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 pro-
posed frameworks for how modes of consciousness may manifest different
levels irrespective of age (e.g., Wilber, 1998, p. 43). Wilber has also pro-
posed 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 hyp-
notizability and dissociation strongly suggests that some individuals are
more likely than others to experience a variety of alterations of conscious-
ness, irrespective of whether they also manifest psychopathology or not
(Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000). Cross-cultural research has sug-
gested 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 asso-
ciated 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 self-
transcendence (Cardeña & 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.
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 213

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 associ-
ated 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 devel-
opment 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 undifferenti-
ated 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 mani-
fold 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 occur-
rences, 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 wak-
ing activity (bursts of uncoordinated motor activity) and crying (State V;
214 Altering Consciousness

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 char-
acterized 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 bio-
logical 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 syn-
onymous 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 atten-
tiveness 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 smil-
ing (i.e., a broad, unmistakable grin, with eyes fixated on the interaction
partner) and—shortly thereafter—full laughter (Sroufe & Waters, 1976).
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 215

Moreover, although associated with “waking activity,” these behavioral


expressions are presumably linked to consciousness experiences (emerg-
ing 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 implica-
tion 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 expe-
rienced and expressed. Already in the first few months of life, infants may
shift their attention from unpleasant to pleasant stimuli. However, new-
borns are very inflexible attention shifters; their gaze occasionally gets fix-
ated 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, conse-
quently, what they will experience.
216 Altering Consciousness

If they are also fortunate enough to be cared for by accepting and sensi-
tive 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 rela-
tively 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 expres-
sions 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 tempera-
ment” (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 inhibi-
tion 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 mod-
erately heritable (Wachs & Bates, 2001). Furthermore, these dispositions
tend to become increasingly stable and predictive of other aspects of devel-
opment with maturation. For example, temperament inhibition (i.e., a fail-
ure 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
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 217

for the self to be affected by the states of others naturally lingers throughout
the life cycle (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). The comparatively “basic” emo-
tional contagion phenomenon may in fact be a developmental precursor
not just of empathy but also of suggestibility in general, including hypnotiz-
ability (cf. Cardeña, Terhune, Lööf, & Buratti, 2009).
Self-awareness unfolds during the first 2 years of life from a presum-
ably 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 volition-
ally 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 experi-
ence of being an intentional agent. Also, unlike the infant, the toddler will
typically start to experience self-conscious states of pride, shame, self-
doubt, 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 develop-
mental 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 expe-
riential 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 con-
ditions, 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 through-
out 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).
218 Altering Consciousness

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 ulti-
mately 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, multi-
faceted construct. Several scholars have suggested a distinction between
dissociation as experiential detachment and as cognitive compartmentali-
zation (Brown, 2006; Cardeña, 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 devel-
opment (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), pos-
sibly 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 dis-
played 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 care-
giver (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
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 219

inescapable fear/trauma that overloads the individual’s defense system (see


also Cardeña, 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 care-
givers are simultaneously the source of alarm (e.g., being abusive, frighten-
ing, 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 dissocia-
tion, 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 represen-
tations 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 child-
hood 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 dis-
continuity in experience brought about by traumatic events will also pro-
duce acute or chronic dissociative experiences (Cardeña, 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.
220 Altering Consciousness

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 dis-
tinguish between the knowledge contained by their minds vis-à-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 attrib-
ute 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 distin-
guish 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 hal-
lucination, 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 develop-
ment 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
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 221

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 pre-
school years. Not coincidentally, preschool children tend to remain
engaged with one activity for longer bouts of time than earlier in develop-
ment (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000), and their playing often con-
sists of prolonged bouts of make-believe play. Children who have failed to
make such a normative gain in sustained attention and executive function-
ing by school age are potential candidates for a diagnosis of attention defi-
cit hyperactivity disorder (Barkley, 1997).
Thus, both metacognitive capacities and episodes of absorption will
typically increase in this life period. However, when all (or most) process-
ing 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 develop-
ment 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 com-
plexities, however, in that some hypnotic suggestions such as posthyp-
notic 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
222 Altering Consciousness

traumatized and nontraumatized children (Putnam, 1997). However, a


different review of studies proposes that dissociation peaks in early adoles-
cence (Vanderlinden, van der Hart, & Varga, 1996). A way to integrate
these seemingly disparate conclusions is to distinguish different phenom-
ena subsumed under the complex construct of dissociation (e.g., deper-
sonalization 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 dissoci-
ation is a likely indicator of psychopathology (Ogawa et al., 1997). Disso-
ciation 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 (Cardeña et al., 2003).
Although younger children have typically already initiated some extra-
familial 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 suc-
ceed 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 them-
selves, 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.
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 223

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 hor-
mones associated with puberty comes an enormous upsurge in sexual
urges (Halpern, Udry, & Suchindran, 1997). By whatever means accom-
plished, 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 ignor-
ing 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 ado-
lescent 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 mak-
ing 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 nega-
tive 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.
224 Altering Consciousness

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 expe-
rienced 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 adapta-
tion and development, we have no desire to express alarmism surround-
ing 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 mari-
juana may be associated with favorable adolescent development, and sen-
sitive 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 typi-
cally love partners and close friends, with whom they prefer to spend
increasing amounts of time and to whom they start to turn when dis-
tressed (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 coinci-
dentally perhaps, a century of research indicates that adolescence also rep-
resents an “age of religious awakening” (Argyle & Beit-Hallahmi, 1975),
which may also include ritually induced ASC [see St John, Volume 1]. As
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 225

already William James (1902) observed, there is something in religion that


appeals to adolescents’ sentiment such that although the cognitive machi-
nery 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. Neuro-
logical 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 sanc-
tification of symbols, such as places and words. The authors propose that
adolescence is a sensitive phase for the learning of emotionally intense sym-
bolic systems, explained by specific changes in the adolescent brain. More
specifically, the initiation of an attachment-like relationship with a transcen-
dent 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 experi-
ences 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 develop-
ment. They include self-mutilation during emotional numbing (Yates,
Carlson, & Egeland, 2008), disordered body perception in anorexia nerv-
osa (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 well-
established 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.
226 Altering Consciousness

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 sit-
uations 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 aspira-
tions, especially in areas such as competitive sports, arts, and science.
Such states presumably build upon basic capacities for sustained atten-
tion, executive functioning, and absorption (Privette, 1983), which made
notable improvements already in early childhood but may now be increas-
ingly employed as required by the new tasks that face young adults. Flow
states are clearly self-organizing in that they potentiate optimal perfor-
mance. Young adulthood (roughly 20–30) may also be especially condu-
cive 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 nor-
mally 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 consen-
sus 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 self-
organizing to the extent that it inadvertently affects the aging person’s per-
ceptions 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.
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 227

Consequently, as sensory acuity lessens, the elderly report lower self-


efficacy, more loneliness and depressive symptoms, and smaller social net-
works (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 infor-
mation regarding the permanence of the spouse’s death into their represen-
tational 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
228 Altering Consciousness

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 expe-
rienced such as a sense of the interrelatedness of all things, of life as mean-
ingful, 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 favor-
able 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 individ-
ual 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 phe-
nomena, 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.

References
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of
attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Alcorta, C. S., & Sosis, R. (2005). Ritual, emotion, and sacred symbols. The evo-
lution of religion as an adaptive complex. Human Nature, 16, 323–359.
Allen, J. P. (2008). The attachment system in adolescence. In J. Cassidy & P. R.
Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications
(2nd ed., pp. 419–435). New York: Guilford.
Allport, G. W. (1950). The individual and his religion. New York: Macmillan.
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of men-
tal disorders (4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.
Argyle, M., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (1975). The social psychology of religion. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 229

Bargh, J. A., & Ferguson, M. J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity


of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 925–945.
Barkley, R. A. (1997). Behavioral inhibition, sustained attention, and executive
functions: Constructing a unifying theory of ADHD. Psychological Bulletin,
121, 65–94.
Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God’s beliefs versus mother’s:
The development of nonhuman agent concepts. Child Development, 72, 50–65.
Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P., & Ventis, W. L. (1993). Religion and the individual:
A social psychological perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bauman, K. E., & Ennett, S. T. (1996). On the importance of peer influence on
adolescent drug use: Commonly neglected considerations. Addiction, 91,
185–198.
Bechara, A., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (1996). Failure to
respond autonomically to anticipated future outcomes following damage to
prefrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 6, 215–225.
Becker-Blease K. A., Deater-Deckard, K., Eley, T., Freyd, J. J., Stevenson, J., &
Plomin, R. (2004). A genetic analysis of individual differences in dissociative
behaviors in childhood and adolescence. Journal of Child Psychology and Psy-
chiatry, 45, 522–532.
Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic
Books.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation. New York: Basic Books.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss. Vol. 3 of Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895/1957). Studies on hysteria. New York: Basic Books.
Brown, R. J. (2006). Different types of dissociation have different psychological
mechanisms. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 7, 7–28.
Bruck, M., & Melnyk, L. (2004). Individual differences in children’s suggestibil-
ity: A review and synthesis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 947–996.
Buss, A. H., & Plomin, R. (1984). Temperament: Early developing personality traits.
New York: Erlbaum.
Butler, L. D., Duran, R. E., Jasiukaitis, P., Koopman, C., & Spiegel, D. (1996).
Hypnotizability and traumatic experience: A diathesis-stress model of disso-
ciative symptomatology. American Journal of Psychiatry, 153, 42–63.
Cardeña, E. (1994). The domain of dissociation. In S. J. Lynn & J. W. Rhue
(Eds.), Dissociation: Clinical and theoretical perspectives (pp. 15–31). New York:
Guilford.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.), Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Cardeña, E., Butler, L. D., & Spiegel, D. (2003). Stress disorders. In G. Stricker &
T. Widiger, (Eds.), Handbook of psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 229–249). New York:
Wiley.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous
experience. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
230 Altering Consciousness

Cardeña, E., & Terhune, D. (2008). A distinct personality trait? The relationship
between hypnotizability, absorption, self-transcendence, and mental boundaries.
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 61–73.
Cardeña, E., Terhune, D. B., Lööf, A., & Buratti, S. (2009). Hypnotic experience
is related to emotional contagion. International Journal of Clinical and Experi-
mental Hypnosis, 57, 33–46.
Carlson, E. A. (1998). A prospective longitudinal study of attachment disorgani-
zation/disorientation. Child Development, 69, 1107–1128.
Carlson, E. A., Yates, T. M., & Sroufe, L. A. (2009). Dissociation and develop-
ment of the self. In P. Dell & J. A. O´Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative
disorders: DSM V and beyond (pp. 39–52). New York: Routledge.
Cassidy, J. (1994). Emotion regulation: Influences of attachment relationships. In
N. A. Fox (Ed.), The development of emotion regulation. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development, 59, 228–249.
Cassidy, J., & Berlin, L. J. (1999). Understanding the origins of childhood loneli-
ness: Contributions of attachment theory. In K. J. Rotenberg & S. Hymel
(Eds.), Loneliness in childhood and adolescence (pp. 34–55). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Chambers, R. A., Taylor, J. R., & Potenza, M. N. (2003). Developmental neurocir-
cuitry of motivation in adolescence: A critical period of addiction vulnerabil-
ity. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 1041–1052.
Coles, R. (1990). The spiritual life of children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New
York: Harper Collins.
Emde, R. N. (1991). Positive emotions for psychoanalytic theory. Surprises from
infancy research and new directions. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 39(Suppl.), 5–44.
Epley, N., Converse, B. A., Delbosc, A., Monteleone, G. A., & Cacioppo, J. T.
(2009). Believers’ estimates of God’s beliefs are more egocentric than estimates
of other people’s beliefs. PNAS, 106, 21,533–21,538.
Erikson, E. H. (1998). The life cycle completed. Extended version with new chapters
on the ninth stage by Joan M. Erikson. New York: Norton.
Gibbs, J. C. (2003). Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg
and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gillespie, N. A., Cloningerr, C. R., Heath, A. C., & Marti, N. G. (2003). The genetic
and environmental relationship between Cloninger’s dimensions of tempera-
ment and character. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 1931–1946.
Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Granqvist, P., Fransson, M., & Hagekull, B. (2009). Disorganized attachment,
absorption, and New Age spirituality—A mediational model. Attachment and
Human Development, 11, 385–403.
Granqvist, P., & Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2008). Attachment and religious representa-
tions and behavior. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment
theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 906–933). New York: Guilford.
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 231

Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.


Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience (pp. 315–352). Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Gwyther, L. P. (2001). Caring for people with Alzheimer’s disease: A manual for
facility staff (2nd ed.). Chicago: American Health Care Association.
Halifax, J. (1980). Shamanic voices. Middlesex, England: Penguin.
Halpern, C. T., Udry, J. R., & Suchindran, C. (1997). Testosterone predicts initia-
tion of coitus in adolescent females. Psychosomatic Medicine, 59, 161–171.
Harter, S. (1999). The construction of self: A developmental perspective. New York:
Guilford.
Hartup, W. W. (1996). The company they keep: Friendships and their develop-
mental significance. Child Development, 67, 1–13.
Hedden, T., & Gabriele, D. E. (2004). Insights into the ageing mind: A view from
cognitive neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 87–97.
Hesse, E., & Main, M. (2006). Frightened, threatening, and dissociative (FR) paren-
tal behavior as related to infant D attachment in low-risk samples: Description,
discussion, and interpretations. Development and Psychopathology, 18,
309–343.
Hibell, B. (2001). European school survey project on alcohol and drugs. Stockholm:
Swedish Council for Information on Alcohol and Other Drugs.
Hinde, R. A. (1966). Animal behaviour: A synthesis of ethology and comparative psy-
chology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hobson, J. A: (1995). Sleep. New York: Scientific American Library.
Hoff, E. V. (2004–2005). A friend living inside me: Forms and functions of imagi-
nary companions. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 24, 151–189.
Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Hood, B. M., Atkinson, J., & Braddick, O. J. (1998). Selection-for-action and the devel-
opment of orienting and visual attention. In J. E. Richards (Ed.), Cognitive neurosci-
ence of attention: A developmental perspective (pp. 219–251). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Iacoboni, M., & Dapretto, M. (2006). The mirror neuron system and the conse-
quences of its dysfunction. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7, 942–951.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Longmans, Green.
James, J. B., & Zarett, N. (2007). Ego integrity in the lives of older women. Journal
of Adult Development, 13, 61–75.
Jang, K. L., Paris, J., Zweig-Frank, H., & Livesley, W. J. (1998). Twin study of dis-
sociative experience. Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, 186, 345–351.
Jeste, D. V., Ardelt, M., Blazer, D., Kraemer, H. C., Vaillant, G., & Meeks, T. M.
(2010). Expert consensus on characteristics of wisdom: A Delphi method
study. The Gerontologist, doi: 10. 1093/geront/gnq022.
Kagan, J. (1984). The nature of the child. New York: Basic.
Kochanska, G., Murray, K. T., & Harlan, E. T. (2000). Effortful control in early
childhood: Continuity and change, antecedents, and implications for social
development. Developmental Psychology, 36, 220–232.
232 Altering Consciousness

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: Univer-
sity 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 communi-
cation: 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 tridi-
mensional 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 dis-
sociative 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 classifica-
tion 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
Altered Consciousness and Human Development 233

symptomatology in a nonclinical sample. Development and Psychopathology, 9,


855–879.
Olness, K., & Kohen, D. P. (1996). Hypnosis and hypnotherapy with children (3rd
ed.). New York: Guilford.
Osis, K., & Haraldssson, E. (1977). At the hour of death. New York: Avon Books.
Piaget, J. (1926/1930). The child’s conception of the world. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, & World.
Piccione, C., Hilgard, E. R., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1989). On the degree of stability
of measured hypnotizability over a 25-year period. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 56, 289–295.
Privette, G. (1983). Peak experience, peak performance, and flow. Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology, 45, 1361–1368.
Putnam, F. (1997). Dissociation in children and adolescents: A developmental perspec-
tive. New York: Guilford.
Rochat, P., & Hespos, S. J. (1997). Differential rooting responses by neonates:
Evidence for an early sense of self. Early Development and Parenting, 6,
105–112.
Roche, S. M., & McConkey, K. M. (1990). Absorption: Nature, assessment, and
correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 91–101.
Rosenzweig, A., Prigerson, H., Miller, M. D., & Reynolds, C. F. (1997). Bereave-
ment and late-life depression: Grief and its complications in the elderly.
Annual Review of Medicine, 48, 421–428.
Rothbart, M. K. (2003). Temperament and the pursuit of an integrated develop-
mental psychology. Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 50, 492–505.
Schwartz, C. D., Snidman, N., & Kagan, J. (1999). Adolescent social anxiety as an
outcome of inhibited temperament in childhood. Journal of the American Acad-
emy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 38, 1008–1015.
Shedler, J., & Block, J. (1990). Adolescent drug use and psychological health.
American Psychologist, 45, 612–630.
Silberg, J. L., & Dallam, S. (2009). Dissociation in children and adolescents: At
the crossroads. In P. Dell & J. A. O´Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative
disorders: DSM V and beyond (pp. 67–82). New York: Routledge.
Spear, L. P. (2000). Neurobehavioral changes in adolescence. Current Directions
in Psychological Science, 9, 111–114.
Sroufe, L. A., & Waters, E. (1976). The ontogenesis of smiling and laughter: A
perspective on the organization of development in infancy. Psychological
Review, 83, 173–189.
Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking.
Developmental Review, 28, 78–106.
Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York. Basic.
Tellegen, A., & Atkinson, G. (1974). Openness to absorbing and self-altering
experiences (“absorption”), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility. Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, 83, 268–277.
234 Altering Consciousness

Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Wilcox, K. J., Segal, N. L., & Rich, S.
(1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031–1039.
Thomas, A., & Chess, S. (1977). Temperament and development. New York:
Brunner/Mazel.
Tolmunen, T., Maaranen, P., Hintikka, J., Kylma, J., Rissanen, M. L., Honkalampi,
K., Haukijarvi, T., & Laukkanen, E. (2007). Dissociation in a general population
of Finnish adolescents. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 195, 614–661.
Tornstam, L. (1997). Gero-transcendence: A reformulation of disengagement
theory. Aging, 1, 55–63.
Vaillant, G. E. (2002). Aging well. Boston: Little, Brown.
Vanderlinden, J., van der Hart, O., & Varga, K. (1996). European studies of dis-
sociation. In L. K. Michelson & W. J. Ray (Eds.), Handbook of dissociation: Theo-
retical, empirical and clinical perspectives (pp. 25–49). New York: Plenum.
Van IJzendoorn, M. H., Schuengel, C., & Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J. (1999).
Disorganized attachment in early childhood: Meta-analysis of precursors, con-
comitants, and sequelae. Development and Psychopathology, 11, 225–249.
Wachs, T. D., & Bates, J. E. (2001). Temperament. In G. Bremner & A. Fogel
(Eds.), Blackwell handbook of infant development (pp. 465–501). Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind
development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655–684.
Wilber, K. (1998). The essential Ken Wilber: An introductory reader. Boston:
Shambhala.
Winslow, J. T., & Insel, T. R. (2004). Neuroendocrine basis of social recognition.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 14, 248–253.
Wolff, P. A. (1987). The development of behavioral states and the expression of
emotions in early infancy: New proposals for investigation. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner
(Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Yaari, R., & Corey-Bloom, J. (2007). Alzheimer’s disease. Seminars in neurology,
27, 32–41.
Yates, T. M., Carlson, E. A., & Egeland, B. (2008). A prospective study of child mal-
treatment and self-injurious behavior in a community sample. Development and
Psychopathology, 20, 651–671.
Zeifman, D., & Hazan, C. (2008). Pair bonds as attachments: Reevaluating the
evidence. In J. Cassidy & P. R. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment theory
and research (2nd ed., pp. 436–455). New York: Guilford.
Zuckerman, M., & Kuhlman, D. M. (2000). Personality and risk-taking: Common
biosocial factors. Journal of Personality, 68, 999–1029.
PART II

Psychological Perspectives
This page intentionally left blank
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 diffi-
cult to define and have yielded enormous amounts of literature in a large
array of disciplines (e.g., Bermúdez, 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). Neuroscient-
ists, 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 fruit-
ful 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 manipu-
lations 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
238 Altering Consciousness

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 embodi-
ment, 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 theoreti-
cal concept refers to those aspects of the self that can be associated with
the structure and functions of the individual’s body. Culture, society, per-
sonal 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 self-
belonging (Bermúdez et al., 1995; Legrand, 2006).
The bodily self is historically associated to other concepts such as cor-
poreal awareness, cenesthesia, the body schema, and the body image.
Generally, all these notions refer to how the body is consciously or uncon-
sciously 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 vis-
ual, 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 integra-
tion 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 affect-
ing how some patients perceived their own body. French otologist Pierre
Bonnier (1905) coined the word aschématie 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 cur-
rent posture, and localize tactile sensations on its surface. Some neurologi-
cal symptoms, Bonnier realized, seemed to suggest that such a sense
existed and was disturbed in specific occurrences. Other authors indepen-
dently presented similar ideas. British neurologists Henry Head and Gordon
Holmes (1911–1912) notably highlighted the importance of motor mecha-
nisms and the ability of the body schema to automatically and involuntary
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 239

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 pro-
posals, 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 dis-
turbances 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 occa-
sions, 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 Cardeña, 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 conscious-
ness, might thus also be associated with specific underlying neural mech-
anisms (e.g., Maravita & Iriki, 2004).
Independently of the content of the bodily misrepresentation, the per-
son’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).
240 Altering Consciousness

different experiential approaches from each other: A person might be indif-


ferent 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 per-
ception 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 conscious-
ness 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 re-
ally has happened. Examples include reduplication of body parts, disow-
nership 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 pro-
vide 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).
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 241

