Comments on: Consensus Trance

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 19:02:35 +0000

Oh, and since I didn’t define what I mean by useful, this explains the goal I have in mind for anyone who cares.

By: hf

hf — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 18:59:10 +0000

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.

By: alistair

alistair — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 03:34:26 +0000

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.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:38:48 +0000

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.

By: pmp

pmp — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:43:03 +0000

“…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.

By: Yves

Yves — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:31:55 +0000

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.

By: jil

jil — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 18:19:33 +0000

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.

By: David

David — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 17:58:01 +0000

“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

By: pmp

pmp — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 16:40:57 +0000

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.