Just found a really cool article on Charley Tart about the mass hypnotic state which we live in called “culture.” Pretty short piece with some really solid parts:
The clues from hypnosis research, experiments into the influence of beliefs upon perceptions, and teachings from the mystical traditions, led Tart to see how normal waking consciousness is the product of a true hypnotic procedure that is practiced by parents, teachers, and peers, reinforced by every social interaction, and maintained by powerful taboos. Consensus trance induction — the process of learning the “normal waking” state of mind — is involuntary, and occurs under conditions that give it far more power than ordinary hypnotists are ever allowed. When infants are first subjected to the processes that induce consensus trance, they are all vulnerable and dependent upon their consensus hypnotists, for their parents are the ones who initiate them into the rules of their culture, according to the instructions that had been impressed upon them by their own parents, teachers, and peers.
Among the techniques prohibited to ethical hypnotists but wielded effectively in the induction of consensus trance are: the enormous amount of time devoted to the induction (years to a lifetime), the use of physical force, emotional force, love and validation, guilt, and the instinctive trust children have for their parents. As they learn myriad versions of ‘the right way to do things’ — and the things not to do — from their parents, children build and continue to maintain a mental model of the world, a filter on their reality lens that they learn to perceive everything through (except partially in dreams). The result leaves most people in an automatized daze. “It is a fundamental mistake of man’s to think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life’s waiting room,” is the way Idries Shah, a contemporary exponent of ancient Middle Eastern mystical psychologies [ie, Sufism], put it.
He also talks about religious experiences and “Born Again” experiences as being sort of blasts out of this normal waking trance state of consensus reality. Pretty cool stuff!
- END -
ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- How To Smoke Salvia Divinorum
- Hold Your Breath Until You Pass Out
- The Stage Door
- Playing Your Character
- Circus Impresario Dream
9 Comments
the problem with those religious and ‘born again’ experiences, though, is that they invariably fail to dissociate the neurochemical process of the experience from its own context. this results in the consciousness re-fixating on a new consensus trance almost immediately upon its liberation from the previous one.
for example, consider the psychophysiological benefits of, say, a hardcore alcoholic or drug addict going sober after having a lifechanging “conversion” experience. the benefits of this process certainly do not derive intrinsically from the value of the christian religion that exploits it to assimilate another individual into its own consensus trance.
“Are we able to say for instance that life is governed by a group of conscious
people?Where are they?Who are they?We see exactly the opposite:that life is
governed by those who are the least conscious,by those who are most asleep.
“Are we able to say that we observe in life a preponderance of the best,the
strongest,and the most courageous elements?Nothing of the sort.On the contrary we see a preponderance of vulgarity and stupidity of all kinds.
“Are we able to say that aspirations towards unity,towards unification,can beobserved in life?Nothing of the kind of course.We only see new divisions,new
hostility,new misunderstandings.
“So that in the actual situation of humanity there is nothing that points to evolution
proceeding.On the contrary when we compare humanity with a man we quite clearly see a growth of personality at the cost of essence,that is,a growth of the artificial,the unreal,and what is foreign,at the cost of the natural,the real,and what is one’s own.
“Together with this we see a growth of automatism.
“Contemporary culture requires automatons.And people are undoubtedly losing
their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons,into parts of
machines.It is impossible to say where is the end of all this and where the way out
or whether there is an end and a way out.One thing alone is certain,that man’s slavery grows and increases.Man is becoming a willing slave.He no longer needs chains.He begins to grow fond of his slavery,to be proud of it.And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”
–Gurdjieff, from P.D. Ouspensky’s IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
interesting. so what’s that say about folks who are ‘delusional’ or psychotic? like schizophrenics or the severely mentally ill? i think (if I remember) Szasz et al says omething similar – that they are not delusional just not buying into our version of what is real.
Dunno who Charley Tart is but it’s always nice to have one’s own hunch expressed by some pundit. Don Miguel Ruiz, a Toltec nagual, says something similar from his tradition and in his language when he talks about the dream, domestication, and the fog of mind, or mitote. The aim of his Four Agreements is to escape that stuff into being fully awake.
“…that they are not delusional just not buying into our version of what is real.”
that’s bullshit. one of my friends was stabbed in the chest, by someone in a psychotic-delusional state, for being the mastermind of a nonexistent conspiracy. are you going to argue that that person was not delusional when they acted in such a manner, when their action was based on purely hallucinatory data that supported a preposterously impossible theory?
some crazy fuckers are just plain crazy, beyond such stupid abstract rationalizations.
tangent, just based on your last statement:
when people have those “born again” moments they are often very confused, and thus have to find some explaination. often times a religion or a church is there to “explain it all” to them, and they accept it blindly because they don’t really want to think for themselves.
that is how religions sort of claim people, by telling them what they’ve felt is connected to their own religion. how dare these divine experiences be personal or universal, right? there has to be ONE single religion that can claim all these divine experiences are related to “their” god? right? ha.
chris, you are right to feel that outrage. the religions bank on some of us having authentic divine experiences then turning ourselves in to become a sort of labrat for the congregation to run experiments on.
when we have these authentic flashes we are waking up. the trick is to ride the tightrope long enough to keep awake and run the gauntlet of dogmatists and stay “sane” at the same time…………….
if you can do that long enough you can then be alive, awake and deeply alone in a world desperate to stay asleep. you then find yourself shaking people to wake them from thier slumber…………….and most will fight you to stay that way.
The post seems plausible enough as far as it goes. But you don’t address the question of what we’d look like without consensus trance induction. Probably because you can’t; we can’t observe humans without culture of any kind because without it children just die. Maybe we can only compare different instances of “hypnosis”. See also pmp’s first comment. Mind you, it seems like it could benefit us to compare operating systems in this way.
Oh, and since I didn’t define what I mean by useful, this explains the goal I have in mind for anyone who cares.