Phantom Limbs, Illusory Movements, Supernumerary Phantom Limbs


The phantom limb phenomenon is present, transiently or perma-
nently, in the majority of amputees (Brugger, 2005; Ramachandran &
Hirstein, 1998). Persons with phantom limbs vividly experience the pres-
ence of a limb that is physically absent. This is perhaps the clearest dem-
onstration 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 (André, 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 reorganiza-
tion 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 hemi-
plegic 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 accom-
panied by delusional claims, such as when a patient not only claims hav-
ing 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 self-
generated movements in the fake hand even when the latter remains
motionless (Fotopoulou et al., 2008). Hemiplegic patients presenting dis-
orders of the body schema also tend to experience movements in their
paralyzed limb when looking at mirror-reflected movements of their con-
tralateral healthy limb (Zampini, Moro, & Aglioti, 2004). Lesions associ-
ated to illusory movements involve predominantly the right hemisphere
242 Altering Consciousness

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 phan-
tom limbs, a condition defined as the perceptual experience of an addi-
tional 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 experi-
ence 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 some-
sthetic 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 auto-
matic 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 patho-
logical conditions occurs] and similarities to heautoscopy, exosomesthesia,
and asomatoscopy (see below). Lesions have involved the right basal gan-
glia (Halligan, Marshall, & Wade, 1993), the right subcortical capsulolen-
ticular 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 thalamo-
cortical loops during intentional movements of the phantom (Staub et al.,
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 243

2006), and activity in somatosensory and visual areas correlating with the
patient’s claim of being able to feel and see her intentionally moved super-
numerary phantom limb (Khateb et al., 2009). Given the variety of phe-
nomenological 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. Kin-
esthetic phantoms may best be conceptualized as the result of preserved
motor efferences and action planning in the context of defective multimo-
dal integration (Khateb et al., 2009). Additional pathomechanisms involv-
ing 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 net-
work 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 accord-
ing to the absence of an external object giving rise to a percept, tactile hallu-
cinations 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 nonexist-
ing 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 dis-
orders are a frequent etiology of simple tactile hallucinations (Fénélon, Tho-
bois, Bonnet, Broussolle, & Tison, 2002), whereas in advanced dementia,
psychiatric conditions, substance abuse, and cerebrovascular disease,
patients sometimes present with delusional parasitosis, the type of above-
mentioned “bugs” hallucinations, also called Ekbom’s syndrome or derma-
tozoic 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. So-
called paresthesias, most notably, are a frequent first alert to patients
undergoing a neurological event. These involve tinglings, pins and
244 Altering Consciousness

needles, numbness, and alterations in the experience of weight, size, tem-


perature, 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 appa-
rently 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 dam-
age), 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 exosome-
thesia. This experience can happen under a variety of conditions, for in-
stance 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 never-
theless relatively easy to induce the experience of touch as arising from
objects or fake body parts, usually by inducing visuo-tactile conflicts (Bot-
vinick & Cohen, 1998), but also after practice with an extended tool (Mar-
avita & 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 simulta-
neously 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 245

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 spe-
cific 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 (Hécaen & Ajuriaguerra, 1952) affect-
ing 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 ali-
enness, 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 per-
ception 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 gro-
tesquely 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
246 Altering Consciousness

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. Con-
versely, 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 hemi-
plegia 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 right-
hemispheric damage with and without anosognosia have highlighted the
specific involvement of the right posterior insula (Baier & Karnath,
2008; Karnath, Baier, & Nägele, 2005) and an additional network of sen-
sorimotor areas including the somatosensory, primary motor, and premo-
tor 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 dis-
turbances 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 attribut-
ing it to someone else explicitly. Others will state spontaneously that their
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 247

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 over-
whelming 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 pos-
terior 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).
248 Altering Consciousness

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 con-
cept 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 sys-
tem. Vestibular disturbances are indeed known to induce dissociations
between the experienced and the actual posture, movement, and orienta-
tion 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 ves-
tibular system and induces symptoms comparable to depersonalization
(Sang, Jáuregui-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 supernumer-
ary 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 under-
going this Doppelgänger experience, an involvement of the left temporo-
parietal junction and the left mesiobasal temporal lobe has been found
(Blanke & Mohr, 2005). In an out-of-body experience, a person feels her
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 249

self as spatially localized outside of the physical body and experiences see-
ing the latter from an elevated perspective (see below).
Another related illusion, referred to as the feeling of a presence, is char-
acterized 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 “presen-
ces” (Brugger, Blanke, Regard, Bradford, & Landis, 2006). Such a feeling
of presence has been induced by cortical electrical stimulation of the pos-
terior 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 temporal-
limbic 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 experi-
ence combining disembodiment, elevated perspective, and autoscopy.
However, specific features, such as how the “disembodied self” is per-
ceived, 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 intrac-
table 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 tempo-
ral 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 partici-
pants 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 mecha-
nisms related to REM intrusion (Nelson, Mattingly, & Schmitt, 2007), the
vestibular and motor system (Cheyne & Girard, 2009), emotions (Nielsen,
250 Altering Consciousness

2007), synesthetic tendencies (Terhune, 2009), as well as personality fac-


tors such as absorption, dissociation, schizotypy, and body image dissatis-
faction (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 experi-
ences” (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 diffi-
cult to envision a neurocognitive account of NDEs as there is a dearth of sys-
tematic 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 per-
sons, and under life-threatening situations, is associated with a disintegra-
tion of sensory modalities, notably vestibular, visual, and proprioceptive
information, together with a variety of factors reflecting cognitive, emo-
tional, 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 con-
sciousness and how they affect the bodily self, as well as experimental
methods developed to study the bodily self in the laboratory.
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 251

Mystical States
Altered states of consciousness associated with mystical states or medi-
tation 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, OBE-
and 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 “tran-
scendent self” also suggests the importance of the temporo-parietal junc-
tion (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 neu-
rology and ASC, at least historically [see Cardeña & Alvarado, Volume 1].
Early investigation of “hysteric” patients suggested an influence of hypno-
sis 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 induc-
tion of altered states of bodily consciousness has also been incorporated
as a tool in the cognitive neurosciences of belief formation in healthy par-
ticipants (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
252 Altering Consciousness

of conducive bodily states (e.g., quiescence, Cardeña, 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 hallucina-
tions 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 sur-
vey of marijuana users that showed a very wide range of bodily self alter-
ations: 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 conscious-
ness sometimes similar to OBEs and NDEs. More recently, Griffiths and col-
laborators 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 frag-
ments” (p. 493), “changes in kinesthetic and cutaneous reception” and
“claims of merging with floorboards or feeling unity with the walls of a
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 253

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 scien-
tific 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, feel-
ings 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, & Cardeña,
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 vari-
ety of sensory deprivation and meditation methods (reviewed in Black-
more, 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 feed-
ing a head-mounted display) while experiencing tactile sensations congru-
ent 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 per-
son 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
254 Altering Consciousness

be located closer to the fake hand than it really is (Botvinick & Cohen,
1998). Interestingly, feelings of illusory ownership during the rubber-
hand illusion have been found to correlate with objective changes in tem-
perature 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 involv-
ing 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 vari-
ety 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 expe-
rient, 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, incor-
poration of external objects, merging of boundaries, complete disembodi-
ment, 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 person-
perspective, 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 ego-
centric spatial frame of reference allowing one to coherently locate one’s
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 255

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, experi-
mental psychology, and the cognitive neurosciences. New therapeutic
methods and creative experimental paradigms, incorporating pharmaco-
logical 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 out-
side the reach of science, such as hypnosis, shamanism, mysticism, reli-
gious rituals, and the use of mind-altering drugs, the study of altered
states of bodily consciousness holds the potential to offer important scien-
tific 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.

References
Alvarado, C. S. (2000). Out-of-body experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 183–218). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
André, J. M., Martinet, N., Paysant, J., Beis, J. M., & Le Chapelain, L. (2001).
Temporary phantom limbs evoked by vestibular caloric stimulation in ampu-
tees. Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neurology, 14, 190–196.
Antoniello, D., Kluger, B. M., Sahlein, D. H., & Heilman, K. M. (2009). Phantom
limb after stroke: An underreported phenomenon. Cortex, doi:10.1016/
j.cortex.2009.10.003.
Appenzeller, O., & Bicknelle, J. M. (1969). Effects of nervous system lesions on
phantom experience in amputees. Neurology, 19, 141–146.
Arzy, S., Overney, L. S., Landis, T., & Blanke, O. (2006). Neural mechanisms of
embodiment: Asomatognosia due to premotor cortex damage. Archives of Neu-
rology, 63, 1022–1025.
Arzy, S., Seeck, M., Ortigue, S., Spinelli, L., & Blanke, O. (2006). Induction of an
illusory shadow person. Nature, 443, 287.
Aspell, J. E., & Blanke, O. (2009). Understanding the out-of-body experience
from a neuroscientific perspective. In C. D. Murray (Ed.), Psychological and
256 Altering Consciousness

scientific perspectives on out-of-body and near-death experiences (pp. 73–88). New


York: Nova Science.
Baier, B., & Karnath, H. O. (2008). Tight link between our sense of limb owner-
ship and self-awareness of actions. Stroke, 39, 486–488.
Banissy, M. J., & Ward, J. (2007). Mirror-touch synesthesia is linked with empa-
thy. Nature Neuroscience, 10, 815–816.
Bender, M. B. (1970). Perceptual interactions. In D. Williams (Ed.), Modern trends
in neurology (pp. 1–28). London: Butterworths.
Bermúdez, J. L., Marcel, A., & Eilan, N. (Eds.). (1995). The body and the self.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Berrios, G. E. (1982). Tactile hallucinations: Conceptual and historical aspects.
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 45, 285–293.
Berti, A., Bottini, G., Gandola, M., Pia, L., Smania, N., Stracciari, A., Castiglioni, I.,
Vallar, G., & Paulesu, E. (2005). Shared cortical anatomy for motor awareness
and motor control. Science, 309, 488–491.
Bestmann, S., Oliviero, A., Voss, M., Dechent, P., Lopez-Dolado, E., Driver, J., &
Baudewig, J. (2006). Cortical correlates of TMS-induced phantom hand
movements revealed with concurrent TMS-fMRI. Neuropsychologia, 44, 2959–
2971.
Bisiach, E., Rusconi, M. L., & Vallar, G. (1991). Remission of somatoparaphrenic
delusion through vestibular stimulation. Neuropsychologia, 29, 1029–1031.
Blackmore, S. J. (1982). Beyond the body: An investigation of out-of-the-body experi-
ences. London: Heinemann.
Blanke, O., Arzy, S., & Landis, T. (2008). Illusory reduplications of the human
body and self. Handbook of Clinical Neurology, 88, 429–458.
Blanke, O., & Dieguez, S. (2009). Leaving body and life behind: Out-of-body and
near-death experience. In S. Laureys & G. Tononi (Eds.), The neurology of
consciousness: Cognitive neuroscience and neuropathology (pp. 303–325).
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Blanke, O., Landis, T., Spinelli, L., & Seeck, M. (2004). Out-of-body experience
and autoscopy of neurological origin. Brain, 127, 243–258.
Blanke, O., & Metzinger, T. (2009). Full-body illusions and minimal phenom-
enal selfhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 7–13.
Blanke, O., & Mohr, C. (2005). Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and auto-
scopic hallucinations of neurological origin: Implications for neurocognitive
mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self-consciousness. Brain Research
Reviews, 50, 184–199.
Blanke, O., Mohr, C., Michel, C. M., Pascual-Leone, A., Brugger, P., Seeck,
M., . . . Thut, G. (2005). Linking out-of-body experience and self processing
to mental own-body imagery at the temporoparietal junction. Journal of Neuro-
science, 25, 550–557.
Blanke, O., Morgenthaler, F. D., Brugger, P., & Overney, L. S. (2009). Prelimi-
nary evidence for a fronto-parietal dysfunction in able-bodied participants
with a desire for limb amputation. Journal of Neuropsychology, 3, 181–200.
Index 391

shaman and pilgrims, 154–56; symbols Infant and toddler cognitive development,
and visions, 156–57 213, 215–19
Huichol Indians: Mexico, 147; plant Information, AIM model of
knowledge, 155 n.4 consciousness, 7
Human development: adolescence, Information processing, and imagery
223–26; adulthood, 226; complexity production, 13
and differentiation, 214, 215, 218; Infradian biological rhythm, 4–5
consciousness, 211–12; early Inner hero’s journey, shamanism,
childhood, 219–22; infant and toddler, 335, 342
213, 215–19; late adulthood, 226–28; Inner voices, 315
middle childhood, 222; self-awareness, Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie,
217; self-regulation, 215, 216 ASC therapeutic recommendations,
Human sexuality: cultural relativity of 295
practices, 190; studies of, 189–90. See Integrated consciousness,
also Sexuality transcendental, 11
Hunt, H. T., 291, 318–19 Interictal period, temporal lobe epileptic
Husserl, Edmund G., 329, 330, 346 seizure, 64, 65
Huxley, Aldous, 77 Interictal personality syndrome, TLE, 66
Hypertensive crisis, tyramine-rich foods, “Internal” awareness, 263–64
104 Internal locus of control, 44
Hyperventilation, 56; sexuality and International Classification of Diseases (ICD-
ASC, 195 10) drug dependence, 170
Hypnagogic sleep stage, 360, 361, 367 Intoxication, 33
Hypnopompic sleep stage, 360 Intracellular messenger molecules, 28
Hypnosis, 331, 335–36; bodily Ion-channel opening and closing, 28
consciousness in, 251–52; and Ionotropic receptors, 28, 29, 30; and
emotion, 281–82; ESP experience, nicotine, 32
363–64; fMRI studies, 334; healing Isoquinolines, cacti, 150
effects, 335
Hypnosis Induction Profile (HIP), 68 Jackson, M. C., 317
Hypnotic responsiveness, 221 Jaffe, J. H., 122
Hypnotic susceptibility, ultradian cycle, 8 James, William, 22, 36, 63, 75, 225, 279,
Hypnotizability, 338; genetic 355; on altered consciousness, 39;
component, 212 pre/transpersonal fallacy, 318
Hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76 Jet lag, 16
Johari, H., 198
Iatrogenic problems, misdiagnosed Johnson, V. E., 200
VSEs, 317 Jung, Carl G., 343; pre/transpersonal
Ictal period, temporal lobe epileptic fallacy, 318; rebirth of self, 343;
seizure, 64, 65 spiritual themes, 303–4
Ictus-related religious experience, TLE, Jurema, bark beverage, 89t, 92, 107
64–65
Igoga plant, 51 Kabbalistic practice, 313
Illusory amputation, 244–45 Kafka, Franz, 343, 344 n.1
Illusory movements, 241 Kallio, S., 340, 341
Imaginary figures, childhood, 220 Karezza, sexual method, 191
Immortality, daoist yoga, 197 Kauyumarie, Huichol deer god,
Inca Cueva site, Argentina, 86 157, 158, 161
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 257

Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., & Seeck, M. (2002). Stimulating illusory own-
body perceptions. Nature, 419, 269–270.
Bonnier, P. (1905). L’aschématie [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 phenom-
ena. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 7, 179–194.
Brugger, P. (2005). From phantom limb to phantom body: Varieties of extracor-
poreal 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). Poly-
opic 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.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cheyne, J. A., & Girard, T. A. (2009). The body unbound: Vestibular-motor hal-
lucinations 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 monitor-
ing 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 inte-
gration 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.
258 Altering Consciousness

De Ridder, D., Van Laere, K., Dupont, P., Menovsky, T., & Van de Heyning, P.
(2007). Visualizing out-of-body experience in the brain. New England Journal
of Medicine, 357, 1829–1833.
De Vignemont, F. (2010). Body schema and body image—pros and cons. Neuro-
psychologia, 48, 669–680.
Dieguez, S., Mercier, M., Newby, N., & Blanke, O. (2009). Feeling numbness for
someone else’s finger. Current Biology, 19, R1108–9.
Dieguez, S., Staub, F., & Bogousslavsky, J. (2007). Asomatognosia. In O. Godefroy
& J. Bogousslavsky (Eds.), The behavioral and cognitive neurology of stroke (pp.
215–253). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doblin, R. (1991). Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment: A long-term followup and
methodological critique. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 23, 1–28.
Egger, V. (1896). Le moi des mourants: Nouveaux faits [The I of the dying. New
facts]. Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 47, 337–368.
Ehrsson, H. (2007). The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences.
Science, 317, 1048.
Fasold, O., von Brevern, M., Kuhberg, M., Ploner, C. J., Villringer, A., Lempert, T.,
& Wenzel, R. (2002). Human vestibular cortex as identified with caloric stimu-
lation in functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neuroimage, 17, 1384–1393.
Feinberg, T. E., Roane, D. M., & Ali, J. (2000). Illusory limb movements in anosogno-
sia for hemiplegia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 68, 511–513.
Feinberg, T. E., Venneri, A., Simone, A. M., Fan, Y., & Northoff, G. (2010). The
neuroanatomy of asomatognosia and somatoparaphrenia. Journal of Neurology,
Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 81, 276–281.
Fénélon, G., Thobois, S., Bonnet, A. M., Broussolle, E., & Tison, F. (2002). Tactile
hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease. Journal of Neurology, 249, 1699–1703.
Ferret, S. (1998). L’identité [Identity]. Paris: Flammarion.
Fotopoulou, A., Tsakiris, M., Haggard, P., Vagopoulo, A., Rudd, A., & Kopelman,
M. (2008). The role of motor intention in motor awareness: An experimental
study on anosognosia for hemiplegia. Brain, 131, 3432–3442.
Frederiks, J. A. M. (1963a). Anosognosie et hémiasomatognosie [Anosognosia
and hemiasomatognosia]. Revue Neurologique, 109, 585–597.
Frederiks, J. A. M. (1963b). Macrosomatognosia and microsomatognosia. Psy-
chiatria, Neurologia, Neurochirurgia, 66, 531–536.
Gerstmann, J. (1942). Problem of imperception of disease and of impaired body ter-
ritories with organic lesions. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 48, 890–913.
Gibbs, R. W. (2006). Embodiment and cognitive science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Giummarra, M. J., Gibson, S. J., Georgiou-Karistianis, N., & Bradshaw, J. L.
(2007). Central mechanisms in phantom limb perception: The past, present
and future. Brain Research Reviews, 54, 219–232.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can
occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 259

Halligan, P. W., Marshall, J. C., & Wade, D. T. (1993). Three arms: A case study
of supernumerary phantom limb after right hemisphere stroke. Journal of Neu-
rology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 56, 159–166.
Hastings, A. C. (1990/1969). The effects of marijuana on consciousness. In C.
Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed., pp. 407–431). New York:
HarperCollins.
Head, H., & Holmes, H. G. (1911–1912). Sensory disturbances from cerebral
lesions. Brain, 34, 102–254.
Hécaen, H., & Ajuriaguerra, J. (1952). Méconnaissances et hallucinations corporelles
[Bodily unawareness and hallucinations]. Paris: Masson.
Heron, W. (1957, January). The pathology of boredom. Scientific American, 196,
52–56.
Heydrich, L., Dieguez, S., Grunwald, T., Seeck, M., & Blanke, O. (2010). Illusory
own body perceptions: Case reports and relevance for bodily self-
consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 702–710.
Holden, J. M., Greyson, B., & James, D. (2009). The handbook of near-death expe-
riences: Thirty years of investigation. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Irwin, H. J. (1989). Hypnotic induction of the out-of-body experience. Australian
Journal of Clinical Hypnotherapy and Hypnosis, 10, 1–7.
Jackson, C. W., Pollard, J. C., & Kansky, E. W. (1962). The application of find-
ings from experimental sensory deprivation to cases of clinical sensory depri-
vation. American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 243, 558–563.
Karnath, H. O., Baier, B., & Nägele, T. (2005). Awareness of the functioning of
one’s own limbs mediated by the insular cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 25,
7134–7138.
Karp, B. I., & Hallett, M. (1996). Extracorporeal “phantom” tics in Tourette’s syn-
drome. Neurology, 46, 38–40.
Khateb, A., Simon, S. R., Dieguez, S., Lazeyras, F., Momjian-Mayor, I., Blanke, O.,
et al. (2009). Seeing the phantom: A functional magnetic resonance imaging
study of a supernumerary phantom limb. Annals of Neurology, 65, 698–705.
Legrand, D. (2006). The bodily self: The sensori-motor roots of pre-reflective self-
consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5, 89–118.
Lempert, T., Bauer, M., & Schmidt, D. (1994). Syncope and near-death experi-
ence. Lancet, 344, 829–830.
Lenggenhager, B., Tadi, T., Metzinger, T., & Blanke, O. (2007). Video ergo sum:
Manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science, 317, 1096–1099.
Lhermitte, J. (1939). L’image de notre corps [The image of our body]. Paris:
Nouvelle Revue Critique.
Loetscher, T., Regard, M., & Brugger, P. (2006). Misoplegia: A review of the liter-
ature and a case without hemiplegia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and
Psychiatry, 77, 1099–1100.
McGonigle, D. J., Hänninen, R., Salenius, S., Hari, R., Frackowiak, R. S., & Frith,
C. D. (2002). Whose arm is it anyway? An fMRI case study of supernumerary
phantom limb. Brain, 125, 1265–1274.
260 Altering Consciousness

Maravita, A., & Iriki, A. (2004). Tools for the body (schema). Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 8, 79–86.
Marcel, A. J., Postma, P., Gillmeister, H., Cox, S., Rorden, C., Nimmo-Smith, I., &
Mackintosh, B. (2004). Migration and fusion of tactile sensation: Premorbid sus-
ceptibility to allochiria, neglect and extinction? Neuropsychologia, 42, 1749–1767.
Mason, O. J., & Brady, F. (2009). The psychomimetic effects of short-term sen-
sory deprivation. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 197, 783–785.
Metzinger, T. (2003). Being no one: The self-model theory of subjectivity. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Michaux, H. (1967). Connaissance par les gouffres [Light through darkness]. Paris:
Galimmard.
Mitchell, S. W. (1905/1866). The case of George Dedlow. In S. W. Mitchell, The
autobiography of a quack and other stories (pp. 83–109). New York: Century.
Miyazaki, M., Hirashima, M., & Nozaki, D. (2010). The “cutaneous rabbit” hop-
ping out of the body. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 1856–1860.
Mogar, R. E. (1990/1965). Current status and future trends in psychedelic (LSD)
research. In C. Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed., pp. 461–480).
New York: HarperCollins.
Morgan, W. P. (2002). Hypnosis in sport and exercise psychology. In J. L. Van
Raalte & B. W. Brewer (Eds.), Exploring sport and exercise psychology (2nd ed.,
pp. 151–181). Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Moseley, G. L., Olthof, N., Venema, A., Don, S., Wijers, M., Gallace, A., &
Spence, C. (2008). Psychologically induced cooling of a specific body part
caused by the illusory ownership of an artificial counterpart. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Science USA, 105, 13,169–13,173.
Nelson, K. R., Mattingly, M., Lee, S. A., & Schmitt, F. A. (2006). Does the arousal
system contribute to near death experience? Neurology, 66, 1003–1009.
Nelson, K. R., Mattingly, M., & Schmitt, F. A. (2007) Out-of-body experience and
arousal. Neurology, 68, 794–795.
Nielsen, T. (2007). Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social
imagery? Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 975–983.
Noyes, R., & Kletti, R. (1977). Depersonalisation in response to life-threatening
danger. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 18, 375–384.
Orfei, M. D., Robinson, R. G., Prigatano, G. P., Starkstein, S., Rüsch, N., Bria, P.,
Caltagirone, C., & Spalletta, G. (2007). Anosognosia for hemiplegia after
stroke is a multifaceted phenomenon: A systematic review of the literature.
Brain, 130, 3075–3090.
Pahnke, W. N., & Richards, W. A. (1990/1966). Implications of LSD and exper-
imental mysticism. In C. Tart (Ed.), Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed.,
pp. 481–515). New York: HarperCollins.
Paqueron, X., Lequen, M., Rosenthal, D., Coriat, P., Willer, J. C., & Danziger,
N. (2003). The phenomenology of body image distortions induced by regional
anaesthesia. Brain, 126, 702–712.
Altered States of Bodily Consciousness 261

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.
Podoll, K., & Robinson, D. (2002). Splitting of the body image as somesthetic
aura symptom in migraine. Cephalalgia, 22, 62–65.
Prince, R. (1982). Shamans and endorphins: Hypotheses for a synthesis. Ethos,
10, 409–423.
Ramachandran, V. S. (1995). Anosognosia in parietal lobe syndrome. Conscious-
ness and Cognition, 4, 22–51.
Ramachandran, V. S., & Hirnstein, W. (1998). Perception of phantom limbs: The
D. O. Hebb lecture. Brain, 121, 1603–1630.
Revonsuo, A., Kallio, S., & Sikka, P. (2009). What is an altered state of conscious-
ness? Philosophical Psychology, 22, 187–204.
Sang, F. Y., Jáuregui-Renaud, K., Green, D. A., Bronstein, A. M., & Gresty, M. A.
(2006). Depersonalisation/derealisation symptoms in vestibular disease. Jour-
nal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 77, 760–766.
Scharfetter, C. (1981). Ego-psychopathology: The concept and its empirical
evaluation. Psychological Medicine, 11, 273–280.
Shapiro, M. F., Fink, M., & Bender, M. B. (1952). Exosomesthesia or displace-
ment of cutaneous sensation into extrapersonal space. AMA Archives of Neurol-
ogy and Psychiatry, 68, 481–490.
Schwabe, L., & Blanke, O. (2008). The vestibular component in out-of-body expe-
riences: A computational approach. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2, 17.
Siegel, R. K. (1984). Hostage hallucinations: Visual imagery induced by isolation
and life-threatening stress. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 172,
264–272.
Staub, F., Bogousslavsky, J., Maeder, P., Maeder-Ingvar, M., Fornari, E., Ghika, J.,
et al. (2006). Intentional motor phantom limb syndrome. Neurology, 67, 2140–
2146.
Tart, C. (Ed.). (1990/1969). Altered states of consciousness (3rd ed.). New York:
HarperCollins.
Tart, C. (1971). On being stoned: A psychological study of marijuana intoxication.
Palo Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Books.
Terhune, D. (2009). The incidence and determinants of visual phenomenology
during out-of-body experiences. Cortex, 45, 236–242.
Tiliket, C., Ventre-Dominey, J., Vighetto, A., & Grochowicki, M. (1996). Room tilt
illusion: A central otolith dysfunction. Archives of Neurology, 53, 1259–1264.
Todd, J. (1955). The syndrome of Alice in Wonderland. Canadian Medical Associ-
ation Journal, 73, 701–704.
Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S. M., Skrap, M., & Fabbro, F. (2010). The spiritual brain:
Selective cortical lesions modulate human self-transcendence. Neuron, 65,
309–319.
Vallar, G., & Ronchi, R. (2009). Somatoparaphrenia: A body delusion. A review of
the neuropsychological literature. Experimental Brain Research, 192, 533–551.
262 Altering Consciousness

Vignal, J. P., Maillard, L., McGonigal, A., & Chauvel, P. (2007). The dreamy state:
Hallucinations of autobiographic memory evoked by temporal lobe stimula-
tions and seizures. Brain, 130, 88–99.
Weinstein, E. A., Kahn, R. L., Malitz, S., & Rozanski, J. (1954). Delusional redu-
plication of parts of the body. Brain, 77, 45–60.
Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experience. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Kripp-
ner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence
(pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Young, A. W., & Leafhead, K. M. (1996). Betwixt life and death: Case studies of the
Cotard delusion. In P. W. Halligan & J. C. Marshall (Eds.), Method in madness:
Case studies in cognitive neuropsychiatry (pp. 147–171). London: Psychology
Press.
Zampini, M., Moro, V., & Aglioti, S. M. (2004). Illusory movements of the con-
tralesional hand in patients with body image disorders. Journal of Neurology,
Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 75, 1626–1628.
Zingrone, N. L., Alvarado, C. S., & Cardeña, E. (2010). Out-of-body experiences
and physical body activity and posture: Responses from a survey conducted in
Scotland. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 198, 163–165.
Zubek, J. P. (Ed.). (1969). Sensory deprivation: Fifteen years of research. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
CHAPTER 12

Altering Consciousness and


Neuropathology
Quentin Noirhomme
and Steven Laureys

For neurologists, consciousness can be reduced to its two main compo-


nents, namely wakefulness (i.e., the level of consciousness or arousal or
vigilance) and awareness (i.e., the contents of consciousness of the environ-
ment 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 irreduc-
ible 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 sup-
ported by the function of the subcortical arousal systems in brainstem, mid-
brain, and both thalami. Clinically, wakefulness can be scored by assessing
eye opening. Awareness is thought to be supported by the functional integ-
rity 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 evaluat-
ing 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
264 Altering Consciousness

Figure 12.1 llustration of the two major components of consciousness: the


level of consciousness (i.e., arousal or wakefulness) and the content of conscious-
ness (i.e., awareness), and the way they correlate within the different physiologi-
cal, 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 veg-
etative 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 con-
sciousness is the transition from conscious waking to deep sleep: The less
aroused we get, the less aware we become of our surroundings and our-
selves (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 disso-
ciated states of consciousness (i.e., patients are seemingly awake but lack
any behavioral evidence of voluntary or willed behavior). Minimally con-
scious patients are unable to communicate their thoughts and feelings but
demonstrate nonreflex movements or command following. The locked-in
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 265

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 con-
sciousness 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 patho-
logic 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 dis-
cussed elsewhere in this book [see Kokoszka and Wallace, this volume]. In
the following section, we summarize the most relevant facts for the discus-
sion 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 di-
vided into cycles where the sleeper passes through several stages classified
266 Altering Consciousness

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 com-
pared 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, vigo-
rous brain activation occurs but sensory inputs and motor outputs are
simultaneously blocked, putting the brain “off-line.” Neuroimaging stud-
ies 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 func-
tional 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 deacti-
vated 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 show-
ing 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).
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 267

Figure 12.2 The wide frontoparietal network supposed to be involved in con-


sciousness. 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 net-
work, 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
268 Altering Consciousness

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 sed-
ative agents induce graded alterations of wakefulness while preserving
several cognitive brain functions (P. Boveroux et al., 2008). At low-
sedative 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 require-
ment, or failure of drug delivery systems can lead to awareness under
anesthesia. If neuromuscular blockers are used, then patients cannot com-
municate their awareness, which can lead to pain, anxiety, or delayed psy-
chiatric symptoms (Serfontein, 2010).
The experts think that anesthetic agents alter brain activity by interact-
ing 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 corti-
ces 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 selec-
tive alteration of connectivity inside the frontoparietal network that is also
impaired in normal sleep (P. Boveroux et al., 2010, Figure 2). The thala-
mus 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 under-
standing of pharmacological loss of consciousness remains at present
incomplete.
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 269

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; emo-
tional states; memory; cognition; or behavior. Not all seizures affect all of
these factors, but all influence at least one (Fisher et al., 2005). Electroen-
cephalography 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 unresponsive-
ness 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 deci-
sion 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 gener-
alized, in which there is no obvious focal onset, and secondarily general-
ized, 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 sup-
pressed 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
270 Altering Consciousness

terminate with impaired awareness and are called complex partial seiz-
ures. 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., pick-
ing, 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 associ-
ation 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 second-
arily generalized tonic-clonic seizure (Englot & Blumenfeld, 2009) [see
Cardeña, this volume, for some specific changes in the content of con-
sciousness 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 eye-
opening (in the absence of voluntary motor activity) marks the transition
from coma to vegetative state, now called unresponsive wakefulness syn-
drome. 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 per-
mitting 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 organ-
ism as a whole (i.e., neuroendocrine and homeostatic regulation, circula-
tion, 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 hemi-
spheric input and output, the center generating arousal (an essential condi-
tion for conscious awareness), and the center of breathing. Clinical
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 271

diagnostic criteria of brain death, however, are widely accepted and are
based on the loss of all brain stem reflexes and the demonstration of contin-
uing 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 dam-
aging 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 con-
sciousness. It is a state of unarousable unresponsiveness in which the
patient lies with the eyes closed and has no awareness of self and sur-
roundings. The patient lacks the spontaneous periods of wakefulness
and eye-opening induced by stimulation that can be observed in the veg-
etative 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 re-
cover gradually within 2 to 4 weeks. Coma can result from bilateral wide-
spread 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 con-
dition, age, clinical signs, and results from complementary examinations.
Traumatic etiology is known to have a better outcome than non-
traumatic, 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 somatosensory-
evoked potentials, and biochemical markers, such as high levels of serum
neuron-specific enolase.
272 Altering Consciousness

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 pub-
lic continues to feel some unease regarding the unintended denigrating
“vegetable-like” connotation seemingly intrinsic to the term VS. The Euro-
pean Task Force on Disorders of Consciousness therefore recently pro-
posed an alternative name (Laureys et al., 2010). Hence, physicians have
recently offered to refer to these patients as being in unresponsive wakeful-
ness syndrome (UWS) a more neutral and descriptive term pertaining to
patients showing a number of clinical signs (hence syndrome) of unre-
sponsiveness (that is, without response to commands or oriented volun-
tary 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 syn-
drome, global metabolic activity decreases to about 50% of normal levels.
Furthermore, neuroimaging studies have identified the frontoparietal net-
work 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 273

Minimally Conscious State


The minimally conscious state was defined in 2002 by the Aspen Neu-
robehavioral Conference Workgroup to subcategorize patients above the
VS/UWS but unable to functionally communicate their thoughts and feel-
ings. 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 environ-
ment 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 emo-
tional but not neutral stimuli, reaching for objects, demonstrating a rela-
tionship 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 with-
out 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
274 Altering Consciousness

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 quadripa-
resis; 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, resem-
bling 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, locked-
in syndrome can be divided into three categories: (1) classic locked-in syn-
drome, characterized by quadriplegia and anarthria with eye-coded com-
munication; (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 includ-
ing all eye movements, combined with preserved consciousness. Neuroi-
maging 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 memo-
ries (e.g., voices, sounds, visual perceptions, touch) or hallucinations that
supposedly occurred either at the time of the insult or during coma (Thon-
nard, Vanhaudenhuyse, & Laureys, 2009). Monti, Vanhaudenhuyse, and
collaborators (Monti et al., 2010) used functional MRI and instructed seem-
ingly 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 275

motor areas] and “imagine walking around your house” [activating para-
hippocampal 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 com-
municate with some (very exceptional) patients. Indeed, one clinically non-
communicative patient studied in the Liège 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 val-
ues. 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 metabo-
lism 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 identi-
fied not one brain region but a wide frontoparietal network encompassing
the polymodal associative cortices: lateral and medial frontal regions bilat-
erally, parieto-temporal and posterior parietal areas bilaterally, and pos-
terior 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 connectiv-
ity 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
276 Altering Consciousness

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 connec-
tivity. The above-presented studies on physiological (e.g., sleep), pharma-
cological (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 sen-
sory 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 fronto-
parietal 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 work-
space, 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 lower-
order 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 Uni-
versity Press.
Baars, B. J. (2005). Global workspace theory of consciousness: Toward a cogni-
tive 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 conscious-
ness? 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.
Altering Consciousness and Neuropathology 277

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 Anes-
thesiology, 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 veg-
etative 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., León-Carrión, 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.
278 Altering Consciousness

Serfontein, L. (2010). Awareness in cardiac anesthesia. Current Opinion in Anaes-


thesiology, 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 expériences de mort
imminente et les souvenirs de la période de coma: Réels ou imaginés? [Near-death
experience and memories during coma: Real or imaginary?] (Master thesis
report). Liège: University of Liège.
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 Cardeña

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 con-
sciousness (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 (Cardeña, 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 exam-
ple 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 psychol-
ogy 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
280 Altering Consciousness

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 dissent-
ing 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 psychody-
namic and behavioral approaches can contribute to their understanding.
Nonetheless, until recently much work within psychology and the neuro-
sciences 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 ensu-
ing forms of attachment, which have an impact throughout the lifespan
(Van IJzendoorn, 1997; see also Granqvist, Reijman, & Cardeña, this vol-
ume). I have also discussed (Cardeña, 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 emotion-
ally 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 conscious-
ness, although they have not typically been researched with that focus in
mind. For instance, intense fear or panic is associated not only with psycho-
pathology but also with dissociative alterations in consciousness (see
below). At the other extreme, intense love can bring about extreme absorp-
tion 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).
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 281

The other side of the equation, namely ASC producing notable emo-
tional 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 dis-
tress (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 prac-
tices (cf. Forman, 1999: see also Shear, Volume 1, and Beauregard, this vol-
ume), 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 inges-
tion of psychedelic drugs, although of course toxic levels of a substance,
psychological disturbance, or negative set or setting can produce bad occur-
rences or “trips” [see the various chapters on psychoactive drugs, this vol-
ume]. With a group of individuals selected for psychological balance,
Griffiths, Richards, McCann, and Jesse (2006) found that ingesting psilocy-
bin 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 experi-
enced being in a “very deep state” (Cardeña, 2005). This is not likely to
have been the effect of the simple induction of counting from 1 to 30 in
282 Altering Consciousness

a hypnotic context, without additional suggestions, because low


and medium hypnotizables do not report these experiences (Cardeña,
Lehmann, Jönsson, Terhune, & Faber, 2007). However, these findings
need to be qualified insofar as there is a small subgroup of high hypnotiz-
ables 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 & Cardeña, 2010).
With respect to another set of techniques that engage attentional re-
sources 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 experien-
ces in the shamanism literature (Halifax, 1980; see also Cardeña, 1996,
and Winkelman, Volume 1).

Altered Consciousness and Psychopathology


The concept of psychopathology is conceptually as complex and equivo-
cal 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 dys-
functional. 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 distress-
ing (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 Blätter,
Fachner, and Winkelman, this volume), or alienate them from their sur-
rounding 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 environ-
ments as a form of shared pathology (Cardeña, 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
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 283

(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 indi-
viduals 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 consid-
eration (Cardeña, 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 uncon-
trolled 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 cul-
tural counterparts (e.g., Moreira-Almeida, Lotufo Neto, & Cardeña, 2008;
Van Ommeren, Komproe, Cardeña, 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 per-
sonal 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 hap-
pens 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 nec-
essary step to understand better the elements of a pathological experience
284 Altering Consciousness

is to conduct far more thorough phenomenological evaluations. For exam-


ple, despite a considerable overlap in other dimensions, the auditory hallu-
cinations 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 lon-
gitudinally and in the context of the person’s attributions, as some manifes-
tations 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, provid-
ing examples from both psychiatric conditions and nonpathological pro-
cesses. 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 encom-
pass all valid views on pathology. For this chapter on altered conscious-
ness, 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
No- or Changes
narrow in body No Id Strong
CONDITIONS* Cs. Delirium image Depers. Fusion agency changes emotions Halluc. Trans.
PATHOLOGICAL
Dissociative dx. xx x x xx x xx x ?
PTSD x x x xx ?
Sleep paralysis xx x x ?
Panic attack x xx xx
Borderline p. d. ? x x x ? xx x
Schizotypal p. d. x x x ?
Somatoform dx x xx x xx
Psychosis x x x x x x x xx ?
Mood dx x x x x xx x ?

NONPATHOLOGICAL
Spirit possession/ x xx x ? xx xx x x xx
Ritual ASC x ? x ? x x x xx xx xx
Meditation ? x ? x ? x ? x
Mystical/visionary x xx xx xx xx xx
Hypnosis x x x x ? x ?
Trauma reaction x ? ? x ? ? x ?
Erotism x x xx ? ? xx ?

(Continued)
Table 13.1 (Continued)

• Key to abbreviations Cs. = consciousness, depers. = depersonalization, Id = identity, Halluc. = hallucinations, Transc. = tran-
scendent 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, hyper-
arousal, 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 schizoaf-
fective 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; Cardeña & Gleaves, 2007).
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 287

another major author who emphasized that how a particular mental con-
tent 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 con-
dition may nonetheless become unconscious or exhibit convulsions, con-
fusion, 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 surround-
ings, perhaps accompanied by unresponsiveness (Litwin & Cardeña,
2000). These manifestations can be symptomatic of various psychopathol-
ogies 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”; Cardeña & Alvarado, Volume 1).
A drastic change in the clarity of consciousness, or delirium, is charac-
terized by severe cognitive disorganization including confusion, incoher-
ent thought and speech, and hallucinations. It can occur in chronic or
brief reactive (to traumas or severe stressors) psychosis (also called bouffée
délirante aiguë, sometimes described cross-culturally in relation to spirit
possession), or in response to psychoactive drug intoxication or depriva-
tion (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).
However, there are also nonpathological examples for at least some of
these manifestations, including losing muscle tonus and becoming unre-
sponsive in the middle of a ritual (e.g., Oohashi et al., 2002). Further-
more, 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 (Cardeña & Spiegel, 1993).
288 Altering Consciousness

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 simi-
lar attempt to alter consciousness (Cardeña, 2005; Cardeña & Spiegel,
1993; Gabbard, Twemlow, & Jones, 1982). They are also found in psychi-
atric 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 auto-
scopy 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 environ-
ment) 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 expe-
rience 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 (Cardeña & Gleaves, 2007; see Presti,
this volume). It bears mentioning that self-injurious behavior, characteris-
tic 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
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 289

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. Cardeña, 1999).
In autoscopy, heautoscopy, or “doppelgänger” 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 José
Millás, 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 experi-
ence 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 per-
haps 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. Consultation-
liaison 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 soma-
toform 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).
290 Altering Consciousness

In nonpathological situations, these experiences may occur as part of


hypnotic manipulations (e.g., Oakley & Halligan, 2009) or of participat-
ing in some activities such as dance and acting (Cardeña, 1997; see also
St John, and Zarrilli, Volume 1).
Similarly, in alterations in the sense of attribution, the individual experien-
ces that someone or something else controls his or her body, thoughts, and
emotions. As part of a pathological process, this experience can be very dis-
tressing, 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 dis-
sociative identity disorder (DID) are characterized by recurrent and dysfunc-
tional alternations of identities and amnesia and are related to a variety of
other distressing symptoms (Cardeña & Gleaves, 2007).
Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that the experience of other-
attribution 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 devel-
opmental 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” experi-
ence, which can happen as a transitional stage in a mystic’s life. Roberts
(1933, in Hunt, 2007, p. 214) recounts:
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 291

Suddenly I was aware that all life around me had come to a complete stand-
still. 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 con-
text 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 disor-
der, 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 uni-
verse”), 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 dra-
matic 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
292 Altering Consciousness

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 dysfunc-
tional behaviors (Sims, 1995); however, nonpathological beliefs can also
evidence irrationality, ego centeredness, and imperviousness to counter-
vailing 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 sugges-
tions 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 autobi-
ographies 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 indi-
viduals grieving after the loss of an important person (APA, 2000,
p. xxxiv). Hypnotic suggestions among the highly responsive can also pro-
duce suggested positive (i.e., perceiving a stimulus that is not present) and
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 293

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 spi-
rit (Cardeña, 1998, 1989; see also Cardeña, 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 incom-
plete awakening from rapid-eve-movement (REM) sleep, during which
the body is immobilized, as happens during REM sleep, although the per-
son 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 dis-
order 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 sur-
roundings 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
294 Altering Consciousness

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 neces-
sarily 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 unex-
pected ASC, anomalous, or exceptional human experience (EHE). Some-
times the complaint is not about altered consciousness but an event in
the environment such as a putative haunting or psychokinetic experi-
ence. Although the evidence shows that most people who experience
ASC, whether spontaneously or in a ritual setting, are psychologically
healthy (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000; Moreira-Almeida et al.,
2008), it is still the case that some individuals may have problems mak-
ing 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 col-
laborators (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.
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 295

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 für 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 psy-
chiatry 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’ con-
sciousness, of which the current reliance on such techniques as mindful-
ness 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 con-
sciousness is fundamental to understanding what may go wrong in a per-
son’s mind but also what may bring about recovery and provide greater
existential joy and meaning.

References
Alvarado, C. S. (2000). Out-of-body experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 183–218). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of men-
tal disorders. (4th ed.). Text revision. Washington, DC: Author.
Appelle, S., Lynn, S. J., & Newman, L. (2000). Alien abduction experiences. In
E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience:
Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 253–282). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Baars, B. (2000). Conscious emotional feelings—beyond the four taboos. Con-
sciousness & Emotion, 1, 11–14.
Belz, M. (in print). Exceptional experiences and mental health. In C. Simmonds-
Moore (ed.), Essays on health and exceptional human experiences. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retro-
active influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psy-
chology, 100, 407–425.
Bentall, R. P. (2000). Hallucinatory experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 85–120). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
296 Altering Consciousness

Berenbaum, H., Kerns, J., & Raghavan, C. (2000). Anomalous experiences, pecu-
liarity, and psychopathology. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.),
Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 25–46).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893–1895). Studies on hysteria. The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2). London: Hogarth
Press.
Cardeña, E. (1989). The varieties of possession experience. Association for the
Anthropological Study of Consciousness Quarterly, 5 (2–3), 1–17.
Cardeña, E. (1996). “Just floating on the sky.” A comparison of shamanic and
hypnotic phenomenology. In R. Quekelbherge & D. Eigner (Eds.), 6th Jahr-
buch für Transkulturelle Medizin und Psychotherapie [6th yearbook of cross-
cultural medicine and psychotherapy] (pp. 367–380). Berlin: Verlag für
Wissenschaft und Bildung.
Cardeña, E. (1997). The etiologies of dissociation. In S. Powers & S. Krippner
(Eds.), Broken images, broken selves (pp. 61–87). New York: Brunner.
Cardeña, E. (1999). “You are not your body.” Commentary on The motivation for
self-injury in psychiatric patients. Psychiatry, 62, 331–333.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and
physically active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53,
37–59.
Cardeña, E. (2008). Consciousness and emotions as interpersonal and transper-
sonal systems. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15, 249–263.
Cardeña, E., & Gleaves, D. (2007). Dissociative disorders. In M. Hersen, S. M.
Turner, & D. Beidel (Eds.), Adult psychopathology & diagnosis (5th ed.,
pp. 473–503). New York: Wiley.
Cardeña, E., Lehmann, D., Jönsson, P., Terhune, D., & Faber, P. (2007). The
neurophenomenology of hypnosis. Proceedings of the 50th Annual Convention
of the Parapsychological Association, 17–30.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous
experience: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Cardeña, E., & Spiegel D. (1993). Dissociative reactions to the Bay Area Earth-
quake. American Journal of Psychiatry, 150, 474–478.
Duke, L. (2004, February 5). Vanishing point: The monologuist transformed his
life into art, but left the final chapter unfinished. Washington Post, p. C01.
Forman, R. K. C. (1999). Mysticism, mind, consciousness. Albany: State of New
York University Press.
Foulkes, D., & Vogel, G. (1965). Mental activity at sleep onset. Journal of Abnor-
mal Psychology, 70, 231–243.
Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. New York: Fawcett.
Gabbard, G. O., Twemlow, S. W., & Jones, F. C. (1982). Differential diagnosis
of altered mind/body perception. Psychiatry, 45, 361–369.
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 297

Gifford-May, D., & Thompson, N. L. (1994). “Deep states” of meditation: Phenom-


enological reports of experience. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 26, 117–138.
Gopnik, A. (2009). The philosophical baby. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Greenwald, A. G. (1980). The totalitarian ego. Fabrication and revision of per-
sonal history. American Psychologist, 35, 603–618.
Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 315–351). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Griffiths, R. R., Richards, W. A., McCann, U., & Jesse, R. (2006). Psilocybin can
occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance. Psychopharmacology, 187, 268–283.
Halifax, J. (1980). Shamanic voices. Middlesex, England: Penguin.
Hartmann, E. (1991). Boundaries of the mind: A new psychology of personality.
New York: Basic Books.
Hastings, A. (1991). With the tongues of men and angels. A study of channeling. Fort
Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Hinton, D. E., Pich, V., Chhean, D., & Pollack, M. H. (2005). “The ghost pushes
you down”: Sleep paralysis-type attacks in a Khmer refugee population. Trans-
cultural Psychiatry, 42, 46–77.
Hobson, J. A. (1994). The chemistry of conscious states. How the brain changes its
mind. Boston: Little, Brown.
Holroyd, J. (2003). The science of meditation and the state of hypnosis. American
Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 46, 109–128.
Hufford, D. J. (2005). Sleep paralysis as spiritual experience. Transcultural Psy-
chiatry, 42, 11–45.
Hunt, H. T. (2007). “Dark night of the soul”: Phenomenology and neurocognition
of spiritual suffering in mysticism and psychosis. Review of General Psychology,
3, 209–234.
James, W. (1961). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature.
New York: Collier. (Original work published 1902).
Jaspers, K. (1963). General psychopathology. Manchester: Manchester University
Press. (Originally published 1913).
Kramer, W. H. (1993). Recent experiences with psi counseling in Holland. In
L. Coly & J. D. S. McMahon (Eds.), Psi and clinical practice (pp. 124–145).
New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The divided self. New York: Pantheon.
Landis, C. (1964). Varieties of psychopathological experience (F. A. Mettler, Ed.).
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lanius, R. A., Vermetten, E., Loewenstein, R. J., Brand, B., Schmahl C., Bremner,
J. D., & Spiegel, D. (2010). Emotion modulation in PTSD: Clinical and neuro-
biological evidence for a dissociative subtype. American Journal of Psychiatry,
167, 640–647.
Laski, M. (1980). Everyday ecstasy. London: Thames and Hudson.
Lewis, I. M. (1989). Ecstatic religion (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
298 Altering Consciousness

Litwin, R., & Cardeña, E. (2000). Demographic and seizure variables, but not
hypnotizability or dissociation, differentiated psychogenic from organic seiz-
ures. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 1, 99–122.
Menezes Jr., A., & Moreira-Almeida, A. (2010). Religion, spirituality, and psy-
chosis. Current Psychiatric Research, 12, 174–179.
Moreira-Almeida, A., Lotufo Neto, F., & Cardeña, 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 Dissocia-
tion, Toronto, Canada.
Radin, D., & Schlitz, M. (2005). Gut feelings, intuition, and emotions: An explor-
atory 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 pos-
session. 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.
Altered Consciousness in Emotion and Psychopathology 299

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. Cardeña,
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., & Cardeña, E (2010). Differential patterns of spontaneous expe-
riential response to a hypnotic induction: A latent profile analysis. Conscious-
ness 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 Scien-
tist, 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., Cardeña, 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., Cardeña, 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 consciousness-
transformation through an encounter with death. Journal of Humanistic Psy-
chology, 28, 105–122.
Wulff, D. M. (2000). Mystical experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Kripp-
ner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience (pp. 397–440). Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
This page intentionally left blank
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 schizo-
phrenia (Boisen, 1962); positive disintegration (Dabrowski, 1964); creative
illness (Ellenberger, 1970); spiritual emergencies (Grof & Grof, 1989); mys-
tical 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 one-
self, 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 halluci-
nations and delusions (explored in more depth below). When they return,
302 Altering Consciousness

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 ear-
liest 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) con-
cluded 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 pro-
portion 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 “tor-
mented by spirits” are elements in some shamanic initiatory crises. In sha-
manic 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 sha-
mans’ 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 psychopa-
thology. 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
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 303

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 neuro-
biological 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 follow-
ing 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, bewil-
derment, 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 (transcen-
dent and absolute), but is depersonal—an admixture of higher and lower
elements. Wilber (1980) writes: “[Psychosis] carries with it cascading frag-
ments 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 arche-
typal 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
304 Altering Consciousness

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 experien-
ces 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 (Cardeña, 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 associ-
ated 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 con-
tributes 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 abduc-
tion, 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
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 305

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 expe-
riences 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 expres-
sion “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 sys-
tems have tended to either ignore or pathologize such intense spiritual
experiences [see Cardeña, 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 experien-
ces. F. W. H. Myers can be given credit for the initial insight that the sub-
liminal can give rise to mystical as well as psychopathological content
(Myers, 1892). Myers postulated a limen or threshold, below which the
306 Altering Consciousness

subliminal self is found. In persons prone to mystical experience, the sub-


liminal 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 sug-
gesting 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 expe-
riences 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 reli-
gious experiences for many individuals, validated their importance and non-
pathological 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 devel-
ops highly grandiose beliefs or even delusions about his or her own spiri-
tual 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 clini-
cians assess for schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations differ-
ent from their own (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, p. 306):
Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witch-
craft) 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 pub-
lic 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).
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 307

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 lov-


ing source. Life review is also common, and the person returns with a mis-
sion 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 experienc-
ing 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 inter-
personal 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 life-
style
• 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
308 Altering Consciousness

• 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 Prob-
lem) in the DSM-IV permits differentiation of NDEs and similar experien-
ces 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 (Grey-
son & 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 evi-
dential 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 ques-
tion that most people have such experiences. Gallup polls show that a
majority of American adults have extrasensory experiences, and the
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 309

percentage is increasing (from 58% in 1973 to 67% in 1986; Gallup,


2002). Unfortunately, both sensationalism in tabloid media and commer-
cialism (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 tran-
scendent 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 dis-
turbing 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 appropri-
ate).
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.
310 Altering Consciousness

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, other-
worldly journey, theophany (receipt of spiritual messages), and return to
earth (Mack, 1999).
Gallup Polls reveal how widespread beliefs are in UFO-related phe-
nomena. 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 mil-
lions 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 extrapo-
lation from a group of students, another researcher suggested that 15 mil-
lion 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 thou-
sands 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 exami-
nation and standardized tests has found that, as a group, abduction expe-
riencers are not different from the general population in terms of
prevalence of psychopathology. Many report that their lives have been
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 311

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 inte-
grate 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 help-
lessness (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 associ-
ated 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
312 Altering Consciousness

conditions associated with intensive practice of yoga and meditation


(Shan, 2000).
The DSM-IV-TR emphasizes the need to distinguish between psycho-
pathology and meditation-related experiences: Voluntarily induced expe-
riences 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 associ-
ated 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” activ-
ities 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 pre-
vented 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 con-
cern 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 con-
trol 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, sleep-
walking, secondary features of DID, and, symptoms of borderline personality.
(Moreira-Almeida, Neto, & Cardeña, 2008, p. 420)
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 313

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 Chris-
tianity consider it desirable to be possessed by the Holy Spirit, with physi-
cal 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 spi-
rit 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 conscious-


ness 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, particu-
larly among members of immigrant groups (Cardeña et al., 1994). Treat-
ment 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 com-
munity should be part of the treatment plan.
314 Altering Consciousness

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 confu-
sion 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 reli-
gion 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 differ-
ent from their own must take cultural differences into account: “In some
cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 315

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 popula-
tion has some experience with voice hallucinations (Posey & Losch,
1983), and approximately 10% of the general population have the experi-
ence 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 situa-
tions, 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 con-
firmed 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
316 Altering Consciousness

both religious and deluded call into question diagnostic criteria for delu-
sions that emphasize the content (i.e., bizarreness or falsity) of beliefs to
classify them as pathological (Brett, 2002). Delusions and spiritual experi-
ences 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 cog-
nition is a confirmation bias that allows us to be impervious to contradic-
tory 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, with-
out leaving residual social difficulties or isolation; in contrast, psychotic
disorders generally persist for a long period and involve ongoing impair-
ment 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 con-
sequences but also by real differences in the states themselves, such as:
loss of subject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less abil-
ity to maintain equanimity; an inability to return to the ontological frame-
work 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 Schizo-
phreniform Disorder, which are psychotic disorders of less than 1 month
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 317

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 psy-
chology 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 halluci-
nations and delusions. In this way, Religious or Spiritual Problem is com-
parable 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, disori-
entation, and interpersonal difficulties occur so frequently that they
should be considered normal and expectable reactions.
Iatrogenic problems may occur if VSEs are misdiagnosed and mis-
treated as psychotic disorders. The clinician’s initial assessment can sig-
nificantly 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 psy-
chopathologized and pharmaceutically suppressed. In an interview study,
“the most subjectively frightening aspect of their experience was psychiat-
ric 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
318 Altering Consciousness

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 pre-
personal experiences are mistaken by the individual or by others as transper-
sonal 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 trans-
personal 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 trans-
mute 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 conceptual-
izations 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 sub-
ject/object boundaries; less ability to control attention; less ability to main-
tain 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,
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 319

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 experien-
ces 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 dimen-
sions 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 psy-
chotic experiences. Therapy, conducted thrice weekly, consisted of listen-
ing 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 develop-
mental 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 com-
munity mental health center inpatient service consisting of daily pharma-
cotherapy, psychotherapy, occupational therapy, and group therapy.
Clients’ length of stay was longer at Soteria than in the comparison pro-
gram (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 cli-
ents treated in a psychiatric hospital (Bola & Mosher, 2003). Soteria
320 Altering Consciousness

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 individ-
uals who have, by choice or accident, entered into these states.

References
Allman, L. S., De La Roche, O., Elkins, D. N., & Weathers, R. S. (1992). Psychothera-
pists’ attitudes towards clients reporting mystical experiences. Psychotherapy, 29,
564–569.
Alloy, L. B., & Tabachnik, N. (1984). Assessment of covariation by humans and
animals: The joint influence of prior expectations and current situational
information. Psychological Review, 91, 112–149.
American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual
(4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual—text
revision, fourth edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Appelle, S., Lynn, S., & Newman, L. (2000). Alien abduction experiences. In E.
Cardeña, S. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience:
Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 253–282). Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Arieti, S. (1976). Creativity: The magic synthesis. New York: Basic Books.
Assagioli, R. (1989). Self-realization and psychological disturbances. In S. Grof &
C. Grof (Eds.), Spiritual emergency: When personal transformation becomes a
crisis. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Barnhouse, R. T. (1986). How to evaluate patient’s religious ideation. In L. Robinson
(Ed.), Psychology and religion: Overlapping concerns. Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Press.
Barret, T. R., & Etheridge, J. B. (1992). Verbal hallucinations in normals, I: Peo-
ple who hear voices. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 6, 379–387.
Behrend, H. A., & Luig, U. (Eds.). (2000). Spirit possession, modernity, and power
in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Berenbaum, H., Kerns, J., & Raghavan, C. (2000). Anomalous experiences, pecu-
liarity, and psychopathology. In E. Cardeña, S. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.),
Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 35–46).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Boisen, A. T. (1962). The exploration of the inner world. New York: Harper and Row.
Bola, J. R., & Mosher, L. R. (2003). Treatment of acute psychosis without neuro-
leptics: Two-year outcomes from the Soteria project. Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease, 191(4), 219–229.
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 321

Brett, C. (2002). Psychotic and mystical states of being: Connections and distinc-
tions. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 9, 321–326.
Buckley, P. (1981). Mystical experience and schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin,
7, 516–521.
Bullard, T. (1989a). Hypnosis and UFO abductions: A troubled relationship.
Journal of UFO Studies, 1, 3–42.
Bullard, T. (1989b). The influence of investigators on UFO abduction reports:
Results of a survey. In A. Pritchard, D. Pritchard, J. Mack, P. Kasey, & C. Yapp
(Eds.), Alien discussions: Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference held at
MIT (pp. 571–619). Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge Press.
Campbell, J. (1972). Myths to live by. New York: Viking.
Caplan, M. (1999). Halfway up the mountain: The error of premature claims to
enlightenment. Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press.
Cardeña, E., Lewis-Fernandez, R., Bear, D., Pakianathan, I., Kubin, M., & Spiegel,
D. (1994). Dissociative disorders. In A. Frances (Ed.), Sourcebook for DSM-IV.
Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Cardeña, E., Lynn, S., & Krippner, S. (Eds.). (2000). Varieties of anomalous expe-
rience: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington, DC: American Psychologi-
cal Association.
Chapman, J., & Lukoff, D. (1996). The social safety net in recovery from psycho-
sis: A therapist’s story. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 47(3), 69–70.
Clarke, I. (2001). Cognitive behavior therapy for psychosis. In I. Clarke (Ed.),
Psychosis and spirituality: Exploring the new frontier (pp. 15–26). London: Whurr.
Dabrowski, K. (1964). Positive disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown.
Dodds, E. (1951). The Greeks and the irrational. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of
dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Epstein, M. (1990). Psychodynamics of meditation: Pitfalls on the spiritual path.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 22, 17–34.
Epstein, M., & Topgay, S. (1982). Mind and mental disorders in Tibetan medi-
cine. ReVision, 5, 67–79.
Forrer, G. R. (1960). Benign auditory and visual hallucination. Archives of General
Psychiatry, 3, 119–122.
Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1991). Persuasion and healing: A comparative study of
psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Freud, S. (1989). The future of an illusion. New York: W. W. Norton (Originally
published 1927).
Gallup, G. (2002). The 2001 Gallup poll: Public opinion. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Gallup, G., & Jones, T. (2000). The next American spirituality: Finding God in the
twenty-first century. Colorado Springs, CO: Chariot Victor.
Greenberg, D., & Witztum, E. (1991). Problems in the treatment of religious
patients. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 65, 554–565.
322 Altering Consciousness

Greenberg, D., Witzum, E., & Buchbinder, J. (1992). Mysticism and psychosis:
The fate of Ben Zoma. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 65, 223–235.
Greyson, B. (1993). Varieties of near-death experience. Psychiatry, 56, 390–399.
Greyson, B. (1997). The near-death experience as a focus of clinical attention.
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 185, 327–334.
Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. Lynn, & S. Krippner
(Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp.
315–352). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Greyson, B., & Bush, N. (1992). Distressing near-death experiences. Psychiatry,
55, 95–110.
Grof, S., & Grof, C. (Eds.). (1989). Spiritual emergency: When personal transforma-
tion becomes a crisis. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Halifax, J. (1979). Shamanic voices. New York: Dutton.
Hastings, A. (1983). A counseling approach to parapsychological experience.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 15(2), 143–167.
Heery, M. (1989). Inner voice experiences: An exploratory study of thirty cases.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 21, 73–82.
House, R. (2001). Spiritual experience: Healthy psychoticism? In I. Clarke (Ed.),
Psychosis and spirituality: Exploring the new frontier (pp. 107–126). London:
Whurr.
Hunt, H. (2007). “Dark nights of the soul”: Phenomenology and neurocognition
of spiritual suffering in mysticism and psychosis. Review of General Psychology,
11, 209–234.
Jackson, M. C. (2001). Psychotic and spiritual experience: A case study compari-
son. In I. Clarke (Ed.), Psychosis and spirituality: Exploring the new frontier
(pp. 165–190). London: Whurr.
Jackson, M. C., & Fulford, K. W. (1997). Spiritual experience and psychopathol-
ogy. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, 1, 41–65.
James, W. (1958). The varieties of religious experience. New York: New American
Library of World Literature (Originally published 1902).
Jung, C. G. (1960). The psychogenesis of mental disease. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press.
Kennedy, J. E., & Kanthamani, H. (1995). Association between anomalous expe-
riences and artistic creativity and spirituality. Journal of the American Society for
Psychical Research, 89, 333–343.
Kirkness, B. (Ed.). (1997). Target schizophrenia. London: National Schizophrenia
Fellowship.
Kornfield, J. (1993). A path with heart: A guide through the perils and promises of
spiritual life. New York: Bantam Books.
Krippner, S. (1991). Advances in parapsychological research 6: Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Laing, R. D. (1972). Metanoia: Some experiences at Kingsley Hall. In H. M.
Ruitenbeck (Ed.), Going crazy. New York: Bantam.
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 323

Lata J. (2005). Visual hallucinations in Hispanic clinic patients: A need to assess for
cultural beliefs. Puerto Rico: Carlos Albizu University.
Leuder, I., & Thomas, P. (2000). Voices of reason, voices of insanity. Philadelphia:
Routledge.
Liester, M. (1996). Inner voices: Distinguishing transcendent and pathological
characteristics. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 28, 1–30.
Lukoff, D. (1985). The diagnosis of mystical experiences with psychotic features.
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 17, 155–181.
Lukoff, D. (1988). Transpersonal therapy with a manic-depressive artist. Journal
of Transpersonal Psychology, 20, 10–20.
Lukoff, D. (1991). Divine madness: Shamanistic initiatory crisis and psychosis.
Shaman’s Drum, 22, 24–29.
Lukoff, D. (2007). Visionary spiritual experiences. Southern Medical Journal, 100,
635–641.
Lukoff, D., & Everest, H. C. (1985). The myths in mental illness. Journal of Trans-
personal Psychology, 17, 123–153.
Lukoff, D., & Lu, F. (2005). A transpersonal integrative approach to spiritually
oriented psychotherapy. In L. Sperry & E. Shafranske (Eds.), Spiritually ori-
ented psychotherapy (pp. 177–205). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association Press.
Lukoff, D., Lu, F., & Turner, R. (1998). From spiritual emergency to spiritual
problem: The transpersonal roots of the new DSM-IV category. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology, 38, 21–50.
Mack, J. (1999). Passport to the cosmos: Human transformation and alien encounters.
New York: Crown.
Maher, B. A. (1988). Delusions as the product of normal cognitions. New York: John
Wiley.
Maslow, A. (1973). The farther reaches of human nature. New York: Pelican.
Mills, N. (2001). The experience of fragmentation in psychosis: Can mindfulness
help? In I. Clarke (Ed.), Psychosis and spirituality: Exploring the new frontier
(pp. 222–235). London: Whurr.
Moody, R. (1975). Life after life. New York: Bantam.
Moreira-Almeida, A., Neto, F., & Cardeña, E. (2008). Comparison of Brazilian
Spiritist mediumship and dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, 196, 420–424.
Mosher, L., Hendrix, V., & Fort, D. (2004). Soteria: Through madness to deliver-
ance. Philadelphia: Xlibris.
Mosher, L., & Menn, A. (1979). Soteria: An alternative to hospitalization. In H. R.
Lamb (Ed.), Alternatives to acute hospitalization (pp. 73–84). San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Murphy, J. (1978). The recognition of psychosis in non-Western societies. In
R. L. Spitzer & D. F. Klein (Eds.), Critical issues in psychiatric diagnosis. New
York: Raven Press.
324 Altering Consciousness

Myers, E. W. H. (1892). The subliminal consciousness. Proceedings of the Society


for Psychical Research, 7, 298–327.
Neumann, E. (1964). Mystical man. In J. Campbell (Ed.), The mystic vision
(pp. 74–99). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Newberg, A., D’Aquili, E., & Rause , R. (2001). Why God won’t go away: Brain sci-
ence and the biology of belief. New York: Ballantine Books.
Perry, J. (1974). The far side of madness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Perry, J. (1977–1978). Psychosis and the visionary mind. Journal of Altered States
of Consciousness, 3, 5–13.
Perry, J. (1998). Trials of the visionary mind: Spiritual emergency and the renewal
process. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Peters, E. (2001). Are delusions on a continuum? The case of religious and delusional
beliefs. London: Whurr.
Peters, E. R., Joseph, S., & Garety, P. A. (1999). The assessment of delusions in
normal and psychotic populations. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 25, 553–576.
Posey, T. B., & Losch, M. E. (1983). Auditory hallucinations of hearing voices in
375 normal subjects. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 3, 99–113.
Prince, R. H. (1992). Religious experience and psychopathology: Cross-cultural
perspectives. In J. F. Schumacher (Ed.), Religion and mental health (pp. 281–290).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Ring, K. (1990). Life at death: A scientific investigation of the near-death experience.
New York: Coward, McGann & Geoghegan.
Rosen, G. (1968). Madness in society. New York: Harper & Row.
Rosenthal, J. (1990). The meditative therapist. Networker, 38–43.
Sacks, O. (1995). The last hippie. In O. Sacks (Ed.), An anthropologist on Mars:
Seven paradoxical tales (pp. 42–76). New York: Vintage.
Saver, J. L., & Rabin, J. (1997). The neural substrates of religious experience.
Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 9, 498–510.
Scharfstein, B. (1973). Mystical experience. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.
Shan, H. (2000). Culture-bound psychiatric disorders associated with Qigong
practice in China. Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry 10, 12–14.
Silverman, J. (1967). Shamans and acute schizophrenia. American Anthropologist,
69, 21–31.
Spanos, N., Cross, P., Dickson, K., & Dubreuil, S. (1993). Close encounters: An
examination of UFO experiences. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 102, 624–632.
Stone-Carmen, J. (1994). A descriptive study of people reporting abduction by
UFOs. In A. Pritchard, D. Pritchard, J. Mack, P. Kasey, & C. Yapp (Eds.), Alien
discussions: Proceedings of the Alien Abduction Conference at MIT (pp. 309–315).
Cambridge, MA: North Cambridge Press.
Targ, E., Schlitz, M., & Irwin, H. (2000). Psi-related experiences. In E. Cardeña,
S. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining
the scientific evidence (pp. 219–252). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Visionary Spirituality and Mental Disorders 325

Targ, R., & Hastings, A. (1987). Psychological impact of psychic abilities. Psycho-
logical Perspectives, 18, 38–51.
Tart, C. (1995). Parapsychology and spirituality. ReVision, 18, 2–10.
Taylor, E. (1983). William James on exceptional mental states: The 1896 Lowell Lec-
tures. New York: Scribner.
Thomas, L., & Cooper, P. (1980). Incidence and psychological correlates of
intense spiritual experiences. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 12, 75–85.
Ullman, M., Krippner, S., & Vaughan, V. (2003). Dream telepathy: Experiments in
nocturnal extrasensory perception. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads.
Van Ommeren, M., Komproe, I., Cardeña, E., Thapa, S., Prasain, D., de Jong, J.
(2004). Mental illness among Bhutanese shamans in Nepal. Journal of Nervous
and Mental Diseases, 192, 313–317.
Wallace, A. (1956). Stress and rapid personality changes. International Record of
Medicine, 169, 761–774.
Walsh, R. (1990). The spirit of shamanism. Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Walsh, R., & Roche, L. (1979). Precipitation of acute psychotic episodes by inten-
sive meditation in individuals with a history of schizophrenia. American Jour-
nal of Psychiatry, 136, 1085–1086.
Wilber, K. (1980). The spectrum of consciousness. Wheaton, IL: Quest.
Wilber, K. (1984). The developmental spectrum and psychopathology: Part I.
Stages and types of pathology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 16, 75–118.
Wilber, K. (1993). The pre/trans fallacy. In R. Walsh & F. Vaughan (Eds.), Paths
beyond ego (pp. 124–130). Los Angeles: Tarcher.
Wulff, D. (2000). Mystical experience. In E. Cardeña, S. Lynn & S. Krippner
(Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence
(pp. 397–440). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.
This page intentionally left blank
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 identi-
fied as subserving social cognition and the feelings of belonging to a com-
munity (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
328 Altering Consciousness

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, daydream-
ing, hypnagogic states, sleep and dreaming, near death experiences,
extreme environmental conditions (pressure, temperature), starvation
and diet, sexual activity and orgasm, respiratory maneuvers, sensory dep-
rivation, sensory homogenization and overload, rhythm-induced states
(drumming and dancing), relaxation, meditation, hypnosis, biofeedback,
psychotic disorders, epilepsy, coma and vegetative state, and pharmaco-
logically 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 Cardeña, this volume].
Given the scope and heterogeneity of such experiences, they are diffi-
cult to define conceptually (Revonsuo, Kallio, & Sikka, 2005; Rock &
Krippner, 2007) [see Cardeña, 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 relation-
ships between consciousness and the world,” we nevertheless add the fol-
lowing 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, nar-
rative, 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 real-
ity. 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
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 329

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 subjec-
tively 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 Weizsäcker 1950). That is, perceptual “illusions”
(Bridgeman & Hoover, 2008) and cognitive distortions (cognitive “heuris-
tics”) are systematically integrated into our everyday experience of reality
as if they were a kind of glue that holds it together. Naı̈ve realism
(Ramsperger, 1940), the bias that one’s own perspective on reality is objec-
tive, 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 pre-
served by a certain resistance to losing common sense (Blankenburg, 2001;
Mishara, 2001). An ASC deviates from the everyday naı̈ve natural attitude of
constructed-consensual reality not by misrepresenting the self-world rela-
tionship 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 under-
lying 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
330 Altering Consciousness

Weizsäcker, 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 naı̈ve 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 therapeu-
tic 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 pri-
mary means of healing in numerous societies relies on a definition of healing
that differs from the biomedical view of being “cured” of disease. Some cul-
tures regard healing to take place “if that person has been spiritually
restored before death” (Krippner & Achterberg, pp. 359–360). This defini-
tion 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 condi-
tions, 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 infec-
tions 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 mecha-
nisms are still not understood: “When the term spontaneous remission is
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 331

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 effi-
cacy 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 prac-
tice 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 thera-
peutic 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 medi-
tation 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 diffi-
cult to find common components (and thus underlying healing mecha-
nisms) among these different approaches. Awareness and control of
breathing is universal, yet there is no single common approach to breath-
ing. 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 percep-
tual stance attentive to the entire field of perception. (Dakwar & Levin,
2009, p. 255)
332 Altering Consciousness

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 heal-
ing 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., naturalis-
tic, 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 randomized-
control 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 associ-
ated with reduced plasma cortisol levels, improved quality of life/coping
ability, more enduring natural-killer (NK) cell activity, and increased cyto-
kine production levels in breast cancer patients (Witek-Janusek, Albuquer-
que, 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
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 333

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 narra-
tive 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 men-
tal 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 indi-
vidual’s beliefs about the practice. For example, the analgesic effects of mind-
ful 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 physio-
logic 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 neuroi-
maging 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 pre-
frontal 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
334 Altering Consciousness

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 underly-
ing mechanisms, we believe that the mixed functional neuroimaging find-
ings 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’ pro-
cesses dependent on frontal cortical areas that generate and maintain cog-
nitive 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 compu-
tational model, Reynolds, Zacks, and Braver (2007) propose that our cur-
rent 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” corre-
lates with levels of homovanillic acid, a dopamine metabolite, in the cer-
ebrospinal fluid. Although the precise role of the activation of ACC and
PFC structures during MM, hypnosis, and related methods of ASC induc-
tion 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 hyp-
nosis as “highly focused attention with suspension of peripheral
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 335

awareness.” It involves the “deactivation of vigilance characteristic of pos-


terior 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 preat-
tentive 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 hypno-
sis 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 shaman-
istic healing, we find support for this hypothesis below. Moreover, this para-
dox 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 con-
sciousness for the purpose of interacting with spirits in order to serve the
community in which she finds herself” (Barušs, 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 Cardeña & 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. Opera-
tionally, 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
336 Altering Consciousness

stimuli, and a reduction in spontaneous thought (Oakley, 2008). There is a


“becoming absorbed and allowing suggestions or spontaneous subjective
phenomena to affect experience” (Cardeña, 2008, p. 252).
Benham and Younger (2008) caution with regard to the empirical find-
ings of the healing effects of hypnosis:

For while hypnosis has been examined in relation to immune, cardiovascu-


lar, 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 sys-
tematically (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 perfor-
mance: 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]. Perfor-
mance 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, Don-
ald (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 sym-
bolic (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
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 337

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 prac-
tice 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. Cardeña and Cousins
(2010) observe that the “sleight of hand” or trickery often found in sha-
manic 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, per-
haps 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 communi-
cation). We interpret such practices to indicate the shaman’s use of a mim-
etic, 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.
338 Altering Consciousness

Cardeña’s (2008) proposal that emotions are transpersonal systems


whereby hypnosis involves emotional contagion processes lends support
to this view. Cardeña, Terhune, Lööf, 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 rit-
ual 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” (Cardeña, 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 schizo-
phrenia (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2000). Psychoactive drugs (e.g., indole-
amine 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 self-
boundaries 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 indi-
viduals indicate that the first dimension is associated with changes in meta-
bolic 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 tem-
poral cortex (Vollenweider & Geyer, 2001; Vollenweider, Leenders, Øye,
Hell, & Angst, 1997) [see Beauregard, Presti, this volume]. These findings
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 339

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 heal-
ing. 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 transforma-
tion,” often invoked during the shamanic rituals. Moreover, this “transforma-
tion” 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 com-
munity (i.e., both healer and patient) are invoked and engaged.

The healer attaches the patient’s emotions to the transactional symbols par-
ticularized 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 contem-
porary 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 sug-
gestive healing power to enter the individual and the other audience par-
ticipants 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 ter-
minology should not deflect from the careful phenomenology of the sub-
jective experience of the implicated ASC as a transformative experience
of embodied self in terms of the spatial, temporal, agentic, and intersub-
jective dimensions of experience during the healing process (Mishara &
Schwartz, 1997) [see Dieguez and Blanke, this volume].
Cardeña (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
340 Altering Consciousness

self-awareness in motor activity”). In the last case, the finding that “repeti-
tive activity does not have to be attended . . . once the whole organism
becomes attuned to the specific rhythm and then maintains residual unre-
flective 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., para-
sympathetic 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 tran-
sient hypofrontality and left-hemisphere inhibition” (p. 1460).
Interestingly, the authors comment, “a similar picture of disrupted func-
tional connectivity (estimated by the same method of EEG structural syn-
chrony) 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 com-
municating with each other normally” (p. 1452). This recalls cognitive def-
initions 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
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 341

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 dream-
ing, 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 rela-


tionship 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 infor-
mation (Alkire, Hudetz, & Tononi, 2008). Tononi (2008) defines this
breakdown as a reduction in “the ability of different cortical regions to inter-
act 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.
342 Altering Consciousness

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 informa-
tion. 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 (Aperspektivität).
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 inter-
connected 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 discon-
nection, 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 meta-
phoric “hero’s journey” during initiation (Randal et al., 2008) is a tempo-
rary suspending of current reality to undertake a confrontation with the
inner world. Here there is an overwhelming of the actual by the boundless
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 343

possibilities of inner experience, where perceiving, imagining, remember-


ing, 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 (Fingel-
kurts 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 integra-
tion 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 tempo-
rarily 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 (Aperspektivität)) 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 self-
transcendence or self-displacement of one’s current perspective. Jung’s
contemporary, Viktor von Weizsäcker, neurologist, phenomenologist,
sense physiologist, and celebrated founder of psychosomatic medicine in
Germany, writes that we only come to awareness of self not as a prereflec-
tive given but reflectively:

We only first really notice our own subjectivity when it is threatened to dis-
solve 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 Weizsäcker, 1950, p. 173, our translation)

Mishara (2010a) describes a similar symbolism of rebirth as meta-


phoric inner journey in Kafka’s writings: The self, which comes to expression
344 Altering Consciousness

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 phenomenologi-
cal 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 neu-
ral 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 dif-
ferent 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 exter-
nal (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).
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 345

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 Weizsäcker, 1950).
The act of narrating requires an ongoing shifting between internal and exter-
nal perspectives or reference frames with regard to one’s own body. The narrat-
ing 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 protago-
nist. 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 atten-
tion 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 narra-
tive 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 coordi-
nate 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 fundamen-
tally egocentric and have difficulty going beyond their own perspective
when anticipating what others are thinking or feeling” (p. 258; recall the
definition of naı̈ve realism as our default reality, above). Remembering
requires a shifting to an allocentric, viewpoint-independent frame of refer-
ence 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 some-
how 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
346 Altering Consciousness

to reflect on ourselves, to narrate our experience to others and thus tran-


scend 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 abil-
ity to say “I,” but the ability to reflectively access a “me,” an external rela-
tionship 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 out-
side, 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 epi-
sodic remembering, the ability to have explicit retrospective and prospec-
tive 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 dis-
placing our initially centric experience, by taking up a position that sit-
uates the embodied self in a shared community experience, which implies
many viewpoints different from my own. That is, an initially egocentric, view-
point 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 repre-
sentation is then produced in the precuneus via translation in the pos-
terior cortex, making use of current head direction” (Burgess et al.,
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 347

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 (pre-
sumably 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 experi-
ences of body-self symbolized by death-rebirth journey symbolism, a jour-
ney 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 jour-
ney of rebirth is the healing movement of self-transcendence.
Although the analogy may at first not seem obvious, giving into a nar-
rative 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
348 Altering Consciousness

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 psychologi-
cal healing.

Conclusions
We have described diverse ways that healing and ASC are associated
and have examined healing and shamanic practices, meditation, mindful-
ness, hypnosis, acute psychosis and its psychomimetic drug models, nar-
ratives, 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 phe-
menological psychiatrist, Wyss (1973) connects inner experience, espe-
cially when controlled processing decreases as in ASC, with a boundless
and sometimes dangerous loss of perspectivity in which the possible over-
whelms 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.

References
Abram, D. (2005). Between the body and the breathing earth: A reply to Ted
Toadvine. Environmental Ethics, 27, 171–190.
Alkire, M. T., Hudetz, A. G., & Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness and anesthesia.
Science, 322, 876–880.
Barušs, I. (2003). Alterations of consciousness. An empirical analysis for social scien-
tists. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Benham, G., & Younger, J. (2008). Hypnosis and mind–body interactions. In
M. R. Nash & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of hypnosis (pp. 393–
435). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Blankenburg, W. (2001). First steps toward a psychopathology of “common sense.”
Trans. by A. L. Mishara. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 8, 303–315.
Brewin, C. R., Gregory, J., Lipton, M., & Burgess, N. (2010). Intrusive images and
memories in psychological disorders: Characteristics, neural basis, and treat-
ment implications. Psychological Review, 117, 210–232.
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 349

Bridgeman, B., & Hoover, M. (2008). Processing spatial layout by perception and
sensorimotor interaction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61,
851–859. doi: 10.1080/17470210701623712.
Burgess, N., Becker, S., King, J. A., & O’Keefe, J. (2001). Memory for events and
their spatial context: Models and experiments. Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 356, 1493–1503.
Byrne, P., Becker, S., & Burgess, N. (2007). Remembering the past and imagining
the future: A neural model of spatial memory and imagery. Psychological
Review, 114, 340–375.
Carli, G., Manzoni, D., & Santarcangelo, E. L. (2008). Hypnotizability-related
integration of perception and action. Cognitive Neuropsychology, doi: 10.1080/
02643290801913712.
Cardeña, E. (2005). The phenomenology of deep hypnosis: Quiescent and physi-
cally active. International Journal of Clinical & Experimental Hypnosis, 53, 37–59.
Cardeña, E. (2008). Consciousness and emotions as interpersonal and transper-
sonal systems. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15, 249–263.
Cardeña, E., & Cousins, W. E. (2010). From artifice to actuality: Ritual, shaman-
ism, hypnosis and healing. In J. Weinhold & G. Samuel (Eds.), Varieties of rit-
ual experience (pp. 315–329). Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz.
Cardeña, E., Terhune, D. B., Lööf, A., & Buratti, S. (2009). Hypnotic experience
is related to emotional contagion. International Journal of Clinical and Experi-
mental Hypnosis, 57, 33–46.
Chisea, A., Brambilla, P., & Serretti, A. (2010). Functional neural correlates of
mindfulness meditations in comparison with psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy
and placebo effect. Is there a link? Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 22, 104–117.
Dakwar, E., & Levin, F. R. (2009). The emerging role of meditation in addressing
psychiatric illness, with a focus on substance abuse disorders. Harvard Review
of Psychiatry, 17, 254–267.
Decety, J. (2007). A social cognitive neuroscience model of human empathy. In
E. Harmon-Jones & P. Winkelman (Eds.), Social neuroscience: Integrating biologi-
cal and psychological explanations of behavior (pp. 246–270). New York: Guilford.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dow, J. (1986). Universal aspects of symbolic meaning: A theoretical synthesis.
American Anthropologist, 88, 56–69.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology, 6,
178–190.
Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H. S., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., &
Anderson, A. K. (2007). Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation
reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive & Affective
Neuroscience, 2, 313–322.
Fingelkurts, A. A., Fingelkurts, A.A., Kallio, S., & Revonsuo, A. (2007). Cortex
functional connectivity as a neurophysiological correlate of hypnosis: an EEG
case study. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1452–1462.
350 Altering Consciousness

Fiske, S. T. (2010). Social beings, core motives in social psychology (2nd ed.). Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.
Fortney, L., & Taylor, M. (2010). Meditation in medical practice: A review of the
evidence and practice. Primary Care, 37, 81–90.
Grant, J. A., & Rainville, P. (2009). Pain sensitivity and analgesic effects of mindful
states in Zen meditators: A cross-sectional study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 71,
106–114.
Head, H. (1920) Studies in neurology 2. London: Oxford University Press.
Head, H., & Holmes, G. (1911). Sensory disturbances from cerebral lesions.
Brain, 34, 102–254.
Hoffman, R. E. (2007). A social deafferentation hypothesis for induction of active
schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 33, 1066–1070.
Holroyd, C. B., & Coles, M. G. H. (2002). The neural basis of human error
processing: Reinforcement learning, dopamine, and the error-related negativ-
ity. Psychological Review, 109, 679–709.
Horowitz, S. (2010). Health benefits of meditation: What the newest research
shows. Alternative and Complementary Therapies, 16(4), 223–228. doi:10.1089/
act.2010.16402.
Jung, C. G. (1969). The psychology of the transference. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen.
Knight, W. F. J. (1936). Cumaen gates. A reference of the 6th Aeneid to the initiation
pattern. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Krippner, S., & Achterberg, J. (2000). Anomalous healing experiences. In E.
Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Exam-
ining the scientific evidence (pp. 353–395). Washington, DC: American Psychologi-
cal Association.
Law, S., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2005). Inuit interpretations of sleep paralysis. Trans-
cultural Psychiatry, 42, 93–112.
Lee, B.-O., Kirmayer, L. J., Groleau, D. (2010). Therapeutic processes and per-
ceived helpfulness of Dang-ki (Chinese shamanism) from the symbolic healing
perspective. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 34, 56–105.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Lynn, S. J., Kirsch, I., & Hallquist, M. N. (2008). Social cognitive theories of hyp-
nosis. In: M. R. Nash & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of hypnosis
(pp. 111–140). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Mahoney, M. J., & Avener, M. (1977). Psychology of the elite athlete: An explor-
atory study. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1, 135–141.
McGeown, W. J., Mazzoni, G., Venneri, A., & Kirsch, I. (2009). Hypnotic induction
decreases anterior default mode activity. Consciousness and Cognition, 18, 848–855.
Mishara, A. L. (1995). Narrative and psychotherapy: The phenomenology of heal-
ing. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 49, 180–195.
Mishara, A. L. (2001). On Wolfgang Blankenburg, common sense and schizo-
phrenia. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 8, 317–322.
Mishara, A. L. (2007a). Missing links in phenomenological clinical neuroscience?
Why we are still not there yet. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 60, 559–569.
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 351

Mishara, A. L. (2007b). Is minimal self preserved in schizophrenia? A subcompo-


nents view. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 715–721.
Mishara, A. L. (2009). Human bodily ambivalence: Precondition for social cogni-
tion and its disruption in neuropsychiatric disorders. Philosophy, Psychiatry &
Psychology, 15, 234–237.
Mishara, A. L. (2010a). Kafka’s doubles, paranoia and the brain: Hypnagogic vs.
hyper-reflexive models of disruption of self in neuropsychiatric disorders
and anomalous conscious states. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine
(PEHM), 5, 13; doi:10.1186/1747-5341-5-13.
Mishara, A. L. (2010b). Autoscopy: Disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and
anomalous conscious states. In S. Gallagher & D. Schmicking (Eds.), Handbook of
phenomenology and cognitive science (pp. 591–634). Berlin, Germany: Springer.
Mishara, A. L. (2010c). Klaus Conrad (1905–1961): Delusional mood, psychosis
and beginning schizophrenia. Clinical concept translation-feature. Schizophre-
nia Bulletin, 36, 9–13.
Mishara A. L. (in press a). The “unconscious” in paranoid delusional psychosis?
Phenomenology, neuroscience, psychoanalysis. In D. Lohmar & J. Brudzinska
(Eds.), Founding psychoanalysis. New York: Springer.
Mishara, A. L. (in press b) Where is “point of view” in the coherence/incoherence
of traumatic memories debate? Consciousness and Cognition.
Mishara, A. L., Bell, M. D., Fiszdon, J., Bryson, G., Nicholls, S., & Wexler, B. E.
(2006). Cognitive remediation improves but does not normalize brain func-
tion in schizophrenia: fMRI of a novel working memory task pre- and post-
treatment. Biological Psychiatry, 59, S313.
Mishara, A. L., & Corlett, P. (2009). Are delusions biologically adaptive? Salvag-
ing the doxastic shear pin. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 530–531.
Mishara, A. L., & Schwartz, M. A. (1995). Conceptual analysis of psychiatric
approaches: Phenomenology, psychopathology and classification. Current
Opinion in Psychiatry, 6, 312–317.
Mishara, A., & Schwartz, M. (1997). Psychopathology in the light of emergent
trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenol-
ogy. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 10, 383–389.
Nir, Y., & Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: From phenomenology to
neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 88–100.
Oakley, D. A. (2008). Hypnosis, trance and suggestion: Evidence from neuroi-
maging. In M. R. Nash & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of hypnosis
(pp. 365–392). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
O’Regan, B., & Hirshberg, C. (1993). Spontaneous remission: An annotated bibliog-
raphy. Sausalito, CA: Institute for Noetic Sciences.
Ospina, M. B., Bond, T. K., Karkhaneh, M., Tjosvold, L., Vandermeer, B., Liang,
Y., et al. (2007). Meditation practices for health: State of the research. Evidence
Report—Technology Assessment, 155, 1–263.
Paus, T. (2001). Primate anterior cingulate cortex: Where motor control, drive
and cognition interface. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 417–424.
352 Altering Consciousness

Plessner, H. (1965). Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch [The steps of the
organic and the person] (2nd ed.). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter.
Plessner, H. (1970). Laughing and crying: A study of the limits of human behavior.
Trans. S. J. Churchill & M. Grene. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Plessner, H. (1980–1985). Gesammelte Schriften [Collected writings]. Frankfurt,
Germany: Suhrkamp.
Rainville, P., Hofbauer, R. K., Paus, T., Duncan, G. H., Bushnell, M. C., & Price,
D. D. (1999). Cerebral mechanisms of hypnotic induction and suggestion.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11(1), 110–125.
Ramsperger, A. G. (1940). Objects perceived and objects known. Journal of Phi-
losophy, 37, 291–297.
Randal, P., Geekie, J., Lambrecht, I., & Taitimu, M. (2008). Dissociation, psycho-
sis, and spirituality: Whose voices are we hearing. In: A. Moskowitz, I. Schae-
fer, J. Martin, & M. J. Dorahy (Eds.), Psychosis, trauma and dissociation:
Emerging perspectives on severe psychopathology (pp. 333–345). Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley.
Rechtschaffen, A. (1978). The single-mindedness and isolation of dreams. Sleep 1,
97–109.
Revonsuo, A., Kallio, S., & Sikka, P. (2005). What is an altered state of conscious-
ness? Philosophical Psychology, 22, 187–204.
Reynolds, J., Zacks, J. M., & Braver, T. S. (2007). A computational model of event
segmentation from perceptual prediction. Cognitive Science, 31, 613–643.
Rock, A. J., & Krippner, S. (2007). Does the concept of “altered state of con-
sciousness” rest on a mistake? International Journal of Transpersonal Studies,
26, 33–40.
Safran, J. D., & Muran, J. C. (2000). Negotiating the therapeutic alliance. New York:
Guilford.
Schneider, R., Nidich, S., Kotchen, J. M., Grim, C., Rainforth, M., et al. (2009).
Effects of stress reduction on clinical events in African Americans with coro-
nary heart disease: A randomized controlled study (abstr 1177). Circulation,
120,(18suppl), S461.
Schwartz, M. A., & Wiggins, O. P. (2010). Psychosomatic medicine and the phi-
losophy of life. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 5, 2.
Spiegel, D. (2008). Intelligent design or designed intelligence? Hypnotizability as
neurobiological adaptation. In M. R. Nash & A. J. Barnier (Eds.), The Oxford
handbook of hypnosis (pp. 179–200). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: A provisional mani-
festo. Biological Bulletin, 215, 216–242.
Tononi, G., & Laureys, S. (2008). The neurology of consciousness: An overview.
In S. Laureys & G. Tononi (Eds.), The neurology of consciousness (pp. 375–412).
Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psy-
chology, 53, 1–25.
Altered States of Consciousness as Paradoxically Healing 353

Vaitl, D., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Jamieson, G., Kotchoubey, B., Kübler, 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 con-
sciousness: 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). Differ-
ential psychopathology and patterns of cerebral glucose utilisation produced
by (S)- and (R)-ketamine in healthy volunteers using positron emission tomog-
raphy (PET). European Neuropsychopharmacology, 7, 25–38.
Weidner, K. E. (2010) Evolution, facial expression, recognition, and social relation-
ships. Unpublished paper, Chicago School of Professional Psychology.
Weizsäcker, 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.
This page intentionally left blank
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 asso-
ciated with altered states of consciousness (ASC), such as those associated
with mesmerism and mediumistic trance (Alvarado, 1998), and this rela-
tionship 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). Psychi-
cal research paved the way for parapsychology, or the study of anomalous
psychology, which is the scientific investigation of psi and related anoma-
lous 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 “paranor-
mal 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 dif-
ference 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
356 Altering Consciousness

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 anoma-
lous phenomena, some of which may have a psi component, and these
include near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, supposed past-
life 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 trans-
personal 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 relation-
ship 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 phenomen-
onologically 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 Cardeña, Volume 1]. In some cases, however, the anomalous
experience is the state because the experience is defined by the phenom-
enological 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). Follow-
ing 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 genu-
inely as they seem. There may be any number of cognitive errors occurring
that cause the individual to misinterpret the event, be they caused by indi-
vidual knowledge, beliefs, misjudgements of probability, misperception,
misremembering, confabulation, or the context of the situation (Pekala &
Cardeña, 2000). Nevertheless, researchers should be wary of simply label-
ling 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.
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 357

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 condi-
tions 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 anthropo-
logically (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, crav-
ing, major physiological disturbances, delirium, disorientation, or amnesia,
358 Altering Consciousness

more or less reliably produces thought, mood, and perceptual changes”


(Grinspoon & Bakalar, 1998, p. 9). The recent rediscovery and use of psy-
chedelic substances in the developed world during the last century has gen-
erated 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 observa-
tions 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 litera-
ture indicates that anomalous experiences tend to occur far more with psy-
chedelics than with other psychoactive substances. This finding also
appears to be rooted in the traditional divinatory and shamanic use of psy-
chedelic plants reported in the historical, anthropological, and ethnobotani-
cal 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 expe-
riences are significantly more likely to have used psychedelic substances,
with more frequent use associated with a greater likelihood of an experi-
ence. 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 sponta-
neous occurrence of both types of experience (Luke, 2008).
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 359

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 com-
pared 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 seem-
ingly 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 (Cardeña, 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) psilocybin-
and/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 neurobio-
logical 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 map-
ping of the individual states in relation to the particular anomalous experi-
ences is clearly a major limitation, both with psychedelics and with other
induction procedures, and this is a necessary direction for future research
(Cardeña, 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 explora-
tory, 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.
360 Altering Consciousness

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 free-
response 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 naı̈vely 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 con-
trolled 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 experi-
ences, whether they are genuinely paranormal or not. Indeed, there exist
some well-evidenced and -reasoned conjectures about the role of psyche-
delic 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 phe-
nomenology of the experience (the state) and the personality traits of the
individual before any real headway can be made, though this may be pre-
mature 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 dif-
fering 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,
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 361

specifically ESP, apparitions, mediumship, OBEs, past life visions, and entity
encounters (Sherwood, 2002). Sleep paralysis, a fairly common sleep disor-
der 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 nor-
mal people. In addition to the usual anomalous experiences occurring during
hypnagogia, sleep paralysis has been associated with psychokinetic and near-
death experiences (Sherwood, 2002).
Evaluating the occurrence of psi phenomena, Sherwood (2002) con-
siders 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 qualita-
tively 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 neg-
ate the possibility that the dreams are just unlikely chance occurrences.
However, Van de Castle (1977) notes that psychic dreams are frequently
362 Altering Consciousness

unusually vivid and intense, though clearly this does not make them unar-
guably 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 naı̈ve 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 indepen-
dent 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 con-
trolled but simplified conceptual replications have been conducted with-
out EEG monitoring by having percipients dream at home. These later
studies also incorporate clairvoyance designs, without a sender, and pre-
cognition 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
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 363

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 motiva-
tional 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 (Cardeña, 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
Cardeña & 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 expe-
rience 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 (Cardeña, 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 sig-
nificant (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 exhibit-
ing “psi missing”—the selection of the correct target image at significantly
364 Altering Consciousness

below-chance expectation—possibly indicating that factors other than


hypnosis were causing the psi effect (Stanford & Stein, 1994). One explana-
tion 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 (Cardeña, 2010). Further, if
the experimental difference is assumed to be caused by the hypnotic induc-
tion, questions still remain as to whether the apparent ESP performance
increase is caused by general induction factors (e.g., relaxation) or to state-
trait interactions, such as the hypnotic context and hypnotizability (Cardeña,
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., Honor-
ton, 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 associ-
ated with meditation and other ASC, Honorton (1974) proposed the pro-
cess 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 pub-
lished 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 pub-
lished 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
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 365

in groups, and significant RNG deviations has continued in recent experi-


ments (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 discern-
ment of the appropriate psi-conducive factor, whether it was prior medita-
tion 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 con-
ceptually 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 medi-
tators 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 med-
itators 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 con-
sequence 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
366 Altering Consciousness

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 comfort-
able 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 meta-
analyses of those have been conducted, though few methodologies in para-
psychology 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 contro-
versy 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
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 367

explored the use of auditory targets instead of the standard visual ones.
Indeed, some of the studies included in the Milton and Wiseman meta-
analysis were specifically designed to “destroy test” the ganzfeld protocol
and had predicted impoverished results through the negative manipula-
tion 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 meta-
analysis studies for standardness as ganzfeld studies, revealing a signifi-
cant positive correlation between study standardness and degree of suc-
cess (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 pro-
vide 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 non-
repeatability, 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 compar-
ing 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 elicit-
ing 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 induc-
tion, 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
368 Altering Consciousness

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 ini-
tial 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 phe-
nomenological characteristics associated with ESP scoring, finding signifi-
cant 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, pro-
vides the basis for a richer understanding of altered states and psi, though
the greatest advances are likely to come through the additional considera-
tion of traits, as well as states, and how they interact as potentially psi-
conducive factors (Cardeña, 2009).

States and Traits


Positive relationships have been found between the report of spontane-
ous 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 (Cardeña & Terhune, 2008). Similarly, certain per-
sonality 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” personal-
ity trait cluster of transliminality, temporal lobe lability, boundary thin-
ness, and positive schizotypy (Simmonds-Moore, in press). Furthermore,
under this rubric, boundary thinness might as also be considered as a state
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 369

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 (Cardeña, 2009; Simmonds-
Moore, 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/nonganz-
feld and schizotypy subtypes in terms of psi performance (Simmonds-
Moore & 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 with-
out 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 (Kripp-
ner, 2005; Luke, 2010), mediumistic states (Gauld, 1982), spirit posses-
sion states (Stevenson, 1995), near-death states (Greyson, 2000), out-of-
body 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 experien-
ces, there has been a very limited consideration of their capacity to dem-
onstrate 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 lab-
oratory 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 meta-
analysis, 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
370 Altering Consciousness

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 sig-
nificant 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 relation-
ship 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 (Cardeña, 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, ill-
defined terminology, and the overlooking of individual differences and
the mutability of altered states (Cardeña, 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 con-
sciousness studies per se are potentially enormous, as the findings fre-
quently 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.

References
Alvarado, C. S. (1998). ESP and altered states of consciousness: An overview of
conceptual and research trends. Journal of Parapsychology, 62, 27–63.
Alvarado, C. S. (2000). Out-of-body experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.
Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 183–218). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Bem, D., & Honorton, C. (1994). Does psi exist? Replicable evidence of an
anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 4–18.
Bem, D., Palmer, J., & Broughton, R. (2001). Updating the ganzfeld database:
A victim of its own success? Journal of Parapsychology, 65, 207–218.
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 371

Braud, W. G. (1990). Meditation and psychokinesis. Parapsychology Review,


20(1), 9–11.
Cardeña, E. (2009). Beyond Plato? Toward a science of alterations of conscious-
ness. In C. A. Roe, W. Kramer, & L. Coly (Eds.). Utrecht II: Charting the future
of parapsychology (pp. 305–322). New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Cardeña, E. (2010). Anomalous experiences during deep hypnosis. In M. Smith
(Ed.), Anomalous experiences: Essays from parapsychological and psychological
perspectives (pp. 93–107). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Cardeña, E., & Terhune, D. (2008). A distinct personality trait? The relationship
between hypnotizability, absorption, self-transcendence, and mental bounda-
ries. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Associa-
tion, 61–73.
Devereux, P. (2008). The long trip: A prehistory of psychedelia (2nd ed.). Brisbane:
Daily Grail.
Gauld, A. (1982). Mediumship and survival. London: Heinemann.
Gissurarson, L. R. (1997). Methods of enhancing PK task performance. In S.
Krippner (Ed.), Advances in parapsychological research 8 (pp. 88–125). Jeffer-
son, NC: McFarland.
Greyson, B. (2000). Near-death experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S.
Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evi-
dence (pp. 315–352). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Grinspoon, L., & Bakalar, J. B. (1998). Psychedelic drugs reconsidered (2nd ed.).
New York: Lindesmith Centre.
Grof, S. (2009). LSD: Doorway to the numinous. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Honorton, C. (1974). Psi-conducive states of awareness. In E. Mitchell & J. White
(Eds.), Psychic exploration: A challenge for science (pp. 616–638). New York:
Putnam.
Honorton, C. (1977). Psi and internal attention states. In B. B. Wolman (Ed.), Hand-
book of parapsychology (pp. 435–472). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Hyman, R., & Honorton, C. (1986). A joint communiqué: The psi ganzfeld con-
troversy. Journal of Parapsychology, 50, 351–364.
Ivtzan, I. (2008). Meditation on consciousness. Journal of Scientific Exploration,
22(2), 147–159.
Kelly, E. F., & Locke, R. G., (2009). Altered states of consciousness and psi: An his-
torical survey and research prospectus. New York: Parapsychology Foundation.
Kelly, E. F., Kelly, E. W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Gross, M., & Greyson, B.
(2007). Irreducible mind: Toward a psychology for the 21st century. Plymouth,
UK: Rowman & Littlefield.
Krippner, S. (2005). Shamanism. In J. Henry (Ed.), Parapsychology: Research on
exceptional experiences (pp. 149–163). Hove, East Sussex: Routledge.
Luke, D. P. (2008). Psychedelic substances and paranormal phenomena:
A review of the research. Journal of Parapsychology, 72, 77–107.
Luke, D. (2009). Lecture report: Meditation and precognition—Dr. Serena
Roney-Dougal. Paranormal Review, 50, 22–23.
372 Altering Consciousness

Luke, D. P. (2010). Anthropology and parapsychology: Still hostile sisters in sci-


ence? Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness & Culture, 3,
245–266.
Luke, D., & Friedman, H. (2010). The neurochemistry of psi reports and associ-
ated experiences. In S. Krippner, and H. Friedman (Eds.), Mysterious minds:
The neurobiology of psychics, mediums and other extraordinary people (pp. 163–185).
Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger.
Luke, D. P., & Kittenis, M. (2005). A preliminary survey of paranormal experien-
ces with psychoactive drugs. Journal of Parapsychology, 69, 305–327.
McClenon, J. (2002). Wondrous healing: Shamanism, human evolution, and the origin
of religion. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
Milton, J. (1997). Meta-analysis of free-response ESP studies without altered
states of consciousness. Journal of Parapsychology, 61(4), 279–319.
Milton, J., & Wiseman, R. (1999). Does psi exist? Lack of replication of
an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 125,
387–391.
Myers, F. (1903). Human personality and its survival of bodily death (2 vols.).
London: Longmans Green.
Nelson, R. D., Bradish, G. J., Dobyns, Y. H., Dunne, B. J., & Jahn, R. G. (1996).
FieldREG anomalies in group situations. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 10,
111–141.
Nelson, R. D., Jahn, R. G., Dunne, B. J., Dobyns, Y. H., & Bradish, G. J. (1998).
FieldREG II: Consciousness field effects: Replications and explorations. Journal
of Scientific Exploration, 12, 425–454.
Palmer, J. (1979). A community mail survey of psychic experiences. Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research, 73, 221–251.
Palmer, J. (2003). ESP in the ganzfeld: Analysis of a debate. Journal of Conscious-
ness Studies, 10(6–7), 51–68.
Parker, A. (2005). Psi and altered states of consciousness. In M. A. Thalbourne &
L. Storm (Eds.), Parapsychology in the twenty-first century: Essays on the future of
psychical research (pp. 65–89). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Pekala, R., & Cardeña, E. (2000). Methodological issues in the study of altered
states of consciousness and anomalous experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, &
S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining to scientific evidence
(pp. 47–81). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Pekala, R. J., Kumar, V. K., & Marcano, G. (1995). Anomalous/paranormal expe-
riences, hypnotic susceptibility, and dissociation. Journal of the American Soci-
ety for Psychical Research, 89, 313–331.
Radin, D. I. (1997). The conscious universe: The scientific truth of psychic phenomena.
New York: HarperEdge.
Radin, D. I., Rebman, J. M., & Cross, M. P. (1996). Anomalous organization of
random events by group consciousness: Two exploratory experiments. Journal
of Scientific Exploration, 10, 143–168.
Anomalous Phenomena, Psi, and Altered Consciousness 373

Radin, D. I., Stone, J., Levine, E., Eskandarnejad, S., Schlitz, M., Kozak, L., Mandel,
D., & Hayssen, G. (2008). Compassionate intention as a therapeutic interven-
tion by partners of cancer patients: Effects of distant intention on the patients’
autonomic nervous system. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 4,
235–243.
Roe, C. A. (2010). The role of altered states of consciousness in extrasensory
experiences. In M. Smith (Ed.), Anomalous experiences: Essays from parapsycho-
logical and psychological perspectives (pp. 25–49). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Roney-Dougal, S., & Solfvin, J. (2006). Yogic attainment in relation to awareness
of precognitive targets. Journal of Parapsychology, 20, 91–120.
Roney-Dougal, S., Solfvin, J., & Fox, J. (2008). An exploration of degree of medi-
tation attainment in relation to psychic awareness with Tibetan Buddhists.
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 22, 161–178.
Rowe, W. D. (1998). Physical measurement of episodes of focused group energy.
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12, 569–581.
Schmeidler, G. (1994). ESP experiments in 1978–1992: The glass is half full. In
S. Kripnner (Ed.), Advances in parapsychological research 7 (pp. 104–197). Jef-
ferson, NC: McFarland.
Schmidt, S. (in press). What meditation can do: Mental health and exceptional
experiences. In C. Simmonds-Moore (Ed.), Exceptional human experiences,
health and mental health. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Shanon, B. (2003). Hallucinations. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 3–31.
Sherwood, S. (2002). Relationship between the hypnagogic/hypnopompic states
and reports of anomalous experiences. Journal of Parapsychology, 66, 127–150.
Sherwood, S. J., & Roe, C. A. (2003). A review of dream ESP studies conducted
since the Maimonides dream ESP programme. Journal of Consciousness Studies
10, 85–109.
Simmonds-Moore, C., & Holt, N. (2007). Trait, state and psi: A comparison of
psi performance between clusters of scorers on schizotypy in a ganzfeld and
waking control condition. Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, 71, 197–
215.
Simmonds-Moore, C. (in press). Exploring ways of manipulating anomalous
experiences for mental health and transcendence. In C. Simmonds-Moore
(Ed.), Exceptional human experiences, health and mental health. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Stanford, R. G. (1990). An experimentally testable model for spontaneous psi
events: A review of related evidence and concepts from parapsychology and
other sciences. In S. Krippner (Ed.), Advances in parapsychological research
(Vol. 6, pp. 54–167). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Stanford, R. G., & Stein, A. G. (1994). A meta-analysis of ESP studies contrasting
hypnosis and a comparison condition. Journal of Parapsychology, 58, 235–269.
Stevenson, I. (1995). Possession and exorcism: An essay review. Journal of Para-
psychology, 59, 69–76.
374 Altering Consciousness

Storm, L., Tressoldi, P. E., & Di Riso, L. (2010). Meta-analysis of free-response


studies, 1992–2008: Assessing the noise reduction model in parapsychology.
Psychological Bulletin, 136, 471–485.
Stickgold, R., Pace-Schott, E., & Hobson, J. A. (1994). A new paradigm for dream
research: Mentation reports following spontaneous arousal from REM and
NREM sleep recorded in a home setting. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 16–29.
Stokes, D. M. (1997). Spontaneous psi phenomena. In S. Krippner (Ed.), Advan-
ces in parapsychological research 8 (pp. 6–87). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Tart, C. T. (1977). Drug-induced states of consciousness. In B. Wolman (Ed.),
Handbook of parapsychology (pp. 500–525). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Tart, C. T. (1993). Marijuana intoxication, psi, and spiritual experiences. Journal
of the American Society for Psychical Research, 87, 149–170.
Thalbourne, M. (2009). Glossary. Journal of Parapsychology, 73, 205–209.
Thalbourne, M., & Maltby, J. (2008). Transliminality, thin boundaries, unusual
experiences, and temporal lobe lability. Personality and Individual Differences,
44, 1617–1623.
Ullman, M., Krippner, S., & Vaughan, A. (2002). Dream telepathy: Experiments in
extrasensory perception (3rd ed.). Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads.
Usha, S., & Pasricha, S. (1989a). Claims of paranormal experiences: I. Survey of
psi and psi-related experiences. Journal of the National Institute of Mental Health
and Neurosciences (India), 7, 143–150.
Usha, S., & Pasricha, S. (1989b). Claims of paranormal experiences: II. Attitudes
toward psychical research and factors associated with psi and psi-related expe-
riences. Journal of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences
(India), 7, 151–157.
Van de Castle, R. L. (1977). Sleep and dreams. In B. B. Wolman (Ed.), Handbook
of parapsychology (pp. 473–499). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Wackerman, J., Pütz, P., Büchi, S., Strauch, I., & Lehmann, D. (2002). Brain elec-
trical activity and subjective experience during altered states of consciousness:
Ganzfeld and hypnagogic states. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 46,
123–146.
Weserman, H. M. (1819). Versuche willkürlicher Traumbildung [Experiments in
induced dream-formation]. Archives f. d. Tierischen Magnetismus, 6, 135–142.
About the Editors

ETZEL CARDEÑA, 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 Reli-
gion (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 permaculture-
based intentional communities.
This page intentionally left blank
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 Contribu-
tions 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 pub-
lished: 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 Parapsychologi-
cal 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 phi-
losophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness,
and he has around 100 publications in this area. His book Understanding
378 Advisory Board

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 Université


de Montréal (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 Neurosci-


ence at the École Polytechnique Fédérade de Lausanne.

Andrea E. Blätter, 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 für 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 sub-
strate, 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 doc-
toral 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
380 About the Contributors

clinical neuropsychologist before joining the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuro-


science at the Brain Mind Institute of the Lausanne Technological Institute
(EPFL), where he is currently completing his Ph.D. in neuroscience.

Jörg C. Fachner, Ph.D., is senior research fellow at the Finnish Centre of


Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at University of Jyväskylä,
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 Transper-
sonal 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 con-
sciousness, 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 Liège, 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 381

David Luke, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of


Greenwich, London, and currently also the president of the Parapsycho-
logical 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 Trans-


personal 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 inves-
tigating 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 larg-
est 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 Profes-


sional Psychology. He researches and publishes on altered states of con-
sciousness 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 under-


graduate 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, research-
ing shamanism amongst the Shipibo peoples of northern Peru.

David E. Nichols, Ph.D., is the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Dis-


tinguished Chair in Pharmacology and a Distinguished Professor of
382 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 pharma-
cology of psychedelics.

Quentin Noirhomme is a researcher at the Coma Science Group, Cyclo-


tron Research Centre and Neurology department, University and Univer-
sity Hospital of Liège. 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 Berke-


ley, 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 con-
sultant 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 psychopa-


thology at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, after earlier studies
at the University of Valencia, Spain. She has collaborated in several inves-
tigations on attachment in early childhood as well as adult attachment rep-
resentations, 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: Wixárika,
Women, Weavers and Shamans (University of Utah Press, 2002).
About the Contributors 383

Michael A. Schwartz, M.D., is clinical professor, Texas A&M Health


Science Center, College of Medicine, staff psychiatrist at Austin State Hos-
pital, 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 Égnér 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.
This page intentionally left blank
Index

(“f”indicates a figure; “n” indicates a note; Alcohol, sedative-hypnotic, 31


“t” indicates a table) Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), alteration of
consciousness approach, 173
AA/NAC (Alcoholics Anonymous/Native Alcorta, C. S., 225
American Church), addiction Alibi (Morante), 279
program, 173 Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, 245
Abram, D., 338 Alien abduction experiences (AAEs), 293,
Absence seizures, 264f, 269 310–11
Acetylcholine, 30; and nicotine, 32 Allocentric perspective, 346
Achterberg, J. 330, 333 Alloesthesia, 244
Activation, AIM model of consciousness, 7 a1-adrenergic receptor sites, 135
Addiction, 33, 170; AA model, 173; Alterations in mood, 290–91
constructions of, 169–71; contracted Alterations in sense of agency, 289
state of consciousness, 176, 183; and Alterations in sense of attribution, 290
drug consumption, 168–69; Alterations in sense of self, 288–90
endogenous reward system, 180–81; Altered states of consciousness (ASC):
medical model, 170–71; psychedelics adolescent risky behavior, 223;
treatment, 114–15, 153, 176, 177; biological rhythm impact, 8; and bodily
sensitization neurochemistry, 181–82; self, 237–40; and development,
socio-cultural learning, 182 211–12; definition, 328; dissociation,
Adjustment Disorder (DSM-IV), 218–19; and drug consumption,
NDEs, 308 167–68; and emotions, 279–82; and
Adolescent cognitive development, ESP, 355, 370; experiences of, 328;
223–26 genetic predisposition, 212; and
Adulthood cognitive development, 226 healing, 327–31; late adulthood, 228;
Advanced sleep phase syndrome and LSD, 121, 123; nonpathological,
(ASPS), 16 283–84, 285t–86t; orgasm as, 194–95;
Aghajanian, G. K., 132 pathological, 269–75, 285t–86t; and
AIM (activation/information/modulation) peyote, 147, 149; pharmacological,
model of consciousness, sleep/wake 267–68; physiological, 265–67; and
cycle, 6–7 psychopathology, 282–94, 285t–86t;
Akinetic mutism, 273 range, 43; reward system, 177–79; in
386 Index

sexual activity, 191–92; stability, 3–4; Attention shifting, infancy, 215


subjective reflections, 128; therapeutic Auto-ganzfeld, 366
recommendations, 294, 295; time- Autogenic training, information inflow
limited, 174; young adults, 226 limitation, 14
Altered states of consciousness with Autoscopy, 249, 288, 289
distorted reality (ASCDRs): differences, Avadhuti, 199
46–47; and dopamine, 45, 46, 48; Awareness: consciousness content, 264f;
range, 43–44 internal self/external sensory, 264,
Altered structure of experience, 267f; regions, neuroimaging studies,
in VSEs, 316 267f, 275
Alternations in perception, 291–93 Axelrod, Julius, 90t
Alvarado, C. S., 361, 363, 368 Ayahuasca, 88t, 92, 103, 108; in alcohol
Amaritia muscaria, 51 and drug addiction treatment, 113–14;
American Psychiatric Association, on brew preparation, 110–12; current
possession trance, 313 applications and uses, 111–12;
Amygdala, glutamate, 137; and olfactory experience, 96; healing use, 112;
information, 152 modern analogues, 114; syncretic sects,
Anadenanthera: leaves, 86, 87t, 88t, 93, 112–13
109, 111; snuff, 33, 109–10 “Ayahuasca tourism,” 90t, 113
Anesthetics, and bodily Ayahuasqueros, 110
consciousness, 253 Azari, N. P., 69, 70
Anhedonia, 291
Anomalous experiences, 356–57; history, Baars, Bernard, 280
357; and sleep, 360–63; trait variables, Banisteriopsis caapi, 88t, 91, 101; harmala
368–69. See also Extrasensory alkaloids, 103
perception, Parapsychology, Psi Barbiturates, sedative-hypnotic, 31
phenomena Barnhouse, R. T., 318
Anosognosia, 241, 245, 246 Barquinha, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), in Barrel cactus, 155 n.4
meditation, 333, 334 Basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC):
Anticholinergic drugs, in shamanistic consciousness, 11–12; protective
practice, 51 mechanisms, 12–15
Anticipation of reward, and Beique, J. C., 133
dopamine, 180 Belonging, sense of, 329, 338
Apallic syndrome, 272 Belz, M., 295
Aperspektivität, loss of perspective, 342, 343 Benham, G., 336
Areca nut, 32 Bentall, R. P., 292
Asomatoscopy, 245 Bereavement (DSM-IV), normal
Aspen Neurobehavioral Conference reaction, 317
Workgroup, 273 Bergson, Henri, 77
Assagioli, Roberto, 314 Beta state, typical waking in mammals, 43
Atropine: in shamanistic practice, 51; in Betel nut (Areca seed), 32
South American Solanaceae, 112 Bharati, A., 198
Attachment: development infancy, 215; Bigwood, Jeremy, 90t, 102
disorganized, 218 Biological rhythms, 4; disturbances,
Attention control, in meditation, 331 15–16
Attention focusing facilitation experiment Bodily consciousness: and ASC, 237–40,
(AFFE), psi effects, 365 288; and drugs, 252–53; experimental
Index 387

procedures, 253–54; in hypnosis, Cave paintings, shamanistic themes, 56


251–52; in mystical states, 251; Cerebral cortex, body schema, 241
near-death-experiences, 250; Changa, smoking, 113
neurological disorders, 240–49; Channeling, 290
out-of-body experience, 249–50; Charles Bonnet syndrome, visual loss, 47
and parietal lobe, 74 Chemical synapses, 25, 26f
“Body armoring,” Reich, 193 Chemical synapses, signaling activity,
Body schema; in hypnosis and meditation, 27–28
335; vs. body image, 344 n.2, 344–45 Chisea, A., 334
BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) Christians in a Charismatic/Pentecostal
signal changes, 71, 72, 74 tradition, brain imaging
Borderline personality disorders, participation, 71
emotional shifts, 293–94 Chronobiology, 4
Boundary thinness, 368–69 Circadian biological rhythm, 4, 5;
Bowlby, J., 218 deregulation disturbances, 15–16
Brain: complexity, 25; signaling structure, Clapton, Eric, 169 n.1
25, 26f Clarke, I., 303
Brain death, 270–71 Classic anesthetic agents, 267–68
Brain imaging studies: conscious Coca plant, stimulant, 31
awareness of emotion, 73–74; future Cognitive abilities, and dopamine, 44
directions, 77–79; positive emotions, Cohoba snuff, 86, 108
72–73; religious experience, 69–72 Coles, R., 220
Brain-mind connection, chemical nature, Collective ingestion, 176
25, 36 Coma, 264, 271; awareness in, 274–75
Brain waves, sleep cycles, 6f Coma vigil, 272
Braver, T. S., 334 “Common sense,” 329, 330
Breathing control, in meditation, 331 Compartmentalization, 218
Breuer, J., 219 Complex partial seizures, 270
Brief Psychotic Disorder (DSM-IV-TR), Compulsive repetition, 175
VSEs, 316 Confirmation bias, normal cognition, 316
Buchbinder, J., 315, 316 Conscious hemiasomatognosia, 245
Bufotenine (5-hydroxy-DMT): chemical Consciousness: biologically produced vs.
structure, 99t; endogenous, 85, induced states, 10–11; defined, 21;
90t, 94, 101 infant and toddler, 213; levels of, 264f;
Burroughs, William, 169 n.1 neuropharmacology of, 133–38;
subjective first-person experience,
Caffeine, stimulant, 30–31 263; subjectivity, 37–38; and
Cakras, 198 thalamocortical system, 127;
Calabrese, Joseph, 176, 177 thalamo-cortical frontoparietal
Campbell, Joseph, 303 network, 267f, 276
Cannabinoids, 32; and dopamine, 48 Context-independent drugs, and
Caplan, M., 311 addiction, 181
Cardeña, Etzel, 149, 312, 337, Contextual bonding and assessment, and
338, 339–40 addiction, 181
Caregiver, source of child’s stress, 219 Cortical connectivity, 340–41
Carlson, E. A., 218 Cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical (CSTC)
Carmelite nuns, brain imaging feedback loops, 127
participation, 71–72, 74 Cortisol, circadian rhythm influence, 5
388 Index

Cotard syndrome, 288 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental


Coulson, Sheila, 55 n.1 Disorders (DSM-IV), drug dependence,
Cousins, W. E., 337 170
Craving, 171 Diet, epigenic intelligence factor, 55
Creativity-related states, young Dietrich, A., 78, 133
adulthood, 226 “Difficult temperament,” self-regulation
CRED (cAMP response element binding), failure, 216
and addiction, 181–82 Discourse on the Method (Descartes), 248
Culture, and drug use, 171, 172 Disorganized attachment, 218–19
Cyclothymic disorder, 294 Dissociation: in adolescence, 225; as
Csikszentmihalyi, M. and I. S., 14 defense, 219; defined, 218;
developmental line, 221–22
Dakwar, E., 331 Dissociative anesthetic agents, 268
Daoist yoga, 196–97 Dissociative identity disorder (DID),
“Dark night of the soul,” 290–91 290, 312
Davidson, Julian, 194 “Divine” light, 250, 253
Davy, Humphrey, 23 DMT (dimethyltryptamine), 30, 33, 34,
De la Cruz, San Juan, 279 85–86, 129, 358; administration,
de Lima, Gonçalves, 88t, 92 101–2; chemical structure, 97f, 98t,
de Quincey, Thomas, 169 n.1 130F; dosage and duration of effects,
Decety, J., 345 103–4; endogenous, 94, 106–7;
Deep sedation, 265, 268 experience, 95–96; history, 86, 91–92;
Deep sleep, unconscious state, mechanisms of action, 105–6; and
264f, 265 monoamine oxidase (MAO), 102, 103;
Delayed sleep phase syndrome occurrence in nature, 100; oral
(DSPS), 16 consumption, 101–2; scientific
Delirium tremens, hallucinations and investigations, 92–94; and serotonin
GABA, 47–48 receptor site, 85, 104; timeline, 87t– 91t;
Delirium, 287 traditional indigenous usage, 107–8
Delphi oracle, 313, 358 Donald, M., 336
DeltaFoS-B, and addiction, 182 Dopamine, 29, 150; adolescent brain,
Delusional parasitosis, 243 224; brainstem source, 45; elevation in
Delusional reduplication of body parts, ASCDRs, 48, 49; and extrapersonal
242–43, 248 space, 45, 53; in dreaming, 47; in
Delusions, 292, 315–16; cultural human brain processes, 44;
impact, 315 parasympathetic action, 44, 49; and
Dementia, late adulthood, 227 pleasure, 179–80
Dependence: contracted state of Dopaminergic system: and consciousness,
consciousness, 174, 176; medical 44; expansion in humans, 53–56;
definitions, 170–71 meditation studies, 334
Depersonalization, 218, 288; and Doppelgänger experience, 249, 289
vestibular disturbances, 248 Dramatic performance, in shamanism,
Depression, 290 336, 337
Derealization, 218, 288 Dreaming, 266, 340, 341; and
Descartes, René, 22, 248 DMT, 107–8
Designs, peyote ASC, 150, 156 Dreams: neurochemistry, 47; REM and
Di Risio, L., 367 NREM sleep, 361; and strong
Diabysis, treatment home, 310 emotion, 281
Index 389

Drugs: and addiction, 168–69; bodily Exceptional human experience (EHE),


consciousness impact, 252–53; 294; therapeutic recommendations,
dysfunction effects/adaptive 294, 295
advantages, 168 Excitement phase, sexual response
DWSC (differentiated waking state of cycle, 200
consciousness), 9 “Executive intelligence,” 44
Exogenous agents use, 14
Early childhood cognitive development, Exosomia, 244
219–22 Expanded awareness, psychedelic, 178
Ecstasy, emotion, 279; in sexual activity, Expectations, and drug use, 171, 172
191 Experience, temporolimbic markers, 67
Ecstasy, drug. See MDMA Experimental procedures, bodily
Edwards, Eiluned, 337 consciousness, 253–54
EEG (electroencephalography), mystical Experimental sexuality study: data
condition measurement, 74 analyses, 202–3; design, 202;
“Ego integrity,” late adulthood, 227–28 results, 203–5
Egocentric representations, 346 Extrapersonal space, human cognitive
Ekbom’s syndrome, 243 skills, 45
Ekstasis, defined, 46 Extrasensory perception (ESP),
Electrical synapses, 25 355, 308–9. See also Psi phenomena
Eliade, M., 198
Ellis, Havelock, 252 Fake hand illusion, 253–254
Emotional contagion, 338; “False enlightenment,” meditation
infancy, 216–17 practice, 311
Emotions: and ASC, 280–82; and ecstasy, Farb, N. A. S., 333
279; traditional view, 280 Fasting, 51
Endocannabinoids, 33; receptor system, Fear: and depersonalization, 291; and
178–79 dissociation, 280
Endogenous DMT, 85, 94, 101; Fetal peyote exposure, 159–60
biosynthesis, 107; function, 107–8. See Fingelkurts, A. A., 340, 341
also Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT First-person perspective, neuroscience, 345
Endogenous reward system, 178 Fiske, S. T., 329
Endorphins, 30, 178 5-HT2a serotonin receptor sites, 131–32,
Entheogens, 33, 121 135, 137; and hallucinogens, 138
Entrancement, 336 5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-DMT), chemical
Environment, and drug use, 171 structure, 99t; endogenous, 85, 94, 100
Ephedrine, stimulant, 31 Fixed rituals, in addictive behavior, 175
Epigentic factors, human evolution, 44, 58 fMRI (functional magnetic resonance
Epilepsy, 269–70 imaging): awareness in vegetative state,
Ergolines, tetracyclic compounds, 129–30 275; hypnosis, 334; mindfulness
Ergot alkaloids, 124 meditation (MM), 333; mystical
Ergot fungus, 34 experience, 71–72
Erikson, Erik, 227 Forman, R. K. C., 291
Euphoria, and opioid receptors, Frederiks, J. A. M., 245
48, 49 Free Evangelical Fundamentalist
European Task Force on Disorders of Community, brain imaging
Consciousness, 272 participation, 69
Evangelical Christian possession, 313 Freedman, Daniel X., 122–23
390 Index

Freud, Sigmund: on hysteria, 219; Grob, Charles S., 126


paranoia theory, 292; pre/transpersonal Grof, Christina, 312, 314
fallacy, 318; on sexual repression, Grof, Stanislav, 126, 161, 196, 312, 314
192–93
Fromm, Erich, 282 Haitian Vodou, 313
Frontal lobe: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 132; Hallucinations, 292, 293; cultural impact,
and portentousness, 129 314–15; neurochemistry, 47
Furst, P. T., 148 n.1 Hallucinogens, 33, 121–22; and
Fusional experiences, 289 consciousness, 126–29; and dopamine,
48–49; dying patient application, 126;
Gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA): and indigenous use, 123–24; mechanism
hallucinations, 47–48; inhibitory summary, 138–39; negative effects,
effects, 29; interneurons, 135, 137; 52–53; neuropharmacology,
receptors, 30; and sedative-hypnotics, 129–33; and religious experience,
31–32 123; in shamanistic practice,
Ganzfeld induction, 366–68 51–52
Geekie, J., 341 Handsome Lake, Iroquois leader, 301
General anesthesia, unconscious state, Harmala alkaloids, 110, 111; and
264f, 265, 268 serotonin, 102–3
Generalized tonic-clonic seizures, 269 Hastings, A., 309
Gerotranscendence, 228 Haunting, 294
Gerstmann, Joseph, 246 Healey, F., 67
Geschwind syndrome, 66 Healing, and shared symbols, 339
Gesture and dance, in shamanism, Heautoscopy, 242, 248, 249, 289
336, 337 Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 23
Geyer, M. A., 127, 338, 340 Heggenhougen, C., 177
Gilman, A. G., 122 Helman, C., 172
Global brain metabolism, and awareness, Hemiasomatognosia, 245
275 Hemi-depersonalization, 245
Glossolalia, 71 Hess, E., 219
Glutamic acid (glutamate): excitatory High-altitude mountaineers, and mystical
signaling, 29; and hallucinogens, 132; states, 251
receptors, 30 Higher power, AA, 173
Goldberg, L. R., 201, 202 Hindu tantra, 198, 318
Goodman, T. W., 122 Hippocampus, in allocentric
Gopnik, Alison, 213 representations, 346
GPCR (G-protein coupled receptor), Histamine, 29
25–28, 29, 30; and opioids, 32; and Hoasca Project, 91t
psychedelics, 34–35; and THC, 32–33; Hobson, J. A., 281
transduction, 27f Hofmann, Albert, 34, 124
Granqvist, P., 68 Holbrook, Lisbeth Jane, 192
Gray, Spalding, 288 Holmstedt, Bo, 90t, 102
Greeley, Andrew M., 191 Homo habilis, tool making, 54
Greenberg, D., 315, 316, 318 Homo neanderthalis, ritualistic burials, 55
Grey, Alex, 113 Honorton, C., 364
Greyson, B., 307 Horowitz, C. B., 332, 333
Grief and mourning, late adulthood, 227 Huichol culture: ASC meaning, 149;
Griffiths, R., 126, 252 peyote use in pregnancy, 158–62;
392 Index

Ketamine: dissociative anesthetic, 36, 268; Marglin, F. A., 198


out-of-body experiences, 358, 359 Marijuana: and bodily consciousness, 252;
Kleitman, Nathan, 11, 12 in shamanistic practice, 56
“Knowing medium,” ASC, 128 Marlow-Crowne Social Desirability Scale
“Known object,” focal awareness, 128 (MC), 201, 203
Kokoszka, A., 13 Maslow, Abraham H., 189
Krippner, S. 330, 333 Masochism, psychoanalytic
Kundalini, 198, 358 perspective, 193
Massimini, M., 127
Lambe, E. K., 132 Masters and Johnson, sexual response
Lambrecht, I., 341 cycle, 200
Landis, C., 290, 291, 292 McCready, William C., 191
“Lantern consciousness,” infancy, 213 McKenna, Dennis, 90t, 112
Laski, Marghanita, 191 McKenna, Terrance, 90t, 94–95,
Lata, J., 315 96, 114
Late adulthood cognitive development, MDMA
226–28 (methylenedioxymethamphetamine;
Laureys, Steven, 342 Ecstasy), 35; prolactin increase, 196;
L-dopa, 47, 49 tactile and emotional sensations, 49
Left hemisphere: dopaminergic Medical models of addiction, 170
transmission, 54; dreams, 47; Meditation: and emotion, 282; ESP
emotional regulation, 49 experience, 364–66; healing effects,
Levine, F. R., 331 331–35; information inflow limitation,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 337 14; practices, 311–12, 331;
Lhermitte, Jean, 245, 252 psi-conducive nature, 364; and
Life After Life (Moody), 306 sexuality, 196; spiritual
Ligand-gated ion-channel receptor, 25 component, 332
Limb ownership denial, 246–47 Mediumship, 290, 356
Limbic-marker hypothesis, TEs, 66–67 Membrane conductance, 136–37
Liotti, G. 219 Memory, in peyote ASC, 152
Locked-in syndrome, 264f, 264–65, 274 Menezes, Jr., A., 283
Locus coeruleus (LC), 133, 135 Mescaline, 34, 51; chemical structure,
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), 34; and 130f, 150; in peyote, 149;
bodily consciousness, 252–53; phenethylamine, 130; pregnancy
chemical structure, 130f; discovery, studies, 158–59
123, 124; ergot alkaloid product, 130 Mesmer, Franz A., 363, 364
Lucid dreaming, 264f, 266, 341 Mesolimbic system, emotion, 178;
endorphins, 180
Macro and micro context effects, 172 Metabolism of information model, 12–13;
Magic consciousness, 2 to 5 years, 212 protective mechanisms, 14
Maimonides Medical Centre, psi research, Metabotropic receptor, 25
362, 363 Metzner, R., 173, 178
Main, M., 219 Michaux, Henri, 252
Maithuna, 198 Micro-and macro-somatognosia, 245
Maliszewski, M., 196 Middle childhood cognitive
Malpighiaceaous woody liana, 92f, 100 development, 222
Mammals, typical waking EEG, 43 Milton, J., 367
Manske, Richard, 89t, 91 Mimetic culture, 336, 337
Index 393

Mind-body problem, 22; and Narrative enactment, in shamanism, 336


neuroscience, 37; and transcendent Narrowing awareness, addictive drugs,
experiences, 75–77 178
Mindfulness-based stress reduction Narrowing of consciousness, 287
(MBSR), 332 National Center for Complementary and
Mindfulness meditation (MM), fMRI Alternative Medicine (NCCAM/NIH),
studies, 333 331
Miner, L. A., 132 Native American Church, 147, 148–49;
Minimally conscious state, 273–74 addiction program, 173, 176
Minimally sedative agents, 268 Natural opiates, and dopamine, 48
Mirror neuron system, 216 Natural rhythmicity, suppressed in
Mishara, Aaron L., 291, 343, 344 n.1 wakefulness, 12
Mislocalizations, tactile, 243, 244, 248 Near-death-experiences (NDEs), 126,
Misoplegia, 247 228, 306–8; and emotion, 281;
MMPI, Goldberg modifications, 201, interpersonal problems, 308–9; and
202, 203 mystical states, 251; temporal
Modulation, AIM model of sequence, 307
consciousness, 7 Neomammalian brain, neocortex, 154
Monoamine oxidase (MAO), 103 Neonate, arousal states, 213–15
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), Neuroimaging experiments,
103, 104, 112; and peyote, 150 psychotomimetic drugs, 338
Monoamines (-NH2), 29–30 Neuroimaging studies, TEs, 69–75, 78
Montgomery, Gary, 160 n.6 “Neuromatrix,”241
Monthly biological rhythms, 5 Neuromuscular blockers, anesthesia, 268
Monti, M. M., 274 Neuropeptides, 30
Mood alteration, hallucinogens, 52 Neuroplasticity, 29
Mood disorders, 290–91 Neurotheology, shamanism as, 50
Moody, Raymond, 306 Neurotransmitters, 29–30; circadian
Moral indignation, childhood, 220 rhythm influence, 5; and DMT, 106;
Morante, Elsa, 279 and exogenous analogues, 167;
Moreira-Almeida, A., 283, 312 receptors, 30; synapse, 25, 26f
Motor neglect, bodily consciousness, 246 New religious movements, belief
Mullin, G. H., 198 assessment, 315
Muscarinic drugs, in shamanistic Newberg, A., 71, 75, 78
practice, 51 Nicotine: nicotinic acetylcholine agonist,
Muzet, A., 174 32; in peyote ceremonies, 152–53; in
Myers, Frederick, 355 South American Solanaceae, 112
Mystical experiences: bodily Nir, Y., 342
consciousness in, 251; characteristics, Nitrous oxide, 268; NMDA-glutamate
63–64; and emotion, 281; and fusion, receptors, 36; psychoactive
289; in sexual activity, 191 properties, 23
Mysticism Scale, 72 NMDA-glutamate receptors, and
Mythic consciousness, 6 to 11 years, 212 ketamine, 36
Nocjar, C., 136
Naı́ve realism, 329, 345 Non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome, 16
Narcolepsy, 293 Nonconscious hemiasomatognosia,
Narrative autobiographic 245–46
remembering, 345 Nonexperimental experiences, 356–57
394 Index

Nonhuman primates, hallucinogen Past life recall, 356


avoidance, 52 Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, psi side
Nonpathological ASC, characteristics, effects, 364
283, 285t–86t Pathologically altered consciousness,
Noradrenaline, 45; in dreaming, 47 269–75
Norepinephrine, 29; and mescaline, 150 “Peak experiences,” young adulthood, 226
NREM (non-REM) sleep, 9, 266; cycle, Perception of self, and parietal lobe, 74
5–6 Peripersonal space, 45
Permanent minimally conscious state, 273
“Oceanic boundlessness,” 338, 339, 340 Permanent vegetative state (PVS), 272
Oceanic sex, 196 Perry, John, 302, 304, 319
Ololiuqui, 124 Persinger, M. A., 67, 68
Opiates, endogenous receptors, 178 Personal neglect, bodily
Opioids, analgesia/sedation, 32 consciousness, 246
Ordinary waking consciousness, external PET (positron emission tomography)
adaptive state, 128 images: cerebral metabolic rate of
Orgasm: as ASC, 194–195; sexual glucose (CMRglu), 133; religious
response cycle phase, 200 experience, 70
Orgasmic reflex, Reich, 193 Peyote: and alcohol and drug abuse
Ospina, M. B., 332 treatment, 153, 176; antibiotic
Ott, Jonathan, 114 qualities, 153; auditory, olfactory and
Otto, Rudolph, 129 gustatory sensations, 151–52; Huichol
Out-of-body experience, 249–50, 288; Indians’ use, 147–49; pharmacology
under hypothermic cardiac arrest, 76; and neurochemistry, 149–52;
and mystical states, 251 preparation, 155–56; pregnancy use,
“Out-of-body journeying,” 50 158–62; Spanish clerical reaction to,
Out-of-body sensations: in ASCRs, 47; 148; visual imagery, 150–51
and dopamine, 45, 46 Phantom limb phenomenon, 241
OWSC (ordinary waking state of Pharmacological altered consciousness,
consciousness), 9 267–68
Oxytocin, 30 Pharmakon (Greek medicine and
poison), 30
Pahnke, Walter N., 125, 252 Phenethylamines, 129, 130; peyote
Pain modulation, meditation, 333 alkaloids, 149
Paleomammalian brain, limbic system, Phosphenes, ASC images, 150
154, 178 Physicalism, mind-body problem,
Pané, Ramón, 86, 88t 75, 76
Panic, and depersonalization, 291 Physiological states of consciousness, 174
Paradoxically healing, ASC as, 327 Physiologically altered consciousness,
Parapsychology, 355–356. See also Psi 265–67
phenomena Pink Flamingos, film, 283
Parasympathetic dominance, dopamine, Plateau phase, sexual response cycle, 200
45, 46, 49–50 Plato, erotic mania, 279
Paresthesias, 243–44 Pleasure and desire, neurochemistry,
Parkinson’s disease, 45, 47; tactile 179–80, 181
hallucinations, 243 Plessner, H., 346, 347–48
Passie, Torsten, 195, 196 Portentousness, and frontal lobe
Passive state of mind, 14 activity, 129
Index 395

Positive emotions, and brain structures, 358–60; positive and negative impacts,
72–73 36; scientific study, 124–26
Possession, 312–13 Psychic experiences, 308; therapeutic
Postictal period, temporal lobe epileptic recommendations, 294, 309
seizure, 64, 65 Psychoactive drugs, 24; and neuronal
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): reward system, 179
depersonalization, 288; emotional Psychobiological systems, neonate, 214
shifts, 293 Psychointegrative plants, 154
Prana, 199 Psychokinesis (PK), 294, 355–56; and
Precognition: and dreaming, 361; hypnosis, 363
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, Psychological Dimensions of Sexual
358 Experience Inventory (PDOSEI),
Prefrontal cortex (PFC): adolescent 199–200, 202; ecstatic states, 201
remodeling, 223; awareness of Psychopathology: ASC presence,
emotions, 73; in meditation, 348 285t–86t; diagnostic taxonomies, 284,
Prenatal experience, 161–62 287; mood alterations, 290–91;
Prepersonal experiences, 318 narrowing of consciousness, 287; sense
“Presence” experience, 249 of self alterations, 288–90;
Previc, Fred, 167 sociocultural context, 283
Priestly, Joseph, 23 Psychopharmacology, 36–37
Prince, R. H., 302 Psychosexual stages of development,
Principles of Psychology, The (James), 22 Freud, 193
Protective mechanisms: cultural practices, Psychotherapy, and addiction treatment,
14; exogenous agents use, 14; 176
information inflow balance, 13–14; Psychotic-like episodes, positive
meditation, 14; natural rhythmicity, outcomes, 301
12–13; physiological, 13 Psychotic/mystical/religious experience,
Psi, defined, 355 302–3; differences between, 314–16,
Psi phenomena, 355–56; in crisis 318; phenomenology, 303–4; spiritual
situations, 280; ganzfeld induction, emergencies, 314
366–68; and hypnosis, 363–64; and Psychotomimetic drugs, 33; experience
meditation, 364–66; psychedelically dimensions, 338
induced, 357–60; and sleep, Psychotria viridis, 100, 101f
360–63; states and traits, 368–69; Putnam, F. W., 295
therapeutic recommendations, Pyramidal cells: cortex, 133; 5-HT2a
294, 309 receptor sites, 134; and
Psilocin (4-hydroxy-DMT), 47, 51, 100; hallucinogens, 138
chemical structure, 100t; U.S. studies,
53 Qi, circulation in daoist yoga, 197
Psilocybe mushrooms, 33, 101 Qigong, 311
Psilocybin, 124, 126; and bodily
consciousness, 252; chemical structure, Rabaris, shamanism, 337, 341
130f; entity encounter experiences, 359 Randal, P, 341
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, ESP Raphe nuclei, 133, 135; and
occurrence, 358 hallucinogens, 138; REM sleep, 130;
Psychedelic experience, facets, 95 tryptamine hallucinogens, 131
Psychedelics, 33, 34, 121–22; addiction Rational consciousness, 11 years +, 212
treatment, 113–14, 153, 176; and ESP, Reactive psychosis, 287
396 Index

Reality, visionary state, 129 Schizophrenia, 45, 49, 291–292; cortical


Reich, Wilhelm, orgasmic reflex, 193 connectivity, 341; experience
Religion, adolescent appeal, 224, 225 dimensions, 338; metabolic activity,
Religious attributions/experience, brain 339
imaging experiment, 70 Schizophreniform Disorder (DSM-IV-TR),
Religious experience, and TLE, 64, 65 VSEs, 316
Religious or Spiritual Problem (DSM-IV), “Schizotoxins,”107
NDEs, 308, 317 Schizotypy, 368, 369
REM (rapid eye movements) sleep, 264f, Scholl, Sophie, 282
266, 293; cycle, 5; and DMT, 106–7; Schreber, Daniel-Paul, 292
newborns, 160, 213, 214; and raphe Schultes, Richard Evans, 124
cell rhythmic rate, 130; state of Schwartz, Michael A., 291
consciousness, 9 Scopolamine: in shamanistic practice, 51;
Reptilian brain, behavior and habit, 154 in South American Solanaceae, 111
Repulsion (film), 292 Seasonal biological rhythms, 4
Resolution phase, sexual response Self: alterations in sense of, 288–90;
cycle, 200 rebirth of, 343, 344
Retrograde signaling, synapse, 28, 33 Self-awareness, development in
Retrospective perspective, 346 toddler, 217
Reuptake transport, 26f, 27 Self-injurious behavior, 288, 289
Revonsuo, A., 340, 341 Self-Rating Behavior Inventory (SRBI), 202
Reward-reinforcement pathways, 33 Self-regulatory skills, infancy, 215, 216
Reynolds, J., 334 Self-transcendence, 212
Reynolds, Pam, 75, 76, 77 Self-world relationship, and reality, 330
Rhino Cave, Botswana, 55–56, 56 n.1 “Sensation of absence,” 244–45
Rhythmic drumming, 50 Sense of self across time, 213
Richards, Keith, 169 n.1 “Sensed presence,” in temporal lobe,
Right hemisphere, and TEs, 67 stimulation experiments, 68, 69
Ring, K., 307 Sensitization, pleasure experiences,
Risky behavior: dopamine and serotonin, 181–82
224; prefrontal cortex, 223 Sensory acuity, late adulthood, 226, 227
Ritualistic ingestion, 175 Sensory deprivation experiments, 13;
Rock art, shamanistic themes, 55–56 bodily consciousness, 253
Roney-Dougal, S., 365 Sensory isolation, 50
Rossi, E. 13, 14 Serotonergic psychedelics, cerebral cortex
Rubber-hand illusion, 253 sites, 105
Running, and mystical state, 251 Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5HT),
29, 150; adolescent brain, 224;
Sabina, Marı́a, 53 chemical structure, 98t, 130f; and
Sabom, Michael, 75 DMT, 85, 101, 104; dopamine
Sacks, Oliver, 312 inhibition, 48; in dreaming and
Sadism, psychoanalytic perspective, 193 hallucinations, 47; 5-HT2a receptor
Sakti, female deities, 198 sites, 131–32; and LSD, 34; and raphe
Salvia divinorum, 35, 51 nuclei, 29, 47, 105, 130, 134
San people, ASC practices, 51 “Set,” of user, 122, 168, 172, 182
Sanchez-Vives, M. V., 136 “Setting,” of user, 122, 168, 172, 182
Sane Society, The (Fromm), 282 Sex Perfection and Marital Happiness (Van
Santo Daime, Ayahuasca sect, 86t, 113 Urban), 190
Index 397

Sexuality: and ASC, 191–95; experimental “Soul vine,” South American


study, 202–5; phenomenological hallucinogens, 51
dimensions, 199–202; and social Speaking in tongues, 313
desirability, 201–2; studies of, 189–90; SPECT (single-photon emission
transpersonal experiences, 196–99 tomography) images, religious
Shamanism: and dream experiences, 341; practice, 70
genetic component, 212; healing Spetzler, Robert, 76
effects, 335–40; Huichol culture, Spiegel, D., 334, 335
154–56; mutual hypnotic-trance, 337; Spiegel, Herbert, 293
narrative in, 347; neurochemical Spiritual emergencies, defined, 314
contributions, 50; nondrug practices, Spiritual Emergency Network, 312
50; transactional symbols, 339 Spiritual experiences, visionary, 301–2
Sherwood, S., 361 Spiritual practices, 311–312; and
Shift work variation, 16 sexuality, 196–99
Shiva, pure consciousness, 198 Spirituality: defined, 301; and parietal
Shulgin, A., 100 cortex, 70–71
Shumala Caves, 148 n.1 “Spotlight consciousness,” childhood, 213
Siddhis, yoga psychic powers, 364 Spousal bereavement, late adulthood, 227
Sigma-1 receptor, 105 Spruce, Richard, 88t, 91, 111
Simmonds-Moore, C., 368, 369 Stace, W. T., 63
Simple partial seizures, 270 State-dependent recall, 182
Sleep, 265–66; deprivation, 51; and psi Stern, Daniel, 213, 217
phenomena, 360–63. See also Storm, L, 367
Dreaming, REM sleep Strassman, Rick, 90t
Sleep paralysis, 293; OBE-like Strategic focus, 44–45
experiences, 249; and Subjectivity, and reality, 75
psychokinesis, 361 Suicide, seasonal rhythm, 4–5
Sleep/wake cycle, 5; AIM model, 6–7; Sullivan, J. R., 168
disturbances, 15–16 Supernumerary phantom limb
Smith, E. O., 168 phenomenon, 242, 248
Smith, Huston, 123 Suyominen, K., 5
Snuff products, 108–9 Symbolic thinking, childhood, 220
“Social brain,” 329, 331, 336, 345 “Sympathetic exhaustion,” dancing, 51
Social neuroscience, 329 Syncretic sects, Ayahuasca, 113–14
Social science models of addition, Szára, Sephen, 89t, 92, 93, 103
171–72
Society for Psychical Research, 355 Tactile hallucinations, 243
Sociocultural context, Tai Chi, 311
psychopathology, 283 Taitimu, M., 341
Socrates: Daemon voice guide, 314; on Takiwasi Center for the Treatment of Drug
madness, 302 and Alcohol Addiction, 114
Solanaceae plants, 35, 357 Tantra, spiritual practice, 198
Somatoform disorders, 289 Tantric sex, 196
Somatoparaphrenia, 246–47 Targ, E., 294
Somnambulism, 266 Tart, Charles T., 194, 200, 252, 293
Sosis, R. 225 Tassi, P., 174
Soteria House, 319–20 Telepathy: and dreaming, 361;
“Soul flight,” 50 psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, 358
398 Index

Temperament and Character Transcendental state, reality of, 129


Inventory, 71 Transition states, pathological, 293–95
Temporal lobe: stimulation experiments, Transliminality, 368
67–69; TEs, 72 Transpersonal emotions, 338
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), 64–65; and Transpersonal experiences, 318; and
religiosity, 66 sexuality, 196
Temporal lobe seizures, 269–70 Transpersonal psychology, 314, 317, 356
Teonanácatl, 124, 125 Trauma, and dissociation, 219, 222
Tetrahydroisoquinolines, peyote alkaloids, Tressoldi, P. E., 367
149 Tryptamines, 85, 93, 97, 129;
Thalamo-cortical frontoparietal network, endogenous, 94
consciousness, 267f, 276 Tukano peoples, Brazil, 92
Thalamo-cortical interconnectivity, 5, 77, “Tunnel” passage, 250
128, 133
Thalamus: 5-HT2a receptor sites, 137; and UFO-related phenomena, prevalence, 310
hallucinogens, 139; reticular nucleus Ullman, Montague, 362
dysfunction, 137–38 Ultradian biological rhythm, 4, 5–8;
Thalbourne, M., 355, 368 imagery, 7, 8, 11–12
THC (delta-9-tetrahydorcannabinol), 32 Ultradian healing response, 14
Therapeutic recommendations, psychic Unconscious state, 264
experiences, 294, 309 União do Vegetal, Ayahuasca sect, 88t, 112
Thoughtless phenomenon, 13 Unity (oneness), in mystical
Tibetan Buddhism, 198–99, 318 experiences, 63
Time perception, 22 Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome
Tobacco: and peyote interaction, 152–54, (UWS), 264, 272
q56; use in Alzheimer’s and Upper visual field, and dopamine, 45, 46
Parkinson’s, 153 Urgesi, C., 70
Tolerance, 171; opiates, 180 U.S. Schedule 1 Controlled Substances,
Tomkins, Silvan, 280 hallucinogens, 93, 124
Tononi, G., 127, 128, 342 Uxa plant, and peyote ingestion, 155, 156
Torda, C., 131
“Total drug effects,” 172 Vaitl, D., 328
Tourette’s syndrome, 244 Valonen, H. M., 5
Trace amines (TA), 30; receptors and Van de Castle, R. I., 361, 362
DMT activity, 104–5 Van Urban, Rudolph, 190
Trance, 287; possession, 313 Vanhaudenhuyse, A., 274
Transactional symbols, shamanistic Varieties of Anomalous Experience (Appelle,
ritual, 339 Lynn & Newman), 304, 310
Transcendent experiences (TEs), 63–64; Vaughn, B., 196
brain imaging studies, 69–75, 78; Vegetalistas, medicinal Ayahuasca, 112
clinical observations, 64–65; with flat Vegetative state (VS), 264, 272
EEG, 77; future neuroimaging studies, Ventral tegmental area (VTA), 133, 136
79–80; limbic-marker hypothesis, Vestibular disturbances, and
65–66; and mind-brain problem, depersonalization, 248, 249
75–77; temporal lobe stimulation Villavicencio, Manuel, 88t, 92
experiments, 67–69; triggers, 64, 78 Virola (Psycotria viridis), 33, 51,
Transcendent self, and brain damage, 251 91t, 100; pellets, 109; snuff,
Transcendental spiritual experiences, 309 108–9
Index 399

Vision logic consciousness, Waters, John, 283


adulthood, 212 Weserman, H. M., 362
Visionary restructuralization, 338, 339, 340 Whitley, B. E., 201–2
Visionary spiritual experience (VSE), 301; Whole body amputation, 247–48
clinical practice implications, 316–19; Wiederman, M. W., 201–2
cross-cultural, 302–3; difference from Wilber, Ken, 212, 303, 318
psychotic, 314–16; mystical, 304; Winkelman, Michael, 154
near-death experience, 306–8; Wirikuta, sacred Huichol desert region,
phenomenology, 315; psychic, 151, 157, 161, 162
308–14; treatment, 319–20 “Wisdom,” late adulthood, 226
Visual imagery vividness, ultradian cycle, Wiseman, R., 366, 367
8, 11 Withdrawal, 171, 180
Vollenweider, Franz, X., 78, 127, 133, Witzum, E., 315, 316, 318
338, 340 Wolff, P. A., 214
Volume conduction, neurotransmitters, Wyss, D., 342
30, 34
Von Weizsäcker, Viktor, 343, 345 Yoga, 311
Younger, J., 336
Wade, Jenny, 192
Wakefulness, 263, 264f, 266, 272; and Zacks, J. M., 334
suppressed information, 342 Zeitgeber (“time giver”), 4, 5
Wake/sleep cycles, regulation, 133 Zen Buddhism, 318
Water lily, Mayan in shamanistic practice, 52 Zona incerta, 4

Вам также может понравиться